When I met Doug, he was talking about being interviewed on Lebanese TV. Yeah, his Arabic is that good.

So when a friend of mine passed along a piece of poetry (and even that title really doesn’t describe Doug’s master work) that Doug performed at a the “Harakat” Cultural Festival at Georgetown University, I was ready to see this lively, welcoming man do something incredible.

To say I was blown away by Doug’s performance would be to put it mildly. (Warning: Tactically placed F-bombs within). For any of us who have gone through the brutal process of Arabic education, the central theme of "bab" (*and it's plural, Abwaab) in Doug's work is simultaneously hilarious and uncanny.

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There is so much to say, I imagine. Today is about remembrance, recognition, and community. It is about pain and grief, joy and love, anger and forgiveness. And yet today is as inscrutable as the last April 16, a moment in time defying our ability to give it voice.

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Even on Spring Break in a commonwealth that is not my own, I couldn’t keep away: a whole crew of student organizations got together last night here at the University of Kentucky for a juicily titled “dialogue” on the question “Does God exist?”

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I got the news on my phone, an e-mail with a link from a friend. Reading the URL, I scanned “shooting.campus.” My stomach twisted. I went home and turned on the television. “It looked like she had a shotgun burn on the side of her fa—” I turned off the television.

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The e-mail messages that came pouring into my inbox yesterday afternoon turned out to be true: William Jefferson Clinton did in fact grace the humble hamlet of Blacksburg, Va., this evening.

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Standing in line at the Mugamma, Egypt’s towering, Soviet-era, unholy office behemoth of bureaucratic nightmares, while my girlfriend was attempting to get the right forms/stamps/signatures for her visa, I had ample time to ponder the wonders of the American system. Ah, to live again in a place where things ran smoothly, when if you read a sign that said “Tourist Visas Here” it really meant “Tourist Visas Here” and not “Refugee Status Inquiries.” For someone on the political left, the entire experience of yearning for America is not one that I often indulge in. I most certainly love my country but since the beginning of my political “activation,” so to speak, in 12th grade, I have had to consume a slew of nasty developments.

So fast-forward to last Thursday, with new and America-loving David sitting snugly in Political Science 3754, American Political Theory, looking at all the folks in ROTC uniforms and ready for one big hug-fest when the professor asked, “What is America?”

Here is a list of the words that followed, chronologically as best as I could write them down:

Democratic
Exaggerated
Fortunate
Opportunistic
Proud
Status Quo

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For a while here, I’ve been on radio silence. It’s been frustrating, to say the least. It wasn’t writer’s block: I’ve been churning out a great storm of work for academic pursuits. But going from the jostling, bruising, frenetic life in Cairo to the bucolic, ivory-tower pursuits of Blacksburg, Va., has left me groping for the same sort of obvious writing inspiration I had become used to, the sorts of things that would grab my deeper awareness and shake me firmly.

Ah, but like a bad travel writer I was trying to figure out what was “different” about my “new” surroundings in order to play up the point as something worthwhile to talk about. And when nothing “new” came along, I sat, frustrated, hands folded, wondering when something would fall from the sky and set me to thinking.

To fill the time and let off some steam, I’ve been wearing my friend’s ears out with yakity-yak about this or that minute cultural point or piece of obscure trivia or semi-humorous story about life away from home. I felt like I had to fill my yawning internal silence with a lot of talk.

But after the blabbing, the silence inside my head had become deafening… until I realized it was the silence that I needed. After all the sound and the fury that was my life for half a year, it was time to, as Mike and Mike say, just shut up.

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Goodbye dirty streets, fresh strawberry juice, and home-delivered McDonald's. No more 5 a.m. muzzeins, television programs I can’t understand and hijab. I’m supposed to be back among my co-Westerners here in Belgium. (And my “co-religionists,” so to speak.) But boy do I feel out of place.

Driving around on the streets of the capitol of the European Union, I took note of all of Mitt Romney’s empty churches standing where the mosques used to be. Little fruit stands and ahwas (sheesha stops) morphed into cozy bars and patisseries. I’ve gone from being able to talk to just about everybody to being able to get along with about half the population. And there’s this question, occurring to me on three separate occasions: What’s up with all the white people?

Day 1 back in the occident passed without a hitch. I sat in my family abode watching ESPN Sportscenter, something I hadn’t experienced since I left the U.S. on June 17. After three runs of it, I flipped over to “Deal or No Deal,” a brutal game show experience I had never previously experienced and hope to never again. I felt like I bit into a candy bar I enjoyed as a kid and, my stomach turning over a little bit, wanted to chuck the rest.

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I will always be ready to stick up for Sean Taylor. When he was in trouble for waving a gun at some folks and then got his SUV riddled with bullets, well, sometimes old habits die hard. When he spit in an opponent's face, well, the guy's a competitor with a mean streak.

I did and will do this defending because Sean Taylor was a Washington Redskin. He was by far my favorite Redskin, showing up on every video game football fantasy team I ever drafted, prowling the defensive backfield, lurking for an opportunity to spear my roommate’s receivers if they got a little too brave running routes over the middle.

One time, one of The U’s nastiest delivered a blow so heavy it hurt me. After a flick of the right control stick laid a digital wide receiver low courtesy of the Hurricane force of number 21’s equally ferocious Xbox iteration, I jumped out of my chair with a triumphant whoop so fast I drilled my head on my lofted bed.

I thought I owned Sean Taylor. But nobody owned Sean Taylor. Sean Taylor owned you.

Until now, when pointless, stupid violence got the best of a monster of a man. I’ve been trying to write something about Taylor since I first heard he was shot and figured, off hand, that there was no way Taylor could die. Critical condition is awful but not insurmountable. Maybe he’d miss the season. But there was no way he could just go.

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Amazing that I’ve survived three months here in Cairo without stumbling into a protest. But I was engulfed in one today just a block from my apartment where a group of employees from the Real Estate Tax Office (the very name should strike fear into the hearts of limited government conservatives) were protesting the fact that their wages were lower than the Finance Ministry and that they wanted to be included under the Finance umbrella for payment purposes. (This group has done this before.)

Favorite sign slogan: My salary = one shoe.

As more and more protesters showed up the chanting got louder, the more home-painted signs sprouted from the group and the more black-clad riot police showed up on the scene. I had walked past the enormous riot trucks parked just around the bend from the gargantuan U.S. embassy here many times and always wondered why they were around, packed to the gills with Egyptians wiling the hours away with tea or cards.

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So I caught wind today that Beliefnet.com has put forward a list of 10 people for recognition as the Most Inspiring Person of 2007. And it happens that one of the ten, and currently the public’s choice for most inspirational, is Liviu Librescu, a Virginia Tech engineering professor killed in the shooting at my school last April. In the aftermath, I was assigned to write a memorial piece on this man who I didn’t know existed until April 16 but whom I have come to respect and honor deeply.

He was a committed family man who always chatted with department members about their children. He was a quiet, reassured friend who was demanding as a professor but open with his heart and liberal with his time when student’s would poke their heads inside his office door. I was constantly reminded that the somewhat dour photograph of him that is popular online doesn’t do justice to the light in this man’s heart.

I began to understand what this man did when I spoke to an elderly colleague of his. I asked him whether Librescu was a hero. The answer was, without hesitation, no.

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I tend towards the scroogier end of things in terms of the Christmas season. When Christmas shopping ads interrupt my Thanksgiving football, I glower. By the time Dec. 24 comes around, I feel like strangling Rudolph, tackling Frosty and not leaving a bite to eat for old Saint Nick. I swear, every year it starts well. I’m ready for the nip in the air, watching the Christmas lights go up, egg nog, the whole bit. But I can’t maintain.

I treat the Christmas religious celebration with a general ennui earned through many, many holiday seasons of being swamped with Christmas, American celebration of consumer culture. The former is a struggling second to the latter when I think about the end of the year.

So it was much to my surprise that I was belting out Christmas carols in the back of a bus bound for Cairo this weekend, tra-la-la-ing without a care. Maybe it’s American holiday withdrawal from having spent my Thanksgiving weekend, literally, in the middle of the desert. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. Maybe I was really, really bored.

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Eight floors, one enormous tent, millions of campaign leaflets and 3,500 or so journalists and their supporters (sometimes even their children) may not sound like your type of party. But it was mine this past Saturday, as the Egyptian Journalists Syndicate threw its biennial elections.

You couldn’t go two feet without a flier and a “fadl,” (more-or-less “please”) stuck in your grill by an earnest reporter hoping you would vote (one of your 12 votes for the Syndicates 12 council seats or your one vote for the presidency) on his or her candidate. Television cameras abounded – reporting on reporters!

What was born out on this day and in my subsequent interviews was the sheer energy of the young corps of Egyptian journalists. In interviews with those who the young hot-shots call “the old generation,” there is an expression of excitement and wonder at the intensity and gusto with which these new professionals have taken to their calling.

In the vein of humanizing the Muslim world, let me point out three things. First, the absolute obsession of the Syndicate with holding fair elections. Second, it is people like the following three young journalists who are pushing the regime across a variety of areas. Third, while each of my new friends are Muslims, each of them makes it clear, in a variety of ways, that its their human identity they values the most.

The “Crazy Journalist”: Hossam, my perpetual fixer, translator and big dreamer is responsible for me being in the thick of things last weekend. He’s been in the business for seven years having gone on several “adventures,” my favorite being his 24-hour stint as a Cairo shoe-shine man.

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In Stephen Hawking's 1998 opinion, "there’s a 50-50 chance that someone will discover the Holy Grail of physics within the next 20 years."

Now hear this:

"Now this naked guy here, just another person wandering around the playa . . . It was a solid game, no obvious blunders, I was simply outplayed. I am quite certain that there is no other place where I could go and be beaten at a game of chess by a nudist playing on a sixteen-foot square board with alien pieces. And bizarre stuff like this was happening all the time."

The preceding is from the Web site of Garrett Lisi, the physics whiz-cum-surfer-cum-world unifier who may have fashioned the “Holy Grail” of physics while crunching numbers in the morning and hanging ten in the afternoon.

But whether Lisi has put theoretical physicists on par with philosophy majors for jobs at McDonald's (as a classmate of mine jokingly put it), the man behind the magic deserves some examination.

While the Telegraph piece above paints him as a sort of idiot savant (“Being poor sucks,” he is quoted as saying), the other interviews that I’ve read draw him out a little further. And while I don’t know his religious leanings, its his type of rethinking and redrawing the Right Way To Do Things that serves as the highest model of what I think a free thinker or humanist could aspire to.

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From the same ideological tar pit that spawned Islamofascist Awareness Week:

It's not yet clear that we have begun to take seriously -- even literally -- the threats of Al Qaeda… But nut cases can make much havoc and kill many people and undermine many societies. To us what they threaten is murder, mass murder. To them it is the vocation of holiness.

Enough is enough. If the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and a need to “redefine privacy,” don’t seem like we’re taking Al-Qaeda and their fellow goons seriously, what exactly is enough?

No, this author doesn’t take a (direct) shot at Islam. But for all of the author’s concern about what seems to be a pretty settled issue of public consciousness – Al-Qaeda is bad and we should do our best to get rid of them – why belabor the point?

What is this article calling attention to, exactly? That Al-Qaeda hasn’t morphed into a legion of dancing hamsters?

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If you can get over the thought of Christopher Hitchens receiving a “back, sack, and crack” wax then this is a good example of the West’s flawed concept of girl power.

(Hitchens put himself through American cosmetic dentistry and general bodily beautification to celebrate his recently acquired American citizenship, detailed partially here in Vanity Fair. Pictures 8-10 are especially endearing.)

The article’s rather interesting (initial) thesis: Both Westerners and Muslims “agree that body hair, in its lush, natural form, is gross and repellent, a problem that must be eradicated at all costs.” I didn’t exactly expect to see that as a point of intercultural connection. But there it is.

The author splits this follicle-based aversion in two ways. Westerners shave their nether-regions because they want to look like porn starlets. Muslims do it because, in so many words, they hate secular society.

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When all is said and done, what happened to the Petit family of Cheshire, Connecticut may look like a contemporary “In Cold Blood.” The brutal murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11, would give any community reason to pause.

But as this piece points out, the Petits were stalwart members of a staunchly anti-death penalty church, Cheshire United Methodist. Which raises one gut-wrenching question now that prosecutors have decided to seek the death penalty against the Petit’s two alleged murderers: What should the congregation, which two years ago held a vigil outside a prison where Connecticut executed its first criminal in 45 years, say or do regarding the proceedings against the two suspects in the murder of three of their own?

About a month ago I was having a discussion with a friend of mine when she said that she would like to see some of the most impoverished parts of Africa. I challenged her a bit, asking why Misery Tourism was something to be desired. She rejoined that seeing it would ingrain the need to help the people more than reading or hearing about it.

I understand the feeling, but I balked at it then and didn’t quite know why. Reading about the Petits, I think I understand my initial trepidation.

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Check out Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s “Shalom Center,” where this absolutely ridiculous “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week,” is turned on its head.

When the imaginary feature film sent out for use in this imaginary Week - which focused on the disgusting Christian-led war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the disgusting Jewish-led killing of Muslim children by airplane bombing raids on Gaza - also included interviews with a few peacenik Quakers, Methodists, and left-wing Jews, criticizing that war and those bombings, did you relax, feeling it was a balanced presentation of Judaism and Christianity?

Apparently, 200 university and college campuses nation-wide are hosting events to up people’s awareness of Islamo-Fascism. Terrorism Watch boasts “3,193,193 unique visitors since January 31, 2007.”

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So in peeling through the research archives of the Arab-West Report today I came across quite an interesting passage in the Qur’an, cited in an Egyptian news media outlet talking about kuffars, or unbelievers and/or atheists.

Sura 45:24: “And they say: ‘What is there but our life in this world? We shall die and we live, and nothing but Time can destroy us.’ But of that they have no knowledge: they merely conjecture.”

Maybe I would quibble a little, but no real arguments here. To continue…

Sura 45:25: “And when Our Clear Signs are rehearsed to them, their argument is nothing but this: they say, ‘Bring (back) our forefathers, if what you say is true!’”

Ah, yes. Me and my conjecture.

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It was lying on my back on the desert floor of Wadi Rum this summer when I got caught up in what is, for me, a surprising conversation. One of my Jordan-exploring compatriots mentioned the fact that, looking up at all the stars that night, he knew there was a God. I quietly imagined that the ancients probably felt much the same way, laying astride their camels in what would become T. E. Lawrence’s legendary stomping grounds, eyes glued to the heavens in wonder. The enormity and grace of a pristine night sky does give this humanist pause.

It was much the same driving through Lebanon two days ago. The country’s jewel, Beirut, the “city that would not die,” sits at the base of rolling, verdant hills. Beyond, the ancient beauty of Jeitta Grotto, the towering might of the Lebanese Cedars, and the glowing countryside in between, flush with vineyards and breathtaking views.
As one tour guide appraised me, “We are the only country in the world in which you can swim in the sea in the morning, get in your car, and in one hour’s time go skiing.”

This is powerful stuff.

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Politicians have a long history of garbling the message when they get in front of the camera. Like this. Or like this. And last but not least, like this.

And then somebody has a little insecurity issue with Evangelical voters, perhaps, and goes on to say something like this:

"I just have to say in all candor that since this nation was founded primarily on Christian principles ... personally, I prefer someone who I know who has a solid grounding in my faith," McCain said. "But that doesn't mean that I'm sure that someone who is Muslim would not make a good president."

The NYT titled its piece on McCain's interview: "McCain casts Muslims as less fit to lead." Slightly dramatic, sure, but you get the point.

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So year 50, day 2 of the "In God We Trust" era is almost said and done. As the afore-tagged article attests, the placement of such a phrase on my national currency crops up in debates over “just how high the wall separating church and state should stand.”

The arguments generally go something like this.

Pious Christian Gentleman X: “Of course we trust in God! Don’t you know we were founded on Judeo-Christian values? Don’t you know divine providence (or at least the Protestant Work Ethic) has made this country great? We’re a Christian nation and should say so. Think of the children! I actually suggest we tattoo our fine little motto on people’s foreheads. But maybe that’s just me.”

Acolyte of Michael Newdow: “Don’t you know the psychic pain that I receive every day looking at my currency and seeing those three, wretched letters! I don’t want to grow up in a nation where my child has to come within a hundred miles of anything that even smacks of this “god” character. We all know stuff like that poisons everything. Ever heard of the First Amendment?”

Both of these people tire me oh-so-much.

Do these four little words constitute the beginnings of the legendary “slippery slope” towards establishing a state religion? No, they don’t. They are sufficiently innocuous enough to strike an important balance: wiping them out would feel like too much of a witch hunt while expanding on them would topple them over into the establishment abyss.

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I couldn’t help but be slightly taken aback by this article in today’s Washington Post. Apparently American churches have found enough loose change in the pews to drop $8.1 billion on audio and projection equipment in the last year. Oh, wait, they do direct deposit tithing now? So no pew change?

Big screen and Hi-Fi, indeed.

Besides the somewhat mournful tack of the latter half of the article, perhaps WiFi church cafés and in-worship light shows aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Nothing prevents the pastor (no Fathers, Imams, Rabbis, Yogis or what have you to be found quoted in this piece) putting on a little pseudo-James Taylor (sorry Campus Catholic), queuing up the requisite scene in The 10 Commandments for his/her 200-inch projection screen and then delivering some serious divinity.

Will podcasting be the death of God? Hardly. Further, the Field of Dreams mentality at work here (“if you build it, they will come,”) probably isn’t far from the truth. Could it be that having the highest resolution projection cannon could constitute a holy calling? Must the modern religious leader walk gingerly through techno-Mammon to illuminate the Divine?

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“Look,” he said, offering a laminated sheet for my approval. “You need to buy one of these. It has Jesus, you see, here, at the top, and almost all the Saints.”

If he was disappointed when I demurred he didn’t show it. Laying his cane against the wall, the man slowly closed the steel collar around his neck. Muttering soft prayers, he wrapped himself in the ancient chain.

No, I hadn’t walked in on a deleted scene from the Da Vinci Code. I was in the depths of the Convent of St. George in Old Cairo’s Coptic Quarter and my erstwhile salesman was undoubtedly hoping to reap the curative benefits of the chain of St. George. Here are the Copts, the Egyptian Orthodox Christians, who birthed monasticism, housed the Holy Family, and are (probably) responsible for adapting the contemporary Christian cross from the Egyptian Ankh to boot.

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Ahlan wa sahlan, or hello and welcome, from the Arab Republic of Egypt. I'm here studying for the next four months.

It’s the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, otherwise known as Ramadan. It’s been an interesting few days, to say the least. I’ve re-familiarized myself with such fine American dining establishments as Hardee's, McDonald’s, and KFC because the cheap-and-greasy falafel or schawerma joints I frequented pre-Ramadan are on a one-month hiatus from providing me 50-cent lunches.

Ramadan-esque topics will be a part of much of my writing for some time, I expect, but one experience does deserve a bit of immediate digital ink. I spent the first night of Ramadan in the shadow Al-Azhar University, one of Islam’s most prestigious institutions (and perhaps the oldest university in the world).

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