San Diego on fire!

This week has been a very crazy week for southern California . Since Friday the news announced that the warm wind named Santa Ana that we have it pretty much every year will start and since it is hot and dry that can lead to wild fires. On Sunday afternoon the fire started in San Diego and soon spread to all over the county by Monday it got a lot worse. Schools and offices were closed. Our Office since is Sheriff Department was not closed but I did not go to work due to bad air quality. By Evening the fire was burning lots of houses and it was getting closer to coast area. On Monday night we were ordered to evacuate our house. I grabbed some important stuff like passports, wedding album (is important to me!), my son’s first album and some cloths. When I was packing the stuff I was very sad and stressed, I was thinking to myself, will we be back home again?. It was a terrible experience. I was in Iran when we had war with Iraq and war was worse than this, because no one could predict where the bomb or missile will drop to evacuate on time but at that time I was very young so I could not feel the depth of disaster but now I had my own family, my own home and was worry about lots of things. Any way we could come back home on Tuesday evening. I was so grateful to be able to come back home and see it is standing there safe, but I really feel sorry for the ones that have lost their homes, over 1600 homes in Southern California have been burned so far and the fire is not still completely contained. Thank god just about 8 people were killed not more, since local officials did a very good job notifying people to evacuate their houses on time. I heard in news that the fire in Orange County has been started by an arsenic person, who just set up fires and they are investigating it. I cannot believe that some people can be so evil; they say these kinds of people have extreme fascination toward fire or feel more powerful when they do these kinds of things. This is not the first time that a person has increased or started the fire on purpose!!!
However San Diego that is famous as finest city of America has become a hell in last couple of days!! I truly pray for all the people that have lost their homes or loved ones because of this fire, hopefully insurance companies and government take actions fast to help them out starting the regular life, I heard that government has offered each family $40,000 for one year so they can rent a place and get settled until their houses get rebuilt. I hope it is a quick process!
It is amazing that how weak we are against the mother of nature and how unpredictable things can be!!

Comparing two books

I wrote about the book Jesus and Muhammad before and how that book made my boss to lose his faith to Islam. I read that book because I was curious and eager to know how that book had such an impact on my boss. The whole book was focusing on negative sides of Islam and the things that could be considered very positive was described and criticized by writer (Mark Gabriel) in a very negative perspective, after finishing that book I felt relieved that I did not lose my fait! I thought, now I should read a book that has some thing positive about Islam and as I mentioned before I decided to read Muhammad Prophet of our time by Karen Armstrong, this book was suggested by one of my blog readesr Ashkavand and when I did a little research about it I found out that the writer of the book is not a Muslim, she has been original a Christian/Catholic and has served as a nun for 6 years. She has done lots of research about different religions and consider herself a monotheists. My impression of the first book Jesus and Muhammad as a non-religious Muslim who is more spiritual was that the writer was very unfair about Prophet Muhammad and Islam!
The second book by Karen Armstrong was a lot more realistic, she even refers to lots of event that are mentioned in the first book but looks at them and analyze them very differently. You see in the book that positive and negative sides of Islam are all mentioned but even things that are considered negative like polygamy or wars are analyzed very deeply in this book. Most of the wars were defending wars because Arabs did not want Prophet Muhammad to promote his religion they putting him and his followers under lots if pressure and attacked them whenever they could. Prophet Muhammad had a very hard job to even convince his own followers that the war is not solution to problems (in today world is hard to convince the leaders of the world that war is not solution to any problem)so just imagine how hard was for him to convince bunch of barbarians that sword was a part of their daily life not to fight. After every war lots of women became widows and their children became orphans without any protection or support so men would just rape them and abuse them, he had no choice other than telling the men that you have to marry the widow woman and protect her and her children if you want to have sexual relationship with her and since number of women were more than men due to wars polygamy was the only solution. He gave Muslim women lots of rights like inheritance right. Before Islam majority of Arab women were property of their men or male families so they would not inherit any thing every thing would go to their male families or husband rather than them. He gave women the right to divorce, so under certain circumentstances women could separate from their husband and … (these are all in this book, is not my own understanding or interpretation). Even Muslim men were rebellious when they heard Prophet Muhammad has brought women these much of rights and he had to talk to them and convince them that these rights are given by Allah and they should accept that. Karen Armstrong says “Muslim Women in 1500 years a go had more rights than western women in early 19th century” She mentioned this even in her interview with Christian Amanpour in a program about Islam on CNN couple weeks ago.
Any way Prophet was always trying to find a peaceful solution with his enemies and when he finally could make peace with Quraish (the biggest tribe of Arabia) his followers were mad at him and he told them that was the time for peace and concentrating on a bigger Jihad which means fighting with our inner self, fighting with the temptations that we always have to make sins.
These days we hear word for Jihad from the critics of Islam, what they are pointing at is holly war but they don’t know the real meaning behind it!
Any way Prophet Muhammad made a big difference in Arab’s people in that time and even now has a good influence on lots of Muslims, although some Muslims like enemies of Islam misinterpret his message and use jihad to attack, kill and terror but truth is there for any body that wants to know about it.
I have a very high respect for a prophet that had such a hard job to make very barbaric people understand that peace is important, human beings are equal and the most important thing is to work on our inner self.
There were things in Islam that we cannot apply to our today’s life like polygamy or women have half right than men in some cases (this was the best for that time), the way bank should work, etc but we can apply his main message to our life and try to be peaceful, work on ourselves and believe in equality between races and sexes.

When I was reading the last chapter about how he passed a way I could not stop my tears and I felt so sad for a moment I truly felt what he was going through and what he really meant to deliver to human beings as a message of god! And I believe that all prophets were trying to make people understand that message too but most of us try to deny the truth and interpret things the way we like.

I hope nobody got the impression that I was advertising for Islam here as I said before I am not religious but believe in peace, decency, honesty, loyalty, integrity and equality between human beings.

Rewind time!!

Today I was kind of free at work. I have finished my last project and my boss has not assigned me a new one. I easily get bored. I need to be always busy at work. I try to do some self study but I get bored from that too! I think my boss wants to give me a mid size project so I can finish it before maternity leave. I told him the other day that I am getting bored and he should give me a good project!! Any way it was close to lunch time and I remembered my job at municipality of Tehran, when I got graduated from university in Iran I got a job with a company that was one of the biggest contractors of municipality of Tehran, part of my job was at the central municipality Computer site near Tehran Bazaar. We were group of young people working together in the site which was a big room full of servers, we had a dining table and every day they would give us free lunch!! That was when Karbaschi was the mayor ( he was the most famous mayor of Tehran ). Some days we had Chelo Kabab ( Rice and Kabab) from Sharafoleslam in Bazaar (a traditional restaurant). That was fantastic, after lunch we would do crossword for a little bit and then would go back to work. We all loved doing the cross word together, mostly the Hamshahi magazin’s cross word! Now today I remembered those days and for a second wished I was there for two hours with same co-workers(I don’t think they work there any more) having Chelo Kabab and do the cross word then I would come back here and do what I am doing here! Have you ever wanted to go back in time and do certain things and then fly back to present???????