Laylat Al Qadr: the night of Destiny, Revelation, Power, Predestination; call it what you will but this one night, which is the pinnacle of spirituality in Ramadan, has an immense psychological and cleansing effect on me. When the Prophet (pbuh) said ’seek it’ I kind of get what he meant.
In the name of God, […]

Now I am a typical male who knows just about nothing when it comes to fashion, specifically what women choose to wear. However I have to admit that when the fashion industry starts producing and promoting clothes for women with 23½-inch waists, it’s a cause for concern, no? Is anorexia a fad now? I thought […]

Almost 19 months of blogging later I’ve reached a hallmark moment here at The Black Iris with 1,000 pure quality posts. Thanks to those who have stuck by me, be you the loyal reader, casual reader or new reader. Your some 5,600 comments have been a pleasure to read and much appreciated by me.
So what […]

I just read about this wonderful cultural event in the Jordan Times today. Madaba, one of my favourite cities in the country that is also known as the ‘city of mosaics’, is holding a cultural festival of sorts known as Layali Madaba (Madaba Nights). From what I’ve read it seems to be an attempt to […]

The Islamic veil is not a subject I like to discuss on my blog mainly because it leads to so much disagreement from all sides of the spectrum that I would just rather avoid it. Never has a piece of cloth caused so much panic, fear and irrationality in the Islamic and non-Islamic world and […]

In light of recent debates on Jordan’s Red Sea Film School being open to everyone including Israelis as well as a recent decision by the Israeli army to ban new Palestinian students from entering Israeli universities, I thought this was an interesting article…
When Jordanian student Said Saleh Abu Ghosh chose to pursue a Master’s degree […]

This is one crazy story about the family of Iraqis that died recently in Amman under mysterious circumstances. The following is what happened…
Amman - Jordanian security authorities have established that a love affair between a Jordanian and an Iraqi woman prompted the man to set his lover’s house ablaze at dawn on Wednesday, killing her […]

Lately I’ve noticed these public service type commercials on a local Toronto TV station that says: “parenting isn’t easy, but it shouldn’t hurt”. It’s an anti-spanking campaign.
This naturally got me thinking because spanking is a common tool used in raising children everywhere in the world. I’m not a parent and I might be wrong […]

with
every
fruitless
search
for
words
to
fill
the
silence
where
sober
tongues
once
lost
in
drunken
chatter
now
run
dry;
like
a
farmer
i
wait
for
spring
to
bear
new
fruit

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In Jordan there are two noticeable yet subtle dialects, those of us who say “Gal” and those who say “2al”. For the non-Arab reader both words mean the same thing: “said”. The ‘G’ and the ‘2′ represent the letter ‘Qaf’ in Arabic but is pronounced differently. The first one: “gal” sounds exactly like it’s read […]

I’ve been wondering lately about the future of blogging; overloading my mind with questions. What will it look like years from now? Will it fade away like a cyber fad? Will the bubble burst like Dot Coms of the late 90’s? Will everyone online have a blog and will we get sick of it? Will […]

“[S]hooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against well-armed communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is […]

US researchers estimate that 655,000 Iraqis, or around one in 40 of the Iraq population, have died as a result of the 2003 invasion of their country, according to a study to be published Thursday by the British journal The Lancet. [source]

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[…]

After several years of playing host to QIZ’s (qualified industrial zones) the government is finally catching up on a much needed dose of reality: the QIZs have created thousands of jobs that are virtually useless since a very low number of Jordanians are even employed.
So the government has decided to “Jordanise” the workforce by […]

So one day a Tafeeli and his wife are joking around when suddenly he throws her out the window. He looks out and sees her on the ground, back broken, moaning, and yells “what’s the matter, you can’t take a joke?”
Every country has a town, or a city, or a region with a people that […]

I’ve decided to start featuring a poll on my blog mainly because I was inspired by a recent post I published here about the Abu-Mahjoob polls. The poll is obviously not meant to be scientific and its purpose is not to act as the basis of any groundbreaking research. It’s there mainly to amuse me […]