May 23, 2010

Hey Norris, So This is EiDiEmDi?

Yesterdays I heard controversial news that made Muslims throughout the world cried out. The news was Everybody Draws Mohammed Day contest a.k.a EDMD appeared on Facebook as a page. And it had more than 65,000 who liked it.

Molly Norris, a cartoonist of Seattle, USA was the first who blew this idea regarding a broadcaster’s censorship of an episode of South Park, the satirical animated television series, which depicted Muhammad in a bear suit. On seattletimes.com stated that she had drawn her cartoon to support the creator of South Park. Norris said it would sent bad message to the country if they did a censorship. "I just felt so strongly — I just felt they sent a really fearful negative message to the country: It could be a slippery slope toward censorship in America," she said.

But Norris’ idea had suggested some strangers to make the EDMD real on facebook. Two graduate students from Europe started a facebook page in supporting EDMD on May 20 and they also started wordpress as well where they said they would post submitted drawings. Another woman started the same page as well. And it also had many members who supported that page. And this drew heat in Muslims. They made a movement to against EDMD. In Indonesia where the first large number Muslims stay, people fulminated EDMD and it creators. Even in Pakistan, the government ordered the internet provider service to block facebook until May 31.

Regarding this situation, Norris disavowed that she’d ever started EDMD facebook page. She also posted apologize statement on her blog, mollynorris.com. She said, “I never started a facebook page; I never set up any place for peole to send drawings to and I never received any drawings (I see that two European graduate students and another woman started the facebook pages). … I apologize to people of Muslim faith and ask that this 'day' be called off.

For Muslims, Mohammed the prophet is the most perfect man in the world from time to time. It is forbidden to us to depict his face. On Hadith, it’s said that to discourage depictions of any living creature. So that’s why Muslims against any depictions for their prophet.

From this situation, we can learn that we must realize we’re living in one place with people from various race, custom, manner, tradition, religion, etc. So that we should be careful with what things we gonna speak to others. A blog commentator said that Freedom of Speech (FoS) doesn’t mean hurting someone’s or religion’s integrity. You can see what has happened with Norris after she expressed support drawing for South Park. It drew heat and cried out from Muslims. Then, now on we must do care our mistakes and learn from them to discourage negative reaction from others and we can live in harmony.

May 8, 2010

Do Think: What Do You Want From You?

I am a creative person. Having great-great-great imagination and concept and idea. But one thing, I have less passion to bring them into reality. I don’t know why. Then I found the why answer in Anis Matta Book, Model Manusia Muslim Abad XXI. Matta said the main problem is the motivation we have. The less motivation we have, the less effort we do. And the more motivation we have, the more effort we do also.

Matta thought that if we just keep our concept and idea in deep part of our mind without action, we cannot realize them. The idea would be stay in mind forever. It would be a prisoner in our mind and dying there. The one thing should we do in realizing our idea is collecting the power. We need energy to run our concept. Unless we want them to be a concept only, just leave the effort of collecting the power and do nothing.

Matta stated, to build a strong motivation we need two more things after collecting the power; using and returning it back to ourselves. The main questions to shape the motivation are, where you will go; what your destination; what are you going to be. Those would help you to collect the power. You will find the motivation after you answer ‘what do you want from you?’. Be honest to yourself. Then you can specify what things do you need to get what you want. So friends, WHAT DO YOU REALLY WANT FROM YOU?