whats the plot

today, i discovered that the quranapp i'd written for facebook has been broken for some time now (mainly due to the changed notification apis, which affects both notification sending and invites). so i've finally updated it and it properly works again.

i actually kind of like their changes - their new invite form and friend selector are pretty simple to use and are very feature full (not to mention well documented), and not having to catch return types from sent messages and forward to a confirmation page is always a very nice thing (tm).

i guess sometimes, you can't just write software and forget about it

keeping the seo statements from the previous post in mind, audio.islamicnetwork.com has become http://quranicaudio.com/ -- it is now running on lighttpd (rather than apache - by the way, so far, i really like lighty masha'Allah) and al7amdulillah, so far, things look good.

quranicaudio.com is one of the web's largest (if not the largest) collection of cd quality downloadable quran mp3s (and some oggs). check it out!

i figured i'd play around with the facebook api today, so i wrote a little facebook quran app for displaying verses from the quran on your profile page. not very polished if i should say so myself, but... it works (at least for me). if you try it, please let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature suggestions.

you can test it here: http://facebook.cafesalam.net/quranapp.

so i saw this article on y! news about muslim feminists in new york wanting to start a quran interpretation council - their goal being to break streotypes involving terrorism and women being oppressed in islam.

i don't know why, but something strikes me as odd about this... "muslim feminists" might be the start of oddity - islam is the first religion that gave women rights and elevated women to a status that is many times higher than that of men. the examples are innumerable, but just one example is that one of the top narrators of ahadeeth who taught the great men of the ummah and whom many of the great scholars took their knowledge directly or indirectly was sayida 3a2isha (ra).

secondly, a "shura council of women to interpret the Quran?" -- i mean what do they think this is, "everyone interpret the Quran the way they wish?" -- its not about men and injustice as they claim it is - the great islamic universities are open to women just as they are for men - no one stopped any woman from studying islam at al Azhar or Madinah Unniversity and publishing great works on Islam if they want to...

so i don't get it, how is a group of random women (which is what i think of when reading this article, of course i could be wrong...) simply going to decide that "men are unjust, we are going to make a council to interpret the Quran?"

i have no problem with women writing tafseer of Quran - as long as they are qualified to do so. however, a group of random women (or men for that matter) writing a tafseer? i think not...

does anyone else see this, or is it that perhaps i am reading too much into this article?

so i was a little bit bored today, and i wanted to write a simple quranic aim bot just for fun... so i took a look at Net::Oscar off cpan and at a sample bot, wrote a sample alpha api to allow searching over quranic realm, and the result:

(02:06:20) ahmed: 3:1
(02:06:21) chisaikaruma:
match: ayah="1"
Transliteration: Alif-lam-meem
Sahih International: Alif, Lam, Meem.

(02:06:23) ahmed: say if you love Allah
(02:06:24) chisaikaruma:
match: sura="3" ayah="31" percent="100"
Transliteration: Say (O Muhammad SAW to mankind): "If you (really) love Allah then follow me (i.e. accept Islamic Monotheism, follow the Quran and the Sunnah), Allah will love you and forgive you of your sins. And Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful."
English: Qul in kuntum tuhibboona AllahafattabiAAoonee yuhbibkumu Allahu wayaghfirlakum thunoobakum wallahu ghafoorun raheem

(02:06:42) ahmed: bismillah alrahman alraheem
(02:06:43) chisaikaruma:
match: sura="1" ayah="1" percent="84"
Transliteration: Bismi Allahi arrahmani arraheem
English: In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.

match: sura="27" ayah="30" percent="84"
Transliteration: Innahu min sulaymana wa-innahu bismiAllahi arrahmani arraheem
English: "It is from Solomon, and is (as follows): 'In the name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful:

i am not quite sure as to whether or not i can send utf8 strings over this or not... i couldn't get arabic results to work from the tiny bit i tried. it still needs some work, but its just a for-fun prototype/proof of concept. i think the greatest benefit was being able to put together an alpha version of an quranic realm api for future use.

i've taken it down for now... and by the way, for those of you wondering about the name, "chisaikaruma" comes from "chisai karuma" (ちさい かるま) in japanese, which means "small car."