Have you ever talked into a microphone with the speaker facing you? That high pitch screech making you wince just thinking of it? Maybe you heard an annoying reverberation getting louder and louder till you unplugged the speaker or mic. That screech or reverberation is what happens when the microphone collecting the sound signal picks up the artificial echo of the original signal. This signal loop compounds and escalates the volume till it overwhelms the original sound, distorts it, and eventually drowns it out. In other words, the speaker is transmitting the sound back towards the source emitting that sound. This is called feedback. When feedback competes with the source, it’s called interference. Continue reading →

Did We not give you two eyes? A tongue and two lips? (Quran 90:8-9)

Where does my sight come from? Did some object generate the quality of sight from nothing? Did some creature take it from another creature and put it in my account? If other creatures in this world have sight, do they each have their own unique supplier of sight? These two verses in the Quran tell me about me, but they tell me in a way that leads me to consider how I got this way. “We gave you sight”.

The One who gave me sight, must necessarily be the owner of sight. Continue reading →

I want to know how the Quran talks about Salah. I’ve been accustomed to speak of Salah exclusively as a ritualized memorized recitation of the Quran punctuated by cycles of bowing and prostrating. However, the language of the Quran – the Quranic idiolect – envisions Salah very differently than we do in our new post-Quranic vernacular. The ritualized Salah was not the genesis of Salah; the Quran did not coin the term, rather it recasts it and invites me to reimagine each phenomenon of Salah in the world around me differently than I’ve been accustomed.

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