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We’ve seen frightening scenes, abominable scenes, horrific scenes.
Nobody wants to testify, nobody wants to talk about it, not even the media.
The whole world is afraid.
We have decided to take matters into our own hands,
and discuss the reality of the Eid al-Kabir.
This is an account, signed Gibran Hasnaoui, and Abderrahman the Cameraman.
(west african accent) Well, uhh, what can I say, I killed her,
she talked back too much, she annoyed me, so, I killed her
We are in Malaysian Borneo, in a little city called Kota Kinabalu,
in Borneo.
There it is, on the map
And because last year I got to Eid prayer late
- I remember it well, it was in Dubai -
this time, I woke up at 4am, just to be on time,
not to miss the prayer.
4am we woke up, to catch the first bus.
We get on the bus, there’s a teenager smoking,
and now you will hear me saying the only phrase that I can say in Malay...
No smoking, bad for the health.
Eid day begins.
In the morning, it’s prayer time. Here it’s at 7am,
it all depends on the country. In France it’s at 9am, Dubai it was at 6am.
This is the Kota Kinabalu Mosque,
12,000 people, the largest mosque in the city.
In the mosque, before the prayer, we sing God’s praises.
There is no god but God
and God is the greatest
God is the greatest and to Him belongs all praise
God is the greatest
God is the greatest, in all things
and praise to Him, always
and glory be to Him, in the morning and the evening
There is no god but God and we worship nothing aside from Him
whether the disbelievers hate it
whether the hypocrites hate it
There is no god but God, Alone
He kept His promise,
salvaged his slave (Muhammad),
gave him victory over his confederate enemies, Alone,
there is no god but God
and God is the greatest
God is the greatest and to Him belongs all praise.
You never see people singing in a mosque.
It’s forbidden, there are no instruments, no music.
It’s not Gospel, it’s not R Kelly.
Men and women are segregated, you don’t waddle, you don’t move your body.
The only day you will hear Muslims chant is on the festival days,
the two Eids festivals : al-Kabir or al-Adha, and Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan.
Then there is the prayer itself:
we prostrate before God,
we prostrate only before God, nothing else,
by prostrating only to God, we don’t make many friends on this planet.
Then there is the supplication and talk by the imam.
This is in Malay, so I don’t understand anything.
And, the long-awaited moment, this is the best moment,
the greetings, the hugs, everybody wishes one another a happy Eid,
everybody asks for each other’s forgiveness; it’s a day for forgiveness.
In Arabic we say Eidkum Mubarak
in Malay they say
and they add
This means “happy Eid, forgive me my faults, clear and hidden”.
In a way, we turn the meters back to zero.
There are hardly any foreigners in the mosque,
we are the only French people.
Everybody asks us where we’re from, and takes photos with us.
It really feels like Asia. Everybody’s taking photos!
So we’re the last out of the mosque, and, like in all the mosques in the world,
when you leave towards the end... you find a surprise
Seriously, this is ridiculous.
Someone’s taken my flip-flops!
This is the second time. The first time in the Philippines, the second time in Malaysia.
I'm gonna help myself
Nice, no? Green!
Wait, wait, there’s a new arrival!
Imagine if I see this guy in town.
He’ll be walking and I’ll say “hey, those are my flip-flops! Thief!”
You have to know, when you go to a mosque, take your least favourite shoes,
don’t bring out your Paul Smiths.
Take the flip-flops that are coming to the end of their lives,
90’s shoes that you keep in a cupboard,
so you don’t return home barefoot.
It’s like musical chairs,
at the end, everybody leaves with different shoes!
But there’s one who loses out in the end,
barefoot.
It's not me.
It’s 8am when we leave the mosque,
and we’re going to sacrifice cows, sheep and goats.
Before we talk about sacrificing, just so we’re clear,
because lots of things are said, lots of misconceptions, a lot of fear.
So, calm yourself, keep calm, just keep calm!
What does it mean to sacrifice an animal in the name of God,
for it to be halal?
You have to slaughter the animal, drain its blood,
and utter God’s name, in Arabic
that means “in the name of God, God is great”.
Alright I see it coming: in the name of Allah, you *** people,
you terrorists, bin Laden.
No, it’s not that.
When you start a piece of work, you dedicate it to someone.
So for example, a book. Right now I’m reading a book, When you start a piece of work, you dedicate it to someone.
So for example, a book. Right now I’m reading a book,
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and he’s dedicating his book to Lucien Descaves, see.
And here for example we have Balzac, who is he dedicating his book to?
“To mister Victor Hugo, your sincere admirer and friend, de Balzac”.
Another book, in English, about the south Philippines,
written by a Filipino researcher, Dr Kadil, he dedicates his book:
So, rappers do it too.
On each piece, before each performance, they shout out to...
Yo, special shout out,
special shout out to Mahmood Mutard,
to Watermelon Della,
to Chico Kapushicko
special shout out to Mamadou Niang,
to Jospin, to Minivan, Karim Minivan,
to all my friends in jail, special shout out, yo, yeah!
What’s strange is that they never dedicate to important people:
special shout out to my mother, who carried me for 9 months,
special shout out to Madame Petit in school,
to Ratus, Marou, Mina and Belo (kid comics characters), who taught me to read,
special shout out to everybody we forget to shout out!
Special shout out to the local council who paid for my transport card during college,
special shout out to the guys in Loir-et-Cher (french department),
28 department Eure-et-Loire,
80 department La Somme
man, 1916 the Battle of the Somme, we’ll never forget you,
1916 never forget!
Special shout out to the guys in the Doubs department, department 25, two five
Doubs doubs doubs dododo two five
So, it’s the same, people dedicate books, literature, rap songs,
everybody dedicates!
Muslims, when they slaughter an animal, they dedicate it too,
the supreme dedication.
A cow is a work of art,
God the supreme artist tells us : “here, I give You this work.”
No royalties, nothing to pay, it’s free.
But you dedicate it to Me. So you say “bismillah, Allahu akbar”.
Another thing I want to talk about is the name of God. Allah, in Arabic.
There are so many things said, false things.
Muslims call God 'Allah' for a simple reason: in Arabic, God’s name is Allah.
And there’s something you need to know.
Jesus, who is a Prophet of Islam for us, spoke a language similar to Arabic
the Aramaic language
It’s a language still spoken in Syria, in a village that I visited a few years ago,
and in this village where they speak Aramaic, what do they call God?
Alaha or Alah
In Aramaic the language of Jesus, we say Allah, Elah it's the same
Syria’s one of the most beautiful countries in the world,
You walk here, you get goose bumps
these are personal and family photos,
the classic Algerian pose.
That’s in front of the tomb of John the Baptist, cousin of Jesus.
Little bit of information for you too, the cousin of Jesus (Isa in Arabic),
is Yahya in Arabic, John the Baptist.
He is buried in the Umayyad Mosque,
and since for us Muslims, prophets are living in their tombs and praying,
He was a prophet of Islam, and what did he call God?
He spoke Aramaic too
Allah, Elah, it's the same thing
In a way, John the Baptist in the Umayyad Mosque, till today he’s praying with the Muslims,
he prays with us. He prays to Allah.
Jesus was a Palestinian prophet, who called God Allah,
he ate slaughtered meat, he was circumcised,
he didn’t eat pork, his mother wore the veil,
and his country was occupied.
Roman occupation, not Israeli occupation.
So Jesus was a Palestinian,
today, if he came back he would celebrate Eid in Gaza with Hamas,
and he’d be stopped at all the Israeli checkpoints
Muslims like to keep forenames, surnames, proper names in their original language.
So Allah remains Allah.
My younger brother is called Fares.
Fares in Arabic means horseman.
But when I call him on the phone, I don’t call him:
Horseman?! Horseman? How’s it going
Yeah, yeah, I’m having trouble here, do you have 2000 euros I could borrow?
ll get them back to you in... in... in 3 years
Horseman! Horseman or no Horseman?
He’s called Fares, we call him Fares.
The same for Karim, which in Arabic means holy.
Hi, yes I’d like to speak to the Holy (female), please.
Karima, the Holy one
Yeah, it’s my aunty, yeah.
For example I have an uncle called Philippe.
Philippe means lover of horses, in Greek.
Hey, he who likes horses, you’re gonna park somewhere else, okay?
That’s my parking place.
Well, you like horses, I like ponies!
You don’t translate names.
Philippe is Philippe. Karim is Karim. Fares is Fares.
Allah is Allah.
Back to Eid day,
it’s a festival day, you visit the family usually, loved ones, friends, neighbours.
So we went to a Malaysian family’s house.
They’re reading the Qur’an before a meal.
This is in the morning, after the prayer.
“And there came from the farthest end of the city a man, running. He said:
Oh my people, follow the messengers
Follow those who do not ask of you (any) payment
And who are rightly guided.
And why should I not worship He who created me
and to Whom you shall return?” (Qur’an 36:22)
Eid is a festival that lasts for 3 days
You pass from house to house, eat with people like this,
it’s an occasion to taste local food.
It’s 9am and we’re eating tuna! And cake.
Cake and tuna. Shrimps
Eid is a Muslim tradition celebrated by sacrificing an animal.
It is killed and its meat is shared with the Muslims of the village.
The meat is not only given to the poor, but to the rich as well. It is distributed equally.
For example, here it’s 1kg of the meat of the animal for each people.
So everybody eats, rich or poor.
This custom is respected and followed everywhere, in small villages and large cities.
It could be any animal: cows, buffalos, goats, as long as it is slaughtered.
I’m not going to talk about Abraham’s sacrifice, the origin of Eid.
I’m going to talk about my previous job.
You’re going to say, what’s that got to do with Eid, sacrifice?
Before, I worked at Siemens.
Mr Haznaoui you work at Ziemenz
and what did I do there? I did programming.
I programmed machines, robots, computers.
When I go into a factory and I see the machines, moving,
It's probably ABB, Kuka or Siemens
And I know there is a programmer behind this machine
Any computer or industrial machine has, as a basic language, a series of 0s and 1s,
0, 1, 0, 1. This is what we call binary language.
It’s the same in living things, who have the language of genetic code,
your series of A, T, G, C, what we call nucleotides.
Plants, animals, they are all made up from this language, A, T, G, C, the genetic code.
When I go to a farm or a zoo, it’s the same thought,
the question: who programmed these animals?
Who programmed this series of A, T, G, C, this genetic code?
I have friends who are in ecstasy when near robots, machines.
They aren’t like this when near a cow.
The trunk of an elephant is more complex to create than a robot.
The 01 language was developed by George Boole, it’s called the Boolean language.
There is a programming language, the C language, developed by Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie has nothing to do with Lionel Richie.
The C++ language, with which I also worked, was developed by a Danish
So the language of living things on Earth ATGC language. Who developed it?
I’m asking a question.
I’ll give you the answer. It was created by God, by Allah.
So if there’s an engineer, or a programmer or a colleague
who comes and tells me there is no God,
I’ll tell him that he failed his career.
He needs to go and do something else, McD fries,
clean the public station toilets, change professions.
You respect von Neumann, who created computer science,
you respect Steve Jobs he is a semi-god,
but you have no respect for Allah,
who created much more complex things than an iPad?
You can find God in anything.
Me, I found God in the programming I did at Siemens.
Developing programs for 68HC11 controller
Some people find God in art, literature, poetry, botany, geology.
I found God
in computer science
You mustn’t forget that God gave faith (title of a French song)
to Ophélie Winter (french singer).
That was back in 1996.
We’re in 2013 now.
You have to do something man.
If you’re really searching, God can give you faith.
Just like Ophélie. Go seek faith
(football coach) You’ve got to chase the ball, kiddo,
(football coach) go after the ball!
I speak to engineers, technicians I worked with,
Siemens, ABB, CNC programmers,
these people understand what I say.
You guys use Autocad, Solidworks, SDK Java, C#, you understand
if you've made a machine or a robot
There you go. Who made you?
You see this hand, it’s much more complex than the robots you can make.
Respect to God, the greatest of programmers, that’s what I have to say.
And I’m not talking to the philosopher
because I know him
...because of Kant's moral. Your ontological argument, I don’t want to hear it...
you’re not an engineer, you’re not a programmer,
you’ve not spent the night typing code, eating pizza.
We are among engineers, the greatest engineer is God, so leave us in peace.
Because I am Nietzschean, of neo-Spinozist tendencies, with a Democritic edge, which come to haunt me in my Athenian retreats...
If you want, you can finish your PhD thesis on Freud and the causes of causality,
take ***, vote Mélenchon (French politician),
just leave us in peace.
Kant’s morals, that’s not my thing...
You are useless, your thesis, nobody’s going to read it, except your jury.
The evolution of Apple products
Little are you grateful (to the Creator) (Qur’an 32:9)
All of this is to tell you that when you sacrifice an animal
created by God, programmed by God,
you thank Him.
When your heart contains even a mustard seed’s faith in God,
you want to eat the meat that was dedicated, or sacrificed for God,
meaning halal or kosher.
We have a particular method of cutting the animal,
and we share the meat with those who want it.
Most people want what we call “daging manis”, which means sweet meat, the tender part.
To get this part of the meat, we cut the stomach of the cow up to its neck,
The most important thing is to use the tip of the knife.
A lot of people use the blade, that’s incorrect.
So, I also sacrificed, I had bought a goat the day before,
and I brought my goat to the mosque.
Well, I’m a beginner! I want little too far, too strong
I still have a way to go.
I'm afraid I touched the goat’s vertebral column.
I still have a way to go.
Okay, let’s watch again in slow motion.
I wasn’t really on form, making a comeback in the 82nd minute,
1st dribble,
2nd dribble,
3rd dribble, here it is,
Bayern’s defender got the upper hand.
Morale in my socks, after the defeat against Lyon,
all I can say is that we hope to do better in the next match.
If you want to play the leading role, you have to know how to play the ball,
assess the situation, pass, otherwise you’re out,
and you won’t move up, which is not the goal.
I know what you’re going to say: it’s inhumane, it’s inhumane!
No, it’s totally humane.
To eat the meat that you raised, you sacrificed, with love and respect,
it’s humane.
There is nothing more humane.
What is inhumane, is eating frozen food in tins,
it’s far from nature, it’s far from our nature.
When you raise an animal, you see it born, and after 2 or 3 years,
you sacrifice it, you kill it, you have centuries of humanity behind you.
People have done this since the start of time.
You eat its meat, you feed your family, with its leather you make a sofa or a rug for the winter.
So relax!
You’re no longer human beings, that’s the problem.
You take the Métro, you live on the 20th floor of a tower,
your shopping is all frozen foods, you’re not human beings any more.
This is the Terminator.
Return to your primordial nature, your original nature,
what we call Fitra in Arabic : balance.
That’s what halal is, actually, it’s organic agriculture,
treating animals well, not giving them bone meals,
letting them see the light of day.
I feel sorry when I see at Christmas time, they sell “halal foie gras”.
It’s not halal at all, stuffing an animal to explode its liver, it’s not halal.
Fighting dogs to death, it’s forbidden in our religion.
Islam tells us to leave animals in peace.
Take a football, a basketball, play tennis, but you can’t mess around like that.
Bulls that have done nothing wrong to us.
If she saw how the prophet Muhammad (pbuh) treated animals,
Brigitte Bardot herself would have become Muslim!
The prophets of Islam, Muhammad being the last, were shepherds in their lives.
All of them.
Real life, pastoral life.
They saw animals born, they sacrificed animals on festival days.
So, for our vegetarian friends, I have vegetarian friends, even vegetarian sisters
I have an anecdote. Once, I saw a goth girl.
A goth. She was dressed all in leather
Black leather. All pale (Warning : prejudice).
And she told me: (Warning : prejudice).
“like, I’m a vegetarian, peace in the world, animals, laboratories, no...”
And she was dressed completely in full leather!
Pale, you know?
Black leather on white skin.
Pal Secam, NTSC
And one of her friends, he had a tattoo
here on his back, a barcode.
Have you seen that before?
Yeah, is the guy on sale or something?
Did his mother have quintuplets,
she didn’t know which was which, so she took a barcode reader,
probably was a former cashier : Beep beep
Hey look, it’s Michel!
Beep. Oh wait no, it’s Hervé.
The guy had a barcode!
Vegetarian, this image of a goth, pale, in leather, with her friend with a barcode on his neck,
that hit me, seriously. It was traumatising!
For these vegetarians, against animal cruelty, it’s true.
Animals have rights, it’s true, you have to respect them,
but there are other mammals at the bottom of your street
who are suffering too, who’ve lost their jobs, who sleep on cardboard,
who get food from charities, and I think that’s the priority, not lab mice.
Relax, get some kebab, put on a leather jacket.
And for those who’ll say to me “hey, no, that’s cruel, you kill animals”,
they wear Berluti shoes, Vuitton bags, who are you to teach me lessons ? Seriously
- What do we have, Carter?
- Captain I believe we have a goaticide.
- Great work, Carter. Write that in the report.
- The Islamist trail is drawn out.
- Not good for the health.
(west african accent) I killed her
she talked back too much, she annoyed me, so,
I killed her, so... yeah.
We're civilised people here, I asked her a question,
she replied "bah, bah"
I didn't understand, so she had to die.
she had to die.
It's over for her.
Here, we're civilised people, we're not in Guinea-Bissau,
we're in Senegal right here,
This was legitimate self-defense, this wasn't an assassination, sir,
self-defense you know?
This is not Guinea-Bissau, this is Senegal sir,
Yes sir
Back to the Eid day, in Malaysia it’s really well organised,
the manager of the mosque used to work at Toyota,
30 years at Toyota in Singapore, so he knows how to organise things.
At some point, you’ve got to ask yourself if you’re still in France.
Hey, look here! I told you, didn’t I? I told you.
Black Islamist, there you go.
The goat story.
Yeah, well, you were right about the black,
but I was right about the Islamist.
I hope he pays hard!
So, some people are going to talk about hygiene,
“they’re barefoot, they’re not wearing masks, no gloves...”
they do this every year since 300 years,
they’ve been Muslim for 300 years, nobody’s fallen ill.
When you travel a little around the globe,
you see that people capacity and tolerance of the people is not the same.
The problem in Europe is that we live in a sterile society.
For Eid, we have to give a third of the meat to the neighbours,
a third to the poor, and a third we eat.
We are 55 people here, including the teachers of the madrassa.
This is the madrassa in the town centre.
Thank you to the French Muslims.
Happy Eid to all of the French Muslims, from the mosque and madrassa of Kota Kinabalu.
Thank you, Muslim World Tour.
One final thing. Buy the Gazelle Magazine.
They’ve written an article about us.
It’s Gazelle Magazine (French Arab women’s magazine), not the New York Times
I just hope we’re not featured between a coconut soup recipe
and the latest anti-frizz shampoo.
And thank you to all the donors on the website, especially those who donate regularly.
This month, we didn’t do a Sadaqa Box, because we’re in Malaysia,
and it’s a rich country.
We’re waiting to go to Indonesia and there will we give the Sadaqa Box money.
With your donations, we don’t just buy goats, we also buy video equipment,
we bought a second camera, there it is.
CNN
We’re working on the next episodes, episode 3 will be released soon inshaAllah,
and episode 4 about Dubai,
episode 5 and 6 about the Philippines.
Thanks
And why should I not worship He who created me and to Whom you shall return? (Qur’an 36:22)
Convey from me, even if it is a single verse (Prophet Muhammad - saws)