Mom
What is a Moslem
I mean for real
Who is a Moslem
I mean for real
What must I do
So I can call myself
Moslem
For real
Like you, mom
Mom
Please tell me
What makes a Moslem
Moslem
Mom
Why do all Somalis
And I mean all Somalis
Bar none
I mean all of them Somalis:
Il Buono
Il Brutto
Il Cattivo
I mean all
Including
Tutti-frutti
Tutti Farabutti
Tutti Figlio di cani
Tutti Figlio di nessuno
Tutti Figlio di Indigini di Buscaglia
I mean
All
All the Twerps
I mean
All the Tyrants
All the Terrorists
All the Torturers
I mean
All the Traditionalist obscurant obstructionist oafs
I mean
All the Procrustean pious bigoted pigs
I mean
All the Obnoxious Oddballs
I mean
All the Treasonous Treacherous Traitors
I mean
All the Terrible ones
I mean
All the toadies
All the timeservers
All the temporizers
I mean
All the refractory riffraff ruffian reactionaries
Who sup on the roots of bitterness born of stubbornness
I mean
All the Sorry-arsed SOB slobs
Who are squealing now
Come weal
Come woe
Our status is the quo!
I mean
All the Aideed Gardeed Habar Gidir
Who never ever want to listen
To the consensus of the Ummah
To the considered learned words of the wisdom of the Ummah
Who never ever want to learn
Who always want to earn
The wrath of Alalh
I mean
All the lousy Liars
Whose loin-clothes are on fire right now
I mean
All the Talibans
All the Cannibals
All the Calibans
I mean
All the Kalaabeen
I mean
All the Kleptomaniacs
I mean
All the Kleptocrats
Like Galayrd
I mean
All the Midgets
All the Monsters
All the Morons
I mean
All the mendacious myrmidon minions of Mahamad Siyad Barre
Like Ina Sad Salad Prozac Boy
I mean
All the Hutu Hawiye Hirab Habar Gidir hellhounds
Who have been holding sublime Somalia
Who have been holding our collective future
Who have been holding out collective fate
In fee
In fear
In folly
In smear
In hock to the Habar Dugag
For the last umpteen years
I mean
All the Hutu Hawiye Coons
With Kalishnikovs
With no Korans!
With no Koans
With no Cojones
I mean
All the Nay Neigh-yers
I mean
All the Blind Mouths
Who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel
I mean
The Good
The Evil
The Ugly
I mean
The Fugly
The Phony
The Fake
The False
I mean
The Freaks
The Frauds
The Frets
I mean
The old Farts
I mean
The fantasists full of fatude
I mean
The Fools
The Fatheads
I mean
The Fanatic
The Fantastic
The Fabulous
I mean
The Fantabulous
I mean
The Floozy
The Fizgig
I mean
The Fearful
The Frightful
The Ferocious
I mean
The Affreux
I mean
The Fanculo
I mean
The Fainéant
I mean
The Funny-in-the head
I mean
The Not-So-Funny-in-the head
I mean
The Good-For-Nothing
I mean
The Know-Nothing
Like dishonest Dubya
I mean
The Goof-Off
Like Qurunle Qanyare
I mean
The Jerk-Off
Like Ina Aideed
I mean
The Sage
The Silly
I mean
The Saint
The Sinner
I mean
The Munafaqeen of Mog
I mean
All the Hajji Harams of Hargayssa
The Unhappy Hypocrite whores of Hargayssa
I mean
Les Grands Parleurs Petits Faiseurs of Somalia
Mom
Why do all Somalis
And I mean all Somalis
Bar none
Why do all Somalis call themselves
Moslems
Mom
Does just mouthing the words
I am a Moslem
Make me Moslem
Mom
Does just praying five times a day
Like you
Like dad
Make me Moslem
Mom
Does just fasting the month of Ramadan
Like you
Like dad
Make me Moslem
Mom
Does just taking a short and sharp shopping trip to Mecca
Like the old rank rich roués of Arabia make me Moslem
Mom
Does just merely going through the motions of a Moslem make me Moslem
Mom
How did Da-Mean Motiveless Malice come to mean
Moslem
Mom
How did
Fitna
Fatwa
Faqri
Come to mean
Moslem
Mom
How did IBM
(I)nshaa-Allah: meaning never ever!
(B)ukra: meaning mañana(the manna of Banana Republics)
& give this sorry sucker the run-around
(M)a-alesh: meaning go fuck a duck for all I care
How did this irate and outrageous IBM
Come to mean
Moslem
Mom
What is a Moslem
Who is a
Cross my heart and hope to die
So help me God
Dyed-in-the-wool Moslem
Like you
Like Malcolm Little
Like Malcolm X
Like El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz
I mean
A Moslem
For sure
For real
For good
For honest-to-goodness
For honest-to-God
For keeps
Forever
For come hell or high water
Or
Dumdum Da-Mean Dubya in Fallujah
Mom
When is a Moslem most
Like Moslem
Like you
Like Malcolm X
Like Michael Mariano
Like Merlin Russell Grove
Like Helen Rank
I mean
Like the real McCoy
Mom
What is your last word on being Moslem
What is your definitive definition of Moslem
Mom
Give me the inside dope on being Moslem
I mean
Give me the genuine real goods on being Moslem
Mom
Who is a Moslem for real
What is a Moslem for real
—Mandhow!
Mahamud!
Boss-tay-ye!
A Moslem is
Anyone
Anywhere
In God’s great wide world
Who gives you
Who gives his neighbor
Who gives
All God’s creation
All God’s creatures
Great & small
PEACE
Peace
From his mouth
Peace
From his heart
Peace
From his hand
For the Lord God made us all
To enjoy Peace
With Him first
And then
With all that Allah has created
I mean
The Peace of God
That passes all understanding
I mean
The Peace that makes me
Like my late dad
Like Siyad Togane
Sing out loud
“Awada Jàw Abgal!
I mean
The Peace that makes me
Like Adan Abdulle Osman
Like Farah Gololay
Sing out loud
Behold!
How good!
How pleasant!
It is
For Somali brothers
For Somali sisters
To dwell together
In Peace
In Unity
In “bonds of affection
And the mystic chords
Of our shared Somali memory”;
Born of “the better angels of our nature”
In the bloodless bonds of Peace.
NOTES
Adan Abdulle Osman: The first democratically elected president of Somalia (1960-1966); the first African president who did not declare himself president for life but walked away peacefully and manfully from power like Saint Nelson Mandela.
Affreux: (French) The horrible ones.
Aideed: Or Aidiid. General Mohamed Farah Aideed, also known as General Wow of Black Hawk Down notoriety; the thug that mugged and kicked Uncle Sam and his UN out of Somalia; once he was the top Somali banana who drove Somalia and the rest of the world bananas. Aideed was the scourge of the Darod; the thug that tarred and feathered and ran Sa-eed Samatar out of town on a rail in an American tank with the whole world watching agog on Larry King Live and on CNN and on BBC and on ABC and on CBC and on CBS and on PBS and on the Toronto Royal Loyal Habar Gidir Broadcasting Castration Center of Gûn Darod Clans!
Aideed simply couldn’t stand Sa-eed because Sa-eed who was then consultant for Ted Kobel of ABC happened to be a disagreeable Darod. Aidiid was simply impossible to deal with:
In my report back
To the Moslems
To the Mennonites
To the Somalis
To the Canadians
To the Americans
To the Europeans
To all the friends of the Somali people
Who had sent me on that fateful dangerous Peace Mission
To Aideed
To Mogadishu
In 1992
I wrote:
It is maktoob now:
It is written now
That there are now three likely scenarios in Somalia
(1) For Somalis
To crown Aideed with the royal diadem
To crown Aideed
King of all the Somali clans!
(2) Or for Somalis
To unite and kick crazy Aideed out of Somalia
To keep the Darod Kalab Afwayne company!
In Nigeria!
To unite and kick crazy Aideed out of Somalia
Just like they had done it
To the dirty Darod despot
Just like they had kicked Afwayne out of Somalia
All the way to Nigeria
(3) Or for Somalis
To kill the SOB Aideed right there
Where he is
In his Hutu Hawiye Nuthouse!
In Moriyan-Mad Max Mogadishu!
That made my audience clamor and cry out:
“Togane
Prophesy!
Play Tiresias
Play the part of the Blind Prophet of ancient Greece
The most famous soothsayer of ancient Greece
You are the man
You were there
You suffered
You saw Aideed
You nearly lost your life four times
Before you encountered
The Hutu Hawiye hero
Aideed
&
His Abgal nemesis
Ali Mahdi
Of the three scenarios you had cited
Which one is the most likely to come to pass?
Afwayne, the spiritual Papa Doc of Aideed, had the sense
To say
To himself
To his dreadful Darod confederacy:
‘You are intelligent,
What better alternative is there
But run away from the wrath of the Hutu Hawiye Hordes!
To Nigeria
Where nigger dictators like me
May micturate away their last days
In peace!’
And then Papa Afwayne split from the obscene scene of Mad Max Mog!
How will the Hutu Hawiye hero end up?
How will he meet his Maker?
Will he too like Afwayne cheat Somali justice
And split from the senseless Somali scene he perpetrated?”
—I stood up and delivered this prophesy:
The Hutu Hawiye hero is a heel!
The Hutu Hawiye hero is a hellion!
The Hutu Hawiye hero is a hellhound
The Hutu Hawiye hero won’t have enough sense
To run away to Nigeria from the wrath of the Hutu Hawiye Hordes!
The Hawiye hero will go down
In a hail of bullets from a Hawiye Kalishnikov
Right there in Mogadishu!
Four years later the words of Togane
The Somali Tiresias
Came to pass!
On August 2 1996
Mohamed Farah Aydiid
Danced to bullets
Danced his last
Danse macabre
Sic transit Gloria mundi Hutu Hawiye Habar Gidir Jalaf!
Thus passed away the glory of the Hutu Hawiye Habar Gidir Jalaf!
Thus passed away the hour of the glory of the Hutu Hawiye Habar Gidir Jalaf!
Thus Aideed & his Hawiye Habar Habar Gidir Jalaf snatched defeat
Out of the jaws of victory!
Thus Aideed & his Habar Kintir killed the whole crazy concept called
Hawiye!
Aideed was gardeed & gardeed wa Allah deed: One who refuses and rejects and tries to refute the result of the consensus decision-making of the Moslem community: the will & the wisdom of Allah and his Prophet who taught his Ummah: “My community will never agree upon an error”
See page 232 of Lewis. A Pastoral Democracy: A Study of Pastoralism & Politics Among the Northern Somali of the Horn of Africa. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.
Finally Aideed heard the music of the only language that he dug; the language of Mugdi Mudug where he hails from; the language of Bud iyo laan: cudgel& stave for he got his overdue comeuppance on August 2, 1996 when he ran heedlessly (as it was his wont) into a hail of bullets.
The trophy of this triumph goes to the clannish confederacy of convenience of Atto’s Rer Hilowle & the Da-ood Abgal warlord, Al-hajji Muse Soodi Yalahow, whose clan Aideed held in utter contempt for Aideed & his Habar Gidir just couldn’t envision Somalia under the leadership of “Ali Diesel & his bovine Abgal & their donkeys.”
Aideed’s legendary mulish mad stubbornness began in arrogant ignorance and ended in his unregrettable and unlamented demise!
Rira bien qui rira le dernier: He who laughs last, laughs best!
Awada Jàw Abgal!: (Somali) Only tonight do I deign to call myself an Abgal! Siyad Togane’s celebrated and inspired salvific retort to the Italian imperialist’s impudent policy of divide and rule and to their crazy clannish question of
“Are you Dir Darod Dayoos Danyer or Doqon?”
His riposte while under duress; while under torture; thus repudiating the crazy claims of his bovine Abgal clan on his integrity & dignity as a free Somali citizen, as an autonomous individual who does not belong to Aideed’s Hawiye herd.
That was the practical beginning of the revolutionary time of the SYL consciousness of the Somali race. A time for every Somali to deny the crazy claims of the Somali KKK —Dir Darod Dayoos Danyer Doqon— upon him; a time to deny & eschew the anachronistic evil of clanism (the most insidious sort of racism) & affirm friendship; a time to betray one’s clan rather than one’s friends who are the medicine of life.
Needless to say that time is right now!
Togane’s SYL past was only the prologue to the present of this Somali generation and many more generations to come.
Blind Mouths: An apt and memorable syncohdeche from Milton’s Lycidas, 1. 119; a fitting phrase for the greedy guts and crazy coons like Qurunle Qanyare and Aideed fils (Tel père tel fils: Like father, like son) who now pose as leaders of Somalia.
Boss-tay-ye: (Somali) My Somali mother’s pet name for me that means the champ who puts chumps in their proper place.
Caliban: A deformed savage from Shakespeare’s Tempest: in this context I mean a primitive brute aptly and memorably described by Kipling as “Half devil and half child” in his White Man’s Burden.
Damean: A dullard loaded like a Darod donkey with dollars like Dubya.
Dubya: The Village Idiot in the White House who won re-election on the mindless slogans of—Four More Years! And of—USA! And on the tactics of Fear & Smear! “Never underestimate the bad taste of the American public.”
Dubya was re-elected by what the great American H.L. Mencken called, Boobus Americanus: “The ignorant, self-righteous, and overly credulous Bible Belt know-nothing, go-getting middle-class philistines whom he also dubbed the “booboisie.”
Faqri: (Arabic) The needless Poverty of the Moslem World.
Farah Gololay: The Oscar Wilde of Somalia; the monarch of Somali wit & waggery; the son of savvy and suavity and savoir-faire who is now in Paradise with Allah for merely making Somalis laugh during the dark days of the Dirty Darod Dictator alias Papa Doc Afwayne.
Fatude: (Somali) “…sincere delusions—that is, lies which the liar believes.”
See page 235of John Berryman. Recovery. New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1973.
A chip-on-the-shoulder delusional attitude informed by ignorance & arrogance. A Somali word meaning an attitude struck & stuck in the high lazy latitudes of the doldrums of the doo-doos of self-deception.
Faude is a child “of an idle brain, / Begot of nothing but vain fantasy...” See Romeo & Juliet . 1. iv. 97-98. It is a typical Somali Mugdi Mudug attitude of bullshit & bluster. The English tongue has borrowed many a word from the Somali tongue, such as yahoo, nag, ninny, seal, was, goose, fug, etc. I predict the English language will soon appropriate fatude. It is just a matter of time before it too begins to roll off the English tongue just like yahoo. See “A Short lesson In Comparative Languages”, p. 5 of M. S. Togane. The Bottle & The Bushman: Poems of The Prodigal Son. Ste-Anne de Bellevue (Québec): The Muses’Company, 1986. Fatude aptly describes the common Somali affliction of disconnection from reality. It also means a rude, crude attitude based on farce and according to Alfred Kazin, “Farce is catastrophe without a context and without a solution.”
A perfect description & definition of the Somali syndrome & the malady of Mog.
See page 95 of Alfred Kazin. God & the American Writer. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1997.
Fatwa: (Arabic) An arbitrary ruling by a fanatic humbug of a bully (like the late and unlamented Ayatollah of Iran) who forgot that “philosophy consists in asking questions, sophistry in answering them, and fanaticism in enforcing the answers.”
Fitna: (Arabic) The endless endemic conflicts of the Moslem world.
Galayrd: (Somali) An eagle. Also the name of one of the most astute politicos on the Somali scene today: Dr Ali Khaleef Galayrd, Somalia’s own Dr Kissinger, who would kiss any powerful derriere regardless of how dirty it is; who was the Prime Minister (2000-2001) of the Transitional National Government concocted by die-hard underling dogs of Afwayne in Arta, Djibouti. His critics call this Somali Iago, not an eagle but gier-eagle, meaning a vulture that is half-Harvard, half-hustler. Ali khaleef Galayrd, a Dhulbahante vulture to the Hawiye eagle, Ina bad mad sad Salad Boy, was the prime minister of Somalia for a season or so; a post that he had bought & paid for in the 2000 powwow of Somali rainmakers in Arta, Djibouti. He could afford to buy & pay for the position on the spot because during the kleptocracy of Afwayne, he was the Minister of Industry and Commerce & absconded with millions of dollars earmarked for the construction of sugarcane plantations & factories. No wonder I had dubbed him & his so-called cabinet as Ali Baba Galayrd & his forty thieves!
Galayrd’s PhD, like so many African PhDs , means “poverty, hunger, and disease”. (“They should let us determine out leaders, not those two monsters—Doctor John Garang and Doctor Riek Machar,” one Sudanese spat out scornfully when I asked his view, “In the SPLA, the ones making all the mistakes are these so-called Ph.D.s—poverty, hunger and disease.”) See page 224-225 of Scott Peterson. Me Against My Brother : At War In Somalia, Sudan, And Rwanda: A Journalist Reports From The Battlefields Of Africa. New York: Routledge, 2000
Irony of all ironies, Galayrd’s doctoral dissertation was Beauracratic Corruption in Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis & Conceptual Inquiry. Apparently Ali Baba Galayrd did his theoretical work of rampant corruption in Nigeria and in Academia that came to fruition in his real practical practice of the real Qurun or corruption in Somalia.
Hajji Harams: All the cunning connoisseurs of all that is forbidden by the Abode of Al-Islam.
Helen Rank: An American Mennonite missionary teacher who served in Somalia from 1961-1976. Helen’s famous last words in an American hospital were: “Take me out of here! You are spending thousands of dollars a day just to keep me alive while a Somali cannot even afford to buy an aspirin. It is obscene; take me out of here! I want to go home and lie down and die just like Somalis do in Mog.”
Hirab: (Somali) The Abgal and their brother clan, the Habar Gidir, are collectively known as Hirab.
Ina Aideed: Hussein Aideed, the son of the late Hutu Hawiye Mad Hatter General Wow.
Kalaabeen: (Arabic) Meaning dogs; singular, kalab. In the lexicon of Somali bigotry & hatred, the worst thing that a mad malicious medieval Somali mullah maddened by modernity can call you are: Kalab! Meaning dog! Or Gaal! Meaning a heathen honky alien infidel! Or Yahood! Meaning a Jew!
Koans: Zen parables.
Les Grands Parleurs Petits Faiseurs: (French) Great talkers of the Word and small doers of the Word.
Malcolm Little: Malcolm Little metamorphosed into Malcolm X only to apotheosize into the immortal El-Hajj Malik El Shabazz.
Mandhow: (Somali) My son.
Merlin Russell Grove: Merlin Russell Grove of Markham, Ontario, was martyred on July 16, 1962, by a Muslim muttonhead from Mugdi Mudug. Merlin laid down his life for me and for his friends in Africa and North America and “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Michael Mariano: See my poem, “The Avatar of the Somali Race”, on the mudulood.com.
Munafaqeen (Arabic) Hypocrites.
Qurunle Qanyare: The bully boy Poo-Bah of the Afar-Qoable clan.
Stubbornness: My mother, quoting the hadith of the Prophet always admonished me, “Mandhow, Avoid stubbornness, for it begins in ignorance and ends in regret.”
Ummah: The great Moslem nation of more than 1.200 billion,
