Pix From Bagrawiyah

God, you have no idea what I went through to upload those pictures, the connection is slow, and the uploading sites have been giving me some shit, Facebook kept logging me out in the middle of uploading process, flickr is useless, finally photobucket gave me a chance to upload some pictures out of the 1GB+ I have taken, I also added some to Facebook afterall, anyways, here are some, I'll add the rest later.. click on the pic to enlarge

Shendi Yaaa

Al salamu alikom yall

I'm in Shendi, i've been here for 2 days now, and tomorrow i'm going to Bagrawiyah, the capital of the ancient kingdom of Kush,

I went to school in Shendi 7 years ago, studied 8th grade in Shendi North School, right after we moved from KSA, I was born here in Shendi, right next to Al-Sikka 7adid (The Train Station), I gotta admit, even though I lived here for a whole year before my family move again to Khartoum, I never seen how amazing this city is. but damn, I forgot my camera's USB plug back in Khartoum, so I won't be able to upload pics till i go back.

So yeah, the city is not the same as it was 7 years ago, it got more paved streets with lights, more multi-stories buildings, Atoz cars as Taxis, and a million raksha, so basically, it's not so diffrent from Khartoum, depends on where you're bike is taking you (my transportation in exploring the city is an old rusty bike that got the word Phoenix on it :D), "7ilat Al-Bahar" (a fancy neighorhood next to the nile, it's like Riad to Khartoum) is so amazing, specially at night, the lights and the trees and the clean paved streets makes it feel more like Khartoum, but what doesn't feel like Khartoum is the Copts. there are many copts here that you can actually see they have social classes, in Khartoum the only Copts I know are rich copts, here there's a whole neghorhood full of them and some of them are poor, and some are not, just like any other race, if they are a race.. I really need to know more about them. anyways, I went to their church, and I gotta tell you, it's mad nice, it looks like a mosque, only with crosses on it and a big ass satellite dish, I didn't get to see it from the inside though, maybe tomorrow when I come back from the ancient city.. man i'm so excited to see the pyramids.

I also wanna go cheak "Al-3ashwa'ey" (litterly: The Random), it's the neighorhood where southerns live, or forced to live I say, I don't know many "janoubi" people here in Shendi, even those who went to school with me I don't remember their names or where they live, but I still remember "Argaweez", she was my grandma's best friend, when she's not cleaning the house, or washing cloths, she just sits there in the kitchen chatting with my grandma, I wonder where she is now, maybe she'll show up when my grandma comes home, she's in Khartoum now, so yeah, the house is mine :D and it's crazy nice when you got the house and the stash, know what i mean? lol

I met a man today at the station, he looked like he's from South but i'm not sure, his name is Yousif, a really nice man, he's a soldier, he told me he came back from Darfur six months ago and now he's doing nothing, he didn't look mad though, I asked him if they were really killing people at Darfur because they're black, he tried to explain how it only started as a tribal conflict over camels and shit, something close to the government's official story so I didn't really care and stopped the politics crap. I hope he finds a better job, he is really a good man.

today's morning was so amazing, I even heared someone telling his friends "This is Sudan's spring", it was cloudy and breezy.. and if bob marley was with me, i'm sure he'd sing "Kaya" lol. so yeah, I went to the train station, but there was no train there yet, only a group of white people, men, women, and children sitting there like they're living there, I approached them with my camera up high and said hi, one guy, I forgot his name (I got my reasons lol) was so friendly so I asked him if I can take some pictures for him and his family, he was totally cool with, but not before taking the only 2 pounds I had in my pocket, I gave it to him cuz they really looked sad, I asked him where they came from, he told me they come from Palestine, yes, palestine, I was like wooo.they were really nice, I took some nice pictures too, but I stopped cuz the oldest one, probably their grandpa, took me aside an started some creepy conversation with me, he told me that "the eye got me" (the "evil eye" in islamic culture", I told him that I don't believe in this stuff, he told me about surat al-falaq and that Allah tells us in to seek refugee "from the evil of the envier when he envieth.", I told him it's as simple as that, we should be on the guard for the evil of the envier, envy is just a feeling, It don't hurt nobody, it's the actions of those who envy is what hurts.

he didn't like what I told him, and he told me some more things that i'm not gonna tell you, sorry but it's kinda private :), he pulled some psychic shit and told me some stuff about ME that I didn't like neither, so yeah, I left them and went back home.

later I went to the river, or as we call it here in Sudan "Al-Bahar" (litterly: The Sea), and it's the most beatifull bahar I ever seen, and the sunset was perfect. after that I went to "Al-Soog" (The Market), and bought a pound of "Basta" (sweets or desserts), and I gotta tell you, Shendi's basta is the best, it's not like the junk they sell in Khartoum, and you get to suck the honey out of the plastic bag :D .

damn, I typed so freakin much, I hope I made sense cuz I don't even remember what I said upthere lol .. but hey, I'll come back later and upload those pictures I took.. so peace

Rap: Producing Art

1- Stoup The Enemy of Mankind (from Jedi Mind Tricks)
this nigga here is a god on the beats .. if you listen to JMT's track "Saviorself" you'll know what i mean, whenever i listen to this song, the beat takes me straight to the pyramids, and that's what makes a great producer, he makes you live what the rapper is talking about.. "Uncommon Valor", also a masterpiece by JMT is another example of his magic touch, he takes artists' lyrics to another level with his creative production, it don't matter if its fight music, love, war, history, or anything. JMT's earlier albums show his abilities so clearly.. his next collabo with Canibus is going to make him an enemy of producers for sure.






2- Tha RZA (From Wu-Tang Clan)
killa beez formed their swarm with the production skills of this man, his work on the group's debut album "Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)" is remarkable for its gritty effectivness, even though the group's equipment was so weak at the time, it was even described as "dusty", but RZA's production came with a brand new style that was unprecedented in hip hop, using soul samples and movie sound clips to enhance the picture lyricists were drawing in the tracks. RZA's solo album "Birth of A Prince" is a masterpiece, lyrically and instrumentally, and with another 4 solo albums, RZA proves with his discordant piano samples and wavering strings that rap is an art. "See The Joy" from Birth of A Prince.









3- DJ Premier (From Gangstarr)
Premo is a ill motherfucka when it comes to making beats, he's been killing tracks since the 1990 and still doin it, he's most notable for his work with Guru in the great GangStarr, tracks like "Above The Clouds", "Mass Appeal", "JFK 2 LAX", "Full Clip".. and Nas's "NY State of Mind", show how simple yet powerful his beats are.. he also produced for many artists such as Nas, The Notorious B.I.G., KRS-One, Bone Thugz N Harmony.. etc.









4- Necro
this white sick motherfucker is a true track murderer, his rugged beats are as sick as his lyrics, sometimes you can see blood comin out of the speakers after playing some of his shit lol, listen to his collabo album with Ill Bill (from Coca La Nostra) "Street Villians" ("Bury You With Satan The Remix").. also his album "Gory Days" got some really gory plays.. and I'm glad to tell you I'm usin some of his instrumentals for my mixtape :D .. my all time favorite beats by him are "The Big Sleep", "Morbid", "light my fire" .. and the list goes on






5- DJ Kno (from Cunninlynguists)
another white boi with infinite skills on the beats, this kid is so fuckin creative his beats are like movies man, the album "Will Rap For Food" is more than enough to prove his abilities, and he really excelled himself with his work on the group's last LP "Dirty Acres" .. and between Rap For Food and Acres, he made some of the most touching beats ever, "A Piece Of Strange" contains some of the most artistic beats in the history of hip hop. start with "Rain", "What'll You Do?", "War", "Appreciation Remix" and "KKKY". get their whole discography to listen to more, it really worth it.






6- 7L (from the group 7LES)
also a white boi, 7L is a skilled producer who manages to take the listener to the core of Esoteric's lyrics.. in tracks like "Rise of A Rebel" it's easy to see that the rebel is 7L with his amazing piano. listenin to the 2006 LP "Moment of Rarities" is a great way to sense his production style.






7- Tonedeff
as a rapper he is a god of flow.. as a producer he's more like an orchestra leader, but without the stick, beats on tracks like "Porcelain" or "Loyal" are deeper than the words said in em, actually the whole "Archetype" album is a deep as a scuba diver production, you don't wanna miss that, listen to it's overture entitled "Overture".






8- Pete Rock
Pete Rock style is based on samples, and he's really nice with what he's doing, even thoough i didn't get the chance to really listen to all what he's done, but his work on Edo-G's album "My Worst Enemy" really forced me to put his name here. cheak "Jus Listen", "Situations".. he also produced for Nas, B.I.G., and many others.


9- The Alchemist
another white producer, this kid truly does turn lead to gold, his serise entiled "The Chemistry Files" are rapper's best friend (he has an instrumentals album with the same name). he produced for so many artists, but most notably is his work with Mobb Deep, Dilated Peoples, Ghostface Killah.. etc. a must listen: "Mama" from Big Pun's album "Endangered Species", Prodigy from Mobb Deep "Hold You Down"




10- Immortal Technique
though his production is not as much as his punchlines, but good things comes in small packages, or something like that.. anyways, his "Caught In A Hustle" track is a mad nice produced saga.




11- Jean Grae
her producing career is not as serious as her MCin' career, but she still a mad nice producer, production of immortal technique's "Revolutionary" from "Revolutionary Vol. 1" belongs to her sweet fingers lol.


12- RJD2
this white kid is a GENIUS.. he's simply a fucking genius, and he makes some real trippy music.. always good to listen to when you high as a bird know what am sayin? RJD2 is a real artist, mixing diffrent types of music creating inspiring tunes.. he mostly rolls solo, but his collabo with Aceyalone is remarkable, he managed to cheak: "Smoke And Mirrors", "Ghostwriter", "Beyond the Beyond", "1976", "The Horror", "Junior", "All For You", and you'll sure gonna download his whole discography


13- MF Doom
before anything, listen to "Biochemical Equation" with RZA from wu-tang and i dare you not to praise this man in the iron mask.. Doom is a Stones Throw affiliate, and he's a gladiator on the beats (the mask he's wearing is designed like the one Russel Crowe had in the movie Gladiator) .. try: "Nastradoomus", "Monkey Suite", "I Hear Voices".. and when he meets with Madlib, that's another story yo..


14- Madlib
another Stones Throw affiliate, and a track killer, his name stands for "Mind Altering Demented Lessons In Beats" so you know how sick this nigga is.. most of his work was done with Talib Kweli and other stones throw affs, like MF Doom, his collabo with Talib "Liberation" is a 5 stars joint, cheak "The Show" .. and then "I Love Marijuana", "Slim Returns".

Can you see?

Pyramids of The Royal City of Meroe (North Sudan) - Period: "Zaman lil deen" (too freakin old)


"Maqam" of Shikh Kabashy (Shrine) - A Sudanese Sufi Sheikh

what do you see? I'll come next week and tell you what I see

Put on your shades cuz the truth will get too sunny

"وَإِن تُطِعْ أَكْثَرَ مَن فِي الأَرْضِ يُضِلُّوكَ عَن سَبِيلِ اللّهِ إِن يَتَّبِعُونَ إِلاَّ الظَّنَّ وَإِنْ هُمْ إِلاَّ يَخْرُصُونَ" - الأنعام (6:116)

"Wert thou to follow the common run of those on earth, they will lead thee away from the way of Allah. They follow nothing but conjecture: they do nothing but lie." - Al-Ana'am (6:116)

I got some trees and i'm ready to smoke

Merry Christmas crackaz :)

A.Roman pagans first introduced the holiday of Saturnalia, a week long period of lawlessness celebrated between December 17-25. During this period, Roman courts were closed, and Roman law dictated that no one could be punished for damaging property or injuring people during the weeklong celebration. The festival began when Roman authorities chose "an enemy of the Roman people" to represent the "Lord of Misrule." Each Roman community selected a victim whom they forced to indulge in food and other physical pleasures throughout the week. At the festival's conclusion, December 25th, Roman authorities believed they were destroying the forces of darkness by brutally murdering this innocent man or woman.

B.The ancient Greek writer poet and historian Lucian (in his dialogue entitled Saturnalia) describes the festival's observance in his time. In addition to human sacrifice, he mentions these customs: widespread intoxication; going from house to house while singing naked; rape and other sexual license; and consuming human-shaped biscuits (still produced in some English and most German bakeries during the Christmas season).

C.In the 4th century CE, Christianity imported the Saturnalia festival hoping to take the pagan masses in with it. Christian leaders succeeded in converting to Christianity large numbers of pagans by promising them that they could continue to celebrate the Saturnalia as Christians.[2]

D.The problem was that there was nothing intrinsically Christian about Saturnalia. To remedy this, these Christian leaders named Saturnalia's concluding day, December 25th, to be Jesus' birthday.

E.Christians had little success, however, refining the practices of Saturnalia. As Stephen Nissenbaum, professor history at the University of Massachussetts, Amherst, writes, "In return for ensuring massive observance of the anniversary of the Savior's birth by assigning it to this resonant date, the Church for its part tacitly agreed to allow the holiday to be celebrated more or less the way it had always been." The earliest Christmas holidays were celebrated by drinking, sexual indulgence, singing naked in the streets (a precursor of modern caroling), etc.

F.The Reverend Increase Mather of Boston observed in 1687 that "the early Christians who first observed the Nativity on December 25 did not do so thinking that Christ was born in that Month, but because the Heathens' Saturnalia was at that time kept in Rome, and they were willing to have those Pagan Holidays metamorphosed into Christian ones."[3] Because of its known pagan origin, Christmas was banned by the Puritans and its observance was illegal in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681.[4] However, Christmas was and still is celebrated by most Christians.

G.Some of the most depraved customs of the Saturnalia carnival were intentionally revived by the Catholic Church in 1466 when Pope Paul II, for the amusement of his Roman citizens, forced Jews to race naked through the streets of the city. An eyewitness account reports, "Before they were to run, the Jews were richly fed, so as to make the race more difficult for them and at the same time more amusing for spectators. They ran… amid Rome's taunting shrieks and peals of laughter, while the Holy Father stood upon a richly ornamented balcony and laughed heartily."

III.The Origins of Christmas Customs

A.Christmas Trees
Just as early Christians recruited Roman pagans by associating Christmas with the Saturnalia, so too worshippers of the Asheira cult and its offshoots were recruited by the Church sanctioning "Christmas Trees". Pagans had long worshipped trees in the forest, or brought them into their homes and decorated them, and this observance was adopted and painted with a Christian veneer by the Church.

B.Mistletoe
Norse mythology recounts how the god Balder was killed using a mistletoe arrow by his rival god Hoder while fighting for the female Nanna. Druid rituals use mistletoe to poison their human sacrificial victim. The Christian custom of "kissing under the mistletoe" is a later synthesis of the sexual license of Saturnalia with the Druidic sacrificial cult.

C.Christmas Presents
In pre-Christian Rome, the emperors compelled their most despised citizens to bring offerings and gifts during the Saturnalia (in December) and Kalends (in January). Later, this ritual expanded to include gift-giving among the general populace. The Catholic Church gave this custom a Christian flavor by re-rooting it in the supposed gift-giving of Saint Nicholas

D.Santa Claus

a.Nicholas was born in Parara, Turkey in 270 CE and later became Bishop of Myra. He died in 345 CE on December 6th. He was only named a saint in the 19th century.

b.Nicholas was among the most senior bishops who convened the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and created the New Testament. The text they produced portrayed Jews as "the children of the devil"[11] who sentenced Jesus to death.

c.In 1087, a group of sailors who idolized Nicholas moved his bones from Turkey to a sanctuary in Bari, Italy. There Nicholas supplanted a female boon-giving deity called The Grandmother, or Pasqua Epiphania, who used to fill the children's stockings with her gifts. The Grandmother was ousted from her shrine at Bari, which became the center of the Nicholas cult. Members of this group gave each other gifts during a pageant they conducted annually on the anniversary of Nicholas' death, December 6.

d.The Nicholas cult spread north until it was adopted by German and Celtic pagans. These groups worshipped a pantheon led by Woden –their chief god and the father of Thor, Balder, and Tiw. Woden had a long, white beard and rode a horse through the heavens one evening each Autumn. When Nicholas merged with Woden, he shed his Mediterranean appearance, grew a beard, mounted a flying horse, rescheduled his flight for December, and donned heavy winter clothing.

e.In a bid for pagan adherents in Northern Europe, the Catholic Church adopted the Nicholas cult and taught that he did (and they should) distribute gifts on December 25th instead of December 6th.

f.In 1809, the novelist Washington Irving (most famous his The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle) wrote a satire of Dutch culture entitled Knickerbocker History. The satire refers several times to the white bearded, flying-horse riding Saint Nicholas using his Dutch name, Santa Claus.

g.Dr. Clement Moore, a professor at Union Seminary, read Knickerbocker History, and in 1822 he published a poem based on the character Santa Claus: "Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, in the hope that Saint Nicholas soon would be there…" Moore innovated by portraying a Santa with eight reindeer who descended through chimneys.

h.The Bavarian illustrator Thomas Nast almost completed the modern picture of Santa Claus. From 1862 through 1886, based on Moore's poem, Nast drew more than 2,200 cartoon images of Santa for Harper's Weekly. Before Nast, Saint Nicholas had been pictured as everything from a stern looking bishop to a gnome-like figure in a frock. Nast also gave Santa a home at the North Pole, his workshop filled with elves, and his list of the good and bad children of the world. All Santa was missing was his red outfit.

i.In 1931, the Coca Cola Corporation contracted the Swedish commercial artist Haddon Sundblom to create a coke-drinking Santa. Sundblom modeled his Santa on his friend Lou Prentice, chosen for his cheerful, chubby face. The corporation insisted that Santa's fur-trimmed suit be bright, Coca Cola red. And Santa was born – a blend of Christian crusader, pagan god, and commercial idol.