Miscellaneous

I have read a number of books in the past month or so and owe you guys about five reviews. Hopefully, I’ll get to them in the next couple of weeks.

Asad has informed me that he has created a phonetic Urdu keyboard layout for Unipad. He also pointed me to the Yahoo! mailing list for Urdu computing. These are useful resources to add to the list I compiled in a previous post.

Hijabman recommends the book Muslims in the U.S: The State of Research by Karen Leonard according to which most Muslims in the US are ‘invisible’ Muslims, i.e. they don’t attend any mosque.

According to Muslim Wakeup, “less than 7 percent of American Muslims attend mosque regularly (compared with 38 percent of Americans who attend church weekly).” In the comments, the author Ahmed Nassef explains where this 7% figure comes from.

The 7% figure for regular mosque attendance comes from the 2000 national mosque study co-sponsored by ISNA and CAIR. The study, which depends only on information from mosque officials, points to 400,000 regular mosque attendees out of an estimated population of 6 million Muslims in the US.

Even if there are only 3 million Muslims in the US, the percentage of regular mosque attendees is still much less than that of church attendees.

Via Perverse Access Memory comes the news that processing times for most immigration documents have increased substantially.

Processing times —- for everything from renewing an annual work permit to securing permanent legal residency —- have as much as quadrupled over the last 18 months, despite the Bush administration’s pledge to cut waiting times in half. The wait to replace a lost green card, for instance, has grown to 19 months from four. And the kind of paperwork sought by Ms. Barschdorff —- a document allowing her to re-enter the country after a brief trip —- now takes seven months instead of two.

As a consequence, and despite an infusion of $160 million earmarked for cutting the backlog, the number of pending applications has risen by nearly 60 percent over the last three years, to 6.2 million, according to a recent congressional report. The root cause, officials say, is the post-9/11 reassignment of 1,000 agents who used to issue documents and now do extensive security checks of every applicant instead.

The fallout ranges from minor inconveniences to wrenching dilemmas.