{"id":1829,"date":"2012-11-26T11:09:18","date_gmt":"2012-11-26T16:09:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/cityofbrass\/?p=1829"},"modified":"2012-11-26T11:09:18","modified_gmt":"2012-11-26T16:09:18","slug":"thanking-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2012\/11\/thanking-you.html","title":{"rendered":"thanking you"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am back from Ashara in India and like everyone else, trying to settle back into the routines we abandoned two weeks ago. I didn’t get any time to write while in India at all, so if I put any thoughts down it will have to be a retrospective, though I did manage to catch the movie Best Exotic Marigold Hotel<\/em> on the plane and found it thoroughly enchanting and relevant \ud83d\ude42 Highly recommended for any westerners journeying to the subcontinent!<\/p>\n

I’d like to say, though, that even more so than previous trips, a very large number of my readers came up to me personally and told me that they read this blog. I am always surprised and genuinely grateful when people do that – I suppose given my picture on the blog header, I am pretty easy to recognize, but still it means a lot to me that you, the reader, find what I say interesting enough to not only read me regularly but also to actually go out of your way to express your approval to me personally. To everyone I met, from the bhai from Kuwait after waaz, to the bhen from Canada and her fiancee from New York with whom I shared a rickshaw, to the bhai from Minneapolis I met at the baggage claim at Newark, and all the other people in between, a genuine thank you and shukran. It’s probably not good for my ego to be receiving this encouragement, but it is good for my writing to know I have a real audience and not a theoretical one. alhamdolillah<\/em>. <\/p>\n

It’s also good for me to be reminded that people do read, so that I actually write more often. So stay tuned \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1830,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829\/revisions\/1830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}