The following is a list of questions that you should never ask anyone: 

1. What happened to your face?
2. How much do you weigh?
3. I haven’t seen your spouse in a while, where is (s)he these days?
4. Are you pregnant?
5. Did you find a job yet?
6. Weren’t you married?
7. Is all that food for you?
8. You’ve put on some pounds, huh?
9. Is that what you’re wearing to the party?
10. Did your parents mind that your spouse is from [insert region of the world here]?

By the way, all of these questions weren’t directed at me.  I’ve heard others being asked and it made my jaw drop.

Please feel free to add to this list.

I’ve been feeling recently that getting that Ramadan feeling has been a little difficult for me.  I feel like my Ramadan “Power Hours” are very limited.  What are Ramadan Power Hours?  It’s the time between sunset and sunrise–the time when it really feels like Ramadan.  Why?  Because you break your fast with your family.  You pray maghrib together.  You share a meal.  Then you go to the masjid to pray tarawih in a large congregation.  You get to a hear beautiful recitation of the Qur’an for an hour.  Then you come home, try to read some more Qur’an on your own.  Wake up a little extra early before sahur to pray some tahajjud.  Eat sahur because it’s the sunnah of the Prophet sallalahu alayhi wasalaam.  Pray fajr at the masjid, and then it’s done.  Eight power hours have flown by.  That’s a lot of activity to cram into eight hours, especially if you consider that at a minimum you try to sleep for about four hours of that time.  That’s not a lot of time to feel Ramadan.  And also, try as I might to feel Ramadan during the day time, all I can feel is my hunger and tiredness.

I guess that’s the most important part about the last 10 days or Ramadan.  Really cutting back on the luxury of sleep and using the few eight Power Hours of night we’re given to truly feel Ramadan and worship Allah in the best possible ways.  Here are some of activities that are easy to do, that I like:

1)  Making extra dhikr at any free opportunity–really restrain yourself from useless talk (especially gossip).  Just saying something as simple as subhanAllah wa bihamdihi, subhanAllah al atheem is light on the tongue but heavy on the scales

2) Read Qur’an as a form of dhikr–recite it outloud and try to make your voice beautiful.  Then make sure to read the meaning to get the most benefit from the activity.

3)  Pray in the last third of the night–even if it’s just one set of two rakaah.  Take advantage of your sajjud and closeness to Allah by asking Him for ANYTHING for this life and the next.  Be honest with yourself and realize that He is truly the only One who can give any of us what we want, and more importantly, what we need.

4) Make du’aa for your parents–you and I both know they deserve it.

Allahumma a’inee ‘ala dhikrika, wa shukrika, wa husni ibadatik! (O Allah, help me remember You, expressing gratitude to You and worship You in the best manner, ameen.)

Two Sundays ago Saqib and I went to the Islamic Center of Naperville to attend its second installment of the lecture series Ramadan Reminders entitled Paths to Remembrance.  This lecture/class was given by AbdelRahman Murphy.  Two things impressed me.

First:  AbdelRahman did a couple things from a speaker’s end vital for a good event.

1)  The speaker was on time (read, early) greeting people as they came in–this is VERY important as a teacher.
2) The speaker was prepared and organized with a power point presentation–also VERY important when teaching.  It shows your audience/students that you cared to prepare something a head of time, that it required thought, and effort.

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Ramadan Mubarak!   A blessed month is upon us.  A month in which the gates of Jannah are open, and the gates of Jahannam are closed.  A month in which any obligatory act can earn up to 70 times its normal reward.  A month in which there is a night worth 1,000 nights.  A month in which people are more generous and caring with one another.  And a month in which people over eat until their guts busts open, they can’t bend to make rukuh properly, and cannot focus properly in prayer, mubarak!  It’s time to bust out the Pepto (more…)

The time has come for me to finish what I planned on starting.

December 6th, 2008

Through this new series I hope to share with you my thoughts on the epic weddings that I attend, one failure at a time.  But I also want to hear about experiences with epic weddings that turned out to be epic failures.  I don’t want to this become a series where I just bash on people who spend a lot of money on weddings.  I want there to be some good to come from this and come up with ways to advise the people on how to make their weddings more Islamically sound and socially acceptable.

So hold on to your ghararahs and shirwanis, because this is going to get interesting!

My first topic of choice is going to be targeting the program of an epic wedding, and what causes it to become an epic fail.

American-Desi Wedding

Weddings in the motherland don’t normally run into this problem.  People back at home know what is important at a wedding–the marriage contract and dinner.  The problem starts stateside, where desis are now trying to incorporate American cultural norms and traditions into our cultural norms and traditions to create some type of blockbuster summer wedding program extravanganza.

What do I mean?  Well at a typical non-Muslim American wedding there is the actual wedding ceremony in a church followed by a reception.  Usually at the reception there are some set parts of the evening:  the bride and groom are received by guests as the new Mr and Mrs; the best man and the maid of honor each propose a toast; the cake is cut; there is the first dance; and last but not least, the bouquet is thrown into a crowd of the bride’s friends.  Each of the moments is expected and takes very little time.  There are only two speeches–which are toasts, and only take about a minute or two max.  All of these practices, by the way, are appreciated by all the guests, because there are only about 100 of them there!  Nothing takes up a lot of time because there is not a huge crowd to manage.

In our weddings, on the other hand, there are about 500 people, average.  So if there is going to a be a program, it requires a lot of planning–planning on a conference-size level.  Planning that requires all the guests have arrived (on time, not a chance), that they are seated (busy eating a samosa, sorry), that they’ll all show interest in what you have to say(not going to happen, because no one cares what your chacha has to say about you.)  (more…)