Yesterday on my drive into Michigan it was a cold and freezing night.  Luckily, there was no snow to mess up the roads.  The sky was cloudless and the stars were out.  I glanced out of the window and there above me was Orion, my favorite constellation.

I started thinking about how wonderful the stars were and how beautiful they are.  I know it isn’t a new thought, but the way they twinkle and sparkle in the night sky is magnificent.  They were glowing bright and making it easier for us to see the road.  I find it rather pathetic, though, that I only appreciate the stars as a thing of beauty.  I think if I was a little more removed from the hubba-ballu of “the big city” and “city life” I’d appreciate the blessing of stars in their entirety.

(more…)

I ran out of checks and went to the bank to order some new ones.  I went to the customer service counter to ask to speak with one of the bankers and they led to a man’s desk.  He got up from his seat but didn’t reach in to shake my hand.  He asked me my name and what I needed and he got right into loading up my account.  He saw on the screen that I had a lot of money in my checking account and was prompted (by his computer) to ask me about opening a savings account to go along with it.

I just told him, “Oh, I don’t use interest,” and he was so pleased with my answer.  He said he truly admired that at my age I cared to follow my conscious and my religion.  He even said he would remove the prompt from my account so that the next banker I would visit in the future wouldn’t ask me to open a savings account anymore.

(more…)

Two things happened at school this past week that made me pretty upset.  They both had to do with the same subject.  The funny thing is, I can’t quite figure out WHY what happened made me upset.  So I’m just going to share the two stories and hope that maybe one of you can tell me why what happened was so… wrong.

1)  For my 8th grade Algebra 1 test I gave the students an extra credit question:  name at least six of the Prophet sallalahu alayhi wasalaam’s wives.  One of the boys raised his hand and said he couldn’t think of any.  Before I could say anything in response to him, a girl in my class told him to just guess by listing six girls names.  And so he did… outloud, “Kelly, Michelle, Melissa…”  Everyone began to laugh.  I told him to stop because he was being disrespectful, and that his joke wasn’t funny at all.  The thing is… when I sat down, I couldn’t figure out why that was disrespectful?

2) Walking in the hallway I overheard some girls making fun of someone’s name.  One friend said to the other, “If I ever met someone named Anas, I would totally call him… ANUS!” The other friends burst into laughter and kept walking to class.  I turned to see who it was, and gave them all a nasty look.

Anas ibn Malik has narrated one thousand two hundred eighty-six hadith, one hundred sixty-eight hadith are in Sahih Bukhari and Sahih Muslim.  When the Prophet sallalahu alayhi wasalaam arrived in Madina, Umm Sulaym presented her son, Anas, to the Messenger and asked if he would accept him as a servant. He was ten years old at that time and served the Prophet sallalahu alayhi wasalaam until his death ten years later. Many of the descriptions of the Prophet sallalahu alyahi wasalaam were related by Anas.  His mother once asked the Prophet sallalahu alayhi wasalaam to supplicate for Anas. He, upon him be peace, said, ‘O Allah, increase him in wealth and sons, give him long life and forgive him his sins.’ Anas would recollect that he had 125 offspring in his lifetime and only two of them were girls, his garden gave fruit twice a year and had basil which smelt like musk and he had lived long and had even survived poison and he hoped for the fourth part of the supplication. He was the last companion to die in Basra in the year 93H aged 103 years old.  He was the longest living companion of the Prophet Muhammad sallalahu alayhi wasalaam.

What’s in a name?

Welcome to a new series on my blog.

What is an epic wedding?  It’s a wedding where the hosts go the extra mile to make anything and everything an “epic” moment.  From the procession, to the entertainment, clothing, dinner, seating, speeches and decorations.  Everything is made out to be a big “to-do”.

I’ve found that in the past year or so I have attended more and more epic weddings that have been nothing more than an epic fail. In the time I spent planning my wedding I kind of appreciated these weddings because they provided me with examples of what not to do.  But now that I am married, and I still have to attend these epic failures, it’s just getting old.

The interesting thing is that most of these epic weddings are failures based on the following points

1. Timeliness–guests are forced to sit and wait for the wedding to start for sometimes more than an hour
2. Program–guests are forced to sit through too many speeches
3. Seating–guests are forced to sit with or around members of the opposite gender
4. “Entertainment”–guests are forced to listen to music or live singing
5. Extravagance–guests are forced to find out just how much money you make and are willing to spend on your kids

Some weddings fail on some of the points, and some weddings fail on all of these points.  Note that all of these failures affect the guests.  When hosts think they are doing something epic, in actuality they are conjuring up ways to make guests uncomfortable and disappointed for 4 (or maybe 5 depending on how late the function runs) hours.

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!

The 1st quarter of school ended about one week ago.  And as you may have guessed it, with that time came a flood of students with a sudden concern for their grades.  These are the students who don’t do any real work all quarter, float through class without a care in the world, never ask questions, participate, or show any genuine interest.  Imagine my surprise when now I find them checking up on grades, and asking for assignments back to see how many points they had earned.

I was happy to see they were enthusiastic about improving, but at the same time very disheartened that they would wait ’til the last moment to show such enthusiasm.  Because really, how much could any student possibly improve a bad grade a week before the quarter ends?

The culminating moment of desperation came on the morning of the last Friday of the quarter.  A student approached me after I had finished teaching a new lesson asking me what in the world she could possibly do to improve her grade.  She absolutely couldn’t take home a D to her parents.  She said she would do anything:  extra credit, assignments, projects, retakes, redos, etc.  I just looked her like, “Are you kidding?”

I picked up a pile of homework that had been turned in that morning and quickly glanced through the papers.  Hers wasn’t in there.  So I asked her, “Did you do your homework?” (more…)