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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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.)  Read the rest of this entry »

This past weekend I helped my parents with some gardening and yard work.  It was a lot of fun, surprisingly.  Or not so surprisingly, I guess.  I’ve always liked doing work outside–mowing the lawn, shoveling the driveway, etc.  Being outside, side by side with my dad, doing some hard manual labor always made me feel more useful than being inside vacuuming or dusting.  But that’s another topic for another day.

On Sunday we worked together to first trim the bushes.  I used a trimmer to make sure all of them were perfectly rounded and flat on the top.  I felt like I was back in ceramics, smoothing out all the bumps on a newly spun pot.  It was nice to fashion it with my own hands.  Anyway, after that finished we had to cut up one of the trees in our yard that was having an identity crisis.

I say this because when we first bought the tree so many years ago all of its branches were growing downward.  It’s a crabapple tree, so its branches droop downward.  I guess that downward growth was forced by man when it was just a little tree, so now that it’s growing up, it’s starting to rebel just a bit.  A few of the branches on the top are growing straight up!  It looks like the tree is vomitting new green leaves.  Unfortunately for it, as healthy as the branches were, we called over Usman uncle and his chain saw to cut the new branches all of.  Sorry tree, but pain is beauty.

Anyway, with all the trees and bushes trimmed up and pretty, I noticed that our yard was still missing something… flowers!  So yesterday when I went with ammi to Randazzo’s, we picked up some flowers and brought them back home.  In the afternoon I went oustide to plant them. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently enrolled in the Bayyinah Institute class Meaningful Prayer.  And while the class itself is really amazing because it is already helping me focus in my salaah, I think it’s the random things that the teacher, Abdulnasir Jangda is mentioning in class that is a little bit better.  A few things:

1)  Algebra comes from the root ja-ba-ra, which means to correct or straighten with force–When asked what the connection was, he said it was because in Algebra you focus on  correcting and balancing an equation until both sides are equal.  I will definitely be telling my students this in the fall, insha’Allah.

2)  With great struggle comes great reward–obviously something we could have all figured out, but it was worded very nicely.  It has a ring to it, y’know?  One we can all relate to or maybe have heard something similar before in different words (ie–Uncle Ben Parker from Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility”)

3)  Knowledge is worth the struggle and time– another something I want to tell my students in the fall when they’re feeling frustrated and unmotivated.  The confines of what we can and cannot learn, when we can or cannot learn, or who can or cannot learn are built by people and are completely unnecessary.

4)  We are all slaves of Allah–there is no “nice” way to say it.  We are literally His property and nothing else.

5)  Rizq is often mentioned in the Qur’an with rain (weather).  This is a comparison because no one can ever control the rain (weather) and similarly no one can ever control their rizq.  It’s all about tawakkul in that case.

6)  Abu Bakr (AS) was not in town at the time of the Prophet sallalahu alayhi wasalaam’s death, and so when he came back to find his Rasul and best friend dead, and his daughter a widow, he went to their house.  When he saw the Prophet’s body covered with a white cloth, he lifted it off his face, kissed his forehead and said that he was beautiful in life and beautiful in death.  This story made me cry.

7)  The prescription of what should be done when you’re upset fall into line with doing salaah.  For example, when you’re upset, make wudu–which is done before prayer.  If that doesn’t work say the isti’aadah–which is done after the opening supplication of prayer.  If that doesn’t work, sit down–which is done during prayer.  Long story short–if you’re mad… go pray!

And that’s just from today!  Expect more later, insha’Allah… or take the class coming soon to a town near you!

http://www.bayyinah.com/