whats the plot

amazing... i came across people asking about islam on y! answers before, but never upon a muslim asking a question about islam on answers until right now. i was doing a search on google for "arabic tirmithi" and came up with several questions on y! answers, including this one about shopping du3a2s, asked on y! answers malaysia. even more interesting is the fact that there's a category for ramadan under holidays and it's full of questions by muslims (i mean, after all, it is y! answers malaysia, right? :)).

dang, i was being paid to make da3wa and i didn't even know it, al7amdulillah

"the way of the Prophets is a difficult path to follow - they were all hurt and slandered by their people, and while they could have retaliated, they didn't. but we have to do our best to follow it..."

this is roughly what someone i really respect told me today after he was cursed out for no reason. while he could easily have hit the guy or cursed him back out, he kept silent. the whole time i could see him on the verge of snapping, but he managed to keep his cool.

truly, as the Prophet said, the rough meaning of which is, "the strong one isn't by the physical strength, but it is the one who can control himself at the time of anger."

it is really hard for the nafs to remain silent, especially when it is wronged and has strength over the one who has wronged it. when a person is patient, however, they send a much stronger message.

may Allah reward him for his patience and grant him and his family utmost happiness in this life and in the hereafter. ameen.

this past weekend, ustaz amr khaled visited us here in the bay area. he came to jum3ah at mca. it was really a surprise to me (i knew he was giving a talk the following day, but i didn't know he'd come to jum3ah). i felt extremely happy when i saw him, and started thinking about what i would say if i could get to talk to him.

he gave a brief 1 or 2 minute talk in english - i was happy that he said our masjid was like a "hug" and that it felt different than any of the masajid he'd seen in europe. i think i had a smile on my face the whole time.

afterwards, i had the honor of shaking his hand, hugging him, and speaking one sentence to him and getting a reply back. i also tried to get someone to take a picture of me with him.

but after seeing the crowds of people rush him to say salams, get a picture with him, or even get an autograph in some cases, i stopped and asked myself a question...

if i was this excited about talking to amr khaled, wanted to find something memorable to say to him, wanted to tell all my friends that i talked to him and hugged him... what about on the day of judgment when we see the Prophet Muhammad (صلي الله عليه و سلم)?

just experienced my first earthquake. i was pulling up at the parking lot of the masjid for isha, and i waited a second to shut the engine off and i was like "why is my car shaking like that?" -- i took my foot off the brake and my car was still shaking. i got out of the car, walked away from it, puzzled at the shaking (the whole time i thought it was the car, i didn't realize it was the ground).

i only realized after the salah when the sheikh started talking about a verse (3:143) and saying how we'd just experienced being saved from death, and then the man said that people should go home and be with their families. so i asked my friend and he told me it was an earthquake.

5.6 on the Richter scale - news here.

sort of late for this, but eid mubarak! just upgraded the blog to wordpress 2.3, i guess i'll have to look into going back and tagging some of the old posts at some point in the future (tm).

in unrelated news, one of my coworkers pointed out the applegeeks lite comic to me. one of the writers of this comic is muslim, and he had some pretty funny comics, especially around eid time. here's one for kicks:

source: applegeeks lite.

i figured i'd play around with the facebook api today, so i wrote a little facebook quran app for displaying verses from the quran on your profile page. not very polished if i should say so myself, but... it works (at least for me). if you try it, please let me know if you find any bugs or have any feature suggestions.

you can test it here: http://facebook.cafesalam.net/quranapp.

i love sheikh mohammad, the sheikh of mca. i also love his amazing marketing skills in bringing the youth to fajr. check out this picture of the t-shirt he gave me:

i love the "and smile" part - and i love how he signed his name at the bottom

so i saw this article on y! news about muslim feminists in new york wanting to start a quran interpretation council - their goal being to break streotypes involving terrorism and women being oppressed in islam.

i don't know why, but something strikes me as odd about this... "muslim feminists" might be the start of oddity - islam is the first religion that gave women rights and elevated women to a status that is many times higher than that of men. the examples are innumerable, but just one example is that one of the top narrators of ahadeeth who taught the great men of the ummah and whom many of the great scholars took their knowledge directly or indirectly was sayida 3a2isha (ra).

secondly, a "shura council of women to interpret the Quran?" -- i mean what do they think this is, "everyone interpret the Quran the way they wish?" -- its not about men and injustice as they claim it is - the great islamic universities are open to women just as they are for men - no one stopped any woman from studying islam at al Azhar or Madinah Unniversity and publishing great works on Islam if they want to...

so i don't get it, how is a group of random women (which is what i think of when reading this article, of course i could be wrong...) simply going to decide that "men are unjust, we are going to make a council to interpret the Quran?"

i have no problem with women writing tafseer of Quran - as long as they are qualified to do so. however, a group of random women (or men for that matter) writing a tafseer? i think not...

does anyone else see this, or is it that perhaps i am reading too much into this article?

i saw this yesterday when i clicked on the gmail tab to read some new mail. click the image for a readable version of it.

and no, i haven't custom added any rss feeds to gmail... it means, "know Allah's marvelous/magnificent plan for your life..." thanks google!

eid mubarak to all - may Allah accept our deeds during this month - ameen.