The beauty of Muslims' prayer

"Last Friday, after the dawn prayer, I stood outside a mosque on a remote mountain in New Mexico. The planet Mars shone like an aircraft coming in to land. But silence reigned: the dawn was, as the Koran puts it, breathing. The trees and stars were, in its words, prostrate before God.

The Muslim life is shaped by acts of prayer which, in turn, are shaped by the movements of the solar system, and the rolling of the planet beneath our feet. A sense of harmony, we hope, is the result. Science can alienate us from the holiness of nature. It can teach us how to destroy nature. But we should thank it too, for giving us more reasons to feel awe, humility, and even gratitude."

Abdal-Hakim Murad

Religion and Social Change Debate

Despite the claims of those who say that religion is just status qua-est and always sides with the oppressors being an obstacle to social change, what is most interesting to notice is that almost all of the religious Messengers (or founders) of major religions were against the status-qua order, fought openly with the oppressors liberating the oppressed. Moses against Pharaoh. Hazrat Abraham against Namrood. Prophet Muhammad against Abu Jahal and company. The social changes they brought were perhaps the most stupendous and most enduring that history has ever produced.

Butterfly Design of Allahu akbar (الله أكبر) (God is the Greatest)

By Muhammad Younis Morty, Islamic Art by Morty.

Winter, Accounting, Jumma Sermon & I

Inner clarity is certainly a big think to have. What can express the beauty in it better than this piece of Islamic art you are seeing.

***

The winter is setting in, with Lahore's atmosphere appearing to be more vague and cloudy, than our skepticism of Pakistan's bleak future. Interestingly, such an atmosphere may in fact contribute to more inner clearness, and of ideas as well (that's my romantic notion of winter). Nonetheless, the trouble is coming for me: The brain-drying assignments of accounting. And accounting is the right kind of subject to talk about when thinking of 'clear thinking' (don't confuse it with Dawkin's "clear-thinking oasis" for 'mentally incapacitate' people).

The study of this subject, i.e., accounting & finance, should be encouraged among Muslims on a general plane, for it is an "exact science". Right now in Pakistan, according to our (simply) brilliant, highly-experienced professor, managers are all idiots. Managers here just don't care about from where a cost comes, i.e., what are the cost-drivers, they themselves being the best example. Resources are being lavishly raped, because no control is in effect. There's a lack of technical bent of mind and expertise, as a well a loss of religious sense towards one's duties. This situation is evident in almost all departments of our society - government departments being the supreme and the "noblest" example. And the only exceptions are people like my professors, who while consulting the companies are trying to teach them sanity.

I have to depart now for jumma sermon and prayers. Sermon is most looked-after commodity for me. It is purifying bath for my heart and mind, whenever I return from diving into university education.

"Abdallah Jones and the Disappearing-Dust Caper" by D. Abdul-Hayy Moore

What Daniel Abdul-Hayy Moore calls as "the Sufi version of Harry Potter" he wrote back in late 80s is this book, "Abdallah Jones and the Disappearing-Dust Caper" :: More than a decade has passed since I heard a bed-time story from my mother. i can still cherish the merriment and pleasure i used to get from the soothing voice of a heavenly gift called maa - ah! those bed-time stories. Abdul-Hayy in the following video has read out the first chapter of his book for 5 mins for us, rekindling the forgotten warm memories of the experience of the kindness of humanity's milk.

Books!

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.

And even the books that do not last long, penetrate their own times at least, sailing farther than Ulysses even dreamed of, like ships on the seas. It is the author’s part to call into being their cargoes and passengers,—living thoughts and rich bales of study and jeweled ideas. And as for the publishers, it is they who build the fleet, plan the voyage, and sail on, facing wreck, till they find every possible harbor that will value their burden.

- CLARENCE S. DAY,
The Story of the Yale University Press Told by a Friend, pp. 7–8 (1920)

These should not sound like "confessions"

As i grow mature, both physically and intellectually, i am becoming somewhat apprehensive of the "possibility" of a more wider application of my intellectual tradition in my life in this age of post-modernity. I am troubled especially when i come, as our ulema did when colonization entered Muslim lands, face-to-face with modern realities. Modern realities of life tend to overwhelm my sense of tradition. Perhaps there may be a problem with my very sense of it, yet the questions it poses to me are profound. Like, should we really study & develop Islamic economics or not? Would it be sane to develop Islamic marketing theory, or apply Islamic principles of mutual business transactions to sophisticated "Business Game Theory & Strategy" - (my university offers a high-level course on the latter subject in which i had the opportunity of playing my part of the game as TA)? Or, should we altogether leave the matter to the experts of these fields of human research? But what's interesting to note here is, why am i bothered about all this? Anyone who has a basic knowledge of Islam and these branches of knowledge can better understand.

I have no particular doubts so far about the social sciences in which religion and Tradition is scrutinized at most, not at best (not at best because scrutinizing Religion, especially the religion of fitra Islam is a clear sign of hatred of wisdom); not that i have resolved all problem, or perhaps none so far. And, certainly there is also no doubt about the comprehensiveness and broadness of Islam, its law (fiqh) and message. What is missing, however, is the lack of a spirit of accpeting its book (Quran), its way (sunna) and its interpretation (four madhhabs). Weak minds and souls like me are confused, for there is no solution evident to them which they can accept and live accordingly which is mutually shared in a social system. We are too lazy now-a-days to love our theology.

Even as I have tried to explain the causes of my apprehensiveness in the preceding para in a most random rumble-some, matter remains and is destined to be unresolved. For they will keep coming. And I will continue to threaten the basis of my belief with all sorts of theories alien to it, until I overwhelm them. Doubts will keep surfacing, and they'd keep challenging me. All I am telling myself is to love the fiqh, for he who doesn't love fiqh has no body; to walk on the tariqah; and continue facing the burdens of being vicegerent of God, since I pray: O Lord! don't make me a zalim or a jahil (one who is ignorant). Make me amongst those who are adil (just) and alim (knowledgeable). Aameen.

The fact of my obsessions with these inquiries may be estimated with the academic jargon i have stored in my sub-conscious, only to pop anytime i am taking lectures, on bed trying to sleep, and in many like pensive situations. the machine within keeps reminding me: You are to have a broad understanding of everything about business and markets; the waters of philosophy are yet to checked; you give no attention to your prose - eat one prose essay daily in the morning; no one is going to let to love yourself until you have known political and social theories of West; a crude understanding of fiqh won't be enough at all, spend 6-7 years at Al-Azhar; the ocean-like vast Arabic has yet to be learned; a critique of modern cultures, you are most concerned with it - the voices go till ∞.

* * *

For me, from the beginning and in the end its all about and its all from the prayer Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) used to pray constantly: 'God! grant me knowledge of the ultimate nature of things!'

Religion on quality time with children

The greatest Muslim theologian, al-Ghazali, who died in the year 1111, taught as follows:

"A child is on loan from God, entrusted to its parents. Its pure heart is a precious uncut jewel devoid of any form or carving, which will accept being cut into any shape, and will be disposed according to the guidance it receives from others."

A traditional, yet a modern father, who sometimes has to leave home while his children still asleep, reflects on the al-Ghazali's quote as: "So faith is big on quality time. Believing that one's toddler is potentially a saint is, I confess, not always easy. But if I think that he, or she, is the vessel of a vulnerable but immortal soul, the consequences for my commitment, and my parenting skills, should be enough to outweigh even my material desires."

From Abdual-Hakim Murad's Thought for the Day, on BBC, 26 February 2003.

Emptiness

Image source

What is all about this emptiness I am hearing these days? I first heard it from a professor at my university who was an atheist and then came back to Islam, or perhaps converted to it. When he was asked why did reverted to islam? He had everything, he studied at oxford, was a Marxist activist and all that. What he said he did not have was peace. He said he felt "emptiness". Then I heard from him the testaments of other converted Muslims who re-uttered the same word: emptiness. Today, I was hearing to Imam Suhaib Webb, the lecturer at Al-Azhar, also himself an Al-Azhari. He says, "I had success, in material terms, but internally i was very "empty". So i was asking to myself, "Why do you feel depressed? Why do you feel sad, if you have girls, the money, the DJ, the clubs, everything is going well but why do you feel internally this "emptiness"?" These are all his words. However, he searched about 'who his Creator was' and came to accept islam.

where do i learn self-control?

i can't make a guess about what i am going to end up doing with my life. i am one who can't make any routine, let alone following one. self-control, if it is anything, then it's the most difficult task for me to imagine doing. hard work - that's a thing which is in our hand, naseeb is in Allah's. i can only fear treading on this path of hard-work.

they'd preach, "self-restrain, self-restrain" - where is it? where do find it?

no problem... guide me so that i can self-restrain. help me take steps, if you know there's value in it. teach me of its efficacy. show me its worth. but don't leave me alone...

Bashing religion with Marxism

Today we made an advancement in our search of truth, which in reality is anything but truth :) :: We bashed religion through the Marxists, only to prove its (i.e., Marxism's) true worth on which we are still working in our Sociology of Religion course. here i want to distract from the theme of the post as religion has distracted humanity from the achievement of a Communist society it has been eternally destined to achieve - i don't know if there is any merit for a seeker of truth to approach Religion from sociological perspective other than to equip oneself with the weapon to defend religion from Satan (for its de-merit, although we are not the one to propose it, however, it is enough to point out the lack of beauty in its angle of vision). Nonetheless, let's allow a few quotations to battle with each other and we would deserve a leave:

Karl Marx:

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature. Heart of heartless; just as it is a spirit of the spiritless situation. It is the opium of the masses." (Perhaps you can appreciate why I have left the last part un-bold for the whole quote is least mentioned but the last part only. And there are certain minds among the ranks of Marxism who say that Marx did not say that we should discard religion. It may be, but there are many who say religion should be discarded. We have to know the difference between what Marx said and what Marxism says.)

Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad:

"Opium is the religion of masses."

(Wait a second! What on earth does opium look like, i was wondering?)

Human Nature and Quran

"'Everyone is born on fitra'. If you combine this human nature (fitra) with the light of Quran, it's teaching - you become a walking tafsir, embodiment of, 'Light upon Light,' verse of Quran." (Imam Suhaib Webb, from his lecture, Way to Approach Quran.) It's like nur on nur.

Similary, the wudu we do has such a spiritual value that if you do wudu on wudu (do it two times), you multiply the light (nur) you attain.

Avoiding the "Mindless"; Becoming the Mindful

Going through P. Berger's article The Easiest Way to Change People's Behavior I have come across something that has testified some subtle intuitions I happened to intuit. When you have more books on interesting topics around you, scattered everywhere in the room, you can really become mindless shuttling around them: you leave the room for something with one book, you enter and catch eye of another and it's easy to get lost with human temptations. At the end of the day, the seeker of knowledge gets nowhere, exhausted - V. Woolf said it correct, "Reading is dangerous." It's a big risk.

Bigger than which is the problem of crazy 'mindless eating' - much more a feature of moderns than ancients, although the latter had some fat stomachs but they nonetheless cared to disdain the uncontrolled habit of eating, and considered it to be spiritually harmful. Peter berger and Brian Wansink the author of Mindless Eating, however see it as a problem of our enviornment. Who can deny the overwhemling influence our enviornment exerts on us? Just read the following advice of Hazrat Ashraf Ali Thanvi (ra) gave to those who tread the path of piety:

Hakim al=Umma Shaykh Ashraf Ali Thanawi (Allah have mercy on him) said,

If someone fears that if he becomes pious (muttaqi), he will lose out on the worldly pleasures, then I say; “Make the intention that I do not want to become pious. However, for the sake of Allah spend some time in the company of the ‘ulama and the masha’ikh and understand the din. The result of this will be that you will not experience any difficulty in becoming pious. On your own accord you will build up the interest to practice (on the din) and you will experience such joy and pleasure in practicing on the din that you will forget about all the worldly pleasures.”

Advices of Hakim al-Umma: Part Six

The ways to change can be be many, but a change in the conditions we live and breath in is only rudimentary. (Do take the Mindless quiz by Brian Wansink to find out your eating patterns here.)

Hakim Murad on Ka'ba & Malevich's "Black Square"

Image source

This majestic and serene painting above is known as the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter (who died in 1935). It is a very fascinating painting i have seen for years. Abdul Hakim Murad writes about it at length: "Malevich’s greatest work is a painting called Black Square. This is a square, painted completely in black, against a white border. He called it his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, a modernity which he hoped would be pure and spiritual, as opposed to the congealed decadence of 19th-century Western materialism.

He chose the image of a Black Square because it is the total inversion of the Western tradition of recording the writhing diversity of the manifest world. He wrote, later, that when painting it he felt ‘black nights within’, and ‘a timidity bordering on fear’, but when he neared completion he experienced a ‘blissful sensation of being drawn into a desert where nothing is real but feeling, and feeling became the substance of my life.’

What on earth could this mean? The modern British writer Bruce Chatwin, who knew Islam well, commented as follows:

‘This is not the language of a good Marxist, but of Meister Eckhart - or, for that matter, of Mohammed. Malevich’s Black Square, his ‘absolute symbol of modernity’, is the equivalent
in painting of the black-draped Ka‘ba at Mecca, the shrine in a valley of sterile soil where
all men are equal before God.’ [...]

At the centre of the Islamic religion lies the Ka‘ba. Uniting the aspects of the divine beauty and the divine majesty, it is ‘a place of resort and safety for human beings’. It lies in a city protected by the prayer of Ibrahim al-Khalil, alayhi’l-salam: ‘My Lord, make this land a sanctuary.’

The Ka‘ba has many meanings. One of these pertains to the Black Stone, which is the point at which the pilgrims come closest to its mystery.

‘Ali ibn Abi Talib narrated that when God took the Covenant, He recorded it in writing
and fed it to the Black Stone, and this is the meaning of the saying of those who touch
the Black Stone during the circumambulation of the Ancient House: ‘O God! This is
believing in You, fulfilling our pledge to You, and declaring the truth of Your record.’’ The Ka‘ba therefore, while it is nothing of itself - a cube of stones and mortar - represents and reminds its pilgrims of the primordial moment of our kind. Allah speaks of a time before the creation of the world: ‘when your Lord brought forth from the Children of Adam, from their reins, their seed,
and made them testify of themselves, He said: ‘Am I not your Lord?’ They said, ‘Yea!
We testify!’ That was lest you should say on the Day of Arising: ‘Of this we were
unaware.’’ (7:171) When we visit the House, we are therefore invited to remember the Great Covenant: that forgotten moment when we committed ourselves to our Maker, acknowleding Him as the source of our being. The Black Stone itself is, according to a hadith which Imam Tirmidhi declares to be sound, ‘yaqutatun min yawaqit al-janna’ - a gemstone from Paradise itself.

The Ka‘ba functions, in the imagination of those who visit it on Hajj, or turn towards it in Salat, as the centre and point of origin of all diverse things on earth. It is oriented towards the four cardinal points of the compass. Its blackness recalls the blackness of the night sky, of the heavens, and hence the pure presence of the Creator. Allah tells us that there are signs for us in the heavens and the earth; and recent astronomy affirms that the spiral galaxies are revolving around black holes. A powerful symbol, written into the magnificence of space, of the spiritual vortex which beckons us to spiral into the unknown, where quantum mechanics fail, where time and space are no more.

The yearning for the Ka‘ba which sincere Muslims feel whenever they think of it is therefore not, in fact, a yearning for the building. In itself it is no less part of the created order than anything else in creation. The yearning is, instead, a fragment, a breath of the nostalgia for our point of origin, for that glorious time out of time when we were in our Maker’s presence."

Read the rest of the article here.

Know your worth...

...and don't boast. This is the sunna of our Prophet.

Learning Islam from the "Objective" International Standard Universities?

About the "grey" thing

"Beware the darkness in the grey areas."

-Abdul Hakim Murad

What I think this aphorism of Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad refers to really is what Islam is all about. According to a hadith, it's Islam to abandon things of doubtful nature (of which we have no certainty of its being either halal or haram). It, on another plane, may be a criticism on the general notion of the Muslims that many things lie in the "grey," implying ,as I have observed in my society, that all such things that lie in the grey area between clear Truth and clear Falsehood are things too much complicated to decode that easily, and hence should be left to the 'reason' to suggest the final answer. Practically, the obedience to reason here is by and large nothing but the obedience to our lower self/desires. I have generalized this mental attitude on the basis of observation of only a handful of the brightest people of my society, who are most literate of worldly and religious affairs, well only knowers of the later domain, and may not be the doers necessarily. 'Masses follow the brightest'. (That's a principle I a brilliant friend of mine told me, who is a president of a student organization called ESEF.) Therefore, when truth is obscure we should not tend to overlook that it is darkness that veils light from our sight, which is not a positive element in the equation.

Muslims' Epistemology

image source

The other we were discussing in our Sociology of Religion class a term called epistemology.. I confess every time I look up its meaning in the dictionary, which I have been doing for some years now, I get more confused than ever, especially because of its fairly repetitive mention in books and philosophical articles. Now I have no confusion about it, since when i came to know:

"The sunna is our epistemology."

-Abdul hakim Murad.
Source.

Wittgenstein Sir!

I have been given this "life-time opportunity" of doing a research on Wittgenstein (W) and his critique on Frazer (F) and Freud (F*). The question is: Where does Wittgenstein's critique on F-F* stands within his own system of philosophy? Was it immature? Was it taken back? Etc. Etc. The question came up when we were being given a comprehensive understanding of W's critique on the theories of F on religion and its sociology. Someone, intelligent and serious enough, raised the point that W had become confused later on about his world-views, so as a consequence he may have abandoned his stance on his previous philosophies, of which this critique, we're studying, may be a part of. I am very interested in W's famous critique on F-F*, so I accepted the challenge even though i can't properly spell W's name. What I don't know now is that what do i need to know and do?

"Boys will be Boys"

Theory of liberation of women and equality of sexes really needs to be revised today. i become more and more convinced of its fallibility the more i study and analyze the nature of the sexes in the light of scientific and anthropological data, and the aftermaths of the so-called liberation movement of women in West. It seems quite clear to me, the result has been more of another kind of enslavement of the female sex with catastrophic consequences for the society at large, a crisis which humanity may never have witnessed before. Shaykh Abdul-Hakim provides a candid, objective analysis of these issues, while also providing Ummah with the critique of Islam on gender-based issues, which if misunderstood at the hands of Western education/prophets of modern education who are storming the lecture rooms iof our "up-to-date," "INTERNATIONAL STANDARD" universities and colleges, can have severe consequences for Muslim community. Shaykh Abdul-Hakim Murad writes:

"I have been asked to offer some comments on gender identity issues as these impact on Muslims living in post-traditional contexts in the West, and particularly as they affect people who have traded up to the Great Covenant of Islam after an upbringing in Judaism or Christianity. The usual way of doing this is by examining issues in the classical fiqh, and explaining how Islam’s discourse of equality functions globally, not on the micro-level of each fiqh ruling. That method is legitimate enough (although as we shall see the concept of ‘equality’ may raise considerable problems), but in general my experience of Muslim talk on gender is that there is too much apologetic abroad, apologetic, that is, in the sense not only of polemical defence, but also of pleas entered in mitigation. What I want to do today is to bypass this recurrent and often tiresome approach, which reveals so much about the low serotonin levels of its advocates, and suggest how as Western Muslims we can construct a language of gender which offers not a defence or mitigation of current Muslim attitudes and establishments, but a credible strategy for resolving dilemmas which the Western thinkers and commentators around us are now meticulously examining.

Let me begin, then, by trying to capture in a few words the current crisis in Western gender discourse. As good a place as any to do this is Germaine Greer’s book The Whole Woman, released in 1999 to an interesting mix of befuddled anger and encomia from the press."

Read the rest of the article here. Its really interesting and eye-opening.