Amir Memon's Blog: January 2008

Halal Mix Tape Vol. 1

HAHAHAAHAHAH... this is hilarious!!!

These bros really put a lot of work into this video... they took old school american songs, changed the wording to be islamic messages, and swapped out the haram instruments with vocal immitations.

You could jump to like 1:20, or even better, 1:50 , or 5:05

Btw, based on the comments, looks like they're from maryland.

Prep for ALIM program, read up on tasawwuf / sufism

InshAllah My wife and I are going to the ALIM program this weekend. The Theme will be " Is Islamic Thought Dying ". I suggest people read the following articles before going on tasawwuf or "sufism" (The science of Ihsan). Muslims tend to be pretty clueless on what it actually is, and since it seems like it will be covered fairly intensively, i thought it would be a really good idea to read up on it beforehand.

On the legitimacy of tasawwuf in Islamic law:
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/sufitlk.htm

http://tasawwuf.org/basics/what_tasawwuf.htm
Tasawwuf.org is associated with shaykh hussain abdul sattar (see the list of representatives of that site).

A taste of what tasawwuf is:
http://www.zaytuna.org/seasons/seasons1/Foundation%20Spirirual%20Path.pdf

Bida and Sunnah in Shariah:
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/nuh/bida.htm
If you don't want to read this entire arti, at least read the ending part where it starts "We are now able to return to the hadith with which I began". I asked a very reliable indo-pak scholar (won't say which one, i'll just say he's not in the US) whether the idea that bida itself takes on the usuli rulings of shariah (wajib, mustahab, mubah, makruh, haraam) is a ligit idea, and he said yes... and he said that the only disagreement with that part of the article is that he said that mawlid / milad is bida makruhah, but i guess that could be debated and could vary from culture to culture.

Bayah isn't necessarily part of tasawwuf, but it's related, so read this:
http://www.alinaam.org.za/tasawwuf/bayat.htm

But to make it all very simple, see The Hadith of Jibreel (#2 here: http://www.40hadith.com/40hadith_en.htm ).
This hadith is like a summary of Islam, see how it talks about three concepts in our deen:

Iman (belief)
Islam (outward practice)
Ihsan (spiritual excellence)

Well each of these concepts have associated "sciences", here's how they map out:
Iman :: Aqeedah
Islam :: Fiqh / Shariah
Ihsan :: Tasawwuf / Tazkiyat-un-nafs

Another way to think of it are these associations:
Iman/Aqeedah :: the mind
Islam/Fiqh :: The limbs, and 5 senses
Ihsan/Tasawwuf :: the heart

And yet another way to think of it, as shaykh hamza explained it are the 3 geometric dimensions:
The forward and backward dimension would be like islam,
The left and right dimension would be like iman,
The upward direction (towards Allah) would be ihsan.
The fourth dimension, time, would be that we are all doing the above for the hereafter, to present ourselves to Allah on the day of judgement.

... all that is really just an explanation of the hadith of jibril.

get it?

Surah Yusuf recited by old school Efasi

So you know how when you go to Quran recitation DL sites like islamway or aswatalislam.net they have two or more listings for Efasi, 1424H and one that plainly says "efasi", well this is the plain one, and i'm pretty sure it's an older recitation. IMO he puts more emotion in his older ones, and his newer recitation seems to be more refined (and has higher sound quality as well). Well, i'm listening to the old school one right now, here's the Odeo player, beautiful:

And here's the translation:
http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/quran/12.htm#1

And the Arabic script:
http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/arabicscript/10_19/12_1-4.htm

Tired of nasty internet Ads?

Are you a facebook addict? myspacer? mail.com user? general web surfer?

Well If you're a Muslim, or a person with some old-fashioned moral values, you're sick of the nasty ads they keep throwing at you. Y'know, the ads with women dressed like prostitutes trying to sell you all kinds of things you don't even need.

Well, in case you haven't figured it out, there's a way to surf the net without all that nastiness.

Download and install Mozilla Firefox -- this is a free browser, that CNET Reviews ranks even higher than Internet Explorer. You can get Firefox here: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

Install that, and then go to this website using Firefox to download Adblock Plus:
http://adblockplus.org/en/installation
Then click on Install.

It will ask you which filter to use, I'm using EasyList, and it works great.

Then that's it, you're in business, you can now surf the web without all the nastiness in Ads.

You'll actually find a lot of other awesome things about Firefox, including its countless available add-ons.

You could now surf your facebook, and have those horrible nasty ads blocked.

Another few interesting things to know about Firefox:

Mozilla Firefox is basically an unofficial Google company -- again, UNOFFICIAL. Mozilla gets a large amount of its funding from Google because of that baked in google search box (you'll see what i mean once you install it).
Mozilla is working hard on using Tamarin (the Flash Player code engine) for its javascript execution
They are also spearheading the effort to comply with the latest ecmascript standards, meaning having Javascript 2, which will look A WHOLE LOT like AS3 (so it behooves you to learn AS3 now). If you've done any javascript / AJAX development, you'll realize how HORRIBLE the coding experience is
My favorite add-on, maybe even more than ad block plus, is FireBug , a heavy duty JS debugger, great stuff.