Amir's Contentions 1

1. The subject of Design Patterns is religion for software engineering.

2. My father in law giving advice to his sons about careers: "Beta, always find the kind of business where you have to do the least amount of work, that makes the most amount of money"

... hahahaah... that's the memon way, my father in law is super cool. FYI, he isn't saying "be lazy" but rather "build or use a business foundation such that making profit from it is easy", because of course in business once you find something that is easy and brings a lot of money, you could multiply that easy thing by your available time/resources and yield a lot more money. The amount of work you put in in pracatice is actually independent of this "hikam" (wisdom, advice, etc).

And this really comes back to the ahadith of the prophet pbuh where he would talk about making things easy. It fits into the SaaS business model in the tech world, etc. So imagine if you opened up a desi restaurant, and invented a device that lets you mass produce high-quality naans on the fly... it would put you leaps and bounds against your competitor. You made naan-producing easy, and can now double up efforts on that platform and make loads of money on that.... and similarly you could buy an off-the-shelf naan producer if it already exists and do the same... they both work.

3. The word "Denigrate" means "To deny the importance or validity of" or to "put down" or "defame"; Etymologically it derives from de+nigrare which means to make black, the word dates back to the 1500s, when slavery was alive and kicking in the US.

... The prophet muhammad pbuh said that racism is a form of jahiliyya (a system / ecosystem of ignorace)... i'm going to stop using that word... not that i used it too often anyway. I'll use defame, or "de-hype" (copyright omar q)

4. Knowledge and Sadaqah (charity for the sake of Allah) are unique in that they are the only things in the world that increase or cause increase by giving it away.
... ie, teaching and sharing actually makes you smarter. Ever since i was a kid, i used to love teaching my peers what i learned, but at the times when i felt a type of "protectiveness" for my knowledge, and tried to hide it from others to have the competitive edge, my grades would drop lower than normal. But yeah, this is what my dad always taught me, and i hear it from ulema all the time. This concept defies logic many times. And we see it in the open source world as well... all these java libraries like struts, hibernate, jdom, jdbc connectors, etc, etc, etc, have all come from a knowledge-sharing model. This is what Google has realized that makes them so much money -- that software is knowledge, which should not be closed off and banked on, because it only increases the more you share it. It is beauty and it attracts the smartest people, and they in turn make more beauty... so what they bank on are the ads which they attach to the fruits of the knowledge that they grow. Genius.

... and the same can be said about sadaqah, and we actually have wahih for that, Allah actually promises us increase in wealth when we spend in His way. I've met plenty of very rich people who will testify to this concept... they invested in the "sadaqah bank" a while ago (as shaykh abdal Hakim calls it), and they got phenomenal returns. All you need is iman.


5. An atheist philosopher said, "Religion is the opium of the masses", Shaykh Nuh said in response to this, "Opium is the religion of the masses"
... Shaykh Nuh said this in Coherence of Islam. Shaykh hamza also said this in 17 benefits of tribulation, but he said shaykh abdal hakim murad said this. Either way, it was one of the three genius ulema of our time.
... In another words the athiest philosopher is saying that in order to escape the reality of a godless world, people engage in the intoxication of spiritual ecstasy that religion brings to get them to stop thinking about it. The athiest philosopher like a person who is blind and was born blind trying to explain the beauty of a rain forest.
Whereas, the ulema are saying that in order for the gnawing feeling of the soul to go away when it is not worshipping Allah, people intoxicate themselves in drugs (and other things) in order to numb the soul. The idea comes from the ayah in surah al-rad 13:28:

أَلَا بِذِڪۡرِ ٱللَّهِ تَطۡمَٮِٕنُّ ٱلۡقُلُوبُ

Verily in the remembrance of Allah do hearts find rest!

6. (Removed)

7. Technology and Shariah: Determining when Virtuality is a euphemism for falsehood.

8. Riba (interest/usury) is even forbidden in computers: try moving a folder into to itself. "The destination folder is a subfolder of the source folder."

9. Mainstream media in the US to the minds of unsuspecting Americans: typedef terrorists muslims;
... that's just one of the biggest lies, there are so many more false typedefs that allow them to get away with this typedef... the way Muslims will win the perception war is to bring definitions from Allah (through Quran and sunnah), and the false typedefs will get completely eradicated because truth squashes falsehood. Lawyers are taught "he who frames the argument, wins the case", this is true in the short term, but in order to make it true for the long run, the actual "frame" or foundation of the argument needs to be inherently true, otherwise that which is built on it will ultimately collapse. Our definitions are from Allah and His Messengers pbut

وَعَلَّمَ ءَادَمَ ٱلۡأَسۡمَآءَ كُلَّهَا ثُمَّ عَرَضَہُمۡ عَلَى ٱلۡمَلَـٰٓٮِٕكَةِ فَقَالَ أَنۢبِـُٔونِى بِأَسۡمَآءِ هَـٰٓؤُلَآءِ إِن كُنتُمۡ صَـٰدِقِينَ
قَالُواْ سُبۡحَـٰنَكَ لَا عِلۡمَ لَنَآ إِلَّا مَا عَلَّمۡتَنَآ‌ۖ إِنَّكَ أَنتَ ٱلۡعَلِيمُ ٱلۡحَكِيمُ 

And He taught Adam all the names (of things), then showed them to the angels, saying: Inform Me of the names of these, if ye are truthful. (31)
They said: Glory belongs to Thou! We have no knowledge except that which Thou have taught us. Lo! Thou, only Thou, art the Knower, the Wise. (32)
(surah baqarah (2))

(I editted the translation a little from Quran Explorer... if you have a problem w/ that, you should look it up urself and/or learn arabic.)

10. Adab is an Art.
... Adab in the common context means manners, etiquette, etc. In the context of Arabic grammar it means to put words in their correct place, a master of Arabic grammar is called an Adeeb. Shaykh Hamza said it means to "put things in the right place." When we show manners and respect to elders, teachers, etc, we are acknowledging their rank in the community, culture, etc. Adab with Allah means to obey His commands (there's probably a formal definition that i don't know), and acknowledging His place above His creation through our beliefs, actions, worship, vision, and state of being. The Prophet Muhammad pbuh's last words were that his objective was just to teach us Adab.

Software architecture is like a type of adab as well... using the right technologies for the right parts of a solution, using the applicable design patterns, etc.

The thing about Art is that it's hard to teach through books alone, you need to see examples, and learning Adab is the same way -- it needs to be learned by example... the living examples being our righteous true ulema of course.

11. Gold is organic money.

12. The human being follows MVC: Model - the heart; View - The limbs which include the tongue; Controller - The brain.
... in MVC, the model preserves state, and the view merely expresses what the model contains. When the view changes due to its interactions from the outside world, it dispatches events into the controller, which then updates the model.

13. The study of compilers is Human Computer Interaction for uber-nerds.
... nothing to do with deening, except of course that it makes us appreciate language even more, which is a sign of Allah.

14. Kufr is Cognitive Dissonance, while submission to the will of Allah causes Cognitive Resonance
... a play on the term "cognitive dissonance" : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance ... ie, things all make sense, the believer sees things clearly, knowledge is a light, and light allows us to perceive.

انَّ الصِدقَ يُهدى الى الِبرِّ
و انَّ البِرَّ يُهدَى الى الجَنَّةِ

"Surely honesty leads to righteousness, and
righteousness leads to paradise." -- The Prophet pbuh

15.
HADITH 4 of the 40 hadith of an-nawawi

"Verily the creation of each one of you is brought together in his mother's belly for forty days in the form of seed, then he is a clot of blood for a like period, then a morsel of flesh for a like period, then there is sent to him the angel who blows the breath of life into him and who is commanded about four matters: to write down his means of livelihood, his life span, his actions, and whether happy or unhappy. By Allah, other than Whom there is no god, verily one of you behaves like the people of Paradise until there is but an arm's length between him and it, and that which has been written over takes him and so he behaves like the people of Hell-fire and thus he enters it; and one of you behaves like the people of Hell-fire until there is but an arm's length between him and it, and that which has been written over takes him and so he behaves like the people of Paradise and thus he enters it."


I don't know whether to be fearful of me being in the first case or hopeful of me being in the second case.

If i'm fearful of being in the first case, that is probably an indicator of arrogance.

So i guess that leaves being hopeful of the second, and I better start deenin'





(Inspired by Shaykh Doctor Abdal-Hakim Murad's Contentions)