Amir Memon's Blog

Red Alert 3 on an iMac 2008

2011-09-01T21:32:00.000-07:00

So I just bought Red Alert 3 after waiting 3 years after its release (out of fear of addiction), and here's how I got it working on my iMac. Listed below are the highest settings I could get them to.

I'm using VMWare Fusion 3.1.3 to run Windows XP SP3 ... installed all critical updates

Install/update VMWare tools if it doesn't do it automatically.

iMac 2008 24 inch.

Upgraded RAM from 2GB to 4GB

Anti Aliasing: off

Terrain Detail: Ultra High

Water detail: ultra high

Model detail: high

Shader Detail: Medium

VFX Detail: Ultra High

Shadows: Low

Vertical Sync: On

Texture Quality: High

Resolution: 1600 x 1200 however this can cause significant frame droppage, so if you're playing on a large map, etc, turn this into like 1024 x ___

Teaching children Hadith

2010-01-06T12:11:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of relatives in Dallas, and more than half are children or teenagers. I've been to dallas before, and each time, it's just like going to pakistan. You kind of take it easy, eat at davats, gup shup, etc.

This time i decided we'll make use of some of the time spent there, so I thought I'd teach the kids some hadiths. It went very well AH. My mom and little sister made excellent hand outs, snipping out the chosen hadiths, translations, and commentaries from the English text book and the Urdu one (for the non-English speaking elders). Turns out that to motivate the boys, all you have to do is get them to compete with the girls. They start collaborating, teaching one another, and the whole deal, it's awesome. Throughout the week I was there, I'd even have 5 year olds coming up to me randomly saying "Ad-deenu naseeHah", over and over again and getting super happy. It was awesome. I wrote the hadith down on a white board in arabic and the translation, explained it, then we'd all say it together out loud 30 times. We went through like 10 hadiths like that, and each kid memorized on average 3-7 hadiths, it was awesome. Here are some of them, I thought i'd post them up:

(The arabic text renders better on certain browsers, and not so well on others)

اَلدِّينُ اَلنصِيحَ

The Religion (Islam) is to act with sincerity (Muslim).

The Arabic word al-nasiha, used in the hadith above, is a comprehensive and unique term and is difficult to translate precisely into English. Even in Arabic, it does not have a synonym. Therefore, the expression "to act with sincerity" has been adopted here as a broad explanation for the Arabic word. Other meanings could be-- giving good advice, directing toward good, acting sincerely or honestly, or being benevolent and desiring good (see Lane, Arabic English Lexicon).

The remainder of the hadith, as narrated by Imam Muslim on the authority of Tamim al-Dari, is "we inquired from the Messenger of Allah, 'Toward whom?' He replied, 'For Allah, His Book, His Messenger, the leaders of the Muslims, and the common people" (Muslim). The hadith makes clearn that one of the most important aspects of true faith is to give good counsel, to wish well, and to act toward everything with honesty and sincerity.

This is further explained as follows: In relation to Allah, "sincerity" means to have faith in His essence and attributes, to obey His each and every command, to express gratitude for His blessings, and to fulfill His rights of Lordship in every possible way. In terms of the Book of Allah, it means to fulfill its rights by accepting it as the word of Allah, honoring it and reciting it correctly, and practicing its injunctions. For the Messenger of Allah, it means to fulfill his rights, confirm that he is the Messenger of Allah, practice the Sunna, honor him and his family, and hold everything that he has said to be true. For the leaders of the Muslims, it means to assist them in virtue, obey them and exhort others to do the same, remind them of their responsibilities and correct them in a polite, reformative, and wise manner. The same applies for the scholars of Islam. For the masses, it is to guide them aright and prevent them from wrong, assist them in their needs and support them, protect them from harm, and deal with them in the best possible manner. Similarly, as regards every other aspect of life, the religious obligation of nasiha is fulfilled by performing everything in the most beneficial and correct manner possible. (Jami' al-'ulum wa 'l-hikam, Mirqat al-mafatih)

اَلدُّعَاءُ مُجُّ الْعِبَادَةِ

Supplication (du'a') is the essence of worship

Supplication (du'a') has been called the essence of worship for two main reasons. First, by supplicating to Allah, a person fulfills his obligation of calling on Allah, which is understood from the verse "And your Lord says, 'Call on Me, I will answer you (your prayer)'" (Qur'an 40:60). This is worship in its purest form. Second, by invoking Allah, one realizes that only He can fulfill one's needs. The servant who calls upon his Lord abandons hope in everything else and turns his full attention to Allah, humbling himself in front of Him. This is the essence of worship. Another desired result of worship is to attain reward from Allah, Because there is such great reward in supplication, it has been called the essence of worship. (Mazad al-ragibin 7)

اَلـْمَرْءُ مَعَ مَنْ اَحَبَّ

A person will be with whom he loves (on the day of judgement)

This statement of the Messenger of Allah was in response to someone who came and inquired, "O Messenger of Allah, what do you say about someone who loves a group of people, but is unable to join them?" What is meant by "a group of people" is the learned or righteous people, and what is meant by, "was unable to join them," is a person who was unable to gain their company or achieve the same status as them in knowledge and action. To this the Messenger of Allah replied, "a person will be with whom he loves," i.e., he will be gathered with them on the Day of Judgment. Allah Most High says, "Whosoever obeys Allah and the Messenger, they will be with those unto whom Allah has shown favor, of the {prophets and the saints and the martyrs and the righteous. The best of company are they" (Quran 4:69-70).

This hadith could also be applied more generally to those who aspire to be with evil people and sinners and secretly admire their actions even though they may not have perpetrated those evil actions themselves. They will be gathered with the sinners on the Day of Judgement (Mirqat al-mafatih 8:740).

اَلْأناة مِنَ اللهِ وَ الْعَجَلَةُ مِنَ الشَّيْطَان

Calmness and patient deliberation is from Allah and haste is from Satan (Tirmidhi)

This hadith refers to everyday activities and not to acts of worship. A person is encouraged to conduct his daily activities with calmness and patience, as acting in haste often leads to spoiling one's actions. However, when it comes to worship, a person is encouraged to hasten toward god, i.e. embark upon good acts with determination and eagerness, and then complete them with calmness, concentration, and devotion (Mirqat al mafatih 8:786). [A] for example, it is disliked for one to run to join the prayer, but it is commendable to perform ablution (wudu') at home and set out for the prayer early.

اَلـْمَجَالِسُ بِالْأَمَانَةِ

Gatherings are to be kept in confidence

What a person hears or sees in a meeting must be kept confidential and should not be disclosed to others. However, as the remainder of the narration states, three things are exempted from this: These are plans to murder, plans to rape a woman, or plans to usurp someone's wealth (Mazad al-raghibin 8). See also hadith 17.

الْاِقْتِصَادُ فِي النَّفَقَةِ نِصْفُ الْـمَعِيشَةِ

وَ التَّوَدُدُ اِلَى النَّاسِ نِصْفُ الْعِقْلِ

وَ حُسْنُ السُّؤَالِ نِصْفُ الْعِلْمِ

(Didn't teach the the last two parts of this hadith to the kids, they were getting tired :-)

Moderation in spending is half of [one's] sustenance, friendliness toward people is half of [one's] intelligence, and asking good questions is half of [one's] knowledge (Bayhaqi, Shu'ab al-Iman).

Here, "Moderation in spending..." is best understood by the verse of the Qur'an: "Those who, when they spend, are not extravagant and not miserly, but hold a just balance between the two" (Qur'an 25:67). [The income a person receives is mostly not in one's control, as opposed to the spending of what one possesses, which is nearly always in his control. Hence, regulating what one sepends of his wealth can provide half the answer to stability in one's livlihood.] Friendliness toward people..." means that a person's intelligence is perfected through interatction with others, in that the collaboration of two minds better than one. And "Asking good questions ish alf of one's knowledge becasuse knowledge of a particular issue only becomes complete by asking the appropriate questions (Mirqat al-mafatih 8:795). [A] Also, fully thinking through a question before seeking an answer provides half the answer to the questioner, as opposed to random questioning.

Thanks to Aneeser for typing up the english parts above. There are a few more that I didn't type up. They are all from Mufti AbdulRahman's "Provisions for the Seekers"...

http://www.al-rashad.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=0&products_id=568

... an EXCELLENT EXCELLENT book, i highly recommend it to everybody. You can pick up the book on occassion, read small amounts of it, and still benefit tremendously. Shaykh Hussain Abdul Sattar is giving detailed commentaries on it here:

http://sacredlearning.org/classrooms/hadith/zad_talibin/index.htm

Amir's Contentions 1

2009-01-10T00:32:00.001-08:00

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)

Zad al Talibin keeps me Smiling

2008-12-04T11:45:00.001-08:00

"Anyone who reads them (the hadiths) and memorizes them is illuminated, and anyone who listens to them and studies them is delighted." -- Shaykh Ashiq Ilahi al Bulandsherhri in the intro to Zad al-Talibin.

After listening to several explanations by shaykh hussain of ahadith in this book, "Zad al-Talibin" (Provisions for the Seekers), i figured I should buy it and started reading it. Man it has been a blast. I've gotten through like 6 ahadith in memorization (they're very very short, but PACKED with meaning), and have read many more. That statement above is absolutely correct -- the one who memorizes it is illuminated. I actually feel a spiritual lift. They're having lay-offs at work, and everybody is depressed (AH my job is ok), but i'm walking around with a huge smile on my face because of the noor in these ahadith, while everybody else is looking quite gloomy (with good reason). What a rush.

Here's the book (in my friend's bookstore ;-):
http://albalagh.net/bookstore/?action=view&item=1016

Each hadith has a short explanation in the book, but shaykh hussain abdul sattar has an approx 1 hour explanation on each one. Here's shaykh hussain's explanations:
http://sacredlearning.org/classrooms/hadith/zad_talibin/index.htm

I wish i could freely type in arabic, I'd LOVE to quote what i've memorized so far, seriously, what an "eman rush"! (Ustadh Muhammad AlShareef)... here's a translation of one of them that are on my mind right now:

4. "Calmness and patient deliberation is from Allah and haste is from Satan."

And here's shaykh hussain's commentary on it:
http://sacredlearning.org/audio/hadith/zad_talibin/hadith_4.mp3

Where this book came from:
So there are 6 popular books of sahih hadith -- sahih bukhari, muslim, tirmidhi, abu dawood, etc. For various reasons, a scholar later wrote a book with a collection of ahadith that is a subset of what was contained in there of around 4000 ahadith. This was called "Masabih al-sunnah", then another scholar wrote "Mishkat al masaabih" and also added like 1500 ahadith -- this is a VERY popular book especially in indo-pak madrassas. Then like 140 years ago Shaykh Ashiq Ilahi wrote this book from Mishkat -- and he especially made it so intro madrassa students can benefit, and also organized it so taht it would help them learn arabic -- starting with the ahadith with the easiest grammatical constructs. Now Mufti AbdulRahman ibn Yusuf translated it -- and man it's an AWESOME translation.

Alhamdulillah, knowledge is TRUELY a light.

I love the etymological root "gnosticus"

2008-11-25T13:26:00.001-08:00

I love the etymological root "gnosticus"... from etymonline.com:

gnosticus, from Late Gk. gnostikos, noun use of adj. gnostikos "knowing, able to discern," from gnostos "knowable," from gignoskein "to learn, to come to know"

When you recognize the blessings of Allah, you are a believer, if you are fully cognizant of Allah and all his attributes, you are also a gnostic, if you fail to do both, you are agnostic.

It's very similar to the arabic root: 'Aa Ra Fa / Ya' ri fu ... which also means "to know".... and whoever it was that translated the word / name / title / spiritual state 'Aarif into "Gnostic" really knew what s/he was doing... it's a perfect translation.

And I really like the word "agnostic"... it's the perfect word to describe that somnambulant state people are in nowadays. They have all the blessings in the world, and are completely agnostic of The Provider of the blessings.... like how on thanksgiving, people say "I'm thankful for ____"... they never say "i'm thankful to God for ___". If you're thankful, you have to be thankful TO someone, or it doesn't make sense, instead you should say "i'm glad that ____"... but it isn't thanks. "To Thank" is a transitive verb.

If you look at the etymology for the word "know" or "knowledge"... it says that even that comes from "gno" which sounds similar to "gnosticus" and it makes me wonder if there is a connection.

On a related note, if you look at the ayah in the Quran in surah baqara (2:31)

وَعَلَّمَ ءَادَمَ ٱلۡأَسۡمَآءَ كُلَّهَا ثُمَّ عَرَضَہُمۡ عَلَى ٱلۡمَلَـٰٓٮِٕكَةِ فَقَالَ أَنۢبِـُٔونِى بِأَسۡمَآءِ هَـٰٓؤُلَآءِ إِن كُنتُمۡ صَـٰدِقِينَ
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)

(That ayah (and the ones that follow) has been on my mind nagging me for the longest time to figure out its meaning, it's a very deep ayah)

If you look at the definition of gnosticus, it says "able to discern"... well able to discern what? the names of things? ie, the ability to identify one thing from another? This is what light allows us to do. In darkness, nothing is distinguishable, but with light, things are differentiable, and in Islam we are taught that knowledge IS a light. So, is this what knowledge is at the most basic level, the ability to identify?

If you look at the two approaches at education: Traditional islamic education, and the western way, one striking difference is how for the former memorization is so heavily stressed, and in the latter it is more about learning how to process stuff.

At the end of several years of western education, one realizes that they really don't KNOW too many things, but have a very strong ability to process stuff. After a traditional islamic education, people actually know a lot of things, but often (nowadays) can't really process as much -- which, of course, wasn't always the case, eg. the formulation of usul al fiqh over a thousand years ago, and the generations that have developed it.

It's like nouns versus verbs: In arabic ALL words are nouns, verbs, or particles.

- Nouns are independent of time.
- Verbs are dependent of time.
- particles have no meaning in and of themselves (like at, in, with, of, etc).

So is knowledge primarily a matter of learning nouns -- learning how to differentiate one thing from another, or how to process things.... or is it both? They are of course both creations of Allah -- Allah has created us and all that we do.... but what is knowledge?

And the idea that "Knowledge is a Light," is very interesting, because light is dual-natured: It behaves both as a wave, and as a particle. My physics book in high school described it as a "wavicle". Maybe knowledge is the same way: it is the ability to identify things, and the ability to process things. Allahu 'Alam.

I dunno why I'm sointrigued by this root. Studying the underpinnings of knowledge itself is really enjoyable..."metaknowledge" ... i probably sound kind of insane right now, haha.

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad's Contensions 11

2008-09-16T16:07:00.000-07:00

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad is such a genius. He's been rolling out his "Contentions" for years now, and they're as thought provoking as ever.

1. Augustine: man’s deformity. Ishmael: his deiformity. (Defy, don’t deify.)

2. Peace without justice is not peace at all.

7. Your greatest liability is your lie-ability.

9. Modernity: an accelerating attempt to shovel matter into the growing hole where religion used to be.
... ouch, i love it.

19. Redefine religion, but do not derefine it.
... ie, correct ijtihad not bida.

21. Anthropomorphism is gender-biased.
... ie, gender only exists because there are two of something, but there is only One God. Once somebody commits the major deadly sin of anthropomorphism, they need to choose to refer to Him as male or female (they usually choose male for whatever reason)... but this distinction was only necessary if they tried to anthropomorphize. The whole gender problem doesn't exist when we realize He is one without comparison.

22. Theology is the quest for the least silly definition of God.
... oh if only cynical orientalists understood this today.

36. Third World Christianity: worship a white man, and be saved from your past!
... ouch, he himself is white so he could get away w/ saying that.

39. Being heretics to the Monoculture requires both courage and style. But we should have room for those who have neither courage nor style.

43. Use words in your preaching only if absolutely necessary.
... dawah is mostly given through actions, there are many many examples from the Quran, Sunnah, and even stories of ulema from the past that prove this.... and now researchers say that like 90% of communication is done through body language.

50. The road to God is paved with laughter at the self. The road to Hell is paved with laughter at others.

53. The world without hell is the word.
... ie, "the word on the street"... ie, a false rumor. If I don't believe in you, you still exist, if you don't believe in hell, it also still exists.

54. A heretic never claims to be a heretic, he claims to transcend orthodoxy.
... kya baat ki yaar! And the funny thing is Muslims in the world where they are minorities, are themselves heritics.... y'know, the beard, hijab, praying in public, etc. The prophet pbuh said "islam came as a strange thing, and it will again come as a strange thing. Glad tidings to the strange ones." The difference is that we have daleel for our herecy.

59. Do not think that anything has any purpose other than to point to God.
... Ayah means a sign.

64. Mockery is for pouring upon kufr, not upon people.
... in another contention he said "If you seek amusement, seek it in the absurdities of kufr."

66. God’s mercy is not limited; but He is not limited by His mercy.
... which is why Islam doesn't have "the problem of evil"

71. Islamism: untie your camel, and trust in God.
... (reference to the famous hadith about predestination)

76. The God of Jesus was not the Jesus-God.

78. If you put the Sunna before mercy, you have lost both.
... some cultural muslims need to be reminded of this

85. Man is the proof of God. The man of God is the proof of religion.
... like imam ghazzali

86. Do not fear any extremist; fear the consequences of his acts.

87. Do not be complacent. Most people judge religions by their followers, not by their doctrines.

90. Scripture defines mercy, but is not an alternative to it.
... related to #78

98. In the fight against the Monoculture, the main sign is the hijab, and the main act is the Prayer.
... related to #54

http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/contentions11.htm

Surely sticking to truth and justice guides one to good deeds, and surely good deeds guide one to Heaven

2008-08-27T16:27:00.000-07:00

انَّ الصِدقَ يُهدى الى الِبرِّ

و انَّ البِرَّ يُهدَى الى الجَنَّةِ

"Surely sticking to truth and justice guides one to good deeds, and surely good deeds guide one to Heaven"

It's a hadith (saying of the prophet pbuh)... and i wrote it with http://www.arabic-keyboard.org/

Man, what a hadith! it's been on my mind for a long time ever since i went to imam zaid's session in "agenda to change our marriages"

quite gangster indeed. If you know arabic, you'll appreciate it a lot more... it flows so well.

... also here's ustadh muhammad alshareef's translation of the same (or possibly similar) hadith:
Allah's Messenger, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, said, "Be
honest, for verily honesty leads to righteousness, and
righteousness leads to paradise."

The fadhaa'il of seeking knowledge

2008-08-27T15:06:00.001-07:00

This post is from my old blog... certain things just don't leave the mind, alhamdulillah, and this is one of them:

----------------- begin quote from old blog ---------------------

"Abu Dharr relates that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said: 'Attending a session of knowledge
is better than praying a thousand raka's prayer,*
visiting a thousand sick people,
attending a thousand funeral prayers.'
Someone said: 'O messenger of Allah,
Is it better than reading the Qur'an?'
He (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:
'Does reading the Qur'an benefit without knowledge?'"

Very nice... I heard Hafiz Aslam tell me this, then a couple days later or so I heard it on sunnipath.com, in Shaykh Nuh's commentary on Imam Ghazzali's (rahimahullah) iHya uloom ud-din. I don't have riwayah on this, if anybody else does, send me an email: sonyplaystation AT excite dot com

But even if that's not a hadith, the fact that Imam Ghazzali (rahimahullah) mentions it in his iHya, shows the significance of knowledge.

* Hafiz Aslam Patel also told me that those 1000 rakats are from the nafl prayers. Obviously you can't just sit down w/ some scholars for a session of knowledge then have the license to skip the next 1000 rakats' worth of fardh (obligatory) prayers... needless to say, but hey, we live in ignorant times.

----------------- end quote from old blog ---------------------

I truely feel sorry for the people who fill their mind-real-estate with music. Sure our minds have a lot of capacity, but your focus is limited AFAICT, and filling that buffer with music is such a horrible waste.

They say "a mind is a horrible thing to waste" about drugs, i say it about music as well.

Joel Spolsky giving career advice to young CS ppl

2008-08-12T13:28:00.001-07:00

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html

I read his book, it's actually one of my favorite books. If you're a programmer, you should read this... especially if you're in college or a recent graduate... man i wish i read this 6 years ago. Here's a sumary:

Learn how to write before graduating.
Learn C before graduating.
Learn microeconomics before graduating.
Don't blow off non-CS classes just because they're boring.
Take programming-intensive courses.
Stop worrying about all the jobs going to India.
No matter what you do, get a good summer internship.

... his article just explains each point.

He's like a Shaykh Nuh Keller for software.

Why is Gold so valuable?

2008-06-13T16:31:00.000-07:00

http://www.theqandatimes.com/artman/publish/article_954.shtm

This answers the question. Gold was money, is money, and always will be money. The price of gold doesn’t go up or down, it stays consant, but the value of paper money is what really fluctuates. I heard this from shaykh hamza, then was reminded of it by my buddy Nizam. We have wahih to prove the value of Gold.

republican texans becoming muslim

2008-05-27T10:06:00.001-07:00

Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbDPt_UZnEc

Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX7lQatQfew

Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41rgEJ-GU3M

I can't wait until more blue collar country Americans become Muslim... Most of them are very good decent pure hearted people, and they have a lot of potential inshAllah.

Contentions 9

2008-05-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad is such a genius mashAllah. It's been a while since i've read his contentions, so i'm reading them again.

2. Feminism has one virtue: it shows that the West is still capable of certainty.

... ouch. But yeah, from athiesm comes relativism, and from relativism comes uncertainty.

9. If you seek amusement, seek it in the absurdities of kufr .

12. Be a good Muslim and you won't want to lie. Be a very good Muslim and you won't need to lie.

13. His name in our age is al-Sabur .

15. Tolerance is no substitute for holiness.

19. We have not grown out of the Shari‘a, we have shrunk out of it.

23. Religion desires to change the age. The age desires to change religion .

24. Politics is one cell within the body of Islam. If it grows unduly, it is a cancer.

27. The asbab are merely the user-interface.

40. The only safe bank is the Sadaqa Bank.

74. Praying through someone is not praying to someone. Praying because someone is praying is praying to someone.
.... that's gangster

77. Your property belongs to you if you belong to God. If you belong to Satan you belong to your property.

96. Which is the bigger prison: Islam in the eyes of modernity, or modernity in the eyes of Islam?

57. Religion, like a garden, is more resilient than a fortress.

... that's it for now
http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/contentions9.htm

Zuhd

2008-04-07T11:37:00.002-07:00

SubHanAllah, we’re such an extravagant ummah in the west. Listen to what mufti mudassir says about weddings, living in our day to day lives versus that of the prophet pbuh and the sahabas ra

http://www.bayaans.org/Ramadan2007/mashrat_sadgi_ihsan.mp3

it’s sad how much of a forgotten practice zuhud (abstinence from extravagance) has become. There are even modern day schools of thought nowadays that deny zuhud altogether.

Just came back from a Mufti Mudassir tafsir

2008-04-03T21:02:00.000-07:00

He was covering a part of surah tawbah.

Some things just got stuck in my head (alhamdulillah)...

he said that imam ghazzali wrote, when referring to religious arrogance (kibr) that...

if it is recognition and fame that you seek, then why bother with attaining through religion, why don't you just become an actor or entertainer?

ouch, nafs-cruncher.

He was also talking about how another scholar (possibly a tabi'een or sahaba) said, what if Allah asked you, do you want a home in this world made of Gold or a home in the hereafter made of dirt, what would you choose?

Unfortunately, because of our short sightedness, we'd choose, the home made of Gold in this world. But in reality, this life is temporary and very short, so the smart thing would be to choose the home made of dirt in the next world, because it will last forever.

But the funny thing is that the situation is flipped around: we get a home made of dirt here (or wood in cali), and Gold in the hereafter. But yet we still don't work sufficiently hard enough for the Golden home of the hereafter, but we tire ourselves out for the home made of dirt in this temporary world.

He also said that laziness is a horribly bad disease of the heart. Procrastination comes from laziness. The prophet pbuh used to seek refuge in Allah from laziness.

Monzy's Kill -9

2008-03-31T16:32:00.000-07:00

Here's the vid: http://youtube.com/watch?v=Fow7iUaKrq4

Man this is soooo genius. It's performed by, what seems to be a phd CS major at Stanford. Watch that youtube vid, it does have bad words tho, so you've been warned.

"You're like a synchronous sock that don't know when to block"

"You're running csh, my shell is bash. You're the tertiary storage, I'm the L1 Cache. I'm a web crawling spider, you're an internet mosquito. You thought the 7-Layer model referred to a Burrito"

"I was coding ish in MIPS while you were playing space invaders"

"I wrote my ___ with zig zag, while I zag zig splay. I throw a bounds check before i write to an array."

"Coming straight out of stanford, ain't nobody tougher. Ctrl x, ctrl c, I'll discard ur freakin buffer"

"Dump your core, trace your stack, where ur grass is going, there won't be no call back"

http://www.monzy.com/intro/killdashnine_lyrics.html... you won't get it unless you are or have been a CS major.

Absolute genius.

Lesson from surah yusuf about the Evil Eye

2008-03-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Whenever you have a culture, especially one that has not received a prophet (in pre islamic times) or has not received dawah or a revival from Muslims in a while, you see all these superstitions coming up. Like for paki and indian muslims, we unfortunately see people in villages believing things like leaving "shoes upside down causes a fight in the home" or in the US how some people believe that if a black cat crosses your path that's bad luck.... or in both, the belief that broken class or mirrors is bad luck.

All of that stuff is complete balogne, and should be thrown out the window. It basically will fall into the category of bida or shirk -- both of which are more than deadly

However, some may think that the "Evil Eye" or "Nazr" in urdu is just another superstition -- but in this case it is not. Every culture on the face of this planet has a term for "the evil eye." Usually when this is the case about something, it is valid. The same is the case for Allah, every language has a name for Him, whether they believe in him or not. The same goes for Angels and Demons (Jinn). The prophet muhammad pbuh confirmed that the "Evil Eye" true. It basically occurs when person A is jealous of person B, and they look at them, and something happens in the spiritual realm that causes person B to be harmed. Mufti Mudassir says that (a or the) symptom is that person B gets a fever.

The root diseases of person A are:
- a love for the material world, because if it were not for that material advantage of person B, the jealousy wouldn't have been there.
- arrogance, because person A believes that s/he DESERVES the material good of B more than himself.
- the discontentment with the divine decree (Qadr). This is really the biggest arrogance, to believe that Allah's decree in what Allah has given somebody is flawed, and that your own decree is superior.

This is the disease of shaytan (specifically Iblis), he was jealous of our father Adam pbuh. Shaytan said he was better than Adam, and then ended up blaming Allah for shaytan's own screw-up.

The cure to this disease (jealousy) is very bitter, if you are person A, you should do this:
- first of all, always say mashAllah
- pray to God that he increase person B in whatever you are jealous of them about
- give a gift to person B.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf once said, "Jealousy is a very underestimated disease in the world today".

Secretary of state, Henry Kissinger said, "what's our oil doing under their soil" ... hahahaha, thought i'd throw that in.

Well anyway, the prevention of being affected by the evil eye is simple:
- for person B to always hide his blessings. Mufti Mudassir said that it is natural for a human to tell others about something good that happened to him/her. But to protect against jealousy and the evil eye, one should hide these blessings, this is out of wisdom.
- for person A to say ma sha Allah (which literally means "what Allah willed"), and it is acknowledging that the decree of Allah is superior to what anybody else may wish.

Here's the ayah that i've been pondering in surah yusuf, where yusuf pbuh's father tells him to not tell his brothers about the great dream he received, because then shaytan can push them to could get jealous and try to get them to harm him:

إِذْ قَالَ يُوسُفُ لِأَبِيهِ يَا أَبتِ إِنِّي رَأَيْتُ أَحَدَ عَشَرَ كَوْكَبًا وَالشَّمْسَ وَالْقَمَرَ رَأَيْتُهُمْ لِي سَاجِدِينَ

قَالَ يَا بُنَيَّ لاَ تَقْصُصْ رُؤْيَاكَ عَلَى إِخْوَتِكَ فَيَكِيدُواْ لَكَ كَيْدًا إِنَّ الشَّيْطَانَ لِلإِنسَانِ عَدُوٌّ مُّبِينٌ

012.004 Behold! Joseph said to his father: "O my father! I did see eleven stars and the sun and the moon: I saw them prostrate themselves to me!"

012.005 Said (the father): "My (dear) little son! relate not thy vision to thy brothers, lest they concoct a plot against thee: for Satan is to man an avowed enemy!

SubHanAllah, what a book! Listen to it.

Article on Obama by Firas Ahmad called "Our Obama Problem"

2008-02-21T12:28:00.000-08:00

“With presidential candidate Barack Obama's surge ahead of Hillary Clinton in the nomination process, American Muslims are now asking how you root for a candidate who doesn't want you to root for him?”

“Attacking Obama for his pseudo-association with Islam is a far safer and more acceptable strategy for right-wing zealots than attacking him for being black.”

Those are excerpts from this article. It's quite interesting:

http://www.altmuslim.com/a/a/a/2676/

He made a lot of really good points, probably the biggest thing that we, as 1st and 2nd generation Muslims have slipped up on is not hooking up with Afro American Muslims as tightly as we should. There is definitely love, respect, and brother/sisterhood, but it's not as close as it should be. InshAllah this will change as my generation and future generations get older and become community leaders. There is a whole lot of potential here inshAllah.

وَاعْتَصِمُواْ بِحَبْلِ اللّهِ جَمِيعًا وَلاَ تَفَرَّقُواْ وَاذْكُرُواْ نِعْمَةَ اللّهِ عَلَيْكُمْ إِذْ كُنتُمْ أَعْدَاء فَأَلَّفَ بَيْنَ قُلُوبِكُمْ فَأَصْبَحْتُم بِنِعْمَتِهِ إِخْوَانًا وَكُنتُمْ عَلَىَ شَفَا حُفْرَةٍ مِّنَ النَّارِ فَأَنقَذَكُم مِّنْهَا كَذَلِكَ يُبَيِّنُ اللّهُ لَكُمْ آيَاتِهِ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ

003.103 And hold fast, all together, by the rope which Allah (stretches out for you), and be not divided among yourselves; and remember with gratitude Allah’s favour on you; for ye were enemies and He joined your hearts in love, so that by His Grace, ye became brethren; and ye were on the brink of the pit of Fire, and He saved you from it. Thus doth Allah make His Signs clear to you: That ye may be guided.

I miss Sidi Yahya Rhodus

2008-02-16T11:44:00.000-08:00

He went back to Yemen to further his studies in the deen, but surfing halaltube.com i found some lecs by him:

http://www.halaltube.com/category/yahya-rhodus

I remember him giving commentary on a collection of hadith about the description of the prophet compibled by shaykh yusuf an-nabahani... his way of teaching was like, filled with Lutf... it was just harmonious, the way he'd move his hands and stuff... it was like out of this world. It's hard to describe.... he taught like the jedi knights in star wars fight.

Sidi Yahya is amazing, people call him "the next shaykh hamza"

Halaltube.com

2008-02-14T12:33:00.000-08:00

Dude, this website has a lot of lectures, it's basically an aggregation of islamic web based media.

I don't know where they got these shaykh nuh lectures from, but i'm glad they are there:
http://www.halaltube.com/category/nuh-ha-meem-keller

I'm listening to this one now:
http://www.halaltube.com/nuh-ha-meem-keller/audio/music-fiqh-and-islam

They've got a good amount of shaykh hamza yusuf stuff too:
http://www.halaltube.com/category/hamza-yusuf

I listened to this one on secularism yesterday (I had heard it a long time ago on mp3):
http://www.halaltube.com/hamza-yusuf/video/secularism-the-greatest-challenge-facing-islam

Shaykh Nuh referred to somebody he knows/heard of that's getting a masters in communications at UCLA, so he asked her

"What's the news in communications?" and he continues with her answer, "The news in communications is that nobody on the campus of UCLA is communicating with anybody. They're all plugged into their iPods, the wonder of wonders... Another theft of reality by virtual reality."
(See the second mp3 on the last URL above at around 13 minutes).

aint nothin like codin' and darsin' at the same time.

Looking back at Ron Paul

2008-02-12T12:53:00.001-08:00

Over the last couple of months i've been watching a good number of youtube vids, etc, by ron paul. And I've been realizing more and more why it was a mistake to want to vote for him.

Well there's the obvious argument of "why waste your vote", but that doesn't cut it for me... that's not what i'm talking about here... i mean more votes, even for a losing candidate allows him to speak up more.

Basically the main good thing about him is his foreign policy, he's right on the ball with that. As for the Economy, its great that he wants to lean out the government. It's great that he wants to get rid of the dept of homeland security, possibly repeal the patriot acts, etc. It was also great that he's home schooling friendly, and wants to turn gold into basically a form of currency (no taxes or capital gain on it). I also like his proposed approach to health care.

But the main things that really bother me about him are:
- his stance on immigration. He's too strict on mexico, and he wants to stop giving student visas to people from "terrorist countries"
- his stance on gun control is kinda scary. He basically wants to make it easier for people to buy guns and carry them around.
- He's too nice to corporations. I think he'd make outsourcing even worse than it is now, which is bound to happen to most industries sooner or later because of globalization, but he'd expedite the process significantly.
- It seems like he wants to have almost no regulation of corporations, this could be very problematic, especially for the environment.

but yeah... i'm not all that crazy about Ron Paul anymore. I'd love it if he would keep speaking about foreign policy though. I think he's also running for congress, maybe that's a better place for him.

So yeah, it's basically turned into what i thought it would, just another election season where we are given basically no real choices. If Clinton will be running for 2008, she'll do fine i think, but she'll probably work too slow. I think she'll beat mccain and become the first female president, and we'll have a total of 24 to 28 years of nothing but Bushes and Clintons running the country. If Obama wins (and he seems to have a pretty good chance at it right now), I think he'll basically do what Clinton would have, but faster. He's young, quick, and probably more approachable by leaders of foreign countries, I see more promise in him. The main thing that scares me about him is that he has said that he wants to go after PK and AFG, but I have a feeling that he was just bluffing to prevent losing certain votes.

Looking back on it now, my prefs would probably be:
1. Edwards
2. Kucinich
3. Ron Paul
4. Obama
5. Clinton

Halal Mix Tape Vol. 1

2008-01-29T12:42:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-17T15:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-16T14:29:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-01-14T15:03:00.000-08:00

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.

Ron Paul at Google

2008-01-08T17:57:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul speaks for over an hour.

Ron Paul on Israel

2008-01-07T13:07:00.000-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Jn2xCF92Y

Good stuff.

Ron Paul 2008, YEAH!!!

2007-12-16T09:32:00.000-08:00

I never thought I'd vote republican for the 2008 election, but now I understand that republican != neo-con.

I've watched a lot of his videos on ronpaul2008.com and they all seem to be very consistent with my views.

Gold is money

One thing that surprised me about him is his allowance for investing in Gold without being taxed on it, this is HUGE for muslims, because I think that's the only way to legitimately avoid interest living in the US. He said that Gold is supposed to be a type of currency according to the constitution, who woulda known.

Pro home schooling

Another thing that surprised me was his pro-home-schooling stance, he understands the benefits, and has seen the positive results home-schooling has brought. So, on top of that he wants to give some tax money back to home schoolers, this would be very significant.

Health care: a hybrid approach

Yet another thing is his stance on health care. Yes i watched Sicko. So there are 2 extremes:
1. keep it the way it is, where health care is run by the corporate monster
2. completely socialize it.

The problem with the first option is obvious. W/ the second one the problem is that gov't has a tendency to crapify everything it runs. When we think of the DMV, the place u go for vaccines (forgot what it was called), etc we get an immediate feeling that its going to be a huge hassle. The workers tend to be very slow and seem to not care about the people they serve, etc. Another problem is that in the US we have some of the best doctors in the world, we have the best medical instruments, etc, and it's all I think because of the extra money that's sent in that direction, so it makes me wonder if that trend can still continue if health care were totally gov't-ified. Also if it were free, people would abuse it, and go to the doctor for the most minor things, and i've seen this in pakistan where healthcare is super cheap, it only screws up the system. Well Ron Paul's model seems to be a hybrid approach, which is where you start giving people an allowance of how much you can spend, then after that amount is reached then you start dealing with health insurance. This would push people to go to the doctor only when they REALLY needed to, and would also provide the extra money for the extra quality we see in doctors, medical instruments, pharmaceutical research, etc.

... that's kind of how Adobe's (my) health plan works. We get an allowance per year which accumulates year to year (roll over style), and once we exceed the allowance they pay 90% up to a certain max-out-of-pocket for me, then they pay 100%. No co-pay at all, period. It works very well.

Foreign Policy

Maybe the biggest thing that I like about him is his stance on foreign policy. He actually listens to "the other side." He wants to pull the troops out of other countries fully. That means not just out of Iraq, but also out of saudi arabia, afghanistan, etc. Instead as for his defensive strategy, he wants to rely strongly on the navy. This makes a lot of sense. He also realizes that NOBODY, including iraq, iran, etc is even close to being able to invade the US. This is very true, it's just an image we're given by the media to keep us scared which will cause Americans to allow the gov't to spend tremendous amounts of money on our war machine, and allow us to steal oil more effectively.

I'd really like to know his stance on the israeli/palestinean issue. I haven't seen anything yet, but i'm assuming that he doesn't want to talk about it, cause the Media is fully zionist controlled, and would completely focus all its efforts on taking him out of the competition if he spoke out against zionism.

Conclusion

Other than that, yeah, i love that he's such a straight shooter. The guy is a soft-hearted doctor that wants to make a difference, that's all. I truely don't believe that he is in it for fame or the money.

The only thing is, that he just seems too good to be true. Whenever there's an environment bent on doing the wrong thing (because of whatever material benefits they have at stake), and there is one person that wants to stand up to do the right thing. The environment just crashes down on that one good person. The neo-cons just control way too much, and on the democrat side, they'd want a piece of him just cause he's the competition.

Hafiz Kamran Riaz visits Cali

2007-12-11T10:43:00.000-08:00

Sidi Hafiz Kamran Riaz from Chicago, IL visited nor-cal last week, and alhamdulillah we loved having him here. He was first in my arabic class at Zaytuna, he gave us some advice and said some really inspiring things about the Arabic language. It was very motivating, and gave us quite a rush. He later gave a talk at masjid muhajireen , and again motivated especially the youth to excel in all that they do, both in matters of the deen and the dunya.

One of the things he did was recite the poem by Al-Asma'ee. He told us the story of how the Ummayad Khalifah Abu Jafar (ra) tried to play the local poets to try to score some free entertaining poetry out of them, and how a great muhadith and scholar Al-Asmaee set things straight.

Here is the entire story (you really need to hear it all to appreciate the actual poem):

and here's the poem itself:

... and of course listening to it on the internet isn't nearly as powerful as experiencing it live. But FWIW, there it is.

"I am a Muslim" FEATURED youtube video

2007-12-11T09:23:00.000-08:00

featured on youtube:

... it was pretty good, good job MAS. 1.14M views, excellent.

And here is the bay area version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoQbMlcK3Pk

haaaaaaaay

and to that we could add "I am an engineer at ____" ... and fill in the blank with Apple, Google, Microsoft, Adobe, Yahoo, Ebay, Boeing, NASA, JPL, KLA, Intel, Oracle, IBM, Motorola, Nokia, PeopleSoft, and so on... yes i know AT LEAST one muslim at each of those companies.

Muslims write the software you run, create the products you use, and yes, even build the airplanes you fly in.

Here comes another bubble video

2007-12-04T14:47:00.000-08:00

That's good stuff, good observations. I take it as a vid theorizing what i've been pondering myself. It seems like in the tech industry there are waves of ups and downs in terms of money. So when there's a "boom" there are all these companies addressing human needs which equate to money. Out of a gazillion such companies, one or two are extremely good and sweep the floor with the others (such as google, ebay, etc), all of the business gets pushed into them, they get filthy rich and the "startups" all die out, and in the death the smart ones cash out, others are unfortunate.

Then there's a period of death in the tech industry, where the only ones left innovating are the fat cats that survived, they further develop the tech infrastructure, and make more things possible. Then all the sudden it becomes possible to be able to fill new human needs, like with facebook there's the need for socialization and at the least a fancy online phone book -- RIA technology and overall advances in hardware (allowing AJAX to get crunched faster than before) make this possible. With youtube, there's video and widespread broadband capability.

Now this video claims that there's another bubble about to pop -- however i disagree. I think there will be bubbles that pop, such as the social networking bubble, it's just too hard to compete with facebook and myspace... so other social networking start ups might die out. But then there are many other endeavors, such as the race for high-def internet video, and this endeavor will be on a cycle as well, but since it will be on a different phase from the social networking "bubble," the entire tech industry won't really feel the loss because the unemployed from the social networking bubble will move to video which might be in its peak at that time.

Now if you mix in all the other technology endeavors, such as the IDE, virtualization, RIA-ifying "Office" apps and creative apps, the future looks fairly bright for the tech industry... when one endeavor dies out, another one is still full in boom. The only thing that might happen, and i think it will, is that it will just stop growing at the rate it has been.

I guess overall you can call it "maturity".

Wanna know a secret?

2007-11-29T12:56:00.001-08:00

Well I guess it’s not going to be a secret anymore, now that I am posting on my highly trafficked blog ;-)

You know that ayah in the Quran where Allah says that ~= “Surely if you thank me, then surely I will increase you (in that)”

And then there’s the principle (which I’m pretty sure is derived from the Quran): When you get something good, thank Allah, and if you are afflicted with something “bad” blame only yourself.

Well Shaykh Muhammad explained that when you perform a good action, maybe tahajjud, or some extra dhikr or avoid a haram action, that you should do a sajdah of shukr that Allah allowed you to do that good deed... then the devine Law that Allah has told us about him increasing us in that will kick in, and He will enable you to do even more.

You get it? so like, lets say you prayed tahajjud right, well that’s a good thing, and you don’t give yourself credit, you know that it was Allah that gave you the tawfiq to pray tahajjud and gave you the means to do so (allowing you to stay awake, etc), so you should thank him for that by doing a sajdah-e-shukr.

Now the clincher is that because you thanked Him for being able to worship Him, He will increase you in worshipping him more. Then you thank him more, and he increases you more. And this seems to me like a path to wilayah.

It’s pretty amazing.

Here's an excerpt from it, again, it's Shaykh Muhammad Al-Ya'qubi in the "Invocations of the Heart" lecture series, CD2, Track 5, starting at around 8:54

Shaykh Yassir Fazaga on KROQ (rock radio station)

2007-10-29T08:36:00.000-07:00

"Ask a Muslim" on the "Kevin and Bean Show" on KROQ

Click here

Shaykh Yassir is breakin' it down. He is the Imam of the Mission Viejo masjid in "The OC" ... my community in so-cal before I moved to the bay area.

Hafiz Aslam told us this story too

2007-10-25T16:38:00.001-07:00

I'm at the second mufti mudassir lecture in the Ramadan 2007 series:

"Zindagi Ki Buniyad - Allah Ka Khauf Aur Allah Se Ummeed"

http://www.bayaans.org/Ramadan2007/allah_ka_khauf_aur_ummeed.mp3

which I get from:

http://www.bayaans.org/ramadan2007.html

I'm referring to the story about the woman who built some water pipelines or something to alleviate the difficulties of hajj for the hujjaj. She passed away later on. So she and others figured that she must be going to Jannah for that. One person saw her in a dream (yes this is possible, we believe in the karamah of a awliya according to aqeedah tahawiyya, i'll let you read up on the details of it)... well anyway, in that dream this woman told the dreamer that when she presented this deed to Allah, it wasn't accepted cuz the money used was from government money anyway. But she entered Jannah anyway because one day she was eating, and the adhan started from a local Masjid, and she fell in a deep state of awe at the greatness of Allah, and she stopped eating and fixed her scarf to cover all of her hair (it was slipping off). .... and that was the action, although small, but packed with sincerity by which Allah entered her into Jannah.

And for the record, Hafiz Aslam heard this story from Shaykh Zulfiqaar Ahmed Naqshbandi at an ijtima in Sacramento around 2.5-3.5 years or so ago. And also for the record, I don't know where Mufti Mudassir heard/read it.

But its def worth listening to Mufti Mudassir tell the story directly.

Mufti Mudassir Owais is amazing

2007-10-25T16:15:00.001-07:00

http://www.bayaans.org/Ramadan2007/akhirat_qayamat_tazkirah.mp3

Just listen to it.

I was listening to Ustadh Muhammad Alshareef's Usul al Fiqh series that i got from ISNA, done with that, now moving on to Mufti Mudassir's Ramadan 2007 lectures. It's all in urdu:

http://www.bayaans.org/ramadan2007.html

Tafsir on Surah Fatihah by Imam Suhaib Webb

2007-10-18T14:51:00.001-07:00

in MP3 format

http://www.savefile.com/files/1131838

http://www.savefile.com/files/1131833

http://www.savefile.com/files/1131846

... I had gotten this from UC Berkeley's MSA's (Cal MSA) website a few years ago, its no longer there AFAIK.

Sister Aminah (a hijabi) on the Tyra Banks Show

2007-10-18T13:16:00.001-07:00

Yeah! represent the deen sister, mashAllah, may Allah reward her immensely. Ameen.

The Beard

2007-10-14T14:46:00.001-07:00

I just came back from my trip to Dallas, TX... We had gone there for Eid. After tarawih all the uncles would establish a little mehfil situation in the parking lot. They'd mainly tell cultural uncle jokes and stuff. But this one uncle, who was a very interesting character, would tell people about Islam. So any way Ateeq Uncle (which was his name) said:

"The beard is in Islam, Islam isn't in the beard"

... he said it in urdu, but that's a good translation, but it flows a little nicer in urdu.

It's true, my buddy mustafa umar ( www.mustafaumar.com ) once made an observation that the ummah seems to be very concerned with the beard, but the biggest sunnah is tahajjud -- but you don't see people focusing on it as much.

... but yeah, i liked his quote.

... and i don't mean to de-emphasize the beard.

Ahmadinejad meeting with Jewish leaders

2007-10-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

Othodox Jews are awesome, they're the Jews that actually follow their religious teachings, may Allah guide them to the straight path inshAllah. We also had an Orthodox Jewish Rabbi come to UCI to speak against Zionism, and man, he took it to the zionists.

http://www.jewsnotzionists.org/differencejudzion.html

http://www.jewsagainstzionism.com/

Seeing the world through craigslist

2007-10-06T08:46:00.001-07:00

Ok, maybe i have too much time on my hands, but one very interesting thing to do is to go to craigslist.org and pick another country, click on cars+trucks under the "for sale" section, and see all the pictures. You actually get to see some real live images of non-hollywood-tainted people just living their normal lives.

its interesting. It's interesting enough to see the kinds of cars they drive, but its even more interesting to see the people in the background.

For example, here's bangalore, india (the tech capitol of india):

http://bangalore.craigslist.org/search/car?query=&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max&addTwo=&hasPic=1

... you can probably do the same thing for different countries and different websites.

Chinese toy manufacturing plants

2007-10-04T11:50:00.000-07:00

http://www.mazm.com/2007/09/19/38.toys-manufacture-in-china-25-pics.html

One thing to keep in mind is that the chinese gov't doesn't usually allow american reporters to take pictures, so my speculation is that these are pics of a particularly good plant.

Ahmedinejad Intervew

2007-09-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

I liked this interview, it was very productive I think... it wasn't the standard ahmedinejad-bashing that goes on on fox news, cnn, etc... where they constantly look for where he messes up instead of listening to what he has to say.

Also, the lady translating most of the interview is doing a pretty good job compared to other translators. FWIW of course, i don't speak farsi, but i can still kinda tell that she's better.

And btw, isn't Viddler awesome, soo soo much better than youtube. The only pain is that, and this is a really big deal, that it doesn't work in Firefox all the time, and I haven't checked Safari at the time of this writing.

If you want to skip around, at the bottom click on "progressive". This will change it to streaming, and you could seek to anywhere in the video. Dude, viddler is awesome.

Good stuff:

Man this guy's hilarious

2007-09-25T11:14:00.000-07:00

Russel Peters... I've seen his other video about the desi guy buying something from the chinese guy at a flea market, but i had never seen these. Good stuff.

(If you're on facebook you have to click "View Original Post" above to see it)

Here's another one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OhIAAKFGws

Going for Hajj this year?

2007-09-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Well, i've got some tips for you. My wife and I went for hajj last year alhamdulillah. We went with "hilal hajj and umrah" ( hajjpriceline.com )... don't go with them, haha. Seriously, don't. You can e-mail me if you need more info. My email addy is sonyplaystation at the website excite.com (so replace the words "at the website" with the @ sign).

Who should you go with?

After talking with other hajjis, and while at hajj, I have found that the best hajj groups are:

Al Madinah (or is it El Madinah, or (E|A)l M(a|e)dina(h?) in regular expressions), not sure, but this is imam tahir anwar's group. If i were to do hajj again, i'd go with imam tahir's group. In fact i would have, but the hajj schedule wasn't matching mine.
Airlink, this is khalid qureshi's group. the group that went with shaykh mukhtar magroui last year (2006)
Dar us salaam. This is the luxury group. IMO, too much luxury. But if u go with them, shouldn't be any harm. After all, you could choose to sleep on the floor on the days of hajj if you want to.

Who not to go with?

Hilal Hajj and Umrah. There's some other chicago-based hajj group associated with them, don't go with them either. I'm not going to give details publicly.

What to look for in a Hajj group?
Make sure, make sure, make sure!!!! that you drill your hajj group provider with these questions before you commit. You should also get it in writing, maybe print out their website or something.

Exactly which hotels will you be staying in. I highly recommend Makkah Hilton or Makkah Hilton Towers (sometimes simply known as "Makkah Towers", but double check anyway). They're both the same basically, the first one is slightly more luxurious, but who cares. Here are some other good close hotels: (note to self: update this later, i think it was al meridian).
Make sure the hotel is within a block or two of the haram. A further hotel means possibly missing a prayer at the haram, each prayer is with 100,000 times the reward, this is not small peanuts.
Make sure the hotel has "american toilets" and not a hole in the ground in the bathroom.
When they say that the hotel is X-star, subtract one or two in your head. U're not there for fun, so a 4-star or 3-star should be fine.
Same goes for the hotel in madinah, the hotel we stayed in was the "ansar diamond". It was great. There are also two more, they're named like "ansar gold" and like "ansar silver" or something, they look fine from the outside, but that isn't much info. Imam tahir's group, and Airlink stayed at Saffir or Safir or something, that was great too. Here are some others that seem to be good too in that area: hilton and movenpick. There's basically a square half mile or so of very nice hotels, they should all be fine. There's one that's really big and simple, i think its called "tayyibah", it's simple and has american toilets. My wife's relatives from PK stayed there, we went in, it was nice, not fancy, but nice. If I haven't mentioned your goup's hotel, at least ask them if they are in the same area as the hotels i mentioned. These hotels are BEHIND the haram, so if you were to enter on a full day, you'd get the last row and not have to walk around? the opposite side of the kiblah, you'd face the kibla. The prophet's (pbuh) grave is on the opposite side. get it?
This is EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: ASK YOUR HAJJ LEADER: "Where will our tents at minnah be?" ESPECIALLY if you will have an elder with you. There are only two possible places: One is RIGHT BY jamarat, i think they call them the "luxury tents". The other is way in the heck on the other side, it's the furthest place possible, its at the border of muzdalifah. If your hajj group says that it's a "45 minute walk", do not go with them. I think it was more than 45 minutes, but that's a good paki-round-off. We're talking about a 3+ mile walk twice a day for 3-5 days, plus super long tawafs and safa marwah, plus all the walking u'd have to do to get to the haram cuz ur bus driver drops you off far away. On top of that, its VERY difficult to navigate through minnah, so that 3+ mile walk can easily turn into a 5+ mile walk. I've heard of people getting CRAAZY lost, if ur that far away, this is very possible. This bullet point is the most important of all. If you have heard of how far the Paki/Indian tents are, well this is further. That being said, it's not the end of the world if you do end up in one of these tents, u'll come back alive inshAllah, haha. Basically all the hajj groups i have heard of that go from the US get the tents right by jamarat, except very few cheapo ones.
Ask about food. Who pays for food? is food included? which days? If they say only on the days of hajj, you shouldn't go with them IMO. Normally for decent hajj groups, they say its the "hotel buffet", this is good. These hotel buffets are too luxurious, but its better than the alternative: 3 weeks of fast food. I actually gained weight because of this, despite all the walking. You don't have much of a choice on the street, its all super oily. I mean alhamdulillah, but still. I remember the food being very different from when i went there as a kid, as a kid i remember all the different cultures selling authentic cultural food. It was the best. Now it's like McCultural food.
Muzdalifah: some of the hajj groups, such as I think dar us salaam, don't have you spend the entire night at muzdalifah, instead they make u spend half the night there. Your are supposed to spend the night at muzdalifah, unless you TRUELY have an excuse. I'm not going to state a ruling on this, so ask a proper scholar, shaykh hussain covers it in the lecture series. You should double check this. Imam Tahir's group and Airlink definitely spent the night there. Alhamdulillah, my group did too.

Take a really good sleeping bag
My memon-ness kept me from getting a good one. That was one of the most difficult parts of hajj for me, and it was all my fault. Sleeping bags have like a temperature number on them when you buy one, that tells you how much temp ur sleeping bag could handle. Get one that could handle like 40 degrees or less (less is more). Some people had one that could handle like -100 degrees, and they were sleeping like babies while i was freezing all night. Mine said like 60 degrees, that was the cheapest $15 dollar one, and that didn't cut it.

Soap:
People make a big deal about not being able to find soap here that's TRUELY scentless for the days of hajj, its true, its not truely scentless at like walgreens. But at the Bin Dawood mall there, they sell scentless soap, it really does seem scentless to me, you could check it urself. I asked imam tahir about cetaphil, and he said it has a scent too.

Ur immunization records:
You know how you have to submit them for ur visa. Well I did, and they lost them. Make sure u make copies. Make copies of everything.

How to prepare religiously for Hajj:
Shaykh Hussain Abdul Sattar has a lecture series on Hajj:
http://www.sacredlearning.org/classrooms/hajj/index.htm
It is ABSOLUTELY EXCELLENT. Seriously, it is UNBEATABLE. He is extremely detailed. My wife took detailed notes on his lectures, let me know if you want it. It is around 10-15 hours of lecturing, you should listen to it all. If you need to, buy an MP3 player, and consider it a hajj expense, it will be worth it iA.

Doing "Number 2" during the days of hajj:
I think even the "luxury" tents have this problem: The toilets are the hole-in-the-ground kind. So either you learn how to use one of those, or you hold it in for 5 days (ouch!), or you do this:
When the bus driver drops you off during hajj for your fardh tawaf at Makkah, they usually drop you off at the same place: The opposite side of baab abdul aziz / baab ul fahad / bin dawud / around where safa/marwah is. Right there is a fancy looking hotel, i forgot the name, but it has a black sign with gold writing. You go inside, make a right, and then a left. And there are bathrooms. Good, clean, american toilets. Oh yes. Use the bathroom then, do yourself a favor. Either that or learn how to use a hole-in-the-ground, which is a valuable technique to learn by the way.

A very useful tool to check up on your Hajj group
Go to http://www.archive.org and enter your prospective hajj group's website. You will be able to see their website as it looked in the past. So for example, here's hilal hajj's website when I went:
http://web.archive.org/web/20061223024310/hajjpriceline.com/index.asp
And here it is today:
http://hajjpriceline.com/index.asp

Just from that you see that there is a $1200 price difference this year (as is the case with many/all other hajj groups i hear... I think they are making up for the massive losses they incurred last year because of the delay in visa approval). You can also see many other things, such as a difference in amenities.

Now that i've scared you straight:
Even though my group leader was horrible, it was still an experience of a lifetime. It was amazing, and my wife and I strongly look forward to going for umrah one day. To see the ka'bah in real life, to see the muslims from all over the world, to see how soft we've become compared to the rest of the world, to be in a place where the reward is so high, to be in the place where the Prophet pbuh was, where his sahabas (ra) where, where basically all top ulema have been. It's really really really something to look forward to. May Allah accept your hajj.

I did it in Java using Blinkenlight's JID3 library

2007-09-12T18:46:00.000-07:00

(see my post below)

The python libraries didn't cut it for me so i wrote it all in java.

It's very simple, here's how it works:


for each file or subdirectory in ./ call myFn(file)

myFn(file):
 for each file/folder f:
     if f is a folder call myFn(f)
     if its a file and an mp3:
         update the ID3 tags using JID3 // there are very simple f.setArtist(), f.setTitle() APIs in there

(funny how my pseudo code looks more like python now, i think i'm falling in love with a new language... but i guess Muslim guys are allowed to be married to 4 programming languages, hyuck hyuck)

and i parameterized it so taht i could use it for other lectures... this is a very common task that i often have to do, i have like > 10GB of islamic lectures that need organizing. Until now i have been using the simple folder/subfolder/filename technique.

only problem with all this is that it's slow... i think the JID3 libraries read in the entire track as a stream -- which stinks cuz islamic lecture tracks can be like 1.5 hours long.

Here it is, and it includes the actual binary, source code, the JIDE3 library, and the Ant build.xml:

http://www.savefile.com/files/1052896

(click the orange "Download" button, it kinda looks like an Ad but it isn't)

Here's how you use it, you put Id3Tool.jar and JID3.jar in the folder where you want to modify the tagging of the MP3s. So for example i have a "suhaib webb" folder, and in it i have a "purification of the soul" folder. In the "purification of the soul" folder i have a bunch of folders representing CDs so like CD01, CD02, etc

So i would put it in the "purification of the soul" folder and run this via commandline:

java -jar Id3Tool.jar "suhaib webb" "purification of the soul"

Instead of running it via commandline you could edit the .bat file in a text editor, and that'll do the trick as well.

Oh and if it gives you a weird "incorrect version in class files" error, i think its cuz i'm using JDK 6 and compiling for the Java 5 format -- it should work, i think its a bug in the JDK 6. To fix this, either recompile using JDK5 or just get JRE 6 from java.sun.com. I ran into the same problem when working on one of our internal apps, trying to deploy onto an instance of Tomcat running on JRE 5. I use Java generics which are new to Java , and love them, so if u have like Java 1.4, it's time u upgrade :-)

Python and ID3 tags

2007-09-10T22:50:00.000-07:00

What's a brother gotta do to get a decent MP3 ID3 tag python library.

So i was prepping for ramadan right... i got this "purification of the soul" by imam suhaib lec series and the "code of the scholars: usul al fiqh" by muhammad alshareef one as well... i wanted to put it on my iRiver and iPod so my wife could listen to it.

But the problem is that those pieces of crap go by ID3 tag, not filename (like my handy dandy PDA)... so i set out on a journey to write some code to dynamically populate the ID3 tags on all my mp3s based on the folder/file names ... y'know so that they could run in order and be grouped properly... instead of everything being under the "unititled" artist/album.

So i churn out my python code, and it looked fine. Nothing fancy, simple os.listdir's etc. And i get an ID3 python library -- the first one that pops up on google. Look up the docs, seems straightforward, and i'm on my way.

i wrote all the code, the code did all the tagging, and it was all great

until i put it all in windows media player that is.

it turns out that the library i was using was for ID3 version 1.2 (the first hit for "python id3"), and what's out now is version 2 or 2.3 and that's waht all the media players use, i think even the flash player. So crap, what a waste of time.

I did more googling, but only found out there is no good id3 v2 library. There's one called like ID3v2, but it's crap... its too low level, i don't have time to worry about byte placement stuff. I want simple id3info.title = "hi" kinda stuff.

but yeah, frustrated. What's a brother gotta do to get a good ID3 python library.

Well anyway, i did see an excellent java ID3 library, i think i'll give it a try

A Cheesy fatwa

2007-09-07T10:57:00.000-07:00

And a cheesy blog title........... ok, i'll stop with the puns

http://muslimmatters.org/2007/07/09/of-mice-and-men-the-cheese-factor

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi gave this fatwa, it's REALLY REALLY good. At first when i started reading it, i was very skeptical.... but after reading the whole thing i'm completely convinced.

It also reminds me of Shaykh Hussain Abdul Sattar's "Pearls of Purity" where he discusses the purity of water and the ability to use it for wudhu, ghusl, etc. ( http://www.sacredlearning.org/classrooms/pearls/index.htm )

Mufti Mudassir on "weak" ahadith

2007-09-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

Mufti Mudassir Owais from Fremont, CA gave a really good lecture on this topic. It is TOTALLY worth listening to.

I was looking for a good explanation of this topic, the only good explanation i had heard was by imam zaid at a deen intensive where he was specifically covering hadith science, but unfortunately it wasn't recorded (as far as I know). Muslims really need to understand the whole "prescription-strength" versus "over-the-counter" hadith situation, there are a lot of really ignorant ppl going around bashing "weak" ahadith and causing all kinds of trouble.

it's in Urdu:

http://www.bayaans.org/akhirat/akhirat_dars23.mp3

you can also get to it from this page: http://www.bayaans.org/akhirat_aur_uski_manzilien.html

and click on: "Akhirat Dars - 23 (Hadith Ki Qismein - Dhaeef Hadith Ki Haqeeqat Aur Tafseel)"

Or you could click on my Odeo player:

Devine GPS (Istikhara)

2007-08-15T11:10:00.000-07:00

Shaykh Abdul Bari Yahya is breaking it down:

http://rs6.net/tn.jsp?t=ymykrdcab.0.v7w7wacab.goeqwacab.471&ts=S0270&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.almaghrib.org%2Fradio%2F

How the Maliki Madhab got all over Africa

2007-07-30T15:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.bayaans.org/akhirat_aur_uski_manzilien.html

on that page, click "Akhirat Dars - 11 (Taleem Aur Tadeeb)"

or you could click here:
http://www.bayaans.org/akhirat/akhirat_dars11.mp3

go to 15:30 ... mufti mudassir makes mention of this.

The reason i'm blogging about it is that i remember a couple/few years ago i was at ISNA at a Ustadh Muhammad AlShareef lecture about i think the life of imam Malik bin Anas (rahimahullah)... ie the founder of the Maliki madhab.... and in the Q/A section somebody asked taht very question, about if imam malik (rahimahullah) never left madinah except for hajj, how then did the maliki madhab get to africa and grow so much.

Well anyway, in that lecture mufti mudassir makes mention of it, transl/paraphrasing:

The lecture is about adab, and he was talking about the importance of adab and how it is a key to barakah and knowledge, etc. So he states a story where Imam Malik (Rahimahullah) was giving a dars to his students, and all the sudden there was an elephant that came into their neighborhood... and all the village people started saying, y'know "whoaaa an elephant". Well the students had never seen an elephant, they had only heard about it, like in surah fil. Well all the students ran out to go and check it out... all but one. imam yahya ibn yahya, who probably wasn't an "imam" yet, didn't go out of adab for the scholar, knowledge, and the blessings of the gathering. His teacher (imam malik (ra)) even told him, "you could go and check it out" and he said no and that that gathering's takhaza and ihtaram is that I should stay here (ie he had proper adab with the gathering, knowledge, and teacher). And mufti mudassir says that, it was through him that the entire maliki fiqh made it to "shaam" and "misr"... shaam is the northern part, ie, modern day syria/jordan/etc. Misr is basically modern day egypt, and hence africa.

In other words, the implication is that, Allah rewarded imam yahya ibn yahya for his excellent adab by allowing him to be the link to spreading maliki fiqh all over the place. It's like the tafsir on surah kawther, how when Allah likes somebody he carries his/her legacy on, and its up to him to "cut somebody off", like the reference in the last ayah of surah kawther. This concept is present throughout the deen, like how when we recite the Quran, our teacher gets rewarded as well, and his teacher, and his teacher, all the way upto and including the prophet pbuh... and it was Allah's favor upon every person in that entire chain to have had the ability and tawfiq to do that good deed, and it is His favor that he kept it going. get it?

Well syria/jordan/etc are mainly shafi'i fiqh right now, not maliki, so some other historical events must have happened to make that change, which is highly probable because imam shafi'i comes a gen or 2 gens after imam malik. But as for maliki fiqh getting to africa, maybe it was through misr... but this is still gross speculation... this needs to be verified, ask mufti saab. However, one thing it definitely does explain is how did maliki fiqh even make it out of madinah, based on his wording it would seem as though it was, at one generation, via imam yahya ibn yahya... but again, please verify. This whole blog posting is based on like 4 sentences from mufti mudassir, everything else is "speculative extrapolation". But I thought it would be good to share cuz i think this is a common Q... "if imam malik didn't leave madinah, how is maliki fiqh all over Africa?"

... and of course don't take my word for any of this, listen to that lecture, and dbl check with mufti mudassir in real life if you can.

Junaid Jamshed is such a G mashAllah

2007-07-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

MashAllah Junaid Jamshed is such a G mashAllah. I've been to a couple tablighi jamaat markaz gatherings, mashAllah those are excellent people -- very much concerned with following the sunnah tooth and nail. They have lectures friday nights in richmond around maghrib if anybody wants to go.

I've gotta go to one of their weekend trips one of these days inshAllah.

Burqini = Burqa + Bikini

2007-07-25T14:36:00.000-07:00

The TIME magazine arti about it:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1645145,00.html

The Burqini website:
http://www.ahiida.com/index.php?a=results&subcat=65

My wife and I have actually been wanting to go white water rafting for a while, and i talked to the aorafting.com lady and asked her if we can wear shirts (i don't like taking my shirt off either... uh, not that i'd wear a burqini, SF hasn't rubbed off on me THAT much, haha), and she said yeah no problem, and she highly recommended that the shirt not be cotton, but rather a nylon type... because cotton soaks up water and leaves you cold, which is especially a problem with river rafting, cuz running water is always very cold. So if somebody out there wants to make their own version of the "burqini"... that's something to keep in mind -- the type of material.

The arti says that it gained a lot of interest from muslims, but now its gaining a lot of interest from non-muslims as well.

Sidi Tyson Amir releases new rap music

2007-07-22T20:36:00.000-07:00

"I represent the deen. My kufi's so clean. I pray to The King (Allah, He is described as al-malik, one of His attributive names). Peace to the prophet muhammad, Ameen."

Tyson's (far right in the picture on his site) in my arabic class at Zaytuna... thought i'd help him promote.

http://www.myspace.com/tysonamir

Alhamdulillah -- Milk is such a blessing

2007-07-19T13:28:00.000-07:00

It's just so good.

There are only two things that we know of that the Prophet pbuh would make dua for an increase of: Knowledge and Milk.

... And in the science of "interpretation of dreams"... Milk is a sign of an increase of knowledge.

In another words, he wouldn't make dua for wealth, power, women, etc... these are the only two things.

That's one of the things I absolutely love about Adobe -- free drinks, and yes, free milk. Good old organic Berkeley Farms Milk. What a blessing alhamdulillah. And yes, for the one who cares about this: I drink non-fat.

Alhamdulillah.

Kashif Memon

2007-06-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Kashif Memon's the desi guy that was on "America's got talent", i think its on NBC. Its like some american idol rip off, but yeah, he made it to the next round which will be in las vegas after they're done recruiting around the country. He lives in Skokie, IL.

What a G.

What's a "Memon"? see the wikipedia article

... and uh-oh, uh-oh, kashif memon's on it too :-)

Lookie my new professional blog

2007-06-02T07:53:00.000-07:00

http://blogs.adobe.com/shaykhalflash/

It's called "Shaykh Al-Flash Amir Memon on the Flash Platform" -- sweeeeet, huh?

Well anyway, for those not familiar with that Arabic or technical terminology, lemme break it down:

Shaykh, linguistically simply means "an elder," however because of centuries of filial piety in the Muslim world (and it still exists, AH), it has come to mean, colloquially, "a teacher", "a veteran", "a veteraned teacher", "a tenured teacher", or just simply "scholar", hence you'll have top scholars historically being referred to as "shaykh al islam".

"Al-" ... this means "The", and is there for grammatical reasons. And yes, wouldn't it be "Al-Shaykh Al-Islam" (first "l" silent since "sh" is a shams letter) if we stick to grammar strictly -- yes, but it doesn't sound as cool.

"Flash" -- everybody knows what this is, if you don't, next time you see something cool on a website like video, games, animation, etc, right click on it and you'll see "About Flash Player...", and that means it's flash.

"Platform" -- Flash is a platform, there are several tools (most of which Adobe makes) that publish flash-based content for various user and business needs. AND, another thing that makes it a platform is that it is cross-OS, flash is on windows 98 and up (which is funny because even Microsoft doesn't support win98), and mac (both ppc and intel), at least 4 linux flavors, solaris, and as time goes on more and more mobile devices. At the center of it all is the Flash Player, so it makes sense for me to be blogging about it since that's my product at work :-)

shaykh hussain on surah Baqarah ayah 5-12

2007-05-17T17:37:00.000-07:00

(if you are on facebook, click "view original post" to see the video player above)

MashAllah, this is an EXCELLENT lecture. I had been wanted to learn more about those particular ayahs as well (the ones about the munafiqeen).

I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend it. You could DL the mp3 and listen to it on your own.

Tafsir on Surah Baqarah 2:30-37 by shaykh hussain abdul sattar

2007-05-10T14:13:00.000-07:00

Napoleon Outlaw becomes Muslim!

2007-03-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

(if you're seeing this on facebook, you need to "view original post" to see the movie)

Ok, so it's old news, but that's the first time i heard him speak, EXCELLENT speech. He was an all-star rapper, one that has rapped with tupac shakur, had all the dunya (material world), but wasn't happy, he accepted islam and now he's lovin it. That's strong iman mashAllah, he's seen the dark side, and now he sees the light and because of his prior experience he appreciates Islam more than those of us who were born into muslim families.

... and yes i copied my wife in putting this video up.

My notes and comments of "Invocations of the heart" CD1 by shyakh muhammad ya'qubi

2007-02-24T20:20:00.000-08:00

There ain't nothin' like codin' and darsin' at the same time.

I was actually there when they recorded this (a year or two ago), it was called "spiritual retreat" (deen-intensive), in san jose, and ever since then parts of it have been echoing in my mind. "Ilahiii!" (My Lord!! (or more literally "My God!" but he avoids that translation in order to avoid falling into the cultural usage like "OMG")). Those who were there, ali malik, wali rafique, omar qureshi, etc, know what i'm talking about. ... and of course there was much more to remember than just that. well anyway, as i listen i'll be jotting down some notes, here they are. As always, all mistakes are mine...

"The more you claim to have knowledge the more jahil (ignorant) you are" -- shaykh muhammad

He tells a story of how when he was a child, his father used to encourage him to do certain things, like read the lesson his father was going to teach out loud in front of the students, this was to encourage him.

Then at one point his father (rahimahullah) told him to give khutbah, and young shaykh muhammad (age 14.5) became intimidated to give it in front of all those people, and his father told him to give him self-confidence, that nobody is more knowledgeable than you, no one will outsmart you and embarass you.

And a personal reflection on this is that iA when my wife and I have children, we know that there is no harm in encouraging them to do something good. Like if I say, wow good job son! then he might like the praise, which will get him to do more. that will possibly bring on arrogance and a motive to do good other than for the sake of Allah, but in the child raising process, it would seem to be ok, it acts as a catalyst or whatever. ... but dont' stop reading here, going back to shaykh muhammad's story...

Then at one point, his father started telling him to be careful, you have to believe that you are the most ignorant person, that anybody here can be a scholar, that Allah can send a big scholar that can be attending the khutbah that friday and can come after the khutbah and point out all your mistakes, that Allah can send a child to ask you a question that you cannot answer and embarass you in front of everybody.

"what you don't know is more than what you know" -- shaykh muhammad

"In order to know your ignorance, just go and research that which you don't know" -- shaykh muhammad

that's sooo true, i see this in computer science (and he also mentioned other fields). there are sooooo many environments and languages to study, .NET, java, the C++ win32 api, python, perl, coldfusion, php, flex (and it's copycat by microsoft: WPFE), this new breed of internet programming like AJAX and the server side, within each of these there are new libraries and specialties, like under java there's the standard desktop library, J2EE, J2ME... there are all the version controls like perforce, svn, cvs... and that's not even like a tenth of the list, let alone learning all these. But for those people who stick to one technology, get good at it, and stop, not only do they stay ignorant, get arrogant, but they also get angry at people who propose a change in technology. It's very interesting, and his whole point is that the same principle applies to knowledges in Islam.

"Whoever guarantees (AHM: to guard) for me what is between his jaws and between his thighs, I guarantee for them Jannah (Heaven)" -- Shaykh-ul-shuyukh The Prophet Muhammad pbuh

Tremendous and famous hadith, he mentioned and commented on it, it was worth quoting even though everybody knows it.

"Oh Allah make the best portion of my rizq (sustenance from Allah) from the last portion of my life" -- shaykh muhammad said it's a common dua of the saaliheen

he commented before and after this saying that imagine if Allah gave you all the money that you were going to earn right now, you might invest it somewhere and blow it (for example real estate, the stock market, etc), but it is out of his wisdom that he gives you the amount he gives you at the various points in your life.

All you bollywooders, check out Junaid Jamshed

2007-02-22T14:36:00.000-08:00

(if you are seeing this on facebook, you won't be able to see the video unless you click "view original post" above.)

wow, mashAllah, may Allah keep him strong.

in case you didn't know, he used to be some big time singer in PK or India, but then he met some religious people, including some scholars i think, and all the sudden, he started practicing islam and stuff mashAllah.

... and btw, that's from the paki TV station "Jeo" or whatever (hence the funny background music).

shaykh hamza's breakin it down

2007-02-14T15:17:00.000-08:00

(if u are seeing this on facebook, you wont be able to see the movie unless you click "view original post")

The Minara Program is coming to the OC with an event called "Agenda to Change Our Condition"

sign up nowww!!

http://www.zaytuna.org/eventDetails.asp?id=95

Surah Baqarah by Efasi

2007-01-23T14:56:00.000-08:00

powered by ODEO

Efasi is amazing, his recitation of surah baqarah (and imran, nisa, and i think also maidah) are AMAZING. i don't think i've heard anyone better, and his recitation will be extremely difficult to beat.

Scroll to like the middle, amazing. "inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raa ji oon" is at approx 57 mins. The safa-marwah ayahs are a little after that.

He has another recitation that's marked "1424H" (ie the year in hijri) that's cleaner, but less emotional. Check english.islamway.com . Here it is odeo-ified:

powered by ODEO

(if you are reading this post from facebook, you'll have to see the original post on blogger to play the recitation).

Flash Player won an Emmy

2007-01-15T10:58:00.000-08:00

Flash won a Hollywood Emmy award for bringing TV onto the internet... all us flash player teammates got to take a picture with it, i feel special now :-) .

(and yes i'm bald now, it's because of a post one post below this one ;-) )

Leaving for Hajj on Saturday iA

2006-12-14T09:51:00.000-08:00

Assalamu alaikum,

InshAllah my wife and I are leaving for Hajj on Saturday.

Please forgive me if I've wronged you in any way.

If I owe you anything please let me know ASAP, and i'll do my best to return it to you ASAP.

So, please say the following, in at least a whisper (so that at least the angels on your shoulders could hear):

"I forgive Amir and Muneeba for everything".

jazzakAllah Khair,
Amir

Israel-Palestine debate muffled in U.S.

2006-12-12T10:14:00.000-08:00

"Israel-Palestine debate muffled in U.S.
By Jimmy Carter
I signed a contract with Simon & Schuster two years ago to write a book about the Middle East, based on my personal observations as the Carter Center monitored three elections in Palestine and on my consultations with Israeli political leaders and peace activists.
We covered every Palestinian community in 1996, 2005 and 2006, when Yasser Arafat and later Mahmoud Abbas were elected president and members of parliament were chosen. The elections were almost flawless, and turnout was very high -- except in East Jerusalem, where, under severe Israeli restraints, only about 2 percent of registered voters managed to cast ballots.
The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations -- but not in the United States. For the past 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize policies of the Israeli government is due to the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices...."

... read the rest here:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/16213056.htm

.... and here's the book, haven't read it, but have heard great things:
http://www.amazon.com/Palestine-Peace-Apartheid-Jimmy-Carter/dp/0743285026/sr=1-1/qid=1165947416/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-2774796-1412719?ie=UTF8&s=books

sheikh ibrahim osman

2006-11-11T23:53:00.000-08:00

Surah araaf 172-187 recited by sheikh ibrahim osman from the mission viejo masjid (in socal):

powered by ODEO

mmkay

2006-11-11T23:48:00.000-08:00

Nevermind, the Daily Show's not so hilarious

2006-10-21T07:33:00.000-07:00

They are sooo asking for Allah's Adhaab to rain down on them. They're standing on one of the most earthquake-prone spots on the planet (hollywood i assume), and yet they have the nerve to do that. And what's worse is that they are squeezing the little taqwa these liberals have in them (like Lisa Simpson when she squirmed at the end in that angel episode).

I mean the jew thing at the end was kinda funny, but a little slanderous, we've got a problem with zionists, not jews in general. There are a lot of very good jews, for example, many of the doctors at the UMMA Free Clinic for poor people (muslim organized clinic for poor people) are jews. I had a nose doctor once that said, "Islam is the closest religion to judaism on the planet" and said that the zionists were crazy. One of my professors from college, doctor levine, was an anti-zionist jew. I was volunteering at this grassroots help-the poor people thing, the organizer was a jewish woman, and she was one of the biggest zuhaad i've ever seen on the planet. May Allah guide them all to the straight path. I have met three brothers in my life that became muslim, and before they were jews. And there are plenty out there www.jewsforAllah.com . And my favorite Muslim who used to be a jew, is the mother of the believers, Safiyya (radhiAllahu 'anha).

But yeah, the zionists are trouble, they know it, we know it, Europeans know it, most of the world knows it, and more and more Americans are becomming aware of it. I mean come on! Even Orthodox Jewish Rabbi's speak out against it (don't believe me? scroll down.). Arab Muslims/Christians/Jews (the original resident ones) have been living there for 1200 years, this crazy group can't just show up one day and start bulldozing their homes, killing their people with apache helicopters, etc, building ghettofied neighborhoods with their apartheid wall. It's wrong, any human being with some common sense can tell.

The Daily show is hilarious!

2006-10-18T14:40:00.000-07:00

(except the first few seconds where he says something dirty)

if this doesn't make you cry, ur heart is dead

2006-10-16T11:54:00.000-07:00

Assalamu Alaikum,

it's in urdu urdu:

http://www.bayaans.org/Ramadan2006/aisha.mp3

http://www.bayaans.org

mufti mudassir owais is such a gem, such a gem mashAllah.

it's ramadan, listen to ulema!

2006-10-15T12:11:00.000-07:00

assalamu alaikum,

this is good stuff:

shaykh hamza on surah balad:
http://www.zikrcast.com/podcast/audio/AlBalad.mp3

shaykh hamza / imam zaid on surah asr and surah rahman:
http://www.zikrcast.com/podcast/audio/RefSASR.mp3

Mufti Mudassir Owais from Fremont, CA:
http://www.bayaans.org/Ramadan2006/daaee_ki_sifaat.mp3
http://www.bayaans.org/

(NOTE: I had written on here that mufti mudassir is Mufti Saeed's son in law, THIS IS WRONG. One uncle I met outside of the masjid told me, I'll assume that I misunderstood and the mistake was on my part. )

mufti mudassir on the adab of the masjid (i was there, sitting a few feet from him, mashAllah, he's amazing) (urdu):
http://www.bayaans.org/Ramadan2006/masjid_ke_adaab.mp3

quran recitation by shaykh murtaza

2006-10-10T13:50:00.000-07:00

Joel on software -- new favorite book

2006-10-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

Man, this is an awesome book about software engineering:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com

So, basically i have two things in my life that I like "doing":
1 - learning about Islam
2 - learning about software and writing software.

(why isn't practicing islam or spending time w/ family on there? because it's a given and doesn't really "fit" in an enumerated list... These things integrate into numbers 1 and 2).

So in the second category, "Joel On Software" is my favorite book, dang he's good.

Download more than 2 files at the same time using Internet Explorer on Windows XP

2006-09-12T16:22:00.000-07:00

Are you a mass Islamic Lecture / Quran MP3 Downloader?

Are you sick of having to only download two files at a time?

If so, use my new handly little IE-hack tool that sets two simple values in the Internet Settings registry. This functionality is provided by microsoft, but needs to be manually enabled. Basically, the HTTP specification puts this limit on there in order to prevent the internet from getting over flooded, but since you bothered to read my blog, you will now be priveledged with being able to DL more than 2 files at a time with IE...

so yeah, here's a little somethign i hacked together during my lunch hour... DL this file:
http://members.cox.net/ahmemon/MaxDLlimitIE.zip
unpack the .exe in there and run it... u could figure out the rest.

For Windows XP ONLY, and Internet Explorer 6 ONLY. I used WinXP Pro to create and test it FYI... but u should be fine with home edition or media center edition.

happy downloading :-)

and keep me in ur duas... muhuhahahahahahha

Oh yeah, and DO NOT use it to download anything haram (immoral), like the nasty immoral Music out there nowadays like snoop kutta, if you do, I have nothing to do with it. Remember, you will die and will have to answer to your Lord.

Sidi Abdul Karim (hafizahullah) one day explained the details of repentence... y'know the standard... first stop sinning, then have remorse for it, then promise to never do it again, then if you transgressed somebody else's right then repay it (like if the sin was stealing).

Then somebody asked, how do you know if you have been forgiven?
He said you don't and you have to keep asking for forgiveness as long as you live or until Allah causes you to forget that you committed that sin. Then he said "it's much easier not to sin in the first place."

man that last statement has been stuck in my mind for a while, it's so true.

but yeah... happy downloading.

salaams,
amir

MashAllah, beautiful

2006-08-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

Surah tawbah from the Quran (112-129)

Hey this one's good!!

2006-08-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

hahhaahaha...

man this is hilarious!!!!

I got a speeding ticket.

2006-08-21T11:06:00.000-07:00

The cop who gave me a ticket let me take his picture. He got all happy, haha.

I was going 80 in a 65 zone, whoopty doo right?

At first when he pulled us over, i thought it was cuz we were looking muslim. I was wearing an all white shalwar khameez, i have a beard, and muneeba (my wife) was wearing wearing a scarf... we were coming back from mufti mudassir's class in fremont. (even tho class was cancelled, he had to go to a janaza).

I think the ticket is going to be 200-300 dollars... so basically it'll probably take a nice chunk out of our release-bonus for releasing flash player 9. I dunno how much the bonus will be, but i'll find out at the end of the month, it should be a pretty beefy bonus since flash palyer is very important to adobe's business strategy.

But anyway, here are the reasons why i would think that he pulled me over cuz i was a muslim:

Cuz me and muneeba were looking very muslim... but our car has no bumper stickers, etc. though.
Cuz he seemed to be a sheltered straight-edge CNN/Fox News believing white boy.

Here are the reasons that I DO NOT think he was pulling me over cuz we're Muslims:

He wrote the ticket for going 75 not 81. But it's weird cuz in the ticket both numbers are mentioned, and he said to me that he'll make it out to be a 65-75 ticket, which will make it a little cheaper for me, and that I'll learn my lesson anyway. That was nice of him.
He told me that there have been a lot of accidents on that road due to speeding, that's why they are tightening up there.
When me and muneeba drove down the road, there was somebody else pulled over.

So my and muneeba's final assessment was that he was just doing his job.

Lessons learned / Reminders:

This is a tribulation: the way to show sabr is to not say "Oh Allah why me?", rather say "what did i do to deserve this tribulation" and recheck all your sins, and take it as discipline from Allah. Blame yourself, not Allah.
Realize that tribulations in this world wipe out bad deeds. Even if you get pricked by a thorn, that'll wipe some bad deeds out.
Say "inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon" = "to Allah we all belong and to Him we shall all return." See the translation of the ayahs from surah baqarah below.
Appreciate the fact that there is law enforcement. In under-developped and new countries like pakistan, the cops take bribes and pull people over basically cuz they need money. The traffic 5-0 here is just keeping it safe for all of us. May Allah guide them to the straight path.

Surah Baqarah:

155. Be sure we shall test you with something of fear and hunger, some loss in goods or lives or the fruits (of your hard work), but give glad tidings to those who patiently persevere,

156. Who say, when afflicted with calamity: "To Allah We belong, and to Him is our return":-

157. They are those on whom (Descend) blessings from Allah, and Mercy, and they are the ones that receive guidance.

It all reminds me of shaykh hamza's state-managent system in life (SMSL)... haha i just made up that name, but here's how it goes. You can be in only 4 states, they can be reduced to 2, then 1, or expanded to n (branches within the 4 states), but its optimally meaningful for the purposes of this blog to keep it at 4:

Tribulation - what is required of you is to be patient. The best patience is Sabr-jameel, where you just say it's from Allah, reflect on ur sins and struggle ("jihad") harder to remove them, and not complain at all. A lesser sabr is to complain, but not complain about Allah, just say "it hurts, but it's from Allah so i'm ok".
Blessing - This is also a test. Gratitude to Allah is what is required of you. You pass it by using the blessing in any permissible manner. It's best if you use it for good though. So, if you got an extra $10, by spending it on like halaal food you would pass the test in this state. Spending it on, maybe feeding a poor orphan, you'd pass it with flying colors. Both of these would show that you are "thankful". And in order to fail, you would spend it on something like alcohol. Simple examples, but they work. (Muneeba: "why does it always gotta be about food?!?!?!" haha)
Obedience - This is ALSO a test. To pass you must not be arrogant, and realize that the obedience itself is a blessing from Allah. If you take credit for your obedience, you are arrogant, and thus fail.
Disobedience - What is required of you in this state is to make tawbah. Which is done in these steps: 1. Immediately stop your sins. 2. Promise to never repeat the sin. 3. Express remorse for having committed the sin. 4. If the sin has to do with oppressing the right of another human, you have to restore the right -- so if you stole $10 from X, give the $10 back to X.

Alrighty, that's enough writing.

Aneesa: don't tell mummy/daddy, i'll take traffic skoo and it'll get erased off my record for insurance purposes. I'll also not ever speed again, and stop fully on stop signs.

jews against zionism

2006-08-13T14:28:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RjnvQHWyLE

hey israel, Rabbi Yisroel Weiss and I have got an idea, get out of palestine!

Masjids, I see Masjids!

2006-08-13T07:13:00.000-07:00

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/masjid/show/

If you are not a muslim and love CNN and Fox News, de-program yourself by watching these images for a few hours.

Muslims are happy good family peaceful people, watch the slideshow in fast/1-second-mode and u'll see what i mean.

Masjid = a place where muslims pray as a community.

Masjid:Muslim::Church:Christian

George Galloway

2006-08-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

man this is beautiful:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=249JaIaubVw

Flash Player 9 for Linux

2006-08-07T19:23:00.000-07:00

I'm one of the two or three Quality Engineers working on Flash Player 9 for Linux

Mike Melanson is a Dev on it.
Emmy Huang is our Product Manager.

By mentioning this, maybe I could attract traffic to my blog (not that i care much for it).

I'm working on testing Red Hat 4 , but we'll be supporting more version(s), i dunno if i'm allowed to say which others.

here's some more words google can pick up, they mean absolutely nothing, they are only here to beef up my search engine hits:
GTK 1.2 GTK 2.0 GTK 2.10 make make clear libflashplayer.so mozilla firefox plug-in dot-release security release myspace.com youtube.com GCC C++ .cpp .h unix shell x86 SPARC Solaris FreeBSD Madrake ubuntu GNome PCLinuxOS Knoppix fedora OpenBSD SUSE Mandriva

again, those words mean nothing.

You know you want it, you linux nerd you, it's making ur mouth water isn't it, ISN'T IT!?!?!

MUHUHAHAHAHA

Auto-Login Registry Hack WinXP Home Edition

2006-08-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

If you have WinXP home edition, like i do (at home anyway), it's annoying cuz there's that wussy fruit-cake login screen. So when u turn on ur computer, it asks you to log in, then u get in and have to wait again.

it's better to just hit the power button, walk away, come back and it be ready to use.

so to counter this, open up this registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWAREMicrosoft\WindowsNTCurrentVersion\Winlogon

Create/Edit DefaultUserName and DefaultPassword to = ur login/pword.

Create/Edit AutoAdminLogin (String value), set the value to 1

and boom, simple as that.

I guess I could make an app that does that for you (like i did for the max download hack), but this is super easy, i'll let u figure it out.

(btw, the date on this post is wrong by 9 days, i wanted the George Gallaway post to be on top.)

latino muslims

2006-07-22T20:56:00.000-07:00

http://www.insidebayarea.com/localnews/ci_4061508

It's funny, in my childhood, i know that I was able to get along w/ my hispanic neighbors and families, then later i grew up and found out that it wasn't a coincidence. We had 800 years of history together in spain. It explains so much, many of their names are like "omar", "medina", they have similar vocab sometimes, and the thing taht stands out the most is that they are family oriented people like muslims.

May Allah guide them to the straight path.

Surah Ibrahim by Mishari Rashid al efasi

2006-06-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

http://quran.islamway.com/mishary1424/014.mp3

His recitation of Surah Ibrahim, is AMAZING, mashAllah, it's a masterpiece.

... of course he has other surahs that he's the top recitor as far as i've heard (and i haven't heard THAT many).... including Surahs: 2 Baqarah, 3 Imran, 4 Nisa, 5 Maidah, 31 Luqman, 18 Kahf

But I think I like Khalid Qahtani's recitation of surah kahf better... tough call.

What a book, subHanAllah, what a book. inshAllah one day people in the US will discover it's beauty in the masses.

dude... i miss mufti mudassir, his classes were sooo awesome, he went to india, will be back in 3 more weeks i think inshAllah. What a brain, mashAllah. My mom's darsin' hard on his lectures now www.bayaans.org (its all in urdu though)

That's the stinky part about summer, there's so much going, ulema are traveling everywhere, and there's basically a darsin' "summer vacation"

Shaykh Nuh Ha Meem Keller on the Niqaab

2006-05-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

http://www.suhba.org/

click on lessons

or you could listen here:

mashAllah what a scholar.

"10. And those Foremost (in Faith) will be Foremost (in the Hereafter).
11. These will be those Nearest to Allah. " surah waqi'a ayah 10 http://www.islamicity.com/mosque/quran/56.htm

At the "sacred retreat: invocations of the heart" deen intensive in 2005, shaykh hamza said (if i remember correctly) that you could basically break believers into two categories, people aiming for:

1. "the path of salvation" so basically trying to get into jannah, basic membership
2. "the path of sanctification" , people like the 'arifeen, wilayah khaasa (as opposed to wilayah aamah), and he said that those verses above refer to them. The people who are totally focused on pleasing Allah, so when they do actions they do it more for the love of Allah, that's the intention they make. It's a very high state, in fact if people don't understand it, they often attack it (and get labelled "salafis" haha).

mashAllah shaykh nuh is a G.

fridays

2006-04-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

alhamdulillah, fridays have so much barakah. Alhamdulillah.

This brother's a super-me

2006-04-14T17:58:00.000-07:00

mashAllah

Mufti Mudassir said that Hazrat ibn Abaas (ra) said that...

2006-04-13T13:08:00.000-07:00

Mufti Mudassir said that Hazrat ibn Abaas (ra) SWEARS that...

"'lahwal hadith' means to play music!!!"

'lahwal hadith' is mentioned is surah luqman, ayah 5 i think.... also in other places I think.

Mufti Mudassir says that he can't believe how muslims consider it permissible to listen to music now!! even the person who prays says it's permissible!?!?!

Mufti Mudassir says that the evidence they give for it is OUTRAGEOUS!! They say that when the Prophet (pbuh) entered medinah young girls sang a nasheed. He says, HOW CAN THEY USE THIS AS QIYAAS (analogical proof in islamic law)?!?!? Those girls were singing such beautiful words welcoming the propehet!! And you are going to compare them with the "loose women" that are singers today?!?!!?

How Mufti Mudassir and in the urdu lang you refer to the Prophet

2006-04-13T13:00:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how Mufti Mudassir (and I'm pretty sure I've heard it by others in urdu) often refer to the Prophet pbuh as "aap".

"aap" is a second person respectful "you". So "thou". So like he'll be talking to us, and then he'll use a second person "you" referring to the prophet pbuh.

I can't explain why it's so amazing, it just is.

It's like as if the narrator of the hadith entered into the presense of the prophet pbuh.

mashAllah, Mufti Mudassir is the gem of fremont, i'm going to so-cal this weekend, but iA next weekend i'll get to see him on sunday.

Mufti Mudassir's quote HAHAHAHA

2006-04-13T12:56:00.000-07:00

"bas woh kharay ho kar pishaab kar ne vala hamara naam lay le, to bas!"

HAHAAHAHAHAAHHAHAHAH

I saw the CEO, Bruce in our office a couple weeks ago, next time i'll remember this. HAHAHAAH

Allah says in the Quran,
"fadh kuruni adh kur kum"
"remember me and I will remember you"

Mufti mudassir on the Eyes

2006-04-13T12:47:00.000-07:00

Allah says in the Quran, "Qul lil mu'mineena ya ghudu min absaarihim" , "(O Prophet) tell the believers to lower their gazes" (and "check out" guys and girls u may see walking around on the street).

Mufti Mudassir said notice that this injunction isn't "Oh you who believe lower your gazes!" rather Allah tells the prophet to tell the believers to do so. He says it is just like if a father sees his son "checkin out" girls or something like that, he will be shy to approach his son directly, instead he will tell his friend, "please talk some sense into my son not to do this"... in the same way Allah tells his friend, the prophet pbuh, to tell us to lower our gazes.

Allahumah sallih 'ala sayyidina muhammad!!

MM says, these are the eyes we will use to see Allah!! (and I would interpret that as "we will be using this same sense to see Allah, since iA we'll get more enhanced eyes in the hereafter iA, whatever those "eyes" may exactly be).

The importance of prayer (salaat, not dua (supplication))

2006-04-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

I'll try to translate to the best of my ability, all (as far as I know) of mufti mudassir's lectures are in urdu:

Mufti Mudassir (abbrev heretofore as "MM")
Prayer is the primary means (urdu: "zarya") to get to a state of ihsan (def by the prophet pbuh: "to worship Allah as if you see Him, and if you cannot get to this level, then at least know that He sees you."). MM says about this, notice the primary objective is "to worship Allah as if you see Him" a 'plan b' be the rest, and he says notice that there is NO third option.

MM said huge awliya (common def: major scholars, primary expertise in tasawwuf) used to say "what's the point of Jannah if there's no prayer ('salat', 'namaz') in it"

MM said that a major wali (singular of "awliya") said "jannah won't have salaat??? awww"

MM said that hazrat haqi indaaz-ullah muhajir said, "if on the day of judgement Allah asks me 'what would you like', i would say 'Oh Allah, give me permission to pray".

And it's very interesting, because the greatest reward we will get in jannah inshAllah will be to see Allah, MM said that the Prophet pbuh said that we will get to see Allah the way people see the moon, MM explained that people will get to see Allah altogether and not have to fight over "get out of the way! let me see!".... and the interesting thing is that prayer, the primary means for us to reach a state of iHsan, a state where it is AS IF we see Allah, is a microcosm for when we ACTUALLY see Allah, which is the climax. subHanAllah!

subHanAllah! shaykh hamza said that a salaf (i think) said that if the corrupt rich people had ANY idea about what a pleasure islamic knowledge is, then they would literally fight us for it.

shaykh hamza said that imam ghazzali (ra) said that the highest amount of pleasure our physical bodies could feel in the world is in having relations with our spouse. And that in the Quran where Allah talks about "hoor ul ayn", we will get hoor ul ayn inshAllah, but it also is like super-duper spousal-relations. Like a physical pleasure far beyond what we can experience in this world.

... So "seeing" Allah is just like that except instead of our bodies experiencing this "rush" it is our souls.

pretty amazing eh?

my recent mass email, mufti mudassir's lecture on "namaz key ehmiat"

2006-04-12T09:52:00.000-07:00

Assalamu Alaikum,

This is an AMAZING lecture, straight up mujaddidi. OMG, what a scholar.

put it on ur MP3 player and listen to it while walking around/etc.... AMAZING...

Give it 5 mins before saying... "drrrr... nvm, i'll listen to it later (ie never)"

http://www.bayaans.org/miscfiles/namazkeyehmiat.mp3

which I got from:
http://www.bayaans.org/misc.html

which I got from:
http://www.bayaans.org/

..... i'll be posting notes later iA

Mufti Mudassir from Fremont, CA

2006-04-06T10:19:00.000-07:00

OMG!!! mashAllah!!! what a scholar!! I'm listening to the tafsir of surah baqarah right now, and it's just amazing. The thing is that the whole tafsir is in urdu so there is some difficulty in understanding it, but his urdu is fairly understandable (for an ABCD like me), especially since a lot of the hardcore-urdu words he uses are from Quranic Arabic, of which's vocab i'm somewhat familiar with.

There's HOURS of lectures on that website ( http://www.bayaans.org ), I think it has all of juzz amma, surah baqarah, imran, maidah and he's almost done with surah nisa. It gets updated regularly week-by-week, or so it seems. I could catch his tafsir live, i think thursday night. They even post shaykh yusuf islahi (AMAAAZING scholar), mufti saeed.

He's got seerah, commentary on aqeedah tahawiyya, AND commentary on the mishkaat collection of hadith.

I've listened to like 5 hours of his lecturing (all commentary on surah baqarah so far), and it's just amazing mashAllah. I HIGHLY HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAND it appeals to my memon-ness cuz it's free. MashAllah, what a gem, i've gotta meet him in person one of these days, the masjid where he gives tafsir (islamic center of fremont) is only 35 miles away.

the cartoons

2006-03-24T20:35:00.000-08:00

This is an amazing lecture:

http://64.246.204.2/~zaytuna/podcast/audio/4.mp3

(if that doesn't work then go here: http://www.zaytuna.org/multimedia.asp -> "Challenges of Co-Existence (Danish Cartoon Controversy)"

which is consistent with this article (not that i'm surprised)

http://www.zaytuna.org/articleDetails.asp?articleID=92

shaykh hamza is a G

I read this a while ago and wanted to blog it...

2006-03-24T20:13:00.000-08:00

From Imam Zaid's translation of the heirs of the prophets:

Al-Shafi'i (ra) said:
Whoever recites the Quran, his value is amplified. Whoever records hadith, his proof is strengthened. Whoever learns jurisprudence, his status is ennobled. Whoever learns Arabic, his disposition becomes gentle. Whoever learns mathematics, his opinion will be copious. And whoever fails to defend his honor will not benefit from his knowledge.

... that's hardcore awesome.

Finally settled in emeryville -- more or less

2006-02-02T10:19:00.000-08:00

So ya, i'm in emeryville now, bay area, ca.... and its funny cuz at the MSU ( www.msu-uci.com ) graduation party I got "most likeley to move up north for zaytuna" haha..... speaking of which my wife and I are taking the marriage class at zaytuna:

http://www.zaytuna.org/classSchedule.asp

And I got a PDA, Palm TX, got it for $250 off of craigslist.com , i put a bunch of islamic pdf's on there and that's what i read on the way home in the shuttle, BART train, and sometimes another shuttle.... in the morning i use the PDA as a mp3 player to listen to Quran (and soon lectures too). U gotta love technology.

my job at adobe is bueno, i'm on the flash player team. good stuff. I can't wait till we release the mobile flash palyer, i'll pop that bad boy onto my Palm.

I've got notes and stuff from all of the above islaming i've been doing, i'll inshAllah post it up soon enough.

The closest masjid to home was the one in richmond(indo pak scholarship, the imam is from south africa -- i've soooo gotta hit up some classes, but the one i wanted to go to conflicts w/ the zaytuna one schedule-wise, but inshAllah in due time):
Islamic Society of West Contra Cost County/Masjid Al-Rahman1110-36th Street,Richmond, CA 94804, USA

But now muneeba and I have discoverd "oakland islamic center", a taxi driver told me the imam there is palestinian (u gotta love that palestinian "eman rush"):
Oakland Islamic Center515 31st St,Oakland, CA 94609, USA

see y'all at MSA West inshAllah in sacramento -- http://msa-west.net/

My "Profile" or blog will be continued here. Before it was here.

2006-01-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

My "Profile" or blog will be continued here from now on. Before it was located here:
http://members.cox.net/amirprofile