Keep Yourself Busy!

You know, all the lectures and books that I read that talk about how to get closer to Allah all have the same advise [more or else] : make a schedule and get organized. We really need to get organized and have a schedule, otherwise we waste so much time. Ever since I was little my dad would always yell at me and my siblings to get organized, don’t waste time and make sure that we have a schedule. So the summer is in [well it's been in for a while, actually sadly classes are like a month away :/ ],  I’m not taking any summer classes and the economy is terrible so I haven’t been able to find another job. So Monday-Thursday I teach at the Qur’an classes that I usually teach at, and then after that I’m free. It’s pretty awesome having free time, I haven’t really been doing much besides getting my lesson plans ready, staying outside, chilling with my youngest brother and reading mad history books. So it’s been good hamdulillah. I try to keep myself busy all the time. I’ve realized that the busier I am, the better I am, does that make sense? I’m more organized, productive… when I’m busy. I get to go to the library/Borders/Barnes and Noble and I juss stay there reading books and getting work done. I love the library, I think my library card is the most abused card in my wallet- well technically it’s not even a card anymore and not in my wallet, it’s this little tiny plastic thing  attached to my car keys so I don’t even have to carry my wallet anymore Books can be so expensive, and whenever I go into Borders/Barnes and Nobles I always see something that I want but can’t afford. So I go to the library and then check if my library has it, or my county or the next county over or I tell the librarian that I want the book and then the library buys it and then I can check it out, hamdulillah It’s quite simple and helps my list of “books to read” move along. But don’t get me wrong, I think books are the best of investments, I juss can’t afford any investments right now.  I recently started studying for the GRE’s and since I’m pretty broke I juss spend time either at the library or the bookstores and then I use the books there. I read the books, take as much notes as I can take the practice tests and answer it on a separate sheet of paper. It’s a pretty sweet deal, I get to use the books for free, so du’as that this stuff actually sticks in my head and inshaAllah I will get a good grade!

So where is all this rambling going? I guess the point of this post is that if your someone who isn’t so good at planning or sticking to schedules try it out- I know it’s hard, I can make plans but sometimes it’s hard to stick to them. Sometimes I juss sit and try to think of a plan and it takes so long that I end up wasting more time!  A good example is say that you decide that from now on you’re going to start working out or running, you keep on saying it and keep on saying it and then one day you actually do it! [ta-da!]  Once you do it you have to keep on forcing yourself to do it, thinking of some kind of motivation to get you to go again, and again… sure in the beginning it seems hard-your muscles start to cramp, the next morning you can’t move, you feel like you’re gunna get stuck in each position of Salah, you feel tired… it’s all new to you so it takes a while to get used to it. But then after a while it becomes second nature and you begin to start a habit to continuously do it without having to drag your feet. Your body will become accustomed to the habit. So once you think of a schedule play around with it, see what works for you, what motivates you to keep on going etc… and don’t start off with an absurdly ridiculously hard schedule that’s impossible to stick to, because then your juss setting yourself up for failure. Get a simple one, then tweak it a little, then add more, tweak it some more and remember that there is always room for improvement, and that we all have “off” days, don’t be too rough on yourself, and not too loose either. I mean when I’m at Borders/Barnes and Nobles it’s so hard for me to force myself to sit down and study because there are so many other books around me that I would rather juss sit down and read. Distractions are all over the place, I live in a small town so the chances of me running into someone I know are high, or there will be someone talking loudly, someone playing their head phones obnoxiously loud or [my worse habit] I tend to sit by the windows in the cafe because I’m weird and like to look out the window, but then I tend to start looking at the cars, and then I’ll hear a car and look to see what car it is and….yes… I know,… I am really, really, really weird, my mother still doesn’t understand whats wrong with me, khayr inshaAllah.  But anyway, you juss have to learn to fight yourself, your nafs, as Shaykh Khalid said, your nafs is like a baby, it juss whines and wants to play and have fun all the time, but we can’t always play can we? You may say yes, but you know you can’t, everything has to be done in moderate proportions. The GRE review book I was reading today said “someone famous once said, ‘know thine enemy’…” at first I thought it was funny that it actually said “someone famous once said” [I am easily amused] but  I got over that and the book went on to say how we need to learn the math material for the exam. So figure out what works for you and what works against you. For me, the summer is always a time for reflecting on what kind of person I was throughout the year [school year]. Have I changed? [for better/worse?] Should I change? Am I happy with who I have become? Do I need to become a better person? How am I deen-wise? Did I try to become better? Did I learn anything new? How can I help others? etc… Hamdulilalh I think this summer was the most reflective one for me and I have made some changes, inshaAllah for the better and inshaAllah I will get closer to Allah. If you’re thinking of doing something like this too, I have one guideline: be very critical of yourself. It can be a bit hard but the only way you can get better is to be super critical, examine each flaw and see if it’s juss a flaw that isn’t doing anything to you, or a flaw that can lead you astray or lead you to trouble. Someone once said, “To be humble is to accept the truth and submit to it even if you heard it from a child or someone who is uneducated or ignorant.” It’s easier said than done, so test yourself out and strive for the best.

Make sure to get outside and enjoy the beautiful weather, play with a younger sibling(s), or niece or nephew, or grab some friends and act like little kids because you’re never too old to act like a little kid :] Go climb a tree, I love climbing trees!

Khayr, that’s all for now, take care inshaAllah and get organized, have fun but not too much, be productive but leave some room for fun. Confusing? Yeah, I really am confusing, I confuse myself all the time and often times everyone else around me as well, khayr, it happens.

Take care inshaAllah, and keep everyone in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Questions About Islam

Take care inshaAllah, and keep everyone in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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“Martyr of the Head Scarf”

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji-oon, may Allah help out the family of the victim through these hard times inshaAllah. Please read this article and try to play the ‘What-if” game in your head [read the article and you'll understand.]

Egyptians cry racism in woman’s slaying in Germany

By MAGGIE MICHAEL – 2 days ago

CAIRO (AP) — Thousands of Egyptian mourners marched behind the coffin of the “martyr of the head scarf” on Monday — a pregnant Muslim woman who was stabbed to death in a German courtroom as her young son watched.

Many in her homeland were outraged by the attack and saw the low key response in Germany as an example of racism and anti-Muslim sentiment.

Her husband was critically wounded in the attack Wednesday in Dresden when he tried to intervene and was stabbed by the attacker and accidentally shot by court security.

“There is no god but God and the Germans are the enemies of God,” chanted the mourners for 32-year-old Marwa al-Sherbini in her hometown of Alexandria, where her body was buried after being flown back from Germany.

“We will avenge her killing,” her brother Tarek el-Sherbini told The Associated Press by telephone from the mosque where prayers were being recited in front of his sister’s coffin. “In the West, they don’t recognize us. There is racism.”

Al-Sherbini, who was about four months pregnant and wore the Islamic head scarf, was involved in a court case against her neighbor for calling her a terrorist and was set to testify against him when he stabbed her 18 times inside the courtroom in front of her 3-year-old son.

Her husband, who was in Germany on a research fellowship, came to her aid and was also stabbed by the neighbor and shot in the leg by a security guard who initially mistook him for the attacker, German prosecutors said. He is now in critical condition in a German hospital, according to al-Sherbini’s brother.

“The guards thought that as long as he wasn’t blond, he must be the attacker so they shot him,” al-Sherbini told an Egyptian television station.

The man, who has only been identified as 28-year-old Alex W., remains in detention and prosecutors have opened an investigation on suspicion of murder.

Christian Avenarius, the prosecutor in Dresden where the incident took place, described the killer as driven by a deep hatred of Muslims. “It was very clearly a xenophobic attack of a fanatical lone wolf.”

He added that the attacker was a Russian of German descent who had immigrated to Germany in 2003 and had expressed his contempt for Muslims at the start of the trial.

At its regular news conference on Monday, a German government spokesman Thomas Steg said if the attack was racist, the government “naturally condemns this in the strongest terms.”

The killing has dominated Egyptian media for days, while it has received comparatively little coverage in German and Western media.

A German Muslim group criticized government officials and the media for not paying enough attention to the crime.

“The incident in Dresden had anti-Islamic motives. So far, the reactions from politicians and media have been incomprehensibly meager,” Aiman Mazyek, the general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims, told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel daily.

Egyptian commentators said the incident was an example of how hate crimes against Muslims are overlooked in comparison to those committed by Muslims against Westerners. Many commentators pointed to the uproar that followed the 2004 murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Islamic fundamentalist angry over one of his films criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.

Abdel Azeem Hamad, chief editor of the independent Egyptian daily el-Shorouk, said that if the victim had been a Jew, there would have been an uproar.

“What we demand is just some attention to be given to the killing of a young innocent mother on the hands of fanatic extremist,” he wrote in his column.

An Egyptian blogger Hicham Maged, wrote “let us play the ‘What If’ game.”

“Just imagine if the situation was reversed and the victim was a Westerner who was stabbed anywhere in the world or — God forbid — in any Middle Eastern country by Muslim extremists,” he said.

The Egyptian Pharmacists’ Association called for a boycott of German drugs. The victim was a pharmacist.

According to numerous interviews in Egyptian local papers with el-Sherbini family, the man who stabbed al-Sherbini used to accuse her of being a “terrorist,” and in one incident, he tried to take off her head scarf. Mourners at her funeral called her the “martyr of the head scarf.”

Laila Shams, al-Sherbini’s mother, told the el-Wafd daily that her daughter said she’d difficulty finding a job in Germany because of her head scarf.

“One (employer) suggested she remove her head scarf to get a job. She said no,” she said.

Officials from a German Muslim group and the country’s main Jewish group made a joint visit Monday to the Dresden hospital where the victim’s husband is being treated.

“You don’t have to be a Muslim to act against anti-Muslim behavior, and you don’t have to be a Jew to act against anti-Semitism,” said Stephan Kramer, the general secretary of the Central Council of Jews.

Source: The Associated Press

Take care inshaAllah, and keep everyone in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Invincible

INVINCIBLE
By: C.A. Webb

When you’re young it’s easy to feel you’re invincible…
Nothing can do you harm or cause alarm to the world you’ve created in your mind, and everything seems perfect.
You say that tragedies can happen to so and so, but to you? No, nothing can get close enough to burst the bubble you’ve come to know as your life.
In your mind accidents, cancer, and STDs are sad calamities that befall those not as fortunate as yourself because for some reason they’re not as special as you.

And that’s sad.

Daily you throw caution to the wind,
Not realizing that any day could be the day your good fortune ends.
You silly rabbit. Don’t you know that the tricks your mind play are only your way of trying to escape what you know to be a possibility?
It could easily be you that a disease is eating its way through, until it claims your body, mind and soul.
As hard as you try to deny, it could be you who loses an arm, leg, or eye to an unforeseen occurrence that could forever change your life.

And then what?

Will you give up, letting your spirit die, not even giving yourself time to try to live with your new lot in life?
Or will you finally realize that the rose-colored eyes you were looking through before were showing you the lies you wanted so much to believe?
You see, as hard as it might be to accept, we all came here the same way, and though we may have seemed t live better or worse than someone else— at the end of the day, we are all one and the same.
So instead of us living just for what me, myself, and I can enjoy today, let us pray that before it’s too late we find out how we can count our days to make this a better place for all of us.

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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467,000 Jobs Lost in June

I didn’t lose my job, I juss felt that my ob wasn’t doing anything for me, I mean it gave me money but I felt like it was making me a worse person slowly-retail is juss not for me. As I continue job hunting, such headlines don’t really help:

U.S. Job Losses Rise in June as Unemployment Reaches 9.5%

By PETER S. GOODMAN and JACK HEALY

Published: July 2, 2009

The American economy lost 467,000 jobs in June and the unemployment rate edged up to 9.5 percent in a sobering indication that the most painful downturn since the Great Depression has yet to release its hold.

“The numbers are indicative of a continued, very severe recession,” said Stuart G. Hoffman, chief economist at PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh. “There’s nothing in here to show that the economy and the market are pulling out of the grip of recession.”

The latest monthly snapshot of the nation’s job situation, released on Thursday by the Labor Department, reinforced a consensus that high levels of unemployment were likely to remain for many months and perhaps years. That will almost surely increase the difficulties of finding work for millions of jobless people while limiting wages and working hours for those employed.

After a May report that showed the pace of deterioration was moderating — with a revised figure of 322,000 net jobs lost for the month — some economists expressed hopes that an economic recovery might finally be emerging. But the June report tempered such visions with the monotony of continued decline.

For another month, manufacturing jobs disappeared, dipping by 136,000, while construction jobs shrank by 79,000 and retail by 21,000. Health care remained a rare bright spot, adding 21,000 jobs.

The losses for June brought the tally of jobs shed since the beginning of the recession to 6.5 million — a figure equivalent to the net job gains over the previous nine years.

“This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle,” Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute in Washington, said in a research note. She called this fact “a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000 to 2007.”

The figures for June did show signs that the pace of job losses is continuing to slow. From November to March — after the collapse of several prominent financial institutions — the labor market lost an average of 670,000 jobs each month. From April to June, the decline slowed to 436,000 a month.

The Obama administration seized on those numbers to argue that its $787 billion spending program aimed at stimulating the economy was gradually working.

“We’re seeing a kind of leveling off here,” Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. “We would have done much worse had we not put the recovery plan in place.”

Early this year, the administration projected that the unemployment rate would peak near 8 percent with the stimulus in place. With joblessness already well above that target, some economists are arguing for another dose of government spending — a call Ms. Solis dismissed as premature. Much of the spending is still in the pipeline and trickling out slowly into the economy, particularly in construction projects that require government permits and planning, she said.

In offering the slow pace of stimulus spending as a partial explanation for higher unemployment, Ms. Solis effectively echoed the criticism that some leveled at the spending package when it was devised: that many of the projects would take too long to have their intended effect.

But Ms. Solis expressed assurances that the program was proceeding according to the administration’s plans.

“We’re making progress,” she said.

Some economists contend that a recovery is indeed in its early stages, cautioning that the job market tends to lag behind progress in other areas.

Michael T. Darda, chief economist at the research and trading firm MKM Partners, pointed to a recent rally in the corporate bond market as a sign that normalcy was returning to the financial system, asserting that this presaged the resumption of economic growth in the second half of this year and vigorous activity next year.

“The labor market is going to lag the recovery process to a certain degree,” he said.

But other experts noted that employment was a more crucial source of spending power than in downturns past, given how many alternate sources of cash had been lost.

Consumer spending amounts to 70 percent of overall American economic activity. In recent times, Americans have found myriad ways to fuel spending even as incomes for many households have stagnated, borrowing against the once-rising value of homes and tapping credit cards.

Now, millions of households owe more to the mortgage lender than their house is worth. Millions more have exhausted their credit. The paycheck has returned as the primary source of spending. Yet, as the June jobs report reinforced, paychecks are eroding even for those who have jobs.

The average workweek for rank-and-file employees in the private sector — roughly 80 percent of the work force — slipped by a fraction, to 33 hours, the lowest level since the government began tracking such data in 1964.

Average hourly earnings for such workers have increased by 2.7 percent over the last year, to $18.53. But weekly earnings have risen less than 1 percent, reflecting how millions of people have lost working hours.

The so-called underemployment rate — which captures not only the jobless but also those working part time because their hours have been cut or they cannot find a full-time job — increased to 16.5 percent.

Some economists contend that as long as such numbers prevail, millions of Americans will continue to hunker down, withholding their dollars from car lots, shopping malls and other places of business, thus constraining hiring at auto plants and retail shops and elsewhere.

“It looks really bad,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. “People can’t spend when they don’t have the money.”

For another month, the average length of official unemployment continued to increase, this time to 24.5 weeks — the highest level since the government began tracking such data in 1948. The Labor Department did report separately that the number of newly laid-off workers filing for unemployment insurance dropped last week. Initial jobless benefit claims fell by 16,000, to a seasonally adjusted 614,000.

While layoffs have slowed in recent months, hiring has yet to pick up, meaning that jobless people face a more agonizing search than ever — a human toll not captured by the data.

In the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, Jeffrey Jones, 40, has found nothing since losing his job as a cook at a senior center in October. He worries about paying rent and caring for his four children. His blood pressure is up, and some nights he stays up and watches television to distract himself from the worries that keep him from sleeping.

“I know I’m not supposed to be letting it stress me out,” he said. “The way I’m going now, I won’t be able to make it too much longer. I can’t go this long without doing something for my family.”

Source: The New York Times

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

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Let’s Get off for Muslim Holidays!

All this aside, I still don’t endorse Bloomberg-not a fan of him, but still read the article: [Also click the links in the article they lead you to other interesting articles as well.]

Razvi, a Msulim Who Endorsed Bloomberg, Wants Islamic Holidays in Public School

By Azi Paybarah

Moe Razvi, a Muslim who endorsed Michael Bloomberg, said incorporating two Muslim holidays into the public school calendar is “imperative to the Muslim community.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg signaled his opposition to the plan, which the City Council overwhelmingly voted to support.

“Every time I have to tell them, ‘It’s a holiday but you have to go to schools’; it’s heartbreaking to go through that,” Razvi, who runs a Brooklyn nonprofit, said in an interview this morning. He said getting the holidays recognized by the school system is “imperative to the Muslim community.”

Razvi declined to comment specifically about Bloomberg, since control of the school system is in flux at the moment. Razvi did say Bloomberg “has been a very good friend” to the immigrant community in supporting their other legislative initiatives.

When asked if there was any symbolic value in having the holidays incorporated into the school calendar, Razvi said, “Big time, man. Come on, kids, they need that acceptance feeling. We’re not the quote-unquote outsiders.”

Source: PolitickerNY.com

Take care inshaAllah, and keep every single person in the world in your du’as.

-radf

Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.

Confused? Didn’t understand something? Click here!