Ever since I was little I’ve always loved cars. I would always play with my brother’s toy cars and when we would go out my brothers and I would play this game where we would pick which cars we would like to have. So since I was little I couldn’t wait to get my license, when I got my license last year I was so happy! I love driving, I think that its so relaxing. Ever since spring semester ended I haven’t really driven anywhere until last week when I drove my brother to his majlis, it was so long since I went driving and I felt like I forgot how to drive. Anyway so yesterday I was driving to my friend’s house and I realized that I do the most amount of dhikr while I drive. I mean when I get in the car I say the du’a for traveling and then I usually continuously say that for quite some time. Then afterwards I switch to some kind of dhikr either SubhanAllah, Al-hamdulillah, Allah hu Akbar, Astaghfurullah or sometimes I juss continuously say a Salawat. I also normally have nasheeds playing in my car-which is usually Talib al Habib or some kind of Burdah or Mawlid, and usually that juss makes me ponder about everything- life, the beauty of so many things around us, how we need to be more grateful etc… Sometimes when I have a bad day, when I drive back home and listen to the nasheeds and make dhikr its like its all juss cleansing out all the anger in me and I end up feeling so much better.

Yesterday I came up with a theory for why I make dhikr so much more when I’m driving than anywhere else. I usually take the high way and when you’re on the high way and you look ahead SubhanAllah all you can do is continuously say SubhanAllah and praise the beauty of this world. You see the beautiful sky with the perfect shade of blue, SubhanAllah. You see the clouds, the big white puffy clouds that come in these unique shapes, SubhanAllah. You try to look at the sun but you have to squint and then look away because of how bright it is and then think, imagine how much more noor the creator of this sun has, SubhanAllah! And then the trees, ah the trees. It sounds quite silly but I think trees are juss so cool. The branches grow and grow and they make their own shapes. The green leaves, so many green leaves and no one knows how many exact leaves there are on that tree except for our rub, the creator-SubhanAllah! And this is juss during the day time, the night time has its own special effect especially when you look at the moon. Sometimes I feel like I can stare at the moon for ever. And lets not forget sunrises and sun sets, SubhanAllah. When you see how amazing they are, all the beautiful colors in such special shades and the arrangement of the colors in the sky, so beautiful that I don’t even think that the best of artist or best camera can replicate it!

Everything around you juss puts you in awe, what a beautiful world our rub has created for us. And then you look around you and see all these other cars and how busy these people are. How they have become so pre-occupied by this world. People yelling at each other, cursing at each other, putting up some hand gestures that don’t exactly mean ‘hi’. Guys shaving, ladies putting on makeup, people talking on the phone, text messaging, dancing, talking to themselves and the list goes on and on. I wrote before about how we need to learn how to slow down, and we really do need to slow down. Technology is really taking so much away from us. I realized today that we’ve learned to interact with each other through the internet and through text messaging but we can’t talk to each other face to face. We need to get up walk around or juss sit outside with no phone, no i-pod, no nothing except for maybe a book and juss sit down and appreciate the little things in life that often aren’t noticed.

Khayr we all have areas that need improvement. But hey no one’s perfect, we all make mistakes, we’re all juss humans. Once we truly learn from our mistakes then we can move on, put our mistakes in the past and replace our bad habits with a good ones, inshaAllah.

Well making dhikr in a car, when you’re driving may not be the best place for dhikr but go out and see what works for you. Though I do not advise driving and staring at the trees and smiling at the clouds-actually I  really don’t advise this, that juss might make you look a little crazy or get you hurt or something. But I do advise making as much dhikr as you can, the Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “Allah the Most High says, ‘I am with my slave when he thinks of Me and I am with him when he mentions Me. For if he mentions Me to himself, I mention him to Myself; and if he mentions me in a gathering, I mention him a superior gathering. If he approaches Me by a hands width, I approach him by an arms length; and if he approaches me by an arms length, I approach him by two arms’ length. And if he comes to Me walking, I hasten to him swiftly’ [Bukhari/Muslim].” I think that when you can sit down somewhere and see some of the amazing yet simple creations of Allah then you can make it a habit to go out there more often and increase your dhikr. Juss sitting outside like in your back yard or something is also nice but whatever the place or time may be, juss be sure to make dhikr. The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “He who remembers his Lord and he who does not remember his Lord, are like the living and the dead.” [Bukhari]

Take care inshaAllah.

-radf

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

‘Islamophobia’ center stage in Hartford

The Islamic Circle of North American and Muslim American Society’s 33rd Annual National Convention will be held from July 4-6 at the Connecticut Convention Center in Hartford. As many as 10,000 Muslims will gather and one of their goals is to fight what they call “Islamophobia.”

This is the fourth year that Hartford will host the event. The convention itself will be held here at the Connecticut Convention Center, but perhaps the most important event of the whole weekend is next door at the Marriott Hotel. It’s called “The Window to Islam,” an all day symposium open to anyone who wants to walk in a take part. Islamic scholars will be speaking and answering questions. The idea — break down the stereotypes and open up a dialogue.

Islamophobia has become part of the presidential campaign. Internet chatter continues to link Democratic hopeful Barack Obama to Islam, despite the fact that he has long been a member of the United Church of Christ, even addressing its convention in Hartford last June. Still, recent polls show 14% of those asked believe Obama is a Muslim. The way his campaign deals with that concerns Muslims.

More controversy was stirred up when Obama campaign staffers refused to allow two Muslim women in head scarves sit behind the candidate for a televised event presumably so they would not be seen on TV and connected to Obama.

Source: NECN

Watch the video here.

Take care inshaAllah and see you at ICNA!

-radf

Ponson, Yanks hit back in Round 2

Righty leads Bombers over Mets to split two-site doubleheader

By Samantha Newman / MLB.com

NEW YORK — The Yankees didn’t have much time to feel the sting of Friday afternoon’s loss to the Mets. A sense of embarrassment flowed through the clubhouse after their crosstown rivals delivered a 15-run performance in front of the Bomber’s home crowd.But the Yankees left that feeling behind, as they hopped on a bus shortly after their 15-6 loss at Yankee Stadium to head to Shea Stadium for the second half of the Subway Series doubleheader.

And the Yankees responded with an impressive pitching performance and a load of their own offensive firepower, rolling to a 9-0 shutout to bounce back from the afternoon defeat.

“You understand that every game is not going to go the way you want it to,” Yankees manager Joe Girardi said. “Sometimes you’re going to get beat bad, but you have to be able to respond. This game is over the long haul — it’s not one game or two games. You’ve got to be able to grind it out.”

The Yankees got back on track behind a new addition to the roster. Right-hander Sidney Ponson took the mound in the nightcap and blanked the Mets through six innings, giving up just five hits.

Ponson got into trouble early when he loaded the bases twice in the second and third innings. But Ponson maintained his composure to escape both jams. From that point on, he appeared more relaxed and comfortable, and Ponson retired the final six batters he faced.

“He threw a lot of strikes down in the zone with his sinker, and he got some big groundouts and a strikeout when he needed a strikeout,” Girardi said. “He gave us everything we needed today.”

Ponson earned a 4-1 record and a 3.88 ERA in nine starts for the Texas Rangers earlier this season, but he was designated for assignment on June 6 because of off-the-field incidents. The Yankees signed him to a Minor League contract on June 18 and tapped him for the Game 2 start against the Mets.

It was his first start since June 4, but Ponson said throwing 78 pitches at Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre helped him get some of the rust off.

The righty arrived at Yankee Stadium on Friday in time to see most of Game 1. And even though he was scheduled to start the second round of the doubleheader, Ponson chose to stay with his new teammates and ride the bus rather than come straight to Shea.

“What am I going to sit here by myself for?” Ponson responded when asked why he made the trip to the Bronx. “Over there, at least I can watch a game, have people to talk to, just get acquainted with everybody.”

While he was getting familiar with the team, Ponson saw starting pitchers from both clubs struggle and falter, but he said watching the Yankees fall may have helped him perform well in his own outing.

“I’ve been in that situation before,” he said. “You get your behind handed to you in the first game, and in the second, you come out in the second game, and I guess it helps you concentrate even a little bit better.”

And while Ponson’s performance held the Mets off the scoreboard, the Yankees showed off their own skills at the plate, connecting for 11 hits.

Second baseman Robinson Cano provided the spark when he drove in the first run in the fourth on a ground ball, and the offense rolled from there. Cano picked up three RBIs, and Bobby Abreu went 4-for-4 as part of the onslaught.

Derek Jeter added two more RBIs and a double in the sixth inning, extending his hitting streak to 15 games.

The Yankees provided more than enough run support for their starting pitcher, and while Girardi said no decision has been made regarding Ponson’s spot in the lineup for the long term, the righty may have earned a second start in the rotation.

If he were to make his next scheduled start, Ponson will see his former team when he throws against the Rangers.

But no matter whom he makes his next appearance against, Ponson’s start on Friday helped the Yankees draw even for the day after a rough start. The New York clubs traded wins and notched 15 total runs apiece to kick off the weekend.

Source: New York Yankees

Watch the recap here.

And again! Read about them here!

Well they tried,

Updated: Monday, June 30th.

Sometimes we juss move about too fast.

Take time out, relax, and enjoy the simple things in life.

Take some time out and do something like juss sitting outside and watching the clouds go by.

Or like going out at night time trying to catch fireflies (and then releasing them of course).

Or sitting on a swing and feeling the wind in your face.

Or my favorite juss sitting down in a quiet corner and reading a nice book.

Take care inshaAllah and try to slow down for a bit.

-radf

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

Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test.

By SARA RIMER

Published: June 23, 2008

A prominent education professor at Harvard has begun leading “reflection” seminars at three highly selective colleges, which he hopes will push undergraduates to think more deeply about the connection between their educations and aspirations.

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

Although others have expressed similar concerns in recent years, his views have gained support on the Harvard campus with students, faculty and even the new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, who made the topic the cornerstone of her address to seniors during commencement week. Dr. Faust noted that in the past year, whenever she has met with students, their first question has always been the same: “Why are so many of us going to Wall Street?”

On other campuses as well, officials are questioning with new vigor whether too many top students who might otherwise turn their talents to a broader array of fields are being lured by high-paying corporate jobs, and whether colleges should do more to encourage students to consider other careers, especially public service.

As Adam M. Guren, a new Harvard graduate who will be pursuing his doctorate in economics, put it, “A lot of students have been asking the question: ‘We came to Harvard as freshmen to change the world, and we’re leaving to become investment bankers — why is this?’ ”

In her speech, Dr. Faust highlighted the results of a spring survey by The Crimson, the student newspaper, which found that about 20 percent of this year’s graduates were heading into financial services and management consulting, down from about 22 percent last year.

She acknowledged the appeal of the jobs — the money, the promise of stimulating work, the security for students of knowing they will be working alongside their friends, a commitment of only two or three years. She urged the students to search for measures of personal success beyond financial security, despite “the all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut.”

In his commencement speech last month at Wesleyan University, Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voiced a similar theme when he sounded an impassioned call to public service, and warned that the pursuit of narrow self-interest — “the big house and the nice suits and the other things that our money culture says you should buy … betrays a poverty of ambition.”

Universities are so concerned about this issue that some — Amherst, Tufts, the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard, for example — have expanded public service fellowships and internships. “We’re in the business of graduating people who will make the world better in some way,” said Anthony Marx, Amherst’s president. “That’s what justifies the expense of the education.”

This year, Tufts announced that it would pay off college loans for graduates who chose public service jobs. And officials at Harvard, Penn, Amherst and a number of other colleges say one reason they have begun emphasizing grants instead of loans in financial aid is so students do not feel pressured by their debts to pursue lucrative careers.

In an interview this spring, Dr. Faust held up as a model Teach for America, the nonprofit program that has recruited large numbers of students at top colleges to teach in low-income schools for two years. With 9 percent of Harvard’s senior class applying to Teach for America this year, 37 students made the cut.

One of the seniors that Dr. Faust met with in the winter was Dhaval Chadha, who wanted her support for a “diversity in careers” forum he was organizing. Mr. Chadha, 21, who grew up in India, will spend the next year on a fellowship in Brazil, working with an antipoverty group in preparation for what he says will be his career in public service.

“I don’t think a lot of people at Harvard know what a hedge fund or a consulting firm is when they start,” he said. But then, he explained, juniors and seniors being recruited come back from expensive dinners out and “start throwing salaries around,” and students begin to understand that “there’s already a kind of prestige attached to working for those people.” “It’s like applying to college all over again,” he added. “ ‘I applied to 8 to 10 Ivy League colleges, and I got in here. I applied to these 40 companies, and I got into these ones.’ It’s exactly the thing that appeals to the Harvard competitive spirit.”

Evgenia Peeva, who will be working for McKinsey, said: “You have to be part of the competition. You have to prove to yourself and everyone else that you can do it.”

Bryan Barnhill, a Harvard senior from a public high school in Detroit, took a semester off and will graduate next year. “Some people say it’s a selfish thing to do,” he said, referring to the lucrative jobs. “They say you should be using your talent for something beneficial for your community. Terms like ‘corporate whore’ would be tossed around.”

Competition for corporate jobs is fierce. But applying, usually online through Harvard’s Office of Career Services, is easy.

“I don’t think I would have applied if it wasn’t almost an automatic option,” said Neil Sawhney, 21, a recent graduate who turned down a management consulting job for a paralegal job, and plans to go to law school. “It’s hard to overstate how much everyone is doing it.”

But for many Harvard seniors, corporate work represents security. “It’s scary not knowing what you’re going to do,” said Chen Xie, who is joining McKinsey. “A lot of people think, ‘Here’s a plan, let’s just do the safe thing.’ ”

When Akshay Ganju began at Harvard four years ago, he burned with ambition to be a doctor. “You get to help people all the time,” he said. But his junior year he took a summer internship with Bain & Company, and loved it. “It was like going to Harvard,” said Mr. Ganju, 21, a new graduate. “There were so many smart people there.”

Now he is about to join Bain for a full-time job. The generous salary, Mr. Ganju said, will make it possible to pay off his college loans.

He still may end up going to medical school, he said, or maybe business school.

“I don’t think the point of our education is to make us rich,” Mr. Ganju said. “We all feel we want to do something meaningful beyond just accumulating wealth.”

Source: The New York Times

Becoming Muslim

by: Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller

“I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands.”
The story of American former Catholic, Nuh Ha Mim Keller, who in the 25 years since his conversion has gone on to become one of the leading contemporary scholars of Islam.

Born in 1954 in the farm country of the northwestern United States, I was raised in a religious family as a Roman Catholic. The Church provided a spiritual world that was unquestionable in my childhood, if anything more real than the physical world around me, but as I grew older, and especially after I entered a Catholic university and read more, my relation to the religion became increasingly called into question, in belief and practice.

One reason was the frequent changes in Catholic liturgy and ritual that occurred in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1963, suggesting to laymen that the Church had no firm standards. To one another, the clergy spoke about flexibility and liturgical relevance, but to ordinary Catholics they seemed to be groping in the dark. God does not change, nor the needs of the human soul, and there was no new revelation from heaven. Yet we rang in the changes, week after week, year after year; adding, subtracting, changing the language from Latin to English, finally bringing in guitars and folk music. Priests explained and explained as laymen shook their heads. The search for relevance left large numbers convinced that there had not been much in the first place.

A second reason was a number of doctrinal difficulties, such as the doctrine of the Trinity, which no one in the history of the world, neither priest nor layman, had been able to explain in a convincing way, and which resolved itself, to the common mind at least, in a sort of godhead-by-committee, shared between God the Father, who ruled the world from heaven; His son Jesus Christ, who saved humanity on earth; and the Holy Ghost, who was pictured as a white dove and appeared to have a considerably minor role. I remember wanting to make special friends with just one of them so he could handle my business with the others, and to this end, would sometimes pray earnestly to this one and sometimes to that; but the other two were always stubbornly there. I finally decided that God the Father must be in charge of the other two, and this put the most formidable obstacle in the way of my Catholicism, the divinity of Christ. Moreover, reflection made it plain that the nature of man contradicted the nature of God in every particular, the limitary and finite on the one hand, the absolute and infinite on the other. That Jesus was God was something I cannot remember having ever really believed, in childhood or later.

Another point of incredulity was the trading of the Church in stocks and bonds in the hereafter which it called indulgences. Do such and such and so-and-so many years will be remitted from your sentence in purgatory. That had seemed so false to Martin Luther at the outset of the Reformation.

I also remember a desire for a sacred scripture, something on the order of a book that could furnish guidance. A Bible was given to me one Christmas, a handsome edition, but on attempting to read it, I found it so rambling and devoid of a coherent thread that it was difficult to think of a way to base one’s life upon it. Only later did I learn how Christians solve the difficulty in practice, Protestants by creating sectarian theologies, each emphasizing the texts of their sect and downplaying the rest; Catholics by downplaying it all, except the snippets mentioned in their liturgy. Something seemed lacking in a sacred book that could not be read as an integral whole.

Moreover, when I went to the university, I found that the authenticity of the book, especially the New Testament, had come into considerable doubt as a result of modern hermeneutical studies by Christians themselves. In a course on contemporary theology, I read the Norman Perrin translation of The Problem of the Historical Jesus by Joachim Jeremias, one of the principal New Testament scholars of this century. A textual critic who was a master of the original languages and had spent long years with the texts, he had finally agreed with the German theologian Rudolph Bultmann that, without a doubt, it is true to say that the dream of ever writing a biography of Jesus is over, meaning that the life of Christ as he actually lived it could not be reconstructed from the New Testament with any degree of confidence. If this were accepted from a friend of Christianity and one of its foremost textual experts, I reasoned, what was left for its enemies to say? And what then remained of the Bible except to acknowledge that it was a record of truths mixed with fictions, conjectures projected onto Christ by later followers, themselves at odds with each other as to who the master had been and what he had taught. And if theologians like Jeremias could reassure themselves that somewhere under the layers of later accretions to the New Testament there was something called the historical Jesus and his message, how could the ordinary person hope to find it, or know it, should it be found?

I studied philosophy at the university and it taught me to ask two things of whoever claimed to have the truth: What do you mean, and how do you know? When I asked these questions of my own religious tradition, I found no answers, and realized that Christianity had slipped from my hands. I then embarked on a search that is perhaps not unfamiliar to many young people in the West, a quest for meaning in a meaningless world.

I began where I had lost my previous belief, with the philosophers, yet wanting to believe, seeking not philosophy, but rather a philosophy. I read the essays of the great pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer, which taught about the phenomenon of the ages of life, and that money, fame, physical strength, and intelligence all passed from one with the passage of years, but only moral excellence remained. I took this lesson to heart and remembered it in after years. His essays also drew attention to the fact that a person was wont to repudiate in later years what he fervently espouses in the heat of youth.

With a prescient wish to find the Divine, I decided to imbue myself with the most cogent arguments of atheism that I could find, that perhaps I might find a way out of them later. So I read the Walter Kaufmann translations of the works of the immoralist Friedrich Nietzsche. The many-faceted genius dissected the moral judgments and beliefs of mankind with brilliant philological and psychological arguments that ended in accusing human language itself, and the language of nineteenth-century science in particular, of being so inherently determined and mediated by concepts inherited from the language of morality that in their present form they could never hope to uncover reality. Aside from their immunological value against total skepticism, Nietzsche’s works explained why the West was post-Christian, and accurately predicted the unprecedented savagery of the twentieth century, debunking the myth that science could function as a moral replacement for the now dead religion.

At a personal level, his tirades against Christianity, particularly in The Genealogy of Morals, gave me the benefit of distilling the beliefs of the monotheistic tradition into a small number of analyzable forms. He separated unessential concepts (such as the bizarre spectacle of an omnipotent deity’s suicide on the cross) from essential ones, which I now, though without believing in them, apprehended to be but three alone: that God existed; that He created man in the world and defined the conduct expected of him in it; and that He would judge man accordingly in the hereafter and send him to eternal reward or punishment.

It was during this time that I read an early translation of the Koran which I grudgingly admired, between agnostic reservations, for the purity with which it presented these fundamental concepts. Even if false, I thought, there could not be a more essential expression of religion. As a literary work, the translation, perhaps it was Sales, was uninspired and openly hostile to its subject matter, whereas I knew the Arabic original was widely acknowledged for its beauty and eloquence among the religious books of mankind. I felt a desire to learn Arabic to read the original.

On a vacation home from school, I was walking upon a dirt road between some fields of wheat, and it happened that the sun went down. By some inspiration, I realized that it was a time of worship, a time to bow and pray to the one God. But it was not something one could rely on oneself to provide the details of, but rather a passing fancy, or perhaps the beginning of an awareness that atheism was an inauthentic way of being.

I carried something of this disquiet with me when I transferred to the University of Chicago, where I studied the epistemology of ethical theory how moral judgments were reached reading and searching among the books of the philosophers for something to shed light on the question of meaninglessness, which was both a personal concern and one of the central philosophical problems of our age.

According to some, scientific observation could only yield description statements of the form X is Y, for example, The object is red, Its weight is two kilos, Its height is ten centimeters, and so on, in each of which the functional was a scientifically verifiable is, whereas in moral judgments the functional element was an ought, a description statement which no amount of scientific observation could measure or verify. It appeared that ought was logically meaningless, and with it all morality whatsoever, a position that reminded me of those described by Lucian in his advice that whoever sees a moral philosopher coming down the road should flee from him as from a mad dog. For such a person, expediency ruled, and nothing checked his behavior but convention.

As Chicago was a more expensive school, and I had to raise tuition money, I found summer work on the West Coast with a seining boat fishing in Alaska. The sea proved a school in its own right, one I was to return to for a space of eight seasons, for the money. I met many people on boats, and saw something of the power and greatness of the wind, water, storms, and rain; and the smallness of man. These things lay before us like an immense book, but my fellow fishermen and I could only discern the letters of it that were within our context: to catch as many fish as possible within the specified time to sell to the tenders. Few knew how to read the book as a whole. Sometimes, in a blow, the waves rose like great hills, and the captain would hold the wheel with white knuckles, our bow one minute plunging gigantically down into a valley of green water, the next moment reaching the bottom of the trough and soaring upwards towards the sky before topping the next crest and starting down again.

Early in my career as a deck hand, I had read the Hazel Barnes translation of Jean Paul Sartres “Being and Nothingness”, in which he argued that phenomena only arose for consciousness in the existential context of human projects, a theme that recalled Marx’s 1844 manuscripts, where nature was produced by man, meaning, for example, that when the mystic sees a stand of trees, his consciousness hypostatizes an entirely different phenomenal object than a poet does, for example, or a capitalist. To the mystic, it is a manifestation; to the poet, a forest; to the capitalist, lumber. According to such a perspective, a mountain only appears as tall in the context of the project of climbing it, and so on, according to the instrumental relations involved in various human interests. But the great natural events of the sea surrounding us seemed to defy, with their stubborn, irreducible facticity, our uncomprehending attempts to come to terms with them. Suddenly, we were just there, shaken by the forces around us without making sense of them, wondering if we would make it through. Some, it was true, would ask God’s help at such moments, but when we returned safely to shore, we behaved like men who knew little of Him, as if those moments had been a lapse into insanity, embarrassing to think of at happier times. It was one of the lessons of the sea that, in fact, such events not only existed but perhaps even preponderated in our life. Man was small and weak, the forces around him were large, and he did not control them.

Sometimes a boat would sink and men would die. I remember a fisherman from another boat who was working near us one opening, doing the same job as I did, piling web. He smiled across the water as he pulled the net from the hydraulic block overhead, stacking it neatly on the stern to ready it for the next set. Some weeks later, his boat overturned while fishing in a storm, and he got caught in the web and drowned. I saw him only once again, in a dream, beckoning to me from the stern of his boat.

The tremendousness of the scenes we lived in, the storms, the towering sheer cliffs rising vertically out of the water for hundreds of feet, the cold and rain and fatigue, the occasional injuries and deaths of workers these made little impression on most of us. Fishermen were, after all, supposed to be tough. On one boat, the family that worked it was said to lose an occasional crew member while running at sea at the end of the season, invariably the sole non-family member who worked with them, his loss saving them the wages they would have otherwise had to pay him.

The captain of another was a twenty-seven-year-old who delivered millions of dollars worth of crab each year in the Bering Sea. When I first heard of him, we were in Kodiak, his boat at the city dock they had tied up to after a lengthy run some days before. The captain was presently indisposed in his bunk in the stateroom, where he had been vomiting up blood from having eaten a glass uptown the previous night to prove how tough he was. He was in somewhat better condition when I later saw him in the Bering Sea at the end of a long winter king crab season. He worked in his wheelhouse up top, surrounded by radios that could pull in a signal from just about anywhere, computers, Loran, sonar, depth-finders, radar. His panels of lights and switches were set below the 180-degree sweep of shatterproof windows that overlooked the sea and the men on deck below, to whom he communicated by loudspeaker. They often worked round the clock, pulling their gear up from the icy water under watchful batteries of enormous electric lights attached to the masts that turned the perpetual night of the winter months into day. The captain had a reputation as a screamer, and had once locked his crew out on deck in the rain for eleven hours because one of them had gone inside to have a cup of coffee without permission. Few crewmen lasted longer than a season with him, though they made nearly twice the yearly income of, say, a lawyer or an advertising executive, and in only six months. Fortunes were made in the Bering Sea in those years, before overfishing wiped out the crab.

At present, he was at anchor, and was amiable enough when we tied up to him and he came aboard to sit and talk with our own captain. They spoke at length, at times gazing thoughtfully out at the sea through the door or windows, at times looking at each other sharply when something animated them, as the topic of what his competitors thought of him. “They wonder why I have a few bucks”, he said. “Well I slept in my own home one night last year.”

He later had his crew throw off the lines and pick the anchor, his eyes flickering warily over the water from the windows of the house as he pulled away with a blast of smoke from the stack. His watchfulness, his walrus-like physique, his endless voyages after game and markets, reminded me of other predatory hunter-animals of the sea. Such people, good at making money but heedless of any ultimate end or purpose, made an impression on me, and I increasingly began to wonder if men didn’t need principles to guide them and tell them why they were there. Without such principles, nothing seemed to distinguish us above our prey except being more thorough, and technologically capable of preying longer, on a vaster scale, and with greater devastation than the animals we hunted.

These considerations were in my mind the second year I studied at Chicago, where I became aware through studies of philosophical moral systems that philosophy had not been successful in the past at significantly influencing peoples morals and preventing injustice, and I came to realize that there was little hope for it to do so in the future. I found that comparing human cultural systems and societies in their historical succession and multiplicity had led many intellectuals to moral relativism, since no moral value could be discovered which on its own merits was transculturally valid, a reflection leading to nihilism, the perspective that sees human civilizations as plants that grow out of the earth, springing from their various seeds and soils, thriving for a time, and then dying away.

Some heralded this as intellectual liberation, among them Emile Durkheim in his “Elementary Forms of the Religious Life”, or Sigmund Freud in his “Totem and Taboo”, which discussed mankind as if it were a patient and diagnosed its religious traditions as a form of a collective neurosis that we could now hope to cure, by applying to them a thoroughgoing scientific atheism, a sort of salvation through pure science. On this subject, I bought the Jeremy Shapiro translation of “Knowledge and Human Interests” by Jurgen Habermas, who argued that there was no such thing as pure science that could be depended upon to forge boldly ahead in a steady improvement of itself and the world. He called such a misunderstanding scientism, not science. Science in the real world, he said, was not free of values, still less of interests. The kinds of research that obtain funding, for example, were a function of what their society deemed meaningful, expedient, profitable, or important.

Habermas had been of a generation of German academics who, during the thirties and forties, knew what was happening in their country, but insisted they were simply engaged in intellectual production, that they were living in the realm of scholarship, and need not concern themselves with whatever the state might choose to do with their research. The horrible question mark that was attached to German intellectuals when the Nazi atrocities became public after the war made Habermas think deeply about the ideology of pure science. If anything was obvious, it was that the nineteenth-century optimism of thinkers like Freud and Durkheim was no longer tenable.

I began to re-assess the intellectual life around me. Like Schopenhauer, I felt that higher education must produce higher human beings. But at the university, I found lab people talking to each other about forging research data to secure funding for the coming year; luminaries who wouldn’t permit tape recorders at their lectures for fear that competitors in the same field would go one step further with their research and beat them to publication; professors vying with each other in the length of their courses syllabuses. The moral qualities I was accustomed to associate with ordinary, unregenerate humanity seemed as frequently met with in sophisticated academics as they had been in fishermen. If one could laugh at fishermen who, after getting a boatload of fish in a big catch, would cruise back and forth in front of the others to let them see how laden down in the water they were, ostensibly looking for more fish; what could one say about the Ph.D.’s who behaved the same way about their books and articles? I felt that their knowledge had not developed their persons, that the secret of higher man did not lie in their sophistication.

I wondered if I hadn’t gone down the road of philosophy as far as one could go. While it had debunked my Christianity and provided some genuine insights, it had not yet answered the big questions. Moreover, I felt that this was somehow connected I didn’t know whether as cause or effect to the fact that our intellectual tradition no longer seemed to seriously comprehend itself. What were any of us, whether philosophers, fishermen, garbagemen, or kings, except bit players in a drama we did not understand, diligently playing out our roles until our replacements were sent, and we gave our last performance? But could one legitimately hope for more than this?

I read “Kojves Introduction to the Reading of Hegel”, in which he explained that for Hegel, philosophy did not culminate in the system, but rather in the Wise Man, someone able to answer any possible question on the ethical implications of human actions. This made me consider our own plight in the twentieth century, which could no longer answer a single ethical question. It was thus as if this century’s unparalleled mastery of concrete things had somehow ended by making us things. I contrasted this with Hegel’s concept of the concrete in his “Phenomenology of Mind”. An example of the abstract, in his terms, was the limitary physical reality of the book now held in your hands, while the concrete was its interconnection with the larger realities it presupposed, the modes of production that determined the kind of ink and paper in it, the aesthetic standards that dictated its color and design, the systems of marketing and distribution that had carried it to the reader, the historical circumstances that had brought about the readers literacy and taste; the cultural events that had mediated its style and usage; in short, the bigger picture in which it was articulated and had its being.

For Hegel, the movement of philosophical investigation always led from the abstract to the concrete, to the more real. He was therefore able to say that philosophy necessarily led to theology, whose object was the ultimately real, the Deity. This seemed to me to point up an irreducible lack in our century. I began to wonder if, by materializing our culture and our past, we had not somehow abstracted ourselves from our wider humanity, from our true nature in relation to a higher reality.

At this juncture, I read a number of works on Islam, among them the books of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, who believed that many of the problems of western man, especially those of the environment, were from his having left the divine wisdom of revealed religion, which taught him his true place as a creature of God in the natural world and to understand and respect it. Without it, he burned up and consumed nature with ever more effective technological styles of commercial exploitation that ruined his world from without while leaving him increasingly empty within, because he did not know why he existed or to what end he should act.

I reflected that this might be true as far as it went, but it begged the question as to the truth of revealed religion. Everything on the face of the earth, all moral and religious systems, were on the same plane, unless one could gain certainty that one of them was from a higher source, the sole guarantee of the objectivity, the whole force, of moral law. Otherwise, one man’s opinion was as good as another’s, and we remained in an undifferentiated sea of conflicting individual interests, in which no valid objection could be raised to the strong eating the weak.

I read other books on Islam, and came across some passages translated by W. Montgomery Watt from “That Which Delivers from Error” by the theologian and mystic Ghazali, who, after a mid-life crisis of questioning and doubt, realized that beyond the light of prophetic revelation there is no other light on the face of the earth from which illumination may be received, the very point to which my philosophical inquiries had led. Here was, in Hegel’s terms, the Wise Man, in the person of a divinely inspired messenger who alone had the authority to answer questions of good and evil.

I also read A.J. Arberrys translation “The Koran Interpreted”, and I recalled my early wish for a sacred book. Even in translation, the superiority of the Muslim scripture over the Bible was evident in every line, as if the reality of divine revelation, dimly heard of all my life, had now been placed before my eyes. In its exalted style, its power, its inexorable finality, its uncanny way of anticipating the arguments of the atheistic heart in advance and answering them; it was a clear exposition of God as God and man as man, the revelation of the awe-inspiring Divine Unity being the identical revelation of social and economic justice among men.

I began to learn Arabic at Chicago, and after studying the grammar for a year with a fair degree of success, decided to take a leave of absence to try to advance in the language in a year of private study in Cairo. Too, a desire for new horizons drew me, and after a third season of fishing, I went to the Middle East.

In Egypt, I found something I believe brings many to Islam, namely, the mark of pure monotheism upon its followers, which struck me as more profound than anything I had previously encountered. I met many Muslims in Egypt, good and bad, but all influenced by the teachings of their Book to a greater extent than I had ever seen elsewhere. It has been some fifteen years since then, and I cannot remember them all, or even most of them, but perhaps the ones I can recall will serve to illustrate the impressions made.

One was a man on the side of the Nile near the Miqyas Gardens, where I used to walk. I came upon him praying on a piece of cardboard, facing across the water. I started to pass in front of him, but suddenly checked myself and walked around behind, not wanting to disturb him. As I watched a moment before going my way, I beheld a man absorbed in his relation to God, oblivious to my presence, much less my opinions about him or his religion. To my mind, there was something magnificently detached about this, altogether strange for someone coming from the West, where praying in public was virtually the only thing that remained obscene.

Another was a young boy from secondary school who greeted me near Khan al-Khalili, and because I spoke some Arabic and he spoke some English and wanted to tell me about Islam, he walked with me several miles across town to Giza, explaining as much as he could. When we parted, I think he said a prayer that I might become Muslim.

Another was a Yemeni friend living in Cairo who brought me a copy of the Koran at my request to help me learn Arabic. I did not have a table beside the chair where I used to sit and read in my hotel room, and it was my custom to stack the books on the floor. When I set the Koran by the others there, he silently stooped and picked it up, out of respect for it. This impressed me because I knew he was not religious, but here was the effect of Islam upon him.

Another was a woman I met while walking beside a bicycle on an unpaved road on the opposite side of the Nile from Luxor. I was dusty, and somewhat shabbily clothed, and she was an old woman dressed in black from head to toe who walked up, and without a word or glance at me, pressed a coin into my hand so suddenly that in my surprise I dropped it. By the time I picked it up, she had hurried away. Because she thought I was poor, even if obviously non-Muslim, she gave me some money without any expectation for it except what was between her and her God. This act made me think a lot about Islam, because nothing seemed to have motivated her but that.

Many other things passed through my mind during the months I stayed in Egypt to learn Arabic. I found myself thinking that a man must have some sort of religion, and I was more impressed by the effect of Islam on the lives of Muslims, a certain nobility of purpose and largesse of soul, than I had ever been by any other religions or even atheisms effect on its followers. The Muslims seemed to have more than we did.

Christianity had its good points to be sure, but they seemed mixed with confusions, and I found myself more and more inclined to look to Islam for their fullest and most perfect expression. The first question we had memorized from our early catechism had been Why were you created? to which the correct answer was “to know, love, and serve God”. When I reflected on those around me, I realized that Islam seemed to furnish the most comprehensive and understandable way to practice this on a daily basis.

As for the inglorious political fortunes of the Muslims today, I did not feel these to be a reproach against Islam, or to relegate it to an inferior position in a natural order of world ideologies, but rather saw them as a low phase in a larger cycle of history. Foreign hegemony over Muslim lands had been witnessed before in the thorough going destruction of Islamic civilization in the thirteenth century by the Mongol horde, who razed cities and built pyramids of human heads from the steppes of Central Asia to the Muslim heartlands, after which the fullness of destiny brought forth the Ottoman Empire to raise the Word of Allah and make it a vibrant political reality that endured for centuries. It was now, I reflected, merely the turn of contemporary Muslims to strive for a new historic crystallization of Islam, something one might well aspire to share in.

When a friend in Cairo one day asked me, Why don’t you become a Muslim?, I found that God had created within me a desire to belong to this religion, which so enriches its followers, from the simplest hearts to the most magisterial intellects. It is not through an act of the mind or will that anyone becomes a Muslim, but rather through the mercy of God, and this, in the final analysis, was what brought me to Islam in Cairo in 1977.

Is it not time that the hearts of those who believe should be humbled to the Remembrance of God and the Truth which He has sent down, and that they should not be as those to whom the Book was given aforetime, and the term seemed over long to them, so that their hearts have become hard, and many of them are ungodly? Know that God revives the earth after it was dead. We have indeed made clear for you the signs, that haply you will understand. (Koran 57:16-17)

Source

(A Graduation speech)

June 1, 1997

Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-
weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who’d rather be
Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of
wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there’s no reason we can’t
entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.

I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt.

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of ‘97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The
long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the
rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering
experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not
understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust
me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way
you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you
really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re
behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing
this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The
most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with
their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re
gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you
won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on
your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself
too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are
everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what
other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be
nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold
on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in
Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will
philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe
you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run
out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it.
Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.
Mary Schmich

My Beloved Prophet

There was a time in my youth,
When Islam was only a custom.
They said “say La Ilaha Illa Allah,..
And pray, you’ll go to Heaven.”

Ah, how simple, no struggle in this,
Just a word, and simple act.
Thereafter I’m absorbed in this world again,
With my ‘assured’ place in Paradise intact.

But this was not to be my fate
For ALLAH chose to guide my heart.
I learnt of a man who struggled so hard
When his mission was from the start.

The story of someone who had morals,
Spoke gently, kindness he knew.
Never fearing to say what’s right,
His conviction in ISLAM was true.

The touch of his hand was as soft as silk
To comfort a crying child.
To mend his clothes, or do the chores,
Never complaining, he always smiled.

A living he made with his bare hands,
The same that held his mighty sword.
Valour shone from the edge of his blade,

His smell was always of musk,
And cleanliness he kept at his best.
Stark contrast with the heroes of today,
Who stink of beer and sweat.

He held the hands of his companions.
Unashamed to play with many children.
So modest, so humble, a perfect example,
That strangers could not recognise him.

His eyes slept little for nights were precious,
His prayers he treasured much greater.
To pray Tahajjud in the depths of night,
Seeking forgiveness, and nearness to his Creator.

He broke his tooth for me at Uhud,
And bled for me at Ta’if.
He cried for me, tears of concern,
Just so I could have this belief.

His enemies admired his teachings,
Uniting every religion, every clan.
Till ISLAM came to every corner of the world,
O, but indeed he was only a man.

To own a house, or build his wealth
Was not his main priority.
To establish ISLAM was more essential,
To bring us under a Higher Authority.

Don’t you want him to plea for your case,
When before ALLAH-The Judge-you stand?
Don’t you wish to be around his fountain,
A burning desire to drink from his hand?

So I love him more than all creation,
My Leader, my Humble Prophet.
Muhammad (SAWS) was a mercy to all mankind,
And to me, he is my Beloved!

-Anonymous

So beautiful MashaAllah.

Take care inshaAllah.

-radf

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

Here in New York the weathers been really hot lately, like really really hot. And the problem isn’t juss that it’s hot, the problem is that it is so humid. About an hour ago it started raining, I love the rain so much! I actually went outside for a bit, I love going out in the rain, but I kind of had to run inside when I realized that the lightning kind of struck the canopy on my patio but its ok. I love it when its pouring rain, like today. I never understand people who say that they hate rain, how can you hate rain? Rain is a blessing. Anyway, that’s it, juss decided to share that with you all.

Take care inshaAllah.

-radf

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

So the Dunkin Donuts controversy, Ya Rubb such crazyness. I really don’t wanna say anything about it, there’s enough videos , articles, e-mail forwards etc… all over the internet. I feel bad for Rachel Ray, I foudn this video on Sr. Doa’s blog. It’s a pretty good video watch it if you have time and judge for yourself.

Take care inshaAllah.

-radf