Computer Crash

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

My computer hard drive crashed (this is being written on a borrowed computer) so new posts will have to wait until it is fixed, inshallah.  

May God bless all who pass this way.  Ameen.

Ya Haqq!

Of Speaking, Silence, and Generosity to Neighbor and Guest

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

The Prophet (pbuh) said:

“Let him who believes in God and the Last Day either speak good or keep silent, and let him who believes in God and the Last Day be generous to his neighbor, and let him who believes in God and the Last Day be generous to his guest.”

- Hadith reported by Abu Hurayrah and recorded by Imam Bukhari and Muslim.

Ya Haqq!

Prospective Immigrants

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

- Adrienne Rich (reposted from Sister Baraka’s Rickshaw Diaries blog).

Ya Haqq!

Note: This lovely and poignant poem also spoke to my heart of the real immigration from one state of awareness to another, the change of perception that comes with stepping onto the Sufi path, or any mystical path. Like the door, the path promises nothing, it is only a path.

Muslim Intellectuals Most Influential on World List!

Salaam and Greetings of Peace:

Who are the hundred most influential intellectuals in the world? After nearly half a million votes, the British monthly, Prospect, and the American magazine Foreign Policy, publish their new list.

Alhamdulillah! Muslims make up the top ten spots.

Number one is the Turkish writer and the Sufi thinker Fethullah Gülen. who is the prizewinner. He is followed by nine other thinkers of the Muslim world: Nobel Peace Prize winners Muhammad Yunus (second) and Shirin Ebadi (tenth), Nobel Prize winner for literature Orhan Pamuk (fourth), as well as Pakistani Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan (fifth), Egyptian televangelist Amr Khaled (sixth), Iranian reformer and Rumi scholar Abdolkarim Soroush (seventh), Tariq Ramadan (eighth), Islamist preacher Youssef al-Qaradawi (third), and Columbia University Professor Mahmood Mamdani (ninth).

Read the rest for yourselves and Google their biographies and writings for your children. Inshallah, this is the beginning of another Muslim Age of Enlightenment.

The hundred most influential intellectuals can be found HERE.

- Edited from the Sufi News and Sufism World Report blog of Thursday, June 26, 2008.

Ya Haqq!

A Teaching of Jesus (pbuh)

Salaam and Greeting of Peace:

Jesus (pbuh) said:

So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.

- Luke 11:9

Ya Haqq!