A Quick Note

Salam!

Bismillah

31:23 (Yusufali) But if any reject Faith, let not his rejection grieve thee: to Us is their return, and We shall tell them the truth of their deeds: for Allah knows well all that is in (men's) hearts.

An Idea

Salam!

Bismillah

This is sort of in response to the last post I guess.

The last few hours I've been seriously considering deferring my scholarship for next semester until the next fall.

PROS:
1. I will get a break next semester to do something BESIDES school.
2. I will have a light at the end of the tunnel to encourage me to finish out this semester.

CONS:
1. What if I decide to never go back to school?
2. What if I get out of practice and suck at school when I get back?

I'm really not sure what to think about it... it sounds good but maybe there are things I'm not taking into consideration.

What do you guys think?!?

P.S. If I don't go to school next semester I will probably find a job inshaAllah like substitute teaching, working in an office or something along those lines.

Motivation

Salam!

Bismillah

I am not motivated to go to school. I am not motivated to do my homework. I am not motivated to study for quizzes and tests.

I am tired all of the time. I can't fall asleep when I need to and when I finally fall asleep, I can't wake up again.

Sometimes I think about sad stuff over and over and over for no apparent reason. I just can't quit. I cry too much and it hurts the people around me.

What is wrong with me? What should I do?

My Feelings.

Salam!

Bismillah

To all of those people who think it is more "liberating" to wear a bikini than an Abaya:

Have you ever worn an abaya by choice?

I have worn both. I feel like that makes my opinion more valid on this subject.

My advice to you...

DON'T KNOCK IT UNTIL YOU TRY IT!

You can feel sorry for me if you want, but be sure that I'm feeling sorry for you and your women.

An E-mail

Salam!

Bismillah

I got another e-mail today from a sister at my masjid. She brought up such a good point and I felt like I should share her experience here.

assalamu alaykum sisters

I heard the most disturbing thing today and wanted to share it with you. I was in the Target changing room trying on clothes. Two women were conversing back and forth as they were trying on their clothes. This is how the conversation went:

"Do they(Target) have a separate changing room for the men?"
"Yes, they do."
"Can you believe they are still segregating men and women?"
"Yeah, I know. I guess some women still have insecurities"
"Oh wow! This shirt needs something under it."
"I guess you can wear something under it if you don't feel comfortable."

So, I know this conversation word for word because it was just amazing how these women thought about this issue. Basically, in order to be comfortable with yourself, it means to show your body. It means to discard any conservative outlook you have or any modesty; otherwise you are "insecure" about yourself. I wanted to tell these women that it wasn't insecurity. It was value.

I think from my experience... this is actually a pretty common mindset among people where I live.

Is this common around your area? Why are women letting society take away their value? What is the benefit they see? How do we help them?

Craziness...

Salam!

Bismillah

Today I got this e-mail from a friend and I thought I would take a little time to analyze it here. Maybe you all got this e-mail too... we know how fast these things like to spread. I will put my analysis in [bold red brackets like this] so that you know it's me :-D

مواقع اسلامية بإدارة يهودية

هذه الرسالة مهمة و خطيرة، تأكد من المواقع بنفسك

Please send this message to all your contacts!!!

الرجاء ارسال هذه الرسالة لكل من تعرف

Beware of the following websites:

انتبهوا من هذه المواقع على الأنترنت:

1. www.answering- islam.org [Actually a Christian Website, not Jewish]
2. www.aboutislam. com [Directs you to a Perfume Store]
3. www.thequran. com [Gives alternative Interpretation of Ayat... I guess it COULD be Jewish... maybe]
4. www.allahassurance. com [Site doesn't exist]
These sites have been developed by the Jews [So in total, there is one site above that could be construed... MABYBE... as "Jewish"]

هذه المواقع تم تصميمها من قبل اليهود...

Who intentionally spread wrong information about the QURAN , the HADITH and the Islam?[Yes a lot of the information on these sites is wrong... I would not trust them.]

وهم ينشرون معلومات خاطئة جدّاً عن القرآن والسنة والأحاديث النبويّة الشريفةوالإسلام

Please spread this information to all the Muslim brothers and sisters around the world.

أستحلفكم بالله أن تنشروا هذه الرسالة لكل المسلمين في العالم

Always check the source of any Islamic web site even if it is very convincing [SUCH a great point!!! Everone do this!!!!!]‏

تأكد دائماً من مصدر المواقع التي تتحدث عن الإسلام

A FAKE AMERICAN QURAAN

http://www.amazon. / com/exec/ obidos/tg/ detail/-/ 1579211755/ qid%3D1096805827 /102-4933271- 2395342 هذا الموقع يباع فيه نسخة محرّفة كاملة عن القرآن الكريم تم تأليفه من قبل اليهود والأمريكان الحاقدين ‎
The new AMERICAN Quran: a dangerous trick a new Quran is being distributed in Kuwait titled 'The True Furqan'[This is actually a book of poetry that is based on the Qur'an, sounds kind of like the Qur'an, and links the Qur'an I think with Trinitarian imagery. Could easily be mistaken for the actual Qur'an Kareem by people who are ignorant, therefore it is pretty dangerous. Go write them a bad review :-P][I also think it is quite telling that this fake Qur'an is "AMERICAN." I love how that is emphasized *sarcastic face* The American part makes it so much worse right??]

المشكلة العظمى أن هذا الكتاب بدأ انتشاره في الكويت بإسم (الفرقان الحق)

You Cant Ignore this, send it to as many muslims as u can.[I honestly don't think this e-mail would have gotten so much attention unless it had the word "Jew" and "AMERICAN" in it in a bad way. This makes me sad... I think we could warn our brothers and sisters in Islam about misinformation without pointing fingers at other Peoples of the Book.]

لا تهملوا هذه الرسالة، إنصر الإسلام ولو برسالة

Anyway, just my thoughts I suppose. What do you guys think?

SCORE!

Salam!

Bismillah

Nearly 1 in 4 people worldwide is Muslim, report says

• Story Highlights
• There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report
  
• Report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
  
• Nearly 2 out of 3 of world's Muslims are in Asia, report says
  
• Roughly 9 of 10 Muslims worldwide are Sunni, report says

updated 8:08 a.m. EDT, Mon October 12, 2009

By Richard Allen Greene
CNN

(CNN) -- Nearly one in four people worldwide is Muslim -- and they are not necessarily where you might think, according to an extensive new study that aims to map the global Muslim population.

Nearly two out of three of the world's Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

India, a majority-Hindu country, has more Muslims than any country except for Indonesia and Pakistan, and more than twice as many as Egypt.

China has more Muslims than Syria.

Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon.

And Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya put together.

Nearly two out of three of the world's Muslims are in Asia, stretching from Turkey to Indonesia.

The Middle East and north Africa, which together are home to about one in five of the world's Muslims, trail a very distant second.

There are about 1.57 billion Muslims in the world, according to the report, "Mapping the Global Muslim Population," by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. That represents about 23 percent of the total global population of 6.8 billion.

There are about 2.25 billion Christians, based on projections from the 2005 World Religions Database.

Brian Grim, the senior researcher on the Pew Forum project, was slightly surprised at the number of Muslims in the world, he told CNN.

"Overall, the number is higher than I expected," he said, noting that earlier estimates of the global Muslim population have ranged from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.

The report can -- and should -- have implications for United States policy, said Reza Aslan, the best-selling Iranian-American author of "No God but God."

"Increasingly, the people of the Middle East are making up a smaller and smaller percentage of the worldwide Muslim community," he told CNN by phone.

"When it comes to issues of outreach to the Muslim world, these numbers will indicate that outreach cannot be focused so narrowly on the Middle East," he said.

"If the goal is to create better understanding between the United States and the Muslim world, our focus should be on south and southeast Asia, not the Middle East," he said.

He spoke to CNN before the report was published and without having seen its contents, but was familiar with the general trends the report identified.

The team at the Pew Forum spent nearly three years analyzing "the best available data" from 232 countries and territories, Grim said.

Their aim was to get the most comprehensive snapshot ever assembled of the world's Muslim population at a given moment in time.

So they took the data they gathered from national censuses and surveys, and projected it forward based on what they knew about population growth in each country.

They describe the resulting report as "the largest project of its kind to date."

It's full of details that even the researchers found surprising.

"There are these countries that we don't think of as Muslim at all, and yet they have very sizable numbers of Muslims," said Alan Cooperman, the associate director of research for the Pew Forum, naming India, Russia and China.

One in five of the world's Muslims lives in a country where Muslims are a minority.

And while most people think of the Muslim population of Europe is being composed of immigrants, that's only true in western Europe, Cooperman said.

"In the rest of Europe -- Russia, Albania, Kosovo, those places -- Muslims are an indigenous population," he said. "More than half of the Muslims in Europe are indigenous."

The researchers also were surprised to find the Muslim population of sub-Saharan Africa to be as low as they concluded, Cooperman said.

It has only about 240 million Muslims -- about 15 percent of all the world's Muslims.

Islam is thought to be growing fast in the region, with countries such as Nigeria, which has large populations of both Christians and Muslims, seeing violence between the two groups.

The Pew researchers concluded that Nigeria is just over half Muslim, making it the sixth most populous Muslim country in the world.

Roughly nine out of 10 Muslims worldwide are Sunni, and about one in 10 is Shiite, they estimated.

They warned they were less confident of those numbers than of the general population figures because sectarian data is harder to come by.

"Only one or two censuses in the world ... have ever asked the sectarian question," said Grim.

"Among Muslims it's a very sensitive question. If asked, large numbers will say I am just a Muslim -- not that they don't know, but it is a sensitive question in many places," he said.

One in three of the world's Shiite Muslims lives in Iran, which is one of only four countries with a Shiite majority, he said. The others are Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain.

Huge as the project of mapping the world's Muslim population is, it is only the first step in a Pew Forum undertaking.

Next year, the think tank intends to release a report projecting Muslim population growth into the future, and then the researchers intend to do the whole thing over again with Christians, followed by other faith groups.

"We don't care only about Muslims," Grim said.

They're also digging into what people believe and practice, since the current analysis doesn't analyze that.

"This is no way reflects the religiosity of people, only their self-identification," Grim said. "We're trying to get the overall picture of religion in the world."

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/asiapcf/10/07/muslim.world.population/index.html

Poetry

The Rose

What Allah said to the Rose

And caused it to laugh in full blown beauty,

He said to my heart

And made it a hundred times more beautiful.

~ Rumi

Niqab Hospital Gowns

salam!

bismillah

I found this article the other day and was really excited, lol. Then I noticed it was written in 2006. This would definitely be more sterile and sanitary than bringing in your own niqab/shayla/abaya/covering into the hospital.

I wonder if it ever happened?

anyone know?

Modesty gowns for female patients

The gowns have been designed to comply with religious rules

A gown designed for female Muslim patients who wish to preserve their modesty for religious reasons is being introduced to hospitals in Lancashire.

The £12 outfits - made in Yorkshire - cover the entire head, neck and body, leaving just a slot for the eyes.

The burqua-style gowns come with trousers, two styles of head-dress and elasticated cuffs to prevent women's arms from being revealed.

They will be available to patients at in Chorley and Preston from November.

The gowns were trialled at Royal Preston Hospital and proved so successful that a number of other NHS Trusts have also expressed an interest in offering them.

Preserving modesty

Karen Jacob, linen services manager at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals, came up with the idea.

She said: "I noticed a gap in the market and thought that it would be great if there was a gown that helped to preserve a patient's modesty."

The gowns are believed to be a world first - and TrusTECH, the NHS organisation which manages innovation for the North West NHS - has the patent.

It means the market for the gowns among the globe's billion-plus Muslims is immense.

Tim Meadows, customer service manager for Interweave, the West Yorkshire-based firm which makes the garments, believes the demand for the gowns could be huge.

"We think there is a large market out there," he says.

"We hope it will be a success. We have invested a lot of time and money."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/lancashire/5315306.stm

Kohl vs. Eyeliner

VS.

Salam!

Bismillah

So I have heard around the grapevine that kohl is okay for women to wear because it is sunnah to do so.

I have some questions maybe you guys can answer for me. :-D (i know i'm getting really into this whole question thing... tell me if it bugs you)

1. What are the benefits of kohl that make it sunnah and not just something to make you look prettier?
2. Was it sunnah for the sahabah to wear it, or just the dudes?
3. What is the difference between kohl (specifically) and the eyeliner we can buy at stores here in the U.S.?

I think thats all I've got, thanks girls!!!!

Arab Wannabe??

Salam!

Bismillah

Today I was reading through some of my favorite blogs and I came across the term "Arab Wannabe" as applied to someone who wears black abaya. I wear black abayat and this hurt my feelings... as if someone were making fun of me for dressing this way because I am not Arab.

(One of my favorites from Sunnahstyle.com)

It got me thinking... Am I an Arab wannabe because of the way that I dress??

Now I look at my motivation for wearing black abaya most days:
1. I'm poor and alhamdulillah sisters out there GENEROUSLY offered me abayat in order to properly clothe myself when I converted. they just happened to be black. (Thanks Rayyan, and I LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE the ones you gave me <3)
2. I like the open style of abaya and it's difficult to find these in other colors.
3. I'm extremely curvy, as Allah made me, and abaya is honestly the only thing I wear that I feel appropriately and modestly covered in.
4. I think they are pretty.

Now as none of my reasons include fitting in with the "Arab" crowd or trying to be "Arab" in anyway, I feel as it is a little rash to label everyone wearing black abaya and shayla as "Arab Wannabe"

So sisters please... don't hurt others feelings in this way. We are all trying our best to please Allah subhana wa ta'ala and we don't need to push each other down.