Softest of Tongues

…. editing. I edit, and edit, and arrange text nicely, and arrange pictures nicely, and it messes everything up. … !… ! … !!!!!! Allahu akbar.   (5 minutes later). I figured it out. you just have to edit the html code and it works fine. excellent. Alhamdullilah.  

This is the first picture I took during our Hajj trip, I believe. We had just been in London for more than three hours – there were three ladies issuing boarding passes to about 30-40 people, yet for some reason it took so long that we almost missed the plane. 30 people, three counter attendants, 3 and a half hours (at least). And it was just boarding passes. We had actually come off the plane and gotten into line first, before everyone else, but fajr time was quickly departing so we left the line, prayed, and came back. No problem at all, there weren’t that many people in the line anyways (so I thought).  

As well, we had already been traveling for quite some time, and the airport, like many, seemed designed to ensure maximum discomfort. Standing room only.  So by the time we were getting on the plane (I think we were the last people, or second last), I was quite annoyed. I was about ready to just fall down, actually, into my chair, and stare blankly out the window.

I was tired, having not slept in the last two nights, weary from standing for so long, and quite frustrated by the airline people. I was trying not to say anything to anyone, especially airline staff, because I knew I would probably sounds quite bitter. Another cause of frustration was that, after all of this time in line, the airline lady had completely neglected to seat my wife and I together. Getting on the plane, we first went to the seat where I was sitting, which was near the front of the airplane. I asked the airline steward if he could arrange it so that my wife could next to me and the man could move to my wife’s seat, further back in the plane. The airline steward looked at me a bit skeptically. “You can ask him,” he said in Arabic, “but I don’t think he’ll want to…”.

I didn’t really know why he wouldn’t want to. I thought that he probably meant all of his carry-on is in the overhead bins already, and he won’t want to move, and it’s a hassle going to a place farther back on the plane, etc. But I asked anyways.The man beside whom I was supposed to sit was already in his ihram garb. He was a bit shorter than myself, much older (40’s), but looked as if he had been quite strong and athletic in his youth. He was Indian or Pakistani, but I’m guessing he had lived his whole life in Britain. He was from West Yorkshire.  

“As-Salamu alaikum brother (: … would it be okay if my wife were to sit next to me, here, and you took her seat? It’s a couple of rows back.” 

-”Wa Alaikum as salam! Oh Sure brother! No problem man!” 

The brother must have seen exhaustion written all over my face. Smiling and jolly, he immediately got up and immediately went to the back. The air steward looked at me with a cocked eyebrow.

“See,” I said, “no problem.” I collapsed into my chair. 

I sat there, quite exhausted, for what must have been a few minutes, when suddenly my wife and I both realized something seemed amiss. For one thing, we had personal TV’s that came out of the arm rest. For another, the chairs seemed quite large, and there was no tray that came down from the chair in front. There was quite a bit of space between us and the next chairs ahead, in fact. Enough to stretch out your legs. On the motorized recliner that you could activate from the armrest…. !!! 

We were actually sitting in business class. I guess because the plane was overbooked, the check-in lady put me in business class, but had my wife in economy. The brother had, without a second thought, given up his seat – which he paid for! – in business class, and went to sit behind us in economy. My wife and I were both so guilty. I couldn’t even touch the recliner.  I went a few rows back to the brother and tried to convince him to take his seat back, and that my wife and I would get someone in economy to take my spot in business so that we could sit together there. He wouldn’t hear of it.

“Not at all my brother, that’s your seat! It’s from Allah!!” He emphasized the word Allah, stretching it out slightly. ”You go and take care of your wife, enjoy this trip! This is going to be the start of a wonderful friendship! I’m so happy we met this way!”  

I didn’t know what to say. I asked him if there was any way I could repay him. “Please brother, just one thing I’d like – my father-in-law passed away recently, please make du’a for him… his name was Ibrahim.”I promised I would. He gave me his address and phone number, and told me he was leading a small contingent from Britain. Their trip was on quite a different schedule than ours, but alhamdullilah, we ended up meeting in the Mina tent city, where he took me on a tour of his group’s tents (:   

That brother’s kindness completely removed my tiredness, I remember. He truly brought warmth to that plane trip. I tried to find some way to get the head officer to bump him to Executive Class, but it didn’t work out. I ended up making good friends with the airline stewards in business class as well, and they made a spot to pray for me in the steward area, standing. It was the first time I ever prayed standing up on an airplane… it felt awesome. To make sujud on an airplane is quite cool. They ended up giving my wife and I gifts before we got off the plane, and when we left they asked us to make du’a for them. (: The best plane ride of my entire life, I can say easily. 

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On another note, it’s interesting how relaxed people are on Middle Eastern flights. They didn’t even check our seatbelts. I have always felt seatbelts were an insane thing on a plane, though I understand why they would impliment them. Travelling at 5km an hour an solid ground, it is incumbent that we wear the belt. Travelling at 600km/h at 30 000 ft, we can take off our belts and walk around the plane freely. Ajeeb. 

In general, the staff are just more relaxed and easy going.

On Air Canada, it’s immediately noticeable that most of the staff (not all) seem quite rigid. “sir! put up the tray table! sir! put the seat back up! sir! sit down! sir! sir!” it’s enough to cause one to get quite irritated with their voices. On this airline, it’s not that they wouldn’t request the same things, but they did it in a much nicer and more laid back manner, i think.  picture of the plane. SA is the only airline I know of with no alcohol and a musalla in the back of the plane. I only realized this on the flight back… on the way there I prayed in the front of the plane. There’s a video screen that shows an arrow that points to the qibla. As the plane turns the arrow adjusts. I didn’t take any pictures, because my camera had died at that point.  

 [hajj plane]

 [hajjis de-planing]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article3459144.ece

  An Israeli minister gave warning today that the army may unleash a “holocaust” on the Gaza Strip if Islamists there do not end their daily barrages of home-made Qassam rockets and their increasing use of Iranian-built Grad missiles.

“The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai, the Deputy Defence Minister said.

The use of the term “holocaust” is usually restricted to descriptions of the Nazi genocide of the Jews in Europe in the Second World War, and many Israelis resent its use in any other context. Mr Vilnai’s deployment of the word appeared to show Israel’s growing frustration that Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza refuse to curb their attacks, despite heavy tolls inflicted in Israeli air strikes and tank raids.

Israel has killed 32 Palestinians, including four children and a baby, in the past two days amid a dramatic escalation of the cross-border war.

As believers, it’s important to have high ambitions – himma ‘aaliyah, in Arabic. Islamically, that means we should be setting our sights on that which is highest – for many, thoughts of their professional aspirations may come to mind here, but for the companions of the Messenger of Allah, sal Allahu alayhi was sallam, this meant that they were focused on attaining the pleasure of Allah, and entering His paradise.

When the Prophet, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, entered Medina, Umm Anas, the mother of Anas ibn Malik, rushed to him. She didn’t have any material possesions that she could sacrifice for the deen and the da’wa, but she gave the most precious thing in her life – her son. She said that she wanted her son, Anas, to live in the Prophet’s house, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, and to serve him.

The scholars note that no mother has done a better thing for her child.

Today, of course, it would be unimaginable to think of a mother giving her son as a servant to some righteous person or scholar… granted, there are no men at the level of the Beloved, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, but nonetheless, the point lies in the aspirations. Umm Anas knew that her son could never possibly achieve a higher rank than that of the personal attendant of the Messenger of Allah, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam; she undoubtedly hoped that as an intimate companion of the Prophet, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, Anas would grow to be a scholar and a man of piety, which, of course, he did.

Some ahadith:

In the book Mishkat al Masabih, Anas bin Malik reported,

“Rasulullah was the most beautiful-natured of human beings. One day, he told me to go to some place. I said, ‘By Allah, I won’t!’. But I did. I went out to do his command. Children were playing in the street. As I passed them, I looked round. Rasulullah was coming behind me. His blessed face was pleasant. He said, ‘O Anas! Did you go to the place I told you?’ I said, ‘Yes, O Rasulullah, I am going there.’ “

Anas bin Malik said,

“When Rasulullah ’sall-Allahu alaihi wa sallam’ shook hands with a person, he would not take his hand away from that person’s hand before that person did so. He would not turn his face away from that person before the latter turned his face. As he sat near a person, he would sit on his two knees; to respect a person, he would not erect his blessed knee.”

He also said: “Rasulullah would visit the sick, walk behind the dead as they were taken to the cemetery and accept invitations. He would ride a donkey. I saw him in the holy war of Khaybar. He rode a donkey with a rope halter. When Rasulullah went out after morning prayer, children and workers of Medina would bring containers full of water in front of him. They would beg him to dip his blessed finger into the water. Though it was winter, he would put his blessed finger into all the containers one by one, thus pleasing them.”

Again, Anas bin Malik ‘radi-Allahu anh’ says,

“If a little girl held Rasulullah’s hand and wanted to take him somewhere for some matter, he would go with her and solve her problem.”

Also noted in the book Masabih is that Anas bin Malik, may Allah be pleased with him, said,

“I served Rasulullah for ten years, and he never even said “Ugh!” to me. He never asked me why I had done this or why I hadn’t done that.”

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[haram captor. dedicated to Basit. (: one day we will drive it! iA.]

so, i happened upon a site that generates slogans at your behest: all you do is type in a word. as we need some better advertising, i typed in “muslim”.  result?  The Future’s Bright. The Future’s Muslim.   (:  

It’s strange that news agencies are placing this cartoon issue in the limelight (and I’m getting emails about it) but Gaza hardly gets mentioned.

My point is that there must also be ijtihad on the part of scholars of the heart when, like their counterparts in the outward sciences, they find circumstances that did not exist in the time of the early Muslims which require Islamic solutions. Ihsan is about states of the heart, and ours are not like theirs.

How much junk mail did the early Muslims have to wade through each day? How many distressing news bites of no conceivable benefit thrust upon their consciousness, how many meals interrupted by the telephone, how many hours spent staring at a cathode-ray tube, how many billboards posing personal questions, how much tedious paperwork, how many “flies of the marketplace” competing for their money, how many crises not even understandable to people living a hundred years ago, how many conversations with uncovered women at work? The list could go on. When a sheikh looks at how to produce hearts that are attached to Allah, he must see what they are like in the first place. The failure of the neo-Wahhabi, Reform Islam at this level is because of its blindness to the spiritual states of people who need the prophetic medicines.

But aren’t the Koran and sunna better? The superiority of the Koran and sunna is not what is at stake here. Rather, the point of all substantive prescriptions of the Koran and sunna lies in human attitudes toward the Divine, without which they be but empty forms. There is no question, for example, that the best of speech is the Word of Allah, the Holy Koran. But if a non-Muslim, for example, were to recite the Koran from beginning to end, would it be as beneficial to him as reciting the Shahada but once, with conviction? Not at all; because what he has is kufr, or unbelief. He is standing in front of a particular door, to which he needs the key of iman or faith in Allah and His messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace). Nothing else will do, no matter how superior in itself. Similarly, reciting the Koran is unquestionably better than supplications from hadith, yet when circumambulating the Kaaba, the latter are better, because one is before a particular door. There is no doubt that the supplications from sunna are nobler than any we can come up with, yet how many a plea for forgiveness in our own heartfelt words has brought us closer to Allah than intoning volumes of hadith? For that matter, dhikr is better than honking one’s horn, but the latter is religiously superior when needed to save the life of an unwary pedestrian. What is the best medicine in the pharmacy? It depends on what one has.

On the religious plane we have been discussing, what would one expect if one went to a doctor and asked him without further qualification for the “best thing” he had? Just about what you find in Saudi Arabia if you go and take a look: a minimalist Reform Islam of going to prayer at the mosque, other agreed-upon obligatory acts, and nothing more. In the face of a very real Western cultural onslaught, it is not working, and has produced a generation of kids (of all ages) who wear headcloths and speak Arabic, but dream of nothing besides what comes out of the Western television and internet they use to fill the spiritual gulf in their lives. Their society is increasingly sick at heart with vice, depravity, drug addiction, and other symptoms of inward diseases that should have been attenuated by the medicines of the ulama of the heart who are officially banned there.

***

fr. a letter by Shaykh Nuh Keller on the Hadra 

fr. angryarab.blogspot.com:

In October, Walid Jumblat, speaking at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the research arm of the Israeli lobby, called on the US to send car bombs to Damascus. In an unusual coincidence–don’t now jump into conclusions and start peddling conspiracy theories, a car bomb just exploded in Damascus. Coincidence. Mere, coincidence, OF COURSE. What else could it be.

Went to a Stockwell Day “lecture” (read: indoctrination session of young law students) last Friday. He spoke eloquently and intelligently (read: with a great deal of cunning) on Bill C-3. I felt kind of sick for the remainder of the day: here we sat, politely smiling at one another, while Mr. Day made political jokes here and there, talking about this measure as if it were a nice friendly addition to the immigration act. We sat in a nice, well-lit room, at comfortable desks, listening to a well-groomed male in a fine suit with smooth speaking skills. The real subject, though we would rather not think about it, was not a piece of paper but six men who are under the most severe form of house arrest in the western world, to my knowledge.

reflections – though these deal with the US, the ideas apply here:

“Just seven years after the ratification of the First Amendment in 1791, Congress enacted the Sedition Act making it a crime to bring “into contempt or disrepute” the government, either House of Congress or the president, “or to excite against them…the hatred of the good people of the United States.”

Passed to defend America against the imagined threat of Jacobean terror and the guillotine, its true purpose was to suppress support for Thomas Jefferson in the run-up to the election of 1800. Trials presided over by Supreme Court justices ended with criminal sentences. One victim was a congressman.

James Madison, often considered the father of the constitution, presciently wrote: “Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.”

Hundreds were prosecuted for criticising American participation in the first world war. After the second world war, left-wingers were jailed for conspiring to teach or advocate communism. More recently, in December 2001, the then attorney-general, John Ashcroft, testified before the Senate that those who scare “peace-loving” Americans with “phantoms of lost liberty” were only aiding terrorists.

When the New York Times disclosed in 2005 that the president had, without a warrant, secretly ordered the wiretapping of Americans’ international telephone calls (in violation of a criminal statute), the newspaper’s journalists were threatened with prosecution for espionage.”

(fr. As’ad Abukhalil)

read about C-3