Look at the sky

Does it make you feel like you could fly?

Look at the trees

Feel it creating the air that you breathe…

A poem by Sister Eda Eken

The eyes are deceiving

What our minds are perceiving

Our lips are revealing

The truth they are concealing…

A poem by Sister Eda Eken

Just remember: if you don’t have attention, you don’t have time. As tempting as it is to “just check e-mail for one minute,” I didn’t do it. I know from experience that any problem found in the inbox will linger on the brain for hours or days after you shut down the computer, rendering “free time” useless with preoccupation.

For many days now, a tornado was building within, Abdullah felt an inexorable sorrow taking root, digging its tentacles deep into his heart. Each passing day fueled his isolation and misery. He had everything money could buy: the best and the most advanced gadgets, yet nothing stirred his heart to happiness. He longed to be seen, to be heard. 

We cannot but be anxious about social trends in the West. The survival of the Western family and classical definitions of gender is a question of immediate Muslim concern. In any battle between a genuinely sacred and a profane orthodoxy, the outcome is fairly predictable. Let us have hope and trust, and remember always that “God’s word is uppermost.”

As a mother of a teenager and a toddler, my approach in raising my two girls is vastly different. Perhaps, as the cliché goes, age and experience play a role. I became a mother first, when I was 23 years old, young, fiery, stubborn, opinionated, ready to conquer the world. One doesn’t contemplate becoming a mother. To many of us, it simply happens.

The forces that stand to harm the human in his journeying to his Creator are both physical and spiritual. The Prophet ﷺ taught us to engage this world, not disengage, while teaching us to be aware of the nature and reality of the physical world around us.

The IMF is a method for paying off investors and transferring the risk to the taxpayers in rich countries. There are two forms of robbery going on: The populations in the debtor countries are being robbed blind by austerity programs, while the taxpayers in rich countries are also being robbed. It's not as serious for the latter because they're richer, but they're still being robbed. The IMF socializes the risk.

One of the greatest events in impact upon Muslims in the last thousand years is the end of the Islamic caliphate at the first of this century, an event that marked not only the passing of temporal, political authority, but in many respects the passing of the consensus of orthodox Sunni Islam as well. No one familiar with the classical literature in any of the Islamic legal sciences, whether Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir), hadith, or jurisprudence (fiqh), can fail to be struck by the fact that questions are asked today about basic fundamentals of Islamic Sacred Law (Sharia) and its ancillary disciplines that would not have been asked in the Islamic period not because Islamic scholars were not brilliant enough to produce the questions, but because they already knew the answers.

The ummah’s greatest achievement over the past millennium has undoubtedly been its internal intellectual cohesion. From the fifth century of the Hijra almost to the present day, and despite the outward drama of the clash of dynasties, the Sunni Muslims have maintained an almost unfailing attitude of religious respect and brotherhood among themselves.

Sometimes it happens that we are blessed with wisdom from places we least expect. The only thing required is a welcoming heart; open to the idea of broadening our horizons to appreciate the beauty of this world in all its amazing hues. For me, one such moment, was when a friend asked me regarding a verse of the glorious Quran that inspired me the most…