Some solid advices

Passed along to me from a bro to whom it was passed along by his dad. I don’t know where he got it from. How’s that for an isnad?

Points of Benefit from the Book Al-Fawaa’id

AUTHOR: Imaam Ibn Qayyim Al-Jawziyyah
SOURCE: Faid-ur-Rahmaan fee Al-Fawaa’id-il-Hisaan (No. 1, pg. 30-32)
PRODUCED BY: Al-Ibaanah.com

1. How can anyone who has common sense trade Paradise and what is in it for the pleasure of one hour?

2. When you fear the creation, you feel repelled by it and run away from it, but when you fear the Creator, you feel close to Him and run towards Him.

3. If knowledge without action were of benefit, why did Allaah condemn the scholars of the People of the Book? And if action without sincerity were of benefit, why did He condemn the hypocrites?

4. Repel the thought, for if you don’t, it becomes an idea. So repel the idea, for if you don’t it will become a desire. So fight against that (desire), for if you don’t, it will become a determination and a passion. And if you don’t repel that, it will become an action. And if you don’t replace it with its opposite, it will become a constant habit. So at that point, it will be difficult for you to change it.

5. When a decreed matter occurs to Allaah’s ‘abd (slave), which he dislikes, then he should have six perspectives about it

First: The Perspective of Tawheed: And that Allaah is the One who decreed it and willed it and created it. And whatever Allaah wills comes to pass, and whatever He doesn’t will doesn’t come to pass.

Second: The Perspective of Fairness: And that He ruled this event to occur in the past and that there is fairness in His Divine ordainment.

Third: The Perspective of Mercy: And that Allaah’s mercy with regard to this thing which He decreed supercedes His anger and vengeance

Fourth: The Perspective of Wisdom: And that it was Allaah’s infinite Wisdom that brought that about. He did not decree it in vain nor did He divinely execute it for no purpose.

Fifth: The Perspective of Praise: And that to Allaah belongs the complete and entire praise for that thing that was decreed, from all perspectives of it.

Sixth: The Perspective of Worship to Allaah (‘Ubudiyyah): And that he is a pure worshipper of Allaah from every standpoint. His Master’s Rulings and Decrees occur to him by virtue of his being Allaah’s possession and slave. So Allaah administers him under His decreed rulings just as He administers him under His religious rulings. So it (i.e. the decreed event) becomes a place for these rulings to occur to him.

6. Little success (from Allaah), bad views, unawareness of the truth, corruption of the heart, laziness in making dhikr, wasting time, distaste for the creation, estrangement between the servant and his Lord, the prevention of the supplication from being answered, hardening of the heart, the termination of blessing from ones provision and lifespan, the prevention of knowledge, being covered in debasement, humiliation at the hands of the enemy, constricting of the chest, prolonged grief and sorrow, a wretched life of poverty, and a gloomy state of being are all produced from sins and neglecting to remember Allaah just as crops are produced from water and burning from fire. And the opposites of these things are produced from obedience to Allaah.

7. If your mind would free itself from the governorship of your desires, the state would return back to it.

8. You have entered into the abode of desires, so you have put your life at stake.

9. It was once to said to one devout worshipper of Allaah: “Until when will you continue to exhaust your soul?” So he responded: “It is its relaxation that I seek.”

10. The women of this world were made beautiful to those who can see in order to test which of them prefers them over the women of the Hereafter. So whoever knows the extent of differences, he will choose what deserves to be chosen.

Dratted mosquitos

Air conditioning and window screens. I miss air conditioning and window screens. Most apartments here don’t have ‘em (well rich people do, but my friends and I aren’t rich). Last night I was at a friend’s house, and since it’s summer it was a warm night. So we left the windows open … and a mosquito ate me all night long. I woke up like three times during the night, scratching at mosquito bites, and listening to the menacing buzz of the beast. I have bites all over my arms and legs and even one on my eyelid. What mosquito sucks out eyelid blood? Gross. At least they weren’t ticks, alhamdulillah. The ticks here carry a deadly disease. Sigh.

One year, and counting

Today marks one year since I started at the paper I work for in Turkey. Subhanallah, how time flies! One year on, and everything that’s happened has gone completely differently than I’d expected or planned.  Things change so quickly! When I came here my expectations were very different; I thought I’d live in the same place I lived when I got here; I’ve moved apartments three times and am planning another (hopefully final) move. I didn’t think I’d leave Turkey unless it was to move back to the US; I traveled once to Germany, once to Egypt, and am planning a trip to Yemen this Ramadan insha’Allah. And, insha’Allah in the next month I’m also changing my job — same company, but working as a reporter instead of copy editor. I wonder what the rest of my time in Turkey will bring.

Workin’ with what you’ve got

In international news coverage this week has been the story of a set of twins born in Germany to a German father and Ghanaian mother.

On a Turkish news broadcast this morning, there was a similar headline — but not really. The story? Also about a set of twins, headlined “One of them blonde, one of them brunette.”

Niqabi refused French citizenship

When Faiza Silmi applied for French citizenship she was worried that her fluent French was not quite perfect enough or that her Moroccan upbringing would pose a problem.

“I would never have imagined that they would turn me down because of what I choose to wear,” Silmi said, her hazel eyes looking out of the narrow slit in her niqab, an Islamic facial veil that is among three flowing layers of turquoise, blue and black that cover her body from head to toe.

But last month, France’s highest administrative court upheld a decision to deny Silmi, 32, citizenship on the ground that her “radical” practice of Islam was incompatible with French values like equality of the sexes.

It was the first time that a French court had judged somebody’s capacity to be assimilated into France based on private religious practice, taking laïcité – the country’s strict concept of secularism – from the public sphere into the home.

The case has sharpened the focus on the delicate balance between the tradition of Republican secularism and the freedom of religion guaranteed under the French Constitution – and how that balance might be shifting. It comes four years after a law banning religious garb in public schools was reinforced. And it comes only weeks after a court in Lille annulled a marriage on request of a Muslim husband whose wife had lied about being a virgin. (The government subsequently demanded a review of the court decision.)

So far, citizenship has only been denied on religious grounds in France when applicants were believed to be close to fundamentalist groups.

The ruling has received almost unequivocal support across the political spectrum, including among many Muslims. Fadela Amara, the French minister for urban affairs, called Silmi’s niqab “a prison” and a “straitjacket.” …

Read the rest of “A Muslim woman too orthodox for France”

Fajr in the secular republic

The muezzin for the mosque closest to my home is completely incomprehensible for the fajr adhan. This is pretty sad, since he’s clearly trying very hard to do a good job. It takes him no less than 10 minutes to get the whole thing out from the (presumably) initial Allahuakbar till the Laa ilaha illa Allah. He screams into the microphone (don’t let any Turks clown on shouting Arab shuyookh, they shout here too, just at fajr time), clearly using his lungs at maximum capacity, and is very careful to introduce a not-so-subtle, whiny vibratto that hits every note on the musical (!) scale. It’s quite a performance. But if you didn’t know that it had to be the adhan, you wouldn’t really know it was the adhan.

Despite all this, I try to set my alarm clock for a few minutes before the adhan goes off so I can lay in bed and listen to it. Hey, it’s one of my favorite things about living in Turkey, the adhan! My timing’s not always spot-on, though (the adhan doesn’t begin when fajr comes in, but instead at roughly 45 minutes till sunrise), so if I don’t hear him peal out the initial, overly nasal ‘AllahuekberAllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaAAAaaahuEK-BERrrrr,’ then I’m left in this pool of confusion trying to repeat after him but not sure if I’m getting it right at all. Is he in the middle of saying Haya `alaas-salaah? Haya `alaal-falah? No, wait, it’s the end of EsselaaaAAAAaatuhayrunnnnminennevvvvvvm! But, wait …. no, he just said Allahuekber again and stopped, so that couldn’t have been As-salaatu khayrun min an-nawm. But there’s no way that was a Laa ilaha illa Allah, so what’s going on here?

Some mornings I lay there listening, unable to make out what he’s saying for an entire seven or eight minutes, and seriously considering whether it’s possible the masjid PA system is being used to blast some odd Sufi hymn or random salawaat or something (they do that sometimes, but usually in the middle of the day a coupla hours before dhuhr).

I really shouldn’t complain, though — because progress is progress. Yes, this is an improvement! Calling the adhan in Arabic was illegal in Turkey for awhile, so for years everyone here had to listen to it in Turkish. (It’s been fixed since 1950.) Naoodhubillah!

O, IJs…

“…Many people prefer the comfort of fantasy to the harshness of reality. They seem to reason this way: ‘How can I arrange my beliefs so I’ll feel most comfortable?’ rather than arranging them to agree with reality.” [Howard Kahane]

While flipping through the TV channels tonight during dinner, I paused briefly on a entertainment channel that shall remain unnamed. A few seconds into it and I realized what it was. One of the most repulsive forms of television programming I have ever seen in my life: the show progresses on two tracks. One, speaking with and re-enacting a tragic, shocking event that touches one family’s life, and another doing the same with a different family that doesn’t know the other family but lives across town. The show speaks with the principal persons involved in each respective incident, their friends and family, and re-paints a picture of how the event changed lives forever. Woven into the background of this back-and-forth between two stunning events is a not-so-subtle message: that people from different strata of the same society may see things very differently, but really, we’re all human at the end of the day, and the grass is always greener on the other side, right?

Wrong.

The problem is that, like a couple of the similarly disgusting shows I’ve seen of its kind, one family is Israeli, and the other Palestinian. It’s so unfair and so misleading and so wrong to pretend that these families are just going through the same tough situation in a country plagued with violence. It’s so frustrating! There’s a big difference between one group of people living with violence in their lives every single day and others who are touched personally by something like this only once in a lifetime. To equate the two is just… it’s abhorrent, deliberate, and shameful. So frustrating!

In other news, the Israeli diplomatic mission here in Turkey is also really nasty. They’re always trying to get media to print their filthy pieces of dishonest propaganda. It’s infuriating. And these days the entertainment media also helps them out for free. Ugh.

Trix are for kids

Sometimes, you just feel silly.

My team at work rotates full weekends off, so basically each of the four of us get one Sunday a month off work (we all get Saturdays off normally, that’s our ‘weekend’). My roommate also works at Today’s, but not in copy editing, so she never gets Sundays off. Anyways, so on my off-day today I went to my Arabic lesson for a few hours, then headed back home to the Asian side of the city.

Since my roommate is the one who makes dinner the vast majority of the time, I figured since I had the day off and the time, I’d cook dinner tonight. On my way home from class I stopped by the grocery store and picked up some stuff, then rushed home to get everything cooked by the time she got home. I called her (to try to get an estimate of when she’d be back, and to ask her to pick up some fruit, as I didn’t want to carry a watermelon in addition to the other groceries I’d gotten), but no response; she probably didn’t hear her phone. Anyhow, she called me back later, just as I was chopping salad ingredients. I asked what she was up to and when she’d be home, and she told me it’d be a bit because she was meeting someone for dinner down the street. Fool me! She’d mentioned last week that she’d be going out and having dinner tonight, but I completely forgot. So now there’s all this food just sitting around. It doesn’t look so appetizing when there’s nobody to share it with. I’d lit candles on the living room table and set it and everything, and now I just have to slop all this food back into the pots and stuff. Boo. I’m like a housewife gone horribly wrong, live I Love Lucy status lol.

Yemen plans update

Sooooo…. insha’Allah I will be traveling to Yemen for three weeks during Ramadan to study Arabic at the Yemen Institute for the Arabic Language (YIAL). My flights leave İstanbul on Sept. 6, arriving again on Sept. 28 insha’Allah. Should be quite the experience!

Mediterranean jellies

While I was writing this article on jellyfish population increase in Turkey, a professor I’d asked to interview sent me the following, very cute email:

“Dear Davenport,

I have no experience with the jellies in the Mediterranean Sea. Yes, I observed the same results when I participated to the cruises in the Mediterranean Sea. Please contact …”

 

Enjoy the jellies!