So many of us like to listen to Islamic music. One particular artist that many of us know is Native Deen. Personally, I’m not the biggest fan of them. Although the message is great, some of their music is too cheesy-sounding for my tastes. Khair, that’s just me. There is one song, though, that is really tight.

Everytime I ride in Rhonda’s car, she’s always bumping that CD. I’m not even kidding you, that is all she plays ever. Totally fine, I mean, subhan’Allah that’s a great thing, right? Fo sho we should all be striving to cut out the stupid meaningless music we listen to in our lives and instead listen to more music with an Islamic theme. So the CD starts off, and all I hear are some dudes talking. I’m thinking, “What the heck? Rhonda listens to some waackkk music.” But then it starts off, and all the guy says is “AlhamdulilLah, alhamdulilLah, alhamdulilLah, alhamdulilLah, alhamdulilLah, alhamdulilLah, subhan’Allah.” And they just repeat that the whole song. Two and a half straight minutes of it! It sounds like it would be so lame, but subhan’Allah it’s totally not & the idea is awesome! Imagine. You’re sitting there singing along to this song, and you’re totalllyyy getting dhikr points the whole time. These are the kinds of songs we need, man, ones that help us to remember Allah (swt) and get thawab for it.

Okay, so I thought my subjugation to this song was over the first time I heard it, but no. That thing gets stuck in your head BIG TIME. I don’t mean like only for a couple or minutes or two, but it’s in there for the whole day. So I noticed myself singing it to myself as I’m walking to class or just standing around or waiting for the brothers to begin prayer. Sometimes I would think to myself, “Wow, this song really needs to get out of my head.” But then I figured why should it? If it’s only helping me, then what’s the use of trying to rid myself of it? Interestingly enough, after a few times of having listened to that song and having had it stuck in my head, making dhikr became an instinct for me when I would walk to class or when I had nothing better to do. Sure I didn’t and don’t remember to do it everytime, but generally speaking, it’s become more habitual than before.

So I just wanted to bring that up cause I forget about it sometimes. Seriously, half the time we’re mindlessly walking around campus from one place to another. Every now and then we’ll see something that sparks our interest, glance over, get bored really quickly, and look away. So why not make better use of that time? It’s never a waste of time to remember our Creator. Even short sayings like “alhamdulilLah” or “subhan’Allah” or “Allahu akbar” are worth it. I don’t know about you, but I can use any good deed, be it big or small, to help myself get closer to Jannah. Luckily, simply making dhikr can help! So let us all remind ourselves to do this as often as possible cause not only does it help you get closer to achieving the ultimate goal in life, but it’s also an awesome way to recenter yourself throughout the day. If nothing else, at least listen to the Native Deen song. Hopefully it’ll get stuck in your head like it was stuck in mine. =)

Assalamu `alaykum,

I found this article in an older TIME magazine last night while I was chilling with my mom at the hospital. It’s about two months old, but I thought it was pretty interesting. Also, note the Daniel Pipes reference.

Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

Minnesota’s Teetotal Taxis

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

(above: Rasheed Gardaad, 29, a cab driver for the past five years, waits in a line at an airport in Minnesota, where Muslim cab drivers don’t want to carry alcohol in their cars.)

Even in religion, where the most insignificant act has cosmic implications, there are big stories and little stories. When an image of Mother Teresa turns up on a cruller, the call is easy. But when a disturbance occurs in the fraught, supersaturated relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, elephantiasis may occur. Witness the tale of Minnesota’s Muslim cabbies.

Starting in 2000, some of the 600-plus Somali Muslims who make up three-quarters of the fleet serving Minneapolis–St. Paul International Airport stopped picking up passengers who were carrying duty-free liquor boxes or other obvious signs of booze, returning to the end of the cab line rather than disobey the Prophet Muhammad’s ban on bearing alcohol. Their Islamic jurisprudence might actually have been a little shaky: most varieties of Islam hold that while Muslims in a non-Muslim country may not drink alcohol, they may carry it, something cabbies in most American cities do without a qualm. Still, by last year the total number of refusals topped 5,000, with as many as 77 a month. Passengers spoke of being rebuffed by several cabs in a row. So the airport reached out to the drivers, and along with the local chapter of the Muslim American Society (MAS), came up with a seemingly ingenious solution: equip alcohol-bearing cabs with a roof light in one color, dry cars with another, and have dispatchers steer passengers accordingly.

That’s when the matter began to take on a larger significance. Word got out, talk radio blabbed, and “at one point,” says airport spokesman Patrick Hogan, “we were getting a [negative] e-mail every 90 seconds.” Some were vile. Others posed good questions: What would keep dozens of other religious groups from demanding their own preferences, with chaos ensuing? Finally there was the full-dress clash-of-civilizations argument, spun by professional anti-Muslim watchdogs like Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum. The hacks’ demands, he wrote, posed “potentially major implications for the future of Islam in the United States.” Danish TV showed up. Al-Jazeera did a live feed.

The airport brass retreated. This month it called for a 30-day airport-license suspension for first-time nonpickups and two years for the second instance. Late last week, Hassan Mohamud, the MAS representative, was still talking feverishly about finding what he called “an alternative within both systems–the one they believe and the one they are living with.”

That may be tough. Immigrants to the U.S., and others, often think freedom of religion is absolute, but it is balanced against other rights or commercial concerns, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 states that “reasonable accommodation” of faith can be trumped by “undue hardship” to an employer. Courts have denied Muslims time off for Friday prayers during business hours. A Roman Catholic pharmacist lost his lawsuit last year against Wal-Mart, which fired him after he refused to fill or transfer orders for birth-control pills.

The Twin Cities taxi issue is thus a rite of passage for both the Muslim community and its neighbors. The cabbies may be wrong, but it takes a special sort of paranoia to turn their action into the kind of constitutional threat that caused Pipes, when he heard the airport’s new stance, to trumpet NO ISLAMIC LAW IN MINNESOTA.

A kind of Islamism does exist in Minneapolis: some Somalis demonstrated there recently in support of the brief Islamist takeover of their homeland. But Rasheed Garaad, 29, whom I talked to as he waited to join a terminal cab line, didn’t connect his pickup policy with a desire to change this country.

“I don’t practice Islam as much as back home,” he says. “I just go to Friday prayers. I try to enforce the laws that I think are very important, like praying five times and not drinking alcohol. There are, like, nine different things dealing with alcohol that are forbidden, and for me, I don’t want to do anything with it. This is how we were in Somalia.” As a result, he says, he has bypassed three fares in five years.

What if a judge ruled he had to drive customers with alcohol or find another job? “It would hurt my beliefs,” he says. “But there are rules in this country. If we want to impose our rules and our beliefs, we should stay where we came from. If the court finds that what we are doing is wrong, then it’s wrong. I could get another job.” That sounds both Islamic and realistic.

With reporting by Keri Pickett

Assalamu `alaykum,

So I somehow came across this really cool website. I’m not sure how I found it, either through google or through another blog, however I really wanted to share it. If you guys have heard of HijabMan, he was the one that started the site. Basically he posts pictures of Muslims doing various things every day. Okay, explaining it like that makes it sound sort of lame, but it’s really tight. Subhan’Allah it is totally amazing to see the variety of Muslims we have in this world. From Turkey to Malaysia to Egypt to America, Muslims are everywhere and in so many different shapes and forms. There are so many different personalities that a Muslim can be, one is a muezzin while the other plays his guitar, however in the end everyone comes together in a beautiful way to identify themselves as Muslims.

One thing of which we should remind ourselves is that we really need to reach out to all our fellow Muslim brothers and sisters. Many times it’s easy to make a snap judgement of other Muslims when you first meet them. Girls might see other girls who don’t wear hijab or who wear more provocative clothing, and boys may see other boys who appear to be a little too friendly with girls. Just through these observations, many of us make judgements about another person’s iman and refuse to believe that they may have a strong faith in God. However, like I said in the last entry, no one has the right to judge another like that except Allah (swt). We should not make assumptions about one another and assume that there is no hope for someone who is straying off the right path. Instead, we should adopt an attitude to help those who are shaky or wavering in their iman. One of the beauties of the brotherhood in Islam is that Muslims can help one another to increase their iman and to gain more knowledge about the deen.

Unfortunately we often forget those Muslims who are different from us. The pious brother who helps out at the masjid might forget that brother who chooses to express his love for Allah (swt) through music and vice versa. That’s what I really dig about the website. Through it, we find individuals of so many different backgrounds, so many different interests, yet all are Muslim. I think it’s pretty tight. And if we really do help one another out, then we’ll become a stonger ummah insha’Allah. Not only that but insha’Allah things like this can help wash away those stereotypes many people have about Muslims (and that includes both Muslims themselves and non-Muslims as well). Anyway, something to ponder, in any case. Here are some pics from the site:

Wa `alaykum asalam,
Zoya

P.S. I know he hasn’t updated the site in a bit, but the archives are still really cool to look through! Hope you guys like it insha’Allah. =D

Assalamu `alaykum,

So everytime I’m in the check-out line at Albertsons, I see magazine after magazine about celebrities and their lives. Sometimes the headlines refer to so-and-so doing drugs or another person who just got divorced, but recently there’s been a trend of weight loss stories. It seems like all of these celebrities feel the need to get to the point where they’re so thin that their bones start sticking out. I’m all for being a healthy human being, I mean we’re supposed to take care of our bodies, right? But I feel like as these celebrity weight loss stories gain more and more coverage, our standards of what an “okay weight” is continue to become more and more strict.

Transformation after transformation is engrained into our head, so much that we believe that Hollywood is reality. No doubt these people are real and are living in this world, but they’re also getting paid for being in the spotlight and for what their bodies look like. Show business isn’t exactly an area you head into if you’re preaching about everyone’s inner beauty. It’s a part of their actual job to have a certain body, good skin, etc. However, just because the media is beginning to focus on the external so much does not mean we should follow suit.

Like I said, it’s totally fine to want to be healthy and to want to be fit. However, like everything, there is a limit. You don’t want to get to the point where you’re so thin that it becomes unhealthy for you. Just because the average size in Hollywood is a zero does not mean that it isn’t okay for you to be more than that. Unfortunately, I really feel that that’s one of the major problems for women today. They feel this immense pressure to look like those women portrayed on T.V. (the models, etc), but why? Who said that that is the way women should look? Why do we think we are judged from the outside-in versus the inside-out?

Our purpose in this life is not to look beautiful or to be the thinnest human beings ever. And I speak for myself first before anyone else because I know that I’ve definitely felt that pressure before. I’ve definitely stressed out about the size of my thighs or what size jeans I wear. I understand that unfortunately it is a part of living in this world that people tend to judge you often just by your appearance. However, we should all remember that no one can truly judge us except Allah (swt). And by whose Mercy are we in this dunya? Who are we working to please here? The answer should be Allah (swt) and nothing else.

Again, I’m not saying that being fit is a bad thing. It’s a wonderful thing, and we should all try to stay in shape. My qualm is with the fact that so often these changes we want to make about ourselves are not for the sake of Allah (swt). Many people want to get in shape just because they want to impress so-and-so significant other or because they’re afraid of what people say behind their backs. If you’re doing it just for the sake of impressing someone, chances are you won’t really be making a lifestyle change as opposed to a quick drastic change to try and get fit in time for him. But also, backbiting is not permitted in Islam, and if you don’t like the way someone looks, then keep it to yourself. Don’t think that you’re superior to someone just because he is not by societal standards nowadays the most beautiful person. Only Allah (swt) knows where our true beauty lies.

Another thing that I just want to mention is that, if you’re doing it for the right reasons, getting into shape becomes so much easier. If you’re doing it to show your thankfulness and appreciation for the blessed body that Allah (swt) has given to you, your methods to become fit can become a form of `ibadah. Imagine that! Even when you’re working out or being active or eating healthier, you can be worshipping Allah (swt) and gaining a reward for that. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s pretty tight. Getting in shape AND getting reward from Allah (swt) is some way nice multitasking. Of course, your intention has to be pure, though.

Basically, because I know I got lost in my rambling, this society has implanted in our brains that in order to fit in, we need to be these skinny creatures that are wasting away. For some reason, it’s becoming a trend, and people judge you solely based on your weight. However, first of all, they have no right to judge you because that right is only Allah’s. Also, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being different, with not conforming to that image. There are no specified guidelines for what is beautiful and what is not because someone’s outer beauty may have no match against your inner beauty. Have confidence in yourself, and be thankful for what you have! Stop dwelling on your flaws all the time and becoming sad about that, embrace and thank God for the thousands of privileges you do have. Your weight is something that can be changed at any time with some effort, and if you’re doing it to show appreciation for the body that Allah (swt) gave you, not only will it be easier to get back in shape, but it will bring you a reward. And come on, who has the audacity to turn down a reward from Allah (swt)?!

Wasalammmm

Assalamu `alaykum,

President Bush did a 5-nation tour of Latin America recently. Here’s some of the warm welcoming he got:

From Uruguay to Argentina to Colombia, protesters made it pretty clear what they thought of President Bush.

I find it pretty interesting that even South American countries are critical of Bush. Some people on this campus tend to think that if you don’t like Bush, you are either a Democrat or a Muslim. Obviously this isn’t the case. In fact, I believe it was reported somewhere that the majority of the nations of the world don’t really like Bush. Don’t take my word on it, especially because I can’t find an source for it, but I do remember reading it somewhere.

I really wish our country would wisen up, though. It’s about time that President Bush takes a step back and actual evaluates the results of his actions rather than taking another vacation at his farmhouse. How is the demolition of Iraq and its citizens benefiting them or even us? America has pretty much already broken Iraq. So why is America not only senselessly inducing the murder of thousands of innocent civilians but also adding even more on the shoulders of its responsibilities? Through this war, our country continues to fall into greater and deeper debt. At the rate it is growing, I honestly don’t know how we will be able to pay it off. Not only will this burden fall onto our shoulders, but it will continue to fall on those of future generations, generations that have not even been born yet and were not able to voice their opinions on this subject. I mean, think about it. Through the horrific slaughters and the unnecessary presence in Iraq, we are harming both Iraqi citizens and ourselves. Even if one feels no moral obligations to stop this war, he should at least remember that any compensation needed to continue America’s presence there will fall on his shoulders.

Latin Americans luckily do not necessarily share this burden with American citizens, yet they do recognize “el imperialismo,” or the imperialistic attitude, of Bush. If they can comprehend this, why can’t we? If those who will not even be held accountable for this war can understand the problems it produces, why can’t those whom this directly effects make a stance against it?

AlhamdulilLah, it does appear that people are wisening up. There was a massive anti-war rally in L.A. today. Unfortunately, I was not able to make it, but I applaud the efforts and statement of those who represented there. However, as I have learned from others, I find it essential to remind all of us that the action cannot stop here. Insha’Allah we need to continue these actions, make them bigger and larger, widen their breadth of effect, and help others to do the same. Through this and through the unity of our actions, our statements will be bolder and will resound even greater through the country. Insha’Allah let us try to imitate some of the examples that have been given to us through these rallies in Latin America.

Wa `alaykum asalam, peace outttt.