U of A Sisters’ Circle

Assalamu alaikum!
After the halaqa on Imam al-Ghazali’s text Alchemy of Happiness,  some of the sisters were asking for background on Imam al-Ghazali and his life. Sorry about the delay

A speech on Imam al-Ghazali’s life by Shaykh Husain Abdul Sattar: Finding the Core - Imam Ghazali’s Journey

Article by Dr. G.F. Haddad: Imam al-Ghazali

And here’s the trailer for the movie Al-Ghazali - The Alchemist of Happiness :

“… the environmental crisis has deep spiritual, philosophical, and religious roots and causes. It is not merely the result of bad engineering.”

“As soon as nature became an ‘it’, there was bound to be this [crisis].”

 “In traditional societies, nature was seen as one’s wife, but the modern West turned it into a prostitute.”

 “The battle was lost as soon as the Hands of God were cut off from nature.”

“Secular humanism changed the views of people about all things from a theomorphic to a homomorphic or homocentric point of view.”

“… in the Muslim world…people are still tied to their faith, but as far as nature is concerned, they have lost the traditional understanding of it, and are just aping what is happening in the West.”

“…has so many beautiful verses [of poetry] on this subject. It is part and parcel of our culture. In fact, in order to become completely industrialized, the champions of industrialization and modernization are destroying that culture. We are negating much of our heritage.”

“Fish begin to stink from the head, not the tail.” Think of the heads of state and governments who make bad decisions based on faulty policies as the heads of the fish, but remember, it is the tail that propels one through the water.

“The pollution of the environment is kind of an eleventh hour externalization of the pollution within us.”

“… in order for [the Muslim world] to come out of its current position of weakness, Muslims have to go against their own traditional culture—a culture that was imbued with the love of nature, in a spiritual sense.”

“Now, if the rest of the world wants to industrialize at the expense of the natural world as did the West, if you want to turn the Amazon jungle into what the Europeans did to the forests of Europe centuries ago (when the lung of the earth was still functioning) the ecological balance…will be destroyed.”

“…if we try to destroy nature, nature will always have the final say. Nature has direct contact with God; it is not responsible to us. It is we who are responsible for its protection, because of the function that God has given us. He has given us intelligence, free will, and other powers which we must use rightly, always remembering that we are His vicegerents. We are not “our own man”; we are God’s man. And in the same way that God makes the sun rise and set every day, we must try to preserve the harmony of nature instead of destroying it.”

In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful

A Secret History

Mohammad Akram Nadwi, a 43-year-old Sunni alim, or religious scholar, has rediscovered a long-lost tradition of Muslim women teaching the Koran, transmitting hadith (deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) and even making Islamic law as jurists. […]

Barring Muslim women from education and religious authority, Akram argues, is akin to the pre-Islamic custom of burying girls alive. “I tell people, ‘God has given girls qualities and potential,’ ” he says. “If they aren’t allowed to develop them, if they aren’t provided with opportunities to study and learn, it’s basically a live burial.”

 

At today’s sisters’ circle meeting, Monazzah gave a really informative presentation on Muslim poetry.

At the end, we passed along a sheet on which we each added a few lines to form a continuous poem.

Look below for our poem: the voices of many sisters coming together in our “Poetic Fusion”. Great job you guys!

——————————–

“POETIC FUSION”

By the MSA sisters!

Sitting, thinking, contemplating- always in a daze

As if in search of an answer- making my way through this maze.

I’ve been moving through confusion, treading through this haze

Struggling with my nafs – apathy and laze

Apathy forever consuming

A hollow void ascend

A dark spiral following

So easy to descend

Life goes like flowing water

My destiny awaits in the midst

But is it destiny or fate?

That questions me time and again

Creeping and crawling, the darkness has crystallized

Within me, now all faith has been compromised

The faith through this haze, although in a daze

I have been moving through this confusion

Creeping and crawling out of this delusion

Fight away for the strength of my nafs

To conquer this all, I say a prayer with each of my breaths

Oh Allah guide me to the path of those most blessed

The path that would lead me to paradise so beautiful

A place so great, a place so fruitful

Allah showed us the way with this beautiful deen

And everyday it occurs to me to say Alhamdulillah and Ameen.

For our Muslim community to sustain itself in the West, we must reconnect with our Islamic tradition of Sacred Knowledge.

If you want to join a sisters’ study circle taking the Sunnipath Introduction to Islamic Belief course, please email ghani.sana@gmail.com ASAP

By the end of the course you will understand both Islamic beliefs as well as their relevance to your life. The emphasis will be on bringing the meanings and implications of these beliefs into your life – so that your daily life is ‘touched by faith’ and so that you can begin to look at life around you in light of your beliefs.

Seek Knowledge in China

For the first Sisters’ Circle Meeting of the semester, we discussed communication and creativity in da’wah and dialogue using the example of the Muslim scholars in
China. Read the awesome article above to learn more!

SAKEENAH is the educational foundation founded by Shaykh Abdallah Adhami. It aims to devote the sacred Islamic sciences, along with the various disciplines of human knowledge, to the enrichment of people’s lived reality, and toward a communal definition of Islam in the Western experience.

Check out Shaykh Abdallah’s lectures! The one on Love for the Prophet (sallallahu alaihi wa sallam) (P1, P2) is very moving. If you showed up last sisters circle meeting, you’ll see the stories mentioned were mainly from this speech :).

“In embarrassment, I confess my love, and yet, my longing draws me near. I should absorb my shame in silence, but I feel that I will combust if I do not speak. What I want is impossible and even preposterous, but since childhood this has been my singular dream. I want the laws of nature to break, I want history to revert, and I want to spend a single day in your company. I want to hug your hand, kiss your head, feel your heart, and implore you to pray for me. I want to study your movements, your gestures, the blink of your eye, and memorize your every step. I want to imbue every cell in my brain and every nerve in my body with a sense of your balance and dignity. I want to mend my heart by fully absorbing your beauty, and then rebuild my faith in humanity. Yet, I know that if the earth and nature could not pause to grant you relief, history will not revert, and I will have to go on living in my visions and dreams.”

– KM Abou El Fadl on Dreaming of the Prophet (sallallahu alaihi wa sallam)

The Sunnah as Primordiality

by Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad

“For the Prophet is humanity itself, in its Adamic perfection. In him, and in his style of life, the highest possibilities of our condition are realised and revealed. And this is beauty itself: the word jamil, beautiful, which is one of his names, refers also to virtue. Ihsan, the Prophetic state of harmony with God, means the engendering of husn, or beauty.”

This is a paraphrase of a passage from Ihya Ulum al-Din (it’s found in the article)

‘The Messenger of God (s) was the mildest of men, but also the bravest and most just of men. He was the most restrained of people; never touching the hand of a woman over whom he did not have rights, or who was not his mahram. He was the most generous of men, so that never did a gold or silver coin spend the night in his house. If something remained at the end of the day, because he had not found someone to give it to, and night descended, he would go out, and not return home until he had given it to someone in need. From what Allah gave him [...] he would take only the simplest and easiest foods: dates and barley, giving anything else away in the path of Allah. Never did he refuse a gift for which he was asked. He used to mend his own sandals, and patch his own clothes, and serve his family, and help them to cut meat. He was the shyest of men, so that his gaze would never remain long in the face of anyone else. He would accept the invitation of a freeman or a slave, and accept a gift, even if it were no more than a gulp of milk, or the thigh of a rabbit, and offer something in return. He never consumed anything given in sadaqa. He was not too proud to reply to a slave-girl, or a pauper in rags. He would become angered for his Lord, never for himself; he would cause truth and justice to prevail even if this led to discomfort to himself or to his companions.
‘He used to bind a stone around his waist out of hunger. He would eat what was brought, and would not refuse any permissible food. If there was dates without bread, he would eat, if there was roast meat, he would eat; if there was rough barley bread, he would eat it; if there was honey or something sweet, he would eat it; if there was only yogurt without even bread, he would be quite satisfied with that.
‘He was not sated, even with barley-bread, for three consecutive days, until the day he met his Lord, not because of poverty, or avarice, but because he always preferred others over himself.
‘He would attend weddings, and visit the sick, and attend funerals, and would often walk among his enemies without a guard. He was the most humble of men, and the most serene, without arrogance. He was the most eloquent of men, without ever speaking for too long. He was the most cheerful of men. He was afraid of nothing in the dunya. He would wear a rough Yemeni cloak, or a woolen tunic; whatever was lawful and was to hand, that he would wear. He would ride whatever was to hand: sometimes a horse, sometimes a camel, sometimes a mule, sometimes a donkey. And at times he would walk barefoot, without an upper garment or a turban or a cap. He would visit the sick even if they were in the furthest part of Madina. He loved perfumes, and disliked foul smells.
‘He maintained affectionate and loyal ties with his relatives, but without preferring them to anyone who was superior to them. He never snubbed anyone. He accepted the excuse of anyone who made an excuse. He would joke, but would never say anything that was not true. He would laugh, but not uproarously. He would watch permissible games and sports, and would not criticise them. He ran races with his wives. Voices would be raised around him, and he would be patient. He kept a sheep, from which he would draw milk for his family. He would walk among the fields of his companions. He never despised any pauper for his poverty or illness; neither did he hold any king in awe simply because he was a king. He would call rich and poor to Allah, without distinction.
‘In him, Allah combined all noble traits of character; although he neither read nor wrote, having grown up in a land of ignorance and deserts in poverty, as a shepherd, and as an orphan with neither father nor mother. But Allah Himself taught him all the excellent qualities of character, and praiseworthy ways, and the stories of the early and the later prophets, and the way to salvation and triumph in the Akhira, and to joy and detachment in the dunya, and how to hold fast to duty, and to avoid the unnecessary. May Allah give us success in obeying him, and in following his sunna. Amin ya rabb al-alamin.’