Riyadat an-Nafs

There once was a king who heard about this great shaykh that lived alone in a forest, and many great things were attributed to him. So the king had him brought to his palace, and prepared a great banquet in his honor. But sitting in front of all that food, the shaykh just took a little piece of bread.

“Subhnal-Allah, What a zaahid you are!” Exclaimed the king! Zuhd, usually translated as asceticism, means to want little of something, or to abstain from it.

“But you are more of a zaahid then I am” replied the shaykh to the king.

Astonished, the king asked him how that could possibly be.

“It is because I have zuhd in regards to this world, which is nothing. But you, O king, you have zuhd of the Afterlife, which is everything.”

You see, Zuhd is NOT abstaining from what is good. Zuhd is knowing what has worth, and what doesn’t. The Zahid simply realizes that the more he takes from this worthless and ephemeral world, the less he gets in the everlasting Paradise. If you ask a child below the age of four (I think), whether he prefers a piece of chocolate right now, or three pieces of chocolate at the end of the day, he will ask for the one piece right now. So you see, the Zaahid is simply someone with the mental development of a 4+ yr old: he knows he’s gaining by temporarily abstaining. The trick is to know – and to always keep in mind- that what you’re getting is far greater than what you’re giving up.

Seen from that regard, Zuhd isn’t what people think it is. It is actually selfishness, because it is wanting the most for yourself. It’s just selfishness directed in the proper way. It is intelligent selfishness. We are all selfish. We all want as much as possible for ourselves. It’s just that some people don’t see that the more they take from this world, the less they will have in the hereafter.

Why do you think highly religious people are so generous? Why do you think our Messenger salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam was more generous than the swift wind? It is because they don’t see themselves as losing anything when they give away money. They see that what they give away is worthless, and what they’re getting in return is priceless. As was revealed to us in a Hadith Qudsi, the entire world isn’t worth as much as the wing of a fly in the eyes of Allah.

People have to understand this- to put things in perspective. A lot of people think that Zuhd and extreme generosity are these magical ideals that are reserved for the most selfless people. No, it is the work of intelligent people, who are just as concerned with their own wellbeing as anyone else, or even far more. They just have the insight to see what is actually good for you and what isn’t. They know what “goods” they should slavishly work to attain.

I end with the story of Sultan al-Ulamaa Izz al-Din ibn Abd al-Salaam and his wife, may Allah be pleased with them. One time, Damascus was hit with a great increase in prices, and people began selling their estates and gardens for extremely cheap prices, so they can afford to pay for their living expenses. So the wife of al-Izz (as he is known), gave him the gold and jewelery that she had in her possession and said, “go buy us with this gold a garden to serve as our summer resort.” So he took that gold, and sold it, and gave away all the money in charity.

So when he went back home, his wife asked, “did you buy us a garden?”

He said “yes, I have bought you a garden in Paradise.”

And all she said in response was, jazaka Allahu khayran. May Allah reward you well!

SubhanAllah. Look at her contentment with that, even though it’s not what she had intended at all. But she realized that he had gotten her a far greater deal than what she had in mind….

So don’t marvel at the generosity of the super-generous Muslim, or the zuhd of the famous zuhhaad. They’re just good businessmen who simply know a good deal when they see one!

And this should help you understand as well, that Zuhd is not a goal to be attained in and of itself. One shouldn’t say “I want to be a zaahid“. It simply is not a goal or an ideal to want to attain for the sake of attaining it.. It is an outcome. A side-effect of something else: of proper understanding. But proper understanding alone is not enough, because you need with it constant remembrance of Allah and of Paradise. Otherwise it’s very easy to forget the hereafter and to be fooled by the things we see around us.

If you want to strive for anything, strive for constant remembrance of Allah, the Majestic. And if you do, and you think about what He the Most Generous has in store for you in the hereafter, then zuhd and generosity will necessarily follow. But to simply want to live like so-and-so or so-and-so because you read about their zuhd, then there is no merit in that. You’re confusing the goal with its effects.
Now tell me: are you a good businessperson?

Bism Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim wa bi-hamdih,

wal salaatu wal salaamu ‘alaa sayyidini Muhammad, whose recitation of the Qur’an has no equal in the world, and upon his family and companions.

I have never really thought about Qur’an reciters until recently. Many people seem to know different reciters and have their favorites, but I couldn’t tell you who’s who from hearing them. In Egypt I did start listening to the Kuwaiti superstar shaykh Mishari Rashid, but I don’t like him as much any more. I seem to be attracted to older voices nowadays.

My interest in reciters was sparked recently in a family dinner when people were discussing my grandfather’s favorite reciter, Mustafa Ismail. It seems he liked him the most, as well as the older Muhammad Ref’at. But the problem with Ref’at is that he lived in an age before good recordings were made, and you can’t really find anything good for him. Mustafa Ismail came after him, and luckily much of his work has survived.

Now shaykh Mustafa Ismail is not your average reciter. He was a genius in the realm of sound, who “understood” music the way Mozart did (have you seen the movie Amadeus?) People who want to learn Arabic music or song have to learn all the different maqamaat, or scales, which are far more numerous and complex than what you would fine in Western music. It seems that shaykh Mustafa Ismail understood these maqamaat without learning them so well, that it was as if he himself invented music theory.

Noted music composer Ammar El-Shereii tried to analyze the sheikh’s musical approach by replaying a few short recitations: “His recitation was miraculous, and he was a musical miracle as well. He was unique.”

Analyzing a different verse, the composer says,

“He would go up to the very highest notes of the maqaam and he would do it with ease, enjoying himself. It is enough to drive you crazy. This man must have understood music very well, and must have meant what he was doing. He uses Saba maqaam at first to demonstrate huzn (sadness), then moves to the C, or Agam, and then he takes his voice high up the notes when he says “al-samaa” (the sky). If this were not a musician, then we the musicians know nothing, and must go home. He knew what he was doing and did it depending on his knowledge of the [seven] qira’at [readings] and his very special expressive ability.”

Dr. Ahmed Nuaina, an Egyptian Qur’an reader, said of him,

“Mostafa Ismail is not just one sheikh. He is several methods and sheikhs in one. You can find all musical forms in his recitation. Whenever I hear a sheikh say something, I remember that Sheikh [Ismail] had said it before. Reciters have failed to come up with anything new after him. He moves easily between maqamaat, and never went off tune. The listener’s ear never feels tired of him, because he always intrigues his listeners. He is creative in his qafalat [endings]. I can often predict qafalat, but his are always unexpected.”

He died in 1978, rahimahu Allah. He seems to be really big in Turkey because if you look him up online you find hundreds of Turkish pages dedicated to him.

You can find some of his work on YouTube, including this recitation from Surat Maryam, to which someone made a video from scenes of the famous Iranian TV show about the Virgin Mary. You can hear the audience shouting “Allah!” out of ecstasy and appreciation at the ends of the ayaat.

uk.youtube.com/watch?v=M5gqi0Q3UUE

The other reciter that I have discovered recently and absolutely love is Omar al-Qazabri, the most famous reciter in the lands of the Maghreb today.

If you go here www.mp3quran.net/omar.html

You will find Surat al-Kahf in the Warsh reading, and the rest of the Qur’an in the more famous Hafs reading. I downloaded al-Baqara (in Hafs) and found it stunning. Download it now!!! Al-Kahf in Warsh is also great. I wish I can find more by him in Warsh.

See also this video of him leading 30,000 people in prayer in the Sultan Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca, bringing them to tears. Such a moving recitation.

uk.youtube.com/watch?v=TViGaNTUftc

. 

Sayyidna Abu Hurairah (radi Allahu anhu), narrates that the Messenger of Allah (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) said, “Extinguish fire with the Takbeer.”

And sayyidna Ibn Abbas (radi Allahu anhu) has narrated that the Messenger of Allah (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) said, “When you see a fire, then recite the Takbeer for it will extinguish the fire.”

 I remembered this two days ago at a restaurant here called Nando’s, where you get to choose the level of spiciness of your meal, and I went for “Very Hot.” After the fiery flames of my veggie pitta had engulfed and burned most of my mouth I remembered the above hadiths and began to repeat Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! (In my mind of course, as to not cause a security alert).

 Now I only remembered to say that when the hotness was beginning to subside, so I can’t tell for sure whether the Allahu Akbar helped with that kind of metaphorical flame, but it did go right away. Again, it was on the way of subsiding anyway, so let me know the next time you eat something spicy and recite the takbir, because I have to stop eating spicy food for (Traditional Chinese) medical reasons, and won’t get to test it.

 On a more serious note, takbir also extinguishes the fire of the nafs if it flares up with bad desires or thoughts, and Shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari has described takbir as a sword in cutting them up.

I and many other Muslims know pathetically little about our history (and I got a BA in it!) I had to find out about a great Muslim ruler and hero, not from proud Muslims who know and teach their history, but from the proud British who display his most intimate belongings in their palaces and castles as trophies. As a hunter would display the skin of a tiger with head and teeth on a wall, the British royalty and military displayed, among other things, his personal body armor, swords and daggers, in glass boxes. And in what I thought was untactful and tasteless, they display a portrait of one of his wives.

The first of these belongings I saw displayed in the Castle of Edinburgh, which celebrated Scottish military achievements, and yesterday I saw many more in Windsor Castle, residence to the British monarchy for more than 900 years.

So who was that Tiger? Before we come to that, a few words are necessary about the Mughal Empire and the Muslim rule of India.

In the words of Shaykh Muhammad bin Musa al-Shareef, the Mughal Sultanate:

controlled the entire Indian subcontinent from the Bengal to the Punjab on the borders of Iran, and from Ghazna (Afghanistan) to the Indian Ocean- an enormous and magnificent state. And we have lost this state with our hands- a precious possession, we lost. The Muslims cry over al-Andalus, but al-Andalus would not even make a province, not even 1/100th of the area of India. And if the Muslims cry over Cordoba and Alhambra, then they have lost [in India] colossal palaces with which the castles of Cordoba, Alhambra, and Grenada cannot be even weighed or compared. And if they cried over a few thousands Muslims who died as martyrs in al-Andalus, then in India millions of Muslims have died. There is not even one inch of the Indian lands, almost, except that on it is pure Muslim blood, and upon which the adhaan was heard loud and clear for hundreds of years. Yet we cry over al-Andalus and forget India- thus the Muslims forget their history. They do not know their history in India, and it is a bright and radiant history- great, grand, and beautiful.

Shaykh Muhammad bin Musa al-Shareef said this when talking about one of the great rulers of the Mughal Empire: the pious and just Aurangzeb, a rare jewel adorning the history of Muslim civilization. But Aurangzeb is too grand to speak of as a side-note, so his is another time. We are now concerned with another great Muslim ruler from the Indian subcontinent: Sultan Fateh Ali Tippu (aka Tippu Sultan), ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore. As I am completely ignorant about the history of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, I do not know this Kingdom’s relation to the Mughal Sultanate. I need to get a book about that as soon as possible.

But here are some tidbits about him:

Tipu Sultan was a learned man- a good poet too- and an able soldier. He was a devout Muslim. The majority of his subjects were Hindus and they were his staunch loyalists for he was a benevolent ruler. His mission was to liberate his land from the yoke of the colonials, and made an alliance with the French in order to fight the British colonialists. He and his father fought many battles against them, and he helped his father defeat the British in the Second Mysore War.

In the words of a historian of India:

Tipu was an enlightened ruler, the sheet-anchor of whose state-policy was the well-being of all his subjects irrespective of caste, creed or class. He took his stand on the bedrock of humanity, regarding all his subjects as equal citizens to live in peace, harmony and concord.

He died in the year 1799, with sword in hand, defending the capital of his kingdom. The great Scottish author Sir Walter Scott even compared Napoleon to him, saying that while Napoleon might have fallen short of showing the same “liberality of conduct and political views” that were shown by Tippu’s father, Napoleon “might have shown the same resolved and dogged spirit of resolution which induced [Tippu Sultan] to die manfully upon the breach of his capital city with his sabre clenched in his hand.”

It is clear that he lived – and died- by his own words, “It is far better to live like a Tiger for a day than to live like a jackal for a hundred years”. It is said that in recent history, he is the only king to die on the battlefield.

.
In the words of distinguished historian of India, Professor Sheik Ali:

Tipu Sultan was a fascinating figure of 18th century, who offered his blood to write the history of free India. He had a vision and a mission in life. The vision was to make his people enlightened and prosperous, and mission was to liberate his land from the yoke of the colonials. His short but stormy rule is significant because of his view that only that life was worth living which would unfold the drama of human freedom, not only political freedom, but also social freedom, economic freedom, cultural freedom, and freedom from want, hunger, apathy, ignorance and superstition. His definition of State itself was organized energy for freedom.

For more information, see this website dedicated to him: www.tipusultan.org/

It rocks!

Best (non Arabic) Islamic bookstore I’ve seen….

It’s near Baker Street Station in London. Just across baker street from the Station. If you’re in London, go check it out.

I just saw a beautiful new translation of Shaykh Muhammad ibn Alawi al-Maliki’s Notions that Must Be Corrected, and urge everyone to get that book.

I wrote in a recent post how I needed to stay physically fit and couldn’t find a place to play badminton or someone to play with, but found a place to learn the sufi-based martial art of Pencak Silat for free and right next to where I live. The only problem with that Silat place is that they seem to have forgotten about this spiritual part of the art. It was in a tiny room, and there was more than a handful of beautiful girls there, not too modestly dressed. And even though I was hoping to find in Silat a means of mental and spiritual discipline, I somehow convinced myself that I wouldn’t be spiritually affected by their presence (or the occasional contact). And to be honest, in my first class, there was more than just occasional contact.

I only went once, and then the next week, before it was time to go again, I fell asleep while reading. And I kept wondering after that if falling asleep at the strangely early time of 6 p.m was meant to keep me from going again until I decided to stop going or something like that. Then, two days after that, I went to the Habib Umar talk in Peterborough with the brother that I met that day, who reads my blog. Before going to the talk, while sitting at the brother’s house, he showed me a diagram from a course of spiritual purification that he takes, that shows how the heart can be blackened by little black dots, one by one. According to that diagram, there are many channels that can bring black dots to the heart, such as the eyes, ears, limbs, etc. You have to purify them one by one in order to stop any blackness from entering the heart. So while talking about dots and how they can add up little by little without you realizing it, he mentioned as an example the Silat girls that I had written about in the previous post, and how they can cause these tiny dots to increase in my heart without me realizing it, until my heart is blackened. That really made me question myself on why I thought that I could escape such a thing in the beginning… What made me think that I’m special, or that I wouldn’t be affected by such a setting? At that point I decided that I was (most likely) to forget about Silat and try to find another alternative. I want to thank him about this naseeha he gave me by asking him to read the hadith that I have posted on my other blog here, which shows the greatness of sincere advice: (nuruddinzangi.blogspot.com/2007/11/naseeha.html)

Then that night, at the talk of Habib Umar, the venerable shaykh said that how could we expect to see the Messenger of Allah, salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam,  with eyes that see that which is haram? And this little sentence from a wali of Allah sealed the deal for me, and I made up my mind that I was definitely going to drop the Silat lessons, even if that means I don’t do any physical exercise for the rest of the year.

But subhan-Allah! As our Messenger salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam promised us, if we leave something for the sake of Allah, then Allah Most Generous will replace it with something better. And the very next day, when back in London, I found out that one of my new friends here in London: a) Loved Badminton and was looking for someone to play with  b) Has an extra racket that someone left at his house  and  c) There are Badminton courts right next to his house!

Bism Allah and hamd is due to Allah. And Salaat and As-Salam be upon Rasool Allah.

A dear brother who reads my blog alerted me to the fact that shaykh Habib Umar bin Hafiz was going to give a talk in Peterborough entitled “Winning Hearts and Minds” and offered to drive me there. So I went to the town that he lives in, and he invited me to a delicious lunch with a salad made from ingredients that he grew himself! Masha’Allah! I stayed at his house a bit and we talked, as it was the first time we met in person. Then we drove to Peterborough to listen to the talk.

I had heard the name “Habib Umar” a few times before but didn’t know anything about him. Turns out he’s the shaykh of Habib Ali al-Jafri, one of my favorite Muslim personalities today, and that he has a huge following in every part of the world, masha’Allah! See (www.radicalmiddleway.co.uk/) for information about that talk, and about the conference in which he took part this morning in Cambridge called The Common Word, which involved some of the biggest Muslim scholars out there.

The talk last night was short but amazing. He talked about the importance of our spiritual states for winning the hearts of the people. He said it is with our internal states, and how they are reflected in our bodies- primarily the faces- and our actions, that we win hearts, much more than with our words. He said that there is a saying that if you do not benefit from the sight of one the righteous, then you will not benefit from his words. He explained some relevant Quranic ayaat and hadiths in an amazing and beautiful way, and told us great and moving stories.

And just looking at this beautiful face of a great scholar, and a wali of Allah, was worth it. It made me long for Cairo- to visit shaykh Abd al-Ghani al-Jaafari.

And the dear brother who took me there gave me a most precious gift: a hat (the type that you can wrap a turban around), that has a representation of the noble sandals of the Prophet Muhammad (salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam) on top, to be one’s crown on one’s head. If only I had my books (they’re in Amman), I would have quoted some poetry about that, which can be found in Muhammad bin Alawi al-Maliki’s Al-Dhakha’ir al-Muhammadiyya and Al-Nabahani’s Al-Anwar al-Muhammadiyya min al-Mawahib al-Laduniyya.

Here is a translation of one line by Imam al-Nabahani that I found online:

So place it on top of your head,

for though in image a sandal, in reality a crown.

What a generous man he was- and he even let me stay the night at his house because it was too late to find a train back to London. He also gave me as a gift a poster with a picture of the tomb of the Prophet salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam, and it turns out that on the back there is a poem by shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari on the benefits of doing salaat on the Prophet salla Allahu alayhi wa sallam. So I said to him, alhamdulillah! I come to London, and the teachings of my shaykh follow me here!

I had dinner tonight at a Moroccan place near Finsbury Park Station. The waiter there was from a town called Ouijda, which is on the north coast, near the Algerian border.

Now my friend from Jordan lived in Ouijda, because he went to university there. He told me that the people of Ouijda are the best people you can ever meet, and that they had real values.

He told me a story that happened to him. He was moving out of his apartment, and needed to store all his furniture and belongings over the summer. A man offered to move all his stuff into a storage place and keep it for him for summer. When my friend asked him how much money he wanted in return, the man said, “whatever you want to pay.” Now my friend wanted to give him money but realized that he only had very little left. And when I say little, I mean little. Something like 10 dollars worth. The man saw that, took it, and said, “This money, it will go away. But rujoolah (manliness), that will stay.”

You see, this man uttered the words “as much as you want to pay”, and he was willing to uphold that word, even at the cost of losing a lot of money and exerting a lot of effort. He lived by the code of true man- the man of principle.

But the waiter, having lived here in London, had a different outlook on life. As soon as I started telling him all the good things I head about Ouijda he started saying apologetically, “But Ouijda does not have civilization like here in London. For example, women there can’t smoke in public, because that would be held shameful.”

Maybe that’s a good thing, I said.

“The people of Ouijda,” he continued, “are like the people of Upper Egypt (Sa’eedis) in Egypt”.

“I much prefer the people of the Sa’eed to the rest of Egyptians” I replied.

One of the horrible things about Egypt is that the entire bureaucracy is in Cairo, so if anyone anywhere in Egypt wants to do any kind of paperwork, they have to come to Cairo. And so, you get to see a lot of people from Upper Egypt walking the streets of Cairo, or riding the underground metro. They stand out from the rest, not just from their distinctive dress, but because they stand tall and proud, and you can tell from their hands and faces that they have toiled and worked hard all their lives. They are also the only ones who do not fear the Egyptian government, and they’re willing to go to war against the government at any time if they feel any encroachment on their rights, while the rest of Egyptians simply accept the fact that they’re living in a police state, under corrupt politicians and military rule.

The man of the Sa’eed is master- he bows to no one but Allah. You can feel his pride and his power- you can see it in his posture, in his limbs, in his rough tongue. But the Cairo city dweller strikes you as weak. If you pay any attention to the expressions and words of the Cairene Egyptians.. you will notice that they are all words of subservience and servitude. I once discussed this with my friend… we thought it must have been the fact that the Egyptian people have always been slaves to foreign powers for thousands of years, that their language is a language of docility and obedience. Everyone is addressed as a master. No one dares call anyone of any importance by a singular “you”, but only by the plural, or by addressing them with “Your Presence”.

But for the Cairo city-dwellers, the Sa’eedis are too “stubborn”, and are the butt of their jokes.

I remember in my Gym in Cairo, there was this French convert, who was on a loud and angry rant about the people of Egypt. “When I came here 25 years ago, everything was different! People were good! But now, the TV, the internet, the music channels- they have ruined the people!” He would complain. “The only people I hire at my house, the only people that I trust, are the Sa’eedis!” A man from Cairo tried to tell him that the Sa’eedis are stubborn, but the French man insisted that they were the only trustworthy and hardworking people in Egypt. Everyone else had been corrupted.

But that waiter in London, he didn’t care about the fact that my friend thought the people of his hometown were the best he had ever met. Nor did he care that they were people of real traditional values, people of honor. The people of his hometown, he lamented, would find it shameful for a woman to smoke in public… If only they can be rescued by civilization… “progress”!

George Square is the central square in the Scottish city of Glasgow. The square and the area surrounding it are beautiful, and the square itself features many statues of great figures, from royalty (Queen Victoria), to generals, politicians, poets, and scientists. In the middle is that of author William Scott, and it rises very high into the sky, in some kind of attempt to place him in the heavens. Now the statues were put there in order to glorify these great figures, if not immortalize them. But the thing is, their faces are covered with bird shit. Birds love nothing more than to sit on top of the heads of these statues, which has resulted in white streams of dried bird droppings covering the faces of all these statues. The result is that instead of looking glorious in the eyes of the people, these figures look the exact opposite.

Muslims, on the other hand, don’t build statues to glorify anyone. Walking around George Square, I couldn’t help but think of the miracle that I saw with my own eyes in al-Madina al-Munawwara (bil anwar al-Muhammadiyya). I was told by my friend who went to Umra before me that there are thousands of pigeons all over Medina, including the Baqee’ Cemetery in which more than 10,000 Sahaba and Ahlul Bayt are buried, but you don’t find a single pigeon dropping anywhere in that cemetery.

When I went to Umra, I saw that with my own eyes. There were thousands of pigeons everywhere in the cemetery. People even threw them food to eat there. But no matter how much you walk in the little pathways between the graves, you will not find a single pigeon dropping anywhere! I saw a single pigeon feather, but not a single dropping! SubhanAllah! All these great Muslims- in fact the greatest of all Muslims and of mankind in general- are buried there, without even as much as a tombstone to tell who is who. This is utmost humility. And Allah Most Generous has honored them by protecting them from pigeon droppings. On the other hand, the people here in the West try to glorify their great ones by statues, which end up being denigrated by bird droppings. Perhaps there is an important lesson here in humility.

The square also reminded me of what was known in Cairo as the Garden of the Everlasting Ones, which was a garden at the very top of a hill in downtown Cairo, close to the area of Imam al-Husayn, radi Allahu ‘anhu. The garden was full of statues of the Egyptian “greats”: authors, singers, actors, etc, who were supposed to live forever in the minds of the people. But all these statues were eventually moved out of that garden and into a museum, and the garden was given as a gift to the great wali of Allah, Shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari, who built his mosque there. And so the minarets of the Mosque of Shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari rose to the skies at the top of that hill, to join the minarets of the Mosque of Imam al-Husayn, symbolizing the closeness of descendant and ancestor. SubhanAllah! the statues were gone, and the Garden of the Everlasting Ones was left for the mosque and adjacent tomb of the great wali of Allah, Shaykh Saleh al-Jaafari, to be his resting place until his everlasting life in Paradise, insha’Allah.

Salla Allahu wa sallama upon sayyidna Muhammad and his family, whose lights can be seen clearly by those who visit them, if they look with their souls.

Bism Allah ar-Rahman ar-Rahim,

And Alhamdulillah. I thank Allah for all He gave me, and in particular I thank Him tonight for my last three days in Scotland, and for arriving safely back to London.

The Scotland trip was really interesting. I spend three whole days there, including one full day in Edinburgh. But it was my first day in Glasgow that was most special, and here is why.

I needed to pray my dhuhr-asr prayer of the traveler, and I wasn’t sure of the Qibla from the hotel, so I thought I should go find the local mosque, since I had to make my best effort to pray to the Qibla, and since I love seeing mosques in different cities. So I went to the central mosque in Glasgow, and while it didn’t look too nice on the outside, I really liked it on the inside. Most interestingly was the fact that in collaboration with something called The Open Museum, they installed a small gallery of historical Islamic artifacts in a hallway of the mosque, mostly from the 17th century or so. Masha’Allah.

So after praying, I was on my way out of the mosque when I decided to look at the table with all the fliers, to get an idea of what kinds of things go on there. I found this beautifully done flier that said,

“Islamic Studies Trust presents a course on The 77 Branches of Faith of Imam al-Bayhaqi, taught by Shaykh Abdul Aziz Ahmed including Nasheeds by Talib al-Habib. Plus free talks by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf & Shaykh Nuh Keller.”

Wow I thought. Let’s look at the date. Hmmm. Saturday 4th October 2008. 7:30 pm. Saturday, Saturday… Wait a minute! That’s today! 7:30! I have an hour! I asked a brother in the mosque if the address as shown was far away and he told me it should be close, so I set off to the pharmacy to buy some things I needed, went to the hotel and then straight to that address, arriving at exactly 7:25! I prayed Maghreb inside with two brothers, and went in as the lecture was about to start.

The lecture began and ended with the beautiful voice of Talib al-Habib (see www.nuralhabib.com/), and after that intro Shaykh Abdul Aziz Ahmed began to speak. I didn’t know anything about him at first, but he began by reading to us a hadith that he learned from Shaykh Muhammad bin Alawi al-Maliki, Shaykh Ali al-Jafri, and Shaykh Jibril Haddad. I was impressed. It seems that the shaykh gives a course there on a different book each time, giving one lesson every month until he finished it. He was about to start this new book (well it’s abridgment), and he gave a very interesting introduction, full of great information and stories. I urge anyone in Glasgow to go: It’s the first Saturday of every month. For more information see (www.islamiceventsglasgow.co.uk/)

I was also impressed by the people there. There was a great turnout, mashaAllah, full of great people of all sorts. I noticed some four white Scottish converts, two of whom married, and one with three young cute sons. I heard something about someone there representing deenport.com, which I don”t really know anything about, having seen their site once or so. In the end, there was free food, books for sale at great prices, as well as CDs of nasheeds of Talib al-Habib. They were also giving away free tapes by Shaykhs Nuh Keller and Hamza Yusuf, and told us to take as many as we wished!

So after the lecture I got to speak to Shaykh Abdul Aziz, and he invited me to his house, until I found a way to get back to the Glasgow city center. (I had no idea how to get back but I knew I’d find a way). Anyway, I went to his house and many people followed. Shaykh Abdul Aziz was a most generous host, and I had an absolutely amazing night getting to know some great people from all over the world (Malaysia, South Africa, Scotland, and more).

Then a most kind couple offered to drop me back at the hotel which was on their way home, and I think it was about 11:30 at night by then. What can I say? Alhamdulillah. Maybe I’ll get a chance to go visit that great community of Muslims again. Maybe for another lesson from Shaykh Abdul Aziz next month, or the one after.

Today I went again to Glasgow’s central mosque to pray before traveling back to London, and arrived there during the Asr prayer. I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of people there, and at the amount of children who were learning the Qur’an in circles after the salaat. What a great community!