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.

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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.

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!

Should be away for three full days, and back online by Tuesday, insha’Allah. My friend is taking me with him to see Scotland, and take pictures of old castles and stuff. Pray for us to have another cool adventure, like the Assassins encounter.

This evening I watched this documentary about a group of children in Jenin, who were taught to act and draw, and to express their feelings of anger, both by forms of art and by demonstration and resistance, by an Israeli woman called Arna.

I won’t go into her story or talk too much about the documentary itself. The only thing I wanna talk about from the documentary is that Arna’s son, because of his interest in acting, etc, filmed this group of children when they were still about 9 and 10 years old. And then he filmed them again when they were teens, and then again most recently when they had grown up. It was a shock to find out that those kids acting the roles of animals as little kids, grew up to become resistance fighters.

Especially moving was the story of Yousef, who was the kid who always made everybody else laugh. His friends tell you the story of the events that changed him, and “hardened him on the inside”, causing him to drive into an Israeli market and shoot down civilians.  My tears started rolling at that point. One of Yousef’s friends was asked to explain his friend’s actions, which he did, in a way that really makes you cry. And you can tell that he was also expressing his own feelings, not just those of Yousef.

The director has a very shocking way of showing you the young men, all grown up, as fighters, and then suddenly showing a clip of them when they were little kids.

If you want to see the faces of the Palestinian fighters, martyrs, and suicide bombers- and then see what they were like when they were children… then you must see this documentary. I just never thought anything like this could have ever been possible. A must see!

During the summer of last year, the Azhar offered a summer program of teaching in the Azhar Mosque itself. This was a free and open program, started by the efforts of the imam of the Azhar, may Allah reward him amply for it, where scholars volunteer their time to teach lessons in the riwaqs (halls) of the Azhar mosque. It was meant to give the common person a taste of what it was like to get an education hundreds of years ago in the traditional system of education, before the Azhar became like your average modern university. In the old system, there were teachers sitting in every corner of the mosque, giving lessons on different subjects, and the students would go around listening to each one until they found a teacher they liked and stayed with him.

So I started attending the lessons, and I arrived one day to the Abbasid riwaq to listen to a lecture on Hadith terminology, but the previous class had not yet ended. Inside I saw that the hall was packed with men and women, listening to a very old shaykh giving a class on tajweed: proper recitation of the Qur’an. There was something about that old shaykh- something beautiful… I felt drawn to him, and decided to sit and listen to the last five minutes of his class.

The shaykh began talking about mankind’s ability to pronounce sounds, and how we differed from animals. But then, as a side note, he said: “Our shaykh, Saleh al-Jaafari- he was really the shaykh of all of us here at the Azhar, he gave us all tarbiya (spiritual upbringing)- he used to say to us: ‘Why don’t you go to the Zoo, to hear the Lion say “Allah, Allah!” as it roared?’ “. So I thought: alhamdulillah! I just found another piece of advice from my shaykh that I would not have found in books or in speeches about him!

And so a week or two later, I set off early in the morning to the Cairo Zoo…. But much to my horror, the Zoo was in an absolutely miserable condition. The birds looked like they were bored to death, and have surrendered themselves to just standing in the same position until they gave up their souls. The rhino- as mighty and powerful as it is- looked completely depressed, and very dirty, and I had no doubt that it was trying to think of a way to put an end to its miserable existence with its own horn. Cage after cage, I saw nothing but misery and depression… And likewise was the poor panther in its tiny cage, restlessly walking back and forth, no doubt feeling constricted, but helpless. But then, on the left, there was a cage for the lion, and another for the lioness. And I was completely surprised to see that, despite being in a cage no bigger than that of his restless neighbor, the lion was king. He sat there, his head held high, and he was proud. He was proud, and mighty, and awe-some. I just stared at it, mesmerized! Even in such horrible conditions, the lion remained a king.

Today I spent about two hours in the London Zoo, where animals fared much better than their Egyptian counterparts. I was delighted to be able to walk through special sections where the animals would be free to roam all around you, such as the African Birds section and a butterfly ‘house’. When I got to the Big Cats section, I went to see the tiger, who was fast asleep. Such a dangerous, such a powerful animal, was sleeping just three inches away from me, only a piece of glass separating us.

But then I heard roars. I quickly turned to the lions enclosure, to find a lioness roaring, and it was incredible. Then the lion, whose name was Lucifer, replied with a series of mighty roars…. And they were majestic. SubhanAllah! There’s just something about that lion, and his lioness… It’s like you can feel power coming out of them as they roared. It radiated from them..

Today I saw what is probably the most poisonous (and therefore dangerous) creature on earth: a tiny golden frog. And I saw the biggest (man-eating) snakes on earth. I also got to stand a few inches away from a tiger, and from the most dangerous hunting packs in the world- the African Hunting Dogs. But none of them deserve to even be compared to the lion, the undisputed King of the Jungle.

Assalamu Alaykum,

* I went to pray at the main mosque in London, the one in Regent’s Park. There was a white british convert in the bookshop with a very long beard and a turban. He picked up the new book that’s out about 1001 Inventions by Muslims, and he looked at the drawings of the inventors, and started laughing. Then he took the book over to the shop owner and said, “Look. All the greatest Muslim scientists and scholars, the ones who drove the progress of the civilization, had very long beards. Howe come today they try to tell us that long beards are a sign of backwardness?” Reminds me of the weak (and some say fabricated) hadith (which I like) that goes something like this: Turbans are the crowns of the Arabs. If they take them off, they will lose their glory.

* [Removed at later date]

* I heard a German college professor say yesterday that London is the secret capital of the Middle East. He was talking about all the events that happen here that are related to the Middle East, etc. Hopefully I’ll get to experience some of that while I’m here.

* Poverty turned out to be a disease after all. A gender-specific one, hitting only women. They seem to have found a way to balance their budgets by wearing skirts with just enough fabric to cover two inches of their legs. And if it’s freezing cold? They just walk faster.

And finally, there’s some great people here. I’m really excited about living here for a while, and already thinking about the possibility of staying longer. So far it’s been a completely positive experience. Alhamdulillah.