/ Apr 04, 2019 05:52 PM / No Comments on My favorite book / 899 viewsWhat’s your favourite book?
There are four books that are my favorites, I do not really prefer one over another:
/ Apr 04, 2019 05:50 PM / No Comments on What should one ask God for? / 363 viewsWhat should one ask God for?
These are the things I ask God for daily:
/ Apr 04, 2019 05:17 PM / No Comments on Praying on a car, bus or airplane (salah) / 905 viewsCan I pray while sitting? For example if prayer comes while I’m sitting in the bus.
There are different opinions on that, but the general opinion is that performing the sunna (non-obligatory) prayers is permitted while riding on a horse or camel or riding in a car, bus or airplane.
As for the obligatory prayers, the general opinion is that it is not permissible to perform them like that unless one has an excuse. The person should delay the prayer until they are able to perform it normally. The exception is when a person fears that they will not have the opportunity to perform the prayer normally, in such a case it is permitted to perform the obligatory prayers in that way while sitting (if they cannot stand).
According to Imam al-Nawawi if the obligatory prayer is performed while riding, the person should redo the prayer once they are able. However other scholars believe that it is not necessary to make these prayers up.
Sources:
/ Apr 04, 2019 04:54 PM / 2 Comments on Making a Hawramani app / 294 viewsSalaam. Brother, would you consider to make an app to access your website via mobile (iOS or Android) in the future? I would love to access and read your latest posts like everyone usually do to access Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, but it's your website. You can name the app "Hawramani" 😀
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
Thank you for the suggestion. InshaAllah I will consider doing that. I have a brother who makes Android apps and it should not be too difficult for him to make an app for the Hawramani website.
/ Apr 04, 2019 04:52 PM / No Comments on How do you face your fears? / 248 viewsHow do you face your fears?
There are two aspects to dealing with fears. The first one is the medical aspect. Some people suffer from anxiety disorder which makes them much more fearful of things and situations than is normal. Such people will greatly benefit from medical help since there are many effective drugs that can strongly reduce anxiety and help such people lead a normal life.
The other aspect is the spiritual aspect. The closer you feel to God the easier it becomes to face your fears. By fully relying on God and keeping His remembrance alive in your heart constantly you will feel as if nothing can harm you unless God wants it, so you will feel much braver in facing your fears.
Please see this page for articles on feeling closer to God: Guides on Becoming a Better Muslim
/ Apr 04, 2019 04:44 PM / No Comments on How can I fix my relationship with my family? / 245 viewsHow can I fix my relationship with my family? I have ruined them and I don't know what to do. Do you have any advice? I am in need of help!
Please see this new answer and inshaAllah you will find it helpful: Improving your relationship with your parents
/ Apr 04, 2019 04:42 PM / No Comments on Fixing people’s negative view of you due to your past deeds / 249 viewsSalam Brother, I hope you're doing well. I was reflecting the other day and I think I am on the right path now, but I had a past life that isn't the greatest. I noticed that people have not moved on from my past life even though I have. It's like I have changed completely but their perception of me is not the best. People tend to not forget the negative things when an individual does something wrong. What can I do to make things right?
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
Sorry about your situation. Fixing people’s view of you is going to be a slow process that will take years. If you reach out to them and try to show them that you are different now they may not believe your sincerity immediately.
The best way is therefore to try to be the best Muslim you can be, and to try to do nice things for people without coming off as too eager to please. InshaAllah they will slowly appreciate the differences in you and start to think better of you.
/ Apr 04, 2019 04:31 PM / No Comments on Improving your relationship with your parents / 460 viewsI don’t have a great relationship with my parents. How can I improve it?
I believe the best way is to achieve a high character and a selfless, generous and forgiving attitude. Dealing with people when having such a personality will naturally make them like you more. So work on yourself first and constantly ask for God’s help and guidance and inshaAllah your relationship with your parents will start to improve.
For more on becoming a better Muslim please see: Guides on Becoming a Better Muslim
/ Apr 04, 2019 04:11 PM / No Comments on Advice to my younger self / 2273 views
If you could give advice to your younger self, what would it be?
I would give myself two pieces of advice:
Even if you spend years reading the best available books, without God’s help and guidance you will never be able to achieve guidance.
Whomever God guides is the guided one. And whomever He sends astray—these are the losers.
The Quran, verse 7:178
The proper attitude toward guidance is to desperately desire it from God the way a person dying of third desires water. This was one of the most difficult lessons I have learned in life and possibly the most important one.
Nothing you do can ever succeed if God does not want it to succeed. Success should first always be sought from God. All good things come from God and we have no power to do anything that benefits us except through God’s will and approval. So it is from God that we should seek all benefit.
Whatever mercy God unfolds for the people, none can withhold it. And if He withholds it, none can release it thereafter. He is the Exalted in Power, Full of Wisdom.
The Quran, verse 35:2
In short, both when it comes to guidance and success, God should be our center. He should be the King from whom we desperately seek these things, knowing that nothing we do will have any benefit unless He desires it.
The lesson I have learned is therefore that I must lead a God-centered life; to throw away all my illusions that I am capable of benefiting or guiding myself.
/ Apr 02, 2019 10:20 PM / No Comments on Islam and magic / 3515 viewsSalamalaikum, I really appreciate you taking the time to answer the questions posed to you with so much in depth research (my earlier ones included). May Allah reward you. To my questions, what are the signs/indications of magic done on a person or household. And if black magic is something we Muslims believe can happen? If so, is a general dua and asking for Allah's help the prescribed remedy or are there specific surahs? Jazakallah khair
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
The most important hadith we have on magic is the following:
Narrated Aisha:
Sahih al-Bukhari 6391
that Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) was affected by magic, so much that he used to think that he had done something which in fact, he did not do, and he invoked his Lord (for a remedy). Then (one day) he said, "O Aisha!) Do you know that Allah has advised me as to the problem I consulted Him about?" Aisha said, "O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ)! What's that?" He said, "Two men came to me and one of them sat at my head and the other at my feet, and one of them asked his companion, 'What is wrong with this man?' The latter replied, 'He is under the effect of magic.' The former asked, 'Who has worked magic on him?' The latter replied, 'Labid bin Al-A'sam.' The former asked, 'With what did he work the magic?' The latter replied, 'With a comb and the hair, which are stuck to the comb, and the skin of pollen of a date-palm tree.' The former asked, 'Where is that?' The latter replied, 'It is in Dharwan.' Dharwan was a well in the dwelling place of the (tribe of) Bani Zuraiq. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) went to that well and returned to Aisha, saying, 'By Allah, the water (of the well) was as red as the infusion of Hinna, (1) and the date-palm trees look like the heads of devils.' Aisha added, Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) came to me and informed me about the well. I asked the Prophet, 'O Allah's Messenger (ﷺ), why didn't you take out the skin of pollen?' He said, 'As for me, Allah has cured me and I hated to draw the attention of the people to such evil (which they might learn and harm others with).' " Narrated Hisham's father: Aisha said, "Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) was bewitched, so he invoked Allah repeatedly requesting Him to cure him from that magic)." Hisham then narrated the above narration. (See Hadith No. 658, Vol. 7)
I conducted a study of all existing versions of this hadith. Below is a diagram of the result:
The result is that this hadith has a 28.3% chance of authenticity which makes it fall between ḥasan and ṣaḥīḥ (ṣaḥīḥ starts at 30%) according to my methodology (which I discuss here). So this hadith has a high chance of being true and authentic, although it is far below 85% which is necessary to establish a hadith beyond doubt (making it mutawātir or widely-transmitted).
So my personal opinion is that this hadith is not strong enough to worry about (too much). But it is strong enough to convince us not to completely discard the possibility that magic may befall a person in this way.
The Quran also alludes to the possibility of being harmed by magic in chapter 113:
1. Say, “I take refuge with the Lord of Daybreak.
2. From the evil of what He created.
3. And from the evil of the darkness as it gathers.
4. And from the evil of those who practice sorcery (literally "those who blow on knots.")
5. And from the evil of an envious one when he envies."
As for signs that show that someone has been harmed by magic–I have not been able to find any hadiths that mention it. Muslims should always seek medical help for their illnesses since we can never be sure that an illness has a mystical or natural basis, and since we have no guidance on how to distinguish between the two, and since we do not have many hadiths or Quranic verses about it, this tells us that magic is not something we should worry about as an everyday thing.
As for protection, the best thing would be to recite the Quran daily and strive to be a good Muslim in order to enjoy God’s protection from all harms.
/ Apr 02, 2019 06:34 PM / No Comments on Are we responsible for bad things that befall our families? / 497 viewsAssalamu Aleykom Wa Rahmatullah Wa Barakatuhu, is it legitimate to think that one's actions can bring affliction to one's family? am i crazy to think that me misbehaving or sinning or straying away from Allah can have a direct impact on my family? the reason why every wrong thing happening to them, in their own personal life is solely my fault? that it couldn't be their own actions that lead them to be so miserable? is it a little bit of both? should i only pray for their wellbeing?
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
It is possible that our sins can negatively affect our families, just as our good deeds can positively affect them. The Quran says:
And as for the wall, it belonged to two orphaned boys in the city. Beneath it was a treasure that belonged to them. Their father was a righteous man. Your Lord wanted them to reach their maturity, and then extract their treasure—as a mercy from your Lord. (The Quran, verse 18:82)
The above verse implies that one of the reasons why God took care of the treasure of the orphans was that their father was a righteous man. God decided to do something good for them because of their father’s virtue.
The Quran also says:
Would anyone of you like to have a garden of palms and vines, under which rivers flow—with all kinds of fruit in it for him, and old age has stricken him, and he has weak children—then a tornado with fire batters it, and it burns down? Thus God makes clear the signs for you, so that you may reflect. (The Quran, verse 2:266)
In this example, the parent’s sinfulness causes suffering to their children.
So our fates are connected. Our families can be sources of both tests and blessings for us, and our sinfulness and righteousness determines how we are tested.
But it is incorrect to think that the bad things that happen to your family are solely your fault. Think of your family’s fate as a shared pool of water. The good things you do improve it and the bad things you do pollute it. But if another family member has a great share of their own virtue then they will enjoy God’s protection and may not be harmed. God does not unjustly punish someone for another’s sins. But if your child was going to have an accident, then whether God protects them and prevents the accident or not may partly depend on whether you deserve the protection or not. The child is innocent of your sins and if they suffer God can always make it up for them in the future with other blessings. But the suffering caused to you because of what befalls your family members may or may not be repaid by God to you depending on whether you deserve such repayment or not. The child may enjoy great blessings because of their suffering while the blessings may be prevented in one way or another from reaching you and benefiting you.
So when something bad befalls a family member, it is always good to think of your own sins and use that as an encouragement to be better. But do not go to extremes in that. There are all kinds of reasons why bad things befall someone, and we can never be sure if we have a share of the fault for its happening. But you can be certain that your goodness and virtue will positively impact your family. The family of Mary (mother of Jesus) was a good family, so when her mother prayed for her child to be blessed and protected, God accepted the prayer:
And when she delivered her, she said, “My Lord, I have delivered a female,” and God was well aware of what she has delivered, “and the male is not like the female, and I have named her Mary, and have commended her and her descendants to Your protection, from Satan the outcast.”
Her Lord accepted her with a gracious reception, and brought her a beautiful upbringing, and entrusted her to the care of Zechariah. Whenever Zechariah entered upon her in the sanctuary, he found her with provision. He said, “O Mary, where did you get this from?” She said, “It is from God; God provides to whom He wills without reckoning.” (The Quran, verses 3:36-37)
/ Apr 01, 2019 04:35 PM / No Comments on Does Izzah mean slave girl? / 1776 viewsI have seen in many sites that izzah means might and power.but in some sites and name apps they provided that izzah means slave girl ..with a note (daughter of Umar Bin mumal was named jariya..before he had become Muslim she was the slave of Umar(ra) and he used to trash her very harshly that she might revoke Islam ..but she ddnt and finally he himself become a Muslim ..) does izzah really mean slave girl??how that note related to this name ? I have heated that in Islam izzah is one of the familiar word with the meaning honour.. Pls rply … We want to choose the name if it doesn’t mean slave girl ..or can us choose the name ?
I have looked at the Arabic dictionaries and as far as I can find there is no relationship at all between the word izzah and slavery. It looks like those sites copied that information from the SearchTruth website which in the past showed the meaning of Izzah as “slave girl” (apparently by mistake). Most baby name websites copy their information from SearchTruth. But currently SearchTruth appears to have corrected this error, so now it shows only “Power, Might” as the meaning of Izzah:
So I wouldn’t worry about those sites. The name Izzah is clearly “power” and “might” and this is what all of the respected Arabic dictionaries show.
/ Apr 01, 2019 02:31 PM / No Comments on Islam and a husband’s rape of his wife / 2146 viewsAsalam Walikum, why is it not considered rape if your spouse raped you? People have told me Islam does not consider that [rape]
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
There is no clear statement in the Quran or hadith on this question, so scholars have simply used their own personal and cultural opinions about it. Since they think a husband has a right to sexual intimacy with his wife, they do not think that the idea of rape applies in marriage.
But there is nothing to force us to accept their views. Personally I think forcing sexual intercourse on a woman is a disgusting and vile thing even if she is one’s wife. So my opinion is that sexual intimacy should only happen with the woman’s agreement and if she does not agree to it, then she should be left alone. If she always refuses sexual intimacy then the husband can seek divorce.
/ Apr 01, 2019 02:30 PM / No Comments on Birth control in Islam / 559 viewsPeople always said birth control is only allowed if the husband permits it, not in general (before marriage) and that Islam highly dislikes it. Is this true?
There is no need to make a big deal of a husband’s permission in such a matter. Whether you are a Muslim or non-Muslim wife, of course going on birth control should be a decision made after consultation with the husband and his agreement. If you do not consider your husband worth consulting in this matter, then there is a problem with your marriage.
As for Islam having a negative view of birth control, that is not true. As I discuss in this new blog post, the hadith in which the Prophet PBUH seems to express a negative view of birth control is not very firmly established. And even if we take it seriously, he mere says that there is no harm in not using birth control. He does not say that birth control is harmful.
/ Apr 01, 2019 02:24 PM / No Comments on How to think critically and creatively in solving problems / 425 viewsHow to think critically and creatively in solving our daily problems as well as in the process of seeking knowledge?
I recommend reading as many books as you can, on any topic, whether fiction or non-fiction. Books can help you face various situations and scenarios before they happen to you in real life, and this enables you to build a data bank in your brain full of solutions and experiences that you can use in the future whenever you need it.
/ Apr 01, 2019 02:07 PM / No Comments on Birth control in Islam: A study of the hadith on coitus interruptus / 3701 viewsA hadith found in three places in Sahih al-Bukhari suggests that birth control is not recommended in Islam:
We asked (the Prophet PBUH) about it and he said, 'There is no harm if you do not do [coitus interruptus1], for if any soul (till the Day of Resurrection) is predestined to exist, it will exist."
Sahih al-Bukhari 4138
First, this hadith does not say that birth control is bad. It merely say that there is no harm in not using birth control.
This hadith, however, is not a very high-quality one due to its meager chain of narrators. Below is a diagram of all of the chains of the authentic versions of this hadith:
This hadith has only an 11.79% chance of authenticity, which is quite low. In my mathematical hadith verification methodology (which I discuss here), a hadith that falls between 10% and 20% is munkar (strange and unlikely to be true, but not clearly false and fabricated). A munkar hadith is not strong enough to act as a basis for establishing sunna (the tradition of the Prophet PBUH). For this reason, we cannot say with certainty that a negative view of birth control is part of Islam. In this case, the commonsense view should be used that birth control is a matter of personal choice.
/ Mar 31, 2019 09:41 PM / No Comments on It is permitted for Muslim women to marry if their guardian wrongfully prevents the marriage / 1200 viewsi am a virgin woman of 35 and and my burning desire to marry a man of my choice and luckily i have found that man…but my family my guardian who is my brother does not in anyway recommend me to marry him…the person i m willing to marry is holding an upright character ,he is a religious man and a goverment office,he is hailing from a noble lineage..he is handsome…i truly love him and willing to marry him….m i supposed to go for court marriage and solemnize my nikah in the presence of two witnesses and magisterate who would act like WALI on my behalf…
If the man you mention is able to take care of you financially and if your brother has no good reason for refusing the marriage, then he loses his right to guardianship because he does not have your best interests in mind. In such a case, if the Muslim judge (a judge can be any knowledgeable person, such as an imam) investigates and finds that your brother is truly wrongful in preventing the marriage, then he can find a better person to act as your guardian (such as another relative, or himself). In such a case the marriage would be valid according to Islam.
However, keep in mind that going against your brother’s wishes could forever destroy your good relations with him, therefore before you go forward with the marriage, try to get your relatives involved and any imams you know in order to convince him to agree to the marriage. The Muslim judge should also try to reach out to him to convince him to agree. If he still does not, then you can still legally marry with the judge’s approval.
Sources:
/ Mar 31, 2019 05:25 PM / No Comments on Feeling useless and purposeless as a Muslim / 1778 viewsI sometimes feel useless. Like I don’t know what my purpose is in life. I am lost and don’t know what to do with my life. I pray, and read Quran whenever I can. I also ask for forgiveness. But like I’m just not happy with the way things turned out and the future does not excite me like it used to.
Think of that as a stage that will pass when God wants. I too have gone through periods when I felt like that and like there was no way out and nothing that I could do about it.
Realize that you cannot help yourself and that it is all in God’s hands. Submit to Him truly and seek help only through Him and He can open His doors for you when He wants. Leave it to Him to take care of you.
Please also see these two pages:
/ Mar 31, 2019 03:22 PM / 2 Comments on Speeding up grep of a 12.4 GB text file / 1228 viewsI am working on a vocabulary-building book for SAT and GRE students. Below is a picture of the provisional cover of the book:
In order to have a wide corpus of classical texts to find word usage examples, I downloaded a massive ebook collection from the Gutenberg project and merged all of the text files into one big file that reached 12.4 gigabytes in size. I then wrote a PHP script that used the grep utility to search through about 250 billion lines of text1 to find the word usages I needed.
Here is an example of the results for the word “taciturn”:
In order to find interesting examples, I use the following regular expression:
egrep -aRh -B 20 -A 20 "\b(she|her|hers|his|he)\b.*taciturn" merged.txt
This finds usages of the word that start with a pronoun such as “she”. This helps find usages that occur mostly in novels, rather than other types of books (the Gutenberg collection contains many non-novel files, such as encyclopedias and legal works).
My first step toward speeding up the grep was to move the file to an old SSD I have that is attached to my desktop. The SSD supports up to 200 MB/second read speeds. This was not good enough, so I eventually moved it to my main Samsung SSD which has over 500 MB/second read speeds. Below is a screenshot of the iotop utility reporting a read speed of 447 M/s while grep is running:
My first idea to speed up the grep was to use GNU parallel or xargs, both of which allow grep to make use of multiple CPU cores. This was misguided since the limiting factor in this grep was not CPU usage but disk usage. Since my SSD is being maxed out, there is no point in adding more CPU cores to the task.
Using the following grep command, it took a little over 30 seconds to finish grepping the entire file once:
Here is the output for the time command which tells how long a command takes to finish:
One of the first suggestions I found is to prefix the command with LC_ALL=C, this tells grep to avoid searching through non-ANSI-C characters.
That seemed to make the grep very slightly faster:
Just to see what happens, I next used the fmt utility to reformat the file. The file currently is made up of short lines all separated by new lines. Using fmt, I changed it to having lines of 500 characters each. This was likely going to make the grep slower since it was going to match a lot more lines since the lines were going to be longer:
But on the upside, I was going to get a lot more results. The fmt command decreased the number of lines from 246 million to only 37 million:
But actually what happened when I did the next grep was that the grep time decreased to only 23 seconds:
I guess the reason is that grep has a lot fewer lines to go through.
Unfortunately it looked like fmt had corrupted the text. Here is an example:
I think the reason was that some (or most, or all) of the text files were using Windows-style newlines rather than Unix-style ones which was perhaps confusing fmt. So I used this command to convert all Windows-style newlines into spaces:
After that operation and running fmt again on the result, grepping again seems to result in non-corrupt results:
And:
I also looked for the corrupted passage above to see how it looked now:
So it all seems fine now.
As far as I know there is no way to speed up the grep significantly further unless I get a lot of RAM and do the grep on a ramdisk, or get a much faster SSD. Just out of curiosity I decided to try out changing the fmt command to make lines of 1500 characters each to see how that affects the grep:
That didn’t actually do anything to speed up the grep further:
/ Mar 30, 2019 03:40 PM / No Comments on Losing faith in yourself as a believer after failing many times / 724 viewsAssalamAleikumWarahmatullah How does one have faith in yourself after disappointing yourself many times? I pray during day, listening to music at night. I study Quran 3 days a row, I don’t study for 3 weeks. I keep going forth and back. I lose hope in myself and am very disappointed in myself..
Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,
You do not actually need to have any faith in yourself. Long ago I lost all faith in myself, realized that I could not do any good deeds or anything that benefits me except by God’s will and permission, and so I realized that all of my faith should be in God alone.
Rather than seeking to be good through your own efforts, seek it through God. Ask God to make it easy for you to be good and consistent in your good deeds. Ask Him every day and rely on Him and acknowledge your own powerlessness. Even if you fail a thousand times, keep going back to Him.
Face God with your heart day and night and stop looking at yourself. All good comes through Him. And whenever you are disappointed in yourself, use this as an opportunity to pray to God for guidance and the ability to be better.
So hold tightly to God through everything that happens to you and keep going back to Him and asking Him for help and guidance. The first step is to stop relying on yourself and to rely on God. Once you do that, His help can come to you and make you better than you could imagine.
Best wishes.