“If a panel of Muslim men, whose origins were in the Muslim world, were to choose Miss World, the title would likely never leave Scandinavia”. This is a quote for a nice article by Imam Zaid Shakir “New Islamic Directions”. In many way the article aptly narrates the state of affairs about a lot of our Muslims male brethren. I suggest you make a cup of chai or brew your favorite coffee and sit down to read it and ponder.

http://www.newislamicdirections.com/nid/notes/The_Ethics_of_Chivalry_Between_Genders/

A friend recently sent me this email. It served as a good reminder and thus wanted to share.

I would like to share my personal experience of 3 individuals whom is saw in Masjid during these days in Hyderabad and Chandigarh.

1. First Person was a blind man. I used to see him in my local Masjid (Hyderabad). He used to be present for every Maghrib prayer, climbed stairs, goes to last row, prays there and then leaves.
2. Second person was a man who could not walk. He used to come to masjid (Chandigarh) for Duhar prayers on Crutches. He used to make wadoo and then offered prayers while sitting.
3. Third person was a man whose right hand was paralyzed. I only saw him couple of times in my local masjid (Chandigarh). He used to leave his right hand hanging and pray with left hand (for takbeer, during reciting, and so on)

If people who have these problems can come to Masjid and pray then why cant we do the same when we have everything?”It was not brought down to earth by an angel, rather Allaah wanted to bless His Messenger Muhammad (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) by taking him up to heaven and addressing him directly concerning the obligation of prayer. This is something that is unique to prayer among all the rituals of Islam. ”

“It was narrated that Jaabir ibn ‘Abd-Allaah (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: The Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) said: “Between a man and shirk [associating others with Allaah] and kufr [disbelief] there stands his giving up prayer.” Narrated by Muslim, 82.”

“It was narrated that Abu Hurayrah (may Allaah be pleased with him) said: I heard the Messenger of Allaah (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) say: “The first deed for which a person will be brought to account on the Day of Resurrection will be his prayer. If it is good then he will have prospered and succeeded, but if it is bad then he will be doomed and have lost. If anything is lacking from his obligatory prayers, the Lord will say, ‘Look and see whether My slave did any voluntary prayers, and make up the shortfall in his obligatory prayers from that.’ Then all his deeds will be dealt with likewise.” Narrated by al-Nasaa’i, 465; al-Tirmidhi, 413.”

This is a reminder for all of us. I ask Allaah to help us to remember Him, give thanks to Him and to worship Him properly.

Imtiaz …

Now tell me, what excuse do you have?

You type verses from the Quran all the time, in Arabic? Yes. How about doing it in less than a second? No? Read on then.
What I’m talking about are text expansion softwares. These are small utilities that run in the background and look for what you type. When you type a pre-configured sequence of characters, magic happens. So no matter what application I’m using, as soon as I type the letters ‘w b r’, this utility auto expands right at that place into ‘with best regards’. This is a huge time saver for people who do a lot of typing on their computers. It’s even useful to us software developers. For the code snippets you might need on a regular basis, these utilities can make you more productive.
It’s east to imagine the benefits of this amazing utility. You don’t type often used word or phrases over and over, you save time, type faster etc etc. To me this utility presented another idea. Before I talk about that, let me briefly mention my project so you’ll understand what I’m doing.
As an active seeker of Islamic knowledge I often find the need to include Quranic verses in my notes. The most naive way us to start typing it. It not only is painstakingly slow, you can make mistakes unintentionally. Another and most common way is to copy paste. That too can take some time. Since you have to first search or navigate to the ayah and then copy paste. So to ease this task I came up with the following idea(mind you this is all for mac users. Sorry I don’t develop for windows).

Develop a software utility that is capable of

1. Being called from anywhere via clicking on its icon in the dock or menu bar icon
2. Must be launched by a keyboard shortcut
3. when launched, a search box should appear allowing to search for a verse by
   1. either surah name and verse number
   2. surah number and verse name
   3. if none of the above then at least being able to do a regular search (least desired feature for v 1.0)
4. Once the software is able to pull up the verse, any one of the following should be possible
   1. copy the verse to the clipboard
   2. paste it into the current cursor position of the application
   3. provide an English or any desired translation of that verse

The above is only a glimpse of my initial thoughts on this project. While I procrastinate ;) on this idea, I wanted something right now. Enter text expander utilities. I realized that I could use one of these tools and get a partial result of what I truly wanted. So I spent a little time working on plugins for both Typinator and TextExpander. Why these two is not the subject here. That I’ll discuss some place else. Take a look at the small video below.

Excited yet? To learn more about how you can do this head on over to my project page.

Alhamdulillah I have been blessed to attend quite a few halaqa, study circles, classes on the famous 40 Hadith by Imam Yahya bin Sharaf An-Nawawi. During these sessions, while taking notes, I lacked one basic ability. This is the ability to copy paste the exact hadith text in Arabic into my notes. While at the same time trying one or more of the following

1. Copy paste the English text
2. Navigate to a specific hadith
3. Getting the source of the hadith in bukhari or muslim
4. Searching for a word or text in Arabic or English

There are a lot of resources available out there on the internet. But I couldn’t find one where I could do all the above. So today I’m launching

http://40nawawi.com

Take a look and let me know your thougts. It’s definitely a work in progress. There are many features I’d like to add in the future. Some of them being:

1. Better indexing of all the hadith
2. More interactive UI
3. Indexing by hadith topic
4. Notes from RSI class on each hadith
5. Search capability
6. Ability for the user to customize the look and feel

Please do bring to my attention any discrepancies in translation or typographical errors. Until next time then  As salaam alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh .

The characteristics of good conduct are three : to shun everything that is forbidden, seek what is lawful and spending amply on one’s dependents – Abdullah bin Al-Mubarak