Assalam u alaikum,
The lessons in Kitab ul Assassi are getting pretty heavy ("fatty," as my teacher would say). I know a lot of people, especially the many foreign students studying here, hate Kitab ul Assassi because it is "non-Islamic" and all the women do not have hijab and it is boring but I personally thought that the people who wrote the book were smart. They started with things that would be important for foreign students to know: eating, sleeping, finding an apartment. Now that I'm in the second book alhamdulillah things are getting more interesting and more serious. Today's lesson was "The Dialogue Between Nations". Basically it was taken from an article in a magazine that called for people to engage in conversation and dialogue in order to save our world from the problems that face us all. The author makes the point that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the pollution of the earth, and explosion of the human population are problems that face us all and do not discriminate between race, social standing, colour, or religion.
Some of people I've met tend to have a pretty hard approach to things: either our way or the highway. They want everyone to accept Islam automatically. They're not willing to talk to non-Muslims respectfully and consider them to be dirty and totally unintelligent. What they don't understand is that without dialogue, without good communication, without give and take, no one will be accept another person's position. Learning Arabic has helped me realize that changing yourself is not impossible: the mind can grow and stretch and change dimensions. But everything takes time and effort, without which change is artificial and sometime impossible.
Today I listened to Surah Ma'arij in Salat ul Isha and I realized also that besides all the shared problems we face, we also all share a common destiny: we all have to face our Lord someday. A day when there are no excuses, no more dialogue, no more conversation...
The guilty man will long to be able to ransom himself from the punishment of that day at the price of his children,
And his spouse and his brother,
And his kin that harboured him
And all that are in the earth, if then it might deliver him.
By no means! for it would be the Fire of Hell!
Truth is painful.
Ma'asalam,
~Ameer
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1 comment:
wasalam,
also, i think the authors of kitab al asassi wanted to reflect the nature of arabic society in the modern day: not every woman wears hijab, not all men wear thobes (though in both cases many do), etc. In all, I really liked the book too. Also, if you read their second and third books you cant help but notice there's a clear bent towards introducing the reader to Islam (esp book 3 - theres an excerpt from a book of fiqh on treatment of prisoners in islam and an excerpt from tafsir of surat yusuf, as well as an analysis of the Prophet's last sermon, salAllahu alayhi wa salam).
In short, I thought it was very well done.
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