40 Days

The countdown is on.

Alhamdulillah we finished the balaghah book and are moving right along to Book Three of Kitab-ul-Assassi. I feel like I am getting ready to learn Arabic all over again. It is a mark of the specialness of this new stage that my teacher said, "We're going to take it real slow now." My teacher never says that. But I'll give no quarter and ask no quarter bi'idhnillah.

40 days isn't much anyways.

After studying balaghah, I appreciate the Qur'anic language more and more. It's amazing that the beauty of the Qur'an can be appreciated on so many different levels. Before I started learning Arabic, I was amazed by the Qur'an, but now I see it on whole different way. For example, we learned about qasr, which literally means "to imprison" or "to confine." In balaghah it is when we describe someone or something by having only one kind of attribute in order to emphasize the attribute. (Ok, that didn't make any sense.) An example might help.

For example, it says in Surah Dhariyat, "And We did not make jinn or human beings except for worship." That sounds pretty straightforward, but knowing that qasr is being used here emphasizes the fact that there is no other purpose for human beings. If it had been written, "And We made jinn and human beings for worship" in Arabic that might also mean that they were created for other things to: eating, playing, etc.

Alhamdulillah everything else is fine, except that it's getting a lot hotter now. Mustafa and I both use the air conditioner at night now and in the day time you really feel muggy. What scares me is how much hotter other places are, like Karachi and Saudi Arabia.

As always, we need your duas.

~Ameer