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Religious emotion and self-knowledge

People often confuse the intensity of an experience or feeling with the reality and authenticity of that experience or feeling. This applies very much to religious and devotional exercises. Both these can induce states of minds like…

Manners in Islam

There is no rigid definition; it is relative to time and place and occasion. Nevertheless, we can apply a couple of test questions that, I find, always give a pretty good indication of what the level should be. First, I ask: am I behaving like this…

Don’t Waste Ramadan

The Prophet (s) said that he was sent to make things easy for the believers. His sunnah in deciding the times of the daily prayers, and the beginning and end of Ramadan, is meant to make things easy so that the people would come together…

Marriage

I wish to share with you some thoughts on three areas of marriage: the personal relationship of the couple, their relationship with their children, and their relationship with their extended families, especially their parents…

Islamic Finance

Islamic finance over the last three decades or so has grown into a huge industry. It is huge both in the sense that vast sums of money are handled by Islamic finance, and also in the sense that a great many scholars have been attracted to it…

Charity in Islam

Even where people are relatively comfortable, the norm of doing charity remains visible and beneficial – even in Muslim communities in the UK, you will see children running around with plates of food for the neighbours if something nice has been cooked.

Unity and Solidarity

It was a depressing and distressing experience for me, at a recent visit to a mosque here in the north of the UK, to hear the call to prayer and then observe that some Muslims did not respond by joining in the lines for the prayer. Rather, they formed…

Reflections on Theory of Evolution

The theory of evolution of all species from a common ancestor, with no special distinction for humankind, spills over from the domain and concern of specialists in biology. It does so because the theory is often promoted as something we have to believe.

Da’wah – Invitation to Islam

God says He does not love that men say what they do not do (al-Saff). This means two things. (a) Be careful of the language you use. Don’t be like those poets who say things that sound very impressive but are impossible to do…

Surah al-Nazi`at

In the opening line, the words are related to the verb naza`a, meaning to drag away or strip out forcibly. Other common words in Arabic derived from the same root include meanings like struggle, death struggle, the agony of death.