Introducing.....The Muslim Popsicle!!!

I should have known it wasn't a good idea when my husband happily chose work over spending what I considered "quality" time with our kids. I think I heard him laugh when he said "You can go if you want, but I have to work." (chuckle, chuckle)

I should have known it was a bad idea when I realised at the last minute he had took the car with him to work and left me with the problem of finding a ride for me and all six of our kids to go. Who has room in their car for that many people? I ended up having to ask two different sisters to each take half of us, leaving the "Teen Queen", the "Love Bug" and the "Samurai" home to wait, while I drive off with the other three boys (who I have yet to dub with nick names so just bear with me on that).

I should have known it was not a good idea to go when the buttons on my abayah kept popping open (which drives me crazy) making me feel half dressed (having a BHD- Bad Hijab Day) and self conscious.

I should have known but I went anyway.... trust your instincts people it's a good thing.

Our masjid had a family picnic and it was as cold as (h.e.double hockey-sticks).

I was literally freezing and shaking. We got there (on top of a mountain no less) and I spread out a few blankets on the hillside, preparing to offer my salat and sit and listen to the lectures that they were about to give and noticed some of my body parts going numb. I made the takbir, made ruku then sudjood and prostrated..... in a puddle of water. The grass was saturated. So now I am WET and freezing and shaking. I am now forced to pray on the hard ground which happens to be in the shade. Cold-Sun = Colder. What kind of concentration in prayer can you have while looking like a break dancer? I was shaking that hard.

I convinced some other popsicles, I mean sisters to help me move a picnic table into the sun and we all sat huddled and shivering there trying to eat (cold food) and listen to the remembrance of Allah. It was 40 degrees and dropping fast. We gave new meaning to the words "Sisterhood and Unity," as we hugged each other and rubbed each others hands and tried to share as much bodyheat as we could spare. Did I mention that they also gave away free ice cream as well? It's hard for me (a natural born conspiracy theorist) not to believe that someone was doing this to us on purpose. Perhaps some FBICIA agent was hiding in the trees getting a good laugh at our expense.

The kids had a wonderful time though. The lecture was amazingly good and my husband laughed at us all when he got home from work.

Say My Name...

Notice to inlaws, school officials, doctors, nurses and every person that was not previously mentioned but falls under this particular category. If you can successfully pronounce:

• Jagermiester


• Schlitz


• Courvoisier


• Alize

Or words like...

• acute peritonsillar abruptio placentae


• phyenylketonuria


• Schizophreniform Histrionic Cyclothemic Disorder

And...

• Lamborghini Marcielago


• Peugeot Coupe Cabriolet

Then you CAN pronounce my children's names.... you know you can!!!

• 
  

My Ummah, Con'td

If you thought my "Ummah," posts were interesting, you may be interested in this entry on a sister's blog I stumbled across. She expressed the sentiment much more eloquently than I did, masha'allah...

Haven't read all of her posts but this one I definetly could relate to.

Can You Sell Your Kids To The Circus?

You know, I always thought that as my children got older, my job would become easier and easier. What a joke! Older kids are messier, sassier and du-uhm...more mentally challenged (wink, wink) than younger kids. Just the other day my teenage daughter was ironing our niqabs, in a hurry to go shopping with her father. The Teen Queen as she will be referred to heretofore in this alleged incident (and other areas of my blog) finishes mine and places it over the back of a chair. As I am tying the thing on, I am greeted by a strange smell.

My fellow niqabis know what I'm talking about. How many times have you put on your niqab and smelled the smell. Kinda reminiscent of cat breath.

Me: "Ew, what is that smell?"

TTQ: "What smell?

Me: "I don't know. (sniff, sniff) Some weird smell. Smells like cat breath."

As I turn for the febreeze (that I make myself with fabric softener and water. Try it girls you'll like it) I hear a bloodcurdling scream followed by peals of unrestrained laughter.

You can only guess what she does if you live with a being of the "teen" persuasion. Yes, she smelled the hot, steaming iron.

I mean she was cracking up. My husband looks around in a panic asking what happened. All I could do was stand there looking at her in incredulity (yes I can still use big words after 6 kids and 6 c-sections.... that's another post though). I guess she thought that since she had just ironed the niqab, maybe the suspect smell came from the iron. Shes lucky she didnt burn her nose off.
'
I only regret that I didn't catch it on camera and publish it on youtube.com.

Homesick!!

Where I am now....





Where I long to be...

I pray soon, Insha'allah...

My Ummah, pt.2

Just to clarify a bit on my last post. I am not against the dawah, I still consider myself salafi, I am not against scholars or scholarship. But I just don't understand a few points:

1. Where are our communities? If there are viable, working productive communities out there please a comment, because I'm sure most of us want and need to know where they are.
2. Why did the Prophet (saw) refuse to name or attack the hypocrites who existed amongst the companions? "I would not want my enemies to say, Muhammad kills his own followers." The personal attacks and slander campaigns of muslims who were trying to spread the dawah has done nothing but kill our unity and destroy our effectiveness as a dawah, has it not?
3. If I have to fight everyday to wear hijab, pray in public and homeschool my kids, why did we not all fight collectively to keep our communities together. People sacrificed so much to build these centers and masjids, weren't they worth fighting for?

On a communal scale as well as a global one, we have let each other down. We have shown that all we can do as an ummah is hide our heads in the sand. I seriously do not see what good came from it all. Do you?

My Ummah, My Ummah...

Bismillah,

My people are in pain. We have been hurting for so long it makes you wonder... will we ever heal? It used to be us against the world. We were envied, respected, talked about and joined. Now we just grieve.

I became Muslim when I was 20 years old. I had searched the globosphere of religion and belief and stumbled upon my greatest love...Islam. I was fortunate to read and study the Quran and Sahih Bukhari before I ever entered a masjid. I bought book, after book and for two glorious years was not tainted in my perspective by any group, sect or party. I was in love, I never wanted to be anything else except Allah's maidservant and a champion of my people.

Then I became salafi.

The salafi dawah echoed what I believed, worship Allah according to his book the Quran and the statements of the prophet muhammad, and the righteous community that followed after him who practiced the same. We were taught to be studious (which in turn became our downfall) to hear and obey, and to emulate the righteous in our dress, attitudes and worship.

I still believe in that way. But salafiyyah (the practitioners of it) failed me.

Just when I thought we were strong, just when I thought we were upon greatness, we were struck down from beneath. The very issues that we were taught to avoid were the very things we fell into and suffered because of.

• Backbiting, tale-carrying, spying: Allah forbid us from this in surah al-hujurat. Khatibs and Imams extolled to us the evils of this practice from the minbars weekly. Yet, a group sprung up amongst us, claiming to be of us, and the backbit and slandered and spied on until all of the trust of one muslim for another was destroyed.
• Enmity, envy and lust for leadership: "and protect us from the evil of the envier when he envies." Everybody wanted to be an Imam, a scholar. Giving beneficial, religious lectures had started to be called "rocking the mic", "blacking-out" and "cutting-up." Everyone wanted to hold an audience, give a class, run a masjid, lead a community until the Imams who had been given this responsibility, were slandered, threatened and defamed. New masjid began to spring up and older, established masajid that had been pillars of the community, were abandoned and boycotted.
• Splitting, division and abandonment: Masajid were abandoned and children pulled out of their schools, friendships were dissolved and families destroyed as a result. Distrust, suspicion and labeling ate away at our communities until nothing was left except a naked, exposed and putrid shell of what it used to be.
• Blind Following: The new era of "the sheikh said" arose. Verses of the quran and statements of the prophet were left off for "but the sheikh said". Our ummah was split into sections: scholars, students-of-knowledge, and laymen. The word laymen meant everybody who was too ignorant to understand the religion so were relegated to the statements and advice of the previous two categories. And with that, no matter how many years you had been Muslim, no matter if you understood the arabic language, tajweed or had memorized various sections of the quran, you could only be entered into the land of the knowledgeable by a select process that to the date of this writing has still not been made known.

So today, we are left with flailing communities that struggle to remain. Distrustful Muslims who either stay to themselves, neither benefiting or being benefited or hunt out the mistakes of every other Muslim in order to debase and defame them and push them into isolation. And in the meantime, our people are being killed, imprisoned, raped and murdered in almost every other country in the world. And we are so busy destroying ourselves that we can be of no help to anyone else. My ummah, My ummah! Will we ever be able to heal?

Say Something Good or Shut Up!!!

Bismillah,

Me and the teen queen (my oldest daughter) went to Walmart together the other day. I was there to pick up some much need items (ice cream) and see if I could get her glasses fixed at the optical center there. After an extra long wait, I start to feel like maybe I'm waiting extra long on purpose. So I'm getting an attitude of course. But I wait patiently. There is a man looking at glasses on the other side of the room, he comes over and places a pair of frames on the counter and stands there to wait. Miraculously, a clerk comes out and *pretends* to be doing something at the desk where we are all standing.

Me: "Excuse me. Does someone normally work at this desk?"

Nasty Clerk Lady: "Yes. But we are all busy with other customers right now. Someone will be with you in a moment."

She then motions to one the other clerks to wait on the other guy with the frames. EXCUSE ME!! Now impatience is turning into fumes and fumes into flames. I was here first!! Keep it calm. Don't start any fitnah.

Nasty Clerk Lady (returning): "How can I help you?"

Me: "My daughter broke her glasses, do you do repairs here?"

Nasty Clerk Lady (taking the glasses and looking them over with a very weird smile on her face): "Yes we fix them but we're not responsible if they break."

Me: "Okay, about how much do you normally charge." Now we're getting somewhere.

Nasty Clerk Lady: "Oh no charge. But we're not responsible if they break."

Me: "Great. Do they look fixable?"

Nasty Clerk Lady: "Maybe. But we're not responsible if they break. You know we're not responsible if they break. If they break while we are attempting to fix them, we're not responsible."

Me: "Lady, they're already broke."

Nasty Clerk Lady: "Yes. But if they break we are not responsible." WHAT!!!!!

So it dawns on me that she doesn't WANT to fix them. Oh, ok! I take my daughters glasses back and we turn to leave the store. I am so upset by this time. I can't believe she made us wait, took someone ahead of us and basically refused to help us. Now, I am human. And unfortunately for me I was not born muslim. I mean I only took my shahadah what 15 years ago. All sorts of derogatory statements fell from my lips as we walked from the store to the car. Pregnant animal of the bovine variety, disbeliever endowed with a strong and unpleasant smell (this post has been edited for censored content...see title) unclean, disagreeable (I can't think of any more replacement comments for what I really said sorry).

The Teen Queen says "Ummie, that's not nice. You're not supposed to say things like that."

Me: "Why not? She's just a kafirah. Did you see how nasty she was being to us? I should have said it to her face."

Teen Queen: "No, Ummie that's not right. You shouldn't say those things." How dare she take up for her. I mean she wronged us. I have a right to vent my frustrations right?

So we get home and I break out the book Riyadhus Saliheen by Imam An-Nawawi. This book is excellent for daily study. It covers so many vital points in the life, worship and character of the muslim. Each chapter starts with verses of the Quran and then gives the statements of the Prophet Muhammad on the particular subject. I want proof for my position that you can say whatever you want to a kafir. But what I found was this:

• 50:18 "Not a word does he (or she) utter, but there is a watcher by him ready (to record it)."



• #1511 "Narrated Abu Hurairah (radi'Allahu anhu) Allah's messenger said "He who believes in Allah and the last day must either speak good or remain silent." (muslim)



• #1520 "Narrated 'Uqbah bin Amir (radi"Allahu anhu) I asked Allah's messenger "How can salvation be achieved?" He replied " Control your tongue, keep to your house, and weep for your sins." (at-tirmidhi)



• #1734 "Narrated Ibn Masud (radi' Allahu anhu) Allahs messenger said: "A true believer does not taunt or curse or abuse or talk indecently." (at-tirmidhi)

Well how you like that. So I sat the kids down and gave them a short talk on the blessings of controlling the tongue and made a mental note to thank Allah for blessing me with such astute kids that do not hesitate to correct me and remind me of his pleasure.

Off to The Races!!!

Bismillah,

Well, I tried not to do it. I said I wouldn't. I was content with just being a vouyuer if you will (is that how you spell it?). But the idea pulled and tugged at me until I gave in. Here I am. Standing at the gates (wondering how and why I am here). I am officially BLOGGING!!! Woo Hoo.... So now what?

A little about me I guess. I am a mother of 6, married (been meaning to get that "I married a lug nut" t-shirt made) and muslim, not in that order. My life is really not that interesting (which is probably why I'm blogging). But we have our moments.

I am (excuse me while I puke) american. I converted to islam when I was 21. Definetely the best choice I ever made. I have traveled to many different places and still not reached the place I'd like to be. I have a teenaged daughter, 4 sons and a little princess who thinks she's 35. All names will be changed in this blog to protect the innocent, prevent lawsuits and basically not embarrass my husband who would probably kill me if anyone knew who we really are.

Stay tuned, maybe someone out there will benefit from my meager efforts...