This is one of the most beautiful poetic descriptions of the Day of Reckoning by the gifted Sidi Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore (May Allah preserve him):

Source: Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Poetry

THEY CAME DOWN FROM THE HIGH AND LOW PLACES,
they threaded themselves along
through the intricate threadings,
the ancient ones and the new ones,
all the famous were among them,
all the shining stars,
all the historical glory-grabbers, the great thieves,
all the inventors with their psychological quirks,
the nobodies came as well, the flowing multitudes of the anonymous,
the endless dissatisfied housewives, authoritative bureaucrats,
gas-station attendants and couples with no children,
philanthropists and the workaholics,

they came through the sandy pass,
faces were indistinguishable, differences unnoticed,
naked they came and assembled,
fear for their own state kept their eyes on the ground,

they came and made ranks,
the noble and notable next to the hardened criminal,
the saint in his glow next to the shrew in her darkness,
all the Chinese came, all the Australian Aborigines,
some who had never been clothed came,
and some who had never been out of them,

important socialites were bereft of their diamonds,
the scholar with references bereft of his briefcase,
the policeman with his beer-belly pitched on his heels,
the priest with his miter now gone, lost in a haze,

well-known faces recognized in the earthly crowd
were lost in the mass now, shaded by the one standing next to it,

no Rolls-Royce stood ready for the king,
his feet made dust-prints with the rest,
no helicopter hovered to take the millionaire away,
he felt the weight of his reconstituted body now with the rest,

as they awaited the setting-up of the scales,
as humanity assembled on the plain under a blinding sun
and awaited the judgment to fall

that would decide each one’s place.

Even the sainted were afraid, the ones whose hearts
glowed like a sunrise
through the transparency of their rib-cages,
even they were covered in sweat to their eyebrows,
the camel-drivers of the edge,
the caravan-leaders at the margins of the earth,
the destitute, delicate, daring hearts who
stayed up nights calling out in hope
and spiritual derangement,

they took their places in this place of no-place
and awaited the click that would tell all,
the sinking or rising of the pan
with the light or heavy scales registering
the forever of their moments
lengthened out now along a line

visible from the beginning to the end of each life
like a straight narrative, or a string with knots in it.

No flaws in the universe,
and the universal memory has no lapses.

Each dwarf or giant of sensibility and care
came to the jamboree

at the beginning of Eternity
and wondered in its echoes

what its final fate would be.

This just made my day!

Source: SunniPath Blog

SunniPath is the vanguard of combining religion and technology. A funny thing happened a few days ago. I was reading a dua at a remote mosque. I didn’t have it memorized so I was reading along with a recording on my iphone. A five to six year old Palestinian girl came up to me and pointed at the iphone and said, “Aysh hadha (what’s that)?” I responded, a telephone. Thinking I was reading Quran, she continued her inquiry, “You’re reading Quran on a telephone?” Laughingly, I tried my best to explain, “No, no. It’s also an electronic device as well that can play Quran and I read along.” With a look of amazement on her face she blurted, “Are you talking to Allah on a telephone?” I thought about it and I guess I was, since I was making dua and using an iphone. It was a bit of a reach but I didn’t want to disappoint her. “Yup.” Her eyes got bigger. “Can I try?” I shrugged my shoulders and put the headphones on her. “Ya Allah, bidee diraja (O Allah, I want a bicycle).”

Source: Zaytuna Institute & Academy

On the news

Everybody’s dog food

Bang bang

Shock dead

Everybody’s gone mad…

From “They Don’t Care About Us” by Michael Jackson

As a little boy, Michael Jackson had an extraordinary charisma — as well as an absolute innocence — that was disarmingly charming. It captivated millions of Americans and eventually people around the world.

As the years went by, his career took strange turns and he slowly turned white, transforming his face eerily into a pale and ghastly masque, perhaps to conceal the pain of alienation from his own self and family. He was also rumored to have unsavory predilections that would never have been suggested if one used the rigorous criteria of Islam before hurling an accusation. Despite the rumors, he appeared to have had a genuine concern for children, wanting to provide them with a world that was denied to him as a child due to the abuses he claimed to have suffered.

I was very happy for him last year when he reportedly became a Muslim. He had apparently followed the footsteps of his dignified and intelligent brother, Jermaine, who converted to Islam 20 years ago and found peace. It seemed befitting that Michael sought refuge from a society that thrives on putting people on pedestals and then knocking them down. He was accused of many terrible things, but was guilty of perhaps being far too sensitive for an extremely cruel world. Such is the fate of many artistic people in our culture of nihilistic art, where the dominant outlet for their talents is in singing hollow pop songs or dancing half-naked in front of ogling onlookers who often leave them as quickly as they clung to them for the next latest sensation.

In the manner of Elvis or the Beatles, Michael is unwittingly both a cause and a symptom of America’s national obsession with celebrity, currently on display in the American Idol mania. Celebrity trumps catastrophe every time. Far too few of us make any attempt to understand why jobs are drying up, why mortgages are collapsing, why we spend half-a-trillion dollars to service the interest on the national debt, why our government’s administration, despite being elected on an anti-war platform, is still committed to two unnecessary and unjust wars waged by the earlier administration, wars that continue to involve civilians casualties on an almost daily basis. Instead, we drown in trivia, especially trivia related to celebrity. And the response to Michael’s death is part of the trivial pursuits of American popular culture. The real news about death in America is that twenty Iraq and Afghan war veterans are committing suicide every day. But that does not make the front page nor is it discussed as seriously as the King of Pop’s cardiac arrest.

Nevertheless, Michael’s very public death notice is a powerful reminder that no matter how famous or talented or wealthy one is, death comes knocking, sometimes sooner than later. Michael has now entered a world of extraordinary perception, a world that makes his “Thriller” video seem mundane. It is a world of angels and demons, and questions in the grave, a world where fame is based upon piety and charity. Given Michael’s reported conversion to Islam last year, Muslims count him as one of our own, and we pray that he can finally find the peace he never found in this world and that he is in a place, God willing, of mercy, forgiveness, and solace.

Source: New Islamic Directions

Like the light of a meteor streaking across the crisp, cold, clear sky of a winter’s night, Michael Jackson, streaked across the sky defining this country’s cultural horizons. None of us coming of age in urban America will forget Michael’s debut onto the public stage with his brothers as part of the phenomenally successful Jackson 5. Hit after hit, “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” “I’ll Be There,” rocketed up the Billboard Charts to number one. I can still reel them all off from memory some forty years later. For better or worse, they are indelibly etched into my mind, and have played a part in defining my soul.

Although I was a couple of years older than Michael, I joined the ranks of unsuccessful Michael Jackson wannabes. At the time it seemed worth the effort as all of girls had gone head over heels for Michael, and just a fraction of his dynamic appeal could reap huge dividends in terms of one’s popularity. The ‘hood was in love with Michael and he apparently had the talent to fulfill the lofty and ever increasing expectations placed upon his slim young shoulders.

However, as the sixties rolled, or limped, into the seventies and the Jackson 5 began to cool off, eventually leaving the Motown label that had launched their incredible success, many of my friends, as well as myself, were attracted to different musical genres, more mature fare. Topping my personal list wasWAR, Stevie Wonder, Santana, and Mandrill. I also began to listen to a lot of jazz, and accumulated quite a large album collection. Whenever, I received my weekly wages from whatever job I was engaged in at the time, and I had many in my youth –security guard, lathe operator, UPS warehouseman—I would head straight to the record store and add to my collection.

What I couldn’t afford to buy, I would get from the radio, my preferred listening hours were three and four o’clock in the morning, when the brother manning the controls at an FM station coming out of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut would put out some serious jazz. I would stay awake listening until just before dawn, sleep a couple of hours and drag myself off to work.

As the years went by I lost that passion for music. Perhaps my waning interest was aided by my little nephews who turned part of my album collection into a stack of customized frisbees when I went off to the Air Force in 1976. It was definitely aided by Islam. After my conversion in 1977, there was no one around to tell me that music was Haram (forbidden). However, as I grew in the religion, the enchanting melodies of the Qur’an became far more appealing than the increasingly commercialized musical fare. For example, George Benson’s offerings starting sounding more like Muzak than the rifts of a jazz purist who rivaled Wes Montgomery.

I would eventually give away what was left of my record collection. At the time I had left the Air Force and was studying in Washington DC at American University. However, I lived a few blocks from Howard University. I drove over to one of the used music vendors on the edge of the campus and made his day as I unloaded a box of cassette tapes and albums.

During those years I had lost touch with what Michael Jackson was doing. I knew he had “blown up” as the young folks say today and that as a solo performer he was reaching heights of fame and popularity that not even Elvis had obtained. I would also read in the tabloids that caught my eyes as I waited to check out at the grocery store of the increasingly strange exploits Michael was involved in, the plastic surgeries, something about the bones of the Elephant Man, sleeping in a transparent, refrigerated crypt, the allegations of sexual abuse, the fantasy ranch in California, and on and on.

It was obvious that Michael was troubled. For sure the physical and psychological abuse visited upon him by a sick father was a large part of the problems that were plaguing Michael as he moved further into his adult years. Surely, the childhood that was denied him as he was thrust into the sinful rigors of show business at the tender age of eight, opening for strip tease acts on the “Chitlin’ Circuit,” in smoke-filled rooms wreaking of alcohol, was part of his troubles. Surely, the confusion of being caught between a devout mother struggling to raise her children as Jehovah’s Witnesses and a fanatically strict, violent and profligate father was part of Michael’s problem.

But I was only able to catch glimpses and snippets of Michael’s life from a distance, hearing a bit here from a well-meaning niece, or catching a bit there on television, before I would take Jerry Mander’s advice and relegate my television to the garbage heap. If Michael was becoming a side show he wasn’t performing for me. Caught up in Islamic activism, during a time my friends and I refer to as “the heady days of the revolution” I had little time to reflect on such matters, I was too busy doing my part to change the world.

However, last year Michael’s name came up again. A good friend who is a reliable source of information called and said that Michael had become Muslim.  Michael was no stranger to the religion, having been exposed to it by his brother Jermaine, who had converted to the faith in 1989.*

Now Michael is gone. Hopefully, he had found peace in Islam. Hopefully, the tears he cried in the privacy of his oftentimes lonely world, tears described by Smokey Robinson as those of a clown, shed when no one’s around, had dried. Michael was an icon, a pain-filled, troubled icon, and like many of comparable stature before him, and inevitably many after him, his fall was sudden and unexpected. Hopefully, his faith cushioned that fall. In any case, he is gone. In conclusion, I can only echo the words of his brother in blood and faith, Jermaine, who tearfully prayed this afternoon, “May Allah be with you Michael, always.”

* An earlier version of this article mentioned that Dawud Warnsby had assisted in Michael Jackson’s conversion to Islam. He has denied that. This article has been amended to exclude that claim..

Al-Hamdulillah, I recently came across the Cambridge Khutbas Etcetera blog, which features audio recordings of khutbas (sermons) by Shaykh Abdal-Hakim Murad. “Society & Solitude” was the first khutba I was fortunate enough to listen to. It was delivered by the Shaykh on the 12th of June, 2009 at Cambridge and I feel if listened to by an attentive heart, has the potential to change one’s life.

We often feel the need to ‘get away from it all’, an impulse which seems to reflect a strange paradox of modern society. On the one hand, we can be overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle of daily life, always part of a busy crowd. Yet at the same time, are we truly connected to what is around us? Or are we somehow cut off from a genuine relationship with our environment and fellow human beings, always ‘alone in the crowd’? In this talk, the sheikh reflects on the spiritual importance of solitude, and discusses how to cultivate the inner sense of stillness and realisation it can bring. But he also reminds us that this cannot be achieved at the cost of actually cutting ourselves off from society. Rather it should be enhanced by channelling it to transform our relationships with those around us, following the incomparable example of the Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) whose mission began in the solitude of the Cave of Hira but which continued in the upliftment of his people and all of mankind.

You may listen to “Society & Solitude“, or download here.

Source: Tikkun Magazine

It is an extraordinary and momentous event to call you president. Your father was of the Luo clan and, as you know, it would be difficult for a Luo to be elected president in Kenya. In our country, while tribe is not an issue, color often is, but you have succeeded in overcoming both clan and complexion, and in doing so inspired millions of people around the world.

Though you preside over a nation that has drifted away from its foundational principles, you possess the qualities that can begin to change that. Winston Churchill said: “Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king.” Your words have moved a nation-in the right direction, toward a more just, more equal, and more perfect union. Now you must call on Americans to live up to the promise of America. You must challenge them, demand of them great sacrifices, appeal to the better angels of their nature. Remind them that we are a nation founded upon the idea of liberty and justice for all, not just for Americans but for citizens everywhere.

You must restore America’s standing in the world. Resurrect the art of diplomacy that previous administrations have abandoned. Meet with world leaders who pose a challenge-in Afghanistan, in Iran, and elsewhere-and gently but firmly wage peace. Redefine the “war on terror,” so it becomes a pursuit of criminals who must be prosecuted and not nations that must be attacked.

But one of the most consequential things you can do is to call on the Muslims. Challenge them to live up to the ideals of their faith that are rooted in self-sacrifice, charity, and most importantly, the single attribute that every Muslim knows characterizes our Prophet: mercy. Your grandfather converted to Islam because he saw something good in it. But Islam is a religion currently under assault. Like many Muslims who have lost sight of the good of America, far too many Americans fail to see the good of Islam.

But Islam stands alongside its sister religions, feeding the poor, nursing the sick, and teaching the ignorant. Far too many people live in horrific conditions, without potable water, enough food, or adequate housing. Islam challenges us to address the problems of the disenfranchised. You know that faith can be a powerful force for the change we need in the world. While you are not a religious leader but a political one, you are nonetheless one whose family extends to both “them” and “us,” and religion has been central in your life.

Barack in Arabic means “descending grace.” Your middle name, Hussein, is a name that the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, gave his grandson after objecting to his father’s desire to name him “Harb,” which means war. While Hussein is a diminutive in Arabic, it actually denotes in this case a superlative and means “great good.”

It is my audacious hope that your presidency is one of descending grace and great good, not simply for this nation, but for the world.

Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is a Muslim scholar, lecturer, and author of Purification of the Heart as well as other works. He is the cofounder of the Zaytuna Institute in California, which is dedicated to reviving the traditions of classical Islamic scholarship.

The authors of Ekhlas would like to introduce to its esteemed visitors, a new venture entitled “The Ekhlas Store”. This online shopping facility will offer to its customers a wide variety of  books, CDs and DVDs based upon sound, traditional Islamic scholarship in addition to a selection of some of the finest, pure, alcohol-free, traditional fragrances from around the world. We will continue to, Insha’llah increase our selection and categories of products in a gradual manner. We ask Allah to grant us success in this venture, Aamin.