inshaAllah on Sunday i will leave for Islamabad. i have not been there for a long time. alhamdolillah my parents are coming to karachi on the 11th inshaAllah, so i may cut the visit short, but it will be good to see my parents after a month of travel.
it would be great if inshaAllah i got to attend medical school in jeddah, and my parents decided to move there, too.
no fireworks. but did you ever notice how beautiful the date palm is? and see how its fronds cascade? they remind me of the way big puffy fireworks expand. but the beauty of the tree is more enduring than a flash of light or a puff of smoke.
and a muslim is like the date palm tree according to the Prophet sull Allaho alayhi wa sallam. coincidentally, it is only in Islam that a person finds true independence. for all of creation is dependent on its Maker. thus all other concepts of independence are based on an illusion, a flash of light, a mere smokescreen.
so, independence day is the day you submit fully to Allah.
... only thing is that i am now, alhamdolillah, at the saudi airlines
terminal waiting for my flight to karachi, inshaAllah.
well, i've attached one pic from the Prophet's (sull Allaho alayhi wa
sallam) mosque in Madinah.
and i saved a lot of entries as word files on the phone. inshaAllah,
i'll upload those from pakistan and play with their timestamps as
necessary. :)
how was my Umrah?
amazing :)
--
Whether you hide what you want to say, or speak out loud, without
doubt He knows what is in your heart. Would He not know Who Created
everything? He is the Most Subtle, the Most Aware. (The Holy Qur'an,
Surah Al-Mulk, v13-14)
Perfect all aspects of your behavior. Why? Find out in Islam. How can
you strengthen the bonds of brotherhood? Fill the gaps: stand close to
your brother in prayer.
tuesday 12:30 am Jeddah
ever have the feeling that your life is a constant process of growing up? my relationship to my parents gives me that feeling often.
on this occasion the growing up has involved my travel plans, and i fear that Allah subhanahu wata ala may not permit me to go to Masjid al Aqsa on this trip.
inshaAllah, He will give me the best outcome. and i still have some hope, but just about a day ago my parents again tried (for about the 20th time) to convince me not to go.
they have an extraordinary fear of Israeli viciousness towards Muslims. angrily i told them to give up trying to make me afraid.
later i apologized for the anger -- resentment carried over from years of disagreeing with them.
well, earlier today i realized that the bizarre routing and ticketing chosen by my travel agent would permit me to omit travel to Jerusalem at no additional expense (except about $1100 in ticketing i had already paid for).
and to my chagrin, i told them about that option -- even though it weakens my position and strengthens theirs (because the "change" would be easy and no extra money would be spent).
the thing is that there is no winning and losing on small things like my desire to pray at Al Aqsa. and compared to caring for one's parents, even the great barakat of my journey would be a small thing.
so i pray that i will get to have both: the ibadat and pleasing my parents. but i know that the means of such providence are quite in Allah's Hands alone.
and i hope that was a little step at least towards a relationship with my parents that is mature and not just getting older.
i still have about an hour and a half wait for my plane to board. fajr will have to be on the plane...
and for all i know, these could be my last hours in Jeddah. medical school here is far from certain.
but on the other hand, inshaAllah, i could be coming back in August to take entrance exams at a local college i visited on monday...
truly i am waiting.
monday 11:30 am Jeddah
alhamdolillahi Rabbil-aalameen. today i visited the two private medical schools in Jeddah.
one is about 3 years old and has an age bias that is expressly in the college rules and regulations: no students who are more than 5 years out of high school, and only in a few cases an exception for students 7 years out.
the other has no age bias and is only one year old. as i am an attorney in the US, the reception here was much better. but it goes beyond the age cutoff -- at this school i was expressly told that my law background and experience are assets that make me an appealing candidate.
at the first school, i was told that there was a strong desire to keep students of similar ages and interests -- so experience was literally a liability.
three incidental notes: getting things done in Jeddah is definitely much easier in the morning than in the afternoon. also, Jeddah's shopping malls are so numerous they only "lag behind" Dubai's in sheer ostentation (no artificial ski slopes here that i know of).
finally, the high point of my visit to the first school was making the acquaintance of a young Saudi applicant whose family home in Makkah is just some 100 meters from the Haram! and has been in their family some 100 years, alhamdolillah, passed down for at least 3 generations.
can you imagine the barakat for that family head who settled his family near the Haram? now think about the awesome reward of Ibrahim alayhis salam, who brought his family to this valley at the Command of Allah, an event that founded the holy city.
sunday 1:20 pm Jeddah
QadrAllahi wa maa shaa'a fa'ala. alhamdolillah, i woke up to pray witr before fajr without the aid of my alarm. but my nap after fajr became a deep sleep which no one disturbed.
trying to get to a medical college by taxi became a circus of confused directions and miscues. and now i sit here, still at the home of my hosts...
alhamdolillah, it was easy to go pray dhuhr.
until i learn arabic, i would have to seriously limit my activities if i lived here.
that could be very good, forcing me to study, and forcing me to learn arabic, inshaAllah. but it would work only so long as i faced no emergencies and no exigencies.
because today has demonstrated the consequences of my limited grasp of arabic and my very limited sense of local geography.
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