Recognizing and reflecting on the ways in which people of other faiths have transformed our lives for the better and have helped us in our spiritual journey is a great way to overcome deeply-rooted stereotypes that are so often harnessed to foment hate in the name of religion. By Mary Huston Today, one often hears…
The Hajj is our sacred journey, and it allows us to gather in spiritual community, in common cause, so we may plead for our wellbeing and spiritual survival. By Shaykh Hamza Yusuf There is no animal on earth, nor yet a bird on the wing, but forms communities like you. We have not neglected anything…
Wimpy had taught me a positive lesson actually””about how to respond when difficult situations are thrown at us. By Nigar You must have heard the term ‘sting operation’ in the media. Okay, but the ‘sting operation’ I am sharing with you here has nothing to do with any of that sort of thing! It’s to…
How easy it is for us to make a fetish of our religious beliefs and practices, so much so that we are sometimes willing to completely dehumanize others, and ourselves, too, for their sake. By A. Kasvari This must have been a little short of forty years ago, maybe when I had just about entered…
Not once in all those many trauma-filled years when I struggled with the obsessive thoughts, did I ever consider turning to God, praying to Him to cure me. By Roshan Shah Thinking negative thoughts about others isn’t uncommon. Nor is it at all unnatural. Even though we may not easily admit it, all of us…
Various religions tell us, in their different ways, that God has created us and sent us here, to the earth, for a definite purpose-certainly not for ‘time pass’. We can discover this purpose from the revelations that God has communicated to us through His messengers If you’ve travelled by train in India, you might have…
We commonly think of illness as dreadful, something to complain about, but there’s a very different way of understanding it, as reflected in a saying attributed to Prophet Muhammad: Nothing befalls a believer, a [prick of a] thorn or more than that, but God will raise him one degree in status thereby, or erase a…
Sometimes Allah will give you exactly what you want after he tests your devotion and sincerity. Allah works in the most mysterious ways and we need to place our Trust in Him! Sa’eed was sitting at the waiting area at the Jeddah airport after having just completed the rites of Hajj. The man next to…
Caliph Umar said, Prophet Muhammad (Pbuh) sought refuge from five things: cowardice, miserliness, old age, narrow-mindedness, and punishment in the grave.’ The Prophet’s prayer was: ‘O Allah I seek refuge in You from idleness and old age.’ Like any other phase in life, old age can be a burden or a blessing. It all depends…
Imagine if the only people we knew and interacted with were people who thought, behaved or looked just like us. How boring it would be. By A Staff Writer If you’ve observed bird behaviour, you would have noticed that parrots, for instance, ‘hang around’ only with fellow parrots, pigeons with fellow pigeons, sparrows with fellow…
