An Online Muslim Youth Literary Journal
OMG, my coffee spilt!
Picture by Lee Jordan via Flickr
A few weeks ago, I had written about how my Gmail got hacked into and how you really don’t know what you got until it’s gone. Jawaad (another MYM blogger) commented,
“MashaAllah a very insightful post indeed. I’m smiling at how you take such an irrelevant issue and relate it to your Deen.”
Have you ever gone through hundreds of Google pages trying to find a certain hadith or ayah, and have only been left with “Izlam is a violent religion” and other inaccurate information?
I posed my thought and Alhamdulillah got some great responses.
Continue reading ‘iTech: Your Search is Over! Islamic Search Engines’
It’s time to bring some Ihsaan to our productions.
For part 1 of this two-part article, which speaks about video taping, see here.
As Muslims, we always have to try to do our best in anything we do. For, as stated by the Messenger of Allah (Salallahu ‘Alayhi Wasallam), “Verily, Allah has prescribed proficiency in all things.” (Hadith #17, An-Nawawi 40 Hadith). Therefore, whatever we produce, we must produce it with Ihsaan (translated as excellence or proficiency). Therefore, we can’t have those videos with boring titles, horrible audio and video quality, and a straight, one-angle shot of a speaker from forty-feet away (There’s actually a Masjid that used a security camera to tape a lecture). We have to be the best of the best, as we are conveying a message that is the best from the best Messenger who received the best book from the lord of all the worlds. We have a standard to uphold. In this post, I will go over some basic editing techniques that will hopefully improve your videos.
“O Allah! I seek Your guidance for that which is good, because of Your infinite knowledge, and Your ultimate power. And I ask You from Your great bounty. Certainly, You are able and I am not. You have (infinite) knowledge and I do not. You are the Knower of the hidden (past, present and future). O Allah, if You know that this matter — (then you name your matter) — is good for me, in my deen, in my life, and in my Hereafter, then make it possible for me, and make it easy (smooth) for me, and then bless me in it. And if You know that this matter is going to be bad for me, in my deen, in my life, and in my Hereafter, then take it away from me, and take me away from it. And (O Allah) take me to that which is good wherever it may be, and make me pleased with it.”
By Arif Kabir
Photo by gcraig3si via Flickr
Reading the Washington Post, I came across a first page article that really struck me; it was basically about an Amtrak engineer who had watched a dozen suicides happen in front of his eyes over the course of 20 years. People would be sitting in the middle of train tracks just waiting to be hit, and the train engineers would not be able to deter the person with their frantic horn blasts and their attempts to brake the 75-mph train. As the article mentions:
“When I looked in the mirror, he was tumbling in the air, just flying,” Evans said. “I can see it as clearly as if it was happening in front of me right now.”
Colorfast mental snapshots of horror, a sense of overwhelming helplessness, sympathy and sometimes anger — these are the aftershocks that engineers and subway train operators report from their special perch as unwilling agents of sudden death.”
Imagine yourself, witnessing a murder happening in front of your eyes, and there is nothing that you can do. Now imagine all those around you that are following the wrong path and are destined for Hell if they don’t change – are you in that same sense of hopelessness?
“Metro’s wide windshields are designed to maximize the engineer’s view. Unfortunately, that means train operators see tragedy unfold with widescreen clarity, a high-def horror they never forget.”
What better maximization do we have other than our eyes in which we get a full view of everything happening in front of us? We have become so used to seeing murder scenes, hearing reports of the amount of dead people in a war or earthquake, reading tallying scores of dead people on Facebook and Twitter, but yet, our feelings of sadness have ebbed away. Why do we no longer feel the ‘high-def’ horror of seeing someone practicing another religion other than Islam and paving their way towards Hell? Have we become so desensitized?
“…the flip side of not being responsible is the devastating feeling of not be able to do anything in the moments before impact. The driver of a car might at least have the option of swerving out of the way or slamming on the brakes. The driver of a train doesn’t steer, and it can take a half-mile or more to stop. Evans has conditioned himself not to hit the emergency brake, a futile gesture more likely to injure passengers or derail the train than protect the person out front.”
Have we had previous experiences that no matter how much we tried, our attempts were futile? Because of this, we just stopped hitting ‘the emergency brake’ and stopped calling people to Islam? This really shouldn’t be the case because we never know when someone will become Muslim and come back to the Straight Path.
“The operator’s sense of helplessness can be worse when the person on the tracks doesn’t actually want to die.”
Sometimes we see people that really don’t believe in their religion and are looking for a way out. However, a circumstance wouldn’t allow them, maybe because of family or perhaps because of cainotophobia (fear of change)? Prophet Muhammad (salAllahu alayhi wa sallam) experienced this when Abu Talib refused to accept Islam because of his forefathers, so it definitely did happen. However, like the Prophet, we got to do as much as we can in hard times like those.
We’re not as hopeless as these train engineers that can’t do anything when a murder’s about to happen. Alhamdulillah, Allah (subhanahu wa ta’ala) gave us much more freedom to do something. We have a full view of the way people are living their lives and may sometimes feel a sense of hopelessness. But get over it. The Prophet did, and ended up making the whole of Arabia Muslim and the 1.5 billion Muslims now. Go help a Da’wah initiative. Be a true ambassador of Islam. You have potential to make somebody Muslim, so live up to that potential.
May Allah (subhanahu wa ta’ala) guide us, guide all those around us, and bring us together in Jannatul Firdaus. Ameen…
MYM Discussion