Webiste: http://www.masud.co.uk

Has it really been 2 months since I last updated this blog? Wow time does fly. It only seemed like yesterday that I was at the birth of my eldest child who is now 9 years old. Someone once said to me that they wished they had more hours in the day and I told him that I don’t because I know I will find ways to waste them, I think this is something that most people would end up doing. Sidi Faraz Rabbani gave some Time Management advice on DeenPort which I think people will find useful.

Having said that, the last two months have been very productive and busy, alhamdulillah. As you can see I have made style and design adjustments to masud.co.uk. Please send me feedback tell me what you like and what you don’t, not sure I will be able to please everyone.

Also in the last two months I have been involved with the visit of Sidi Musa Furber translator of Etiquettes With the Qur’an of Imam Nawawi and recently Shaykh Hamza Yusuf. Sidi Musa is a real gem and we hope to continually benefit from him insha’Allah, may Allah grant him the best of this world and the next. The feedback from the courses he taught were all excellent and positive and people love his teaching style. He reminds me very much of Shaykh Nuh Keller in his general demeanor but has some of the fieriness of Shaykh Hamza. People have really taken to Sidi Musa who we hope to have back in the UK sometime next year insha’Allah.

I was also invovlved with Shaykh Hamza’s visit. People turned out in numbers for him. In Glasgow over 900 people came, in Bradford over 1000 and Oxford was again over 1000. The event in Bradford was a slide show of Muslim contribution to Western Civilisation which was very well received. There were a lot of non-Muslims in the audience who afterwards came to see Sh Hamza to express their gratitude and well wishes. The last two times we did an event for Sh Hamza in Bradford the sisters who organised the event hired a signer for the deaf, this is just something that only sisters would think of, how considerate of them may Allah reward them. I think that any event that any of us organise should be as accessible to as many people as possible including those with disabilities particularly those with hearing problems. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People has access to Signers for hire. I also think that Muslims should learn sign language, particularly for the purposes of dawah and educating deaf people about Muslims and Islam and to help out at events. The lady at Bradford did well, she was a non-Muslim and didn’t know anything about Islam and Muslims! We gave her a 15 minute overview before the event and managed to keep up with Shaykh Hamza as well. But for me it illustrated the fact that we need Muslims or people who understand Islam and Muslims as well as the terminology specific to Muslim to do signing.

What am I reading and what have I read recently:

Currently reading: White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-century India , William Dalrymple is a wonderful travel writer and researcher. I have only just started this book so I don’t have much to say on it just yet, but it shows that when the British first arrived in India many Englishmen were taken by the exotic culture and vibrancy of India, so much so that a lot of them “went native” and adopted the ways and religion of the Indians and married (or had affairs with) Indian ladies. After a while this became an area of concern for “The Company”. Dalrymple also charts the transfomation of the British from Traders to colonialists with the arrival of Cornwallis fresh from his defeat in America determined not to make the same mistake in India.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation Is one of the best books I have read in a long time. It is a very entertaining read and in a very lucid style considering it is a book on punctuation! I read it in a matter of days it was that good.

One of my pet peeves at the moment is poor punctuation and grammar, mine may not be brilliant but I am always mindful of what I am writing, more on this in my next blog…