Salams,

My father was married at the age of 14 (much against his wishes) by the age of 16 he had a baby daughter, my half-sister (now 48 yrs old). My father was married and divorced before he married my mother. The first lady whom he married was his paternal cousin. Anyway, my father excelled in his studies but due to this added responsibility of raising a family and taking care of his parents and siblings (one brother, four sisters) he finished up his studies and sought work. Everyone I have spoken to about my father said that he would have done really well academically had he pursued his studies, but circumstances dictated otherwise. This has always been a resentment in my father that he was not allowed to further his academic pursuits and this is what drove him to push his children in the academic direction…….

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Currently
Went to the hospital yesterday to have a wisdom tooth extracted. The tooth in question is growing horizontally and on occasion is quite painful. After being injected with anaesthetic the right side of my mouth was sufficiently numb for the dentist to proceed. After much poking, prodding and scraping (I won’t go into gory details) the dentist decided not to extract under local anaesthetic and told me I needed to come back and have it removed under general anaesthetic. He stitched me up and sent me home. Why am I telling you all this? Well there is a fiqh issue here. The dentist told me that I wasn’t to rinse out my mouth and/or spit. This obviously affects wudu’ and so the question arises what do I do? If I omit rinsing out my mouth will that invalidate my wudu? Well, rinsing the mouth out is a sunnah and not fard, therefore it can be omitted if one has good reason to omit it for example if it is harmful to you to do. In this case for the first 24 hours after the procedure, the scar needs to clot to heal and rinsing a spitting makes this process difficult. For ghusl the same rule applies only if you are absolutely sure that this is the case [for an excellent fiqh resource visit the Sunni Path website].

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Books I am reading at the moment:
Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
Invented by the Babylonians, rejected by the Greeks, an object of worship for the Hindus, a test of faith for the Christians and the west, the Muslims used it and introduced it into general use and wide acceptibility. Zero has always been controversial. This book looks at the history behind it and why it often scared religious figures and why famous Greek thinkers and scientists would kill to keep it out of their number-philosophy. Pythagoras, the great greek mathematician, sentenced Hippasus of Metapontum to death because he divulged the secret of Zero. This book is quite an entertaining reading, very well written with a clear lucid style and I found it very enjoyable considering it is about mathematics.The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Having read the The Hobbit as a child I didn’t really appreciate it, so I read it again about three years ago and thought it was an excellent story I decided to read the The Lord of the Rings.