Ikram Hawramani's Blog, page 17

How do I face difficulties in life?

What do you usually do when faced with difficulties and hard problems in life?

Normally people become more religious, pray more and read more Quran when going through a difficult trial. I try to practice Islam in such a way that difficulties do not affect how I do it: I want to always read as much Quran as a person going through great difficulty, regardless of whether I am going through difficulty or not.

So I do not have anything special that I do when faced with difficulties. I want to always live in such a way that I am always ready to face difficulties without having to make any changes.

Is it permissible to read the Quran without wudu and when menstruating?

Should I perform wudu before reading from it? Can I read when I'm going through menstruation?

Reading the Quran without wudu is permissible, but touching a book of Quran without wudu is considered impermissible by most scholars. I’m not entirely convinced by their arguments but just to be safe it is best not to touch an Arabic book of Quran without wudu. This does not apply to reading the Quran from a computer or smartphone; this is allowed even when menstruating. The prohibition on touching a book of Quran without wudu does not apply to translations since they are not considered literal books of Quran.

One can also read from an Arabic book of Quran without wudu and when menstruating as long as they do not touch it, for example if they wear gloves.

References

Previous answer: Can you read Quran on a computer or smartphone without wudu?Fatwa from the Saudi Fatwa Council (Arabic PDF)

Weak hadith: “women who are dressed yet naked”, “heads like camel humps”

Below is a hadith found in Sahih Muslim, Ahmad, al-Tabarani and elsewhere:

Abu Huraira reported Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) having said this:

Two are the types of the denizens of Hell whom I did not see: people having flogs like the tails of the ox with them and they would be beating people, and the women who would be dressed but appear to be naked, who would be inclined (to evil) and make their husbands incline towards it. Their heads would be like the humps of the bukht camel inclined to one side. They will not enter Paradise and they would not smell its odor whereas its odor would be smelt from such and such distance.

Sahih Muslim 2128

A person familiar with the study of hadith will immediately sense this hadith to be fabricated; it has the grotesqueness and vagueness that is often found in fabricated hadiths and never found in the highest quality hadiths. And a study of the hadith’s chains of transmitters supports such an impression. Below is a diagram of the hadith’s chains of narrators:

Using probabilistic hadith verification, this hadith receives an authenticity score of 6.72%, which puts it in the inauthentic/weak (ḍaʿīf) category despite being in Sahih Muslim. The main reason is that the hadith comes through the transmitter Suhayl b. Dhakwan, who is a non-hujja, meaning nothing he says can be trusted unless it is backed up by other evidence. But the only authentic evidence we have actually contradicts this hadith, because we have the following in Imam Malik’s hadith collection al-Muwaṭṭaʾ:

Yahya related to me from Malik from Muslim ibn Abi Maryam from Abu Salih that Abu Hurayra said, "Women who are naked even though they are wearing clothes, go astray and make others go astray, and they will not enter the Garden and they will not find its scent, and its scent is experienced from as far as the distance traveled in five hundred years."

Book 48, Hadith 7

Notice that the above hadith is not attributed to the Prophet PBUH, but to Abu Hurayra himself. This hadith is authentic due to having an authenticity score above 30% (36%).

As far as we can tell, this was a statement made by Abu Hurayra that was modified and falsely attributed to the Prophet PBUH. Note that it does not mention flogs or camel humps.

What is Irony? A Unifying Psychological Definition

It is a testament to the sophistication of Western languages that they have a word for irony. None of the Middle Eastern languages I know (Hawrami, Kurdish, Farsi, Arabic) have a word for it. Farsi has wārūneh gūyī (literally “saying the opposite of what is meant”), but this refers to sarcasm and unintended ironical statements.

Below are all examples of irony:

Her heart was as soft as a brick.

She spent years working hard to be a novelist until she gained worldwide renown for winning a poetry prize.

The fire station caught fire.

A serial killer became the victim of a serial killer.

"Let's meet for coffee tomorrow," he said, while the audience knew he would be dead by the evening. [tragic irony]

"My wife is dragging me to this play. Someone please kill me," Abraham Lincoln tweeted.

Someone drank from the Fountain of Youth and died, not knowing that the water had to be boiled first. [from Terry Pratchett's Eric]

What is the thing about all of these that makes them ironical?

Looking up irony on Wikipedia, I saw this:

Henry Watson Fowler, in The King's English, says, "any definition of irony—though hundreds might be given, and very few of them would be accepted—must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same." Also, Eric Partridge, in Usage and Abusage, writes that "Irony consists in stating the contrary of what is meant."

I wasn’t satisfied by any of the definitions of irony given in the Wikipedia article. Meditating on the question, I realized that the problem with defining irony is that linguists expect to find the meaning of irony within the structure of the ironical sentence, image or scene. But I realized that irony is actually a psychological phenomenon:

Irony is anything that attempts to pull your leg by making you expect a certain meaning, giving you a sense of smug self-satisfaction when you recognize the snare and you see the wider meaning.

Irony pulls you in, giving you pleasure when you mentally “pull out”. Thus “as soft as a brick” is ironic because “as soft as” sets you up to expect a proper simile. Once you realize the comparison is with a brick, you mentally pull out of the set up and realize what is going on. This gives you a nice “sense of pride and accomplishment”, as the Electronic Arts spokesperson said.

The fire station being on fire is ironical because the mundane interpretation is that it is just a building on fire. But once you mentally pull out and recognize the wider context, you see the incongruity between a building meant for fighting fire actually being on fire.

Anything ironical has therefore a mundane or naive interpretation (a serial killer is dead) and a wise or wary interpretation (a serial killer is dead by his own category of crime). It is the mental leap from the naive to the wise interpretation that gives us the pleasure of irony.

Tragic irony, as in someone likable in a novel saying “See you tomorrow!” while the author has told us the person is going to die before the day’s end, is the same kind of setup. The difference is that due to feeling sorry for the character, we stop ourselves from feeling the usual smug self-satisfaction at our mental leap. But if we wanted to be unkind, then it would give us exactly the same kind of pleasure as any other kind of irony, as in laughing at Abraham Lincoln’s imaginary tweet asking to be killed.

To give a more technical definition:

Irony is anything that sets you up for a naive interpretation, giving you pleasure when you mentally leap to the wise interpretation.

What type of illness do I have?

What type of illness do you have if you don’t mind me asking?

The one that prevents me from working is similar to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome but is something else.

How does one maintain a strong faith in God?

Salam alaikum. This is a personal question for you, brother. How do you hold onto your belief so firm and sincerely? Do you rely not only to your strong reasoning, but also your intuition to trust the information you gather and the knowledge you have?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

I believe our souls have the power to recognize God and to feel His presence. As I write this, all it takes is a tiny bit of effort and I feel God. A connection is established. I believe people lose this ability due to starting to dislike God after suffering losses and hardships. It is a grudge that closes their hearts so that they start to refuse to face God, always refusing to look into that place in their soul where the connection is.

Islam enables me to channel this connection in the right direction, but it is not essential to it. The connection is always there regardless of any thinking. But if I ever rationally doubt Islam, all it takes is reading a few pages of the Quran and all my doubts go away. Reading it, on every page I run into a few verses that clearly could not have been written by a human. It is as if someone wrote a passage that deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature, and did it not just once, but over and over again across 600 pages.

Which one is better: tahajjud or qiyam al-layl?

Asalaam alaikum Which one better between tahajjud and Qiyam layl

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Tahajjud is normally considered more virtuous due to it being more difficult, since a person has to interrupt their sleep to do it. But I believe God rewards us based on our efforts, so it depends on each person’s situation. So regardless of whether you perform tahajjud or qiyam, your reward depends on what you do with the time and abilities that God has given you.

Why does Allah let some people suffer so much?

When will my suffering end? it's been long enough since I'm in emotional pain. I think suffering never ends for some people. My mother is a nicest human being anyone would ever meet on the Earth and Allah has tested her through out her life. First she got an abusive husband and because of him one by one all of my mother relatives deserted her. From her parents to her siblings to her cousins to her friends all left her. Why Allah gave her such a life? I think same is going to happen with me.

Is it permissible to marry someone if we do not love them?

Salam brother! As you always say that marriage is an individual's personal matter so cux of some valid reasons I think it's not appropriate for me to get married but at the same time I know very well that getting married is the only way I have, to escape from my toxic parents and purely because of this reason I'm getting married. What Islam says about this? Because if I continued living with my parents I would become severely psychologically ill.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Islam does not require us to marry for love. Many marriages take place due to the couple finding each other good fits due to coming from the same kind of family or having the same degrees. So if you want to marry to get away from your parents, that is perfectly fine. I believe a person is capable of falling in love with almost any person of the opposite sex as long as there isn’t something horribly wrong with the two persons. So regardless of what reason you marry for, as long as both of you are reasonably decent human beings, love always develops.

Islam and GMOs (Genetically Modified Organisms)

Hello, I'm the anon who asked about the homunculus. Thank you for answering my question. I have another question to ask of you. Is GMO, or genetically modified organism, generally a good thing or a bad thing?

Hello,

The Quran speaks against “changing God’s creation”, but as I discuss in my answer on cosmetic surgery, this refers to mutilating living things for superstitious reasons. Islam permits the castration of farm animals, grafting one type of plant onto another, creating new varieties of plants using selective breeding, and hybridization, all of which are major ways of “changing God’s creation”.

My conclusion is that making changes to living things, including genetic changes, is permissible in Islam, as long as it is done for a good reason. I have nothing against genetic modification in itself, although like any tool it can be used to create dangerous and harmful things as well as beneficial things. 

A disease could wipe out all banana trees that bear the kind of bananas we are used to, due to the fact that they are all the same genetically, and genetic modification may be the only way to enable the trees to survive. And one day we may have genetic therapy that can be used to change a person’s genes to cure things like autism and bipolar disorder. 

From a theological point of view, I believe that God created the earth’s creatures through “topological evolution”, which refers to the fact that the shape of the earth, the presence of seas, rivers and mountains, the strength of gravity, and various other factors all went into creating the creatures we know. And since topology is changeable (we are permitted in Islam to remove hills and mountains, dam rivers, create canals that link disconnected seas), this means that the creatures are changeable. Linking two disconnected seas will cause genetic changes to various creatures by changing the topology in which they exist. It was never God’s plan to create changeless creatures, but to create creatures whose genetic code could respond to the environment and change with it. For more on this see my essay: Reconciling Islam and Darwinian Evolution: Al-Ghazali’s Matrix and the Divine Template