Ikram Hawramani's Blog, page 18

Can you pray nightly prayers (tahajjud) if you do not pray other sunnah prayers?

Can you pray nightly prayer even if my usual prayers aren't up to the mark? I usually stay awake at night and I end up thinking maybe I should pray but since I mostly only pray obligatory prayers and not sunnah out of laziness I feel like I can't pray at night? I want to know if there is a ruling about this thank you

You can perform voluntary prayers whenever you want at any time of day or night (except during the few minutes when the sun rising or setting). And if you do not perform the usual sunnah prayers that is all the more reason to perform the night prayers when you feel like it.

Ways to improve the Muslim community

Salam. What is your opinion about our Muslim community? Is there any particular thing we should improve as a community?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

A community is just a collection of individuals, and if the individuals are good the community will be good. One thing that would greatly help any community is for the members to learn to love those around them regardless of their differences and disagreements. No matter how rude or narrow-minded and ignorant we think someone is, treating them with love and forgiveness rather than judgment will help soften their attitudes and make them more eager to be better toward others. This is of course easier said than done. It requires the calmness of spiritual maturity to be able to override our natural resentments and angers toward others and to treat them in ways we do not feel they deserve.

Curing jealousy in Islam

Salam alaykum. For a long time I’ve been tested with jealousy. I am deeply insecure with myself physically and spiritually, and jealousy makes me feel uglier. My spouse in the past use to look at other women and that really made me more insecure and jealous. He has changed now. But jealousy is still something I face a lot and it builds anger and hatred in my heart. I just want to overcome jealousy and be a loving secure person with myself, and appreciate others. Please help.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

I believe the best solution is to read the Quran daily and to try to live up to its ideals. Once you have a close connection with God it becomes easy to separate yourself from your situation and to view it with calmness and contentment. Rather than fighting the jealousy, work to become the type of person who naturally does not feel jealous. Maintaining a close relationship with God and the contentment that comes with it requires daily work. It is not something that can be achieved once, it has to be achieved every day by doing sufficient worship or Quran-reading.

How should a moderate Muslim treat conservative, liberal and Islamist Muslims?

Salaam. Brother, do you have any advice on how a moderate Muslim should behave towards the conservative, the liberal, and the Islamist Muslims? I seem to see them in a negative light and I know it's not the right attitude towards those who have different perspective in faith and life in general. Also, I hope you would give a glimpse of history of why they are that way now. Thank you very much and have a good day.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Just see them as humans doing their best to make sense of things. You do not have to like them but you can love them. What distinguishes a saint from an ordinary person is the way their loving connection with God spills over until it includes everyone on earth. In God’s presence you see everyone as their mothers saw them when they were infants. This is of course difficult to achieve and maintain, but it is an ideal we can all work toward. The point of Islam is to always work toward the highest ideal. And once people know that your main attitude toward them is love, they will be much more likely to soften their hearts and attitudes toward you and to be convinced that something they are saying or doing is wrong.

Unfortunately I cannot go into their history in an answer. Different circumstances and personalities lead to different understandings of religion. People can always force a text to say what they want it to say.

Does bleeding from the body invalidate ablution (wudu)?

Hello ^^ I have a question if you don't mind answering: does bleeding from your body (not the private parts) invalidates ablution? I've done research online and it seems that opinions are split in half about this matter and I have no idea which to follow! Thanks.

Hello,

Bleeding does not invalidate the state of ablution unless it is from the private parts. A person can even perform salah while they are bleeding. There are hadiths that mention the Prophet PBUH and Ibn Umar praying after bleeding or while bleeding without renewing their ablution.

References:

Fatwa from the Qatari Fatwa Authority (Arabic PDF)

Are women required to cover their hands in prayer (salah)?

Salam. I wanted to ask if women should cover the hands, especially the back of the hands, so that the prayer can be considered valid? Also, is there any specific dress for a woman to pray or is it the same as, like, when women wears a loose abaya in the middle east? Thank you.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

Covering the hands is not required during prayer in the Shafii and Maliki schools, which is the opinion I prefer. Any costume good enough to go out in should be good enough to also pray in. See the Hijab page for more details.

Raise children as Muslims, or let them choose their own path?

Salam, brother. I hope you are in a good health. I have this thought passing through my mind and I'm deeply thinking about it and concerned if one day when I am married and have children, of what should I do in that situation. And so, I have a rather personal question for you related to that, if you don't mind. As you can see, you hold onto Islam so firmly and sincerely. This makes me curious of how will you raise your children. Will you teach them Islam and raise them Muslims, or will you allow and let them choose whatever path they want? How does Islam view this? That is all my question. Thank you very much for your time.

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

That is a good question, and the answer to the question as I stated it in the title is to raise children as Muslims, and to let them choose their own path.

If Islam is true, then our children have a right to be brought up in an environment that makes it as easy as possible for them to understand, experience and adopt Islam. They should be encouraged to learn Arabic, read the Quran, pray and attend mosque services.

However, a wise parent will also respect the fact that their children are humans honored by God with the ability to choose their own path freely. Their love for their children should not be conditional on the children being good Muslims. If a child starts to doubt Islam, the parent should not act as if the child is wicked. They should let the child take his/her time and grow in their own way. A parent should even be prepared for the child to one day completely abandon Islam. It might just be a phase and they may come back after some time, months or years later. The most important thing in such situations is love; if the child is treated with love and kindness despite doubting Islam, despite even wanting to leave it, and if good relations are maintained in such situations between the parent and child, then the child will be far more likely to come back to Islam at some point.

It is not our job as parents to force Islam on our children. We try to make it possible for them to be the best Muslims they can be, but we keep in mind that they have free will and can always abandon Islam if they want. Respecting a child’s free will leads to the child feeling honored and respected, while trying to override their free will always leads to rebellion.

Also see this answer where I deal with similar themes: Dealing with a homosexual child in Islam

Muslim alternatives to savings accounts

Salam, Since savings accounts aren't an option because of interest, are there other alternatives you know of where muslims in the west can safely keep their monthly savings?

Alaikumassalam wa rahmatullah,

If you live in Britain, Al Rayan Bank offers Islamic savings accounts where the income is from rent rather than interest. In the US, Bank of Whittier offers similar savings accounts. There is also the Azzad Wise Capital Fund, a mutual fund that earns income from Islamic bonds (sukuk).

Ayesha, At Last by Uzma Jalaluddin (Book Review)

Get it on Amazon.

Ayesha, At Last is a 2018 novel by Uzma Jalaluddin, a Canadian Muslim. It is her first novel. The publisher stresses that this is a Muslim version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. This comparison is very unfair to Austen’s great masterpiece and sets readers up for disappointment. The story is a melodramatic and unrealistic soap opera with unbelievable characters and events. The dialog is atrocious. The hero is an absolute bore and the heroine is best described as an impulsive non-Muslim teenager who happens to wear the hijab, neither of them having any of the depth and sophistication one expects from Jane Austen’s heroes. But if you can get over these things and treat the novel as just another below-average contemporary novel with elements from Pride and Prejudice thrown in, you will be able to enjoy an entertaining and thrilling tale. If you read novels merely for entertainment then this book fits the bill. But if you expect something more than entertainment, something that expands your ideas and makes you look at life and people in a new way as Jane Austen’s novels do, then this book has nothing to offer.

Ayesha is an Indian immigrant living in Toronto. She is a high school substitute teacher and poet who falls in love with a conservative Muslim man named Khalid who has a very large beard and wears a traditional Muslim skullcap and white robe even to work. In their early interactions Khalid manages to offend and anger Ayesha in numerous ways, while falling in love with her by steps. There is much argument and misunderstanding. Just as Ayesha and Khalid reach a point where they are ready to accept each other romantically, Khalid’s wicked and domineering mother Farzana finds out about their relationship and quickly arranges an engagement party with Ayesha’s beautiful but spoiled cousin Hafsa. Khalid at first thinks his mother has arranged an engagement to Ayesha due to a case of mistaken identity, but when he finds out the truth he goes along with the engagement because he thinks Ayesha has been leading him on for the sake of her cousin. Meanwhile the villain of the story, Tarek, tells Ayesha about a scandal in Khalid’s family and insinuates that Khalid had been supportive of the banishment to India and forced marriage of his sister Zareena after she had been discovered pregnant.

Ayesha concludes that Khalid is a monster, coward and hypocrite and calls him all of these adjectives when he proposes to her (while still being officially engaged to Ayesha’s cousin). Right after the rejection Khalid goes on to tell Hafsa that he is breaking up with her. In anger, Hafsa runs off with the villain Tarek without telling anyone. Tarek convinces Hafsa that he loves her and that they will have a secret wedding very soon.

Khalid writes Ayesha a long letter in which he explains what really had happened with his sister, showing her that he wasn’t the monster she had thought him. Eventually Tarek returns Hafsa to her family, and it is discovered that he had been the lover of Zareena, Khalid’s sister. He had done all of this in revenge for her banishment and forced marriage. He also manages to destroy Khalid’s mother’s reputation by manipulating her into playing a video of him telling a packed mosque all about Zareena’s treatment.

Once Hafsa is back, she quickly gets engaged to Masood, an eccentric and buffoonish wrestler and life coach who doesn’t mind the scandal surrounding her. Meanwhile, Tarek manages to save Hafsa from even a greater scandal by taking down Tarek’s pornographic website where he had been intended to show nude photos of Hafsa that he had taken while they had been together. Tarek uses the help of his Persian friend Amir and Ayesha’s computer geek brother Idrees. During Hafsa’s wedding, Khalid and Ayesha meet. She tells him she is grateful for his saving Hafsa’s reputation, and they quickly agree to get engaged.

The story is very exciting in the second half of the book, it is almost like a thriller. I found myself forgetting all the major criticisms I had of the book and simply enjoyed the story, regretting that it was to end soon.

Now, onto my criticisms.

Ayesha

The heroine Ayesha is nothing like Elizabeth, the heroine of Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth is a beautiful example of Christian sense and maturity. Reading her dialog is honey to the mind and soul. She is the very best of Christianity “made flesh”. Ayesha, on the other hand, represents Islam only by her hijab. Islam is only relevant to her as a problem she has to overcome. We do not see anything at all that shows Islam to have made her in any way different from the typical Western girl.

A person expecting to see a Muslim alternative to Elizabeth is therefore going to be sorely disappointed. There certainly are Muslim girls who are just like Elizabeth and I have known some in my extended family. Westerners would be right to conclude that Islamic culture is inferior to Victorian Christianity if the best we had to offer were girls like Ayesha. As someone who has actually lived in a very Pride and Prejudice-like atmosphere in my Iranian-Kurdish culture, I find the culture represented in Ayesha, At Last highly inferior.

Ayesha is not a very likable person either, at least not in the first half of the book. She breaks a ceramic mug and leaves it strewn all over the street, potentially damaging people’s car tires. She is irresponsible enough to leave a classroom unattended in order to hide herself in a bathroom stall to write poetry. At times she is as irresponsible and impulsive as a Western teenager. But I did grow to like her once I got over my disappointment and stopped to expect her to be a Muslim Elizabeth.

Khalid

The male hero of the story, Mr. Darcy’s equivalent, is 26-year-old Khalid. But he is far more reminiscent of Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice than Darcy, at least in the first half of the book. I couldn’t help laughing when the author writes on page 141 that to Ayesha, Khalid was unlike any other man she had ever met. Are the choices of Indo-Pakistani girls living in the West so depressingly limited that Khalid should appear as anything but the most average Muslim male you can think of?

Mr. Darcy’s trouble in Pride and Prejudice is that he has very strong opinions and is not shy to express them, causing people to view him as rude and heartless. Khalid’s trouble is quite the opposite; he has zero opinions of his own and insults people by expressing his opinions bluntly. He says “I’ve never had a girlfriend. How could I possibly know what I want in a wife?” He goes on to say that his mother can choose better for him. Even at the age of 15 none of my high school friends (who were good and dutiful Muslim boys) would have been so oblivious and immature to say something like that with seriousness. They would have gotten over this type of thinking in elementary school. What an insult to my high school friends!

The dialog

The biggest problem with the book is the dialog. There is no other way to express it: it is horrendous. The editor who allowed such dialog to go to publishing should find another job; it is as if she knew nothing of one of the most elementary points of novel-writing. To give an example:

"I grew up in a very diverse neighborhood, so I'm used to living and working with people of different ethnicities and cultures," Clara said.

Page 20.

A person may write something like that in a job application. Writing it in an informal email would make people smirk. Saying it out loud–but no human would ever say something like that out loud without causing hilarity.

And here is Khalid talking like teenager trying to write a self-help manual with a thesaurus:

"Your presence in a relationship is not indicative of commitment but rather inertia. Standing before your friends and family and pledging your love and loyalty is an essential ingredient for a long-lasting union.

Page 164.

Indicative? Inertia? Long-lasting union? People never use words like that when talking.

And here is a Indo-Pakistani aunty talking:

Finally, she should show a deference and modesty of character. She must not speak when her elders are talking. She must be quiet and refined, never gossip or joke.

Page 75.

Not even a professor will use a word like “deference” in conversation.

Since no humans speak this way, it is clear that the author never imagined her characters actually speaking the dialog. A reader imagining the characters actually speaking the dialog aloud will find unintended hilarity on almost every other page.

Unreal behavior

Tarek puts his hands around Ayesha’s shoulders to lead her to somewhere quiet to chat with her. No self-respecting Muslim woman would ever let a man touch her casually like that. The book is full of such actions that never take place in the reality of a Muslim community.

On page 88, the wicked white woman Sheila says to an employee,

Not a word of this to anyone, [u]nless you want your life to become very uncomfortable.

Unreal elements like this quickly turn the novel into a soap opera. At one point Ayesha wakes up in the women’s section of the mosque and sees Khalid looking at her. Immediately she says to him, “Were you staring at me?” What kind of Muslim woman shames a Muslim man like that? Unbelievable and gross.

And then there are the horrible Indo-Pakistani aunties we meet. Here is one talking after coming to see Ayesha and her family to find out if she is a good fit for her son:

We have a few more girls to see today. We will be in touch if Masood thinks you will be a good fit for the position.

And here is Khalid’s mother talking to Ayesha:

When Khalid spoke about the teacher who was helping him plan the conference, I knew it was time for him to get married. Before he was duped by a pathetic spinster pretending to be more than she was.

Page 201.

The crudeness, rudeness and the complete lack of good manners among the Indo-Pakistani mothers makes them look like Neanderthals compared to the classy and sophisticated women of my Iranian-Kurdish background. The book confirms the worst stereotypes Westerners may have about Muslim women. This type of behavior can be expected among the lowest class of Iranians, but not among the affluent “gentleman class” that is the equivalent of the society portrayed in Pride and Prejudice. Maybe the author is simply caricaturing legendary bad aunties that she has never met in real life. I really hope so.

And here is Ayesha speaking with Khalid after discussing setting up a mosque conference:

Khalid, we're too different. This isn't ... real. Please, just let me go.

Page 119.

What on earth? I cannot imagine even the most mentally disturbed and immature Muslim girl to speak like that, acknowledging that he has a romantic interest in her out of nowhere, when their relationship is supposed to be formal and professional.

And here is Tarek, a respected Islamic conference organizer, talking to Ayesha in the presence of Khalid:

How can I focus when you're such a distraction?

Page 148.

And here are Ayesha and Khalid supposedly having a classy and subtle romantic talk where they cannot acknowledge their attraction for each other. This happens during an extremely unreal scene where Ayesha’s grandmother agrees to teach traditional cooking to a completely random and unmarried stranger (Khalid). A real Muslim grandmother would consider it completely scandalous to partake in this set up, but she happily goes along with it.

"I'm the doomed spinster. When I finally have the time to look for a husband, I'll be thirty-five and all the good men will be taken. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll find a second cousin in India who will marry me for my Canadian citizenship."

Khalid was doodling in his notebook. "Or you could look around right now," he said slowly, and Ayesha felt her hand tingling from where they had touched.

"Khalid ..." she began, but Nani [Ayesha's grandmother] was back.

The obviousness and crudeness of Khalid’s hint that Ayesha should be considering him as a romantic interest makes one want to gag.

The lack of Christian charity

Besides all the character and narrative failings of the story, there is also a serious moral failing that shows the author to have little of Jane Austen’s spiritual maturity. The author has no empathy for her “wicked” characters, who are all pure evil. The only “normal” people, the only humans, are the people immediately surrounding the heroine: herself, her mother, her brother Idrees, her grandparents, her friend Clara, and Khalid and Hafsa once they are humanized by Ayesha. Everyone else is a vacuous cookie-cutter stereotype. The author is unwilling, or unable, to see the world from the eyes of any of the other characters except at rare moments. Only the people she likes are really human, and those she doesn’t are judged as soulless robots filling this or that role, only good for judging, criticizing, parodying. This lack of empathy for most of flawed humanity is typical of many Muslim intellectuals and is troubling.

If you cannot empathize with your typical and bad characters, if you cannot see how you could have been exactly like them in alternative circumstances, then you have a lot more to learn about being human, a lot more before you are truly mature and able to elevate others. Standing before Jane Austen I feel safe, no matter how much is wrong with me, I know she will see me as a human that can be empathized with. Before Uzma I feel utterly insecure; which one of her stereotypes do I fit so that I can be shoved and dismissed into that category, to be ignored, parodied: Muslim male type C.

In other words, what the author lacks is Jane Austen ‘s wonderful Victorian Christian charity which we also see in George Eliot, the willingness to see every human, and I mean every human, as infinitely worthy, irreplaceable. Austen has taken to heart the Christian principle to treat others as you like to be treated yourself (as best stated by Kant), and that includes racist and “Islamophobic” white women and controlling and domineering Indo-Pakistani mothers. If you want to know a person’s spiritual maturity, see how much humanity he or she attributes to the people he dislikes and disagrees with. So the general treatment of flawed Muslim society is definitely not Austenian, quite the opposite. I know Austen will have it in her big heart to love me even if she knows I’m a sexist, prejudiced and arrogant male. A mother’s unconditional love is extended to all; knowing that no one is wholly bad and that everyone, no matter how bad, was at one point an adorable infant dearly lovable to a mother.

The author’s idea of a good ending is that Khalid’s poor mother Farzana, after losing her husband and daughter, also loses Khalid who moves out of her home, so that she is left alone in her house; her reputation shattered and her husband and children taken away from her. This is absolutely tragic, but the author’s complete lack of empathy for Farzana makes her rejoice in such an ending.

Conclusion

I don’t believe in holding Muslim writers to lower standards, so I haven’t tried to moderate my criticisms. But this is the author’s first novel and it is to be hoped that she can improve on the aforementioned points in any future novels she writes. There was one line in novel that greatly impressed me, describing what it feels like for a Muslim woman to meet an interested Muslim man for the first time during the formal rishta ceremony where the man and his family observe the woman:

Ayesha looked at the clock. Only five minutes had passed. She had forgotten how uncomfortable it was to go on a blind date in front of her entire family.

Page 110.

Are Muslims forbidden from making deals with Jews?

Are we forbidden to be making deals with jews? This is because certain preachers from my country accuse them that they would definitely break every promise they make.

There are no rulings about making deals with Jews. We treat them the way we treat other non-Muslims. It is true that many Jews subscribe to a moral system where non-Jews are treated as inferior and unworthy of loyalty, so this has to be taken into account.