Project 365

If you want others to think the best of you, you need to start by thinking the best of them

— Yasir Qadhi

Gotta erase those negative thinking resided in my mind! 🙂

Fatimah is part of me. Whatever pleases her pleases me, and whatever angers her angers me.

— Prophet Muhammad SAW

I have never seen anyone whose habit, character and the manner of speech were as similar to the Prophet (SAW) as Fatimah’s. Whenever the Prophet saw her approaching, he would welcome her, stand up, kiss her, take her by the hand, and sit her down in the place where he was sitting.

— Aisha RA

It brings me to shiver every time I hear or read these quotes about the Prophet SAW and his beloved daughter, Fatimah. I envy their close relationship, to be honest :).

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.
Don’t try to see through the distances.
That’s not for human beings.
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Yes, I gotta keep walking, though I don’t know where this path leads me to. I live in the present and that’s the only thing I can see. "Now" is where I belong. And I don’t want to let my fear controls me. Because fear looks too much on the future and I’m not supposed to see it.

Fight for the fear and live the life we have now.

Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing,
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language,
even the phrase ‘each other’
doesn’t make any sense.

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

So, I’ll meet you in that field?

Until you’ve found pain, you won’t reach the cure
Until you’ve given up life, you won’t unite with the supreme soul

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

True. When we are happy, sometimes we forget to be thankful to The Creator. When we suffer, that’s when we try to search for Him.

May Allah SWT always protects us and makes us one of those people who always remember Him. Amin.

I am constantly
surprised by the longing for
you that never quiets.

— Daily Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson

Especially right after that message I mistakenly sent. And the stupid argument we had as a result of it. Damn, I miss you.

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.

— Siddhārtha Gautama

Let us say, alhamdulillah.

Even though I lost the one person I used to look up to, I still have You. I still have my family. I still have friends. They are the ones I turn to when I seek for help. They are the ones who can stop the stream when I bleed.

And I’m thankful for it. Alhamdulillah.

I just finished watching a TED video presentation by Sheryl WuDunn titled Our Century’s Greatest Injustice. Again, I’m not too keen on writing so I’m just going to write some interesting issues she made in bullet points.

• More girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all battlefields in 20th century
• Girls aged 1-5 die at 50% higher mortality rate than boys in all of India
• Women and girls aren’t the problem. They are the solution.

If you’re not fully utilizing half the talent in the country, you’re not going to get too close to the top ten

— Bill Gates, when he was in Saudi Arabia, referring to the Saudi women that were not fully utilized.

• It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls’ education – Larry Summers
• When you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. With economic opportunity, it can be transformative.
• Research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of, there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself.
• We have all won the lottery of life. And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? So, here’s the cause. Join the movement. Feel happier and help save the world.

The presentation reminds me of a quote made by Queen Rania of Jordan:

If you educate the women, you educate the family. If you educate the girl, you educate the future.

So, are you ready to discharge that responsibility? 🙂

How could you reach the pearl by only looking at the sea? If you seek the pearl, be a diver: the diver needs several qualities: he must trust his rope and his life to the Friend’s hand, he must stop breathing, and he must jump.

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi

Taken from the book Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis by John R. Bradley. One of the best books that I encountered, discussing about Saudi Arabia and its society.

The Saudi Labor Law does not define any rights and duties of the employer of domestic staff, who are in effect his slaves. Of course, not all employers are deliberately cruel or abusive. Many are merely casually so. They believe what they have been told for decades: that theirs is a perfect society and that they, as a consequence, are more completely civilized than anyone else. Quite innocently, they regard their maids and drivers as lesser humans, born in filth and ignorance, who should be grateful for the opportunity to serve them.

I’ve heard too many abuse and mistreatment stories from firsthand victims. Upon reading the book, there’s nothing surprising that I found. Everything seemed to be familiar. It’s 2010 and Saudis (including other Arabs) still treat their maids like their slaves. It saddens me. How can they do such things to other human beings?!

If… the despised Asian blue-collar workers left en masse, the country would collapse overnight. Garbage would pile high in the streets, families would go hungry, restaurants would close, goods would remain undelivered and rot, and the water supply would stop. There would be no more farming the desert, no transport, no fixing and filling the all-important cars, no air-conditioning, no lighting the streets, no repairing of roads. There would be no trade in anything but sheep and camels, and the wind would whistle through deserted markets. And the sick, injured, and dying would pile up in the corridors of hospitals, if they somehow managed to make it there.

They extremely depend on us, yet they are not able to show us the slightest gratitude. Is that an example of a so-called civilized society?