Brief History of Nearly Nothing!
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  • March1st

    This was the first time I drove with my new Trailblazer from Riyadh-Makkah-Madinah-Riyadh. It was enjoyable trip with additional passenger – Pah. She stayed with us for almost 6 month and only 2 weeks before leaving that we managed to bring her here. Apa nak buat I was busy with Hajj, project and also the OUM exam :( . Glad to hear that she was happy with the trip :)

  • March1st

    The time lapse video was taken in early January 2010 . I started taking the shot after maghrib and completed it around 9am the next day. This was only our second trip to Madinah — took Pah with us before she’s leaving Saudi Arabia back to Malaysia.

  • February6th

    I read some stuffs about homeschooling – and always admire Susan Wise Bauer idea of classical home education.
    You can read the intro here

    Classical education depends on a three-part process of training the mind. The early years of school are spent in absorbing facts, systematically laying the foundations for advanced study. In the middle grades, students learn to think through arguments. In the high school years, they learn to express themselves. This classical pattern is called the trivium.

    Wow! How inspiring  but reading was much easier than implementing it :)   I knew that there is  better method from the traditional Islamic education system – the madrasah! And recently I found a book which clearly explained the life in a madrasah.

    Check this out – a book from Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies about the life in Nadwat Al-Ulama in India. A forgotten and misunderstood education system inherited from the glorious Islamic ages – a must read!

    Madrasah Life

    A student’s day at Nadwat Al-Ulama
    By Mohammed Akram An-Nadwi – Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies

    As quoted taken from a book written by MAJOR-GENERAL SIR W. H. SLEEMAN,1788-1856. Resident at the Court of Lucknow, India describing the education in a madrasah.

    Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official by William Sleeman

    Perhaps there are few communities in the world among whom education is more generally diffused than among Muhammadans in India. He who holds an office worth twenty rupees a month commonly gives his sons an education equal to that of a prime minister. They learn, through the medium of the Arabic and Persian languages, what young men in our colleges learn through those of the Greek and Latin–that is,grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford–he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato, and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna: (_alias_Sokrat, Aristotalis, Aflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus, and Bu Ali Sena); and,what is much to his advantage in India, the languages in which he has learnt what he knows are those which he most requires through life.

    And again I am inspired ! :)

  • May16th

    Dreams

    Posted in: Life in Saudia

    I think I “dream” a lot – many times that my wife would shout at me asking if  I heard what she just said,  the regular answer would be Err ehh what was that again?  … as I explained to her that it was a genetic thing. I got it from my father and my son Imran now inherit it from me too (at least that’s what most of his teacher said at every Parent’s Day session I attended to ).

    Enough said  about my day dreaming– do you know that dream is a serious thing ?  Sigmund Freud wrote a famous book about it more than a century ago and those “neuro” scientist had their idea on where it came from  too though I merely understand what those neuroscientist talked about here is a quote.

    Allan Hobson is a retired Harvard psychiatry professor who did a great deal of neurophysiological work on dreaming and is vehemently anti-Freud, suggesting that dreams are just the higher cognitive centres creating a narrative out of essentially random brain stem activation.
    [http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2007/10/the_big_fight_over_t.html]

    Being a muslim, we have to refer back to the source — Quran and hadith . Here is an interesting lecture from my favourite  online “teacher”  — Anwar al-Awlaki  about some rules of dream interpretation. Hope we can benefit from it, inshaallah!