The Makkah and Madinah trip
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 
Trip Madinah
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.
Read MoreThe Madrasah
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 !
Dreams
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!
Read MoreValues matter!
Have you heard about Carly Fiorina recently? Me neither .Somehow, I heard that her succeeder, Mark Hurd decided to buy EDS last week to make HP one of the big players in IT services next to IBM . For those who does not Carly Fiorona , she was the CEO of Hewlett Packard Co. from 1999 until she was ousted in 2005 and for the record I have nothing against her of being a woman CEO (once quoted as the most influential woman in IT) , it just that being a typical engineer, I always admired companies who is led by someone with an engineering background –in short things about Carly never interest me much unlike stories of the nerds at Google or even Steve .
But recently upon reading a book that I newly bought, I came across an interesting part of her speech [about Islam] which was given just ~ two weeks after September 11,2001.
Quoted :
There was once a civilization that was the greatest in the world.
It was able to create a continental super-state that stretched from ocean to ocean, and from northern climes to tropics and deserts. Within its dominion lived hundreds of millions of people, of different creeds and ethnic origins.
One of its languages became the universal language of much of the world, the bridge between the peoples of a hundred lands. Its armies were made up of people of many nationalities, and its military protection allowed a degree of peace and prosperity that had never been known. The reach of this civilization’s commerce extended from Latin America to China, and everywhere in between.
And this civilization was driven more than anything, by invention. Its architects designed buildings that defied gravity. Its mathematicians created the algebra and algorithms that would enable the building of computers, and the creation of encryption. Its doctors examined the human body, and found new cures for disease. Its astronomers looked into the heavens, named the stars, and paved the way for space travel and exploration.
Its writers created thousands of stories. Stories of courage, romance and magic. Its poets wrote of love, when others before them were too steeped in fear to think of such things.
When other nations were afraid of ideas, this civilization thrived on them, and kept them alive. When censors threatened to wipe out knowledge from past civilizations, this civilization kept the knowledge alive, and passed it on to others.
While modern Western civilization shares many of these traits, the civilization I’m talking about was the Islamic world from the year 800 to 1600, which included the Ottoman Empire and the courts of Baghdad, Damascus and Cairo, and enlightened rulers like Suleiman the Magnificent.
Although we are often unaware of our indebtedness to this other civilization, its gifts are very much a part of our heritage. The technology industry would not exist without the contributions of Arab mathematicians. Sufi poet-philosophers like Rumi challenged our notions of self and truth. Leaders like Suleiman contributed to our notions of tolerance and civic leadership.
And perhaps we can learn a lesson from his example: It was leadership based on meritocracy, not inheritance. It was leadership that harnessed the full capabilities of a very diverse population–that included Christianity, Islamic, and Jewish traditions.
This kind of enlightened leadership — leadership that nurtured culture, sustainability, diversity and courage — led to 800 years of invention and prosperity.
In dark and serious times like this, we must affirm our commitment to building societies and institutions that aspire to this kind of greatness. More than ever, we must focus on the importance of leadership– bold acts of leadership and decidedly personal acts of leadership.
With that, I’d like to open up the conversation and see what we, collectively, believe about the role of leadership.
Darn! And I thought who this woman really is? While the West was busy condemning Islam in the midst of September 11, 2001 — she couragedly stand by her principle did otherwise. Too late to know her? I hope not!
I found a video on her talking about ethics , something that I think most of the top management up there less interested than getting “the results” . As she said “Values are the only one that lead you when no one’s watching and when you think that anyone will ever found out. Values matter!
Carly rocks — gotta find her book!
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The more I know, the less I understand
All the things I thought I knew, I'm learning again..
