I’m also working on a look and feel update.

Thanks to everyone who voted for this blog! InshaAllah I will work harder to improve the quality of the content here and together, with Allah’s permission, we can make a difference for a few souls.

This blog contains a special secret, a ‘podcast’! If you have ITunes or an IPod w/ ITunes, or any other software that accepted podcasts, you can listen to the 20+ Audio files I offer from my podcast category. As I post new ones, you will receive them automatically into your mp3 player or computer.

To subscribe, just give the podcast software (i.e. Itunes) this url:

http://yursil.com/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=27

Instructions for Itunes:

You can subscribe to virtually any podcast in the known universe by dragging its URL into your podcast playlist, or by typing the URL into “Subscribe to Podcast” under the Advanced menu.

If you don’t have a MP3 player, you can always click on the PODCAST category to the right to hear all the great audio.

Tell all your Muslim friends that have IPod’s!

Normal service resumed….

I have updated the mission statement of my blog (in my mind), changed the looks, and applied a few new policies.

Purpose of the Blog:

The purpose of this blog is to present my views on everything that I care about. I use my real name in all I do, because I am writing on my behalf not a trademark or a ‘personae’. Although I have associations with many Islamic organizations and continue to volunteer and maintain good ties with them, nothing I say or do here represents their views in any way.

With regards to my Tariqa, this is my passion and my love. The lessons I learn influence what I write. When I will (and indeed I have and will) write something incorrect, it is from me and my weakness in learning properly as seeker and student.

I also desire to share the tradition of Sunni Islam by capturing audio, video, and photographs wherever I am. I will share those on this blog as often as possible.

This blog is going to tackle strong issues. I will also be heavily commenting on other peoples sites.

Looks:
I was a bit tired of the last look and found it extremely hard to read. This is much more clearer and still attractive. The looks will still be changing colors here and there but this will be the general theme for some time.

I threw my picture up there for a few reasons. One is to reflect that this is my personal blog, and nothing that I say or do officially represents the organizations and such that I love and cherish (so as they may not be tainted by my words when I go astray).

I also enjoy remembering the feeling I had when this picture was taken, Hyder had talked me into taking a trip up the mountain and I enjoyed it very much. I will find other pictures and rotate them but they will be pictures of meaning to me.

Links Policy:

My links were out of control in the last version. It was one of the reasons I went with a smaller font. I will make a separate page with all the blogs that I read and watch at some point.

However, I also had many links on my front page to Brothers and Sisters who never reciprocated the favor or have not updated in months. I therefore have removed their links. I am still monitoring and reading their blogs, but right now I can only afford the space to those who care enough to link back to this site.

I will kindly add those back who desire to be linked on my site, leave a comment and add a link and it ‘shall be done’ (inshaAllah).

I have left those in which I have recently added.

Finally:

Things have been moved around but inshaAllah and with support I will make it even better yet.

The word about true traditional Islam has not spread far enough, and we are not going back into ‘whatever hole we came from’.

We are Islam, and we are for peace, tolerance, tradition, strength and righteousness.

We are lovers of the spiritual without watering down an ounce of the importance of Shariat and the legal aspects of Islam.

We are knowers of our past and carriers of the torch for the future.

Welcome to those who come and farwell to those who leave. Wassalam.

Realized the site looks terrible in firefox. Will make the adjustment during the day, expect strangeness while I work on it.

Added a page to the right to discuss how to get the audio files as a Podcast.

Took a break mostly because I had to deal with comment spam again. I still havent fixed it but now I’m just ignoring it for a while and turning off comments on old posts.

In other news.. my brother is in costa rica, feel free to check out his blog on the left.

The fact that I am nearing the half way mark for Contentions 1 is kind of discouraging as it has taken some time to get to this point. I also don’t want to make this solely a ‘contentions’ blog so I try to talk about other things as well.

It does seem that I’ll have to pick up the pace on the contentions, maybe doing 2 a day instead of 1. Inshahallah, we will see

Sometimes I feel I/we need to go through somewhat of a spiritual self-criticism and worldly-denial like the one that Shaikh Abd al Qadir is able to uniquely provide in order to find balance for ourselves from the extreme love for this world that develops naturally, like plaque on teeth.

A sort of counter-weight (just like dhikr, salat, etc). I find Sheykh Abd al Qadir’s work to be pretty effective in this regard!

Call it spiritual bi-polarity if you will, but it’s goal is not to remain at either end of the polarity but to maintain the steady state of balance for a majority of the time.

http://www.yursil.com/blog/2005/09/intelligent-design-and-islam/

Raumaan Ahmed was born on April 16th and he’s doing just fine. Pictures available here.

He is now two months old and I’m able to just now begin doing other things I used to do. He gets his shots today, hopefully he can handle like a big boy, even though he’s really quite little!

Al-baz.com has needed my attention as well, but Br. Ruslan had some problems with the access at the current hosting. Soon it will be hosted some place where I can do much more interesting stuff with it. Both this site and the Al-baz suffer from comment spam, and its a nightmare to stay on top of it.

I have a way to fix it, but I dont want to adjust moveable type any further on this server. I’m very limited what I can do here. So the site will move. Probably to www.yursil.com.

classes are ending now so I have some more free time. I’ll work on some stuff tomorrow.

comment spam is killing the site, i’m thinking of moving servers so I can use typekey registration.

we are just considering names right now, if you have any good ideas please send them my way.

A lot has occurred since we last met (as it may be). One of the biggest things is that my wife and I are expecting a baby. Classes started again, and work is… as usual.

The baby has been on my mind and I realized that the children of today will probably have a unique insight into their parents as many parents will have a ‘trail’ on the Internet, as I know I do.

Obviously one reason I stopped blogging is because I got extremely busy with my family life.

Besides that I began to have a distaste for blogging itself. I felt the blog was becoming an outlet and expression for my nafs. Working on and typing out Shaikh Abdul-Qadir Jilani’s (rad) site has imprinted this fear of my own nafs. I often feel I am the young man he talks to. Studying Sheykh Nazim’s work itself has also done this to me.

Who cares what I think about something, except me? If it has any value it is simply because I think it has value, and who am I? If someone else thinks it is meaningful they are unfortunately misguided people, since I am not a scholar nor anything close to the quality muslim I need to be. What I was spewing out wasn’t knowledge but mostly bad interpretations and maybe some links to real knowledge.

The baby has helped me get past that somewhat, in a way I will be doing this for him/her. Another way for my child to get to know me better, maybe see me in a way that they may never know personally.

—–

Another thing that occurred is that this site got targetted by a lot of spam comments. The site is receiving about 50 SPAM comments a day on various pages.

In a way this is kind of interesting, and to me symbolizes that when you leave something good, bad creeps in to fill its place.

Unfortunately, this has meant I have had to make comments go through an approval process first. I will be visiting my old blogging friends sites and start getting active again inshah’allah.

—

see you tomorrow.

I breezed through these past few contentions, just because I believe some of them are fairly simple to understand and expanding on them is just unnecessary. I figure if someone has a question, they will ask.

Another note, I am not a student of Sheykh Abdal Hakim, and I have no insight into his Contentions except what by what I have read of his work. Just another disclaimer.

Also as a reminder for the non-Muslim visitors, “Sheykh” is a word that is literally translated to “Old Man”, but is used Islamically for scholars or other forms of educators. Traditional Islam has no clergy who have special religious rights upon non-scholarly Muslims. The respect I show for Sheykhs Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, Nazim al-Haqqani, Hisham, etc, is simply respect for their work, knowledge, and spiritual station.

We are getting approximately 100 hits a day which is just great. I also know that Google has linked to this site on many keywords in which I appear in the top 10. “Traditional Islam”, “Wahabi’s”, “Pictures of Hamza Yusuf”, “Changes since 9/11″ are all things that are bringing this blog up pretty quickly.

I need something else to write about regularly, lest this become a Contentions blog rather than whatever I want it to be (vague resource on a the thoughts of a traditional Muslim).

Maybe I will write about Science and it’s relationship with Islam tomorrow.

– Update: Everything should be running smooth now.

1) Links will now pop-up. I love to do external references but it seemed to be annoying my local friends that you had to hit -back- to get back to me (strange that’s what I thought it was for? j/k)

2) Added a few plugins which changed the calendar and allow you to go back and forth in months.

3) Adding some code which changes the way extended entries work. If your browser supports it, you don’t get sent off the main page to the permalink anymore. I’m not sure this is better, but for now I’ll try it. I like everything about it except that when you choose to hide it has to adjust your position to the top of the article you were reading.

4) Yes, I will be adding images and changing the template more and more. I just have not had the ‘inspiration’ yet. I also want to add small icons that represent my categories. I have to think of something good for the top. I’m thinking of putting pictures that represent Mind, Body, and Soul and put plus signs between them. Also some arabic caligraphy needs to be added back in.

It’s all evolving.

But! Since I’ve gotten a few hits, I’m assuming this is of interest to a few people. As I post more and more on other blogs we may see more visitors coming to this site. I hope that is the case and unfortunately the only way I know that is by the hit counter and comments and karma votes. I do hope for comments and enjoy the votes so keep it coming.

Here is where I begin to build the case for my new blog:

This will be a home for entries related to my spiritual, political, and other interests. I will continue to maintain my usual journal for the past year, which will either have duplicate entries for some time or limit that to my fitness concerns. I have not decided yet. I definately needed this other place to express other parts to my personality. These are facets of me which have not had an outlet for the past year or so.

I also like the ability of being able to decorate as I please, as the designer part of me has not had a forum to express itself for some time. Expect the look of the site to change a little as I installl new features and become comfortable with the graymatter Perl code.

I need a place to post and chronicle my life with pictures.
I’ll go into my beliefs, ideas, and interests in the next post.

Welcome.