Monday, February 13, 2012

Where has the love gone?

I am a bit late about this as I have only read it on twitter a few minutes ago, but the case of Hamza Kashgari really makes me sad. My heart aches every time something like this happens and I feel so sorry for the state of the ummah currently. The man said a few things on twitter regarding the prophet, and now it seems that his life might be on the line.

It makes me sad whenever people make fun of the prophet, the muslims rather than teach how the prophet was really like and his contribution to their lives and in doing so makes them understand why it is so disrespectful to make fun of such a person, choose to collectively call for murder of these people. Early in the days of his da'wah, people made fun of the prophet in even worse way, they called him even worse things, they put trash in his path, they even flung camels dung and intestines on him while he prayed. But when he finally won the conquest of Mecca, did he do the same to the people who hurt him so? No, he forgave them. When the people of Ta'if sent out their urchins and stoned him till he fled from them bleeding, and the angles were willing and ready to crush the town with mountains, did he approve of it. No, he just prayed that maybe their next generation would be muslims. A man who his companions say was never angry on his own account. Such a man, do you think if he was still amongs us today, would want us to react this way to such small and trivial things? I believe that he would rather not.

You can go here and here to see exactly what did he tweet. In his tweet he did not call the prophet any names, or associate with him any bad behaviour or anything. At most you can say was that he called the prophet a man, a normal man. And that was all that the prophet claimed he was. He was a normal man. With a message from Allah. And maybe that's the part where the contention is. With words like 'do not like the halos of divinity' and 'I shall speak to you as a friend, no more', people jump to the conclusion that he has renounced his religion. He even apologized and made shahadah and still people howl for his blood. Personally, I think these are extremely bad examples the muslims are making. You are not making the case of proving a 'most merciful and most forgiving' God by killing people. You are not making the case that if the muslims ruled the land, all the people will be treated fairly and justly with due respect and dignity no matter what they believe in. You are not making the case that Islam is the highest and none is higher because you are acting like you need to "protect" Islam and that it's followers are just dumb sheep that would be easily confused because their faith is so complicated.

On his death bed, the last words of the prophet was 'ummati, ummati, ummati' (My ummah, my ummah, my ummah). So concerned was he for his ummah, that even in the very last moment of his life, he was still thinking and worrying about them. He had such love for this ummah. He gave up everything and underwent countless challenges so that this beloved ummah would be properly guided and would find peace and safety in this world and in the next. Please do not bring shame to the prophet this way and make the world think that he was a lesser man than he actually was.


p/s: ummah means people. As the last messenger of Allah, Muhammad's ummah was the whole of mankind.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Running Android SDK on Arch Linux x86-64

A funny thing happens once you've downloaded it. Running ./adb in the platform-tools folder will yield a command not found error. But it's right there in clear view. Why wasn't it found. The answer seems to be because the android sdk itself is only 32bit thus you would be required to enable the multilib repos. Follow the instructions here on the things you need to do after you have enabled multilib support, namely you need to install the multilib-devel package which would replace the base-devel package.

Is Blogging No Longer a Thing?

As I embark on my new journey to learn the Rust programming language, I find myself pondering—where have all the blogs gone? In search of pr...