Monday, November 21, 2011

Why Make Time for Allah?

As promised, I finally wrote my first legit post in a long time. I led a sister's halaqa on Friday and I thought I would share with you what we discussed. The topic was why should we make time for Allah. The sisters at the halaqa were all college students and as college students it's easy to get distracted by this world and to forget to make time for Allah S.W.T. Even if you're not a college student, try to apply this to your life and inshAllah this can be a reminder that no matter where we are, whether it's in the office, at school, or at home, we should always make time for our Creator.
Although the topic of this post is why should we make time for Allah, I would like to look at the question being posed at the opposite side of the spectrum. Why should Allah make time for us? What have we done that makes us so deserving of His blessings?  Do you wanna know why we can’t seem to answer this question? It’s because No matter what we do for Allah, we can never repay Him for all of his blessings. Everything Allah commands us to do is not for Him, it’s all for our benefit. Praying does not benefit Allah, fasting does not benefit Allah, wearing hijab does not benefit Allah. All of this is for our own well being. Allah loves and cares for all His creation. It is only by His mercy that we even exist. The fact that Allah created us should be enough of a reason for us to make time for Him. 

Allah SWT says in the Quran, “And I (Allah) have not created the jinns and humans except they should worship Me.” [51:56]

In this ayah, Allah SWT is telling us that the sole reason He created us is so that we can worship Him. That is why we we’re created! Now, this ayah does not mean that we were created to pray day and night nonstop, and to fast every single day of the week. We are not angels of course, they are perfect while we obviously are not. 

*Anything that we do, when we make our intention to please Allah SWT, can become an act of worship. It’s so amazing when you think about how Allah makes it so easy for us to worship him. Before we study, if we say “bismillah”, suddenly, those 5 hours we spent studying have been considered an act of worship, and we have just fulfilled our purpose in life- worshiping Allah SWT. And this goes for anything, before we eat, when we take out the trash, when we clean, when we greet our sisters with a smiling face- ANYTHING that we do (as long as its halal of course), as long as our intention is pure and sincere, it can be considered an act of worship and Allah SWT rewards us for it inshAllah. We should pray our salat, remember Allah in all that we do, and make duaa that He accepts our deeds. 

Saturday, November 12, 2011

New Path

So...I'm thinking about changing the direction of this blog. It is indeed called Beauty of Islam, therefore my goal is to make it exactly that. I remember when I was first starting out in my journey of embracing Islam. Islamic websites and blogs helped me with my struggles and they increased my knowledge about Islam through the great posts they wrote. I hope to be able to do that once more. I feel like I lost sight of the goal of this blog and I haven't been blogging as much as I used to. SubhanAllah, there was a time when I would blog up to 5 times a day, even when I had exams to study for and papers to write. Writing about Islam on this blog isn't only inshAllah beneficial to you, but also to me. I learn so much as I search for hadiths and ayahs from the Quran for my blog posts and it really did give me an imaan boost. I miss that. God willing, I will make a change and Beauty of Islam will be back on track and even stronger then ever!