AND IF MY servants ask thee about me—behold, I am near; I respond to the call of him who calls, whenever he calls unto Me: let them, then, respond unto Me, and believe in Me, so that they might follow the right…
TAKING ONE’S INTENDED PLACE IN OUR BROTHERHOOD (continued) Our good deeds benefit our ‘brothers’ (male and female) as well as ourselves. doing good can be contagious! No one should be shy about encouraging one another, competing in good, about doing any and…
TAKING ONE’S INTENDED PLACE IN OUR BROTHERHOOD Being a complete Muslim is not a spectator sport in which your required duties are performed by your Imam or by your community’s officially designated anti-Islamophobia activists or da’wah specialists. To the contrary, developing a…
IN THE PREVIOUS segment, in appraising Dr. Dirks’ 400-page book, Understanding Islam: A Guide for the Judaeo-Christian Reader, we summarized his 72-page presentation of the sources and content of Islamic Faith. We enlarged upon his material regarding Gabriel as the angel of…
HAVING SURVEYED THE life and times of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (Part 3), Dr. Dirks, in his 400 page Understanding Islam: A Guide for the Judaeo-Christian Reader, moves on to deal, in greater depth (than in his 64-page Concise Introduction) with the sources…
FOR THE MODERN, non-Muslim reader who has already read the 64-page Concise Introduction to Islam (2014) by Dr. Jerald F. Dirks, I suggest, as a second step, the same author’s handling of the same subject in his nearly 400-page Understanding Islam: A…
JERALD F. DIRKS’ slim 64-page volume, A Concise Introduction to Islam (Amana Publications, 2014) makes available a quick appetizer for the busy modern non-Muslim who knows about Islam only what is being propagated in the mainstream media. In Part 1 we appraised…
MAXIMIZING OUR ‘WAYS AND MEANS’ – NURTURING OUR BROTHERLY COOPERATION So as to make sure that we are in line with what is required of each of us by our Lord, let us review what are our basic “ways and means.” They…
THE NINTH MONTH on the Islamic calendar—twenty-nine or thirty days of community fasting (Ṣawm), from crescent to crescent, Ramadan—is, among other things, a celebration of Al-Ra ḥmân’s renewal of guidance to mankind. Our Ramadan and Its Associations with Revelation One of the great…
FEAR IS A common emotion, and “scared” is a word we often hear. It is an older sense of the English word “fear” that is key to our success in responding to Allah’s Guidance, and thus in attaining His blessings. Allah repeatedly…