Assalamu alaykum All,
Ramadan Mubarak to all of you. We ask Allah to guide us to the best deeds and to accept from us our fasting and prayers.
Ramadan is the month of Quran and generosity. In Abbas says: “I have never seen anyone more generous than Rasulullah, and he would be most generous in Ramadan when Gibril would read Quran with him”
Imam Malik used to close the books of hadith and fiqh in Ramadan and devote his time to Quran.
Allah says: “The month of Ramadan in which Quran was revealed.” So the revelation of Quran began in Ramadan.
Therefore dear brothers and sisters we should focus on Quran during the holy month.
Lets not forget too that the month of Ramadan was a time when great battles were fought such as the battle of the criterion, the battle of Badr, and the greatest conquest, the opening of Makkah. There is also the important battle that saved the Muslims from the Mongol invasion, the battle of Ayn Jalut. So we should not forget our brothers who are carrying on this duty today from our dua and support.
Lastly, we need to keep in mind that while we are enjoying the blessing of freedom and having iftar with our families that we have thousands of brothers behind bars and only Allah knows what conditions they are in and there are thousands of families who are deprived the presence of their loved ones. Lets pray for them during this blessed month.
O Allah free our Muslim brothers from the prisons of the tyrants and shower on them and their families Your mercy. O Allah accept our good deeds and forgive us our mistakes.
Assalamu alaykum

Question:

Salam Alakum. What I understand from your lectures is that you believe the

method to re-establish Khilafah is through Jihad. Can you respond to this?

“Another view that is being addressed to the Ummah is the concept of fighting

the rulers and that through military struggle Islam will return to the world

stage. Again this is based upon a particular Hadith. It has been narrated from

many sources including Imam Muslim that the Prophet (saw) said, .Do not

challenge the people of authority unless you see explicit Kufr of which you have

I am done with my book reviews, so now let’s take a culinary tour of prison. The first item on the list is kudam.
The definition of kudam is a unique creature that exists on Yemeni military bases and prisons. It is the plural of kudma or kidma. The unique thing about kudam is that no two are equal in shape or color. The color can range anywhere from off-white to black. The shape of kudam does not conform to known geometric shapes. To a first time observer, they might appear to be visitors from outer space. Their size is usually equal to a large fist.
Do you have any idea what kudam really are?
Kudam are the staple breads of prisoners and soldiers in Yemen. They are fascinating pieces of art.
Kudam are transported from bakeries to military basis and prisons around the country on open flatbed trucks and are therefore subjected to wind, dust, sun, rain and the various forms of life that would naturally want to devour them. However kudam are pretty resistant to the elements, with the exception of rain, which they never handle well.
Kudam are supposed to be multigrain. That is how it was in the old days. Now they are most likely whole-wheat. They are fermented so their taste resembles San Francisco’s sourdough bread (those who live in America would know what I am talking about). They consist of a solid crust (and I mean really solid); they could be used for fights. They are covered with a layer of loose flour plus whatever particles have become attached to them along their route to prison, such as dust. Inside this hard crust, they are soft and tasty. They are mouth watering when hot, but unfortunately we only received them hot for sahur during Ramadan.
The ration for every prisoner is 6 kudam, which works out as 2 for breakfast, 2 for lunch, and 2 for dinner, but you get them all before breakfast.
There is a traditional way of eating kudam that is unfortunately dying just like all other wonderful customs. The traditional way of ‘breaking in’ to kudam is that you hold one kudma in each hand and then slam them together as hard as you can. This takes care of breaking loose all the foreign particles and flour that is hanging on to the surface. It also breaks the crust. This tradition is mostly lost among the prisoners, who may not have had enough exposure to kudam before incarceration, but I used to see the prison wardens always do it.

I have received the following question from one of the readers of my blog:

I am not sure how much you have noticed, but in the West, their is a campaign to undermine your personal credentials as an ‘Alim. The all-too-common tactic of attacking the ‘messenger’ rather than the message itself is being employed in these campaigns.
We want to be able to refute any false claims against you and support all of your works, wholeheartedly. Can you please provide us information regarding the Shuyukh that you have learned under in the past, and who you may be currently learning under? As well as, the source of your ‘ijaza, etc. This will be very important in refuting any slanderous attacks against your credibility.

There was a particularly mean Prison Head who decided to ban me from having any Islamic books. I then asked if I would be allowed to have English novels. He agreed. I have never been fond of novels. Most of my reading has been in Arabic. When I have read English, it has been Non-fiction, mostly related to current affairs. But, because any book that I ordered would have to be subjected to review by the prison administration, I was worried that if I ordered any current affairs books, that they would be banned. And that might lead to a temporary, or even permanent, ban preventing me from having any English books after that.

I would not have been able to order this book. There was a brother who was transferred from a prison in Saudi Arabia to our prison, and he had the fatawa with him. The original print of the fatawa is 35 volumes but this brother had a condensed version that was 5 volumes. The pages where very thin and the print was very small. The brother told me that he had the fatawa and that the prison was holding it. I really wanted to get a hold of it so I asked him to try his best to convince the Prison Head to hand it over to him. It took some time, but eventually he got it and was able to sneak it in for me. Having such a reference in prison is a rarity, and when some of the students of knowledge who where in there heard about this, they were adamantly asking me to lend them some of the volumes. In fact, when I was being released, while I was walking out of the jail, one brother risked walking out of the wing where he was housed to get within my line of sight to wave to me and yell out his request to leave the fatawa for him.  I did.  But because I had to ask the prison guard who was with me to give it to him, I wonder whether he received it or not. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to complete it all before I was released.

Prisoner 650

A Pakistani Muslim woman had been held in the notorious Bagram Prison in Afghanistan for years and now her current whereabouts unknown. Have you heard about her? Most likely not. A Muslim woman is lingering in such a torturous jail and no alarms have gone off in her country or in any part of the Muslim world. How low have we, as an Ummah, stooped to not only allow such a thing to happen, but to be so oblivious about it?

This eight volume set falls under what is classified as the fiqh of hadith. There are books that concentrate on the fiqh derived from Quran, such as the books of Tafsir by al Qurtubi and AbuBakr bin al Arabi, and you have books of fiqh that are concerned with a particular madhab, and then you have books of comparative fiqh, and then there is the category that this collection falls into, and that is the fiqh of hadith. This collection of hadith was done by Majdudeen Ibn Taymiyyah, the grandfather of the famous ibn Taymyyiah, and al Shawkani wrote Nail al Awtaar as a commentary on these hadith.

Imam al Nawawi is a fascinating scholar. He led an exemplary life. He lived exclusively for knowledge; he dedicated his whole life to it. The diversity of his knowledge made him an expert in many fields. His writings on fiqh are so important that when there is a difference of opinion among Shafi’i jurists, it is his opinion that becomes the official opinion of the Shafi’i School.

All of the books I have mentioned until now were brought to me by my family. Because they were not ‘officially’ allowed to visit me yet, getting the books would take a long time. But at a later point, I had the added privilege of being able to place orders directly through a warden who made purchases according to the prisoners’ needs, such as clothes and books.