Egyptian Gumbo

May Allah ‘az wa jal raise her in ranks in Jannah, and make her successful in all her endeavors, ameen.

When I heard her speech, the ayah “Abasa wa tawala, an jaa’ahul ama3″ came up. Subhnallah, smiles are acts of charity, would we suppress our smiles if we knew the person we were in front of was blind? Allah watches us, even if he/she can’t.

I read this story yesterday online, not thinking much of it other than it was, in fact, one of those stories as a journalist that you realize makes for prime front page space. It has all the elements of newsworthiness: prominence, conflict, conspiracy, wealth, beauty, fame, etc., etc.

Today, I find out that I actually know the guy who was sentenced to hang’s niece. She is my cousins very close friend. I’ve met not only her, but her mother (who in the story was reported as having fainted when she heard the verdict) few times, and I can’t say they were anything but nice people.

Apparently, her uncle was the one involved in this scandal and when I was watching the news today with my aunts I saw her and her family in the court room when the verdict was called crying. Wallahi weird things happen here, subhanAllah. I saw her mom (Hisham Talat Mustafa’s sister) fainting and they had to carry her out to an ambulance.

As a journalist this story is gold in terms of newsworthiness, but as someone who knows the guy’s neice girl and her family (although not very well), I actually feel horrible this is so public and has forever branded their family’s name with murder and scandal.

The story is below:

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Egyptian Tycoon Sentenced to Hang in Death of Singer

By Maggie Michael
Associated Press
Friday, May 22, 2009

CAIRO, May 21 — Suzanne Tamim shot to fame in an “American Idol”-style TV show, a green-eyed Lebanese beauty whose pop songs about love’s agony mirrored her troubled life. Now, the man reported to be her secret lover — a married, politically powerful Egyptian tycoon — has been sentenced to hang for paying a former government security agent $2 million to slit her throat.

Billionaire Hisham Talaat Moustafa showed no emotion Thursday as he was convicted and sentenced for ordering the killing of Tamim — the latest chapter in a tale of sex, power, money and murder that was closely followed throughout the Middle East.

Many had wondered whether the 50-year-old real estate mogul, an influential member of the ruling party with ties to President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal, would get away with murder in a region where the rich are often thought to be above the law.

The courtroom erupted in chaos after the conviction of Moustafa and the former security officer, Mohsen el-Sukkary, who also faces the gallows. Moustafa’s sister fainted, and his two daughters burst into tears.

Tamim rose to stardom after appearing on an Arab talent show in 1996, appealing to Middle Eastern audiences with her sultry dancing, cascading chestnut hair and melodramatic crooning. She soon fell upon troubled times, separating from her Lebanese husband-manager.

Tamim and Moustafa met in the summer of 2004 at a Red Sea resort, according to transcripts of Moustafa’s interrogation. Moustafa said he wanted to marry her in 2006 but then retreated, and they broke up. Tamim left Egypt and hooked up with a kickboxer.

Moustafa, apparently angry over having been jilted, turned to Sukkary, who worked at his Four Seasons Hotel in Cairo. The prosecutor said the tycoon helped arrange visas and tickets for Sukkary as he trailed the singer first to London, then to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

Transcripts of alleged phone conversations kept by Sukkary and seized by police have Moustafa telling him, “The agreed amount is ready,” and, “Tomorrow, she is in London and you should act.” In a later tape, Sukkary explains that he missed his chance in London and “will wait to move it to Dubai.” Moustafa chides him and then says, “Okay, let’s finish with this.”

According to Dubai investigators, Sukkary followed Tamim last July 28 to her apartment in the swanky Dubai Marina complex and attacked her repeatedly with a knife.

I haven’t shared Quran recitations for a while so I thought i’d post a couple from my favorite reciter:

Khalid AlJuhaim– Surat Maryam:

Surat As-Saffat (I posted this one earlier)

From Surat Yusuf:

Indeed a beautiful dream.

Also, stay tuned every Wednesday for tafseer Juz ‘Amma classes after Maghrib salah (Eastern Standard Time).

The classes will resume next week. Also, inshaAllah withing the next week or two all the past tafseer lessons (audio) will be available for download via www.bayyinah.com/dream. We ask that if you spread them around to please refer everyone back to the site inshaAllah.

Bayyinah Drawstring Bag?

What do you think? Keep your class material/water bottle in…

Oprah is generally looked upon in American society as a great empowered but honest woman. She definitely has great interviewing skills. However, if you’ve always been an Oprah fan, this post may change your whole perception of her and her show.

I have a little bit more time on my hands now that I have spring break, and so I decided to turn on the TV to America’s favorite day-time talk show host, Oprah Winfrey. Unaware of the subject matter of today’s show I watched as she brought on a guest who was publicly taking the innocence of little children right before our eyes.

The guest was Laura Berman, an author who decided to talk today about how to speak to your kids about sex.

A concerned mother of a 10-year-old came on the show seeking advice on what to do. Her daughter for the past eight months has been asking her mom what “sex” was. The mother kept telling her child she would “tell her later.” The child knew it was something possibly embarrassing and refrained from asking her father, but still had no idea what it was and wanted answers from her mother.

“Doctor” Berman gave the mother advice. She told her to talk to the girl and tell her sex was just the ways babies are made. “That’s not too bad,” I thought to myself — after all I there was nothing explicit about that answer; but the doctor went on.

She decided to show the girl diagrams of human anatomy, both boys’ and girls’. She also told the mother to tell the child about “pleasure.” And forgive me for getting explicit, but the 10 minutes I watched of this show SHOCKED me. She decided to talk to the child about what I’ve seen IslamQA.com call “the secret habit” and tell her that it’s perfectly normal and OK to do so!

AHH! WHAT! Did I just hear that right? Oprah, have you gone mad inviting someone like that on your show!? A 10-year-old girl who had a simple question because she heard this word used around her school, and this is what they teach them in return?

Wallahi I was so disgusted. But it didn’t stop there! Berman proceeded to recommend getting their daughters toys (of the bad kind!) to “explore.”

I didn’t watch anymore. That served me right for even trying to watch anything. Wallahi I feel like it corrupted even me and I’m not a 10-year-old girl! It was so embarrassing I couldn’t watch another minute of it.

Lesson of the day - get your children out of public school and into Islamic school. Don’t let non-Muslims teach your kids! Islamic schools are not sheltered, I understand that, but at least there is a sense of disgust and reprimand that children learn when it comes to Zina. Instead of feeling it’s perfectly normal to do, at least the students KNOW it’s wrong!

Wallahu alem.

Sorry for the explicit nature of this post, but seriously be aware of all this garbage.

1. The Project:

I have an awesome team — hands-down. MashaAllah the sisters and brothers I work with are amazing. Everyone from my marketing group to the coordinators in each of the locations I work with, are awesome.

Lately, between scheduling, confirming venues and guiding people through how to promote the classes, we’ve come up with a brand-new site called bayyinahexperience.com. If you’ve ever taken a Bayyinah class it’s kind of hard to explain. You can’t really explain the feeling you get while you’re in class learning, nor can you really explain in detail what it’s all about; it’s one of those “you just have to be there” moments. Well we can’t guarantee that this site will give you the full “Bayyinah Experience” but it will sure attempt to give you a glimpse. We decided that video blogging was the way to go. Have the students video tape the fun, random, and intriguing moments that happen during class and even during the breaks. They can share their reflections, a story that happened to them on the way to the class, or anything related to what would normally be talked about or shown at a Bayyinah class.

Each location we conduct seminars in, we ask the coordinators to get someone to be in charge of getting footage. And the result is a student-run video blog dedicated to Bayyinah — otherwise known as bayyinahexperience.com.

I’m excited to see how this site is going to catch on as we go to more and more locations and add more and more classes to our curriculum. It should be pretty fun to come back to on a regular basis, inshaAllah.

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I have had such little time to post thoughts, reflections, media content on Egyptian Gumbo lately because I’ve been busy with other (greater, inshaAllah) things. I want to keep EG alive inshaAllah, and inshaAllah I will be able to do so once I graduate from LSU this May.

Between school and my work, I’m trying hard to keep with setting aside some time for my own personal development. Make dua for me!
EG

This was too cute to pass up posting on here. haha.

Madness I tell you!

Wanting to steal someone else’s baby may not seem like normal to the average guy; OK fine, the average person. And sure, we don’t actually steal them, but this “thing” is what makes us talk baby talk at any Johnson and Johnson or Pampers commercial we see on TV. That’s right, it’s those motherly instincts that overtake us women and make us reduced to a puddle around children.

I can’t help it. I see a cute baby and I’m melted. I want kids.

But it’s the other motherly instincts that make me terrified of bringing a child into this world.

I’m not talking pangs of birth (although one of the scariest thoughts). I’m talking raising a kid, in America — actually, the world.

There is so much filth out there, much more than when we were growing up. And there has been a lot of filth that went around with generation X. Elementary kids know about sex, drugs and curse words. It seems like what used to be sheltered until high school, is now, sheltered until 3rd grade.

They are growing up in a society where being Gay is normal and culturally accepted, and anyone to speak otherwise is a hate monger.

When I was working for the Reveille, we had this columnist who decided to write a story about why America should stand together against homosexuality. The guy was right on point. However, I don’t think there has ever been a column that got more hate mail, more threats, and more responses in the history of the Reveille. Not even I, with my record hundreds of hate comments a week, had that much of a backlash against me.

The sacredness of the institution of marriage is questioned. After all, why get married when you have all the perks of marriage without any of the responsibility? Producing illegitimate children is a fashion these days, the latest accessory.

Then comes the issue of what am I going to do with my kids and school? Islamic schools, I hope that they can come up to par on the education level one of these days. And there is no way I’m sending my kids to public school, and then again I can only home school up to a certain level.

I hear many times people say, “I’m going to take my kids and live overseas.” Unless you live in Saudi, I can assure you, globalization has taken its course. What happens a lot of the times, is that the parents think their kids are now “safe” give them more freedom, and in the end the kids do much worse things “back home” than they do here.

Wallahul musta’an.

I want my cute, cuddly baby. But what’s a mother to do?

Surely, we can find some comfort in knowing that Allah protects and takes care of the children of the righteous, but have we really attained righteousness?

Scary thought…