Can you hear that?

Typewriter

16:41 - “To those who leave their homes in the cause of Allah, after suffering oppression, We will assuredly give a goodly home in this world: but truly the reward of the Hereafter will be greater. If they only knew!”

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

To know is difficult, to not know is dangerous / 1:21 PM

I just felt like researching the meaning of 'Masya'allah'. Although the source I got is wikipedia, I think the definition is quite reliable.

Masya Allah (ما شاء الله) adalah frase yang diungkapkan seorang Muslim untuk menunjukkan kekaguman terhadap seseorang atau kejadian. Dalam hal ini, digunakan sebagai ekspresi penghargaan, sementara dalam waktu yang sama juga sebagai pengingat bahwa semua pencapaian bisa terjadi karena kehendak-Nya. Terjemahannya kurang lebih adalah "Allah telah berkehendak akan hal itu", dengan kata telah yang menekankan tentang doktrin Islam yang percaya pada takdir. Digunakan sebagai ungkapan kegembiraan disertai doa.

And I googled it again to find other sources and found this comment on a blog post:

salam sis..
u write well..
but i would like to point one thing.
an egyptian fren of mine who speaks arabic of course, once asked me why i never say masya Allah when i see beautiful things. and i said, in malaysia.. we misunderstand. we say masya allah when things are bad. and subhanallah when things are good. and she said.. but its sunnah to say masha Allah (not subhanallah) when u see amazing things. Masha allah is hard to translate succinctly into English. The literal meaning is "what God has willed". The sense in which it's used is more like "what a wonderful thing God has willed".
u can check with ur arab visitors.. of course subhanallah is also praise to god but saying masha allah is the right thing. its just like saying subhanallah instead of alhamdulillah. theyre both praises to god, but one is more appropriate than the other.
thanks :)

I wonder than, what is the proper thing to say when you stumble upon something that is seriously bad. Something you never really thought of, something you sort of knew but never paid attention too. What if for all these years, you think you've been doing the right thing, but in actual fact, you're just doing what you're told to do. I'm quite at a lost for words actually. Will saying SubhanAllah, Masya' Allah or AstaghfiruAllah suffice? I'm somewhat frightened and I really feel sinful but I guess I'm glad that I was given the chance to do my own research on my religion.

At this point, I would want to thank Riza for introducing to us cubs the arrivals and I would like to urge whoever is reading this to visit their website: www.thearrivals.blogspot.com with and open heart and mind. It's a series of episodes that speaks of coincidences (or are they?) in reference to Islam. For those who are weary of trusting such a site, please, by all means do your own research. Read books, hadiths, research online or even talk to someone reliable like an ustaz or ustazah.

And I'd like to share a phrase I learned from a Haruki Murakami book about coincidences:

"Even chance meetings are the result of Karma"

What does it mean? It means that things in life are fated by our previous lives (or for Muslims, our Rohs. It is said that our Rohs have gone through our lives once before we have and of course, our destiny is already writtn by Allah s.w.t). That even in the smallest events there's no such thing as coincidence.

So think about it.