Imam Ghazali on time management

"Your time should not be without any structure, such that you occupy yourself arbitrarily with whatever comes along.
Rather, you must take account of yourself and order your worship during the day and the night, assigning to each period of time an activity that must not be neglected nor replaced by another activity.
By this ordering of time, the blessing in time will show itself. A person who leaves himself without a plan as animals do, not knowing what he is to do at any given moment, will spend most of his time fruitlessly.
Your time is your life, and your life is your capital: by it you make your trade, and by it you will reach the eternal bounties in the proximity of Allah.
Every single breath of yours is a priceless jewel, because it is irreplaceable; once it is gone, there is no return for it.
So do not be like fools who rejoice each day as their wealth increases while their lives decrease. What good is there in wealth that increases while one’s lifespan decreases?
Do not rejoice except in an increase of knowledge or an increase of good works. Truly they are your two friends who will accompany you in your grave, when your spouse, your wealth, your children, and your friends will remain behind.”
— Imam al-Ghazali

Summary: Why children are disobedient to their parents بچے والدین کے نافرمان کیوں

Summary of this bayan as I undderstand it:

1. Secular education is like Ghiza (food) and Religious education is like dawa (Medicine). We need both of these to live a healthy life. Where food is regular, we become sick, and need medicine. Likewise with education.

2. Everything has a taseer (nature, side effect) — water has an side-effect that it cools one down in addition to quenching the thirst. Spices have an effect the heat one up, though the primary reason is to improve the taste of the food. It's the nature of the secular sciences that they progress. They improve my criticising the previously accumulated knowledge, findings flaws in it, and improving upon it. The idea is newer is better than older. So the kids who are taking secular education subconsciously adopt this view with regards to their elders.

3. Religious education. Respect the elders, love the elders, trust the elders, associate with the elders. Rely on the elders. Religion doesn't "progress", it doesn't improve upon the previous. It only applies what was said earlier, to what's new. Religion progresses not my evolving, not by looking at older things with new perspectives, but newer things with old perspective.

4. Secular education is the science of experimentation. Experiments can be criticised in light of new experiments. Of course. But Wahi cannot be criticised in light of new "knowledge". If we challenge or criticise Wahii, we might lose Emaan.

*args, **kwargs

Inside a function header:

* collects all the positional arguments in a tuple

** collects all the keyword arguments in a dictionary

>>> def functionA(*a, **kw):
       print(a)
       print(kw)


>>> functionA(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, a=2, b=3, c=5)
(1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
{'a': 2, 'c': 5, 'b': 3}

In a function call:

* unpacks an list or tuple into position arguments

** unpacks an dictionary into keyword arguments

>>> lis=[1, 2, 3, 4]
>>> dic={'a': 10, 'b':20}
>>> functionA(*lis, **dic)  #it is similar to functionA(1, 2, 3, 4, a=10, b=20)
(1, 2, 3, 4)
{'a': 10, 'b': 20}

Bad Big Wolf

From here: https://www.futilitycloset.com/2017/05/25/fire-and-fog/

When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote his first story, at age 7, “my mother … pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon,’ but had to say ‘a great green dragon.’ I wondered why, and still do.” It turns out that there’s an unwritten rule in English that governs the order in which we string our adjectives together:

opinion
size
age
shape
color
origin
material
type
purpose

In The Elements of Eloquence, Mark Forsyth writes, “So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.”

Another unwritten rule concerns ablaut reduplication: In terms such as chit-chat or dilly-dally, in which a word is repeated with an altered vowel, the vowels will follow the pattern I-A-O if there are three words and I-A or I-O if there are two. So:

tip-top
clip-clop
King Kong
flip-flop
sing-song
shilly-shally

And so on. Interestingly, these rules about precedence seem to follow a precedence rule of their own: The “royal order of adjectives” would require Red Riding Hood to meet the “Bad Big Wolf” (opinion before size). But the rule of ablaut reduplication apparently trumps this, making him the Big Bad Wolf.

“Why this should be is a subject of endless debate among linguists,” Forsyth writes. “It might be to do with the movement of your tongue or an ancient language of the Caucasus. It doesn’t matter. It’s the law, and, as with the adjectives, you knew it even if you didn’t know you knew it. And the law is so important that you just can’t have a Bad Big Wolf.”

I don’t know how this applies to dragons.

(Thanks, Nick and Armin.)

Review: Islamic Guide To Sexual Relations

Islamic Guide To Sexual Relations by Muhammad Ibn Adam Al-Kawthari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Some non-muslims teased the companions of noble prophet saw. They said, your prophet tells you about how to wipe yourself too.

The companions, not suffering from any inferiority complex, said Indeed he does. And he tells us to do in so and so manner.

Alhamdulillah, Allah has taught us through His messenger about each and every facet of life. And one important aspect of a person's life is sex. Maslow would place it as one of the five most basic human needs. Well above self-actualisation, esteem, love, belonging, intellectual pursuits. In terms of a person's well-being's dependence on it, it's not much different from food itself. As the joke goes. Sex, like Oxygen, only becomes important when you aren't getting any.

Unfortunately, muslim world is too shy to talk about it, or to acknowledge.

May Allah give rise to more scholars in ummat, who are able and willing to talk about the relevant issues with clarity and completeness. This book is by one such scholar.

At the very least, one would learn what how the Prophet, the greatest of men of all time, loved his wives, and treated them.

At the best, it could inspire one to fall in love with Allah and His final prophet once again, for having thought about us, the ummatis to such an extent, and to provide us with a deen so complete in guidance, and so pure in its rule.

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Mumtaz Naseem

Review: The Metamorphosis

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I cannot say anything about this book that hasn't been said before. But I must say that it is a novella that is both humorous and horror at the same. The character in it is find in a ridiculously pitiable state, yet the reader never sympathises with him, reader only thinks of himself. What if it were to happen to me? Kafka throws some satire and social commentary for additional zest.

This is timeless.

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