July and August

Ah, recording my monthly musings have been rather delayed because of everything else in life I'm up to, and I thought since July and August had a similar theme (not really), I'd just do them together!

It all began with my slightly chipped front tooth getting rechipped, sustained from my July the 19th 2004 episode. My mum superglued it back in after I retrieved the small enamel jigsaw piece from my lollipop, and it felt weird until I finally lost the fragment down the sink, and constantly prodding the gap with my tongue didn't lessen the weirdness. The dentist sorted it all out in the end :) Lasered in and everything (although there was some stuff that did suspiciously smell like superglue). The dentist said it was the best mouth she'd seen all day (and then she saw my teeth :B).

I again went paintballing with my St. George's friend Haseeb and his lot; we got there after a chilled-out train journey where I was reading my Yes Man book in between catching up with my mate. We got things going after his friends finally arrived, and the weather was quite nice; not too hot and not too cold, but that all changed later on, with the thunderstorm raging on and off, the rain pounding down like it had a vendetta against us. The other team was full of cheats; people who didn't go off once you shot them, so I decided to get out of the castle I was supposed to be defending and navigate through the thorns all the way around the edge until I was behind their base, stealthily shooting them in the backs before disappearing again, take that! On the way home the thunderstorm raged on, and Victoria station was evacuated because of the leaking roof and flood, but it was an experience, and if I wasn't in the 'Yes Man' phase, I probably could've enjoyed a nice dry day at home.

I saw Ice Age 3 with my brother and his mates (my friends were practically non-existent at this time), and I liked it, certainly better than number 2!


Then an Iraqi charity dinner, £25 per ticket, me and my brother and his mate, waiting ages for the food and doing bizarre things in the process. And afterwards the raffle, which my brother bought FIVE tickets for, before we had any chance to discuss whether we should be getting them or not. Our eyes were on the two Wembley tickets up for grabs, but what did we win? A women's arab dress. And then another! My brother went up to collect the first, I went for the second, but I was gobsmacked even the first time that one of our numbers was called!

Obviously the thing that stood out most in this month was the trip to Spain and Morocco (which I'm still typing out the diary for!). My final thoughts being quite mixed; Spain looked amazing, clean and was full of character. It's just sad seeing an old Muslim land no longer in the hands of the Muslims, with them being relegated to less affluent parts of town, and the old landmarks turned into tourist attractions, adorned with crosses. But nevertheless, it was an enlightening experience, and to be honest, I enjoyed the character of the place more than I did Morocco. I'll try and elaborate further after my diary's finished inshaallah.

My brother and I also joined a newly-formed football club, Cricklewood United, and the first day of training didn't go too well for me; I collapsed every so often because I'd twisted my ankle in some slim and unstable red football boots, which weren't the most comfortable in the world. But luckily, I had another pair I saw in a sale recently, exactly the same type as my red ones, and which also happen to be my mum's favourite colour.


They look nice, but a training session in these beauties left blisters and rubbed heels. But it did make me appreciate how cool blisters are; the body making cushions so you could feel more comfortable, that's what they essentially are!


~~~~~~August~~~~~~


The month kicked off (literally) with my first proper official-like football match in more than ten years (with my last time being in the under-10's league at Lillie Road), if you don't count the couple of matches I had at Imperial. It went alright, until I came off with cramp in my left leg, and we lost, but it was good getting to know our new team-mates, and how greedy some can get with the ball!

We went to Brighton as a family, ate freshly-made doughnuts (where you see the machine making it and flipping it over in the oil) and ice cream that we had to run to the car in the heavy rain. Sea-world, a very old Victorian aquarium with a cool tunnel so you can see the sharks and the big 40 stone (I think) turtle swimming along from underneath. I also saw a couple of smaller turtles getting intimate with each other, not making the '5th leg' mistake again ¬_¬, and managed to touch a shark fin before noticing the 'Do Not Touch' sign. And that's about all Brighton had to offer, apart from the pebbled beach of course.


Another match, we drew this time, and I came off with a cramp in my left leg. More training, but with the new boots I bought from Niketown. I noticed their bright colour behind the counter days before they got on the shelves (I saw some footballers wear them before... yes I'm a sucker for subliminal advertising), and just as I was about to leave and contemplate getting some non-orange ones as well, but I'm sure you'll agree they are quite nice. They're just like the ones in my dream!


We got an ice cream machine which is supposedly like the ice cream vans make, and they do taste the same, but it also needs you to freeze parts of the machine beforehand, which I think is a bit of a cheat. The ice cream at Hamleys was also nice; we went around London as a family, on the boats in Hyde Park, the pet section at Harrods (and the fossils weren't bad either!), and stood where my mum always used to stand when she was working there all those years ago... 'twas good. The next day three of us went to my afghan friend's house and chilled playing FIFA, and we liked it so much, we went to another friend's house the next day after my mate's wedding to do the same! Oh yeah, the wedding; we sat ourselves down in the packed venue and played with the toothpicks whilst some guy at the front was speaking Somali, and the occasional cheer as we picked up our friend's name being mentioned. Not many of our secondary school friends turned up which was sad, but the food was nice, and the lesson learnt that day was that if a Somali guy offers you some green sauce, politely decline; it's hot!

There was another dinner, this time for Palestine, and they had an auction at the end (after the nice asian food), and to get things going, I bid for practically every painting out there, until others bid higher. This did work out until the guy who I was mainly bidding against decided that he'd bought enough paintings that night, resulting in me having to lug home a massive £55 painting on the bus!

(It looks better upside-down I think)

And another friendly football match, winning this time, and my first goal! Oh and how can I forget the awesome family picnic we had in Richmond park? Sheltered by an old tree enswathed by the bracken, spotting a few deer and their fowl on the way, and eating food we could've easily had at home, but without the wonders of the wilderness all around.

I've just realised how much waffle I have to delete go through in my monthly notes before I can call this a legible monthly memoir. I haven't written anything on September yet; maybe it's better that way...

The Light

Since it's Ramadan and all that, I thought I should talk about my ever-increasing experience and love for a certain book. Now is a month where people are putting so much effort into completing its reading, without putting that much thought into how deep this book actually is. Yes, the Quran. My earliest memories of learning the Quran go back to my reception class at school, where we all obediently followed exactly what the teacher said, without really knowing what all the Arabic meant, and I have a tape somewhere of my three year-old self repeating Suratul-Feel (The chapter of the elephant) over and over again in my cute and innocent voice. I had obviously read translations of the Quran as I grew older, but my real hands-on experience was when I started lessons with my brother at my friend's house, towards the end of primary school, and which went on for about five years; just us three students and a teacher. There I learnt all of the rules of tajweed and of some stories and why certain verses were revealed at certain times. The young teacher was extremely nice, and with probably the best voice I've ever heard reciting the Quran, mashaallah. I remember standing in Taraweeh once, and he was leading one night for some reason, and I just proudly stood there, "That's my teacher".


Various Quran competitions kept my memorising levels up during my teenage years, as well as Sheikh Hasan's amazingly insightful Islamic Studies lessons, making us memorise the English translations too. I hadn't done much Tafsir, learning about the explanation of the Quran, apart from during the last ten days of Ramadan once, and our weekly sunday circles, but Imperial changed all that. The weekly Tafsir sessions on Suratul-Fatiha opened my eyes up completely to the multitude of layers the Quran possesses. We weren't only learning 'standard Tafsir', the meaning of words, but the Arabic root words they came from, and the meanings of those. We learnt of the different classes of letter that can make up a word, and why they were chosen to make up that word. We were asked questions such as why Allah chose a certain way to phrase something and not another in order to express such a meaning, and why a sentence was composed in such a way and not another. It turned out to be the deepest time I've ever analysed a piece of text; this wasn't a simple dissection of an anthology, these were the words of God, so intricately placed together to produce something so flowing and poetic. These poetic techniques weren't put here by accident, and the effects on the meaning and feeling of the verse they each made were plentiful.

We were taught that the Quran makes reference to other chapters (that may or may not have been already revealed at the time), for example, the final verse in Suratul-Israa' makes reference to the next five surahs in order. I found it amazing, and we were sent home, encouraged to find our own undiscovered phenomena with this book (which, if you look properly enough, are alot!). Each of the 114 chapters is coupled with another, which could provide a mirror image to the other, or compliment the other chapter in meaning, and each one has an axis about which the rest of the surah 'rotates'; so the Quran isn't only linguistically perfect, but visually also. You can get out your calculator and start doing maths with each letter having a value, and finding patterns, or you can just count the number of words that crop up and correlate them with others; anyhow, the possibilities with this book are endless, and more are yet to be stumbled upon.


The Quran wasn't revealed as a "Here you go" one book. Over a period of 23 years, bit by bit, a few verses at a time, it slowly came down through the angel Jibreel, and reorganised and reassembled according to how it was told to be, until the revelation was complete. It makes reference to events at the time, as well as events that were prophesised to happen, and until the end of time, we constantly find new things relevant to our age that weren't realised before. Back then it was memorised, as well written down on leaves and fragments of bone, and to this day, it remains unaltered, untouched to the letter. The Quran contains so many scientific facts that were unknown of at the time, only recently being discovered. It begs the question: How can an illiterate man in the middle of the desert, at a time when the world was in some of its darkest days with regards to scientific discovery, produce something so intelligent that doesn't go one bit against modern established science?

If I was doing this blog for over twenty years, I would find that I was such a fool two decades ago for writing the things I did, and want to change and edit my blog-posts to suit my views and ideas now. With the Quran this never happened, resulting in not one contradiction in the entire revelation over the 23 years, a proof of its divine roots, memorised word for word by so many people around the globe, preserved by memory and by writing until now.

The Quran is a proof unto itself that it contains the words of the Creator. Fourteen hundred years ago, at a time when Arab society was full of well-versed poets, this book came down leaving them speechless; how could anything so pure be reproduced by a human being? And it is a challenge Allah gives in the Quran itself: "Produce a chapter like it if you are truthful."

It's overwhelming when you realise that the text you're analysing came from the same being that made you, and everything else around you. So next time when you're listening to the Imam reciting at a hundred miles an hour, or if you're reading the Quran, try to peel away the cloak upon cloak of depth and discover this immaculate guidance that has been left for you until the end of time.