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Psychiatrist sums up life from an Islamic perspective.

Heard a quote from a podcast recently, the Jordan Harbinger podcast, episode 1114:

So a hypothetical will make us feel fear in the present. It's not a hypothetical fear. It's like we feel the pain in the moment.

Yeah. And that's the way that our brain works.

But we cannot feel a hypothetical pleasure in the moment. We can have some degree of anticipation. Yeah, you can be paranoid about a car crash, but you can't imagine going to the movies and then get a rush of dopamine.

It doesn't work like that. You actually have to go to the movies.

When we are anticipating something exciting that we want to do, we don't get the pleasure and dopamine of that action.

To give another example, if you anticipating getting married in the near future, you won't get the dopamine hit just from the anticipation itself. You get that high when you actually do meet her, get married, and spend time with her.

On the other hand, if you think you won’t get married, the stress you might feel of not getting married actually does harm your body in the present.

This brings a new angle to the Islamic concept of how this world is not supposed to be Heaven. It’s a temporary place, which is actually a test for us.

And last time I checked, tests are stressful.

Don’t put all your hopes in this world. Take your portion of this world, but strive for the next world.

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Treat your daughters like humans, not corpses.

There is a lot of jahiliya still in our Muslim circles.

Giving birth to a baby girl is considered a setback or a waste of time, instead of a blessing. Compound that with the mental setback daughters can have if the father feels the same way. He gives her no attention, letting her desperately seek male attention through other means, scarring her for life.

The only love she received from her father was when she was just a little child, but that slowly dwindled as she got older because now she is a woman, so she’s almost not a mahram anymore.

No affection, no hugs, no special treatment. Just the typical, “How are you doing?”

After all, when she gets married, she becomes someone else’s “daughter,” right?

Wrong.

Your daughter is still your daughter, and if things go south, she falls back under your protection, dad.

You’re not being a good Muslim by neglecting her, thinking you’re doing the right thing.

Why don’t you follow the example of the Prophet ﷺ and how he treated his daughter Fatima RA?

The Prophet ﷺ was firm when he had to be, and gentle and kind at the same time.

When the Prophet ﷺ gave his famous speech in Makkah at the declaration of Prophethood, he was telling his family to believe in Allah, and save yourselves from the hellfire. He mentioned all the tribes, and started naming individual family members, concluding with Fatima RA where he told her to, “fear Allah, because I won’t be able to save you from the fire of hell. But in this world, ask me for whatever I have and I will give it to you.”

Even in this pivotal moment of his life, he ﷺ was being strict and loving at the same time with his daughter.

He showed his love for his daughter, even in such nerve racking circumstances, and he wasn’t afraid to hide it.

In many other instances, the Prophet ﷺ would outwardly show his love to Fatima RA by standing up to greet her, kissing her forehead and even seating her in his place when she came to visit.

This, my fellow Muslim Dad, is how we treat our daughters.

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The one coping mechanism we need the most, but we use the least.

People cope with their problems in many ways:

  • Drugs

  • Alcohol

  • Stress eating

  • Yelling

  • Hurting their families

  • Excess video game consumption

  • Netflix

  • Porn

But there's one coping mechanism that people are moving more and more away from:

Prayer.

In in particular:

Salah.

You can't even begin to realize how important Salah is.

Allah is not in need of our Salah, but we are desperately in need of it.

What better feeling can we have when we ask Allah, the Creator of the Heavens and Earth, the One who is able to change everything for you, for our needs?

Never underestimate the importance of Salah!

Just imagine what can happen to us if we substitute any or all of our coping mechanisms with Salah.

Not only will it save your life, it will save your soul.

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Rich vs poor people…

Hot take:

Poor people buy their kids screens.

Rich people...don't.

I didn't define what rich and poor are, but I'll let you think about it.

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Don’t wait until they’re older…

When your kids are young, they think you know everything.

They think you’re infallible.

Of course we are not infallible, but this is the time to capitalize on spending time and investing in them with your presence and your knowledge, however little it may be.

Teach them even one ayah, as narrated by the Prophet ﷺ.

They will soak in whatever you say and might even practice it better than you!

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Your children are wealth.

People teasing me in a joking manner that I will need a second part time job because I’m having a 4th kid.

That’s the mindset of someone who sees children as a liability, instead of seeing children as wealth and as an asset.

Alhumdulilah I’ve been able to put myself and my family in a position where I live within my means, and can provide for my family comfortably.

The secret isn’t hard.

Bust your butt, spend less than what you make, save and invest, and put your trust in Allah.

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The Dawah of Gaza.

The situation in Gaza and the West Bank is another wake up call for the whole world, to let them know that there will be a Day of Judgment.

The whole world is looking and seeing the destruction and mayhem, and should be thinking to themselves:

"How can such an injustice ever be equalized?"

I hope the honest and sincere, who are pondering and thinking, find the truth of Islam and the peace it brings.

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What a screen does to your child..

A small but powerful statement from SUNY Potsdam:

"Screen time desensitizes the brain’s reward system.

Many children are “hooked” on electronics, and in fact, gaming releases so much dopamine—the “feel-good” chemical—that on a brain scan it looks the same as cocaine use."

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Shaytan doesn’t take days off.

Just because your kid is homeschooled or goes to an Islamic School, that should not be a reason to lower your guard.

Always keep your guard up.

Shaytan doesn’t take days off.

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Marriage is more than just a Sunnah.

When you get married, you are following a Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ.

But it is a lot deeper than that.

Deeper than you can imagine.

When you get married, your character changes dramatically.

Your life has so many character transformations that you will not even be aware of.

It will happen organically.

You will become a husband or wife, a parent, a son-in-law, etc, and your character will be molded with every situation under the sun.

You have to learn to deal with another person and sacrifice some of your time for them.

You will have fun,

you will argue,

you will love,

you will sacrifice,

and you will learn what patience really is.

Then you will have children, and now you will be sleep deprived, while loving them more than anything else (after Allah and the Prophet ﷺ).

No single day will ever be routine or the same.

A chaotic blessing.

Your life will be a rollercoaster at times, but you won’t want to get off of it.

It’s hard to explain if you don’t have kids, but the minute you do, it all makes sense.

All these experiences will solidify, strengthen, and make your emotional intelligence more flexible.

You will be molded into a stronger person who is more thankful, and life’s challenges will no longer make you angry and derail you, because you’ve been there and done that countless times now.

That is what a good marriage will do for you.

Did you ever hear of the Prophet ﷺ lose his cool over silly little things? Even for huge obstacles, he kept his composure.

That doesn’t mean he ﷺ didn’t get angry, but he got angry the right way.

Emotional intelligence.

There’s a right and a wrong way to get angry at someone.

When you get married in sha Allah, you will know what I mean.

He ﷺ was faced with challenge after challenge, but he was able to persevere.

Now, what happens if you don’t get married?

It can get ugly.

Your character is more likely to become very rigid.

You have been so used to living a certain way, that small changes aggravate you.

As you get older, your routine settles, and your emotional intelligence declines.

You become one-dimensional.

You become selfish.

You become grumpy.

Too many moving parts causes you to panic.

Your individualism only grows bigger, and sadly, you will be alone.

You never had kids, and now when you see kids being kids, it annoys you.

It might even disgust you.

What did the Prophet ﷺ say about a person’s character?

Aisha reported: The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said:

إِنَّ مِنْ أَكْمَلِ الْمُؤْمِنِينَ إِيمَانًا أَحْسَنُهُمْ خُلُقًا وَأَلْطَفُهُمْ بِأَهْلِهِ

Verily, the most complete of believers in faith are those with the best character and who are most kind to their families.

Sunan al-Tirmidhi 2612

If you really want to perfect your character, your relationships have to be more than just having friends and being an Uncle or Aunty.

You need to be a parent.

You need to be a spouse.

You need to be that rock that your spouse relies on, and your kids rely on.

At the end of the day, it is your family that will care about you the most.

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The best era to raise kids.

Back in the 80s and 90s, we had less Islamic resources, but we also had less distractions.

Today, we have more Islamic resources Alhumdulilah, but we also have more distractions.

I honestly can’t decide which time was a better time to be in, and it really doesn’t matter.

The point is, Allah subhana wata'aalah put you and me at a specific time on this earth, and it is up to us to make the best out of it.

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Getting a head start will benefit you exponentially.

My wife and I were talking about homeschooling, and she mentioned to me how if she started homeschooling at our oldest's current grade (7th), it would be a lot harder since the subject intensity is just at another level.

When you start early from Pre-K, you can also learn the information along with your child, making it easier for you to digest the material and concepts.

Remember, you will only have to learn the material from scratch once.

Each subsequent child will learn the same subjects from you, but since you have already taught the subject before, it will come back fast.

The only thing that gets challenging is managing more kids.

The material is not the issue.

Start them while they're young, and while you have less of a hill to climb.

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Smoking weed in Jamaica..

I didn't know what pot smelled like until 2014.

I was 32 years old in Jamaica on vacation, talking to some guy on the beach, asking for directions.

My kids know what weed smells like today.

This is crazy, and unacceptable.

More and more drugs are becoming legal or OK to use, and it will destroy this country.

It will destroy our children.

We would have people come to school to warn us about drugs, and now it's being turned into a cultural norm.

Read more

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“The internet is forever. But also, it isn’t.”

s. e. smith from The Verge (paywalled article):

Every few days, I open my inbox to an email from someone asking after an old article of mine that they can’t find. They’re graduate students, activists, teachers setting up their syllabus, researchers, fellow journalists, or simply people with a frequently revisited bookmark, not understanding why a link suddenly goes nowhere. They’re people who searched the internet and found references, but not the article itself, and are trying to track an idea down to its source. They’re readers trying to understand the throughlines of society and culture, ranging from peak feminist blogging of the 2010s to shifts in cultural attitudes about disability, but coming up empty.

This is not a problem unique to me: a recent Pew Research Center study on digital decay found that 38 percent of webpages accessible in 2013 are not accessible today. This happens because pages are taken down, URLs are changed, and entire websites vanish, as in the case of dozens of scientific journals and all the critical research they contained. This is especially acute for news: researchers at Northwestern University estimate we will lose one-third of local news sites by 2025, and the digital-first properties that have risen and fallen are nearly impossible to count. The internet has become a series of lacunas, spaces where content used to be. Sometimes it is me searching for that content, spending an hour reverse-engineering something in the Wayback Machine because I want to cite it, or read the whole article, not just a quote in another publication, an echo of an echo. It’s reached the point where I upload PDFs of my clips to my personal website in addition to linking to them to ensure they’ll remain accessible (until I stop paying my hosting fees, at least), thinking bitterly of the volume of work I’ve lost to shuttered websites, restructured links, hacks that were never repaired, servers disrupted, sometimes accompanied by false promises that an archive would be restored and maintained.

This is why I usually make a PDF of an article and link to that PDF versus the actual article. Not to mention the haram images that might be on there, which I can easily cover up.

FYI, the title quote also belongs to s. e. smith.

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Taylor Swift’s sweat.

Did I get your attention with the title?

Good.

About a month ago, I was watching a clip on YouTube, where a lady was asking whether or not it was worth spending $2,500 for Taylor Swift tickets.

These were not front row seats, but they were nosebleed seats, essentially the furthest seats away from Taylor Swift. 

You would need binoculars to see her.

The host of the show was outraged that these nosebleed seats cost $2,500.

She said for that kind of money, I want some of the “Swifty sweat” to hit me.

(I need to be so close to her that her sweat hits me in the face.)

That same evening, we reached a point in the Seerah where an incident occurred, and the sahaba were gathering the leftover wudu water of the Prophet ﷺ to use for themselves. This went down a tangent where we discussed how the hair, the sweat, and even the saliva of the Prophet ﷺ was considered blessed.

So blessed to the point that they would take some of the sweat and put it in their perfume.

And it was narrated from Anas that Umm Sulaym used to put out a mat of leather for the Prophet ﷺ and he would take a nap in her house. When the Prophet ﷺ fell asleep, she took some of his sweat and hair and kept it in a bottle, then she put it in some sukk (perfume made of musk). He [Thumaamah ibn ‘Abd-Allah ibn Anas] said: When Anas ibn Maalik was dying, he left instructions that some of the sukk should be put in his hunoot (perfumes used in preparation of dead for burial). 

Narrated by al-Bukhaari (6281)

The sahaba would take these things and seek blessings from them, and there was nothing weird or wrong about it.

Naturally the kids thought it was kind of strange, but that is because they’re still kids, and don’t understand how the adult mind and body work…

And that is where we as parents have to bridge the gap, educate, and defend.

So what if the Sahaba sought blessings from the Prophet ﷺ’s sweat? This is something unanimously agreed upon, and the Prophet ﷺ himself approved of it.

As we can see from the Taylor Swift example, people seek some sort of “high" or blessings from other people’s bodily fluids to this day.

It sounds strange when you say it like that, but it’s the truth!

The “Swiftie sweat” is just an example, but it can be applied to many celebrities whose teeth, leftover tissues, and even used underwear sold for thousands of dollars.

I remember watching TV shows where during certain episodes, the main character would meet their favorite celebrity and after shaking their hand, they would say: 

“I’m never washing this hand again.” 

It is because now they have a part of that person on them, which makes them feel special.

Of course no man's sweat or saliva is worth anything today, and the only sweat or saliva that was blessed was that of the Prophet ﷺ.

Now when you talk to your kids about this, they will know how to educate and defend the sahaba and the Prophet ﷺ on this matter.

And most importantly, it will increase their Iman!

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Your “love” is weakness.

As a Muslim parent you don't go to concerts...

But your kids participate in concerts at school.

As a Muslim parent you don't go and dance with strangers...

But your kids participate in dances at school.

Why are Muslim parents so weak, that they can't even opt-out of these dances and concerts?

Your kids will plead and beg, and you will give in out of love.

But that is not love. That is weakness on your part.

Whatever happened to your love for Allah first and foremost?

Whatever happened to, "We hear and we obey?"

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Teens being constantly online.

Gaby Del Valle from The Verge:

Nearly half of US teens are “almost constantly” online, though the platforms they spend their time on vary significantly, according to a new Pew survey.

Notice how the apps that require you to read (X, Threads, Reddit) are less frequently used compared to YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Threads is relatively new, but, just a curious observation.

I wonder how this would compare to adults’ usage of social media.

Are we just as likely to watch instead of read?

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