October 31, 2007

Awake

Ijtema.net is back up and running, as of today! JazakAllah to Manas for getting the ball rolling again.

But what is this website?

Ijtema.net is an initiative to scour and identify the best of the Muslim blogosphere. There's a lot of good content out there, but finding it is not always easy. The team at Ijtema.net goes through the laborious effort of digging through tonnes of content daily, to find the content that best articulates the issues that matter. Update 2007.11.08: I've added a little feed that shows the last five posts from Ijtema on the bottom-right corner.

But wait, there's more!

At least, there will be, insha-Allah. Stay tuned.

But what about Irrelevant Opinions?

As most of you know, I just took an extended break through all of Ramadhan and beyond. To be honest, nothing interesting happened during these few weeks, but it was refreshing. I'm still waiting for some inspiration to write, but things are at quite a lull. If I don't find anything meaningful to write anytime soon, I'll just find something to complain about eventually.

October 20, 2007

Weak Signal

I was out for dinner a few days ago with a number of my old MSA friends that I had not seen in several years. Among those present at the dinner, half of the group was now married, while the rest of us were all in various stages of transition from academia to the working life. The topic of conversation briefly moved to marriage, and the married folk among my friends insisted on offering their thoughts and feelings on what marriage means.

One offered up this analogy:

"Finding a wife ... is like finding a good cell phone plan. It takes a long time, but if you get the right one, it's ... very good."

He tried supporting his analogy with some examples, but I don't think anyone quite understood the point he was trying to make. Or maybe it was just me; marriage metaphors are just not my thing.

"I'm on a Pay-as-you-Go plan," I replied. "I don't think that would be quite ethical..."

The evening remained quite enjoyable, but the married folks eventually had to leave, unable to join the rest of us for the obligatory post-dinner Tim Hortons trip.

"Yeah, I should get back home," one said. "My wife called a few times."

One of my friends offered the following retort, which finally made sense of the absurd cell phone analogy.

"Oh, so I take it you've ran out of minutes?"

October 12, 2007

Back Home, and Eid Mubarak!

Assalamu'alaykum,

I pray everyone had/is having a wonderful Eid insha-Allah. We are celebrating tomorrow insha-Allah.

I'm back home after a couple of weeks away, and am just catching up with my e-mails and voicemails now. Things are very busy at home so if you're waiting on something from me, it will still be another few days at least. I probably won't post anything substantial here for another couple of weeks or so. Until then, keep me in your du'as.

All the best,
Faraz