Just purchased this great writing on Islamic logic from the Uṣūl al-Din bookstore next to al-Azhar: ‘al-Kawkab al-Mushriq’ by the 13th century Ḥanbalī polymath from Aleppo, al-Muwaffaq ʿAbd Allāh al-Mīqātī (d. 1223).

It’s almost Americanisque that Ibn al-Mibrad’s women were called Luscinia, Jewel, Sweety and Gazelle.

While reading this account of al-Manṣūr & his teacher Azhar (d. 230) in one of my classes today, a student read the word as “ḥalaqah.” Not on my watch.

Damascus flourishes back with its scholars. The texts of al-Nawawī are being memorized by young boys and girls, our future generations. In August this year, they competed to memorize Riyāḍ al-Ṣāliḥīn—a collection of 1,896 ḥadīths—with prizes for the top three memorizers.

He almost made sense of Jesus, a man who can’t be worshipped, on his own. But he was abruptly reminded by a Pauline gatekeeper that instinctive and rational interpretations of the Bible are not tolerated in Christianity.

One thing that people of all faiths can agree on is that compound ignorance (jahl murakkab) is “often one of the chief fatalities of life.” Denton J. Snider in ‘The Will and Its World’:

May Allāh have mercy on her. Tafsīr al-Jalālayn in Japanese? That’s absolutely awesome. This Egyptian Qurʾānic exegesis has enjoyed such incomparable acceptance since it was compiled, from both scholars and laymen.

Some diasporic minds are so deep fried in ḥalāl fast food oil that they refuse to admit that parents can be wrong on parenting, but they have no hesitations stamping them to hellfire if they don’t conform to their newly discovered revisionist views.

If you want a real-life example of a discussion that perfectly fits into “leaving what doesn’t concern him” (tarkuh mā lā yaʿnīh), just look at non-Saudis squabbling over the Clock Towers. Both sides are gloriously daft, and nothing they say will ever change a thing on grounds.

Ibn Ḥazm’s (d. 456) love-takes are much better than his fiqh-takes. He relates from one of his close friends—whom he describes as a man of bad temperament and unpleasant composure—that “he never knew what jealousy was until he fell in love.”

Ibn Ḥibbān (d. 354) records that three types of people shouldn’t be consulted on matters and their opinions mean absolutely nothing. One of them is a husband to a woman who can verbally emasculate him. A millennium later, and it still checks out.

In 9th-century Egypt, many Muslim women were experiencing extreme obesity. Some grew so corpulent, they couldn’t stand in prayer or reach parts of their bodies for purification. The Shāfiʿī jurist Ibn al-Naḥḥās (d. 814) notes that if such obesity is due to choices, it is a sin.