Doa Taubat

One famous prayer of repentance, or dua taubat, could be roughly transliterated as follow: Ilahi lestu lil-firdawsi a’la wa la akhwa ala nar il-jaheemi Allah fa habli tawbata wa-ghfir dhunubi fa innaka ghaafiru dhanb il-adzimi This doa has been put to song, together with a lovely malay translation, by Junied, a nasheed group from Singapore […]

Haul of Imam Abdullah al-Haddad

Every year, all over the world, muslims in the spiritual lineage of the great saint Imam Abdullah al-Haddad gather together to celebrate his life and remember his great wisdom. He is most fondly remembered in the parts of the world that have benefited from the dawah of the scholars and saints of Hadhramaut: Yemen, the […]

Big Bang: Science or Myth

The American Scientist has an interesting article titled Modern Cosmology: Science or Folktale that got me up to speed with current theories for the cosmos as we see it. The books I remember reading about the universe as a kid, which talked about black holes and dwarf stars and so on, didn’t have all this […]

Islamic Universities in Indonesia

A window into the intellectual evolution of Islamic higher education in Indonesia: an interview with the rector of UIN Sunan Kalijaga Prof. Amin Abdullah by Prof. Farish Noor of The Other Malaysia.

…what is happening in places like UIN SUKA: You have pious Muslim students who are practicing Muslims who nonetheless can actually read the Quran and Hadith using the methodology of discourse analysis; who can write papers about inter-textual interpretations

Mawlid Barzanji

12 Rabi’ul Awwal has come and gone again. In the past, I’ve written about a famous book of poetry about the birth of Prophet Muhammad (s) called Mawlid Daiba’i. Actually the Mawlid poetry more widely read in Malaysia is Mawlid Barzanji, named after its composer, Imam Zayn al-`Abidin Ja`far ibn Hasan al-Barzanji (d. 1177) (r). […]