folio

Oh how I love my wife. What a shame such sentiments hit with such force when she is so far away, when I am ill like this. In a moment of delirium wrought by the altercation between those biting shivers and the piercing sweaty heat late at night, I dispatched a message: ‘Come home early, if you [...]

I try my best not to take on freelance work — an odd thing to say, perhaps, in the midst of what many describe as the world’s worst recession — but somehow these jobs seem to find me. A couple of years ago a very amiable chap pursued me for weeks in an effort to [...]

What a marvelous creation is the pomegranate.

As we travel this road, God’s generosity becomes ever more apparent. My year between the two Ramadans was marked with periods of darkness and a great descent, troubling to my mind, and yet God’s mercy has been unending. The days of immense folly still return to the mind, often whilst bowing in prayer, causing an [...]

Close to nine years ago, when I needed assistance along this path, He sent me my companion and garment, my soul-mate and friend, my ally and confident. Four and a half years ago, when I sought guidance and truth, He sent me a teacher and advisor, learned and perceptive, positive and wise. Two weeks ago, [...]

It is a sentiment that several of us have noticed being repeated with increasing frequency on the world-wide-web: that the Muslim blogosphere is dying a death, that all the good blogs have disappeared, that the Muslim blogging phenomenon has run its course and all that remains is tired, uninspirational, repetitive dross. As a so-called blogger [...]

Allah has never failed me, but I have failed myself. I have witnessed His signs over and over, yet still I stumble and fall. There was a period earlier this year when my wife and I frequently felt dizzy and sickly, which we attributed in the end—rightly or wrongly—to not having eaten meat for quite [...]

This is the view from my front door. I took it this evening with my wife’s camera when I came home from work. I took it because it means something to me; something that I’ve been thinking a great deal about for the past few days.

I am grateful to Allah, my Creator and the Creator of all things, that He granted me a home in a small market town in a steep-sided valley. I am grateful to my Lord for granting me this humble dwelling on one side of the valley, overlooking the fields of cows on the other side [...]

It is now two years and a month since I was told that I could never have children. The news was broken by a Locum Doctor while my GP was on her summer holidays – he didn’t know much about the disorder, had to look it up in his medical encyclopaedia, then advised me to [...]

This morning my car wouldn’t start, so I had to call out the AA. It is funny how something foreign can become so familiar within such a short space of time, such that something we could once do without becomes something we take for granted. And it is funny how when something is always there, [...]