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In this month of clemency, our Lord sent us a mercy in the form of a man who refused to fly into an unholy rage when his son was torn away from him in the midst of the anarchic disintegration that had seized a nation in the preceding hours. He has become an example for [...]

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 [...]

This Ramadan I resolved to memorise the remaining short suras I have thus far failed to learn. One sura a day, I told myself, for I can do it, for it’s not that hard, for I have learnt twenty ayats in an afternoon or a morning before. But taking stock, on this the nineteenth day [...]

People of my generation tend to have a little ditty secured firmly in our minds thanks to an Australian soap-opera that ran for the duration of our childhood: “Neighbours: everybody needs good neighbours.” It was never going to win anyone a Grammy, but it was a word of truth all the same.

So we are making our escape, setting down in Istanbul on Saturday afternoon. That sprawling metropolis bridging Europe and Asia. InshaAllah we will pray Tarawih in one or two of the grand mosques. But soon we will be moving on. If we fly, we will be in Trabzon, eastwards along the Black Sea coast an [...]

I received the following in an email from imase this morning and wanted to share it: Ramadan is derived from an Arabic word for intense heat and scorched ground As heat cleans that which is unclean, may this month clean our heart from any impurity within As heat that scours the muck off a surface, [...]

My name is Timothy Bowes, an English Muslim working for my local NHS Primary Care Trust. It is the last week of our month of fasting, known as Ramadan. I arose at five o’clock this morning for breakfast before the start of fasting. Today it was Heinz Baked Beans on Toast. We have not had [...]

January 1998: this was my first Ramadan, half a year before I came to believe in Islam. It was an experiment, an experiment that went badly wrong. Around November I had stopped eating pork, telling everyone who knew me that I didn’t like the taste. The first phase of my experiment. In the popular vocabulary [...]