2020 April Class notes by DJ Male 18 years old Class of 3/29/20

The first thing we did in class was that we had our testing session. During the testing session, I worked on memorizing the whole prayer in Arabic and English, specifically getting all the Surah’s right. When I finally tested out, I recited the whole prayer and the Surah’s and I was able to recite the Surah’s correctly but in the main prayer, specifically the Tashahhud and Darudi Ibrahim, I was kind of shaky on it.

My homework for next week is to fix my Tashahhud and Darudi Ibrahim and review the entire prayer just to make sure I am confident on it, so I am ready next time.

After the testing session, we had our lecture and some things that I learned were that a mistake that a lot of people make in their life is that they only focus on perfectionism and they can easily get caught up with themselves instead of dealing with what they have.

An example of this is only choosing to only buy clothes from expensive stores and spending lots of money, instead of buying them from Walmart and saving money. This can also apply to faith and religion where there are people who focus too much on ritual and practice in order to become a better Muslim, but they actually neglect the logic behind what they are doing. Essentially, in order to avoid this, you must need to know the logic behind what you are doing and why you are doing it.

 I also learned that just taking a shower does not make you eligible for prayer because you have not done the specific sequence/ritual that is required to physically and mentally prepare yourself for prayer that is prescribed in the religious tradition, which is called Wudu. Another important thing that I learned was that in life, and you must not become the type of person to tell someone that you will do something in advance, but when the time comes later, you do not do it and lie to the person. It is almost like deceiving that person in my opinion, depending on the context. An example of this is a person going to a gym or starting a diet program. What will happen most likely is that that the majority of people will not go to the gym or go on a diet due to excuses, laziness, or forgetfulness. It is human nature. What ends up happening is that the gym and diet businesses will take advantage of this false hope by the person and in a way steal their money because that person promised to go to the gym or start that diet, but they never did it.

We also had a guest speaker who joined the class for about 10 minutes and he gave a quick talk about how the story of Isra and Miraj has different interpretations to it and he gave his interpretation to the story which was not the traditional one and it had more to do with the history at the time because he mentioned a Jewish king named King Herod the great and the Romans. After hearing this, I realized there are different interpretations to this story.

After the guest lecture, we continued on with our main lecture, and we talked about how there will be a problem with Ramadan this year due to the Corona Virus. Some of these problems include the Mosque’s being closed and how are we supposed to do Taraweeh prayers. Unfortunately, with the virus still raging, this Ramadan will be very unique and we will most likely have to pray Taraweeh at home and we also cannot go to our friends and relatives houses to break our fast due to social distancing. This virus will most likely stay when Eid comes, so we must also prepare for what we will do on that day as well. We also discussed whether fasting at home or at school made the fast go by easier and I picked at school because at school, your mind is occupied with studying and doing work and interacting with many people and that can take your attention off for the desire for food, while at home, you are mostly by yourself and your mind is not occupied and the temptation of food and water is right in your fridge. After having the Ramadan discussion, some last points that our teacher made is that time management is essential in order to succeed in life, especially with education but it can also apply to faith such as being able to pray all your prayers on time, even though you most likely live a busy life with school, family, and work. You must be able to balance all these things. Lastly, we ended last class by watching the Mooz-lum movie, which I have already watched the whole movie and have done an in-depth review and analysis and what the message of the movie is basically giving. I wrote the analysis/review back from the class of 12/23/18 and I send it to my teacher on December 26th, 2018 on my Gmail.

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