2025 Sep OT M 12 Week 4 Sep 28,2025
For the second time when I came to class today I forgot that if you come late you’re supposed to pray two Rakahs. LG asked me to go outside with RB so that he could tell me what I was supposed to do, so once I came back inside I prayed two Rakahs and then we resumed class. LG said we all had to sit cross legged for a long time because none of us did our homework. During that excruciatingly long time period, we were all reviewing the topics on our paper, and I was pretty far ahead. It was only J who was ahead of me.
All I did during that time was bring surah al Falaq to the back of my mind, or bring it to my long term memory and memorize du’a al Istiftah in english. It took a while because I was also reviewing the other surahs that I memorized in the past that I just wanted to make sure I still remembered. After I was done memorizing, and reviewing, I tested out with LG just to present to him what I learnt and what I knew.
After I finished testing, LG told me to learn al tashahud in english and arabic. It was quite difficult, but I think I will get the hang of it soon. I was able to completely memorize it in English, but not quite in Arabic. Because I memorize things faster when just listening to it, I wanted to listen to it in class, but I knew it would disturb the other people around me trying to learn separate things, so at the time of writing I am indeed listening to Tashahud. Before I tested for the second time, LG told me that it was a race between me and J. Because of this, I thought J was at the same level as me, thus, I rushed, but I don’t think that caused any deficiencies in learning.
After all that, pizza came and we were gifted permission to stand up and go eat. From there, class really started. We talked about certain tools we have to fulfill our duties as Gods servants, which is to make ourselves and the world and people around us better and better. Like, we give charity to understand how lucky some of our positions are. Instead of just saying, “Phew, i’m so glad i’m not that poor person. He’s suffering so badly!”
Instead, What we do or should do is to instead try to reduce the suffering upon that person. It helps us be good and mindful, and them better. We also pray to stay mindful of God. We are supposed to fulfill our duties but it is indeed hard because of shaytaan influencing our minds. The more shaytaan influences our minds, the less mindful we become of God, so God made it easy by just asking us to pray five times a day to stay mindful of Him.
And lastly, we also fast to be mindful of those who do not have sufficient food. God also locks up shaytaan during Ramadan, so if you do something very bad, you know it’s not shaytaan who influenced you, you know it’s you and yourself. Since we don’t really change our habits except for eating during daytime in Ramadan, we can inspect our bad habits and not just blame it on shaytaan.
Another large topic, CCA is regarding common sense, context, and accountability. Like, anyone with common sense wouldn’t be goofing off and playing fun goofy music at a funeral. It makes no sense. Like, if you find a poor struggling dog on the sidewalk, I guess you could ignore it, but that’s not making anything better. But if you find a struggling dog and you do the opposite of helping it, like picking it up and throwing it off the sidewalk, then you probably lack the common sense needed to do simple things like helping a suffering creature. For context, here is an example.
The prophet Muhammad (SAW) said, before entering the masjid, check your shoes for scorpions. But it doesn’t apply. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, it depends on your area, but in our case, it means to check for danger with or around you before entering the masjid, because the masjid should be a safe space for ritual, praise, and worship. Finally, for accountability, going back to my poor dog example, if you choose to walk past the dog and not help it, it would be your fault if the dog began to suffer even more, or even die. Everyone is accountable. If you drop your phone and the screen shatters, it’s completely your fault. You are accountable. You can’t blame it on the phone if you didn’t even have a screen protector. So all of that is your fault. You are accountable.
Like I said earlier, we pray to stay in remembrance of God, but we also pray to prevent things that we can’t control from happening. Like let’s say you are taking a test at school. You would pray as in say Bismillah, but not to help you pass the test, that depended on if you were studying well enough. You would pray to prevent things that you wouldn’t or couldn’t control from happening, like a school shooting. I mean, you can’t pass your test if that happens, right? So since you can’t control it, there is only one other source to rely on to protect you.
The way we should approach our parents when we want something is also how we should approach God when we want something. We love our parents and we love God for all they will and have done for us and all alike, but when we want things, it’s no different. It doesn’t change when we want something, or it shouldn’t change. We should still love them and meet their best expectations in order to receive what they think we deserve for meeting expectations and pleasing them.
My final topic here will be how your bad deeds can wipe away your good deeds. For example, if you are on the bridge to cross between heaven and hell and your score is super high so you think you will make it, then you don’t, then it’s too late and you have already realized the people who you have done bad to in the past have decreased your score and you never asked them for your forgiveness, but if your score appears to be below the requirement and you pass, it just means that you have done lots of good and people want you to pass into heaven.
Today has been a very informative class as always so hopefully I was able to cover enough topics and reach the word requirement and hopefully anybody reading this likes my essay! Assalam!