When the Prophet (Peace and Blessings be Upon Him) sighted the moon of Rajab (two months before Ramadan) he used to pray to Allah in the following words:
An extraordinary Channel 4 documentary describes the glorious rule of Muslims in what is now Spain. A forgotten history is remembered. A must see documentary.
A major upgrade of data to vast areas of Pakistan seems to be in the works by Google for Google Earth. Major cities included in the recent update include most notably Lahore and the Eastern part of Faisalabad. The resolution for these areas is apparently similar, if not on par with that of Karachi and Islamabad. The inclusion of Lahore and Faisalabad completes the top cosmopolitan cities of Pakistan with Karachi and Islamabad already been covered. For people interested in real estate in these major cities this update is greately helpful.
Other areas at first seem to be picked at random but everything seems to fall in place when one notices that most of the mountainous regions of Balochistan are also included in the update. Jacobabad, Sukkur, Rohri, Rahim yar Khan, Okara, Gujranwala are some of the other cities included too.
I have confirmed this but you may have to install the beta version of Google Earth to be able to view these places. I may be wrong. If you are able to view these places with the older version, please let me know.
If you know of any other resources that I may have missed, please post them in the comments.
[via: musingsofamuslimah]
The most reliable method to determine the direction of the Qibla is by looking at the Sun. Every year, because of the revolution of the Earth around the Sun and the inclination of the axis of rotation to the Ecliptic, the Sun is directly ABOVE THE KABAH only two times.
Similarly, the Sun is BELOW THE KABAH (in Makkah) only two times.
The direction toward the Kabah can be easily determined by finding the direction towards (or away from) the Sun at the instants when the Sun is ABOVE (or BELOW) the KABAH.
The Qibla direction would be TOWARDS THE SUN, at the instant WHEN THE SUN IS ABOVE THE KABAH. The Qibla direction would be AWAY FROM THE SUN, (in the direction of the SHADOW of a vertical rod) at the instant WHEN THE SUN IS BELOW THE KABAH.
The only obvious requirement is that the Sun should be visible at that instant. Nearly half of the world would be able to see the Sun at these times. The other countries would not be able to see the Sun, because the Sun would be below their local horizon, at those times.
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Narrated Abu Huraira:
The Prophet said, “Allah will give shade, to seven, on the Day when there will be no shade but His. (These seven persons are)
Sahih Bukhari Volume 1, Book 11, Number 629
Google has quietly added support for two new languages, Arabic and Hebrew, a couple of days ago. They really seem poised to take over the web based email service catering to 40 different languages. They have specifically been targeting the arabic speaking world first adding arabic to english and english to arabic translation services and now arabic in gmail.
Here is a high quality recording of Surah Ar-Rahman by Sh Mishary Rashid Al Efasy. Inshallah I plan on adding the whole quran once I can make sure there are no copyrights on the recordings.
[audio:055.mp3]
Digg is all the rage these days with everyone trying to make it to the front page to try and get more traffic to their sites. I’m a huge fan of Digg myself, visiting the site atleast 20 times a day. When digg started, the topics that made to the front page seemed to be very diverse but I have to say that nowadays things seem to be getting a bit repetitive. The stories making to to front page seem to do more and more with a handful of topics that are getting somewhat tiring.
After spending a little bit of time I came up with a list of things one has to do or the topics one can write about to make it to the front page. This is by no means a sure shot way but it does seem to have worked from what the numbers show.
Try it out for yourself. See how far you get. But don’t submit any junk articles. I’m sure you’ll get much more than the usual 8 – 12 Diggs I’ve previously gotten.
Digg if you agree.
Everytime I go somewhere and need to use a PC I check to see if firefox is installed. If it isn’t I ask for permission to install it after listing its benifits. And firefox alone without any extensions, as you might know, is only the beginning of an experience. But to go around hoping page to page looking for extensions had become too much of a task installing firefox. So I decided to list them all on a page so its easier to find the ones that I need.
Apart from Firefox, the page also lists some other freeware and opensource software that I have found really useful. Like a replacement notepad, a direct-to-disk mp3 recorder and a couple of media players.
I thought sharing this page with everyone might be beneficial. You can check it out here.
