fromadreamer asked: Salam. I love your blog by the way. Very inspiring. :) I have a question about relationships and marriage. I am still young and far from the thought of marriage but I am worried. I am aware that any contact between male and female is prohibited, but how am I supposed to know the man I am to marry? I don't plan on marrying a man before knowing him for at least a year because you never know a person's truth. Is it haram to have a relationship even if marriage is a possibility? Shukran:)

Salaam! 

May Allah bless you for your lovely words. I think if you take the time to listen to Yasmin Mogahed’s stance on marriage in Islam, you’ll find a lot of the answers you’re looking for. Much love, Dee.

chasingpavements5308 asked: Salam. need advice... what do you do when you have "fallen" for someone.. who is righteous.. reminds me and brought me closer to Allah... but at the same time, I feel as if I'm addicted to him as I can't get him off of my mind. And the smallest things will make me so happy with him. I'm not sure what to do. he is the only guy I do talk to outside of school. And its so hard to not text, or not run into him at university. I dont know how to detach myself... i don't want to seem desperate either

Salam habibi,

InshaAllah you take an hour of your time to listen to this brilliant lecture by Yasmin Mogahed on this very subject you’re talking about; walahy, it’s worth it.

yasmin mogahed on twitter

It’s never easy to stand when the storm hits. And that’s exactly the point. By sending the wind, He brings us to our knees: the perfect position to pray.

This is love. By Yasmin Mogahed

What if every single stumble, every challenge, every experience in our life was only intended for one purpose: to bring us back to our origin? What if every win, every loss, every beauty, every fall, every cruelty, and every smile was only intended to unveil another barrier between us and God? Between us and where we began, and where we are desperately seeking to return?
What if everything was only about seeing Him?

Dunya is supposed to be a tool to get to Allah. But instead, we use Allah as a tool to get to dunya. We use Allah (thru duaa, religious devotion, etc) to get what we want from dunya (that job, that degree, that house, that wife/husband). While it’s encouraged to make duaa, our End is dunya, and Allah is only our means. And it should be the other way around.

skycloudsky:

Yasmin Mogahed. Jewels of Jannah.

It took women in the West almost a century of experimentation to realize a privilege given to Muslim women 1,400 years ago.

Given my privilege as a woman, I only degrade myself by trying to be something I’m not—and in all honesty—don’t want to be: a man. As women we will never reach true liberation until we stop trying to mimic men and value the beauty in our own God-given distinctiveness.

If given a choice between stoic justice and compassion, I choose compassion. And if given a choice between worldly leadership and heaven at my feet—I choose heaven.

But as Western feminism erases God from the scene, there is no standard left- except men. As a result, the Western feminist is forced to find her value in relation to a man. And in so doing, she has accepted a faulty assumption. She has accepted that man is the standard, and thus a woman can never be a full human being until she becomes just like a man.

I have nothing but your generosity to put my hope in. Nothing. For I stand at Your door holding broken scraps…and yet you open. Save me from this storm. I am the most helpless of all your slaves. And I’m lost. Wandering in the middle of a forest trying to find my way. But all the tress look the same, and each path just leads back to the beginning. No one finds their way out of this forest—except whom You save. Save me. For truly, truly I cannot save myself.

To attain that state, don’t let your source of fulfillment be anything other than your relationship with God. Don’t let your definition of success, failure or self-worth be anything other than your position with Him. And if you do this, you become unbreakable, because your handhold is unbreakable. You become unconquerable because your supporter can never be conquered. And you will never become empty because your source of fulfillment is unending and never diminishes.

Looking back at the dream I had when I was 17, I wonder if that little girl was me. I wonder this because the answer I gave her was a lesson I would need to spend the next painful years of my life learning. My answer to her question of why people have to leave each other was: “because this life isn’t perfect; for if it was, what would the next be called?”

(via skycloudsky)