The Cake that Omar Baked

A most rewarding and fulfilling part of a Muslim’s worship are those blessed moments that he spends praying in the depth of the night, privately addressing his Great Lord, sincerely glorifying Him, humbly imploring Him – beseeching His forgiveness and asking Him for favours. The voluntary “night prayer”, or qiyam, is indispensable for a person’s moral, spiritual, and physical welfare. Yet, it is greatly misunderstood and largely neglected by most Muslims. This is why we present this book, with two main objectives:

1. Provide a complete guide on the subject of qiyam and related issues, in accordance with the Quran, the Sunnah, and the guidance of the Salaf.

2. Present to the reader, in the process, two important works by the prominent scholar Muhammad Nasir ud-Deen al-Albaani (may Allah bless him): “Salat ut-Taraaweeh” and “Qiyaam Ramadan”.

This book is not only for Ramadan, but is for every night of the year. It is an treasure of guidance that one will want to keep by his pillow at night, and grab it as soon as he rises for the greatest bliss of the night. It is a gift that is sure to please and benefit

The secular mind had a grand plan, to establish an earthly paradise, a utopia of the here and now, a modern civilization governed by human reason, rationality, and the triumph of progress. Whilst ideals are one thing, the means to realize them is something else. Away from the hype, emancipating humanity from the shackles of God and religion has proved no easy matter. Mapping the Secular Mind critically examines issues of reason, rationality, and secular materialism, to explore how these mental perceptions, or ways of mapping the world, have affected human interaction and sociological development. It does this by comparing and contrasting the ideas of Abdelwahab M. Elmessiri (1938 2008) a leading Arab intellectual, and Zygmunt Bauman (1925), one of the world s foremost sociologists. In the last few decades, an emergent Western critique of modernity has inspired Muslim intellectuals to develop new ideas, images, terms and concepts that state their positions towards the tendencies of secular modernity, its transformations and consequences, and how it manipulates perceptions of reality. The book challenges foundations of secular ideology to argue that its aspirations have deeply transformed human consciousness and man s sense of self, leaving him a creature of purposeless consumption, wearied by the search for fulfillment, and controlled by materialistic laws governing physical phenomena. It also offers a more darker thesis, that Fascist Germany and the Eugenics movement were a form of Social Darwinism taken to its logical course. These were not an aberration from the principles of modernity, Ali argues, but a consistent outcome of the modern worldview, with the seeds of self-destruction being woven into the very fabric of the philosophy.