Sunday, September 29, 2013

Kautsar Youzarsif Seferagic


Peace be upon you,
All praises to Allah, peace and blessings upon the Prophet Muhammad.
On Thursday, September 19, 2013, at 12.43 am, my boy was born. It was unbelievable that I could finally see him here on earth. We had been waiting for him for almost 39 weeks and thankfully Allah let him birth normally, without so called caesarean and vacuum.
My wife and I were so relieved with his birth. We could never thank Allah for His blessings. Everything is perfect in His design.

Some of my friends asked me about the meaning of my son's name. Yes it is somewhat unfamiliar in the ear of Indonesian. Moreover when we need to say it. But I am sure we will be familiar someday. We name our son Kautsar Youzarsif Seferagic for some reasons - hope, prayer and gratitude. 
First, I personally admit that my name does not really have a meaning. My parents just did not explain. But I am so grateful, of course. My son's name has a deep meaning, hopefully.

Kautsar, it is a lake in paradise. From this lake, Prophet Muhammad later will give the fresh water to his followers. My wife and I really hope that my son and us will be those who drink the water from the lake, aamiin. Another meaning of Kautsar is the blessing. Yes, he, my son is a huge blessing for us since he will later pray for us, he will worship Allah with us. He is now worshiping Allah, anyway, we just do not know the way of his worship as a newborn baby.

Youzarsif, it is a calling of old Egyptian to Prophet Yusuf. When Prophet Yusuf became a noble and trusted person in Egypt, he was called so by the people of Egypt and king Amenhotep. We pray to Allah may our son will be like Prophet Yusuf who had firm faith, who could influence and give benefit to as many people as possible, and also who could think and act wisely.

Seferagic, it is a word in Bosnian. The meaning of it is the same as Abdullah in Arabic. The meaning in English is "Slave of Allah". We pray our son so much to be just the slave of Allah. We pray him to always remember and call Allah whenever, wherever.

We as parents can only give the best effort for our son. Islam teaches us to name our sons and daughters with a good name. We try to do so. Now we are planning to hold an aqiqah (slaughtering goats). May Allah bless my son, may Allah bless us, may Allah bless you all, amiin.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Piracy – We can ignore it!


Peace be upon you,
Few days ago I saw a headline on newspaper saying that the piracy in Indonesia has already somewhat terrible. As the largest Muslim country, it's undoubted that this fact is shameful. It's not just songs, movies which are being pirated, but for sure it includes software such as windows and Microsoft office which might be the very common things among us. Well, don't you think that it's wrong to use any piracy stuff or doing piracy itself? To me, I just cannot live and think well if I do it. Why? It is because I have known the risk of committing piracy as well as I know the alternatives of software and things related. The risk, I read somewhere on the net that we Muslims are supposed to respect somebody's properties. Example, we cannot of course steal the pen belongs to somebody who is not Muslim. Though we think that he is disbeliever, we have to still respect him. Even we have to live with him well, respect to each other. If we steal his pen, that means we do not respect him and it'll be counted as a sin. Talking about alternatives, exactly there are lots of free and open sources softwares we can use and emblem in our computers. As a teacher and student, I really only use my computer for mostly typing, browsing, watching, listening and doing little sketching. Indeed I can do all of them by simply using a zero dollar software i.e. Ubuntu. If there is something at-no-cost and pretty easy to use, why are we still using illegal ones? Unless you bought the software, you'd better use any free operating system available out there. What I mentioned above is just one of the countless programs we can use and share with anyone. Something I do to minimize the piracy is by spreading the message of “go open source” to friends and relatives of mine. Praises to Allah that one of my co-workers is now using Ubuntu for his laptop. He does not use pirated Windows anymore. What I did to him was just to give little bit explanation about Ubuntu and I helped him install his computer. Earlier before him, I also installed free softwares on my wife's laptop. Respecting other can be done by not pirating and starting to learn something free such as Ubuntu Linux. If we spend few hours to learn, we can be free from so-called pirating. I am insya Allah willing to help anybody explain or install the free ones.

Knowledge in Islam

Seeking for knowledge is indeed a compulsory for Muslims. This is what my Prophet taught me. We are highly encouraged to get as much as beneficial knowledge for the sake of living our lives well. Knowledge or science in Islam is not something separated from religion. In the past, we knew that a group of people got victory or advancement because they left their religion, meaning that they did not follow the teaching of their religion since it was false or somewhat contradictory with science. But we Muslims will never get any improvement in terms of science whenever we leave Islam since in the book of Islam, i.e. Al Quran, it contains countless number of sciences we can surely believe or prove that they are along with the inventions. Attaining beneficial knowledge is one of the three good deeds that will finally benefit us when we have passed away. Those three things are amal jariyyah (charity), devoted and pious offspring and the last is beneficial knowledge. Thus we could know that indeed Islam emphasizes the importance of seeking for knowledge and its application or benefit for society. In another hadith, more or less says “Seek for knowledge since you are an infant till your are about to be buried”. The next thing we need to put in mind is that, the knowledge that we pursue in Islam must be knowledge that is useful or not crossing the Islamic rules. Dr. Saiful Islam once said, “We Muslims should not always be in the most front of everything. We cannot always be the pioneers or the advanced ones in every single aspect of life”. From his statement we can take lesson that for example in the competition of certain kind of vulgar dancing, we are not demanded to take part moreover wish to be the best. In fact, we should abandon that kind of stuff. Another example, in the competition to be the best pub singers, for sure we can never participate in that event since the place like pub will drag us far from Islam. What we Muslims should pursue is the knowledge that will make us know Allah better. It can be anything, you know better. Think it yourselves or ask your pious friends and trusted teachers. Happy learning!