Dan Writes

Farsh se Arsh Tak | The Journey of a Du'a بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَٰنِ الرَّحِيمِ FARSH SE ARSH TAK From the Earth to the Throne The Journey of a Du'a — Taqwa, Gratitude, and the Mu'min Who Calls A Theological Essay I — Who Is the One Calling? Before you raise your hands, before the words leave your mouth, you have to know who you are. Not in the philosophical sense. In the theological one. The Quran does not address you as a citizen of a country or a member of a tribe when it speaks about du'a. It addresses you as an 'abd. A servant. And in that servanthood is everything you need to understand about why this act even works. Allah says in Surah Al-Baqarah: وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِي عَنِّي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبٌ ۙ أُجِيبُ دَعْوَةَ الدَّاعِ إِذَا دَعَانِ "And when My servants ask you about Me, indeed I am near. I respond to the call of the caller when he calls upon Me." — Al-Baqarah, 2:186 Notice He said: My servan...

THE TWIG AND THE RAILS On What We Cannot Know, and Why That Matters By Danial Abbas --- There is a question that has followed us from the moment we became aware  enough to ask it. Where does all of this come from. What is it, really.  Not in the way a textbook answers it, with diagrams and terminology that  give the impression of an answer without actually being one. But genuinely;  what is this, and where did it come from, and what is on the other side  of the limit of everything we can see. We have built telescopes that see thirteen billion light years into the  past. We have split atoms. Mapped the human genome. Sent machines past the  edge of our own solar system into interstellar space. And at the end of  every one of those instruments, at the absolute boundary of every method we  have ever developed, the question is still sitting there. Unchanged.  Waiting. That is not a failure of science. That is a statement about the nature of...

  Chapter Seven: Fool's Gold Eli opened his hand. The ring sat in his palm under the amber light, simple and clean and patient, the way it had been patient in the display case for the past three weeks while the city moved around it and the snow came and went and two men stood at the window on separate evenings and looked at it and thought about what it meant and arrived, on the same Christmas Eve, at the same shop, at the same moment. He looked at James. He looked at Adam. Then he walked to James and held out his hand and James took the ring from him with both of his and held it the way a man holds something he has been moving toward for a long time without always knowing that is what he was doing. "Merry Christmas, James," Eli said. James looked at the ring in his hands. He did not say anything for a moment. When he looked up his eyes were the same pale gray they had always been, but something in them was different, some quality of tension that had been there all...