Yaser M. Haddara

Al-hamdulillah, I have to say that I am rather pleased with the way that this blog has evolved. Considering how much I like to talk it’s probably not a surprise that this has become a very addictive exercise :) . There are days when I am just too exhausted or too overbooked or too disorganized to be able to blog, and al-hamdulillah I am not at the stage where I suffer withdrawals symptoms on such days :) . Nonetheless, on any given day, if I can’t blog I feel that something is missing. Very curious development given that this journal is barely 4 weeks old! Even more curious (or, in Wonderlingo, curioser and curioser) given that I’ve had things I’ve meant to write in more traditional formats that were actually started 4-5 years ago and are still in the “in progress” stage! Al-hamdulillah, it is a blessing to be given an opportunity that matches one’s style, and it is a blessing to be able to express and share oneself.

For those of you that are following this little project, I thank you from the bottom of my heart - it is your engagement that makes this rewarding and keeps it alive.

A quick update then on how this thing has been shaping up. With tremendous help from Jaffer and Suleiman the custom header for the particular theme that I am using has been further customized to use certain pictures. So now the header picture rotates between six scenes: two from Cordoba, one is the courtyard of al-Hambra, and one each from the three sacred mosques. Inshaa Allah there will be more to come, I just grabbed a beautiful picture of a sidewalk in Cordoba from Farah’s blog.

I also finally got around to creating a blogroll. The blogroll currently has People and Places, and inshaa Allah I will eventually add Things. A quick intro to my good friends listed there (I won’t put links here, it’ll get too tedious, but please visit them from the links in the sidebar):

• Ahmed Deif is the Head of MAC Youth and a newcomer to blogging. He seems to be metering his output at one post per week, but take it from me they are worth the wait!
• Ali Jafferi is a thoughtful, creative, courageous, and engaged member of the McMaster crowd. He has much to say about the state of the ummah and the way we need to understand our past, present, and future.
• Ayman Khafagi is my good friend down south! He started a blog long ago and then allowed it to lie dormant for a while. I am glad that I had something to do with his return to the blogosphere and it has been a pleasure. His blog about the death of Muhannad Jondy rahimahullah is appropriately somber. But humorous or solemn he is consistently provocative and engaging. (OK he’s my friend so I’m biased; he’s also a member of the MAS Youth Exec so I’m even more biased; but check it out for yourself and you’ll see).
• Farah I have already mentioned. She has this amazing photoblog and she has incredible taste. I loved the exploding icecaps, and the photoblog has an eclectic range from natural scenery to architecture to calligraphy to art.
• Hadeel is our correspondent in Cairo and she’s doing a terrific job. She’s recently promised a series of open letters to Egypt that I’m sure will be especially engaging.
• Hafsa, our newlywed hijabi, and her husband Omair, have been sharing pearls of wisdom gleaned by the two of them from marriage, travel, and new careers. Wait’ll they start with children :D .
• Hamza Moin is Maniac Muslim :) . The best way to describe this is that it’s a genuinely cool project. Cool may be an outdated descriptor, but for me it captures the Maniac Muslim phenomenon, and I do believe it is well on its way to becoming a phenomenon inshaa Allah. Visionary!
• Jaffer Maniar is a gem (I am plagiarizing his description of Suleiman here ;) ). He’s the one that’s been guiding me through my illustrative efforts and he’s quite a talented young man. You’ll see some of his comments on my blog. He updates every Sunday so I suggest you designate for yourself at random a day in the week that you can check out his blog (not necessarily Sunday). That way we won’t overwhelm his server with traffic ;) .
• And keeping the best for last (it just worked that way alphabetically :D ), Suleiman. Jaffer calls him a gem and I agree. May God reward him greatly for what he’s done and is doing with hadithuna. I am still waiting for permission to share with you articles from the Ghost in the Machine workshop but when I do inshaa Allah I will share a really insightful paper on social software (blogging, bookmarking, etc.) I believe hadithuna is a great idea, and one whose time is now. And it owes both its existence and its upkeep to Suleiman’s vision and dedication. And as if all this wasn’t enough, his own blog is just outstanding.

So what’s next? First, inshaa Allah I aim to keep on bloggin’ :D . You can always check out my “Coming Soon” page to see what’s in my queue and you’re welcome to suggest other things. I haven’t been immediately responding to comments because I am ever hopeful that if I start interesting threads we can get decent discussions going and I don’t necessarily want to be in the center of the discussion :) . But I do read every comment and I do mean to eventually respond to every open comment (this may be a little ambitious given that we already have 5x comment-to-blog ratio) if not directly then at least by inclusion in future posts.

Second on my list is to finally settle on what I want to include in my About page and perhaps have a nifty author profile in the sidebar a la Suleiman.

Third is to figure out how to use the flickr lightbox both in the body of the blog and in the sidebar so I can upload some pictures.

I also need to inshaa Allah expand the blogroll. There are a couple of really interesting blogs that I have seen for people that I may not personally know but have nonetheless had a strong impact on me. Gradually they’ll be added to the blogroll. I am also trying to talk Wael into doing this inshaa Allah. We’ll see. I will not add a place or thing to the blogroll unless I blog about it first. Hopefully that’ll keep things manageable size-wise.

And last but not least, I want to explore the 3-column version of my current theme provided I can get it to work with minimum headache to Suleiman.

So please keep checking this out and help me with your feedback. And remember to leave comments :)