Until recently, I scoffed at the all the crazy stuff religion teaches. Heaven and hell, angels and demons, spirits, miracles, etc. all seemed like non-sense that could only be believed before science became a well-established method of finding the truth. I’m still skeptical about the literal belief in these religious stories, but I’ve come to

I constantly stop whatever I’m doing during the day and take a second to ask, “What’s the point of all of this?” The modern secular world has answers. Wealth, pleasures, stuff, careers, prestige, sex, are all (unsatisfactory) answers to this question. It surrounds us, we buy into it, and it causes us pain. Most successful

It’s common in the military to take Islamic words that wouldn’t normally be offensive and turn them into a derogatory term to refer to the enemy. “Hajji” is a good example. Making the Haj is a pillar of Islam, so the term shouldn’t really be offensive, but alas, the military culture can be crude and

After two weeks of praying five times a day, it’s not obvious that I’m becoming more humble. Nobody would notice anything different in their interactions with me. My routine, other than the actual prayers, hasn’t changed too much. At work around 1:30 I will mysteriously disappear for 15 minutes into a conference room by myself,

I like to sleep in on weekends. I’m a morning person generally, but on the weekend, I sleep until 10 or 11 so. Unfortunately, Islam doesn’t allows you to skip your morning prayer (Fajr) just so you can sleep in. What this means for me is that I have to get up some time between 4:20

I’m rereading Nassim Taleb’s book, Antifragile (one of the books that inspired this project) and I came across a passage particularly relevant to this month of my project: Marketing is bad manners— and I rely on my naturalistic and ecological instincts. Say you run into a person during a boat cruise. What would you do

I attended my second Jummah yesterday at the Dar al Hijrah Mosque yesterday afternoon. It’s only a 10 minute drive from both my work and home, so I left the office around 1 PM thinking I would have plenty of time to find it and get parking. I got to the mosque and the first

Each philosophy or religion that I’ve explored has placed a great emphasis on detachment from worldly pursuits. Stoicism, Catholicism, and Judaism all say that the pursuit of wealth and prestige is an unworthy (or at least lesser) endeavor for human beings. While it’s not bad to have those things, one should not pursue them for

David Brooks wrote an excellent op-ed piece in reaction to the Atlantic article  The Confidence Gap. The Confidence Gap authors makes the argument that while there is some inequality between men and women in the workplace due to societal attitudes and such, much of it can be attributed to women’s lack of self-confidence relative to

  I’ve been avoiding praying at work. Last week, I was lucky and managed to do my afternoon prayer at home due to off-site meetings with clients that allowed me to stop by my apartment for a bit during the day. Yesterday, I didn’t have that convenience. At around 1:00 PM, I went to the