twins of faith

Published on 02/01/2012 on nsmz

Assalammualaikum.

Last week I went to the Twins of Faith Family Festival at PICC.

It was presented by Mercy Mission. Masha-Allah, it was soooo captivating! There were talks, exhibitions and edutainment. My fave part was the talks! lol I'm over-reacting maybe, but whoaaa it's sooooo cool.

The tickets can be bought at the website.

Workshops were also held; marriage workshop for adults who want to get married, food/nutrition workshop for people who want to live a healthy lifestyle and knowing what food is "halal and good", and there were a lot of workshops for women like: Super Moms at Workplace, Women in the Eyes of God. There's a LOT of workshops that I'm not mentioning here, however if you want the complete list, click here.

But sadly we didn't go to any of those workshops.

We did went to the talks, though. Went to 9 talks. Out of 16. I'm feeling quite guilty.

The first talk in the morning of 24th Dec was "You Are the Best of Nations" by Sh. Yahya Ibrahim. Taught the audience that we, muslims, are the best of nations! 'Remember who you are'.

And then there were a few other talks.

At 3.15 pm during that day, there was a talk entitled "I'm Muslim and I'm Proud", which I really really reaaallly wanted to attend, but there was a lil bit of problem and we couldn't be there.

We came back to PICC after Maghrib and attended two more talks, "Cultural Islam or Islamic Culture" and "One Faith, One Family". I extremely LOVE these two talks.

The first one was by Dr. Bilal Phillips, a Canadian. He highlighted the cultural believes in Malaysia, which many people do, and is somewhat khurafat or shirk, especially bersanding. I know that a lot of you have already known this, but most people in Malaysia still practice the bersanding, tahlil and etc, right? So I still want to mention it here, heheh. Okay, let me just get this straight...

Bersanding. People say you get barakah when people sprinkle you that-kind-of-water-that-I-don't-even-know-the-name. Well, the act of sprinkling is okay. But when you believe that you can get Barakah from it, now that is just WRONG. You can't simply get barakah by people sprinkling you water, can you? This is SHIRK.

Tahlil. This one is not shirk, though, it's just one of the typical malay cultures which people practice. (please correct me if I'm wrong).When people pass away, their families would do a ceremony, typically called "kenduri arwah". People would do it for days, weeks or even months if you're a royalty. It's not really compulsory to do this.

So the conclusion is: we should practice Islamic culture - following Rasulullah's Sunnah, being nice to others, respecting people's opinions and so on instead of practicing a cultural Islam - where you practice cultural believes and ending up impacting your Islam.

The second one was by Sheikh Hussein Yee, who is a Malaysian. The talk taught us that we should unite, no matter if you're a Syafi'ie or a Hambali or Hanafi or Maliki or any mazhab, we should be a family. We should help each other. And also, especially in Malaysia, where there's a diversity - we have Indians, Chinese, Malay, Iban, Kadazans and several ethnics. In this country, we could see that some Malays goes well only with Malays, and the other races too. It doesn't matter if you're a Chinese, Malay, or Indian, we should be together - because we're One Faith, One Family.

Hmm I'd like to add a personal note about Sh. Hussein Yee. He faced many difficulties when he first became a muslim. Some Chinese thinks that when you become a muslim, you become a Malay. And they don't want to become a Malay, because, uh well, you know how some Malays are. So in order to grow Islam, we ourselves should become a better person first. Be exemplary Muslims.

Okay that's all I wanted to say about the talks

There were entertainments by spoken word artists like Boona Mohammed and Muslim Belal. Masha-Allah, I wish I could talk like them.

So... the event was amazing! They're going to do another one in Melbourne soon.