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Christianity was found in places, notably in Yemen, and among the Arab tribes in the north under Byzantine rule; Judaism too was practised in Yemen, and in and around Yathrib, later renamed Madina (Medina), but the vast majority of the population of Arabia were polytheists.
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Anonymous (The Qur'an)
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We have to make our right
Wherever we are, out of whatever is there.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Christian women also, at one time, covered their headsβnot just nuns but all women when they entered churches, until quite recently.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Allah belonged here too.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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We must always remember that our cultural figures are not the guardians of our morality. We must guard that for ourselves.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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The most amoral man could write a brilliant literary work. The freedom to express and create what he chose was the relevant thing, because that was why we had literature.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Jerusalem, ----How cruel it was, after all, that the geographical center of their faith was not actually located within the confines of the Christian world at all -----It was not a lusting after the strangerβs territory but a desire to properly embody oneβs own, to make it animate, to animate the sacred within it. Wasnβt this, after all, a much more noble impulse, not to conquer Jerusalem but merely to build oneβs own? Or Lifeβa tragedies could be written and engaged over and over like waves. But the rhythms contained the all.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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From other Muslim women she saw, although they were similarly uncovered, she felt waves of cynical disapproval. Their stony expressions seemed to say, you see how these young girls abandon their ways as soon as they are set free. A mistake to let them come here. And from the non-Muslim majority, she received the imaged phantom of the kind of judgment she would get if she did dare to cover her face here.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Itβs only literature, I know, but it does something, or at least it says something.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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We go chasing after love. We are thwarted, interrupted from our own path, our own plan.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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The little guy never wins.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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In the end, itβs pointless. All theyβre ever looking for is their Hollywood love story.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Their presence here, however, was an act of imperialism. Was she complicit in it by being grateful and partaking? The worse thing perhaps was that the British were so oblivious to the presence of any issue regarding the placement of these treasures.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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When in Rome, do as the
Romans. That was not just friendly advice. That was survival.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Saudi girls stay home, or they get good jobs or good educations.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Itβs when life starts going wrong, when things start being horrible ,that you first realize that life isnβt like anything in a book You wish you could go back to how it was before, but you canβt. Life isnβt really like a book.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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The place would welcome you back in five days or in five years or in fifty or, for that matter, if such things were possible, in five hundred years.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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The words were right, but the reasoning wasnβt.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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The logical conclusion of any political expansion surely was equally detrimental, equally devastating, if and when it happened to be successful?
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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It was a habitβthatβs what it was calledβnot a veil. But then they kicked the habit.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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I always find something to enjoy. If not the story, then the scenery or the costumes. Thereβs always something good about it.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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People just begin to fall apart, and itβs hard for anyone else, anyone on the outside, to hold them together.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Complacent. Complacence does not take you to good places.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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when she looked at him here in the dusk, her first and overwhelming desire, if one could call it that, was to invite him to take a nap, to offer him a soft place to rest. That was all.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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No, said Maryam. βIt doesnβt limit my participation in the world.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Looking pretty,β said Wilson. βLike you. Maryam flushed. She draped her green silk scarf more firmly around her neck, wishing for a moment she could pull it up to cover her face.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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I ask you, your forgiveness that if I hurt you; harmed you or mistreated and disappointed you at any point, any circumstances since I am travelling towards Makka and Madina where resides my heart and life that's my power and love and peace.
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Ehsan Sehgal
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It wasnβt her fault she was so beautiful; rather, everyone else was at fault for being too blind to notice.
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Madina Papadopoulos (The Step-Spinsters)
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We found ourselves in a loversβ arrangement common in cities, when you see each other after midnight, once a week or so, sometimes dinner if he felt up for a date. I wanted more, but he had just gotten free of a long relationship, and Iβd never been in one. We dated other people. I gravitated to people who reminded me of him, quiet, reserved, people who moved with diligence and discipline in their art. Masculine, but soft. When I couldnβt bear our arrangement, I cut myself off. But I wanted to smell him. I traced his scent back to the source, the Brooklyn Bangladeshi-owned oil shop Madina on Atlantic Avenue, an institution. Named for one of the two holy cities in Islam, the word al-Madina simply means the city, and the shopβs visitors include Black and Muslim entrepreneurs, fragrance aficionados, folks who want to smell good for cheap, imams who sell the oils to the prison commissary, making perfumes available to inmates. I would purchase five-dollar roll-on bottles of oil to smell him in those periods we were off-again.
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TanaΓ―s (In Sensorium: Notes for My People)
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Qurban apki azmat pe amma zainab salam ullah alaiha
Apko apni ankhoon me basane ko dedar e yar ko g chahta h
Naseeb hon nisbaten apki qurb e yar ko g chahta h
Muhabbat me khak hua jata h dil lagta nahi zamane me ab
Nikle ap k qadmo me dum ye arzo ho puri g chahta h
Naseeb ho mitti Madina ki ap k Nana sarkar huzoor ka ho dedar g chahta h
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SImt e Dervish
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As a teacher, I do not only explain concepts; my job is to inspire too.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Those less motivated students kept their activities and their preferences so obscure.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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It was a choice between something more and not something more.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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There was much love but no pretense between them.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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What did it matter? Didnβt she have as much right to wear a head scarf? The girlβs accent was English.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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He spoke like an Arab, but he acted nothing like.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Their bodies were tanned, toned, and golden. From where had
come the notion that the British were all pale and pasty-looking? β¦ Would they modify their appearance as they got older? For seeking employment, likely, it would be necessary, wouldnβt it.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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Jerusalem, How cruel it was, after all, That the geographical center of their faith was not actually located within the confines of the Christian world at all.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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It never hurts to know your enemy.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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How nice it was when expressions and idioms really echoed actual fact , and became literal , as well as figurative , truths all the same time.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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You needed experience in order to get a job, so, in effect, you needed experience in order to gain experience. Those who didnβt have it were precisely those who had little hope of ever getting it.
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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When did that higher, more spiritual conviction become something craven and greedy? And then again when did that greed transform itself into something worse, something less of the instinct and more closely related to the higher faculties?
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Alaa Alghamdi (Road to Madina)
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His strength and bravery had inspired troops, and she had learned from his brazen courage. So she too would inspire her troops. After all, love was a battlefield, and she would be taking prisoners.
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Madina Papadopoulos (The Step-Spinsters)
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The City of Madina itself becomes sacred. Everything he (the Prophet) touched, every little place he went, every palm tree he touched, the mount Uhud - everything has a particular magnetism about it. And Imam Maliks Madhab is based on that sense of sanctity of the city of Madina. It's not purely a legallstig concept, it's a sacred concept: the holiness of the City.
(Imam Malik: Sage of the City of Light - quilliampress.com)
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Timothy Winter