Date: August 26, 2020
Assalamu Alikum WaRahmatullahi WaBarakatuhu, As we approach the end of 2015, we’re humbled to be able to serve the community through Alim’s comprehensive platform. We first thank Allah SWT, who has enabled us so that we can carry on this work of Da’wa. Secondly, we would like to take this opportunity to thank our generous donors for their continuous support and encouragement. This past year, Alim Foundation has achieved many milestones, including improved web portal with added functionalities and new contents, new translations, new Tafaseer, as well as , new versions of Android and Apple apps to name a few. We were able to do many of these enhancements because of donors like you. Take advantage of the tax break before the year end, please donate(https://www.alim.org/donate/) generously to help us continue this noble work. Alim.org is a non-profit 501 c organization, and your donations are tax deductible. Act before December 31st 2015 to take advantage of 2015 tax break. Please visit us at www.alim.org(/) to donate and support us! Wassalam Walaykum WaRahmatullahi WaBrarakatahu The Alim Team
"The best of what a man leaves behind are three: a righteous child who supplicates for him, ongoing charity the reward of which reaches him, and knowledge that is acted upon after him."
Sunan Ibn Mājah
"Every day two angels come down from Heaven and one of them says, 'O Allah! Compensate every person who spends in Your Cause,' and the other (angel) says, 'O Allah! Destroy every miser.'"
Sahih Bukhari
Part I Salah (Prayer) is one of the Five Pillars in the faith of Islam and an obligatory religious duty for every Muslim. It is a physical, mental, and spiritual act of devotion that is to be performed five times every day at prescribed times. In this ritual, the believer starts stand-up, bows, prostrates themselves, and completes while sitting in the prayer platform. At the time of each posture, the believer delivers or recites certain sections, phrases and prayers. The term salah is generally translated as "prayer" but this definition is little unclear. Muslims use the words "dua" or "prayer" when mentioning to the common description of prayers which is "reverent requests made to God". Many scientific studies are done on belief and worshiping approaches. A team of scholars from Malaysia recently answered this query by learning how Muslim prayer affects alpha waves in the brain, and their results show a profound connection between mind and body. The study was completed using brain scanning technology, such as magnetic-resonance imaging and electroencephalograms (EEG), to know how the brain responds to spiritual or divine practice. Islamic prayer, or salat, needs the believer to go through more than a few distinct bodily postures while performing specific supplications. The sequence of positions is fixed, and it’s repeated many times for each act of prayer. Believers start out standing, then bow at the waist till their upper bodies are corresponding with the ground, with their hands pressed against the knees. Then, they come back to a standing posture before bowing down to the fully prostrate posture and touching the foreheads on to the ground. After bowing, believers sit up on their knees temporarily before coming back to a final bowing position. The same cycle will start again. Each of the stage in this prayer cycle will last for a few seconds, and the total prayer cycle lasts around 30 seconds and a full minute. During the study, the researchers studied brain waves at variety of postures with and without vocal prayers. To learn more into this and understand how these different postures mark brain waves, they fitted the helpers with EEG monitors around the frontal, central, temporal, parietal, and occipital regions and told the volunteers to complete a series of prayer cycle. Consequently, they found substantial increases in alpha movement in volunteers’ parietal and occipital but, amazingly, only during the bowing stage of the salat. In contrast, alpha wave stages didn’t vary much at all amid inactive state and prayer in the standing, bowing, or kneeling positions. This following study dig through the effect of Islamic prayer (salat) on a relative power (RPα) of electroencephalography (EEG) and autonomic nervous movement and the connection between them by means of spectral scrutiny of EEG and heart rate variability (HRV). !(/img/equation.png) where fmax=95 Hz, fl=8 Hz, fh=13 H During the prayer salat, a remarkable increase (p
Read MoreReem Shaikh is a 17-year-old Muslim hails from Houston. Wonderful news is that she has finished memorizing Qur’an when she was just seven and traveled to Egypt to learn Arabic. She did not get an opportunity to go to regular schools. She was homeschooled until the age of 12. Then she pursued her bachelors in Islamic Studies at Qatar University. The very fact is that children who are homeschooled will be stereotyped as illiterates. But case for Reem is something different. She is now a social activist and joined Doha youth forum, a forum from UN to give youth an opportunity to voice their opinions, last year. She was the only young Muslim girl who addressed UN delegates and answered their questions on role of youth in fighting crimes around the world.
Read MoreThe Initiative on Islam and Medicine (II&M)(https://www.medicineandislam.org/overview/), located in Brookfield, Wisconsin, conducts research on Islam and Biomedicine. Their research programs are focused on the theological, social, and biomedical aspects of religion and medicine and are meant to benefit the health of American Muslims and also in the development of an academic, multidisciplinary field of Islamic Bioethics. They support and provide scholarships to healthcare providers and religious leaders and act as a platform for impactful research and tailored education. Additionally, II&M provides educational opportunities, workshops, consultations, courses and certifications, medical student internships, and hosts events that facilitate the participation of medical and social scientists, Islamic studies experts, and Islamic scholars. After extensive pilot testing and methodical curation, as claimed by II&M, they have announced the launch of a self-paced, multi-modal course named “An Introduction to the Field of Islamic Bioethics”(https://www.medicineandislam.org/bioethics-course/). This course is said to benefit Muslim clinicians, healthcare practitioners, medical students and trainees, chaplains, religious leaders, bioethicists, and patients and is based on II&M’s principles of data-driven, theologically appropriate, and research-tested intellectual resources to engage with contemporary healthcare. The course will introduce learners to: * Critical concepts in Islamic theology and law that undergird normative ethical frameworks * Scholarly discussions regarding the methods, content, and scope of Islamic bioethics and * Extant normative rulings and discursive products of applied Islamic bioethics relate to end-of-life care, organ donation, and reproductive health. This course is based on adult learning theory and is a 10-module course that runs in 4-months cohorts. It involves: * Specially curated lectures and readings that allow for active learning as participants engage with the source material of Islamic bioethics, * Summative lectures that hit on the key points from the material with added experiential commentary and explanation from a practicing clinician, clinical ethicist, health policy consultant, and scholar * Short quick-hitting reflection questions and quizzes that allow for the learning to be concretized Additionally, the course yields 16.5 CME and MOC credits for physicians. At the completion of the course, participants will be able to: * Describe the sources of Islamic morality * Identify the producers, consumers, and the discursive material of Islamic bioethics * Describe the contentions around what constitutes the "Islamic" in Islamic bioethics * Apply critical analysis skills to decipher gaps in the Islamic bioethics discourse * Delineate the major Islamic juridical views on end-of-life healthcare, organ donation, and reproductive health Register now(https://www.medicineandislam.org/bioethics-course/) for the course at II&M’s website and avail of the introductory 50% discount.
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