Like the birds…

Author: Amina & Mariam. This article has 3 Comments

As I look back at it, now, I find that it was all a part of a perfect plan. I did not know them, and yet, by the strangest of circumstances, they entered my life and I entered theirs…just in the nick of time.

I wish that I could say that I could start at the beginning of the story but that would be too presumptuous of me. I do not know when the beginning was. Instead, I know that this was written thousands of years ago…this encounter was decided by God, the One and Only, the Sustainer of the Heavens and the Earth…

Like the birds

It started sometime in 2009. My father got a job offer in a small city in Saudi Arabia. Although the pay and benefits were far less than what he had been receiving, we could not ignore the fact that the city offering the job was only an hour and a half’s drive from the Masjid Al Haram or the Ka’bah. (That and the fact that his contract was coming to an end). So my father decided to accept the offer.

We had to leave…

Because of the nature of the visas we had been residing in, we knew we would have to leave the country we had been residing in for 9 years by July…The problem was that my father’s job in Saudi Arabia wouldn’t start until September. We also still needed to get our visas from Saudi Arabia and we had been told that could take a bit of time. So we decided to head on to our homeland, Egypt where we always spent our summers. There, we decided we’d wait for everything to be sorted out.

And that is where it happened..

Like the birds…

The day before Ramadan came and we were still in Egypt. Being my first Ramadan in Egypt and being clueless to the masjids there, I wondered where to attend taraweeh prayers. I got all sorts of answers. Well meaning relatives advised me against going to the masjids (as they were crowded, people often ended up getting into arguments, few of them had a.c.s, etc.) My teacher who taught me Qur’an advised me to go a certain masjid which she said would be at the end of the block I was living in. I decided to follow her advice, but my mother suggested a different masjid even closer to our house…one that had somehow always escaped my attention.

I hadn’t fully made up my mind about which one to go to when the adhan rang out…Quickly, I bounded down the infinite steps (60+) and went in the direction of the adhan.He had started reciting surat Al Fatiha and I was captivated…

The Imam’s voice was beautiful.

This would be the masjid I would go to, I decided.

Yes, it turned out to be the one my mother had suggested. (Mothers are always right, aren’t they? ;)

Like the birds…

On the third night of Taraweeh, a young woman came in a bit late. SubhanAllah, who was standing at the end of the line? My sister and I. She asked us a question (which I can no longer remember) and then offered her sajadah (carpet) for me. I responded that my khimar usually worked well enough as a carpet. At that moment, I felt that she looked a bit curiously at me. I wasn’t that surprised…my Egyptian accent never came out sounding very genuine. However, I soon forgot all about her and focused on the prayers…

During the break though, she started talking to us. To tell the truth, I wanted to get to know her because I had noticed her reciting along with the Imam Surat Al Baqarah. Wow, I had thought. What a good person, mashaAllah. We talked about where we were from (the usual question because of our accent, what we had studied, etc.) SubhanAllah, I really took to her. I told her about how bored I was (I had been in Egypt a few months by now and had not really done much)..

And that is how it happened. Two weeks later we had become “friends” when she suddenly asked us if we truly were that bored. I told her, ‘Yes! I wish I could be doing something,” and then…she introduced us to a volunteer organization that helped pass out food to the needy and collected money for orphans and poor people ….

And that is how I entered the orphans and poor people’s lives…

The next day, immediately, with our older cousin with us, my sister and I went to the organization and met the lady in charge of collecting money for the orphans. She told us that she hadn’t been able to collect much, yet. We jumped in and Alhamdillah others did, too…Alhamdillah, at the end we had collected much more…

And that made me realize something…Allah had us meet her.

It was part of the orphan’s rizq that we met the young woman at the masjid. It was part of a plan that I would be standing at the end of the line and she would come late, only to have to stand next to me…It was part of the plan that she would find my accent funny and that eventually certain orphans would get the money they needed to face the new school year…

On the authority of Umar ibn Al-Khattab that the Prophet Sallah Allahoo alyhee wa salam said: “If only you relied on Allah a true reliance, He would provide sustenance for you just as He does the birds: They fly out in the morning empty and return in the afternoon with full stomachs.” Ahmad, An-Nasaa’I, Ibn Majah, Al-Hakim and At-Tirmidhi who said: “Hassan sahih”

And there is no creature on earth but that upon Allah is its provision, and He knows its place of dwelling and place of storage. All is in a clear register. (11: 6)