What upsets me....

 I am so grateful to Allah that He has made my heart love two different places. I lived in UK for 17 years and memories is what makes us who we are. I felt at home there, familiar and as soon as I landed in Malaysia I felt familiar too. I have been able to experience two very different places in the world in terms of its weather, the people, the food and the culture.

I can't explain the feeling I had when I met up with the sisters again. It was surreal. I have yet to meet anyone like my sisters in Britain. They are warm, they are generous, they are fun and we can have good conversations about the world politics.

Still, I have seen some other things in Britain that has made me very angry and sad. I have seen how people can be so arrogant and how even some Muslims have been affected by a mentality of 'I deserve such and such'. People believe that they deserve a perfect life, they deserve the house, the car, the job, the husband, the wife, the children, the health and as soon as something goes a bit wrong...like if they suffer from something not very serious such as having a cold or diarrhoea which are self-limiting or if they have some chronic benign illness like dysfunctional bowel then, they think that they have been robbed of their 'perfect life'. I have heard Muslims wearing himar and jilbab saying things like."I can't go on like this for the rest of my life" saying it with such arrogance that I wonder whether they truly have eman. There is no humility, no acceptance of the Qadr of Allah, no saying 'I know this is from Allah'. Rather, it is I came to see the doctor and you're telling me I haven't got anything serious but I am not  having perfect health like other people and you have to fix me no matter what...' and as if God does not exist. I have heard people who have been suffering for years from arthritis due to old age, have complaint about every single treatment that they have received under the NHS, have had every single investigations in the world, refuse to accept any advice and still say after so many years to the doctor, "So what are you going to do for me?" In other words "doctor, sort out my miserable life".

No amount of medical knowledge or psychiatry or psychology is going to sort out misery. If a person is miserable, if a person has negative thinking, if a person believes that they deserve better than what Allah has already given him, if a person is ungrateful then, there is no remedy for him except...to reflect, to realise and to repent to Allah swt.

There is a difference between demanding for our rights given to us from Allah swt e.g. as what the people in Egypt are doing today, demanding for a just and fair system, demanding for the implementation of Islamic rule. It is okay for a husband to demand his rights from his wife or that a wife to demand for her rights. Allah has given us certain rights as an ummah, as citizens, as mothers, fathers and children. That is different from demanding from Allah the kind of life that we think we deserve. It is Allah that decides our Rizk, our Ajal, our health, our future, our past.It is Allah who decides how many children we have or if we have any at all, it is Allah who decides if our children are intelligent or have an impairment. For these things we cannot demand, we can only be grateful for the things that we have and make dua to Allah to alleviate us from any suffering or to increase us in goodness.