Who I am · my faithSince 610 CE
بِسْمِ اللَّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ
In the name of Allah, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful
Islam
The first of the three pages about who I am rather than what I like, and the only page on this site about something I did not choose. Everything else here is taste. This is not.
What is on it: the five pillars and the six articles, the Qurʾān as a set of numbers, all ninety-nine names, the three mosques worth setting out to travel for, the twenty-five prophets named by name, and the chain of scholarship every bit of it travelled down. The prophets, the mosques and the scholars used to live on my apps page, which was the wrong home for them: that page is about three pieces of software, and this is not.
وَيَمْكُرُونَ وَيَمْكُرُ اللَّهُ وَاللَّهُ خَيْرُ الْمَاكِرِينَ
“But they plan, and Allah plans. And Allah is the best of planners.”
Holy Qurʾān · Al-Anfāl 8:30
The Three Holy Mosquesالحرمان والأقصى
The three mosques the Prophet ﷺ said are worth setting out to travel for: Makkah, Madinah, and Jerusalem. Every mosque here is drawn, not photographed: each one is an SVG elevation built from the same parts, in its own architectural language.
And the Ones After Themالمساجد
The mosques the rest of the architecture came out of, in the order they were built. Ottoman semi-domes, Mughal onion domes, Andalusi horseshoe arches, Maghribi square minarets: the same building solved a dozen different ways by a dozen different places.
Prophets in the Qurʾānالأنبياء
Twenty-five are named. Grouped the way the Qurʾān tends to introduce them: the first prophets, the ones sent to the Arab peoples, the house of Ibrāhīm, the Israelites who came through Isḥāq, and finally the one who came through Ismāʿīl. Filter by line.
وَمَا أَرْسَلْنَا مِن رَسُولٍ إِلَّا بِلِسَانِ قَوْمِهِ لِيُبَيِّنَ لَهُم
“And We did not send any messenger except in the language of his people, so that he could make things clear to them.”
Holy Qurʾān · Ibrāhīm 14:4Every one of them was sent speaking the language of the people in front of him. Five are the Ulul-ʿAzm, those of firm resolve (Nūḥ, Ibrāhīm, Mūsā, ʿĪsā and Muḥammad ﷺ), and they are tagged below.
Scholarsthe athari chain
The line the ummah’s knowledge actually travelled down: the rightly guided caliphs, the ten promised Jannah, the Muhājirūn and the Anṣār, the two generations after them, then the four imāms, the ḥadīth masters, the writers of ʿaqīdah and tafsīr, Ibn Taymiyyah’s circle in Damascus, and the revivalists after them. Filter by generation.
خَيْرُ النَّاسِ قَرْنِي، ثُمَّ الَّذِينَ يَلُونَهُمْ، ثُمَّ الَّذِينَ يَلُونَهُمْ
“The best of people are my generation, then those who come after them, then those who come after them.”
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī · Ṣaḥīḥ MuslimThose three generations are as-Salaf aṣ-Ṣāliḥ: the Companions, the Tābiʿūn who met them, and the Atbāʿ at-Tābiʿīn after them. Every group tagged Salaf below is one of the three; everyone listed after them is measured against what they understood.