veiled4allah

this blog is not currently active

This blog is not currently active. See Al-Muhajabah's Jottings for my occasional long-form posts or follow muhajabah on Twitter to see what I'm up to these days. Thanks for visiting and feel free to browse the archives.

my blog is five years old

It's getting to the point where I post only once or twice a year, but the blog isn't completely dead, and it is now 5 years old! Hard to believe, but the first posts were on May 24, 2002. Where did the time go? If anybody is still reading this, thanks for sticking with me. I can't promise more frequent posts in the future, as my job keeps me busy and after working with blogs all day, I often don't feel like updating my own. Mostly I don't get any further than bookmarking stuff on del.icio.us so you might want to subscribe to that if you're looking for something to read! Life is going well. This is going to be a busy summer for my family. My dad is retiring at the end of May, my sister is getting her Ph.D. in mid-June, and my grandmother will (inshallah!) be turning 100 at the start of August. I'll be going down to California for the second event and to Minnesota for the third. Thanks again to everybody who still checks in, I hope you're doing well and getting what you want out of life. Peace and blessings to all :)

four years of blogging

As of tomorrow. Hard as it is to believe, I started this blog four years ago, on May 24, 2002. Posting is very sporadic these days and likely to remain so - my job keeps me busy and after eight hours dealing with blogs (in tech support) I often don't feel like doing anything with my own. I greatly appreciate those of you who are still reading. Thank you. For those who visit the site directly (instead of reading via RSS), I've added a little section above the posts (which don't change very often) which features things I've been reading lately, courtesy of del.icio.us. This is updated in real-time and I usually add a couple links to it every day since it's much faster and easier than blogging. So you might find this interesting or of value, inshallah. Despite how infrequently I post to this blog, I like having it. When the mood does strike, I like having a place to put up things of interest. Blogging is something I do for myself, even though I hope others may find it valuable in some way. The last four years have been quite interesting. When I started the blog, I had recently become unemployed. That fall I went back to school to study to be a paralegal. However, the job market for that wasn't too good and I had a variety of prospects that just didn't work out. Then in August 2004, I hooked up with the job I've had ever since then and still am going strong at. Working for Six Apart is terrific. Just being able to work from home and not have the hassle and expense of a commute is worth a great deal to me. I love the work that I do and the people that I work with. Best of all, as a start-up, Six Apart offers good opportunities for career growth and advancement. Starting last fall, I have moved into more of a leadership position on my team, with lots of new responsibilities and challenges. Allah SWT has truly blessed me in giving me this opportunity :) Even though I don't blog too much myself, it can truly be said that blogging is what makes my world go. Back in May 2002, hardly anybody blogged. It seemed like the famous blogs could all be counted on the fingers of one hand. And just look at it now! How many people now make their living by or from blogging. I love reading blogs. For me the best thing is finding a link to something interesting or important that I never would have found on my own. I'm a voracious reader but more and more what I spend all my time reading isn't books but information on the web. Blogs pull it all together. For an information junkie, they're like crack ;) So here's to another four years and more. May they bring me as far as the last four years have. And here's to all of you who check out this little corner of the blogosphere. Please do keep dropping by every now and then and may you have all the best. Peace and blessings. P.S. In a brief experiment, comments are open. I usually don't have time to moderate them, or the energy to deal with the trolling it always brought but hopefully, this will go well, inshallah. Heh. This is the longest original-content post I've written in months, if not years. Still kicking, after all

and the check's in the mail, right?

My blog is worth $128,150.58.
How much is your blog worth?

;)

three years of blogging

Once again, I forgot to post about my blogiversary for several days after the fact :p First day's posts are here, for what it's worth. A lot has changed since I started this blog. It's gotten a lot more attention in its time than I ever thought it would, although it's going through a quiet period now. A lot of things have happened in the last three years that I didn't imagine would happen in this country, or at least that we would go along so much with them. I wish I felt more optimistic about the future, but I don't. veiled4allah is actually only one part of Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs; the others are The Clipboard, a clip blog of interesting news stories that I find, and A Quranic Journal, which is currently on hiatus (note to self: I need to start updating that blog again). veiled4allah is deliberately intended to focus primarily on issues relating to Islam and Muslims and to be a place for me as a Muslim to speak up for peace and justice and hopefully correct misunderstandings about Islam. There are a lot of issues I don't cover here, some of which you can find at The Clipboard if you're interested. Most of all, I just don't want to look back and know that I was silent when I saw injustice.

a quick guide to veiled4allah

Welcome, visitors from Informed Comment! Thanks for dropping by. I'm extremely honored that Juan Cole selected me as one of a small number of genuinely diverse voices in the blogosphere that he wanted to highlight. I've been pretty busy with work lately so updates here have been a little slow, but I would like to particularly recommend some of the following selections from my archives. These blog entries are also listed in the sidebars on the main page of this blog. Terrorism is not Islam (more condemnations by Muslims of terrorism) Islamic non-violence - Learn about efforts by Muslims to promote a philosophy of non-violence within the Islamic tradition Muslim outreach events - Think that Muslims are "silent"? Read this catalog of news stories about outreach events hosted by Muslims in their communities The "What Islam Really Says About" series: Anti-Semitism Crime and Punishment Forced Marriages Honor Killing Human Rights Individual Freedom Mutilation Non-Muslims' Fate Non-Muslims' Rights Pluralism Prisoners of War Rape Stoning Terrorism Torture My complete archives are here. Take a look around, browse the "Further reading" section on each entry's page to find more related entries, and hopefully you'll find something new to learn or something that interests you. Thanks for visiting!

a little milestone

I just recently passed 3000 entries at Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs, the conglomeration that includes not just this blog but also my clip blog (where I post up interesting articles I find) and my Quran blog. This entry is actually number 3002 :p

travails of a webmaster

Readers of my site who use really ancient browsers may notice a change in its appearance, though hopefully folks using modern browsers (I mean, ones released in the last five years) shouldn't notice any difference. Previously, visitors using ancient browsers had a problem viewing my content because the side columns overlapped the middle column with the text. Now, these visitors will see a really stripped-down version of the site without any fancy styling or formatting. It isn't pretty, but it should at least be readable. The problem is that the earlier browsers were very poorly designed and full of bugs so that they don't interpret CSS correctly. It's difficult if not impossible to design a sophisticated stylesheet that works in both modern browsers and ancient browsers. I went for designing one that works in modern browsers, but this causes problems for the occasional visitor reading my site from a really old browser on their computer at work (hi, Dad ;) ). Hopefully, the changes I made (a CSS hack) will allow the site to be read by most all visitors, inshallah, even if it isn't always pretty. The site should look normal except for visitors using Netscape 4.x and IE 5.0, inshallah. If anybody is using a more recent browser than that and sees the site messed up, please drop me an email, inshallah.

fifteen minutes of fame, or something

I don't know how long it's been up, but a reader pointed me to BeliefNet's list of the best spriritual blogs, which includes veiled4allah. There are three other Muslim blogs listed. Interestingly, all are by women. Where are the blogs by the brothers? Is this a problem of a lack of Muslim men who blog, or are the blogs by Muslim men being ignored? I know that the majority of the blogs listed in my Muslim Blogs List (which gets a mention by BeliefNet) are by women but there are a number of excellent blogs by Muslim men that BeliefNet has overlooked.

update

I am continuing to receive harassing emails from the individual who has been posting harassing comments to the blog. These emails will be reported to Juno. Whether or not the emails are actually being sent from a Juno.com email account, Juno will surely have an interest in harassing emails that appear to be sent from their service. I will follow up on this and if it becomes necessary, I will look into contacting a law enforcement authority. This is now the second time I have requested to no longer be sent these emails; I have also requested multiple times to no longer receive the comments on my blog. The person who's doing this knows very well that I have attempted to block him four times and that I have closed down comments on my blog entirely in order to stop being contacted by him. This has gone beyond a joke. Harassment is against the law. When a person asks to be left alone, you leave them alone. Two weeks with six warnings is far beyond what I should have to do to live my life in peace.