Khadija – Muslimah revert, abused, indebted, helped

I received this from the Andalus team and simply had to share. After all, this is meant to be the month of mercy. Muslims should not neglect the simple mercy of helping a lady in distress, especially one who reverted to Islam and has suffered so much at the hands of another Muslim.

I received this email two days ago, and already, alhamdulillah, her debts have been cleared. Nevertheless, Solace appears to be a noble cause and we should contribute, even a pound, in these last ten days of Ramadan. Who knows, we might hit the Laylat-ul-Qadr jackpot and be rewarded the equivalent of £10,000 as a result.

***

 

Assalamu alaikum,

Dearest Brothers and Sisters,

Whilst many are mashaAllah donating abroad during this blessed month, little do we realise that a sister right on our doorstep is suffering…

Abused. Beaten up by her husband. Isolated. Struggling and emotionally distressed – please read the story of Khadija…and please help…
(All details are true except Khadija’s name which has been changed to protect her identity)

SOLACE has a very sad case of a revert sister that has been tested in so many ways and needs your help. Before you read about her plight, please note that SOLACE has been supporting this sister since May of this year and has verified her plight by seeing physical proofs of documentation . May Allah help her. Ameen.

Sister Khadija is an English revert in her early 20s who has been a Muslim for four years. She has four children under the age of 6 and is sadly a victim of Domestic Violence by her Muslim husband. In fact, a meeting was arranged between her and her SOLACE volunteer which she unusually did not make. Her SOLACE Keyworker kept trying to reach her by phone. Khadija’s husband picked up the phone and said she was at the doctors.  We then heard nothing for days. It was only a week later that she called and said she was there in the room when her husband spoke to her Keyworker. He had beaten her black and blue and lied so that no one would find out what he had done.  In addition to this, he has accumulated so much debt in both of their names over the years. The police took matters into their own hands and arrested him due to the state that Khadija was physically in – bruises on her face. She went to court and would not be a witness against her husband as she felt that he was a changed man as he started to pray. When he returned home, he treated her in such a degrading way and said he had had enough, took his belongings and left her to manage all of their children and to pay off her debts.

Two SOLACE Keyworkers went to visit her recently and they were very saddened by what they saw – her children were wearing clothes that were far too big for them, there was hardly any food in the house – and yet despite all of what she is going through – they noticed a great concern and love that Khadija had for her children.

Khadija is struggling – she is struggling to hold on to her deen, she is struggling to be a mother to 4 very young children, one of whom was born 8 weeks prematurely. She is struggling as a victim of domestic violence. Despite all of these problems, we have seen Khadija to be pro-active. And this is evident in the fact that she has secured a job which starts on 20th August stacking shelves in a factory. She has taken this job as she wants to clear her debts. It is extremely stressful for her when the bailiffs have come to the house threatening to take away whatever they need to – the SOLACE Keyworkers have said there is nothing of value in the house to take…

We are helping Khadija by providing counselling for her and by helping her to establis a home routine, a routine for her children and money management. Wonderful SOLACE Volunteers have also cooked for her and dropped off shopping for her. But she is still in a desperate plight.

Our request is simple – we want to clear her debt. We want to give this new Muslimah a fresh start. We want to remove the anxiety and stress from her so that she can concentrate on learning about her deen and being a Mother to her four children. We want to show her where everyone else has failed her in life, the Muslim community was there to support her.

She has not once asked us for any help – rather it is us that has offered to help her. We urge all brothers and sisters to please donate even just
£5 to clear her debt so that she can focus on what is more important. We do not feel that a young single mother who is broken physically and emotionally should have the added stress of working long hours when really should be focussing on building herself up so that she no longer remains a victim of domestic violence and looking after these 4 innocent children. She has very brief contact wit her non Muslim mother and brother due to the sexual abuse she suffered as a child by her mother’s partner. She is alone and needs our help.

Please can we reiterate, we do not normally ask for financial help for one particular case but as we have seen documentation from Courts with regards to the domestic violence and a pile of debt recovery letters as well as the state of this sister physically, emotionally and mentally –  we feel the need to do so.

We urge you to please donate by the following methods (ensure you put Khadija as your reference):
·         By paypal to donate@solaceuk.org
·         By direct bank transfer:
Account Name – Solace
Bank – Lloyds TSB
Account Number – 14808660
Sort Code – 779130

Please NOTE if you do donate, it is essential that you send an email to info@solaceuk.org with your name, telephone number, date you donated, amount you donated and method (ie via paypal, direct bank transfer) so that if the debts are cleared, we can return your money to you.

Finally, the Prophet (saw) said: “Whoever alleviates [the situation of] one in dire straits who cannot repay his debt, Allah will alleviate his lot in both this world and in the Hereafter.” Muslim

We hope no one will simply do nothing with this email. It is our hope that everyone who reads it will at least donate £1 towards this sister and forward it on.

Please remember Khadija in your duaa. It is only when we try to place ourselves in the shoes of Khadija that we can truly even imagine what she is going through.

Wasalamu alaikum
SOLACE
www.solaceuk.org

Fitness Diary Comparison: Evernote vs Day One vs SImplenote

A few days ago I started keeping a “fitness” diary. This involves the entry of everything that goes into my body bar repeating medications. I recommend it for no other reason than it stops you reaching for that fourth Krispy Kreme because of the effort of updating your diary.

I’m keeping a Notebook in Evernote for this purpose, which also has proven useful in collating other information about improving my health in general. There’s only one problem with this approach, Evernote is slow. In fact, it’s unusably slow on an iPhone.

The iPhone, like most smartphones, is designed for reflexive, repetitive twitch use. So I pull it out of my pocket, fire up an app, do something and put the phone away. There is usually no time for waiting around. Evernote spends so much time synchronising that it’s pretty much a non-starter unless you’re sitting on a bus and have time to kill.

So I thought about using Day One, my favourite journalling app (which I use across iPad, iPhone and a couple of Macs of course) but the sync on that is flakey at best. I’ll make some updates at night on the Mac and the next day I’ll pull out the iPhone and iPad and despite syncing, they’re showing me two different versions of the file. Force-quitting and relaunching doesn’t help.

A less important issue on Day One is that Markdown formatting is supported on the iOS versions, but strangely, not on the Mac version, where I would find it most useful, but this is an issue that doesn’t have a bearing on my diary-entry problem.

Looks like I’ll have to stick with trusty old Simplenote, synced to Notational Velocity on the Mac. I recently paid for the Premium version of Simplenote and find it almost unbearably elegant. The only sync issues I’ve ever had with Simplenote stem from my desire to integrate my iA Writer documents with my Simplenote folders. Although the Premium version of Simplenote allows for Dropbox syncing, their site offers stern warnings against integration with other applications.

Once I’ve finished entering a day’s worth of data, I create a new note in Evernote and copy and paste. Not the neatest workflow, but a lot faster than using Evernote on the iPhone directly. The downside? Neither Evernote nor Simplenote display Markdown formatting, but I can live with that. The whole point of Markdown after all is that it doesn’t need to be displayed formatted.

In my ideal cloud, one folder on a server somewhere would hold my documents, which would be seamlessly mirrored to my connected devices, of which the Mac would be just one. Not long to wait for iCloud.