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<\/a><\/p>\nIt\u2019s been quite a weekend in our house.\u00a0 I\u2019m recovering from a nasty sinus infection, trying to remember to take my antibiotics at the right time and still getting another head cold on top of that.\u00a0 I hate dosing myself with medicine because then all I want to do is sleep.\u00a0 Sleep or sniffle, sniffle or sleep.\u00a0 Finally, alhamdulillah, I\u2019m getting over the worst of it.\u00a0 I can feel the phlegm in my chest wanting to come out and all I can envision is that gross little cartoon character on the Mucinex commercial.<\/p>\n
So, I\u2019ve been kind of out of it, but I\u2019m on the upside now.\u00a0 Then, Saturday evening, my husband took ill.\u00a0 For my dear husband, being sick is a family affair.\u00a0 He likes to share symptoms with everyone in the house, and will call his sister to give her a blow-by-blow account of his malaise.\u00a0 This time around was something like food poisoning.\u00a0 Was it something I cooked or something from outside the house?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 Alhamdulillah, no one else in the house got sick, but my hubby was sick enough for everyone.\u00a0 Poor thing.\u00a0 He was really miserable.\u00a0 When he\u2019s healthy, he\u2019s constantly on the move.\u00a0 It\u2019s impossible for him to sit still unless he\u2019s engrossed in a lecture or a rerun of NCIS (the letters of which he invariably gets out of order when asking me to change channels).\u00a0 This illness laid him low and kept him in the bed.\u00a0 He felt that there were knives poking him in the stomach and he couldn\u2019t keep down any food.\u00a0 I medicated him as best I could, tried to keep him hydrated, and spent most of the weekend corralling the kids and trying to keep them from being too loud.\u00a0 The worst of it passed in about twenty-four hours.\u00a0 When he started feeling a bit better I went in to keep him company and bring him water.\u00a0 He was trying to figure out exactly what it was that brought on this illness, and I was surprised when he told me it was backbiting.<\/p>\n
Now, you have to understand my husband.\u00a0 He is mashaAllah a religious and very private person.\u00a0 Never in a million years would he give up a confidence.\u00a0 Brother A can tell him a secret and no one else will ever know about it.\u00a0 He is trusted in our community and people look to him as a role model.\u00a0 But he does have this weakness.\u00a0 He listens<\/em>.\u00a0 He will listen to someone\u2019s problem.\u00a0 He will listen to a funny story.\u00a0 His ability to listen makes him a good counselor as he tries to help people.\u00a0 But the bad side is that he often listens to things that are, shall we say, not useful.\u00a0 Gossip.\u00a0 Oh, most of us do it, to some extent.\u00a0 He happens to be the kind of person that others feel comfortable sharing stories with, and he is not aggressive enough in cutting off the story teller.\u00a0 This is what happened on Friday.\u00a0 One friend was gossiping about a mutual friend.\u00a0 Of course, this kind of gossip is never along the lines of \u201cOh, I saw him serving the homeless at the soup kitchen\u201d, but rather was negative.\u00a0 And of course the proper Islamic thing to do is say \u201cBrother, don\u2019t backbite about our friend.\u00a0 Surely if he has committed a sin it is not our job to uncover him, and Allah knows we commit sins as well,\u201d but instead he made all the proper tsk tsk noises and listened in disbelief.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t pass on the gossip, not to me, alhamdulillah, or anyone else, but he feels that just by listening to another backbiting and not correcting him he was guilty of the sin of backbiting himself.\u00a0 No matter if the stomach ache was \u201ccaused\u201d by him finishing off a bowl of the kids\u2019 food that had sat too long on the counter or a fast food folly, the illness was a strong reminder from Allah that when you talk about someone, it is likened to eating the flesh of your brother, and you can imagine what kind of a bellyache that would give you.<\/p>\nIt wasn\u2019t the only incident of backbiting we had this weekend.\u00a0 SubhanAllah, we grow up thinking that women are the quintessential gossips, but just this morning we had another lesson that men can be just as bad about backbiting one another.\u00a0 My husband called me and told me that a complete stranger called him this morning, demanding to know why he, my husband, had been talking about him and his wife.\u00a0 My husband was dumbfounded and had to ask who this guy was.\u00a0 I\u2019m So-and-so, he said.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know you, my husband replied, so how can I talk about you?\u00a0 But your friend So-and-so said that you went to the masjid and were talking about me and my wife\u2026. Turns out, a mutual acquaintance, who didn\u2019t know this guy well either, had said the brother was having issues with his wife and could my husband, who is considered a person to go to for advice on Islamic issues, talk to them.\u00a0 My husband demurred and said it would be better if some relatives and people from the couple\u2019s country took care of it because they would better understand the situation, and he talked to a friend of his from their country and gave him the number of the young couple to call.\u00a0 End of story.\u00a0 So somehow, my husband\u2019s momentary involvement with someone once removed from this couple ended up with him supposedly gossiping about them in the masjid.\u00a0 Fortunately, this was a reasonable man and it didn\u2019t take long for him to realize that the mutual acquaintance was the one at fault, and he ended the phone conversation on good terms with my hubby and inshaAllah they might even meet at the masjid and get to know one another in a proper manner.\u00a0 Do I need to tell you that the next call my husband made was to tell the gossiper that he was no longer welcome in our lives?\u00a0 It was not the first time he had carried gossip and Allah only knows what stories might already be circulating about my family from the mouth of this man.\u00a0 May Allah give him hedayah.<\/p>\n
This has been a weekend for lessons on backbiting.\u00a0 First of all, you can feel how destructive it is.\u00a0 If the psychological damage were always translated to physical distress, to a wrenching pain in the gut and nausea and a throbbing skull, people would be much less eager to pass on the latest tale told round the water cooler (or on that modern water cooler called Facebook).\u00a0 Gossip changes people, damages relationships.\u00a0 My husband now knows something about a friend that causes him to see him in a negative light, and he\u2019ll never be able to take that knowledge out of his head.\u00a0\u00a0 He almost had an enemy in someone he\u2019d never even met, and he severed a relationship with another due to a breach of trust.\u00a0 Carrying gossip is like taking a feather pillow and tearing it open, then casting all the feathers into a stiff breeze.\u00a0 There\u2019s no way you can ever gather back all that was let loose.<\/p>\n
So, next time someone wants to offer you a juicy tale, just stop him or her.\u00a0 Just say \u201cNow, now, that\u2019s not really any of my business, so I\u2019d rather not hear about it\u201d.\u00a0 As long as it\u2019s not something dangerous, like little Johnny tying firecrackers to cats\u2019 tails, or someone abusing his wife or a grownup hurting a child.\u00a0 You have to have some judgment as to what is informational and necessary and what is damaging and malicious.\u00a0\u00a0 If you think about it and you can\u2019t find any benefit in telling, then stop the gossip and don\u2019t listen to it, and of course don\u2019t pass it on.\u00a0 Not to your neighbor, not to your friend, not to your spouse.\u00a0 Let it die.\u00a0 Think about times you\u2019ve been on the receiving end of gossip and how bad it made you feel.\u00a0 Feel compassion for a fellow struggling human being and think of all the sins you commit that Allah covers over and keeps from being exposed.\u00a0 Yeah, I get a bad shiver at that.\u00a0 Stop and think, and remain silent, no matter how tempting or juicy the story is.\u00a0 You don\u2019t want to eat the flesh of your brother or sister, do you?\u00a0 Neither do I.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s been quite a weekend in our house.\u00a0 I\u2019m recovering from a nasty sinus infection, trying to remember to take my antibiotics at the right time and still getting another head cold on top of that.\u00a0 I hate dosing myself with medicine because then all I want to do is sleep.\u00a0 Sleep or sniffle, sniffle […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
A Tasty Meal of Human Flesh<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It's been quite a weekend in our house.\u00a0 I'm recovering from a nasty sinus infection, trying to remember to take my antibiotics at the right time and\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Tasty Meal of Human Flesh\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It's been quite a weekend in our house.\u00a0 I'm recovering from a nasty sinus infection, trying to remember to take my antibiotics at the right time and\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Muslimah in Progress\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-02-20T17:34:57+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/files\/2011\/10\/bismillah2.jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Nancy Qualls-Shehata\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Nancy Qualls-Shehata\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html\",\"name\":\"A Tasty Meal of Human Flesh\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2012-02-20T17:34:57+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2012-02-20T17:34:57+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/#\/schema\/person\/6218cbef696f8f6c933831dfcc2096b9\"},\"description\":\"It's been quite a weekend in our house.\u00a0 I'm recovering from a nasty sinus infection, trying to remember to take my antibiotics at the right time and\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/2012\/02\/a-tasty-meal-of-human-flesh.html#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"A Tasty Meal of Human Flesh\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/muslimahinprogress\/\",\"name\":\"Muslimah in Progress\",\"description\":\"I'm an American Muslimah of a certain age with some pretty strong opinions. 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