HAhmed.com

As most of you know, and is evident from my many posts, I came from a University (Stony Brook) with a rather large and active MSA. My time at the university, particularly with MSA-related activities and the brothers I met in large part through the MSA have greatly shaped who I am today, and has truly given me life-long friends. In coming to med school, the one thing I would definitely miss about Stony was the MSA, and the lifestyle of being actively surrounded by humble, devout, and overall ‘cool’ Muslims. I wasnt expecting much of that at Downstate… However after coming here I soon found out we had an MSA. And that really excited me. But I soon found out that it was only a year old and not that active (no disrespect to the current MSA board or anything). Granted every1 here is really busy and generally dont have  much time for any extracirricular or personal activities, let alone running an active MSA.

However, Alhamdulillah i was happy to find out that a sister was starting a weekly halaqa. (mashallah, were so blessed to have this proactive sister - lol and guess where shes from - Stony brook of course!!) But after 2-3 weeks the attendance died down and I was worried that it wouldnt last. This past Tuesday however, this sister couldnt attend the halaqa due to a prior commitment, so this first-year accepted the responsibility of running the halaqa. He tried to change the format a little bit to make it more appealing to the busy Muslim medical students here. So be vowed to only play SHORT lectures, (10-20 minutes.) After busy days of multiple lectures and labs, he didnt really think we wanted to listen to another long lecture in the evening of passive listening. And after the short talk from a scholar we would discuss it as a group, then conclude with salat in congregation. He heavily advertised the SHORT talk part. And this past week we had 8 people show up! (lol i know thats not alot for u stony ppl but for us this was a big deal to me. He was just expecting it to be my roomate and him.)

And this week, we listened to Shaykh Husain Abdul Sattar give a short lecture on Consistency in Actions. And every1 loved it. Mashallah this shaykh is awesome. People loved the talk and commented on his appealing tone of voice (no yelling, no "do this or ur gonna go to hell" rhetoric, very calm & supportive), His goal-oriented-ness and the practicality of what he was saying were vert appealing. Being consistent in ones actions is apparent for any successful student (who have to study consistently!), as most of the peoplewere at our halaqa, (besides me, of course - shouldnt i be studying now instead of writing this post? lol).This talk stressed the importance of remaing steadfast and consistent in actions of the deen as well. And no action is too small, from even doing a little bit of dhikr daily, or reading a couple of ayas of quran regularly - just be consistent with it. Inshallah we have all learned and benefitted from this talk and are now actually implementing our own consistent actions.

Moreover, the other students really respected how Shaykh Husain became a shaykh while pursuing his MD at the University of Chicago Med school as well. (We are just struggling to get by with med school, let alone anything else!!) Inshallah we will definitely play more of Shaykh Husain’s short lectures at our halaqas in the future. I highly recommend you check out more of his talks (readily downloadable for free on his site).

And finally if any of u have any suggestions as to what to cover in our halaqas, or would like to recommend a particular (short) lecture for us to listen and reflect/discuss, please share it here as well. Alhamdulillah!