Of Sociology...or just some sentences from it =/

Assalamualaikum wrt wbt...

It was such a tiring day.. (people who read older posts would notice this sentence came almost frequently..=P). Math probability quiz that I remembered only 5 minutes before it started, senior design progress oral report (it went bad..), swimming for a time-out, and then an ad-hoc senior design meeting late in the evening. It was hours too late that I was informed we're gonna have another meeting with our senior design advisor tomorrow morning..and I have one complicated CAD drawing due prior to that meeting...[sigh..]

Anyways, my intention was not to bore people about how my day went by...it was simply something else =)

I was reading Sociology 101 text book this morning while working at the reeve front desk. Flipping page by page, skimming word by word, I'm almost ready to doze off.. Suddenly, I came across a sentence or two from the textbook, that I found interesting and I would like to share..

"...Everywhere you look you see things that exist apart from other things---reality consists of parts and pieces. Moreover, at any given moment, you ignore most of what is within your field of vision and block out most sounds within hearing range. Only by selecting what to see and what to hear can we see or hear anything---to see and hear "everything" would overload our senses to the point that we would hear and see nothing. This alerts us to the most fundamental scientific activity: to isolate and define those portions of reality to be studied and explained..."

- Sociology, Rodney Stark, 10th edition

Besides the good wording, I think what is said made a total sense...

In terms of being a student, you have to choose what you wanna to hear, what you wanna to see, and what you wanna do...therefore comes the magic word 'PRIORITIZE'..

A college student who fails to prioritize, losses the valuable time he/she could use to do something more crucial, into doing nothing at all....Or looking at the other extreme, one could do too much tasks, ex: taking more credit hours in semester etc.. Being productive is undeniably good, but being too productive by disregarding one's limit and capacity will lead to 'pancit'ness..thus came the word 'SLACKING' It is only too late that one realizes that the hard work and toil are just fruitless uphill battles......sad..

On the other hand, looking at an Islamic point of view, we cannot select the things in religion that we wanna see or what we wanna hear only.. These 'things' include fiqh issues, quran and hadith, ibaadah etc..

For example, when we're stuck in something that we don't know whether it's haraam or not, we cannot go and seek fatwas that permits it and ignore the others..true, there are khilaafs (perselisihan pendapat) in some issues, but we can't go 'shopping for fatwas' that suits our wants and desires without considering the opinions of other schools of thought that might have stronger proofs...this is just pure ignorance..

Other example would be about quranic verses and hadith..we cannot take just a small chunk of quran verses and leave the other chunk to proof something..most of the time, to get the meaning of an ayat, we have to read the ayat before and the ayat after, sometimes we have to look at other surahs...this is the problem which I've seen happening a lot the with the non-Muslim during interfaith discussions..they argue some issues or teachings in Islam that they found as offensive, used a small chunk of Quranic and hadith verses that sounds like supporting the issue, and blame Islam as a religion that promotes violence.. It's like taking chunks of jigsaw puzzles and leave the rest of it. Can we see the big picture of the puzzle if we do this?

Sometimes they take Quranic verses literally, not being aware that Quran uses classical Arabic that has very deep and beautiful meaning in each words....this is why we are not recommended to read the translation (terjemahan) only to deduce something from the Quran, but to read and understand the exegesis/interpretation (tafsir) as well..

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These are what I come up with when reading a small chunk of the paragraph from the 'interesting' Sociology book..

Wait, did I just ignore the knowledge that the book wants to educate me..and wanders around thinking about something else..? =/

Oh well, verily, Allah knows the best....

Back to work!