IN Digestion

Well, I had a lot of fun at Texas Dawah Conference - I enjoyed many of the classes, I even enjoyed some of the stuff from Shaikh Waleed! (I do not normally enjoy his stuff as much) but the one part of his Khatira at the end about Optimism was really enjoyable -

I liked anything I heard from Shaikh Yasir Qadhi, and Dr. Ibrahim Dremali (I love his voice and personality, so anything he says is automatically good).  I got to hang out with Neon Night and Aamir (with TWO A’s) for 5 or 6 days? And a bunch of other people, but do not rememember all of them -

I missed all of the morning lectures each day (I woke up around 2pm on average) and by the time I had breakfast/lunch it would be 4ish -5ish -

Some of the more interesting things were the obvious first lectures telling us all to be ‘Good Ameircans’ and there seemed to be a consensus that the lecture “In the Mind of a Terrorrist’ just sucked -

I got into a fight with at least two Sufis and about four or five salafis and I enjoyed the company of about 20 or so other Salafis who were surprisingly pretty openminded to my beliefs (most Salafis are slowly becoming desensitized to the so called people of innovation)

The funny thing was a Sufi who was walking around with a chip on his shoulder about how this conference was a sellout panzy conference, and was instead a Hamza Yusuf/ISNA fan boy - that was interesting -

What was more interesting was some one who knew Abu Zubair personally and was apparently good friends with him who told me to completely ignore his takfeer of me, I ended up having to defend his takfeer of myself - and then after finding out what he made takfeer of me for he went on to explain to me that it is shirk in 3 of the 4 madhabs to make Wasilah with anyone but the Prophet Sallalllahu Alayhi wa Sallam (and that it is shirk to even do so with the  Prophet sallallalhu alayhi wa sallam) in the Hanafi Madhab - He said he would e-mail me the details of that -

Another interesting thing was hearing a Pretty Nice Deobandi guy explain the artistic beauty and merits of Chaiya Chaira (the hit Bollywood Song) and how well it was executed. - LOL
All in all, though a conference like this would have sickened me as a Salafi (as so many people were open minded to the sufi ways, it’s not even funny) as a Sufi - I throughly enjoyed the fact almost everyone was respectful and even open to different views  -  It’s nice knowing that even though many people claim to be Salafi they hesitate in making takfeer of someone who calls out to the Awliyah of Allaah - it shows their slowly becoming sufi without even realizing it in the name of ‘Hikmah’ or whatever.

And at least one of the invited guests whom I did not already know had learned of me and my online antics, thats always nice!
Sas