bismillah

yusuf and alex are helping out

javed: yusuf and alex were waiting at the bus station for the bus to arrive. a lady with a bag over her shoulders, a baby stroller in her hands, and two large suitcases was approaching. yusuf saw the lady and quickly moved in her direction without thinking much. yusuf shyly touched the suitcases and asked very politely

yusuf: is it okay if i carry these suitcases for you?

javed: the lady initially did not know how to respond but agreed.

yusuf: hey, alex, come over here and take the second suitcase.

alex: sure.

yusuf: alex, while we are waiting for the bus, stay close to the bags so the lady, inshallah, knows that we want to help her bring her luggage inside the bus. also, the bag she wears on her shoulders – ask her if you can carry that for her.

alex: sorry, ma’am, may i carry this bag for you too?

javed: again, the lady did not know how to respond. however, alex and yusuf seemed friendly, so she agreed again.

alex: thank you, ma’am.

yusuf: usually, alex, i say these words to you. thank you, ma’am. thank you, alexandra. do you get it?

alex: look at my beard and now tell me who the lady among us is.

yusuf: pretending to see the invisible might be identified as an illness.

javed: the bus arrived. alex and yusuf first carried the luggage inside the bus. then yusuf went back.

yusuf: alex, come over here and carry the other side of the baby stroller.

alex: sure.

yusuf: alhamdulillah, we made it. ma’am, please let us know when you want to leave the bus so we can, inshallah, help a bit.

javed: the lady smiled and said thank you

side story about free palestine

javed: alex and yusuf are next to each other and having a conversation in the bus.

yusuf: the military regime in israel is still killing palestinians.

alex: this is true, but you are not allowed to say that in public.

yusuf: why not?

alex: because we live in a free and liberal world. you can say and think anything as long as it aligns with the things powerful people want you to believe.

yusuf: you mean the us government?

alex: not only them. but let’s stick to the us for a moment. they are very good at invading other countries and then telling these conquered countries what to say and what not. in fact, it goes much further than that.

yusuf: i know, there are phd theses and books written about the illegal invasions of the us. basically, they are ruling other countries and every high politician knows about that.

alex: because the us government is the international bully, their strategic ally, israel can do whatever they want.

yusuf: this is what we are seeing. israel is literally doing whatever they want. it is not a question of whether israel is committing genocide or not, but a fact that israel is bombing babies.

alex: got it, but you still cannot say these kinds of things. do you think it would make a change if the us citizens knew what their government has been doing for so many years?

yusuf: to some degree for sure. there are great people around the globe fear could not silence. they spoke out against the crimes committed by the united states of israel. some of the brave people standing for justice were from the us. even though we are not allowed to publicly condemn israeli soldiers killing innocent babies, everybody is doing it. saying that israel is doing their best to commit genocide backed by the us has become common knowledge. and alhamdulillah for that.

alex: indeed, regular people across the globe stand for palestine. you know what would happen if you could talk to a far-right israeli political leader?

yusuf: what do you mean?

alex: you would tell them, stealing the land of other people is a crime.

yusuf: stealing land, killing newborns, children, women, and men. taking away water, electricity, gasoline, and food. no one has the right to take away water from you. you need to be a monster to do that and an evil being to support that.

alex: yeah sure, but how would they reply? they would call you an antisemite.

yusuf: this is something which i am really struggling to understand. let’s say you are:

• from country a,
• speak language b,
• have past c,
• future inshallah is d,
• favorite food is e,
• studied f,
• love g,
• age of h,
• and of religion i.

now these variables, change them as you wish. still, you will remain human and universal law won’t change. you can change these variables in one way or another. if you are bombing innocent people, once or as in the case of israel many times, you are a monster.

alex: but not if you are living in israel. yusuf, i think this was very antisemitic of you to say.

yusuf: also, i am reading the quran. i know about my beloved prophet musa (as) and through the quran i know a bit about the torah. the torah is more my book than of these israeli bombers. people who would follow the torah could never mass bomb helpless people and then celebrate it too.

alex: okay, what is it that you want to say?

yusuf: not jews are mass bombing children, but zionists are. as far as i know, antisemitic means being against jews. but the guys who are bombing are zionists and not jews. zionists are abusing the religion of the jews to commit evil deeds.

alex: wise words, my dear friend. also, it is known that jews across the globe stand for palestine. in fact, there are videos on social media showing how israeli police is attacking orthodox-looking jews.

javed: the lady signaled yusuf that she wants to leave the bus. alex and yusuf helped her to leave the bus and left the bus themselves after three more stations.

yusuf: do you think javed’s webpage will be taken down or he will get issues with his current phd position at the university? i mean, he is writing these things and making them public.

javed: we inshallah will see about that.

alex: who is javed and what are you talking about?

reasons for learning to code

alex: fine, then don’t answer my question. in our last conversation we found out that written code is nearly everywhere these days. it might be hidden from our eyes, but we know it really can do some helpful tasks.

yusuf: true, let’s inshallah continue our conversation on that topic. besides knowing that code is used quite a bit, why should you learn how to code?

alex: you are the one supposed to answer me that question.

yusuf: just start to think.

alex: if you can call yourself a coder, you might also be perceived as an engineer. i mean, it could be quite cool to call yourself an engineer.

yusuf: from today, you shall call me engineer yusuf.

alex: no, my dear lady. i think because there are so many programmable objects around us, the need for people who can code should be quite high. thus, it would just make sense to believe that there is a demand for people who can code. i mean, finding jobs for such people should be easy.

yusuf: impressive, maybe you have learned how to think analytically by spending time with me. besides just finding jobs, think of big corporations like meta, twitter, microsoft, google, and so on. they literally make money through coding and some other things we can neglect for now.

alex: i get it, you mean, not only can coders find jobs, but they can make a lot of money. as you know, when you talk i do my best to filter out your voice. however, one time you were talking about your muslim projects and so on. didn’t you need tech for that?

yusuf: one of my life goals is to reunite the ummah of the beloved prophet (saw) together. and the best way to do that is to just follow the initial way. it was the quran that made enemies into friends. black, white, arab, non-arab, big, small, poor, rich, you name it. the quran generated love between all kinds of different people.

alex: what is your point?

yusuf: let me speak out. the quran united all of these people and got rid of racism. now to get the ummah of the beloved prophet (saw) reunited, i need to teach them the quran.

alex: the quran is already there.

yusuf: yeah, but very important teachings from the quran are not known by way too many muslims. you can use code to spread these very important messages.

alex: how?

yusuf: webpages and apps are code. artificial technology is also code. you can inshallah leverage these solutions to make your knowledge at least available to others. even if nobody will ever read or watch my things, at least inshallah i did my part.

alex: so, you can use code to work on private projects. in fact, i think the demand for webpages is very high. you can be a muslim like you, you can own your own business, be a politician, a content creator, or whatever. if you need to provide a service, that is, you want to make money, chances are you are going to need a webpage. if you are an activist, you want your voice to be heard. the same is true for content creators and politicians, while i would suggest muting the politicians’ voices.

yusuf: exactly, code helps you with private projects, business and also for good causes. let’s say you want to collect donations to build an orphan house. you build a webpage so people can find you. you add some payment functionality, such that they can make their donations.

ai and coding

alex: can you do ai stuff when you can code?

yusuf: ai is more than just code. however, if you want to train a model, guess what? you need to know how to code. if you want to host your trained model on a webpage and charge monthly fees to your users, guess what? you should know how to code.

alex: so coding alone does not suffice for ai?

yusuf: no, but it is a very important part of it. if you want to convert text to speech, text to images, text to videos, summarize videos, let a large language model go through the net for you, get speech to text, and a lot of other stuff. each of these fields has its additional demands. people do phd theses on each of these fields. so coding is not enough.

alex: career, making money, doing something for the community, private projects, possibly automating some of your processes… what more?

yusuf: this javed guy, he wrote a python code. imagine you would like to be active on multiple social media platforms. now, you can just write your post and add some images. once done, his python code will make the one post on all the selected social media platforms.

alex: ahh, nice. so you can do automation with it.

yusuf: especially for muslims like me, we need technology to get halal alternatives. currently, the global financial system is based on ribba. you may call it interest. ribba is one of the worst things for humanity. in order to remove ribba as the default global payment method, we muslims need to learn how to code. we could start small, for example, let’s build a payment method that is based on crypto and not on fiat money.

alex: please, please stop it there. crypto, inshallah, for another time. still got it, halalifying the world a bit.

yusuf: i think the list of reasons why one should learn to code is quite long. let me give you one more reason that i really find very important.

alex: no, sorry, your request was denied.

yusuf: as far as i know, Allah allows muslim females to go to work. however, the job description and environment must be adequate. let me tell you something. quran readers try to treat their wives like queens. now, do you think you can just go to the queen of england and say, “hey, what’s up” and hug her?

alex: no, because she is dead.

yusuf: the point is, you need to get an appointment, but even before that, how do you get this appointment? so seeing her in private becomes very difficult. let’s compare her with our honorable female muslims. they might not be that wealthy and in a palace, but you know when you are in front of a muslim woman. you know that you cannot touch her, you cannot see her hair, she is a muslim and she is protected.

alex: i love it, you call them your honorable female muslim. anyhow, i do not think all muslims regard honorable muslim females like you do.

yusuf: maybe not all muslims, but inshallah quran readers do.

alex: what again was the point?

yusuf: for these honorable muslim women, who do not want to display their bodies as if it would have no value, coding can be a very good way to work halal.

alex: how?

yusuf: if you are a coder, you only need your laptop and access to the internet. you can work from wherever you like. you get paid by your work, by the functionality of the lines of code, not by how you look. in this case, there is no need for honorable muslim females to be exposed to men who find it okay to just hug females, like it would have no meaning.

javed: alex hugged yusuf and said, come on baby, it had no meaning to me.

mashallah, let’s summarize

yusuf: alhamdulillah, i think we talked about quite a few things. my dear alexandra, would you mind recapping?

alex: i mind it when you talk to me. you find code in all kinds of industries and environments. this is one reason why you may want to learn how to code. however, there is so much more to it. you might want improve the world,

• make money,
• advertise yourself as a content creator,
• offer your service, whatever it might be,
• automate some daily tasks,
• be cool and call yourself a coder,
• find halal alternatives,
• offer honorable muslim females halal jobs,
• get some fundamentals to get into the world of ai.

yusuf: nice, however, i am not sure if saying “be cool and call yourself a coder” is a valid reason.

alex: it is and you have no idea.