Hello there reader and Ramadhan Mubarak!

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk to approximately 100 people at the institute where I study. I spoke about the importance and reward of salah and the consquences for not performing salah. Often this is a topic we think we know so much about and it can get a bit yawn-worthy because we've heard it all before. 

I wanted to give my audience something to take back with them and something which they could adopt and put into practice. I gave them some tips on how to overcome laziness towards salah, how we can prepare ourselves for salah and how we can enhance our concentration in salah. I thought it would be worth sharing with you too. 

Well, this news is surprising.

Apparently eating up to TWO bars of chocolate a day reduces your risk of heart disease and stroke.

So all of you that have been given dire medical predictions, repeat after me: omnomnomnomnomnomnomnom.

It will air live on Radio Ramadan in Oldham and maybe also the internet.

Tune in at 12:30am during Ramadan, listen in, call in and take part.

We are now at the starts of a leadership contest for the Labour party following the election defeat and Ed Miliband's resignation.

Today the nomination stage ended.

Unfortunately the biggest lesson from the election defeat has not been learnt: policies don't matter, image does.

If people had focused on the Conservtive party's policies, they wouldnt have done as well - they had massive policy gaps and a £12 billion black hole that will hit the poorest hardest.

However David Cameron was more photogenic.

None of the new Labout candidates are. Chuka Ummuna was, but he has already withdrawn.

Recently Asghar Bukhari of MPACUK posted online that he had lost a shoe from him home. The twist was that he thought it was some sort of intimidation campaign by zionists who wanted to show that they could get to him,

The twittersphere exploded with ridicule from The Quilliam Foundation's Majid Nawaz who started a twitter hashtag "#MossadStoleMyShoe" to other zionists who found it easy to capitalise on this conspiracy theory.

Asghar Bukhari then followed this all up with his response where he stuck to his guns, stated that other activists have also suffered such things and even a former US senator who was pro Palestine documented such behaviour.

Naturally this has just increased the ridicule, exposing a level of paranoia that seems unreal.

Maybe it is just me and I live a sheltered lifestyle, but all of a sudden, there seem to be articles about people leaving Islam and their "courage" that are doing the rounds in mainstream media.

A lot of Muslims will rather ignore this issue, but if it blows up in our face, we will all suffer.

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I've just heard on Noor TV that after a few meetings, some scholars have decided that in the UK it is best to allocate a specific amount of time for Maghrib and Fajr:

Maghrib time lasts an hour from sunset

Fajr time lasts 1 hour and 40 minutes before sunrise.

It is interesting and I wonder which scholars participated in this and if they and others will be going along with it.

So says top British Cop "Mak" Chishty.

I guess he will next say that only extremists turn down bacon sarnies...

Why is it that the Muslims that do get to positions of power are often the biggest sell outs?

(To stop other people falling into extremism, it is precisely this sort of thinking which you need to avoid - the one that tars us all as extremists for simply accepting Islam.)

You have no way of verifying this, but I’m an average looking girl (sorry, woman; I haven’t got to grips with the fact that I’m an adult now). However, I grew up in a Pakistani community which mistook my paleness for beauty, so I was fortunate enough to be told that I’m pretty and that I’m beautiful. Maybe that’s the reason why I’m sitting here, comfortable enough in my own skin, to be writing this blog.