Aiman Azlan's Blog

The question of culture and Islam has been a huge one in my mind and the minds of so many Malaysian Muslims. Recently, this question has come to light again with the accusation of "arabization" of Malaysian Muslims. In other, more "classical" manifestations of our lack of understanding in the harmony between Islam and culture, we see confusions with regards to gender relations, women's roles in society, dress code, social mannerisms, and "Islamic" food. It seems like we have to move forward to a more back-to-basic, but at the same time, wider and deeper discussion about the topic. No longer can we rely on simple rote memorization, lazy copy-and-paste, and blind adherence to the text as a short cut way to practice religion. Especially when we are currently in an age of cultural mixing, thanks to the advent of social media. Mixing can be beneficial, but detrimental if one doesn't have strong roots to begin with. Without proper understanding of ...

It has just come to my attention that I have been doing public speaking for about 4 years. I started off in 2011, while still being a university student at University of Toronto, Canada. The first invitation that I received was from Multimedia University, Cyberjaya. It didn’t occur to me back then that I’ll be turning what I thought was occasional talk invitations to an actual career. So began my journey traveling all over Malaysia and beyond (Singapore, Brunei, South Korea, and Australia) to speak to mainly to the university level audience about youth-related topics. In my limited experience, more often than not I would come across a similar issue among many university students, especially Malaysian students. Like a pattern that I am seeing again and again, it seems to me that many of our university students lack confidence in themselves. So I ask myself: how can I help? Once you have identified the problem, you immediately think of a solution. The thing is, you can only offer a...

It is not enough to think positively once in a while. We don't want positive thinking to be something that we do. We would like for it to become something that we are. We want to become positive, especially in bad times. The sad thing is, it is not that easy to do. What is more sad is, often times it is easier to become negative in the face of a negative situation. Our emotional reaction to something will affect our overall state and our overall state will affect the people around us. The bad news is, if we are negative, then our negativity will affect those who are around us. The good news is, the same thing can be said about positivity. The better news is, we can change from negative to positive by changing our mindset. We have to intercept our negative thinking as it happens and modify it into something more positive. This doesn't mean that we deny the bad thing that had happened. We already established that it is a "bad" thing. We are only changing how we pe...