Baraka Blue

Sending love, light & ancient wisdom through modern mediums via: music, poetry, workshops, retreats & classes. Contact: [email protected]

[Fred Björn @Jawnmard1]

“Verily, Allāh has angels who journey through the earth to convey to me the greetings of peace from my nation.”

— Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ)

📚
Sunan al-Nasā’ī 1282

#sufism
#tasawwuf

[Things From the Past @pastarchive]

Ottoman set of damascened calligrapher’s tools, 19th century

[The Andalusian Edit @andalusianedit]

A glimpse into the riad of perfumer Serge Lutens in Marrakesh, Morocco.

[Pope Leo XIV @Pontifex]

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas

[Fred Björn @Jawnmard1]

— Persian Sufi master Abū Saʿīd Abū’l-Khayr (may Allāh sanctify his secret)

📚
Asrār al-Tawhīd

#sufism
#tasawwuf

[The Andalusian Edit @andalusianedit]

Gustavo Simoni — "Celebration Outside The mosque Of Sidi Boumediene, Tlemcen" (1898)

Eid Mubarak!

[Naval @naval]

The human brain isn’t designed to process all of the world’s breaking emergencies in realtime.

[Polymath Investor @polymathinvest1]

A few months back, I published this guide on how to remember everything you read.
Re-sharing it here for anyone who finds these protocols useful.

(1/11)

[• @Alhamdhulillaah]

Over $1 million has been raised to support the family of martyr Amin Abdullah, who was killed by domestic terrorists while protecting worshippers at the Islamic Center San Diego.

👉🏼https://t.co/po3Y0uYDVG

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper.

Her name is Audrey van der Meer.

She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth.

The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time.

Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen.

Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task.

When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once.

The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected.

When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely.

Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG.

Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events.

The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem.

Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next.

Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve.

Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews.

Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad.

Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page.

A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched.

The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall.

The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down.

The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page.

That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it.

Two studies. Two countries. Same answer.

Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast.

Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth.

You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick.

The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew.

Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

[Atlas @pqapka]

how did Maghrebis went from dressing this to that ?

[Nafi‘ @Tsunalyst]

“Have you become a Muslim, Goethe?”
“If Islam means submission to God, then we all live and die in Islam.”
“So, yes…?”
“There is no truth greater than the Oneness of God.”
“So—“
“In the valley below, flowers spring beneath his ﷺ footsteps,
The meadow in his breath finds life.”

[Ottoman Imperial Archives @OttomanArchive]

📷 Studio Keepsake Portrait of Three Sufi Dervishes, Konya (Central Anatolia), c. 1900

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

YouGov: 24% of very liberal Americans say it is "always or usually acceptable" for a person to be happy about the death of a public figure they oppose, compared with just 3% of very conservative Americans.

[Alex & Books 📚 @AlexAndBooks_]

Heraclitus once said:

“No man steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.”

The same is true for books:

No man steps in the same book twice, for it is not the same book and he is not the same man.

[Baraka Blue @BarakaBlue]

@triggerpod @RaymondIbrahim5 It would be amazing if you had a conversation with a great contemporary British Muslim scholar like Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) who can speak with subtlety about these & other topics that are of interest to you & your listeners @KonstantinKisin https://t.co/W4T8phCqx7

[Roro @tropdecomptes]

La légende du jazz Miles Davis reprend un journaliste qui lui parle de l'esclavage et des souffrances que ça a engendré chez les noirs et dans leur musique :

"Mon père est riche, ma mère est belle et je sais jouer le blues. Je n'ai jamais souffert et je n'ai pas l'intention de souffrir." ⬇️

[Hamidreza Azizi @HamidRezaAz]

#Iran’s announcement of an expanded control envelope in the Strait of Hormuz - coupled with strikes on oil facilities in Fujairah and strikes on oil tankers - points to a deliberate escalation toward the United Arab Emirates’ oil export bypass routes.

The objective is to keep alternative export channels at risk, sustain elevated oil prices, and block any perception of normalization. In other words, the message is that Donald Trump’s mission in the strait will not be cost-free. Instead, it will generate greater complexity and sustained pressure on the energy market.

[The Andalusian Edit @andalusianedit]

Illustration of Granadans in the 15th century. The figures on the top half seem to be Nasrid elites and the figures on the bottom half seem to be the common people of Granada.