Jannah Gems #46 – Allah (SWT) Gave Me this Gift

My story is really just one that, you know, everything is is in Allah's hands. And he uses us the way he wants to use us because we're not scholars, we're not people who were doing doctorial thesis in Arabic, it was just all fate that led us into doing the work that we were doing. We never intended to do it. So Sandra Nash International is actually myself, the founder, and actually two of my very close friends in 1989. There was a Canadian brother who passed away he was a scholar from Omokoroa University, he had just graduated. And when he passed away, I was visiting with his wife. And before he died, he had made a contract with the owner, previous owner of dorable custom, his

name was Suleyman, godson, to print some of his books that he had done in English, they were like translations, mostly if Arabic works.

And she said, You know, I have these manuscripts. And you got to remember at that time, women couldn't drive in Saudi Arabia. And she didn't really have a way to get there. So she said, Could you deliver these for me? And I said, sugar, but even myself, I was having car issues at the time. And I said, it's gonna take me a couple days to arrange it. Do you mind if I read the text? And she's like, Oh, of course. Sure. Go ahead. Now you have to remember, I was only Muslim about two years at this time. And this was, the first book was on the soul, and what happens to it at death, and in the Hereafter, the subject was absolutely fascinating to me. But with all due respect, the

brother had been studying and speaking classical Arabic for so many years, that his English got a little bit flowery. Anybody who knows Arabic, and this is a huge problem for translators, who, um, you know, you have all these repetitions of phrases that can just make it sound so gorgeous and deep and Arabic. And when you try to translate that into English, it's like spoon feeding. It's like, Come on, let's get to the point, right. So I approached his wife, and I said, Listen, this book is amazing, but it really needs some doctoring. You know, we got to fix the English in it to do it justice. So she, I gave her some examples. And she agreed, and the publisher gave us the Go ahead.

But he thought we were just going to put, you know, a little change here, a little change there. We actually ended up kind of reorganizing the text. And we, you know, we just, we kind of tore it apart, to be honest.

I hope for the better, right?

So then when I took it to the publisher, I said, Oh, here you go, this is what we've done. And he said, Well, we were not going to read, you know, typeset the whole thing and get it out it out a day, you've got to make it press ready. And I opened my big mouth and I said, okay, because like we've done all this work, but I have no idea how to do that, or what I was going to do.

Because I'm like, oh my government awake, done. So I was calling one of my friends Aisha and I said, What am I going to do a bla bla bla bla bla Well, thank God, it opened my mouth. And of course this is Allah working his way. Yes. So she said, Oh, we have a friend who owns a computer store. And I'm sure he can, you know, get you some kind of program help you figure it all out, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So she introduces me to this brother of the month of the month for years took me under his wing. You know, in the beginning loaned me a computer loaned me a printer gave me a program that taught me how to typeset and you know, so we did the first book, well, the publisher

said, hey, you know, you guys could do pretty good on that. How would you like to do some other work? And so that's how we began. I have so many mashallah American friends that lived in Jeddah, so many of my friends there, were going to toughie, the Quran school, they were memorizing Quran and I was always feeling like, you know, I'm not so great at memorization. I remember I some, but, um, I couldn't go to these really intense classes. It just not me. It's the way I learned. Let me go at my pace. Let me read don't force me to memorize. As I read, I will learn, okay, I kept saying no, I can't do I can't do a bubble bubble, blah. And I was feeling kind of guilty that all my friends seem

to be able to do it, but I couldn't do it. And I remember Subhan Allah the same, the the widow of the brother who wrote these books, and I was telling her about my, you know, feeling guilty about not memorizing Quran and data and she said, Allah gave you a gift of something different. And you don't even know what that will give to us. He led you into it. And you're still doing something for the community that's important and needed, you know, and after that time, it's almost like it made me commit more to wanting to produce the books that we produced and you know, hoping insha Allah that there was benefit in it. Subhan Allah, Allah gave me the ability I didn't even know I had it

right. I mean, I fell into that world.

So powerful