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Mujir Farooqui

@themujir

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Lawyer ⚖️ | Entrepreneur 🪙| Historian 📚@sandsoftimepodcast فخرًا كنديٌّ بجسم، حيدرآباديٌّ بدم، دمشقيّ بقلب، مقدسيٌّ بروح، ومسلم في كلي

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**LOST FOR 781 YEARS. FOUND IN 7 DAYS.** 🕌

In 674 CE, a 90-year-old Companion of the Prophet ﷺ marched with the Muslim army to the walls of Constantinople. His name was Abu Ayyub al-Ansari رضي الله عنه — the man who hosted the Prophet ﷺ in his own home when he first arrived in Madinah.

He died at those walls. His final request? Bury me as close to the city as you can.

And then... the world forgot where he lay.

For nearly eight centuries, his grave was lost beneath the soil outside Constantinople. Empires rose and fell above him. Until 1453 — when a 21-year-old Sultan named Mehmed II arrived with a promise from the Prophet ﷺ himself: *"Verily you shall conquer Constantinople."*

During the siege, Mehmed asked his teacher — the saintly scholar Aq Shamsuddin — to find the resting place of the Sahabi. For seven days, the Shaykh searched and prayed. And then he pointed to a spot and said: dig here.

They dug. And they found him. رضي الله عنه

Today, his tomb at Eyüp Sultan is one of the most sacred sites in Istanbul — and I'm standing right in front of it. The man who welcomed the Prophet ﷺ into his home now welcomes millions to this city.

781 years lost. Never forgotten.

⏳ Sands of Time — history you can stand on.

#SandsOfTime #AbuAyyubAlAnsari #EyupSultan #Istanbul #IslamicHistory Sahaba MehmedTheConqueror FatihSultanMehmed Constantinople 1453 OttomanHistory MuslimHistory Türkiye IslamicHeritage HistoryTok Madinah ProphetMuhammadﷺ taken in Istanbul, Turkey by @themujir

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3 months ago

You know the story of Prophet Yusuf (AS). But who was the woman beside his father?
The Qur’an describes him welcoming his “parents.”
Could the woman beside Prophet Yaqub (AS) have been his maternal aunt?
Tarek and Mujir explore one classical interpretation—and the reported connection to Leah bint Laban, remembered as a mother figure.
Had you heard this interpretation before?
Watch the full conversation on YouTube: @SandsOfTimePodcast.
العربية:
أم النبي يوسف عليه السلام أم خالته؟ نستكشف اختلاف المفسرين في هوية المرأة التي حضرت مع النبي يعقوب عليه السلام. الحوار باللغة الإنجليزية.
اردو:
حضرت یوسف علیہ السلام کی والدہ یا خالہ؟ حضرت یعقوب علیہ السلام کے ساتھ آنے والی خاتون کے بارے میں مفسرین کی مختلف آرا جانیے۔ گفتگو انگریزی میں ہے۔

#ProphetYusuf #SurahYusuf #SandsOfTimePodcast #سورة_يوسف #حضرت_یوسف by @themujir

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4 days ago

7 PROPHETS AND WIVES. 1 HOLY SITE.

In al-Khalil is a cave that Sayyidna Ibrahim عليه السلام bought outright as a burial place for his family — and the family never left it. Sayyidatuna Sarah, Sayyidna Ishaq عليه السلام and Sayyidatuna Rifqa (Rebecca), Sayyidna Yaqub عليه السلام and Sayyidatuna Layka (Leah), with a chamber long held to be that of Sayyidna Yusuf عليه السلام. Of every maqam attributed to a Nabi anywhere on earth, this is one of only two that the ulama have historically been willing to call certain. The other is in Madinah.

The colossal stone enclosure standing over the cave is Herodian, roughly two thousand years old and never breached. The Byzantines made a church inside it. The Umayyads turned it into a masjid and built the chambers honouring each Nabi. When Salah al-Din took Hebron after Hattin, he restored it fully — and brought up the minbar carved in Ascalon in the 1090s, which still stands by the mihrab today, one of the oldest surviving minbars in the Muslim world.

It remained one masjid for eight straight centuries. The last thirty years have been harder, and there is a sad history here that anyone who visits will feel. But standing in these rooms, what stays with you is the sheer improbability of it: one family, laid to rest together four thousand years ago, still together, still visited, still remembered by name.

🎥 @snapitsmaryam

#SandsOfTime #AlKhalil #Hebron #IbrahimiMosque #IslamicHistory taken in Hebron, West Bank by @themujir

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23 days ago

Broke two superpowers. Undefeated. Died of boredom.

Homs, Syria — جامع خالد بن الوليد

Khalid ibn al-Walid رضي الله عنه, likely born 592, died 642. Some fifty engagements, never lost one, most against armies three, four, ten times his size. The Prophet ﷺ called him the Drawn Sword of Allah — سيف الله المسلول

Byzantine power in Syria: broken. The Sasanian empire: finished. Then he was relieved of command, and died in bed here in Homs in his late forties. What he reportedly said at the end — there is not a hand's span on my body without a wound from a sword or an arrow, and here I die as a camel dies. May the eyes of cowards never rest.

The masjid was heavily damaged in the war. Reconstruction is underway. taken in Homs, Syria by @themujir

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a month ago

In Damascus lies one of the greatest heroes in Islamic history you’ve probably never heard of — Rukn al-Din Baybars al-Malik al-Ẓāhir.

Before Baybars, the Islamic world had no answer for its deadly foes. After him, those foes had no answer for him.

Captured as a Turkic child and sold into slavery during the Mongol upheavals, he rose through the Mamluk ranks by sheer military brilliance. He first proved himself at al-Manṣūrah and Fāriskūr in 1250, hatching a daring plan in real time that turned the tide against the Seventh Crusade and ultimately led to the capture of King Louis IX of France.

A decade later, after the fall of Baghdad (1258), he again played a decisive role at ʿAyn Jālūt (1260), executing a brilliant bait-and-switch strategy under Sultan Quṭuz that halted the Mongol advance for the first time in open battle.

By 1261, he was Sultan.

He dismantled Crusader strongholds, fortified the frontiers, rebuilt the military, restored Abbasid legitimacy in Cairo, and invested heavily in Bayt al-Maqdis, strengthening institutions and the sanctuary of Masjid al-Aqṣā after decades of war.

Video Cred: @abemoiz

#islamichistory #baybars #mamluk #jerusalem #alaqsa taken in Old Damascus الشام القديمة by @themujir

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6 months ago

CAPTAIN JACK SPARROW...WAS MUSLIM??

The Captain Jack Sparrow of British folklore — the one Pirates of the Caribbean made famous — traces back to a real man. And that man died a Muslim.

Jack Ward was born around 1553 in Faversham, Kent. He gutted fish for a living before making his fortune raiding Spanish treasure ships under an Elizabethan privateering licence. When James I made peace with Spain in 1603, the licence vanished and Ward became a wanted man overnight.

So he sailed for Tunis, cut a deal with Uthman Dey, and kept going. He asked James for a pardon. James refused. Around 1610 he accepted Islam and took the name Yusuf Reis — and he didn't go alone. His entire crew came with him. He married in Tunis, trained the corsairs, and died there in 1622.

Even then he wouldn't touch an English ship. He hunted Spanish and Catholic fleets and let his countrymen sail past — which is how a Muslim corsair ended up in English ballads as the friendly neighbourhood pirate.

His nicknames in the records? Birdy. And Sparrow.

🎥 @snapitsmaryam

#JackWard #YusufReis #IslamicHistory #Tunisia #piratesofthecaribbean taken in Carribean Sea by @themujir

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a month ago

Far more than a Conqueror.

They call Mehmet II "the Conqueror" because he took Constantinople. But to remember such an incredibly multifaceted person for one deed he accomplished at 21 is reductive and practically insulting. He is so much more; likely one of the most accomplished rulers in world history. When he died unexpectedly at 49 — with his armies dug in at Otranto (Italy) and the fall of Rome all but a foregone conclusion — his death was met with both celebration and awe across Europe, where he was reportedly dubbed "the Great Eagle of Europe" whose long-feared flight had finally ended. Hence, we call him "Mehmet the Great". Far less credentialed rulers have worn that honorarium — it truly belongs here.

At least 5 languages. Philosopher. Poet. Lawgiver. Scholar among scholars. And the man who fulfilled the Prophet's ﷺ words: "Constantinople will surely be conquered." And then added Bosnia, Greece, Albania, Serbia, Trebizond, Wallachia, the Crimea and Karaman into the Ottoman fold.

Al-Fatih; Mehmet the Great 🇹🇷

Video cred: @snapitsmaryam

#SandsOfTime #AlFatih #MehmedTheConqueror #Istanbul #OttomanHistory taken in Fatih Mosque, Istanbul by @themujir

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2 months ago

The Sultan So Great Even the Europeans Couldn't Hate.

In Damascus, just outside the courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque, lies one of the greatest sultans and commanders of the medieval world — revered by those who followed him and respected by even those who came to destroy him.

Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub رحمه الله. Son of Najm al-Din Ayyub, a Kurdish officer in Seljuk service; nephew of the soldier Asad al-Din Shirkuh. Born in Tikrit in 1137 and carried out of Iraq as an infant — Mosul, then Baalbek, then Damascus, where he grew up under Nur al-Din Zangi and learned his fiqh, his Arabic, and his politics in this city. He called himself a man of Sham.

He went to Egypt as his uncle's junior on a campaign nobody expected to make him. He came out of it as vizier, ended the Fatimid caliphate in 1171, and welded Egypt to Syria for the first time in centuries. At Hattin in 583/1187 he destroyed the army of the Crusader kingdom in a single afternoon, and that October he entered al-Quds — eighty-eight years after it had been taken — and let the city walk out alive. Ransoms were paid quietly from his own treasury for those who couldn't meet them. Europe answered with three kings and the largest army it could raise, and still could not take it back.

He ruled Egypt, Syria, the Hijaz and Yemen, and spent almost all of it in the saddle. Months after the truce that ended the Third Crusade he returned to Damascus, took a fever, and died in the citadel in 1193 at fifty-six, leaving forty-seven dirhams and one piece of gold. His household borrowed money to bury him. Three years later his son al-Afdal built this room beside the mosque he prayed in, and laid him here.

#SandsOfTime #Damascus #SalahAdDin #IslamicHistory #AlQuds taken in Damascus, Syria by @themujir

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2 months ago

Mehmed took Constantinople in 53 days. This picture-esque Bosnian village took him 8 years.

You might think the stone houses, the mosque, and the hammam make Počitelj an Ottoman creation — but this village actually predates Islam's arrival in Bosnia, going back to the days of King Tvrtko I in the 14th century, the ruler Bosnians hail as their great predecessor before Islam. When the Ottoman conquest swept through and the Bosnian kingdom fell in 1463, Počitelj refused to follow. A Hungarian garrison dug into its walls and turned it into the last anti-Ottoman holdout on the Neretva, and it took Mehmed the Conqueror another eight years — until 1471 — to finally take it and consolidate Bosnia fully into the Ottoman fold. Only then did the Ottomans build the town you see today: the mosque, the madrasa, the hammam, the clock tower. And then time simply stopped. Nothing major was ever built again, leaving Počitelj a perfectly preserved window into the 16th century, climbing the hillside above the Neretva like an amphitheater of stone.

📸 @snapitsmaryam

#Pocitelj #Bosnia #OttomanHistory #IslamicHistory #SandsOfTime taken in Počitelj, Čapljina by @themujir

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3 months ago

**The 🇧🇦 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Bridge They Couldn't Kill**

From the banks of the Neretva, cradled by the hills of Mostar, rises a testament to Bosnian resilience and the Islamic heritage of the Balkans — the Stari Most.

Completed around 1566 by order of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and built by Mimar Hayruddin, a student of the legendary Mimar Sinan, its single stone arch spanned roughly 29 meters — one of the widest in the world at the time. For 427 years it stood as the heart of Mostar, a city literally named for its bridge keepers, the *mostari*.

Then came the war. In 1993, the bridge was shelled (by the Croatian Defence Council, or Hrvatsko Vijeće Obrane) and collapsed into the river it had crossed for four centuries. But the people of Mostar never let go. They said it would rise again for those who love it — and it did. Rebuilt with stone from the original quarry using the same Ottoman techniques, the bridge reopened in 2004 and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site the following year.

The stones fell. The idea never did. What is built with love cannot truly be destroyed.

📸 @snapitsmaryam

#StariMost #Mostar #Bosnia #BosniaAndHerzegovina #OttomanHistory IslamicHistory MuslimHistory UNESCO WorldHeritageSite SandsOfTimePodcast IslamicArchitecture OttomanEmpire BalkanHistory MuslimTravel HistoryLovers Neretva Suleiman TravelHistory taken in Mostar, Bosnia & Herzegovina by @themujir

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2 months ago

In central Syria stands قلعة الحصن — Qal'at al-Hisn, the Krak des Chevaliers — what may be the greatest castle ever made.

Built by a local Mirdasid Emir in 1031, the Franks took this spur of the Jabal Ansariyya in 1110 and held it for a hundred and sixty plus years. In 1142 it passed to the Knights Hospitaller, who turned it into the most formidable fortress of the medieval world: walls inside walls, a sloped stone glacis you cannot mine or ladder, cisterns and storerooms said to hold five years of supply.

Muslim armies came again and again and could not take it. Nur al-Din campaigned beneath these walls and was beaten off. The lord of Aleppo tried in 1207 and failed. The Ayyubids tried in 1229 and failed. Salah al-Din himself rode through this country in 1188 taking castle after castle, yet looked up at this one and gave it a pass, knowing what it would take.

Then in 1271 came the Unstoppable Force, Sultan Rukn al-Din Baybars (r. 1261-1277), fresh from stripping the Crusaders of Caesarea, Haifa, Jaffa and Antioch. His engines breached the outer wall in weeks, but the inner keep somehow held. What finally opened it was that combination of military genius and tactical cunning — a forged letter, sealed as though from the Hospitaller commander at Tripoli, ordering the garrison to surrender. With the Crusaders taking the bait, the greatest castle ever made passed back to the Muslims.

Baybars raised his own tower, turned the chapel into a masjid, and cut an inscription into the wall that can still be read today.

Vid Cred: @abemoiz

#crusaders #damascus #Baybars #Syria #IslamicHistory taken in Krak Des Chevaliers, Hims, Syria by @themujir

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a month ago

**1451.** A 19-year-old sultan takes the throne — and nobody takes him seriously. The Romans (Byzantines) immediately reach for their favorite weapon: a rival Ottoman claimant sitting inside their walls, ready to be unleashed to contest the throne.

Mehmed II's answer wasn't a diplomatic letter. It was fortress.

In roughly 4 months, Rumeli Hisarı rose on the Bosphorus — Boğazkesen, the "Strait Choker" — effectively cutting Constantinople off from the Black Sea. Two years later, in May 1453, the prince they dismissed entered their city as Fatih (Conqueror).

Filmed on location at Rumeli Hisarı, Istanbul. Video cred @snapitsmaryam

#SandsOfTime #RumeliHisari #MehmedII #Fatih #Istanbul OttomanHistory ConquestOf1453 taken in Istanbul, Turkey by @themujir

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3 months ago