A Day in the Life of al-Albaanee - In the Words of His Wife

  “Our noble mother, we’d like you to give us a description of a complete day from his life, may Allaah have mercy on him, from the time he would wake up for fajr until the time he’d go to bed at night.”

A description of a full day from the Shaikh’s life. The Shaikh, may Allaah have mercy on him, would wake up for the morning prayer, if not before it, and would also wake some of his students through the phone. Then he would, as long as he was physically able, go and take his students from their houses or from the road where they’d be waiting for him. They would pray the morning prayer in a mosque where the Imaam would strive to implement the Sunnah and shun innovations, like the qunoot in fajr, and most of the time the mosque was far away from our area.

Then if there was no sitting with his students in the mosque, the Shaikh would come back to his library and stay there amongst his books and his research up until seven o’clock in the morning at which time I would have prepared some breakfast for him. So he would take his breakfast and then return to his library and stay there until it was time for the siesta [qailulah], which was when the Shaikh would begin to feel sleepy. So he would go and sleep for a short while and then return to his library.

And this was how his lunch would be too, at one o’clock. As for dinner, then the Shaikh would not desire it. He would answer calls on the phone after ishaaprayer, for he had appointed two hours for issuing religious verdicts on the phone. As for visits, he had set the time between maghrib and ishaa for them during the days when his circumstances would allow him to do so.

     “How would the Shaikh react to what the Islamic nation was going through and what affect did that have on him?”

As for the reaction of the Shaikh to what was occurring in the Islamic ummah, then we did not have a television in the house, because the Shaikh did not want to bring that upon us, and he wouldn’t buy newspapers but [at the same time] he would be extremely hurt at what was happening to the Muslims in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and the other Islamic countries.

And he was often greatly moved by his Muslim brothers in Syria at the time of the events that occurred in the eighties with the Alawites. Since many times the Muslim youth would come to him and seek his counsel and he would honour them and receive them in the best way possible.