By Mawlana Hamzah Wald Maqbul Having taught basic `aqidah courses several times over, through phone, internet, and the time honored medium of person to person contact, I can tell you that one of the trickiest subjects to tackle is always that of qadr, or divine predestination: are we in control of our own lives, or are we living out a hard deterministic cosmic script in which we are bound without any choice of our own? The brief answer according to orthodox Sunni theology based on the Qur’an and Sunnah is: (a) Allah knew everything before He created anything, in both…