Bismillah

Bismillah, alhamdulillah, wa salatu wa salamu ‘ala Rasoolillah, wa ‘ala alihi wa sahbihi wa man wala. Amma ba’ad.

Allah ﷻ tells us in the Qur’an about Ramadan in verses that many of us recite each year. They begin with:

“يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا”
“O you who believe!”

One of the companions (radiAllahu ‘anhu) said that whenever you hear this phrase in the Qur’an, pay close attention. Why? Because what follows is either a command towards something good—khayr—or a prohibition from something evil—sharr.

The Command to Fast

Allah ﷻ says:

“يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا كُتِبَ عَلَيْكُمُ الصِّيَامُ كَمَا كُتِبَ عَلَى الَّذِينَ مِن قَبْلِكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَتَّقُونَ”

“O you who believe! Fasting has been prescribed for you as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may attain taqwa.”

It’s already written, already decreed—fasting is fardh, a compulsory obligation upon us. Just as it was upon those before us.

Fasting Across Faiths

I remember a brother who converted to Islam. During Ramadan, he attended a school gathering with various religious leaders. When he declined the food, someone from another religious group approached him and said:

“I know why you didn’t eat. It’s Ramadan, isn’t it? You’re fasting.”

The brother replied yes. Interestingly, he had converted from that man’s own religion. The man then said something remarkable:

“Fasting is such a noble thing to do. It’s too bad our religion changed it over the years.”

Many religions have remnants of fasting—maybe avoiding certain drinks or foods—but the tradition has been diluted over time.

The “Criticism” of Islam

People often criticize Islam by saying: “You Muslims are still practicing the same Islam from 1400 years ago.”

SubhanAllah. What a beautiful “criticism”! That’s exactly what we want—to follow the Islam practiced by the Prophet ﷺ and his companions.

Ramadan: A Month of Qur’an and Du’a

In the verses about Ramadan, there’s a powerful interjection. Between the verses on fasting, Allah ﷻ says:

“وَإِذَا سَأَلَكَ عِبَادِي عَنِّي فَإِنِّي قَرِيبٌ”
“And when My servant asks you concerning Me—indeed, I am near.”

“أُجِيبُ دَعْوَةَ الدَّاعِ إِذَا دَعَانِ”
“I respond to the du’a of the supplicant when he calls upon Me.”

Allah ﷻ will answer your du’a. Every single time.

The Power of Du’a

You might make du’a for a Cadillac Escalade. And either:

1. You get it.
2. You get something even better.
3. Allah protects you from a harm you didn’t know about.

Even if your du’a isn’t answered in this life, it’s stored for the Hereafter.

The Prophet ﷺ told us: on the Day of Judgment, when people see the stored rewards of unanswered du’as, they will wish that none of their du’as had been answered in the dunya!

The Cost of Du’a and Intention

What does it cost to make du’a? Nothing.

What about making a good intention? Also nothing.

But the reward? If you make a sincere intention to do good, it’s recorded as if you did it. And if you actually do it? You get 10 times the reward.

Imagine the power of simply sitting down and making lofty intentions:

• “I want to build 1,000 masjids.”
• “I want to donate a billion dollars to da’wah.”
• “I want to bring a thousand people back to Allah.”

Even if only 1% of people fulfilled those intentions, our community would be transformed.

Don’t Let Others Deflate Your Intentions

Sometimes when you make big intentions, someone will say, “That’ll never work. Be realistic.”

That kind of mindset deflates ambition. But the Sahaba didn’t think like that. In fact, the Battle of Badr happened during Ramadan. And what did they do? They fasted and fought.

The Prophet ﷺ made du’a:

“O Allah, if this group is destroyed, You will not be worshipped on Earth.”

Ramadan wasn’t just about fasting—it was about striving.

The Spectators and the Participants

Masajid are packed on:

1. The first night of Ramadan.
2. The last 10 nights.

These are the spectators—the ones watching from the sidelines. But the real participants are in the masjid every night. They push through, read Qur’an while others sip tea, and spend time feeding others—not just feeding themselves.

Shahr al-‘It’am vs. Shahr al-Ta’am

Ramadan is Shahr al-‘It’am—the month of feeding others. But many of us have made it Shahr al-Ta’am—the month of eating!

There’s so much pressure, especially on our sisters, to raise food quality. But is that the essence of Ramadan? Going to dinner parties? Eating more than usual?

The Prophet ﷺ performed i’tikaf in Ramadan—not social dinners. In his last Ramadan, he did 20 days of i’tikaf.

No More Excuses

People often say:

• “I can’t go to the masjid daily.”
  But in Ramadan, they show up every night.
• “I can’t pray Qiyam—it’s too hard.”
  Yet during Ramadan, they wake up early for Suhoor and Qiyam.
• “I can’t live without coffee or cigarettes.”
  But in Ramadan? They go cold turkey from dawn to dusk.

The same goes for Qur’an. A person might read nothing all year, but in Ramadan they finish the entire Qur’an.

Training the Soul

Fasting trains the soul to obey Allah. You’re avoiding things normally halal—like food and drink—because Allah said so.

After Ramadan, avoiding haram becomes easier. Ramadan is about developing taqwa through spiritual training.

What Makes a Ramadan Unforgettable?

Try to remember a Ramadan you’ll never forget. What made it unforgettable?

For most people, it’s tied to Taraweeh:

• A special imam.
• A deep focus.
• Consistent attendance.

But what if that imam isn’t there next year? Will you give up? No. You have to be the one who brings the focus—you extract the benefit, not wait for it.

Behind the Scenes: Life of the Imam

Let me take you backstage—what is Ramadan like for the imam?

• After Fajr: Reviewing Qur’an while everyone else sleeps.
• Daytime: Resting intentionally to preserve energy for night prayers.
• Afternoon: More Qur’an review.
• Iftar: Light meal. If he eats too much, he can’t lead Taraweeh. He might literally vomit—no joke.
• Taraweeh: Complete concentration.
• Post-Taraweeh: Brief rest. Then the cycle continues.

Why? Because the Qur’an is his priority.

Be Like the Imam

Whether you’re leading or not, you can live like the imam.

Let Ramadan become a month of:

• Qur’an
• Discipline
• Du’a
• Intention
• Ibadah

You can even aim to memorize 10 ajza’ this Ramadan. It’s not impossible. People have done it.

Final Thoughts

Don’t be the person who shows up at the airport and says, “I haven’t decided where to go yet.”

If you don’t know your destination, you’ll go nowhere.

Make your intention now. Plan your Ramadan today. Prioritize Qur’an and ibadah above all else. And with Allah’s help, you’ll make this Ramadan unforgettable.

Jazakum Allahu Khayran.
May Allah grant us all a truly epic Ramadan. Ameen.

Related:

Ramadan Duaa Series: The Greatest Delight

5 Duas For Ramadan Therapy | Sh Yahya Ibrahim

The post How to Make this Ramadan Epic | Shaykh Muhammad Alshareef appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

What does every new Imam need to know about being an imam? What do you do if you’re in a small community with minimal resources? How do you manage joining a new community, learning the ropes, and not biting off more than you can chew? In this episode, Sh. Mohammad Elshinawy shares his advice for new imams, community building, and reflections on his own imam experience.

Shaykh Mohammad Elshinawy is a Graduate of English Literature at Brooklyn College, NYC. He studied at College of Hadith at the Islamic University of Madinah and is a graduate and instructor of Islamic Studies at Mishkah University. He has translated major works for the International Islamic Publishing House, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America, and Mishkah University.

Related:

Don’t Take For Granted Your Community Imam I Sh. Furhan Zubairi

The Rise of the Scholarly Gig Economy and Fall of Community Development

 

The post [Podcast] The Parts of Being an Imam They Don’t Warn You About | Sh Mohammad Elshinawy appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

A longstanding aspirant statelet in the Horn of Africa shot to international attention this month when Israel announced its recognition of Somaliland, an otherwise unrecognized defacto state in northern Somalia that has existed since war engulfed the region in the 1990s. Because the issue of Somaliland secession is widely unknown to Muslims outside the region, this article will give a short summary of its history.

Colonial Contrasts

Somalis constitute one of East Africa’s major ethnic groups, organized in clans and clan confederations and tracing their history back centuries in the region: major clan confederations included the Isaq, who dwell largely in Somaliland, the Hawiye in central Somalia around Mogadishu, the Rahanweyn in western Somalia, and the Darod, scattered around the region. 

Today, Somalis are split across several countries beyond the eponymous Somalia. In part, this is a legacy of colonialism, when the British, French, and Italian empires waded into the Horn of Africa, where Somali clans and sultanates had already had a long history of opposition with Ethiopia. Djibouti became a French enclave; Somaliland and Kenya were British colonies; and the rest of Somalia was under Italian rule, with the exception of the Ogadenia region, named for the Ogaden clan within the Darod confederation that predominates in a region ruled by Ethiopia as its southeast province.

Italy’s defeat in the Second World War bequeathed most of Somalia to British rule, where it remained for a decade before official independence in 1960. The first British thrust into the region, some fifty years earlier, had been countered by the daring preacher and adventurer Mohamed Hassan, disparaged as the “Mad Mulla” for his twenty-year resistance. Hassan, from the Darod, had a mutual enmity with the Isaq confederation, which, unlike most others, Somalis do not remember him fondly. Somaliland had been a British colony for much longer than the rest of Somalia, and in fact was given independence a few days earlier in the summer of 1960.

Somalilweyn and its Discontents

That independence came after a long period of activism from Somali opposition parties, notably the Somali Youth League, which called for Somali independence and where support for the independence of the Somali peoples at large, not just those under British rule, was widespread in what became known as Somaliweyn or Greater Somalia.

A key roadblock to this idea was not just friction with neighbouring powers, notably an imperial Ethiopia whose rule of Ogadenia was widely unpopular, but also the balance of power within Somalia itself. Somaliland had become independent under its leading colonial politician, Ibrahim Egal, who was soon persuaded to join the rest of Somalia, for which he became prime minister. As a rule, Somaliland was a backwater, and much of the Isaq populace chafed; as early as 1961, there was a coup attempt that was speedily suppressed. In fact, as one of the few parliamentary democracies in 1960s Africa, Somalia’s first decade was generally marked by chaotic factionalism and in 1969 army commander Siad Barre led a coup; prime minister Egal, at the United States at the time, was imprisoned on his return as one of the many elites of his generation purged by the military regime.

Though Siad promised revolutionary change, siding at first with the Soviet Union in the Cold War against a Western-backed Ethiopia; what socioeconomic improvements he oversaw would be drowned by his own recourse to repression and corruption. A change in family law that contravened Islamic law in 1975 was an early flashpoint, and after a momentous war for Ogadenia in 1977-78 failed – where Somalia’s former Soviet allies switched sides to decisively join a newly communist Ethiopia – Siad’s dictatorship began to crumble from within. An early sign of the rupture came when Majerteen officers from Siad’s Darod confederation, led by Abdullahi Yusuf, attempted a coup immediately after the Ogadenia defeat; in its wake, Yusuf fled to Ethiopia, which supported him in a 1982 incursion into Somalia.

Corrosion under Siad

The 1982 campaign came even as Siad repressed another coup and purged his Isaq deputy, Ismail Abukar. Though Abukar was one of a number of cross-clan leaders imprisoned in this period, the Isaq clan in particular objected to Siad’s dictatorship; the previous year, a rebel Somali National Movement or Wadaniya had been founded by exiles in Britain. Though its membership was overwhelmingly Isaq – including former officials such as Ahmed Silanyo, police officers such as Jama Ghalib, army officers such as Abdulqadir Kosar, and clan leaders such as Yusuf Madar – the group importantly claimed to represent Somalia at large and, unlike its heirs today, rejected claims of secession.

Siad, by now bolstered with considerable weaponry by the United States, responded with an outsize cruelty that overwhelmingly targeted Isaq in the north and drove more into the insurgency’s ranks. By the late 1980s, an insurgency was in full swing and had overrun much of Somaliland. In response, in spring 1988, Siad’s son-in-law, Said Morgan, cut a deal with the Ethiopian regime to stop supporting one another’s insurgents before turning on Somaliland with savage ferocity.

The Harrowing of the North

Said Morgan, the “Butcher of Hargeysa”

Morgan’s destruction of Somaliland carries parallels with the Iraqi Baath regime’s meantime harrowing of its own, Kurdish northland, during the same period. Like the Baath’s murderous governor-general, “Chemical” Ali Majid did with the Iraqi Kurds, there is no doubt that Morgan and his lieutenants saw Isaq as a fifth column to be bloodily crushed. As with supposed voice recordings of “Chemical Ali”, there are letters supposedly from Morgan that call for the elimination of the Isaq confederation; whether or not these are genuine, there is no question, and ample reliable evidence, that Morgan and his lieutenants were willing to butcher the population in droves. One particularly infamous call by an officer was to “kill everything but the crows” that came to feast on corpses. In the process, Morgan flattened Hargeysa and killed thousands, particularly through aerial bombardment.

As did Iraqi Kurdish opponents of the Baath regime, Siad’s opponents characterize this massacre as a genocide of the Isaq. It did, however, occur among a general narrowing of the regime where Siad, despite his rhetoric of shunning clan prejudice, narrowed his group of loyalists to not only his clan but his own family; it is no coincidence that his son-in-law, Morgan and son, Maslah Barre, were increasingly prominent in the army. The Isaq clan were the most brutalized but by no means the only victims; Siad had already frozen out the Majerteen clan within his own Darod confederation, and his favouritism also alienated much of the Darod’s Ogaden clan, whose army officers increasingly defected. Similarly, the major Hawiye confederation predominant in Mogadishu was increasingly disconsolate. By the early 1990s, a mixture of revolts and mutinies ousted Siad and helped plunge Somalia into what was unprecedentedly described as a “failed state”.

Freedom and Independence?

In the process, the Wadaniya insurgents managed to capture Somaliland under the leadership of Abdirahman Tur; along with the Isaq confederation, the Darod Dhulbahante clan, led by such cooperative chieftains as Abdulghani Jama, now joined them. Wadaniya was more of a coalition than a fixed group, however, and its constituent camps began to fight for power. That this struggle was not as destructive as that of the remaining Somalia owed largely to the mediating role of chieftains and elders, who organized a number of conferences and elections.

Isaq chieftains such as Ibrahim Madar, son of the former Wadaniya leader Yusuf, were especially important and, with the rest of Somalia in disarray, began to push increasingly for secession. Somaliland was already de facto separate from the rest of Somalia, but the persistent agenda from the mid-1990s onward was for its recognition as a separate country. Since Somaliweyn had collapsed and Somalis were already split between other countries like Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya, the argument ran, there was no point in Somaliland staying in a dysfunctional Somalia either. The moment also seemed propitious; in 1993, Eritrea broke away from Ethiopia after a long, difficult independence war.

Jama Ghalib

Even as the United States was leading a United Nations incursion into the rest of Somalia, Tur was removed in favour of the former Somalia prime minister Egal. Isaq commanders Tur and Ghalib, a former police inspector-general, opposed the secessionists and joined forces with Farah Aidid, Mogadishu’s preeminent commander who had first ousted Siad, and then the United States. However, in 1994-95, Somaliland “loyalists” of Egal managed to bloodily root out these Isaq dissidents in a series of battles at Hargeysa and Burao.

As a former prime minister of Mogadishu who had originally negotiated Somaliland’s addition to Somalia, Egal struggled to convince hardline separatists of his bona fides. Yet as his power increased, sidelining competitors by the late 1990s, he did indeed press toward a separatist agenda, and was even reported to have contacted the infamously anti-Muslim Israeli regime by offering cooperation against “Islamic radicalism”: this despite the fact that the original Wadaniya resistance against Siad had criticized his irreligiosity and dealt heavily in Islamic slogans, styling themselves “mujahids”; indeed, the Somaliland flag retains the Islamic shahadah. Somaliland was nonetheless seen favourably among foreigners wary of the conflict in remaining Somalia, and a considerable foreign lobby grew for its separation from Somalia and its recognition as an independent state. A year before his death in 2002, Egal held a referendum that opted for Somaliland’s secession as an independent state.

Somaliland, Puntland, and the Occupation of Somalia

However, secessionism was unpopular among the Dhulbahante who predominated in the Sool region of northern Somalia, between Somaliland and the coastal region of Puntland. Many Dhulbahante dissidents gravitated east toward Puntland, where Ethiopia’s former vassal Yusuf, had set up his own fiefdom and aimed to form Puntland as part of a federalist but united Somalia. When the American “war on terror” began, Puntland, and Yusuf more specifically, became a favoured client of the United States as a “counterterrorism” partner. In 2006, both the United States and Ethiopia invaded Somalia and ousted Mogadishu’s short-lived Islamist government, installing Yusuf in its place under a foreign occupation.

Yusuf’s place at the helm of an American-Ethiopian-backed regime in Mogadishu ensured that Puntland had Washington’s ear, but Somaliland’s major foreign lobby persistently argued for independence, while periodically cracking down against dissidents who favoured a united Somalia. The fact that the original 1980s Wadaniya resistance had rejected separatism was now conveniently forgotten; the fact that unionist Somalilanders such as Ghalib opposed the 2006 invasion ensured that they could be frozen out of the political elite with little repercussions.

On the other hand, even after Yusuf’s resignation, the Somali government and its Puntland wing attracted largely Dhulbahante dissidents in Sool who wanted their region to be separate from Somaliland and part of Somalia, either as part of Puntland or as a separate region. During the 2010s, when Somalia’s new federalist constitution was arranging new regions, the Sool region pressed its case: led by Ahmed Karash, the Sool region announced its loyalty to Somalia under the name “Khatumo” or finality, with support from both the central government in Mogadishu and the regional government in Puntland. There have been repeated clashes over this region, particularly Lasanod, since 2007.

Regional Rivalries

The replacement of relatively conciliatory Somaliland leaders such as Silanyo with hardline separatists like Musa Bihi, a former Wadaniya commander, helped harden this dispute. So did the attitudes of strongly unionist Somali leaders such as Mohamed Farmajo, who ruled Mogadishu in 2017-22, and Puntland leaders such as Said Deni, who was a rival to both Mogadishu and Hargeysa.

Regional rivalries also played into these disputes. A staunch centralist, Farmajo was long backed by Turkiye and Qatar, and opposed the United Arab Emirates, which was supporting a number of separatist actors in the region. He also tried to cultivate better ties with the new, similarly centralist Ethiopian ruler Abiy Ahmed. Ethiopia, which had a longstanding rivalry with Cairo, had meanwhile long found it convenient to play off the rivalry between Puntland and Somaliland, and the United States did the same. Saudi Arabia initially supported the United Arab Emirates in its dispute with Qatar, but has recently moved closer to Ankara, Cairo, and Doha.

The Somali government’s case was widely recognized abroad, but its own legitimacy was weakened by its reliance on the multipronged foreign occupation that had ousted the Islamists in 2006. Although a compromise brought back many Islamists, including the ousted former ruler Sharif Ahmed and his successor Hassan Mohamud, to the fold in 2009, cyclical squabbles over the makeup of the state and over an unpopular but essential foreign occupation have persisted. At their most extreme, Somali unionists resorted to the untrue claim that Shabaab, the main insurgent group, was a Somaliland agent, because many of its leaders were Isaq northerners. This was fantasy, but the claim’s very existence pointed to the difficulty of legitimation during a foreign occupation.

Road to Disgrace

After returning to power to remove Farmajo, Mohamud managed to secure Lasanod and announced the new Sool-Khatumo region as a separate region, under Abdulqadir Firdhiye. However, Puntland leader Deni, closely affiliated with Abu Dhabi, threatened secession in 2024. And at the end of 2025, Israel, closely linked by now with the United Arab Emirates, followed up its support for secessionists in other Muslim countries by recognizing Somaliland.

In a move whose criticism within Somaliland was swiftly suppressed, Somaliland leader Abdirahman Irro welcomed Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar and oversaw a generally shameless spree of welcomes for this new, supposedly groundbreaking relationship. Like other pro-Israel governments in the Muslim world, Hargeysa evidently supposes that ties to Israel will strengthen its international position, particularly with the United States. It is a disgraceful denouement to a political experiment that began with genuinely valid grievances but has morphed into an autocratically ruled fiefdom.

The fact is that the Somalia regime that ravaged Somaliland in the 1980s ceased to exist decades ago, and that the current Somaliland programme bears little resemblance to the Wadaniya insurgency of that period. Even as its government loudly cites the savagery of a long-extinct dictatorship in the 1980s to justify its separatism, Somaliland cracks down on dissidents and aligns itself with the most vicious regime of the 2020s.

[Disclaimer: this article reflects the views of the author, and not necessarily those of MuslimMatters; a non-profit organization that welcomes editorials with diverse political perspectives.]

 

Related:

– Op-Ed: Understanding The Somaliland Recognition Decision – A Counterargument To The Prevailing Muslim Consensus

– History of the Bosnia War [Part 1] – Thirty Years After Srebrenica

The post Op-Ed: Bitterness Prolonged – A Short History Of The Somaliland Dispute appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Lee Ayi reveals a disturbing secret, and Darius is pushed to demonstrate his abilities.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

* * *

Training Ground

When the clothes were stacked in a hamper and the lines had been taken down, Lee Ayi said, “Wait here.” She disappeared into the house and returned with a wooden training dao that I had not known existed, as well as my own spear.

I froze, remembering my father’s ruthless training. What was this? Like brother, like sister? The blood rushed to my head, and my face turned hot. I was not that little boy anymore, and even my father had stopped abusing me eventually. My entire body tensed. In that moment, I could hear the cowbells as the animals grazed in the far field. I smelled the faint, sweet musk of the safflowers, and could feel my own heartbeat in the wound on my shoulder.

Lee Ayi handed me the weapons. “Yong trained you, yes?”

I stood mute, one weapon hanging limply in each hand.

“You don’t have to answer. I can see it in every step you take. Even the way you work. Your balance, poise and economy of motion. The subtle flourishes you add when sweeping the floor. The way you shift your weight. Well, my father trained me as well, though not as thoroughly as Yong.”

I swallowed. “Okay, so?” The words came out dry and hoarse.

She waved to the circle of clear earth where the clotheslines had hung. “This is my training ground. I need to practice.” She clenched a fist, a gesture so unlike her that I shifted my weight to the back foot. “It’s part of me,” she continued. “It’s in my blood. But Husband does not approve of martial arts, nor any form of violence. So every Friday I wait until he goes to Jum’ah and I practice alone. This is my secret. Maybe the farmworkers see but they mind their own business. But you are here now. Will you keep my secret?”

“And what do you need me to do?”

“What?” She shook her head. “Nothing. Just keep my secret. Will you do that?”

A Negotiation

“What is the real reason Ma Shushu did not take me to town?”

Lee Ayi tipped her head back, regarding me. A slow smile appeared. “You’re a negotiator, eh? My brother taught you many things.” The smile vanished, replaced by a serious expression. “Can we just say that he wants your shoulder to heal, and leave it at that?”

“Is that the truth?”

“Part of it.”

Lee Ayi looked down, spotted a small stone that had found its way into her training space, picked it up and chucked it. Then she stood straight and looked me in the eye. “Your Ma Shushu does not want the Shahs to know you exist.”

I frowned. I didn’t know what answer I had expected, but this wasn’t it. “Why?”

“Nur was Shah Zheng’s only daughter. He married three wives, but he apparently lost his fertility and could not sire another child. He is an old man now, and you, as his grandson, are his only surviving descendant. You are thus heir to the family fortune. But Zheng has a younger brother, Osman. He now runs the family business in all but name. He is a ruthless, unprincipled man. Husband is afraid that if Osman knew about you, he would kill you.”

The thought that my mother’s family, instead of being happy to know me, might want to kill me, made me feel empty inside. I walked to the washing basin and sat on the stone rim, putting my chin in my hand.

“I’m sorry,” Lee Ayi said. When I did not reply, she said, “And my secret?”

I waved to her to go ahead and practice.

A Single Step

She began with empty hands, and at first I barely watched.

My thoughts were still tangled in what she had told me about the Shahs, about my mother’s family and the danger attached to my very existence. I sat on the stone rim of the washing basin, my chin in my hand, staring at nothing in particular while Lee Ayi stepped into the cleared circle of earth.

Her movements were confident enough, practiced, familiar. She knew the basic Five Animals stances, strikes and forms. Tiger, Crane, Snake, Praying Mantis, Dragon. The transitions were there, but sometimes incomplete. One time she flowed from one posture into the next and forgot the intervening strike entirely, leaving a small emptiness in the form that my eye snagged on instinctively. Her stances were serviceable but shallow, her steps sometimes too short, as if she were reluctant to fully commit her weight.

I watched without comment.

When she stretched a hand and requested the wooden dao, and I tossed it to her, something changed. Her posture straightened. She turned her hips fully into the cuts, using her whole body rather than her arms alone. The blade whistled softly as it passed through the air. She was not elegant, and her repertoire was limited. But she was effective. There was intention behind every strike.

With the spear, however, she struggled. Her grip was too far down toward the end, and her hands did not slide smoothly enough on the wood as she changed grips. She overextended on slashes and used her muscles to slow the spear down at the end of the movement, rather than using her body to bounce it back or whip it around, which resulted in slow recoveries. A couple of times I winced involuntarily. My father would have beaten me if I’d done that.

When she finished, she stood in the middle of the circle, hands on her thighs, breathing hard. Sweat darkened the collar of her tunic and ran down her temples.

“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”

I gave a half shrug. “You’re strong. And fit.”

She gave me a sharp look. “That’s not an answer.”

“You’re pretty good with the dao.”

“And the rest?”

I threw up my hands and blurted, “Why are you asking me? I’m just a kid.”

She snorted. “You are that. But you know more than you reveal.” She wiped her face with her sleeve and regarded me steadily. “Show me something of your own.”

I felt my shoulder throb in warning. “What do you mean?”

“Something small,” she said. “One form. Slowly. We can’t risk you opening that cut.”

I should have refused. Every lesson my father had drilled into me screamed that this was a mistake. We kept our skills secret, we did not show them off. But something in her gaze held me there, not challenging, not pleading, simply certain. And anyway, she was family.

I stepped into the circle.

Dragon Surveys His Domain

The earth felt different beneath my feet, packed and bare. I took one wide step forward and dropped into a deep stance, sweeping my hands down to one hip, then drawing them up in a wide arc. The movement finished with my hands snapping back into a tight guard, balanced and ready.

I straightened and saluted, one fist against an open palm. The hand of war and the hand of peace.

“Dragon surveys his domain,” I said.

Lee Ayi stared at me. Her face had gone very still. “You are highly trained.”

I did not answer.

She extended the dao, handle toward me. I pursed my lips and grimaced. “You know I’m injured.”

“Your left shoulder is injured. Use your right hand.”

My nostrils widened as I inhaled deeply, then let it out. “Why?”

“I want to see.” Her tone was deadly serious.

I swallowed. “Only a little.” I took the dao and twirled it easily in my hand, closing my eyes, warming up my muscles.

I saluted with the dao, raising it above my forehead and parallel to the ground, then stepped slowly to my left, bringing the dao up in a number one roof block that flowed into a slash to the neck of an imaginary enemy. I continued with this slow motion dance, reaching around with my hand and pulling, slashing, then spinning away into a thrust that was only a feint that turned into another slash.

I stopped and faced Lee Ayi. “Crane circles the hill.”

She regarded me solemnly. “You killed two men.”

Shock widened my eyes as I remembered the two robbers I’d killed and buried in the peanut field. But how could she know? My brain raced, then I realized – feeling like an utter fool – that she meant the movement I had just done. It was a form, a prearranged sequence in which I killed two imaginary opponents.

“Yes.”

She gestured. “More.”

I twisted my mouth to one side. “Why?”

“My father taught me that sequence, but I forgot it. I want to see more.”

River Flow

I let out a breath that was almost a sigh. Then I took a long diagonal shuffle step one way then the other, attacking with a series of slashes from different angles as my feet danced lightly across the dirt.

As I moved, I fell into River Flow. There were no more cowbells, no afternoon sun heating my face. No Lee Ayi, even. Without plan or awareness, my movements sped up. I leaped up and came over the top with a thrust, but it was a feint that pivoted into a cutting diagonal slash at the last instant. My body had missed this. I was a flame of fire, my movements too fast for an untrained eye to follow. The dao was a part of me. Anything I could envision, I could do.

Many mediocre fighters fought with nothing but the blade, but I was better trained than that, and I threw kicks that snapped out and back, punches that made my wounded shoulder ache, and hits with the pommel of the sword that flowed into elbow strikes that flowed into short-range slashes and thrusts. Never was I out of balance, never did I hesitate or falter.

The dao was a shadow that darted behind my back and around my head, surged high and dropped low, and struck from unexpected angles. In River Flow my parents were not dead, and Far Away was not lost. There was only the movement and my imaginary enemies, and I was in harmony with them. When they pushed forward I slipped to the side to let them pass. When the enemy charged I parried and let him run into the point of my sword. When he slashed I side stepped and matched his slash, cutting along the length of his arm. There was no opposition, no clash. My father had repeated this many times: “The enemy tells you how to kill him.”

I forgot that my aunt was there. My movements became more dramatic. I moved as I used to in my solitary practice sessions, after my father had gone. At one point I did a forward somersault in the air, coming down with a vertical slash, which reversed into an upward slash intended to catch the enemy’s hand. These were movements my father could no longer perform himself, but had coached me through, and some were movements I myself had invented when I practiced alone, after he had gone.

I stopped when the pain in my shoulder reminded me where I was. I stood in the circle, breathing deeply but comfortably. I did not know how much time had passed. Perhaps enough to lower a bucket into the well twice and pull it back up.

Turning, I saw Lee Ayi’s face. She looked stricken. I knew immediately I had done the wrong thing. Stepping forward, I bowed deeply and offered her the sword with both hands, the edge facing me.

Not Gentle

She snatched the dao out of my hands. Her face was pale, her jaw tight. “You shame me.”

I looked away, my gaze alighting on the tall elms that sheltered the house. “That was not my intention.”

“I know.” She exhaled once, sharply. “I have never witnessed such skill. Not even from Cai Lee, and he was a grandmaster. How did you learn that?”

I met her eyes. My gaze was uncompromising. “My father trained me from the time I could walk. He was not gentle.”

“Fathers are sometimes not gentle. That doesn’t mean they -”

“Haven’t you seen my scars?” I nearly shouted. My nostrils flared as I yanked my sleeves up, showing her the many scars on my arms, from cuts my father had given me with the spear, the wooden dao and even the live dao. Some were pale and faded, while others were pink and raised.

She blinked. “I thought from the rough peanut vines, or the hoe.”

I pulled my shirt up and threw it on the ground. “And these?” My stomach and chest also bore long scars.

Her anger was gone, replaced by dismay. “Yong did that?”

“I told you. He was not gentle.”

Her lower lip trembled, and a pair of tears rolled down her dusty cheeks, leaving clean tracks. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“Your cut has reopened.”

I looked at my shoulder and indeed she was right. The bandage was stained deep red.

Gently, my aunt took my hand, led me into the house, washed my wound and re-bandaged it.

“You rest,” she said. “I will finish today’s housework. Don’t tell Husband about what we did today. Or about your wound.” She began to leave, then turned and said, “I’m sorry.”

When she was gone I lay in my bed, wishing that Far Away was here to cuddle up next to me and purr. I knew I had hurt Lee Ayi in more ways than one. I felt like my past was a heavy chain around my neck. It would always be there. I would never be free.

Moon Cake

In the late afternoon a man came to the house on horseback. He was perhaps thirty, dressed in a merchant’s jacket with brass buttons. His face was pale and slick with sweat. Lee Ayi ushered him into Ma Shushu’s treatment room and had him lie on the padded table and wait.

Ma Shushu and Haaris returned not long after. Haaris said he had a surprise for me and handed me a small box. Opening it, I found a round pastry of some kind.

“What is it?”

Haaris gaped. “You never had a moon cake? It’s filled with sweet bean paste and nuts.”

I wasn’t in the mood for Haaris’s unsullied, childish enthusiasm. I thanked him, deposited the moon cake in the pantry, and went back into the bedroom to lie down. This was not to be, however, as Ma Shushu popped his head into the room and asked me to come to the treatment room.

I found Haaris there as well. Ma Shushu was tending to the merchant. He had long, very thin needles that he heated in a candle flame, then inserted with quick, steady hands into the man’s scalp, neck and the backs of his hands.

The man on the table had his eyes squeezed shut. “My head,” he muttered. “Like a drum being beaten from the inside.”

Ma Shushu glanced up at me. “How was work today?”

“It was fine, sir,” I said, tucking my chin into my chest, feeling the weight of secrets bearing down on me. “How was Jum’ah?”

“Good, alhamdulillah. The masjid was full.”

“I have never been to a masjid, or a Jum’ah. I would like to go.” I waited to see how he would respond.

“Oh. Well. Let’s focus our attention on the patient for now. Darius, what I do is called acupuncture. It is an ancient method of healing. You may watch, but you must remain silent.”

I retreated a few steps, put my back to the wall, and watched. How strange this household was. My father had been a dangerous, half-broken man who abused me, drank, stole, and gambled away what little money he had. But he had never lied to me about anything. I was quite sure of that. Yet here in this beautiful, wealthy household, populated with kind and talented people, everyone lied. They lied to me and to each other, and I lied to them.

Did that mean that I was becoming less like my father, and more like these people? I was very confused.

“Darius, are you paying attention?” I heat the needles first to make sure they do not poison the blood.”

I refocused my attention. For good or ill, this life was my future. I must learn, work hard and do my best to fit in.

“Yes, Ma Shushu.”

* * *

Come back next week for Part 7 – Refugees At The Door

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

 

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Zaid Karim, Private Investigator, Part 1 – Temptation

Gravedigger: A Short Story

The post Far Away [Part 6] – Dragon Surveys His Domain appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

At first sight, the western strip of the Sahara, yawning south of such famed Moroccan cities as Marrakech and Fez, and separating the Mauritanian desert from the Atlantic coast, might not seem an obvious site for regional competition. In fact, the Western Sahara, with its large phosphate reserves and its blue-hued stones, has been the main prize in a decades-long conflict that drew in the region’s major players with continuing repercussions today. This article will trace the background of the dispute up to a seminal moment: the “Green March” of November 1975, an extraordinary coup-de-main by Morocco’s monarchy that split the region with Mauritania and led to a conflict with Algeria and the Sahraoui Polisario Front that has yet to entirely ebb fifty years later.

Background

For centuries, Morocco was the premier power of the Islamic West, or Maghrib as the region was called at the time. Since local clans of the Amazigh or Berber ethnic group welcomed Idris bin Abdullah, a descendant of Ali bin Abi Talib fleeing the nascent Abbasids, a continuity has bound this western edge of the Muslim world, whose authority at its peak extended north across the Mediterranean and south into the Sahara. Nor was the trajectory of power one-way: a thousand years ago, a confederation of austere Sahraoui Islamic warriors, the Murabitoun, advanced north from the desert, taking over Morocco and entering Andalus to confront a Christian resurgence. We need not trace the trajectory of every faction that ruled Morocco to realize a close link between the regions around modern Morocco, a constant reference point for Moroccan nationalists.

Yet though its sultans, including the Alaoui dynasty that has ruled since the mid-1600s, frequently claimed a caliphal title as Emirul-Mouminin, they were not unchallenged among the Muslims of the West: to their east, the Ottoman sultanate arrived as far as Algeria through links with seafaring corsairs, and to the south they competed with such West African sultanates as the Songhai. Cycles of competition and coexistence marked Morocco’s relations with her neighbours.

In the colonial heyday of the nineteenth century, as France in particular swallowed up much of northwest Africa, Morocco’s position became both more critical to the Muslims of the West as well as more delicate. A sultan such as Abderrahmane bin Hisham (1822-59) could wield influence with largely autonomous religious leaders, such as his neighbour Abdelkader bin Mohieddin, who fought against the brutal French subjugation of Algeria; yet bruising encounters with the French army persuaded him not to overextend himself.

Hoping to modernize, the sultans of the late 1800s entered a pattern of negotiation, debt, and eventually a soft subjugation to the European power that had contemporary echoes in Istanbul and Cairo. If this was uncomfortable for Muslim rulers, its effect on them was scant compared to the periphery of their realms, where jihad and raids were repeatedly launched by clansmen and Sufi adventurers: often officially in defence of the Moroccan realm and with links but little long-term support from the sultanate.

Watering Eyes Amid Colonization

Such a Sufi leader was the fighting scholar Mustafa “Maelainain”, or “Water of the Eyes”, who preached among the Sahraoui clans in the far south. A prolific writer and occasional tutor of Moroccan elites, he nonetheless had considerable autonomy in what is now the Western Sahara and dealt with other local principalities such as the small Mauritanian sultanate of Adrar. Maelainain tutored both the Moroccan prince Abdelhafiz bin Hassan, a great-grandson of Abderrahmane, and Adrar sultan Sidahmed Ould-Aida, and acted in effect as a frontier warrior for both realms against France. Maelainain was already nearly seventy years of age when he began raids on French garrisons, building the town of Smara as a base for a relatively sophisticated force. He had some help from the sultanate as well as from France’s rivals, like Spain and especially Germany.

In 1906, colonial competition led to a division of privileges in Morocco, to which Sultan Abdelaziz bin Hassan, a great-grandson of Abderrahmane, unilaterally agreed. This dismayed many Muslims, including Maelainain, whom French propaganda portrayed as an ingrate and rebel. It was, however, urban Muslim opposition in northern Morocco that ousted Abdelaziz and installed his brother Abdelhafiz, unprecedentedly pledging loyalty on the condition that he use his position to wage jihad against the colonialists. Instead, once established, Abdelhafiz brutally purged his supporters.

Maelainain also broke with precedent by leading an army from the south into the Moroccan heartland in order to salvage the sultanate’s independence. Abdelhafiz made no move as his former tutor was defeated and repulsed south to his stronghold, Tiznit. The sultan even enlisted the aid of French soldiers to crack down on his own protesting subjects.

This in turn sparked an international crisis, Germany objecting to France’s direct involvement, and raised the colonial stakes higher for France. Both Maelainain’s former students, Ould-Aida in Adrar and Abdelhafiz in Morocco, gave way in 1912: Ould-Aida was forced to yield his realm and join the French army, and Abdelhafiz was forced first to sign away independence in favour of a protectorate and then to abdicate anyway. With Maelainain having passed away, his son Ahmed Hibatullah now took up the banner and announced himself sultan of Morocco. Known thus as the Blue Sultan, he made it as far as Marrakech before he was defeated in battle against the French army.

French newspaper from 1912 reporting on the “Blue Sultan” Ahmed Hibatullah’s campaign from the south.

Led by wily viceroy Hubert Lyautey, France employed a strategy of colonization in Morocco different from its summary wreckage of Algeria. The Moroccan elite of the time was coopted rather than crushed, symbolism around the monarchy was enhanced even as its power was stripped away, and this ensured a breathing space: unlike Algeria, where Arabic language and Islamic leadership had been systematically crushed, Morocco experienced a “soft colonization” that nonetheless deeply impacted the way its elites saw the world.

Spain Enters The Fray

The next major anticolonial resistance took place not against France but against Spain in the 1920s, in the Rif region of northern Morocco rather than the south. Like Maelainain, its leader, Mohamed Abdelkerim, had respected Islamic stock and managed an impressively organized army of clansmen, who spectacularly humiliated the Spanish army at Anoual in 1921. It took a major French intrusion to oust and exile him five years later, and French encouragement for Spain to turn to the Western Sahara in the far south, to which it had first laid claim in 1884 but would only manage to occupy fifty years later.

Sahraoui clans put up long-running resistance, often led by Maelainain’s family: his sons, Mohamed Laghdaf and Murabbih Rebbouh, and nephews, Mohamed Mamoun and Takiullah Ouadjaha, led resistance alongside preachers like Mokhtar Ould-Boukhari and commanders such as Aissawi Tibari, who led dozens of raids totalling thousands of miles across the desert. Even Sidahmed Ould-Aida, the ousted Adrar ruler, deserted the French ranks and joined the resistance, where he was killed. Nonetheless, by summer 1934, a joint French-Spanish campaign had secured the region; such leaders as Laghdaf and Mamoun preferred to deal with the Spanish rather than the dreaded French army. Spain was further weakened by a major civil war in which the eventually triumphant right wing of the army, led by Francisco Franco, fired the first shots by seizing garrisons in colonial Morocco.

French-ruled Morocco eventually saw a separate civil resistance, epitomized by the Istiqlal party led by Allal Fassi, largely based in the cities among ascendant intellectuals. This symbolically claimed loyalty to the Moroccan monarchy, and called for independence from colonial rule to rule over a “Greater” Morocco comprising the sultanate’s entire older realms. Mohammad V bin Yusuf, nephew to Abdelaziz and Abdelhafiz, was a particular pole of attraction, as he began to show more assertiveness during the Second World War when France, and indirectly its colonies, were overrun by Germany.

Independence And Its Limitations

No longer the imposing phantom of the past nor minded to reform itself, the 1950s French empire faced varying levels of opposition throughout North Africa. In Algeria, this featured a vicious war; in Tunisia involved unionist protest and smaller peasant revolt; and in Morocco, a mixture of both protest and revolt. France briefly stripped Mohammad of the Moroccan crown, but protests forced them to restore him, and he declared independence in 1956. Morocco supported the anti-French insurgency in Algeria and was keen to engage Mauritanian dissidents against France, such as Hurma Ould-Babana, who announced loyalty to Rabat.

At first supported by Morocco, Sahraoui insurgents led by Benhamou Mesfioui also overran much of the Western Sahara and besieged Spanish garrisons in 1957-58. But when Spain agreed to withdraw if Morocco took responsibility. The Moroccan government’s role transformed to that of controlling rather than supporting the revolt, preferring to engage with Madrid. Mohammad’s son and future successor Hassan II led the Moroccan army into the region to restore the situation, helped by friendly chieftains such as Khatri Ould-Joumani; to the dismay of such Moroccan expansionists as Fassi, Hassan II would ally strongly with Spain. In the Rif region, Rabat also crushed a revolt that aimed, among other things, to bring back Abdelkerim, the still widely influential scourge of the Spaniards.

Succeeding the throne, Hassan II spent the 1960s in hostility with newly independent Mauritania, which he saw as a French puppet and refused to recognize until 1969. However, relations were also tense with Algeria, which had wrenched independence through war but retained economic links with France as well as conceding the French government a small foothold in its deep south. After border skirmishes, a pattern emerged whereby Algeria, soon under military rule, and Morocco would house one another’s dissidents, who in the Moroccan case were largely leftists.

Spain had set up a regional assembly in the Western Sahara, which largely incorporated local chieftains and had limited influence. This was insufficient to stop protests in the Western Sahara, whose most notable leader, Mohamed Bassiri, disappeared. Though the Western Sahara is often treated as a case of opposite societies between Sahraouis and Moroccans, the situation was much more complicated, and many Sahraoui activists maintained at least a hopeful attachment to a Morocco whose government was, however, unwilling to risk its Spanish alliance, no matter how much Moroccan nationalists wanted.

Take the case of Khalili Reguibi, who had fought Spain in the 1950s and then joined the Moroccan army; he remained loyal to Morocco, but his frustrated son, Mohamed Abdelaziz, joined the Polisario Front, a leftist group that led an insurgency against Spain. This was less bizarre than it seems now: at the time, Moroccan nationalists could agree with Sahraoui nationalists that Rabat should help evict the Spanish colony; unfortunately, Fassi regretfully informed Sahraoui contacts, there was scant prospect. As late as October 1974, even Algeria, Hassan’s rival, informed the United Nations that the Western Sahara should join Morocco, and even Polisario originally requested the monarchy’s support. However, perhaps in part because of the longstanding negative experience with Rabat, a United Nations survey found widespread support for independence rather than joining Morocco.

The Green March And Its Discontents

Not until Spain’s impending withdrawal, in the last days of Franco’s rule, did Hassan stir into a flurry of action. He sent his prime minister, Ahmed Othmane, to Madrid to hammer out a joint administration of the Western Sahara with Carlos Arias-Navarros and Hamdi Ould-Meknes, the foreign ministers of Spain and Mauritania: this was to be an interim affair before a referendum. But in a spectacular fait-accompli, half a million Moroccans, unarmed and bearing only the Quran and the Moroccan flag, marched south into the Sahara with chants of takbir. This meticulously organized Green March, a scene to gladden the heart of any Moroccan patriot, was organized and led in person by Hassan II himself, flanked by Othmane and security boss Ahmed Dlimi, and widely applauded across the Moroccan political spectrum.

Ahmed Dlimi

This was in direct contrast to the reception in the Western Sahara. The Sahraoui assembly, led by chieftains such as Baba Ould-Hassina and Ould-Joumani, objected and even threatened to join Polisario to expel the Moroccan intrusion. Yet in an example of how quickly chiefly opinions could adjust to circumstances, two-thirds of the assembly joined Morocco over the winter while Dlimi followed up the Green March by imposing army garrisons. Though Sahraouis would be much better-placed in Moroccan officialdom than under Spain, thousands left the area, many decamping to the Algerian border town Tindouf, which became a de facto headquarters for Polisario’s “shadow government” led by Lamine Ould-Ahmed.

While Morocco and its junior partner Mauritania set about arranging administration, with Hassan’s chamberlain Ahmed Bensouda as governor-general for the Moroccan sector and Abdullah Ould-Cheikh his Mauritanian counterpart, Algeria supported Polisario. Not only Algerian dictator Houari Boumediene but also his leading lieutenants – future ruler Abdelkader Bouteflika, prime minister Moussa Abdelghani, and party chief Salah Yahiaoui – were intimately involved in support for the Polisario Front. The Algerian army clashed directly with its Moroccan counterpart over the winter, but Mauritania was an easier and softer target for Polisario. In summer 1976, its chief Ouali Sayed led a devastating raid into the heart of the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott; though he was slain, a line of lieutenants, including his brother Bechir, Abdelaziz, Brahim Ghali, Sidahmed Battal, Ayoub Lahbib, and Brahim Hakim, would lead Polisario either on the battlefield or in international diplomacy.

Throughout the next fifteen years, the Western Saharan war had major regional and international repercussions: it cemented a simmering rivalry between Algeria and Morocco, helped bring down a Mauritanian government or two, and played into the Cold War with Morocco firmly in the Western camp. Though a ceasefire held for nearly thirty years, during which time such Polisario leaders as Hakim and Lahbib joined Morocco, the conflict has flared up again in the 2020s.

Conclusion: A Split In The Islamic West

So what are we to make of the Western Saharan conflict? Comparisons often made by left-leaning critics with Israel’s occupation of Palestine are plainly absurd: at no stage did Morocco descend to the level of viciousness, ethnic cleansing, or systematic massacres periodically on display by Israel, and there are undeniable historical, religious, cultural, and social links between Moroccans and Sahraouis that are plainly not true of Israelis and Palestinians. From the nineteenth-century desert mujahids to as late as the 1970s, Sahraoui leaders and groups often identified with Morocco, so much so that in 1912 the Blue Sultan set out to take the entire country and liberate it from France. Until the 1970s, Morocco’s own abstinence from reciprocating this solidarity owed more to an attempt to balance France out, if through an unpopular alliance with Spain, than any lack of public sympathy.

On the other hand, the Moroccan government itself has a record of using and discarding the region to Rabat’s convenience, whether in the days of Abdelaziz and Abdelhafiz or Hassan II. The harsher Moroccan tactics, such as Dlimi’s construction of a major “sand wall” in the early 1980s, resemble colonial tactics, even if comparisons with Israel are ridiculous. Moroccan protests that Polisario is simply a tool of the Algerian junta ignore its own militarized treatment. And the tensions accruing from a decades-long conflict have polarized the people of the Islamic Maghrib, foremost of the Western Sahara itself.

 

Related:

– From Algeria to Palestine: Commemorating Eighty Years Of Resistance And International Solidarity

– Islam In Nigeria [Part I]: A History

The post Green March In The Sands Of The Blue Sultan: Morocco And The Conflict Over The Western Sahara appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

I took Visionaire, a course about making “dream duas,” the last time it was ever taught by Shaykh Muhammad al Shareef. While I thought I would continue to learn and deepen my understanding of his teachings for years to come, Allah had different plans. As I revisit the course in preparation for Ramadan this year, here are the basics of what I learned about making dua from the shaykh before his passing. 

It’s Sunnah to Aim for the Highest in Your Duas  

The Prophet’s final words were a dua. He was lying in the lap of his beloved wife, Aisha , and she just used a miswak to clean his teeth. His final words were, “Oh Allah, in the highest companionship,”1 referring to his desired station in the akhirah. Throughout this dua, we can see the final act of the Prophet was making a lofty dua. 

Following in his footsteps, we should also make huge duas that only Allah can fulfill. Dua is not about us, what we can have, or what we deserve; dua is about the One who will answer it. Thus, we raise our standards when it comes to dua without needing to be timid, moderate, shy, or embarrassed to ask Allah or anything we want.

If we can reach the zone of “slightly unrealistic,” we’ve started asking Allah at a scale that is fitting to His Majesty. We’ve reached that zone when we become confused or feel uncomfortable because we can’t figure out how a dua could ever come into volition. For example, someone wants to change their career and needs time and money for further education. Once they start struggling to figure out the logistics of how they would make ends meet without working full-time and balance their family life, that’s where Allah’s Divine capability intercedes. The duas we make should aim to reflect Allah’s infinite ability and not our finite human limitations.  

You Can Make Dua out of Pain or Pleasure

We can make dua from a state of pain or pleasure, and that Allah listens to both. 

Allah answers the duas of pain and desperate need and says so in the Quran.

“Is He [not best] who responds to the desperate one when he calls upon Him and removes evil and makes you inheritors of the earth? Is there a deity with Allah? Little do you remember.” [Surah An-Naml; 27:62]

The Prophet has also taught us that Allah guarantees to answer anyone who uses the specific dua of Prophet Yunus 2

 

“And [mention] the man of the fish, when he went off in anger and thought that We would not decree [anything] upon him. And he called out within the darknesses, “There is no deity except You; exalted are You. Indeed, I have been of the wrongdoers.” [Surah Al-Anbiya; 21:87]

The good news is that when we are trapped in the belly of the whale, so to speak, in our own lives, we know our pleas will be answered. However, if times of crisis are the only times when we make dua, we will find ourselves constantly needing to be in a disaster to perform this powerful act of worship. On the flip side, when we’re not in pain, we completely disconnect from dua and remain quiet. That sounds pretty sad and is a huge disadvantage to only make dua from pain. 

However, we can also make dua out of pleasure–ones that make us excited and put a smile on our faces. These duas are the ones we say, “I can’t wait to get into sajdah to make dua for this” because we’re looking forward to having them answered with so much anticipation. These duas can be separated into three broad categories: things we want to experience, things we want to own, and the type of person we would like to become. Being able to connect to the duas that encapsulate our dreams, is not silly or trivial. They build the intimacy in our relationship with Allah because we continue to ask and ask and ask from Him, even during the good times.

Finally, we should look for hacks to create optimistic duas we can feel excited for even during times of sadness and distress. If we are experiencing doom during a calamity, is there a happy future we can look forward to? We should try to make dua for that as a solution to the current crisis we are facing. For example, a woman has just given birth but has severe health complications and has been in the ICU for a week. While her family is distraught, hoping she’ll recover, they probably can’t think of anything else to pray for. Instead of repeating Ya Allah, give her a full recovery, maybe they can look forward to the mom enjoying her baby’s first birthday or high school graduation in full health. Ya Allah, let her bake the baby’s first birthday cake. Ya Allah, let her make a heartfelt speech about her baby’s accomplishments at his graduation dinner.  Doesn’t that sound optimistic, exciting, and so beautiful? Sometimes, it is easier to repeat a dua and stay consistent with asking for it when the dua itself looks on the brighter side of a painful, trying situation.

Give Your Dua an Emotional Charge

The undercurrent to making dua regularly and being truly committed to it is being moved emotionally in some way. As mentioned above, the emotions can range from negative to positive–sadness, desperation, outrage, fear, excitement, joy, anticipation, etc. Finding an emotional charge for a dua, and specifically a “dream dua,” entails knowing it can be real and imagining it as so. Using visualization techniques, such as making a collage of photos that represent what the actualized dua would look like or imagining what it might smell or sound like, can help build the emotional charge we need to fuel our dua habit. We will find even more excitement when we ask for something if we’ve taken some time to relish in what it would be like to have that dua answered exactly as it has been asked.

Dua is not just Spontaneous, it Involves Careful Preparation and Diligent Work

Dua doesn’t have to be a spontaneous string of words that come from fleeting feelings in our hearts at the given time of the dua. Dream duas that we commit to repeating often involve careful preparation. We must introspect on our current lives and the future lives we wish to live. We can try to visualize what those duas would look, smell, feel, sound, and taste like. We can explore all of the possibilities and brainstorm before committing to a select few. We can think about the words that best capture what we imagine. It might take 10 or 20 attempts to find the perfect wording for a dua and even involve input from others. The duas we make don’t have to be carefully guarded and secret; we are welcome to get help for them. 

The work doesn’t stop at coming up with the duas. We can commit to making dua according to a dua habit we devise. (Specifically in Visionaire, the dua habit involves making dream duas multiple times a day/night throughout Ramadan and for 6 months afterwards.) We can also commit to working on making those duas come true with our own efforts, keeping in mind that we seek the worldly means and trust in Allah .3

Grand Duas Help us Grow

As humans, there is no point where we’ve finally “arrived” or “made it” in our lives because things constantly change. We are either growing or dying in everything we do. There is always another mountain to climb; we just have to be the ones to find it. The champion MMA fighter Khabib couldn’t get any higher than being a world champion, right? What he decided to pivot to next was coaching a future world champion. He found another goal to fight for. Our grand “dream duas” benefit us by helping us find, and eventually achieve, our next growth. 

Moreover, dream duas can help motivate us, keep us focused on a clear vision, and hold ourselves accountable. If we find that there are duas we keep coming back to over 5-10 years, we can double down on investing in ourselves in those areas to complete our end of the bargain.4 We can do whatever we can in that area and leave the rest to Allah .   

Don’t Feel Guilty about Making Dua for Dunya 

There is nothing wrong with making dua for the dunya. In the Quran, we are taught to say a dua that asks for the best in this dunya.

 

But among them is he who says, “Our Lord, give us in this world [that which is] good and in the Hereafter [that which is] good and protect us from the punishment of the Fire.” [Surah Al-Baqarah; 2:201]

The key is that we are not exclusively making dua for the dunya. That feeling of guilt is coming from Shaytan, who is trying to prevent us from engaging in a good deed. We shouldn’t be shy about asking for anything from Allah. As a matter of fact, the more we ask, the happier Allah is and the closer we become to Allah through dua. 

Another form of guilt that can deceive us is feeling as if we shouldn’t ask for more if we’re supposed to be grateful for what we already have. However, Allah states that those who are truly grateful will experience an ever-increasing abundance of more to be grateful for [https://quran.com/ibrahim/7.] This dispels the idea that being truly grateful means that a person will never deserve, or desire, more.

I’m Too Scared to Make Dua for the Wrong Thing

Some of us may be faced with dua paralysis when we feel nervous that we are going to ask Allah for something that will turn out to be bad for us in the end. To quell this fear, we should look at the three ways in which Allah answers duas. The first answer to the dua is yes, and exactly what the dua asked for. The second answer is yes, but not now. It will happen later. And the third is yes, but I have something better for you. The protection from making dua for a bad thing is built into the way Allah promises to answer all duas, so make the dua and then leave the rest to Allah . We must have the best opinion of Allah and know that He will always send us good according to His all-encompassing knowledge5.  

Dua is a Lifeforce that will Change You

Dua is a lifeforce that reminds us of the miracles that we are. Aren’t humans just “ghosts inside a skeletal meat living on a rock hurtling through space?” Shaykh Muhammad reminds us.6 Our lives are a sign of Our Creator, the One who can do what we aren’t even capable of imagining or knowing. Thus, dua isn’t about us; it’s about the all-powerful and infinite God whom we worship. As a matter of fact, even non-Muslims know dua works–they just call it by different names like manifesting, the principle of positive attraction, etc. Even Shaytan knows dua works…and he shows us how intensely he understands that duas are not about the asker, but the Responder. Shaytan makes the craziest dua–to live forever and have the power to tempt and lead mankind astray. That is a scary level of yaqeen we can all learn from.

Dua is the only tool we have to rewrite our destiny. Dua is larger than us. Sometimes we feel like we have to change a lot of things in our lives in order to start or return to making dua. However, we don’t need to change; all we need to do is begin in order for dua to change us. Allah will outstrip our smallest baby steps at the onset of this journey and facilitate our progress as we strive to turn and ask from Him.7 So, what are we waiting for now? Get excited about making dua. Godspeed!

 

Related:

– Constructing Your Personal Arafah Dua List I Sh. Muhammad Alshareef & Sh. Yahya Ibrahim

– From The Chaplain’s Desk: Sayyid Al-Istighfar – The Greatest Dua For Seeking Forgiveness

 

1    https://sunnah.com/bukhari:44632    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:35053    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:25174    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:25175    https://sunnah.com/bukhari:74056    https://quran.com/51/20-227    https://sunnah.com/ibnmajah:3821

The post What Shaykh Muhammad Al Shareef Taught Us About Making Dua appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Muslims swept off the street by ICE, Somalis in Minnesota targeted by racism from the President of America, Palestinian activists illegally detained: post-Trump America is a hellish dystopia… yet one that many Muslims voted for.

In this episode of the MuslimMatters Podcast, Zainab bint Younus speaks to Imam Dawud Walid about the political and cultural pendulum swinging to the right after the leftist allyship of the 2010s, and the phenomenon of Muslims voting for Trump in the last election. She asks him about his book “Towards Sacred Activism” and what priorities Muslims need to keep in mind before choosing to engage with or seek allyship with political and cultural groups in the West. Are Muslims meant to be right-wing or left-wing? Tune into this episode for a deep dive into this contentious discussion.

Imam Dawud Walid is currently the Executive Director of CAIR-Michigan, member of the Imams Council of Michigan, and advisory board member of Muslim Endorsement Council (MEC) which is a national endorsement and support organization for Islamic chaplaincy. Imam Dawud has ijazaat in various disciplines of the Islamic sciences, has served an imam for many years, in addition to writing several books, authoring essays, and speaking at multiple institutions around the world.

Related:

Podcast: Priorities and Protest | On Muslim Activism with Shaykhs Dawud Walid and Omar Suleiman

Holding Onto Prophetic Etiquettes When Protesting: Encouragement And Advice For Muslim Human Rights Advocates

The post [Podcast] Should Muslims Ally with Conservatives or Progressives? | Imam Dawud Walid appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The principal role for which Naledi Pandor of South Africa is known is politics, but her principal interest lies in education. During the final year of her career in 2024, the septuagenarian foreign minister of South Africa gave an education in principled politics with perhaps the most concrete step of any government minister against Israel’s assault on Palestine when she took them to an international court for genocide.

There were personal costs to pay, of course, given the ferocity of Zionist propaganda that has accompanied the genocide. Most recently, in November 202,5 her visa to the United States was revoked in an extraordinarily petty move, which was nonetheless celebrated by Zionist organizations, many of which had spent months attacking both South Africa in general and her in particular for having had the temerity to challenge their bloody assault on Palestine.

But for Pandor, the vindication of being on the right side of history was well worth it. Speaking at Ottawa during a whirlwind trip through Canada just days before the cancellation of her visa, she described the feeling when, after months of personal attacks, professional snubs, and outright mistreatment by both local rivals and foreign peers, her case was found to have been valid all along: “Thanks be to Allah, it’s a wonderful feeling.”

Not that there was any let-up in the urgency of the Palestinian cause, of course. With the genocide still afoot, she emphasized the importance of civil society and mass, organized international solidarity. Palestine’s plight required, she said, that its supporters “build a united global front” in support. This front can not afford parochialism, sectarianism, tribalism, and hatred.

Background

Pandor grew up amid the downtrodden black majority in apartheid South Africa in a family with both educational and political roots. Her grandfather, Zachariah Matthews, was a professor renowned throughout Africa, who was exiled from his homeland after opposing apartheid in 1956 and became a diplomat for the newly independent Botswana before he passed away. Though he was also exiled, Zachariah’s son Joseph Matthews, Pandor’s father, ended up taking a different route: after apartheid ended, he left his father’s party, though he served a few years as minister in charge of police in a subsequent coalition cabinet. By contrast, Pandor, like her grandfather, spent her political career in the African National Congress, which has ruled South Africa for the past three decades.

The African Congress’s rise to power in 1994 came at the end of several generations’ worth of struggle, where they were the main, banned party representing South Africa’s downtrodden majority against the apartheid regime. Their leader, Nelson Mandela, is renowned in anticolonial circles for, among other things, his unfettered solidarity with Palestine, famously remarking, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It was this internationalist solidarity that Pandor inherited; speaking at an event arranged by the Justice for All organization, she emphasized the need for human dignity and freedom across borders – highlighting, along with Palestine, the cases of Rohingya, Uyghurs, and Kashmiris as oppressed people deprived of their rights.

From South African Apartheid to Israeli Genocide

“Pandor stressed the importance of civil society as nimbler, more flexible form of activism than reliance on officialdom” [PC: Al Jazeera]

Israel’s supremacist regime over Palestinians has often been likened to apartheid; Pandor recounted the similarities in militarized townships, forcibly separated places for different races, and the seizure of land for European settlers. In some respects, the current situation is even more ludicrous: where the apartheid regime in South Africa handpicked puppets to impose on the majority black population, today Tony Blair, the former British prime minister and notorious neoconservative ideologue, is being trotted out as a prospective viceroy for a Gaza that does not want him.

But Pandor also emphasized certain key differences. In South Africa’s minority rule, the majority workers in unions were able to organize and protest on account of their importance to the South African economy, thus pressuring the same apartheid regime that deprived them. This is not applicable to Palestine, especially under the current genocide, where the role of international solidarity becomes that much more important.

Pandor stressed the importance of civil society as nimbler, more flexible form of activism than reliance on officialdom: civil society can also afford to stick to its principles in ways that officialdom may not. In taking political stances on principle, she remarked, “For some of us, we are there for freedom, for others we are there for the selfie – and actions will tell which one [is which].”

As an experienced diplomat, she lamented the limitations of even multilateral international bodies and particularly urged the reform of United Nations institutions to break free of the control of the major powers: “It is tragic that the body we rely on for peace and security,” she said, was dominated by five member states more responsible between them for global insecurity and war than the others put together.

The role of principled activism was therefore paramount for Pandor, who quoted Mandela’s advice to youth: “Be a person who makes trouble, but make good trouble.”

South Africa’s Fight for Justice, Home and Abroad

Fighting for a just cause dovetailed neatly with Pandor’s understanding of Islam, to which she converted earlier in life. The African Congress had a considerable amount of support among South Africa’s Muslim minorities, many of whom had been engaged in the campaign against apartheid. For Pandor, faith in Allah enabled her to withstand frequent barbed attacks from political opponents. These could go from sweeping bigotry, as evidenced by much of the attacks on South Africa’s current government in recent years, to the pettily personal: she drily recounted how rivals attacked a slight British inflection in her accent, having studied and taught in Britain in her youth.

Education was Pandor’s first job, and after a stint leading South Africa’s equivalent of a senate, the first woman to do so, she held a number of ministries largely related to educational advancement. She also served a brief stint as interior minister, and ended her ministerial career with five years as South Africa’s foreign minister. As a veteran politician well-versed in the cut and thrust of power, her initiative in a principled cause meant that much more. So too did her emphasis on the importance of civil society, something located well outside the realm of the corridors of power.

Since it threw off apartheid in the 1990s, South Africa has generally been seen as a leader on the African continent and is often catalogued among rising states in the international system. With that system having long been dominated by first colonial, and then Cold War superpowers’ competition, Pandor emphasized the importance of this moment in history: when these “Global Northern” powers, who have dominated international relations for centuries, are in flux. It was a huge opportunity, she said, for the “Global South” to reconfigure international relations to a more equitable keel.

It was only a few days later, after her trip to Canada, that Pandor found that her visa to travel to the United States had been revoked. This stemmed partly from a general hostility toward South Africa by the United States, especially during Donald Trump’s current reign, where far-right activists regularly and speciously claim that Pretoria’s anti-apartheid measures discriminate against the white minority.

This reached such a stage that Trump personally berated South African leader Cyril Ramaphosa for this fictitious oppression and offered asylum to white South Africans fleeing the country, a ludicrous proposition that even baffled many of its intended beneficiaries. And it also stemmed from a linked Zionist campaign against South Africa, which is accused of being in cahoots with Hamas to malign the Israeli state. Pandor, the highest-profile Muslim minister, a black veteran of the anti-apartheid movement, and the lady who took Israel to court, was a central target.

Throughout it all, the South African has kept a dry wit, a stiff upper lip, and an iron will. “Remain engaged until freedom is won,” she said at Ottawa. “That is all.”

 

Related:

– Who’s Afraid Of Dr Naledi Pandor? – Zionist Panic and a Visa Revoked

– When News Becomes Propaganda: Gaza, Genocide, And The Media

 

The post Iron Principle Under Pressure: A Profile Of Naledi Pandor appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

A day of prayer, work, and long-buried family truths ends with Darius left behind, wondering what he is not being told.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

* * *

Darius’s First Prayer

As ordered, I rose at dawn without prompting – I could almost hear my own cow back home calling, wanting to be milked – and dressed to tend to the morning duties.

As I walked toward the door, Haaris took my hand to stop me. “Not yet,” he said. “We have to pray Fajr.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but Zihan Ma entered from the front door, sleepy-eyed, but with his face and beard dripping water. He said gently, “Make wudu’. Haaris, show him how.”

Haaris led me out into the cold, to the outhouse. It was a long walk, as the outhouse was on the edge of the property next to the safflower fields, in an area where the land sloped downhill. There was a hedge planted in front of it, shielding it from view, and I saw that there were actually two of them. Haaris explained that it was a twin-pit system, in which one pit was allowed to decompose while the other was in use. When fully decomposed, it would be emptied and the waste would fertilize the fields. The latrines stank a bit, of course, and flies buzzed about. That was normal.

We relieved ourselves, then walked back to the house. On the western side of the house there was an open space with clothes lines strung up. The well was there, surrounded by a circle of flat stones, and with a large stone basin beside it. Using a ladle to scoop the water, Haaris showed me how to wash my hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hair, ears and feet.

“You do this every morning?” I was amazed, for I had typically not bathed more than once every three or four days.

“More than that,” Haaris said.

Inside, a large bamboo fiber mat had been laid down in the living room. We arranged ourselves in a formation, with Ma Shushu in front, myself and Haaris behind him, and Lee Ayi behind us. I understood that we were about to begin a religious ritual of some kind. Lee Ayi had assured me that they did not pray to statues, and that was obvious, as there was no statue in sight. According to her, they prayed to Allah, an eternal, all-powerful being.

“What if I am not yet ready to participate in this ritual?” I asked.

Ma Shushu gazed at me solemnly. “Nothing will happen. There is no compulsion in religion. You will still be a part of the family.”

I remembered my father’s words: “The only one to worship is Allah.” He had not explained, but my heart told me that if he were here, he would not object to this ritual, even if he himself did not participate. I exhaled, feeling my chest relax. “I will pray with you. But I don’t know what to do.”

“Just imitate Haaris’s movements for now. We will teach you the words later.”

I raised my hands as Haaris did, and Ma Shushu began to recite. The words were foreign, but his voice was deep and pleasant, and the rhythm of the chanting was hypnotic. I felt myself falling into River Flow, just as I did when practicing Five Animals. We bowed, stood, prostrated, sat, prostrated, and stood again. At one point we looked right and left, and I did not know the prayer was finished until Ma Shushu turned in his place and sat cross-legged.

“How do you feel?” he asked me.

I felt close to tears, was the truth. All those times I had stopped and watched the people in the temple, and felt envious of them in spite of their stupidity, and felt a pull to join them – now I understood why. I felt small and humble, but not humiliated, and certainly not stupid. Rather I felt elevated, not in a literal sense, but as if my heart had grown in my chest. I could not express any of this, and in the end I only said, “I feel calm.”

Ma Shushu nodded. “That is a good way to feel.”

Women’s Work

I was prepared to go out and start the farmwork, but Ma Shushu stopped me. “Not yet. Your shoulder is not ready. Only light housework for now.”

First I swept the entire house. Then Lee Ayi set me to work at the low table near the window, where the morning light poured in, deep and yellow. I sifted a huge sack of rice to remove small stones, and when that was done I shelled peanuts into a clay bowl, the dry skins crackling softly between my fingers. I worked quickly but methodically, not missing anything. My shoulder still ached, but the work was slow and did not strain it.

The scent of the peanuts reminded me of home, and I found myself missing Far Away and Lady Two. My poor cat. Where was he now? Running from house to house at night, pawing through the garbage for a scrap? A dairy cow was valuable, someone would always care for her. But a stray cat with no parents who loved him, no home, no job? They would throw stones and chase him away. I sighed.

“What’s wrong?” Lee Ayi asked as she rinsed a pile of vegetables.

I shook my head, saying nothing.

Outside, I could hear goats bleating and the dull thump of hooves, the steady noises of a working farm that went on without me.

Lee Ayi moved quietly in and of the room, taking the vegetables outside to dry on woven trays, and lifting lids to check simmering pots. Every so often she glanced at me, not to hurry me, but to be sure I was not favoring the wounded arm too much.

“You work like your father,” she said at last.

I looked up, startled. “Is that good or bad?”

She smiled faintly. “Both.”

She sat across from me and began stripping safflower petals from their heads, her fingers quick and practiced. The petals fell into a shallow basket like small flames.

“I feel bad,” I said, “that I am doing women’s work, while Haaris is outside by himself.”

Lee Ayi gave an annoyed click with her tongue. “There is no men’s work and women’s work. There is only work. All work holds dignity. A cook and a floor sweeper are no less dignified than a horse trainer or an army general. As Muslims, we serve Allah by serving humanity. When you work to benefit others you are working for Allah, and that is the highest calling.”

This was a foreign concept to me. What did humanity have to do with me? My father had never believed in serving anyone nor benefitting anyone except himself, me and my mother. Perhaps a compromise would be to understand it as service to family. By serving this family, I served Allah. I could accept that.

Highway Robbery

“Yong was always restless,” Lee Ayi said, as if reading my mind. “Even as a boy. Cai Lee tried to beat it out of him. It did not work. The harder Father pushed, the more Yong pushed back.”

I said nothing. I had never heard my father spoken of as a child.

“He had no patience for books,” she went on. “Nor for rules. The only things that ever held his attention were fighting and gambling. Martial skill came to him as easily as breathing. Gambling too. He was very lucky. Or perhaps very cursed.”

Her mouth tightened briefly, then relaxed again.

“He never cared for religion. Not even a little. When he began drinking as a teenager, Father said enough was enough. He cast him out. No food, no money, no place by the hearth.”

She did not look at me as she said this, but at the safflower petals.

“I used to meet him in secret,” she said quietly. “I would bring him steamed buns, or rice wrapped in cloth. A few coins. He always said he would pay me back one day.”

She gave a short, humorless laugh. “He never did.”

I would have smiled at the ridiculous notion of my father paying anyone back for anything, but the image of him as a hungry youth wandering the roads sat badly in my chest. As my father had lived, so had I as well. Was that the curse my aunt spoke of? Would I pass the same curse on to my own children?

“One day,” she continued, “Yong came upon a carriage stopped on the road, surrounded by three thieves. Highwaymen. Atop the carriage sat a noble Hui family, the Shahs. Among them was their daughter, Shah Nur. She was sixteen years old and beautiful. Yong fell in love at first sight.”

I froze, watching Lee Ayi intently. Shah Nur was my mother. I had never heard this story before, nor did I know anything about my mother’s family.

Lee Ayi went on: “I suspect if not for the beauty of Shah Nur, Yong would not have interfered. But he took it upon himself to attack the highwaymen. He carried nothing but a staff, while the highwaymen were armed with swords. Yet Yong killed one of the robbers in seconds. Seeing this, your grandfather, Shah Zheng, dismounted and joined in, taking the dead robber’s sword. Between them they drove the other two off.”

It was easy for me to imagine my father doing that. In my mind I could picture the entire battle, and could describe precisely what moves Yong had performed. This was the only incident I’d ever heard of in which my father’s fighting skills had been used to help someone. I felt proud of him.

The Shahs

“The Shahs,” Lee Ayi went on, “are descended from Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, the companion of the Prophet, peace be upon him, who brought Islam to our land. They are the most noble of us all, and the most wealthy, as they organize and finance huge caravans that carry goods from here to India, Persia and Turkey.”

“I saw a caravan once,” I enthused, pleased to be able to tell Lee Ayi something she did not know. “We passed it on the road from my family’s town to the city. It had fifty horse-drawn wagons, can you believe it? They were loaded up with textiles, spices, armor, pistachios, and other things I could not see. It was guarded by many men. I never thought there could be so many armed men outside of the army.”

“Did the wagons bear an emblem of a mountain peak surrounded by five stars?”

“Yes!” I grinned at her. “How did you know?”

“Those wagons belong to the Five Stars Trading Company. That is the Shah family’s company.”

I gaped. “One family owns all of that?”

“And much more. Anyway, Shah Zhen rewarded Yong well for saving their lives. It was more money than he had ever seen. It happened, however, that as he had fallen in love with Nur, she too was captivated by him. For the Shah family, such a match was out of the question. Yong was nominally Muslim, but he was a nobody, a lout. So Yong met with Nur secretly and convinced her to leave with him. It was madness. But she was young and brave, and ready for an adventure. They used the money to buy a farm in another town. They disappeared.”

She resumed stripping petals.

“After you were born, Yong came back only once, alone, to give us the news. But the Shah family had never stopped looking for Nur. They put a price on Yong’s head. He knew if he stayed, he would bring danger to us all. So he left again and never returned. We knew that you existed, but that was all.”

I set the last peanut into the bowl and rubbed my fingers together, brushing away the skins. A multitude of thoughts swirled in my head. I didn’t think my poor mother had gotten the adventure she dreamed of. My father had never been cruel to her, had never beat her, but neither had he been the loving husband she must have hoped for. He had a temper, he shouted at times, he went to town to drink and gamble, and he was in and out of jail as far back as I could remember. Our farmhouse was decrepit and non-productive, and we had been very poor. And now Shah Nur, daughter of a great and noble family, was buried in a small flower-lined plot behind an abandoned, broken-down farmhouse.

I must have been silent for a long time, because I found Lee Ayi beside me, rubbing my shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “What’s done is done. Your mother is with Allah, just as we all will be one day. The best thing you can do is remember her love for you. That is her legacy.”

I nodded. Feeling the need to defend Yong Lee, I said, “My father did better in the end. He changed.”

Lee Ayi nodded. “I believe it. He joined the army to provide for you. That was an act of love.”

My lower lip trembled at that, but I managed to stifle it.

Dhuhr

At that moment, Ma Shushu came in from outside, his arms and face again dripping water. “Time for Dhuhr,” he said simply.

We laid out the mats. Lee Ayi adjusted my cushion so I would not strain my shoulder. Haaris was still out in the fields, his voice carrying faintly as he called to the animals.

“What about Haaris?” I asked.

“He is tending to the animals,” Ma Shushu said. “He will pray on his own.”

I felt a flush of heat rise up my neck. The boy was outside working while I was in here, clean and sheltered, shucking peanuts and sifting rocks out of rice. I reminded myself of Lee Ayi’s words: All work holds dignity.

When the prayer was over, Ma Shushu – seeing my obvious embarrassment – said, “You will be back in the fields soon enough. Do not borrow tomorrow’s pride today.”

After prayer, we ate a simple meal. Rice, greens, a little salted fish. I ate slowly, forcing myself to be mindful.

Lee Ayi made a plate and asked me to take it out to Haaris. I found him in a wide, grassy field on the other side of the outhouses. I hadn’t even known this field existed. The scent of the grass was rich in my nostrils. Haaris sat on a boulder, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, holding a bamboo switch and watching the cows, donkeys, and goats as they grazed. His boots were dirty, and he looked tired. He accepted the plate eagerly and began to devour it.

“Watch the baby goat.” He indicated with the chopsticks. “It keeps trying to headbutt the calf.”

I squeezed in next to him on the boulder and watched. The goat was more than a baby – maybe six months old, I would guess, though my eye was unpracticed – while the cow’s calf was younger but much bigger. As I watched, the goat bleated loudly, reared up on its hind legs and aimed its forehead at the calf, which was busy grazing. At the last instant the calf moved its head to the side and the goat missed. Haaris laughed out loud, spitting a bite of green beans.

I smiled as well. “The goat is a fighter.”

“Say ma sha-Allah.”

“What is that?”

“Oh, it’s like, this is something good that Allah made.”

“Repeat it.”

Haaris repeated the phrase, and I did my best to pronounce it.

“I’d better get back,” I said.

“I’ll see you soon,” Haaris promised. “We have studies.”

Studies

I changed the sheets on the beds then took the food scraps – vegetable peels and such – out to the compost pile. Outside, the sounds of the farm went on. Inside, the day settled around me like a garment I was still learning how to wear.

A few hours later Haaris and I sat on woven mats in Ma Shushu’s study, the afternoon light slanting in through the window and laying a pale rectangle across the floor. A low desk stood before him, its surface worn smooth, with a stack of books neatly arranged at one corner. Haaris sat cross-legged beside me, already alert, his back straight and his hands folded in his lap as if lessons were a form of prayer in themselves.

Ma Shushu began with numbers.

He drew figures in charcoal on a wooden board, simple at first. Counting, grouping, dividing. Haaris answered quickly, eager to please. I was slower, unused to putting numbers to paper, but the logic of it came easily enough. When Ma Shushu shifted from grain tallies to weights and measures, I leaned forward without realizing it. This was useful knowledge. Real knowledge. The kind that kept accounts honest and prevented quarrels.

“Math is justice,” Ma Shushu said, tapping the board once. “If you cannot count, someone else will count for you, and it won’t be in your favor.”

After that came reading and writing. Haaris fetched brushes and ink while Ma Shushu laid out a sheet of paper. He wrote a single character and explained its strokes, the order, the balance. Haaris practiced carefully, tongue caught between his teeth. When it was my turn, my hand felt clumsy around the brush, but Ma Shushu corrected my grip without comment and had me try again.

“Slow,” he said. “Meaning comes from care.”

My father had taught me to read and write by drawing characters in the dirt, using the wooden training dao. I had literally grown up writing with a sword. However, I was not used to the brush, or the small scale. Once my hand became accustomed to the grip, and I learned to ease the pressure and make everything smaller, my hand began to flow. The brush whispered across the page.

“Have you done this before?” Ma Shushu asked. “You pick it up fast.”

“My father taught me using a – “ I stopped myself. “A stick.”

“A stick?” Ma Shushu sounded offended. He shrugged. “Well. Not everyone has resources.”

I stiffened for a moment, not sure if my father was being criticised. Then I took a breath and relaxed. I did not want to see my father and Zihan Ma as opposites or opponents. My father’s lessons in Five Animals had literally saved my life. Once, at the town fair, I had seen a relay race, where the teammates passed a red ribbon from one to the next. I imagined my father passing a ribbon on to Zihan Ma. I was that ribbon. That was my hope, anyway.

When the ink was set aside and the brushes rinsed, Ma Shushu poured water into three small cups. He drank first, then gestured for us to do the same.

“Now,” he said, “we speak of deen.”

Haaris shifted closer, his expression changing. This was his favorite part, I could tell.

Ma Shushu did not open a book. He rested his hands on his knees and looked at us, first at Haaris, then at me.

“All of it begins with tawheed,” he said. “The Oneness of Allah.”

He did not raise his voice or dramatize the words. He spoke as if stating a fact as simple as the sun rising in the east.

“There is one Creator. Not many. Nor should anything else in the creation be worshiped. When you understand this, many other questions become smaller.” He went on to explain the concept of tawheed, the Oneness of God, and its many applications to our lives. I began to understand that this central belief of Islam was deep and all-encompassing.

“That is enough for today,” he said eventually. “Tomorrow we continue.”

“What do you think?” Haaris asked me when the lesson was over.

“I think I have a lot to learn.” That was the best I could offer.

Jum’ah

The next day was Friday. Once again I was relegated to housework. Once the early morning tasks were done, Ma Shushu and Haaris began hitching the donkeys to the carriage. The carriage was piled high with safflowers that the farm laborers had harvested yesterday.

“Are we going to town?” I asked.

“Haaris and I are going,” Ma Shushu said. “It’s market day, and it’s Jum’ah, the main day of prayer for Muslims. We will deliver the safflowers to my sister and a few others, then attend prayer.”

“What about me?”

Ma Shushu did not meet my eyes. “Your shoulder is not healed yet. The jostling of the carriage would not be good for you.”

As they departed, all I saw was the back of the wagon and a heap of flowers. I waved, but no one saw me. The whole thing was very strange, and I couldn’t feeling there was something I wasn’t being told.

They were hardly out of sight when Lee Ayi called me to the west side of the house. She nodded to the clothes on the lines.

“Help me take these clothes down and fold them,” she said, speaking quickly. “Then take the lines down.”

“Some of the clothes are still damp,” I remarked as I took down a pair of Haaris’s trousers.

“Doesn’t matter,” Lee Ayi replied. “We’ll put them back up later.”

This made no sense to me, but I did as ordered. Lee Ayi worked fast, rushing, which was not like her at all.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 6 – A Single Step

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

 

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Searching for Signs of Spring: A Short Story

A Wish And A Cosmic Bird: A Play

The post Far Away [Part 5] – There Is Only Work appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Grief, an emotion, an exclusive state of being; a membership to which one never wants, but is nevertheless served. Thousands and thousands before me have lived through it, and many thousands more will come after me who will experience the aching pain of grief. I know for sure, each one of those lived experiences will be as unique as the leaves that drop from the trees at this time of year. As I finish yet another salah where I’m wiping away tears with my prayer garment, I feel an intense throbbing, deep inside my heart, a struggle that erupts out as tears. It seems to have no end. 

It is a Sunday night, which means work tomorrow; the beginning of yet another week where I will carry my invisible yet ever-so-heavy grief around with me: finding that smile when greeting others, listening attentively, and communicating, because, as expressed in every language, life must go on. It’s now a little over a year since I lost my father. I have carried on in the best way I can, making sure I only cry behind closed doors. You see, the problem with that is, you are then always expected to carry on – so the invisible weight of grief becomes even heavier on the already constricted heart. 

Understanding Fate

At times, usually when I’m driving, I remind myself of the immense blessing of grieving for my father well into my forties. Allah , Ar-Rahman, blessed me with a kind and loving father for over four decades – a gift many hundreds of people have not been privileged to have. I have seen close friends and family lose loved ones at much younger ages, and they have carried on beautifully. Why then does my heart hurt in this way? Am I an ungrateful soul? I’m not sure I know the answer to this. Can a grateful heart not feel pain?  Isn’t pain also an emotion felt by the living, just as gratitude is? Just because I cry, does it mean I am not accepting of Allah’s beautiful and perfect decree in my life? 

It is the human in us. The very thing that differentiates us from all of Allah’s Creation is our ability to feel continuously. We love and are loved, but this does not mean that we don’t experience sorrow or are exempt from hurting others. We can be grateful, yet have endless tears. This is what makes us humans with hearts: a heart that is more than an organ, a heart that feels. This is what my year-long exclusive membership to the emotional field of grief has taught me. It is one of the many emotional states that will now be with me – until I myself leave this dunya. I can hide it, but I cannot avoid it. I may never find the right words to describe it, but every inch of my beating heart will feel it every single day. 

Grieving As A Believer

“Life has to go on, but how should a heart carrying the badge of grief carry on?” [PC: Duniah Almasri (unsplash)]

Life has to go on, but how should a heart carrying the badge of grief carry on? The Qur’an and the Seerah of Prophet Muhammad are my answer. You would think worship is easier for the one who loses someone dear, but no one talks about how you freeze with worship when grieving. How the heart has a yearning to connect with its Lord, but the mind remains still, lost and struggling to move. It is then that the years of holding the mus’haf close to the heart help revive it for worship. It is then, -knowing that the tears running down Muhammad’s (saw) face after losing his infant child, knowing he continued with his role as the last Prophet of Islam-, that this helps you take steps towards living life. We know about all the losses in his life, from before his birth; from the death of his father, to losing his mother, grandfather and then later his beloved wife and uncle. The seerah weighs heavily with death and grieving, but life, purpose and calling upon Allah continue. It is then that you are reminded of what a real human experience of grief is, because in the example of the Prophet Muhammad , we know is for us the ideal believer and human. 

I don’t think anyone truly learns to live with grief. I think it can be soul-consuming; we either park it somewhere or find a way to carry it with us – but it is always there. At times, the intensity of missing someone, remembering their face, the pain they lived with, the sacrifices they made, all of this and more, can make us feel lost and detached from the every day of life. It is for these moments that having a daily relationship with the Qur’an brings focus back into our day, allowing us to understand how life can feel bearable.

For many years now, I have run a group of daily Qur’an recitation with other sisters. We recite ten verses a day and read the translation of the same ten verses. This has been running for over a decade now, but it was in my year of grief that the group was my anchor and I realised the true blessing of having a daily relationship with the Qur’an. For all the verses I had read and learnt about, they came as a soothing balm in my time of hurt. It allowed me not to be dismissive of feelings but rather gave meaning and purpose to the overwhelming fear that comes with mourning someone we love. It is a form of therapy, but with the Words of Allah – His Speech – how can we not find comfort in it? 

 “Your Lord has not forsaken you” [ Surah Ad-Duha;93:3]

Dua’ – A Gift For The Deceased And For The Living 

After a year-long journey of wiping away tears at night and walking with a forced smile during the day, I have taught myself to make dua’ for my father’s soul in a way I have not done so before. There is an enormous comfort in knowing that when we make dua’ for a departed soul, they benefit from it. 

Abu Huraira narrated that “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ said, ‘Verily, Allah Almighty will raise the status of his righteous servant in paradise, and he will say, ‘O Lord, what is this?’ Allah will say, ‘This is (due to) your child seeking forgiveness for you.’” [Sunan Ibn Majah]

I cannot express in words how much relief this provides me. To know that my good actions can aid my father now allows me to continue; it allows me to want to do good, and it also helps this private experience to feel acceptable. 

Allah , The Most Wise, in His Wisdom permitted us, His servants, to know about this; to know that we can benefit those who have left the dunya. This knowledge that He has shared with us of the unseen is of great benefit for both the living and the dead. 

Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah (saw) said: “When the human being dies, his deeds end except for three: ongoing charity, beneficial knowledge, or a righteous child who prays for him.” [Sahih Muslim]

It is by knowing this that a grieving believer can refresh and re-intend to carry out good. It is by knowing that I shall make every tear a means of dua’ for my father, but also live such a life that I do both: attempt at being a righteous child of my father’s, but also leave behind children who will also pray for me in this way. In order for this to happen, there is much work. And this is faith. This is what faith is like for us Muslims. It is not something confined to our prayer mats, but has to be present when we do everything else; and this includes when and how we grieve, too. It is only because of faith that I am able to navigate the waves of sorrow and understand its permanent residence in my life. 

 

Related:

– Unheard, Unspoken: The Secret Side Of Grief

– Sharing Grief: A 10 Point Primer On Condolence

The post Keeping The Faith After Loss: How To Save A Grieving Heart appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Every dictatorship eventually collides with a problem it cannot solve by expanding prisons, perfecting surveillance, or laundering repression through emergency laws. That problem is conscience. Not the decorative conscience wheeled out in constitutional preambles or Friday sermons, but the dangerous, embodied kind: people who insist on calling crimes by their proper names, who refuse to perfume mass violence with the language of “security” or “complexity,” and who behave — almost scandalously — as if power were still accountable to principle.

Pakistan’s rulers understand this problem well. They have built an entire governing philosophy around neutralizing it.

In Pakistan today, Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan occupies precisely this intolerable space. He does not command mobs. He does not control institutions. He does not benefit from the romantic mythology reserved for martyrs or political prisoners. What he possesses instead is far more destabilizing to a regime addicted to fear and confusion: moral coherence. He behaves as if ethical clarity were not a public-relations liability to be managed but a responsibility to be exercised.

That posture — quiet, disciplined, unyielding — explains why he matters. It also explains why he is dangerous.

Moral Presence in an Age of Managed Brutality

Authoritarian systems are, above all, management projects. Pakistan is no exception. It manages narratives, crises, alliances, dissent, and public memory with the meticulousness of a corporate risk department. What it cannot manage — what consistently escapes its spreadsheets and talking points — is moral presence.

Moral presence is disruptive because it refuses translation. It refuses to convert injustice into “context,” mass killing into “geopolitics,” or repression into “stability.” It insists that some acts are wrong regardless of who commits them, how eloquently they are justified, or how many uniforms are involved.

Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan’s politics operate in this register. His participation in the Gaza solidarity flotilla was not a publicity stunt or an exercise in symbolic humanitarianism. It was a direct refusal to outsource solidarity to press releases. At a moment when Muslim rulers perfected the art of condemning genocide in the passive voice — where Palestinians are always “dying” but never being killed — he chose presence over prose.

He crossed a line Pakistan’s generals, bureaucrats, and their Western patrons desperately prefer remain blurred: the line between rhetorical sympathy and embodied accountability.

That decision reverberated far beyond Gaza. It landed squarely in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, and in the quiet calculations of a regime that understands — perhaps better than its critics — how contagious moral consistency can be.

Two Consciences, Two Cells

Pakistan’s current moment is defined by a grim symmetry. Its two most morally resonant political figures now occupy opposite sides of a prison wall.

Imran Khan, jailed, censored, and methodically erased from public life, embodies the conscience of mass politics: the inconvenient truth that popular legitimacy cannot be indefinitely manufactured, managed, or extinguished. Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan, still free for now, embodies something the regime finds equally threatening: proof that ethical clarity does not require state power, mass rallies, or electoral machinery.

The regime grasps this distinction instinctively. Mass leaders can be isolated, demonized, or imprisoned. Moral leaders are harder to neutralize. They do not rely on crowds or cycles. Their authority travels horizontally, through example rather than command. It accumulates quietly, beneath the regime’s noise, until it becomes impossible to contain.

This is why Senator Mushtaq’s activism has sharpened rather than softened. Through the Pak-Palestine Forum and the Peoples Rights Movement, he has rejected the regime’s preferred compartmentalization — one in which Palestine is mourned abstractly while Pakistan is governed brutally, one in which foreign oppression is lamented while domestic repression is normalized.

He insists, instead, on linkage. That insistence is unforgivable.

The Crime of Consistency

Dictatorships do not fear hypocrisy. They depend on it. Hypocrisy is the lubricating oil for authoritarian rule. What they cannot tolerate is consistency.

“Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan’s politics operate in this register. His participation in the Gaza solidarity flotilla was not a publicity stunt or an exercise in symbolic humanitarianism. It was a direct refusal to outsource solidarity to press releases.” [PC: @SenatorMushtaq, US Social Media Company X]

To denounce Zionist apartheid rhetorically while collaborating with its regional enablers is acceptable. To mourn Palestinian corpses abroad while disappearing Pakistanis at home is standard operating procedure. To oppose domination — imperial, military, or ideological — without qualification is destabilizing. It deprives power of its favorite alibi: “context.”

This is what unites the figures Pakistan’s current rulers find most intolerable.

Barrister Shahzad Akbar’s insistence that law should function as principle rather than weapon cost him safety and exile. Imaan Mazari’s defiance — amplified rather than tempered by her mother, Dr. Shireen Mazari — ruptures the convenient fiction that human rights must be suspended in imperfect governments. Dr. Mazari’s tenure as minister for human rights is dismissed not because it failed, but because acknowledging it would complicate the intellectual laziness of liberal gatekeepers.

Dr. Yasmin Rashid’s endurance, Ammar Ali Jan’s principled radicalism, and the courage of Baloch and Pashtun leaders resisting erasure under conditions bordering on colonial occupation all represent variations of the same threat: they refuse to turn politics into branding. They insist on substance where power prefers symbolism.

The regime’s response is uniform: criminalization, vilification, disappearance. Consistency is met with coercion because it cannot be bargained with.

The Unnamed Majority and the Regime’s Real Fear

To focus only on prominent figures, however, is to miss how resistance actually survives.

Dictatorships are not undone by heroes. They are undone by accumulation — by the steady aggregation of small refusals. A taxi driver who speaks honestly despite surveillance. A teacher who refuses to recite official lies. A lawyer who takes a case she knows she will lose. A journalist who documents one more testimony before the knock comes.

These people will never be celebrated. That is precisely why they terrify power.

Authoritarianism survives by convincing people that their courage is singular. Fear isolates. It interrupts accumulation. It persuades individuals that resistance is futile when, in fact, it is shared.

Pakistan’s rulers invest obsessively in fear because they understand this arithmetic.

Palestine as a Moral X-Ray

Linking Palestine to Pakistan’s internal crisis is not a rhetorical excess. It is an analytical necessity.

Palestine functions as a moral X-ray of the contemporary world order. It reveals how easily states abandon principle when convenience beckons. It exposes the vocabulary through which mass murder is sanitized — “security,” “self-defense,” “rules-based order” —  how those same vocabularies migrate seamlessly into domestic repression.

Zionism, as practiced by the Israeli state, is not an aberration. It is a concentrated expression of a global logic that treats some lives as disposable and others as strategically valuable. The same logic that justifies the annihilation of Gaza authorizes the pacification of dissent in Pakistan.

When Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan speaks against apartheid-genocidal Israel, he is not performing internationalism. He is diagnosing a system. That diagnosis unnerves Pakistan’s rulers because it collapses the distance they rely on. It reveals that the victims of empire recognize one another — even when their oppressors coordinate discreetly.

The Regime’s Dilemma

Pakistan’s rulers depend on fragmentation — between causes, movements, and moral vocabularies. They prefer activists who choose single issues and avoid dangerous connections. They are deeply threatened by figures who connect dots.

Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan does exactly that. He refuses to choose between Palestine and Pakistan, between anti-Zionism and anti-dictatorship, between faith-based ethics and universal human dignity. He insists these struggles are not adjacent but inseparable.

That insistence is his protection and his peril.

For now, he remains outside prison. History suggests this is rarely permanent.

The Final Accounting

A reckoning will come. Prisons will open. Files will be read. Silence will be reclassified as collaboration.

When that day arrives, many will rediscover their principles retroactively. Some will plead ignorance. Others will invoke “complexity.” A few will insist they were merely pragmatic.

Very few will be able to say they spoke plainly when plain speech carried a cost.

Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan will be among them.

So will the thousands whose names will never appear in essays like this.

Dictatorships do not fall because they are exposed. They fall because they are exhausted by the relentless refusal of ordinary people to surrender their moral vocabulary.

That refusal is Pakistan’s most valuable resource.

And it remains — despite everything — uncaptured.

 

[Disclaimer: this article reflects the views of the author, and not necessarily those of MuslimMatters; a non-profit organization that welcomes editorials with diverse political perspectives.]

 

Related:

– Allies In War, Enemies In Peace: The Unraveling Of Pakistan–Taliban Relations

– The Graveyard Of Normalcy – New Report Uncovers Egregious Human Rights Violations In Indian-occupied Kashmir

The post Op-Ed: From Pakistan To Gaza – Why Senator Mushtaq Ahmad Khan Terrifies Power And Zionism appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The sandwich generation, or ‘sandwich carers’, refers to adult individuals who provide unpaid care to ageing parents or older relatives while simultaneously raising their dependent children. In the UK, around 2% of the population1 provides “sandwich care,” balancing responsibilities for both children under 16 and older adults in need of support. Whereas in the US, the percentage is much higher, with 23% of adults “sandwiched between their children and an ageing parent.”2

This study proved that – unsurprisingly – sandwich generation carers are at a greater risk of mental health struggles and need support. 

Equity In Eldercare

In my youthful naivete, I strongly believed that when it came to looking after one’s ageing parents, it had to be distributed equally according to the number of children. By my logic, if an elderly couple had four children, then all four of them had to take turns to look after their parents. Only children have the responsibility of caring for both ageing parents with no siblings to lean on, except for a loving and supportive spouse, if they have one.

Many decades later, I have come to realize that no matter how many children there are in a family, except in rare circumstances, the bulk of eldercare usually falls on one adult child and his/her spouse and children. One of my friends, a Malaysian cardiologist who encounters many ageing elders, echoes seeing the same thing in her clinical practice across both Muslim and non-Muslim families.

The rise of individualism in today’s world is probably a driving force in elder neglect. When families lived closer together, the norm was for all children to help in the care of their elders. With the rise in economic migration and diaspora Muslim communities, the elders who did not move with their children are often left behind in their old age. 

Cultural Expectations vs Islamic Obligations

There seem to be many cultural “myths” when it comes to caring for elders. In Malaysia, where I live, the responsibility for eldercare often lies with adult daughters, even if families have sons. This may be due to the strongly matriarchal society and women often being the main income earners. In other parts of the world, the emphasis is on adult sons looking after their parents, even if they also have daughters. Desis have an expectation of the eldest son caring for his parents, when the actual work gets shifted onto his wife. 

The reality is this: Islamically, eldercare responsibility lies on all adult children, regardless of gender. Caring for one’s parents is a fardul ‘ain (individual responsibility), and not a fardul kifayah (communal responsibility). One child caring for an ageing parent does not lift the responsibility from other children.

An Unfortunate Bias

“The reality is this: Islamically, eldercare responsibility lies on all adult children, regardless of gender.” [PC: Raymond Yeung (unsplash)]

Often, the hidden subtext of the adult son looking after his parents is this: while he goes to work and earns an income to support his family, it’s actually his wife who is expected to look after his parents. She’s the one already looking after their children, after all, so the cultural expectation is for her to extend her caregiving duties to her in-laws. Why not? She’s already at home, anyway, right? 

Caring for her in-laws is not her Islamic obligation – her obligation is to care for her husband, children, and her parents! Undoubtedly, she will be rewarded for caring for her in-laws, but once again, that is not her obligation. A daughter-in-law caring for her husband’s parents is a recommended act which is not lost on Allah . 

However, it’s important to realize a burnt-out daughter-in-law will be less likely to fulfil her actual obligations: her husband and children. May Allah guide and have mercy on all of our families, and help us all do better.

No Easy Answers, But Everything Is From Allah

When it comes to equitable eldercare, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for families who are spread throughout the globe. Even with all adult children in the same city, eldercare is probably not distributed equitably either. Someone will have to sacrifice something for an unknown period of time.

In the best case scenario, all adult siblings step up in their best ways possible, put their differences aside, and work as a team to care for their ageing parents. Sadly, this is not always the case. When eldercare is left to only one adult child and his/her household, it can be so frustrating to ask for help, only to have minimal response from other siblings. 

What helps is always turning to Allah and making choices that align with His Pleasure. If you are bearing the load of eldercare, please know that this is a sign of Allah’s Love and honouring of you, through service to your elderly parents. Their dua’s for you will bring about tremendous goodness to you – even if it may not be immediately apparent.

Tips For Making Eldercare Easier

If you are the main carer for both elders and young children, here are some tips that may help:

1) Build a strong support network: Nobody can look after elders or children on their own without burning out, let alone when looking after both age groups! Please don’t wait until you are on the brink of a mental breakdown, but rather proactively have a conversation with family and/or loved ones, and discuss how everyone can help support you in caring for the elders under your care.

2) Build in breaks: Try your best to build in regular daily, weekly, monthly and yearly ‘pressure release valves’ – for lack of a better term. When family comes to visit and spends quality time with your ageing elder, use that opportunity to rest and recharge.

3) Elder vacations: Before elders struggle with more severe health issues, arrange for them to go for a holiday in another adult child’s household. Even if they might be reluctant to leave their comfort zone, this break will give a much-needed respite for the main household of carers.

4) Acceptance: Sadly, as health issues often worsen in old age, there will come a time when ageing parents will no longer be able to travel. This is the time for them to be visited and cared for, especially by adult children who live far away or are absent for other reasons.

Imam Ahmad narrated that Usamah bin Sharik (may Allah be pleased with him) said, “I was with the Prophet Muhammad (Alla when the Bedouins came to him and said, ‘O Messenger of Allah, should we seek medicine?’ He said, ‘Yes, O slaves of Allah, seek medicine, for Allah has not created a disease except that He has created its cure, except for one illness.’ They said, ‘And what is that?’ He said, ‘old age.’” [Ahmad, Tirmidhi, Abu Dawud]

Conclusion

Marriage is a lifelong commitment that not only includes the care and raising of children, but also the care and burying of elders. When families were closer together and Islamic values were more prevalent, discussions around eldercare weren’t even necessary among siblings. Elders were cherished and cared for by their adult children and grandchildren until the end of their long and blessed lives.

Now, there needs to be a revival of more intentional conversations around eldercare, especially with the rise of individualism and the cultural bias that expects only eldest/youngest sons to do the heavy lifting. Every single adult child has a role to play, even if it’s inconvenient. The door of service to our elders is a golden opportunity that only lasts for as long as they are with us in this dunya. Once they pass away, that door closes, never to be opened again.

 

Related:

– Avoid Financial Elder Abuse Through Islamic Principles

– Restoring Balance In An Individualized Society: The Islamic Perspective on Parent-Child Relationships

1    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00333506240049792    https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/08/more-than-half-of-americans-in-their-40s-are-sandwiched-between-an-aging-parent-and-their-own-children/

The post The Sandwich Carers: Navigating The Islamic Obligation Of Eldercare appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Gravely wounded and fevered, Darius wakes among strangers who may become the first real family he has ever known.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

* * *

Safe

I drifted in and out of a gray place. Sometimes I was in my father’s house and the rats were chewing at my shoulder instead of the crop. Sometimes I was in the temple pool, and the carp had human faces and they were all my father, all of them judging me in silence.

Once I woke up enough to feel something sharp slide into my skin near the wound, and I tried to fight, but a strong hand pressed my good shoulder down and a calm voice said, “Lie still. I am drawing the heat out. Do you want to keep the arm or not?” Then the darkness pulled me under again.

When I finally woke properly, I lay on a narrow pallet in a small, clean room. My shoulder throbbed dully. The air smelled of herbs, smoke, and something bitter I did not recognize. Light filtered in through a paper-covered window, soft and white. Shelves on the walls held clay and glass jars containing herbs, and I knew not what else. A rectangular plaque on the wall displayed words in a flowing script that I could not read, and an ornate wooden desk and chair stood beneath the window, with a stack of books atop the desk.

I had never seen so many books, and thought that this family must be very wealthy. I saw my traveling pack in the corner, but there was no sign of my weapons. My tunic had been washed and repaired.

I suddenly remembered my money kept in a secret pocket inside my tunic. I clutched frantically and felt the purse beneath the shirt, the weight of the money still there. The movement sent a bolt of pain through me so sharp that I gasped.

“Easy.” The word came from my left and just behind me.

I turned my head. A woman sat on a low stool beside the bed. She was short, with strong hands stained faintly with safflower dye. It was the woman who had stood at the doorway, though she no longer seemed as fearsome as she had then. Even if no one had told me, I would have known she was my aunt, as she looked so much like my father she could have been his twin. Maybe she was his twin, for all I knew. She was a beautiful woman, lean and strong, with smooth features and high cheekbones. It occurred to me for the first time that if she was beautiful, perhaps my father was handsome. I had never thought of him that way.

“Your purse is intact,” she said. “We are not thieves. You are safe here.” She held a damp cloth, and now she reached out and wiped my face with it, as if I were a much younger child. Then she helped me sit just enough to sip from a cup. The water was cool and tasted faintly of some bitter root. I grimaced.

“It will help,” she said. “My husband boiled it with herbs for the fever. Now stay here, do not move.” She rose and stepped out of the room, and a moment later, the man I’d encountered at the door earlier stepped into the room. His face was dark and handsome, with a thick black mustache and inquiring black eyes. His hair fell to his shoulders in soft waves. Behind him peered the boy I had seen behind him at the door, his eyes bright and curious.

“Hi,” the boy said. “I’m Haaris.”

Questions

“Hush, do not speak to him,” the father said. He nodded to me. “I am Zihan Ma. I am a healer. How is the shoulder?”

“It hurts,” I said honestly.

“That’s normal.” He stepped forward and laid a hand on my forehead. “The fever has broken, alhamdulillah.” Gently, he pulled the tunic off my shoulder. A strip of cloth was wrapped around my upper arm to hold the bandage in place. With quick, practiced fingers, he loosened the cloth around my arm and lifted the edge of the bandage.

Cool air touched the wound. I hissed.

“Hold still.” He studied it for a moment, then nodded, satisfied. “The flesh is no longer angry. It will leave a scar, but you will keep the arm.”

The boy edged closer. “Can I see?” he whispered.

“Let him breathe.” Zihan Ma glanced down at me. His eyes were measuring, weighing me as my father used to weigh a prospective victim with a single glance. “You can stay another day and night to rest, but then you must leave. This is not a hospital, nor an orphanage. We cannot care for you.”

“But -” I stammered. I felt as if I’d just been struck in the stomach. “Where will I go? I have no one else.”

Jade Lee touched my arm gently. “Where are your parents?”

I breathed deeply, trying to get myself under control. “My mother died when I was seven. My father, Yong Lee, went to fight the invaders. They say he is dead. I came here to find you.”

Jade Lee drew her head back, staring at me. “What is your name?”

“I am Darius Lee, son of Yong Lee, son of Cai Lee.” That was all I knew of my ancestry.

“Eh?” Jade Lee seized me by the shoulders. “Darweesh? Is it really you? Of course it is, look at you! You look just like your mother. I am your aunt!” She seized me and embraced me tightly, and I went completely stiff. No one had ever hugged me except my mother, and my father just that one time. Sensing my discomfort, she pulled away again. “You say Yong is dead?” Her voice softened. “Was it the drinking?”

I shook my head. “He quit drinking in the end. He enlisted in the army and died fighting the invaders. The Mayor would not let me stay on the farm alone, even though I brought in the peanut crop by myself.”

She looked stunned. “He enlisted? But why? He never cared about anything but himself, and certainly never cared about politics or patriotism. He did not even care about his faith.”

“Rats destroyed our crop. I believe… I think he wanted to do something for me. To provide me with a future.” I shrugged. “We never spoke of such things.”

“How did you get the shoulder wound?” Zihan Ma asked. His tone was firm but not accusatory.

“Two robbers attacked me in the town. A constable stopped them.” I did not mention that I had sliced a man’s face open.

“You smelled strongly of wine. Are you a drunk like your father?”

“Husband!” Jade Lee rebuked. “That is no way to speak of the dead.”

“It is the living I am worried about. You know what Yong was like.”

Zihan Ma’s words angered me, but I restrained myself and spoke calmly. “I do not drink. I poured wine over the wound to clean it. And my father was more than what you say.”

“Why do you carry weapons?”

“The dao was a parting gift from my father. The spear, too, was his.” I did not tell him that I had killed two men with the dao. That was definitely not something he needed to know.

A Plea

It was obvious that Zihan Ma was not happy about me being here, and suspected that I brought trouble to his door. Maybe he was right. My whole life had been a struggle. I was like a piece of metal being shaped by a blacksmith. There might be a moment of quiet, but another hammer blow was coming soon enough.

But I sensed that Zihan Ma was a good man. Judging by Haaris’s health and apparent innocence, and Jade Lee’s overall well-being, I knew that I would not be beaten here, I would not be cursed. I would be fed and treated decently, and I needed that so badly, I was desperate for it. I had told myself that I could take to the road and survive on my own, stealing and grifting, but now that I sat in this comfortable home, with hot food on the table, I cringed at the thought of leaving.

“Sir,” I said. “Ma Shushu.” (It was hopeful of me to address him formally as Uncle Ma). “If you’ll let me stay, I won’t be a burden. I brought in two peanut crops on my own, without help. I had a cow. I’m used to hard work. I know what my father was like, everyone does. But I won’t steal from you or make trouble.”

I reached into my coat, took out my purse, and tried to empty it onto the bed. But my hand shook, and the nine gold coins spilled out, some onto the bed and some rolling across the floor. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” I was growing increasingly panicked. “This is the money from my father’s enlistment, and the monthly salary he sent, and from my last peanut crop. You see, I have no need to steal. You can take it. You’ll see how hard I work. Please.”

With the last word, my voice broke, and I began to sob. I was deeply ashamed of this, and pulled my tunic over my face. I had not even wept for my father’s death, and here I was crying to be allowed to stay in the home of virtual strangers. My aunt leaned in quickly and pulled me to her.

“You poor boy,” she said. “Of course you can stay. Isn’t that right, husband?”

I pulled out of my aunt’s embrace and wiped my nose and eyes with my coat.

“Please, Daddy,” Haaris said. “Let him stay.”

Zihan Ma gave a slight nod. “All this pleading is unnecessary. You are family, Darweesh. Of course, you may stay; that is a given.” Haaris had already picked up the fallen money, and Zihan Ma returned it to me. “Keep your money, put it away.”

From that moment on, I was part of the family. I always addressed my aunt as “Lee Ayi” – Aunt Lee – and Zihan Ma as Ma Shushu.

Recovery

They let me sleep again after that, and the rest of the day blurred. In the evening, Lee Āyí changed my bandage, then fed me a delicious chicken soup that, by itself, nearly made the entire ordeal worthwhile.

After that, Haaris sat cross-legged on the floor and told me stories of the goats and the donkeys and the cat named Bao, as if he had decided that words alone could keep me alive. The younger donkey, he said, loved to eat watermelon. “He takes huge bites,” he laughed. “Gobbles it right down to the rind.” I tried to imagine this, and found myself smiling. At the same time, I was a bit jealous, as I had never eaten watermelon myself!

The next morning, I woke to feel thin, hot needles pricking the skin around my shoulder; I tensed, but Ma Shushu’s voice came calm and unhurried: “Breathe. In and out. Let the qi move.” I did not know what qi was, but I obeyed. I felt vastly improved. The pain in my shoulder was down to no more than a slight ache. By lunch time, I was out of bed and walking. My head felt clear, and my limbs were my own again.

My aunt helped me sit on a cushion in the main room, then proceeded to set food on the table. It was a low wooden table polished smooth by years of elbows and bowls, and on it were dishes that made my stomach clench with hunger. Steamed greens glistening with sesame oil, soft white rice piled in a clay bowl, slices of beef in a dark, fragrant sauce, pickled radish, braised eggplant, and a tureen of soup filled with mushrooms and tofu. To me, it looked like a feast for a noble.

Home Now

We sat on woven mats. The warmth of the room seeped into my bones, and for a moment I simply breathed in the scents – ginger and garlic, simmered broth, cooked meat. Lee Āyí took her seat beside Haaris, and Ma Shushu settled across from me, his knees cracking softly as he folded his legs.

Before anyone lifted a bowl, he raised his hands slightly and said, “Bismillah ar-Rahman ar-Raheem.” Then he spoke a short prayer in a steady, calm voice, asking Allah to bless the food and the family and the guest who had come into their home.

I stared blankly, unsure if I should bow my head. I desperately wished not to offend these people, but I could not bring myself to worship something that, for all I knew, was yet another statue. My aunt noticed. Something in her eyes softened – not pity exactly, but a recognition of what had been missing in my life all these years.

“Darweesh,” she said gently, “your father taught you nothing of our faith, did he?”

Her tone was neither surprised nor harsh; rather, it held the sadness of someone confirming what they already suspected.

“No, he did not,” I said quietly. “I once heard the name Allah, but I do not know what it means. My father… disliked the worship of statues. If that is what you do, I cannot participate. I do not mean to offend you, truly. Please forgive me.”

Ma Shushu said, “Statues?” and his face reddened. I had indeed offended him. But my aunt put a hand on his arm to still him, and spoke to me: “We do not worship statues. We are Hui people, you, me, and both your parents, and their parents, and so on. Our people have been Muslim for over a thousand years. We worship Allah, the Creator of all. The One who gave us life, provides this food, who has always existed and will always exist, and who knows all things. Unlike the idols, we did not create Him. He created us.”

I mulled this over, trying to conceive of such a being. “But,” I finally said, “if this – Allah – created all things, then who created him?”

“No one. He is Eternal. This world, the sun and moon” – she waved a hand – “and the stars in the sky are like grains of sand in Allah’s Hand. He is a merciful God, full of generosity and forgiveness. He hears our prayers and is closer to us than our own jugular veins.”

I swallowed, not knowing what to say. This sounded like a wonderful fairy tale. On the other hand, I’d had a lifelong fascination with temples, and a yearning to lose myself in the worship of a deity who was actually worthy of my adoration. Wasn’t that a sign of some knowledge inherent in my soul? Some recognition that such a being must exist?

Ma Shushu put up a hand. “It does not matter for now if you believe as we do. You will be required to learn this religion, which is called Islam, but you will not be forced to practice it. Now let us eat while the food is hot.”

“Yes, Darweesh,” my aunt said. “Husband is right. You will learn. You are home now.”

The word home struck me strangely. I did not know what to do with it, so I pretended not to hear.

We began to eat. The cat, Bao, appeared as if by magic, and sat beside Haaris, licking her lips. As we ate, Haaris dropped small pieces of beef fat for Bao, who chewed them so noisily that I almost laughed. I tried to restrain myself and to eat in a civilized way, but after the first few bites, my hunger overcame my manners – what few I had. The food was soft and warm and rich in ways I had forgotten were possible. When I devoured a bowl of rice and tofu too quickly, Haaris grinned and pushed the pot toward me. “We always cook plenty,” he said. “Mama says growing boys eat like wolves.”

Aunt Lee swatted him lightly. “Do not tease Darweesh.”

I cleared my throat. “Actually, Lee Ayi, my name is Darius. That is what my father always called me.”

She smiled. “Very well. Darius. You gave us quite a fright, you know. You arrived at our door stinking of wine and rot, then fell like a sack of millet. We didn’t know what to think. And your wound was already poisoned. One more day and you would have lost the arm. Alhamdulillah that you got here when you did.”

“I… walked,” I said. “I saw Auntie Ming in the town. She gave me directions.”

“And gave you a few sharp words I imagine,” said Ma Shushu. “She never liked your father.”

“Never mind that,” Lee Ayi said. “We’re just glad you didn’t walk yourself into an early grave. Here. Eat.”

Duties

As we ate, Ma Shushu wiped his mouth with a cloth and cleared his throat. “Darius,” he said, “you will have duties here, as every member of this household does. Work must be done properly.”

I nodded, a piece of beef half-chewed in my mouth.

“For now, we will give you light work only. But when you are recovered, you will rise at dawn with Haaris. First task: milk the cows. They must be calm, so move slowly and speak softly. When they are milked, let them and the donkeys out to graze in the west field. After that, shovel the dung from the stalls—take it to the compost heap behind the barn. Then feed the chickens and collect the eggs before the sun grows strong. The goats receive their feed as well, and check that none have wandered into the safflower rows.”

I was nodding along. “Yes, Ma Shushu.”

“Good. When the morning tasks are done, you will return to the house for lessons. Reading, writing, arithmetic, and the basics of our deen.”

I had no idea what he meant by deen, but I remained quiet, and he went on:

“In the afternoon, you are free. The hired hands tend to the fields. You may help them if you wish, but it is not required.”

Nothing he said dismayed me. Compared to fighting off rats with a shovel, killing thieves in my doorway, or tending a field alone from dawn until darkness, these tasks felt almost light. The idea of studies was strange, but not frightening.

“I understand,” I said. “I can do all of it.”

“Certainly you can,” he replied. His voice held no doubt, only calm assurance.

My Lee Ayi refilled my bowl again, and this time I forced myself to eat slowly. Haaris asked questions about my father, my farm, crops, cow, and my dao. I answered what I wished and ignored the rest. The soup warmed my chest; the rice softened the edges of my hunger; the quiet murmur of family around a table – something I had never known – settled over me like a heavy blanket I did not want to shrug off.

For the first time since leaving home, the tightness in my chest eased.

“Your God, Allah,” I asked. “Does He have a temple?”

“We call it a masjid,” Ma Shushu replied. “There are many. There is one in town, you probably walked past it.”

“Does it have a pool with carp?”

Haaris grinned widely. “It does! How did you know? And there’s a cat that sleeps there too. And it has soft carpets and pretty designs on the walls.”

Old Friends

When the meal was finished, Lee Ayi brought out a small plate of sweetened peanuts, roasted and glazed. I stared at them, at the familiar shape and smell. My father had grown peanuts with his bare hands, cursing the heat and the rats and the soil itself. He had tried to build something that would provide. These peanuts were nothing like ours, for they were larger, sweeter, and coated with honey. But they brought my father’s face to my mind in a way that hurt with a sweet kind of pain.

“You are safe here,” my aunt said again, as if answering a question I had not spoken.

I lowered my gaze and nodded. I believed her, though some part of me was sure that something would happen to wreck it. Such comfort, food, and care were not meant for me; they never had been.

That night, the cat, Bao, tried to climb into my small bed. I pushed her away. I was still mourning the loss of Far Away, and was not about to replace him with some old farm cat. Bao hissed, and went to Haaris’s bed instead.

When everyone was asleep, I crawled out of bed and padded silently to the small storage room where my weapons had been placed. I took the dao in its scabbard and strapped it to my back. My aunt said this was a safe place, and I believed her, but I couldn’t truly comprehend that word, safe. How could anyone guarantee that? I had been on my own for a long time, and had killed men in my own home; men who had come to murder me. Safety was in my hands, not anyone else’s. Safety was something I purchased with daily training, sweat, blood, and aching muscles. Sleeping without a weapon felt like sleeping with my hands tied behind my back.

Returning to bed, I pulled the blanket over me. My shoulder still ached, but pain and I were old friends. Pain, hunger, fear, loneliness. These were real things, things I believed in and trusted, because they were honest.

I thought about the – what had Ma Shushu called it – the masjid? The Muslim temple, with its thick carpets and outdoor pool. The concept of childhood was alien to me, but when I imagined it, I thought of sitting beside the pool, trailing my fingers in the water, and watching the fish, without worry or fear. Perhaps I could go to the masjid one day and watch the carp, and listen to the prayers, and be a child for a while. If such a thing was ever meant for me.

My eyelids grew heavy, and I slept.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 5 – A Secret Revealed

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

 

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Searching for Signs of Spring: A Short Story

A Wish And A Cosmic Bird: A Play

The post Far Away [Part 4] – A Safe Place appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Beneath me is a thin, extra-long twin mattress. In my hands is a tattered mushaf, too thick to easily hold even in two hands. I’m sitting in a dorm room for the first time at UC Santa Barbara with the ocean’s waves playing softly in the distance. A mustard yellow dupatta pulls itself uncomfortably around my neck as I stumble through reading Surah Al-Mulk in Arabic. I hope my roommate and friend isn’t watching too closely as she sits on the bed next to mine with her phone, but I’m struggling so much to finish reading in time for dinner that I don’t have much energy to spare for feeling self-conscious.

A Companion In The Grave 

This devotion to reading Surah al-Mulk is new, and something I’m doing solely for myself. Some random lady at a masjid wearing a niqab told me that reading it every night will make it a companion in my grave that will save me from being punished.1 That sounds like a hack I’m willing to believe in and implement.       

The fear of the punishment of Hell is supposed to be a great motivator for Muslims; otherwise, why would it be mentioned in the Quran in horrifying detail? But when I hear about the punishments of Hell, I don’t break a sweat. Sorry…Hell? It’s just too abstract and theoretical to impact me. I’ve got to die first, wait for the entire world to end in an insane earthquake, be resurrected, and go through the Day of Judgment with all of humanity, and then maybe eventually I’ll be thrown into a pit of fire. I’ve got a lot of time before any of that happens.

But what truly scares me is what is real in this world: that’s the punishment in the grave. If I read a few words about life in the grave, I’m paranoid for a whole day and sobered up for a good week. Why? Because I’ve been to a cemetery, prayed a funeral prayer with a dead body in front of the congregation, smelled the sickly scents inside of a morgue, and seen a fresh pile of earth next to an empty grave. To me, that’s real, and I could be in my own grave tomorrow night, for all I know.  

So, I spend the hour break during student government camp at sixteen years old, making sure I deal with my life in the grave adequately. It is a miracle I am there in the first place–but a miracle with conditions. I could go if and only if I promised I would not a) attend the dance, and b) perform in the skit/dance competition between schools. It was something I put on the table outright when negotiating going on a multi-day-and-night co-ed trip. My parents were already not fans of my decision to join the student government, and going to this camp was unofficially mandatory for everyone. I knew I was pushing my luck, but they eventually signed the permission slip and I packed my bags before they could change their minds!

That Night

It’s from out of these very bags that I pull the full-blown carpet janaamaz, my yellow namaz dupatta with the tiny Sindhi mirrors studded all over it, and my mushaf every day of the trip. I admit, it’s an assortment of odd additions to what could easily be a trip brimming with unabashed rule-breaking away from home. There are two things I would guard on this trip, no matter what: praying all five prayers every day, even if they are all late, and reading Surah Al-Mulk before I sleep. These are not things I promised my parents. These are not things they ask me to do or keep track of at home. These are things I do to prepare myself for my grave.

“There are two things I would guard on this trip, no matter what: praying all five prayers every day, even if they are all late, and reading Surah Al-Mulk before I sleep.” [PC: Md Mahdi (unsplash)]

My friend disturbs me as our free time concludes, saying she’s off to meet the others for dinner if I want to join her now. I haven’t finished, but I’ll wrap it up before bed. The next couple of hours aren’t extraordinary–eating dinner in the cafeteria and attending a leadership seminar of some sort. After that is the big dance, which I am not attending, of course. I run into some minor problems, though: nobody else is going to the dorm, and I’m worried about walking by myself at night on an unfamiliar college campus, and I’ll be passing right by the dance that’s happening in a courtyard along the way. I’m already feeling hesitant about being alone, and I’m very aware of the fact that I’m definitely the black sheep in the student government group. As I try to figure out how to get back to the dorm on my own at the top of the steps towards the festivities, some of the seniors press me to join them. It only takes a couple of entreaties, and my curiosity takes the best of me.

I descend the concrete steps into Dante’s Inferno with the gaggling group of senior girls, a reluctant smile on my face. I’m going to my first high school dance and I know this is the only time I’ll ever get away with it. Maybe prom won’t be too much to ask for in two years…? I pass Mr. Garcia, the teacher in charge of our high school’s group, and see a smirk flit across his face. He knows I’m breaking my moral code because I expressly told him I need to be excused from all dancing activities for religious reasons. I push it from my mind and tell myself to see what this quintessential high school experience is all about. 

The rest of the night goes poorly. Although I’m no stranger to dance parties with my sisters and our friends, I can’t relax here. My shoulders are tense, my throat is tight, and my jaws feel hot the same way they get when I’m lying. I can’t make myself smile, and my limbs jerk in an awkward way when I try to groove along to a beat. I have danced to these very songs so many times, but here, I’m too aware that the air is heavy with teenage sexual angst. I try to ignore it, but I’m too busy being disgusted and feeling guilty for breaking my promise to my parents and going against my personal code. I finally see what grinding looks like in person, and I am horrified; particularly to see some girls I look up to partaking in what looks like a pre-mating ritual. I get what all the hullabaloo about banning it from school dances is about now. 

I think of another tactic: I take in the oppressive air and use the energy to my strategic advantage towards a cute, unassuming white guy from my school that I’ve been nursing a crush on for a while. This is my chance to make a tiny move–nothing too extreme. I’m trying to muster up the courage, but I can’t breathe enough to propel myself into action. Is the air as thick as slime, or is it just me? I look around and want to close my eyes to everything I see. 

All I wanted to do was have a good time! I scream at myself in my mind. Grudgingly, I know it’s not going to happen here. I’m not like the rest of them, even the other Pakistani girl who is also Muslim and has been empathetically nudging me towards all the haram things that the others do. I can’t be like the rest of them, even if I want to be. 

I decide to leave before I can witness more of my classmates’ t strange escapades, not sparing a care about getting back to the dorm on my own. I nudge my roommate and tell her I’m not feeling well and need to bounce. Luckily for me, she has a headache and wants to knock out. We walk towards the steps, and I make sure to wave down my teacher and let him know we’re leaving. I hope he chokes on the fact that I only spent half an hour here and had a horrible time. 

Not Tonight, My Friend

Twenty years later, I admit that I have thought about that night often, particularly when I feel tired and would rather sleep than read Surah Al-Mulk. They say that the Quran can be a companion, and when I hope it can be a companion in my grave, I remember wearing the dupatta while reading the surah and hearing the ocean. I remember walking down the steps to the dance into the muggy air pregnant with teenage titillation. I remember feeling like I was moving through sludge even though I thought I could indulge in a secret night away. I wonder how I could do such opposing things in the same night. I feel the surah wrapping its mustard yellow wings around me in an embrace. Holding me, it whispers–not tonight, my friend. I’ve got you. Somehow, it was my wingman back then, saving me that one night and thus probably on many others.  I remember that night when I can hardly look at myself in the mirror from the shame and guilt from my sins of the day and feel that I am not worthy of reading Surah Al-Mulk. But we’ve experienced so much together since that night at UCSB. I owe it so much and I know I can’t leave it hanging now.  Once I’m six-feet under, I I hope it returns the favor and clings onto me.

 

Related:

– Lessons From Surah Al-Mulk: How The Bees And Birds Teach Us About Tawakkul

– Surah Al Waqiah Paid My Tuition Twice

 

1    https://sunnah.com/tirmidhi:2891

The post Why I Can’t Leave Surah Al-Mulk Hanging Every Night appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Each year, the judges of the Muslim Book Awards spend time and thought on choosing the best Muslim books of the year. We look for quality of writing, rich and unique stories, and most importantly, Islamic values being upheld and highlighted.

After much reading, discussion, and passionate thoughts, the judges have finally cast their ballots – and the Muslim Book Awards 2025 winners are in!

Best Toddler Book

Here’s Our Religion is a unique giant-sized board book that kids will turn to over and over again! Rather than telling a story, this book introduces images and short descriptions of important Islamic concepts and themes, such as Ummah, Qur’an, Salah, Ramadan, Zakat/Sadaqa, Hajj, and Sunnah.

Best Picture Book

Saif’s Special Patches is about a little boy who is shy – but also much more than “just shy”! The patches in his special quilt represent all the different instances that Saif has been persistent, helpful, brave, and smart – and remind him that even though it’s not easy learning how to swim or knowing how to help out at the masjid, he can do it!

Best Young Adult

Huda F Wants to Know? does a lot more than just crack jokes. This latest installment in the Huda F series starts with Huda preparing for her junior year of high school, with laser focus on ACT exam prep, applying for scholarships, and getting her driver’s ed done. What she didn’t expect was her parents telling her that they’re getting a divorce. This graphic novel does what I never expected a comic series to do: explore mental health, friendship, and family relationships with care and nuance.

Best Adult Fiction

“Far Away from Home” is a brilliant debut that brings us the story of three Black Americans Muslims in New Orleans, set after Hurricane Katrina. Weaving together spiritual journeys, personal struggles, and the history of Black Muslims in the American landscape, this book is deeply immersive and reminds readers of the power of faith in Allah.

Best Holiday Book

“The Eidi Bag” isn’t just a story about celebrating Eid al-Fitr; it’s a story of culture, faith, anticipation, disappointment, change, and appreciation. It is Sarah’s first Eid in a new country and she has made herself a new Eidi bag just for the occasion! But it turns out that Eid traditions in this different place aren’t quite the same as back home. Sarah longs for Pakistan and the traditions that she is used to, but she slowly realizes that different traditions can also be fun and filled with love and joy.

Best Juvenile Non-Fiction

“Shining Hearts: Sahabah Stories for Kids” by Marium Uqaili introduces both male and female companions (five of each) in a way that isn’t dry or too detail-heavy. The text is spaced out well on the pages, with small side facts and questions laid out as well. This is excellent for 5+ as a learning resource!

Best Adult Non-Fiction

“The Heart of Design: Spirituality, Creativity and Entrepreneurship” is a brilliant examination of Islamic principles in the context of design, business, creative pursuits, and more. The book connects personal spiritual lessons with external practice, highlighting how one can cultivate a holistic higher praxis. Lush in layout and rich in content, this book will linger with readers long after they’re done, inviting them to return over and over again.

Best Illustrations

“Dear Moon” is a visually gorgeous book that serves as the perfect coffee table book or gift to loved ones. Characterized by soft colour schemes, sweet hijabi characters, and Islamic reminders, this book is a delight to the eyes and the heart. This book is a collection of Zayneb Haleem’s best work, quoting Quranic ayaat and other gentle Islamic reminders. Whether you’re an adult who just needs a glimpse of joy, or a young one who loves pretty illustrations, this book will definitely be picked up and flipped through often.

Judges’ Choice

“A Mouth Full of Salt” is a tale of long-ago (and yet not that long ago) Sudan that meanders like the Nile, but with a powerful undercurrent that pulls you to its end. A little boy drowns in a village, setting off a chain of tragedies and discoveries that uncover generational secrets. The women at the peripherals of the village are much more than sideline observers; their lives underscore the village’s past and future.

Bookseller’s Choice

Everything Grows in Jiddo’s Garden is the story of a young Palestinian girl and her Jiddo.

Jiddo’s garden is a wonder. In it grows so many amazing things—to see, smell, and taste. But helping him to tend the garden teaches this young girl about even more than fig trees. It gives her a chance to discover just who she is. Many years ago, like so many Palestinians, her family was forced to leave their homeland. But Jiddo shows her how, until they can return, tending a garden can connect them to home—and to each other!

Congratulations!

Congratulations to all the winners of the Muslim Book Awards 2025!

[DON’T FORGET! SPECIAL COUPON CODE: Use the coupon code “MBR” for 15% off all products ordered from Crescent Moon Bookstore!]

Related:

Muslim Book Awards 2025: Finalists

The Muslim Bookstagram Awards 2024 Winners

The post The Muslim Book Awards 2025 Winners appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

In 1937, philosopher-poet and perhaps the foremost intellectual of Muslim India, Allamah Muhammad Iqbal, wrote a series of letters to the leader of the All Indian Muslim League and eventual founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

Over the years, Iqbal and Jinnah had come to share a deep respect and admiration for one another – a respect that had not always been the case. When Jinnah agreed to the Lucknow Pact almost 20 years earlier, for example, Iqbal fiercely criticized and refused to acknowledge it.1 Over time, however, Jinnah would recognize Iqbal as “the sage-philosopher and national poet of Islam,”2 and Iqbal would recognize Jinnah as “the only Muslim in India today to whom the community has the right to look up for safe guidance.”3 When coupled with the poetics of Iqbal, these letters offer us tremendous insight into Iqbal’s own thought, particularly his emphasis on the integration between the theological, cultural, political, economic, and social.

Perhaps the most important of these letters is the seventh, written on the 28th of May, 1937. In this letter, Iqbal confronts the problem of the Muslim League’s popularity with the very population it claims to serve. To Iqbal, the primary problem of India was not simply British rule – it was colonialism as a social, economic, and political ordering of society. In his warning to Jinnah, Iqbal presciently warns the statesman of replacing one colonial class with another. If, Iqbal warns, the offices of the Muslim League are simply made up of aristocrats and their friends and relatives, the Muslim League will not achieve its primary objective: the economic and cultural advancement of Muslims in India. Iqbal warns Jinnah that:

“The league will have to finally decide whether it will remain a body representing the upper classes of Indian Muslims or the Muslim masses who have, so far, with good reason, taken no interest in it. Personally, I believe that a political organization that gives no promise of improving the lot of the average Muslim cannot attract our masses. Under the new constitution, the higher posts go to the sons of upper classes; the smaller ones go to the friends or relatives of the ministers. . .the question therefore is: how is it possible to solve the problem of Muslim poverty? And the whole future of the League depends on the League’s activity to solve this question.”4

Although the problem of the Muslim League lay in the framework of its governing structures and could be remedied by smart politics, in contrast, Iqbal was deeply pessimistic about Congress’s capacity to do the same for Hindu India. In particular, Iqbal was suspicious of the political leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, and what he called his “atheistic nationalism”:

“I fear that in certain parts of the country, e.g., N.W. India, Palestine may be repeated. Also, the insertion of Jawaharlal’s socialism into the body-politic of Hinduism is likely to cause much bloodshed among the Hindus themselves. The issue between social democracy and Brahmanism is not dissimilar to one between Brahmanism and Buddhism. Whether the fate of socialism will be the same as the fate of Buddhism in India, I cannot say. But it is clear to my mind that if Hinduism accepts social democracy, it must cease to be Hinduism. For Islam, the acceptance of social democracy in some suitable form and consistent with the legal principles of Islam is not a revolution but a return to the original purity of Islam.”56

The structure of his argument, and particularly his fierce critique of Nehru, reveals much about Iqbal’s own thinking about society. If the primary objective of politics is the cultural and economic upliftment of society, then that upliftment is dependent on the political structures that organize it; those political structures themselves, however, are dependent on the cultural base that supports it; and that cultural base is dependent on the self-imagination of the members of that society. In his dual critique of both Congress and the Muslim League, Iqbal makes a prophetic assertion: the failure of the Muslim league will be due to the aristocratic and landed-elite’s dominance over the political structure; the failure of the Indian National Congress will be because Nehru’s “atheistic socialism” will create a civil war within “Brahmanism” itself, because the very basis of political structures – culture – will be incompatible with the political structure Nehru will try to erect.

The centrality of caste-based thinking that acts as a lens in the mind of contemporary Hinduism would create significant tensions with Nehru’s utopian socialism; a tension that would eventually erupt in a socio-cultural civil war within Hinduism itself. For the Muslim mind, however, such ideas of “social democracy” as he called it – a shorthand for economic parity and meritocracy – were ideas embedded within the Muslim’s imagination of his own past. The shari’ah itself guaranteed economic justice; the sunnah of the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, recommended a meritocratic distribution of labor regardless of lineage.

Iqbal proves prophetic in both his critiques: India, which is embroiled in an intense socio-cultural civil war over the nature of Hinduism, is one of the world’s most unequal countries today; and the military-landholder alliance of convenience that dominated Pakistan’s politics after the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in 1951 has concentrated all political and cultural power in the hands of a small aristocratic elite and brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Iqbal would also anticipate the post-colonial and subaltern thinkers who began writing in the 1960s: colonialism is not simply a form of conquest built upon the imagination of a civilizational hierarchy; it is a particular manifestation of a general category of extractionary governance that is built upon the nexus of socio-cultural beliefs and practices that are enshrined in a political structure which extracts economic benefit from the many and collects it in the hands of a few.

Colonialism may have ended in its most explicit forms, but colonialism as a form of governance is more prevalent today than it was in the 1850s.

Neo-Liberal Extraction and the Culture of Capitalism

The fall of the Soviet Union marked a distinctive shift in the world’s socio-economic imagination. There was no longer any need to debate the merits of capitalism and liberal democracy; we had, in the words of Francis Fukuyama, reached the end of history. Liberal democracy and neo-liberal capitalism had clearly demonstrated themselves in a cold-war of social darwinism as the most ideal forms of human socio-economic organization, and all that was left was for the rest of the world to “catch up” to these discoveries. The last 40 years, in general, and 34 years in particular, have been a global experiment on a general cultural framework: individual greed is the driver of all goodness in society.

When Milton Friedman declared that “greed is good,” he also declared that all good is a product of human greed. This thinking has become increasingly indicative of the Western mind, a continuous shift from the glorification of austerity and poverty by the Catholic Church centuries earlier. And, so, as a practice of social, cultural, and political policy, all the Western world has continuously unleashed greed, positioning it not as a vice to be remedied but the primary producer of the greater good of man. And, as always, it is the Quran that is most prophetic:

“Know that this worldly life is no more than play, amusement, luxury, mutual boasting, and competition in wealth and children. This is like rain that causes plants to grow, to the delight of the planters. But later the plants dry up, and you see them wither, then they are reduced to chaff. And in the Hereafter, there will be either severe punishment or forgiveness and pleasure of Allah, whereas the life of this world is no more than the delusion of enjoyment.” [Surah Al-Hadid; 57:20]

Unleashed capitalism, undergirded by a the conception of the self rooted in material individualism (as opposed to Islam’s radical spiritual individualism), has wrought untold destruction on the earth, perpetuated the televised genocide of entire peoples; thrown country after country into social and political upheavel; all in the name of greater capital accumulation which has turned the whole world’s economy into a vacuum that sucks the wealth of the many into the hands of a few.

Returning to our frame story of Iqbal’s letters to Jinnah, and to the greater thinking of the philosopher-poet himself, we are confronted with a significant problematic of our own conceptions. After the genocide in Gaza and the utter ineffectiveness of Muslim politics in all its manifestations – from access-based establishment politics to anti-establishment protest movements – there has been a greater call for Muslims to “create” power. While well-meaning, many of these calls prove to be simplistic and counter-productive in their understanding of achieving power in a thoroughly broken world order.

Projects for wealth generation perpetuate structures of extraction; projects for culture reinforce the structures of material individualism; projects for political participation reinforce the illegitimate dominance of elites over social systems. The discourse of “navigating” the system quickly turns into one reinforcing it – to simply become integrated into a ruling class of destruction to further advance one’s political objectives.

And, yet, power is indeed very powerful; and simply ignoring the mechanisms of power or refusing to participate within them leaves one at the mercy of those who would deploy the levers of power against you. Muslims are therefore trapped in a conundrum that seems impossible to solve: refusing to engage in existing structures is to become exploited by them; engaging in them turns one into a participant in competitive exploitation.

Iqbal’s Relevance Today

This, perhaps, is where Iqbal is most prescient and informative. At the core of Iqbal’s entire philosophical project, one which I will write about more extensively, is a critique of modern modes of social organization as a critique of the very imagination of being itself. To Iqbal, the material reality is created by conceptual understandings; and those conceptual understandings are rooted in an imagination of the self as a purely material being. Where Western thought has seen the world in binaries, the most important of which are the body and the soul, Iqbal, as an inheritor of the Islamic philosophical tradition, rejects every binary possible.

The root of Western dysfunction is the abandonment of the soul, where Christianity abandoned the body. The root of Christian dysfunction is where Christianity abandoned law for spirituality. The root of philosophical dysfunction is where philosophy abandoned intuition for thought. All dysfunction is rooted in imaginations of oppositional binary, where one of two concepts must be chosen at the expense of the other.

In the Quran, however, all matters are integrated: the soul is integrated with the body; the legal is integrated with the material; the material is integrated with the metaphysical. The rectification of human society, therefore, is to remind the human of what they truly are, of what the world is, of what all of reality itself is. The human is most alone when he attempts in vain to find meaning in materiality alone. He is most prone to his own self-destruction – and the destruction of all of the world and humanity itself – when he seeks to fill the God-sized hole in his heart with materiality. It is when man is most estranged from the reality of himself that he becomes entirely estranged from God.

Iqbal encapsulates it best in a couplet, when he says in the Javidnama:

به آدمی نرسیدی ، خدا چه می‌جویی

ز خود گریخته‌ای آشنا چه می‌جویی

“You haven’t reached (the reality of) Man;

     For what do you seek God?

From one accustomed to fleeing

     From himself – what do you seek?”

Man has forgotten himself, so man has forgotten God; but the world only makes sense when it finds its sense in God. The world is in need of a return to God; nothing can escape the need for God – not as a trite contemporary spiritualism which assuages the guilt of materialism, but as an inextricable part of self-imagination that manifests in an ethic of action rooted in passionate pursuit of the love of God.

We lack the love to seek Allah , so we lack the vision of ourselves, the world, and the universe that is a gift from Allah .

There is much more to be said, much more to be written, much more to be explored, but, for now, let it suffice to say:

قلندریم و کرامات ما جهان‌بینی است

ز ما نگاه طلب ، کیمیا چه می‌جویی

“We are dervishes, and our miracle

     Is the ability to see the world

Seek the capacity to see from us – 

     For what do you seek alchemy?”

 

Related:

– The Tolling Bell Of Revolution – Why The World Needs Allamah Muhammad Iqbal Now More Than Ever

– Islam, Decoloniality, And Allamah Iqbal On Revolution

 

1    The Lucknow Pact was an early agreement between the Indian National Congress and the All Indian Muslim League in which Muslims were given greater representation in Hindu-majority provinces in exchange for non-Muslim majority in representative bodies in Muslim-majority provinces. Iqbal was a vocal critic of the pact, as he saw it as a majoritarian ruse of tokenizing Muslims in Hindu-majority provinces in exchange for stripping Muslims of agency in Muslim-majority provinces.2     Letters of Iqbal, 2363    Letters of Iqbal, 2584    Letters of Iqbal, 2545    Letters of Iqbal, 2556    Iqbal likens the struggle between social-democracy and “Brahmanism” – that is, Brahmanic control of all Indian levers of political and economic power – to the struggle between Brahmanism and Buddhism. Buddhism started in India but never truly flourished there and found most acceptance in non-Hindu regions. Iqbal intimates that this is due to the logic of caste in Hinduism which is incompatible to the core message of Buddhism.

The post An Iqbalian Critique Of Muslim Politics Of Power: What Allamah Muhammad Iqbal’s Writings Teach Us About Political Change appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

The Muslim Book Awards is the literary event of the year (at least, we’d like to think so!) – and we are delighted to announce the 2025 Muslim Book Awards Finalists!

Each year, the MBA judges dedicate their time to going through books by Muslim authors and illustrators, for audiences of all ages. Our mission is to find the best books of the year, combining Islamic values with storytelling craft, creativity, and publication quality. Whether self-published, Muslim-published, or traditionally published, MBA holds every Muslim story to the standard of Ihsaan… because Muslim readers deserve the best!

After many hours spent poring over the 2025 submissions, we present the 2025 Muslim Book Awards Finalists!

Many of the books can be ordered from our sponsor, Crescent Moon Bookstore, and a link has been provided for each title. Read through the whole post to find our special Coupon Code at the end, and get a discount off your order!

[Note: This year, we did not receive enough submissions for the Early Reader/ Chapter Book and Middle Grade categories to include them in the finalists.]

Toddler Books

Street Puppy, Masjid Cat is sweet picture book all about a street puppy and masjid kitten, who live very different lives – yet cross paths unexpectedly. The simple rhymes contrast the street puppy’s life to that of the pampered cat in the masjid, and the vibrant illustrations evoke the lushness of Southeast Asia.

Dark Nights and Light Hearts: A Muslim Book of Opposites continues Hena Khan’s series of toddler books introducing colors, shapes, and now opposites! The heartfelt rhymes, the centering of Islam, and the enveloping illustrations make these books timeless, sought after, and beloved.

Momo & Bronty’s First Book About Allah is a sturdy board book that uses bright illustrations and simple language to introduce the concept of Allah to the youngest members of the Ummah. This book covers concepts like the oneness of Allah, Allah as the Creator and the All-Hearing, and our ultimate goal of reaching Jannah.

My First Book About Ramadan is also a continuation of a great Muslim board book series that teaches little Muslims the basic fundamentals of Islam. The soft, glowing illustrations creates a loving positive relationship between young readers and what they’re learning about, establishing the beginnings of a lifelong connection to Islam, inshaAllah.

Here’s Our Religion is a unique giant-sized board book that kids will turn to over and over again! Rather than telling a story, this book introduces images and short descriptions of important Islamic concepts and themes, such as Ummah, Qur’an, Salah, Ramadan, Zakat/Sadaqa, Hajj, and Sunnah.

Picture Books

The City of Jasmine is a celebration of a land beloved to Muslims, one which has finally been freed from decades of tyranny. Nadine Presley’s gorgeous descriptions of the Umayyad masjid, Qal’at Dimashq, the Barada river, marketplaces and bookstores and kitchens and courtyards, are a love letter to the blessed lands of Shaam.

Hilwa’s Gifts is a beautiful slice of Palestinian life, showcasing joy and tradition. Ali is visiting his family in Palestine, and it’s olive harvest season! Seedo teaches Ali the traditional method of harvesting olives, with love and care, and the journey that the olives will take into becoming gifts that keep on giving.

Saif’s Special Patches is about a little boy who is shy – but also much more than “just shy”! The patches in his special quilt represent all the different instances that Saif has been persistent, helpful, brave, and smart – and remind him that even though it’s not easy learning how to swim or knowing how to help out at the masjid, he can do it!

All the Ways to be Pretty provides an Islamic approach to internal beauty to counter the societal emphasis on external appearance, by drawing on the examples of Ai’shah (RA), Khadija (RA), Sumayyah (RA), Maryam (RA), Hajar (RA), and Rufaidah (RA), may Allah swt be pleased with them all.

Young Adult Books

Huda F Wants to Know? does a lot more than just crack jokes. This latest installment in the Hua F series starts with Huda preparing for her junior year of high school, with laser focus on ACT exam prep, applying for scholarships, and getting her driver’s ed done. What she didn’t expect was her parents telling her that they’re getting a divorce. This graphic novel does what I never expected a comic series to do: explore mental health, friendship, and family relationships with care and nuance.

“Odd Girl Out”  is a Muslamic take on quintessential YA: a teenager going through big life changes, dealing with the drama… and in this case, also facing Islamophobia. Maaryah Rashid’s life is uprooted by her parents’ divorce, in more ways than one. She has to leave behind her glamorous life in Dubai to live in the middle of nowhere, Essex; she’s the only hijabi at her school and the target of a nasty Islamophobic bully; and her mom is so busy falling apart after the divorce that she doesn’t seem to notice Maaryah’s own grief, loneliness, and struggles. There are repeated references to salah, hijab as an act of worship, and what being Muslim means in the West.

As with all Muslamic YA that touches on various teenager-y things (boys, parties, various haraamness), I recommend this for 15+ and for parents to be willing to have discussions with their children on these topics.

Hand Me Down Your Revolution is a collection of short stories, poems, and memoir essays produced by Muslim Youth Musings, a fantastic literary organization for aspiring Muslim writers. From the magical realism of “Where the Crimson Roses Bloom” to the amusing “Jamal’s Kufi,” the deeply moving “A Love Letter to Muslim Kids in Public Schools” the gorgeous prose of Rituals for the Grieving” and “Mother Wound,” there’s a little something for everyone.

Adult Fiction

 

“The Slightest Green” is a multi generational novel weaves a narrative that will stay with the readers for the warmth and depth it explores of a fictional Palestinian family. The characters and their stories, their trauma and dreams are very tied to Palestine and the occupation, but the focus on the individual and the ripple effects will linger.

“Detective Aunty” is on the case! Kausar Khan is a widow who’s always had a knack for figuring things out, and when her daughter is accused of murder, she knows she has to do more than cook, clean, and keep an eye on her granddaughters. The problem is… no one else, including the real killer, is happy that she’s investigating! Billed as a cozy mystery, this book also touches on larger themes of grief and loss, estranged family relationships and healing, and even thoughtful reflections on growing older as a desi woman.

“A Mouth Full of Salt” is a tale of long-ago (and yet not that long ago) Sudan that meanders like the Nile, but with a powerful undercurrent that pulls you to its end. A little boy drowns in a village, setting off a chain of tragedies and discoveries that uncover generational secrets. The women at the peripherals of the village are much more than sideline observers; their lives underscore the village’s past and future.

“Far Away from Home” is a brilliant debut that brings us the story of three Black Americans Muslims in New Orleans, set after Hurricane Katrina. Weaving together spiritual journeys, personal struggles, and the history of Black Muslims in the American landscape, this book is deeply immersive and reminds readers of the power of faith in Allah.

Holiday Books

“The Eidi Bag” isn’t just a story about celebrating Eid al-Fitr; it’s a story of culture, faith, anticipation, disappointment, change, and appreciation. It is Sarah’s first Eid in a new country and she has made herself a new Eidi bag just for the occasion! But it turns out that Eid traditions in this different place aren’t quite the same as back home. Sarah longs for Pakistan and the traditions that she is used to, but she slowly realizes that different traditions can also be fun and filled with love and joy.

“Ramadan on Rahma Road: A Recipe Storybook” introduces us to Rahma Road, where Muslims of many diverse backgrounds get together to observe Ramadan together. Each spread features a glimpse of a family’s iftar prep, and a recipe for the meal that comes from the diverse backgrounds: roti bom for Malaysians, koshary for Egyptians, and even South African rep with bunny chow!

“Ibraheem’s Perfect Eid” is a sweet story about a little boy realizing there is more to Eid than presents. While Ibraheem is very worried about whether he got presents or not, this also incorporates references to the Sunan of Eid, shows Eid salah (and Ibraheem actually listening to the khutbah!), and niqabi rep in the illustrations.

Juvenile Non-Fiction

“40 Hadiths for Children” covers 40 short, easy-to-understand ahadith about good actions, good character, worship, and daily life. The hadith text is featured on the left page, while the next page briefly explains the hadith in child-appropriate language, alongside practical tips on how to implement the hadith. This is great for parents to read with their kids (short and sweet to incorporate into a daily khaatira), and madrasah teachers

“Eliyas Explains What Prophet Muhammad (sallAllahu ‘alayh wa sallam) Was Like” continues Zanib Mian’s unique storytelling style of goofy-but-relatable kid escapades as a vehicle to delve into Islamic themes and discussions. Eliyas learns all about RasulAllah (sallAllahu alayhi wa sallam) from his parents and uncle – and how to apply the Prophet’s character to his own everyday life. As with every Eliyas Explains book, this one is perfect for kids who have otherwise short attention spans. It’s an easy to read early chapter book, there are different fonts and little illustrations to engage young readers’ attention.

“Shining Hearts: Sahabah Stories for Kids” by Mariuk Uqaili introduces both male and female companions (five of each) in a way that isn’t dry or too detail-heavy. The text is spaced out well on the pages, with small side facts and questions laid out as well. This is excellent for 5+ as a learning resource!

“Game Changers: Stories of Hijabi Athletes from around the World” features Muslim women (specifically hijabis) from around the world, engaged in a wide variety of sports. From hockey to archery, parkour to skateboarding, it was impressive to see all the fields Muslimas have excelled in. Detailed backmatter discusses why Muslim women wear hijab, and touches on related issues such as modest sportswear and perseverance.

“The Prince of Stars: Ulugh Beg’s Quest to Map the Stars and Seasons” is a rich, visually stunning exploration of a figure of Islamic history. Ulugh Beg was a Timurid Muslim prince whose true passion lay in studying astronomy, leading to discoveries that would change the course of science forever. While this is targeted at 4-8 year olds, even older children go back to this book to read, learn, and re-live the adventure!

Adult Non-Fiction

“One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” is a blistering reckoning of the genocide of Palestinians, and the larger geopolitical context in which Zionist occupation and Western imperialism have become the status quo. This book is for a generation that understands the west can no longer be trusted to police and guide the world, or its own cities and campuses. It draws on intimate details of Omar’s own story as an emigrant who grew up believing in the western project, who was catapulted into journalism by the rupture of 9/11.

“Bigger Than Divorce: A Muslim Woman’s Path to Healing and Purpose” is unique contribution to non-fiction, tackling the difficult subject of divorce and its aftermath. The book’s approach is pragmatic; there is no wallowing in angst and self-pity, but rather acknowledging the hard emotions of divorce, and then moving forward in a spiritually and emotionally healthy way. The author grounds her work  in spiritual wellbeing, beginning with considering one’s purpose in life as a slave of Allah, and using our relationship with our Creator as the foundation of building the next chapter of our life post-divorce.

“The Heart of Design: Spirituality, Creativity and Entrepreneurship” is a brilliant examination of Islamic principles in the context of design, business, creative pursuits, and more. The book connects personal spiritual lessons with external practice, highlighting how one can cultivate a holistic higher praxis. Lush in layout and rich in content, this book will linger with readers long after they’re done, inviting them to return over and over again.

Illustrations

“Lulu in the Spotlight” is a delightful romp through a typical desi wedding! Lulu is finally old enough to have a plan of her own for winning the prize during joota chupai, and Natasha Khan Khazi’s illustrations truly convey the excitement, emotions, and colors of South Asian weddings.

“Animals Love Qur’an” is the official songbook for the classic Dawud Wharnsby Ali nasheed of millennial childhoods! Azra Momin’s signature illustrations bring the classic lyrics to life, evoking nostalgia in us parents and passing on this beloved childhood song to the next generation.

“Dear Moon” is a visually gorgeous book that serves as the perfect coffee table book or gift to loved ones. Characterized by soft colour schemes, sweet hijabi characters, and Islamic reminders, this book is a delight to the eyes and the heart. This book is a collection of Zayneb Haleem’s best work, quoting Quranic ayaat and other gentle Islamic reminders. Whether you’re an adult who just needs a glimpse of joy, or a young one who loves pretty illustrations, this book will definitely be picked up and flipped through often.

“Ibraheem’s Perfect Eid” is a sweet story about a little boy realizing there is more to Eid than presents. Nabila Adani’s illustrations show important parts of the story, like Ibraheem listening to the Eid khutbah, and the wide diversity of the Ummah being represented.

“Sunflower Kisses” might be another hijab story for girls, but Hatice Kubra Erkut’s bright illustrations create vivid imagery of a magical glow flowing from Ayah’s hijab. Celebrating Muslim illustrators and artists starts with appreciating their work in all its forms, and “Sunflower Kisses” is a lovely way to witness Erkut’s work for the first time.

Bookseller’s Choice

Check back on January 12th to see our reveal for the Bookseller’s Choice book this year!

Don’t forget to stay tuned for our announcement of the winners next week, inshaAllah!

[SPECIAL COUPON CODE: Use the coupon code “MBR” for 15% off all products ordered from Crescent Moon Bookstore!]

Related:

The Muslim Bookstagram Awards 2024: Meet The Finalists!

The post Muslim Book Awards 2025: Finalists appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

A mistake in a crowded street leaves Darius wounded and sick.

Read Part 1 | Part 2

* * *

Both Sides Match

Criminals were criminals wherever one went. Having been a low-level criminal myself, I knew the culture, expectations, and rules. These men saw me, a 13-year-old boy, as an easy score in a town that was apparently lawless.

My father had taught me never to reveal my skills before the fight begins. In this way, I could catch the enemy off guard. But I didn’t want to engage in a public brawl that could end up with either me dead, or the blood of these men on my hands. Perhaps if I were to demonstrate my ability to defend myself, these ruffians would seek easier prey.

I settled on a compromise. I already had the spear in my hand. I would strike one of the men hard enough to hurt, but not hard enough to kill, and then wait to see what the other would do.

A piercing sound made me flinch. A constable came running up, blowing a silver whistle and swinging a baton. So the town was not lawless after all. Like me, the constable wore dark trousers, a knee-length jacket, and cloth shoes with white socks, but he also wore a tall, cone-shaped hat. A badge hung from his waist identifying him as an officer of the law. The overall effect was comical, and I smiled. The constable was not coming for the ruffians or me, but for the two brawling men.

As I was distracted by this spectacle, the thug with the scarred mouth lashed out with a kick aimed at the inside of my knee. I reacted instinctively, sweeping the spear across the front of my body to redirect his kicking leg. Scar Mouth was fast, however. The kick had only been a feint to distract me from the knife, and he now lashed out with the blade, aiming for my neck. I tucked my head and took the cut across my shoulder, and at the same moment brought up the point of the spear and raked it across the attacker’s face, opening a deep wound from the corner of his mouth to his temple. He cried out and stumbled back, blood pouring from the wound.

“There,” I said savagely. “Now both sides match.” Even as I said these words, I knew I sounded like my father – cold rage was the essence of his personality – yet I did not care. I was furious, more at myself than at Scar Mouth. Like a fool, like a day-one novice, I had allowed myself to be distracted from an imminent threat, and it had nearly cost me my life. Nor had I entered River Flow, the combat state of mind my father had taught me, in which one moved without thought or emotion. What a debacle. My father would be ashamed.

The other ruffian, the red-eyed one, drew his knife and stepped forward, but at that moment another constable came running, whistle piping. Red Eyes picked up his companion, who had fallen to the ground, and tried to hustle him away, but the constable caught them and struck Red Eyes on the back of the head with a wooden baton. He collapsed like a dead man, and the constable proceeded to beat them both.

A Bloody Grin

I took the opportunity to walk quickly away, clutching my wounded shoulder. I ducked into a narrow alley between two shops, where laundry hung on ropes overhead, and the ground was littered with broken tiles and scraps of paper. Pressing my back to the wall, I drew a slow breath to steady myself, then removed my jacket – which was now sliced open across the shoulder – and peeled my shirt down to get a look at the wound. The cut ran like a bloody grin across the top of my shoulder. It was long but not deep, yet the edges already looked angry and dirty. Blood ran freely down my arm and abdomen. I was sure the ruffians’ knives were filthy. If I left the cut alone it would surely get infected, and I had no wish to lose an arm… or my life.

The alley was not as empty as I’d hoped. A woman paused at the far end, a basket of scallions on her hip, and stared at me with wide eyes. A pair of boys lingered nearby, whispering to each other, one pointing at the blood on my arm. An old man shuffled past slowly enough to make it clear that he was taking his time so he could watch. He grinned in embarrassment and looked away. Soon, two more people stopped. The city, it seemed, always had eyes.

I had been cut many times while training with my father. My father had always washed the wounds, poured rice wine over them – his drink of choice – and wrapped them in clean cloth.

I ignored the watchers and went to a public water pump at the end of the alley. The water smelled faintly of iron, but water was water.

I gritted my teeth and splashed it over the wound, rubbing gently with the corner of my shirt to wash out any dirt. Blood and water ran down my chest. It stung so badly that my hands shook, but I kept going until the water ran mostly clear.

A vendor’s stall stood just beyond the alley. I pressed a coin onto the counter without meeting the owner’s eye. He frowned at my age, at the blood, but handed me a small clay bottle of liquor. I uncorked it and poured it over my shoulder.

The pain roared up my arm like a wildfire. I might have collapsed if not for the fact that I had been through this before and knew what to expect. My breath hissed out between clenched teeth; my vision wavered. Someone gasped. Someone else muttered that I was mad. I braced my good hand against the wall and waited. When the fire subsided, I dared to look. The blood had slowed. Good enough.

Trust No One

As I tore a strip from the bottom of my shirt, a shadow fell over me. A woman — middle-aged, with a face like weathered bark and kind eyes — crouched beside me.

“Child,” she said gently, “you’ll ruin that shoulder if you leave it like that. Come to my house. My husband was a soldier. I know how to treat these things properly.”

I hesitated. She did not smell of wine or filth. Her hands were clean. There was nothing cruel in her eyes, only concern. For a heartbeat, I wanted desperately to go with her — to be tended to, spoken kindly to, looked after.

But I did not know her. I trusted no one in this place. My father had drilled this into me quite literally, that no one in this world could be trusted but family, and even then, with reservations. “Do not trust even me,” he used to say, and I knew he meant it, for he had been my tormenter as well as my caretaker.

“My aunt is nearby,” I lied. “She’ll see to it.”

She studied my face, as if weighing my words. Then she sighed, nodded once, and pressed a hand briefly — almost motherly — to my uninjured arm.

“Make sure you keep it clean,” she said. “And change that bandage in the morning.”

She left, and the little audience, sensing the show was done, drifted away. Only the boys remained long enough to give me a last curious stare before running off.

I pressed the folded strip of cloth to the wound and tied it in place with another strip looped under my arm and across my chest. It was clumsy work, but it held. The bandage soon grew warm and damp with blood, but not soaking. I could still move my arm. It was painful, but it moved.

“There,” I muttered under my breath. “So much for my first day in the city. Get it together, Darius.”

I pulled my bloodstained jacket back on, though the movement made me wince, and tightened the spear strap. I smelled like wine, sweat, and copper. I needed to find my aunt. This town was too much for me. The noise, stink, and sense of danger were overwhelming. I felt as out of place as one of the temple carp would be if taken out of the pond and placed upon a horse charging into battle.

For a moment, the image made me smile. A giant carp riding horseback, wearing battle armor and holding the reins, its mouth working as it gasped for air. I laughed out loud, drawing a few open stares from passers-by. The sound of my own laughter, as much as anything that had happened to me so far, frightened me. I sounded like a crazy person.

A woman passing by slowed at the sound. She held the hand of a little girl, perhaps ten years old, who was chewing thoughtfully on a glossy brown sweet skewered on a thin stick. The girl stopped to stare at me openly, her steps lagging until her mother tugged at her hand.

“Come on,” the woman said sharply, not unkindly but with impatience.

The girl resisted, craning her neck to look at me as if I were something curious washed up from the river. Then, to my surprise, she pulled free. Before her mother could stop her, she trotted toward me, the sweet bobbing in her hand.

“Lihua!” the woman called, startled, hurrying after her.

The girl stopped a few paces from me. She did not come too close. She looked at my bandaged shoulder, then at my face, then held out the sweet without a word, her arm fully extended, her eyes lowered in sudden shyness.

I stared at it, uncertain. No one had ever offered me food unprompted before. I took it carefully, as if it might vanish if I moved too fast.

The mother caught up, breathless. I braced myself for her to snatch the child away, to scold her, perhaps to curse me for frightening her daughter.

Instead, she looked at me and said sternly, “What do you say?”

I did not understand. I stood there holding the sweet, mute. “Hello?” I said finally. I looked the girl up and down. “Your dress is pretty.”

The girl giggled, but the mother frowned. “You say, ‘thank you,’” she snapped.

“Oh.” Heat crept up my neck. I had not been raised with such polite expressions. “Thank you,” I said quickly. I bowed deeply to the girl, deeper than necessary, the movement tugging painfully at my shoulder. The girl giggled again, pleased, and allowed her mother to take her hand.

They went on their way, the girl glancing back once, smiling.

I stood there holding the sweet until they were gone. Then I ate it slowly. It tasted of sesame and sugar, and might have been the best thing I had ever eaten. My heart lightened a bit.

I had been told by the Mayor that my aunt’s name was Jade Lee, her husband was Zihan Ma, and they had a child whose name the Mayor did not know. I walked through the streets asking about them. People waved me off, shook their heads, provided conflicting answers, offered to sell me things, and, in the case of one noble, spat on me.

Ming

When I presented my question to an old woman who owned a stand heaped with some kind of orange flower, she looked me up and down skeptically. “Are you Darwish Lee?”

I frowned. “No. I am Darius Lee.”

She snorted derisively. “How does someone not know how to pronounce his own name? Your father is that miserable lout, Yong Lee?”

I was stunned. How could someone know my father’s name in this town? “He’s not a lout,” I said hotly. “He was a peanut farmer, and he is in the army fighting the invaders. He’s… well… the Mayor says he died.”

The woman’s face softened. “I am sorry. To Allah we return. I will not speak ill of the dead.”

So this woman too worshiped the God called Allah. Before I could ask about it, she went on: “Your auntie’s husband, Zihan Ma, is my brother. My name is Ming.” She studied me more carefully. “You have been wounded.”

I tipped my head to the side as if to say, “I suppose so.”

“I am working now,” Ming said, “but if you are hungry you can go to my house and my daughter will feed you.”

I was, in fact, hungry, tired, and hurt, but I had come this far, and I wanted to meet my aunt. I told Ming so, and she gave me directions. I should follow the main road, then turn right when I reach a huge elm tree that shades the entire road. Continue past the temple, walk until I can no longer hear the temple bells anymore, then turn left. From there, it would be a quarter day’s walk. My aunt’s house was set back from the road, but they were the only farm on that road growing safflower, so when I saw the safflower, I should enter through the gate. There I would find my aunt’s house.

“I don’t know what safflowers look like,” I said.

Ming shook her head sadly. “You have a wooden head, don’t you?” She picked up one of the stalks heaped on her stand and shook it in my face. It had small green leaves and a roundish orange flower with spiky petals. Its scent was sweet but mild. “This is a safflower, strings-for-brains. From your auntie’s farm, in fact.”

A Long Walk

Before setting out, I bought a wedge of cheese and filled my gourd flask at a public well. I slung the spear over my good shoulder and started down the road Ming had described.

The town fell away behind me, swallowed by dust and distance. The sounds of carts and hawkers faded, replaced by the quiet tapping of my own footsteps and the soft slosh of water in the gourd. The road was lined here and there with elms and poplars, their leaves whispering in the breeze. Fields stretched on either side, some green and thriving, others bare and brown, like my father’s land in the bad years.

After a while, the cut in my shoulder began to throb – slowly at first, then harder, beating in time with my heart. The bandage felt hot against my skin. I shifted the spear and immediately regretted it. Pain shot down my arm like fire. I took the jacket off and tied it around my waist, then lifted my shirt and checked the bandage. The cloth was dark with fresh blood, and something thicker and sticky seeping through. I re-tied it as tightly as I could manage and kept walking.

By midday, the world seemed brighter than it should have been. The sun pulsed like a fevered eye. I felt sweat trickling down my back, but at the same time a strange chill crawled over my arms, raising gooseflesh. My mouth tasted bitter, my head felt stuffed with wool, and my shoulder was as hot as a coal burned beneath the skin. I tried rolling my arm to loosen it and nearly cried out. I could not lift the arm properly anymore. I noticed that my jacket had come undone from around my waist and was gone. It had fallen somewhere on the road. I could not go back for it.

I thought of Far Away and Lady Two. Were there thieves in my house even now, digging up the bare earth floor, searching for gold that did not exist? Would the Mayor sell the house, or simply take it? Would some stranger sleep on my straw mattress, or would it all be left to rot? I had worked so hard to bring that land back from the dead. The thought of it slipping from my hands made something tight form in my chest.

To distract myself, I ran through the Five Animals forms in my mind. Tiger claw to the throat, crane beak to the eyes, leopard fist to the ribs, snake flick to the groin, dragon kick to the head. I pictured my father correcting me, rapping my legs with a stick when my stance was not deep enough, shouting at me to sink, sink, sink. Now I could barely keep myself upright.

The truth that my father was almost certainly gone pressed up from the inside of my mind like hot, bubbling mud. He had been the foundation of my life as well as its bane. He had beaten me, starved me, and abandoned me, yet he had also trained me, fed me when there was food, and wept when he saw what his absence had done to me. Now there was no one between me and the world but myself. I felt sorry for myself in a way I never had before. The feeling was like a weakness in my legs, as if they had turned to noodles.

Step, step, step. One foot in front of the other. I tried to imagine my aunt, Jade Lee, and her husband, Zihan Ma. What kind of people were they? Would they welcome me, or see me as a burden? More beatings, more shouting, more nights going to bed hungry? If that proved to be the case, I decided, I would not stay. I knew how to steal without getting caught, how to move quietly, how to run. I could live as a thief if I must. I did not want that life, but I would survive. I had already survived worse.

By the time the sun tilted toward late afternoon, every step was an effort. My feet were sore, my back ached from the weight of my pack and the dao, and my shoulder burned as if dipped in boiling water. A faint buzzing filled my ears. The world swam slightly if I walked too fast. Twice I stumbled, and once I had to stop and lean against a poplar tree until the dizziness faded.

I followed Ming’s directions as best I could: past the great elm that shaded the road, past a small roadside shrine, past a temple whose bells I could hear faintly behind me even after it vanished from sight. The sound seemed oddly distant, like something heard underwater. At last, I saw a field blazing with orange flowers – safflower, I knew now – from which rose the low hum of bees. I hoped my aunt’s door was not far beyond it, because I was no longer certain how much farther I could walk.

Farmhouse

A low stone wall bordered the road. A gate of rough-hewn wood stood open. As I stepped through, a man in a blue jacket and soft shoes was coming out, leading a horse by the reins. He had the soft hands and weak shoulders of a city man, and he smelled faintly of incense and wine.

“He’s in fine form today,” the man said to no one in particular. “Totally cured my gout. His needles are blessed by heaven.”

I stepped aside to let him pass. As he passed me, he got a better look, or perhaps a whiff, and reeled back, covering his mouth with a sleeve. He mounted his horse with a grunt and rode off toward town.

Inside the gate, I found myself on a working farm. A few young men – hired hands, I guessed – were out in the fields tending the safflowers, wearing wide-brimmed hats, and moving carefully between the rows with baskets slung from shoulder poles. In a nearby pen, goats cropped at a low wooden trough, their bells tinkling softly. From a barn with wide double doors came the sound of cows mooing, deep and content. A henhouse squatted beside it, chickens scratching in the dust around the door. Two gray-brown donkeys grazed freely near a stack of bundled firewood, occasionally flicking their tails at flies.

An old gray and white cat lay perched atop a carriage near the barn, paws tucked under its chest, watching me with half-lidded eyes as if it had seen a thousand boys like me and expected nothing new.

It was a far wealthier farm than that which my father and I had owned. The buildings were straight and well-kept, the fences repaired, the tools neatly stacked under the eaves. Smoke rose from the chimney of the main house in a steady plume, carrying with it the faint smell of cooked vegetables and something savory.

I stood there in the yard, dust on my shoes and sweat drying on my back, and thought that they must be eating supper. I felt as weak as a newborn calf. My clothing was drenched in sweat, and my heart beat too hard as I stepped up to the heavy wooden door, and heard voices talking inside. I raised my hand to knock, hesitated, and dropped it. Then I took a breath, let it out, and knocked on the door.

Unwelcome

The man who answered was of average height but stocky and a bit chubby, with muscular arms and shoulders. His face was dark and handsome, with a thick black mustache and inquiring black eyes. His hair fell to his shoulders in soft waves – very unlike my father, who had kept his hair short or shaved.

He did not look like a native of this land, and I wondered for a moment if he was an invader, but that was silly. The invaders were said to be tall and ivory-skinned, wearing armor that shone like moonlight. This man was of average height, and darker-skinned than me.

Close behind him stood a woman, and a boy of perhaps 10 years old. The boy was lean and used to hard work, I judged, but nevertheless had a softness about his face, as if he had never faced any great hardship, never been abandoned, never been beaten. I almost hated him for that.

As for the woman, she was short, and her eyes had pronounced folds. Her teeth were white, and even from the way she stood I could tell that she was martially trained, as there was a restrained power in her posture. Even relaxed, she appeared poised to strike.

The man’s eyes shot to the dao on my back and spear in my hand, then roamed over me, perhaps taking in my calloused hands, young but muscular body, and my altogether wretched condition. The torn and bloodstained shirt, the sweat and grime.

“Are you here for treatment?” His voice was not welcoming. “I do not work after sundown. And if it’s trouble you’re looking for, you’re in the wrong place.”

I tried to speak, but what came out was a croak. A bout of dizziness washed through my head, and I planted the spear to steady myself.

Someone said something, but I didn’t understand the words. My vision had gone entirely gray. I felt myself falling. I dropped the spear and reached out for purchase, but found only air. And then I was aware of nothing.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 4 – A Safe Place

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Searching for Signs of Spring: A Short Story

A Wish And A Cosmic Bird: A Play

The post Far Away [Part 3] – Wounded appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

2025 was an eventful year; for the world, our ummah, and surely our own personal lives – alhamdulillah for both the ups and (what we see as) downs.

Here at MuslimMatters, we published around 250 articles and podcasts: from timely current affairs pieces to community updates from across the world, from Islamic book reviews to investigative articles, from deep-dives into Islamic history, to of course, faith-led discourse around various modern-day themes.

Just in case you missed out – or even if you wouldn’t mind a re-read! – we’ve put together a roundup of articles that most piqued our readers’ interests over the past year.

We give you: The MuslimMatters Readers’ Choice Most Popular Articles From 2025:

 

THE TOP THREE

1.

Over 85 Muslim Scholars, Leaders And Institutions Say Muslim Nations Can Take “Concrete Action” To End Gaza Genocide

 

2.

Pro-Israeli Dating Company Quietly Buys Out Popular Muslim Marriage App

3.

The Fiqh Of Vaginal Discharge: Pure or Impure?

Islam & Spirituality

The Perspective of Khalwa from the Quran and Sunnah: Advice For Modern Day Interactions

My Rabb Will Never Abandon Us: A Personal Journey Through Love, Loss, And Tawakkul

The Muslim Woman And Menopause: Navigating The ‘Invisible’ Transition With Faith And Grace

Society

MuslimMatters Still Stands With Imam Nick

Beyond Badr: Transforming Muslim Political Vision

The Expansion Trap: Why Mosques Are Struggling Despite Fundraising

 

Life

Money And Wealth In Islam : The Root Of All Evil?

Is Your Temu Package Made With Uyghur Forced Labour?

10 Lessons After 10 Years Of Marriage

Culture

The Promise of SAIF: Towards a Radical Islamic Futurism

A Prayer On Wings: A Poem Of Palestinian Return

K-Pop Demon Hunters: Certainly Not for Kids

Current Affairs

The Elon Musk Anti-Islam Crusade

American Patriotism and Israel – How Should Muslims Navigate the Two?

Is Syria’s New President The Type Of Political Leader Muslims Have Been Waiting For?

Podcasts

Podcast | Happily Ever After (Ep 2) – What Are The Limits Of Wifely Obedience?

Podcast: Is Harry Potter Haram? Islamic Perspectives Of Poetry And Literature With Sh. Shahin-Ur Rahman

Podcast: Manifest(ing) Shirk – Zodiac Signs, Crystals, And Manifestation | Shaykha Aysha Wazwaz

Special Mention

In the midst of everything else that we published, a special shout-out has to go to Moonshot: the riveting and beautiful Islamic short story series (by our very own Wael Abdelgawad!) that saw us through the year, having us eagerly waiting for Sundays for the next chapter to be published.

Moonshot: A Short Story [Part 1]

And finally, a great, big jazakAllahukhair to all of our readers, both loyal and new. Please do keep commenting, sharing, and of course, reading!

 

Related:

The MM Recap – 2024 Reader’s Choice Articles

The MuslimMatters Ramadan Podcast Playlist 2025

The post MM Wrapped – Our Readers’ Choice Most Popular Articles From 2025 appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Introduction: Faith Meets Technology

Have you ever found yourself late at night with a question about your faith, scrolling through search results and forum posts, wondering which sources you can actually trust? It’s a modern dilemma in the timeless quest for knowledge.

However, in an age saturated with information, authenticity has become the scarcest commodity. This challenge is particularly acute for Muslims when seeking guidance on matters of belief, practice, and spirituality.

We live in an era where artificial intelligence is reshaping nearly every aspect of human life, from how we work and learn to how we seek meaning. The question isn’t if technology will touch our faith, it’s how. This article explores the intersection of Islamic Ethics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the current state of innovation in the Muslim world, and finally examines Ansari Chat as a case study in how these ethical principles can be translated into code.

Navigating AI Through the Lens of Islamic Ethics

AI is growing fast, promising incredible benefits but also raising complex ethical questions. For Muslims, this necessitates a careful evaluation of how AI aligns with faith and values.

Islamic scholars and institutions, including the International Islamic Fiqh Academy (IIFA), Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy, and the Muslim World League, are already actively debating these issues. In the West, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America (AMJA) has centered its 2026 Imam’s Conference around this very topic. These institutions draw on centuries of Islamic legal reasoning to ensure AI serves the common good (maslaha) while protecting the higher goals of Islamic law (maqasid al-shari‘ah).

To be clear, the goal is not to reject AI, but to provide frameworks that ensure the technology reflects the values of justice, compassion, and accountability. The real challenge is not whether Muslims should use AI, but how to use it responsibly while avoiding harm (darar).

The Current State of Islamic AI Innovation

Before diving into specific ethical frameworks, it is important to recognize that the “Islamic AI” sector is already bustling with innovation. The landscape is rapidly expanding beyond simple chatbots. We are seeing:

• Quranic Verification: Apps like Tarteel are using voice recognition AI to correct recitation in real-time, aiding in memorization (hifz).
• Islamic FinTech: AI-driven robo-advisors are being trained to screen stocks for Shari’ah compliance, automating complex financial rulings.
• Personalized Learning: Education platforms are utilizing large language models (LLMs) to tailor Islamic curricula to the specific level and school of thought (madhab) of the student.

However, this rapid innovation is not without risk. Without ethical guardrails, these tools can inadvertently amplify bias, commodify sacred knowledge, or present hallucinated information as religious fact. This is why a robust ethical framework is not just theoretical—it is an urgent necessity for developers.

Core Islamic Principles for AI

Islamic ethics is not a fixed rulebook; it is a living system that guides moral choices. When applied to the development and use of AI, four key principles stand out:

“The real challenge is not whether Muslims should use AI, but how to use it responsibly while avoiding harm (darar)” [PC: Masjid Pogung Dalangan (unsplash)]

1. Protecting the Higher Goals of Shari‘ah (Maqasid al-Shari‘ah): These include protecting faith (din), life (nafs), intellect (aql), family (nasl), and property (mal). Every AI system should be judged on its impact here. For example, generative AI that produces deepfakes threatens the intellect and social cohesion, whereas AI used in medical diagnosis actively protects life.
2. Justice (‘Adl) and Fairness (Qist): Islam mandates fairness. Training data often reflects historical social inequalities. If an AI used in hiring or credit scoring is trained on biased data, it perpetuates injustice. Technologists have a duty—each according to their capacity—to audit systems and remove these biases.
3. Trustworthiness (Amanah) and Responsibility (Mas‘uliyyah): Humans are entrusted (khalifah) with stewardship of the earth, including technology. Developers must build AI that is safe and transparent. Crucially, responsibility cannot be outsourced to a machine; humans remain accountable for the AI’s effects. This also extends to environmental stewardship, considering the massive energy resources required to power data centers.
4. Striving for Excellence (Ihsan): Ihsan means doing the best one can, as if in God’s presence. In software development, this means going beyond bare functionality to create technology that is beautiful, efficient, and truly beneficial, rather than predatory or addictive.

AI and Religious Rulings (Fatwas)

A critical distinction must be made regarding religious authority. While AI can search the Qur’an and Hadith faster than any human, the IIFA and Al-Azhar agree: AI cannot replace a human jurist (faqih).

Key reasons AI cannot replace human jurists include:

• Understanding the Spirit of the Law (Fiqh): Legal rulings require nuance and moral insight, not just pattern recognition.
• Understanding Real-Life Context (Waqi‘): A ruling must fit the specific situation, culture, and needs of the person asking. 
• Spiritual Insight (Taqwa and Basirah): Fatwas come from a life of faith, study, and devotion. AI has no soul or spiritual consciousness.

AI excels at pattern recognition, but it lacks the soul and consciousness required for moral adjudication. It is a powerful research assistant, not a scholar.

A Simple Ethical Framework for Users

For the everyday Muslim engaging with these tools, the following guide ensures responsible usage:

• Verify and Validate: Treat AI output as a starting point. Always cross-reference with the Qur’an, authenticated Hadith, and qualified scholars.
• Clarify Intention (Niyyah): Use AI for learning and solving problems, never for deception, finding “loopholes,” or generating deepfakes.
• Recognize Limits: AI is a tool, not an authority. It is fallible.
• Promote Good: Use AI to spread beneficial knowledge, while avoiding the spread of unverified information.

Perhaps one simple way to reflect on the use of AI is on the collective good (ummatic welfare). We should ask not only, “What can AI do for me?” but also, “What can AI do for the whole Muslim community?” In his article on Ummatic Soft Power, Ashraf Motiwala emphasizes how the use of AI will influence the future of the ummah: “Ummatic soft power must therefore operate on three fronts: (1) developing substantive Islamic perspectives on AI ethics; (2) influencing global discourse such that these perspectives are seen as viable and attractive; and (3) implementing them in actual technologies, through ummatic research labs, ethical standards, and applied AI platforms.” The consequence of this is that AI should be seen as a means of helping Muslims with the issue of revival, unity, and good governance.

By applying these principles, Muslims can ensure technology becomes a tool for ummatic welfare—helping with revival, unity, and good governance—rather than a source of confusion.

Operationalizing Ethics: The Case of Ansari Chat

How do these high-minded principles look when translated into actual code? One prominent attempt to answer this is Ansari Chat. Led by Dr. M. Waleed Kadous, Ansari serves as a useful case study in how to bridge the gap between Islamic scholarship and Silicon Valley engineering.

The project began in 2023 with a “proactive” philosophy. Rather than waiting for big tech companies to build Islamic tools as an afterthought, the Ansari team asked: What if the community shaped the technology to serve its unique values from the very beginning?

Transparency as Trust (Amanah)

The first ethical decision the project made was regarding trustworthiness (Amanah). In a landscape dominated by proprietary “black box” algorithms, where the decisions made by the developers are hidden, the Ansari team committed to being open source. 

This was a strategic ethical choice. For a tool dealing with sacred knowledge, the community needs to know how the answers are derived. Open source acts as a “public recipe,” allowing scholars and developers to inspect the code, verify the sources, and ensure there are no hidden agendas. This transparency builds a relationship of trust that proprietary models cannot easily match.

The Technical Fight Against Hallucination

“The community response suggests a hunger for tools that respect religious context.” [PC: Zulfugar Karimov (unsplash)]

Applying the principle of accuracy and verification, the evolution of Ansari highlights the technical challenges of “Islamic AI.” Early versions, like many LLMs, were prone to “hallucinations”—sounding confident while being factually incorrect.

To address this, the team shifted from a simple chatbot model to a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system. In simple terms, this gives the AI an “open-book test.” Instead of inventing an answer, the AI must first look up relevant facts from a trusted database—including the Qur’an, Hadith collections, and extensive Fiqh encyclopedias—before formulating a response.

This shift drastically reduced inaccuracies. Furthermore, later iterations introduced citations, ensuring that answers include verse numbers and links to original texts. This feature supports the user’s duty to verify and validate, empowering them to check the primary sources rather than blindly trusting the machine.

Impact and Utilization

The community response suggests a hunger for tools that respect religious context. By mid-2025, data showed that users were not just asking for trivia; they were asking about Fiqh (Islamic law) and Deen/Dunya balance. The tool has been accessed in over 20 languages, highlighting the global demand for accessible knowledge.

However, the project explicitly respects the boundaries of authority. It is designed to provide information and context, but stops short of replacing the scholar in complex, personalized rulings, aligning with the consensus of the IIFA and Al-Azhar mentioned earlier.

Conclusion: An Ecosystem of Ethical Innovation

Ansari Chat, as an example, acts as a proof of concept for a broader vision: an ecosystem of Islamic AI. Whether through integrating with educational curricula, supporting local adaptations like Tanyalah Ustaz in Malaysia, or developing tools for academic research, the goal is to plant a “forest” of innovation.

The story of Ansari demonstrates that technology does not have to distance Muslims from tradition. When built with Ihsan (excellence) and Amanah (trust), AI can function as a bridge, making sacred knowledge more accessible and verifiable. It offers a blueprint for the future: a generation of Muslims who are not just consumers of technology, but architects of it, ensuring the digital age is navigated with faith, responsibility, and moral clarity.

 

Related:

– AI And The Dajjal Consciousness: Why We Need To Value Authentic Islamic Knowledge In An Age Of Convincing Deception

– The Promise of SAIF: Towards a Radical Islamic Futurism

The post Faith And Algorithms: From An Ethical Framework For Islamic AI To Practical Application appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.