October 13, 2025

This is not justice. But it is much-needed relief.

This is not peace. Who could call it that, with their boot pressed against your neck?

Your killers still roam your lands. Your heroes remain locked in dark rooms.

Your children are buried in the rubble. And so are the dormant grenades.

There is no victory without liberation. But alhamdulillah for your joy today.

No one deserves it more. May nothing you gain ever be lost.

We are with you. We will never abandon the cause, and resistance takes many forms.

”They Should Stop Fighting” Is the New “Let Them Eat Cake”

“The war is finally over!” say the people outside of Palestine who have barely been paying attention. They dare speak of injustice in the past tense. Their selfish relief is repulsive. They can’t wait to stop hearing about Palestinian suffering. In case the obvious needs to be stated outright: Palestine is still not free. A single moment free from active bombardment is not “the end of the war” (even now, the war crimes haven’t even stopped, and you could even argue they’ve escalated). The ignorance of the international community is part of what has prolonged the genocide, allowing such injustice to endure at such an intensity for two years and eight decades, and I won’t let anyone off the hook by calling their ignorance naive, because passivity is a choice.

I’ve heard people from the US to the Arab world say the resistance should stop fighting “because the people of Palestine are tired.” As though if the resistance stopped resisting oppression, the oppression itself would somehow magically cease. Liberation is not the vanity project of the resistance. Exactly what do people think Palestinians have been fighting for? How removed from reality can these careless commenters be?

When people blame the resistance for fighting back, they forgive the oppressor for giving them a reason. “They should stop fighting” is the new “let them eat cake,” a frivolous refusal to acknowledge the true source of a problem, coming from a perspective that is privileged to the point of delusion. When those who say the fighting back must stop because the people of Palestine are tired, what they really mean is that they are tired of hearing about Palestine and feeling guilty. Well, we are tired of the world betraying the oppressed with their silence, which they only break to lazily pass judgment on how the oppressed should handle the injustices that the world’s silence has brought them.

Wrath of the Defeated Killers

While the fight has obviously not ended, these are still blessed days. Although our emotions in this moment must be a diluted version of your own, precious Palestine, you still elicit in us a more intense response than anything else in our life. The only delight that could compare to witnessing your happiness is witnessing your oppressor’s humiliation. Israel still seems to not understand just how much its supporters have lost, and how much more they are about to lose. But they know enough to feel wrath at your joy and vicious envy at the world’s love for you.

In true sadistic Israeli fashion, just as they did during the previous ceasefire, after agreeing to release a fraction of the thousands of Palestinian hostages, the IOF just raided the homes of their families and made threats against them, warning them against publicly celebrating the return of their kidnapped and tortured loved ones. Last time, the Zionist forces intensified the abuse of their captives in their daily beatings before letting them go and shaved the Star of David into the head of one Palestinian hostage. Reading the news in this era feels like hearing updates from an abusive husband who is desperate to retain control over his wife through intimidation, but somehow applied to the scale of entire populations. In fact, caring about Palestine feels like knowing your neighbor's child is being abused, yet Child Protective Services and the cops are somehow in on it, and every time you check in, the abuse has gotten worse, and all you can do is scream to tell the other folks in town and to let the child know that you care, but you can't stop it.

Alhamdulillah, from the freedom flotillas trying to break Israel’s siege on Gaza to the marching of millions across Europe for Palestine, our screams have been getting louder. As the tides keep turning, it will become increasingly important to sharpen our skill of distinguishing opportunistic hypocrites from the people who stood by justice even when the oppressed didn't have popular support. Killer Kamala recently dared to make a statement on the genocide, may she face the Hague. Omar El Akkad’s cleverly phrased and often quoted book title continues to gain relevance with every passing day: “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” So we’ll have to find a balance between healthy skepticism and a welcoming attitude toward sincere newcomers to the cause who are simply still learning. When evaluating a newcomer, consider their previous stance on Palestine, and if it doesn’t look good, then consider whether they seem openly remorseful versus dismissive regarding their past complicity. In some cases, the only road to repentance is retribution; the political structures that enabled the genocide (most political structures around the world) cannot be the ones to prevent future atrocities, and everyone who profited from such evil can only redeem themself by facing the profound punishment that’s due, not by “joining the new leadership to help reconstruct Gaza” after having themselves destroyed it.

The Jewish Identity Crisis

In light of the current exchange of captives, this next part addresses specifically the subset of Jewish people who have been grappling with their lingering attachment to Israel now that their holocaust in Palestine has become more obvious to the vast majority of the world. I walked past my local Temple Israel with my family the other day, and we saw photos of Zionist prisoners of war, members of Israel’s genocidal army, adhered to trees in their courtyard. As they call them, the hostages. I immediately thought of the eleven thousand plus Palestinian hostages who the mainstream Western media never mentions, the reason for the fight in the first place, hundreds of whom are children and all of whom are held in torture prisons by illegal Israeli occupation forces with the support of the United States. These neighbors of ours would sooner publicly grieve war criminals who share their identity than spare a thought for the masses they victimized in their name. If our mosque were to display those eleven thousand faces, how big would our courtyard need to be? We just kept walking.

Genocide is only “complicated” when you identify with the oppressor. I can see how personal ties to the transgressing party would make standing with the oppressed less convenient, but inconvenience does not dissolve personal responsibility. To anyone who was raised Zionist and is currently struggling with the most epic case of cognitive dissonance of all time, I have a request: please mull over your moral dilemmas in private. Grieve your childhood attachment to the idea of Israel with people going through the same identity crisis, and rage against the ones who manufactured and weaponized your emotions to justify a new holocaust. This is all productive work.

But don’t make it Palestine’s problem.

The Western empire’s illegal occupation of Palestine isn’t complicated, it’s only complicated for YOU. That’s fine, please do process those emotions. But be very conscious about which parts of that journey you make public when your privileged tears have the power to fund bombs and silence the people who are suffering for your sense of self. You should use your position to turn fellow Jewish people into allies for liberation, willing to take back what was taken by Zionists, and willing to give back what was taken from Palestine.

And if you ever look up and realize that even your conversations about Palestine spotlight only the Jewish experience, when the narrative becomes about your ego, your resentment, your atonement, here’s a good exercise: just imagine how you might feel if the Holocaust were only publicly discussed by Germans, if those conversations centered their internal struggle and regret and excluded the souls who actually suffered the internment camps. Your identity crisis in this historical moment is interesting and important, but outside the walls of your homes and synagogues, it’s not the central story, so don’t let it be. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak out; on the contrary, your voices are sorely needed, but that’s precisely because Western society puts more weight on your experience, all while continuing to conflate Judaism with Zionism. So God bless you for speaking, but when you do, please remember: although the genocidal mainstream media won’t feature the people of Palestine, until they are liberated, it’s their stories that matter most.

Recently an Israeli man approached my mom during her standout for Palestine. Compared to her typical interactions with Israelis, this man was relatively “nice,” yet his immediate question for her was not about the genocide. It had nothing to do with Palestine. No, what he wanted to know was whether she believes Israel should not exist. That was his primary and sole concern. As if Israelis were the ones facing ethnic cleansing. This exchange reminds me of the way hypothetical psychological harm befalling Jews is given more media attention than active physical harm being inflicted upon Palestinians.

It reminds me of the “we love our Jewish brothers and sisters” disclaimer people feel compelled to include in any statement about how genocide is wrong. Again, to hear how ridiculous this sentiment sounds, apply it to the Holocaust: “we love our German brothers and sisters, but we have to put our foot down and say that the Holocaust is wrong.” Would Jews feel supported or baffled by such a message? And these are the kinds of sentiments coming from the very few public figures who do spare a thought for Palestine. And rather than pointing out their odd framing, audiences applaud their courage for using the word genocide.

The bar could not be lower. People who were brought up Zionist, whether explicitly or simply by virtue of living in the West, will have their work cut out for them in terms of undoing the training they’ve received that continually centers their ego and tells them they’re special and superior, ever-persecuted victims who have been chosen by God Himself. Even as the hateful Jewish supremacist ideology of Zionism dies in the hearts of the people before our eyes, its impact continues to infect the echo chambers of the powerful, from the double-standard terminology used in reporting to the unchallenged assumptions and disproven lies that are still thrown around. The best cure for the world’s Zionist hangover isn’t to purify Israel’s image by distancing the apartheid settler colony from Netanyahu's administration; it’s to center Palestine.

The Whole Story

During her downtown standout for Palestine yesterday, amidst overwhelming support from the public, my mom says someone yelled at her: “The war is over! Go home!”

Another man asked her with irritation how long she plans to stand there. She told him, “Until Palestine is free.”

He told her, “I know that. When will that be?”

Her reply was patient. “When there is justice.”

Which he didn’t like. Then he said, “Do you want to know the whole story?”

And she said, “I know the whole story.” And he started babbling about the land belonging to Israel, so she told him to leave.

When she got home, I was crying too hard to get the name out: “You know S… Saleh?” I was gasping and she couldn’t hear me. She took me by the hand and led me upstairs, where I started fully sobbing. They killed Saleh al-Jafarawi, but apparently the war is over.

I’ll see you on the streets.

Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian student who has lost two hundred relatives over the course of Israel’s genocide, remains in ICE custody at the time I write this essay in September; she has been in prison since March, and she was first kidnapped by the US government during the vengeful, fearmongering wave of immigration detentions that, by the Trump administration’s own admission, targeted Palestine activists (photo from Middle East Eye).

Our childhood passport photos inside our mom’s Iraqi passport in 1998.

9/7/2025

Newly exposed classified data from the Israeli military itself reveals that over eighty percent of the Palestinians they have killed are civilians, and seventy-five percent of the Palestinians they have detained in Israeli military prisons that are infamous for torture are also civilians. Putting aside that death tolls are widely understood to be severe underestimates, and that Israel posthumously declares its civilian victims to be terrorists without evidence, let’s take this data at face value for a moment, though the truth is likely to be even worse. People have taken notice that this statistic of over eighty percent is more damning than the civilian death toll ratio of the Nazi-aligned Axis powers during World War II. It’s become increasingly clear to even the willfully ignorant by now that if Israel isn’t actively trying to wipe out every Palestinian off the face of the Earth, then at best, their existence is inconvenient, their lives are disposable, and their suffering is ignored if not actively enjoyed by Zionists.

Israeli journalist and liberation ally Gideon Levy points out in a recent article that even at Israeli protests for a ceasefire, the focus is not on the genocide or the famine, the absolute holocaust being orchestrated in Israelis’ names against the indigenous people their government occupies; rather, the focus of the Israeli protesters seeking ceasefire is overwhelmingly on “the hostages.” This term of course is in reference to the dozens of remaining prisoners of war in Gaza, members of Israel’s genocidal occupation army who are unfortunately regarded by the Knesset as living liabilities that Israel has yet to kill, not for a lack of trying. And note that when the Israeli people protest for the release of the hostages, they are not referring to the over ten thousand Palestinian hostages held illegally by the Israeli government, some of whom have been in prison without charge for decades, with more civilians being dragged away in IOF raids in the West Bank daily. These are Israel’s protests for peace, mind you; with very few exceptions I do deeply admire, even in their protests for peace, Israeli peace activists neglect to mention the active genocide they fund on the land they stole. I don’t have another word for it; it’s just embarrassing, and damn, those chosen people sure do deserve each other.

Israel’s own genocidal army admits to its genocidal statistics, and polls continue to show the majority of Israeli society mirroring this genocidal mindset, yet they call it war. If it’s a war, then Israel, as a terrorist pawn of the Western empire, as an apartheid settler colony, and as a psychopathic society of Jewish supremacists, is apparently comfortable with the vast majority of human beings they murder being collateral damage, something other than their claimed intended targets. Truly, they have less regard for human lives than healthy people have for animals, for trees, for blades of grass that folks would naturally feel bad about needlessly harming. It’s not collateral damage, though, because it’s not war. Obviously, the civilian death toll is their goal, their intended target all along.

But I’d also like to talk about that overlooked under twenty percent, the claimed intended targets, the combatants, the so-called terrorists, the ends that Israel believes justify all means, even if Israel’s means include the daily massacres, dismemberment, and starvation of children. Of course, anyone with a functioning conscience would say there is no end great enough to justify such war crimes, that atrocities carried out en masse against children could never and should never be justified in the first place. But Israelis, unironically believing their people to be “chosen,” find their mission so noble and their opponents so evil that anything can be justified in service of their cause, even if Palestinians have to be put in real danger to protect Israelis from hypothetical danger. For that reason, the successful murders of Palestinian combatants, the deaths that make up under twenty percent of Israel’s genocide victims, justify in Israel’s perception the ongoing “accidental” daily mass murders of Palestinian civilians.

Yet if by Israel’s own logic, one can murder their enemy’s children to keep their own people safe on stolen land, then wouldn’t it be even easier to conclude and far less of a moral stretch to say that Palestinians have not only a right, but a duty, to defend against genocidal Israeli soldiers who are actively murdering their children in their own homes? Wouldn’t self-defense in the context of genocide not only absolve an occupied people of guilt, but make them heroes for their fight? Wouldn’t that expression of defensive force, in the context of protection against imminent threats from an illegal occupier during a genocide, be the most morally acceptable instance of force, especially according to international law? If violence in that extreme situation is not justified, then no violence can ever be justified, and no army should ever exist. In other words, even that under twenty percent Israel murdered, they are absolutely not within their rights to have killed, neither legally nor morally. Israel is not eighty percent off target, it is one hundred percent in the wrong.

What does it mean to be a combatant during a genocide? Clearly a lot is riding on that term for Israel. Even going back before October Seven, what does it mean to be a combatant during an occupation? Crucially, is it even possible for an indigenous warrior facing off against a racist settler colony to be unjust toward that colony? I’m serious, think about it: what does any colonized person, civilian or combatant, owe to their oppressor? Famously, Palestinians treat their Israeli oppressors far better than Israelis treat their Palestinian hostages, as the Israelis the Knesset has abandoned in Gaza are fed by Palestinians even through the famine Israel has designed, and these Israelis are sheltered by Palestinians from Israeli bombs even through the genocide Israel is waging.

Meanwhile, how does Israel treat its indigenous Palestinian civilian captives? It starves, tortures, and rapes them. It beats them and denies them medical care. It deprives them of sunlight and loved ones. And these captives aren’t members of an occupying genocidal army, no, they’re doctors. They’re journalists. Too often, they are children.

Israel treats the best of Palestine worse than Palestine would ever treat the worst of Israel. So when I ask what Palestine owes to its oppressor, it’s clear that they have fulfilled their end of the human contract above and beyond all reasonable expectations, in accordance with Islamic laws about upholding the rights of one’s enemy, laws I used to consider purely hypothetical before my soul lived to witness this era.

More importantly, what do the people of Palestine owe to each other? They sacrifice their lives to protect their loved ones, and we are expected by the Western world to look down on these souls’ willingness to defend their people, to condemn their resistance and use their courage as a reason to deny them mercy.

Most importantly, what do we owe to the people of Palestine? Given the way they have exposed the truth about the entire world to itself, given the burdens they alone have been enduring to free us, the complacent masses, I’d have to say we owe them everything, and we have failed them eight billion times over.

Now that Israel’s holocaust in Palestine has become so obvious to the world as a genocide, now that the manmade famine and the daily massacres targeting children, journalists, and medical workers are making even the chosen people uncomfortable, I just have to ask why, why are we still taking Israel’s word, on anything? Anything they have ever said or will ever say? Would people capable of genocide not be capable of lying? Should their speech not immediately be regarded as likely to be the opposite of the truth? The Zionist narrative on October Seven, the Zionist narrative on their enemies, the Zionist narrative on their stated mission, all of that should come into question now. If war criminals hate someone, then shouldn’t that someone be assumed innocent (if not heroic) until proven guilty? And shouldn’t that proof come from any source other than the mouths of war criminals and industries that are serving and covering and justifying the ethnic cleansing right now?

As people focus on Israel’s death toll ratio of civilians versus combatants, will they not stop to ask if Israel even has the right to fight indigenous combatants on stolen land? According to international law, they do not. While Israel talks about their nonsensical right to self-defense, where is the threat to their people? Beneath the debunked lies around a single day that woke up a sleeping world, what remains? A bunch of privileged land thieves talking about antisemitism? Aren’t they embarrassed?

Chosen people, doesn’t it feel shameful to talk about words offending you, to talk about “feeling unsafe,” when the people being killed in your name are actually unsafe, being massacred by the dozens on the daily, their buildings leveled to the ground? What do you still feel entitled to from the people you are committing a genocide against? Should the starving, disfigured Palestinian who has lost hundreds of members of her family and has been displaced a dozen times while outrunning your bombs be more diplomatic in her wording, lest her harsh reality that you created inconvenience your reputation or self-image? Would that your victims could even once enjoy the luxury of feeling offended. Alas, they are too busy searching for their loved ones in the rubble (even if you didn’t click on any of the previous links in this essay, you might want to click on this one). Palestine doesn’t owe us a damn thing, and we will never be able to pay off our debt to them.

8/11/2025

ATTENTION ALL MUSLIMS: prayers for forgiveness are only considered sincere if you intend to stop doing the deed you’re asking forgiveness for! Do you think you can fool God?

As more images circulate of Israel and the Western empire’s genocide in Palestine and the manufactured famine and the targeted bombing of young journalists and medical staff, as the ongoing atrocities get increasingly harder for the complicit and the complacent to deny, more and more useless voices feel the need to acknowledge the war crimes several hundred thousand martyred bodies too late, and it’s true that the more the world hears about Palestine, the better, but some of these voices have really been adding to the noise by expressing “concern” or “condemnation” either without naming the criminals or without channeling their claimed sentiments into any kind of action. The main culprits, of course, are public officials in the West and their pawns abroad who hold any kind of power, the kinds of sniveling politicians who “mourn for Gaza” because of “the humanitarian situation” there, while continuing to vote to send all of America’s money toward weapons so Israel can complete its Final Solution to the Palestinian Question.

But my targets today aren’t the sniveling politicians, who obviously aren’t reading and wouldn’t listen anyway. Today I’m talking to the Muslims. Not the disturbing sort who have stooped to blaming the victims to ease their own guilty conscience, but the ones who claim to live by Islam. I see you these days, lurking in the comments online beneath news clips of charred bodies and loved ones screaming while sorting through the gore. I keep reading your messages, a dozen variations of the same plea: ya Rabbee, forgive us for not doing more, we failed Gaza.

What gets me is the past tense.

You didn’t fail Gaza. You are failing Gaza. Actively. And I wouldn’t dare say our Most Forgiving God won’t forgive you, I’m actually saying the opposite; if you are finally recognizing that you’ve been too distracted by your own ease to address their hardship, then you still have a chance to redeem yourself now. But you have to contribute to the liberation of Palestine before Palestine is liberated; otherwise, you’ll be counted among the silent, and our Lord is not only the Most Merciful, he is also the Most Just.

If you’re feeling helpless, that’s only natural. The fact that you left those comments means you care, and that’s a lot to work with, actually. Remember that it’s not on you to free Palestine. Allah will free Palestine. But what you are expected to do is try.

*

Today, the Middle East Eye reported that a young Israeli man has been arrested by police and institutionalized by his own parents for spraying a message onto the Western Wall and the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem; the graffiti reads: “THERE IS A HOLOCAUST IN GAZA.” He was literally sent to a psych ward for telling the truth in the Holy Land. Gaslighting on the scale of institutions, on the scale of an empire, is always disturbing to see, but as every soul on Earth inevitably meets its end and stands before God on the Day of Judgment, I would much rather be standing next to that man, that Israeli man who did something, who said something, who tried something, who risked something, instead of finding myself standing on that Day next to a fellow Muslim who lived their own little quiet, passive life.

I know the prospect of acting can feel scary and unpleasant. It’s okay to fear losing what you have, and it’s okay to calculate acceptable risks and take the smallest of steps. Whenever I feel afraid, I think of how it must feel to live in Gaza, and then my anger replaces my fear as I remember: I have more right to be on these streets with this message today than anyone else passing by on their daily routine.

Do you think the record-breaking hundreds who were arrested in London this week weren’t scared? Many a brave soul in England who got arrested on Saturday for “supporting terrorism” just for voicing their opposition to genocide was terrified and crying out of panic at what they were about to do; one gentleman interviewed at the demonstration said, “But it’s even more awful if we don’t do it.” And imagine how much scarier it would have been if they were arrested and prosecuted alone, instead of by the hundreds, thereby reducing their risk and maximizing their impact.

You can’t sit back because others are acting and you’re too scared. They’re scared too, and your presence makes everyone a little bit safer. Resistance is an individual decision, but a collective act.

*

This should be good news: you can do something, something that makes a difference! Below is a list of some broad actions you can take, ordered from the bare minimum to the genuinely striving; these are different deeds you should try and keep trying to enact, finding what works for you based on whatever specific means Allah has blessed you with.

1) Watch, listen, read, learn about, bear witness to Palestine. 👀 You can’t care if you don’t know. Hearing the news secondhand once every few weeks isn’t enough. You might say “it hurts too much, and it won’t do them any good for me to watch their misery,” but how could you ever begin to help them if you aren’t even making them part of your life? Of course you’d feel helpless if you barely even check in about what’s going on, you are making yourself helpless; I was able to write this essay just by cobbling together recent news items that have been on my mind, but if I hadn’t been following the stories closely, I wouldn’t have had anything to say beyond “this is so sad and evil.”

2) Make du’a by talking to God from the heart every day. 🤲🏼 If you’re Muslim, then you believe in the promise of Allah. You know how this one ends. Victory is coming. It’s natural and compassionate to feel distressed on behalf of the oppressed, but living in despair is irrational and indicates you’ve missed the point.

This genocide isn’t bigger than the forces of good. It isn’t a battle of wills between the colonizer and the colonized. It’s a test, for you, for everyone alive. Victory is guaranteed for the oppressed, in this life and the next insha’Allah, but your fate is yet to be determined. Will you side with the oppressor for personal gain, will you be considered among the indifferent, or will you rise to the occasion and fight injustice? Confide in ar Rahman about your distress, desperately ask for His help, and understand that He hears you! You’ll be surprised at how cleansing it feels, like your soul had been waiting for you to finally say something, to acknowledge your revulsion at the sadistic horrors, even just in the privacy of your own bedroom.

3) Donate often. 💰 It’s true that the aid in the trucks is rotting at the border thanks to Israel's siege while airdropped “aid” is killing children by impacting their skulls on arrival and the “aid” distributed by the GHF (state-sponsored terrorists) comes laced with drugs and the high likelihood of getting shot and killed by the same person who just handed you your meal. However, there are reputable organizations with internal access to charity kitchens in Gaza. Look for groups that have Palestinian volunteers who consistently provide evidence of recent aid distribution across the Gaza Strip.

4) Protest in the best way you know how. ✊🏼 You might make a sign and stand alone on a busy street corner, or with a friend, or as part of a group of activists. If you’re new to protesting, it might feel less intimidating to go with a friend to an organized rally at first. But some of the most impactful actions are the ones that involve direct human connection, conversations with people who still don’t know. You can inform them. These conversations call for gentle patience; try to avoid being judgmental and shaming, even though this topic can stir up a lot of feelings and the ignorance of the complacent can be frustrating. It’s not your job to successfully convince others, just to try to spread awareness, which can be done by wearing pins, holding signs, making art, writing articles, producing videos, or creating any other kind of content to share online, making Palestine visible in whatever spaces the general public might frequent, as well as spaces associated with the sins of the colonizer, such as weapon factories and Zionist embassies.

I’ll also share a few words of warning about what doesn’t tend to be as effective. For your own safety and peace of mind, don’t bother engaging with the hostile and the hateful. You’ve already won by upsetting them with your declaration of truth. If someone doesn’t appear to be engaging in good faith, end the conversation immediately by turning away and chanting loudly if needed to drown out their efforts to bait you. Also, there aren’t many comebacks you could say in response to cruelty that are more dignified than silence. Finally, don’t waste too much of your precious time trying to outreach politicians bought by AIPAC. It’s not rational to ask war criminals to stop committing war crimes, or to go through a broken system to fix it.

5) Expand your circle of empathy. 💚 Wherever you encounter injustice, it’s your responsibility to address it. If you live in the West, your money is likely funding the extermination of the Palestinian people, but there are many other oppressed peoples in desperate need of your attention. Based on where you live, find out which injustices your silence would most directly contribute to.

In the United States, ICE agents in plain clothes have been kidnapping innocent people away from their loved ones, frequently targeting activists as well as laborers, holding them in prisons for extended periods, and deporting them to countries far from their homes; many of the victims tend to be racial minorities, especially Latino and Black people, and they commonly face abuse while in detention. Meanwhile, Indigenous Americans have been fighting for their rights since the colonizer first occupied Turtle Island. Other notable ongoing injustices include Saudi Arabia’s atrocities against the steadfast yet impoverished people of Yemen, India’s incomprehensibly cruel occupation of Kashmir, and the horrific genocide in Sudan funded by the despicable United Arab Emirates. This is a highly abbreviated list and by no means comprehensive; in virtually every spot of land on Earth, you will find injustice (and from Guatemala to the Congo, Israel is often somehow involved, typically by training genocidal armies and selling them arms to crush local liberation movements).

When you encounter oppression, don’t turn away. It’s too easy to turn away. What if it were you? It could still be you, and your silence wouldn’t save you from the senseless violence of the imperial boomerang.

So there’s your list. Pick something and do it. Then try something else. Remember why you’re on this Earth. Push yourself a little more, on the regular, just to keep the oppression and suffering of your brothers and sisters in your orbit.

Otherwise, how could we possibly be forgiven?

On multiple occasions, Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, warned us very clearly: “Fear the prayer of the oppressed.” The people of Palestine have already told the complacent traitors among us: they don’t forgive us, and they are praying we will be held accountable by Allah for our inaction and our silence. Sure, it’s scary to resist the state, but that du’a is freaking terrifying, and you’d better pray it doesn’t apply to you.

“Do the people think they will be left alone by saying ‘we believe,’ while they have not been put to the test?”

- Verse Two of “Al ’Ankabut” (the Spider), Chapter Twenty-Nine of the Qur’an

7/28/2025

If you watch mainstream news outlets in the West, then you might feel intimidated by the task of trying to make sense of “the complicated situation with Israel and Palestine,” so here is a Zionist-inspired glossary to help you learn more without accidentally committing a hate crime or supporting terrorism in the process!

Antisemitism - The opposition of genocide (but like, in a racist way that hurts the feelings of the high-tech military funded by the most powerful countries on Earth). Famous antisemitic groups whose prosecution of war crimes is clearly motivated by their hatred of Jews include the United Nations, the International Court of Justice, Doctors Without Borders, and every human rights organization in the world. Please note that actual Nazi politicians are not considered antisemitic as long as they support Israel.

Famine - Something that isn’t happening in Gaza, or if it is, then it’s an unfortunate tragedy that Israel, the United States, and their allies among the Arab governments need to starve babies to death and shoot down children lining up for aid in order to preserve Israel’s national security, and if you don’t like it, then maybe Palestinians should have thought of that before resisting occupation.

Genocide - An extremely antisemitic term to refer to Israel’s extermination campaign as carried out through their daily massacres of civilians in Gaza. In fact, Israel’s extermination campaign as carried out through their daily massacres of civilians in Gaza is NOT a genocide. The Holocaust was a REAL genocide, so Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza can’t be a genocide. Instead of using the offensive term genocide to refer to Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, use the word “war,” which clarifies that Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza is double-sided in the sense that survivors in Gaza have given Israel a lot of trouble by daring to fight back or continue existing, especially on land that Israel wants. It’s okay to think that Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza should be implemented differently, but what’s most important for Zionists is to focus on what words are used to describe Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, rather than acknowledging the atrocity itself, because words are more offensive than bombs in Zionist culture, in which perception takes precedence over reality. Arguing about terminology is a good way to focus the conversation away from Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza to avoid making any moral assessments of highly complicated, incredibly sensitive situations that only Jewish supremacist genocide historians could possibly comment on and that the general public should be very careful when getting into, lest they inadvertently support terrorism by opposing Israel’s extermination campaign in Gaza, which again is not a genocide. Author note: apologies for the wordy entry; if only there were a single word that could describe Israel’s extermination campaign as carried out through their daily massacres of civilians in Gaza!

Holocaust - A common misconception is that the Holocaust is an atrocity enacted by the West against many minorities in the past, an evil that Western society should really learn from; for Zionists, however, the Holocaust is actually a convenient tool that it would be a waste not to harness, a historical license for world domination understood through the lens of perpetual victimhood on the basis of tribalism (“identity”), which preemptively justifies anything Israel does, including carrying out their own Holocaust against an entirely different group of people whose land Israel’s founders colonized after Zionists collaborated with Nazis to get the Jews out of Europe by violently expelling Palestinians in 1948 and claiming the survivors’ homes in order to artificially construct a Jewish state.

Heroism - The use of violence for any reason in any capacity by anyone working for the West, especially against civilians indigenous to Southwest Asia or North Africa.

Hostages - The only people in the Gaza Strip considered human by the general public in Israel (and considered disposable by the government of Israel), this term refers to Israelis captured and held in occupied Palestine since October 2023 and leveraged in ceasefire negotiations, since the humanity of Palestinians is not acknowledged by world powers. Don’t refer to the remaining Israeli hostages as prisoners of war, whether to describe the colonists who were living in illegal settlements on stolen land or the soldiers who participated in ethnic cleansing. Additionally, be sure not to use the term hostages to refer to the over ten thousand Palestinian civilians getting tortured in Israeli military prisons. Beyond that, please be careful not to use the term hostages to refer to the two million Palestinian civilians unable to leave the concentration camp of Gaza while Israel bombs and starves the entire Gazan population into oblivion.

IDF - The IDF refers to the Israel Defense Forces, who should not be considered terrorists when they massacre, dismember, torture, and starve civilians in Palestine on a daily basis, because the IDF act in “self-defense” to protect Israel’s security (this one should be obvious guys, it’s right in their name).

Israel - Apparently a promise and a gift from God Himself three thousand years ago, a piece of Earth exclusively for the Chosen People, who are of course the Zionist Jews, many of whom don’t believe in God (this piece of Earth already had Arab Jews peacefully living there, but those Jews weren’t from Europe, so the promise to the people who felt owed by God Himself was not fulfilled until the past century, according to Zionists).

Khhhamas - Supporters of terrorism might claim that Hamas is the elected government in Gaza, but Gaza is occupied by Israel and Palestine isn’t a state, as it doesn’t exist and has never existed. Khhhamas could be anywhere in Gaza, and anywhere with the slightest chance of Khhhamas being present is a valid target, which makes every mosque, church, school, hospital, refugee camp, and charity kitchen in Gaza a valid target. Journalists, medics, doctors, or any other professionals who might have ever interacted with the government of their own society are therefore considered combatants and threats to be neutralized by Israel despite the Geneva Conventions. If you look somber enough while saying it, then the massacre of hundreds of civilians in a single day can be justified on live TV through the claim that there might have been some Khhhamas around. It is customary to condemn Khhhamas before being granted permission to speak on the subject of Palestine, which isn’t a state and doesn’t exist.

Liberal - A real ally for the reputation of Israel, a liberal is a person whose public identity revolves around fighting oppression, yet who can be trusted to stay silent about (if not actively support) their taxes funding Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

October Seven - The last known day of human history. Also the first day of human history since the Holocaust. Of course, it is an insult to survivors to question the claims made on that day just because no evidence exists for many of the claims made by politicians and the media networks that serve them, or because those claims were all immediately debunked. And on that note, it is definitely an insult to Zionists to look into what the IDF did on that day in 2023.

Palestine - A new term invented to confuse and misguide people, as no such place has ever existed, and the land was empty before the past century even though it contains the holy sites of multiple major world religions; note that calling for the freedom of this made-up land that definitely doesn’t exist is incredibly offensive to Jewish people, and that Israel needs desperately to protect itself against antisemitic terrorist threats from a people who aren’t real (if any part of this Zionist definition is confusing, then know that they’d like for you to feel free to stop trying to learn about Palestine and respect Zionist expertise on the matter).

Resistance - This term is used by supporters of terrorism, as there would be nothing to resist were it not for the Palestinians fighting back against the massacres of their loved ones and the theft of their homes; for Zionists, anyone in Palestine resisting occupation and oppression is inherently a terrorist who compromises their savage people’s undeserving chance at peace.

Self-Loathing Jew - A Jewish person who refuses to identify with beliefs of Jewish supremacy.

Terrorism - The use of violence for any reason in any capacity by an Arab or Muslim, especially on their own land against colonizing invaders.

The West Bank - One of the only pieces of Palestine that remain, Israel recently voted to annex the West Bank, which is already occupied by the IDF and their puppets; in the West Bank, Palestinian children are killed by Israeli settlers without consequence or else arrested by the IDF in raids and tortured in Israeli military prisons to prevent the spread of future terrorism.

War - A magical word that, when invoked, suddenly renders irrelevant any universally acknowledged moral principles of fundamental human rights.

Zionist - Another term for a Jewish person, and you’re antisemitic if you don’t use the terms interchangeably, even though one refers to a violent political ideology, while the other refers to an ethnoreligious group. A Zionist is someone who believes that no matter the cost and no matter the consequences, Jews deserve a homeland like everyone else, even though many ethnic and religious groups don’t have their own state, even though the European settlers in Israel already have homelands with accompanying citizenships, and even if Arab Jews need to be kidnapped from or terrorized out of their homelands in order to create such a state where Jewish people (Zionists) can finally feel safe (from the people whose land they stole).

6/23/2025

Part One - The Great Liberal Letdown

(A Personal Critique of the Western Individualist Approach to Justice)

If you’re not in the mood for an appetizer, you can skip straight to Part Two, in which a Muslim writer addresses Jewish readers from the bottom of her heart, but otherwise, indulge me as I set this table we’ll be sharing today with some juicy ideological context. What do you get when you combine Western individualism with an attempt to empathize with others? The liberal fascination with identity. Perhaps since the era of the “Enlightenment” starting at the end of the 1600s in Europe, people in the West haven’t been as ideologically primed to think in collective terms, so to conceptualize systemic injustices, rather than considering oppressed peoples on a communal scale, I’ve noticed in the US at least that folks tend to focus on “the marginalized individual,” an idealized representation of someone whose voice should be elevated because it has been drowned out or silenced by its mainstream counterpart. Under this subversive system of progressive morality, “oppressed identities” ironically become a sort of currency in liberal spaces, giving people permission to speak, and to be respected in some cases regardless of their deeds or even what they have to say; the message seems to be that the status quo has imposed itself on everyone for so long that it is now time to hear from anyone fitting into a counterculture category.

I remember back in grad school, people would preface their every comment with the phrase “as a [insert list of marginalized identities],” so for instance, a wealthy White classmate might feel the need to leverage the fact that she identifies as bisexual in order to lecture people of color about equality (yes, this is a real example, or examples, I should say, because it happened all the time). It was almost comical in a sad way to witness the hesitation in the voices of my students as they tried to seek acceptance when sharing their ideas by leaning on the approval of sufficiently “marginalized” people in their orbit. I cringe to recall that I also felt the need at times, in order to be heard by my peers, to open my remarks by pointing out that I am an Iraqi hijabi, even though my race and religion are readily apparent to onlookers. If you’re reading this account without having experienced such a strange subculture for yourself, you might think it advantages people of color, or at least offers us a level playing field, but unfortunately, Western liberalism often has the opposite of its intended effect; it didn’t take long for me and my friends, international students from West Africa, India, and East Asia, to form our own group just to get some refuge from all the self-righteous posturing of our performatively woke peers, who might have meant well, but often managed to both excessively shower us with awkward reverence while condescending our respective cultures, thereby paralyzing any organic opportunities for deep conversation and genuine connection.

Aside from making class discussions insufferable in the self-important world of liberal arts, there are many other unfortunate drawbacks to this mentality that justice is all about how individuals are perceived and petty power struggles in who should get to have a voice. So many culture wars could have been avoided, for one thing. People who have been privileged by society tend to get far more defensive and less receptive to messages of social justice when the conversation becomes about their identity, something to which we each have a personal attachment by definition, rather than about the far more pressing historical and institutional realities impacting the colonized. But the message has been lost in its execution through an emphasis on individualism. In other words, the obsessive liberal fixation on identity has obscured the admirable liberal intent to get people to question the oppressive systems that currently govern our world.

Sometimes it feels like the West views “the White man” as an archetype of privilege whose success should be simultaneously scorned and sought, but if success is defined by this archetype, then minorities and women will only be viewed as equal if they are the same as the standard set by the privileged, as if all they need to do is “rise to the level” of whichever group currently holds all the resources. For instance, how many storytellers have expected audiences to be grateful that Black people are now allowed into White narratives, their features slapped onto traditionally Caucasian characters as if merely associating with Whiteness is the pinnacle of achievement, or having a diverse cast of actors puppeteered by a room of homogenous, like-minded writers is progress? And how many movie studios have congratulated themselves for empowering women by featuring female characters who commit acts of violence without hesitation or remorse, all while looking pretty for the camera? Just because oppression is a male-dominated industry doesn’t mean putting a woman in charge of a fascist regime balances the scales. Anywhere I turned over the course of the too-many years I spent in higher education, I saw the hypocrisy inherent to liberalism, and I saw people sticking to it religiously for no other reason than because it seemed better than the alternative.

Part Two - What’s It to Jew?

(A Plea to People Who Feel Weird About This Whole Genocide Thing)

I critique liberal ideology so often not because I have any love for conservatism in American culture; rather, I address my appeals to people who relate more to the progressive mentality because liberals at least claim to care about justice for all. They claim to care about the voices of the oppressed. They claim to understand that the system is corrupt and needs to be changed. And damn it, they claim to be willing to change it. Yet they sure have gotten annoyed with us for asking them to care about the livestreamed genocide against children that their taxes are funding.

I don’t know if they ever meant a word of what they said, but what if I stop trying to reach them out of frustration, only for more lives to be lost due to this attitude of resignation? So let’s keep trying: the flaws inherent to any ideology rooted in Western individualism, even ones that might sound empowering on the surface like Feminism, have become increasingly clear to me over the course of the American-Israeli ethnic cleansing of occupied Palestine; the aid massacres persist on a daily basis, and I really don’t know what to do. Every meal I eat will feel like a sin until this sadistic siege is lifted. The first draft of this essay was basically a four-page timeline of Zionist war crimes in 2025, but the world doesn’t need my echoes right now, so please: consider these words instead…

If liberalism provides cover for wealthy European Americans to cling to their identities as persecuted descendants of Holocaust survivors while a new holocaust, another Nakba, is carried out to seize more land on behalf of Jews from the indigenous population of Palestine, then clearly this ideology has failed at its one purported task: to establish justice for all. Mind you, despite Jewish-supremacist lawmakers’ best efforts to destroy the term by conflating it with opposition to Zionism, antisemitism remains without a doubt a real and problematic phenomenon. But it’s also Europe’s sin, and it was never Palestine’s burden to bear. On the contrary, Jewish people have historically sought refuge in Muslim leaders from persecution. Meanwhile, Zionists and Nazis literally collaborated to expel the Jews from Europe. Rabbis debate whether a Jewish state is even necessary, but either way, it could have been established far more justly and safely on land donated by Germany, England, the United States, or any other G7 war criminal who so dutifully yet self-servingly follows Israel’s bidding.

The real question now is what Israel means to you, cherished reader; whoever you are, you get to decide what your identity means, and no one else can define it for you. Being Jewish for some people apparently means fostering a belief in one’s own inherent superiority over others and a blind loyalty to tribalism; that interpretation of the Jewish identity tragically has led Zionists to become the Hitlers and Pharaohs of our time. But there’s always another option. Just look at organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace, an impactful collective whose honorable struggle for the liberation of Palestine has regrettably put much of the complacent and colonized Muslim Ummah to shame. And JVP didn’t take a year of genocide to think about their stance; they didn’t even wait till the sun set on the seventh of October 2023 to release a statement identifying the illegal Zionist occupation of Palestine as the root source of violence in the region.

If anyone Jewish is reading these words right now who still doesn’t know what to make of Palestine, here is your chance to apply the rich lessons from Jewish history and teachings that you are in the best position to reflect on. Depending on your background, your government, your synagogue, and even your own family might have pressured you to remain loyal to the project of Israel since you were a child, lest you be labeled a traitor or a “self-loathing Jew.” We shout “it’s not complicated” in our protests for Palestine, and politically, the truth of colonization, occupation, apartheid, and genocide isn’t complicated, it’s familiar, but for you, the whole matter I have no doubt brings up incredibly complicated feelings that I am privileged to not have to navigate; I am gutted to say that I have seen Jewish activists lose family over this fight while mine goes out to rally together. Still, I know you have a deep appreciation for sacrifice, because we quote the same story from the same Most Merciful Creator about Prophet Abraham and his son, peace be upon them, and because the Talmud and the Qur’an both describe saving one life as akin to saving humanity. Isn’t choosing justice over identity the ultimate sacrifice?

Solidarity between Jews and Muslims isn’t just a historical oddity or a dream for the future; in a living testament to their moral courage, Jews in the United States have been at the forefront of the movement for the liberation of Palestine, and it’s time for you to join them. It’s not the time to gradually grapple with personal feelings around identity expectations, deep and complex though they might be, because while people who were raised Zionist angrily mourn the privileges they are losing and mull over “choosing sides,” thousands more Palestinians are starving and getting sniped by quadcopters and shelled by tanks while standing in line to receive “aid” from the very people who cut off their nourishment and subjugated them in the first place. I don’t want to find out again tomorrow which Palestinians lost the latest slaughter lottery, and I get sick to my stomach just imagining having this conversation with you several decades too late when we’re both bearing witness right now. It might feel uncomfortable, it might cost you personally in ways I could never understand, but raising your voice now could lead to the end of these massacres of children being carried out with your taxes in your name for your supposed safety. Believe me, I’ve got my own tangled web of cultural identity questions to contend with, but I do know one thing: a Jew who stands for Palestine is forever beloved to us, and a Muslim who stays silent through this oppression estranges himself from our human family. Hypothetical Jewish reader, even with all of my rage, sorrow, and love for the colonized peoples of this Earth, this isn’t me begging; yes, I feel desperate, yet I know God alone can and will free Palestine, with or without us. Be certain: this essay is my outreach to you, because like it or not, our fates are and always have been intertwined.

5/5/2025

The Excellent Question

An increasingly common attitude I’ve been hearing from liberals these days is a reaction of exasperation whenever Palestine is mentioned, as if to say, “Ugh! We’re still on that?” Palestine was unmentionable for seventy-five years of oppression, but ever since it first got its moment in the broader public eye in 2023, many people in the Western world seem to be losing oxygen while holding their breath waiting for the fad of solidarity with Palestine to pass into obscurity as social justice trends often do. We’re talking about the kind of people who posted a black square on their social media accounts after George Floyd was murdered by a cop during the height of the pandemic, those who have been happy to coexist with institutional racism since then, so life can feel comfortable again and everyone can return to their illusion of a just world, or at least one that’s convenient to fix. In the United States, social justice causes are expected to matter suddenly and die quietly. It’s no wonder then that people are getting real tired of still seeing protests for Palestine like an eyesore on every roadside and having to keep hoping genocide won’t get mentioned at every major public event only to suck the air out of the room each time. They just don’t get it: why does everything have to be about Palestine?

Great question, guys!

The Ones You Should Be Asking

If I could speak for a moment on behalf of my fellow Palestine activists, we actually think it’s weird too; you’re just asking the wrong crowd. Instead of asking the people reacting to the ongoing genocide why everything has to be about Palestine these days, why not save your reaction for the politicians who are still committing genocide, funding it, and providing cover for it? Why don’t you ask the Zionist soldiers who murdered over forty refugees in Gaza today alone? Why don’t you ask the Jewish supremacist settler colonists who terrorize rural villagers in the West Bank with new atrocities each day on camera? Consider asking the Israeli politicians who sanction the use of starvation as a weapon of war and the kidnapping and torture of thousands of civilians of occupied Palestine in military prisons without charge; these policies are endorsed and enforced by the same internationally wanted war criminals who decided today to escalate their military operations in Gaza, much to the horror of the families of the few remaining Israeli hostages who haven’t already been killed by their own makeshift nation’s airstrikes.

Or you might ask American politicians why everything has to be about Palestine all of the time. Why are they willing to dedicate so much of your country’s bleeding budget just to finish the job of ethnically cleansing Palestine? Why for the sake of Palestine are they willing to violate their own constitution and risk being held in contempt of federal courts just to arrest Ivy League students for thought crimes after having them kidnapped right off the streets, as if they were the main characters of a dystopian thriller? Why is Congress voting today on H.R. 867, the “Israel Anti-Boycott Act,” which seeks to impose twenty-year prison sentences and million-dollar penalties on citizens who so much as share information online about ways to boycott Israel? By applying economic pressure to the international community, boycotts are a peaceful way of encouraging ethics under capitalism, a method of resistance that worked for South Africa, the OG apartheid state, and since when can a “free country” like the United States dictate individual citizens’ spending habits? Why are your federal and state politicians all owned by AIPAC, a foreign interest lobby that blatantly demonstrates the American government’s exclusive servitude to Israel, a relatively small piece of stolen land an ocean away? Why are these leaders willing to sell their souls and destroy their humanity and mutilate whatever’s left of their reputation to publicly support a genocide against children and start a handful of wars across decades and bomb a new country each day and drag every society and its people down with them, all just to keep that one distant settler colony in power?

America, are you free?

You almost can’t blame Israelis for believing they’re God’s chosen people; why does the entire world appear to be set up to serve their precise cause at the extreme expense of everyone else on the planet? For that one colonized territory between Africa and Asia, the Western empire is evidently prepared to lose everything. Why indeed does everything have to be about Palestine? Seriously, ask them. I’d love to understand it myself.

The Disingenuous Diversion

Now, for those who question our focus on Palestine using the “whataboutism” fallacy by bringing up other injustices and causes worth fighting for, my response is to applaud your commitment to those struggles and to denounce your false dichotomy. Every struggle is connected, and I personally focus on Palestine because I’ve noticed that the Zionist world order is always at the center of the oppression of all colonized people in the modern world, such as communities in Yemen, Sudan, and Kashmir to name just a few. But we both know those aren’t the causes you’re referring to, as your rhetoric, like your empathy, tends to be limited by your borders, and I also have to wonder, for those of you who supposedly care so deeply about other causes, why you don’t just focus on your own fight instead of trying to silence us in ours. The only answer I can come up with is that you are threatened by Palestine. It exposes your hypocrisy. You can’t feel intellectually or morally superior anymore while laughing at Trump’s absurdity, because your favorites have very eloquently supported genocide. So now you can’t talk about climate change, or healthcare, or women’s rights, or school shootings, you can’t make a single argument for justice while looking away from Palestine without coming across as incredibly fake or self-serving.

Of course, people who care about Palestine have been accused of being single-issue activists by liberals who are quite bored of the fact that we’re “still fixated on this one complex overseas situation that’s totally out of our hands anyway.” But I struggle to understand what could be more urgent than the livestreamed daily mass murder of infants, press, and surgeons that’s funded by our taxes. And I reject the framing of this so-called “conflict” as complex; Israel’s genocide in Palestine is only complex for those who identify with the oppressor. The scene looks rather straightforward and disturbingly familiar from where I’m standing, except to say that this evil is even more readily apparent and cartoonishly exaggerated than our previous experiences with oppression.

I’ve heard liberals claim that voting for their favorite war criminals is not an endorsement, but a strategy, and if only we can work together within the system, then we can see incremental changes start to take place. My response is that working within a broken system, while certainly easier than overhauling it, is not very strategic at all, and that if genocide isn’t a dealbreaker for you when you’re thinking about who to seek change from, then something has gone very wrong with your internal decision-making paradigm. Palestine might seem like a random afterthought that’s a world away to those who are struggling with their own daily hardships that feel much more present in front of them, but to anyone paying attention, it’s clear that those hardships too are a result of the Zionist world order and the imperial boomerang. Liberals aren’t wrong that it’s a major inconvenience to insist on supporting Palestine within a system that’s fundamentally opposed to Palestinian rights; my question is why that system to you seems worth saving.

The Cognitive Dissonance

If you’re liberal, two facts are likely true of you: your identity revolves around caring about the human rights of the marginalized, and you have been silent through a livestreamed genocide funded by your taxes.

If you’re conservative, two facts are likely true of you: your identity revolves around protecting the interests of your tribe, and you have been silent as your government has endangered your people and drained your resources to wage multiple wars on behalf of a foreign population.

It’s no wonder so many Americans hate when we bring up Palestine.

It’s too bad we won’t stop until Palestine is free.

4/18/2025

Allah tells us in Surat al ’Asr that mankind is ever in a state of loss.

I sometimes think of life not like an hourglass turned upside down, the loss and the gain symmetrical, but rather a pencil being worn down with use as the graphite is repeatedly pressed into the page to create art, and we are both the pencil and the page of art, so while Time grinds us down, it also builds us up into something profound, subhan al Haqq.

My pencil is my aging body, more tired than it used to be.

And my page is my aging soul, living with more purpose than it did before.

I’ll remind you, dear reader, as I remind myself: don’t look to the pencil. You might feel sad to see it lose its shine as it chips and shrinks, but what is the point of a pencil if not to make its mark? Is there not a messy masterpiece unfolding in its wake? You did that, by the grace of the One who gave you your pencil and made you art.

4/6/2025

Why don’t they matter to you?

Human beings, born as refugees on their own land into a life under military occupation, apartheid, siege, and genocide, made possible by your tax dollars…

Why have you said nothing?

Children dismembered, teenagers kidnapped, women raped, men tortured, reporters burned alive, medics sniped, people starved, by the masses, in full view, and documented daily, the war crimes kept fresh against a people solely because they are indigenous to a land to which colonizers inexplicably feel entitled…

Why do you not protest?

Almost five hundred children have just been murdered since Zionists resumed their genocide in Palestine only twenty days ago. These are not estimates. We know their names, and their massacres have been livestreamed. Not one of us should feel safe from being asked what we did… or why we didn't.

I wish I could call you cowards, but deep down, I know it’s not fear that keeps you silent. Your indifference is suffocating. I’ll never understand. I’ve seen you get worked up before, over other injustices, you’ve filled the streets. I’ve heard you rant and watched you rally, riling up the people to take a principled stand against oppression, I’ve felt your passion.

I wish I hadn’t.

Why is the greatest evil the only exception for your conscience? It would be less devastating if you had no conscience at all. All this time, I’d assumed you had no capacity for revolution within you, and now you dare invite me to your liberal demonstrations? This entire time, you could speak? I wish for your sake you were mute.

2/1/2025

The use of the word "postcolonial" is an insult in this fleeting window of humanity’s timeline when "Israel" exists. What exactly is “post”? Whether people realize it or not, the modern world is fundamentally split into colonizers and the colonized, and it's not fun on either side of the equation; it doesn't have to be this way, mind you, but with the West in power, it just is. We are living through history's most documented genocide; I won't call it over when Zionists repeatedly violate the ceasefire by murdering more indigenous children in refugee camps and imprisoning civilians to torture in military detention at a faster daily rate than they have been releasing the hundreds of Palestinian hostages through the deal the resistance has amazingly managed to secure. Yet we still use terms like "postcolonial"; it's like when people in the US talk about racism as though it ended the day slavery did (not that the prison industry we call the United States is even "post-slavery").

The colonizer is desperate to erase any trace of the people they colonize, and they refer to their atrocities as the past even as they actively bring in more settler terrorists to steal more land. They celebrate their enlightened progress as an egalitarian society even as they frame this progress as exclusive to the “democratic” West, in stark contrast to the “barbarians” they still need to save from themselves. Islam with its imperative to fight oppression has proven an enduring threat to every colonizer, and that’s why they bomb our lands and judge us for the rubble. I remember when I was in high school, a teacher in training who had “served” in Iraq interrupted my speech during my guest presentation to express his incredulity at my description of the beauty of my homeland, and even still I write these words from the land of my colonizer in a language that has sadly surpassed my mother tongue in my own head. The indigenous peoples of the US are very familiar with this treatment; I was certainly taught about the "Natives" by the American school system like they don't exist anymore, never mind the injustices that persist on the reservations to which they have been relegated for the past few centuries.

The colonizers don't just steal land; they take identities. The Europeans of "Israel" craft stories about their "Middle Eastern" roots, claiming our food and our music while outlawing our symbols and our celebrations, and displacing and dismembering our bodies. Meanwhile, the inherent contradiction of their society cannot be concealed despite their best efforts; even in this so-called utopia for Jewish people, White Ashkenazi Jews are privileged over Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, Arabs who actually are native to the land, and don’t get me started on the status of Jews of African origin in this fabricated state resting on a house-of-cards claim. The irony of “Israel” is somehow tragically lost on too many descendants of Holocaust survivors who went on to craft their own ethnosupremacist apartheid state, like the victim-turned-abuser on a global scale; Hitler’s vision too featured a chosen people who were above morality, and they too were White.

As the ideological successor of Nazi Germany, "Israel" is so humiliated by photos of Palestinian triumph from these miraculous hostage exchanges because they are too loud to ignore, the persistence of Palestinian statehood too evident to reject. Has the global population ever united under a single banner in protest before Palestine? The flag the Zionists tried to hide from the nation they tried to delete has now become the universal symbol of liberation that ties people together from Yemen to Sudan, from South Africa to Guatemala, from Ireland to China, while Zionists literally can’t pay people enough to attend rallies on their behalf. Against absurd odds and through their reliance on God alone, the resistance of Palestine have achieved their aims on the road to total liberation, while the Zionists have bankrupted the Western world carrying out a livestreamed ethnic cleansing, and all they have to show for it is the irreversible destruction of their reputation on the world stage and the epic implosion of their own fragile utopia.

Sure, “Israel” can raid the West Bank and kidnap and lock up people just for celebrating the release of their imprisoned loved ones. Hell, “Israel” can lock up the entire population of Gaza in the world’s biggest concentration camp as they inflict their own holocaust by draining the funds of the other colonizers while their own societies crumble to sustain this oppression (like I said, it’s no fun on either side). And the tyrannical colonizer puppets who subjugate the Arab countries can continue to use their spineless armies to prop up the walls of that very concentration camp in the ultimate act of betrayal of their own people, only to be met with the suffocating silence of the majority of Arabs…

But even as humanity continues in its impotent shame to fail Palestine day after day, the ranks of those who seem content to live small lives in which Palestine is not their cause to shoulder is shrinking as more people and more peoples realize just as Nelson Mandela did that it all comes down to Palestine, that the liberation of Palestine is the key to the liberation of the world at long last from the Western empire (ironically known as “the free world”), which has repeatedly proven itself unfit to be the steward of this Earth. Mandela too was called a terrorist by the West, but he is now begrudgingly celebrated by the very states that maligned him. One day soon insha’Allah, I’ll be able to stop censoring myself in my own essays for fear of my family’s safety; liberation is a sigh of relief that will come from a breath that has already been drawn since a fateful October, and one day soon by God’s will, Palestine will free itself from the Zionist colonizer around whom the modern world is designed, and free the entire human race in the process.

1/4/2025

Dear Tony Schinella,

I'm reaching out to provide an additional perspective and context to the Patch News article yesterday about the Nakba Day controversy. I'm grateful the full description of the Nakba was highlighted, but the discussion featured no mention or exploration of any rational basis for which acknowledging Zionist war crimes could remotely be considered antisemitic. Imagine how absurd and insulting it would be to consider a Holocaust remembrance to be "anti-Germanic." My Muslim community in NH has been commenting on the perspectives covered in your article with bewilderment, and our many Jewish allies in the movement for the liberation of Palestine have likewise felt voiceless because of mainstream media coverage on even the local level silencing their significant efforts for justice by omitting them from the story. There was likewise in yesterday's recapping of events no analysis of how local Zionist outrage at the colonizer's historic war crimes being exposed is especially atrocious given the global context of the active daily genocide the Zionist apartheid state is perpetrating in Occupied Palestine, with hundreds of civilians having been murdered in the past week alone, burned alive in hospitals and frozen or starved to death in refugee camps, all through US taxpayer funding. Most recently, Doctors Without Borders joined the long list of international human rights organizations to independently document and denounce the genocide. There is a global humanitarian consensus outside of our tiny Zionist, White supremacist bubble, and this context should be part of the conversation on a local level as well if one's journalism is to have influence, especially considering the number of journalists, members of your profession, to have been murdered by Israel while wearing clearly marked press vests has officially surpassed two hundred since the start of the genocide.

Thank you for your consideration.

12/28/2024

If you’ve ever carried a protest placard in a crowded place, you might have come to learn that every sign is a survey, transforming you into an unwitting pollster as passersby weigh in on your displayed statement, whatever message matters more to you than the approval of strangers. To hold a sign is to become the sentiment painted on it, to forfeit your personhood on the street and instead represent the embodiment of an idea. And once your humanity is abstracted into an opinion like that, people suddenly feel comfortable speaking to you the way they do in comment sections online. Which is to say psychopathy is underdiagnosed in this country, and I have become accustomed to death threats.

Would you like to know the results of my latest survey?

When asked to react to the Zionist project’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, an estimated five hundred cars polled over the course of an hour on a busy road in suburban Maine responded as follows: roughly five racist expletives, five honks in solidarity, and the overwhelming silence of the vast majority of Americans.

This poll was conducted in front of a bomb factory across the street from an elementary school that creates the shells for the explosives dropped on children in Gaza with funding from American taxpayers.

The Western world’s active massacres at hospitals and refugee camps in Palestine have been extensively documented by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, B'Tselem (an Israeli initiative), and countless other organizations in the West and around the globe.

The author of this study declares one potential conflict of interest in that the ethnic cleansing in question is of her own community.

11/7/2024

Working as a therapist during an election has been a fascinating experience. While some clients have shared their excitement about the results, others have confided in me their clinically significant distress; we’re talking panic attacks and violent nightmares. And although I don’t relate to either reaction, when I’m at work, aside from my hijab, I’m not a being with opinions, but a reflection of my clients, as I’m far more interested in how the election has impacted their mental health than I am in their politics. Some clients believe their lives will turn around because of this win, and some clients believe they’re about to lose everything, but all clients are thinking of themselves and how Trump’s second presidency could affect them personally.

Normally, politics brings out the worst in people. Western democracy fools us into thinking change comes from the very systems that violently enforce the corrupt status quo. The “lesser evil” fallacy manufactures the population’s consent and even responsibility for the sins of the state while distracting them from its atrocities. The illusion of choice that we call voting makes people frantically weigh possible outcomes they could never accurately predict, compromise their principles, and shame and even dehumanize everyone who didn’t follow the same selfishly motivated line of reasoning that they fell for.

But here’s the thing: I love my clients.

While politics can make us forget our humanity as the state trains us to blame each other instead of our oppressor, therapy humanizes the context of our politics, and I am left thinking that people are shockingly naive, yet fundamentally compassionate, and selfish, sure, yet vulnerable, and I don’t want to be angry at them anymore. It’s true: many Americans didn’t say a damn word as their taxes funded the ongoing genocide in Occupied Palestine, then they voted for one of two fascist war criminals and acted self-righteous about it just like the Western state trained them to. But so many of my fellow Muslims in the US have been just as disappointing; why are they making utilitarian calculations and concessions when Islam is so profoundly critical of utilitarianism? Are we not instructed by al Haqq al Mateen to choose good regardless of the worldly consequences and leave the outcome in this life and the next with Allah?

Seeing that even the colonized have bought into the colonizer’s narrative that playing their rigged game is what matters most, that it matters at all, has reminded me that all of us stuck here under the influence of Western hegemony are susceptible to the same propaganda, that every sucker has a story, myself included. For so many folks, it’s not that they don’t care, but they don’t know, from the ones with the most disturbing childhood trauma you’ll never hear about who related to Killer Kamala’s “fear and shame” campaign, to the ones who grew up on the streets and work for peanuts while dreaming about the delusional promises of the Orange Disaster. Politics makes us dumb and mean, but there’s so much more to us than the state would have us believe. Take it from me, a clinical counselor who happens to be an anarchist: perhaps the only time these days my heart is not suffocating with rage at the mention of politics and the hypocrisy and injustice of this world is when I’m with my clients, because my job requires me to tap into the part of my heart that politics dulls; tribalism becomes empathy, and suddenly I remember who the real enemy is.

8/2/2024

I think of taqwa (consciousness of God) on a spectrum: there’s total ghafla through lahwa (obliviousness through distraction), and there’s a vague awareness, and there’s a genuine mindfulness, and then there’s absolute connection, and when absolute connection is achieved in salat, it’s difficult to describe or remember after the fact, but it feels like sudden clarify, intense awareness of the Truth, like you’re awake for a second while the rest of your life is a dream, and that moment with opened eyes, with an opened heart, is absolutely shocking, and without warning you’re sobbing, and it’s as beautiful as it is bittersweet, because you know you’ll go back to sleep again in another moment, and your Maker will once again feel just out of reach, but He is al Qareeb, ever near, and we are the ones who drift, don’t we, so I’ll hold onto the memories, and the habits, I’ll keep praying so it can happen again, the path lighting up for long enough that I can make sure I’m still on it, and see how far I’ve come since the last time I was awake, and plan out my next steps with firmer feet, confident in my return to You.

7/12/2024

Why do you only watch your leaders when they put on a show for you? Shouldn’t you make a point to watch them specifically when they aren’t trying to win your votes? Why tune into their promises and performances once every four years and tune out their countless and constant war crimes, financed courtesy of you and me?

It’s not our fault; the money is stolen and the signatures forged. This is the charade of Western democracy. The media crafts the narrative and tells you when to watch, then your heart freezes with anxiety at the thought that the wrong puppet might win, your opinion directly implanted from “the news,” either outcome having so little bearing on your life, and both outcomes guaranteeing more death beyond the border that you don't think about because lobbyists invested a hefty sum to make sure of it.

So I stand on the street corner and say stop this daily genocide of children, because I have been watching, and I lost count of how many said deport her, like they own the place, when we’re both Americans on stolen land and it was their bombs that brought me here and made me this way, so taste your harvest as you watch your show.

4/10/2024

Politics is a series of utilitarian concessions, and as soon as we allow ourselves to think politically, we’ve already fallen into the trap where anything can be justified. We could shake hands with powerful oppressors and find a way to say we’re doing it for the oppressed. Politics attracts would-be activists for justice and distracts them from taking down the system by promising change from within the system… but the only thing the system changes is the activists themselves. Before approaching any political effort, we have to start by asking: what are we willing to compromise on, and will our souls get compromised in the process?

Tonight, the more privileged of my fellow activists for Palestine congratulated themselves for collaborating with a Zionist to get a ceasefire resolution passed, a resolution with racist and fascist wording. As they bent down to get on my level, they said to me, “It’s not ideal, but if you kiss the boots on your neck, maybe they’ll let you draw a breath!” My seasoned friend tried to warn me. Now I know.

I wandered the house after getting the news, feeling baffled and betrayed, but after witnessing their reasoning escalate so quickly from “let’s not boycott this event, so we can tear apart their resolution and demand a new one” to “let’s send an email thanking the Zionist for this resolution, as a show of good faith,” suddenly everything made sense; I could see on a local scale how the corruption starts, and how it can lead to progressives in power supporting the genocide we see today. When he stands next to a violent racist, the diplomatic racist suddenly doesn’t look so bad in the eyes of the one who’s desperate for allies. But by then, what are you even fighting for anymore? You’re told to dilute your tongue to get results until the scream in your heart gets drowned out and washed away with the rest of your principles.

This isn’t what democracy looks like when it gets corrupted; this IS democracy. It’s not just the tyranny of the majority, but their homogenization. And when the compassionate among the majority fight for the minorities, they’re sometimes more willing to make compromises, because they might feel they’re already doing the minorities a favor by fighting on their behalf. In politics, considering “both sides” of the story means meeting in the middle between the oppressed and their oppressors. I pray I don’t forget this one: the real fool was me, for approaching politics in the first place.

I believe the resolution passed because I withdrew my involvement. Over the past six months, I’ve seen people in power abuse my family and then treat White activists with relative respect, and I’ve learned that uncompromising words of integrity that actually honor your cause get you nowhere in politics. All this is not to say that there aren’t also genuine White allies (who have often sacrificed far more than I have), not to mention the occasional traitors of color, but that interpersonal dynamics are impacted by larger social forces, which are in turn compromised by politics. You have to be diplomatic to get crumbs, and then you have to trick your opportunistic self into thinking these slimy allegiances are worth the gains because one day you’ll have the whole loaf. Except by then, you won’t be you anymore, but the very enemy you once sought to destroy.

3/29/2024

I had an interesting experience at my field site last week: a client offended me. I have this new client who I’ve never met in person or even seen, as our sessions take place over the phone. She’s a lively person, a storyteller and a comedian to her core, and it’s been a pleasure and an honor getting to know her story, as she’s taught me so much about resilience. We have established a wonderful rapport, and at the end of our first session a couple of weeks ago, she told me I’m good at what I do and will have many clients wanting to work with me, which was very touching to hear.

Last week, she kept talking well past the hour, but I didn’t have another session in the morning and gave her the extra space. But then right as we were closing the session, when she was talking about how she has so much to be grateful for, she said something that she would never have uttered if she could see me. She said she’s lucky not to live in one of “those countries,” and went on to list just about every Islamophobic and racist stereotype I could think of. Chuckling, she kept asking, “Am I right?” I swallowed my hurt and laughed her off the phone as the session was ending. As I tried to go about my day reviewing treatment plans, I kept staring off into space, her unnecessary words replaying in my mind. I found myself hoping she one day meets me in person and feels embarrassed as soon as she sees my hijab, realizing that this therapist she so fully trusts is from one of “those countries” that she so pridefully wrote off.

I know. I know the session is always about the client and never about the counselor. That’s why I brushed off her comment in the moment, and of course I don’t plan on bringing it up or giving her anything other than my best. Still, my perception of her has shifted since that day, as I continue to grapple with this time period in which all of the systems that surround me dehumanize my people at every level to justify their genocide on our dime. I cannot overstate my disillusionment or rage; I don’t think this fury in my heart will rest until the Day of Judgment.

That same day, another client of mine praised the Palestine pin on my bag and told me he’s an anarchist. It’s been a strange journey, becoming a counselor and an activist at the same time. I feel like I’m living two lives, sitting with people through their most intimate struggles during the week and raising hell in city streets, town halls, and bomb factories on the weekends. I’m so tired. My life has come full circle in an interesting way; my childhood consisted of similar circumstances and feelings as the US used a lie that was immediately disproven to decimate my homeland of Iraq for Zionism, only to laugh off their “mistake” two decades and several million lives later. I daydream of justice. That’s why I’m a counselor; validation is vindication for my clients, proof that what they’ve suffered matters, that it was wrong and should never have happened.

I remember one of my wise and kind-hearted classmates sharing as she held back tears how she was struggling to manage her feelings about a case she was working in which a little girl was raped by her father. Whether we feel offended by or on behalf of our clients, the session is about their emotions, not ours. My goal this week is to convey unconditional positive regard for my client by acknowledging her struggles while continuing to learn from and be there for her. In a way, she’s done me a favor, as this incident has reminded me of the blessing of my hijab; I know that whenever I help a client in the office, I’m simultaneously humanizing Muslims in their eyes. Justice takes many forms, and it’s an ongoing fight as long as we breathe.

3/23/2024

We go through life with foggy eyes, and from time to time, al Jabbar allows the clouds to lift, restoring our full eyesight. In such times of clarity, I feel the same urgency as a man who has minutes left to live, as I recognize that the fog will return and I won’t retain this level of sharpness until the next life, subhanallah.

Still, the crisp vision of spiritual insight offers me sufficient perspective to head in the right general direction with my foggy eyes until it’s time for my next blessed burst of taqwa that lifts these clouds from Earth, this smog of the soul, subhanallah wa bi hamdihi.

I see now in the moonlight of Ramadan, I see the world for what it is, if only for this moment, and I am awed and reassured. How should I live my life, which is from You, except by heading back to You, Allah? Alhamdulillah, my heart is bursting.

3/17/2024

Dear Dover City Councilors,

My name is Yussra Ebrahim, I'm a clinical counselor, I grew up in the Masjid in Dover, and I served the Dover District Court last year as a Court Appointed Special Advocate for children involved in DCYF cases of neglect and abuse.

I'm reaching out to urge you to support the ceasefire resolution that Councilor April Richer will present at the next meeting; I have a few important responses to present to common arguments against my crucial request, and I ask that this email be added to the public record.

In response to the argument that "I'll support a ceasefire as a private citizen, but not as a city councilor."

What's the point of having power if you're not going to use it? What did the people of Dover elect you for? Last week, you all adopted Councilor Linnea Nemeth's resolution to make March women's history month. If women's rights mean anything to you, then you won't just adopt feel-good resolutions that no one would disagree with, but also the resolutions that make history by fighting against current injustices and rejecting the status quo of oppression, not just in retrospect, but as it is unfolding, when it matters most.

Women in Gaza are giving birth by receiving C-sections without anesthesia while they are being bombed and their hospitals are getting stormed by IOF troops. The babies are born extremely malnourished because Israel has been using starvation as a weapon of war in this genocide. Lately, Israeli helicopters have started to regularly engage in "flour massacres," in which they shoot into open crowds of thousands of starving Palestinians lined up to receive aid.

Everything I'm saying has been cataloged in detail by international human rights organizations and journalists on the ground in Gaza and livestreamed constantly for those who care to see where their tax dollars are going. Anyone who denies this genocide has either consumed far too much war propaganda or is willfully racist, preferring their own White privilege over the basic human rights and dignity of the Indigenous Palestinian people whose land European Israelis have been illegally and violently occupying on our dime for the past seventy-five years. This issue only seems complex because it's been presented that way to us for decades, because Western politicians and press have long had the difficult job of twisting the narrative and dehumanizing the victims sufficiently to make their politically-strategic oppression of millions of marginalized people seem justified.

In response to the argument that "we shouldn't take sides and risk offending the Jewish community."

I've had the honor of meeting and befriending more Jewish people as an activist for the people of Occupied Palestine than I ever had the chance to encounter before. It's not the brave, conscientious Jewish people, but Zionists who believe in their own racial supremacy, that a resolution for peace would offend. Since when are we wary of offending White supremacists and warmongers? Imagine if you had the opportunity to vote on a resolution for the rights of Black people in the early 1900s, knowing that doing so might "ruffle feathers" among the privileged in the community.

Your response to this moment will make crystal clear to the public your true reason for getting into politics. Instead of worrying about the reputational risks you take on by voting for this resolution, consider the reputational, legal, and moral risks you take on by failing to do so. The masks have been shattered and the cat's out of the bag; it's finally become socially acceptable to criticize Israel, the most oppressive apartheid state the modern world has ever seen, and as we know from the history of honorable resistance and every social movement and liberation struggle, once the people begin to unite to challenge the oppressor, they never stop, until that oppressor inevitably falls and their name becomes an embarrassing chapter in a history textbook. Don't allow Dover to be part of that embarrassing chapter when it's already so obvious that the tide has turned toward justice.

In response to the argument that "this is not a local issue."

This argument has frequently been raised in the over seventy US cities that still ultimately passed ceasefire resolutions, cities including Chicago, Cambridge, Portland, and our own Durham, New Hampshire (you can track how many cities have passed ceasefire resolutions at this link). When the federal and state governments continue to make decisions in direct violation of the wishes of the majority of their people, our recourse in this so-called Democratic society is to turn to our local government, to at least go on record and say that we don't stand for this extreme evil that is happening on our dime against our consent. Although the City of Dover doesn't directly fund apartheid Israel's military occupation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, the people of Dover do, as over half a million dollars in federal taxes that come out of Dover annually specifically go toward financing Israeli weapons. Imagine if that money were instead to go toward funding the basic human needs and enriching development of the people of Dover. On that note, I also urge you to increase funding to the Willand Warming Center, to keep it open year round, since shelter is a year-round need, and to consistently spend the city's budget on those who need it most in order to have the greatest humanitarian impact with the people's money.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely, Yussra MT Ebrahim 🍉

Southern New Hampshire for Palestine

2/4/2024

Dear City Councilors of Portsmouth,

For months now, Israel has been waging a sadistic genocide against the Palestinian people for the explicitly stated purpose of ethnically cleansing the land, and none of this horror would have been possible without our tax dollars. The context for Israel's vicious brutality includes decades of settler-colonial land theft, military occupation, ethnosupremacist apartheid law, siege that employs starvation as a weapon of war, the bombing and raiding of houses of worship, schools, homes, refugee camps, and so many hospitals, the illegal use of white phosphorus, the targeting of the families of journalists, and the imprisonment and torture of thousands of civilians in the world’s most densely populated concentration camp. We bear witness to and hold the world accountable for the documented oppression that is the Palestinian existence. Yet the US and the rest of the inhumane Western powers have defunded UNRWA, one of Palestine's final lifelines, despite the International Court of Justice’s ruling in South Africa's case against Israel. We feel helpless and foolish contacting the federal and state government, cognizant of how preposterous it is to beg war criminals to stop committing war crimes, and we can't keep watching clips of children in mass graves searching through the body bags for their parents. The evil of the Zionist project of Israel, Western imperialism, and White supremacy is fundamentally repulsive, and this world is starved for humanity. We've led chants at rallies and given speeches at demonstrations and marched against weapons factories, but today we're appealing to you.

We know the people on this council care about fighting oppression; that's why we voted for you. At this very moment, SNH for Palestine is also bringing this fight to Manchester City Hall; we are part of a much bigger movement, and over seventy US cities now have passed a ceasefire resolution in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine, including Somerville, Cambridge, Portland, Providence, Chicago, Seattle, and Oakland! When the American people are at odds with the American government, this is our recourse; isn’t taking a public stance against mass murder on our dime the bare minimum? Tens of thousands of people have been slaughtered during this hellish winter, largely children, systematically targeted by Zionists, and we live in an era in which these atrocities against humanity have been livestreamed on social media, much to the inconvenience of our self-serving legislators who accept funds from AIPAC. Children are suffocating beneath the rubble, because of our taxes. Their limbs have to get amputated without anesthesia, because of our taxes. Their only crime is that they are indigenous to the land that Europeans wanted and stole and continue to steal, a familiar story that should alarm you and shake you to your core.

We urge you leaders for justice in this city we call home to add Portsmouth to the list of cities calling for a ceasefire in solidarity with the long-enduring people of Palestine. We pray you hear our plea. We can't rest until Palestine and the entire human race is liberated from this corrupt world order.

Sincerely, Yussra MT Ebrahim

1/10/2024

On the night before South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is reviewed by the International Court of Justice, I’ve sent the letter below to the United States president and his friends.

Dear War Criminals,

The West called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and now they celebrate him. How fitting that South Africa is leading the cry for freedom against the tyranny of Western imperialism now. The tide is turning in favor of justice yet again, despite your best efforts, and Palestine will be free, regardless of your evil actions, and regardless of the outcome of this case.

This vicious genocide, waged by the US and Israel upon children in the thousands and political prisoners and journalists and doctors and an indigenous people who have suffered decades of military occupation, apartheid rule, inhumane siege, and unprecedented bombardment of the world’s most densely populated concentration camp with explicitly voiced intent to ethnically cleanse the region, is so glaringly wrong that none of your lies can convince anyone anymore who isn't already hell-bent on deluding themselves with sugarcoated Islamophobic, racial supremacist propaganda. Is there an international law left that you haven't violated? You might consider your careers more important than human rights and Palestinian lives, but in the grand scheme, your reign of terror is as limited as your moral compass.

Still, it's disturbing how easy it is for you to justify mass murder, while the rest of us stay up late each night worrying if we've inadvertently caused any harm to anyone's feelings that day. If anyone reading these words has a drop of conscience left sparking within them, then allow me to join the chorus of voices urging you to do what little you can with whatever power you have to help bring an end to this ultimate threat to the human race; either way, the wrongdoers are already and eternally doomed, and I pray to be among those testifying against them, in this life and the next. You were never our leaders, but our prison guards, and the show you put on for your benefit alone won’t ever stop us from saying shame on you thousands of times, once for every life you've destroyed.

Sincerely, Yussra Ebrahim (An Iraqi Muslim Woman Whose Country You Might Recall Destroying)

12/14/2023

What could be my appetite for this world, my indulgence in a meal that others can’t taste? What could I cherish of my family while theirs are massacred? What is freedom when not everyone has it? Games and shows don’t play the same anymore, when all of life has been revealed to be a game, a show, a performance to keep us all distracted.

I don’t want to keep playing.

I don’t want to forget again. Ya Rabbee, don’t let me. Don’t let us live for this life; make us live for al Haqq. As long as oppression is a possibility, and it was the premise from the start, don’t let us fool ourselves into making this evil home our permanent address.

We are awake now to the test of injustice, and all praise is due to You. Every threat to silence us only makes us louder. I have never seen a sight less civilized than men in suits. But what can they take from people who don’t live for this life?

10/20/2023

Let’s play “How Many Wrongs Can You Find in This Picture?”

1. First, and this one should really count for several points, I spy the seventy-five years of oppression of the Palestinian people via Israeli occupation since the Nakba, Israel’s apartheid policies, and their sixteen-year blockade of Gaza, infamously making it “the world’s largest open-air prison,” in which its densely-packed civilian population, half of which are children, have limited access to water, food, and medicine.

2. All of these horrific injustices have of course been denounced by international human rights organizations for years, yet have again and again failed to make headlines.

3. Now there are also currently developing Israeli war crimes to add to the list: a second Nakba and ethnic cleansing, displacement and loss of life on a tremendous scale, the victims largely children, or as Israel likes to call them, “human shields.”

4. Shame on everyone who refers to this decades-long war as “the Israel-Hamas conflict,” managing to erase any mention of the people of Palestine from their own genocide in the hopes that they die quietly; the mainstream media’s failure to report on this monumental injustice is a monumental injustice in its own right.

5. Social media platforms censor and shadow ban those who do speak out where journalists have failed.

6. Every system in modern society from talk shows to university administrations is set up to intimidate into silence whoever dares to play this dangerous game of not looking away; the bravest have been publicly shamed and fired for speaking out, and European nations like France, a bastion of repressive Islamophobic policy, have even outlawed rallies for Palestine.

7. And of course there’s Israel’s strategic use of DARVO to unironically blame the oppressed for their own dispossession and present the settler-colonial oppressors as the victims as they bomb houses of worship, schools, and hospitals where refugees who weren’t homeless when this month began have taken shelter, with Israel’s highest ranking officials confessing to these sins, hastily deleting the evidence, and lazily saying that “it must have been this or that group of Muslim terrorists who somehow hit their own people in a misfire,” like we’re stupid.

8. The media believes them and has been repeating their narrative; I guess we are stupid.

9. Israel’s incredibly well-funded supporters refer to anyone critical of the racial terrorism of the Zionist project as racists and terrorists, and now our money in the US is being used to send military “aid” to those committing ethnic cleansing rather than the ones being “cleansed,” those whose suffering lies at the root of this evil catastrophe founded on racial supremacy, the Zionism that has gone remarkably unchallenged on the international stage since Israel’s inception.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few, but it’s safe to say there’s no winning a game when you lose count of the score. Al ‘Adl is testing the world, not just Israel, and so many seem to be failing that test and should fear to meet their Maker and on one sudden, irreversible Day of Judgment be made to answer for their complicity evermore. The politicians, the soldiers, the journalists of so many countries are all complicit in committing, supporting, profiting off of mass atrocities and lying about it. They think they’ve gotten away with murder because Palestinian lives simply aren’t a currency on the world stage. But so many others are rising to honor the moment.

• The bravery and resilience of the Palestinian people in their resistance against oppression as they fight for their rights and freedom and take care of each other when no one else is taking care of them have set the new standard for human excellence in modern times.

• The peoples demonstrating around the world on their behalf when it’s hard to access Palestine with our donations and everyone from tireless noble leaders like Shaikh Omar Suleiman to strangers on the street, every soul watching, sharing, posting, standing, praying, crying for people they’ll never meet, is so treasured for their compassion.

• The outspoken organizations in the hostile West like the deeply admirable people of Jewish Voice for Peace and so many others have continued to take a stand against Israel’s racial violence and media manipulation even when the fight for truth has gotten really hard, marching through DC chanting: “Not in our names! Not with our money! Ceasefire now! Let Gaza live!”

Subhanallah, ya Rabbee, ar Rahman, al Musta’an, an Noor, there’s so much darkness in the world right now, but it makes these lights dazzling. How could we ever look away?

9/5/2023

It’s a shame, the way religion looks through society’s eyes. It’s like they can see us carrying a box, but they have no idea what’s inside. Some people are obsessed with criticizing that box. They don’t like the material. They have opinions on its shape. They claim it’s too heavy, but they’ve never carried it to know for sure, and why won’t they just peek inside? Perhaps they used to have a box of their own, a different one that someone made them lug around, and no one ever taught them how to get it open, or the box turned out to be a fluke, its contents toxic, so now they assume every box must hold the same danger within and they hate all organized boxes, but I want them to know that labels aren’t everything and it was never about the box.

8/12/2023

Something was conspicuously absent from my heart last week: anxiety. I encountered all sorts of flustering situations, yet found myself uncharacteristically unflustered through them all: days-long uncertainties, missed opportunities, last-minute plan changes, unfamiliar territories, and dangerous driving conditions! Yet I felt not only at peace, but grateful for every unfolding, and I found myself laughing from the bottom of my heart as my rusty car slid across a submerged and shrouded highway through a foggy, torrential, crackling, magnificent thunderstorm. That’s not a metaphor. But it could be.

Where did the dread go?

I have a theory.

You see, I’d decided in advance to donate those days. This time is dedicated to this cause, so I’ll entrust it to God; whatever happens happens. I’ve done this enough times now to have noticed a pattern: I seem to have the best time when I don’t consider the time my own. In contrast, whenever I want things to go a certain way, whenever I consider myself to be in control of a situation in the sense that I’m invested in its outcome, I find myself stressing about the future.

Think about it: aren’t your greatest anxieties around the things you treasure the most?

So here’s my theory: my anxiety stems from the urge to be in control, which on a deeper level stems from a love of dunya, needing one’s worldly life to unfold as desired or expected, as though this temporary existence is the life that matters. It’s natural to be nervous every now and then, but when we make a daily habit of worrying about our future, it’s only ever our worldly future that ash shaytan inspires us to obsess over. When I switch my perspective to seeing the world with an awareness of the Hereafter, the actual, lasting future, I ironically find myself living in the moment more than ever before, allowing it to be however it is, however Allah wills it to be. People who chase worldly gains might advise you to be ambitious and set your sights on your lofty material goals no matter what, but this advice can make you a desperate slave to your desires; the beauty of being willing to accept any outcome is that your own desires lose power over you and you start to appreciate and cherish everything you have for what it is.

7/16/2023

The Qur’an reads very differently, or rather, it is understood by the reader very differently, when approached with the understanding that Allah al Muta’alee is addressing the reader herself. I remember I used to read the Qur’an with other people in mind, thinking, “Oh yes, this verse reminds me of these unjust people I know and all of their shortcomings.” But when we focus too much on judging others, we weirdly lose the ability to take what is given as a chance to self-reflect and personally grow; in this way, ash shaytan can make our dislike of others into a means of stagnation for ourselves, subhanallah. When I read the Qur’an to measure and guide my own behavior, on the other hand, I find that this profound, poetic standard holds the instructions I’ve been seeking all along, the reminders that recharge hearts every day, to look for the good in others, avoid the bad, and insha’Allah better oneself.

6/6/2023

Do you have it? Time to think is a pretty straightforward concept. If your lifestyle or habits keep you engaged or distracted for every waking moment, then you have cut yourself off from this surprisingly crucial experience. But sometimes you suddenly find yourself with minutes to think; maybe you forgot your phone as you set off to meet someone.

You arrive at the promised spot a bit early, but not early enough to go back and get your device. At first it feels like a waste; you could have used this time to answer messages. But it’s too late. So you wait there and you think.

Hey, it’s nice out; you can hear the wind. Your mind is finally free to wander and start to process what it’s taken in today. You’ve been awake for six hours, but you’ve only just noticed. In this spare moment, you are contextualized in today, and today is contextualized in your life, so it feels, for the first time in a while, you realize, like you are living it and actually here, subhan al Khaliq.

You realize you haven’t seen this friend in several months and you remember last time and what you've been wanting to ask them about. Now you’ve let your mind establish a sense of continuity for this meeting. You wonder what else you might realize, given more time. Your friend arrives.

5/9/2023

Nothing compares; the spring is achingly beautiful. The ache comes from its fleeting nature. It’s a short and sweet enough season to make us acutely aware of time passing, while the winter can feel endless. Each flowering tree stays in bloom for mere weeks, the miracles not waiting for us to be around to witness them.

Your Earth goes from cold to hot so quickly, subhanallah, while our hearts wish desperately to live in the transitions between them, when Your signs are on full display in every color we can recognize. I pray to be surrounded by these subtle reminders of al Lateef, not stuck heedless in the extremes. Your words were not revealed to a people who experienced the four seasons, so these amazing signs aren’t even referenced in the Qur’an, subhanallah, but the extremes are detailed in the criterion, contrasted against the straight path and Your oneness, the balance and the harmony and the fate of each soul for what it earns. As I sit bathed in the light of an Noor, every worry and sorrow feels irrelevant.

Nothing compares, until the next season comes along.

4/26/2023

With secular religions and philosophies that are about enlightenment rather than revelation, the self is expected to internally and independently transcend in wisdom, rather than being externally guided by God, upon whom the soul is dependent. But there’s a major problem with founding moral insight on the self: the self is the need, so it can’t be the one to fill that need, like a cup drinking its own emptiness.

While truth is firm, the self is dynamic. It is influenced easily and forgets often; one might call it fickle. And it is prone to arrogance, its unchecked assumptions leading it to construct monuments to falsehood without a first floor. Any worldview has lost its way if it feeds the ego rather than disciplining it through humility to submit to what is greater; just as we did not create ourselves, we can’t be the ones to guide ourselves. Alhamdulillah, with tawheed, the goal is not the self, so we seek not the cup, but the water, and as Samad, who provides it.

4/24/2023

Are you exhausted by life? Keep reading.

I used to say gratitude is the key to happiness. Alhamdulillah, I’ve since come to understand that it’s also an antidote for mental health struggles, and a core expression of faith. Often when we experience hardship, we begin to preemptively keep a lookout for signs of hardship out of fear, but our vigilance can be our undoing. As we become experts at looking for trouble, able to pick it out even from among a sea of blessings, we risk losing the ability to see those blessings at all. We could end up failing to notice the good even when it surrounds us, because we’ve retrained our brains to be our guards, offering unflinchingly skeptical protection from life’s ability to hurt us again.

But these guards are killing us.

Give your mind and heart a break from constantly worrying and dwelling, because doing so isn't keeping you safe, but making you live in fear and sadness regardless of your circumstances. Instead, take a lesson from the final verse of Surat ad Dhuha (93:11: mention the blessings from your Lord) and rewire your brain to look for the good with a gratitude routine. Whether when making thikr or journaling, set aside time each day to prompt yourself to consciously take stock of what’s positive. If you don’t count your blessings, how will they count in your life?

4/4/2023

In epistemology, the popular assumption of our day seems to be that the best way to the truth is to question everything and never accept anything by default, lest one’s confirmation bias take control and mislead the mind.

Well, I’m questioning this assumption!

In Surat an Nahl, Allah presents us with this simple, profound exchange: “And it will be said to those who would beware Allah, ‘What did your Lord send down?’ They will say: good” (from 16:30).

Those who have used their reasoning to recognize that Allah is their Lord and submit to al Haqq should have a humble attitude toward the truth. While some say that claiming to know the answer with certainty is arrogant, is it not arrogant to scrutinize everything by default, as though one’s limited ego, driven by ever-shifting deluded desires, is a better gatekeeper to the truth than Truth itself: Allah? I find this attitude of accepting with patient trust whatever Allah sends down so refreshingly beautiful. It takes great humility to admit that wisdom exists beyond one’s current ability to access it, and to dedicate oneself to understanding that wisdom, instead of automatically regarding with skepticism anything that doesn’t align with one’s current imperfect understanding. Isn’t the real way to keep our minds open and our confirmation bias in check not to submit to ourselves and question the truth, but to submit to the Truth and question ourselves?

3/19/2023

It’s the twentieth anniversary of the Iraq War, subhanallah. Twenty years ago today, when I was almost nine, Iraq was invaded, our country then, bombed and occupied, devastated by what has become our country now. Iraq is like a garden that some passerby decided to torch, a garden that’s still largely in ashes to this day, yet most folks forgot about it once the fire was out. Years after the arson, people acknowledged that it was wrong, but that’s about it for reparations.

At least in this life.

And now we live in the arsonist’s garden. We are not native to his soil. Then again, neither is he. Side by side, we till the earth, because what else can we do? We invest so much into his garden, the only one we have now because of him, and he is not thrilled about our presence as we make his flowers bloom. We get his dirt on our knees, knees that longed to be planted in their parents’ garden for such a long time. But today we sow al Khaliq’s soil without sorrow, because this bed has become more than just the arsonist’s garden, and alhamdulillah, our hearts are ripe.

3/9/2023

Death isn’t just a fact of life; it’s the fact of life.

Still, life can be so captivating that death seems to come as a surprise, every single time. It’s the ultimate worldly certainty, yet we often struggle to believe it when it happens, or even remember it when it doesn’t. The cold shock of someone who was, yet isn’t, just doesn’t make sense to us, because we develop object permanence from infancy. I believe witnessing loss is stunning not just because the sudden absence alarms us, but also because we know, deep down, that rationally, something doesn’t add up.

Yet the rest of the equation is beyond our perception.

It’s not beyond our reasoning, though. Just as entropy in the universe can only increase, a consciousness, once spirit is breathed into it by the will of al Muhyee, can only advance in experience. An idea can’t be “unthought,” and what comes to exist cannot “unbecome.” Al Mumeet is also al Ba’ith, and the dead are not lost just because they have left our reach; after all, we’ll reach them again soon enough!

2/22/2023

Time is a corrosive chemical agent, not a neutral backdrop. Time is patient, but it’s also dynamic. This worldly life is one of change; it’s no place for stillness. What does that mean?

If you’re not growing closer, you’re moving further apart. If you’re not gaining, you’re losing. If you don’t keep striving to improve, you risk not only stagnating, but backsliding into your lowest lows and sinking ever lower. Worst of all, you’d be unaware of just how far you’ve fallen as you fall, until you convince yourself that down here is where you started and it’s human nature, after all.

No! Human nature is to choose. I choose to strive, but I know I can’t rise by myself. I am swimming against the tide, the water pulling me toward a burning land where I can rest, yet roast, while my arms struggle in the direction of a bountiful garden. The cards might seem stacked against me, given the direction of the waves, but the opposite is true, because all along, I was never swimming alone.

2/6/2023

I’d like to shine an ultraviolet light on all of my blind spots and everything immature in me, to see the stains that are apparent, but not visible to my human eyes. My vision has adjusted to a very specific level of light, like I’ve been living in sunset this entire time and have forgotten all about nighttime and daylight. My scenery looks pink, pinker than it is, as though that were the only color. But I don’t know what else is out there, because I haven’t seen it, because my corner of spacetime has reprogrammed my eyesight. Still, sometimes I get these moments of self-awareness and insight, and I think to myself, “Is this view too pink, or is it just me?” And the answer is both, because I don’t have a smudge on my glasses; the pink is in my mind. And there’s nothing exactly wrong with pink, except I think I might be swimming in it, so I pray for confirmation from al Baseer, some sort of ultraviolet ray to show me whatever I’m not seeing.

1/4/2023

I still don’t know what to make of emotion. Is it real? Is it good? What would we be like without feelings?

Emotion can be as deceptive as it is powerful. It can paralyze and it can propel us. A fictional story, when told well, can move us more than our own life. And the stories we tell ourselves about our circumstances can color and cover the truth, until fear and grudges and emptiness become the motivation behind every decision we make. On the other hand, where would we be without our courage, love, and determination?

Some people are more emotional than others, with maladaptive extremes on either end of the spectrum, but even for those who feel detached, detachment is a feeling, and our shared existence is defined by emotion, which leads me to wonder: without the affective dimension of our reality, would we still be human, or sentient? Life without moods is about as challenging to imagine as life without linear time. In fact, having feelings might be more essential to our nature than the passage of time, because feelings are a fundamental aspect of our connection with our Creator, al Wadood, and with each other. The way we feel reveals where our true interests lie. In a way, then, emotion is the realest thing about us.

12/9/2022

Sometimes I think about how, in writing, one is inherently filtering their thoughts, sifting through the noise to piece together a coherent narrative, which leads me to worry about the sincerity of my journal entries. But with my personal studies of cognitive behavioral therapy, I’m starting to question this idea that my thoughts represent myself in my truest form anyway. Although Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” I believe that being is attributed to a more essential quality than thinking. If thoughts can become an expression of illness, if one’s cognition can be restructured, then thinking is like painting, and not like the paints themselves. What I mean by that is that while I used to uphold my thoughts as the colors and my words as the brushes that deliberately paint with them, I’m now realizing that thoughts too are “brushing the paint” as I think them. Then what is the paint? My perceiving soul? Subhanallah, al ‘Aleem holds the answers beyond our grasp!

12/5/2022

Guilt is a confusing emotion, because we often refer to it for moral data, relying on it to clarify whether we are in the wrong, yet as an emotion, guilt can be irrational, and to blindly go with the gut when the stakes are so high is to invite bias and lose perspective.

Guilt is like mud in the waters of truth, adding substance, but reducing clarity.

I’ve witnessed guilt in myself and in others work counterproductively. Have you ever seen someone agonize over something silly, feeling bad about a neutral or even positive deed of theirs? These same people can simultaneously be oblivious or even adamant about their true misdeeds. This imbalance frequently takes the form of us fretting over our brief pleasant interactions with strangers while treating those closest to us with impatience, for example.

Then is guilt maladaptive, or can there ever be good guilt? Well, mud is good for the skin as long as you don’t get it in your eyes. Al Lateef designed us with emotions for a reason, not so they’ll tell us where to go, but to get us going at all.

11/7/2022

If you were always fed before your stomach had a chance to become empty again, would you have any awareness of hunger? What would food mean to you, if it were always around? I’ve been blessed, privileged, beyond my comprehension; I never knew hunger, so I didn’t appreciate food for what it was until I felt the pangs of its absence. And I’m not really talking about food.

Spirituality was a part of my life before I was old enough to think abstractly. Before I realized how urgently I would come to rely on it. Praying was like doing my homework. Get it done because you have to because it’s the good thing to do. Even as I got a bit older, I’d witness other people embarking on spiritual journeys, meditating, asking questions, seeking connection and truth and guidance, and I’d have no frame of reference to relate to their motivation. I already had a full spread in front of me, and I ate when I was supposed to. I appreciated the meals, but superficially, enjoying their flavors and not their nourishment, which didn’t even occur to me, ironically because it was always there for me when I needed it.

Growing up, I thought of religion as an identity. This mindset is understandable for a Muslim girl who lived in the United States through the “War on Terror” in which the government and the media simultaneously terrorized and accused Muslims in order to advance corrupt political agendas. As a result, religion became a very political experience for me. It was personal, intensely so, it was always my top priority, and it was fueled by righteousness, but it wasn’t driven by that indescribable searching; for a long time, it wasn’t philosophical. I was more religious than the vast majority of people I encountered, but I see now that I was far from the most spiritual.

And the reason I can now see the nature of the religiosity I exhibited growing up is because, alhamdulillah, I can feel a shift in me. I could feel myself becoming spiritual since the start of the pandemic. I no longer want the same things out of life that I used to. I don’t want approval; I want connection. I don’t want to attain; I want to appreciate. I don’t want to achieve; I want to help. I want the present, the meaning and the depth and the richness of it. I want God, and when I seek anything else, it feels like filler. Junk food.

I’m trying to figure out what’s caused this gradual transition in me. Are these changes just part of growing older? I’m in my late twenties now, and the picture I’ve painted of my current self is, of course, not how I always am (I eat a lot of junk food), but more of a general trend. Will an older version of myself look back at this time and find fault in the nature of my religiosity now? I almost hope so, because I pray I keep growing, always.

I think I might have gotten here, only through ar Rahman, ar Raheem, because life has humbled me a bit, in the best way. My life didn’t turn out the way I had expected it would. There were a few things I used to really want that I didn’t get, and a few that no one would want, and now I am honored that Allah chose them for me, because of where they have led. What I got served on my plate instead? Deeply delicious, and actually filling.

10/8/2022

Have you ever found yourself caught in a cycle of anxious praying that doesn’t make you feel any better? Has your spirituality been reduced to compulsive acts? Maybe whenever you stress about a responsibility you’ll soon have to fulfill, you quickly mutter the same words, “give me strength, grant me ease,” but you’ve said them so many times, you don’t feel them anymore, you only feel their lack, and it seems like all prayer does is punctuate your desperation. Many of us can find ourselves in this rut, but it’s possible to become more conscious of how we practice our deen, starting with our mindset; if you relate to any part of this reflection, it might be time for you to change the way you think about prayer.

We too often forget this truth, but inherent to prayer is the act of communicating. When we pray, we are praying to someone, not just praying, or the prayer would have no point. In fact, the difficult situation we’re praying about would also have no point, because the whole reason we are tested in this life is to draw nearer to Allah. Of course our prayers will fall flat if we use them to speak without hoping to be heard.

Indeed, sometimes it seems we speak to express ourselves rather than to communicate with others, meaning that when we speak, we can have a bad habit of focusing more on ourselves as the speakers than the listeners to whom we are speaking, and the same is often true for du’a, unfortunately. Imagine someone who doesn’t think much about God, but finds themself suddenly in a desperate situation. When they call out to Allah, they might be thinking more about the situation they need help with than the help itself, let alone the Helper. This mindset makes the prayer not only less satisfying, but also less sincere, if you think about it, especially if they promptly return to ignoring Allah subhana wa ta’ala as soon as He saves them.

So don’t just call out; call out to God! Call Him by His beautiful names: an Noor, as Salam, Malik al Mulk, Thul Jalalee wal Ikram, Fatir as Samawatee wal Ardh (the Light, the Source of Peace, Owner of the Dominion, Lord of Majesty and Generosity, Originator of the Heavens and the Earth)! Using these names reminds us who we are addressing when we pray by invoking His glorious attributes. Rather than dwelling and ruminating, thinking, “oh no, my deadline, help me,” we can actually draw strength from prayer by thinking of our Lord when we pray to Him, whose mercy and ability encompass every concern we could possibly have.

9/15/2022

I panicked this week like I have never panicked before. My throat was tight! My breath was short! My blood felt like poison and I just wanted to leave my skin so the suffering would end! Subhanallah, it was really bad. The worst of the turmoil lasted for many hours, during which my body kept overheating like crazy, I couldn’t stop trembling till my legs hurt, and my heart was incessantly beating at a dangerous pace, the sensations very physical and visceral and strange. Perhaps the weirdest part was how suddenly and inexplicably this emotional hurricane started raging. It lasted for a frighteningly extended period that turned into days, although my symptoms thankfully became less intense with time, and for a while, I couldn’t shake the greatest indicator that I had stopped being myself: I lost the desire to eat.

Alhamdulillah, I am so grateful to be writing in the past tense.

When I was in the thick of it, crying uncontrollably, bewildered, desperate, I would have done anything to get out of it. I’m writing these words to note a discovery: I could have.

When my mom woke up, I told her something was wrong, and she hugged me and laughed, and just like that, the worst of the panic attack subsided.

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but worrying, the practice of considering every nagging thought, is a voluntary act. A choice. In my case, it’s become a habit, a tendency ingrained in me that has snowballed into a fixation on the future that has damaged my present without actually benefiting my future in the least. If my worrying were truly rational, if it were really so self-preserving, then I’d be more worried about my tendency to worry and rob myself of my precious present. If only I had correctly identified worrying as its own kind of waswasa, I would have known to fight this seemingly innocent adversary rather than relying on it to get me through that difficult day.

Now don’t get me wrong; we don’t have complete control over anything, and I don’t mean to say I’ll never worry again or that it was my fault that I had such a hard time. All control is with Allah, and sometimes we are tested with trials we are meant to struggle through. Masha’Allah, in my case, panic attacks are a rare occurrence, and this week’s particular struggle, likely a combination of external, cognitive, and biochemical factors, although it was scary and traumatic, has also led to a blessing in the sense that it has shifted my perspective in a way I hadn’t realized I’ve been needing. Greatly. I’ve wasted so much time worrying, the moment I feel joy, about losing that joy… thereby, ironically, losing that joy. The root of joy is gratitude, while its true threat is fear.

Here’s what worked for me: stopping myself. Let me explain. When I was deep in the midst of my anxiety’s cruel grip, I continued to entertain the same repetitive worries in a debilitating cycle, thinking the same unpleasant thoughts again and again as though worrying about something bad could somehow prevent it from happening, when the reality is that the experience of worrying about an occurrence is so often worse than the occurrence itself. I compulsively insisted on seeing my negative thoughts through to the end as if to defend myself against whatever was worrying me, but the surprisingly liberating truth is that all along, it’s my worries that have been dragging me down, and not the things I’ve been worried about.

If anyone reading these words is anything like me, I hope you find some comfort in the suggestion that you do have some control over your mental habits, just like your physical ones. Just as you can choose to start your day with a cup of tea or to snap out of your mindless scrolling through a screen by pausing to pray, you can choose to shift your focus when your brain starts retreading the same tired paths. It sounds obvious in retrospect, but in the moment, it was genuinely a revelation to me that the thoughts I entertain are indeed entertained by me, that I have been hosting them all along, these lousy, intrusive guests in my head, and it’s time to kick them out.

My panic began to subside by Allah’s mercy after I yet again interrupted my attempt to achieve calmness to start the same miserable process of mulling and dwelling and fretting, but this time, I stopped myself, thinking, “I’ve already thought these thoughts. Thinking them again won’t lead anywhere. I’ll just waste time and hurt my peace of mind.” Giving myself permission to not compulsively go through the same routine was shockingly yet obviously the solution. Unfortunately, “compulsive” could be my middle name, but alhamdulillah, You have always helped me out of my trance and protected me from ash shaytan’s deceptive influence. I’m now committed to retraining the habits of my brain, may as Salam help me through this process.

I’ve always been a planner, a future-oriented soul, and I like this trait of mine; alhamdulillah, I think there’s some optimism inherent to it, and it makes me reliable. But it has at times taken on a dark twist in my life and overshadowed my true goals. This time, when I started to pointlessly panic about the future despite the fact that nothing was truly wrong and so much was right, I was able to stop, reroute my thoughts, and return to my day by thinking, “Hasbee Allah wa ni’mal Wakeel.” God is enough for me, and what a blessed Trustee!

If I truly trust You, then I can let go of this feeling that I “need” to worry, like worrying is doing something productive, rather than destroying me from the inside out. If I truly fear You alone, then I can find peace insha’Allah by redirecting my every anxiety, fear of falling short of my potential, fear of change and uncertainty, fear of losing loved ones, to the only empowering fear I know: fear of Allah. Taqwa, the consciousness of God, is not fear as an anxious person understands it, but rather mindfulness of righteousness and purpose, motivation to please the Most Compassionate and to not wrong oneself nor others, and submission entirely to You.

I realize I have some work to do, because part of me instinctively wants to wonder how long this blessed liberation from fear will last and almost feels compelled to worry about losing it, about the panic returning. And it’s true that sometimes a storm of hormones takes over and you just have to ride the wave with prayer and loved ones and funny YouTube videos. But truly, there is no change nor strength except through You, and alhamdulillah, I am currently of the mind that even when my old worrying habit pops up again, insha’Allah I’ll recognize it for what it is: a habit, something I can influence. Let anyone reading these words consider the idea that hidden within the problem is the solution: it’s all in your head.

8/11/2022

May 29, 2020 - This Name of Yours

Ya Rab, al Lateef, I love this name of Yours. According to the poster by my bed, it means “the Gentle, the Subtly Kind.” I’ve heard the word “lateef” used both to mean pleasant (in some contexts) and subtle (in others). But it would appear the term is a combo of the two concepts. What an interesting combo it is. I wouldn’t normally think to combine kindness with subtlety. But you could argue that to be kind is to be gentle, and to be gentle is to be subtle. Subtle as opposed to overt.

I love this name of Yours because it’s complex in its distinction from many of Your other beautiful names, ya Rab, which are not only overt, but the greatest example of themselves conceivable. You are al ‘Alee, al ‘Atheem, the Most High, the Great, yet You are also subtle. We tremble in awe at Your mere mention, yet smile to ourselves at Your constant presence. Your rattle our homes with thunder, yet cool our skin with a lovely breeze. And Your signs are big and obvious, like the birth of a new life, yet intricate and stunning, like the inner workings of a cell. Subhanallah. Ya Rab, al ‘Alee, al Lateef, grant me what my heart wants most, and only khair, immensely, wonderfully, by way of it. Ameen!

*

May 1, 2022 - The Pleasant Subtleties of al Lateef

Al Lateef: the Pleasantly Subtle.

This name is one of my favorites, to the point where I’ve actually written about it in a journal entry before, perhaps years ago (masha’Allah, I’ve been keeping a journal for years now, for as long as the pandemic, subhanallah), before reflecting on any other name in here. I love this beautiful name so much because it’s unexpected and not what one would typically associate with God. So many of His names are inherently not subtle at all. They are the greatest extremes, attributes like al Jabbar (the Compelling Restorer), al Mutakabbir (the Dominant), al Qahhar (the Subduer with Absolute Control)! Allah subhana wa ta’ala is powerful!

But He is also subtle! He is beyond our perception. His plans take time, not because they have to, but because we undergo changes in life gradually, because He is al Lateef! The pleasant breeze blowing through the trees glorifies His name, Allahu akbar! It’s not just the eruption of a volcano that serves as one of His signs, but the trembling of a leaf, the splitting of a cell, subhanallah, ya Rabbi, I love You, al Lateef!

*

August 10, 2022 - The Subtle, Gentle, Pleasant, Kind Almighty Allah

Ya Rabbi, al Lateef, this beautiful, nuanced name of Yours is ever one of my favorites that I hold dear, I love it so much, subhanallah. We forget You when we don’t engage in regular reminders that recharge our souls, reminders of the evident, reminders of why we’re here and what it all means, while You are constantly perceiving us, subhanallah. Our relationship with You is our relationship with our own existence, as You made us and put us here and gave us all that we have for a reason, and You have the power to take it all away.

Sometimes we avoid You because we don’t want to deal with heavy topics, preferring comforting distractions. We want fun, not guilt. But when we only strive for worldly outcomes, based on our own desires and assumptions, we don’t feel anything but empty. It’s ash shaytan who convinces us that al Lateef, the Pleasantly Subtle, the Gently Kind, is unpleasantly heavy and guilt-inducing to consider, astaghfirullah. In reality, guilt comes from the avoidance of al Lateef, while turning to Him is always a breath of fresh air.

How phenomenal that the Most Powerful, al ‘Azeez, gives us the choice! One might ask how Allah could be both the Almighty and the Subtle. But considering His delicate use of His incomparable and limitless power, considering the free will He offers us, which we abuse while He, al Haleem, allows us with remarkable forbearance to learn from our mistakes, the name of al Lateef uniquely captures the essence of the Almighty Maker, Sustainer, Guide, the Truth and the Light, the Source and the Ruler of reality. Given the conditions of our mystifying universe, which didn’t have to look as beautiful as it does, and the equally mystifying human experience, so rich in its simplicity, our Lord must be both Almighty and Subtle, His presence so clear and all-encompassing, like water, yet so difficult to describe, even with endless words.

7/9/2022

They use my face for the cover, but you won’t find my words inside. They collect us all, one of each. All of the colors, but none of the shades. They change their logo with the trending topics. The trending topics trample over the people they represent. I am afraid to speak up in the spaces meant for us. Is there an us? It’s hard to tell, when we’re on display, talked about more than listened to, and how rarely we speak with each other. This is the diversity aesthetic. It sure looks like justice; we make them look good.

6/29/2022

But what if I miss my exit, or miss the stop sign, or miss the other car, but only by an inch, by a moment, by divine intervention? What if it had hit me? What if it happens again?

What if asking is its own kind of disaster?

And what if flying down the road, hugging the coast for miles, embraced by the unfurling sky, a perfectly bright summer blue kissed with white, with room for my loudest singing, stretching like the paths that keep on coming, so much bigger than me, and I get to explore them, what if all of that makes me feel like a part of this universe of Yours, and I can’t help but to ask… what if driving carries me farther than I ever imagined I could go?

6/8/2022

Outside of Paradise, we won’t find flowers pinker than May, or skies bluer than June, but walking is a lonely thing, it can be a lonely thing to wear down the same paths again, while my soul has nowhere to be but in me, and they are so pretty, achingly beautiful, these paths, but who is looking?

And maybe if someone were looking, I would have to stop and wait for them and feel trapped, and maybe they would have to stop and wait for me and make me feel rushed, and walking alone can be a free thing, and I don’t know of a freedom bluer than June.

In June I try new things and work with wonderful people and see friends and plan for family times, and I meet myself in my mind, and I love to engage myself in ideas and stories and jokes and make art with my hands, and I especially love to talk to You in my head and onto my hands in prayer, and You listen and You understand and You remind me and the conversation is more real than any I’ve ever had.

In June I wake up late and miss the morning, and I’d love to see it again soon, but I stay up with my parents, who give the flowers their colors in my eyes, and You gave us the skies, and You gave us not only ourselves, but each other, and You, in this universe of Yours so deep and true and bluer than June.

5/12/2022

If I had to capture the essence of humanity in a single concept, I think I’d have to say that free will is what makes us human. As humans, we are neither compelled to perfection like angels, nor enslaved by our impulses like animals. We get to choose. And that simple ability is so profound, because it makes everything we do a test of our sincerity. Getting to choose means there is a thought process behind our decisions, and we allow ourselves to submit our will to different motivations. Understanding choice might well be the key to understanding our purpose here, to accessing morality.

Another aspect of our nature, a consequence of our will, is our distaste for submitting. We yearn to be in control, because we have been granted control, and there is nothing so disturbingly wrong as the violation of that sacred control. But what does that violation look like? Oppression and abuse, of course, are major violations of free will, but there are also less intense forms of one soul imposing its will on another. We even resent the more subtle strings that pull us, like society’s expectations, or even our own worldly pursuits, from status to wealth. In a sense, then, the individual soul can inadvertently become enslaved by the whims of its own ego, so even submitting to oneself, which seems like the ultimate freedom, is just another psychological prison.

If we understand that our will isn’t ours, that we did nothing to produce it, and instead, it’s a trust by which we are being tested, then the goal becomes clearer: to submit to nothing other than the divine source of that will. Human beings were never the ones in power; we had no say over our birth, and we will have no say over our death. Though our will is free, we are bound to submit, to one thing or another, as dependent creatures who did not design our own will, as spiritual creatures who value knowledge and connection and goodness and are looking for outer and inner peace, for something greater than us. So what are we looking for? On what, or who, are we dependent, what is most deserving of our submission? That’s where our free will comes in, our chance to make the ultimate choice, the most important decision that we really get to decide for ourselves in this life.

Islam is the Arabic word for submission. The matter of our free will and the inevitability of our submission to whatever we choose is right there in the name. Religion is often understandably perceived as an obstacle to freedom by victims of suffocating religious upbringings in which the will of others was imposed on them. But there can be no compulsion in belief, and we all believe in something. What could be more beautiful than to not suppress, but harness that rebellious spirit that lives within every ego, and use it to resist submitting to everything, to anything, other than the one most worthy pursuit?

No one can make you a slave to your fears or your desires if you only fear and desire Allah, the Creator, the Most Compassionate. Every one of us is bound to submit, bound by the One who gave us the ability to submit and the time and the reminders to do so. Thanks to God, the choice is ours.

4/5/2022

For most of my life, I’ve hated thinking about this, and I still can’t admit it sometimes, but right now, I’d like to: I struggled with my mental health as a child. I used to go through dark periods of guilty compulsion and pervasive sadness. The timing of these periods coincided with the War on Terror more than I realized at the time. I didn’t start connecting the dots until I wrote my master’s thesis on the Iraq War, and I’m still coming to realizations now as I’m studying in the field of mental health, realizations like how I must have been experiencing survivor’s guilt, or why I feel such a need to be in control. With more than enough going on outside of myself throughout my formative years, my mental health wasn’t something I spent much time thinking about, but I’ve been thinking.

I was too young to be kept in the loop, and too young to form a comprehensive understanding of global politics and notice trends in society. But I was old enough to be deeply disturbed by the scenes on the news. The news makes up some of my most vivid childhood memories. How could I not be traumatized watching people who looked like my family being violated by people who looked like my neighbors? And I was old enough to lose my sense of security in my own home after the FBI broke into our house, after the Patriot Act was passed and gave the government permission to violate the rights of Muslims, after they started throwing innocent people into prison who are still there today. I was old enough to worry about having my dad taken away from me, old enough to be shaken by the violent incidents and horrific deaths of my relatives that occurred in rapid succession in the early years of the Iraq War. I was old enough to have my innocence and my identity gutted.

I’m a cheerful soul. The type to wink at my reflection. I talk to myself like we’re friends. I don’t like remembering how disturbed the inside of my head could get, or how much I worried my mom, but I wouldn’t have gotten through those dark periods without her. And I shudder to think of where I would have ended up without my relationship with God.

There’s this frequently repeated phrase in the Qur’an that brings me a lot of comfort: “there will be no fear for them, nor will they grieve.” This saying is in reference to those who follow God’s guidance, and I’ve heard an interpretation about how protection from fear means God covers our future, and protection from grief means God covers our past. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how the Qur’anic phrase also covers both anxiety and depression. Allah has been my comfort through the darkest periods, my source of perspective through the “what ifs” and the “should have beens.”

I’ve been thinking about mental health again not just because I’m studying it now, but because I was diagnosed last year with an autoimmune disease of the thyroid that occasionally messes with my emotional stability. I have what my mom and I call clouds and storms. Clouds are moments of inexplicable sadness. Storms are moments of inexplicable fear. Thank God, they don’t last more than a day at a time, but when I look over my journal entries this past year, I have more “bad weather” days than I used to. The good weather days have always outnumbered the bad, by God’s mercy, and my life is better than it’s ever been, in more ways than I can count.

I’m a better person too. Even the darkness has been a gift through the meaning it has created in my life. So I’m going to stop letting the darker periods disturb me. I don’t want to delete a single day and undo myself. Not anymore. I’ve been thinking, and I wouldn’t change a thing.

3/28/2022

Let’s say the goal is to be liquid, to go with the flow of changing currents while still maintaining integrity as a single body of water. I used to be solid, rigid, stuck in place, assuming my stance is right by default and closing myself off to everything else. As I gained life experience and humility, I was grateful to melt and ebb and flow, letting myself get pulled and pushed by different perspectives. But these days, I’m worried about becoming gaseous. Whatever anyone says could permeate into myself, or cause me to scatter.

I seek stability. I seek refuge from becoming gaseous, and from becoming solid. To the Maker of matter, I pray to hold shape while leaving room. I pray to be strong against their particles, to sweep and not be swept away, unless I incline to do so. I pray to be guided like a river by the earth, tossing and turning and splashing and churning with every bend, to rise and collect myself and rain down on the world in Your name.

3/10/2022

Every year, not too long after my birthday, I take a new picture to use for my accounts online. For an entire year, that static image is me, my official representative, until it’s time for an update, and some years, I’m sad to change out a timeless photo I’ve grown attached to just to stay current. But this year, my photo has been a poor representative from early on.

Every time I look at her, I think, “She has no idea what’s coming.” She looks slightly away from the lens, content, having come home from a Ramadan night spent praying in the masjid alongside her community, led by her dad’s beautiful, tired voice. She is undiagnosed. She has led an entire life in which her health barely occurred to her. Sometimes I look at her and feel a sense of loss, and I just can’t wait to replace her with me as my profile photo.

But then I remember that she has so much to learn. That she’s still searching for what she’s had all along, but she won’t realize that without going through some painful lessons, only to come out closer to her mom than ever before. And she’s still stuck in a dead end, when a path she doesn’t know she could love so much is just around the corner for her.

The Yussra pictured at twenty-seven still thinks fulfillment is just a feeling that fades after adolescence. Alhamdulillah, she has no idea what’s coming.

2/12/2022

I’ve wronged myself. I know that now. And I wish I could say with more confidence that I won’t ever do it again. But I can’t really trust myself at the moment.

They say shame is the unhealthy version of guilt, that guilt is about the act, and shame is about the person. But what I’m feeling right now, it’s not exactly that I hate myself. Doesn’t every emotion serve a purpose? I think guilt is about the past, and shame is about the future; while guilt tends to be associated with specific incidents, shame applies more broadly, which means shame can be preventative.

I’m feeling guilty about what I did, but more than that, I’m ashamed of myself, ashamed to learn how low I can stoop, afraid I'll find out how far I’m capable of falling. Good isn’t a trait I can secure; it’s a state I have to maintain. Better that I know that now. Can I reach it again?

Guilt was only the first step. I can’t just feel bad about the past act and move on. I also need to feel bad about what my future self might do, and get my current self far from that point. A healthy dose of shame is the first thing that’s given me hope.

2/5/2022

Have you ever had one of those nights when it doesn’t feel like the morning will come? Like sunshine never existed? I don’t mean losing hope in the morning arriving, I mean forgetting it’s even a thing. It just doesn’t occur to you, you’re so stuck in your moment. Living in the moment can be freeing, but without an awareness of moments beyond it, it can also be a prison. Think of it: every “endless” night that’s ever been has ended, yet the feeling that it wouldn’t made it seem too big to overcome in the moment. Our sense of perspective shapes our perception of reality, and it’s really, really limited.

The fact that we can forget about daylight at nighttime is a good indication of our limited ability as humans to maintain a sense of perspective. It’s no surprise, then, that we have a tendency to lose sight of the longer term and the bigger picture. The grand scheme is too grand for the human brain to comprehend, let alone retain constant awareness of. Remembering it is a conscious act, which is why we must keep choosing to do so, why our lives unfold in regular cycles of forgetting and remembering.

The Arabic word for person, “insan,” shares a root with the word for forgetfulness, “nisyan.” It’s in our nature to lose perspective. We are animals who have a hard time remembering anything outside of our own immediate experience at any given moment. But subhanallah, we’re also more than animals in that we can. Our time here is a series of reminders from one exceedingly patient God that the light is coming, right on cue.

1/14/2022

At first you were new to me, winter. You greeted me first, with snowfall at my birth. And everything was new to me, so I forgot, and you remained new, every time I saw you. Once I could remember, I was able to appreciate how much you had to offer, each miracle forming a lasting memory the first time I lived it: eating snow when nobody was looking, sledding down the hill, scaling the mountains you would become, snapping icicles off of the bottom of the car. Then, when you became familiar, I learned to notice the way you’d leave just so I’d miss you, and you’d be new again when you came back.

But now even your cycle has become familiar. I know your ways, and I know your patterns, my eyes accustomed to the prettiest flakes. You come and go and I hardly notice. The walls of my room don’t change. Not when I don’t leave them.

Winter, you were never my favorite. You know that. The other three were tied for first. You were a novelty I didn’t ask for, in a land I didn’t expect to claim, and when I grew up, you became the pain on my face as I walked through campus with frozen eyelashes. You became biting winds and dangerous roads and howling hands chipping ice off of the windshield when I was already running late, winter.

Yet here I am missing you because my life is indoors now, and I’m short on excuses to brave your cold. Forgive me, old friend. You were never my favorite, but you greeted me first, and you’re a lot older than me, but we come from the same Source, and you overstay your welcome every year, but I really do love you. So keep it coming, the same snow that became summertime storms only to be recycled stunningly into new crystalline designs.

You are beautiful in every form. I’m admitting it. I love you. I love it when you say, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”

12/21/2021

Though it’s obvious in retrospect, making a decision on a Sunday morning is nothing like the freedom of choice on a Friday night. I had to get to Sunday to figure that one out for myself. With days of time to call your own ahead of you, you don’t just have time to spend, but time to kill too. You can binge a show you’ve already seen several times, that’s Friday night. But Sunday? Sunday is Monday’s shadow, and every choice you make, every investment in a priority, is a decision to decline to spend your time some other way, any other way, and suddenly, nothing feels good enough.

That’s how I feel making commitments in my late twenties compared to making life choices as a teenager. I’ve seen what time looks like on the other side of the sandglass. It piles up! It runs out, so fast, forever! The timer has always been there. It was flipped over the moment I was born. I just didn’t notice it till enough grains had accumulated to reveal the desert of my own mortality. What looked like abundance on one side becomes such a weight on the other, and every number that isn’t infinity starts to seem small. But rather than nothing feeling good enough, anything good will do, and everything feels precious, when it’s done in awareness of You, who makes the sand and flips the glass and weighs the grains… on the other side.

11/5/2021

It’s beautiful, but it sure complicates life, how multifaceted we all are. We each have multiple different constantly evolving interests, and we like each one for several distinct reasons in terms of how they uniquely resonate with each of us.

How, then, can we zero in on a particular career path to walk, seriously studying in only one field and then committing to a specific job? Rather than the right job perfectly fitting one individual’s soul, each person adapts to the job that seems to most closely suit them. One’s “dream job” might just be the one that captures the most elements of what one is looking for. It might offer a person a feeling of fulfillment, an ability to work as part of a team, and a good schedule, for instance, yet keep that person cooped up indoors for longer than they would have liked.

Every dream involves sacrifice. Compromise. Adapting. Beyond just careers, the same holds true for human relationships. One might have the same sense of humor as one friend, and the same taste in music as another. We won’t meet a person or find a role that mirrors our every aspect, even when we need to commit to a single role or person.

But we can come close. We can adapt. And we can remember not to depend on a single aspect of life to complete us. After all, we were created dependent and complete.

10/31/2021

When you’re angry enough to punch somebody even though you’ve never thrown a punch before in your life and you don’t even have anybody to punch, when your heart is so encumbered that the tears keep coming even when you’re going about your business, when you’re so confused by a turn of events that you’re not sure you can trust reality anymore, when you’re so tired and it won’t stop and you know you’re not in control and still forget, listen to the rain that hasn’t for one moment today stopped providing a radio static embrace, forming in the heavens and falling to the earth again despite having been gathered from the ground, purifying splashes hugging your eardrums as though the water were your essence, gentle with your heart, so kind when you need it most, a reminder from the One who makes the rain and sends it down and heals the pain and lets you frown when you need to recollect like rainwater.

8/18/2021

There were these doors at the airport when I arrived in Ottawa that read: “NO RETURN BEYOND THIS POINT.” I was about to pass easily through these exit doors until I saw this sign. Was I really sure that this was the right way? I’d been looking for the baggage carousel, and the arrow looked like it was pointing to that apparently irreversible set of doors, but I could have been mistaken, and if that were true, then advancing in search of my luggage could have cut me off from ever again accessing the very place that actually held what I needed.

I stood before the daunting doors for a moment, uncertain. I doubled back to reread the signs that had led me to this point, this unexpectedly grave crossroads. But after giving myself that moment to pause and make a conscious decision, I still had to go through those fateful doors. Because there was nowhere else to go.

And the whole ordeal sparked a sensation in my spirit that immediately, alarmingly rang true; my soul recognized something in that sign, that command to advance and never turn back, moving in only one direction, like time. Like life. Like passing away to another realm. As I walked through the doors and let them close behind me, I didn’t feel panicked like I thought I would; I found myself thrilled at the adventure of having to go on despite not knowing what awaited me on the other side.

7/22/2021

I didn’t even own a pair; they make me look standoffish. And now I can’t do without them even through windshields and cloudy skies. I don’t feel like myself sometimes these days. It doesn’t help that I have to board up the windows to my soul, and a mask blocks my smile, and the heart on my sleeve keeps skipping a beat. Incognito, I am free. But also not me. I become nocturnal and fight myself. Who am I to fight back? I catch the sun at the wrong end of the day. These shades filter out the light from my life, damaging and brilliant.

Sometimes I can’t help myself; I take them off and soak in the rays, the brightness that hurts so beautifully. My hijab colorful, my smile radiant, my eyeballs burned. Red pain and freed tears and for hours I can’t keep them open. That’s the price I pay for a minute of exposure. Still I bask, because I don’t feel like myself in sunglasses, and I like being looked in the eyes, and I love the way Your world looks when You make everything glow.

Maybe I’ll wear them again tomorrow and take in the view; maybe because of them I’ll be able to look at the sun directly. Maybe I’ll look cool.

4/25/2021

These days, in an increasingly secularized world, in which even the religious often keep their worship relegated to a specific and personal frequency of their lives, the overarching faith that once governed the people has not exactly left a void, nor, in its absence, yielded a decentralized community. No, these days, the role of religion, in not only the heart of the individual, but the fabric of society, has been replaced.

By politics.

In the age of information, one’s allegiance to a political party has become less their opinion and more their identity. Conservative and liberal rhetoric are referenced by their respective followers for guidance. They engage, within their respective circles, in this discourse to determine and renegotiate what is righteous and what is reprehensible. The two groups, in their conflicting values, talk about, but not to, each other. And they are both victim to the fallibility of humanity, reliant upon humankind for answers, from pundits to politicians, those most driven by power and chained to their remarkably fleeting, deceptively influential cultural context.

Is there a religion more dangerous than the one to which its followers don’t realize they adhere? May God help us all.

4/21/2021

I often hear people say, “I don’t have a problem with anybody.” It’s become a sort of disclaimer folks attach to their opinions out of concern that minorities might find them racist. And as a minority, when I hear such disclaimers, I actually believe them. I can tell that the fear of being perceived as racist is sincere, and a literal white supremacist wouldn’t feel the need to preface their speech.

Yet, much to my bewilderment, those well-meaning folks who have no problem with anybody are frequently the same people who try to defend Derek Chauvin, the white cop who on camera brutally, slowly murdered George Floyd, a Black man who had done nothing worthy of arrest, let alone street execution, and used his final moments on Earth to plead for his life. Perhaps the racial anxiety of Chauvin’s defenders stems from guilt, and deep down, they know that their allegiance to the group they most identify with should not come at the expense of their allegiance to truth and justice, as is too often the American way.

It’s not enough to passively “not have a problem” with the very existence of minorities. Those are some seriously low standards for righteousness. One must actively have a problem with the oppression of minorities, to not stand with or for it, to be aware of it, to call it out when one sees it. Minorities are by definition outnumbered in a democracy. Not having a problem is not enough. In fact, not having a problem is precisely the problem.

4/16/2021

Ramadan always brings strange weather, subhanallah. It’s especially strange because Ramadan doesn’t take place during a fixed season. I was reading the Qur’an when the blowing winds outside suddenly intensified and I heard a single strong gust followed by a loud pop; a little electrical explosion had occurred on the street, and in an instant, the power went out. No lights, no heating, no computer. Allahu akbar.

When I read the Qur’an, I feel mindful of Allah swt, aware and devoted. But when I’m locked into a different task, I get too easily distracted. I think distraction would not have such an easy time holding me back from my goals and growth and closeness to Allah swt if my baseline closeness were closer.

The sudden darkness of this blackout made me aware of the steady presence of the light, light I’d stopped consciously seeing because I’d gotten used to it, as though it were meant to serve as background rather than the only means of seeing anything else. Right outside of my room, we have these colorful lights that I hung up a few Eids ago and refused to take down, because their beauty used to take my breath away. A while ago, I realized I’d lost the ability to see them, unless I explicitly remembered them and thought to look. Now I can see them again, because for the first time in so long, they are black. Lifeless wire strung from the walls like a barbed fence. Ya Rabbi, return Your noor to us and guide me to never get used to the light. May it never again become the background I take for granted yet desperately need.

3/5/2021

Bismillah. Today I’m thinking about faith. Faith asks the rational human being to accept as truths matters that are inherently uncertain to humanity in this worldly life; no one alive knows for a fact what happens after death and beyond the confines of this world in which time is always moving in the same direction, toward our departure.

So why do so many believe? Do we simply decide to do so, out of a self-deluded desire to will into existence a more comforting answer? Those who don’t believe might say yes, but belief isn’t about thinking what you want; it’s about what you really think is the case.

I can be at cognitive peace with centering my life with confidence around the truth of my answers to these most important questions that humanity cannot for the duration of our time here be certain about, because I believe that doing so is the test itself.

Do you believe your actions have moral consequences? Despite concrete proof of ultimate justice, do you feel innate within you that which could be termed a moral compass? If we all knew for sure that choosing to behave badly would result in justice being enacted against us, then sure, we’d choose to be good, but could you really call that a choice?

So our question here on Earth, the one I think might matter most, is whether, given the choice, we’ll choose good, to be good, to do good, or instead embrace distraction, self-interest, and power. When good people struggle with belief and doubt, it can almost feel like they’re focusing on the wrong thing; they already believe, because they already believe in good, and they don’t actually need certainty about death, because they are already certain about the miracle of this life and taking seriously the test of now by caring about these questions and our purpose and each other and doing their best. That, I think, is what it means to live in God’s name, to truly choose to follow the light, not despite but because of our inability to see the lighthouse, until we reach the end of our journey home.

2/2/2021

Sometimes I feel like people starve themselves of purpose. I think “starve” is an apt verb, because I believe purpose is a human need, and to deprive oneself is mentally, spiritually, unhealthy. Folks might not even realize the growing impact of their jaded, cynical, nihilistic outlook until they hear someone else describe the mounting daily inner pain they feel as a result of this outlook, and find themselves relating so much, and feeling so shocked to hear voiced what manner of dissatisfaction they’ve been apparently pushing down, that they immediately burst into powerful tears. Sometimes you can’t tell how empty you’ve been feeling lately until someone else points out the gaping hole within themself, and you are stunned to find that you recognize that hole in you.

Reasoning one step further, one must recognize that a growing emptiness inside is evidence that the present hole wasn’t always there, and that the hole itself is evidence that the filling exists, the lack indication of the possible, the starvation for meaning proof of purpose.

I don’t deny the feelings of emptiness others have suffered through. I myself have felt fuller at times and emptier at times. But it’s crucial to recognize that emptiness really is just a feeling, transient and subject to change. When you feel a certain way, that feeling, that perception of reality, can too easily get confused for reality itself. Folks ask, “Is this all there is? What is the point?”

The hole, fellow humans, is not in the world. It’s in us. We’ve all got voids. One point is to find the right way to fill them. Considered that way, to avoid a void is to fear the dark while acting as though you’ve embraced it. Really, a void is a driving force, a source of motivation, a container teeming with potential, because it still has room left in it for you to fill. That question of “why” that has for so long plagued humanity, then, can be its own answer, serving as the fire within us, not our darkness, but the light that challenges it, our reason for existence that is as sure as our existence itself.

1/1/2021

When the Iraq War (as it’s called in the US) was unfolding, it seized the attention of the West, like it seized my attention and defined my childhood, shaping my very identity and my perception of the world, not just in that moment, but as an objective reality that didn’t seem capable of changing. But as more years pass since the end (as it’s called in the US) of the war, the difference between Americans and Iraqis regarding the lasting impact of the war, which took place on Iraqi soil, becomes disturbingly clear. The destruction of my homeland, as it was happening, at the very least felt central to the attention of everyone around me. But now it’s been reduced for most in the States to a nostalgic old punchline, a contested, controversial bit of trivia, an era left to misguided patriotic history buffs with a passion for weaponry, like the tools of genocide are collectibles.

The rubble remains, yet to those whose votes and tax dollars caused it, more so with every passing year, it’s history.

This is a new flavor of offense, another layer to contend with, a charge to add to the list of war crimes, and the taste isn’t as sharp, but it’s just as bitter, and there’s a new pain that comes with aging loss, after anger has gutted you, and you’re left with sorrow, and the need to make things right.

Iraq, I can only keep you alive in my heart anymore by writing about you. And it hurts to write about you. Who am I? It’s bewildering. Subhanallah. These are feelings that I know won’t be resolved in this life. How can they?

And new wars start all the time, like a human life were nothing more than a resource. But Allah swt will not count the death tolls as do the greedy and senseless, like statistics. God witnesses and records everything, from the intentions of every soul to these wounds that haven’t healed right. Ya Rabbi, let these words reset our bones and remind me who I am: Iraqi.

12/25/2020

Lately my reality has felt surreal. No, nothing major has happened, and all is remarkably well, alhamdulillah. But the days have been passing so fast, like simulations, and I keep finding myself dissociating from the moment in a meta manner, reflecting on it as though it were in the past as I’m living through it, like, “Subhanallah, both of my brothers and I are in the same room right now. It’s like childhood.” And even just writing that last sentence actually made me cry just now, and why would it make me cry? It’s because I feel as though I occasionally experience reality in this zoomed out way, as though my present were a mere glimpse of everything. I guess it is. But being constantly aware of that fact can be overwhelming.

The truth is overwhelming.

And the truth is at odds with complete immersion in one’s daily life, with life in the moment, and nothing beyond. But remembering You always feels like a wake-up call, always snaps me back out of that surreal, dissociating feeling, and suddenly, with a single prayer, even from the moment I say “ya Rabbi,” I feel frighteningly real, being here feels frighteningly real, comfortingly real, this whole thing. Oh, ya Rabbi. What do I do? Guide me, ya Rab. I no longer have the so-called bliss of ignorance. I’m at the age where I no longer enjoy doing nothing in the same way I used to. One week off work, and my sense of reality would be compromised, if not for You. Subhanallah, alhamdulillah, Allahu akbar.

12/3/2020

Social interactions can really feel like a performance at times. Everything from small talk with a stranger to expressing love to someone dear can involve a certain amount of performing. Performing doesn’t necessarily mean acting. Really, it’s about displaying what’s inside of you on the outside to communicate to others and connect with them.

But sometimes, the process of translating inner thoughts into outer expressions isn’t all that straightforward. Sometimes something gets lost in translation, or something unintentionally gets added to the message in the process of conveying it. Social awkwardness derived from uncertainty toward oneself or each other can thwart one’s delivery. Some days, it can feel, even for those who are relatively socially skilled, as though the most basic interaction is an opportunity for flustering, anxiety-inducing misunderstandings.

At least, that’s how I feel. The moment I part ways with someone, even the moment I start to speak, I get to thinking, “Oh no. Did I offend them? Did I offend them when I asked if they have any questions, or when I wished them a good weekend?” I start worrying about whether or not I came off as sincere. I really do wish them well, but why do everyday phatic expressions sometimes sound phony in my voice?

I think there’s a stunning complexity and nuance to the art of conversation. With a single word and in a single tone, I can intentionally or unintentionally come off as cheerful, professional, guarded, abrasive, or countless other possibilities. And regardless of whatever I even manage to put out into the world, I have absolutely no control over how the listener’s brain will then receive my message. Ya Rabbi, guide me to successfully convey the best of me, kind and sincere!

11/27/2020

Subhanallah, it’s rather strange, and miraculous, and a bit humbling, how after one is mercifully delivered from a hard test by Your grace, in many cases, it soon starts feeling like the struggles one suffered had never transpired at all. We take from difficult life experiences the unique lessons they offer, but not always the pain. Memories of even the worst of times eventually become funny, yet the strength of character built up from those times remains. We go through great trials, and at the time, we wonder why, until we come out the other end better people, more empathetic, more patient, more reflective. Only Allah swt is generous even in testing us, withholding provisions, allowing harm to befall us.

“What of trauma?” one might counter. Trauma, yes: the lasting wounds of pain inflicted in the past. But I contend that trauma isn’t a side effect of the hardships we endure in this life, but rather a hardship in its own right. Learning to cope with a haunting past can be quite the meaningful journey, in a painfully healing sort of way.

Thinking back to my own trials, I’m awed at how that which had for so long plagued me in the past has been gone for so long now, I almost always forget to even think of it. It rarely occurs to me, now that I’m through the tunnel and out the other side, that I once lived in the dark. Insha’Allah, the same will soon hold true for the tunnels I currently traverse. How wide the possibilities, and breathtaking Your design.

11/19/2020

If we think of our psyche or soul as running on sustenance, much like our body does, we can come to a few important conclusions…

1. We have control (at least partially) over the state of our spirit, how we feel and are as conscious beings.

2. Our thought patterns, and therefore our behaviors, are influenced by what we consume, not only physically, but spiritually. What we expose our mind to, the way we spend our time, serves to nourish or harm the wellbeing of our essence.

Some days I feel lower in spirits than usual, more detached from myself, and I get this sense that the recent diet of my soul is to blame. When I consume anything that is in opposition to my goals, or even just removed from what I really care about, I begin to feel an internal dissonance, which manifests as apathy. Something as simple as seeing something wrong and not pausing to acknowledge it as wrong, even just internally, is enough to knock me off balance, because I can’t reconcile my momentary passivity with my deeper belief that everything matters. I’ll feel bothered by a nagging discomfort all day unless I stop to consciously recognize bad as bad, and the moment I do, my moral compass feels recalibrated, but if I don’t, my values can shift with neither my permission nor awareness, until one day I look up and realize I’m not standing where I’d meant to stand.

Though I’m more vigilant these days, alhamdulillah, masha’Allah, in identifying and steering clear of all poisonous foods for the soul, I do still indulge in junk food for the soul, and junk food as the staple, rather than the snack consumed in moderation, can crowd out what is healthy for the soul and leave a person feeling empty without feeling light.

If we pay mind to the diet we feed our soul, and classify our habits and parts of our routine as poison, junk, or nourishment, we can make our decisions more consciously and take charge over our condition, in the deepest sense of the word.

Everything matters, even when it’s all in our heads.

10/17/2020

Call it one of the less charming quirks of living in America. Every four years, as the presidential election approaches, you can expect the diversity of voices to suddenly unify and deliver the same message: shame on you if you don’t vote; shame on you if you don’t suck it up and pick the lesser evil.

Not shame on the establishment for ensuring that we only have evil to choose from, for pooling their resources to rig the game so their puppet of choice wins the nomination, for time and again taking away our shot at real change, for panicking when a candidate manages to become popular even though he threatens their power and would actually fight corruption within the well-oiled self-serving lobbying machine that is the United States government, for muzzling that popular candidate, all while the illusion of democracy continues to be sold to the people.

Not shame on the media for selling that illusion, for serving as a propaganda network for either party rather than the stronghold that checks their power and cuts through the noise with truth so the people can be kept informed and distinguish reality from spectacle.

Not shame on the government for oppressing people at home, slaughtering them abroad, and pivoting the societal conversation away from this, the true greater evil, an evil that runs deeper than the threat posed by any one candidate, this poorly kept secret that regardless of which party is in charge, we are governed by a system that holds sacred not human life, but money and power.

No, none of that. Just shame on us, we the people, who have a miniscule, statistically insignificant, philosophically dubious amount of power in our hands, shame on us for not using that “power” to choose the option we apparently have no choice but to go with, which means it isn’t a choice at all, and the actual powers that be have made sure of that.

Still, the voices clamor: “If you don’t vote for the lesser evil, you’re letting evil win!”

No, talk show and channel hosts with political sponsorships. Moving beyond the nonsensical nature of your sentiment, I feel it has to be said that if the greater evil does win, then I blame the lesser evil, for not being good enough to vote for, for replacing the nominee so many people genuinely, desperately wanted, and for many of us, to vote for the lesser evil is to validate the establishment’s meddling, through which they've made it clear it doesn’t actually matter what we think.

Every four years, it’s the same senseless display: the establishment screws the people, and we’re left being blamed and guilted by those who are meant to be representing us and voicing our concerns. If we don’t vote for the lesser evil, we’re in the wrong? Philosophically, how does this claim hold up, and why is it so popular, and worse yet, ubiquitous? Evil is evil, and it seems inherently wrong to support it, or at least not wrong to not support it.

It’s insulting the way we are repeatedly asked to consider how much more evil could be unleashed if we don’t support one of the two candidates who was corrupt enough to make it to the top, the supposedly less atrocious one, who has historically taken no issue with violating the basic human rights of the marginalized, who puts humanity on his platform only when people are watching and doing so wins him points, who is still atrocious, but just in less blatant, more diplomatic, and less well-known ways.

How about this instead? Shame on those of you in power, who put us here, for guilting us. For putting this on us. For having the nerve to blame the victims of this vile system you’ve created.

Regardless of who wins and who loses, when the innocent inevitably suffer at the hands of whichever evil victor, lesser or greater, I won’t be blaming myself for not participating in their system. I’ll go beyond just saying that my conscience is clear; in good conscience, I cannot, I will not, I outright refuse to endorse evil.

As for those of you who still think you have a duty to vote, you want to “choose” the lesser evil? Go ahead and take your pick. I understand your reasoning. But I’m not playing.

9/21/2020

Today, on my walk, as I looked up at the leaves that are starting to redden, I simultaneously felt both great peace and sharp lucidity. I passed by children and passed by parents, and thought about what makes someone a child. This one house had balloons tied to the mailbox, among them an inflated numeral seven. Seven years. Not as much time as I used to think it was, and now a single year goes by rather efficiently for me, so looking at that balloon made me imagine this yearly endeavor to mark one’s child aging up, and how, from the perspective of the child, it’s objectively a huge deal that they are now seven and not six, and how, from the perspective of the parent, their child is growing up so quickly, far more quickly than they remember childhood passing for them, so they have to mark the new age, appreciate it properly, before it changes again. Subhanallah.

That balloon prompted this reflection, and made me realize that I officially feel like I am woman and not girl, and I cannot express how earnestly I treasure this feeling, alhamdulillah. Nor have I sufficiently conveyed the breadth of the shift in my perception of reality and my own existence since the pandemic first began, subhanallah, subhanallah. If you read through my journal, you might think, “No, you’ve pretty much covered it.” But I keep finding new depths to this psychological development. Every moment is so precious, and I am conscious of my living, temporarily, within it. Every trembling leaf says Your name. Suddenly, I perceive Your presence in the leaves as clearly as I can see them, crisp against the blue of the heavens. Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar. Allahu akbar!

9/11/2020

To those facing a test in finding moderation, those seeking to break free from a bad habit, those experiencing a frightening loss of control to their impulses, which have started to feel like a part of them that is actively working against themselves, those ashamed of their apparent enslavement to that which shatters their own aspirations, whether you want to stop compulsively biting your nails, spend less time on screens, fix your sleep schedule, lose weight, cut smoking or drugs out of your life, stop being ruled by inertia and following the path of least resistance, stop once and for all, whatever your demons, this reflection is for you.

There seems to be an interesting distinction between wanting something and wanting to want something. This distinction reveals to us different kinds of wanting: there’s desiring, and then there’s aspiring. The former speaks to the fleeting feelings of the moment, our impulses, while the latter gets at our long-term intentions and hopes for the future, which we have the power to realize, by Allah’s leave. But the latter can also be sabotaged by the former.

Impulse versus intention, a battle that can be as difficult as it can be woefully repetitive, cycles in a feedback loop that one knows they should break from, they know it, and they want to so badly, but in the moment, to which their essence feels reduced, they want something else even more, something that destroys their progress toward their claimed goal. Worse yet, the want of the moment can feel so overwhelming that it gets joined by an even darker want to disintegrate all other wants, considerations, awareness of the future that exists just beyond that moment. Suddenly, you find yourself tuning out anything and everything that can threaten the realization of the impulse, its pull impossibly strong, even when you know it’s all in your head.

But mind over matter. The first step to overcoming this matter is believing it is possible. It would be irrational to deny this faith, since it is objectively true that bad habits can be kicked, as difficult as it might seem when you feel like the hair stuck at the bottom of the drain, in the midst of your dark cycle.

Ramadan ended months ago, but I’m thinking of it today. Some days I feel in need of it, and the heightened discipline it offers the worshippers of Allah swt, His creation, through a healthy amount of restriction. It also offers insights into the human condition.

One such insight is a remarkably simple, surprisingly empowering message: be hungry. Ramadan is a time for one’s aspiring to outshine their desiring, with stunning dignity, and one way in which the holy month vanquishes impulses is by putting the worshipper in the position of being unable to respond to the impulses’ call. Being made to sit in one’s wanting, to truly experience it, and not immediately indulge, results in some eye-opening lessons.

“But if I don’t eat, I’ll be hungry!” a new faster’s subconscious might remark.

The only answer he can give himself? “Then be hungry.”

Sometimes we give into our harmful desires not out of wanting to experience the indulgence, but out of not wanting to experience the wanting any longer. There is a dangerous relief in ceasing one’s resistance to temptation. But where does such weakness of willpower come from? Perhaps from the misconception that the wanting is more than momentary. The lie that giving into desire will make it stop, rather than grant it power over you.

Sticking with the example of one’s biological drive to eat, let’s say we have a person who wants desperately to lose weight (the discussion that follows should not be applied to those struggling with eating disorders). She knows that overeating will undo her efforts toward that goal, yet the desire to binge is so strong, indulgence seems inevitable. She thinks, “I can see where this is heading. If I deny myself now, I’ll only get hungrier, and then I’ll really go crazy and eat everything in sight.”

Let’s analyze this defeatist attitude. First of all, to deny one’s fleeting biochemical urges is not to deny oneself; in fact, it is quite the contrary. It is to listen to one’s true self, rather than silencing the spirit in favor of its vessel. Second of all, in reality, the feeling of a physical need to overeat is generated based on one’s eating habits, so ironically, overeating when hungry not only doesn’t satisfy, but causes more hunger in the long run, resulting in a classic vicious cycle.

If only she’d allow herself to be hungry for a time, the hunger would pass. It will pass. It’s okay. Be hungry.

8/24/2020

Every day feels like a lifetime, every week a moment. Another fascinating change in time perception that comes with adulthood. Alhamdulillah, I like it.

Something else adulthood has taught me is the psychology behind committing wrongs against oneself and others. Let’s say we have a pure, uncorrupted person standing at a point called A, and a truly twisted individual at Z. Perhaps he is a murderer, and A is appalled to learn that Z is capable of such evil, and cannot fathom, from where she is standing, how someone like Z can even exist. What is he thinking, what could he possibly be thinking, to take so unthinkable a course of action? Does he feel guilty? Does he justify it? Does he not even care about the morality of his actions and other people altogether? He must be a psychopath, whatever that actually means.

Yes, it is truly difficult for A to wrap her mind around Z. But Y can understand him. Y might look at him and think, “At least I’m not THAT bad,” but can understand him nevertheless, and might even fear, deep down, becoming him.

In this analogy, A is often a child, or one who has the purity of a child, and that is, contrary to popular belief, entirely a positive. Although A is objectively superior to B based on how each point is defined in this analogy, B might convince himself the opposite is true, because he is “less sheltered” than A, more familiar with the ways of the world and man’s capacity to sin. By that logic, the devil should be admired for his street smarts. Subhanallah, how easy it is for us to delude ourselves. How humbling, then, that we are, in terms of purity, to look up to children, and to become better in Your name for their sake, and ultimately, our own. Subhanallah.

So here’s my theory about how someone like Z can exist, and why people do bad things: I believe we fall from grace in increments. The fall from grace is not always a single swift motion, one fell swoop into darkness. We become numb to our own increasingly concerning behavior as our wrongdoing becomes normalized to us in stages, steadily corrupting our idea of what is acceptable one little slip-up at a time. If A were to slip a bit and find herself at B, then suddenly C is just a little bit easier for her to comprehend than it used to be, a little bit more in reach.

And some slips might not even be actions we take; they could be ideas we form, notions we accept to rationalize mistakes so they’re easier to live with. Recognize the shaytan’s influence yet? There’s also this sense that if we’re ruined anyway, no longer pure, we might as well stop resisting the inevitable, embrace it, and fall entirely into whatever black hole is calling out to us. As though purity were a state that, once lost to us, could never be regained. As though purification didn’t exist. This fallacious line of reasoning is as common as it is sad. Who could be more lost than the one who believes that God, the Ever Forgiving, can no longer forgive her?

Just as we are capable of falling in increments, indeed, slipping, we are capable of climbing back up to A, perhaps not directly from Z, but in increments (though some folks do, by the grace of God, find sudden motivation to kick a bad habit, or break free from some negative cycle, cold turkey). We can start by making one better choice, and just as one poor decision can send us careening down a dark path, one good decision can be the first step back toward the light. When we understand the logic of increments, we might even come to the conclusion that not a soul is irredeemable. Not even the one at Z.

Ya Rabbi, al Quddoos, al Hafeeth, grant us the wisdom to not judge, the guidance to not slip, and the strength to climb back better if we do.

8/18/2020

How is it that the longer I am on this Earth, the stranger I find life to be? Beyond strange, it’s absolutely bewildering. Subhanallah.

When you’re a kid, the extent of reality seems limited to whatever specific situation and environment you happen to grow up in. Growing up, I wasn’t just a minority, but an enemy minority in a hostile land, an Iraqi Muslim coming of age in America during the so-called War on Terror. I thought I had a wider, truer perspective than those around me. But by virtue of being a child and experiencing everything, from myself to society, for the first time, I didn’t have enough data points to truly see the big picture and be able to claim a fuller understanding of reality.

My first data points, my earliest meaningful life experiences, were highly politicized. They were about global power struggles, oppression, propaganda, and discrimination, to a far greater degree than one would expect a child to be acquainted with. I used to feel enlightened, because I knew the truth about the corrupt and horrific war that the country of my peers waged on my own, and because my peers dared to justify this war to me.

But I wasn’t enlightened; I was bitter.

Because of my extreme first data points of human experience, I thought all of life was like this, about war and distrust. Even more than I’d realized at the time, my childhood wasn’t normal: the feds breaking into our home, the brutal murders of our relatives abroad, the imprisonment of our innocent family friend, who was only just released from prison this year. The wounds caused by the early days of the War on Terror have yet to heal, and fresh injuries and injustices persist, sending the lives of new generations of innocent people careening off course, the way ours were. My people and my family were wronged, and those wrongs make up some of my earliest memories.

But my peers were rarely the ones at fault. War and immigration made my heart feel homeless throughout my childhood and into my adolescence, but I made my isolation worse by keeping a distance from those around me at school. I’m sure they saw me as different, but I think I might have seen myself that way even more. I used to think they rejected me, that I’d have so many friends if only I’d grown up in the Middle East, where I thought I belonged. But once I’d visited the Middle East enough, I realized that I didn’t fit in there either, that being raised in America meant that my experiences as the enemy minority had already shaped me.

That immigration had damned my refugee heart and it was too late for me to belong anywhere anymore.

The realization that my supposed homeland wasn’t actually my natural environment, and I didn’t even want to move there anymore, even if the choice were mine to make, drained my bitterness and left me feeling confused about who I was supposed to be. To think, I used to feel like I had a leg up on those who felt the need to find themselves and their purpose, since I once felt so sure in my righteous fury at the injustices I experienced. The Middle East was a new data point for me, once I was old enough to see it through more objective eyes, and I didn’t love what I saw in the place I had for so long idealized; it was just a place, flawed like any other, and in fact unfamiliar to me in the way it was flawed compared to the land where I had involuntarily grown up.

So my thinking shifted. I no longer felt like I had been cheated out of the life I was meant to have. And having spent enough time in the “wrong” timeline, I was no longer the person I would have been had I been granted that coveted life of belonging.

So where did that leave me?

Well, the bitterness faded away with my childhood idealism, so my heart opened, and gratitude filled its place. And seeing more of the world and its imperfections made me rethink my purpose, so my mind opened, and I decided to make the most of the unique timeline I was in, where God had blessed me with so much and made me, in His wisdom, an enemy minority in a hostile land, followed by a foreigner in my own land, the odd one out wherever I went, so visibly in my hijab, the girl who seemed to belong nowhere, yet understood more about the clashing perspectives of the people from both lands than either of them understood the other.

It was as a teenager that I started feeling like I was meant to be a diplomat, bridging the gaps in different human experiences and fostering understanding between groups at odds. And I started feeling like I was meant to help other minorities in my position learn how to productively grapple with and make sense of their identity. Maybe my unique experiences could be put to good use and benefit others; my voice held value. Maybe I was meant to write. Maybe I was meant to teach.

I used to think I was wasted on my environment, as arrogant and entitled as that sounds to me now, but now, with more data points, I realize I was the one who was letting my environment go to waste. I was the one who didn’t try to get more involved in the American life I struggled to accept as my lot, when I should have been so grateful. It wasn’t until college, when my world became both bigger and deeper, that the last of my bitterness disappeared, as I was informed by more data points, and alhamdulillah, it was then that I was first able to experience what I’m really like, to meet the sunny girl I am now and could always have been.

What bewilders me today is that I am only coming to these conclusions now, years after grade school, years after college, even after my master’s program, in which I wrote my life story, and years into my career as a writing teacher, in which I get to show people from different walks of life how to deeply process and effectively communicate their experiences to others. Alhamdulillah for the remarkably blessed unfoldings of my journey. What makes life so strange is the fact that as long as we live, we can never have a full understanding of existence, because we are always, no matter our age, capable of gaining new data points that make us realize how limited our understanding was before, subhanallah, and that is beautifully bewildering.

8/13/2020

Time is so heavy. I’m in my twenties, and already I feel it: the overwhelming weight of the years of life behind me. I suppose without time, life wouldn’t mean as much. At least not this worldly life. Though time tethers and limits and threatens us, it also defines the nature of our existence.

The older I get, the more I feel drawn to reflect on this concept to which we are all subjected by Your design, ya Rab. When you’re a kid, and not yet truly acquainted with the phenomenon and its effects, time seems like a distant reality. When you’re older and have time behind you and, presumably, time ahead, the past makes time feel heavy, the accumulating mass of life that’s been lived, and the future makes you see time for the depleting finite resource that it is, for as long as you are bound to this life, so the older you tends to live with more intention.

The carefree nature of childhood comes not just from the quality of being a dependent rather than a provider, but from the difference in awareness of time as well. Perhaps part of the innocence of youth is the innocence of not knowing, not knowing the weight of the past or how precious the future will become. And our entire coming of age, becoming who we are, often takes place before this awareness even hits us!

As a Muslim, I feel less uncertain about why we’ve been given any time in the first place; we are here to choose good, over and over again, despite our free will and forgetful nature, and that’s what it means to worship God. Yes, I’m so grateful to have time; what I’m less sure of is what to do with it. Considering the long term, where do I go from here? How should I live? I pray to ever be becoming the best version of myself. Guide me, ya Rab, al Khaliq, al Hakeem. The wisdom of Your design mystifies me, even as it defines me, even as You unfold with mercy Your sacred timeline that continues to write me into existence.

7/12/2020

Pessimists have this argument: they’re wiser than optimists, because they’re less prone to getting disappointed. Since their expectations are always low, when things go poorly, they aren’t deflated, but vindicated, and when things go well, they’re pleasantly surprised.

I’ve always found this argument irrational. Perhaps it’s the pessimists' attempt to feel superior despite having the bleaker worldview, or to justify to themselves that they aren’t missing out on some happiness they could be experiencing; no, those who claim to be experiencing it must somehow be foolish or misguided. Otherwise, it would make no sense for anyone to embrace pessimism. Otherwise, if a better attitude is possible, why don’t they have it?

Consider the classic example of the glass being half full versus half empty: it’s the same glass! The difference is in perspective, and through their perspective, the optimist is able to be happy with less. Though happiness isn’t always a choice, given difficult conditions like depression, pessimism is a choice, a mindset one chooses to adopt. In many cases, happiness can be simpler than we make it out to be, and humans have a tendency to overcomplicate all that is simple and good. Watch me boil the key to happiness down to a single word: gratitude.

Let’s return to the example of the event that could either go well or poorly. Before the event, the optimist is happier than the pessimist, because they’re savoring their excitement for the event, while the pessimist is dreading it, expecting it to go wrong. After the event, if it goes well, the optimist is delighted, while the pessimist is caught off guard, having done all that worrying for nothing, having wasted the chance to relish the simple joy of looking forward to something. And if the event goes poorly, even in their vindication, the pessimist will only increase in cynicism, while the optimist, true to their nature, will swiftly search for the silver lining, the hidden blessing.

And that’s the point. It’s not about what happens. It’s about how we regard what happens. A pessimist will always regard life poorly, while they could be appreciating it. That's why I encourage us all to have faith, to live our lives with open hearts. We’ve all got the same glass; might as well enjoy it!

6/20/2020

You know how when you get really into a show and start binging episodes, when you wake up the next day, your first thought is of the characters? I find it concerning how easy it is for the human mind to convince itself of a false reality. Imagination is a powerful, delightful tool, yet I’m surprised how fragile can get the line between fact and fiction in an individual’s mind. I just finished a gripping sci-fi novel, and the world of that book feels very real to me right now. I know that, thankfully, this feeling will shortly wear off as my experience of reading the book fades naturally, but for now, if you were to tell me about a disaster currently unfolding in the world, it would for the briefest of moments feel no more real to me than the events of the story, and I would find myself more emotionally connected to the latter. That scares me. I realize that many read, or watch, or play, for precisely that reason, that freeing yet consuming escapism.

But I don’t want to escape.

I believe in the profound, objective importance of being here, ya Rab. I understand reading as a diversion for the suffering, but I pray I can always read and feed my imagination for the purpose of enriching my mind’s grasp of the truth.

5/19/2020

Even more interesting than dreams is the moment of transition from dream to reality. Let’s consider that moment, since it seems to hold hints to the nature of consciousness and existence. Often, being pulled out of a dream and becoming aware of the real world that the dreamer has been physically occupying all along is a disturbing experience. Commonly, the dreamer tries to resist leaving the dream, sometimes even after realizing it is only a dream and the truth exists outside of it.

Why, then? Why do we cling to our surreal, fabricated experiences? I think the answer lies in our investment in these experiences.

While we were dreaming, the dream was all we were aware of, so we placed our care in it wholeheartedly. Upon beginning to wake up, we slowly come to acknowledge the futility and apparent lack of purpose in all of our dream efforts. But most fascinating is what happens next: in an instant, our mind, or heart, or soul, goes from caring immensely about and investing exclusively in the dream to abandoning this passion altogether, having come to understand that we have no choice but to let it go, that it had been bound to amount to nothing all along, and only our deeds remain.

I imagine that waking up from worldly life will feel precisely this way.

Subhanallah.

5/13/2020

Looking out in yearning, my arms resting on the sill, I stood at the window for a while, entranced. It hadn’t been my intention. I had gone to the window because I’d noticed that the leaves on the maple trees just outside were starting to open up and take their shape. A new stage of spring. What kept me at the window was the realization that the world was beautiful and I missed it. I missed driving. I missed socializing with people. I missed my masjid.

But it was chilly out, and I’d have had to wear a mask, which made breathing unpleasant, and I had nowhere to go, and nothing to do, and no justifiable reason to be outside. Not during a quarantine. But I felt so locked in. Yes, my inner wit responded to my thoughts, one would feel locked in during a lockdown. I laughed at myself for a moment, then went back to feeling forlorn. I could long for nature and life beyond my room all I wanted, but be honest, said my mind to my heart. It wasn’t like I would actually head out.

Resigned, I left the window to read my book in bed, comfy. But then suddenly I was throwing on a hijab and jacket over my pajamas, digging my keys out of my long-abandoned purse, grabbing my phone and my book, running downstairs, and putting on sneakers. How wonderful it felt to put on sneakers! Sitting on the stoop with my shoes in the cold of the morning in the light of day, I glanced around at the gorgeous scenery, which looked more beautiful than I remembered it, every bit of it, from the shape of my car to the blue of the sky. Deep pink petals were littered around me. The neighbor’s cat stared me down from across the yard. And I felt alive, and like myself, and upon consciously realizing that I had put on clothes and walked out the door, I said into the fresh air, “This is awesome.” And it was.

Two phenomena struck me as I read my book in the company of nature. First of all, that I could at any given moment hear seven distinct bird calls. Were they always this loud? The volume was shocking, slamming repeatedly into my eardrums in a glorious cacophony, and each call was so remarkably different and important and refreshing to listen to. Something about the chaos, and the precision that existed within it, and the fact that these affairs played out whether I was there to know about it or not was resoundingly humbling. The only song I recognized was the two-toned spring mating call of the male chickadee, high, then low, a bittersweet melody from my childhood. I also saw a robin up high and far off in a distant tree, and a little bird with a black and yellow cap flitted underfoot into a nearby bush.

Then I found black and yellow a second time. As I read, a fuzzy bee approached the blooming shrub near my special stoop and darted haphazardly, yet with great intention, from flower to flower. He seemed to be in a rush to collect nectar. His haste to consume, I found shamefully, comically relatable. Yet more than that, I was amazed at how he knew precisely where he wanted to go. Just like me, I suppose, on this miraculous, mundane morning that I was blessed to have witnessed. His deliberate path from one blossom to the next became even more impressive when he abruptly left the stoop and zoomed across the yard directly to a different shrub in bloom. Suddenly I understand the expression “he made a beeline for” this or that. He didn’t visit every flower, or check which ones would be good before diving in. Maybe he could tell so quickly by smell. I don’t know. All I know is that this morning, I prayed to be able to experience Your magnificent creation, and now here I am. Not locked in at all.