Letters from a Muslim Woman Podcast

Happy June, my friends.

This week, as a treat for paid subscribers, I wanted to bring you my recently published essay in WAYF journal. You can purchase a digital copy of the whole journal here if you are interested. It’s full of beautiful poems and pieces, including a stunning one by Ambata Kazi.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting publication so I could share this piece with you. It’s a segmented essay that explores themes I come back to again and again in my writing: belonging, faith, the immigrant experience, but all through the lens of Names and what they say about us and who we are.

Instead of simply sharing the essay with you, I decided to try something fun and read it for you on video. (A short excerpt is available below for free subscribers.)

Let me know how you like it, and what your own feelings are about your names. Are they complicated? Do you feel as though your name fits you?

Thank you Marc Typo, Debbie Weil, Alex Dobrenko`, Mona Ramadan, and many others for tuning into my live video with Malak Silmi!

Just this Tuesday, I wrote about the complexities of writing from the non-dominant culture, so it was super refreshing to chat with a fellow Arab/Muslim child of immigrants about the trajectory of our lives through the lens of Ramadan. I hope we didn’t throw too many unfamiliar terms at you all 🤣🤣.

Join me for my next live video in the app.

A couple of weeks ago, the boys and I had an epic sleepover in the basement while M was away. We inflated the air mattress, draping bedsheets over it to make a fort from one side of the room to the other. We brought down blankets and sweet and salty popcorn and a bowl of jelly beans and sour peaches. Then, we watched a cheesy Will Ferrell musical and sang karaoke, belting our songs out at full volume, the Apple TV remote our microphone.

The boys are 13 and 11 now. They are fairly independent when it comes to the hard work of keeping them alive. We get the groceries, but they make their own breakfast. We double check that their homework is in their backpack. That they’ve packed a hat in case it gets cold. Still, those heady days of heavy lifting are over, at least physically.

There are no car seats to lug from the back seat into the house. No strollers to fold and open one handed. No babies hanging on hips.

Nine years ago, M was away for two weeks in July. This was the stage of our life when summer was choreographed down to the day, with scheduling and coordination starting in March. Daycare spots booked. Day camps reserved. Vacation requested. The boys were 4 and 1.

I gave M my blessing and booked off work for the same two weeks he’d be traveling. My mind, my delusional mind, imagined regular sleepovers with my sisters and the niblings. There would be no need for day camp, because the kids would be in a camp of sorts with their cousins, my sisters and I the counselors. I saw late night shenanigans. I saw my own idyllic childhood, replayed.

No so.

Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience

Somehow the date approached and I found myself alone with a toddler and a kindergartner for two straight weeks. No childcare. No camp. No sisters or cousins to entertain us. Grandparents dispatched to another country, to the aid of another mother, her hands full with another set of grandkids.

What I remember most was the oppressive heat of that July. The air still. The windows and backdoor opened in the desperate hopes of a breeze that never came.

Without my sisters’ company, I didn’t have the energy for the city pools. Instead, I would muster my strength and gather the big blue Ikea bag of sand and water toys, loading it onto the back of the stroller. Then I would wrestle A in and buckle the harness, keeping an eye on D to make sure he hadn’t followed a rolling ball into the road.

In this way, we would make our way to the water playground, where I would pray for them to get into a groove. To find wonder in the water splashing and gathering in their buckets. In the way an older kid might spray them with a soaker. In the way their feet left a trail of little wet prints as they ran to me in anger or delight.

Sometimes, we’d last 3 hours at the park. Sometimes 30 minutes. And then we’d come home and the whole rest of the day would yawn ahead of us. Endless meals and snacks and dishes and diapers and baths and tantrums, and I would kick myself for my poor summer planning.

Once the boys were asleep, I would reach for the remote, craving the voice of an adult, even one who would only talk at me, rather than to me. One night, I clicked on The Walking Dead. Even though I despised Zombies, even though M had asked me again and again if I wanted to watch it and I had said no, again and again, afraid of the gore and the nightmares.

Still, it was hours of plot and character and stakes. And I needed stakes after negotiating between two small children all day. By the time each episode ended, I would find myself sucked all the way in. Too invested to stop, but also too afraid to be alone with my thoughts in the dark. My husband, my parents, my sisters all hours away, and me alone in the night. The adult in charge.

The next day, D would wake me bright and early. His chubby little hand shaking my heavy shoulder, his thick little voice repeating, “Mama, mama, is-hee”. Or A would demand release from the crib across the hall by screaming with all his might. And we would start all over again.

I have long felt guilty about being a working mother, a mother whose children spent hours each day being fed and cared for by another adult. More than once in those early years, I would Google “homeschooling” and find myself scrolling a fantasy on Pinterest. Idyllic images of women in flower print dresses baking in sun-drenched white kitchens. Their children gathered around enormous quartz islands. The youngest finger-painting. The oldest midway through a baking soda - vinegar volcano.

The problem with all of this, of course, was that I hate finger paint, I hate crafts, and I am a terrible teacher. But the guilt? The guilt was real.

That summer, two warring ideas became abundantly clear to me. The first was that I would have made a terrible homeschooling mother. That my children were definitely better off at school and camp, where educators would tend to their learning. The second was that I felt like a horrible mother. A mother who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) conjure art projects out of thin air. A mother whose pancakes and cookies did not take the shape of beloved Disney characters.

The boys and I would bake and run and play with Duplo. But the house was a mess. And I never cut the crust off their bread. And I had kept a baby book for maybe one week before the whole charade of tracking memories in anything other than a hard drive had collapsed in on itself.

I love to play with babies. To tickle their little bellies and watch them howl with laughter. To hide my face and hear them cackle when it is revealed again. I love to chat with 3 year-olds. To watch their delight as they find the shape of a sentence, to discover their ability to make magic.

My niece, Rania, called me her second mom when she was still a toddler. “Khalto Noosa!” she would shriek at the sight of me, running over to be scooped up and cuddled and loved.

And yet, for all the precious joy of babies and small children. For the miracle of having them melt into your arms for a nap. For their impossibly chubby cheeks and pudgy fingers, I am more at home in motherhood now than I have ever been.

The boys are little humans now, which isn’t to say they weren’t always humans. But before, their babyhood trumped their personalities.

Now, I can see them more clearly. Their curiosities and their habits. Their favourite books. Their favourite games.

Not so long after that summer where I momentarily experienced single parenthood, I read an article online that soothed my guilt, called This stage of life? It’s hard.

“In this stage of life, you are bombarded daily with a whole host of decisions. Some of them life-changing, some of them not. None of them with clear cut answers… Do I send (my kids) to public school? Homeschool? Charter school? Do I continue to breastfeed? Do I blow the budget so that I can buy all organic? Do I force my child to apologize, even though the apology will be insincere? You don’t know the answers to ANYTHING, but you feel constant pressure to figure out EVERYTHING.”

Reading that article, something finally clicked for me. Nobody doing that early parenting had it together. Not me. Not my friends whose houses were always clean when I went over. Not the moms in the photos on Pinterest.

It’s supposed to be hard, I realized. I’m not failing because it’s hard.

The nigh of our sleepover, when we finally went to bed it was nearly 1 a.m.

The next day I woke up cranky and a little annoyed with everything, and of course, the guilt kept trying to resurface.

Cue the inner voices shouting over each other: ‘Don’t undo all the bonding by snapping at them’ versus, ‘You spoil them so much! You’re doing it all wrong.’

This time though, I recognized the turmoil for what it was. Parenting is not for the faint of heart. If you’re lucky, you walk a never-ending tightrope of struggle and reward.

And the guilt? The guilt will never go away. We just learn to recognize it. Soothe it, lull it to sleep the way we used to lull them, when they needed us simply for survival.

Let’s chat in the comments:

* Are you a parent? Do you have a lot of mom guilt/dad guilt?

* Are there other things you feel “not enough” on?

* How do you quiet the “I’m not doing enough” voice in your head (yes I’m looking for advice)

A couple of weeks ago, Soraya, Baba and I took a trip the Grand Canyon. I’ve written about Soraya’s wanderlust before, and about my lack of it, but I’m grateful to her for inviting me along on the short trips. For dropping an itinerary at my feet that is too tempting to resist and dragging me along to see the world’s wonders.

We were in and out in 4 days: landing in Phoenix, driving north through Arizona, staring at this wondrous, cavernous beauty, and driving south again through the Red Rock region of Sedona. Every moment seemed tinged with anticipation, both good and bad. Here we were, in America mere days before the election, before the re-ascendance of Donald Trump. Here we were, so close to a cliff’s edge, both literally and figuratively.

The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is wider and deeper than it has any business being. You expect to see the whole thing with your eyes. And then you get there and you realize that you can see maybe 2% of it at any given time. And the 2% you’re seeing is as far as your mind can fathom, and even that is overwhelming.

Just looking down is enough to feel as though you’ll tumble. Enough to feel as though there is no end to the drop.

And yet, it is breathtakingly beautiful. It is mindboggling and mind blowing. It is perspective shifting.

Last Wednesday, after being home for a few days, D and I went to a presentation by a Canadian astronaut and he spoke about the wild shift in perspective you get, looking down at Earth from the vast emptiness of space. I think the next closest thing to that is looking into the Grand Canyon. Perspective. We are so small. We are so small so let’s not sweat the small stuff.

And yet.

On our last morning there, Soraya and I saw the sunrise over the eastern-most point of the South Rim. The earth around us there was desert-like, dusty and red. Everything felt precarious. If the magic of what we had seen the two previous days was wearing off, well then, that moment brought it all back.

Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience

I try to remember the glory of God in these moments, to look at the Sun, a miracle, rising over the Canyon, a miracle, and let my remembrances accompany my awe.

So I was watching the sun come up, and praying, and taking photo after photo, when I noticed that the glove of my right hand was missing, had fallen away from me some time between the shuttle bus we’d gotten off and the craggy walk we’d taken to the cliff’s edge.

It’s amazing how much the loss of a $10 Costco glove will affect your mood, even when you are witnessing a natural wonder, a miracle of creation. We are so small, not only in size but in perspective, in heart, in the things that might worry us. A perfectly replaceable glove.

“We can look for it,” Soraya said and started to walk around, so caring is she for her older sister.

“After,” I told her, “We’ll look for it after. We can’t get this sunrise back.”

And so we stood and we watched and we prayed, but now our utter focus had been pierced. The loss of a $10 Costco glove loomed over our moment, and the future of a Trump presidency, and the anxiety of flights home, and every other potential moment of fear or loss.

There is a verse in the Quran that says, Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. This translates to verily, humanity was created anxious.

I think about this when I’m spiraling. When I’m in the middle of contemplating literal miracles and I’m derailed by the most ridiculous of things. When I’m overtaken by a sense of foreboding.

In the chapter in question, God goes on to talk of the healing power of prayer. How that anxiety can be mitigated. I think of Marcellus Williams and his last words, and I think he understood that.

I am a long way, but I am trying.

The sunrise, by the way, was glorious. The red rocks around Sedona where we drove later that day were incredible. My heart yo-yoed, falling to the pit of my stomach and rising to the opening in my throat as Baba drove the car along the switchback roads on the mountain in Oak Creek Canyon. We descended from 7000 feet to 4000 feet of elevation. Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a.

Earlier that morning, Soraya and I looked for the second glove as we walked back to the shuttle bus stop. We didn’t find it.

“Never mind,” I told her as another bus pulled in to the stop. If the cost of the sunrise over the Grand Canyon was a glove, I would pay that a hundred times over. And yet I still felt disappointed. By what? The loss of control. The smallest thing having gone wrong.

And then I noticed something black being held by a small rock on a larger boulder. My glove! I snatched it up quickly and we boarded, my heart buoyed.

“Oh good! So that was yours,” a man said. He’d been there on the cliff too.

“Thank you!” I told him and we sat down, flushed and energetic.

I’m not sure why this moment is cast in such prominent relief. Why the smallest thing having gone wrong is so crushing, and the smallest thing having gone right is such a boost. But here we are. Sweating the small stuff in spite of ourselves. Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a.

I am beyond split-brained at this point — split-hearted? Split-souled?

These are the words I write to my friend in our text chat, trying to explain the overwhelm of conflicting feelings, the overwhelm of conflicting states of being that have settled inside me as the genocide continues to unfold.

I keep searching for a word to articulate this and falling short. Simultaneous doesn’t feel accurate. Simultaneous is when you do two, maybe three things at once. But this is not about juggling or multi-tasking. This is about a deluge. About trying to wrap my mind around one awful thing when another hits and another and another and another until I am buried beneath a blanket of suffocating layers of horror. Multiplying. Compounding. Accruing interest.

An exhibit of the my split-hearted state:

I finish reading Maggie Smith’s book, You could make this place beautiful. Or more accurately, I start reading it, cannot stop, and finish reading it within 48 hours. I want to dog-ear every second page and highlight every word with thick yellow marker, except I’m reading on my phone.

I want to tell you that this book made me cry, but it didn’t. Because of course I can’t seem to cry anymore.

My tears have been giving me the silent treatment for about three years now. Partway through the pandemic, my whole emotional coping system broke down, but since the genocide, this struggle has reached a whole other level.

I am dry and shriveled, like the pit of a prune, not even the flesh of it.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I try the things that have always brought me tears — cheap tricks, but they’re reliable.

I play Castle on the hill by Ed Sheeran and my eyes water a little at “singing to tiny dancer” but as I try to catch the crescendo, the lump in my throat disappears and I am dry.

I am a drought, papery thin and ready to set alight. I am the beginnings of a forest fire.

So I go searching for my tears in the songs that used to get me when I was younger. I search in To Sir with Love, in Adia and Joey and One Sweet Day, but my sobs stay trapped inside me.

I go searching in a book of poetry called Water & Salt by Arab-American Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Her poem, Immigrant, catches in my throat, the way she describes America as,

“…the place where the planes are madeand the place where the presidentwill make the call to send the planesinto my storybook childhood..”

I can feel my tears trying to awaken, but the numbness gives them a sedative, shushes them back to sleep. No. It’s not time for you yet, the numbness tells the tears. She won’t be able to cope if you show up today.

Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience

I read Sharon Simmons words about keening. I discover that to keen is to wail for the dead and I think yes, I want to keen. Please God let me keen but I don’t keen, can’t keen. Instead I load the dishwasher. I fill out forms for endless field trips. I winterize the basement and change the settings on the furnace.

I read a poem that Amal Kiswani shares called I translate the names of boys killed in Gaza. In her Note, Amal calls it “a beautiful poem that made me cry.”

I read it and I still don’t cry, but I feel the feelings that would have made me cry before. I share it with my sisters, with my friends, because sharing poetry is a gift.

Sharing poetry says, I read this and I felt something and I want you to feel it too. I want to tell my sisters and my friends that these poems made me cry because that is the highest compliment, and the most accurate description. Except that they haven’t.

When I say I want to cry what I mean is that I want to be spent, is that I want the relief. What I mean is that I want for the the dam to break and the well of emotion to escape instead of sitting, trapped on my chest. Trapped and building pressure along the walls of my temples. Trapped behind my forehead. Trapped in my lungs each time I try to take a deeper breath.

What I mean is that I want the catharsis. I want the sleep of the dead that comes after crying for the dead. The sleep that sucks you down down down away from visions of boys on fire, visions of babies taking their last breaths, visions of men in a line, walking to their open graves.

What I mean is that in a movie, you cry at the climax, and that every day I’ve seen another horror and thought to myself this must be the climax Dear God this has to be the worst it’ll get Dear God let it get better let this be rock bottom let it end.

How do you deal with hard things? Do you shut down? Do you cry?

For nearly a year now, whenever I close my eyes I see bloodied Palestinian children covered in dust that used to be concrete. Now, my mind’s eye brings me a new vision. The bright, beautiful face of Marcellus Khalifa Williams, a Black Muslim man who was executed several days ago by the State of Missouri for a crime he did not commit.

In the aftermath of his killing, my feed was flooded with pictures of his poetry, written for the children of Palestine, and his last words, a testimony.

All it takes to become a Muslim is the utterance of a simple statement, a testimony called the shahada.

Ash-hadu anla illaha illa Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasool Allah.I bear witness that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God.

I’ve sat in the mosque a hundred times and heard these words spoken as new Muslims are welcomed into the fold. I’ve heard them in the call to prayer before salah.

I utter them myself during the prayer, a reminder of what I believe and what I declare. God is One. His prophet, Muhammad, is my guide for His teachings.

Would I have put my hopes in God, or in my executors?

All of this to prepare me for the time that these words will matter most. At death.

My biggest fear is that I will be on my deathbed and not manage the shahada. That I will forget the words. That my carelessness in life, my lack of attention, my insufficient faith, will show in what doesn’t come out of my mouth.

In the moments before death, we are reduced to our very core, and what if the testimony isn’t at my core? What if my core is empty?

In Arabic, the shahada is so called because it’s a statement from a witness. I imagine a court, but not the broken courts of our broken criminal justice systems. Not the courts in which America can kill its own Black citizens, nor the ones in which it can veto any statements for the end of occupation, the end of genocide, the end of one massacre after another, after another.

In Arabic, a witness is called a shaheed. This is the same word for martyr.

Marcellus Williams, who wrote poetry for the children of Palestine, is a shaheed, much like the children of Palestine.

Marcellus Williams, in his moments before death, was not reduced, but elevated to his core, a core that was content. A core that praised God and knew it was going home, to God.

Our faith teachers have written volumes about diseases of the heart. About envy. Covetousness. Greed.

In Islam, the original sin, the one that cast the devil out of heaven, is arrogance. The cure to arrogance is humility. The cure to envy and covetousness is contentment.

This is why you will hear the mothers of murdered children in Gaza say, Alhamdulillah between their tears. Alhamdulillah alaa kol haal. All praise be to God in every situation. The same words Marcellus wrote for his final statement.

They mean, I’m hurting, but I still trust you, God. They mean, I’m hurting but you are still worthy of my contentment. You are always worthy. They are the words of a true believer.

I imagine myself in his place, asked for a final statement. I imagine my denial, my refusal. I would have written an essay on my innocence. Would I have put my hopes in God, or in my executors?

In our tradition, when someone dies, we say inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon. To God we belong and to him we return.

Marcellus knew this. We do not belong to the executors. We belong to God.

Subscribe to Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim experience.

If you haven’t already, you can read the details of the ways that the criminal justice system failed Marcellus’ specific case below. Click through the carousel to read.

Marcellus from an earlier interview. Such conviction.

The always eloquent Hanif Abdurraqib on Marcellus and the concept of “innocence”. Click through the carousel to read.

Marcellus’ poem for the children of Palestine.

The day we brought our baby home from the hospital nearly 14 years ago, I felt like I was wading through water. The air itself was thick and viscous. Exhaustion had descended so that people’s voices seemed to travel through a tunnel to reach me. M and my mom were carrying my bags and the car seat, respectively. I was carrying my weak body and unsettled heart.

We had left our 18th floor apartment two days earlier in the maddest rush I had ever experienced, missing an emergency car delivery by a matter of minutes, gotten through the insanity, and come home with a healthy baby boy. And yet, rather than feeling tethered to a line of women through time immemorial who had managed the same feat, I felt oddly, increasingly isolated.

D was born in the middle of December in Montreal, where dusk falls at 4:25 p.m.

Mama, (my mama, even though apparently I was now a mama myself,) was with us for 8 weeks, tending to my every need so I could tend to the baby. She brought me bowls of chicken soup and buckwheat bread, lest my wheat sensitivity trigger his indigestion. Glass after glass of fenugreek and caraway tea, an old Egyptian concoction for increasing milk. Sliced pears and frozen mangoes and little pieces of broccoli to scoop up hummus. Mostly, I just wanted coffee with too much cream and sugar, and a croissant from the bakery in the underground metro tunnels five minutes away.

Despite Mama’s waiting on me hand and foot, I never emerged from our bedroom before 2 p.m., barely grasping at the remains of weak sunlight the winter sky had to offer.

Mama held the baby while I slept, and encouraged me to sleep when he did. But I couldn’t, despite my exhaustion. My body was both lacking and restless.

On the fifth morning after we came home, we ran out of apples and tomatoes. Before either M or Mama could argue, I blurted out, “I’ll get them.”

There was a small grocery store two blocks away where we made minimal purchases because it was so overpriced, but this was going to be my outing, high prices be damned. M and Mama looked at each other, looked at me, and nodded.

All day, I dreamed of this walk to the store, of how I would make my way down the street, alone. I would pace the aisles, taking my time, considering random sauces and marinades, rolling firm fruit around in my palms.

After D was fed and swaddled, I left him with my mom to burp and put on my winter coat and boots. It was the first time I’d walked out since I’d come home from the hospital as a mother. The store was bright and airy and I walked through it slowly, attempting to savour each moment. When I was done, I came home, put my shopping bag on the kitchen counter and went to sit on our bed, where I started to cry.

I couldn’t have explained to you what the tears were for, beyond the fact that I had expected my grocery run to be life-changing, and yet here I was, still swimming through the soup of my new existence. In hindsight, I think I was mourning the woman I had lost in gaining my motherhood.

Every day, I wept. Sometimes, it was because D wouldn’t burp, or because he would manage to extract his little hand from his swaddle and hit his tiny face with his tiny fist. Sometimes, it was for no reason at all. Sometimes it was because I didn’t want to cry, and the shame of the tears brought them on all the more. Mama sat with me, hugging me and telling me again and again, “you’re a wonderful mother, Noha. All of this is normal and all of this will pass.”

I am so grateful for her faith in me. For telling me I was doing a good job when I had no idea what I was doing. For not shaming me when I was ready to shame myself.

And then by some miracle, 6 weeks after they had flooded my system, the tears stopped. It was as though someone had found the source of the leak and plugged it. Winter still dragged on but the days grew ever-slowly longer. My little baby, who ate like a champion, became the love of my life. His smiles rejuvenated me, his burps delighted me, his little fingers and little toes were delicious and so, so kissable.

I am lucky that my postpartum blues didn’t morph into full blown depression. That my mother was there to tend to my every need. That my husband held my hand through it, despite being as lost as I was. I am lucky that the feelings inside me subsided into love and connection, and that my heart reset its sensitivity gauge.

But I remember that sense of being untethered when I see a soul in the throes of depression, even when everything on the outside looks and sounds and seems normal. What kindness can I hold for those souls? How can I pay it forward?

Let’s chat in the comments:

* Is there something you experienced that was supposed to be “all good” but wasn’t the storybook version?

* If you’re a parent, or have a parent in your life, have you seen someone struggle post partum?

* Do you think there’s enough honesty in the culture about how hard the first few months of parenting really are?

If you’re like me, you’ve been following the US election even though you’d rather look away. As a Canadian, I have no vote, and yet, I care more than I’ve ever cared before. It’s hard not to care when American policy affects so much of what happens not just within its own borders, but across the world.

My first thought continues to be Palestine. The killing of Palestinians now not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank. The destruction of whatever little civil infrastructure still exists. The annexing of more and more and more land. This is the first thing on my mind as I watch a speech, a rally, a debate. And last week’s presidential debate was no exception.

Last week, after the presidential debate, I furiously wrote this out on my phone when I found myself unable to sleep.

If you’re enjoying Letters from a Muslim Woman, consider upgrading your subscription for access to my unfinished letters series every other Tuesday.

The world’s most lethal fighting force

When you promise”the world’s most lethal fighting force”

what I hearisCraters the length of football fieldspregnant with tentsfilled with familieswho fledafter the school was bombedafter the friend’s house was bombedafter their uncle’s house was bombedafter their house was bombed

What I seeisA girl who wakes up to the chaosin the burnt husk of another hospitalshrapnel covering her little faceA girl who asks her doctorin a panicif this is the heaven her mother promised

She is concernedbecause it’s noisyand it’s scary and it still smells like death(the stench is unbearable, you see, and we can’t smell it through our screens,but it is blood and rotting flesh, and raw sewagemixed together with the sharp sting of still-hot metal.)and the dust? The dust is everywhereit cakes her face it lines the beds and the windowsillsit is the remains of every building no longer standing.

Her mother said that if the bombs comethe next time she woke up, she’d be in heavenand her mother has never lied before, but this?this does not seem like heaven

What I see is A father of newborn twinscelebrating new lifeso rare in these partsA father who walks the rubble-filled streets to get his babies’ birth certificates and walks back to find the apartmentwith his wife and babies (those perfect, tiny creatures! 10 fingers! 10 toes!) GoneA blackened hole in its place

What I see is A man abducted off the streets of GazaReturned months laterHis eyeshauntedunable to hide the animal fear of what they’ve endured

When you promisethe world’s most lethal fighting forceI’m not impressed but terrified

But thenyou were never trying to impress mewere you?

Every scenario I’ve described above is real.

The craters are the result of a recently bombed tent camp in Khan Younis, Gaza, where Israel dropped 2000 pound bombs on families sleeping in tents in the middle of the night, killing or burying alive whole families in a matter of seconds on the night of September 10th.

The girl in the hospital asked this doctor if she was in heaven in this clip below.

The father of newborn twins’ story can be found here

And finally, this man. This poor man’s face is haunted, and will haunt me to my dying day.

This poem could have been hundreds of pages long. I’ve left out some of the most indelible images, because I cannot bring myself to write extensively about beheaded babies, pregnant women and their husbands, killed and hung by soldiers on the roof of their house, innocent men taken into torture camps called prisons and raped, hungry dogs eating human remains on the streets.

We need more than a ceasefire. We need an arms embargo. We need unfettered access to aid and health workers. We need a massive influx of everything required to rebuild society in both Gaza and the West Bank, and we need the authority figures who led this charge held to account. Anything less is not justice, and not enough.

Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week, where I share my most tender, unvarnished thoughts on topics like Islamophobia, sincerity and hypocrisy, the visibility in being a visible minority and the pressure to be perfect.

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Let’s chat in the comments:

* Have you been following the US presidential election?

* What are your thoughts on Kamala? Are you conflicted like me?

* Are there statements you’ve heard, political or otherwise, that were meant to impress you but instead terrified you? Tell me about them.

The day before school started again last week, D and I went out for long, languid bike ride. The weather was perfect, just a hint of cool in the air, and a bright, clear sky with loads of sun. We only had an hour or two, so we headed south through Little Italy to Dow’s Lake, took the route by the Rideau Canal, circled through downtown and headed home.

D mostly rode ahead of me, too tall for his bike, shoulders set, the wind catching in his t-shirt like a sail. I caught myself 5 or 6 times about to call out safety reminders. A little warning about the loose gravel on the path, a reminder of sudden drops and sharp turns.

Instead, I held my tongue. This boy was heading to high school the next day. Whatever I have taught him of bike safety, he already knows it.

Along Queen Elizabeth Drive, I saw two figures ahead of us. A man on a bike, and a small child beside him, riding in perfect unison, side by side. I marveled at their synchronicity. Because our pace was leisurely, it took some time to catch up, to see them in the light of the sun instead of always turning ahead at the next curve in the road.

When we were finally close enough to see them clearly, it all made sense. The man was riding with only one hand on the wheel, the other on the little girl’s shoulder. And now, instead of marveling at them I marveled at him. At his balance. At his self trust. How much maturity, how much confidence, not just physical, but psychic, must you have to continue along, threading forward, only one hand to yourself and the other so clearly guiding?

She didn’t have training wheels, she had him.

My own confidence is still a little shaky since my fall, still focused on the worst case scenario. Despite the glorious whether I couldn’t help but widen sharp turns, avoid curbs, go very slowly.

My son, for his part, didn’t seem to notice. He rode easily and silently. Not in a boasting way but just the way a boy might enjoy the open air and the trees and the grass, and the acorns littering the path and the water running alongside.

Every once in a while, a bike would come along behind us and overtake us, and sometimes, they would only overtake me for a bit, before they sped up again and passed him too. And I noticed that this was new.

Strangers had never separated us along the path before. He’d always been so clearly my child, but now, he was taller than I was, and so clearly his own person. They didn’t realize we belonged to each other. And this made me both very happy and very, very sad.

We overtook the man and the little girl as we approached downtown. I looked over as we pedaled by, and for the first time, now that we were at their level, I noticed a baby in a carrier in front of him. He caught my eye and we both smiled.

He couldn’t have known that in that moment, he’d made me consider the possibility of trusting things to go well. The possibility of believing you can ride a bike with one hand on the wheel and the other on your daughter’s shoulder, with your baby in the front. The possibility of the gorgeous day instead of the potential fall. Of beginnings instead of endings.

Let’s chat in the comments:

* How’s the “back to school” fall vibe treating you? Are you caught up in it?

* Are there kids in your life who are suddenly bigger than you can believe?

* How do you manage riding your proverbial bike with one hand while guiding others, or do you?

Hello and Salaam, my friends.

Deep breath… When I started writing unfinished letters, it was with the intention to explore the unvarnished parts of myself. The parts the aren’t quite so polished and sanded down. And to do it behind the safety of a smaller space here in this little corner of the internet. Writing today’s post felt like an exorcism, the release of words I haven’t trusted myself to explore publicly before. And sharing it? Hitting that publish button? That is terrifying. Which is why I know I have to do it.

Thank you to my friend Isabel Cowles Murphy for being my test reader, and for walking me back from the “I can’t publish this everyone will hate me” ledge. We should all be so lucky to have a sounding board like you.

Thank you also to poet Maya C. Popa, whose work inspired this post…

A gentle note that there is a paywall in this post. If you’d like access to the whole post, consider upgrading your subscription.

Ok, I can’t think of anything else to put off sharing this. Deep breath… exhale… here goes!

When they go low, we go high.

I’m not entirely sure where I first heard that, but a few years ago, it suddenly felt like that phrase was everywhere.

Taking the high road is not a new concept. It’s been seen as a sign of character for as long as humans have written their history. It has religious implications too. Jesus is famously known for eschewing, “turning the other cheek”. The Quran, Islam’s holy book, tells adherents to “respond with what is better”.

I’m a follower of both Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Jesus, may God’s peace and blessings be upon them both. So why do I find myself struggling with taking the high road?

A few weeks ago, I read an incredible essay, here on Substack, by a writer I admire greatly. The essay was about the racist responses to a poem she had shared on social media, that asks people to consider PTSD for war survivors.

It was beautiful, thoughtful, and internally focused. It rightly pointed out the fact that much of this racist abuse and rhetoric was a symptom of internal anger, of what she called a ‘virtual wound’. It asked us to consider how much we look down on those with this virtual wound, rather than looking inward at our own wounds, and being grateful that we haven’t been afflicted with this particular one.

I am sharing the link to the post here, but I need to tell you that it is now behind a paywall, so I hope I’m forgiven if I’m misremembering.

I hit the heart on the post, as I usually do. I may even have restacked it. Then, I added the following comment:

I have a lot of complicated feelings here. On the surface, I agree, but I wanted to say that for some of us in marginalized communities, we need someone else to do the heavy lifting, because we face ugliness day in and day out. Somewhere, on some level, there needs to be that balance between:

1- kindness and walking along with the people you can move in the direction of kindness, and

2- firmness on what the red lines are, on what is unacceptable.

The dehumanization so many experience goes beyond words on a screen. It becomes fodder that fuels decisions to ban refugees from entering a country. To enact violence against Black and brown bodies, to send more weapons to kill people far away. How do we accept this? Or balance the kindness with the practical implications? I don’t have the answer.

I left my comment up for maybe 10 minutes. Then I deleted it, afraid that I might offend the author when she was so clearly an ally.

I could dedicate a whole essay to my anxiety and people-pleasing. To how it is so severe that my worry about offending someone — someone with which I have no relationship, however much I admire her — lead me to delete the comment above in a panic. And perhaps I will dedicate a future essay to that subject, but for now let’s get back to taking the high road.

Before I deleted the comment, I saved it to my phone. A part of me knew I wasn’t done grappling with these ideas.

As I reread the words I wrote, I could see that I wasn’t responding to the original essay. My discomfort had less to do with the author asking us all to look inward, and more to do with my fear of being asked to overlook injustice, which she had never suggested at all.

Here I was, projecting, because people of colour have been asked so many times to overlook injustice in order to keep the peace.

But what do we lose when we turn the other cheek?

Doesn’t the idea of turning the other cheek come from a longer sermon? Doesn’t the whole sentence, together, say, “to the one who strikes you on the cheek, turn to him the other also?” Who has the privilege to lose again and again? To let someone strike you on the right cheek and then the left? Who is asked to take the high road instead of fighting?

And yet, even as I write this, I feel the pang of not living up to the ideal of my prophet. Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, was so honest, so trustworthy, that even his enemies kept their most valuable material possessions at his house. After he narrowly escaped Quraysh’s attempts to assassinate him, and had fled Mecca to Medina, he sent his young cousin, Ali, to them to return their valuables.

As a child, I heard this story in Saturday school when all I wanted was the clock to run down and my weekend to start.

Now I marvel.

Can you imagine? A group of bullies chase you out of your city. The only home you’ve ever known. On your last night there they try to kill you. And you give them back their money? Who among us wouldn’t take the money and call it justice?

Today, in our current climate, we watch a criminal justice system that incarcerates and kills Black men in America and Indigenous men in Canada for cigarettes, or walking down a street where a white person deems them “suspicious”. While rich, white men who’ve been convicted of multiple felonies can run for president, never mind avoid jail time.

Today, in our current climate, we watch bombs rain down on millions of civilians, besieged, with no where to go. While the man who signs off on dropping those bombs gets a standing ovation in the halls of congress, and the one who sent him those weapons is the president of the most powerful country in the world.

Who is asked to turn the other cheek? Not these men.

It’s easy to be magnanimous when you hold all the cards. It’s easy to be a gracious winner. And yet, we don’t even ask this of them. These men are allowed and encouraged to fight. These men are allowed to be angry.

I think that I believe in righteous anger. I think that I believe in a rage that demands equality for all, that asks the hard questions. A rage that can hold hands with softness and love. A rage that births justice.

Let’s chat in the comments:

* What do you think about turning the other cheek? In theory or in practice?

* Do you believe that the principle is asked equally across society? Do we expect forgiveness and forbearance evenly, in your opinion? Or do you believe it’s lopsided?

* Do you hate me? Are you about to unsubscribe? 😰

I’m continuing to share resources about Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing a link to John Oliver’s excellent explainer on the West Bank. This link doesn’t work in Canada unfortunately but should work in the US. I highly recommend it for context and history, as the news rarely gets into these details.