Few have afforded Somali vernacular discourse the staying power like Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame “Hadraawi,” arguably the greatest Somali poet and philosopher of his era.

In 2002, before an assembly, he confronted that question that had hovered over the course of his lifetime of accomplishment; instead of beginning with the prose and philosophic insight that characterized the works that have earned him global renown, instead, he began with that which was somewhat unexpected: a confession.

It was a confession that came, following one of the most expansive and deeply reflective poems in Somali literature - a poem where Hadraawi grappled with the very fundamental issues of existence, longing, and the human condition.

“I left my country while I was still young. After finishing school, I carried my pen and my notebooks with me. When I returned and stood once again among my people, I was told: speak about the problems facing the country using what you have learned. But everything I had studied could not answer the questions that reality was asking of me. My education could not satisfy my conscience, nor the responsibility now standing before me.”

This gap between what he had learned and what his people needed him to share had spurred him, years earlier, at the start of 1995, to sit and write “Daba-huwan”1 one of the longest poem written in the Somali Language, a self-reflective retrospective in which he looked back on his life’s journey; childhood, schooling, the long learning of life itself, the meaning crisis, resistance to colonization and a yearning for a sense of peace with oneself.

He had kick-started the poem with excruciating questions for himself, confronting the weight of his desires, and his quest for truth.

Here he laid down the great burden that he wrestled with. In the lines, truth’s ultimate reply to him was “pour it all away.” This could be read as an imperative: unlearn, discard, dismantle whatever he thought was true before, until he understood how much of it stood on foundations built on nothing real.

But what he grasped was far more than simply naming lies as lies; it was to acknowledge that his education could not begin to grasp, far less address, the deeper needs of the soul, or could begin to respond to the existential quandaries with which he grappled.

His understanding was, he recalled, that returning to the land of his childhood, where every problem seemed to come with its own answer - hard though some might be, and of which one part, was rooted in man himself, another in man and nature. Then he found himself stumbling into a built world of systems which he could not navigate or use freely; finding himself boxed into a manufactured existence detached from his personal imagination and judgment.

According to him, this predicament was not due to any natural or inherently existing condition but was manufactured by colonial dominance and everything that had followed in its wake. He pointed to the colonial schools and the many institutions of their making which had moulded his initial understanding of himself and the world, as the very origin of the ‘wound’; to him these institution wore the look of the educated yet provided him with little of true worth to confront or make him see.

“I remember being a child in the countryside,” he shared, “Every problem that arose seemed to carry its own solution. But when duty finally called on me, I found I had nothing to say. In that moment I set aside my books, and the hollow prestige of learning that had no real bearing on what stood before me.

Even my teacher, I came to understand, was part of the very problem I was fighting. I once believed the wrong done to me began there, in that room. But its roots stretched much further, back to an invasion that had come from distant lands, carrying its own purpose. Without knowing it, I had already become one of its casualties.”2

He asserted that these imposed systems of learning removed the individual from the centre of their prior frame of reference, their roots, conscience, and an acceptance of the fundamental principles of themselves. He believed they could rewrite the very wanting within all men to include many new desires never previously existing.

“We were opened and remade until countless new wants took root in us, a million needs we had never carried before. Then, once our own hands could no longer keep up with what had been placed inside us, we were told to give up everything: first your religion, then your homeland, then your conscience, then your dignity.

Give up the birds, the wild animals, the forests, the herds, give up everything. Glory be to God, the Greatest.”

Brought to such a state, people turn into thieves. They chase gold, they steal, they loot, they destroy, because their means can no longer match what has been demanded of them. To feed these endless wants, they build with one hand while tearing down with the other.

Only the one who truly understands the danger can feel the full weight of its pain.”

He went even further, directing his critiques at these structures themselves. In his eyes, they were the primary source of many ills, the breeding ground from which oppression springs. He described them as devoid of both humanity and morality, arguing that the colonial structure left fractured societies, drained communities, shattered identities, depleted cultures, and broken traditions that had long held together successive generations. He stands in defiance of nihilism’s hollow creed, resists the cold machinery of bureaucracy, and rejects the pursuit of materialism.

His critique extended to how these power structures dismantled justice, protection, and integrity, turning innocence toward corruption, and how they crafted the very conditions for death and destruction. All of this, he argued, stemmed from their birth in colonial rule. He goes on to lay out these unsettling lines….

In the lines below, he brings forth vividly what decays the soul, that is, immortality and unlimited avarice in lower instincts. His reflections and self-recrimination raise up an honest, poignant question, in recounting the dryness of a conscience that rebels against a whole and justly laid down concept of justice which has in fact collapsed, being shattered into silos of divisions.
He goes on to challenge himself and ask what kind of danger lies ahead of a person who has departed from nature’s rules and Allah’s guidance for such a person is, initially, committing an injustice unto his very self.

Here the lines hint at the subtly subversive idea that the person who refuses has a self which he also has the capacity to want for something, or in other words that the person who refuses as a human being stands as a contrary. The former person stands as an example as standing in opposition to the ‘yes man.’

The poet puts forward one of the most difficult and unsettling questions a human can ask of himself. “ What if the conscience begins to dry up just like a lake, out of which all animals and humans were drinking, and they come one day and find nothing?” “What would they say if they were presented with this great despair, which is that the lake out of which they drank has all of a sudden disappeared into dryness?”

This echoes the poem’s own image of “damiirku hadduu qallalo”, the conscience running dry, and gives it the weight of parable.

In all this, the poet keeps reiterating again and again without settling, yet this poem remains one of the greatest moral reflections in the history of Somali literature. And what makes this poem greater is not just the excellence in its art or Hadraawi’s intelligence and wisdom, but his own honesty when delving into questions that all souls seeking guidance in their walk of life could identify with.

b

The uniqueness of this poem lies not only in the freedom to pose these questions and the very sense of self he brought to them, but rather in the choice of sources for his reflections and questions rather than resorting to whatever answers modern society presents. Instead, he delves into history, culture, tradition, morality, and Divine guidance.

Hadraawi turns his gaze upon the creation of men and confronts a troubling truth: how ungrateful we are. As humans, we do not look at what we have but are always looking at what we do not have, and this gaze hides the blessings that are already there. That is the nature of humankind.

This is a portrait of suffering in its specificity; it is where the individual confronts divine providence not with open palms but with doubled fists and where each granted boon is measured against what has been denied, where the servant still clings to his greed and his thanks choke with the force of demand.

Such is the conundrum of the acquisitive psyche, which can never hold more without yet feeling it empty of that other single missing thing it craves: Hadraawi writes of “the one missing string, the one that is not there, the not-yet there... Which is the thing most present to his mind”; and by its size, all else he already has appears to diminish and fade away from him, and when that which he wants, that blessing, does not come swift upon demand, this servant, “instead of enduring patiently, is wrathful and his ribs tremble to hold his anger.”

This section, where he reflects on the nature of human beings, concludes with line “Daryeel kama mahadceshaan.” The same servant’s lips that are able to plead in times of disaster and need often fail to offer gratitude to their Creator for the portion of blessings they have already received. The blessings are there but the eye is not there to acknowledge.

Hadraawi’s paradoxes do not finish here. He turns his gaze into himself now, and finds no more comfort.

Here the poet confesses in the first person what he has only denigrated. The very ambiance that surrounds him takes on the form of desire, the air thick with yearning stirs the him within. For it is not simply that he desires: the poet is occupied by, surrounds himself with, indeed breathes in desire without being able to breathe it out.

A heart once captured by earthly desires sweeps him on relentlessly, forward, without direction and without halt.

Such is the state of a soul ignorant of stillness: continuous motion that achieves nowhere, appetite without satiation and desire that increases as he takes hold of it. But still deeper wounds and uglier blemishes are exposed in the looking glass. Hadraawi shows no fear in putting a name to these iniquities.

The badness, the sin, the corrupted feeling is not just placed in the soul it is burning. It burns like a fire within that the soul doesn’t see. “Ta ii daran baan jeclahay” is the terrifying confession that follows: I love what is destroying me.

This is how the tortured soul behaves; self-annihilation beyond any explanation that might seek to reason it out.

The “Daymo dhow” that he is positioned represents no inward sight but a blinded lust; vision clouded by desire the soul does not recognize it’s immediate suffering.

His own desire is a factor for this pain, but the riddle which Hadrawi displays is the lover’s devotion in spite of its damage.

However, the narrative doesn’t end in gloom; in front of a clean mirror viewing each stain of his soul Hadrawi shouts his longing - not for those that are absent in the physical world - but for the one that has long since departed within himself.

The chant of “I want” repeated six times is not the same lust that the poem has already condemned. It’s a soul recognizing it is sick and needing to be cured. Return and repentance, the turning back that is the essence of repentance. Purpose and life, the regaining of meaning from the soul’s long wandering of a darkened heart. Healing and health, the mending from the damage caused by a corrupt sense. A clean state of being, the wiping of the mirror. And lastly surrender. Handing over the soul, sending it out to greater ends, directing the restless soul back where it belongs.

The poet’s riddles take us through the human condition from the universal blindness of ingratitude to the individual misery of knowing oneself. From the burning desires of a defiled character to a soul crying for purity. No, this poem does not easily gift redemptions. Lust still possesses. A confused mind still searches. A boundless hunger continues to starve: But the mirror has been held up; the blemish made known; and in that revelation, in the strength to confront one’s own ugliness, lies the beginning of the possibility of return and repentance.

The wanting is not the end of the story. Wanted is the entranceway. The prayer is what follows. It collects all the fragments of longing together and makes of them a singular petition, directed to Allah alone, to the Listener of prayer. It is not the prayer of the slave impatient because his urgency is not recognized. It is the prayer of a man who can see himself now and know, with a broken heart, what to ask for.

The first petition of the prayer is simple. “I want what shelters me”. The poet is no longer speaking of his lust as a thing that overwhelms him but of his desire as a direction to be placed in his Allah’s hand. He wants his will made congruent with God’s, his desire redirected toward its true source.

The striving of the just takes the place of the wondering of a mind that had lost its way. Allah’s plenty takes the place of the lost object which had tormented the ungrateful servant before. A sound and purified heart is what the mirror was meant to reveal all along: not the blemish but the original purity beneath it. And then, the repayment of what is due completely alters everything. The man who had once wasted God’s bounty now wants to be indebted to God for everything.

The declaration of his wants, the poem’s concluding du’a, its perplexing conundrums, its critique of (neo)colonialism and its enduring systemic legacy, and, above all, his longing for return and repentance are what make this poem stand apart from all others. Hadraawi was a man who experienced life in its fullness, and it humbled him. It made him question himself, compelled him into solitude, and led him to confront the burdens of his own soul. These are the very reasons that moved me to write this commentary.

Share

May Allah have mercy on Mohamed Ibrahim Warsame, Hadraawi. He passed away on August 18, 2022, in Hargeisa at the age of seventy-nine. May Allah illuminate his grave, accept his life’s work as a lasting charity, and grant him the highest ranks of Jannah. Ameen.

Whenever I read the news or watch the events of our time unfold, with growing immorality, declining thoughtful reflection, and fading natural compassion, this verse rises in my mind and helps me understand how deeply the human soul can be corrupted. Yet even so, there are some whose depth of corruption is difficult to fathom.

They may be educated in the conventional sense, fluent in systems and skilled in acquisition. Yet what they chase governs them. They no longer possess the inner stillness required to discern right from wrong, for greed has clouded the mirror of the heart. It is their desire — their hawa — seated quietly upon the throne where only the Divine should reign.

This is where the verse arrests me. Not merely in its eloquence though the Arabic pierces with breathtaking precision but in its diagnosis. Allah does not describe a monstrous villain or an obvious tyrant. He describes someone ordinary. Someone who allowed preferences to gather authority, indulgence by indulgence, until without proclamation or ritual he had constructed a sanctuary around the self.

And thus, without bowing to an idol of stone, he began to bow to himself.

The classical scholars note that the Arabic root of hawa means “to fall”. Al-Ṭabari, in Jamiʿ al-Bayan, traces the etymology to this sense of gravitational descent: to follow desire is, structurally, to fall. [¹] This is not metaphor; it is the verse’s entire argument encoded in a single word in my understanding.

Subscribe now

The answer to the question asked by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) is later revealed in the next verse, offering a profound and striking comparison:

أَمْ تَحْسَبُ أَنَّ أَكْثَرَهُمْ يَسْمَعُونَ أَوْ يَعْقِلُونَ ۚ إِنْ هُمْ إِلَّا كَٱلْأَنْعَـٰمِ ۖ بَلْ هُمْ أَضَلُّ سَبِيلًا ٤٤

“Or do you think that most of them listen or understand? They are only like cattle—no, more than that, they are astray from the ˹Right˺ Way!”
— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran

This verse presents a question for anyone who feels spiritually distant from their Creator. It asks: have you observed the one who makes his own desires his god? The Prophet (SAW) was asked, “Or do you think that most of them listen or understand?”

The verse does not suggest that these people lack hearing; rather, their inner hearing is veiled. Their intellect is occupied by desire, leaving them unable to comprehend or reflect. What then do they become? Animals, perhaps—but even more lost, for when a person neglects the use of reason and surrenders entirely to base impulses, how is he truly different from an animal? The verse emphasizes that they are even more astray than the cattle.

In this verse the Quran speaks of hawa “capricious desire” and of a person who feeds the insatiable hunger of the nafs. He is compared to a dog: whether you drive it away or leave it alone, it pants all the same. It is never satisfied. This is the nature of unchecked desire.

When hawa overtakes the soul, the heart becomes unprepared to receive guidance. It is too absorbed in pursuing and gratifying worldly appetites to incline toward higher truth. In such a state, guidance may be present, but the heart, preoccupied and restless, cannot fully welcome it.

The verse 25:43 is not alone in the Quran. Allah returns to the same image in Surah Al-Jathiyah, but this time with a far darker outcome attached:

The difference between 25:43 and 45:23 is the difference between a diagnosis and a prognosis. In Al-Furqan, the verse asks: can you be responsible for such a person? In Surah Al-Jathiyah, we learn what happens when the answer is finally no Allah lets him go astray in accordance with His knowledge of who this person has chosen to be.

The sealing of hearing, heart, and sight is not punishment imposed from outside. It is the natural consequence of what was freely chosen inside. Ibn Kathir’s commentary is precise here: evil was made beautiful to him, so he considered it good. [²] A person cannot be guided through eyes he has volunteered to cover.

And then the devastating question: “Who will guide him after Allah?” There is no answer. Because there is none.

What moves me about 25:43 is who Allah is speaking to. Not the slave of desire, he is beyond the address. Allah speaks to the Prophet ﷺ, whose grief over those who would not accept guidance is documented throughout the Quran, and asks: would you then be responsible for him? Mawdudi, in Tafhim al-Qurʾan, reads this as a precise moral categorization: some people cannot be guided not because the truth is unclear, but because they have no interest in being bound by anything other than themselves. [³]

The Quran names this plainly elsewhere:

“And who is more astray than one who follows his desire without guidance from Allah?” — Quran 28:50

The answer is embedded in the question: no one. Not ignorance — ignorance can be corrected. Not sin — sin can be repented. But a self that has decided it is its own authority cannot be reasoned with, because it has made reasoning its servant.

And in Surah Ṣad, the command comes to the Prophet directly:

“And follow not desire, lest it lead you astray from the way of Allah.” — Quran 38:26

If even the purest of human hearts required this warning, the verse is not addressed to someone else. It is addressed to me and to you!

Ibn al-Qayyim, Dhamm al-Hawa (The Dispraise of Lowly Desires) mapped the process with surgical precision: “Repel the thought, for if you don’t, it becomes an idea. Repel the idea, for if you don’t, it becomes a desire. Fight that desire, for if you don’t, it becomes a determination. And if you don’t replace it, it becomes a constant habit.”[⁶] That is the anatomy of a throne being built, one surrendered moment at a time.

Footnotes

¹ Al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-Bayān ʿan Taʾwīl Āy al-Qurʾān, commentary on Quran 25:43. Al-Ṭabarī identifies the etymological root of hawā as deriving from the verb meaning “to fall” or “to descend,” establishing desire as inherently gravitational in its moral direction.

² Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, commentary on Quran 25:43 and 45:23. Ibn Kathīr links both verses and Quran 35:8 in explaining how the worship of desire operates through a perceptual corruption: evil is beautified until the servant mistakes it for virtue.

³ Sayyid Abul ʿAla Mawdudi, Tafhīm al-Qurʾan, notes 56 on Quran 25:43–44. Mawdudi distinguishes this person from one sincerely misguided: the slave of desire has no fixed commitment and cannot be held to any agreed-upon principle, because the principle changes with the mood.

⁴ Ibn ʿAbbās, as cited in Mufti Muḥammad Shafīʿ, Maʿārif al-Qurʾān, commentary on Quran 25:43. Ibn ʿAbbās said: “Selfish desires are like an idol which is worshipped,” and recited this verse in evidence.

⁵ Ibn Kathīr, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-ʿAẓīm, commentary on Quran 35:8, cross-referenced with 25:43 and 45:23.

⁶ Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyyah, Dham al-Hawā (The Dispraise of Lowly Desire), trans. Dr. Saleh as-Saleh. The passage describes the progressive stages by which an unchecked thought becomes an entrenched habit, cited at abdurrahman.org.

Share Revolution Within

There is a verse in the Qur’an that stops you mid-breath. Not because of its length, but because of the precision of its imagery. In Surah Al-Isra, verse twenty-nine, Allah speaks to the human being in visceral, bodily terms: do not make your hand chained to your neck, and do not spread it out completely either. In both directions, the clenched fist and the flung-open palm, lies a particular kind of ruin. One destroys you silently, while you still have everything. The other destroys you loudly, when you have nothing left.

The Arabic word for the chained hand is maghloola, from the same root as the iron fetters placed on prisoners. Ibn Manzur, in his great lexicon, wrote that ghull was the most humiliating of restraints, reserved for captives of war.¹ So when the Qur’an says “do not make your hand chained to your neck,” it is not merely describing a miser. It is describing a man who has become his own prisoner. The wealth he refuses to release has, in effect, shackled him. He guards his gold and his gold guards him, and neither of them is free.

The opposite extreme is painted just as vividly. “Do not spread it out completely” and the Qur’an uses the phrase kull al-bast, a total extension, every last opening. Scholars noticed the deliberate weight of the word kull, meaning all, complete, without remainder. This is not generosity. This is self-erasure wearing the mask of virtue.

And then the verse seals itself in two words: maluman mahsoora. Blameworthy and stripped bare. Al-Qurtubi, the great Andalusian jurist, observed something luminous about this pairing. He wrote: “The miser earns blame while his wealth is still with him. The spendthrift earns blame after his wealth has abandoned him.”² The miser suffers a wound to his soul in abundance. The spendthrift suffers a wound to his soul and his life together. One is condemned in his palace. The other is condemned in the street.

Al-Tabari recorded from Mujahid, that towering student of Ibn Abbas, the Prophet’s own cousin and the sea of Qur’anic knowledge, a description of the word mahsur that carries a weight difficult to forget. Mujahid said it describes one “like a bird stripped of its feathers.”³ The image is devastating in its completeness. A featherless bird is not simply diminished in appearance. It cannot fly. It is exposed to every predator. It has lost the very thing that made movement possible. The spendthrift who empties himself of everything is not merely poor. He is grounded, exposed, stripped of the capacity to rise again.

This is what lifts the verse beyond financial instruction into something far more essential. It is a meditation on capacity. The point of preservation is not hoarding. It is the maintenance of one’s ability to keep giving. A man who gives away his last shirt cannot come out to lead the prayer. Ibn Kathir recorded precisely this: that a woman came to the Prophet ﷺ in need of clothing, and he, whose generosity was a river with no dam, gave her the shirt off his back and remained in his home, unable to emerge. It was then, the scholars say, that this verse descended. Not as a rebuke, but as a tender correction from the Divine to the most selfless heart in creation.⁴

What pierces the soul about this is that the instruction was not sent to a greedy man. It arrived for the most generous soul who ever walked the earth. Which means this verse was never only for the avaricious. It is addressed to every sincere human heart, including the pure ones who give until they collapse.

Ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya, in his Madarij al-Salikin, looked beneath behavior into the spiritual root of these two diseases. He wrote that miserliness is, at its core, a disguised failure of faith: “The miser’s hand is chained because his heart does not believe in the promise of Allah to replace what is spent.”⁵ He clutches his wealth because he has quietly decided that it, not God, is his true security. He proclaims his faith with his tongue and contradicts it with his fist. Extravagance, Ibn al-Qayyim argued, flows from a different corruption, ego, heedlessness, the desire to be seen giving without the discipline of actually caring about what the giving does.

Both are forms of spiritual blindness. The miser cannot see beyond what he has. The spendthrift cannot see beyond the moment of giving. Neither one is truly present to the full arc of responsibility that divine trust, amanah, demands. The middle path, infaq, spending in the right measure, for the right purpose, at the right time, is what Ibn al-Qayyim called an act of tawakkul, of genuine trust in God.⁶ The moderate giver does not preserve because he is afraid. He preserves because he understands that his capacity to give tomorrow is itself a form of giving today. He has internalized what the miser and the spendthrift have both, in their opposite ways, forgotten: that wealth passing through human hands is not owned. It is carried.

This verse does not stand alone. It sits inside a passage running from verse twenty-two to thirty-nine of Al-Isra, a moral charter so dense and comprehensive that Ibn al-Qayyim himself called it “among the most condensed collections of divine commands in the entire Qur’an.” ⁷ Parents. Orphans. Chastity. Life. Honest trade. And right there among them, wealth. The placement tells us everything. How you hold what you have been given is not a practical afterthought. It is a first-order spiritual question, standing shoulder to shoulder with how you honor your mother and whether you take an innocent life.

There is one final depth in this verse that quietly devastates. The word mahsur, stripped bare, shares its root with the Arabic word for a siege. To be besieged is to be surrounded and cut off, unable to receive or to send. And this, with a kind of terrible precision, describes both extremes. The miser is besieged by his own greed, surrounded by wealth, cut off from the mercy of giving. The spendthrift is besieged by his own emptiness, having let everything pour out, cut off from the ability to receive with dignity. Both are immobilized. Both have broken the sacred circuit.

Because that is what wealth is, in the Qur’anic vision. Not a destination, but a flow. A river of divine provision moving through human hands, and the moral life consists in being a conduit that keeps it moving. The chained hand dams the river. The completely open hand floods and empties it. The balanced hand, open enough to give and wise enough to preserve, keeps the water moving. And in keeping it alive, remains alive itself.

Seventeen Arabic words. The full moral and spiritual architecture of a human being’s relationship with everything they have ever been given. Not a rule, but a vision. Not a restriction, but a liberation from the silent prison of the clenched fist and from the loud ruin of the flung-open palm, toward something rarer and more luminous than either: the faithful, dignified, and knowing middle.

The Night Journey (17:29)

وَلَا تَجْعَلْ يَدَكَ مَغْلُولَةً إِلَىٰ عُنُقِكَ وَلَا تَبْسُطْهَا كُلَّ ٱلْبَسْطِ فَتَقْعُدَ مَلُومًۭا مَّحْسُورًا ٢٩

Do not be so tight-fisted, for you will be blameworthy; nor so open-handed, for you will end up in poverty.

— Dr. Mustafa Khattab, The Clear Quran

Footnotes

¹ Ibn Manzur, Lisan al-Arab, root ghull Muhammad ibn Manzur (630–711 AH / 1233–1311 CE) was an Egyptian lexicographer whose Lisan al-Arab remains the most comprehensive classical Arabic dictionary ever compiled, spanning twenty volumes. In his entry on ghull, he explained it as an iron collar binding a prisoner’s hands to their neck, the ultimate symbol of subjugation and lost agency. The Qur’an’s use of this word for miserliness was deliberate and devastating: the miser is not merely careful with money, he is enslaved by it.

² Al-Qurtubi, Al-Jami’ li-Ahkam al-Qur’an, on 17:29 Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Qurtubi (600–671 AH / 1204–1273 CE) was a Maliki jurist from Córdoba whose tafsir is renowned for extracting legal and ethical rulings from each verse. On this ayah, he distinguished the two condemned states with precision: the miser is blameworthy while his wealth remains, the spendthrift is blameworthy after it is gone. He connected the verse to Al-Furqan 25:67, where the servants of God spend neither wastefully nor miserly, seeing the two verses as a pair: one the warning, the other the ideal.

³ Al-Tabari, Jami’ al-Bayan, on 17:29, narration from Mujahid Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (224–310 AH / 839–923 CE) authored the foundational work of classical tafsir, gathering narrations from the Companions and Successors with their chains of transmission. The narration comes from Mujahid ibn Jabr, primary student of Ibn Abbas, the Prophet’s cousin whom the Prophet ﷺ himself called “the interpreter of the Qur’an.” Mujahid’s descriptions carry rare authority, representing understanding passed directly from the Prophet’s household. His image of mahsur as a bird stripped of feathers captures not just poverty, but the loss of the very capacity to move.

⁴ Ibn Kathir, Tafsir al-Qur’an al-’Azim, on 17:29 Isma’il ibn Kathir (701–774 AH / 1301–1373 CE) was a Syrian hadith scholar and student of Ibn Taymiyya. His tafsir is among the most widely read in the world, known for interpreting the Qur’an through authentic prophetic narrations. He recorded the sabab al-nuzul, the occasion of revelation, for this verse: the Prophet ﷺ gave a woman in need the shirt off his back and was left unable to appear in public. The verse descended not as a rebuke, but as divine wisdom: sustaining one’s capacity to give is itself an act of stewardship, not selfishness.

⁵ & ⁶ Ibn al-Qayyim, Madarij al-Salikin, on tawakkul and the diseases of the heart Muhammad ibn al-Qayyim al-Jawziyya (691–751 AH / 1292–1350 CE) was a Syrian scholar of unmatched spiritual depth and a devoted student of Ibn Taymiyya. His Madarij al-Salikin, Stations of the Wayfarers, maps the inner stations of the soul across three volumes. In it, he diagnosed miserliness as a hidden spiritual failure, a heart that has replaced trust in Allah with trust in wealth. Extravagance flows from ego and the commanding self, nafs al-ammara. True infaq flows from tawakkul, a settled certainty that Allah is Al-Razzaq, The Provider, and that what is given sincerely is never lost, only transformed.

⁷ Ibn al-Qayyim, Madarij al-Salikin, on the moral charter of Al-Isra In the same work, Ibn al-Qayyim reflected on the passage of Al-Isra from verse twenty-two to thirty-nine, eighteen verses covering obligations toward God, parents, the poor, orphans, life, integrity, and wealth. He described it as among the most compressed ethical constitutions in the entire Qur’an, and noted that its placement within a Surah named after the Prophet’s most intimate divine encounter was not incidental: the journey toward God and the ethics of one’s dealings with creation are not separate paths. They are one and the same road.

Life in rural communities unfolds in layers of complexity, where each new birth marks not the beginning of carefree childhood, but an immediate introduction to responsibility and survival. From my earliest memories, life wasn’t about play it was about purpose. With a curious mind perpetually asking elders thousands of questions, I began herding goats at a young age, thrust into a world that demanded alertness and understanding.

In those formative years, I learned to read the environment intimately: the trees, the birds, the wind, the livestock. But what captivated me most profoundly was sound. When you’re alone herding livestock across vast jungles and mountain ranges, sound carries an ambivalence that stirs conflicting emotions fear and hope, shock and recognition, the unknown and the familiar.

The sharp cry of a hornbill defending its territory, the urgent bleating of goats sensing a predator, the violent rustle of wind through trees each sound demanded my attention and interpretation.

I was forced to listen intently, to decipher what approached, and to act decisively against every threat. Most of my shepherding days were spent in solitude, and this loneliness became an unexpected gift, teaching me to understand the world through silence and sound alike.

Decades have passed, and much has changed. I’ve traveled to different places, ventured far from those mountains. Yet despite the distance, I still long for the music of nature. What I’ve discovered, however, is that I’ve also forged a unique connection with music itself not merely as background noise or entertainment, but as something that resonates at a deeper level.

I find myself asking: Why does certain music touch the soul so profoundly? Why does it penetrate the heart with such precision? Why does it seem to convey messages from familiar situations we can’t quite name? How does our brain instantly recognize certain chords, as if remembering something forgotten?

The music I’m drawn to most often carries no words just musical chords, strings, and flutes breathing majestically pitched sounds into existence. Listening to Anouar Brahem, the Tunisian oud player whose work penetrates the soul, particularly his piece “The Astounding Eyes of Rita,”1 puts the listener in a state of simultaneous conundrum and ease. The music waxes and wanes through varied emotions and ultimately leaves you in silent awe. When you listen to his “Stopover at Djibouti,”2 you become completely hypnotized by the strings of the oud, entering a state of mesmerism where you surrender to the rhythm and vanish like water turning into air.

Then there is the unmatched Sudanese flutist Hafiz Abdirahman Mukhtar and his album “Everlasting Days.” When you listen to “Ports,”3 you cannot help but wonder: how can anyone create something so magical, something that leaves the soul spellbound? Through this piece, you travel into orbit, into bewilderment and ecstasy. The album also features “Features from the Face of the Village,”4 a composition that makes you wander like a whirling dervish, seeing the unseen and feeling a transcendence beyond normal human capabilities. No words emerge—only magnificent energy beyond ordinary perception.

Then there is the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and his “Valse Sentimentale” 5 a tender, reflective, and wistful piece, expressive of deeply personal emotions. It is heartbreaking and indescribably beautiful. Through this composition, you understand how music transcends understandable realities, how it portrays thousands of unsaid feelings, and how pure instrumental music connects hearts and gives everyone their own unique understanding.

I read comments about “Valse Sentimentale” on YouTube, where the piece now has over 30 million views. People offered vastly different interpretations. One listener wrote: “The expression of a broken rage, a lost love, a forgotten memory, a dead rose somehow flourishing, coming all together in a sick melancholy and expression of reasonable insanity.” Another commented: “Children playing hopscotch, but the camera pans out and they’re in a dystopian war zone.” All of this reveals the depth of emotion embedded in the piece and how everyone carries their own translation of it.

Hafiz of Sudan, Brahem of Tunisia, and Tchaikovsky of Russia all portrayed their understanding of reality through music. And somehow, they reached my heart: a Somali nomad who, except for our shared humanity, has no tangible connection to any of them or their countries. It is a human connection forged through experiencing the multilayered realities of life and finding common ground that transcends borders, language, and circumstance.

Perhaps the answer lies in those early days of listening when survival depended on understanding every sound, when solitude taught me that meaning hides within rhythm, tone, and silence. Just as I once interpreted the calls of birds and the warnings of wind, I now find myself decoding the emotional language of strings and breath. The solitude that taught me to listen evolved into a capacity to hear not just with my ears, but with something deeper a part of myself shaped by those lonely days when sound meant everything, when listening was survival, and when silence held its own wisdom.

What those seeking meaning feel when listening to this kind of music is often unexplainable. Yet, if anyone has ever offered a true explanation, it is the one provided by Al-Ghazali in his book The Alchemy of Happiness:

“The heart of man has been so constituted by the Almighty that, like a flint, it contains a hidden fire which is evoked by music and harmony, and renders man beside himself with ecstasy. These harmonies are echoes of that higher world of beauty which we call the world of spirits; they remind man of his relationship to that world and produce in him an emotion so deep and strange that he himself is powerless to explain it.”

From a Sufi perspective, this passage reflects the idea that music is not merely an art form but a spiritual mirror. The hidden fire in the heart represents the soul’s innate connection to the Divine. When stirred by melody and harmony, this fire awakens, momentarily dissolving the boundaries between the self and the transcendent. In these ecstatic moments, the soul remembers its origin, glimpses the higher realities, and experiences a profound longing for reunion with the Source a longing that is felt more than it can be articulated.

Music, then, becomes a subtle bridge between the earthly and the spiritual, guiding the seeker toward inner illumination and divine remembrance. Life’s journeys will take you to different places, but there is no journey more beautiful than the one where you seek meaning in everything you hear, see, touch, or imagine. From the mountains where I first learned to listen, to the concert halls and recordings that now fill my ears, the thread remains the same: sound as language, music as truth, and silence as the space where understanding begins.

Here are the songs I mentioned in my writing. You can listen to them when you have time, and perhaps when you are in search of something deeper

“The quieter you become the more you are able to hear.” – Rumi

Recently, I went hiking in the ever-beautiful Chyullu Hills of Kenya. As part of the journey, our guide led us into the Kisula Caves the longest and deepest lava tube in Africa, and among the longest in the world. The caves were deep, dark, and unsettling. Some of us were overtaken by claustrophobia, a fear of darkness and the unknown.

After a while, we moved carefully through the rocky and moderately challenging paths, each of us switching on our lights to guide the way. At one point, the tour guide asked us to come closer. When we did, he said, “Let’s have one minute of silence.” Most people agreed, but a few could not stop talking, as though their minds could never find stillness. Others began ordering everyone to be silent.

I disliked both the ones who kept talking and the ones who tried to enforce silence because both groups only added to the noise.

For me, this moment was deeply intriguing. I was standing in a place completely shielded from the noise of the outside world, and I wanted to fully experience that rare quiet. Then someone spoke again, saying, “In the sacredness of this moment, let us try to hear the voices of our ancestors.” In truth, most of us could not clearly hear even the inner voice of our own souls. And those who cannot grasp their own inner voice will neither hear nor understand the voice of any other being.

Once again, we attempted the one minute of silence, and this time it was far better. Before the silence began, everyone turned off their lights. Gradually, the cave was swallowed by darkness, and everyone became quiet, breathing slowly and deeply. I closed my eyes, though it hardly mattered because of the intensity of the darkness, no one could see anyone else.

Within that single minute, thousands of thoughts flooded my mind and hundreds of questions arose. I breathed in and out deeply, completely immersing myself in the darkness and the stillness. A mild cold settled around us, accompanied by tiny droplets of drizzle falling from the cave walls. Those small drops sounded heavier than anything else, amplified by our focus and by the sheer depth of the silence and darkness.

Memories began to surface. I found myself reminiscing about herding goats on misty mornings, when rain had drenched the earth the night before feeling cold, yet deeply observant. I remembered listening to old men talk about what life had offered them, their conversations filled with both laughter and the weight of what they had endured. I recalled my mother reciting poetry, her face appearing vividly before me as I remained in the darkness.

I thought about the long journey life had unknowingly taken me on, and in that moment inside the cave, thousands of scattered dots began to connect. What I wanted from life became clear; challenges came into view, along with a quiet determination not to give up but to push forward and face the world.

I began speaking to myself in a soft, inner voice no lips moving, no energy wasted, only reflection. Then all thoughts disappeared, all images vanished. My heart and my mouth fell silent, and even my mind grew still as thought itself stopped. It was in this moment that I felt the truth of Abu Bakr al-Farisi’s words. When asked about the silence of one’s innermost being, he said, “It is to abandon preoccupation with the past and the future.” [Al-Risālah Al-Qushayrīyah, 1:247.] In that cave, I finally understood what he meant: true silence is not merely the absence of sound, but the freedom from everything that keeps the mind restless.

Suddenly, voices broke the silence. Lights were switched back on, and people began asking one another what they had felt. As for me, I had seen many things and heard the voices within. I wished the silence had lasted a little longer. I wanted to remain in that place a fragile space where even a small movement could send you tumbling into rocks and hollows because it was there, in that stillness, that I truly felt present.

During my two-day hike, and even up to today, this one minute of silence has stayed with me, because I realized the profound importance of being mindfully silent in this noisy world. If the heart is willing to speak, let it pour out beautiful things; if not, let us try to unite the unsaid and the said, along with the meanings they hold, and allow the heart and mind to relearn the value of silence.

Speech is meaningful when it serves as a tool to resist the burdens of our emotions or the injustices our hearts perceive. But as long as we are running from ourselves, neither speech nor silence can offer true meaning. I believe that inner silence, coupled with understanding and clarity, is a peerless art.

In the words of the prominent Bosnian political theorist, philosopher, and leader Alija Izetbegović, may Allah grant him mercy:

“In the world, things are in relations of mutual dependence rather than those of cause and effect. Instead of observing them in a cause-and-effect relationship, we should observe them in their correlation.”1

Since Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency, the world has witnessed the leader of the most materially powerful country accusing a small Somali minority of wreaking havoc, while the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk, has relentlessly insulted Somali migrants. Far-right media figures such as Tucker Carlson continue to demonize and vilify them. One is compelled to ask: what is the correlation? Why are Somalis and Somalia suddenly in the global spotlight?

What may seem complex to outsiders is immediately understandable to Somalis, who say:

“Aflagaado waa astaan dagaal” — “Slander is a symbol of war.”2

Indeed, this is a war not waged with conventional weapons, but through mega-narratives and global agendas. As Nigerian historian Toyin Falola observes:

“For the powerful countries, the agenda of ‘global history’ is actually to retain their dominance… migrants can be attacked and expelled when necessary. It is the weak nations that are being asked to adjust, to subordinate their national histories…”3

Trump, Musk, and the far-right coalition are not merely expressing personal animosity; they are employing a classic colonial tactic: naming, stigmatizing, and demonizing those perceived as threats to their dominance.

Despite these attacks, the Somali community in the United States demonstrates remarkable resilience. Small in number, they thrive through collective solidarity, political engagement, and mutual trust.

While individual success is valued, Somalis often flourish most when supported by their community. Even when divided by clan lineages, a shared sense of Soomaalinimo binds them together, creating networks of strength, identity, and enduring cohesion.

This vitality has frequently been met with hostility. Allegations emphasizing their small numbers, supposed criminality, and derogatory labels such as “garbage” are not mere coincidences.

While every community can have wrongdoers who must be addressed through proper legal channels, these attacks amplified in global headlines reveal a broader strategy of fear, marginalization, and dehumanization.

The concept of the cultural bomb, by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, provides a critical lens to understand this phenomenon:

“The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain defiant liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves… The intended results are despair, despondency, and a collective death wish.” — Decolonising the Mind4

Attacks on Somali Americans reflect precisely this strategy: undermining identity, casting doubt on abilities, and eroding community cohesion. Yet, as Ngũgĩ emphasizes, the oppressed retain a defiant liberty, and the Somalis’ enduring commitment to mutual support, cultural pride, and civic participation illustrates the resilience of oppressed communities.

At the heart of Somali culture lies honour (sharaf) inseparable from family reputation, shaping integrity, pride, and behaviour in every sphere of life. Generosity and dignity extend beyond the immediate family or clan, fostering resilience, adaptability, and independence without compromising identity.

Somalis do not conform to external cultural expectations merely to appear “civilized” by Western standards; they preserve their heritage while remaining indifferent to outside judgment. They are naturally independent, eloquent, and unshaken.

This collective and individual strength explains why Somalis thrive globally. Even in contexts of political instability or societal chaos, their humor, sense of self, and communal bonds sustain them. No imperial narrative can erase a liberated mind, and it is precisely this freedom of thought that challenges figures like Trump and Musk, who cannot comprehend such an existence.

As Edward Said observed in Culture and Imperialism:

“Those who tell the stories also rule society.”

For Somalis, every individual is a living repository of the country’s stories, myths, traditions, and genealogies, sharing history with humor and pride. In this way, the Somali spirit endures, not merely surviving the world’s pressures, but shaping its own narrative, asserting identity, and passing it on with unbroken resilience.

Storytelling and oral tradition are central to Somali identity. As a “nation of poets,” Somalis transmit history, ethics, and identity through artistic expression. Poetry is not merely a practice; it is a way of being.

The Somali poet Abdulkadir Hersi Siyaad (Yamyam) captures this spirit:

“Although I have nothing, my head is high,
I do not beg, I am rich inside with
self-respect, dignity and pride.

…..
If you’re my foe, I’ll never be subdued,
if you’re my friend, my whole heart is for you.
To the man who will not consider my view,
I won’t be forced to comply with you,
joining with others all over the world,
I’ll shake off the chains of my oppressors,
servant to no one, unburdened, free.
I AM SOMALI.”

Through these traditions, Somalis resist external pressures, assert identity, and sustain communal bonds. Their resilience, cultural pride, and freedom of thought continue to challenge imperial narratives.

Whether dismissed, insulted, or targeted, Somalis maintain a profound awareness of colonial and global power dynamics, grounded in faith, culture, and history. Their collective solidarity, honor, generosity, and oral traditions allow them to thrive independently, assert their identity, and preserve their heritage, demonstrating a model of communal strength and defiant liberty in the modern world.

Somalia, the homeland of the Somali people, endured more than three decades of unrest following the collapse of its central government. Despite facing unimaginable suffering, the Somali people demonstrated how to survive and rebuild from scratch without a functioning state.

Remarkably, when compared to other nations that have lacked stable governance for decades, Somalia’s resilience stands out, and this is largely due to the strength and spirit of its people.

Moreover, while the country is rich in untapped resources, gold, oil, gas, and uranium no external power has successfully exploited them, a testament to the vigilance and cohesion of its people. Internally, there may be political divisions, yet externally, the majority of the population shares a unified understanding of global matters.

In every sense, it is the people of Somalia who define the nation: resilient, resourceful, and unwavering, proving that a nation’s true strength lies not in its institutions alone, but in the character and unity of its people.

Footnote

Before the disaster, Mogadishu glittered. Nights pulsed with music at the Uruba Hotel, where laughter spilled into the warm air. The National Theatre staged dramas that echoed the country’s spirit, while bougainvillea cascaded from walls, their blossoms dangling like notes in a love song. From the coast, the ocean’s breeze swept inland, setting palm fronds swaying like dancers in prayer. Elders sat beneath the shade, leaning over boards of Shax [Somali board game], their quiet rivalry stitched into the fabric of the city’s rhythm.

Children’s laughter threaded through the Italian arcades, their voices ringing against facades cracked and flaking like old paint. Mogadishu bore its scars openly, but like a woman who paints her eyes with kohl, her bruises deepened her beauty rather than hid it. She was still a pearl clinging stubbornly to her oyster, fragile, radiant, and defiant, as though daring the world to test her strength.

Bilan was born and raised in this beautiful Mogadishu. She was just nineteen years old, having finished high school and entered her first year at Somalia’s National University. Slim and tall, with wide eyes, thick eyebrows, black lips, and light brown skin.

She was radiance made flesh, her cheekbones catching light like twin crescents. Men in tea-shops lowered their cups when she passed, whispering with flippancy or envy — some praising her beauty, others disparaging her modesty. Yet she was more than her physical form. She embodied the archetype of the Somali woman: her gait graceful, her speech measured, her gaze carrying both mercy and warning.

Hassan had always trained his eyes downward. A disciple of the Sufis, he had been schooled to chase inward light, not outward glitter. His evenings ended in zikr circles where tambourines echoed like waves against the shore and his lips moved with steady devotion: La ilaha illa Allah…

But that night, as he walked home through the twilight, his gaze lifted and froze. Bilan stood at a vegetable stall near his alleyway, the lamplight resting on her face as though it had been waiting for her alone. For years they had lived as neighbors, shadows brushing but never colliding. Yet now, suddenly, it was as if he had never seen her until this instant.

The shock cracked his silence. His chest filled with a thousand whispers not his own:
Is this the nafs I was sworn to battle? Is this Shaytan, disguised in beauty? Or is it guidance, a love that might polish the heart instead of stain it?

His steps slowed, his lips still mouthing dikr. The rhythm faltered, then steadied again, as if her presence were not an interruption but a missing refrain. She did not disturb his remembrance. She completed it, the way a half-remembered verse suddenly reveals its meaning after years of repetition.

That evening marked Hassan forever. His heart, once disciplined into silence, now smoldered with a fire he could not quench. Each night, returning from zikr, he steered his steps toward the same vegetable stall. Sometimes she was there, her laughter mingling with the scent of coriander and limes. On those nights, his chest swelled with a secret gratitude. But when she was absent, the emptiness was sharp, as though the whole city leaned inward and collapsed upon him.

In another corner of Mogadishu, Bilan’s mother was also weaving rhythms of remembrance. A devout mystic, she hosted Sitaad on Fridays, when women gathered in her home to beat drums and sing praises of saints. Their voices rose like wings, carrying the weight of longing and the balm of consolation.

And Bilan noticed him too. She had always known Hassan by sight, long before he ever turned his eyes toward her. His family’s name carried weight in the alleys of Hamarweyne, spoken with reverence for their piety. Her mother often spoke of them with admiration, whispering that such households kept the city’s spirit alive. So when Bilan saw Hassan passing by, lips moving in zikr, she recognized not only the man but the lineage he carried like a lamp.

But even as love at first sight began to stir Hassan’s heart, and Bilan’s eyes quietly turned toward him in return, a greater storm was gathering. The city’s nights still hummed with laughter and music, yet beneath the surface there was a tremor a sense that the ground itself was shifting.

People whispered their favorite balm against uncertainty: “Way hagaagi’—It will be okay.”. The words passed from lips to lips in tea-shops, in markets, in classrooms, like a charm meant to ward off fate. Yet everyone knew, in the secret chambers of their hearts, that things were not okay. Somalia, once one of the most open and liberal societies in Africa, was now being trampled under the boots of a regime whose iron fist squeezed the air out of every home, every prayer, every song.

Outwardly, life went on children still chased footballs through dusty alleys, elders still leaned over Shax boards, the theatres still staged plays. But inwardly, the city smoldered like an ember hidden beneath ash. People smiled, yes, but their smiles were brittle, carrying the taste of fear. They said “Way hagaagi” not because they believed it, but because without the words, despair would have devoured them whole.

It happened on a night strung with lights and wedding drums. Hassan’s sister, Maymouna, had invited Bilan and a few neighborhood girls to their elder cousin’s wedding. The courtyard smelled of incense and cardamom tea; women’s laughter rose over the beat of the drums.

Hassan had not planned to speak to her. For months he had circled her presence like a moth circling a lamp, retreating into zikr instead of desire. But tonight, something in him broke open. shyness, loneliness, silence all of it fell like an old garment. He walked straight to her.

“My name is Hassan,” he said. His own voice startled him; it trembled like a string plucked for the first time.

Bilan’s hand flew to her mouth. She looked down, a smile blooming and retreating all at once. “I know you, Hassan.”

The words struck him like a bell, shock and warmth ringing together. He wanted to speak again but felt the eyes of the crowd on his back. What would they say, the devout man speaking softly to a girl in the corner of a wedding? He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded length of white paper, his handwriting pressed across it like a prayer.

“Bilan,” his voice cracked, “we don’t have time to talk. People will see us. Please read this later. Respond to me.”

When her fingertips brushed the paper, something passed between them electric, undeniable, like a spark jumping from heart to heart.

Bilan’s hands trembled too. Moisture gathered in her palms, her heart drumming faster than the wedding drums. For months she had imagined this moment, but when it came, it outpaced her expectations and her courage.

“Haye, Xasan, waan kuu soo jawaabi,” - - Okay, Hassan, I’ll respond to you” she said, hand still pressed to her mouth as she turned away.

Hassan stood rooted, unable to move. He watched her vanish into the swirl of colors and music. Questions flooded him like a tide. Hassan, are you okay? he asked himself. Is this Shaytan luring you, or is this love as a form of guidance?

He pressed his hand to his chest, feeling the paper’s absence like a wound. No. This is love. And what is better than the fire of love? Let the fire burn me, so I might disappear. And he turned, walking back into the night, a man already changed.

and urgency of replying to Hassan.

Hassan had been lucky to hand his letter to Bilan just in time. No one could have imagined what was coming. The morning after, Mogadishu awoke gagged: avenues barricaded, ministries gutted, policemen scattering into clans like beads spilling from a broken necklace. Children’s laughter had turned to cries; sporadic bursts of Kalashnikov fire stitched the air.

Bilan’s father, once a clerk among ledgers and trade routes, now haggled for rice under the eyes of gunmen. Her mother prayed between sobs while tracer rounds scribbled across the horizon like handwriting from hell. The city had collapsed into a fight between everyone and no one government, warlords, and tribes bleeding into the streets.

And still, in that chaos, Bilan felt the need to answer Hassan.

Two days after their first meeting, Bilan waited by the vegetable stall Hassan always passed on his way home. When she saw him, her throat tightened words froze, and fear of watching eyes pressed heavy on her chest.

Hassan noticed her at once. Their gazes locked, silent, the world holding its breath. Without speaking, Bilan tossed a small balled-up paper toward him. He bent down, heart pounding, and picked it up.

Neither said a word. Both turned away, walking in opposite directions, but carrying with them the same secret fire.

From Bilan
To Hassan

“Hassan, I know you and your family. I know the man you are. Any woman who knew a man of such faith would be lucky to know you. If loving someone could add meaning to my life, it is you. My mother has always spoken well of your family, and I always waited for you to approach me. I cannot say my feelings equal yours, but I confess I love your character, your devotion, peity and your akhlaq. I do not know what the future holds, but I promise you I am yours. Only promise me that your love will guide me toward goodness”

Bilan,

Hassan could scarcely believe Bilan’s words. To be loved back was this not the hope that had carried him through silent zikr nights? His approach, timid yet desperate, now seemed blessed. But even in the warmth of her response, a weight pressed on him: the burden of being in love in a city that was burning.

Mogadishu was unraveling thread by thread. The system had collapsed; schools shuttered, hospitals stripped bare, the market shelves emptied. Even the fabric of morality was fraying. Warlords carved the city into fiefdoms, overturning what little order remained.

They looted without shame, killed without hesitation. Each dawn arrived only to reveal fresh graves, each dusk swallowed more cries. Survival itself became the daily ritual, more urgent than prayer, more demanding than faith.

And yet love had dared to spark. To be in love here, especially at its first breath, was both salvation and torment. Bread was scarce, water rationed, gunfire constant. To whisper affection beneath such skies was to court hell and heaven at once. Hassan’s heart wrestled: How can one dream of tenderness while the city bleeds? How can love exist when life itself is barely endured?

Still, he felt it: their love was no distraction. It was defiance. In a world where warlords had stripped Mogadishu of everything, love itself became resistance, a pearl gleaming stubbornly within the ruined oyster of the city.

The streets once draped with bougainvillea now lay scattered with shell casings and burned tyres. Where frankincense and myrrh once perfumed the air, there lingered only the metallic stench of blood. After the dictator fell, warlords turned the city into their battleground, and Mogadishu became a man-made disaster. Those who could began the exodus.

Bs family slipped away quietly, risking the long road to Kenya until at last they reached Dadaab, where survival meant nothing more than breath. Hassan’s family fled too, but he stayed clinging to his mosque, to the zikr whispered in hidden Sufi circles, as if prayer could hold the ruins together.

Then came the silence: Bilan was gone. He heard whispers she had reached Kenya, but the city swallowed letters, voices, everything. He grew thin with sorrow, often sleeping hungry, weaving through checkpoints where death waited in every glance. Some days he was caught and spared. One day, he was not.

Blindfolded, he smelled rust and blood. Fists fell like hammers, every blow punctuated by the same demand: “Which clan are you?” His ribs burned, his mouth filled with iron. Yet above the pain, he floated on zikr: Allahu, Allahu, Allahu.

Which clan, dog? they barked.

He remembered his father’s voice: Your only lineage is faith, not tribe.

Through broken lips, he forced the words:
“I pledge allegiance… to God.”

The laughter that followed was cruel, but within him something unshaken glowed brighter than bone.

They released him at last, his left hand broken, his body marked with bruises that spoke louder than words. Dumped on the roadside, Hassan lay half-conscious until a neighbor recognized him. The militias had left him like refuse, but the neighbor lifted him onto a donkey cart and carried him back to Hamarweyne.

For six months, he lay recovering in his elderly cousin’s home, tended with patience and whispered prayers. Survival felt like a punishment and a mercy at once. When he could finally hold a pen again, he entrusted a letter to a traveler bound for Dadaab a man who knew both him and Bilan.

It was the only lifeline he could send across the chasm of a broken country. Hassan’s letter smelled faintly of smoke and dust, as though the city itself had leaned over the paper.

“Beloved Bilan, Mogadishu groans like an old man struck in the chest, but I endure. Bullets sing at night, yet I still hear God’s name between them. Love, if it exists, is not play it is worship. Write to me, so that I may keep breathing.”

Her reply came weeks later, ink smudged by a trembling hand. “Hassan, exile is a prison without walls. But your words cut holes in the sky. Tell me: is Somalia a clan, a map, or the Qur’an pressed to our hearts? My love for you is the same love I hold for a bleeding homeland. Do not abandon either.”

He wrote as if from a deathbed, each word a farewell. With every checkpoint he crossed, he did not know if another letter or even another breath would survive him.

Ka socota Xasan
Ku socota Bilan

My beloved Bilan,
Our country burns and so do our hearts. Mogadishu has become a kind of hell on earth; I do not know if I will survive.
I loved you because I wanted to live with you, because I saw my dreams my world and my Akhirah — in you.
If I die, then let it be on the soil of my motherland. If Allah wills, I will survive this pain; if not, know this: guard your heart. Do not chase gold or fleeting moments. Have something to live for. Do not let your soul be corrupted.
Love is pain, but perhaps pain is also meaning. Nothing worthy comes from nothing; life is always dual. The world will not stop for you or me, but you can still choose mercy. Never belittle, never be greedy, help as much as you can. Free yourself from your nafs.
And if we do not meet again in this world, Insha’Allah, we will meet in Jannah.

Xasan

Three days later, Bilan received the letter and the news of Hassan’s death in the same breath. She had never imagined such a moment. Her world collapsed; her dreams dissolved into the dust of Dadaab. She vowed never to marry. Years later, resettled in the United States, she lived outwardly in safety but inwardly with a wound no medicine could close.

Thirty-four years passed. At fifty-three, Bilan returned to Mogadishu for the first time. The city she had carried in memory was gone. Only ruins, blocked alleys, and a battered shoreline remained the sea still crashing as it always had, the last witness of what was lost.

War in Somalia had spared nothing. It had touched every heart, split every family, scattered lovers like seeds in the wind. Those who survived learned not to heal but to live with the ache, carrying their memories like a pulse beneath their ribs, beating still.

It is a world where everything appears clear, and yet all cry out, “It’s too complicated.” In other words, this is an age unlike any before, where wisdom is both abundant and absent, and truth, though ever-present, somehow remains out of reach. It is the era of information, and yet people often fail to access and make sense of the right information.

Events unfolding far from home capture global attention, and while their importance is widely acknowledged, many choose silence in the face of their gravity. In such cases, being quiet is not strange; it is a political act.

Everyone has the right to express what they feel. The truth wounds only the oppressors, who depend on the silence of the oppressed to sustain their power. No one should feel compelled to be polite at the cost of truth.

As the Palestinian visionary Edward Said aptly put it: “Much as I have no wish to hurt anyone’s feelings, my first obligation has not been to be nice but to be true to my perhaps peculiar memories, experiences, and feelings.”

In 1956, Frantz Fanon submitted his resignation letter from a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria. In that letter, he famously wrote: “There comes a time when silence becomes dishonesty.” With these words, Fanon made it unmistakably clear that silence in the face of injustice is not merely passive it is a moral failure and a political act of complicity.

Subscribe now

Despite the exact time when Fanon was writing the letter was another right moment for a man with a modicum of dignity like him to confront injustice. Today, the world is even more complicit in the acts of terror faced by the Palestinian people.

As everyone strives for a good life and a successful career filled with material abundance, enjoyment, and enthusiasm or devotion through worship of our Creator; Fanon posed one of life’s most fundamental moral questions in that very letter of his resignation. “But what can a man's enthusiasm and devotion achieve if everyday reality is a tissue of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for man?”

This profound moral question captures the conundrum many faces today a tension between knowing the right answer and taking meaningful action. Yet both are often overshadowed by the madness brought on by the harsh realities of our time. As Fanon wrote, “Madness is one of the means man has of losing his freedom.”

In a nutshell, silence is not only political in certain moments but also immoral in the face of certain issues. In Islam, speaking up against injustice is not merely encouraged it is a moral and spiritual obligation. The Qur'an and Hadith emphasize that silence in the face of wrongdoing can be tantamount to complicity, while speaking the truth is a form of worship and resistance. The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) stated:

“Whoever among you sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; if he is unable, then with his tongue; if he is unable, then with his heart and that is the weakest of faith.” Sahih Muslim

This Hadith emphasizes the duty to actively oppose injustice at all levels, highlighting that inaction is a sign of weak faith.

Storytelling is inherently political and can become an immoral act when it serves to dehumanize victims or promote narratives that claim one race is superior to another, labeling some as evil and others as chosen.

These are the hallmarks of colonial storytelling. Yet, the most dignified figures in human history are those with a conscience and a reasoning mind those who chose to resist injustice, regardless of the cost or the means, who refused to kneel and instead stood tall, even if it meant throwing stones at bulletproof tanks.

When moral apathy takes hold in the public realm, truth dies, humanity fades, and life begins to lose its meaning. Our hearts grow heavy with melancholic sadness, words lose their weight, and despite everything being clear, we no longer know what to say or do.

Madness becomes the norm, and we fail to realize that we’ve lost the most fundamental divine gift God granted to humankind: freedom, the ability to think, speak, and act with moral responsibility. And I think, that’s what our society is today.

So, to remain silent in the face of injustice is a political act. To portray the victim as inhumane is also political. But the pen that dehumanizes innocent children who were burned alive is just as dangerous as the bomb that tears them apart or sets them on fire. These repetitive media narratives are what have normalized the ongoing massacre of the Palestinian people and no one should stay silent about it.

"Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being," said the great twentieth-century poet, playwright, and novelist, Paul Goodman, as he examined what he called the nine types of silence in modern life. Silence, in itself, is a language much deeper than words, and we must all agree that there are many profound things we cannot express if we are simply shouting. In other words, silence is a form of thought processing, and for those who believe that thought and language are inseparable — that thinking occurs "in" language — it implies that without language, thought itself ceases to exist.

Let me briefly revisit Paul Goodman's definitions of the nine silences.

"Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, from which new thoughts emerge; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, 'This… this…'; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift, and helping them be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal, but sullen to express; baffled silence; and the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos." (Paul Goodman)

Goodman’s definitions of silence are deep and profound. In other words, “to understand, you must first make a moment of silence.” The more we are required to talk and focus on the outside world, the harder it becomes to hear our inner voice and feel the deep, shifting truths within ourselves.

In Islam, scholars like Imam Al-Ghazali emphasize "samt" (silent dignity) as a spiritual state that allows for introspection, remembrance of God (dhikr), and moral discipline. In his book Revival of the Religious Sciences, when discussing silence, Al-Ghazali begins with a warning:

«اعلم أن خطر اللسان عظيم ولا نجاة من خطره إلا بالصمت»
"Know that the danger of the tongue is great and that there is no salvation from it except through silence."

Al-Ghazali teaches that guarding the tongue by keeping silent is the foremost form of safety. He explains that "in silence there is safety, and therefore its excellence is great." By remaining silent, one "gathers the mind," maintains dignity, and frees the heart for contemplation.

In his words, silence brings "al-wuqar" (serene composure) and creates "space for thought, remembrance, and worship," while shielding one from the consequences of careless speech, both in this life and the Hereafter. In short, for Al-Ghazali, silence has both spiritual and psychological benefits: it allows the believer to focus on God (dhikr and ‘ibāda) and cultivates a humble, tranquil state of mind.

Silence, then, is a form of worship, as the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (Peace be upon Him) said: "Whoever believes in Allah and the Last Day should speak good or remain silent." (Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim)

As mentioned in Al-Ghazali’s book, Sufyan al-Thawri said:
"The temptation of speaking is greater than the temptations of family, wealth, and children"

And as Mu‘adh ibn Jabal reported, the Prophet ﷺ (Peace be upon Him) said:
"One of the trials of the scholar is that he prefers speaking over listening."
قال معاذ بن جبل رضي الله عنه: من فتنة العالم أن يكون الكلام أحبّ إليه من الاستماع

Despite the spiritual significance of silence, many saints, thinkers, philosophers, writers, and poets from different societies have tried to define its importance in their own way. Whether it’s a moment of awe, listening, observation, resentment, or self-recrimination, these moments of silence make us people of understanding.

They grant us the privilege of garnering clear thoughts and finding meaning both within ourselves and in our perception of the world around us. In Islam, silence is not only a means of understanding but also a form of ‘ibādah (worship).

When Khalil Gibran’s prophet-protagonist is asked to address the matter of talking, he responds: “You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime. And in much of your talking, thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”

Here, Khalil portrays talking as a form of entertainment, a way of running away from ourselves instead of running toward self-reflection. He powerfully explains that thinking is like an open space, but when confined by the structure of words, thought may try to express itself, yet it cannot reach its full potential. Words limit the freedom of thought, preventing it from soaring and fully exploring its possibilities.

In a nutshell, silence is a source of wisdom, a path to finding meaning, and a space to examine both things and ourselves. Those who wish to understand what truly matters in life must dive deep into the fertile silence of awareness, where the soul is nourished and new thoughts emerge.

1

We are all travelers, and we are searching for something that makes us feel our existence are accomplishing something in life. We often hear the advice to "just be happy, no matter what," but life is far more complex than that. Happiness can't be the ultimate goal; it is elusive and transient. Is there any sane who has never been stung by sadness or weighed down by despair? I think not.

Duality is a major end of life. A person who is always happy would see no need to contemplate anything new or to work toward self-improvement. It is in the striving, the trying to attain something just beyond our reach, that we find ourselves engaged in the myriad realities of existence-some bitter, some sweet. The bitterness of one moment is balanced by the sweetness of another.

It is in the interplay of these contrasts that we are reminded of night at high noon. In the day, we contemplate the world and all its light, but in the dark of night lies a lesson: the need to take rest from toil, time to think things out. This constant, repetitive nature or rhythm in dualism finds reflections in opposing forces we must somehow overcome within us.

But despite the great yearning of the human soul for more, it will never be satisfied with what it has. Whatever we have, we want more. The irony, however, is that in getting "more," we actually run the risk of losing our sanity, health, or the very things we had. We appreciate little: time, privileges, wealth, opportunities, and skills we already have, until something bigger or stronger takes them away from us.

Does accumulating more and more wealth really bring long-lasting satisfaction to the human soul? The answer is deeply debatable. However, this insatiability finds a very intelligent explanation from the wisdom of Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him). Anas bin Malik narrated, the Messenger of Allah -peace and blessings be upon him- said: “If the son of Adam had a valley full of gold, he would want to have two valleys. Nothing fills his mouth but the dust of the grave, yet Allah will relent to whoever repents to Him.” 1 This hadith clearly explains the desire of humanity, that is always craving for the treasure of this world.

Happiness, as we often envision it, is an exaggerated ideal. In the race for this unreachable state, we should not refuse ourselves the right to feel sad, unsatisfied, bored, or nothing, because our feelings are just not quite clear. These feelings are no failures but part of human existence. Accepting them enables us to live life with genuineness and balance, rather than losing ourselves in a perpetual race of chasing happiness.

This era may be called the epoch of information, but ironically, so many people lack the inward knowledge to perceive these multidimensional realities that stare us in the face day in and day out. The plethora of information has numbed us into chasing that elusive shadow of happiness-a happiness that basically emanates from contentment, a sense of being, and living in this present moment.

In 1977, Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon said, "Information consumes attention; hence a wealth of information produces a poverty of attention."2 This profound insight highlights our modern predicament: a poverty of attention directed toward ourselves and the world around us. We become wanderers in our own lives, disconnected from our essence. Paradoxically, at a time when our technological connectiveness has reached an unprecedented level, we have lost the one connection that really matters: the connection to our humanity.

Subscribe now

It comes as disconnection in our relationships and inside of us. Happiness is not about continuous distraction; it is in the connections we make: the connections to society, family, and one another. It is in understanding, helping, and embracing others with compassion. As humans, we are the light of Earth, bestowed with this rare capacity to think. To think is to be free, and to be free is to allow ourselves the space to reflect on the dualities of life: light and dark, sadness and joy, hardship and ease, stillness and activity. In admitting these contrasts, we recover what it is to be human: a balance of being and becoming, striving and resting, living with meaning and grace.

The greatest thing in life that all humans want to attain is eternal bliss, fulfillment, and wisdom that opens up the heart. We strive to achieve something in life, yet the peace is somewhere else. Actually, happiness is a state of mind—one must truly believe this.

What brings true joy is developing curiosity within us-about our inner feelings and the experiences that the outside world has to offer. We should learn to look within, engaging in constant self-inquiry in search of an explanation for life's most profound questions.

But there are those who will say, "You can't question yourself all of the time; it is so unsettling." And indeed, it can be! But only those running from their real selves avoid this kind of introspection. It is within this quest for the answers to give life meaning that true happiness is found.

I feel that by understanding the complicated realities we go through daily and questioning the world around us, it helps us see life more clearly. It is in this understanding that one may ultimately find happiness and meaning.

In The Alchemy of Happiness, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali starts with the words, "He who knows himself is truly happy." 3 That is to say, for understanding the world, one should understand his soul. Instead of spending life chasing after momentary physical pleasures that cannot heal spiritual wounds, one should pay attention to spiritual attunement and self-knowledge.

Footnotes

One night in September 2023, I visited Mogadishu's largest hospital, formerly known as Digfeer and now called Erdoğan Hospital. It was an experience that left me so bewildered and reflective on life and its mysteries. One of my friends was suffering from food poisoning, and I stayed with him for two hours in the emergency room. In this short but deeply moving period, I witnessed a lot of suffering and hardship.

To my left was a gentleman who had been in a car accident, writhing in pain. Before me, a young girl also writhed in agony as her small frame fought the waves of pain. To my right was an elderly man whose groans were heavy with the weight of what seemed like the final hours of his life.

My eyes scanned the room, shocked and saddened at the same time. Behind me stood a mother who was with her little girl, tenderly caressing her cheeks to console her. The small child lay attached to a breathing machine; her weakness showed in each struggling breath.

Two young policemen came in, obviously very tired, their eyes heavy with sleeplessness, as they checked on their injured uncle, a victim of an explosion. A brother begged his younger sibling, whose shoulder was broken, to eat something at the far end of the emergency room. It was a scene painted with pain, resilience, and silent prayers.

Outside the emergency room, in anxious clusters, faces etched with worry and despair, waited helplessly for news of their loved ones. The doctors were vastly outnumbered by patients and could give only very few answers to the questions, leaving many of the relatives feeling abandoned in their sorrow.

The doctors here look pretty exhausted too. They are only human, after all, and with that many patients in the hospital, it is the middle of the night. One of the doctors went outside the door for some fresh air or something, maybe to call someone on the phone. But he looked so tired that he forgot he had his phone on his lap. He just sat there not moving or talking, staring off into his fatigue.

Those indeed were some reflective hours in the hospital for me. If it were in my power, I would have healed everyone in the hospital. But then, my mercy is nothing before the mercy of the Most Merciful. This suffering brought before my mind the purposes of the Creator, reminding me—moments like this are deep reminders—of the fragility of life and wisdom beyond human comprehension.

During those quiet reflective moments, amidst efforts to make sense of everything going on around me, I found myself in the shoes of the patients lying in their beds and their loved ones anxiously consoling them or waiting for news outside the emergency room.

I came to realize how ungrateful I have been towards life and this most special gift of health. I was struck by how often my worldly desires overshadow the sustenance and beauty of good health—one of life's greatest blessings.

But how do we treat this precious gift of health? How often do we neglect it or fail to appreciate it? To understand the pain of others, we have to develop the capacity to empathize and console as much as we can. When I say "others," I also mean ourselves—because in many ways we become strangers to ourselves when we fail to value the gift of a healthy life.

Once we have a realization of life and health, the "otherness" fades away. We see that nobody is really independent; all are connected by experiencing life as a human. It forms a singularity of existence that ties together all of humanity. But where there is a lack of empathy and kindness, division happens, and a sense of otherness in every place and person becomes the norm. And humans are who are supposed to take care of everything on earth we become blind by the moment we perceived there is race better than the other race

Humans are meant to take care of everything on Earth—ourselves, animals, trees, and all of nature. Yet, we have become blind due to our desires. Do these desires ever have an end, or are our so-called goals truly benefiting our lives? This blindness of the heart has created a void within us, stemming from a lack of compassion.

And as M. Fethullah Gülen aptly put it, (May Allah have mercy on him and grant him Jannah)

“Compassion, which can be defined as loving and caring for others without expecting anything in return, helping the oppressed and the wronged, and treating them with extreme kindness and sincerity, is a manifestation of the godly virtues, heavenly breath, and a further name for the warmth of all mothers.”

We have little compassion and care for the rest of humanity these days. We are in a deep state of forgetfulness, and the problems and oppression in the world have only worsened this year, serving to numb us. For anyone with even a tinge of sanity, this has been a year of sadness and profound sorrow a reflection of the years to come.

Returning to the story of Mogadishu's hospital—it was a moment to reflect and appreciate the blessings of good health. As we step into the new year, 2025, we are confronted with the bitter reality of impotence, which struck us like a sledgehammer to the forehead. It felt as though an immense force had knocked us down, leaving us unconscious and stunned in 2024.

In this new year, we must ask ourselves: how will we utilize the little power and privileges we possess? Will we strive to be part of the positive history of the world? Will we take action against the injustices and suffering faced by humanity, or will we remain silent and indifferent?

Will we cultivate gratitude for the blessings we have, or will we fall deeper into a state of forgetfulness? Will we use our minds to think critically, or allow external narratives to shape our perspectives? These are the questions that must guide us as we move forward.

When I was a small child, my mother taught me a lesson. At the time, I didn’t understand its importance or the deeper meaning behind it, but now it’s something I think about all the time.

We lived a simple, nomadic life in a small village where everyone knew each other. Some houses in the village stood out more than others, and ours was one of them. Our home was a gathering place; everyone came to us, even people we didn’t recognize as children. My parents always reassured us, saying, “This person is a relative who has come from far away.”

We owned goats and cows and practiced seasonal farming whenever the valleys filled with water during the rainy season. Alongside this, we ran a small hotel and a mini-shop where nomadic travelers could stop for food, tea, sugar, and other essentials. Life wasn’t perfect, but we lived it the best way we could—better, in fact, than most people in the area.

My mother’s quiet generosity and the openness of our home left a lasting impression on me. It was a way of life rooted in community, hospitality, and shared responsibility, values that I carry with me to this day. All things my mother taught me one thing become stack into my mind and it was her words during eating time when My mother gave us one fandhaal (a traditional Somali hand-carved spoon) to share among my brothers and me as we ate from the same plate. While we ate, she would stand or sit beside us and sings “Wadaagoo, Walaaloo”, “Wadaagoo, Walaaloo” again and again until we finish the food together.

“Those who share together are brothers.” This philosophy of sharing whatever we had with others defined our home. It was a home for all: for travelers, for those in need, and for farmers who came from afar. My mother was the epitome of a typical Somali woman—strong, resolute, and caring. She had a God-given ability to speak in both the beauty of poetry and the soothing tones of daily dialogue. My father, on the other hand, was quiet, innocent, and somewhat shy, which made it easy to approach him with any request.

I think my father’s personality was profoundly influenced by the experiences of his early years. He was a freedom fighter, part of the youth who fought in the 1977 war between Somalia and Ethiopia in the Ogaden region. Before joining the army at a young age, he was a humble camel herder. His years of battle experience and the hardships he endured shaped him into a calm and easy-going man. Because of his reputation and my mother’s generous spirit, our home was always full of people.

At that age, I didn’t know what communism or the idea of a classless society was about. But in today’s world, where capitalism seems to be eroding everything, and fewer than 100 people control more wealth than over 8 billion others, it doesn’t feel quite right to me. What my mother was teaching us wasn’t exactly against private ownership, but rather, it was about the moral responsibility of those who are privileged to help the less fortunate and those in need.

As the Iraqi-British rapper and public intellectual Kareem Dennis, better known by his stage name Lowkey, sang:

"If you’re trying to be rich, man—and that can be rich in anything—
Don’t you take too much."

British-Palestinian rapper Shadia Mansour, whose soulful voice conveys even more through the chorus of the song:

"If you take something you don’t need and keep it,
Then you’ve stolen from somebody else who’s hungry."

My mother taught us the importance of community and togetherness, something that feels so rare these days. In a world where so many people are focused on chasing material things, her lesson was simple but powerful: to stick together, care for one another, and share so that no one is left behind. It’s not about having too much or too little—it’s about having the moral responsibility to help others whenever you can. After all, no one should be poor because someone else is rich, and no one should be rich at the expense of someone else’s poverty.

This beautiful lesson has stayed with me, shaping my thoughts as I began to seek meaningful truths about life. Growing up, I didn’t understand wealth or poverty in the conventional sense. Instead, I saw people who needed help. From an early age, I felt a moral responsibility to help in any way I could.

What does it mean to help? Your understanding of it might differ from mine, but we can agree on this: any act of kindness is a form of help. A simple smile when someone needs it, a few words of encouragement, or empowering someone to trust themselves—these are among the greatest gifts we can give.

As a Somali proverb says, “You might meet someone who gives you money, but you will rarely find someone who gives you good advice.” True advice, offered with kindness and foresight, is one of the most profound forms of help—it nurtures a person’s future and provides the wisdom they need.

In this era of deep forgetfulness—of ourselves and those around us—what we need more than anything else is a sense of connection and togetherness, a sense of society. A society that feels for one another, that supports one another, that listens to one another. What defines our existence should be our shared sense of being. What divides us should not be the differences in the circumstances each of us faces but rather how we choose to show kindness to one another.

Sudanese singer Mahmoud Abdelaziz is seen in this undated portrait. Abdelaziz, a beloved cultural icon, passed away in 2013.

One day, I’ll write something about this—the similarities in music and lyrics between Somali and Sudanese songs. But tonight, the matter feels different. Here I am, sitting alone, sipping a cup of coffee while a low-toned song plays in the background. A few moments later, I decided to ask the person playing the music to change the song. Instead, I asked for my all-time favorite—one of Ibrahim Awad’s classics. But this time, the voice wasn’t Ibrahim Awad’s. It was the legendary Nancy Agag. 

Ibrahim Awad’s song, with its profound lyrics, is undeniably beautiful. The way it begins with the line “Oh time, have a little mercy” is a masterpiece of artistic expression, capturing the deep yearning for meaning. I believe it’s these opening lines that made me fall in love with the song.

I can argue that Nancy’s version is better. Maybe it’s her unique voice that gives the song a deeper meaning to me. As the evening went on, more Sudanese songs followed. Alone with my thoughts, someone played another Sudanese song. This particular song compelled me to write and sent me into deep contemplation. Astonishingly, there were two Sudanese women sitting in front of me. One of them stood up and played a song by Mohamud Abdiaziz. The song was “Write to Me.” I was fine until I heard this haunting line: ‎

كيف شعور الناس في الغربة؟ كيف عاملة؟ “How do people cope in a land not their own? How do they survive?”

Isn’t this profound? Yes, it is. Only those who have experienced homesickness and nostalgia for their homeland can understand the emptiness within and the pain of living far from home. It’s a feeling that words fail to capture—a sickness with no cure. The only remedy is to walk the streets where you grew up, to reconnect with the place that shaped you, the environment that nurtured your curiosity. The song continued:

‎كيف شعور الناس في الغربة؟ كيف عاملة؟

“How does one live far from home, bearing the weight of longing?”

The question is devastating. How does anyone withstand such emotions? How? And again, how? It’s an indescribable feeling because words seem futile. This made me realize that home is not just a physical place—it’s something you carry within yourself. It’s part of your very being, part of your breath. That deep, long breath you exhale when homesickness overtakes you—that is home.

As I sat in silence, trying to make sense of the song and the emotions it evoked, I asked the woman who played it why she chose it. She replied, “I like Mohamud Abdiaziz.” I repeated my question, “But why this song?” She said again, “I like it because it asks about the condition of someone far from home.”

Her innocent, feminine look seemed to say more than the song’s lyrics ever could. I held my breath, and my thoughts turned to Sudan’s current state. “My God, her beautiful people are in hell,” I thought to myself. I’ve never been to Sudan, though I’ve always wanted to visit and experience the real lives of Sudanese people. But today, Sudan is not the Sudan it once was. Things are falling apart, the world is watching in silence, and the media barely pays attention. As a journalist, this made me reflect on the moral questions of my profession. Why do I find journalism meaningful when it sometimes feels like the world doesn’t care?

‎عاملة كيف؟ والناس في الغربة كيف حالك؟

“How are you holding up? And how are the strangers treating you?”

Can anyone fully answer this? These questions linger, yet they seem to have no definitive answers. To be a stranger in a strange land, surrounded by an unfamiliar culture, is an alienating experience. As Warsan Shire put it:

“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.”

I, myself, have never truly felt a sense of home since 2011. I tell people that everywhere is my home, but that’s a lie. I mask my feelings, hiding the void within. I still carry a lingering longing for the place where I used to herd goats and tend livestock—a place where I knew every tree that grew on the land. I often find myself thinking about how I left that place and the journey that brought me to Nairobi. It was this journey that led me to meet two beautiful Sudanese women who, like me, had left their home behind. All people’s struggles are the same, and their feelings are alike. Only the places that shape us set us apart.

‎عاملة كيف؟ والناس في الغربة كيف حالك؟

“How do you find life in exile, far from all that you know?”

For the Sudanese people, music is central to their daily lives, and the same can be said for Somalis. Many describe Somalis as a nation of poets, whose poetic words, when blended with music, have the power to stir the listener’s soul—evoking happiness, fear, or a silent sense of awe. Today, however, both communities are grappling with immense distress and challenges. Reflecting on Ibrahim Awad’s poignant opening lyrics, “Oh time, have a little mercy,” I find myself wishing for the same—for time to show mercy to the Sudanese and Somalis, granting them moments of peace and bliss.