In reality, this is 100% my fault. You see, I have a habit of air conducting when I’m emotionally overwhelmed. I listen to music (usually instrumental), go for a walk, and wave my arms around like a traffic cop.

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Not only is this great cardio, but it also releases me of whatever fullness I have been overtaxed with.

Win win.

Some weeks ago, I felt such an impulse. So, I took my phone, paired it with my headphones, and started blasting the Hamilton soundtrack. It was past maghrib, the skies and scene darkening around me.

It was also hot.

Within about 10 or 15 minutes of my walk, a pitter-patter of rain started falling. I didn’t think much of it, except for a brief wondering: should I turn back home?

I didn’t, as the drops were refreshing and the music was jamming. All the angst and irritation of the day were being released, and I wanted that to continue.

It rained on and off throughout my walk. By the time I came home, I was soaked.

My headphones, it appeared, were still intact.

So I put them away.

The next morning, I tried to turn them on and they wouldn’t budge. No power, no zhuzh, no nothing.

For a while, with a backup wired pair still functioning, I left them alone. But then, as I attempted to use the wired pair on a recent call, those, too, transmitted no sound. My world of private listening came crashing down.

It’s surprising how debilitating such a loss can be, when meetings and phone calls are a central part of my everyday life. Now, the world must hear my life in full, public, audible sound.

A bit later, my wife dropped her phone in a pool of water in the kitchen sink. It stopped charging. But with the help of a bag of rice and the gift of time, it started holding battery again.

Inspired by this, I thought that maybe something similar could work for my headphones. So I stuck the pair in a bag of rice for a couple of days. After all, it had been multiple weeks of electronic death - perhaps the revival window was longer than would otherwise be the case.

Subsequently, I took it out and plugged it in when, lo and behold, it started charging again!

I could not help but think of the Qur’an’s description of the Divine power to bring things back from the dead.

This is only one of multiple examples where the Qu’ran talks about the Divine’s capacity to bring the dead back to life. From discussions in Surah Al-Kahf of the sleepers of the cave who slept for 300 years (and then some) to discussions in Surah Al-Baqarah of Prophet Ibrahim cutting up and scattering birds that then miraculously came back to him when he called them - there are myriad descriptions of these kinds of incidents.

The Divine is, indeed, the Maintainer of Life (Al-Muhyi) and the Bringer of Death (Al-Mumeet).

The problem, though, is that we so often pretend to take on one or both of these characteristics.

I, for instance, did not begin my attempts at reviving my headphones with bismillah - a silly mistake. As such, it ought not to come as a surprise that when I tried to unplug and turn the headphones on, all they did was flash red and white in random patterns.

At fajr yesterday morning, they were solidly white - they had been that way the entire night.

A recent email from a work colleague described the process of developing new theatre, which the colleague wanted to invite students to participate in, as “creating something from nothing.”

I paused on that phrase when I read it.

We humans are - ourselves - created beings. It is therefore ontologically and epistemologically impossible for us to create something from nothing when we ourselves are already created. To subscribe to that type of thinking is to assume an authority and power that goes far beyond what humans are granted.

It is the type of arrogance that led the Pharoah that faced off against Prophet Musa to his downfall, in believing that Divinity was his rather than him being the subject of Divinity.

Only the Divine has the capacity to bring something into being from nothing, to initiate life and death and life again, at Divine Will.

How do we handle this reality, knowing that, ultimately, we - to quote the Hamilton soundtrack - “have no control [over] who lives, who dies, who tells your story”?

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No bag of rice can resurrect us, unless the Divine makes it so.

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that control and power and function are the ultimate illusions, unless they are truly granted and gifted by and from the Divine.

And even then, they are illusory still because all it takes is a few raindrops to short-circuit our sense of being in charge.

Looks like I’m on the market for a new pair of headphones.

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And with that, a du’a for you and for me: I pray that in the moments where you develop or create an illusion of grandeur, one that makes you believe that you are in charge or in control of a circumstance, context, or situation, that you instead are blessed with the awareness and inspired with the understanding that to be is to be created, a product of Divine Enactment and Articulation, a word or a breath that moves you and me and everything that we think of and think we create from nothing to something.

These TVs often display a range of channels, most of your basic things - news outlets like CNN, Fox, and MSNBC; sports channels like ESPN; and food/home channels like Food Network and HGTV.

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TVs are highly distracting, which is why my wife and I don’t have one in our house.

It’s also why my workouts get longer and longer (but less and less effective) if the weight machine I’m using is close to the TV - I turn into a zombie.

My most recent zombification, however, was more an agitation than anything else. It was about the double standard that the US and Euro-America in general applies to Muslims.

At the exact moment that I was at the gym, CNN was reporting on comments that the Michigan progressive candidate for Senate, Abdul El-Sayed, had made on a Zoom call with Democratic donors. Referring to the Democratic senator John Fetterman from Pennsylvania, whose politics and voting record have veered sharply to the right since taking office, El-Sayed described his own potential value to the Democratic Party by suggesting that Fetterman could be an “ogre on a pike” and that an example could be made of him for abandoning the values he ran and ultimately won office through.

To this day, and even in writing this Substack post, I don’t fully understand what El-Sayed was trying to say. The framing is clumsy at best.

But that’s not even my biggest concern here.

Because as soon as CNN played the audio of the leaked Zoom call, a 5-person panel (two white women, a Black man, a Latine woman, and a white man) started ripping into El-Sayed.

Violent rhetoric, one called it.

Disgusting and vile, another said.

Dangerous and inappropriate, a third commented.

This is Orientalist, racist discourse all over again.

Here, in this country, we have a president who - lest we forget - has made all sorts of vulgar comments about women, immigrants, and entire countries. He started a war mostly for the fun of it and put himself above others by, most recently, secretly switching planes via a catering truck while others remained unaware of a potential assassination attempt.

And CNN is calling El-Sayed violent?

Far be it for me to assume that any major news outlet in this country speaks anything remotely close to the truth (they don’t) rather than parroting what big money donors want them to say, there’s a broader point here.

Today, the sharpest, most immediate criticism is attached to Muslim figures. The Orientalist tropes of Muslims as angry, backward, violent, dangerous threats continue to have enormous staying power.

In their recent book A Global Racial Enemy, my sociologist colleagues Saher Selod, Inaash Islam, and Steve Garner have argued that Muslims have become a racialized enemy all over the world. To be Muslim - whether in the US, the France, India, China, or many places in between - is to be seen as something different, threatening, and strange.

The Prophet foretold this. In a relatively well-documented hadith, he stated that Islam would end as it began: as a strange thing.

Often, this hadith is interpreted to mean that, over time, it will become difficult to find individuals who hold on to the faith in the way that it is meant to be held onto, in terms of practicing it appropriately and upholding its principles. It is seen as a warning to ensure that commands found in the Qur’an are maintained. Like this one:

But what if there is a secondary meaning, a further layer to this hadith? What if the strangeness that Islam came with in the first place is not just about the practitioners of Islam (i.e. Muslims) but also about how the faith is perceived in society more broadly?

In the early days of Islamic history, those who professed to believe in One Creator, One Deity, One Divine - these early Muslims were persecuted. They were framed as disruptors of the Arab political order, as social deviants, as vagrants and criminals, as weak and insignificant.

They were, from the beginning, outsiders.

For much of the 20th and now 21st century, but most specifically since 9/11, we have seen a dramatic increase in anti-Muslim racism worldwide. Muslims are increasingly being pushed to the margins, through policies like the “Muslim ban” in the US and the racist and anti-Muslim Citizenship (Amendment) Act in India - among others.

This is a return to how things were.

It’s almost like the social strangeness of Islam is an undead, zombie-like thing, coming back to haunt us. Call it Islamophobia, Orientalism, or anti-Muslim racism - the similarities are uncanny.

And, for those of us living the reality day-to-day, more than a bit scary.

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Yet, it only increases the faith of the believers while deepening the misfortune of those who do not.

Those who know, who endure, who continue to believe despite the rhetoric and politics that hang around are tested with this kind of nonsense daily.

Perhaps that’s why Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, when speaking about these kinds of circumstances, advised the Muslim ummah to stick close to its faith and avoid - as much as possible - engaging in civil strife.

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So with that, a du’a: I pray that as you go about your day, finding yourself trying to steel against the difficulties of political rhetoric and machinations swirling all around you, shenanigans that demonstrate extreme moral decay where the rich keep getting richer at the cost of the poor getting poorer, the oppressors continue to thrive at the cost of the oppressed being further downtrodden, the center no longer holding as the margins unravel at their seams - in that moment, I pray that you find within yourself the power to retreat into remembrance of the Divine and the recognition that the crudeness of this world is but a reminder of how Divinity works: on Its Own Time, in Its Own Way, and with Its Own Methods.

Now, however, I’m much more likely to do salaat in an airport or wudhu in a public bathroom. The politics of my practice have shifted considerably.

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Take, for instance, my most recent airport adventures: a conference in Baltimore put me in airports twice. Going from Hartford to Baltimore was generally uneventful - no overlap with salaat time and a fairly smooth transit.

But on the way back, my waiting time at the airport overlapped with ‘asr. I was mostly focused on finding an empty gate at which to complete salaat once I got through security that I almost missed the care that the TSA agent showed to me.

Yes, care.

At the front of the line for PreCheck, which allows for an expedited security screening process in exchange for giving the US government your fingerprints, various personal information, and $85 every five years, I handed my ID to the TSA agent.

Around us, it was chaotic and noisy, a full-on and typically busy Sunday afternoon at the airport. He took my ID, slid it into the processing slot, and asked me to remove my glasses and facemask for a facial-recognition picture. Despite seeing someone next to me opt out and stand to the side of the camera, I stayed where I was.

The TSA agent handed my ID back to me.

“Asif?” He asked.

”Yes,” I responded.

“Salaam ‘alaykum,” he said.

“Wa ‘alaykum salaam,” I said.

“Next!” He called out.

I moved on, through security and to my gate.

It was the briefest of interactions, only legible and audible to me and him. The quiet intimacy of such a moment exists for a split second before the securitized sociopolitical comes crashing in, interrupting two brown men saying salaam to each other with all the care of a bull in a china shop.

Immediately thereafter, I moved through putting my bags on the conveyor belt, emptying my pockets, walking through a metal detector, and awaiting my bags on the other end in the hopes that I wouldn’t be “randomly” selected for secondary screening.

I wasn’t.

I proceeded through the airport, found my gate, and rushed to complete some computer tasks before salaat. ‘Asr was around the corner and boarding was soon thereafter. Time was of the essence.

With my admin work complete, I looked around the terminal for an empty gate. There were not that many options, except for one spot down by the end. Having already completed my wudhu, I gathered my things and walked over to the space between the columns where passengers line up and the abandoned gate podium. There, I unfurled my musalla and began salaat.

A few rakaat into my practice, a woman in a wheelchair was wheeled over by a staff person. The staffer parked her as first in the early boarding line. With my back toward her and moving through ruku’ and sujood and qunoot, I could hear her tip the staffer before that person left.

Then, there was silence.

In the silence, I felt her eyes watching me. A familiar fear emerged as I continued my worship. Anxiety rose as I could not tell exactly what was happening behind me. Who was she? What did she think of me? What would I face when I turned around?

The Qur’an is fairly clear about situations like this:

Knowing this, and already in a public place where I knew this dispensation was permitted for me, I shortened and quickened my salaat. Four rakaat became two, and four sets of sunnah/nafilah became one. I said my final salaams, stood up, picked up my musalla, and turned to face whatever was next.

"That’s a beautiful prayer mat,” the white, wheelchair-using woman said. “Did you make it?”

Of all the questions that might have been posed to me in that moment, this was not the one I was expecting. I continued to fold the musalla, responding while I looked down that I had gotten it while abroad.

“It’s beautiful,” she said once more.

I nodded and put the musalla in my bag, walking past her towards my gate.

"Thank you,” I said. “And it even folds up nice and small for when I travel.”

She offered no response, except to pause scrolling on her phone as I spoke.

In the contemporary United States, Orientalist politics and anti-Muslim racism have conditioned us to believe that we are going to suffer or be abused in some kind of way when we are in public places. Often, and especially in charged geographies like airports or political rallies, these kinds of things do happen.

And yet, they also sometimes don’t. In fact, sometimes the opposite happens. The question is about what kind of orientation we, ourselves, take to the world and what we expect or assume to happen when we encounter it.

In the prescriptions around how to prepare for hajj, the Qur’an offers guidance around what we ought to do ahead of time and during the process:

The word of interest here is translated above as “righteousness” - other translations render this best of provisions as “ward[ing] off evil” or “right conduct.”

In Arabic, though, we’re talking about the concept of taqwa (تقوى). Coming from the root word q-w-a (ق-و-ى) which means to become strong or be strengthened, it is often characterized as having a spiritual shield around oneself, based on a combinations of the translations mentioned above: righteousness, right conduct, and warding away evil.

Taqwa is cultivated through an iterative process of refusing to allow circumstance to dictate spiritual practice and presence.

Or, alternatively: taqwa is cultivated through an iterative process of enacting consciousness of the Divine in every situation, on every day, in every place.

There are hundreds of thousands of words spoken in sermons and lines written in treatises about taqwa and how the embodiment of it reinforces what it means to be someone who centers the Divine in everyday life.

What is perhaps less discussed is its mutually reinforcing capacity. Because taqwa is not just a shield to hide behind that, once erected, is there for the long haul. Rather, it is a shield that is generated through practice, through attention and commitment to centering the Divine in everyday experience.

It’s the kind of shield that makes you less likely to succumb to anxious what-ifs, the type that my body felt while I did salaat at the airport.

It’s the type of protection that enlivens what it means to understand the Divine’s direct actions and work in and on this earth at any given moment.

It’s the form of trust that gives you a sense of peace and calm amid the chaos and uncertainty of life.

It’s a shield that I’m still working on.

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A wondering before the du’a: what might it look like to expect protection from the Divine rather than hoping that it will come? Could that be a form of taqwa in and of itself?

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And with that, a du’a for you and for me: I pray that the practices of connection to the Divine that we engage with on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis are ones that we can carry with us no matter what kinds of circumstances we find ourselves in, practices that strengthen our own types of taqwa, uniquely and personally configured for the people that we are, the situations that we’re in, and the relationships that we have with the Divine - however small, medium, or large those connections may be - a taqwa that sustains and centers us amid all the uncertainty and confusion of everyday life, for now and forever more.

The book talks about, among other things, a process of making theatre with British Muslim youth that I facilitated back in 2017-18. As a result of that work, my collaborators created a radio play called The Wedding.

It was my first, and thus far only, foray into the world of radio plays. The process that I facilitated ran about 6 months, and it primarily involved women collaborators (the pic above is a stock photo - but some of them did wear hijab and, occasionally, headphones!). They participated in theatre exercises, generated characters, improvised dialogue, and wrote the script.

I describe the entirety of this process, including moments that didn’t make their way into the script (as well as those that did) in my book.

I also talk about the participants: university students, professionals, men, women, practicing Muslims, cultural Muslims, and more. There were folx who did salaat regularly alongside individuals who didn’t, individuals from all different racial and sexual identity backgrounds, and so on. I tried my best to bring as many different types of people together, so long as they self-identified as British and Muslim while being between ages 18-35.

Fast forward to a few weeks back, and I was in conversation with colleagues about my book. I had convened a roundtable about it at one of the major academic theatre conferences, bringing together other university-based theatre people to talk about how the work in the book resonated with or differed from their community-based practice.

Aside from me, there were three folx on the panel: a white woman who works primarily with students, a Latinx woman whose work includes undocumented and migrant Spanish-speaking community members, and an Arab male refugee whose practice focuses on themes of migration and home.

Only my Arab male colleague was Muslim.

It was heartening to someone with insider knowledge about Islam speak to the themes of the text. But it also forced me to level up my thinking about the practice, something that was based on - and for a while has been - a fairly solo endeavor because of the dearth of Muslim theatre makers in academic spaces in this country.

I think I’m probably the only Muslim faculty or staff member in the entire fine arts complex at the university where I work.

At one point in the conversation, my Arab colleague made an interesting observation. Having read the text like the other panelists, he said:

“I don’t think there were enough rituals of Muslimness in the process”

The comment took me a little bit by surprise. We debated back and forth for a while.

I wondered about the way that including all possible Muslims in a community-building process meant that I de-prioritized shared rituals of Muslimness.

He responded with the idea that there’s more value in being unapologetic in articulating a space as staunchly Muslim than there is in trying to include everyone.

I conceded that maybe, as a younger and inexperienced facilitator at that time, perhaps I had insecurities about folx not participating if it wasn’t an open enough space or process.

He acknowledged that if he had proposed a theatre-making process to students at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Syria (his home country) and insisted on including salaat or other rituals of Muslimness in the work, he would have been “laughed out of building.”

The discussion continued.

As I reflect on that conversation, I find myself wondering two pairs of things:

• Pair 1: does ritual make a Muslim? Or does the Muslim make ritual?

• Pair 2: does belief make a Muslim? Or does the Muslim make belief?

There is a constant dialectic in our world between and in relation to these things, where the practice of being Muslim exists alongside the experience of being Muslim.

For many of us Muslims, those two are intertwined. The Qur’an is clear that both matter for righteousness to manifest:

But veering too much to one side or another - i.e. thinking and acting that either belief/submission or practice/ritual is the only thing needed to be Muslim - makes things incomplete.

A dimension of this incompleteness comes from, at least in a Euro-American context, the European (un)Enlightenment’s emphasis on the privatization of religion and religious practice. At risk of oversimplification, around the 17th/18th centuries, logic and reason became the main conceptual paradigms that underpinned European thinking in fields as diverse as law, medicine, and the arts. This approach displaced the esoteric, faith-based, and public dimensions of religious practice.

Privatization of faith - giving way to a secularism that remains rooted in Christianity - is something that Islam never caved to, despite us all ultimately being individually judged by the Divine for our actions and belief. Secularism’s belief that logic could supplant faith has subsequently failed, exactly because - as Islam offers - there is a need to hold both action and belief together.

And yet, perhaps part of what underpinned my Arab colleague’s astute observation was the recognition that Euro-American norms and politics attempt to force Islam into a permissible and palatable and manageable state, a coercion that is ultimately played out on the bodies, practices, and choices of everyday Muslims.

What if I had prioritized shared rituals of Muslimness in the theatre-making process, making space for the enactment of faith alongside the enactment of performance?

What might that have looked like? Visiting Malaysia some time ago, I watched from my Airbnb as the young men who played on the football pitch across the street paused practice to do salaat in jamaat under the open sky when the time came.

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Does the place where we are give us more or less freedom to be who we are? Does it inform what becomes possible in creating Muslim spaces within non-Muslim publics?

Does the secularist framework facilitate everyone - and I mean everyone - being able to practice what and how they would like?

Or, is it - as most politico-cultural systems are - only designed to uplift the privileged few at the expense of oppressed others?

Something to think about.

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And with that, a du’a: I pray that the spaces that you convene and the contexts in which you work are both welcoming to all and rooted in truth, honoring the practices and principles that matter to you and your allies, ultimately privileging the possibility of connection to the Divine through giving of yourself and gathering those you love into and through curation of community and collectivity.

In speaking, I wonder if I gave into the power of fear and protection rather than curiosity and possibility.

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The panel was set up where I and four other academics discussed our experiences of making theatre, teaching students, and navigating institutional shenanigans. Each of us spoke from our lived experience before answering questions from the audience.

One audience member, who recently graduated with their MFA and was applying to jobs around the country, wondered if their power was being taken away by the job market and the likelihood that they would have to relocate away from Los Angeles (where they are based) for work. LA is the city where this person had a number of community connections that gave them clout and social/creative capital. Moving to another place would mean starting over.

In response, the other panelists and I offered different ideas. One empathized with the audience member. Another raised the importance of different types of values, where going where you are sent is sometimes part of the gig. And I mentioned the fact that some communities don’t get the choice, as immigrants or children of immigrants, to stay where they are. It is, in fact, an immense privilege to not have to move - just as it can be a privilege to move.

As I mentioned being a child of immigrants, I looked at my parents. Because this conference took place near where my parents live, I invited them to attend this panel. They sat there proudly, listening to what I and the other panelists were saying.

But in the room full of about 300-400 people, many of whom were white and most of whom I did not know, I did not name my parents’ presence out loud. Later, they told me that they were expecting me to based on the direction of my remarks. Other panelists told me, in private, that I “should” have mentioned their presence.

I felt ashamed.

Did I do something wrong?

After the panel, the three of us went to jumma. There, the khateeb spoke about the importance of protecting one’s family from punishment, and how to do that. His remarks centered on a particular ayat:

Using this ayat as a point of departure, the khateeb commented on the difficulties faced by the community, speaking about the significance of ensuring that community members look out for each other, checking in when they haven’t seen someone in a while. He called on individuals in his congregation to prioritize both their own worship and the moral and religious upbringing of their children. He invited his community to avoid duplicitous behavior like doing salaat and consuming pork or crossing other Islamic red lines.

As he spoke, the pain was etched on his face, almost as if he was feeling - in real time - the struggles of the individuals around him.

I started crying.

Partly, this was because I felt a transfer of the emotion he displayed.

But separate to that, I found myself at a crossroads: between protecting and honoring.

The Qur’an is very clear about how we are to relate to our parents. Across multiple ayat (2:83, 2:215, 4:11, 4:36, 6:151, 17:23, 31:14, 46:15, 46:17, and 71:28 - quite possibly others as well), we are enjoined to offer kindness, fairness, gratitude, and honor to our parents. Just one example demonstrates the significance of this, where the Qur’an parallels being grateful to our parents with being grateful to the Divine:

In this light, given the fact that my parents were in the room and I was impressing upon the gathering the significance of being a child of immigrants, I did not honor them appropriately by naming their presence.

And at the same time, a part of me wanted to protect them from who knows who and who knows what in the audience. I generally do not assume audiences to be ill-intentioned. But I also know that theatre audiences can carry with them a much more variable and conservative politics than might first appear to be the case.

I once facilitated post-show conversations at a major theatre in the DC area. The show in question overtly featured themes around Islam and Muslimness. There was also, problematically, one scene in which a drunk and outraged husband beats his wife for some kind of transgression (the details of which are escaping me). During the post-show, a white female audience member took the mic and said “I’m not a fan of wife-beating, but if there’s any woman who deserved to get beat, it’s her.”

My point: theatre audiences are wildly unpredictable.

So how does one simultaneously hold and enact the Divine commands to honor parents (which often carries with it a public dimension of presentation) and to protect family from “a Fire whose fuel is people and stones”? And, in a corollary, to protect oneself and one’s family from the very real and damaging effects of nazar?

Perhaps part of the answer is a recognition that protection is three things at once: a trust, an action, and an assessment. The action is, for example, building a fence around a garden to protect it from unwanted critters or digging a trench around a city to keep out invading attackers. It may also look like not introducing one’s parents to an unknown audience, maybe.

But in both examples, an assessment is also necessary. The garden cannot protect itself from being eaten - groundhogs and rabbits love vegetables. Similarly, a city with not enough people to defend it must resort to more sophisticated tactics.

Yet with my parents, perhaps I did not make an accurate assessment. Perhaps they were more ready to engage with or be recognized by the public than the part of me that made that decision was willing to admit. Or perhaps I held an idea that being a good family man, whether relative to one’s spouse, children, or parents, requires protecting them.

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There’s only so much that a person can do to protect their family. For ultimately, the final dimension of protection is a trust in the Divine that that protection is appropriate for the circumstance, rather than an outdated or outworn impulse from a time long ago. Indeed, the Prophet (pbuh) was told to say as much:

Perhaps the lesson is more about discernment - of knowing the difference between actual harm and perceived harm - than it is about not taking action in one direction or another. For if the Divine is the Ultimate Protector - Al Hafidh, the Preserver; Al Muhaymin, the Watchful Guardian; Al Wali, the Protective Friend - then taking a risk in belief and courage will always and forever be rewarded with Divine Security.

Just a thought.

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And with that, a du’a: I pray that you and I, in our dealings with family and our honoring of parents, are able to walk the line and toe the balance between risk-taking and protective measures, between calculated daring and daring calculation, between appropriate assessment and effective action, on the way to strengthening our trust in the Divine’s capacity to make magic happen, even and especially when we least expect it.

It was one of the most diverse art-making spaces I’ve encountered in some time, especially given how much whiteness gatekeeps the arts in the US.

Studies have shown that teaching artists nationwide are overwhelmingly white and female, in the realm of 80% or more.

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And even I, as a Muslim theatre maker and educator, rarely encounter others from my religious and racial background in theatre.

So imagine my surprise when I walked into this youth theatre making space and met with the dozen or so youth leaders to see a visibly Muslim, hijabi, Black sister among the group.

Mind. Blown.

Mind shouldn’t have been blown.

But mind was blown, nonetheless.

Throughout the days of my observation, beyond my regular duties, I made an effort to notice how the young woman was perceived in the space and how she related to her peers.

In a large group meeting as tension mounted about the amount of work that the group still had to do, she spoke up and reminded her peers to remember that theatre was about having fun.

When she dropped into one of the technical areas to ask a question about the needs of that department, they commented on how remarkable it was that she was able to wear a scarf and a full-sleeves sweater in the heat of New York summer.

When a teaching artist noted how the young woman was still getting to grips with her role even though they were already almost 2 weeks into the intensive, another staff member noted that they decided to include her because of her enthusiasm, even though she had no prior theatre experience.

This individual may not have been the brightest star of the whole enterprise, but there was a quiet power and commitment about her presence in the space.

Yes, there were other Black young women in the room - both within and beyond leadership roles. But the presence that she otherwise had struck me because it felt novel.

It shouldn’t.

In encountering this young woman, I wondered about what sorts of spaces we have made in this country for young Muslims to be involved in the arts.

Too often, we have conflated immigrant- or class-based anxieties around scarcity and not having enough with pushing young Muslims into careers in the sciences, engineering, business, finance, technology, and law.

The collateral damage has been a dearth of creative thinkers.

And yet, we have examples from our traditions about the significance of the arts. Prophet Dawood (pbuh) was a musician. Prophet Suleiman (pbuh) had a palace that was the aesthetic envy of the world. Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) watched and encouraged a war dance performance as an Eid commemoration in the masjid.

The Divine even directed Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) to read the Qu'ran in a musical way, speaking explicitly about rhythm (one of the three bases of music):

Subsequent to that, we have hadith from Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) instructing the rest of the ummah to read the Qur’an “in a melodious tone” and “voice” - melody is another of the three bases of music.

What does it mean that our immigrant and class-based anxieties have disconnected us from the melodious and rhythmic roots of Islam?

How can we profess to worship the Divine, one of whose beautiful names is Al-Khaliq (the Creator, the Maker), if we deny ourselves connection to all of the Divine’s qualities?

What might it look like for us to regain and recenter our creative and artistic lineage, especially in the US, moving beyond the spiritual closed-offness that marks our conservatism about the arts?

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Perhaps it might look like what some places are already trying, places like Khayaal Theatre in the UK and Lantern Theater in the US.

In time, it might not be such an anomaly to see a visibly Muslim woman in a mainstream theatre space.

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And with that, a du’a: I pray that whatever creative activities you and I undertake and engage in serve as an antenna to the Divine, offering you an opportunity to connect with The Creator of All Creation and a window into what it means to have been gifted, however fleetingly, with the capacity to generate something from something, recognizing that the type of generative work we engage in is only ever a pale imitation - if that - of the Divine’s capacity to make something, anything, and everything from nothing.

PS. Starting next week, I’ll be shifting my publication schedule to Friday mornings. Same great content, brand new day. Hope you continue to enjoy!

This is not my normal practice.

But doing so carried me through making breakfast and asking my father-in-law if he wanted coffee.

A few points of clarification about my father-in-law:

1. At the moment, he stays with my wife and I.

2. He has mobility challenges and advancing dementia.

3. One of his main preoccupations these days is why my wife and I don’t have children, yet.

4. He thinks coffee is a morning pick-me-up for him (it is, and it is also a vehicle for delivering medication he otherwise would be unlikely to take).

Also, he is not Muslim.

My wife came into Islam during her college years, well before she met me. Given her father’s cognitive decline and how long his condition has deteriorated for, it’s hard to know if he knows that she is.

But he, himself, is not.

Every morning, he closes his eyes and bows his head and recites Sanskrit/Hindu phrases in front of images of what he deifies.

And still, I serve him coffee.

This particular morning, I asked if he wanted coffee. I was still unkempt and not in especially remarkable clothes (even if my PJs are stylin’).

He told me that he was getting ready - unshaven and still getting to grips with the morning - so it could wait.

And as I was about to walk up the stairs, he looked at me.

“You look so fresh! Did you have a bath?”

“No,” I replied.

“Shave?”

“No,” I said, scratching the stubble on my face.

“You look so fresh!” He said again.

Nothing was different about me that morning, relative to other mornings.

Except that I had done dhikr.

It was perhaps only 15 or so minutes between brushing my teeth and preparing my breakfast, yet it made a visible difference on my face. Visible enough that a man who believes in multiple gods rather than the single Divine could see something, even if he was otherwise flummoxed or clueless as to how it happened.

The Qur’an is fairly clear about the significance and value of doing dhikr. Often translating as “to remember,” we are reminded of the beautifully circular relationship between one’s heart and one’s remembrance of the Divine:

More specific directions on how to engage in such remembrance come earlier in the Qur’an:

But when we think of this in English, there’s a curious split that happens. Because to remember something is to recall it or remind oneself of it, yes.

At the same time, to remember something is also to “re-member” it, where a “member” is an older form of a noun that describes a limb of the body (think of, for instance, the disturbing idea of dismembering somebody).

So what might it mean for dhikr to be a practice of re-membering?

Part of this is related to the fact that dhikr has a physical effect. In the same way that the repeated arm-swinging motion of a tennis player can internalize their comfort and familiarity with hitting the ball accurately, repeated mention and glorification of the Divine can internalize our relationship to the Divine.

This has a concrete, embodied consequence. The tennis player develops stronger muscles and increased discernment about which shot to hit at which instance. The dhikr practitioner develops a stronger spiritual center and increased precision in what repetition works best at which moment.

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Practice doesn’t make perfect. It makes permanent.

Or, in the case of my 15 minutes of morning dhikr while making breakfast, it makes physical.

The innate capacity for us to recognize this is not limited to a person who calls themselves Muslim. It is an impulse that is baked and blown into each one of us, no matter what sorts of earthly influences have shifted us away from that innateness.

Underneath all of that is our primordial nature: to connect with the Divine.

We just have to realign ourselves with it.

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And with that, a du’a: I pray that you and I each take increasingly frequent moments to re-member what makes us innately human, a connective tissue to the Divine that is embedded in all of us, fresh and refreshing all at once, so that our hearts - day by day, and moment by moment - can find and be at peace as we return to the Divine Spark within each of us.

Yoga, weightlifting, going for walks - these have all become part of my routine as I work to increase flexibility, strength, and endurance.

But I keep wondering if, as a result, I’m not being spiritual enough (whatever that means).

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Growing up, I received many implicit and explicit messages about my body.

As a young person, I saw individuals who were disconnected from their bodies, undertaking a healthy spiritual diet of reading Qur’an and doing salaat, but subsisting on small meals that traded minimalism for nourishment.

At age 14, I heard a mentor tell me and a number of other young people in the room that the weight we were at in that moment was the best one for us to maintain throughout our lives.

Subsequent messages around the value of and safety found in staying small translated to me always feeling that small and medium-sized garments (at most) were the right sizes for me, no matter how I grew or how much gravity caught up with me.

Years of sports injuries that did not heal properly and even more years of sitting hunched over a laptop in pursuit of secular education led to muscle weakness and tightness, especially in my back, neck and shoulders.

Now, as I work to improve that condition and strengthen those areas, I have daily rituals around movement and stretching and strengthening. These rituals require me to attend to what my body is telling me - an intense weightlifting session yesterday that leaves me sore today means a day of recovery, rather than further intense exercise, is what’s best for me right now.

Yet even as I do this, parts of me wonder if I’m wasting my time. For so much of the messaging I received was that spirituality requires asceticism, a removal from and disavowal of the body’s needs. Abstaining from sex, nourishment, and so on are said to be the way to spiritual purification.

This is a problematic attitude, seeded in Puritan and Christian ethics and things like the invention of monasticism. Islam is pretty clear that this is not the way to go; that instead, a middle path is to be taken. And that every act - including those that are tied to the body and one’s experience of this world through the sensorial - can be a spiritual one if intended and framed correctly.

My wife put it to me succinctly the other day, building on a concept I have known for some time:

“Your body has rights over you. And how you maintain it/the condition you keep it in is part of how it will testify in favor of or against you in the end.”

I’ve long been familiar with the concept of our bodies being loaners. We are kind of like cars: the vehicle is our body, the driver is our nafs or soul that takes us one direction or another, and the gas in the tank is the ruh or spirit that makes us go. This body that I inhabit - like the house I live in, car I drive, or computer I type at - has been loaned to me for a short while. Capitalism leads us to believe that this body and these items are, fundamentally, ours.

When I return that body by departing from it and handing it back to its rightful owner, the Divine who Created us all, questions will be asked of how I maintained it.

How did I keep it?

How did I improve it?

How did I ensure that the actions that I took with it furthered me being in right connection to the Divine and right connection to creation?

The Qur’an offers an important note about this, warning us that our entire body will be part of the way that we are held to account. Look at Surah An-Nur, ayat 24, speaking about those who falsely accuse others of things like adultery:

Then there is Surah Yaseen, ayat 65, speaking about those who do not believe:

And then, perhaps most evocative of all, is Surah Fussilat, ayat 20-23, which describes what happens in the dialogue on the Day of Accounting between those who disbelieve and their bodies:

The underpinning idea beneath all this is that physical actions have spiritual consequences. And not only that, but also: the body itself is a storage unit for one’s own spiritual health.

A cynical reading of these ayat might suggest that these testimonies are only occurring in reference to those who disbelieve or deny the wrong that they have done. Yet how do I know that I have not done wrong with my limbs or my eyes?

Am I certain that I look away or lower my gaze in reference to every scantily clad woman at the gym? There are a lot of them - am I sure that I avoided each one?

Am I certain that I donate charity by typing in my credit card info or putting money in a box without hoping that someone will see me doing so?

Am I certain that when I’m in a long line at the supermarket, another cash register opens, and I’m ushered into the new line that my gait doesn’t carry a slight pompousness saying “Haha, suckers!” to those still waiting?

Every one of those failures, if and when they happen, is something that my eyes or my fingers or my legs know about. They are actions that my body does and will remember.

Do I? And will I?

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Perhaps the approach to take is one in which - even when doing a seemingly physically focused task like weightlifting or yoga or going for a walk - I orient my reason for being as related to connecting to the Divine and honoring the sanctity of the bodily gift that I have been loaned.

Perhaps I ought to begin not from a place of wanting to develop greater physical strength or flexibility, but rather from a place of wanting to develop greater intimacy with the Divine, now and later on.

Perhaps I ought to set the intention that I am maintaining this body or doing these exercises for a spiritual purpose rather than a physical one. Perhaps I ought to renew that intention with each plank or dead bug or corpse pose.

Perhaps all of that would remind me that, ultimately, this physical body will disintegrate into dust and soil and dirt after my limbs and my organs recount to me whatever transgressions I have forgotten.

Maybe, then, my body doesn’t just become a place that keeps the score or grows more muscles. Maybe, then, it becomes a sacred thing that I have to care for as part of, rather than as something separate from, my spiritual essence.

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And with that, a du’a for you and me: I pray that in our connection to the Divine, we recognize the specialness and uniqueness of what it means to be responsible for the body that we have been entrusted with, singular and particular and distinctive as it is, with its own fingerprints and retina and DNA, all of which comes and goes as quickly as the blink of an eye, ultimately understanding this body as one whose maintenance, upkeep, and improvement is, in fact, a spiritual and sacred act.

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Even the notion that I “will” do something feels scary to me, mostly because I prefer to be careful with my word knowing that I may say that I “will” do something, but the Divine may have other plans.

In work emails, for instance, if I’m called into letting a student or colleague know about a probable future action that I intend to take, I prefer to speak in the language of intention or plan rather than concreteness. This is especially the case for non-Muslim colleagues and students I interact with, saying things like “I plan to do x” or “I look forward to doing y.”

In cases where I’m comfortable invoking the Divine in my everyday speech, like with my family or friends or some culturally sensitive and aware colleagues, I add an "insha’Allah” or a “God willing.” When I teach courses on Islam, those ideas also make an appearance.

English is a language that prefers definitiveness in the past, present, and future. My Islamic worldview, however, recognizes that any present and future that may exist is 100% contingent on what the Divine has in store.

So imagine my surprise when, the other day, my daily Qur’an reading featured ayat 47 from Surah Ibrahim:

I’m working my way through The Study Quran right now, and the commentary on this verse is particularly interesting. The commentators write that this verse is one of the only ones in the entire Qur’an that uses an active participle in relation to things we should attribute or not attribute to the Divine.

The word in question is mukhlif (مُخْلِفَ), which refers to one who breaks - particularly, in this iteration, one who breaks a promise. So by starting this ayat with a negation, the Qur’an is instructing its readers to never think, even for a second, that a Divine Promise to any of the messengers will be unkept.

But there’s something even further about this particular language, which is in the idea of the active participle. An active participle describes an action that is ongoing. It is continuing and perpetual. In English, because we smash action and the present moment together, there’s essentially no difference between an active participle (i.e. the type of action) and a present participle (i.e. when a particular action is occurring).

Yet none of the Divine human messengers, from Adam (pbuh) to Muhammad (pbuh) are alive any more - or so most of us think. So how could the Divine Promise to them still be ongoing action that is occurring right now?

What if we were to expand our thinking about who this is addressed to? And the temporality of what promising means? And what if our actions at this exact moment are part of the fulfillment of that Divine Promise?

Think about promises that the Divine made to Prophet Ibrahim, for example (Surah Al-Baqarah, ayat 124):

To this day, Prophet Ibrahim is regarded - across the globe - as the original monotheist. Three great faiths (Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) are united in being considered and called the Abrahamic faiths. And yet, among all of those who descend from Prophet Ismail (pbuh) or Prophet Ishaq (pbuh), Ibrahim’s sons, there are those who do evil.

What about promises that the Divine made to Prophet Muhammad? Surah al-Fath (ayat 28) and Surah at-Tawbah (ayat 33) say almost the same thing. Here is Surah al-Fath:

The Orientalist sociopolitical anxiety about the spread of Islam and its capacity to be a broad tent under which everyone (and I mean everyone, across time and space and place) can and will recognize the Oneness of the Divine is presaged here. The growth of Islam is ongoing. Birth rates are a huge factor in this - aka our current actions. By 2050, the number of Muslims worldwide is projected to be almost equal to the number of Christians (currently the largest religious group in the world). In my lifetime (if I hit the average life expectancy of an Asian male in the US of 80+ years), there may be more Muslims worldwide than any other group, fulfilling the above ayah completely.

And then there are promises that the Divine made to and about Prophet Isa (pbuh) and Imam Mahdi, the Messianic figures who all Muslims believe will restore justice to the earth after a lengthy period of upheaval and chaos and injustice (sounds like our current moment, no?). The Qur’an, and other scriptures, are aligned on this. See Surah al-Anbiyah, ayat 105:

The idea of being among the righteous is bandied about people in all sorts of positions of political power. But despite what they say, do the actions of Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth demonstrate righteousness? Or, as is more likely the case, drawing on the legacy of standing up to tyranny that a descendant of Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) - Imam Husayn - embodied, does another descendant of the Prophet, who both Sunni and Shi’a sources agree to be Imam Mahdi based on prophetic hadith, constitute one of those righteous servants who will enact good things for this earth at the appropriate moment?

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Underneath all of this is an important point. The Divine’s promises are not something that occurred back then, in the past. They are something happening right now, in an ongoing and continual sense. Believing that the Divine’s direct actions in this world are separate from the present day overlaps with an Orientalist anti-Muslimness that renders Islam as fixed, static, and backward. The Divine is here, present, now, doing the thing at this exact moment.

Do you feel it?

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With that, a du’a: I pray that you and I are able to see and feel and experience the presence and present-ness of the Divine in everyday life, not as an aside or as some kind of extraneous thing, but rather as the basic Essence of a living and live relationship with the Divine that is current and ongoing - always and forever right here and right now.

“Thank you for trusting in my driving skills!”

An older white lady called out to me in the Trader Joe’s parking lot as I got out of my car. Still bleary-eyed from my acupuncture-induced stupor, I looked up.

“Your car was so close to mine that I thought I would hit it!”

I still couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic or genuine, so I mustered up the only response I could:

“Oh!”

She continued:

“So thank you for trusting in my driving skills!”

And then, just before driving off, she made an Anjali Mudra gesture, aka a namaste gesture, aka a praying hands gesture. Which, in emoji speak, is one of these: 🙏🏽 - except she was white, so it was one of these: 🙏🏻

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I’m used to getting this gesture from unassuming white people where I live, most of the time as an innocuous expression of gratitude. Where I wasn’t quite expecting it, though, was at a recent Muharram majlis.

The maulana was narrating a story about Prophet Ibrahim (pbuh), and a moment when he invited over to his house some people from his community for a meal. To emphasize that Prophet Ibrahim (pbuh) was treating his guests well, the maulana said the word “respect” and pressed his hands together as in the emojis above. Then, the majlis continued.

The moment stuck out to me because there is, in some South Asian Muslim circles, reticence to use this gesture due to its strong association with Hinduism and Buddhism specifically, and their reference to/use of idols or statues. Some online Q&A forums on Islam claim that because the meaning of the associated phrase (namaste) is “I bow down to you,” then this gesture is equivalent to making a partner with the Divine and is therefore a big no-no - we’ll debunk this all in a sec, so stay tuned.

There is also a racial unease here. Whiteness, for example, has co-opted the gesture and the related namaste greeting as both hello and goodbye in yoga classes all over the country, often times without participants in these classes knowing the meaning of what they’re saying. Namaste as a concept has also moved into popular culture with various bags and t-shirts sporting related slogans. Political figures even used it as a non-contact greeting during COVID.

So what actually is going on here? A quick Google image search of “namaste” and “praying hands” shows images that look remarkably similar.

[praying hands search results above; namaste search results below]

The first issue to unpack here is that of bowing. On a literal level, the Sanskrit origins of the term refer to bowing to another person, with reverence. That action makes some of my fellow Muslims uncomfortable, because the understandable idea is that bowing implies lowering oneself to another and only the Divine is worthy of that.

And yet, if that’s the case, the Qur’an offers up two curveballs in Surah Yusuf. The first is in ayat 4, when Prophet Yusuf (pbuh), as a child, dreams of the sun, the moon, and 11 stars bowing to him, which his father - Prophet Yaqoob (pbuh) - interprets as himself and Yusuf’s mother/11 brothers bowing to him out of respect. The second curveball comes at the end of the surah, where we get the fulfillment of that dream, in ayat 100:

So how can we Muslims take issue with the concept of namaste (if it does, in fact, only refer to bowing to another person with reverence), if our own prophets did and benefited from this same action?

The second issue to unpack here gives us more clarity, and that is about the deeper meaning of namaste. In a spiritual sense, namaste isn’t about bowing - it is about mutuality. Reticent though I am to cite a white scholar on this topic, lest I perpetuate the appropriation of Indian cultural expressions, the sociologist Holly Oxlander has offered an elegant definition of namaste as “the sacred in me recogniz[ing] the sacred in you.” Or, in other formulations I’ve read elsewhere, the Divine in me recognizes the Divine in you.

There is nothing un-Islamic about this. Sufi psychology teaches us - derived from Qur’anic sources and the commentaries of luminaries like Imam Jafar al-Sadiq - that we are many layers: body, heart (qalb), intellect (‘aql), soul (nafs), spirit (ruh), and conscience. Multiple of these connect directly to the Divine and how we, as humans, are constituted. Indeed, when the Qur’an (Surah al-Hijr, ayat 28-29) talks about the creation of humans, we are told this:

“My spirit” is translated from رُّوحِى (ruhee). There is thus, literally, an extension of the Divine in each of us. That extension finds peace in proximity to the Divine, and even further, the innermost conscience finds in its ultimate return to the Divine.

Why, then, do we hesitate to recognize it in each other?

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There’s a lot to be said for staying away from anything that might tempt us away from the path to and of the Divine. Anything that smells of deifying something else other than - money, idols, people, status - the Divine is to be avoided.

And yet, if our connection is true, then the innermost meanings of things - whatever spiritual tradition they come from - ought to lead us straight back to the Source of All Things, without disavowing that core truth of all truths: that there is only one deity worthy of worship, and that is the Divine.

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With that, a du’a: I pray that your relationship to the Divine is based on that primordial and originating extension, an impulse that initiated all the energies that animate your everyday life, actions, relationships, and interactions to and throughout this world, such that that originating extension is a light you see in others and connect to, no matter what background they may come from.

For a variety of reasons, I chose to out a day later than I initially planned to, a choice that meant I change my flight, hotel, and rental car reservations.

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Changing the flight was easy enough. Southwest doesn’t charge change fees and the fare difference was negligible.

The hotel was a little trickier. I’d booked it through a third-party app and was within 48 hours of the original trip when I wanted to initiate the change, meaning that I had to get approval for the new dates.

So I sent them a message through the app, got no response, and called them the next day. The staff member told me that the manager had to approve this kind of date-change request, and that they’d tell her about it when she came in later that morning. By that afternoon, there was still no change - so I called once more and got hold of someone who would confirm the change. An email later, I had confirmation of my new hotel reservation.

But despite the minor follow-up that was needed for the hotel, it was the rental car reservation that reminded me how much easier life is when we 1) recognize the Divine’s plan and 2) submit to it immediately and entirely.

Similar to the hotel situation, I was trying to make a change to the rental car within 48 hours of the original booking. For that, the third-party site (booking.com) named a recommendation through their app:

“Want to make a change to your rental car reservation? Just cancel it and make a new one with the relevant changes.”

So first, I tried that. What the cute little prompt didn’t say was that that cancellation would incur a fee worth about 40% of the original reservation (close to $200).

That didn’t impress me much, so I called booking.com. In the past, I’ve been able to get them to call the rental car company (Hertz, in this case) and make a date change to a reservation, so I thought it would be simple enough in this case to do the same thing.

The agent agreed to call Hertz. But after putting me on a brief hold (it’s always a “brief” hold, even if it takes 20 minutes), she came back on the phone.

"I’m sorry, sir, but something is wrong with our calling system. I can’t call out to Hertz. I’ve escalated this to our back office team and they’ll take a look and I’ll email you as soon as I know something more.”

Curious. They couldn’t call the rental car company? Maybe it’s just a fluke, I thought.

Two hours later, an email came in from the agent.

“The back office team confirmed that we can’t make any changes to this reservation. If you want to make changes, you have to cancel it and make a new one.”

Undeterred, I waited until the next morning and called again, hoping to speak to someone else. My call was routed to a new agent, who - once again - agreed to call Hertz and see if a change could be made.

After another brief hold, he came back on the phone.

Booking.com Agent: “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t seem to call out to Hertz. I tried Googling their number and I tried the number we have for them in our internal system. Neither of them worked. It’s very concerning that we can’t contact them. So I’ve escalated this to our support team, and hope to hear back from them soon.”

Me: “Can I call Hertz myself and see if I can make a change?”

Booking.com Agent: “Sure - and if you get through to them, call us back and let us know which number you used.”

So I hung up with him, Googled the customer service number for Hertz, and dialed. Within seconds, I was connected with an agent. Marveling at the fact that I’d done nothing remarkable yet was still able to reach somebody where others had failed, I marveled further at the Hertz agent’s response to my issue.

Hertz Agent: “Well, sir, your rental car is part of a travel package sold by Priceline. And with all travel packages, we hold rental cars for 24-48 hours after the originally scheduled pickup time in case of flight delays or something like that. So if you’re only coming one day later, the car will still be available.”

Me: “But I reserved the rental car through booking.com.”

Hertz Agent: “Maybe they purchased the rental car from Priceline in a package and sold it on to you.”

Me: “OK, that’s great. But can I call Priceline to see if they can change the rental, maybe to my wife’s name instead?”

Hertz Agent: “You can call them.”

So I hung up with her and called Priceline, the final step in this saga. After outsmarting the automatic answering service, I got through to a live agent.

Priceline Agent: “Hello, thanks for calling Priceline - what is your full name?”

Me: “Hi, my name is Asif Majid.”

Priceline Agent: “Hello?”

Me: “Hello?”

Priceline Agent: “Hello, is anyone there?”

Me: “Hello? Yes, I’m here. Can you hear me?”

Priceline Agent: “OK I don’t hear anyone, so if you’re there please say something.”

Me: “Hello, yes I’m here.”

Priceline Agent: “I can’t hear you if you’re there, so I’m going to end the call now. Thank you for calling Priceline and have a nice day. [click]”

I laughed out loud to no one but myself. The lady on the other end of the phone literally could not hear me.

What a silly situation.

And then, upon further reflection, I couldn’t help but marvel once again.

Because how often do I find myself in a situation where I think I know what’s best and try to push for that despite having information that demonstrates something else entirely?

How often do I refuse to accept what’s in front of me?

How often does my attachment to a particular outcome - to coming up with solutions to problems that don’t actually need solving - get in the way of surrendering to the Divine’s elegant next step?

None of the third-party agents could connect with Hertz or even hear me because the information I needed - about the rental car being held for me - had to come directly from the source. And not only that, the thing that was mine (this rental car, in this place) was not going to miss me since it was for me.

So often, we go to all sorts of different places other than the Divine to understand the Divine. We go to lecturers or books or YouTube or whatever else. We go to friends and family and colleagues and public figures.

But do we touch base with our internal hearts that are primordially connected to the Divine? That are already so close that an intermediary and an intercessor isn’t needed in order to build that relationship and establish that connection?

Certainly, there is value in following a guide along an unknown path - someone who can tell you which turn to take or show you a way around an obstacle or provide you with a light source in the dark. We have many in our tradition, from prophets to imams to learned scholars and others.

Yet we also have a chance to strengthen our connection to the Divine through regular and consistent relationship-building where we attend to the Source rather than every single intermediary - especially if those intermediaries themselves don’t have appropriate or unfettered access to the Source.

What might it look like to know that the Source is the Divine, that a third-party with a malfunctioning phone line or one who cannot even hear you or one you cannot even access is not the right route through which to get the information you need? To establish the connection you deserve? To build the relationship that your soul warrants?

What might it look like to be focused on the Source rather than its derivations? How might that change our relationship to being a person of faith?

And perhaps more centrally, what is the impulse in me that pursues more information or answers and ultimately creates more confusion for myself and those around me even when I’ve already been handed a clear truth? What’s that about?

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The Qur’an offers us a very clear reprimand of those who do this, in the shape of the Bani Israel. In Surat al-Baqarah, ayat 67-74, the Bani Israel are traveling with Musa when there is a murder within their community. To find out who did it, they are commanded to sacrifice a cow, which - the story later reveals - will assist them in figuring out the culprit.

But before doing so, they ask myriad different questions about the cow: the type of cow, its color, and the type of labor it performs. Each time Allah responds, but then even when they’re given clear information, they undertake the sacrifice “hesitantly” and “not with good will.” It would have been better for them, the Qur’an tells us, if they had just accepted the information they were given the first time.

This episode is so central to the Qur’an that the entire surah is named after it - al-Baqarah translates as “The Cow.”

If we are given clear signs yet still push and prod and poke for something else, we are only harming ourselves. What might it look like to do otherwise, to surrender, to submit fully instead - even and especially when the Divine Wisdom behind that submission isn’t yet clear to us?

Of course, this will look different for everyone. But I can’t help but wonder how we may be able to trust that the Source will protect us from any route that is one of misinformation or disconnection and, instead, give us the avenue to know the Divine in a way that is the most direct and appropriate for our circumstance.

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And with that, a du’a for one and all: I pray that as you make your way through the world, you are able to recognize when a route is closed to you because that route, for whatever reason, isn’t the one you need in getting you closer to the Divine but rather, through persistence, perseverance, and placement on the occasional “brief hold,” you find, are aware of, and experience the route to the Divine that is the most direct and uninterrupted for you.

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The other day, I sat with my parents in a restaurant. It’s a happening Indian hotspot with a great halal weekend lunch buffet, unlimited mango lassi, and unlimited chai.

In the winter, their gajar halwa is on point. And back before the pandemic, they offered a delicious Gujarati thali on alternate Fridays.

What’s not to love?

When you first walk into the restaurant, there is a statue of Ganesha, one of the more prominent Hindu gods - a curious but not inexplicable inclusion in a halal Indian restaurant. Many restaurants across India integrate this kind of contradiction: Hindu context, Muslim embrace.

The restaurant itself is divided into two parts: one with the buffet and the other for dinner seating. There on a Saturday, we sat in the buffet section and devoured plate after plate of fish curry, tandoori chicken, Kashmiri biryani, and more.

I finished eating first (typical) and on the cusp of catching a train back to Connecticut soon after our meal, wanted to do salaat before leaving. I was going to go outside in the humid afternoon heat, when my mom suggested I ask the waiter if there was a place to pray.

“They won’t say no to that,” she said.

“You never know,” I replied.

“True,” she said.

I asked the waiter. He told me I could go into the other room, as they were about to close their lunch shift and reopen for dinner a couple hours later. So I got my musala from the car, re-entered the restaurant, and walked into the other room.

It was long and quiet, with banquette seating running along the walls. Tables and chairs rounded out the scene, the walls decked out with colorful, larger-than-life paintings of Indian life: three women outside a home here, a group of men in a bharat there, a royal posing for a photo somewhere else. All of them spoke to a strong and diverse, if somewhat imagined, heritage.

My main issue, though, was finding the qibla’s direction and making sure I wasn’t facing one of the paintings. So I found a corner, angled my musala just so, and began.

A few rakat into my salaat, I heard voices wafting into the cool and air-conditioned space from the kitchen. They were far enough back that I pushed them out of my mind, focusing instead on my connection with the Divine.

But then, a rakat or two later, I heard them again - this time closer and much louder. Then, silence.

With my body in salaat and my soul yearning, my mind began racing and my heart became afraid.

Was I holding them up from leaving?

Were they irritated I was there?

Would they say something when I turned around?

I could feel them watching me, their eyes focusing on what I was doing, matching the story that I told myself about being a restaurant interloper.

I thought about truncating my salaat, when a voice from within told me to calm down. There was no need to fear. I had asked permission to enter and was using the space per the waiter’s instruction.

I finished my salaat, completed a tasbih and some du’a, and turned to sneak a peek. Five of the kitchen staff, all men, were lying on the banquettes in various states of relaxation.

Each one was glued to their phones.

Not a single one of them even bothered to look up as I put on my shoes, folded my musala, and left the restaurant.

Nothing happened. At all.

In Surat an-Nisa, ayat 102, the Qur’an documents Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) receiving direction on how to perform prayer in a moment of fear. The verse specifically references conducting prayer amid circumstances of fear in a shortened way or in smaller groups - with one group armed and another group praying, before switching - in the event that one fears for their life, such as in war.

At the same time, in other places, the Qur’an describes how important it is for the believers to not be afraid, and instead to be certain that the Divine is with them, as in when Musa and Haroon feared that Pharaoh might be “quick to harm them or act tyrannically” or when the early Muslims fought the disbelievers at the Battle of Badr and they were overcome with a divinely inspired “serenity” that allayed their fear of the forthcoming battle.

What, then, is the difference?

English is a poor language to translate into, such that the nuances of what the Qur’an is saying in all of this is flattened. But the circumstances of all these situations are the key. In the latter two situations, fear was about anticipation that something bad might happen - punishment from Pharaoh or violence during the next day’s battle. In the first situation, fear was about what was actually happening right then and there - being in the middle of a fight.

One of them requires strength of belief and character that the Divine is with those who believe. The other requires practical and appropriate cautionary action.

My fear during salaat in the restaurant was not seeded in reality.

It was seeded in my mind.

It was seeded in what might happen rather than what was happening.

So often, perspectives that we hold about how something will unfold is not based on how that thing is actually unfolding. Rather, it’s based on how we think that thing may unfold.

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When can we give the little voice inside us, the one the speaks from a place of quiet courage and belief rather than what-ifs and fearmongering, the reins?

What does it look like to quiet one’s own anxiety and anticipation in favor of hearing things as they truly are?

And are we brave enough to admit when something isn’t actually what we thought it was, when - instead - the blessing of the circumstance is that we are led to see and hear things as they truly are?

For the old adage is true: everything you want is just on the other side of fear.

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With that, a du’a for one and all: I pray that amid all your doubts and discomforts, anticipations and anxieties, that when you are struck with a fear that later on turns out to be not quite as big of a deal as you first thought, that the Divine gives you the capacity and strength to recognize that for what it was and - instead - makes possible a rerouting of the part of your person, the signals in your brain, and the butterflies in your stomach towards a more clear-eyed understanding and vision of the world before you.

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Even though barely 1% of the worldwide Muslim population goes for hajj annually, the pilgrimage is almost universally the topic of jummah khutbahs in the prior week and Eid al-Adha sermons. Indeed, the first 10 days of the last month of the Islamic year are among the most sacred in the whole calendar.

Unsurprisingly, there’s been a lot of posts and writings on sacrifice lately - “adha” refers to sacrifice, honoring Prophet Ibrahim’s actions when he was commanded in a dream to sacrifice his son Ismail (who he had prayed years and years for) and, just as he was about to, the Divine replaced Ismail with a ram.

This particular episode is lauded in the Qur’an and within exegeses as a demonstration of the significance of Ibrahim’s belief and epitome of his faith. That he was willing to give up the thing that was most precious to him on this earth, for the sake of the Divine. And because it was such a significant thing that Ibrahim did, the Qu’ran says that the Divine responded in the following way:

For Eid salaat this past week, I visited my family and went to a community that I know well. There are, as with all things in life, advantages and disadvantages to going someplace familiar.

Advantages:

• Lots of people know you

• People are excited to see you

• Relationships feel comfortable

Disadvantages:

• Lots of people know you

• People are excited to see you

• Relationships feel comfortable

The person who offered the khutbah was the son of a former mentor of mine. He had gone through some professional work changes lately, leaving a job in the federal government for a new project in the start-up/nonprofit world in funeral/burial services, and reflected on that transition during his khutbah.

There was so much to do, he said, in this new role. His mind was overtaken by all the tasks before him, considering the weightiness of being responsible for someone’s final arrangements. It consumed him, such that one day, he awoke in the middle of the night and realized that he had been making an illah out of his new project, course correcting from then on.

In Arabic, an illah is a deity or a god. Allah, therefore, is actually al-illah, as in The God. Same, too, with the witnessing or testimony of faith that all Muslims must both profess and believe in to count themselves (and be counted) as Muslims - la illaha il Allah: there is no god but God, or there is no deity but The Deity, or there is nothing worthy of worship but The One That Is Worthy of Worship.

Purifying oneself, Islamically, often revolves around releasing attachment to anything else that could be or is being treated as an illah. The khateeb, in the remainder of his sermon, invited us to wonder about what types of things we have attached ourselves to - not just things like projects or people or physical things but also attitudes and self-images and so on.

Sitting there, I thought first of a project that I’ve been agonizing over for the past 6 months. It is a major grant that would reduce my teaching load and increase my professional growth by developing a new area of expertise for me. It also, in doing so, might make it possible for me to have a more flexible schedule to support the potential of changing family needs.

I’ve obsessed and planned and prayed to have this thing come to fruition, seeing it as a solution to problems that - though not yet fully problems - are somewhat likely to become problems in the future. For a while, it had become an obsession.

Then came a final step - a meeting with supervisors who had to provide a letter of support for the application to move forward. And based on major personnel changes that are ongoing around me, they said no.

I struggled to contain my emotions in the meeting - anger, frustration, fury, sadness, and disappointment all jostling for pole position - but ultimately found a way (only through the power of the Divine) for them to reconsider their stance. A few email exchanges later, we had some form of agreement: a much reduced version of the original plan.

I sweated about whether or not this thing was still viable or still able to meet both the personal and professional goals that I ascribed to it. But I also, in reflecting on the Eid al-Adha sermon, found myself realizing that I had made an illah out of this project. Rather than trusting that if this grant was good, it would come to me, and that if the problems I anticipated actually came to fruition, then the Divine would also provide solutions for them, I put all my eggs in the basket of this grant.

Why worry about funding and time when the Divine is the Funder of all funders and the Creator of all time anyway?

As we drove away from the khutbah, my wife and I reflected further on the message. Can you, I wondered, make an illah out of something that you’re praying to the Divine to make happen? Surely the act of praying about or for something means you are inherently recognizing that it is subordinate to that which you are praying to.

Gently and elegantly, my wife demurred. It is possible, she suggested, to attach so much hope and belief and expectation to something other than the Divine such that that thing becomes more important and takes more precedence than the Divine, even while still hoping that the Divine will make that thing come to reality. In fact, perhaps it is because of the power that I ascribed to the grant that I prayed to the Divine for it to be realized.

At one level, I was still a Muslim.

At another level, I had become a hypocrite.

Astaghfirullah.

And perhaps, rather than me seeing the meeting with my supervisors as a negative thing, I would be better served to understand it as a protection and redirection because - as a result of it - I was forced to sacrifice my belief and attachment to the idea that the grant would solve all the problems I had or thought I might have.

Subhanallah.

What else might I have to sacrifice to actually be worthy of the creed I profess and the testimony I recite multiple times a day?

What images do I hold or project of myself as a good man or husband, images that inflate my ego and make me behave in ways that could do with a course correction?

What ideas about nicety and putting-on-airs do I uphold, so as not to ruffle others’ feathers, choosing silence or inauthenticity rather than speaking up or on the truth when it comes to me?

How do I cast out the hypocrite within me?

How do I dismiss my attachment to anything other than the Divine?

How do I truly surrender?

In the exegeses of the ayat I referenced above, Shi’a commentators have offered an important variation on the mainstream Sunni interpretation of what equivalence was offered for Prophet Ibrahim in not sacrificing his son. Of course, there is agreement that a sheep or ram was replaced as a sacrifice in the moment. Some Sunni commentators suggest that this was perhaps a ram that had grazed in paradise for 40 years and/or it was one delivered to Prophet Ibrahim by Archangel Jibreel himself.

But every Qur’anic verse is laden with multiple meanings. The 19th/20th century Shi’a ‘alim and scholar, Ayatullah Mahdi Puya, has this to say about the episode (with greater succinctness than I can offer):

In verse 107, the sacrifice with which Ismail was ransomed is described as great by Allah, therefore it must be great in absolute degree. An ordinary ram by no means, in any sense whatsoever, can be termed as great; moreover under no circumstances a ram can be greater than Ismail son of Ibrahim, both the most distinguished prophets of Allah…The ransom, therefore, is essentially a great sacrifice Allah had kept in store for future when the religion of Allah would be perfected and completed after the advent of the Holy Prophet. It was indeed a great and momentous occasion when two men of God stood ready to offer to Allah that which was dearest to them [Ismail offering his life and Ibrahim offering the life of his son] to seek His pleasure, then Allah puts off this great manifestation of "devotion and surrender to His will" which was the real purpose of the trial (not blood and flesh) to a future date, so that the "devotion and surrender to Allah's will" should be demonstrated in a greater style and degree than what Ibrahim and Ismail could. This [is the] type of service Imam Husayn performed, many ages later, in 60 A.H., and as he was a descendant of Ibrahim and Ismail the credit of "the great sacrifice" goes to them [and him] also.

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Surely we can understand sacrifice on multiple levels. Yes, there is physical sacrifice of something that we love or find important. Imam Husayn and Prophet Ibrahim/Ismail laid down their own lives and the lives of their loved ones for the Divine.

But there is also sacrifice of one’s own beliefs and self-attachments, which these men did as well. Prophet Ibrahim gave up beliefs of what might have been the Divine when he - in his younger years - oscillated between believing in the stars, moon, and sun as his Creator before tossing those aside and praying for true guidance. Imam Husayn came to terms with sacrificing his right to leadership and the easier choice of giving allegiance to corrupt rulers of the time.

What might it look like to give of ourselves, both physically and spiritually, and the things that we hold dear?

How might the reward we get as a result be even greater than whatever we first imagined?

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With that, a du’a for one and all: I pray that in the moments of difficulty when we are attaching ourselves to something we are giving perhaps too much credence to, we are given the opportunity to sacrifice, to eliminate, to reduce down the excesses that make us lose touch with our connection to the Divine and, that when such an opportunity does arise, we have and can act on the conviction and courage we have to make such a risky, daring, and ultimately rewarding move.

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I used to live in an apartment across the street from a hospital. In front of the apartment sat a beautiful tree, which blossomed with bright red leaves in the fall. Upon first visiting the apartment, my wife and I were enamored by the bright colors, by the way that the tree shaded the apartment’s living room window.

One of our upstairs neighbors, a boy with autism and ADHD, took great pleasure in climbing the tree and nestling himself into its leaves, the bark and branches a natural respite from the busy and noisy city.

Have you ever loved a tree?

Now in the home where I live, the backyard is a quiet, flat square of grass. For months - mostly from overwhelm at being a new homeowner and a deluge of wintry snow - I didn’t tend to it. I let it run wild, growing well beyond 4, then 8, then 12, then 16, then 20, then 24, then 28, then 32, then 36 inches tall. Portions of the lawn that were previously barren began to reseed themselves, turning brown dirt into green grass.

I began to love watching the grass turn into a field. When a breeze would blow through the yard and the natural grasses swayed in the wind, I relished their patterns of movement. I began to cherish their back and forth swishing.

Have you ever loved the grass?

One day, without warning, men from a tree care company showed up. The had chainsaws and ropes and a truck and a woodchipper. They were not there to care for the tree. They were there to cut it down.

I went outside to confront them, to ask them who gave them the right to cut down our tree. They said it wasn’t our tree, but rather a tree belonging to the city, because it sat between the road and the sidewalk. It had been declared dead by the city’s arborist. It had been declared “in the way” of a forthcoming, soon-to-be-installed surveillance camera on a nearby light pole. I debated tying myself to the tree, but instead went back inside, helpless.

Have you ever given up on something you loved?

After a while, the grass had become far too tall. I tried to find someone to mow it, looking on this and that app. Ultimately, two men rolled up in a truck. I awoke to the sound of buzzing lawnmowers. When I looked out the window, half the backyard had been cut down to only a few inches tall. I felt an immediate pang of sadness.

Along the other half, a young man in a pink sweatshirt and white/black camo pants stood, shoving his push mower into and over the remaining grass. It was so tall that his machine shut off more than once, overwhelmed by the nature. I couldn’t bear to look. I turned to the side in bed and buried myself under the covers until they left.

Have you ever realized you’ve made a horrible mistake, but only found out what you had after it was gone?

From the living room window, I watched and witnessed as branch after branch thudded to the ground. Somebody had to pay attention, somebody had to care. And so I stood, feeling, staring, and listening as the ground shook at nature’s weight. The stumps were so heavy that the men couldn’t even lift some of them into their woodchipper.

I cried.

Later, after it was done, my wife and I happened upon one of the cuttings in the shape of a heart. We kept it on our back porch for a while.

Have you ever watched a tree die?

As the mowers buzzed around the lawn, I felt a visceral discomfort, the same unease I feel when a barber brings clippers towards my neck or ear. My spine shudders and my shoulders stiffen. The colonization of the land, the colonization of my hair - each of them frightened my soul.

I wondered if my ancestors also shuddered when the British turned forests into plantations.

Later, after it was done, I walked among the wreckage I paid for. A part of me was disconsolate at the shoddy job they did. Another part of me wanted to purify it all in its entirety.

Have you ever wondered what it means to be a steward of the earth?

The problem with we humans is neatly described in the Qur’an, especially in terms of our relationship to nature. Surah al-Ahzab, ayat 72, sometimes known as the Amana verse, has this to say:

Sometimes, the “trust” is interpreted as things like knowledge and truth. But it is also interpreted as stewardship of the earth, a “trust” in how we interact with the created world.

The heavens, the earth itself, and the hills - all of them were smart enough to know that justly engaging with the natural world is an extremely tall order. It requires judiciousness, an appropriate use and manipulation of resources (only to improve it, never to decimate it), and more.

In Islamic laws of war, it is forbidden to harm a tree or other vegetation before, during, or after battle. In Islamic laws of adoption, it is forbidden to take from or use an orphan’s property - the Qur’anic example is that of an orchard, garden, or livestock - except to maintain or improve it.

The heavens, the earth itself, the hills - they each knew this and their limits when offered the trust of stewarding the earth. They knew the responsibility was too great and so they shrank from it.

Humankind, on the other hand, arrogantly took on that responsibility.

And we have proven to be tyrants, fools, and thieves.

I read once (probably on Facebook, if I’m being honest) that the only thing that sets humans apart from other animals is our capacity for unmitigated, unfettered, and willing destruction.

No other animal does this.

Why do we?

And moreover, why do we wonder at or deny that the earth is heating, that storms are brewing, and that nature is fighting back? Are not the choices we have made, as failed stewards of these lands and waters, ones that demonstrate our haughtiness? Is it so surprising that our haughtiness would be our downfall?

There are myriad examples of this in the Qur’an, where arrogance about nature yielded natural consequences. Firaun’s belief that he could build a tower up to heaven was one of the reasons he was drowned in the Red Sea. The people of Thamud suffered a massive earthquake after not allowing the she-camel to graze on common land by hamstringing her. The list goes on.

As I ponder these experiences, both Qur’anic and personal, I find myself wondering what stewardship truly looks like. By which I mean stewardship in the Islamic sense of being trustworthy - that is, worthy of the trust that we’ve been given.

Is it cultivating an ethos of using less?

Or trying to maximize what you have?

Is it advocating for structural change?

Or enacting habits that do something different?

Is it crying over the loss of a single tree?

Or letting my lawn run wild?

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I struggle with the balance completely, especially knowing that this earth was created for our use.

Perhaps the key word there is use, not abuse.

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And so, a du’a: I pray that you and I cultivate a greater sense of attachment to the trust that we’ve been given, to enjoin that which is good and forbid that which is evil in relation to our physical environs, to exist and behave justly in relation to it, and to fulfill the responsibility of care, compassion, and kindness that we have to our fellow creation - from the free-flowing grasses and mighty trees to the smallest ant and enormous elephants - on the way to enacting the best possible relationship to the Divine, a relationship that requires, among many other things, honoring and respecting and cherishing the Divine’s creations.

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PS. I’ll be taking off for Eid al-Adha next week. Wishing everyone a joyous Eid, and looking forward to getting back at it the week of June 1st.

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It was a Friday, so I looked about for a place to do jumma. The closest masjid I could find was a fifteen-minute walk away, so I set out on foot about half an hour ahead of time. Google Maps reviews of the masjid said it would likely be crowded, since it was in the heart of Manhattan.

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I arrived at the address and entered the building. It was an older, rundown sort of place. The building directory didn’t say anything about a masjid, but I knew it was on the first floor upstairs.

Yet as I waited for the elevator, something felt off. This didn’t seem like the place. I looked around, walked over to the stairs, and pulled out my phone to read the description more closely.

Now, I’m no fan of AI (I have failed students for using it on assignments in my classes), but I do appreciate that Google Maps has now integrated an AI feature that summarizes a location’s reviews into a single sentence, offering a succinct encapsulation what to expect based on others’ experiences.

The summary said something like: “Reviewers say to be sure not to miss the entrance - it’s through a garage full of food trucks and street carts.”

What?

I was clearly in the wrong place.

I exited the building and walked a few steps down the block. There, sure enough, was a series of heavy-duty plastic curtains concealing the opening of a garage door. I pushed through.

Inside was met by a massive courtyard-like space. Sheets had been laid down for folx to pray on, transforming what was a parking lot for food trucks and street carts into a masjid.

A few men were lounging or had already begun some salaat. And in the corner was a set of stairs leading up to a small carpeted room: the masjid. I ascended, removed my shoes, performed my sunnah/nafilah, and got set for jumma.

The visit to this masjid flashed me back to a moment from my doctoral work in Manchester, UK, during Ramadan. There, at the back of a famous halal Indo-Chinese restaurant, the owners had set down sheets in the parking lot for folx to do salaat on. Many local community members came to this restaurant for iftar, but only three people at a time could fit in the single, purpose-built room that the restaurant had for salaat - others had to go outside.

I’ve reflected on this elsewhere (in my book, Making Muslimness - DM me your email address if you want a free PDF of it, by the way!), but it strikes me that this is a thing we Muslims do: transform spaces from “secular” to sacred.

I put “secular” in quotes because I don’t believe there is such a thing as a “secular” space, in the truest sense of the word. This is not least because of the Prophetic hadith about the entire earth being a masjid, and therefore wherever you are at the time of salaat is an appropriate place at which to perform it. Think, for example, of the recently revived video of folx doing taraweeh in Times Square (thanks to comedian Mo Amer for featuring it on The Daily Show) - a transformation of one of the most sensorally overwhelming, capitalism focused, entertainment oriented spaces in the world into a place of prayer.

This happens everywhere. And it isn’t an accident. From café rooftops in Kuala Lumpur to vacant classrooms in London, the transformative potential of the Islamic politics of space is everywhere.

I sense that this speaks to an even wider phenomenon. I sense that part of what’s at play here is a deep unease (in a good way) with us being souls stuck in physical bodies.

Let me explain.

If the soul is oriented towards the Divine, yet is trapped in physical form, then yearning to reconnect with that Divine - even in fleeting moments like daily salaat - requires transforming the soul’s physical environment into a spiritual one.

Soulfulness cannot fully flourish in a physical environment that is not set aside, or is not particularly focused, or is not specifically oriented towards the Divine.

And when whatever we find, see, and touch around us does not remind us of the Divine, we have to make it remind us.

This necessitates changing one’s physical into something metaphysical, where laying down a jacket or blanket or spare bedsheet with the intention of connecting to the Divine suddenly makes it a sacred space.

How many times have I put down some kind of cloth on the ground, to do salaat in an airport while on a layover?

Immediately, the purpose and function of the location becomes something different. It becomes a space that resists the logics of the place’s design. It becomes a reflection of one’s commitment to prioritizing the Divine, wherever one may be.

This, I think, is one of the things that sets Islam apart from many other religions. Ultimately, you do not need a specific physical location to be a Muslim.

What you need is a spiritual transcendence that goes beyond the tangible and into the realm of the ethereal.

What you need is a commitment to the cause of connection.

And what you really need need is action that activates attachment to the Absolute, actions that are not limited to keeping the Divine in a single place.

How could we even do that, when the Divine is the one that created all those places in the first place?

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The Qur’an tells us repeatedly that this world was not designed for play or amusement. Perhaps that’s part of the reason why, in this day and age of constant entertainment and frivolity, we so regularly transform it into a place of prayer: as a reminder of and return to its original purpose for existing, that of hosting human-Divine connection.

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And with that, a du’a: I pray that whatever space you and I find ourselves in, we are able to harness the courage to establish connection to the Divine on whatever ground is before us, with whatever materials accompany us, and with whatever purity can join us, in order to bring to light and into practice closeness and nearness to the Divine, which is, in and of itself, the ultimate gift of all.

The topic? Contentment.

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The maulana was talking about the life of Imam Ali al-Rida, the 8th Shi’a Imam. He had the honorific title al-Rida - which translates as “the pleasing one,” “the one who is content,” or “the one who is satisfied” - which allies and enemies alike used to refer to him. At jummah, the maulana used this title and stories of the Imam as a jumping off point to help us understand the of contentment in the Islamic ethos.

He talked about this in many ways: in calamity, in finances, in work, in family, and more.

But there was one metaphor he used that blew me away. The maulana said that to achieve contentment in the appropriate Islamic way, we all ought to be more like bank tellers.

Bank tellers? I was confused.

Yes, bank tellers. Because bank tellers sit all day receiving and passing out money. They take in and give out probably thousands of dollars in a given day.

But crucially, they do this without emotional attachment or affect - perhaps because this is a job but also, more importantly, because the money they’re handling isn’t theirs.

The money the teller transfers either belongs to the bank or to the customer they are passing it to. The teller is simply a medium, a middleman.

So why do you hesitate to give zakat, he asked, knowing that all of your money doesn’t belong to you anyway?

My mind exploded when he said this (not literally, I’m still intact, alhamdulillah - but you get my drift).

It wasn’t because of the way he framed this in relation to money. Rather it was because of the broader implications of what it means to be content in this world.

Think about it:

• How often do we get attached to a thought that is just passing through us, obsessing over the possibility of that thing or that idea with no justifiable basis that it is seeded in reality?

I went to get something framed recently and saw a gentleman in line who got attached to using a particular frame for his artwork, only for the staff member to tell him that that frame was out of stock. The customer offered to call the framing warehouse to find out when it was going to be available, he offered to buy the frame himself and bring it in, he offered to wait until the frame was back in stock thereby missing out on the ongoing sale - anything he could do to fulfill his attachment.

• How often do we think that we know the purpose for the things that we have, when there may in fact be another more important purpose to attend to later on?

This past weekend, I was entering a store when a man stopped me and asked if I had $2 for the bus. I said no and that I didn’t have any cash. But as I reached the store’s doors, I remembered I had a $20 bill in my wallet. So I asked the cashier to break my $20 into $5 notes, intending to give one to the man outside. It took a while for the cashier to figure out how to open the register without a sale and by the time I went back outside with a $5 note in hand, the man was gone. I looked for him or for someone else to donate to, but there was no one. The next day, I got a piece of mail saying that my wife’s car needed an emissions test - which can only be paid for in cash: exactly $20. The money had another purpose, yet to be revealed to me.

• How often do we think that the thing we have - the job, the house, the stuff - is ours for good, rather than just being ours until the Divine deems it is time for someone else to have it?

My workplace is going through tremendous turmoil at the moment with people leaving and others shifting positions. At least four of us (myself included) have been thrust into new leadership positions as a result of all the change, positions that - at least for me - I never would have considered going for were it not for the fact that others left or are leaving theirs with sudden notice. But when the Divine says it is time to change, stepping up is required.

For the maulana at jumma, the only way through all these ups and downs is contentment. He was quick to point out that contentment doesn’t imply a lack of emotion or feeling, pointing to the story of the Prophet’s (pbuh) sadness at the loss of his infant son Ibrahim.

The Prophet was crying at the loss, but even in that moment, reminded himself and those around him of still being content with the Divine’s actions, with what the Divine has given or taken, with whatever circumstances have unfolded.

Contentment, in other words, is the deepest capacity to remain steadfast in accepting of what has come and giving of what has been given to you.

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What if we were like bank tellers with our careers?

Our reputations?

Our love lives?

Our relationships?

Our homes?

Our stuff?

What if the bank tellers hold the secret to detachment, not because of what they do but because of how they do it?

What if, at root, we concerned ourselves less with attachment to that which we are dispensing and more to that which is the Source of all that can be dispensed and the capacity to dispense at all in the first place?

What might it look like to maintain the je ne sais quoi of letting things just pass through, because everything that we touch and see and feel is all temporary and fleeting anyway?

It might look a lot like contentment.

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And so, a du’a: I pray that amid all the chaos and madness of the world, the injustice and the pain, the uncertainty and anxiety, the trials and the struggles - I pray that amid all of that you and I can find the means and capacities and inner resoluteness to maintain steady and deep contentment, whatever comes and whatever goes, knowing that we, too, one day, will be of those things that pass through and go, returning from whence we came to the Divine’s embrace.

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Initially, my train was scheduled for 8 PM - the latest one I could get, not knowing how long the show and post-show would go. Having already left my bags at the hotel, I intended to see the show, find a place to do asr, have a relaxed dinner, and head to the train station.

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So imagine my surprise when, as the show was concluding, I overheard an usher mention that the talkback was only 20 minutes long, ending around 4 PM. I checked Amtrak - there was a train leaving at 4:30 PM, which was just enough time to get my bag and get to the train station.

The talkback ended promptly and I zoomed out of the theatre, into the respectable rain and through Times Square. The hotel was only a few minutes away, but I arrived fairly wet. Upon retrieving my bags, I jumped onto my phone and changed my train ticket.

In the midst of this, the concierge approached me. I did not notice him, my head buried in my device, struggling to input my credit card information, until he spoke:

“Excuse me sir, do you need a taxi somewhere?”

Hyperfocused on the task in front of me and (probably subconsciously) upholding a scarcity mindset even though I was on a work trip, I disregarded his offer.

“No thanks, I’m just going to do this train thing.”

The ticket went through and I headed out, my GPS showing a 12-minute walk to the train station.

Plenty of time, I thought.

I launched my feet and luggage past tourists, over puddles, and through crosswalks. Rushing down the street in the unrelenting rain, I walked so fast that my shins started hurting.

Splish, splash, ow, splish, splash, ache, went the cadence.

Through my befogged and rain-splattered glasses, I saw the train station ahead of me, a major meeting place of city-specific, regional, and national rail services. 4:18 PM.

But my GPS showed it a little bit further away.

So instead of going straight, I turned right.

Disaster.

Sidewalk gave way to construction, and I was in the wrong spot. I turned around, spotting another entrance to the station and headed towards it, dragging my luggage into traffic amid honks and screeches.

Approaching the second entrance, the door was locked. No way in. Two other pedestrians also approached, and one relayed that there was another entrance - back the other direction.

It was the one I’d seen but hadn’t taken.

Splish, splash, ow, splish, splash, ache - I rushed back, praying to my Lord to get me to this train on time. The week had been long and meandering. I was ready go home.

I got onto the escalator, descending below. 4:22 PM.

When you’re in a rush, there are few things worse than being on an escalator. In a moment of calm, they are brilliant for enhancing the slowness of your day. But in a hurry, they are often infuriating.

This one was no exception.

At the end, I grabbed my luggage and raced through the station. A text message:

"Your train will be departing from Platform 8.”

Signs throughout the station pointed the direction. First Platforms 12-21, then Platforms 1-19, then Platforms 1-12. I followed the arrows, entered another hallway, and passed by number after number.

1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 - 8! I hurtled towards the escalator on the right.

But instead of going down to the platform, it rose up from it.

Escalators are indeed enemies of the frantic.

4:26 PM.

On the opposite side of the up escalator was a set of stairs. So I sprinted down those, unceremoniously thumping my carry-on down each step

There, at the bottom, on Platform 8, was my train.

With one last heave, I lifted my bags onto the train and paused in the vestibule to catch my breath, rain-soaked clothing and luggage dripping everywhere.

4:28 PM.

I entered the mostly empty carriage, put my luggage in the rack above, and sat down.

Alhamdulillah.

Barely a moment passed before the train started moving - apparently, I was facing backwards. I regrouped and picked another seat, forward-facing this time.

As the journey progressed and my clothes began to dry, I found myself wondering about the concierge and his offer. It was a mercy from the Divine, the offer to call me a taxi and - in anticipation - save me from the pain and rain. Yet I turned it down.

Why?

The situation was difficult enough as it was, but I made it more difficult upon myself.

Why?

The trip was to be fully covered by the project budget, yet I still felt like I could not afford a 5-minute cab ride to the train station.

Why?

In Surah Ash-Sharh, the Divine addresses Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) directly, describing how the Prophet’s heart has been uplifted, his burdens have been made easier, and his reputation has been enhanced. And then, verses 6-7 say this:

There’s a lot of popular discussion of these verses, because of the way that they promise ease with difficulty. Not before or after but rather concurrently. At the same time. With.

The concierge offering to call me a cab, while I booked a ticket. The other pedestrian indicating where the station entrance was, while I was flustered in the rain. The conductor agreeing to come back and scan my ticket when it initially didn’t load, while I sat drenched and drained in my seat.

Yet I find it so difficult, at times, to notice, acknowledge, and accept these mercies in the midst of hardship. Wouldn’t a $20 cab ride have saved me a lot of headache? Wasn’t it worth it?

And yet, there is no added benefit or value in additional suffering, in disregarding the mercies that the Divine sends in moments of trial.

What does it say about my image of the Divine or my attempted over-reliance on myself that I chose the path of most resistance rather than the path of least?

Who am I - and who are we - to make things harder than they need to be? And moreover, who am I - and who are we - to disavow the Divine’s mercies when that same Divine is the one that created us?

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The Qur’an has it right all along, because the Divine:

Is there a way out of the morass that is me wronging myself, us wronging ourselves?

Can I - can we - recognize the mercies that show up with and alongside difficulty, in the exact moment of that happening?

Can my own - can our own - scarcity shadows, infected by capitalist profiteering and neoliberal flexibility, take a step back in favor of other values that matter more (comfort, dryness, and not getting lost)?

I don’t know, but I hope so.

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And so, a du’a for one and all: I pray that you and I can interrogate the paths that we haven’t taken - not from a place or regret or what-ifs, but from a place of learning and healing - so that when we are next faced with such a circumstance, we see within it the ease and the difficulty, marveling in and connecting to and appreciating the Divine’s capacity to so elegantly provide both at once.

For the first time in a while at a conference, I was not presenting. Rather, I was listening, taking in ideas and perspectives on Muslim mental health as I (insha’Allah) slowly but surely attempt to move in the direction of researching the intersection of theatre, trauma, and Muslim refugee youth.

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There’s a different mode of magic that comes into play when listening rather than speaking, receiving rather than doing, absorbing rather than acting. For someone who tends towards speaking first, it’s a curious and compelling reminder to remember the value of taking things in and letting them settle.

The Qur’an reminds of this in Surat al-Ma’idah, ayat 82-83:

More than once over the weekend, I heard people speaking truth and started tearing up. I wrote down quote after quote in my notebook. Many of them related to trauma:

“trauma is a whole different monster when it’s unhealed”

those who have “overcome their trauma” become “credible messengers”

“what are we being polished for? what are we being sharpened for?”

“Western mental health contributes to an erasure of the soul”

“emotional mastery is a sign of true strength” because “the Sunnah is to appreciate the emotional experience”

“silos are a failure of spiritual imagination”

And the one that hit me the hardest:

“if hurt people hurt people, then healed people heal people”

Subhanallah.

What might it take to be one of those healed people, I wonder?

In alignment with where my research seems to be going these days, I’ve been thinking a lot about what Islam says about trauma - but not in the way that others might be thinking of it.

For the Qur’an, to me, feels pretty instructive on this topic. The first few verses of Surat al-Ghashiyah (ayat 1-7), which is traditionally interpreted as a discussion of the perils of punishment in the afterlife, might also describe a trauma response:

Sounds terrifying.

And so is the experience of trauma.

“A whole different monster when it’s unhealed,” trauma can result in lived experiences not too far off from some of this.

Trauma responses are almost always overwhelming to one’s system. Being downcast (i.e. depressed), overburdened (i.e. overwhelmed), and exhausted (i.e. disassociating or zoning out or shutting down) are natural consequences to a nervous system that has reached its limits.

But what about the next few segments, you may ask? How could burning or drinking or eating relate? The Arabic root words offer some insight here.

The word used for a “scorching fire” is naar, which comes from the same Arabic root as noor (light) and munir (illumination). What if the fire of trauma, the hurting of it, is actually the place where healing can also happen?

Next, we have ayin as the word used for a scalding “spring” as in a spring of water, which shares a root with ayn (eye), referencing a source of water or a source of vision. What if the core or source wound, as it’s often described, is burning with reactivation again and again in a trauma response, a spring that can’t be shut off?

Then, we have dhariya’ which renders a “foul, thorny shrub,” a tasteless plant from the Hejaz region of today’s Saudi Arabia, the Qur’anic Arabic of which shares a root word with dhara’a (to humble). What if a trauma response feels like a humiliation, a lowering of oneself the most base dimensions of personhood?

Finally, we have a lack of nourishment or “satisfying hunger,” which comes from ju’in, a term that shares a root with ja’a (empty in the belly, longing). What if a trauma response yielded an inability to attend to one’s physical needs, specifically disconnecting an individual from their body’s cues about hunger?

Plot twist: these, among other things, are - in fact - exactly the types of things that trauma and trauma responses do to an individual: makes it harder to know when to eat, surfaces feelings of humiliation, and reactivates a source wound over and over again.

The Qur’an taught us this over 1,400 years ago.

But crucially, it also taught us how to heal.

Because what was it that Rumi said?

“The place of the wound is where the light enters.”

(also a quote that someone dropped at the conference!)

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There’s often a limitation that we impose onto the Qur’an, especially those of us for whom Arabic isn’t a first language, where we rely on translations and transliterations that only capture one level of meaning: the literal one, which a specific translator has rendered. And then, without understanding, we argue about those interpretations and attempt to make meaning of the Qur’an in that light.

The reality, however, is that each verse (nay, each word!) has multiple layers of meaning. Imam Jafar as-Sadiq said there were 4 layers (literal, allegorical/metaphorical, hidden meanings, and spiritual). The Prophet himself indicated 7 layers (external and then hidden meaning, which contained another hidden meaning, which contained another hidden meaning, and so on).

Who are we to keep the Qur’an so small?

Why are we so afraid of its hidden depths?

And why are we blinding ourselves to its layers and layers of truth?

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With that, a du’a: I pray that wherever you may travel in the coming days, weeks, and months - whether through your literal body or in your intellectual mind or via your emotional heart or into your spiritual existence - that your travels take you to and through the truth, always and forever servicing as a source of reflection and inspiration in achieving greater and closer connection to the Divine.

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Mostly, this is because of a number of changes happening in my professional environment.

My department consists of about 30-35 faculty/staff. Over the past year, the following has occurred:

• approx. 5 of us have lost a loved one

• about the same number have had to care for (an ailing) loved one (or multiple)

• our most recent department chair left her position to take another job, with approx. 3 weeks notice

• by the end of this year, 5 folx will have quit, retired, or left the university for one reason or another

• our department has been flagged as having multiple “low enrollment” programs, and faces the threat of closure if things don’t change

And beyond all that, since I’ve worked at this university (starting in 2022) there have been at least 3 presidents and 3 provosts, possibly more (I’ve lost count).

Amid all of this, somehow, I’ve been floating along and doing my thing. I attribute a lot of that capacity to being a person of faith (and acupuncture and going on walks).

But I also feel that much of this flotation comes from an awareness of awe, in the Divine’s capacity for destruction.

This isn’t a particularly sexy topic among Muslims of a certain generation (millennials and younger, I’d suggest), primarily because many of the ways that folx learned about the Divine through their parents or grandparents was with a lot of associated doom and gloom. Kind of like this:

Child: Why do I have to do salaat?

Parent: Because otherwise Allah will punish you.

Or, something like this:

Grandchild: Why do we fast?

Grandparent: Because otherwise we will burn in the fires of hell.

Dramatic. Unfortunately, also very common.

As such, I’m a bit wary of wading into this dimension of the Divine because it is often easier to stick only with the supposedly positive characteristics of the Divine, especially in a time of such wanton destruction: things like mercy, truth, light, and forgiveness.

Undoubtedly, these are all significant, and indeed there is a hadith qudsi indicating that the Divine’s mercy prevails over His wrath.

This yields two questions, then:

1. Why are so many of us focused on the destructive potential of the Divine rather than His more lenient qualities?

2. Why would I focus on destruction in this post?

Both of these questions yield a similar answer: it depends on how we imagine the Divine.

Humans are, inherently, limited. We are souls with spirits in a body, a body that has and takes physical form, a physicality that means we have been prescribed a beginning, middle, and end. Certainly, bodies grow and change throughout life. But ultimately, they die and degrade.

The Divine, by contrast, neither “is born” nor “dies.” The Divine is limitless, unbounded, superseding time and place. Ultimately, the Divine is beyond gender and the 99 names or qualities that we use as descriptors.

The issue is that we limited humans are attempting to comprehend that which is limitless.

As a result, the characteristics we emphasize about the Divine say more about us than they do about the Divine.

If we focus on names like Ar-Rahman and Ar-Raheem, which emphasize different kinds of Divine Mercy, then we start to see ourselves as out of control and in need of Divine Mercy. If we focus on names like Al-Wahhab and Ar-Razzaq, which emphasize the Divine’s capacity to bestow and provide, then we start to see ourselves as impoverished recipients dependent on the Divine’s gifts. If we focus on names like Ar-Raqib and Al-Basir, which emphasize the Divine’s all-seeing and all-witnessing capacities, then we start to see ourselves as blind and only able to access partiality in any given moment.

All of these approaches add different dimensions to our visions of ourselves, as well as our visions of the Divine.

Yet in the contemporary age, we are often reticent to approach Divine Qualities that appear to us to be negative, names like Al-Mudhill (The Dishonorer or The Humiliator), Al-Khafid (The Reducer or The Abaser), and Al-Mumeet (The Creator of Death).

Why?

Because there is no escape from the “negative” qualities. There is only acceptance of them. The individual who is dishonored or humiliated or reduced or abased cannot fight that circumstance. They can only accept it.

I can only accept that my family lost a loved one within the past year. I can only accept that my workplace is in shambles. I can only accept that my future employment may not exist.

Any other tactic simply yields unnecessary self-inflicted suffering.

The Qur’an is very clear about this:

In other translations, the second half of the ayat is rendered as “man wrongs his own soul.” In either case, it is we who make our own situations worse.

Because whereas contemplation of the “positive” Divine Attributes may lead me to humble myself or reform myself, contemplating the “negative” Divine Attributes leads me to detach myself from the dunya and re-attach myself to the Divine.

My job dissolving or my loved one taking her last breath has a finality about it, because I cannot resurrect anything.

I can do nothing about these circumstances except submit to their reality, a reality that is crafted by The Ultimate Reality that is The Divine.

The Divine Qualities are a holistic package, because (from a human perspective), they all achieve the same ends: bringing humans closer to the Divine.

We cannot only take one type without the other, thinking that we know better about what is best for us. Again, the Qur’an is clear:

Maybe it is our own limitations that are keeping the Divine small, rather than daring to contemplate every aspect of what the Divine entails.

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What would it look like to engage in capacious consideration of the Divine’s true balance of power?

To reflect on everything rather than just something?

To wonder what it is that exists beyond the form through which we take in and experience our environments?

To be curious about why we seek pleasure and avoid pain?

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Things to think about.

And with that, a du’a: I pray that whatever destruction, dissolution, and disintegration we find ourselves negotiating right now, we are strengthened through that experience to come closer to the Divine and, in that closeness, build whatever it is that we are meant to construct in our communities, contexts, and chronologies.

The bigger issue was that this particular set of trails in this particular park is notorious for being hard to follow.

Mountain bikers’ paths crisscross the terrain, and few of the trails are properly marked with blazes that make them easy to follow.

So after following a blue-blazed trail for almost an hour, passing over streams, through forests, and along ridgelines, I came to an intersection.

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Straight ahead, the blue-blazed trail continued. Crossing that trail, to the left and right, was an unblazed trail, one that (according to Google Maps) was called the Nipmuck Trail. Named after one of the indigenous nations of this area whose land was stolen by colonizers in the 17th and 18th centuries, the trail cut deeper into the forest on the right. On the left, if I followed it far enough and long enough, it led back to the car (so said Google Maps).

What to do?

Stick with the clearly marked path but end up with a longer hike home?

Or risk getting lost on an unmarked path in a place where my GPS and phone signal could give out at any minute?

I turned left. It turned out to also be a turn towards faith.

For a while, the trail was fine. I periodically pulled out my phone to check that I was still following the dotted gray line that led back to the road where I parked.

All good.

The path ascended and then descended, moving out of soft pine needles and into crunchy leaves. Another check of the map.

Still good.

It then hit a few small stream crossings, before happening upon a much larger stream called Roaring Brook (so said Google Maps). I crossed the Brook and sat down to have some snacks and water. Now hydrated and nourished, I got up, walked a few yards up the trail, and checked the map again.

Not good.

The pulsing, pale blue-and-white dot (thanks, Voyager 1 and Carl Sagan) that represented my phone and I was off in the dark gray hinterland of the park somewhere. The Nipmuck Trail was, somehow, way off to my left, with no path leading to it.

At this moment, pointing my phone in the direction of the trail, I considered my options:

• A: retrace my steps and go back to the blue-blaze trail

• B: stay on the path I was on and hope that it connected with the Nipmuck Trail

• C: bushwhack across the marshy bog to my left and hope to encounter the Nipmuck Trail where Google Maps said it was

• D: cry

I ruled out Option A because it would be too time consuming. I ruled out Option B because I had no evidence that my path would intersect with the Nipmuck Trail. I ruled out Option D because while it may be cathartic, my problems wouldn’t be less significant.

Option C it was.

So, I turned left and began moseying through and across marsh and bog and moss and standing water, trying to stay as dry as possible.

Towards the end of Surah Ali ‘Imran, the Prophet is counseled on how to handle difficult situations (this is related, I promise).

The Qur’an details his experience at the Battle of Uhud, when he assigned a number of Muslim archers to hold their position on a hill overlooking the battlefield, no matter what, so that they could protect the Muslim army’s rear flank.

When these archers saw that the Muslims were winning the battle, many of them abandoned their posts to join in gathering the spoils of the battlefield. The enemy commanders, seeing this, took their forces around the now-unprotected hill and attacked the Muslims from behind, turning the tide of the battle. It ultimately ended in a stalemate (or a Muslim loss, depending on whose accounts you follow).

Subsequently, once the battle was over, the Prophet did not shame or publicly admonish the archers who disobeyed his orders. The Qur’an comments in this way:

But then, the ayat goes on to say something quite powerful:

If all things go back to the Divine (which they do), then making the decision to take the unmarked trail in the hopes that Google Maps, GPS technology, my phone battery, the weather, my shoes, and the terrain of the woods would do me a solid really about trusting the Divine.

Not a single one of those things was in my control.

All were essential to make it safely back to my car.

Each of them was in Hands that guide my actions and protect me from and through all that I might otherwise bumble into.

How often do I make a decision and fully put my trust in the Divine, especially when that decision is one that I am unsure about?

How does the risk that I take in making a decision I’m not 100% certain about provide an opportunity for me to put de-center myself and re-center the Divine?

What would it look like for that decision-making process - any decision-making process, really - to begin and end with the idea that I am being fully, truly, radically, and completely held by the Divine?

What might I be willing to do or try or believe or enact?

The writer EL Doctorow has said that “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Replace “writing” with “life” and Doctorow’s pro-Israel positions with pro-Palestine ones, and the man may have been onto something.

The Divine give us the tools that we need just at the moment that we need them - not a second earlier. Trust in that fact and process, even and especially when decisions are not fully clear, is what the above ayat is talking about.

It is a command to make a decision and have trust.

It is a command to tie up your camel and pray to the Divine for its protection.

It is a command to step onto some squishy moss and hope that you don’t sink into the muck.

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Trust in the Divine got me back to the path, back to my car, and back to my computer to write this post.

I wonder what else it can do, for me and for you.

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With that, a du’a: I pray that you are able to make decisions and trust in the right thing of them working out for you, even and especially when they are unclear, knowing that the Divine is in full control and complete charge of every thing, time, place, person, circumstance, situation, and idea that any of us can possibly imagine.