That’s when the official movement for basic legal rights for women started in New York, called to be the Feminist movement. Soon it took over the world by storm, and still today in many developed places and other minor countries, women and men alike vouch for the movement.

But in this modern world feminism has lost all its meaning, and has become a fight against men rather than preaching equality. You can argue how it isn’t, but I beg to differ. Since factual evidence suggests otherwise.

Coming back to the topic, as a Muslim why is it bidah to preach feminism? Isn’t feminism good? Don’t they preach basic rights and destroy patriarchy?

That’s what I believed for the past two decades of my life. Until I started to study Islam and the Quran to understand and get closer to my Creator. Turns out there is a lot to unpack, and here I will point out a few facts for you to research for yourself, so please, do not take the title for its face value while it holds a spectrum of knowledge.

As a Muslim what you should believe is what Allah and the Prophet taught us, not what Tiktok or social media trends teach you. Most people won’t read a full page of information on a topic and conclude to themselves after a viral video with a catchy phrase comes on their fyp. Allah created both men and women differently. Fundamentally they cannot be equal, and equality doesn’t always mean good. Instead Allah made us compatible — meaning together we are complete. That’s why a husband and a wife is considered to be completing each other’s halves when they marry. Without one there is none. To each Allah appointed different responsibilities. There is a reason why only women can give birth, there is a reason why beneath a mother’s feet lies heaven. There is a reason why a mother is considered to be more precious and valued than a father. There is a reason why Allah made men to govern the world and sent male Prophets instead of women.

Allah knows best why He did what He did. We are His servants, not advisors.

Feminism, even though it tries to teach the basic women’s rights, also partakes in making a human independent, especially women. What they teach and what Allah guides are totally different things that clash against each other and cannot live codependently.

Allah gave the women more empathy and the highest capacity to be emotionally open while making men logically driven and emotionally rational. Do you think it was by accident? Why a woman wants to be seen and a man wants to look? Why women’s vision and men’s vision have varying field of view? That naturally men are stronger physically?

Feminism these days does nothing but break this balance and carelessly say men and women are equal, when in reality they aren’t. But they sure are compatible, like I mentioned before. Every single problem becomes a man vs woman war, no effort is put to silence the problem and solve it. Take Lindsay Clancy — on trial in Massachusetts for strangling her three children to death. Instead of confronting what actually drives a mother to kill her own children, pro-feminist corners of the internet moved to make trends of hurting children with water, and rallied nearly a million dollars for her family — nothing to do with justice, everything to do with sympathy for the woman alone. Further to abolish the patriarchy, what’s the plan? To make misandry more evident. To share the phrase “a top-tier man is just an average woman” — the argument being that a woman alone can be financially independent, give birth, and run a household, while a man, apart from fathering a child, contributes comparatively less (though plenty of men do carry the load of raising a child alone or caring for a terminally ill spouse). What gets missed in that argument is the actual point: we need each other to survive as humans. This “I alone am enough” mentality is exactly what widens the gap.

I am not advocating for a man to not know how to cook or clean. Or to not pick himself up around the house. Nor for a woman to not chase her dreams of becoming a company’s CEO, or as small as going to work on her passion. Do all of it, learn how to survive as a human in this new world, but do not forget why we are in this Dhunya and what our responsibilities are.

Allah gave women their basic rights before feminism existed. And gave them more than feminism could ever give. The sahaba and those who closely came after them upheld the preciousness. From then till now, along the way, culture, modern terminology, and the kuffar’s agendas got mixed in and ruined how a man and a woman should function in a society. And now we fight against each other, man saying a woman’s place is in the kitchen and a woman saying men shouldn’t have opinions over pregnancy. Shaythan is on top of it all, dancing on his throne while we give up imaan and join whatever this Dhunya has to offer.

Women in Islam shape generations, they carry so much weight in Allah’s words that as a society we forgot the value of it. We forgot. We forgot. WE FORGOT.

We forgot that Dhunya is temporary, we forgot we are here as a traveler and our final resting place is in the grave and what comes after it. May Allah make us all the people of heaven, forgive us and make this Dhunya tolerable.

Ameen

The orange comes to him once, early, set on a platter gone soft and silver with age. He does not ask where either came from. He only knows the orange is the single sweet thing inside a place otherwise made of green and shadow, and he eats it slowly, the way something is eaten when a boy suspects it will not come again. He keeps the seed without knowing why yet. He is careful with it anyway, the way he is careful with most things no one has told him are worth keeping.

He grows the way things grow inside four hedges — sideways more than up, patient because nothing has taught him another way to be. The hedges do not shrink as he does; if anything they hold their ground more stubbornly, some years, than he holds his. One never softens no matter how close he presses against it. One is cut back hard whenever it dares toward flower, as though flowering were an error someone keeps correcting. One is left wild enough that standing inside it, some afternoons, he cannot be found even by himself. He turns to the fourth without deciding to — it becomes, without him naming it, the one he speaks to when there is no one else the hedges will let him reach.

He returns to the platter more than once, across the years the hedges keep for him. Each time it gives him back a little less of himself and a little more of something dimmer, tarnished in patches no sleeve quite reaches. He holds it up anyway. He is learning, slowly, to read his own face in something imperfect, because nothing in this garden has ever offered him a clean reflection, and he has stopped waiting for one to.

By the time he trusts his own hands, the seed has been kept so long he almost forgets it is not simply a stone he carries. But one evening, the hedges dark on every side and the platter set down beside him, he opens the ground with his fingers, low, between two hedges that have never once made room for anything on their own — and he plants it. He does not know if it will take. He waters it anyway, and thanks Allah for the seed, and — quietly, in the same breath — for whatever the ground still owes him.

When Penelope waited for Odysseus for twenty years, he never thought she could not escape her melancholy — and that’s when I felt connected intimately with his mind. He wanted to chase the setting sun over the horizon with her. On a ship with the best sailors and crew, sailing West. Yet he said, he mentioned, he tried to make her promise. To remarry, to move on…

But instead Penelope gave her brooch to him, and she waited. Odysseus, his heart was set at home, on Ithaca, on Penelope. She waited for him, and he tried his utmost best against all odds, to cross and reach.

And I am Odysseus in my story, and my Penelope is waiting for me at the end of this treacherous journey. I am not a King, nor a General commanding an army, I do not have a ship, nor the chance of the open sea to set sail. I am just a man who has Penelope, and I am fighting my way through to get to her.

I haven’t seen her in real life, I haven’t touched her. Nor has my eyes set on hers. But I yearn for her within my bones, within my very fiber of my being.

I do not know what her voice sounds like when she is half-asleep, nor how her hand fits into mine — not yet. But I have imagined it enough times that the imagining has started to feel like its own kind of memory. I imagine leaning into the curve of her neck and breathing her in, the way sailors say they can smell land before they ever see it. I imagine her clothes, folded somewhere in a drawer I have never seen, still holding onto her the way driftwood holds onto the sea long after it has washed ashore. I think if I ever held that fabric to my face, I would know her before I knew her.

I imagine the small nudge of her shoulder against mine — not a push, not a pull, just the quiet insistence of someone who wants to be closer without having to ask for it outright. Odysseus did not need Penelope to speak to know she was there; he carried the whole shape of her, the weight of her waiting, in the hollow of his chest for twenty years, through Circe’s island and Poseidon’s storms and every siren that tried to convince him the sea was worth more than the shore. I carry something similar. Not memory — anticipation. A future so certain in my mind it has already started to feel like the past.

And I imagine that kissing her would not feel like the beginning of something, but like arriving somewhere. The way a ship stops rocking once it reaches harbor. The way a held breath finally leaves the body. I think, for the first time in a long while, I would stop bracing for the next wave.

Ithaca was never really a place Odysseus was trying to reach. It was a person, shaped like a place. My Penelope is the same — not a destination, but a direction. I have no sea to cross, only distance, and time, and every ordinary, unglamorous obstacle a man without a kingdom has to face. But I am crossing it anyway, the only way I know how — one day, one hour, one unremarkable Tuesday at a time — because somewhere at the end of it, she is still yearning for that brooch she gave me, still choosing to wait. And I intend to be a man worth that waiting.

A while back, someone sent me an Instagram DM, justifying that I was a rapist, since I did not believe in Feminism and I was a horrible person. And in that thread they mentioned how they wished men got pregnant instead of women, and how much they wanted us to suffer. If men had that responsibility, to be frank and hypothetical with you, getting pregnant might have been the most masculine thing a man could do in such a world. Imagine Andrew Tate and all of those red-pilled guys, screaming on top of their lungs on social media, selling courses on how to be a man who gives birth fifteen times or something, calling out people who didn’t want to get pregnant a coward.

Its a horrible human cycle that never ends.

How far would you go to undermine what Allah has bestowed upon us? The responsibilities we have to carry as each gender? Hmm? Did I ever deserved such a justification from a Muslim woman? What if I was the person who justified a woman like that? Hmm?

I’ve been told to my face that misandry isn’t that big of a deal on its own, and that men created it. And how men deserved the suicide rate that they topped off every year, and how men should do this and do that. If an older man likes a younger woman that is weird, but if an older woman does it its totally fine and romanticized?

If a man cannot provide, he is bullied (rightfully so). If a woman cannot cook, she is found to be cute? Empowered? If a man speaks about his feelings he is considered needy and when a woman does it, its being brave? When a woman has to clean the whole house, cook and take care of the kids, its totally fine for a man to say “I pay the bills so I don’t have to help” - that’s a failed marriage, failed gender responsibilities, failed Imaan.

Allah gave us everything, I mean EVERYTHING when the last sentence of the Quran came down from the heavens, when our beloved Prophet ﷺ breathed his last. Allah made Islam COMPLETE, and he told us to obey Him and His messenger.

Somewhere, nurturing got redefined to mean everything except the home. We started measuring a woman’s worth by how far she could get from the kitchen, as if the kitchen was a punishment and not a place the Prophet’s ﷺ own household lived in with barakah. Khadijah (RA) ran a trade empire. Aisha (RA) narrated over two thousand hadith. And still, the home was never beneath them — because nurturing was never only a career or only a kitchen. It was the ability to hold a household together with your hands and your heart at the same time, and neither one cancelled the other out.

Now a woman who takes pride in cooking for her husband, in keeping their home a place he wants to return to, is looked at with something close to pity. As if she settled. As if warmth is a lesser ambition than a job title. We call her “just a housewife” in the same breath we call a man “just a provider”, both of them stripped of the sacredness their roles once carried, both of them reduced to something apologetic instead of something worshipful.

But feeding your husband, raising his children, making a house exhale when he walks into it, that was never small. The Prophet ﷺ said the best of you are those best to their families, and he did not qualify that with a career NOR a specific gender. A woman who cooks for her household out of love is not regressing. She is doing what half the world has forgotten how to call worship.

The double standard is this: we shame a man for not providing, and we shame a woman for providing in the way Allah made natural to her. We want her ambition to look like his, forgetting that qawwamah and nurturing were never meant to be identical — they were meant to be complementary. A woman who finds dignity in her home is not less liberated than the one who finds it in a boardroom. She is simply not asking the world’s permission to define her worth for her.

We were given roles, not to cage us, but to complete us. Qawwamah was never meant to be a crown men wear to escape responsibility — it was a weight. A man was made a protector and maintainer not because he is superior, but because Allah knew what he could carry, and asked him to carry it without complaint. And nurturing was never meant to be a leash on a woman’s worth — it was a trust. A power so quiet the world forgot to call it power at all.

Somewhere along the way, we started picking and choosing. Men wanted the authority of qawwamah without the burden of it. Women wanted the burden lifted without letting go of what made it sacred. And now we live in a generation that inherited the language of Islam but not the weight of it, where a man can say “I pay the bills” like it absolves him of gentleness, and a woman can say “I’m empowered” like it absolves her of softness. Both of them borrowing the vocabulary of Deen to excuse the abandonment of it.

This is the double standard nobody wants to name: we did not fail because our roles were unequal. We failed because we stopped seeing them as amanah — as trust, as worship, as something we would be asked about on a day when Instagram DMs and red-pill courses will mean nothing.

A man who does not help his wife is not “traditional.” He is negligent, and negligence was never masculine — the Prophet ﷺ mended his own sandals and served his household (although not every single time he came home), and no man was more of a man than him. A woman who mocks a man’s tears has not found strength; she has mistaken cruelty for it. Neither of them are living qawwamah or nurturing. They are living convenience, dressed up in whatever ideology lets them keep it.

May Allah keep blessing you and your family with health and wealth, and Jannah at the end of this bittersweet journey. Ameen.

Simply, I am dying, my time on this earth is limited, just like you. The thought of death always made me melancholic. It made me dreadful, anxious, it still does but not the kind where I have difficulty in breathing and my brain turns on me with all the dreadfulness it can conjure.

But not anymore.

All I feel is a calm clench within my heart. A subtle sigh of heavy breath, and I go about my day. Death will touch you, it won’t consume you, latch to you like a parasite hungry for something human. It’s always a touch, and your soul, whether it was good or bad, being dragged out of your shell, or slip like a water droplet from a leaf. Always, always, pray for the droplet to be you.

This Dhunya is nothing but a hoax, a beautiful lie, a test for all of us. Death is nothing but a doorway to something that we were all destined. Death is nothing more than a veil to be lifted, so your soul can traverse to the beyond, an invitation from Allah Himself.

Make peace with death, my friend. And when it touches you, I pray to the Most Merciful, that you are welcomed with goodness, accompanied by musk, and the water droplet, to be your soul. I pray the Barzakh invite you with open arms, and the hell fire being shown through a window in your grave, shut close forever. And may you find peace in the grave, until the day of judgment rolls around.

Do not forget to pray for me too, my friend, make me a water droplet in your Dhuas too. Ameen.

Ok, here I write, ready to bruise you.

You probably deserve the things that had happened to you, the good and the bad. The hurt you feel, the dopamine hit you get when you drink your favorite cappuccino at your favorite café, the constant life hiccups where you mess up something that you were sure you couldn’t mess up…

Yes all of it. You deserve them.

I mean, look at it this way. Lets say you bumped your pinky toe on the side of the table and that caused you so much pain that you teared up, cussing, and sat on a nearby chair. Then you look up at the clock for no reason at all — you remember that you haven’t prayed Asr.

That pinky toe accident caused your body to sit down, cleared the eyes using tears and you vented emotionally, which was the result of the cussing and grunting. But most of all, you remembered that you didn’t pray Asr. And probably that pain was also a cause of sin that you committed and forgot a while back. Now you are even, your slate is clean, plus you didn’t forget to pray.

Now flip it. You walk into your favorite café, order the cappuccino you always get, and it tastes exactly the way you needed it to taste today. That small relief, that five-minute peace before the day swallows you again, that wasn’t random either. That was a thank-you note from Allah for the dua you made last week that you’ve already forgotten you made. You didn’t keep a record of it. He did.

This is the part people skip past, because we’ve been trained to think of “deserving” as a punishment word. We only use it when something bad happens. You deserved that. Said with a smirk, said to sting. Nobody says “you deserved that good coffee” with the same weight, because we’ve decided good things just happen to us and bad things are owed to us. Flip that script. Both are owed. Both are earned. You are not a passive character in your own life collecting random L’s and W’s — you are in a constant, quiet transaction with your Lord, and most of it is happening without your knowledge or consent, because that’s mercy. If you saw the full ledger of what you actually deserved, you wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.

So here’s where the hypocrisy creeps in. We accept the cappuccino without question. We say alhamdulillah, maybe, if we remember. But the second the bad thing shows up — the stubbed toe, the spilled coffee, the argument with someone you love, the small humiliations that pepper an average Tuesday, suddenly we want an explanation. Suddenly it’s “why me.” Suddenly Allah owes us context. You didn’t demand an explanation for the good. Why are you demanding one for the bad?

You don’t get to cherry-pick which side of the ledger you believe in.

And I want to be clear about the scale I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about real harm — abuse, trauma, the things done to you by people who had no right to touch your life the way they did. That’s not “deserving,” that’s wound, and wounds like that need real care, real therapy, real time, not a journal entry about pinky toes. What I’m talking about is the small currency of an ordinary day. The minor slights. The bruised ego. The petty inconvenience. The dropped phone, the missed bus, the friend who didn’t text back. These are not punishments from a cruel God. These are tiny corrections from a Merciful one, small enough that you can carry them, frequent enough that they keep your slate from ever getting too heavy to lift.

Because here’s the thing nobody tells you: Allah could let your sins pile up untouched until they crush you all at once. Instead, He drip-feeds the consequences in forms so small you barely register them as consequences at all. A stubbed toe instead of a depression. An awkward conversation instead of a destroyed friendship. A bad night’s sleep instead of a wrecked month. You call it bad luck. It might be the cheapest discount you’ve ever been offered.

So next time something small and stupid goes wrong, you trip, you spill, you forget, you fumble a sentence in front of someone you wanted to impress — don’t reach for “why me.” Reach for “what did I forget.” Check your prayers. Check the tongue you used on someone yesterday. Check the dua you haven’t said in a while. You might find that the universe isn’t against you. It’s just keeping the books balanced, the way it’s always done, quietly, while you weren’t looking.

You probably deserve it.

All of it.

And honestly? That should bring you peace, not dread — because a God who corrects you this gently is a God who hasn’t given up on you yet.

I am His, my name spells out the meaning ‘Allah’s Servant’ and I am so much proud of it. I slammed my chest as I was writing this, proud, utterly proud to be His servant, the greatest of all - even better - Allahuakbar! (Allah is Greater)

I am just here to remind how much of His doing do we as humans live by. I mean, duh, He created us all, but we, the forgetful perfected creation, show no signs of undoing our forgetfulness to keep His remembrance as much as we can. As I am writing this, my fingers move over my keyboard, the eyes dart back and forth, sometimes keeping it on screen, my brain fires neurons, making me think, reload words from the large terabyte worth of information stored inside my skull. My breathing, deep at times, filling my blood with oxygen needed for survival. The almost perfect cluster of atoms cushioned under me, holding me in a position that is comfortable; a chair. The air around me is humid, and the fan above me cools me, as the electricity for it cruise through multiple levels of wires, and a source, maybe a dam crossing the river. The tons of water that is needed to keep that going. The food in me that reached after years of growth and flourishing, I mean, the rice couldn’t have been on my plate if not for the farmer, and what if that farmer was not alive and well just like me?

I could go on and on, I could, and it will never end. His blessings upon me, upon us, upon you the reader.

Yet…

One may ask, did I even asked to be born? To be birthed? For a human to carry me nearly nine months, for them to raise me twenty two years, and till this day, my mother’s blood flows through me.

Yet why?

Because you were chosen.

Not stumbled upon. Not an accident of biology or a cosmic coincidence. You were chosen, pulled from the infinite sea of souls that never got to taste air, never got to feel hunger, never got to know what it is to be tired and then rest. And you were placed here. Given a body that works without your permission, a heart that beats without your instruction, lungs that don’t wait for you to remember to breathe.

You didn’t ask to be born. True.

But did you ask for the laugh that escapes you when something catches you off guard? Did you ask for the specific way sounds lands in your chest, or the way a smell can drag you back ten years in an instant? Did you ask for the exact texture of the relationships that have shaped you — the ones that held you, the ones that broke you, the ones that quietly made you who you are?

You didn’t ask for any of it.

And yet - here you are. Reading this. Somewhere warm enough to keep you alive, with eyes that work, with a mind that questions, which is already more than most of creation was ever given.

The question isn’t why you were born without asking.

The question is — what does it mean that you were given this much without deserving a single gram of it?

That’s not a burden. That is mercy wearing the shape of an existence.

And so all, for Him.

Not out of obligation the way you clock into a job. Not out of fear the way you avoid a fire. But out of the overwhelming, chest-tightening realization that everything you are, everything you’ve touched, everyone who has ever looked at you with love — none of it originated from you. You are a vessel. A beautifully made, embarrassingly forgetful, stubbornly hopeful vessel — and He filled you anyway.

So when I say all for Him, I mean my writing. My grief. My ambition. My morning. My failures I haven’t told anyone about. The version of me I’m still building in private.

All of it, back to where it came from.

Because what else do you do when you realize you have been loved this completely, this quietly, this relentlessly — by Someone who needed nothing from you and gave you everything anyway?

You give it back.

All of it.

And keeping it halal in this era? Oof, that’s one hell of an accomplishment. There is a fine line between something becoming haram, but before I mention anything about it, I do want to tell you this. Viewing Islam purely through the lens of halal and haram is just ideocracy. Rather viewing it through what Allah forbids and dislikes, and what he likes, that’s the mindset you should have. Because it just reduces halal and haram to just yes and no, when it is something far deeper than that. It is what Allah likes and dislikes, and what he has done to keep us safe and out of potential harm’s way.

Think of intimacy, how it is haram to do it without marriage. With marriage? It becomes a form of worship that Allah loves. And receiving that love from Allah, the most merciful and the creator of all, isn’t that a blessing most of us yearn for?

Imagine you found someone, you had a conversation or two and found out that you both are compatible for marriage. What do you do? Do you become boyfriend and girlfriend? Make it official? Or hide and do things in secrecy, like talk, video chat, share reels on social media, text like frantic monkeys who cannot keep their hands off of them? Most people just lose the plot, they forget why they even started the conversation of being a potential spouse to each other, and spend time talking about nonsense and maybe even doing haram things together over the phone. It just reduces love that only lives through a digital escapade, making the complexity and barakah behind it starve. That’s why when a haram relationship couple get married, it just doesn’t feel right to them? Obviously, things have gone south for them, the family problems, societal norms, the things they have done to get to that position. Love becomes tedious to them at some point, and solving the problems they created for themselves or running from it, that’s what their life becomes. And may Allah forgive us and grant us grace both in this world and the hereafter.

That’s why ‘keeping it halal’ exists for a reason. Getting to know someone for marriage, and then leaving them alone and focusing on your life and your growth until the time comes for you to go ask for their hand in marriage. Or waiting, just waiting. Not waiting blindly, but ‘Ok I have my degree that ends next year after that I will initiate my family to talk with yours / I will secure myself with a proper job that pays well first and after working for two months and saving up for it I will contact your family / I have to achieve this specific dream before we get married and only after that can we initiate anything’ type of wait. And no, it doesn’t limit yourself to that only, even being single, knowing that marriage is something not probable to your situation right now and you haven’t found the one. Plus you are actively not trying to have a relationship in any shape or form, basically being single for a while, that’s also keeping it halal. And I encourage more people to make things halal. Keep it halal and within limits.

This becomes either the very thing that builds your existence or the thing that drives your mental health into the rotting sewers.

Imagine this, you have someone who is waiting to receive love from you and give love in return. The perfect cluster of atoms, just a few miles or a few thousand miles away from you, trying hard to keep each other’s hands off each other. Putting Allah first before your measly human desires that are almost worthless in this Dhunya considering how much destruction it can bring to one’s life. And are only eternal in the hereafter. That’s something so hard to live through.

You haven’t seen them eye to eye, maybe you have and stopped for the sake of Allah. You haven’t smelled their scent, you have no idea how they sound like (maybe you do) or you haven’t touched them to feel their warmth. You haven’t had a proper conversation with each other to connect deeply, you don’t know most of the things about them, and you have zero idea if they love and share the same humor you have.

And what does the brain do? Apart from creating fake scenarios with them? It fills gaps. Ever so quickly, weaving a narrative inside your head that most of the times are very wrong and incorrect. Maybe you follow them on social media, maybe you seen some of their reposts, and think to yourself ‘ok he/she likes this, doesn’t like this, is in this state, and have opinions like this’ NO!

Love doesn’t live only through your phone. And that’s exactly where the difficulty begins. Why is keeping it halal so hard? Let’s be honest about it rather than pretend it isn’t.

The brain is wired for connection. Allah created you with a fitrah that leans toward belonging, toward being known, toward warmth. That is not a flaw by the way, it is a feature. But shaytan knows the address of every feature you have, and he will knock on every one of them. Every time you put your phone down, he will whisper. Every time you see something beautiful, he will remind you of a person. Every time your chest feels hollow, he will offer you the shortcut.

The wait has no guaranteed end date. A deadline makes almost anything survivable. But halal waiting doesn’t come with one. Your job situation can change. Their family situation can change. Health, geography, circumstances, none of it is in your hands. And the not-knowing is its own kind of suffering. Ibn al-Qayyim described this state — the mushtaq, the one in longing — as someone whose soul has already departed toward what it loves, leaving only a hollow body to go about its day. Some of the classical scholars documented those who preferred death to the prolonged absence of their beloved. Not because they were weak, but because the pain of not yet had become heavier than the idea of any other relief. That’s how real this is. Islam didn’t pretend otherwise, it acknowledged the weight and still said: wait.

Imagination is also, very much, merciless. You already know this. The brain fills gaps. It builds a version of that person that is assembled from fragments, a caption, a repost, a laugh you once heard. And you fall for the version your mind invented. You grieve a person who doesn’t fully exist yet. You fight wars with a ghost. You have conversations in the shower that have never happened and never will. That’s not love. That’s isolation wearing love’s face. The world keeps moving while you stand still. Weddings. Announcements. Couples posting. Everyone seems to be arriving somewhere while you’re still at the station. And shaytan will use every single one of those posts as evidence against your patience.

So why bother?

Because this — all of this — is the fastest lane to actually becoming ready.

The wait is not a pause in your life. It is the preparation. Every day you spend working on yourself instead of texting someone you shouldn’t, you are building the version of you that deserves what you’re waiting for. Every time you swallow the urge to reach out and redirect it into your work, your Dheen, your craft, you are building sabr, and sabr is not passive. It is an active, daily, almost violent choice to trust Allah’s timing over your own impulse.

The person on the other side of that wait is also being shaped. By the same silence. By the same longing. By the same choice to not compromise what Allah has asked of them. When you finally meet, I mean when you truly meet, within what is halal, with witnesses, with intention — you are not meeting the person they were. You are meeting who the wait made them. And you are bringing who the wait made you.

That’s not a small thing.

That’s two people who proved, under pressure, that they could choose Allah over comfort. And a marriage built on that foundation doesn’t crack the same way.

Keep it halal. Not because it’s easy. But because what’s on the other side of it is barakah that the shortcut will never find. May Allah bless you with ease, sabr and give peace and relief to your waiting.

I didn’t ponder that much while I was writing this at one o’clock in the morning, I am just spitting what comes to my mind right now. Raw, unfiltered.

I am yet another, just like them. Mending through this, through writing, creative exploiting myself until I cannot conjure anymore.

And yet, the journey continues…