Religious leaders during sermons often advise their congregations not to love this world, explicably sensing that love of this world will replace the love of God. While this is a justifiable claim—people enraptured in the material often experience emptiness which they attempt to fill with more material, believing they are achieving what the material superficially …
Continue reading Loving this World, Work, and the Privilege of Contemplation
Consider the following passage, Women attended the mosques as men attended. Hind bint Usayd ibn Hudayr al-Ansariyyah learnt surah Qaf from hearing the Prophet recite it in the prayer. Ibn Jabir and Uthman ibn Abi l-Atikah says: Umm al-Darda was an orphan under the guardianship of Abu l-Darda; she used to come to the mosques …
I was ten years old on 9/11. Counting up until last year it was the halfway point of my life. I remember that, being ten, and denying myself the luxury of tears. I didn’t have to try hard not to cry: I simply couldn’t. It would have been, I felt, ridiculous for me to cry. …
As someone who has studied Arabic for a couple of years, compelled primarily by a desire to understand the Qur’an, and who remembers the frustration of not being able to understand it (and is aware of it still, because I have not mastered the language) I’m heartbroken when religious people—particularly women—dismiss their own interpretations on …
Continue reading On Interpreting the Qur’an and Subjectivity
This post is brought to you by a bewildering conversation I had a while ago in which an XY tried to mansplain to me that his interpretation of a specific verse pertaining to women is not unjust because it is from God, and therefore [what is from God] cannot unjust. (Read: His interpretation is from …
Continue reading Rejecting Your Sense of Justice is Rejecting a Device of God
In studying Islam and researching religious tradition, I naturally encounter sectorial differences in the perception of religious figures and in the practice of religious rituals; —while I’ve described my renouncing approach to Islamic sects, in dismissing sectarianism and contemplating its contraints from the position of a religious woman, without disclosing with which sectorial teachings I …
Zeina Shaaban, a good friend of mine who is extremely dedicated to ending domestic violence and has protested in writing against the proposals of those who would prevent legal protections in Lebanon, has created a magnificent video denouncing domestic violence and marital rape, embedded below. Contrasted against the stark, brutal reality of abuse, in the …
Continue reading Celebrate Mercy–Help fight domestic violence, a video by Zeina Shaaban
the fatal feminist 