November 30, 2015

No more Muslim identity: Being a personal Muslim


I’ve been finding it very hard of late to be Muslim and even harder to be Sufi. Not Muslim in a political or ostentatious way, living in Jordan my visible Muslim identity is no concern of mine. Being here in Jordan I don’t worry about being a visible Muslim. I don’t worry about how I […]

November 25, 2015

Work like a horse


Once I heard that horses keep going until they cannot, i.e. they work until they collapse and die. If you’ve read Animal Farm you may remember Boxer, he was the horse who adopted the motto “I will work harder”. There are so many lessons in that book and so many warnings. But despite his hard […]

November 24, 2015

Let it go


Let what go? All of it. All of the dreams you thought you’d accomplish by now. All of the hope you put in this or that thing, let it go. Sometimes we reach a point in our adult life, look around and ask: What in God’s name happened? And often we don’t have answers for […]

November 23, 2015

Living without the “white gaze”


My parents never told me I had to “work twice as hard as white people to be half as successful” and I’m glad they didn’t. We grew up in a black working-class neighborhood yet my siblings and I have gone all around the world and back not because we had a ton of money rather […]

November 18, 2015

Sleep well


One thing I’ve never done quite well is sleep. Not that I don’t sleep, I probably sleep too much, but not well. I’ve been told that the best sleep is sleep before 11 pm. So it doesn’t exactly surprise me that my habit to sleep around 1 am doesn’t exactly work. I wake up late […]

November 17, 2015

Commentary on work vs home


“I would argue that, if anything, the fact that she raised five children and devoted her life to providing them with a safe, secure, balanced family life is a tribute to her.  She has contributed greatly to society by creating self-sufficient, independent children who are self-reliant and, hopefully, good and decent folk.” Link This argument has […]

November 16, 2015

Eating Meat


There’s no denying that in Islam meat-eating is permissible there are in fact occasions when eating meat is highly encouraged and others where killing animals is a necessity. In short, we have the undeniable right to kill some animals and eat them. This does not mean that the purpose of animals is to be slaughtered […]

November 11, 2015

Slowing down fast fashion


This coat is 56% cotton, 44% virgin wool and made in the USA. Classic, chic and timeless and presumably long-lasting, it’s the kind of coat I’d buy, it costs $3,950. The sticker shock took me back for a moment, $3,950… so if I had a full-time job -which I don’t, paying $12 an hour (though I […]

November 10, 2015

Ode to ‘students of knowledge


Note: The term ‘student of knowledge’ in the Islamic tradition means someone who studies Islamic knowledge specifically in a traditional manner of studying from teachers who have a senate back to the prophet, peace to him, so independent study -though valuable, wouldn’t count and is not including in this ode. I wrote this “off the […]

November 9, 2015

The End of Fast Fashion


Watch this and make an effort to live more consciously.

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