Fig & Olive

Too often it’s not that we truly love people it’s that we’re so painfully afraid of facing the God awful truth of our painful isolation. We eat, we text, we chat, we browse all to remove the pain of loneliness, all to avoid our own selves, to not have to deal with our own selves […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

“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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]