Fig & Olive

You can’t attach to the goal and remain attached to God. I’ll share a bit about myself, which I try not to do too often, and that is that I was attached to a goal. Maybe not much to say, aren’t we all? But it only recently dawned on me just how deeply attached I […]

Alienation is the state of being withdrawn or separated from a group, person, or situation to which one was formerly attached. There are quite a few definitions of alienation, including those specific to Marxism and psychiatry. The best definition, for our purpose, in the one above. Alienation in some ways isn’t particularly special or interesting. […]

While Feminists have always painted themselves as a women’s movement they have in reality always represented a small segment of the population. They believe in and advocate a particular ideology that some women feel empowered by and other women feel oppressed by. It has always been a movement that represents some women and not all. […]

Umm Salama was one of the wives of our beloved prophet, peace to him. Before her blessed marriage to the prophet, she was married to Abdullah, an early companion, and martyr in the way of God. After facing persecution in Mecca and through God’s permission the Muslims of the era left their homes in Mecca […]

Since the success of the gay marriage debate by the LBGT, religious communities have turned inwards to focus on fighting against the influence and influx of this movement and its members on their communities. This is, in itself a noble fight but it has a nefarious past and until that is honestly reckoned with it […]

It is true. Nature brings us closer to God. We know, as human beings, that we did not create the sky, the dirt, the moon or the trees. It is difficult not to acknowledge that there is a “higher being,” “higher consciousness” or “mastermind” involved in the creation of nature —of those things that exist […]

One of the most popular posts on this blog is ‘But, Khadija worked’, which examined -in part, the fallacy that Khadija ‘working’ should diminish men’s financial responsibility to their wives. In the post, I used the term “wage-slave” to describe women who were forced to work outside the home. That term is harsh but valuable […]

Of late, I’ve been reading a lot of Islamic works written by Muslim academics —bits and pieces to finalize an upcoming research paper and work on an upcoming lecture. What strikes me as off in all of these works is a confusing lack of Adab. Adab generally means good manners or a way of approaching […]

God declares in surah 4, verse 34, that men are providers and maintainers of women and women are obedient to men and the “keepers of the unseen”. While the end of the verse is often what attracts our attention as modern readers because it is so at odds with our cultural conception of marriage, the […]

The tongue, Mohamed Ghilan states in his podcast episode entitled Prohibitions of the tongue: Part 1 of 6, is like a bar. If a Muslim walks into a bar, they might be going to simply get a glass of water or soda. Or it could be that the company they work for decides to hold an […]