Happiness and the Source of Good

As public awareness of mental health issues increased in the 2000s, professionals and influencers have recommended affirmations or mantras to foster a sense of well-being. You wake up in the morning and repeat positive sentences. You ‘manifest’ the best things so you capture energy from the verbalizations.

However, Islam, fourteen hundred years ago, already gave us daily du’as: our morning and evening adhkar. Here are a few of these du’as, and how we can internalize them in our pursuit of happiness.

Happiness has to come from the source of all that is good: Allah. Happiness is also a subjective feeling, and psychologists have even commented on how humans can convince themselves of happiness through things like cognitive reframing. So the combination of these two: a desire to be happy, and seeking happiness from Allah, is built into these daily adkhar. It’s important to remember that the value of these phrases is not from the rote uttering, but from believing them wholeheartedly with every repetition.

Du’a No. 1: “I Am Pleased With My Lord”

Our ruh, our soul, was not created for this fleeting world; it was destined to reunite with Allah. In this temporal realm, there will always be a tinge of sorrow, a wave between moments of grief and joy. Because, eternal, pure, unadulterated happiness lies only in our meeting with our Maker.

“There is no Muslim who says, in the morning and evening: ‘Radaytu billahi Rabban wa bil-Islami dinan wa bi Muhammadin nabiyyan’ (I am pleased with Allah as my Lord, Islam as my religion and Muhammad as my Prophet), but that he will have a promise from Allah to make him pleased on the Day of Resurrection.” [Sunan Ibn Majah #3870]

An easy way to make this adkhar a habit is to connect it with a task: I’ll start saying it when I open the ground coffee, or as I make my bed. Repeating this du’a, as we prepare breakfast or commute to work, slowly transforms us. We begin to realize our contentment: we, whom Allah has guided, we, upon whom He has bestowed His mercy, are indeed content with Allah as our Lord, His Messenger as our Prophet, and this religion, in all its beauty and wisdom. We, who may not understand every commandment and every test, but still strive, are content with this world view and content with Allah.

Du’a No. 2: “Allah Is Sufficient”

The Prophet ﷺ advised us to seek solace by reciting: “Hasbunallah wa ni’mal-Wakil” (Allah is Sufficient for us, and He is the Best Disposer of affairs).” [Riyaadh as Saliheen 409]

Since the footage of Gaza flooded our phones, we’ve seen first hand how strong this phrase is. We’ve seen it said by the father holding his beheaded child, or the brother carrying his martyred brother, or the mother finding her child’s burnt flesh. We’ve heard it over and over from the strongest of our ummah. So shouldn’t we, with our ordinary daily struggles, say it even more?

When we relinquish the reins of our lives to Allah, acknowledging His supreme control, we experience an unimaginable freedom. We give every moment to Allah, trusting that He is the Best Disposer of our affairs, from the mundane to the monumental. “And Allah is the best of planners.” [Qur’an 8:30]

I used to be afraid of driving, but a Christian woman once told me: “Every time I get in the car, I ask Jesus to take control of the steering wheel, so while I’m driving I know he’s got me.” I never thought of my fear that way, so now I repeat this du’a and have full faith that Allah has it all under His control and I just have to have trust.

Because who can write your story better than Allah, the All-Knowing, the Most Gentle, the Mutakabbir and Al-Musawir? Your story, woven with both joy and sorrow, might at times feel like an arduous journey, marked by trial after trial. But it is not a tragedy, it is a happily ever after, because your story does not end in death. Your story ends in an eternal Paradise where endless conversations await with your Maker and those you cherish. In Jannah, the love of Allah surrounds you, “Indeed, Allah loves those who rely upon Him.” [Qur’an 3:159]

This trust in Allah’s perfect plan is a sweet surrender: He promised you Paradise, and you gave yourself to His plans.

Du’a No. 3: O Changer of Hearts

Anas narrated: “The Messenger of Allah ﷺ would often say: Ya Muqallibal-qulub, thabbit qalbi ‘ala dinik‘ (‘O Changer of the Hearts! Strengthen my heart upon Your Religion.)’ So I (Anas) said: ‘O Prophet of Allah! We believe in you and what you have come with, but do you fear for us?’ He said: ‘Yes. Indeed the hearts are between two fingers of Allah’s fingers, He changes them as He wills.'” [Jami` at-Tirmidhi #2140]

Allah is the maker, molder, and owner of our hearts. Often, sadness is a state we fall into, and we allow ourselves to remain there, sinking deeper until it seems impossible to climb out. We bury and wallow in our sadness. Our bodies then follow suit, lethargically, and getting out of the hole is much harder once we dig into it.

If we remain sure in our faith, the rocky moments in life won’t shake us. You won’t suddenly stop praying. You won’t stop reaching for your Qur’an. You’ll only keep going, keep asking, and keep hoping for an eternal akhira, over a life filled with issues. This happens with a strong heart, and a strong heart is a gift from Allah, if only you ask for it consistently.

So when the bad days happen, and when you can’t seem to get a break, and each test keeps coming: you just tell yourself, this is the life of this world; what would it be, if not filled with hardship? Jannah is coming ~ a better and everlasting life is coming.

Conclusion

Once we get into the habit of daily adkhar, it becomes so natural that even on rushed days, or relaxing days, we feel incomplete without them. We do not need the daily affirmations of the new wave of pseudo science. We already have these du’as in our sunnah, taught by the Messenger ﷺ, and directly given from Allah. Your Creator knows you best, and knows exactly what you need.

Related:

The Dua Of The Overwhelmed Believer

What Shaykh Muhammad Al Shareef Taught Us About Making Dua

The post Du’as for Happiness: Finding Joy Through Daily Adhkar appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Historical Fact

In the realm of Islamic scholarship, female scholarship is sometimes defined as Islamic teachings that are transmitted by a woman scholar or female student of knowledge with an unbroken chain stretching all the way back to the Prophet ﷺ. This has always been part of our Islamic heritage. The earliest and most famous female scholar is none other than our Lady Aisha bint Abu Bakr (RA), the youngest wife of the Prophet ﷺ. She narrated over two thousand hadiths over the vast spectrum of sacred law.

A Common Misconception

There is a troubling misconception in some circles that female scholarship is now a thing of the past, and no longer what it used to be. There is a claim that there are not many female memorizers of the Qur’an, fiqh teachers, experts on hadith, and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Female scholars exist. Not only do they exist, they are busy teaching. Many female scholars are doing the incredible work of raising their own families throughout their seasons of life, and teaching and learning along the way with the support of their husbands and/or families.

There are also female scholars who are unmarried, divorced, widowed, or don’t have children – what connects all of them is a deep love for Allah, His Prophet ﷺ and a passion for teaching and upholding sacred law. In both the Muslim heartlands all over the world and diaspora Muslim communities in the West, you will find female scholars and their students.

Connecting Women with Scholarship Today

What may be harder in this age of so much fragmentation is connecting female students with female scholars in person. However, the beauty of the online world is how much we can access female scholarship online. Rabata has recently launched The Ribāṭ university for women. There are other women-only resources such as Gems of Light, Jannah Institute, Al-Huda Institute in North America. Daar Aisha College is another example of a women’s-only Islamic centre in Australia.

There are also many institutions in North America such as Tayseer Seminary and Qalam Institute which serve both male and female students, and have male and female teachers, as well as Isra Academy in Australia.

In Malaysia, where I am based, alhamdulilah, female scholarship is very much the norm. Masjids are designed for women in the most thoughtful of ways: there are separate rooms outside of the prayer areas that are available so menstruating women can still attend classes to teach and/or learn, babysitting services during Ramadan during tarawih so mothers can concentrate and beautiful, large masjids with entrances for both men and women, including elevators and ramps for the elderly.

This intentional accessibility for women across all ages is a very strong contributing factor to the following: women’s Islamic education, women’s strong relationship with the masjid as an institution, and a training ground for young children to be accustomed to women’s presence and activity within the masjid.

I have never, ever, been barred from entry in any masjid in Malaysia, alhamdulilah, and I’m so grateful I have never had to enter a creepy back entrance to enter the women’s prayer area.

There are many brilliant asatizah and shaykhaat teaching in Islamic universities, private institutions, and schools. My children attend a local Malaysian government school and amongst their favourite teachers are the kind ustadhs and ustadhas. However, it’s not perfect here either, and there is always room for improvement.

The Reality of Female Scholarship

Some male scholars being unaware of female scholarship does not negate its existence. Many Muslims – both men and women – aren’t aware of the historical and ongoing legacy of female scholarship. It simply isn’t considered a big enough priority. There isn’t enough uplifting of female scholarship in general.

This is directly connected, in my opinion, to the fall of the caliphate and post-colonial brainwashing. Both of these disasters continue to have a direct impact on every single part of the Islamic reality, including awareness of and access to female scholarship. Shaykh Muhammad Akram Nadwi and his groundbreaking book “Al-Muhaddithat” is a must-read for everyone for highlighting the rich history of female Islamic scholarship.

Alhamdulilah, Islamic scholarship that we see today is directly connected to the contributions of past female scholars such as Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) as well as present day female scholars and students of knowledge. Our deen is a dynamic one which responds to present-day realities e.g. the epidemic of secret second marriages, zakat scandals etc.

Dr. Mariam Sheibani

Female scholars have answers and invaluable contributions to these deeply problematic issues. Dr Mariam Sheibani has a brilliant research paper on secret second marriages Deceptive Debauchery: Secret Marriage and the Challenge of Legalism in Muslim-Minority Communities and many other brilliant publications.

Dr Deina Abdelkader, Dr Zainab Alwani and Dr Tamara Gray were amongst the female scholars who wrote the extremely important Dissenting Opinion to the Council’s Position on Zakāh.

Many, many female scholars and students of knowledge all around the world signed off on the Statement Against Abuse: The Female Scholars Network. We exist. We are here, and inshaAllah, we are not going away.

The Importance of Lived Experience

Female scholars offer something male scholars simply do not: the lived experience of embodying the deen, throughout all our different seasons of life. Female scholars offer girls and women of all ages the gift of understanding the correct application of sacred law in our daily lives. We also model study and career possibilities for our daughters, and normalise the pursuit of Islamic knowledge for our sons.

From the arrival of our menses in our teens, to the fiqh questions that come up when we are newly married or pregnant, to the grief that comes with pregnancy loss – these seasons of life can only be deeply understood by a female scholar who has experienced the same. These are all powerful opportunities to turn to Allah, and what better way than through the guidance of a female scholar who has walked that same path?

Safety and Accountability

Not only do female scholars add to the rich tapestry of what Islam has to offer, but it is often a much safer option for children and women to study with them. We can no longer ignore the tragic realities of so many sexual scandals with male scholars. Only Prophets are protected from sin. The unquestioned power and authority given to male scholars in positions of religious leadership create environments ripe for abuse. Mohammad Saleem’s abuse of children is a horrific example. More recently, an imam in New York was arrested for molesting two young girls on the masjid property.

This is not to say that all male scholars should be treated with suspicion, but it’s important to be aware that abuse exists in our communities too and to put measures in place to prevent this from happening. Shaykh Danish Qasim and Danya Shakfeh, Esq. from In Shaykh’s Clothing have developed a Code of Conduct for Islamic Organisations and a contract to help safeguard Muslim communities from abuse. The use of contract law can hold abusers accountable, and dissuade potential abusers from thinking they can get away with it. These systems can be put in place well ahead of time e.g. doing background checks on every single potential teacher long before any children are harmed.

Although there are a minority of Muslim women who also abuse other women and children and enable male abusers, we have seen far too many reported incidents of male teachers who have grossly abused their power. The reality is that most abuse is not reported, so what we see in the news is actually the tip of the iceberg. Muslim communities worldwide need to continue having discussions and building awareness about abuse so we can protect our most vulnerable.

The Hurma Project is also an incredible resource, driven by God-centered academic research by Dr Ingrid Mattison and Dr Rania Awaad. Maristan also offers resources for mental health care for Muslims affected by abuse.

Real-World Impact

Female scholars offer compassionate solutions for real-world difficulties that women face – challenging in-laws, inheritance squabbles, infertility struggles and bereavement, to name a few. When handled poorly by well-meaning but clumsy male scholars, so many of these issues can end up driving Muslim women far away from Islam.

This fatwa on whether or not a woman can work, at first glance, looks harmless. But how common is it in the West, especially, to find a women-only work space? What if she does not have male mahrams she can count on to look out for her? Limiting her access to work will not help her. Over, and over again, incorrect interpretations of Islam have led to devastating cruelty to women and children in the name of God.

This is why we need thoughtful scholarship that considers women’s realities on the ground within the Shari’ah to help establish a Prophetic society. The Ma’ruf Commons, led by Dr Mariam Sheibani, is a “research and education organization that develops programs and resources for Muslim communities to advance intentional learning, spiritual formation, and ethical practice, integrating religious values into both public and private life.” (Quote from website)

It is a brilliant example of traditional Islamic scholarship meeting contemporary challenges through the lens of deep Prophetic compassion and wisdom. Among the many resources Dr Mariam Sheibani shares include a brilliant paper by PhD candidate Samah Marei titled What Happened to Islamic Family Law in the Modern Era? There is so much nuance when it comes to applying Islamic law in the modern era, especially when Muslim minorities answer to Western secular legal system, or when problematic cultural norms conflict with Islamic law in Muslim-majority contexts.

A Still Valuable Perspective

However, women scholars aren’t infallible and are also impacted by biases, including problematic cultural beliefs about women that have no basis in the Shari’ah. There are unfortunately some who also issue problematic fatwa. Despite this, it’s important to remember that female scholarship offers an alternative perspective that is still valuable and protective, inshaAllah.

Related:

The Light of Female Islamic Scholarship: Da’wah, Difficulty, And Determination

The Woman Who Corrected Umar: Mahr, Tafseer, and Advocacy

The post Female Scholarship In Islam: A Living Legacy [Part 1] appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

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A Hard Land

Not every Afghani village welcomed strangers so openly. Some watched from behind shuttered windows. Others gathered silently upon distant ridges, leaning upon spears and old hunting bows. They neither threatened nor greeted us. They simply watched until we disappeared into the next valley.

“The kindest village may hide a thief,” Sergeant Karim reminded us one morning as we resumed our march. “The coldest village may be perfectly honest. Judge no one too quickly.”

I’d imagined our journey from here would be a gradual descent into a Persia that was hot and flat, where masjids towered to the clouds, and where the streets were paved with alabaster and pearls. Well, maybe not exactly, but something like that. Instead we began to climb. As we did, the land grew harder, and the people too.

The fertile valleys of Central Asia gave way to mountains that seemed designed to keep men apart. Villages clung to rocky hillsides like weeds. Fortified towers overlooked narrow passes, and nearly every settlement appeared prepared for war. The roads wound through barren valleys strewn with boulders, while jagged peaks watched from every direction. In some places the mountains rose so high that sunlight reached the valley floor only briefly each day.

The men here wore loose trousers beneath long tunics, with woolen cloaks draped across their shoulders against the cold mountain air. Turbans and pakol-style caps were common. Most of the men carried weapons openly. Even boys scarcely older than Haaris often wore knives at their belts.

Many villages were closed and fortified, with guarded walls. When it was possible, we traded with the locals. We ate flatbreads baked in clay ovens, roasted lamb seasoned with unfamiliar spices, rice studded with raisins and carrots, and thick yogurt. More than once I found myself wishing Lee Ayi could taste some of it. She would have loved to learn the recipes.

The caravan grew tense as we crossed those lands. Extra guards rode the perimeter. Watches were doubled. The merchants spoke in quieter voices. Even the horses seemed nervous. Karim spent much of his time studying maps and questioning locals about conditions ahead.

What Happened to Us?

Meanwhile, Weili continued drifting farther away from me.

At first I told myself I was imagining it. Then I told myself it did not matter. Eventually I found myself searching for her without meaning to. I invariably found her beside Arslan. They rode together, practiced together, shared meals, and spent hours struggling through one another’s languages. The more comfortable they became together, the less interested she seemed in having even the shortest conversation with me.

One evening, after watching them laugh together beside a campfire while Arslan mangled Chinese pronunciation for her amusement, I finally reached the end of my patience.

I found her later near the horse lines, checking a bowstring by lantern light. For several moments I simply stood there watching her work. I had rehearsed the conversation in my head dozens of times. Now that the moment had arrived, I had no idea how to begin.

“What happened to us?” I finally asked.

She glanced up, surprised. “Us?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No,” she said. “I really don’t.”

The answer irritated me immediately. Why couldn’t she just be honest? “We used to spend time together.”

“We still do.”

“Maybe you greet me in passing and ask how I’ve been. That’s it.”

She lowered the bow.

“Darius…”

“You spend all your time with him now.”

Understanding flickered across her face. “Oh.”

Something about that response made my temper flare. “That’s all you have to say?”

“What exactly do you want me to say?”

I folded my arms. “We spent months together. We studied together. We talked every day. We shared things about our lives. We meant something to each other. Then this man appears and suddenly I’m invisible. We don’t ride together, you don’t come to study the Quran with me, you don’t ask about me. We’ve barely spoken since I told you about my birthday.”

I wanted to say, I miss you, you hurt me, you abandoned me. But I could not bring myself to say such words aloud.

Her expression shifted from confusion to disbelief. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.”

“You can’t?”

“No. It’s outrageous.”

The anger I had been carrying for weeks finally boiled over. “What do you mean, outrageous? You’re the outrageous one. You were supposed to be with me. You were my girl.”

The words escaped before I could stop them. The instant they left my mouth, I knew how they sounded.

Weili’s face hardened. “Darius, I never promised you anything. Absolutely nothing.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” She spat the question like a rock she’d found in her food.

“Yes, but I thought -”

“You thought wrong. I was your friend. That’s all. We traveled together. We studied together. We became friends.”

“Then why did you stop being my friend?”

“Only a child would ask that question.”

That was the moment when I knew there was nothing more to say. On some level I knew that her resorting to diminishing me in that way meant that she had no genuine answer to my question. And anything I said would be devalued as a childish complaint. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from saying softly, “I’m sad. I feel alone.”

I knew these words did in fact sound childish. I didn’t say it to garner sympathy. I said it because it was a deep truth, and I was in pain.

Her face hardened. “I’m sorry. But that’s not my fault. I’m not your wife or your fiance. So don’t try to manipulate me or blackmail me emotionally.”

For several moments neither of us spoke. Then she picked up her bow. “If you misunderstood our friendship, I’m sorry. Truly. But that isn’t my fault. It’s best if we don’t talk anymore.”

With that, she walked away.

A Major Sin

The next several days were a bad time for me. Up until that moment, I’d still had hope that Weili would come back to me. I loved her. I had imagined a future with her as my wife. She’d dote on me like Gulnur did on Kuangren. She’d give me many children like Ahmed’s wife had done. We’d have our own home, and Far Away would live with us.

Now that was all shattered.

There were moments, as we rode along narrow trails beside steep cliffs, when I thought about throwing myself over the side. Even with all the hardship I had been through, I had never experienced such thoughts before.

Once I nearly did it. I let myself fall back to the rear of the caravan. When the caravan turned a corner around a mountain ridge, I held back. The path was narrow, with a sheer mountain face on one side, and a vast drop on the other. I dismounted from Belly, and removed his tackle – his saddle, bridle and cinch – so that he would be free to go on his own. Then I stepped to the edge of the cliff. My toes projected over the edge. Far, far below, a raging river was a tiny silver ribbon.

I knew this was a major sin. Suicide was haram in Islam, as it was a rejection of Allah’s plan. I breathed the frigid air, and when I let it out my breath billowed visibly out over the precipice. Perhaps Allah would understand my pain and be merciful with me.

“Belly will miss you,” said a voice from my heart.

“Belly will be fine,” replied my logical mind.

“What about Far Away?” my heart voice said. “No one loves you like he does. He nearly died following you. He’s still waiting for you to come home. If you could soar through the sky back to the farm, you would find him right now, perched on the wall beside the road, watching for you to return.”

My logical mind had no reply to this, and I burst into tears. I could not do this. It wasn’t that I feared death. If it were nothing but an empty void, I would welcome it. But in my heart I trusted Allah. He would make a way forward for me, a way out of my pain. He would bring me back to those who truly loved me, and who I loved.

I was about to step away from the edge when my boot skidded on loose shale. Pebbles rattled away into the abyss. My arms flew out instinctively as I struggled to regain my balance. I teetered over the edge. Vertigo made my head spin. No! I didn’t want to die!

Before I could fall, Belly lunged forward and seized the back of my tunic in his teeth. The sudden jerk pulled me off my feet in the opposite direction. I landed hard on my back in the middle of the road, staring up at the cold blue sky.

For several heartbeats I could only breathe.

Belly stood over me, licking my face until I reached up and laid a trembling hand against his neck.

“Alright,” I whispered. “I’m alright.”

Always Dangerous

Belly had saved my life, and I’d learned a powerful lesson in that moment. I wanted life, not death. That was unquestionable. Weili had broken my heart, yet she had not broken me as a human being.

Yet the sadness persisted. I distracted myself from thoughts of Weili by reviewing Five Animals forms as I rode, and by reciting Quranic surahs. At night, I practiced my fighting techniques. More than that, I threw myself into training with a kind of desperation.

Whenever the caravan halted for the evening and my duties were complete, I would take up my dao and walk beyond the last wagons where there was room to move. I began with the fundamentals of my family art: tiger, crane, leopard, snake, dragon.

I repeated the forms until my clothes clung with sweat despite the mountain air. When one form ended, another began. I imagined opponents rushing me from every direction. I cut, spun, ducked beneath invisible blades, sprang over imaginary obstacles, and rolled across the rocky ground before coming up with my sword already moving.

Where the forms ended, my imagination began. My movements were acrobatic, perhaps unrealistic, and always dangerous. With a blade as sharp as mine, a wrong move could sever one of my own limbs.

The younger guards began gathering to watch.

“You’re trying to kill yourself,” Brother Ahmed observed one evening.

“It wouldn’t matter,” and I meant it. Suicide was one thing – I’d established that I would not do that – but death in an accident or in battle wouldn’t be my fault.

He looked at me for a moment, then nodded sadly.

A Smart Horse

I often talked to Belly as I rode. “I should have kept my mouth shut,” I told him one afternoon.

He flicked an ear.

“I know. You’re right.”

Another flick.

“You always take everyone else’s side.”

One of the merchants riding behind us laughed. “Who are you talking to, Darius?”

“My horse.”

“The horse talks back?”

“Sure, why not?”

“What does he say?”

“That I’m an idiot.” That brought laughter from several riders nearby.

Before long it became a running joke. “If anyone has questions,” Meilin called out one afternoon, “ask Belly. He has all the answers.”

“He talks about you too,” I told her.

“What does he say?”

“That you’re a great fighter but meaner than a bear.”

She snorted. “He’s smart.”

I never told them that Belly had saved my life. Then they’d really think I was cuckoo.

A New Rogue?

Kaungren had by now recovered from his lashing. He walked upright again, and resumed his duties, though he and his wife were still granted the luxury of a private wagon. He no longer sneaked into passing towns and returned with locals hot on his heels.

Instead, Arslan seemed to have taken his place as the disobedient rogue. Three times, as we passed villages, I saw the young archer split from the caravan and ride into town on his own. He always made sure to do so when Karim wasn’t watching. Initially I thought nothing of it. I knew he spoke Persian, as did these locals. I thought maybe he was going into town to trade, or buy personal supplies. But I also worried that he might be pulling a Kuangren – going into town to drink, gamble, or steal. This worried and angered me, because he might bring disaster upon us.

Or so I told myself.

I confronted him after one of these unsanctioned side trips. The caravan had stopped to feed and water the horses. These mountains were strange, for the air was cold, and the wind cut through the passes like Karim’s bullwhip, scouring one’s skin; yet the sun had an oddly piercing glare that made you want to seek shelter. But there was work to do, and the best you could do was drape a cloth over your head and stay busy. It was a hard land, and I found myself thinking that I would never want to fight people who had grown up in this land.

I found Arslan sitting in the shade of a wagon, rather than tending to his horse. He claimed he’d gone into town to buy a few arrowheads. His eyes were vacant and his speech slow, and there was a strange scent about him that was familiar, but that I could not identify. Yet he was not drunk, for I knew the signs all too well from my father’s alcoholic binges, and I did not see those signs on Arslan.

I dismounted Belly and stood before him.

“What are you into?” I demanded. “What’s your story?”

“I’m to good thing,” he replied in my language, and his speech was slow and dreamy. Not slurred like when a man was drunk. More like he was sleepwalking.

“Leave Weili alone,” I told him flatly. I had no right to say this, but I said it anyway.

“You think she girl for you?” He smiled faintly, and continued in his own language, saying something that sounded to me like “If she was your girl, she would be your girl.”

I studied him. He was a tall and broad-shouldered young man with a wide face. Muscular and prematurely bald. Handsome. There was something almost beatific about his face, as if he were in perpetual prayer. And he was the best archer I’d ever seen. He could shoot me down from five hundred paces, but in any type of hand to hand combat I would demolish him. Then we’d see who was a child, and who was a man. I wanted to kick him and say, “Get up and fight.” I almost did.

But what was the point? He was right. If Weili loved me, she would be with me. I shook my head and rode away.

I briefly considered telling Karim about Arslan’s unauthorized disappearances. But that wasn’t my way. I wasn’t a tattletale. Such a tactic would for sure not bring Weili back to me. And I still didn’t actually know what Arslan was up to.

Enemy of the State

That night, the skinny kid with the scraggly beard – Memdooh – was reciting poetry again. I saw a number of faces I recognized around the fire, including Weili’s. Arslan was nowhere to be seen. This cheered me, and I went and sat cross legged next to Weili. She turned and saw me, and to my surprise she gave a rueful smile. “I was too harsh in what I said,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”

I felt warmth rush through me like a great draught of steaming hot tea. “Forget about it,” I whispered back. We fell silent in order to listen to Memdooh. He swayed back and forth and gesticulated with his arms as he chanted:

My horse is a Mongolian.
He’s small, I can’t control him.
His temper is hot
but he never stops.

I’m no Mongolian,
but I’m red hot.
My arm is lightning,
my sword is faster than thought.

I rolled my eyes at this. Memdooh was a decent fighter, but if his arm was lightning, my farts were thunder.

The proclamation is made
the hour is late
They classify me
with the enemies of the state.

There was some muttering at this. Criticism of the emperor was not permitted in our land.

Demons pour forth
from a crack in the land
None of them guess
what I have in my hand.

I draw my sword
and empty my head
They can’t kill me
if I’m already dead.

This was intriguing. He was talking about River Flow. Yet Memdooh did not fight in River Flow. In battle he shouted in anger, bellowed in triumph and occasionally screamed in fear. Not that there was anything wrong with fear.

We’re far from home –
strange cities and bazaars –
Yet we’re never alone
For we are Five Stars.

Memdooh waved his arm in a flourish and we knew he was done. The audience applauded and broke up. Weili approached the young poet, and I accompanied her.

“That was amazing,” Weili gushed. “So good, so much fun. How did you learn to do that?”

“My grandfather was a poet,” Memdooh boasted. “He studied with the great Wu Weiye.”

“That last stanza was spot on,” I said. “But what was that about being an enemy of the state?”

He looked me up and down. “I am not a rich, comfortable Hui like you, brother Darius. My people are White Mountain Turki Muslims from Altishahr.”

I stared at him blankly.

He sighed. “What the Chinese called Xinjiang. In the far northwest.”

“Oh.” I nodded.

“The Chinese invaded us. So yes, I am an enemy of the state.”

“Yet you work for Five Stars, a company that serves the emperor.”

He glared. “I have my reasons.”

Weili pulled me aside. “Can’t you just enjoy a thing without analyzing it?” she demanded. “You don’t always have to prove how smart you are.”

It felt like I’d been slapped. So much for leaving our fight behind and making up. Still, there was something on my mind and it couldn’t wait.

“I have to tell you something,” I said. “There’s something strange going on with Arslan. He sneaks into local villages sometimes. And there’s something about him, something weird. Like he’s not completely awake. He’s all dreamy and distant. I don’t know what it is. But you need to be careful. There’s something not right about him.”

Something that might have been guilt flickered across her face, but it was so quick I could have imagined it. It was replaced almost immediately by outrage.

“Are you spying on him?” she hissed. “What about me, are you spying on me? You nasty little creep, stay away from us!”

I took a physical step back, as if I’d been hit in the chest with a sledgehammer. My mind went completely blank.

Weili turned and stalked away.

A Thief Among Us

Over the next several days, things began disappearing.

At first no one thought much of it. A pair of ivory chopsticks went missing. Then a whetstone. Someone spent an hour searching for his leather belt before finally borrowing another. Brother Ahmed misplaced his prayer beads, only to discover them hanging from his saddle where he himself had left them. A merchant complained that his ink brush had vanished, then sheepishly found it tucked inside a ledger. One of the cooks searched everywhere for a small pouch of cumin before deciding he must have left it behind at the previous campsite.

Longwei loudly declared that old age had finally caught up with the caravan.

“We’ve marched so far,” he announced, “that our memories have refused to come with us.”

That drew some laughs.

Then one of the merchants discovered that six silver coins had disappeared from his purse.

The following day another merchant reported that a small pouch of saffron, worth nearly its weight in silver, had vanished from his wagon. A teamster swore someone had taken his wife’s jade hairpin, which he carried wrapped in cloth as a gift for his return home. Before long, another merchant found that several tiny packets of cinnamon and cloves had disappeared from a locked chest.

No one laughed anymore.

Those were not the sort of things a man misplaced.

Each item was small enough to slip unnoticed into a pocket, valuable enough to exchange in almost any village, and nearly impossible to identify once sold.

From then on, every man counted his belongings before bedding down for the night. Purses were tied beneath tunics instead of left beside bedrolls. Merchants began sleeping with one hand resting on their strongboxes. Conversations grew quieter, and more than once I caught men studying one another with narrowed eyes.

One evening I overheard two merchants speaking in low tones.

“It’s Kuangren,” one said. “It has to be.”

“But,” the other objected, “I heard that his own wife’s ivory comb went missing.”

The first one chuckled. “It takes a cold-hearted man to steal from his own wife. That Kuangren is incorrigible.”

I shook my head. The old Kuangren had been a fool, a gambler, and a womanizer, but he had never stolen from the caravan. And the man who now prayed beside Brother Ahmed every evening scarcely resembled the one who’d been whipped in Kyrgyzstan. To steal from his own wife? Impossible. He doted on her. More than once I had seen him helping Gulnur carry water.

No, it wasn’t Kuangren.

Opium

A thought nagged at me, and eventually I sought out Hakim Yusuf.

I found him trimming dried herbs outside his wagon.

Without looking up he smiled. “Nothing is bent sideways today, I hope.”

“No.”

“Good. Have you come to assist me?”

I smiled ruefully. “Not yet, sorry. I need to ask you about something.” Without naming Arslan, I described the condition in which I had seen him beneath the wagon. His slow speech and distant expression. The strange sweetness in the air around him. The dreamy look in his eyes.

Hakim Yusuf stopped trimming the herbs. “Opium.”

The certainty in his voice startled me. “You know about it?”

He gave a little wave of his hand. “I don’t know who you’re referring to. I know the symptoms.”

“What is it?”

“We physicians use it as a medicine. It’s very useful to dull pain before a difficult procedure. If I have to operate or amputate, for example.”

I snapped my fingers as recognition struck. “That’s how I know the smell!”

Hakim nodded. “Many physicians use preparations derived from opium, but diluted, and only when necessary. No one would use it raw. It’s too powerful.”

“Why would someone take it if he’s not injured?”

Hakim shook his head sadly. “Why do we humans do anything? We are foolish creatures. Allah offered the burden to the heavens and the earth and they refused it, but we took it.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It brings a feeling of peace… even bliss. Particularly the first time. It allows a man to forget his pains and regrets for a while. Don’t we all want that? But it extracts a heavy price.”

“You mean it’s expensive?”

“Yes, it is, but the price I refer to is addiction. A man discovers that yesterday’s dose no longer satisfies. He takes more, then more again. Before long the good feeling is gone, and he is only taking it to avoid the severe pangs of withdrawal. He stops caring about anything but the drug, and to get it he will lie and steal. Eventually it will kill him.”

That sounded like being trapped in a nightmare. For a moment I actually felt sympathy for Arslan. Who wouldn’t want to escape the pain of this life for a while? But…

As if hearing my thoughts, Hakim Yusuf  said, “Such a man would be a danger to the caravan.”

I chewed on my lip. “Where would this opium come from? How would a man get his hands on it out here in the middle of nothing?”

Hakim looked toward the dark mountains surrounding us. ““Much of the opium traded across these lands begins right here.”

I followed his gaze. “Afghanistan?”

He nodded. “One would only have to enter a local village to buy some. You know what, that’s a good idea. I’m a bit low, maybe I should stock up. I’ll talk to Karim…” He entered the wagon and started puttering about.

I called out my thanks and left. It all made sense. Arslan was the thief, selling the stolen items to fuel his addiction. But, I realized, there was nothing I could do. First, I had no proof. Second, even if I could prove it, Arslan would be whipped and exiled. I wouldn’t mind seeing that. But Weili – who, I suspected, already knew about Arslan’s problem – would hate me forever. She would never, ever forgive me.

A Flicker of Light

Three nights later we camped in a narrow valley where a small cave overlooked the caravan from a low ridge. The mountains pressed close around us, shutting out all but a ribbon of sky overhead. The air carried the bite of approaching winter, and after evening prayer everyone gathered close to the cook fires until the flames burned low. Gradually the laughter faded. One lantern after another winked out until only the sentries remained awake.

Weili had accused me of spying on Arslan. It hadn’t been true then, but it was now, in a way. I made a point out of checking his duty station during the day, and his bedroll at night. Walking  past his bedroll now, I found it empty.

It might mean nothing. Men often wandered away from camp for a few moments of privacy. But as I was settling my blanket beside Belly, I noticed a brief flicker of orange light among the rocks above us. It vanished almost immediately, as though someone had cupped a hand over a flame.

I should have called for another guard to accompany me, and maybe even alerted the Sarge. But I did not. Without waking anyone, I climbed the rocky slope. Loose stones shifted beneath my boots. The night was silent except for the whisper of the wind threading through the pass.

The smell reached me before the cave did. It was faint, sweet, and strangely familiar.

When I stepped into the cave, I froze in shock. The cave itself was shallow, scarcely more than a hollow in the mountainside. Its ceiling was blackened by years of smoke. A tiny oil lamp burned, throwing wavering shadows across the stone walls.

There, in the light of the lamp, with their backs against the rock, sat Arslan and Weili. He sat with one knee raised, head lolling to the side, seemingly asleep. As for Weili, a long pipe resting loosely in her fingers. Wisps of pale smoke drifted lazily upward before disappearing into the darkness. I could hear the tiny hiss of the lamp flame. The sweet smell of the smoke hung heavily in the still air, clinging to my clothes.

Weili smiled as though I were an old friend arriving for tea.

“Darius.” There was love in the way she spoke my name, and it nearly broke my heart.

“Come,” she said, and she lifted the pipe toward me with slow, dreamlike generosity. “You try.”

“Weili,” I said, and my voice broke.

“You are so good,” she said dreamily. “You always loved me. No one…” She inhaled from the pipe, then let the smoke rise slowly from her mouth. “Ever loved me before. I never… deserved you.”

My mouth fell open. What was she saying? Hope surged in me. I reached out a hand.

“Then come with me. Forget Arslan. He’s a thief, he’s rotten. You don’t need him, you don’t need  this drug. It’s poison. Hakim Yusuf told me so.”

Her eyes widened and her nostrils flared. “You told Hakim Yusuf about me? You rat!” She tried to stand, but her legs gave out and she slumped back to the ground. “Get out of here. I’m with Arslan now, get it through your brick head.” She picked up a loose stone from the cave floor and flung it at me. I ducked as it flew past.

Arslan roused from his stupor. “What…. going on?”

With her eyes on me, Weili threw her arms around him and kissed his cheek. “Nothing, my love.” She passed him the pipe, and he inhaled.

I wanted to run away. Instead I said, “You’re better than this, Deng Weili.”

She released her hold on Arslan and slumped against the wall of the cave. “No,” she said sadly. “I am exactly this. You loved…” She twirled a finger in the air, trying to think of a word. “A mirage. Go away, Darius.”

I stumbled out of the cave. Tears made icy sideways tracks on my face as the wind hit.

There was nothing I could do. If I went to Sergeant Karim, I knew what would happen. Twenty lashes for Arslan for sure, for the thefts. As for Weili, I did not know. What if she had stolen as well?

An Eerie Pass

Personal items continued to go missing. Men cursed under their breath and searched one another’s faces with growing suspicion.

I said nothing.

Each complaint felt like another stone added to the burden I was carrying. And every day that I remained silent, I became a little more ashamed.

The mountains grew higher. The valleys narrowed until the road became little more than a ledge carved into the mountainside. Dark cave mouths peered down from impossible heights, some scarcely larger than doorways, others wide enough to swallow an entire wagon. I found myself studying them more often than the trail beneath Belly’s hooves.

I no longer monitored Arslan’s movements, or tried to talk to Weili. I divorced myself from the entire matter, and tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. But her words haunted me: You always loved me. No one ever loved me before. Those words went around and around in my head like a pair of squirrels chasing each other endlessly. Her little show of affection toward Arslan didn’t bother me at all, but her saying, “I never deserved you” – that was like an arrow in my gut.

We crossed a rocky pass with high mountains on either side. The mountains were riddled with caves. The entire place was blanketed in an eerie silence. Even the birds seemed reluctant to enter that pass.

The attack came without warning.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 22 – The Raid

Reader comments and constructive criticism are important to me, so please comment!

See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Pieces of a Dream | Part 1: The Cabbie and the Muslim Woman

Trust Fund And A Yellow Lamborghini: A Short Story

The post Far Away [Part 21] – Opium appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Southern Lebanon has been devastated by the Israeli assault; ruins dot the county of Nabatieh.

A significant aspect in the ongoing war and negotiations between the United States and Iran has been the related Israeli attack on Lebanon, whose Shia community and in particular Hezbollah militia has close religious, historical, and political ties to Iran. As it has done for over fifty years, the Israeli military has intermittently attacked Lebanon since 2024, but this latest round that began in spring 2026 has received proportionately far less attention than earlier attacks despite enormous bloodshed and its direct relevance to both the war in the Persian Gulf and the genocide of Palestine. More than anything, the war and a blatantly lopsided ceasefire that went into effect last month has exposed the limitations and bluster of a Lebanese government that loudly asserts its privileges but chronically fails to meet its responsibility, especially security against a rabidly aggressive neighbor.

The area most obviously abandoned to repeated Israeli attack is the largely Shia south, which has suffered immense damage not simply during the mid-2020s but from Israeli incursions, on and off, for over half a century. The south is often pathologized, certainly by Israel but also by domestic Lebanese critics, as a reckless hotbed whose fealty to Hezbollah will only bring peril to Lebanon at large. Yet Hezbollah, for all its faults, has managed a security and level of services that the Lebanese government has never afforded the region.

Nor are the southern Shias alone as scapegoats for Lebanon’s plight. Historically, one group after another has been blamed whenever Lebanon’s integrity is violated: at the moment it is Hezbollah and Shias in the south; earlier it was Syrian refugees and their largely Sunni supporters in areas such as Arsal and Sidon; earlier it was alleged Sunni “jihadists” in cities such as Tripoli; and earlier, at the outset of the 1975-90 war, it was Palestinians and their Lebanese supporters across a number of the country’s demographic groups, largely Muslims or Druze.

Lebanon was originally set up in the 1920s by France as an enclave for the region’s Christians, especially Maronites who shared the Catholic faith of most Frenchmen. At the time, anti-Muslim sentiments ran deep within French colonial policy, which largely caricatured the Muslim majority of the region as naturally predisposed to violence against minorities. In addition they were inclined to side with Maronites in a long-running feud with Druze, another of Lebanon’s minorities. It was only belatedly and grudgingly that France resorted to a long-outdated formula of splitting power between the elites of various confessional groups. Yet the fact that even in a newly formed Lebanese state Muslims, Sunnis and Shias, soon outnumbered Maronites contributed to the system’s inherent tensions, which were already apparent in the 1950s and resurfaced with major violence in the 1970s.

During this period, conservative and rightwing Lebanese politicians, often but not always Maronites, were inclined to resort to an ossified form of nationalism that exceptionalized  Lebanon and pretended that it existed in a regional vacuum. Where links with France were seen as natural in preserving this Lebanese exceptionalism, links with outsiders – whether those of Sunnis with Palestinians or of Shias with Iran – were treated with suspicion. Today, after the 1980s Lebanese war’s resolution contributed to an officially more equitable adjustment in the confessional balance of power, this nationalism manifests itself chiefly in loudly decrying the “foreign links” of Hezbollah with Iran while ignoring those of every other Lebanese actor with other foreign powers.

The lopsided peace deal that Joseph Aoun and Nawaf Salam’s Lebanese government struck with Israel has virtually signed away practical Lebanese independence when it comes to the United States and its approved regional states, while loudly asserting Lebanese sovereignty when it comes to disarming Hezbollah. This rests on the pretence that Hezbollah does not have a major domestic constituency based off years of not only warfare but genuine sociopolitical services. It also rests on ignoring countless Israeli provocations and incursions throughout Lebanese history, since long before Hezbollah was founded.

The irony is that time and again Lebanese ultranationalists, who frequently scapegoat their compatriots for undermining the state, have time and again been the quickest to give way and even collaborate when the country is actually invaded: this was the case throughout Israel’s repeated invasions since the 1970s and largely through the thirty-year Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Both these invasions were directed, principally and initially, at the Palestinians in Lebanon. One reason that many other factions and most of the Lebanese government faded meekly away before these invasions, which came at the cost of not only Palestinians but Lebanese citizens as well, was because Palestinians had been scapegoated for Lebanon’s sociopolitical problems.

When the Syrian occupation of Lebanon ended in 2005, complaints about the occupation, its corruption and abuses, were commonplace among rightwing and conservative Lebanese nationalists: yet it had been the same current who had welcomed and benefited from the original 1976 invasion in order to crush their Palestinian opponents. Many rightwingers, particularly the populist far-right militias of the so-called Lebanese Front and the South Lebanon Army, supported the even more brutal 1982 Israeli invasion, which installed their leader Bashir Gemayel as a shortlived vassal before his assassination. The Palestinians’ removal as a significant factor from Lebanese politics only brought the turn of other Lebanese citizens, ranging from Sunni Islamists in the north and Shia Islamists in the south to Druze leftists in the east, to come under attack by either the Syrian or Israeli armies, or both.

The most significant of these have been the Hezbollah group, which is now some forty years of age. An unusual closeness to Iran, who sent a large number of military “advisors” to train and equip the group in the 1980s, was frequently noted, yet treated as an exception, by rival groups and factions themselves close to one foreign power or other. In its early years Hezbollah fought Israel and, alongside Palestinians and Sunni Lebanese, the Syrian occupation of Hafiz Assad. Eventually and controversially, Iranian brokerage prompted a Hezbollah rapprochement with Syria, to the extent of assisting Assad’s son Bashar during the 2010s war.

Collaboration with the Assads, in which Lebanese nationalists were themselves involved until it fell out of fashion, is not the main criticism of Hezbollah. Rather, like the Palestinians of the 1970s, Hezbollah is blamed for having provoked Israeli “reprisals” in the service of a foreign agenda, thereby weakening the Lebanese state. Yet the record is clear that Israel has repeatedly, deliberately, and systematically attacked Lebanon since long before Hezbollah existed. The Lebanese state itself has little record to which it can point, certainly not in the south, even during peacetime. And as for foreign agendas, the scapegoating of resistance in Lebanon – whether that resistance was by Palestinians in the 1970s or Hezbollah in the 2020s – has long been led by those actors who were most amenable to actual foreign invasions of Lebanon, whether by the Assads’ Syria or by Israel.

Under fire: Lebanese army commander Rodolf Haykal has come under sustained foreign criticism for his reluctance to attack Hezbollah on behalf of Israel.

The year 2026 brings several anniversaries of this record. In summer 1976, Assad dispatched a major invasion to support the Lebanese rightwing against a combination of leftist, Muslim Lebanese, and especially Palestinian opponents: this brought about three decades of occupation where the Assad family famously manipulated and shaped the Lebanese political process. Israel’s role was even worse: having already mounted an invasion all the way to Beirut as well as made repeated raids during the 1980s, in the spring of 1996 and the summer of 2006 Israel again made major, pointedly brutal incursions into southern Lebanon: it was here that the Israeli military gave a moniker to its longstanding tradition of deliberate viciousness, the “Dahiya Doctrine”, named for a town that was flattened over and over as a form of pressure. The Dahiya Doctrine has of course been on full view in other Israeli misadventures, notably Gaza. Yet as in Gaza, it had little demonstrable military effect: instead, particularly in summer 2006, Hezbollah shot to international fame for having outlasted and outfought a more powerful Israeli foe.

Despite the bruising blows that the group has suffered over the Israeli invasion of 2024-26, there is no indication that Hezbollah will fold on this occasion either: indeed, as Lebanese army commander Rodolf Haykal among others has recognized, the group’s prestige has only soared after fighting Israeli invasions. Once more, as in the summer of 2006, it is the Lebanese government that has looked impotent and inept, browbeaten by the United States into accepting a lopsided agreement. Wiser exceptions to this rule, such as Haykal, were subjected to diplomatic snubs and a smear campaign by neoconservatives in Washington, such as Lindsay Graham, and their confederates in Israel: he was accused of having “gone rogue” and defeatism against Hezbollah. Defeatism against Hezbollah, a Lebanese group operating in its homeland, was apparently a bigger crime than defeatism against a pointedly brutal Israeli invasion.

That the country invading Lebanon could accuse the Lebanese army commander of being a “defeatist” against his own compatriots is an indication of the ludicrous expectation that the Lebanese state is meant to act not as a government for its citizens but a check against those same citizens. That is, of course, how Israel and thus, unfortunately, much of Washington see the Muslim and Arab worlds at large: that is to be expected. What is particularly absurd is that Lebanese “nationalists” with a long and almost seamless record of collaborating with foreign invasions should then turn on their own compatriots in the name of strengthening the Lebanese state. Very often, as in the case of the rightwing, this is accompanied by anti-Muslim prejudices that in effect call into the question of Lebanese Muslims, whether it was the Sunnis of the 1970s or Shias since the 1990s.

No state is strengthened or its people served by a hostile foreign invasion. But the pretence that Iran is the only foreign actor involved in Lebanon serves as a method of justifying actual foreign invasions, with undisguised brutality and contempt for Lebanese life, by far worse actors. The Lebanese government and its supposedly nationalist supporters do their country a major disservice with this selective patriotism.

The post Selective Memory undermines Lebanese Patriotism and Populace appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

This is not, in the end, a story about a checklist, though the checklist is real and the arithmetic beneath it is merciless. It is a story about the people holding it, about what they are running from, what they secretly long for, and the strange way that wanting something too precisely can place it forever out of reach.

Where the Wanting Goes Wrong

I know my worth; I’m not lowering my standards. You hear it everywhere now, in group chats and matrimonial profiles alike, the anthem of a generation that refuses to settle. The first half is a hard-won victory. For generations, some women were handed to men like furniture, appraised by families and expected to absorb whatever flaws their husbands arrived with. To stand up and name your own worth was a correction, and a necessary one.

The second half is where the trouble begins. A healthy instinct, run through the machinery of a consumer culture, can curdle. Worth was meant to be a foundation, a quiet certainty that you deserve dignity. Instead it hardens into a ranking, measured against the curated lives scrolling endlessly across a screen. And the moment worth becomes comparative, it becomes “insatiable”. She wants him taller, richer, more visibly devout. He wants glow without effort, grace without heft, a spark that can’t be taught. The bar does not rise once. It rises every time you open the app.

And the expectation no longer tracks anything in particular. This is not the private affliction of the successful, earned by a wall of degrees; it has become the cultural default, the air everyone breathes, felt just as keenly by those the world overlooked as by those it celebrated. The asking price went up across the board, all at once, for everyone.

“The moment worth becomes comparative, it becomes insatiable.”

The apps did to marriage what the buffet did to appetite. They convinced a generation that the next plate is always available, so why finish this one? “Hope is a fickle, dangerous thing,” and it does its damage by aiming the eye at the possibilities instead of the probabilities. The man with a flooded inbox keeps every door open and therefore walks through none, mistaking the open doors for freedom, never noticing that a man who keeps all of them open never actually enters a room. And keeping your options open is not only greed. It is fear in the costume of abundance, because to choose one person is to become vulnerable to one person, and so to risk being seen, disappointed, left.

Worse, the market rewires desire itself. Scarcity passes for value; the heart confuses difficulty with worth. So the kind, available, devoted person reads as desperation, while the one who barely answers reads as a prize. It is the logic of a slot machine, where unpredictable reward grips harder than reliable reward. People chase the feeling of being wanted, mistake it for love, and go home, again, to an empty room.

We Already Have Too Much

Step back from the ballroom and the same pattern is everywhere. No generation in history has had more than we do. More food than we can eat, more clothes than we can wear, more schooling, more attention, more of everything than survival ever required. And we feel less for all of it. Abundance raises the baseline so high that nothing moves the needle. The body’s reward system, built for scarcity, goes quiet in a world that never lets it go hungry. We are full and unmoved.

The mistake we keep making is to treat that numbness as a shortage. If a full closet does not satisfy, buy more clothes. If a hundred matches do not move you, line up a hundred more. But more is the disease, not the cure. The person drowning in options is not starving for options. They are starving for the ability to be moved by what is already in front of them.

That ability is not fixed. It can be trained. The same plate, eaten with attention and real hunger instead of distraction, gives back its pleasure. The same ordinary day, met with gratitude instead of comparison, returns more than a better day met with contempt. Dopamine is not only a function of what arrives; it is a function of how you meet it. With practice, you can pull far more out of what you already have. That is the quiet skill an abundant age forgot to teach, and it is most of the game. Islam had a name for it, and prized it above every fortune.

Richness, the Prophet ﷺ said, is not an abundance of possessions but the richness of the soul. [Bukhari 6446] That is the one thing a culture of plenty cannot buy and has forgotten how to grow: the capacity to be filled by what is already in front of you.

The Same Is True of Love

A relationship obeys the identical law. You will not squeeze joy out of a partner by upgrading to a better one, any more than you squeezed joy out of your closet by adding to it. Depth comes from attention, not acquisition. The couples who go the distance are not the ones who found flawless people. They are the ones who learned to draw the good out of an ordinary, decent human being, day after day, the way you learn to draw flavor out of a simple meal.

So here is the practical shape of it.

Be strong. A husband or a wife is not a luxury product delivered finished to your door. It is a person you build with, which means you have to be solid enough to build. Compromise, since no one worth having arrives without edges. But do not compromise so far that you disappear, because a person who vanishes into a marriage has nothing left to give it. The line between bending and breaking is the entire art.

Choose someone you can work with, and become someone worth working with. Bring the best out of them, and let them bring the best out of you. Push against each other, sharpen each other, stand and fight side by side through the parts that are hard, because that friction is not the failure of the thing. It is the thing.

Courtship is hard, and often you enter it only half-convinced, pushing yourself toward something you are not yet sure of, perhaps only filling a void, but hopefully trying in earnest. When what you find does not match what you pictured, work with what is there and set your intention to make it work. And if the interest dies altogether, look for an honest way out, and take it whether or not the other person grants you the grace of understanding. That is your part, and it is why you cannot be speaking to several people at once. To divide your attention is to withhold the respect the person before you is owed, and no absence of a “formal tie” excuses it. The heart was never built to be spread thin across many at once, and comparison will quietly drain the joy out of every one of them. This is a serious journey. If you choose to walk it, walk it with the utmost respect.

You Are Also the Room

But the room is full of other people, and they are trying, too. This is the part the lonely rarely consider. You are not only a seeker moving through the crowd; you are also the crowd that others must move through. The same eye that ranks a partner turns easily on everyone else’s chances, and a whole culture has quietly agreed to let it. We have become a people who appraise each other’s pursuits the way the ballroom appraises its guests, coolly and comparatively, always to someone’s diminishment.

Refuse it. When you see two people who might be good for one another, and one of them is hesitating, nervous, half-convinced they are not enough, be the one who gives them courage. Stand at their side. Speak the good you know of each to the other, honestly and generously, and let the best of one meet the best of the other. It is quiet work, and unglamorous, and it is holy. You are amplifying a goodness that is real but too shy to announce itself. The world is not short of decent people. It is short of anyone willing to help them be seen.

And resist, with everything you have, the sweeter temptation to do the reverse. It is so easy, and it wears the face of care so well. A whisper about someone’s past, a rumor you never witnessed but are glad to carry, an afternoon spent excavating a stranger’s history as though you were guarding someone from harm, when what you were really doing was entertaining yourself. Do not carry what you did not see with your own eyes. And the digging itself, the compulsion to know exactly who a person used to be, will not move one letter of what is already written, for them or for you. What is decreed does not wait on your findings. You cannot audit a soul into being safe to love.

Many will disagree, and I will not pretend I can prove it. But I have watched people make a pastime of meddling in one another’s affairs, dressed up as concern, certain it costs nothing, and then sit in their own quiet rooms, bewildered, wondering why the harvest will not come. And least trustworthy of all is the counsel of anyone with something to gain from keeping two people apart, who warns you off the one they quietly want for themselves, or who would sooner see a match fail than watch a person they resent flourish. No one should stand between two people while their own heart has something to win or lose. You cannot spend your days salting other people’s fields and expect your own to bloom.

And if you are the one who helped, if you gave them courage, spoke the good word, turned two lives gently toward each other, then keep it to yourself. Do not return to collect the debt. The instant you announce it, the instant you say, “I did this, I made this,” you convert a gift into a transaction and drain the barakah clean out of it. Good done in secret keeps its blessing; good done for an audience has already been paid, in full, in the cheap coin of your own credit. Let them believe they found each other. Do the thing for its own sake, and disappear.

Keep Going

And if you love someone, do not let hesitation cast the deciding vote. Fear will always argue for the safety of waiting, and waiting has buried more love than rejection ever did. But let the courage be the “lawful kind”. And aim for the pleasure of Allah , and keep it before the pleasure of the heart. The Prophet ﷺ taught us that nothing was ever seen to equal marriage for two who love one another. So gather your courage and say the words that can be said in the light. Love does not reward the cautious. It rewards the brave who stay.

An honorable approach may falter the first time, and the second, for reasons that have nothing to do with your worth. The geography of two lives is rarely simple;  two clocks may strike different hours, a heart may be mid-repair from a storm you cannot see, or their path may already be crowded with another pursuit. Sometimes, you may step forward only to look within and realize your own foundation is still settling. A threshold that closes because the seasons did not align is not a verdict; it is the cost of trying at all. Keep going until you get it right. And if the right person has not arrived yet, stop scanning the room for them and turn the work inward. Become the kind of person the right one would be lucky to find. Be the good one, quietly and patiently, knowing that what is written for you will never lose its way.

You were right to know your worth. You were only wrong about where it lives. Worth was never something to be ranked, presented, or proven; it was something to be built, slowly, on ordinary mornings, out of attention and effort and the refusal to quit. The loneliest people in those ballrooms are not the ones who wanted too little. They are the ones still waiting to be handed a feeling they could have learned, all along, to make.

Related:

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– You Found “The One” In Your MSA [Part 1]: First Steps

The post The Arithmetic Of Longing: On Loneliness, Desire, And Learning To Want Well appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16  | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19

* * *

A New Recruit

Arslan asked permission to accompany the caravan to Persia. He said he’d always dreamed of seeing the great cities of Isfahan and Shiraz. From there, according to him, he would visit Al-Quds, then he would go south to see Makkah and Madinah – his lifelong dream.

Sergeant Karim replied with an annoyed wave of the hand. “We are not a taxi service.”

Weili jumped in. “You misunderstand, Sarge. He will work for his passage. He will be one of the guards. You’ve seen his ability with the bow. He can shoot farther than anyone here. That could be a great defensive asset.”

Karim regarded the young  man. “You follow my commands. Learn our rules, and abide by our discipline. If you want to know what happens when you break the rules, ask Kuangren.”

Arslan must have already heard about Kaungren, for he swallowed nervously, then nodded his head. “I be good in fight. I work.” He switched into a language I didn’t know, and Karim replied in the same language.

Ahmed leaned in and whispered in my ear. “He says he can speak Persian. Boss says fine, the kid is hired, but only to Isfahan. One way.”

“So you speak Persian too?” I whispered back.

“Persian, Arabic, Uzbek, Mandarin, some Cantonese.”

I was impressed by Ahmed’s knowledge. But I didn’t much like this development with Arslan. It had been fine when he was merely a handsome local that Weili had met, and who would soon be left behind. This was different. Why should we take him along? He wasn’t one of us. He hadn’t been trained like us, he hadn’t earned it. But I knew my place, and I kept my mouth shut.

We proceeded into Afghanistan. The green plain gradually gave way once more to stone.

For several days the caravan wound through the valleys of Afghanistan, following ancient roads worn smooth by countless horses and wagons before ours. Villages clung to the hillsides wherever water could be found, their homes built of rough stone and sun-dried brick, blending so naturally into the mountains that one sometimes did not notice them until smoke began rising from their chimneys.

The people proved as varied as the land itself.

As we passed by one village a man came out to welcome us warmly. He wore shalwar kameez, pointed leather shoes and a huge turban, and spoke Persian. He was, it turned out, the clan chief and the Imam. Before long, women appeared carrying baskets of flatbread still warm from their ovens, bowls of yogurt, dried apricots, steaming kettles of tea, and fresh goat cheese. The villagers brought goods for trade as well. Our merchants eagerly unpacked bolts of silk, porcelain, spices, and steel tools, and traded some for good quality wool, walnuts, honey, carved bowls, and sturdy mountain ponies.

The little girls, who all wore headscarves, seemed fascinated by Weili. No doubt they had never seen a woman who looked like her, tall and dressed like a man, carrying weapons and letting her hair hang free. Before long they had surrounded her, giggling as they tucked tiny wildflowers into her long black hair and carefully braided them among the strands. Weili laughed so freely that I scarcely recognized her. Meilin got some attention too, but not like Weili.

When the girls stepped back to admire her work, Weili and Meilin both bowed their heads solemnly as though they had just been adorned by a queen.

We all prayed Maghreb together, with the village Imam leading the salat. He recited part of Surat Al-Rahman, which I recognized but did not know by heart, then Al-Ikhlaas, which of course I did know. Once again I was amazed at the universality of Islam. Here I was, thousands of leagues from home, yet these people prayed as I did, and recited the same Quran I did. These men and women whose language I did not speak, yet we spoke the same language. We saw the world in the same way – more or less – and believed in the same things. They were total strangers to me, yet not strangers at all. We were children of one mother, for brother Ahmed had said one night that the word “ummah” – the universal body of Muslims – came from “umm,” mother, because we were all one family.

After salat the men made a huge fire to warm us against the chill night air, and everyone gathered around it. Someone made coffee, and served the guests. Sergeant Karim called for Longwei.

“Entertain us with one of your stories.”

Longwei’s Tale

Longwei smiled and settled himself beside the fire, extending his hands toward the flames.

Ahmed translated to Persian as Longwei spoke.

“Several years ago,” he began, “I was returning from Calicut on the southwestern coast of India with a small caravan of five wagons. Our merchants had purchased pepper, cardamom, cinnamon, and fine cotton cloth. I’d done a little trading of my own and had earned seven gold coins, which was all the wealth I owned in the world. I was happy. We had crossed most of the Indian peninsula without incident and thought ourselves blessed by Heaven.”

He sighed dramatically.

“That was our first mistake.”

Several of the Afghans exchanged knowing smiles. There was some muttering.

“They say,” Ahmed translated, “that they’d rather march to the gates of Jahannam than through South India.”

Longwei nodded. “Indeed. We entered a stretch of jungle where the trees grew so thick that even the sun seemed afraid to enter. One man was bitten in the eye by a snake hanging from a tree, and died in minutes. Another was swarmed by huge ants, and survived three days in terrible pain before dying.The road narrowed until two wagons could scarcely pass one another. Then we heard drums.”

He paused. “Not one drum.”

He looked slowly around the circle. “Hundreds.”

The listeners leaned closer.

“Are you sure,” Meilin interrupted, “that all of this didn’t happen in your imagination in a tea shop in Delhi?”

Our guards, used to Meilin’s sharp tongue, laughed, but the Afghan men frowned.

“Quite sure,” Longwei replied dryly. “It happened exactly as I say. The drums suddenly ceased. Men came pouring from the forest like ants from a broken hill. Men with painted faces, wild hair, and scarcely any clothing. They carried spears, bows, axes…” He shrugged. “…and very unpleasant expressions. We guards looked at one another. Their chief shouted a demand. No one understood him, but the meaning was clear. Our boss decided that living was preferable to dying.”

A ripple of laughter passed around the fire.

“We surrendered.” Longwei spread his hands. “They made every one of us climb down from our horses.”

He stood to demonstrate, climbing awkwardly to his feet before pretending to step down from an imaginary horse.

“Then they took our swords.” He handed an invisible weapon to an invisible bandit.

“They took our purses.” Another invisible handoff.

“They took our boots and our tunics.” By now everyone was laughing. Even Karim’s shoulders were shaking slightly.

“And then…” Longwei said gravely, “…they ordered us to remove every stitch of clothing.”

The Afghans around the fire erupted.

“No!”

“They did?!”

Longwei nodded solemnly. “I assure you, they were most thorough. We stood there, thirty respectable merchants and guards, as naked as newborn babies.”

The laughter became louder still.

Brother Ahmed wiped tears from his eyes as he translated into Persian.

One elderly Afghan slapped his knee so hard that he nearly toppled backward. More than a few men spilled their coffee.

“I’m glad I missed that scene,” Meilin commented.

Longwei gave her an annoyed glance. “Woman, you wish you had been there to see my beautiful body.”

I laughed at this. Beautiful was not a word I associated with Longwei.

The Hiding Place

“If I may continue? They searched every garment. Every saddle. Every wagon. Every bundle.”

He spread his hands. “They found everything.” He lowered his head mournfully. “Or so they believed.”

The laughter subsided.

“They left?”

“They left,” Longwei affirmed. “Very pleased with themselves.” He mimed watching them disappear into the jungle.

“When they were finally gone, we all began putting our clothes back on. There was much complaining.”

“‘My boots!'”

“‘My silver!'”

“‘My wife’s necklace!'”

“‘My pepper!'”

He acted out each complaint in a different voice until everyone around the fire was grinning.

“I dressed myself in silence. Then…” He closed his fist and shook it back and forth gently. “I jiggled my seven gold coins in one hand. Clink… clink… clink… I shall never forget that beautiful sound.”

No one laughed. Instead they stared at him in confusion.

Ahmed frowned.  “But… they searched you.”

He nodded knowingly. “They searched our clothing and purses.”

“Then where did you hide the coins?”

Longwei grinned. Then he stood, placed both hands upon his generous stomach, and lifted it with considerable effort.

Beneath it he tapped the front of his waistband.

“Under my belly.”

For a heartbeat there was silence. Then the camp exploded. The Afghan merchants laughed the loudest of all. Several bent forward until their foreheads nearly touched the ground. One man actually rolled onto his back, pounding the earth with both fists.

Brother Ahmed laughed so hard he rolled too close to the fire. His shirt caught on fire, and he beat it out hastily, which only made the others laugh more.

Karim covered his face with one hand, shaking his head.

“So that,” Longwei said with perfect dignity as the laughter continued around him, “is one unexpected advantage of growing fat.”

A Duel

When all the excitement died down, one of the Afghan elders pointed to Meilin and asked a question. Ahmed said something and shook his head.

“What?” Meilin demanded. “What did he say?”

“It’s not important.”

Meilin stood. “Tell me.”

Ahmed sighed. “He wants to know what an impertinent little woman like yourself is doing dressed as a guard.”

Meilin’s face flushed with anger, but Karim held up a hand to forestall her. He called to one of the men: “Bring two training swords.”

The man hurried back with the swords. Karim called me over and handed one to me. These were very much like real swords in their size and weight, but they were wooden, with dull edges that could not cut. Karim handed me one then whispered in my ear: “Make her look good.”

I understood. He wasn’t asking me to play clumsy or go slow, but to play to Meilin’s strengths. She might be short and slightly heavyset, with a broad face that made her look more like a farmer’s wife than a caravan guard, but Meilin was astonishingly quick. I had seen her vault onto a horse without touching the stirrup, and once, when a wagon axle snapped, she had flipped clear before the wagon even hit the ground. I would not have been surprised to learn that she had grown up in a wushu school.

We saluted one another and began to circle.

Meilin eyed me seriously. I felt like a frog being visually dissected by a healer’s apprentice. “I’ll try not to bruise your pride,” she said.

I smiled. “Okay.”

She sprang forward.

I barely caught the first blow. The second rapped smartly against my shoulder before I could turn it aside, sending a sharp sting through my arm. Even with a wooden sword, a solid strike could leave a bruise that lasted for days.

The Afghan men murmured with surprise. Whatever they had expected from a woman of her build, it was not this.

Meilin pressed the attack without giving me time to recover. Her feet seemed almost to skim the earth as she darted from one angle to another, striking high, then low, then high again. Twice I saw clean openings that would have given me victory. I ignored them, giving ground instead.

She did not miss the hesitation. Her eyes narrowed.

A third opening appeared as she overextended herself on a downward cut. Instinct screamed at me to step past her and put the sword to the back of her neck. Instead I let the moment pass.

The next instant her sword cracked against my ribs hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs.

The villagers gasped.

I managed to smile through clenched teeth.

“You’re getting slower,” she observed.

“So I’ve been told.”

She came again, relentless now. She caught me off guard when, amid a flurry of sword strikes, she threw a kick. I tried to parry the kick with my left hand but her foot struck my fingers. My middle finger bent sideways from the middle knuckle, clearly broken. Meilin did not stop. I wondered whether Karim appreciated just how difficult his order to “make her look good” really was.

She ran at me and cut to her left. This was a standard tactic against a right handed fighter like myself. You moved left to flank the opponent and put yourself in a safer spot. I pivoted and began to raise my blade into a roof block to parry the expected strike. However, Meilin did not go left. The entire thing was a fake. Instead she leaped right, putting herself directly in front of me. This was almost never done, and my instincts told me it was tactically unsound. Yet I was unable to capitalize on it, for in an instant she parried my blade with her own and headbutted me, striking my chin with the crown of her head, stunning me. At the same time  she wrapped my sword arm with her free arm, then tripped me. I crashed to my back, and she sat on me with her sword against my throat. My own weapon had gone flying.

The audience was utterly silent.

I raised my hands.

“I yield.” As if it wasn’t obvious.

For a heartbeat no one moved. Then the Afghan men burst into applause. Several nodded approvingly. The elder who had questioned Meilin’s place among us grinned broadly and said something to Ahmed.

“He says,” Ahmed translated, “that any caravan with women like her should fear no bandits.”

The old man stepped forward and bowed respectfully to Meilin. She returned the bow with quiet dignity.

Longwei folded his arms and looked at her with pride. “And that,” he declared, “is why I love her.”

The words escaped before he seemed to realize what he had said. Longwei’s face turned the color of a ripe pomegranate.

“I mean…” he stammered. “That is why I… greatly admire her swordsmanship.”

Brother Ahmed coughed suspiciously into his sleeve, while Karim became intensely interested in the contents of his coffee cup.

For just an instant, Meilin’s stern expression softened. Then she sniffed. “You’d better keep admiring my sword,” she said. “It’s the only thing of mine you’ll ever touch.”

The camp erupted in laughter once more, and Longwei accepted it with as much dignity as a blushing poet could manage.

Give Your Best

As the gathering broke apart, I felt someone seize my sleeve.

“Come here.” It was Meilin.

She led me behind one of the wagons, out of earshot of the others. When she turned to face me, her cheeks were red with anger.

“Don’t ever do that again,” she hissed.

I blinked.

“You let me win.”

“I—”

“Don’t insult me. I have spent years proving I belong among these guards. I don’t need charity from you.”

“It wasn’t charity.”

I looked down at the bruises already darkening on my arms, and my broken finger.

She followed my gaze and I saw surprise in her eyes. “Your finger. I didn’t realize.” Her gaze hardened again. “You deserve it. Don’t ever give less than your best.”

I nodded. “Yes ma’am. If it’s any consolation, you really got me at the end. I didn’t fake that.”

She shook her head in disgust. “You need to learn how to talk to a woman. Forget it, go see the Hakim.”

I watched her walk away. My middle finger had begun to swell, and it sat at an angle that fingers were never intended to assume. I was deeply dismayed. This would seriously affect my ability to perform my duties. It wasn’t even about holding the dao – this was my left hand after all, and not my primary weapon hand. But I had to be able to hold Belly’s reins. I had to be able to load and unload crates from the wagons when we stopped at trading locations. Not to mention cleaning myself after… you know.

I would have gone to Weili for sympathy, but she was nowhere to be found. I’d seen less and less of her lately. When I did see her, she was often in Arslan’s company. She’d smile and greet me, but it wasn’t the same.

Feeling suddenly exhausted, I trudged to Hakim Yusuf’s wagon. Every step was a painful effort.

Hakim Yusuf

Yusuf ibn Rashid, who we called Hakim Yusuf, or sometimes just “the Hakim,” was in his early sixties, lean rather than frail, with a neatly trimmed white beard, alert brown eyes, and hands that seemed permanently stained with herbs and oils.

Unlike the merchants’ wagons, the Hakim’s clinic smelled of vinegar, camphor, dried herbs, lamp oil, and medicines whose names I did not know. Bundles of roots hung from the ceiling beside neatly labeled jars and little cloth packets tied with string. Mortars, pestles, knives, splints, rolls of linen, and shelves crowded with bottles occupied nearly every available space.

The familiar scents washed over me like a forgotten memory. For a moment I was back on Zihan Ma’s farm, sitting on a low stool while my uncle brewed a medicinal broth. I could hear the donkeys braying outside, smell Lee Ayi’s cooking, and see the afternoon sunlight falling through the paper windows of his treatment room.

“You’ve come after all.” Hakim Yusuf’s voice brought me back. He was seated beside a small lantern, grinding herbs with a stone pestle.

“I got hurt.” I held up my hand.

“Oh.” His mouth was a flat line when he looked up. “I thought you were here to keep your promise.”

“What promise?”

“After Kuangren’s punishment, you offered to assist me in the future.”

“Oh, right.”

“Then you vanished.”

I shrugged helplessly. “Hakim Yusuf, there hasn’t been a raid. No one’s been hurt.”

He took my hand in his and turned it over, studying it. His manner was gentle, and his confidence was reassuring.

“I broke it sparring with Meilin,” I explained.

“No, you didn’t.”

In spite of the pain, which was less severe than I would have expected, I smiled. “I think I would know how I broke it.”

He wrapped one hand around my wrist and took hold of the bent finger with the other. Before I could ask what he planned to do, he gave one quick pull. There was a sharp pop, and Hakim Yusuf immediately realigned the finger.

“I meant,” he said, “that you didn’t break it.”

I blinked. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

He smiled. “It’s remarkable what happens when things are put back where Allah intended them to be. It was dislocated. Try moving it.”

I curled my hand into a fist.

“It works.”

“That is the preferred outcome.”

My relief was so strong, I felt like I’d just ridden Belly for two days without pause, and was now relaxing in the cool water of a desert oasis. I was still sad and lonely, but suddenly it felt bearable.

Hakim Yusuf began preparing a salve for my bruised ribs and arms. He looked up over the rim of the little clay bowl.

“Darius… do you imagine I spend my days waiting for someone to be stabbed?”

I opened my mouth.

He raised one finger to silence me. “This morning I treated a merchant whose gums are swollen from rotten teeth, a muleteer with an infected blister, a guard with fever, three horses with saddle sores, and another guard who was convinced he had contracted a terrible disease.”

“What did he have?”

“An overactive imagination.”

I laughed. “Was that Longwei?” The big man always seemed to think there was something wrong with him.

Not answering, the Hakim continued stirring the salve. “Battle wounds are a small part of my work.” He spread the cool ointment gently across my bruised ribs. “When you helped me with Kuangren, I noticed something.”

“What?”

“You paid attention.”

“I just followed your instructions.”

“More than that.” He wrapped a bandage around my torso, tied it snugly and sat back. “You observed and anticipated. You asked sensible questions. Those qualities are difficult to teach.”

“My uncle is a healer. I have assisted him.”

He nodded. “Now it makes sense.”

Growing Up

I looked around the wagon once more.

It felt strangely peaceful here. Outside were guards laughing around the fire; merchants discussing politics, prices and the news of the war back home; and horses stamping in the darkness. Inside there was only the quiet clink of glass bottles and the comforting smell of herbs. The wagon was the oasis I’d been wishing for. It was familiar and comfortable.

Someone rapped twice against the side of the wagon, and Sergeant Karim ducked through the doorway, his broad shoulders filling most of the opening. His eyes immediately went to my bandaged hand, then to the bruises already darkening along my ribs.

“That was nicely done.”

I smiled despite myself.

“I didn’t know,” he said, “that she’d be that hard on you.”

“She knew I was holding back. That’s what made her angry.”

He scratched thoughtfully at his beard. “I should have known she’d see it.” For a moment he stood in silence, considering the matter. Then he nodded to himself. “You know what? I’ll confess to her that it was my idea. I’ll take the heat off you.”

“No.” The answer escaped my mouth before I had even thought about it.

Karim looked genuinely surprised. “Why not?”

I searched for the right words.

“Because right now she just thinks I’m a stupid boy who doesn’t appreciate how talented she is.” I smiled faintly. “Which, if I’m being honest, was true until tonight. But if you tell her it was your idea…” I hesitated. “It will hurt her.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “Explain.”

“You’re her sergeant. She looks up to you. She needs to feel that you believe in her.” I glanced toward the open doorway, where the sounds of laughter still drifted from the campfire. “We all do.”

The wagon fell quiet. Karim looked at me for a long moment. At last he reached out and rested one heavy hand on my shoulder, giving it a gentle squeeze. “You’re growing up, Darius.”

Without another word he stepped down from the wagon and disappeared into the night.

An Oasis or a Prison?

“You’re not a typical caravan guard,” Hakim Yusuf commented.

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“So?” The Hakim folded his hands inside his sleeves. “I could use an assistant.”

“I don’t know if I’m typical or not, but I am a caravan guard. I already have duties.”

“There are many men,” Hakim Yusuf said quietly, “who know how to make holes in other people. “But you have hands capable of healing. Don’t waste that.”

Panic came up out of my gut like acid. It rushed up from nowhere, leaving me feeling constricted. The sense of this place as an oasis vanished. Suddenly it felt like a prison. I looked toward the wagon door as if it were an escape. My breath was shallow and rapid.

“I can’t go through this again,” I said. “I’ve been through this.”

“What do you mean?”

“Being pressured to choose between medicine and the sword. You can’t force me to choose! If I’m good at one thing and the other, then so be it, that’s who I am. My father taught me to fight from the time I could walk. He crammed it down my throat, he made me bleed and cry, but it was all he had to give, and he gave it, and now it’s mine. Not you or anyone else will take it away. I am sick of people trying to decide for me what I should be.” I stood quickly, snatched up my shirt, and put it on. In my haste it caught on my finger, and I groaned in pain.

“Easy, Darius.” Far from being offended, Hakim Yusuf’s  manner was calm and soothing. “Of course it’s your decision. I’m not forcing you to choose. I just thought you might come assist me for a few hours a day, that’s all.”

“Oh.” I looked at the floor, feeling ashamed. “I don’t know if Sergeant Karim would like that.”

Hakim Yusuf put a hand on my chest and rubbed gently. “Get some rest. Think about my offer. If you decide you want to do it, I’ll talk to the Sergeant. I have some influence. And if not, it’s okay son. I’ll never bring it up again.”

I put a hand to my forehead and rubbed it. “I’m sorry, Hakim.”

“Don’t be silly. All is well. Now listen. The finger will be tender for several days. Be careful.”

“I’ll try.”

Far Away

Most of the camp had settled into silence. Here and there a few lanterns still glowed beside the merchants’ wagons, and somewhere in the darkness I could hear someone laughing at one last joke before turning in for the night. I walked with one arm pulled tightly to my side because my ribs hurt less that way.

I found Belly standing where I had left him, patiently chewing his hay as though the affairs of men had never been any concern of his. He lifted his head when he heard my footsteps and gave a low, questioning whicker.

“I’m alright,” I assured him. “Or I will be.”

I checked his feed bucket. He’d eaten all the oats and mash, and the bucket was empty.

“Good.”

His water trough was nearly empty as well, so I carried another bucket from the nearby stream and filled it. Belly plunged his nose into the water at once, drinking noisily until great drops ran from his whiskers.

“I suppose you worked as hard as I did today.”

He nosed my pockets. I smiled. “Sorry,” I told him. “It’s not Eid anymore. I’ll get you a few carrots in the morning.”

I fetched the curry comb and began working it through his thick black coat. Dust and loose hair came away beneath the brush in little gray clouds. Belly leaned into it contentedly, half-closing his eyes.

“I met with Hakim Yusuf tonight.”

One ear turned toward me.

“He wants me to become his assistant.” The words sounded strange spoken aloud.

“I don’t think he means instead of being a guard. At least… I hope not.”

I paused to work a burr from his mane.

“He says there are plenty of men who know how to make holes in other people, but not enough who know how to close them.” I smiled faintly. “That sounds like something Zihan Ma would say.”

When I finished brushing him, I put a thick blanket over him, as the night was cold. Then I crouched carefully and examined each hoof in turn. Belly shifted his weight obligingly as I cleaned away packed dirt and a few small stones.

“Good boy.”

I patted one sturdy leg before moving to the next hoof.

“You know…” I said after a while, “you’re my only friend now.” The words escaped before I had a chance to stop them.

I rested one hand against his shoulder, feeling the steady warmth beneath his coat. “You and my cat back home.”  I laughed softly. “His name is Far Away. Isn’t that funny? Because he’s so far away now.”

Belly turned his head and nudged my shoulder, nearly knocking me off balance.

“It’s okay, I told you. I’m okay.”

For a long moment neither of us moved. The mountains stood black against a sky crowded with stars, and the camp around us had become so quiet that I could hear the soft grinding of Belly’s teeth as he returned to his hay.

“But it’s alright,” I said at last, scratching him beneath the mane where he liked it best. “I’ll take care of you, and you’ll take care of me.”

I looked up at the stars.

“And Allah will protect us both.”

Belly snorted softly, as if entirely satisfied with that arrangement.

I smiled, spread my blanket beside his picket line, and before long the sounds of the camp faded into sleep.

* * *

Read Part 21 – Opium

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See the Story Index for Wael Abdelgawad’s other stories on this website.

Wael Abdelgawad’s novels – including Pieces of a Dream, The Repeaters and Zaid Karim Private Investigator – are available in ebook and print form on his author page at Amazon.com.

Related:

Pieces of a Dream | Part 1: The Cabbie and the Muslim Woman

Trust Fund And A Yellow Lamborghini: A Short Story

The post Far Away [Part 20] – Among the Afghans appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Esposito may well have been the last great public intellectual in the field now called Islamophobia studies, although he used the term less frequently than many who later made an industry of it. Long before Islamophobia became a conference theme, a specialized vocabulary, or an academic career track, he was confronting its most consequential forms: the intellectual caricatures that shaped journalism, diplomacy, public opinion, and American foreign policy.

He did not simply describe prejudice against Muslims. He disrupted the machinery that produced it.

His method was deceptively radical: he studied Muslims in order to understand them.

That proposition sounds almost embarrassingly obvious. Yet Esposito entered a field in which influential Western scholars routinely approached Islamic movements as pathologies to be diagnosed, security threats to be contained, or civilizational irritants to be explained away. He refused this intellectual laziness. He treated Islamic revivalism not as a fever passing through irrational societies, but as a complex response to colonialism, authoritarianism, secularization, social dislocation, and the enduring human search for moral order.

An Italian-American Catholic Embraced By Muslims

He engaged figures such as Hasan al-Turabi, Rachid Ghannouchi, Hasan Hanafi, and Khurshid Ahmad when much of the West preferred to demonize them. He did not agree uncritically with everything they believed; serious scholars do not confuse understanding with endorsement. But he recognized that scholar-activists could not be comprehended through intelligence briefings, hostile newspaper profiles, or inherited Orientalist categories. They had to be read, questioned, challenged, and encountered as thinking human beings.

Through books such as Voices of Resurgent Islam and Makers of Contemporary Islam, Esposito introduced Western audiences to a vast intellectual world they had scarcely been told existed. He developed friendships across the Muslim world because he went there not as an anthropologist examining exotic specimens, but as an interlocutor. In societies accustomed to Western experts arriving with prefabricated conclusions, his seriousness felt revolutionary.

His mentor, Ismail al-Faruqi, helped shape this disposition, but Esposito made it unmistakably his own. He became perhaps the first Western scholar of contemporary Islam to be welcomed across Muslim societies with something approaching popular affection. He was not merely respected. In Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey, and elsewhere, he was embraced.

When he visited Pakistan in 2017 to deliver the inaugural memorial lectures for my father, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, the reception was extraordinary. The lectures, co-organized by the US-Pakistan Intercultural Coalition, took him to the Lahore University of Management Sciences, the University of Management and Technology, the National Defence University, and the Institute of Policy Studies. The halls were packed. Audiences stood wherever they could find space. John Esposito, an Italian-American Catholic scholar from Brooklyn, arrived in Pakistan and was received like a rock star.

But the enthusiasm was not celebrity worship. Pakistanis understood what he had done. Here was a Western scholar who had spent decades explaining Islam without condescension, Islamic politics without hysteria, and Muslim grievances without treating Muslims themselves as guilty until proven moderate. They regarded him, quite simply, as the greatest living Western scholar of Islam.

“Uncle John”

For our family, however, he was also Uncle John — or at least the sort of figure who occupies that emotional territory.

Before my father and one of his closest friends, Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad, passed away in 2016, I knew Prof. Esposito primarily through telephone calls. He was hilarious. He would announce, with theatrical exasperation, that he was still waiting for my father’s hopelessly overdue essay for yet another edited volume. This happened repeatedly over the years. My father’s deadlines were elastic; John’s irritation was affectionate; and both men seemed to understand that the ritual would recur indefinitely.

His humor extended to his own career. He liked to say that before 1979 he barely had one and could hardly imagine writing a book. Then came Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution, producing what John jokingly called his first Lexus. Osama bin Laden and September 11, he would add, were responsible for the Mercedes. Behind the joke was a devastating observation: Western interest in Islam expanded most dramatically when Muslims could be represented as a crisis.

Esposito understood this danger earlier than almost anyone. In The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, he anticipated the geopolitical temptation that followed the collapse of communism. Great powers, deprived of a grand enemy, rarely accept the inconvenience of peace. Islam was soon drafted into the vacant role. After September 11, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam challenged both the appropriation of religion by terrorists and the exploitation of terrorism by those eager to indict an entire civilization.

Courageous Scholarship

His scholarship was courageous because it was published when misunderstanding Muslims was professionally safer than understanding them. The American media frequently preferred experts whose authority seemed proportional to their hostility. Esposito, arguably the leading Western authority on Islam, was often less visible in mainstream American discourse than ideologues who possessed neither his fieldwork nor his intellectual range. Apparently, the qualification for explaining Muslims on television was not knowing them too well.

Internationally, matters were different. He advised governments, addressed universities, consulted policymakers, edited encyclopedias, and wrote more than fifty books translated into dozens of languages. Yet the scale of his bibliography can obscure his larger achievement. He built an intellectual infrastructure for seeing Muslims as historical actors rather than permanent suspects.

After my father’s death, my own relationship with Prof. Esposito deepened. His emails were an improbable combination of erudition, outrage, gossip, warmth, and comedy. He was generous with his time and prodigal with his friendship. Together with Professor Tamara Sonn and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid, he formed part of the intimate circle of intellectual powerhouses I had heard about since childhood — my father’s confidantes, critics, collaborators, and beloved interlocutors.

It was therefore only fitting that Esposito delivered the first Dr. Mumtaz Ahmad Memorial Lectures, and that Tamara Sonn delivered the following year’s lectures. They were not ceremonial selections. They were family.

Activism Beyond Academia

One of my final and most revealing exchanges with Prof. Esposito concerned an international appeal demanding medical transparency and humane treatment for former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan. He was deeply disturbed by the situation. Still, I told him I would understand if he preferred not to sign. Pakistan had awarded him one of its highest civil honors, and he was habitually received there as a state guest. Public dissent could jeopardize relationships cultivated over decades.

He did not deliberate for two seconds.

“Add my name,” he said.

Soon afterward, representatives connected to the Pakistani Embassy approached him with exquisite politeness. They praised him, honored him, and then delicately suggested that he had misunderstood Pakistan and been misinformed. Esposito replied that he understood the situation perfectly well. When he recounted the conversation to me, we laughed.

Tamara Sonn signed as well. Both knew that their standing with Pakistan’s establishment might never be quite the same. They chose principle over prestige — an elementary moral decision that remarkably few intellectuals, Muslim or otherwise, seem capable of making when honorary treatment, official access, and personal convenience are at stake.

This was not an isolated act. Esposito stood by Dr. Sami Al-Arian through years of persecution and confinement, visiting him under house arrest when many respectable people found distance more comfortable. He advocated for him when solidarity carried consequences. Esposito’s bridge-building was never the bloodless dialogue of hotel conferences and polished communiqués. He built bridges toward people whom power had isolated.

That distinction matters. Plenty of people celebrate pluralism when pluralism is fashionable. Esposito defended human dignity when doing so was awkward.

He spoke of dialogue between “Islam and the West” before the phrase became institutional furniture. But he also knew that civilizations do not converse; people do. His genius was to create relationships where abstractions had produced antagonisms. The founding of Georgetown’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding was therefore not merely an academic accomplishment. It embodied his central conviction: that knowledge must become encounter, and encounter must become ethical responsibility.

John Esposito perhaps did more to combat Islamophobia than much of the contemporary Islamophobia studies industry because he worked upstream. He challenged the categories, assumptions, and foreign-policy fantasies from which anti-Muslim prejudice drew its authority. He did not merely denounce the fire; he examined the intellectual wiring that kept setting the building ablaze.

His critics occasionally accused him of being too sympathetic to Muslims. It was an inadvertently revealing charge. Sympathy, in their vocabulary, meant refusing to begin with contempt.

Esposito began with curiosity. He proceeded with rigor. He ended, more often than not, with friendship.

That is why the Muslim world mourns him not as a foreign specialist who wrote about Islam, but as a friend who stood with Muslims without romanticizing them, spoke for justice without seeking applause, and crossed boundaries that lesser minds treated as walls.

My father was blessed to call him a beloved friend. I was blessed, after my father’s passing, to discover that friendship for myself. His last lesson to me was also the lesson of his life: honors are pleasant, access is useful, and prestige can open doors — but none of them is worth the price of silence.

John Esposito built bridges in an age that rewarded walls. The finest tribute we can offer him is not simply to praise those bridges, but to possess the courage to cross them.

Related:

– Thinking Long-Term: The Legacy of Yahiya Emerick

– Khurshid Ahmad, Pakistani Jamaat Leader And Scholar, Dies Aged 93

The post The Legacy Of Professor John Esposito: The Scholar Who Refused To Turn Islam Into An Enemy appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

A Special Invitation

What if I were to tell you that there is a special invitation that comes to you every night? It peaks around the corner after twilight, and drops into your lap before the morning sun beams’ brilliance appears. When all others are asleep, it almost unnoticeably slips into the pockets of your soul. As the distractions of the day let you be with the nocturnal darkness, it invites you to find yourself in uninterrupted seclusion with the Highest of High. It welcomes your heart to enjoy a private conversation with your Creator. It is tahajjud, and it tells you to come, come, be with your Lord.

Note: The night is considered the time in between isha and fajr prayer. Qiyam al-layl, “standing at night,” is often used to define the voluntary night prayers offered before sleeping, and tahajjud, “giving up sleep,” are usually the supererogatory nightly prayers prayed before fajr after having slept. For the sake of ease, this article does so too. Both terms, however, are generally applied interchangeably.

Among the Righteous

Tamim al-Dari was one of the sahaba who was well-known for his wholehearted dedication to the night prayer. He would be the first to light up the glimmering oil lamps at the masjid. Our beloved Messenger, may Allah send peace and blessings upon him, would stand in nightly devotion for hours and hours, so much so his feet would swell (Sahih al-Bukhari 4836). Sayyida Zainab once tied a rope hanging in between two pillars in the masjid so she could hold onto it when she got exhausted from standing in prayer at night, though the Prophet, may Allah send peace and blessings on him, advised not to go to such lengths. (Sahih al-Bukhari 1150). Commitment to voluntary prayers in the nighttime was truly a given in the early Muslim community. These moonlit hours were created for both sleep and worship.

“Allah makes the night into the day and the day into the night. Allah hears and sees all things.” (Surat al-Hadid 6; illumination by Nilgün Gedik)

The Prophet said so himself, may Allah send peace and blessings upon him: The best prayer after the obligatory prayer is prayer at night (Sunan an-Nasai 1614). It is the habit of the righteous who came before us. It brings us closer to our Creator, expiates our evil deeds, and prevents us from sinning (Sunan al-Tirmidhi 3549). Night vigil is an opportunity to be elevated in rank, as we know that Allah can raise us to a station of praise when we commit to it (Surat al-Isra, 79).

Through what is referred to as the Hadith of the Heavenly Dispute, we learn that our beloved Prophet, may Allah send peace and blessings upon him, once asked Allah in a dream what the highest angels dispute about. Alongside providing food and speaking gently, praying at night was one of the most virtuous deeds the angels argued about when discussing the expiation of sins (Mishkat al-Masabih 748).

Surat al-Furqan reminds us that the true servants of the Most Compassionate are those who walk on the earth humbly, and when the foolish address them improperly, they only respond with peace. They are those who spend a good portion of the night prostrating themselves and standing before their Lord (63-64). The upright? They are those who sleep only little at night and pray for forgiveness before dawn (Surat al-Dhariyat 17-18).

The knights of the night are among the real muminin. Surat al-Sajdah tells us so. “The only true believers in Our revelation are those who, when it is recited to them, fall into prostration and glorify the praises of their Lord and are not too proud. They abandon their beds, invoking their Lord with hope and fear, and donate from what We have provided for them. No soul can imagine what delights are kept in store for them as a reward for what they used to do” (15-17).

Calligraphy by Emre Sessiz of two Quranic verses: “And you did not throw when you threw but Allah did throw” (8:17), and “And We are closer to him than the jugular vein” (50:16)

What Happens at Night?

It is said that Imam Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafii compared the dua made at the time of tahajjud to an arrow that does not miss its mark. In the last third of the night, Allah comes down to the lowest heaven, asking “Is there anyone to invoke Me, so that I may respond to invocation? Is there anyone to ask Me, so that I may grant him his request? Is there anyone seeking My forgiveness, so that I may forgive him?” (Sahih al-Bukhari 1145).

This means that in this last part of the night, your Creator comes and seeks you out. As the night prayer tends to be more concealed, some argue that it is closer in sincerity. It is kept between the worshipper and Allah, a little secret between you and Him in the stillness of the night. In those moments before you stand to pray at daybreak, you can get as close to Him as you can in this dunya. You are invited to pour your heart out, beg for forgiveness, and ask for anything you so desperately yearn for.

Night prayer brings comfort to the soul. It is a soothing balm of sakina that we need to make it through the day. Men of knowledge such as Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali and Jamaluddin Abdul-Rahman Ibn al-Jawzi have dedicated endless writings to qiyam al-layl, the latter considering the night prayer as the ultimate spiritual weapon of the believer. Leaving sleep is a disciplining trial that is hard on the lower self. The battle with the bed is when tahajjud does its deepest work, even before the prayer begins. Do we want to snooze and snore, or does our heart long for closeness to Allah and choose it over rest and comfort? In addition, recitation in night prayer offers an opportunity to profound contemplation as our daily distractions are put to sleep.

Fireflies in Dark Times

Praying at night was one of the first sunan established. The Prophet, may Allah send peace and blessings upon him, stressed its importance in his first sermon in Madina (Sunan Ibn Majah 3251). Given its context, we can read the practices mentioned in this sermon as key elements to build a close-knit community: spreading peace to promote unity and social cohesion, offering food to those in need, and praying at night. It is a way to strengthen our spiritual wellbeing and resilience, a tool to purify our heart and make our willpower steadfast and our body more powerful. These are key elements to build a foundation on. Imagine the effect we can have on the Ummah, the relief we can bring. Imagine how it can allow us to excel in doing good and bringing our best self to the table.

When our Prophet was distressed in Makkah, Allah addressed him through Surat al-Muzzammil, may Allah send peace and blessings upon him. The Surah’s first verses (1-8) read, “O you wrapped in your clothes! Stand all night in prayer except a little, pray half the night, or a little less, or a little more, and recite the Qur’an properly in a measured way. For We will soon send upon you a weighty revelation. Indeed, worship in the night is more impactful and suitable for recitation. For during the day you are over-occupied with worldly duties. Always remember the Name of your Lord, and devote yourself to Him wholeheartedly.” For our beloved Messenger, may Allah send peace and blessings upon him, to be able to handle this weighty revelation, this heavy task that was looming, he had to prepare himself spiritually. For us to be able to carry our own role in this dunya gracefully, we need to do the same. Tahajjud can help us with that.

A lantern-lit room at night, by Franscisco Fronseca

Rise at Night and Rise in Rank

The broken-hearted, the sinners, the great, those who have tried and those who try, the virtuous, the ones that are lost and those who do well. Tahajjud is a call to us all. Even if you have not been able to fully commit to the five daily prayers consistently, you can try to pray a little at night. Perhaps it will offer you the strength you lack to fulfill the obligatory during the day. A waterfall of other good habits might sprout from it.

The struggle starts the day before. Fill your daylight hours with good deeds, avoid sins to avoid a heavy heart, steer clear of man-sized meals before you go to sleep, recite your evening adhkar, and sleep early with the intention of waking up for tahajjud. Make notes during the day on what to make dua for and turn your place of prayer in a serenely attractive spot. If you are a woman and you would like a circle of support, you can join Rabata’s Tahajjud Threads on WhatsApp. If you need a sturdy wake-up call, you can try the most irritating Fajr alarm ever developed. Remember, when you wake up your spouse and resort to sprinkling water in their face to do so, Allah shows mercy for this most romantic act (Riyad al-Salihin 1183).

Start with a pure intention. As tahajjud is voluntary, there is no fixed set of rakʿat required. It is prayed in sets of two and recommended to start with two short rakʿat (Riyad al-Salihin 1179). The Prophet, may Allah send peace and blessings upon, would pray eight rakʿat in total, four times two. Yet for you to build this habit, begin lightly. You can start by waking up 15 minutes before fajr and sticking to two rakʿat. Depending on the scholarly opinion you follow, you can conclude with the odd witr prayer.

Once you have been able to establish a recurring routine, you can wake up earlier and add more rakʿat. Remember that the actions that Allah loves most are the most constant, even if little (Sahih al-Bukhari 6464). Give yourself time to get used to it and do not despair. Our soul is changed by what we return to. Only steadily our bond of love with the Divine becomes rooted.

You can turn to longer ayat or shorter ones. In your dhikr and dua, focus on forgiveness. Recite out loud and let the meanings of the words seep into your heart. Did you know that the angels come down to listen to your recitation (Sahih Ibn Hibban 779)? If you follow the Shafii madhab, you can read from a mushaf in your sunna prayers and gradually complete a khatma in your night prayers this way.

Allah is calling you. You can be one of those pajama heroes whose limbs drag themselves out of their beds and who illuminate their homes like Tamim al-Dari did. Turn your house into a lighthouse for our people. You do not even have to adorn yourself with your best attire for this extraordinary encounter. Have a look, dig deep into the pockets of your soul. Are you answering the invitation?

Related Posts:

Good Sleep, Good Health, and Tahajjud: Sh. Yaser Birjas

A Tahajjud Journey To Inspire Your Own : A Ramadan Goal That’s Not As Hard As It Seems

The post Tahajjud: A Call to All Pajama Heroes appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Yahiya John Joseph Emerick was born into an Irish-American Baptist family in the American Midwest in 1971. Having picked up a fascination with fantasy literature in his youth, he brought adaptable, creative writing skills and an active imagination into the world of Muslim writing after converting to Islam. That conversion came after some trouble during his teenage years in accepting the concept of the Trinity among Christians. In his first year of university during the late 1980s, he studied the Quran for some six months and, as he said during a rare interview, “couldn’t deny the personal appeal from God to the reader.”

By contrast Emerick was disappointed in the writing quality of many English-language Islamic books during his early years in the faith. “I saw,” he said in the same interview with the UmmahReads blog, “that a lot of Islamic books were written in a very one-dimensional way without much verve or imagination. I wanted to write books that would show people how I saw Islam when I came into it. For me, Islam was a blend of spiritual, emotional, intellectual and practical things all woven together in an artistic tapestry that one could use to decorate their inner and outer world.”

As a history schoolteacher, Emerick began an impromptu fictional series about Ahmad and Layla Deen that formed part of his oeuvre: such fictional stories about and for Muslims were much rarer when he started out than they are now. On the importance of fiction for Muslim children, he explained, “Kids look almost exclusively for inspiration and identity from their peer group. Books are another window into viewing and adopting attitudes and if our kids spend their reading time reading only about non-Muslims and their world, then our Muslim kids will feel that the non-Muslim world is the ‘real’ world…Having some books with Muslim characters allows our kids to see that, in addition to the non-Muslim world, there are places and spaces to be Muslim, also. The two can even mix, and in that mix, Islam can still remain.”

In addition to fiction, Emerick wrote a large number of books explaining Islam for readers of various ages: these included an addition to the famous “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding” series, which publishes basic explainers for novices and was particularly widespread during the 1990s and 2000s. Several of his books were written to explain the Quran, especially to teenagers. “Muslims take it for granted that, well, a kid from a Muslim family will be and stay Muslim by osmosis and association.” In a secular environment, “Muslims have…to do da’wah to our own children in order to win their loyalty for life. I write books, therefore, to bring Islam to our young people in a way tailored for them. Too many of our ‘scholars’ live in ivory minarets and fail to see the lives of the real people below them.”

On the growing body of Muslim literature in the Anglophone world, he remarked that he would like to see more “teenage, real life experiences.  A lot more literature for the tween set. We need a monthly kids magazine and a separate monthly teen magazine. These have been tried in the past, but always failed, due to a variety of factors. We also need more diverse literature, not just flighty poetry or political books.”

Emerick’s body of work was particularly impressive given that he worked two jobs and largely self-published through his personal press, Amirah Publishing Company. In addition, he was involved in both activism and interfaith initiatives and founded the Islamic Foundation of North America bookstore. His books have covered a large number of topics and genres, and his death to cancer is a loss to the Muslim community.

One of Yahiya Emerick’s many books.

One of his former students, Fawzia Syed, expressed her shock in a social media post. “Brother Yahiya” was her first Islamic Studies teacher, the first convert she had met, and one whose work she still uses as a “starter kit” for young Muslims.

“The depth of my sadness has honestly surprised me,” she wrote. Emerick had been her first Islamic studies teacher and an accessible one. As he worked on his Islam edition for the Complete Idiot’s Guide series during recesses, she recalled, “my friend and I would bother him while he was writing, asking him all kinds of questions. We’d ask him what he was writing about, about Islam, why he became Muslim, and probably every random question curious middle schoolers think of. One of the things I appreciate most is that I was never too intimidated to ask him questions. He was never impatient with answering, nor did he ever make feel any of my questions were silly. He was an authority figure, but I felt like I could ask him anything — either he would answer us or laugh it away.”

Serving upcoming generations for Allah’s sake was a major theme in Emerick’s life, as explained in his final thoughts in the UmmahReads interview: “I believe we, as Muslims, need to transform ourselves to meet this challenge. We must come out of our cocoons, smell the chai and see how we can make Islam relevant for the coming centuries. Future generations will either have an easier time being Muslim or a harder time based on our groundwork today. That’s a big responsibility and it is what Allah (swt) requires of us. Strive together in His cause, the Qur’an tells us, and we will be compensated with satisfaction and Allah’s good pleasure. Truly that is what seekers should work to achieve!  Ameen.”

Emerick’s student, Syed, recalled that he had gifted her three of his books as his former student. After his signature at the end, he wrote, “Thinking long term.”

Innalillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioun. May Allah accept his service.

The post Thinking Long-Term: The Legacy of Yahiya Emerick appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Bilal Abdul Kareem has spent over a decade reporting in Syria.

That Syria would be shed of fifty years of grasping control by a dictator’s family was unthinkable ten years ago, when the war that would eventually see the ouster of the Assad dynasty was at its peak. In 2016 Syria was fought over by a bewildering kaleidoscope of actors: a crippled regime had invited in militias backed by Iran, mercenaries backed by Russia, and the militaries of both countries; a violent Daesh emirate had sprawled over the Iraqi border to take over much of the east; an American invasion had backed a largely Kurdish front against Daesh; and pitted against all these camps were a largely Islamist collection of rebels backed by either Qaeda or by a Turkish military that, in opposition to its American-backed Kurdish insurgents, had also surged into Syria.

Today the situation is transformed. Tens of thousands of Syrians have returned home under a government more benign than any predecessor in over a half-century. Daesh, always more an Iraqi than Syrian phenomenon, seems out for the count. Most foreign militaries have left, though Israel, that most bloodthirsty of regional spoilers, has continued brazen incursions beyond its occupation of the Golan Heights, hoping to break off the Druze minority in the south. Russia, preoccupied in Ukraine and Mali, has accepted its defeat; Iran, reluctant to admit a betrayal by the Assad family that would expose the wastage of its Syrian incursion, is now preoccupied in a war against the relentless aggression of both Israel and the United States.

The latest foreign military to leave Syria is that of the United States, who discarded years of support for Kurdish militants in northeast Syria to the satisfaction of Turkiye, given that many of these American-backed “Syrian Kurds” were in fact Turkish rebels. There has been a remarkable rapport between Ankara and the new Syrian regime led by Ahmad Sharaa, who was, ten years ago at the war’s peak, still part of Qaeda. Having discarded that link in summer 2016, Sharaa has worked closely with Turkiye to the discontent, ironically, of otherwise bitter enemies Iran and Israel, but to the evident satisfaction of Washington. Against more belligerent colleagues who follow the party line of former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett that Turkiye and Syria are now Israel’s major threats, American envoy Tom Barrack has worked out an arrangement where the United States cooperates in “counterterrorism” with Syria, purportedly against Daesh. The Americans who, ten years ago, were bombing and arming militants through northern Syria to fight against Sharaa have now embraced him as a counterterrorism partner.

An American Outlier

Yet one American who has not fared so well is Bilal Abdul-Kareem, an African-American journalist whose presence in Syria has largely conveniently been forgotten but who was, at the peak of the war, the boldest and most recognizable foreign reporter in the country and chose to live, marry, and settle there. Abdul-Kareem’s name brings to mind the Syrian war’s crescendo in 2016, when the battle for the major city of Aleppo was winding to a bloody conclusion in a campaign where tens of thousands were killed. In those days, English-speaking foreigners such as this writer could access Abdul-Kareem’s reports from the heart of eastern Aleppo, amid shattered buildings and choking rubble.

Journalists are often divided on to what extent they can become advocates for their subject. In Abdul-Kareem’s mind, certainly, there appears to have been no doubt on the matter; his reportage went hand in hand with advocacy, and his sympathy was squarely with the Syrian revolt against the Assad dynasty, and especially with the Islamic element that he believed was its conscience and underlying ethos.

Today some supporters of the new Syrian state, particularly those keen to dispel ideas of its being an extremist group, are uncomfortable with this Islam-centred viewpoint, believing that it would play into the hands of the 2010s revolt’s many enemies who frequently lumped in Daesh, which actually did very little fighting against Bashar Assad, with the revolt at large. Many critics of this type hail from the more socially liberal advocacy of the 2010s revolt, often based in Washington and sensitive to any charges of the “religious radicalism” that has been such a convenient enemy of the American elite, and much of the Western elite for that matter, in the twenty-first century. Added to this is the fear, often shared by some Syrian Muslims over the past century, that the emphasis on Islam might play into the hands of foreign powers who want to wedge off minorities against a long-suppressed Sunni Muslim majority.

The fact, however, is that it was precisely Sunni Islamist groups that held out in the Syrian battlefields and eventually managed to unseat Assad. There is no more glaring example than Sharaa himself, who had a bounty on his head for years by the same Washington that now welcomes him.

During the 2010s, many “liberal” advocates of the Syrian revolt in Washington would point out Sharaa as an example of a “bad actor” that might benefit if the United States did not support the revolt. As it happened, when the United States invaded Syria in September 2014 Sharaa and his group were second only to Daesh in their list of targets.

As it also happened, the United States has ended up reconciling with Sharaa, who is now cheerled by the same circles that once vilified him. If nothing else, Abdul-Kareem is more consistent in his views than his critics: today it is easy to dismiss him as a foreigner out of touch with Syrians, yet during the war he had far closer links and more interaction with the 2010s Syrian militant groups, and indeed much of civil society, that defeated Assad than do most of his critics today.

Aleppan Alamo

Once more 2016 Aleppo is instructive: at this peak of the war, when not only the United States was pointedly distancing itself from the actual revolt in favour of misleadingly misnamed Kurdish “rebels” that only ever fought the rebels’ Turkish backer, Abdul-Kareem was reporting from the beleaguered city. During that battle, Sharaa’s field commander leading a daring counterattack against the Russian army, Usama Nammoura (known variously as Abu Hajar and Abu Omar), was killed not by the Russians but by an American airstrike. In the heat of the multifaceted Syrian war, a Washington establishment that publicly criticized Russian brutality was quite happy to pick off commanders who actually led the fight against Russia. Although Sharaa had severed his ties with Qaeda shortly before Nammoura’s assassination, at that stage the United States was clearly not satisfied.

During this final desperate stage of the Aleppo campaign, Abdul-Kareem interviewed a prominent field commander, Abdul-Muin Ashidda (also known as Abul-Abed), who had recently left the Ahrarul-Sham group that was then the largest among Syria’s militant groups. As bluntly outspoken as his interviewer, Ashidda railed out at the rebels’ lack of coordination and especially at Turkiye, whose army had recently entered Syria but had, to his annoyance, failed to relieve Aleppo.

This was, it should be noted in fairness, a shortsighted view: it was then far beyond an extremely preoccupied Turkiye’s capacity to save Aleppo, and in fact later Ankara’s diplomacy and military would crucially and repeatedly shield the rebels against Russia. In short, contrary to Ashidda’s critique, the Turks helped when and where they could. Nonetheless these complaints, which Abdul-Kareem faithfully recorded and might have shared, spoke to frustrations among rebels then under severe fire in their biggest stronghold, which collapsed after a climactic months-long campaign in December 2016. Moreover, Ashidda’s call for independence from foreign reliance struck a chord.

Days later, in the early weeks of 2017, Sharaa announced a new group called Tahrirul-Sham, pointedly claiming to be independent of any foreign tutelage. It was built around his existing Nusra Front, and very quickly other rebels, including those from larger groups like Ahrarul-Sham, flocked to join what initially appeared to be a broad coalition: Ashidda himself was an early recruit. In fact, Sharaa and his inner circle maintained the key levers of power within the group, and used their newfound popularity to strike out at their former cohort-turned-competitor, Ahrarul-Sham, from whom they took much of Idlib in summer 2017. Ahrarul-Sham largely refused to fight their brethren, and Sharaa’s unilateralism shocked recent confederates, many of whom broke away.It  should be noted that Abdul-Kareem’s early coverage of Tahrirul-Sham was largely positive; he optimistically hailed the provincial government Sharaa subsequently set up in Idlib as Syria’s first elected government in years.

Sharaa proved a wily operator, first establishing his supremacy among rebels, including Ahrarul-Sham, then mending his fences with a Turkiye that sturdily shielded Idlib against Russian takeover, while sidelining and eliminating Qaeda loyalists who resented his defection from the group. As the years passed, both Abdul-Kareem and Ashidda soured on Sharaa: their problem was less ideology than the nature of governance and more specifically security, which was often secretive and arbitrary. Though Islamic courts and mediators aplenty existed, Sharaa had brazenly disregarded them in seizing Idlib from his former comrades in 2017; with the same cavalier attitude, his administration in Idlib occasionally seized and imprisoned people well beyond any rationale of emergency measures. At various stages both Abdul-Kareem and Ashidda, whose 2016 tirade had helped trigger the momentum behind Sharaa’s supremacy, were jailed and mistreated in ways that could not conceivably be justified under any implementation of Islamic law.

It is unclear how much of this can be attributed to Sharaa: what is clear is that his security forces behaved with wide latitude and little censure. The stirring changes in Syria since Sharaa’s takeover have yet to include security transparency. Though there is no remote comparison with the decades-long, industrial-scale abuses of the preceding regime under the Assad family, which included the summary torture and executions of tens of thousands of Syrians in a practical police state, it is clear that the “revolutionary” Syrian government has a long way to go to match rhetoric with reality in this specific and very important regard.

Abdul-Muin Ashidda, like Bilal Abdul-Kareem, initially supported but then criticized and fell afoul of Ahmad Sharaa.

None of this is an automatic endorsement of the personal views of Abdul-Kareem. It should be noted, however, that despite policy criticisms he has consistently expressed goodwill toward the new Syrian state and, especially, the largely Islamist fighters who led it to power. Abdul-Kareem’s criticisms were largely focused at overreach by the security forces and what he views as unedifying diplomacy with Donald Trump’s United States. In a social media video last winter, he publicly stated: “We simply cannot legitimise the presence of the enemy, and I said America is the enemy of the Syrian people.”  As a disenfranchised American citizen himself, who has survived airstrikes by his own country’s government, Abdul-Kareem perhaps has more reason for hostility than most, but this suspicion toward the United States is by no means unique in Syria.

One episode that might have landed Abdul-Kareem in particular trouble was his interview with Hani Sibai, a London-based ideologue who has never forgiven Sharaa for having abandoned Qaeda. Though there is no indication that Abdul-Kareem shares Sibai’s affinity for Qaeda, he certainly did oppose Syrian contact with the United States. To the Syrian regime, the danger of such an interview lay in the influence that such a figure might have over the Islamists, both Syrian and otherwise, that make up a large proportion of its army. It was perhaps this that precipitated Abdul-Kareem’s arrest: he had prefaced his public criticism of Sharaa with the words, “I’m not going to sugarcoat this, and it probably is going to get me in trouble”, and certainly that much was true.

The irony is that weeks after Abdul-Kareem’s arrest, Syria and the United States struck a deal wherby the American army did withdraw from the Syrian northeast and abandon its local vassals, who soon gave way. This might have satisfied Abdul-Kareem had he been at liberty to witness it, but there was a price to pay: American airstrikes have continued in Syria as before, principally focused on alleged Daesh holdouts though in at least one notable case a victim was found to not have been involved with Daesh at all.

Ahmad Sharaa’s diplomacy with Donald Trump has so far blunted Israeli aggression but raises longer-term risks for Syrian security with regards to the United States.

Good Cops, Bad Cops, Arrests and America

For a Pakistani citizen such as myself, the American role in Syria raises similarities with the Pakistan of my own youth, during the military regime of Pervez Musharraf. The comparison between military dictator Musharraf and Islamist commander Sharaa might not be obvious, particularly given that Islamists at large widely detest the former and have embraced the latter. But there are eerie parallels: it is often forgotten that, much as Sharaa earned credentials fighting a “jihad”, Musharraf benefited from the reputation he had garnered from having fought India and supporting Kashmiri “mujahideen” earlier in his career. When Musharraf took over Pakistan in 1999, he was originally welcomed by many Islamist circles and frozen out by the United States.

The tables turned in 2001, when Musharraf supported the American invasion of Afghanistan and provided counterterrorism coordination with the United States. Much like Sharaa’s vaunted diplomacy today, the Pakistani dictator fell in line with a regional pattern where other countries, from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan to even Iran, backed the American war in Afghanistan: Pakistan simply hopped on the bandwagon, with certain crucial limits, in the ignobly opportunistic spirit of “If you can’t beat them, join them”. Similarly today Syrian diplomacy with the United States is simply joining a regional bandwagon where other governments, from Lebanon to Jordan and Egypt, have already acquiesced, indeed to a much greater extent, to American militarism in the Middle East. As Pakistan’s history with Islamist militants was seen as a valuable asset for intelligence in Washington in 2001, so too is Sharaa’s history with various militants today.

Another similarity lies in the fact that diplomacy with the United States was seen, in 2000s Pakistan and 2020s Syria, as preferable to pressure by a nastier neighbour: in Pakistan’s case this was India and in Syria’s case it is Israel. India had not only lobbied for the American war on Afghanistan but also for its expansion into Pakistan, and the winter of 2001-02 exploited a murky militant attack on its parliament to amass half a million soldiers on the Pakistani border. It was this threat, and the fear of an Indian-American coalition, that pushed Pakistanis to accept acquiescence with Washington as a supposed alternative: the logic ran that if Musharraf embraced American leader George Bush, it would prevent Bush from embracing India. In retrospect, however, this apparent compromise only enabled a Washington that only drew closer to India to infringe on Pakistan in other, more indirect ways: the United States proved simply the “good cop” to India’s “bad cop”, and the airstrikes it began in northern Pakistan with increasing unilateralism set off a civil war in Waziristan that has since spread and has yet to abate to the current day.

Switch India for Israel a quarter-century later and Syria is in an analogous position. Proponents of Syrian rapprochement with Trump often cite a very real Israeli threat: Tel Aviv has made no secret of its hostility toward Damascus and, much like New Delhi with Pakistan a quarter-century ago, is lobbying the United States to let it expand its war into Syria. In flattering Trump, Syria hopes to stave off this immediate threat. Yet this bonhomie comes at a real price of facilitating American airstrikes in Syria, and as Musharraf found out to Pakistan’s detriment this is a slippery slope that could lead to longer-term repercussions. In short, there is no guarantee that the United States will not return to its “good cop-bad cop” routine, particularly given the Washington establishment’s long, stubbornly symbiotic relationship with Syria.

Of course, the parallels are not exact. Pakistan was a nuclear-armed state; Syria today is a weak, recovering country still under partial occupation. Conversely, the international climate in 2001 was almost uniformly conducive to unilateral American aggression; today, there is far more dissent against a declining United States. Pakistan was more or less regionally isolated in 2001; Syria is today supported by a major regional power in Ankara. Perhaps this is why Damascus feels it has more to gain and less to lose from diplomacy with a pointedly unreliable Trump: that remains to be seen.

The question of Syria’s relations with the United States, their context and dangers, pose a very real debate. Unfortunately, there is scant debate to be had on one hand with the likes of Sibai, whom Abdul-Kareem was perhaps unwise to give airtime, but also when Syrian security can so quickly abandon its promises of justice and jail a longstanding sympathizer without pretext. Again writing as a Pakistani who witnessed the impact of American-backed autocracy during Musharraf’s regime, this is an unhealthy sign and Sharaa’s government would be well-advised to at least provide some clarity as to the rationale of Abdul-Kareem’s arrest, if not release him outright. Given that even members of the former regime, with its numerous well-documented crimes, are set to receive a public day in court, there is no conceivable reason to imprison a well-wisher of the Syrian people and state without explanation.

Conclusion

Syria has some impressive achievements in the year and a half that Bashar Assad fell. Sharaa has done a fair job of building a governing coalition, and withstood severe pressure by an Israel that lost no time in vilifying and attacking southern Syria. The new regime has also faced genuine, serious emergencies: its first year alone saw Israeli bombardment and support for Druze separatists, the American-backed Kurdish militia in the east, and remnants of the former regime in the west.

Despite this, most of Syria is at least for the moment more secure, and by all accounts most of its population better-placed than under the tyranny that fell in 2024. A rebuilding Syrian state has reached out to numerous actors across geopolitical camps, staved off numerous challenges that were supported by hostile neighbours, and negotiated conditional withdrawals, including by the American military without joining the pro-Israel camp that so many other Arab states have under far less duress.

But injustices can multiple quickly if left to fester, and that can have a deteriorating effect on other aspects of governance and life. A Syria that cannot afford such deterioration can redress the issue by extending the justice and transparency it has long promised to its inconveniently outspoken prisoner Bilal Abdul-Kareem.

[Disclaimer: this article reflects the views of the author, and not necessarily those of MuslimMatters; a non-profit organization that welcomes editorials with diverse political perspectives.]

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