“Why are Muslim women becoming feminists?” is the (not so) new “why are Muslim youth becoming radicalized?” sentiment… not amongst non-Muslims fearing the paths of angry young Muslims questioning Western socio-political hegemony, but amongst Muslims who are convinced that Muslim women are plunging our community into destruction by questioning the norms of our cultures and even of our faith. What does it really mean for Muslims to buy into the framework of feminism?

In order to answer the question of why Muslim women have been turning to feminism, we must be willing to have a long and very uncomfortable set of conversations among ourselves. There is no single or simple answer, there is a great deal of community accountability and reckoning required, and there is no neat, tidy way to solve the myriad of problems that we will see evinced throughout this discussion. If anyone truly cares about the wellbeing of Muslim women – and Muslim men, for that matter – we must be willing to overcome the set of (faulty) defenses that we have constructed against all perceived attacks on our community, which has a tendency of conflating the Deen itself with the practices of the people, even when the latter is in wild contradiction of the former.

However, it’s not just about why Muslim women are turning to feminism. Many will ask why such a question is relevant in the first place. Why does it matter that Muslim women are ascribing themselves to feminism? After all, isn’t Islam a feminist religion? Doesn’t Islam uphold women’s rights? Why wouldn’t Muslim women be focused on women’s rights?

These complex questions, and equally complex answers, will be discussed in this paper, but be warned: this is not some pithy piece that will “put feminists in their place” or “smash the patriarchy once and for all.” This is more than just your average Muslim refutation piece. This series is meant to be a glimpse into our history, our ongoing realities, and painful truths that we must finally face before we can seek effective solutions and implement solutions that will mitigate the damage inflicted on our Ummah for centuries.

The (Still) Salafi (Formerly) Feminist Tells All

Who am I to speak on this topic at all to begin with? Once upon a time, I was known as The Salafi Feminist, a (rhetorically) fire-breathing menace on the Internet. What many don’t know is that I didn’t start off that way – the Salafi Feminist emerged as a consequence of a very real, very painful journey. My fury came from a place of experiencing dhulm not in isolation, but as part of a societal framework framed as “Islamic” beliefs and expectations. Nor was I alone. When I shared my experiences, droves of women from around the world shared similar stories, and often even much worse. What we all shared in common was that those whom we trusted, those held up as leaders, those who claimed to represent the Islamic ideal, all failed us… and often outright refused to acknowledge what we had endured.

My journey began when I was first reeling from the immense personal distress of being in a toxic marriage characterized as “Islamic,” and then confronted by a communal refusal amongst Muslims to even acknowledge all the ways that our faith is weaponized against women. The more I tried to point to the Deen as a solution to the very real problems that we have as a community, the more Muslims were hostile to even recognizing those problems, and resorted to labelling me (and other Muslim women trying to do the same) as “feminists.”

Ironically, this pushed me directly towards engaging with feminist discourse, which was problematic in many ways. In hindsight, there were many perspectives and ideas that I shared that I now regret; indeed, I apologize for any misguidance that may have occurred as a result. Despite having some familiarity with the Islamic sciences, I was not well grounded enough to be able to identify some of feminist philosophy’s fundamental flaws and the ways it would impact my way of thinking. Often without realizing it, I found myself absorbing ideas that were not in keeping with our faith; even as I was cognizant of certain fundamental principles of Islam, I found myself subconsciously absorbing attitudes and perspectives that did not align with those principles. It has taken years of personal error, spiritual growth, and increased learning to step away from the vortex and understand more deeply how wrong things can go when one is attached to the wrong framework.

My experience as a conservative Muslim woman who gravitated toward feminism in response to oppression in the name of “traditional Islam” has reinforced the urgent need for the Ummah to seriously engage with the recurring harms Muslim women identify in our thought and practice. Had Muslim leadership and communities meaningfully addressed the dhulm perpetuated in our spaces, many women (including myself) would never have been spurred towards other methods of dealing with our community’s problems.

After years of reflection, research, lived experience, and spiritual growth, I am more convinced than ever that the ultimate solutions to the Ummah’s internal and external struggles—personal and spiritual alike—lie within Islam itself. External ideologies can never offer the holistic answers we require. However, I also believe – just as emphatically – that unless the Ummah engages Muslim women’s concerns with seriousness, nuance, and accountability for our collective failures, we will continue to see Muslim women turning to the philosophies of feminism in search of justice and dignity. My work as a believing woman pursuing justice and dismantling the many layers of poison in our Ummah has only just begun. My rage has certainly not subsided; it has only been refined.

What Is Feminism?

There is no single definition of feminism. And there’s the rub – to engage with the discussion of feminism in the first place, one must be willing to acknowledge and engage with the messiness of it all. You cannot simply claim that something is “feminism,” come up with a clever comeback, and then declare victory over “feminism.” Whether in academia, social media, or the real world, there are multiple “feminisms” that are being discussed, developed, and deconstructed. There are the many waves of Western feminism; Black feminism; POC feminism; “womanism”¹, Christian and Jewish feminism; socialist/ Marxist feminism; “Muslim feminism” (which itself has multiple layers to it) and even “Islamist feminism (or womanism)” (Badran, 2009, pg. 242-245; Hidayatullah, 2014, pg 37-45).

Dictionaries will give you varying definitions (“the belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power, and opportunities as men and be treated in the same way” from the Cambridge Dictionary; “belief in and advocacy of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” from Merriam-Webster – emphasis mine). Loosely and colloquially, many understand feminism as believing in the complete equality of men and women and seeking to replicate that equality at all levels of life and society. Even this is not entirely accurate, as many fiercely discuss and debate the importance of differentiating between “total equality” vs “equity.”

With all this in mind, references to “feminism” in this paper will refer to secular value based movements, not just any conversations around women’s rights. Where relevant, I will specify between different types of feminist movements.

It is important to note that secular feminism has its own unique history in the West, rooted in centuries of ingrained Church-perpetuated beliefs around the inherent inferiority of women, from blaming Eve for Adam’s fall from heaven to witch-hunts and more. I will not fall into the trite habit of boasting about how Islam gave women rights 1400+ years before women in the West received the right to vote. While it is an accurate statement, it does not reflect the realities of Muslim women’s experiences in Muslim societies throughout those 1400+ years. Others have elaborated on the rights Islam gave women elsewhere, and in more scholarly detail I ever could. Our concern, however, is with modern realities, not long-ago eras of Islam’s greatest ideals realized and then lost.

The label of “feminism” has a fraught history in non-Western countries, specifically the Muslim world, where it was used as a tool of colonization even as the suffrage movement was being clamped down in Western countries (Ahmed, 1992, pg. 152-153). Whether under Lord Cromer in Egypt in the late 1880s, or the French in Algeria in the same time period (Rahnama, 2023, pg. 120-153), ‘feminism’ was little more than an imperial tool weaponized for colonial purposes against Muslim populations. Nor was this a historic phenomenon; feminism continues to be used to justify violent Western imperialism against Muslim lands (Ezaydi, 2026, pg 173-197), from the original “War on Terror” invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and, currently, the destruction of Iran.

However, this is not to dismiss any and all efforts in the name of women’s rights as a solely colonial enterprise. Even as the West introduced the very category of women’s rights to political and social discourse, there were those who objected to colonization while recognizing that women were, indeed, experiencing significant oppression in our own societies (Mubarak, 2022, pg. 57-61). Women’s rights movements in Muslim countries, often referred to as “feminism,” had their own unique discussions, priorities, and activisms that did not always equate to Western secular feminist agendas (Badran, 2009, pg 1-6; Badran, 1995, pg 223-250). At times, women’s rights movements started in the same place before diverging, as with the formidable Islamist revival figure, Zaynab al-Ghazali, who split from Huda Sha’rawi’s feminist group in 1936 (Badran, 2009, pg. 24-27). Many Islamic activists, including Zaynab al-Ghazali, sought to reject both colonization and the oppression of women, all under an Islamic framework.

Unfortunately, many of us – especially in the West – are disconnected from our Islamic heritage, both ancient and contemporary. In women like Zaynab al-Ghazali and Shaykha Dr. Heba Raouf Ezzat we have examples of how to address the complex issues of anti-Islamic agendas alongside engaging in serious critique of unIslamic attitudes and practices found in Muslim societies (McLarney, 2015, pg. 219-253). Yet – for whatever reasons – their works have neither been widely translated nor made part of the dominant discourse, whether academic or Islamic. Indeed, it is deeply concerning that many who spend hundreds of thousands of hours pontificating on the topic of Islam and women in lectures, webinars, and courses somehow omit their work entirely. As a result, Muslims in the West today conflate any kind of “women’s rights” discussions with feminism even when it is not grounded in secular discourse. Traditionally trained, orthodox shaykhaat (female Islamic scholars) are constantly accused of feminism when they advocate for women’s Shari’ah rights or challenge unIslamic attitudes and behaviours towards women that is claimed to be “Islamic”; even male scholars who advocate for women are accused of being corrupted by feminism, called “white knights,” and attacked for challenging the status quo.

We must be intelligent enough to recognize that, given our geopolitical, social, and linguistic contexts, it is impossible for us to avoid engaging with certain discourses or using certain types of terminology (e.g. patriarchy; misogyny; androcentrism) when we discuss gendered matters. These words are a part of the English language, with clear definitions, even if colloquial usage influences the emotional impact of these words; just as we use terms like “racism,” “ethnocentrism,” and more when we discuss racism as a general concept as well as within Muslim communities. To claim that these words have no basis in our Islamic tradition is to render us mute on more than race and gender issues; it is an idiotic claim that would invalidate half our Islamic intellectual tradition, which contended with far more serious issues of philosophy and creed. Unless we all revert to speaking the fus’ha Arabic of the Messenger’s era and refuse to acknowledge our existence in the modern timeline, we must get over these emotional arguments and deal with the realities we live in – including speaking English and living in Western contexts.

However, this does not mean that we should not develop our own frameworks and vocabularies – we absolutely should, and at least some figures dedicated to meaningful work in the field have undertaken these efforts (McLarney, 2015). This also does not mean that we should not be extremely cautious in terms of the language we used, being aware of the way in which certain terminology is weaponized, and the foundational assumptions underlying that language. Engaging in these discussions to begin with must come with careful analyses of the terminology used, the philosophies behind them, and our theological positionality as Muslims who must contend with these epistemologies. As Talal Asad (2018) notes, the language of secularism (and thus, feminism) is not neutral; it is embedded in power, history, and practice. We cannot be blind to this reality and the ways in which it impacts us at every level.

Colloquial use of terminology that originated in academia usually moves beyond their dictionary definitions and becomes heavily laden with cultural meanings that remove nuance, conflate cause-and-effect, and adopt problematic assumptions that are not properly interrogated. We see much of this especially in online discourse, which takes phrases such as “toxic masculinity” (originally meant to critique some societal beliefs around how men are perceived as masculine) and turns them into caricature accusations against all traits associated with men. This must be kept in mind when having conversations around Islam and feminism, as it is necessary for us to consider the contexts in which we are speaking, and to whom; the average online Muslim won’t be able to parse the difference between academic verbiage and casual usage when the words used are the same. The way one person uses the word “patriarchy” as a neutral descriptor vs another who uses it as a sweeping condemnation make a massive difference in how thoughts and ideas are communicated and internalized. Preachers, activists, academics, and influencers spend far too much time talking past each other than engaging with other meaningfully precisely because of this mismatch of understanding and usage of vocabulary.

We must also be intelligent enough to distinguish between those actively calling to the secular values and definitions of feminism, those who just want to improve women’s rights but only know how to do so using popular feminist vocabulary, and those who are actively engaged with Islamic tradition to uphold Islamic values around women’s rights. If we are not willing to do this much, then we prove ourselves to be insincere in dealing with the very serious issues that plague our Ummah today.

As we proceed, we must keep the following in mind: when injustice becomes a norm, resistance is inevitable. In a Western context, this means that feminism itself was inevitable, as a response to the oppression that besieged women at every level. From being viewed as property to finally being able to own property, from the right to access equal education to protections against discrimination, and more, one must acknowledge that the suffragist movement in Western countries resulted in real, tangible, positive results that benefit women – Muslim as well as non-Muslim – today. How far feminism has gone beyond resisting oppression and pursuing justice to go to another extreme is something else to be considered.

In Muslim contexts, we must realize that engaging with the lived realities and the discourse of feminism, shared via media and technology, was and is also inevitable. What is not inevitable is a future wherein all Muslims seeking solutions to gendered injustice turn to secular feminism – but only if we as a community are committed to putting in the work to oppose this injustice from within our own traditions.

What’s So Bad About Feminism?

This is the part where many people expect either long, convoluted discussions about Marxist and neoliberal constructions of societal hierarchy and power structures… or reductive memes about “feminists are happy to make coffee for their bosses but not their husbands!” I am here to do neither.

So what is so bad about feminism? Put simply: it is a framework that does not begin with the belief in a Creator who is the All-Knowing, the All-Wise, the Most Just Lawmaker. Feminism in its many mutations, and especially its most widespread and contemporary iterations, is mired in a worldview devoid of knowledge and belief in Allah and His Guidance. Discussions around morality and sexuality, gender and hierarchy, are permuted through a lens structured solely upon human-made ideas of good and evil. Feminism, along with every other philosophy that exists, is the result of humans trying to make meaning of the world without a foundation of Divine Guidance. It is especially important to note that in the Western context, secularism (and thus feminism) is inextricably tied to the history and consequences of the Enlightenment – a movement emerging from volatile Christian violence and that eventually resulted in cutting off the concept of “God” from public life, and consequently from private morality. Thus, a deliberate choice has been made to eradicate the role of God from the most fundamental aspects of human life, with unsurprising ramifications.

It is not surprising that so many women who have experienced or witnessed injustice and oppression at the hands of men think that men are inherently the problem, or that any social structure wherein men have authority is inherently harmful to women. After all, this is what their experience has taught them. From a secular perspective, religion has only ever been weaponized against women, to women’s profound detriment. Male-led societies have rarely resulted in the uplifting of women, but in their suppression and humiliation. This is the soil from which emerges a feminist hermeneutics of suspicion: a perspective that is predicated upon the assumption that all or most religious and cultural structures are created by and for male interests.² One could argue that for those without Islam, this is a logical conclusion to come to. For those without Islam, there is no God who determines good and evil or promises judgment; no Divinely ordained set of ethics by which to live, to judge, to hold oneself or others accountable; no spiritual framework which women can turn to with confidence that their very existence is respected, honoured, and valued. In a secular worldview, there is no faith in a Hereafter wherein justice will be meted out. Justice itself is a concept entirely at the whims of the dominant powers that be, malleable and ever-changing with the latest political, social, or intellectual trend.

Islam, however, gives us a different foundation upon which to build our faith and our worldview. As Muslims, we believe completely in the Qur’an as the first source of Divine Guidance and Legislation; we believe in the role of the Sunnah as the second primary source of spiritual direction and practical rulings. We also have an understanding of the rich, varied corpus of traditional Islamic scholarship – a tradition that doesn’t exist as a fossilized entity to be followed blindly, but which continues to develop to this day. We also have a healthy recognition that our scholarship is not infallible; at the same time, through our Islamic tradition, we understand that rulings and structures have deeper meaning and wisdom. Legal authority or hierarchy does not automatically equate ontological superiority. Every question that is associated with feminism, from questioning female worth to discussions around sexual behaviour, from gender roles to finances, is ultimately answered within the framework of believing that Allah revealed a Divine structure for us to exist within. Most comfortingly, we understand as believers that where justice is not implemented in this world, it most certainly will be upheld in the Hereafter by the Most Just, on the Day when none can escape His Justice.

In summary, we must always remember that no matter the philosophy or ideology in question, anything that is not firmly grounded upon the Qur’an and Sunnah – and most importantly, upon taqwa of Allah – is not something that we can rely upon. While there may be some kernels of truth to be found, or some elements of accuracy in their ideas, they will always be fundamentally flawed. It is through Islam alone that one will ever find a truly comprehensive concept of justice.

The Trauma to Feminism Pipeline

It is a caricature that Muslim feminists are spoiled young women studying liberal arts at a liberal university on their fathers’ dime. To start with this assumption is already a sign of refusing to engage with the reality of Muslim women’s experiences. We have no statistics from within the Muslim community to tell us exactly how many Muslim women began identifying as feminist after going to university. It is also true that there are many women who have not experienced trauma who identify with the term ‘feminist,’ for various reasons. We do have considerable anecdotal evidence from Islamic scholars (both male and female) deeply engaged in grassroots da’wah work, who testify to the trend of Muslim women ascribing to the term “feminist” after enduring or witnessing significant traumatic experiences.

These traumas are very real: witnessing or experiencing abuse at the hands of men evoking their status as qawwamoon; forced marriages; FGM³ being touted as a part of Islam⁴; being raised with the beliefs that women are inherently inferior to men in Islam^{5 6}, that women do not enter Jannah except through the permission of a man, that Allah hates women, that women’s education is haraam⁷, and so on⁸. Fataawah, Islamic books, and masjid lectures abound labeling women as weak, emotional, incapable of rational thought or action, and constructing ideas of “wifely obedience” that go beyond the pale and into the realm of accepting abuse silently. When these are touted as the Islamic stance on women’s existence, how are Muslim women supposed to think well of Allah?

It is also common to find that people have ingrained assumptions about Islamic values and rulings based on faulty premises; for example, that hijab was mandated by men to control female sexuality, rather than that hijab is a command from Allah that is part of a larger vision of sexual ethics for all believers. Other ideas, such as teaching that women’s sole purpose in life is to become wives and mothers, do little to bring Muslim women closer to Islam.

Many girls grow up with a warped understanding of Islam itself, often because of their parents’ and communities’ lack of tarbiya. There is almost always a gross ignorance of Islam, Islamic values, ethics, frameworks, and rulings. The conflation of culture (whether South Asian, Arab, or otherwise) with Islam has been a massive source of confusion, pain, and injustice for Muslim women around the world. These traumas become a motivating force to push Muslim women away from Islam.

It is only understandable that girls and women who are not raised to believe in their inherent worth as believers in the sight of Allah, who are excluded from worshipping Allah in His Houses, whose understanding of their existence revolves around sentiments of disgust and anger, will inevitably question these premises. It also understandable that, when penalized for asking questions in the first place (as happens to many women who sincerely go to scholars with their questions), these women will seek answers from outside of our tradition in an attempt to reconcile their fitri understanding that the Most Just Creator could never condone such vile injustices.

Indeed, an oft-ignored element of the phenomenon of Muslim women identifying with the label of feminism is that the Muslim community as a whole has demonstrated a consistent refusal to meaningfully deal with these issues from the ground up, on a regular basis. Many Muslim women who ask questions or challenge our community’s status quo are immediately vilified as “feminists” trying to undermine Islam even when they explicitly say they’re not feminists and don’t identify with feminism (a common challenge faced even by traditionally trained women Islamic scholars!). When faced with such antagonism from other Muslims, many of these women actively choose to identify as feminists, since their attempts to engage from within using a solely Islamic-based terminology yielded no change or benefit. Using the language of feminism gives them the opportunity to tap into wider discussions, address certain phenomena with more specific vocabulary, and utilize existing research and social work that has been done regarding women’s issues.

If Muslims are sincere about addressing the problems of feminism within our community, then it must happen proactively, not reactively. That is to say, it is not effective or meaningful to spend thousands of hours debating “feminism as deviance”; what will prevent a mass exodus of Muslim women from looking outwards for solutions will be to aggressively deal with our community’s problems from a firmly grounded perspective in the Qur’an and Sunnah. AlHamdulillah, we are beginning to see this work being done in various capacities, but the reality is that much more work is needed in this regard – especially in light of the red pill ideology permeating many spaces and doubling down on justifying the harms done to Muslim women in the name of Islam.

There is a stark necessity to acknowledging that feminism isn’t the biggest, baddest thing to happen to the Ummah: wholesale dhulm (oppression) is. When we treat the lives of women as less than an immediate priority, when we repeatedly turn a blind eye to abusers while enjoining the abused to be patient (or to take responsibility for their own abuse!), when we demonstrate husn adh-dhann for “scholars” who commit abhorrent crimes while demonizing the victims, when we defend vile celebrity rapists who briefly use the cover of Islam while attacking believing women and calling them hypocrites and apostates – we demonstrate that we do not care about the spiritual or physical wellbeing of Muslim women. In all these cases, it isn’t feminism pulling women away from Islam… it is Muslims who are doing so.

Victims of Modernity

That’s not to say that every Muslim woman who finds herself turning towards feminism is a victim of abuse or gross cultural practices. Sometimes she’s a victim of modernity – no different from the many Muslim men wandering about who are also suffering from this affliction (though their diseases remain either undetected or simply considered not as serious).⁹

Man or woman, the quality of the average Western Muslim’s Islamic upbringing leaves much to be desired. When we already contend with statistics that show that only about 42% of American Muslims even pray five times a day, can we really have high hopes that the majority of young Muslims are being raised with a robust, holistic knowledge of Islam itself? How many Muslims, male or female, have been taught to understand Islam as a systematic, structured way of life? How many young Muslims have even a rudimentary awareness of the development of the Islamic sciences, let alone how rulings around hijab or other gendered matters came to be? To expect that Muslim women should somehow know the finer details of these scholarly discussions while their male counterparts do not, and to accuse such women of disrespecting our tradition when they simply do not know, is a double standard that only does our Ummah damage to uphold.

Coupled with the lack of thorough Islamic upbringing is the absorption of modern secular liberal values, whether through the education system, entertainment and media, or simply the society that Western Muslims are raised in. This, too, is part of a larger, overarching concern that exceeds the scope of this paper, yet is required to be considered more deeply: should Muslims really be content with settling in nonMuslim lands and raising our children in cultural and intellectual environments that we are not preparing them to contend with appropriately? Muslim parents bear a great burden around the tarbiya that they provide – or do not provide – to their children, and this has endless repercussions on the state of the Muslim Ummah at large.

A common issue specifically around discussions of feminism and Islam is the projecting of modern secular liberal values upon Islam itself, with little to no understanding that secular values – feminist or otherwise – are built upon a socio-theological and historical context that is utterly different from Islam and devoid of the presence of Allah. There is rarely an awareness of how feminism was used as a colonial tool to dismantle Muslim societies as part of the effort to portray the West as inherently superior and rational, while Islam was belittled as being a backwards, oppressive faith.

Statements like “Islam is a feminist religion!” and “Prophet Muhammad was the first feminist!”¹⁰ are predicated upon understandings of “justice,” “freedom,” and rights discourse that are distinctly divergent from the understandings of those same words within the Islamic spiritual-legal tradition. Questions of authority, marriage, sexual consent, abortion, and all the other trigger topics are then picked apart and understood through an intellectual paradigm that is utterly discordant with an Islamic worldview.

Perhaps most insidiously, this absorption of Western frameworks results in a type of internalized Islamophobia. There is a reduction of Islam to a private spirituality and of “Muslim-ness” as a cultural identity, rather than a holistic, publicly lived worldview and lifestyle that includes the public, the private, the domestic, the political, the social, the cultural, the ritual, and more. A sense of Western exceptionalism arises, one in which there is an assumption of Western secular values as a universal truth and superior moral system over Islamic truth, despite the constant state of flux of Western secular values.¹¹

In these circles, it is not uncommon to find an Othering of religious Muslims as backwards and misogynist; sometimes the racism comes out blatantly by using terms such as “Taliban” or “Wahhabi” as slurs against Muslims seen as too conservative. The concept of Islam as the ultimate, timeless Truth revealed by the All-Knowing and Most Just Lawmaker is replaced by the blind, implicit belief that contemporary Western mores are the sole arbiter of what is right, what is moral, and what is just. From here on out, it is all too easy to slip from into perennialism, and from there into atheism itself.

Not the Intersectionality We’re Looking For

A consequence of being steeped in secular liberal discourse is that from well-meaning discussions around human rights and oppression, a sharp left turn is taken into the weeds of social justice warrior¹² rhetoric. While it is understandable that Muslims seek allyship amongst others who will support our rights (especially in the age of ongoing illegal detainments, Zionist targeting, and endlessly increasing Islamophobia from the right wing and centrist left alike), we have sadly taken to unsavory bedfellows.

Moving beyond understanding the concept of intersectionality as it applies to certain valid spheres,¹³ there is an embrace of intersectionality with all elements – most notably the LGBTQ movement and its push to not just normalize homosexuality, but to celebrate it. The intersectionality of LGBTQ issues with wider rights discourse meant that Muslims looking for support for our civil rights were compromised by the expectation to change our own moral stances. It wasn’t enough for us to simply acknowledge that yes, LGBTQ people are entitled to the same legal rights and protections that everyone is supposed to have in a secular society. We were expected to move into the realm of explicit support for their causes, too; that our morality was now to mirror their ideas of morality (or lack thereof). To defy this was to be labeled bigoted, hateful, and essentially confirming racist stereotypes of Muslims as backwards, savage, and a threat to enlightened Western civilization.

As a community, we witnessed the snowball effect of this intersectionality. A blurring of sensibilities and the desensitization of our Islamic moral beliefs around sexuality have led to egregious public displays of utterly unacceptable nonsense. The examples are endless: from Ilhan Omar, a hijabi woman, dancing at Pride Marches to claims that “Islam has always had a place for homosexuality and gender fluidity!”; Scott Kugle’s laughable attempt at re-interpreting the Qur’an to allow for homosexuality; organizations like HEART aggressively attacking Muslims who uphold the Islamic prohibitions against homosexuality; blaming the political right for traditional Islamic stances against a range of issues from abortion to homosexuality, and more. At a theological level, the complicating of and rejection of “patriarchal heteronormativity” has resulted in explicit blasphemy: Rashida Tlaib publicly declaring that “my Allah is a She,” echoing the likes of Amina Wadud and others (who clearly missed the memo about Allah’s chosen way to reference Himself in the Qur’an¹⁴). Ominously, the LGBTQ cause has been weaponized by Western development and humanitarian aid organizations as an imperialist tool against Muslims.

The Qur’an and Sunnah are rendered sacrifices on the altar of intersectionality. An Islamic worldview is perceived as not just moot, but shameful. Contemporary ethics are projected onto Islam; Islam no longer defines the foundation of morality, but is expected to meet the standards of Western society on any given day, regardless of how quickly the wind blows in another direction. For those of us who still believe deeply in social justice work (as we should, in keeping with Islamic ethos), it is imperative that we do this work while firmly grounded in Islamic principles. Imam Dawud Walid’s book, “Towards Sacred Activism,” provides a solid foundation of how to navigate social justice activism without falling into the precarious pitfalls of inadvertently supporting belief systems that profoundly contradict the very foundations of our faith.

Social Media Muslim Girl Bosses, Dawah Bros, and Monetizing Ragebait

There is another place where we see the frameworks and language of feminism used to create a Frankenstein’s monster of discourse around Islam and women’s rights: the Internet. Social media, particularly on platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, have become a breeding ground for anyone and everyone to grab a mic and start pontificating on what they think Islam says about Islam, women, and every other topic under the sun. While Dawah Bro Inc. is perhaps most easily identified as an ugly subculture of the Muslamic Internet, they are just one side of the toxic social media coin. The other side of the coin is what can perhaps be labeled as Muslim Girl Boss : flooding social media feeds with sound bytes claiming that “Islam says wives don’t have to do anything!” or “Khadijah (ra) was a CEO!” or “talking about hijab is spiritual blackmail!” or “hadith are a flawed, man-made construct of the patriarchy!”

This particular genre of social media influencers consists of individuals who have no traditional background in Islamic studies, yet feel confident enough with their secular educational backgrounds to speak on Islamic matters. This is particularly dangerous, as secular educational training – even in “Islamic studies” – is a wildly different worldview than that of genuine Islamic knowledge. Even those who claim to reference fiqh tend to have little or no understanding of usool al-fiqh, the differences between madhaahib and their internal structures, and the greater holistic legal and ethical considerations of the Shari’ah.

The result is that – whether Ted Talk or podcast, YouTube short or viral TikTok video – the sweeping claims being made are both wildly incorrect and cringe-inducing. Unfortunately, they also snag hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views; generate endless comments; are stitched by other content creators; and contribute to a Frankenfiqh discourse in Muslim online spaces that has no concern for the depth and nuance of true Islamic scholarship. Not coincidentally, these takes also reflect a very particular set of worldviews: one based on secularism, individualism, capitalism, and pop feminism.

Just as Dawah Bro Inc. thrives on creating toxic perspectives around gender roles and relationships, where women are caricatured as greedy, vindictive, and deceitful towards innocent men, Muslim Girl Boss creates its own warped reality. Women who do not share aspirations of shattering corporate glass ceilings are demeaned as brainwashed baby breeders; relationships built on mutual reciprocity, albeit presenting in “traditional” ways such as husbands as breadwinners and wives attending to the domestic sphere, are recreated as inherently dangerous to women.

The weaponization of pop-therapy vernacular (not to be confused with valid therapeutic interventions!) is used to convince women that normal marital miscommunications and disagreements are equivalent to abuse. Emotional validation is given priority over all else, including personal accountability. Fiqh of marriage is dismissed wholesale as misogyny from classical scholars, to be rejected in favour of contemporary secular relationship norms (despite the erratic and fickle nature of the latter). Rather than fostering healthy discussions around gender roles and interactions in society, those immersed in pop-feminist spaces create an environment of suspicion and hostility towards those perceived as supporting a patriarchal structure within the Muslim community.

Even the use of terminology such as “patriarchy” and “misogyny” is devoid of nuance, often swapped interchangeably for one another without pausing to consider the implications. More dangerously, those who have some passing familiarity with Islamic vocabulary wield technical Islamic jargon in a manner that strips the phrases of their legal context, leaving viewers with wildly incorrect conclusions that are attributed to the Shari’ah. Many Muslim women walk away from this content feeling as though they cannot trust traditional Islamic scholarship, while also feeling justified in believing that Islam does, in fact, conform to modern 21st century Western ideals. Endless videos fill the algorithm with warnings that Islamic scholarship is a behemoth of misogyny to be rejected, that Islam itself is little different from Christianity or Judaism, that the structures of the Islamic sciences are a house of cards to be swept away.

These social media personalities do a lot more than just undermine the role of traditional Islamic scholarship; they also construct a culture of pseudo-intellectualism (characterized, ironically, by significant ignorance) and heightened antagonism between Muslim men and women. Rather than shedding light on Islamic law’s nuanced approach to all matters – including gender roles, responsibilities, and rights – they flatten the discourse into one of patriarchy vs feminism, of male oppression vs female victimhood. In their professed quest to enlighten the public about all things Islam and women, they muddy the waters of intellectual integrity, nuanced knowledge, and Ummatic allyship in the cause of justice for men and women alike.

These online dumpster fires don’t just stay online – they leak into the real world, causing young Muslim men to gravitate towards false machismo under the guise of Islamic masculinity and quoting Andrew Tate, while Muslim women grasp for responses to this poison. Unfortunately, many of those responses contain just as much poison, especially the increasingly common rejection of ahadith as a source of Islamic authority, based on accusations of misogyny and corruption. This rejection of hadith and the Sunnah, under the guise of women’s empowerment, signals something extremely dangerous: a rejection of Islam as a holistic faith, one which was sent to us by an All-Wise, All-Knowing Creator, and an attitude where personal discomfort or lack of understanding of Islamic texts is elevated over the concept of sami’na wa ata’naa (we hear and we obey).

Rather than seeking to explore deeper scholarly explanations of contentiously-viewed ahadith, rather than seeking female scholarship to provide insight and empathy while upholding the Islamic tradition, it has become a common response to claim that one’s own intellect (or five-minute Google/ ChatGPT search) is superior enough to trump a spiritual and scholarly tradition that spans over 1400 years. This reaction doesn’t actually help Muslim women overcome oppression in our communities or even reconcile personal spiritual challenges – all it does is create a doorway that leads to rejecting the fundamental premise of our faith, which is complete and utter belief in Allah’s Perfect Guidance and Justice.

In turn, rather than championing the cause of Muslim women, we end up with endless social media back-and-forths accusing influencers of apostasy (egged on by those same influencers). The Ummah’s real issues are drowned out in favour of jobless behaviour, attention-seeking, narcissism, and making money off the short-sightedness and emotional reactions of thousands of online followers whose every like, comment, and reaction video makes money for those whose last thought is their own spiritual wellbeing (let alone that of their audiences).  Thanks to an algorithm which actively elevates conflict and antagonism, Muslim men and women have been manipulated into (or actively played a part in manipulating others to) view each other with suspicion even as they try to get married (to one another!), struggle to find alignment in religious values (despite sharing the same deen), and clash even in masjid spaces as polarizing views are weaponized on the minbar and divide the community¹⁵. There is little sense of believing men and believing women as allies of one another, seeking Allah’s Pleasure and to establish justice in the Ummah and around the world.

The phenomenon of these influencers reflects two very dangerous patterns of behaviour: the first is the sheer arrogance of speaking on matters of Islam without actual Islamic knowledge gained from traditional study; and the second is a culture of presumption that anyone can speak on religious matters, regardless of their training (or lack thereof). Bluntly speaking, this is a type of spiritual disease; one which comes with widespread, dangerous social consequences alongside the negative impact on their own spiritual states. By putting themselves in the position of speaking on such matters as Islamic law and ethics, these influencers are presenting themselves as experts – rather than directing their audiences towards those who truly are qualified to do so, including numerous female scholars with genuine traditional training and qualifications in the Islamic sciences.

It is imperative that as a collective, Muslims who have genuine concerns around women’s rights and issues concerning women do not turn to social media shills as figures of authority or influence. We must not enable their ignorance and their hubris; we must not mistake their grifts for grassroots work; we must not reward their attention seeking with our hits, views, and stitches. Instead, we must reorient ourselves to the actual methodology of seeking knowledge. Pursuing real-work change must take place from within our own tradition, not from a shaky framework cobbled together from colonialism, secularism, capitalism, individualism, feminism, and the millions of others -isms bogging down our intellectual processes and fogging our cultural filters.

From the Streets to the Ivory Towers

Most Muslims are “average” Muslims, and you don’t have to be a university graduate to be impacted by the factors that we discussed in the previous sections. Lack of Islamic knowledge, absorbing ideas around Western secular superiority, and being chronically online are all issues to be found amongst the everyday Muslim. Feminism is just one growth of the ugly morass that is the Western sociopolitical hegemony that has, alas, infected the entire world.

But for those who have gone past social media soundbytes and found themselves immersed in deeper explorations of feminism and Islam, what needs to be known about that beast colloquially known as Muslim feminism? How have the discussions in the ivory towers of academia trickled their way onto our streets, and how are Muslim women impacted when we pick up books penned addressing the topic of Islam and women? While there are endless articles, webinars, and YouTube lectures pontificating on feminism and its impacts on Muslims, there is very little actual understanding in the Muslim community of what and how feminism in a Muslim context emerged, developed, and continues to influence others – and what isn’t feminism no matter how much one tries to make it so.

As someone who used the label of ‘feminist’ for many years, I am the first to note that most people embroiling themselves in these discussions don’t know what they’re talking about. The vast majority of people who use the term feminist have not studied feminism, are not even aware of its long (often sordid) history, or the confusion of thought trends ascribed to feminism, and even more rarely have read works by Muslim feminist authors. Over the years, however, I have taken the time to actually read works by notable Muslim feminist academics and developed a much deeper understanding of the fundamental theological flaws behind “Muslim feminism.” It is only by engaging with these works, rather than relying on flimsy stereotypes, caricatures, and outdated ideas of what “feminist” discourse entails, that we can most effectively address the very real, very dangerous beliefs undergirding the entire structure.

Many women find themselves picking up copies of Amina Wadud or Fatima Mernissi’s books at some point or another – sometimes as required readings in a university religions class, and sometimes out of desperation, in search for anything to more seriously address their questions around Islam and women (especially if they were already berated by imams for daring to ask those questions in the first place!). Unfortunately, this reading is usually done without a solid understanding of aqeedah, tafseer, the development of fiqh, or Islamic scholarship in general. Without a grounding in the Islamic sciences, such readers are left unable to identify just how deeply problematic, and wildly incorrect, these authors’ foundational premises and ultimate conclusions are.

The next part of this article will examine the ideological structures underpinning the field of Muslim feminism in academia, key figures and their contributions to the field, and the necessity of effective responses to these ideas.

References

Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam. Yale University Press.

Asad, T. (2003). Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford University Press.

Asad, T. (2018). Secular Translations: Nation-state, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. Columbia University Press.

Badran, M. (1995). Feminists, Islam, and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton University Press.

Badran, M. (2009). Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences. Oneworld Publications.

Ezaydi, S. (2026). The Othered Woman: How White Feminism Harms Muslim Women. Pluto Press.

Hidayatullah, A. A. (2014). Feminist Edges of the Qur’an. Oxford University Press.

McLarney, E. A. (2015). Soft Force: Women in Egypt’s Islamic Awakening. Princeton University Press.

Mubarak, H. (2022). Rebellious Wives, Neglectful Husbands: Controversies in Modern Qur’anic Commentaries. Oxford University Press.

Rahnama, S. (2025). The Future Is Feminist: Women and Social Change in Interwar Algeria. Cornell University Press.

Related:

ShaykhaTalk: Female Scholarship Or Feminism?

Addressing Abuse Amongst Muslims: A Community Call-In & Leadership Directives | The Female Scholars Network

The post Muslims and the F-Word: Feminism, Dhulm, and Jahiliyyah appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

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* * *

Empty Eyes

The pass had narrowed until our caravan stretched into a long column that wound like a great river snake along the curving mountain road. The air was thin and bitingly cold. Longwei, Meilin and I were stationed near the rear of the caravan, beside wagon forty out of fifty. Longwei rode ahead of me, his weathered face grim beneath his fur cap. Meilin was behind, one hand resting near the hilt of her dao, her eyes roaming constantly over the cliffs above.

The front of the caravan was completely out of sight, far ahead and around a bend. Jagged cliffs hemmed us in on both sides, their gray faces pocked with caves and dark fissures that seemed to watch us like empty eyes. We carried our own scents with us: mule sweat, leather, and horse dung.

There was no calling of crows or hawks, no bleating of mountain goats, no adhaan or cooking smoke echoing up the mountainside from a distant village. The world was silent but for the hoofbeats and creaking wagon wheels of our caravan.

It wasn’t only me who was unsettled. Conversations had lapsed. No laughter sounded. Everyone had their eyes fixed on the caves, as if hordes of demons might pour forth at any moment. Riding easily on Belly’s back – he and I were like one creature at this point, we knew each other so well – I rubbed my hands together vigorously to warm them.

To break the tension, I quietly recited my favorite of Memdooh’s stanzas:

I ride from a northern land
curved sword in my hand.
I’m young but I’m hard
for I’m a caravan guard!

Belly flicked his ears, appreciating the enthusiasm in my voice. Heck, he probably knew the stanza himself by now.

“Boy,” Meilin hissed, “if you recite that poem one more time, you and I will duel again. And I won’t go easy this time.”

I chuckled at this. She’d dislocated my finger and bruised me from head to toe last time, and that was going easy?

Sergeant Karim came toward us, riding slowly along the length of the caravan, studying the heights instead of the road ahead. A brass signal horn hung around his neck, and his face was grim. Every so often he would point with two fingers.

“You. Tighten your helmet.”

“You, fasten that chin strap.”

“Shield on your arm, not your saddle.”

The guards obeyed without question. Men checked sword belts, adjusted bowstrings and settled helmets more firmly upon their heads. One teamster began humming nervously to himself until Karim silenced him with a glance.

“Keep your eyes open,” Karim called. “No one wanders. Stay with your wagons. If the horn sounds, you know your positions.” He continued toward the rear of the caravan.

The merchants instinctively drew closer to their teams. Guards loosened swords in their scabbards and rested their hands upon bow grips. Even the horses seemed to sense the tension. Ears flicked back and forth, nostrils flared, and more than one animal tossed its head uneasily.

Belly gave a low nicker. I reached forward and rubbed his neck. “I know, buddy. We’ll keep each other safe, like we always do.”

“Belly talking to you again?” Meilin asked. “Maybe you can get a bird to scout for us, like Prophet Sulaiman.”

A little later Karim returned from the rear.

The Tea House

“Care for a cup of tea, Sarge?” Meilin joked. This was a reference to the wagon we were guarding, which we colloquially called the Tea House, because it carried a small quantity of jade, several chests of silk and paper, and a great many crates of tea. Riding alongside, the scent of the tea drifted toward me, sweet and pleasant, strangely comforting amid so much unease.

He grinned, knowing that Meilin’s joke did not take away from her attention to her duty. “I’m holding out for Persian chai,” he replied softly. “They make it with saffron, rose and cardamom. No more talking. Listen for my horn.” A moment later, he was gone, moving forward.

The Tea House was pulled by four mules in tandem, two lead mules and two wheel mules nearest the wagon. The wheel pair supplied most of the braking and steering, while the lead pair provided the extra pulling power needed on steep grades. I had learned all of this on the journey, mostly from Longwei, who seemed to know something about almost everything.

I rode up beside the driver’s bench.

“Cover yourselves with the heavy blankets,” I told the driver and his young apprentice. “And keep a firm hold on the reins. Something’s coming.” I couldn’t have said how I knew this, but I was sure of it. I was discovering that I had good instincts for this kind of thing. My father’s training, perhaps.

The drivers glanced uneasily at the cliffs, then reached beneath the bench and spread thick wool blankets across their shoulders.

As for the two merchants responsible for the Tea House goods, they sometimes rode on horseback alongside their wagon, but today they had chosen to remain inside. Hearing my warning, they hurriedly pulled heavy quilts over themselves and crouched low among the cargo.

I fell back into position. I pushed my helmet more firmly onto my head, tightened the chin strap, and rested one hand on the hilt of my dao. My eyes searched the caves above while my other hand absently rubbed Belly’s neck.

“Steady, boy,” I murmured, and he flicked an ear in acknowledgment.

Cattle Horn

From somewhere far forward and above us came a high-pitched trumpeting sound. It was definitely not Sergeant Karim’s brass horn.

“What is that?” I called out to Longwei.

He glanced back at me. “Cattle horn. Not ours. Something’s happening.”

From the front of the caravan, a horse screamed. The sound was faint but unmistakable.

Now Karim’s horn did sound. One long blast, and one short. The signal for “attack at the front of the caravan.” From behind and around me, guards spurred their horses into a gallop, surging forward. I gave Belly a little kick with my heels as well, but instead of quickening the pace, he stopped dead.

I groaned. “Not now, Belly, please.”

“Darius,” Meilin snapped. “What are you doing? Let’s go.”

I knew that kicking Belly harder would not produce results. Instead I leaned forward to whisper in his ear. Then I froze and cocked my head.

“Wait!” I called out to Longwei and Meilin. Memdooh was riding past, and he paused as well. They circled back to me. Meilin’s face was flushed with excitement, Memdooh’s with what was likely fear, and Longwei looked entirely unfazed.

“What is it?” Longwei demanded. “You heard the signal. Get your damn horse to move.”

“It’s not that. I heard something from the rear. I think they might hit us there.”

Longwei glanced to the rear. There were no guards remaining back there except the six who formed a permanent rear guard, headed by Corporal Jian.

“I see nothing,” he said, but his tone held a note of doubt. “Jian carries a horn as well, he can signal if anything happens.”

I looked up sharply toward the caves at the rear of the caravan. “There it is again.” A cold knot formed in my stomach.

“What?”

“A rock falling.”

Longwei glanced irritably at the cliffs. “We’re in a mountain pass, Darius. Rocks fall. And I didn’t hear anything.”

“Neither did I,” Meilin admitted.

“My hearing is better than yours,” I said quietly.

The sound of fierce fighting drifted to us from the front of the caravan.

“It sounds bad up there!” Memdooh exclaimed. His voice held a note of panic. “We have to get up there or we’ll be whipped for dereliction.”

“I’m telling you,” I said, “an attack is coming at the rear. Those six men will be overrun. And what about the Happy Wagon? Gulnur is alone and defenseless.”

The third wagon from the rear was Kuangren and Gulnur’s matrimonial wagon. Some of the guards had painted flowers on it, and we had come to call it the Happy Wagon. Gulnur had fallen ill to some kind of flu, and was asleep back there. I knew these things because it was my job to know. All of us knew the status and contents of every wagon in our sector.

“How can you know that?” Longwei’s tone was irritated and angry.

“My gut.”

Meilin studied the cliffs above the rear of the caravan. The wind tugged at her hair. Somewhere up front, another scream echoed off the mountains. Finally, she nodded. “I trust the kid. Besides, there are plenty of guards up front. What if something does kick off back here?”

Longwei stared at her for a moment, then muttered a curse beneath his breath. “Wonderful,” he said. “We’ll all be whipped together.”

Rear Attack

Without another word, the four of us turned our horses and started toward the rear. We had not gone fifty paces when another cow horn bellowed from behind the caravan, loud and terrible, echoing through the pass.

Longwei stopped so abruptly that his horse reared. “Damn,” he growled. “The kid was right.”

“Heaven preserve us,” Meilin whispered.

The attack came all at once. Volleys of arrows poured forth from the small caves in the cliff. Corporal Jian toppled from his saddle without a sound. A mule shrieked and collapsed in the road, shafts protruding from its neck.

“Darius,” Longwei said softly, “remind me never to doubt your ears again.”

Men boiled out of the caves like soldier ants. They came on foot with wild cries, bounding like goats down the steep slope, wielding either short lances, or short, curved swords that looked much like my dao.

The four of us charged into the storm.

Three of the rear guards were down now. One of the surviving guards was struggling to free his leg from beneath his fallen mount while the other two fought desperately beside the last wagons.

The attackers numbered at least fifty. They scrambled down the slope in loose groups, shouting in a language I did not understand. Even in the midst of battle, I found myself struck by their appearance. The Afghan men were handsome – tall and lean, with high cheekbones and fierce eyes of blue, green, and amber. Their clothes were patched and faded, their boots worn nearly through. There was something hard and weathered about them, as if the mountains themselves had carved them into what they were.

At the rear of the attackers stood a middle-aged man with streaks of gray in his beard, shouting orders and pointing with his sword. Beside him loomed two enormous bodyguards carrying axes.

As we passed the Happy Wagon, Kuangren and Gulnur both stepped out. I’d thought Kuangren was on duty, but he must have been looking after his wife. He looked ridiculous in a nightshirt with no trousers and leather slippers, yet carried his bow and a fat quiver of arrows. His wife wore a long robe, and despite her pale, sweaty face, she too carried her bow.

From somewhere, Shah appeared. He was a big guard, tall and powerful, with bulging, muscular arms that threatened to tear his sleeves open. He carried a giant broadsword and could bash a man’s skull in even with the flat of the blade. I was happy to see him.

Orders

Longwei took one look at the battlefield. “Wedge formation!” he roared. “Straight through the center! Break them apart!”

My eyes roamed quickly over the battlefield, and I shouted, “No!”

Longwei wheeled toward me, astonished.

“What?”

“Kuangren! Gulnur!” I pointed at the gray-haired elder at the back. “Target the leader! Longwei, Meilin, flank them! Longwei, go right, Meilin, left. Kill the bodyguards, then attack from the rear. Memdooh, find high ground and empty your quiver. Check your lines of sight, don’t hit our men. Shah, you’re with me. We’re going up the middle. I need to get to Jian’s horn.”

For a moment, no one moved.

Longwei stared as if I had lost my mind. “Boy, know your place,” he growled.

Meilin looked from me to the Afghan commander and then back again. “Do as Darius commands!” she shouted. “You have your orders!”

Longwei looked like he’d been stabbed in the back. His eyes darted from Meilin to me, and I saw rage there. But he did not argue. He and Meilin rode in opposite directions, evading the oncoming force, and moving fast.

Trusting the men to do as I’d ordered, I plunged into the battle with Shah at my side. We had a huge advantage because we were mounted and the Afghans were not. Belly was steadfast, obeying the slightest pressure from my knees, and sometimes moving exactly where he needed to without prompting. We were surrounded by the deafening tumult of battle, but for all Belly cared, the noise might as well have been the sighing of the wind through a stand of eucalyptus trees.

Beside me, Shah cut men down as easily as a gardener might prune a thorny tree. He wasn’t even breathing hard, and I heard him chanting, “SubhanAllah wa bihamdihi, SubhanAllah wa bihamdihi, SubhanAllah wa bihamdihi.”

Two Shorts and One Long

A burly, middle-aged Afghan with a tangled beard like a juniper bush swung an axe at my midsection. Axes were much harder to block or parry than swords, and I didn’t try. I pulled Belly back just enough to let the axe swing by, missing me by the width of a pinky finger, then leaned forward and put my dao into his throat. I kicked him off the weapon, slipped an upward jab by a gangly youth of twenty or so, and lopped off his arm.

Corporal Jian lay before me. An arrow had pierced his chest. His black eyes stared blankly upward. He’d dropped the brass horn, and his outflung hand stretched toward it, as if he had been about to blow it when he fell, and had been reaching for it until the moment of his death.

I dismounted and closed Jian’s eyes.  Then I lifted the horn, raised it to my lips and blew two short blasts and one long. The signal for “attack at the rear of the caravan.”

For just an instant, the fighting seemed to pause all around me, like a dragon taking in a deep breath before blowing fire. Some of the Afghans uttered what could only have been curses. Then the dragon blew, and the fighting resumed.

Unfortunately I’d drawn attention to myself. A half dozen arrows winged my way. I dropped to the ground, snatched up a fallen shield and covered my head and neck. Most of the arrows missed. One bounced off the shield. But one pierced my left calf. I cried out in pain but there was no time to worry about it. A shadow loomed behind me and I turned a split second too late as a big Afghan came charging at me with a lance in one hand and a sword in the other. An instant before he reached me, an arrow entered his neck, and he crashed to the ground beside me. I looked around and saw Memdooh, standing atop a boulder, another arrow already nocked into his bow. He was pale and clearly terrified, but he grinned at me, and I grinned back. He’d saved my life.

Again, just to be sure, I raised the horn. This time I took a deep breath and blew as hard as I could. Two short, one long. Then I hung the horn around my neck, leaped back onto Belly’s back, lifted my dao and plunged into the fight.

A Belly Bite

A hand seized my boot and yanked.

I pitched sideways in the saddle, suddenly looking down into the furious face of a blue-eyed Afghan who was trying to drag me to the ground. I twisted, bringing my dao around, but before I could strike, Belly wheeled sharply and sank his teeth into the man’s shoulder.

The Afghan screamed. Belly shook him once, violently, like a dog worrying a rat, then flung him backward.

“Good boy!” I shouted. “You gave him a Belly bite!”

Belly pinned his ears and surged forward, apparently outraged that anyone had tried to steal his rider.

Men came at me from every direction. I did not kill everyone I faced. A man thrust a lance at me, and I parried the lance and slid my dao up the shaft to his hand, slicing his hand neatly in two. He screamed and dropped the lance as blood fountained from the hand. But he would live. I parried a sword stroke, slashed the attacker across the chest, then ducked as a lance passed over my head. An arrow whispered past my face, and I felt a hot sting along my cheek, followed by sudden wetness. When I touched my face, my fingers came away bloody. The arrow had only grazed me. But there was no time to be relieved.

My Muslim Brother

A young Afghan came through the press directly toward me. He was perhaps twenty years old, tall and lean, with fierce hazel eyes beneath a dark turban. His cheeks were sharp, his beard only beginning to fill in. He raised his curved sword to strike and shouted, “Allahu Akbar!”

Simultaneously, I lifted my dao to block and cried the same words: “Allahu Akbar!”

I froze.

Of course I knew the Afghans were Muslims. I had heard the adhaan in their villages. I had prayed beside them, eaten their bread and listened to their imams recite Quran. Yet until that moment, the men attacking us had existed in my mind only as raiders.

This man is my brother, I thought. My Muslim brother. The thought hit me like a stone from a catapult. He was a young man who performed his salat just as I did. Who bowed toward the same qiblah. Who perhaps had a mother waiting for him in one of these mountain villages, or a wife who had packed food into his satchel before he left.

Panic rose in my throat like bile. How could I kill him? A hadith of the Prophet, one I had learned from Ahmed, rang in my mind: “Insulting a Muslim is wickedness, and fighting him is kufr.”

Kufr! I could not fight this man. I could not kill these people. The young man lunged at my midsection. I barely twisted aside in time. His blade passed so close that it scraped the leather of my belt.

“Wait!” I shouted, but he paid no attention. “As-salamu alaykum!” I tried. Yet the man brought his sword down toward my head. I raised my dao into an umbrella block. Steel crashed against steel above my head, the impact jolting through my shoulders.

I did not counter. I could not bring myself to. My eyes darted from side to side, searching for some route of escape. Men fought all around us. Horses screamed. Dust filled the air. There was nowhere to go.

Was there a chance the man spoke Uzbek? “Aka!” I cried. The Uzbek word for brother. Yet the Afghan attacked again, anger and confusion in his hazel eyes. Perhaps he could not understand why I refused to strike. His sword swept toward my ribs.

I leaned away and parried late. The edge sliced through my coat without touching flesh.

He recovered instantly and raised the weapon for another blow.

I had no choice. Sooner or later one of his blows would get through. I feinted toward his head. When he lifted his sword to meet the false attack, I changed direction and drove the point of my dao into his chest.

His eyes widened.

For one terrible moment we stared at each other. The man’s mouth opened, but only a wet breath escaped. Then his sword fell from his hand, and he collapsed beneath Belly’s hooves.

Tears spilled from my eyes. If the man did indeed have a wife waiting for him back home, she would find only bitterness returning. Why had he made me do that? I wanted to climb down, kneel beside him and somehow undo what I had done. But even at my young age I knew that death is the one thing that cannot be undone. You can apologize to a man for insulting him. You can make restitution for hurting him. But death is a road that enters a dark cave and disappears from view. When you kill a man, you take away everything he will ever have.

The Retreat

Life, on the other hand, is a sea that at times lifts you up, and at other times crashes down upon you, and you either swim or drown. Another Afghan rushed me, and I cut his belly open. He might survive with help. A second came from my left, and I struck him across the temple with the guard of my dao, knocking him out. A third threw his axe at me, and I ducked it. It was as if half of the attacking force had suddenly decided that I was the main obstacle between them and success. Another man swung a sword at my leg. I blocked it and sliced upward. He leaned back but the tip of my sword caught his chin, cleaving it in two.

As quickly as the wave slammed into me, it receded. The fighting had become scattered. The Afghans were no longer advancing. A few continued to press, while others glanced behind them or began backing toward the caves.

“The commander is dead!” Longwei shouted. “Their commander is dead!”

I looked toward the rear of their force. Longwei and Meilin stood near the gray-bearded leader’s body. One of the hulking guards lay facedown nearby, an axe still gripped in one hand. The other was sprawled on his back with Meilin’s dao buried in his chest. As I watched, she put a foot on his chest and pulled it out.

A shudder seemed to pass through the attackers. Then they broke and ran.

Some fled up the slope toward the caves. Others ran down the road or leaped among the boulders, abandoning weapons and wounded comrades. The surviving guards cried out in triumph and started after them.

A Wagon

“They have a wagon!” someone shouted.

I turned.

A narrow trail branched from the main road behind the last wagon, descending steeply between two walls of stone. I had not noticed it before. Four horses were pulling one of our covered wagons down the trail at a reckless pace, the wheels bucking and bouncing over the uneven ground. Afghan men ran beside it, perhaps twenty of them, pushing at the rear and clinging to its sides.

The trail led directly toward the mouth of a great cave.

For a heartbeat I could only stare.

Then I looked around me, trying to understand what remained of the battle.

Perhaps thirty Afghans lay dead or wounded along the road and among the rocks. I was personally responsible for maybe ten of them. Several of our own guards were down as well. Longwei and Meilin – both breathing heavily, their clothing streaked with blood – stood over the bodies of the commander and his bodyguards. One side of Longwei’s face was purple with bruises. Meilin’s hair had come loose, one sleeve had been torn away, and one arm hung uselessly at her side, probably broken.

Memdooh lay curled beside the boulder from which he had been shooting. He clutched one leg while moaning through gritted teeth. A short sword lay near his hand, its blade red. He had fought even after he ran out of arrows. He had held his ground.

Gulnur lay on the ground beside the Happy Wagon.

Kuangren knelt over his wife in his nightshirt and slippers, his bow forgotten in the dust. He had gathered her into his arms and was rocking her, pressing his face against her hair. I could not tell whether she was conscious. Her robe was stained with blood.

Shah alone appeared untouched. The giant stood amid the bodies with his enormous sword resting against one shoulder, breathing as calmly as if he had merely finished chopping wood.

What to Do?

Men were looking at me. I still wore Corporal Jian’s horn around my neck. I had given the orders. Now the rear guards, the merchants, even some of the teamsters watched me, waiting to be told what to do next.

I had no idea.

Should we pursue the wagon? Tend the wounded? Secure the remaining wagons? Send men into the caves? The enemy was fleeing, but they might be drawing us into another ambush. Memdooh needed help. Gulnur might be dying. The surviving Afghans could regroup at any moment.

My thoughts collided uselessly in my head.

Then hoofbeats thundered up the pass. Sergeant Karim came charging around the bend at the head of a mass of mounted guards. Among them was Weili, her bow at the ready. Dust rolled behind them like smoke. Karim’s sword was red with blood, his armor dented, and the brass horn bounced against his chest as he rode.

Relief flooded through me so strongly that my knees nearly gave way.

River Flow

The sergeant reined in so hard that his horse skidded sideways in the dust. He took in the scene in a single sweep: the dead Afghans scattered across the road, Longwei and Meilin standing over the bodies of the commander and his guards, the wagon careening toward the cave, the horn hanging from my neck, and the men looking to me for orders.

His gaze settled on me.

“Recommendation?”

For a moment, I simply stared at him. My left calf felt as though someone had thrust a hot poker into it and left it there. Blood soaked my boot. My cheek burned where the arrow had grazed me. The world tilted strangely, and I swayed in the saddle.

Recommendation? Was he insane? I was sixteen years old. Half the men around us had gray in their beards. Sergeant Karim himself had fought in a dozen battles before I’d ever picked up a sword. Why was he asking me?

Then something happened inside me. The panic and pain vanished, and everything slowed. The screams, the dust, the clashing steel, the cries of the wounded – all of it receded into the distance. My mind became perfectly still, as clear as a summer sky. For the first time that day, I fell into River Flow.

From my perch atop Belly’s back, I pointed with my dao.

“Archers! Target the men running beside the wagon, not the horses! Weili, take the driver! Someone find Arslan! Get him here now!” Yes, I knew Arslan was a man with a problem. And he’d seduced Weili away from me. But he was the only man capable of bringing the wagon driver down at long range, and that was all that mattered.

“Shah and I will pursue the wagon,” Longwei called.

I turned to Karim. “I don’t know if you want that.”

“Do you want that?”

Entrusting me with such decisions was ridiculous, but – still in River Flow – I went with it.

“No pursuit!” I shouted. “Archers only. No one leaves the road.”

Karim nodded once, as if everything I had said were entirely reasonable. “Move!” he roared.

The surviving archers hurried into position. Memdooh, still lying beside the boulder, struggled upright and reached for his bow with trembling hands. I grinned fiercely at that. Courage was not a battle-hardened warrior who killed without emotion. Courage was this wounded young man, climbing to his feet to carry out his commander’s wishes. He might not be much of a poet, but he had the heart of a lion. Allah protect and preserve him.

Weili vaulted onto a rock overlooking the trail and drew an arrow from her quiver.

The wagon was perhaps two hundred paces from the cave.

Their Dirty Secret

“Loose!” Karim shouted.

Arrows hissed through the air. One of the Afghans running beside the wagon spun and collapsed. Another pitched forward beneath the wheels. A third cried out and clutched his thigh. But the others kept running, pushing at the wagon and shouting to one another. Weili, tasked with shooting the driver, missed, her shot going wide. It should have been an easy shot. I’d seen her shoot better on her worst day.

“Again!” I shouted. “Fire at will!”

A second volley flew, and a third. Another three men fell. The driver still sat hunched on the bench, lashing the horses onward.

Weili drew, exhaled, and released. Her arrow sailed wide, striking the rocks behind the wagon. She nocked another arrow, drew farther this time, and released. Again she missed. The wagon pulled farther away every second. It would soon be out of range.

“Where is Arslan?” Karim bellowed.

“I’m here!” Arslan arrived disheveled and panting, his hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. He looked as if he had run half the length of the caravan. He carried his massive bow in one hand.

Karim pointed furiously at the fleeing wagon. “The driver! Bring him down!”

Arslan lifted his huge bow and pulled, but I saw that his arm trembled, and he was not able to draw the arrow all the way back to his cheek. He loosed, and the arrow fell short. He cursed, grabbed another arrow and shot again. This one fell short as well.

The wagon was almost at the cave now.

Longwei spurred his horse forward. “Sarge, let me pursue. We can still catch them!”

“No!” Karim roared.

Longwei wheeled back in disbelief. “Why?”

Karim pointed toward the yawning cave. “There could be a hundred men in there. We will not risk any more guards for one wagon. Darius already gave a command on this.”

“Darius,” Longwei muttered, and spit. No one else argued, and we watched helplessly as the last of the Afghans disappeared into the darkness. The wagon vanished after them, swallowed whole by the mountain.

For a long moment, no one spoke. Karim’s eyes moved from Weili to Arslan, then to me.

I knew why they had failed. I knew their dirty secret. But I said nothing about that. Instead I said, “If anyone is to be whipped for disobeying orders it should be me. It was my call to move to the rear.”

This Is War

“We’ll talk about that later,” Karim said. “What’s next?”

I swallowed, then called out. “Medics! See to the wounded. Our wounded first, then the Afghans.”

“Almost right,” Karim said. He called the chief medic over. “Our wounded only. Do not touch the Afghans.”

“But they’re Muslims,” I said.

He studied me. There was a newfound respect in his gaze. He didn’t seem angry about the loss of the wagon. Some part of me realized that none of this was new to him. He’d done all this many times.

“I’m no religious expert,” Karim said, “but being Muslim doesn’t mean we sacrifice our lives to their greed. We have limited medical supplies, and a caravan to protect. We will be on the move very soon. The Afghans can return for their own dead and wounded. This is war.”

He began to give orders to load our dead onto the wagons. I realized that by “very soon” he meant right now. He meant to get the caravan moving again immediately.

It was becoming harder to think. The crystal clarity of River Flow faded, and the pain rushed back into my body. My calf felt as though it were on fire, and my cheek too felt hot, as if I’d been slapped very hard.

Someone was saying my name. I looked down. At some point the shaft of the arrow had broken off – I hadn’t even noticed – but the arrowhead was still in my leg. Blood streamed from the wound and ran down Belly’s side. The mountains spun around me, and I swayed in the saddle. The dao slipped from my fingers, and I felt myself falling.

* * *

Come back next week for Part 23 – Delirium

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 22] – The Raid appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

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.

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 | Part 20

* * *

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:

– Getting to Know A Potential Husband/Wife? 3 Questions To Ask Yourself First

– 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

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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

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 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.