I am grappling with just so many things this semester. I think the biggest one, right now, the biggest mountain I am staring at and trying to figure out how to cross is Failure. There. I have named it and now I am one step closer to conquering it, which seems paradoxical, and perhaps, it … Continue reading prose// facing Failure

Here I am, riding on the train back to school from my parents’ home. I realize I spend an awful lot of time in transit. One city to the other, one building to the other, one class to the other. From the room to the laundry room back up the stairs again. I walk. Often. … Continue reading prose// transit, travel, & The Next Big Thing

I was flipping through my class notebook from last year and found this written a midst my philosophy notes: "My arabic is the beginning of my shame. It is emptiness." I do not speak Arabic. My father does and my grandmother does and so do my aunts and uncles and cousins whom I have not … Continue reading prose// arabic-less

We all have our own motivations for seeking Heaven: life without pain, wealth, bounty, good food, the Prophet’s home, your home, eternal bliss. I think about and remember those things too when I pray, when I fast, when I pin my hijab into place in the morning. But I also crave Heaven for another reason. … Continue reading prose// jiddu

I have been reflecting on what it means to be beautiful a lot recently. For most of my life, I have wanted to be beautiful. I have often stood in front of the mirror and started at my body and wished away every part of it and prayed over it and begged God to give … Continue reading prose// i want to be beautiful

I moved away from home for college in the fall of 2016. I was seventeen years old at the time, and I had never done anything so courageous in my life (I have gone on to do more courageous things, but the world was smaller then and I couldn’t see into the future far enough). I … Continue reading prose// approaching nineteen

In an odd way, I feel like I have just become Muslim for the very first time. I have made it my New Year’s resolution to focus myself and return to the very basics of faith, and establish myself as a seeker of my own relationship with God, independent of my mother or father or my family history, or what people know me as or what people assume about me as a woman in hijab.