Eid Mubarak, all! This year has been a time of seeking intentional spirituality in my life. Ramadan has been really varied for me; there was no consistency that I could find in it, other than a renewed sense of wanting to move towards spiritual wellness. I fasted; I didn’t fast. I felt grounded; I snapped. […]
These posts were written during the summer while I was in Bangladesh, in preparation for the upcoming academic year. Long story short: when I looked back at the archive, I didn’t have the desire or the time to put them up. But now, since I’m coming back to the blog, I decided that some of […]
Homemade burfi! It’s a sweet milk cake. Since I talked about fasting earlier, I thought I should talk about what I’ve actually been doing during this month – often, people assume that I’m not doing anything but feeling hungry/thirsty all the time! Instead, here are the most common things I’m doing each day. 1. Sleeping. […]
Ramadan is upon us! During this holy month, for those who don’t know, Muslims everywhere observe the fast – meaning that they do not eat or drink between the hours of sunrise and sunset (unless they have been restricted from fasting due to illness, traveling, or other prohibitory factors). The fast is a really unifying […]
In light of the recent death of one of my family members, I have been musing on personal faith and its context in my brief life. This faith has sustained me through both tragedies and triumphs in the past and continues to support me each day. I know that many of my readers are not […]
I went back and forth about whether to write a post about 9/11. In some ways, it is an insignificant day to me – at the time, I was 9 years old and believed that the next target was going to be the Space Needle, which was the only important tall building I could conceptualize […]
Muslimah Media Watch gives a great perspective on voices that are not often allowed to speak in either Western or global media: Muslim women. They bring together broad opinions about representation with very focused stories on the impact of decisions by governing bodies on Muslim women (such as FIFA’s treatment of the Iranian womens’ soccer […]
Last week, I talked about my position on skin-lightening creams. Even as I wrote that post, I was bursting with contradictions. Some include: Is it a woman’s right to do that to her body?*Are people using these products uninformed about the consequences and the societal expectations informing their choices? If not, what makes them choose […]
In light of some intellectual talk over this weekend, I have been thinking a lot about how discrimination works in our society. I believe that it comes from mixed metaphors. Have you ever thought about how stereotypes form? Typically, they come about because of a categorization projected from the majority group to the minority, regardless […]
(Muslim and proud.) I have not written about a contentious argument this month, but there are some things that just push my buttons. I am a routine reader of Salon.com’s Broadsheet, and recently they posted up an article about Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping and how her captor used a veil to keep her secreted away. But […]