Tales of a Solitary Soul

My aunt, whom I was pretty close to, passed away in Pakistan.

"To Allah we belong, to Him we shall return."

Make dua' for her but more importantly, make dua' for yourself. Verily, Allah sends reminders so those still living can wake up.

International Week at the U of A:

Tuesday
Killercoke.org: Fighting Power with Power (12.00pm - 1.20pm in Dinwoodie Lounge)
Buduburam 16 Years Later: A Case Study in Protracted Refugee Situations (5.00pm in International House Meeting Room)
Keynote Address: Water and Human Security, A Thirst for Survival (7.30pm ETLC 001)

Wednesday
Individual Responsibility to Alleviate Poverty (2.30pm in Alumni Room)

Thursday
Change Your Lens: View the World (10.30am in International House Meeting Room)
Terror is in the Eyes of the Beholder (3.30pm V-Wing 102)

Friday
Food For Thought (10.00am International House Meeting Room)
Tar Sands as a Weapon of Mass Destruction (11.00am in Timms Centre Lobby)

Labels: International week, politics, university

I'm asked the same question over and over again by wide eyed kids, beginning their long and often painful yet hoped to be a worthy journey called post secondary education. What year am I?

What should I say? Fifth year going into my sixth and only my Bachelor's to show for it? Or take the easy way out by claiming it to be my last two terms in school and dodging it altogether?

First year is a distant memory yet it's etched in some corner of my mind to resurface at the most awkward of moments. Just the other day, I was sitting with someone who has already graduated when a couple of first years stopped to talk. They wanted advice on how survive in the jungle, to get ahead in the rat race.

I walk through the familiar hallways blindfolded, the same path I've taken for years. The sun is about to set and I have a long way to go.

Labels: university

My engineering career will be spent transporting oil to your cars and homes, a commodity without which economies would crash, wars would start, nukes would be fired -- in other words, a pseudo doomsday scenario would erupt. As you can tell, all of us have much riding on this black gold.

This is good news. If my subscription to National Geographic has taught me anything, it's that global warming is coming; it's just a matter of time. Now we have transnational corporations with incomes higher than half the countries in the world willing to accept it. No matter how small, a step forward is a step forward.

I never did like Exxon Mobile but they've just scored a bonus point. They're back on my Companies to Work For list.

Labels: exxon, global warming, haroon, oil

Earlier, I wrote about the need for feminism of the Islamic variety. Here is part 2.

Written by G. Willow Wilson:

I want to begin with a story.

In the months leading up to the Egyptian presidential elections in 2005, I spent some time reporting on state media coverage of the increasingly frequent demonstrations and clashes between rival parties that accompanied the campaign season. Local state-controlled television channels were providing only cursory and contradictory information about these events, such that it was often impossible to know for certain what the aim and constituency of a demonstration was unless you had been standing in the thick of it yourself. This is exactly what I did on several occasions.

One incident, a protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that attracted hundreds of black-clad riot police, was difficult to pin down even then. State media outlets were claiming that it was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, and refused to cover the event on the grounds that the Ikhwan were an illegal party. The protest itself was so chaotic that it was difficult to make heads or tails of its ideological thrust.

I left and took the metro home, overheated and frustrated. In the women’s car, I ran into my cousin-in-law. We were surprised to see one another downtown at that time of day; we both lived on the southern outskirts of the city, I worked from home, and she was still a university student. She asked me what had brought me to Tahrir on such a hot afternoon. I hesitated before answering. She knew what I did for a living, but I had always thought it best to be discreet about the details of my work around our family. The prevalent opinion in the social strata we both inhabited was that a woman did not, strictly speaking, have the right to put herself in potential social, political or physical danger.

“Covering the protest,” I said finally, deciding the truth was simplest, “What about you?”

She looked me right in the eye. “Participating in the protest,” she said. And that is how I discovered my soft-spoken muhajeba cousin-in-law was an Al Ghad party member.

I am reminded of this incident whenever I read about the Plight of Muslim Women. I am rarely comfortable with the way in which the very serious issues facing modern Muslim women are rhetorically addressed, both within and without the community. Reformists have yet to paint a picture of the Plighted Muslima that describes my cousin, acknowledges her complexity, her agency, the breadth and depth she brings to the word ‘femininity’.

I will not argue the Stockholm Syndrome-esque position of some traditionalist Muslim women, and say she is in no way oppressed: she will have a curfew all her life, there are ideas that she will not be permitted to impart to her children, and her husband will have an absolute social right to veto clothing or friends or habits of hers that he finds unacceptable. There is no way to soften or rationalize this reality, nor should it be softened or rationalized.

What I will argue, however, is that ‘oppressed’ is not a sufficient description of the person she is, or of the life she is building for herself. Whether she had to lie to attend the protest, or reasoned or coaxed her way into permission, or simply held her chin up and left the house, she was an actor in her destiny that day. She is proof that a clever woman, a capable, kind, brave woman, is never ‘simply’ a victim, no matter how dire the circumstance in which she lives. My cousin isn’t alone, either. I have yet to meet an ordinary woman. I am beginning to think there are no ordinary women; only extraordinary women in excruciatingly ordinary circumstances.

Today, it is finally acceptable to suggest that the bra-burning era of western feminism—which, along with economic experiments like socialism and communism, made a significant impact on the Nasserite Middle East during the Sixties and Seventies—inappropriately and ironically devalued femininity. The idea that women may have different needs than men, but possess an equal right to have those needs met, proved too complex for public consumption, and a wretched but expedient proposition took its place: women are exactly the same as men, and are thus entitled to the same things.

I vividly remember how this proposition manifested itself: when I was an adolescent in public school in the US, having your period was not considered a sufficient excuse to sit out of gym class. This would be admitting that girls were ‘weaker’ than boys. Encumbered with medicine balls and batons, girls would double over in pain, weeping, and be ignored; however, as soon as one had a sports injury, she could sit out for days on end, the lauded product of the new girls’ sports programs. It should come as no surprise to the belligerent architects of this experiment that the young women of my generation are ready for any amount of patriarchy if it means they can menstruate in peace. They have run screaming back into the institutions their mothers abandoned, and having suffered month after month in feminist gym class myself, I hardly blame them.

Yet the backlash against western feminism has been as unnatural, as insufficient, and as short-sighted as the movement it rebels against.

In the West and among Muslim women (and yes, among western Muslim women) it has become fashionable to objectify oneself, without even waiting for a man to demand it. We have willingly hinged our identities on pieces of clothing: the micro-skirt and the jilbab, the stiletto and the hijab, and we pantingly scream ‘we are not ourselves without these!’ as soon as someone raises an eyebrow. As if this should be a source of pride. As if it is a good thing to be so much a shrine to oneself that a change of clothes would destroy one’s identity. (Full disclosure: I wear a headscarf [with western clothing], but I take it off when I’m in small-town America and I think it will scare people. I love my scarf, but I can’t honestly say I feel less Muslim without it. Nor do I think I should.)

Women themselves have participated in the return of the ideal of the oversexed housewife, the black-shrouded virgin, the psychological emptiness that is womanhood when woman’s sole purpose is to serve man. In the rush to re-assert the public primacy of the male gaze, whether through a western standard of total feminine obedience or an Islamic one, women have put man before God, or, if you prefer, before truth. We are all, post-feminist Muslim and Christian and eastern and western and secular and faithful, guilty of a little blasphemy.

We struggle, always, with an image: what is woman? What should she look like? Say? How should she act? We struggle with an image because we have decided we are not equipped to struggle with something as dynamic as a personality. I am not, my cousin is not, the women I admire are not, symbols to be analyzed incoherently. Yet this is what the dialogue surrounding the Plight of the Muslim Woman has done: reduced us to our obstacles, our clothing and our genitalia. I am still waiting to meet the reformist who can look my cousin in the eye and say ‘You are no type, you fit into no bell-curve, and you move between oppression and independence with a dynamism no theory of mine can explain or resolve.’ To acknowledge, in other words, that her identity is not a static set of symbols (Muslim, woman, Egyptian) but an interplay of experiences, powered by something that exists in spite of gender or religion: that she is a person. Before she is anything else, she is a person.

This is something the women’s movement, particularly as it pertains to Muslim women, must address: when one speaks of women one speaks of several billion individual histories. Let us create no more mass narratives and no more simplistic fixes: women are not men with wombs, nor are they wombs without minds, and we should no longer act surprised when treating them as such, en masse, fails to adequately address their problems. Perhaps it is time for the women’s movement to enter the greater conversations: to write not ‘women’s literature’, but literature; to address not ‘women’s issues’, but issues of universal human importance. Dealing with women in isolation has only taken us so far. Today, I believe it is much more vital to address in their entirety the systems that produce both underprivileged women and men who are petty tyrants: poverty, lack of education, political and religious repression. I am of the opinion that the Grameen Bank does more for women than the Vagina Monologues. (I saw the latter when it debuted in Cairo and found it absurdly and laughably out-of-context. Let’s get these women running water, basic healthcare and literacy classes before we tell them that they will only achieve personhood when they can go on display before an audience of men and scream at full volume about their labia.)

Men cannot go forward without women, women cannot go forward without men; to treat the ills of one without treating the ills of the other is to ignore the disease in favor of its symptoms. If we truly want to pull down the obstacles faced by women—Muslim and otherwise—we must tackle the obstacles faced by humankind. Anything less will only be another temporary solution; a memetic, theory-driven bandaid made of stiletto heels, headscarves and manifestos for a wound made of war, disease and ignorance. We as women must come into our powers as individuals and work for something better.

Labels: feminism, Islam

I head back to university this Monday after an 8 month hiatus. This is essentially my second last term insha Allah and if all goes according to plan, I should be graduating in December. But this is certainly not the end of line. I'll be back for a second degree insha Allah but meanwhile, I need some time away in the real world.

I feel like Frodo at the base of Mount Doom. A journey worth a thousand pages with tales of grief and joy alike. Those that started alongside have already left save a handful who stay, afraid of the unknown. I've overstayed my welcome too but my time is not far.

Yet, a part of me is happy that it all comes to an end. The challenges have become old and the routine has begun to drag me down. A new phase of life awaits and best of all, new challenges. My wings have just grown full.

Labels: life, school

It is related that a devout worshipper by the name of Humam came to
Imam Ali (May Allah Ennoble his countenance) and asked him to
describe the pious people so vividly that he could almost see them.
Ali (ra) responded:

Their speech is truthful; their clothing is moderate;
and they walk with utmost humility. They lower their gaze
from everything Allah has forbidden. They allow their ears to
listen only to that which is beneficial. Their souls accept
exposure to trials and tribulations as easily as others accept
luxurious living.

Were it not for their appointed term, their spirits
would not have remained in their bodies the span of a
twinkling of the eye due to their intense longing for their
Lord. Because the Creator is magnified in their souls,
everything else is viewed as insignificant in their sight. Their
hearts are sober; people are safe from any wickedness from
them; their bodies are slim [they don’t overindulge their
appetites]; their basic needs are few; and their souls are chaste.
They patiently endure the few days they spend in this world
knowing that they will be followed by a long, peaceful
rest—this is the profitable life-transaction which their Lord
has allowed them to enter into. The world desired them;
however, they had no desire for it. It imprisoned them, but
they ransomed their souls from it [with their restraint and
righteous deeds].

At night, their feet are arranged in ranks as they
dutifully recite the Qur’an in slow measured tones. If they
come upon a verse that stimulates [in them] longing [for the
delightful things which Allah has promised] they ponder it,
craving to attain them. Their souls soar due to the intensity of
their longing for those delights. If they come upon a verse
that frightens them [with the threat of Allah’s dreadful
punishment] they hear it reverberating in the depths of their
hearts. They imagine that they hear the dreadful sounds of the
Hellfire in the innermost recesses of their ears. You find them
kneeling down [before their Lord], begging to be liberated
from the Hellfire.

As for their days, they are forbearing, clement scholars.
They are righteous and pious. Fear [of Allah] surrounds them,
piercing them like arrows. One who gazes upon them thinks
that they are sick. However, they are far from being sick.
They are not satisfied with a minimal amount of righteous
deeds, nor do they consider excessive amount of worship to
be great. They see their faults, and they fear that their deeds
won’t be accepted. If someone praises one of them, he says, “I
know myself better than others [know me], and my Lord is
more knowledgeable of me than myself. O Allah, don’t take
me to task for what they say, and make me better than what
they think of me, and forgive me for those sins which they are
unaware of.”

One of the signs [of such a person] is that you observe
strength in his religion. His gentleness is accompanied by
sobriety. His faith is coupled with certainty. He longs for
knowledge. He acts with forbearance. He lives moderately, even
when blessed with wealth. He is humble in his worship. He
endures poverty with dignified grace. He patiently endures
trying circumstances. He seeks his sustenance from the lawful.
He hastens to right guidance. He is agitated if he perceives greed
in himself. He works righteousness all the while trembling,
[fearing that his deeds won’t be accepted]. His greatest concern
is gratitude. He arises in the morn preoccupied with the
Remembrance of God. He goes to bed at night overwhelmed,
apprehensive. He rises in the morning overjoyed. His
apprehension arises from the awareness of his heedlessness. His
joy is caused by the bounties and mercy Allah has showered
upon him. If his soul presses him with something he despises, he
does not concede [to it] and withholds from it what it desires.
The comfort of his eye is that which cannot be eradicated [the
reward of his righteous deeds]. His abstinence is from temporal
things. He mixes clemency with knowledge, and speech with
action. He expects death at any moment. His slips are few
[because of his cautiousness and deliberateness in speech and
actions]. His heart is content. He is easy-going. He is constantly
on guard against assaults upon his religion. His lusts are dead.
His anger is suppressed.

People anticipate goodness from him. They are safe from
any wickedness from him. If he is in the company of the
heedless, he is recorded as being mindful [of his Lord]. He
overlooks those who oppress him. He gives to those who deny
him. He joins relations with those who cut him off. He is far
removed from any indecency. His speech is gentle. You find
nothing bad in him. He is always a source of good. During
calamities, he is composed. In dire straights, he is patient. In
times of ease, he is thankful. He does not oppress those he
dislikes, nor does he sin for the sake of those he loves. He admits
the truth before his witnessing is sought. He preserves all he is
entrusted with. He does not hurl abusive names at people. He
never harms his neighbor, nor does he insult people when he is
experiencing hardship. If he is transgressed against, he perseveres
until Allah takes revenge for him. He relies on himself while he
himself is a source of relief for others [they can rely on him]. He
tires himself for the sake of his salvation, not burdening others in
any way. His distance from those who remove themselves from
him is a form of abstinence, while his drawing near to people is
from his gentleness and mercy. Hence, his distance from people
does not arise from arrogance and haughtiness, nor is his
closeness to them motivated by cunning and treachery.

Hearing this, Humam dropped dead. Imam Ali (ra) said,
“This is what I feared would happen to him.”

*Taken from Hafsa's blog*

Labels: Islam, righteous