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Who am I to pass judgement on the despair of the youngster who has only known this war, waged in his land since he was only four? Who am I to pass judgement on the man who lived and died dishonourably in East Harlem, who was eradicated in an instant in a hail of bullets [...]

No matter how hard you try to obliterate your past, there is no escaping the Eternal Record and the Wayback Machine.

When we were young we spoke of faith and truth, of rightness and wrongness, and of goodness. Now we talk of pragmatism. And we deride our younger selves and the zeal that once accompanied us.

If you let your faith go, it will go. If you let your anger consume you, it will.

I confess that for most of the past decade I was convinced that the so-called Smoking Gun video purportedly showing Osama bin Laden describing the attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001 was a fake. I believed it to be a lazy contrivance thrown together to convince a gullible public of the rightness of [...]

Life is filled with trials and tests, but somehow we never recognise half of them in the mundane encounters of daily life. ‘Do you think you will be left to say, “We believe”, and will not be tested?’ we remind ourselves as calamities unfold on our television screens. Tornados rip a town to pieces, and [...]

You complained that your man was not religious, but at least he was kind. Now your husband is a zealot. One day we will hear you complain that this man made you hate Islam. Never will you ask what he meant when he said he hated your Islam, when you rejected his five prayers and [...]

Black ants crawling on a black stone in the middle of the night are difficult to detect, but to the egotistical writer, his own egotism is as apparent as a black elephant dancing on a white rug in the living room. Indeed, it is as apparent as the act of looking for a royalty-free image [...]

All of the urgency has left me. I used to think I had to rush to finish the projects that competed for my time and attention, but now I am resigned to a timetable not of my making.

Do al-istikarah in deciding all of your affairs. It works.

What a marvelous creation is the pomegranate.

One lesson that experience teaches me is that sincere repentance must always be followed by vigilance. In Ramadan we have the gift of being able to distinguish between two types of sins: those that come from within, from the nafs, and those that come from outside. When, in the midst of that blessed month, we [...]