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Do not convince yourself when you embrace Islam that you are special, immune to the trials of this world, for every living man and woman must decide whether to take up this path or reject it. You are not a special case. You too must struggle and strive against the call of your nafs. You [...]

In this month of clemency, our Lord sent us a mercy in the form of a man who refused to fly into an unholy rage when his son was torn away from him in the midst of the anarchic disintegration that had seized a nation in the preceding hours. He has become an example for [...]

When a post on my blog is categorised as “fiction” and is also tagged “fiction”, it is safe to assume that it is fiction. Sometimes I share fragments here an there, while progress on the larger projects continues to stall. Sometimes something occurs to me while I am mowing the lawn or driving to work; [...]

If you were a real man, she said, you wouldn’t have tolerated me talking to you like that. She thought it would be her final knock-out blow — victory hers — drumming her point home; feeble loser. And by your definition, he replied, if you were the real deal you wouldn’t have talked to me [...]

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.

I always find it strange when I encounter those Muslims that sneer at their brethren who profess a love of gardens — common though these detractors are — writing them off as middle-class liberals (that meaningless insult of our era). It is not that for many of the poorest people around the world the garden [...]

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 [...]