8/21 in the belly of the fish
cross stitching, listening to solar power, intermittent fasting, working on a hadith project, moving to a new house, and other end-of-summer activities
Hi friends! Hope you are all having a lovely time and gearing up for the last stretch of 2021. Life is good in this corner of the world and there are, at any point in time, more than a million things to be grateful for. So let me be grateful 😇
I am 172 days into my DuoLingo studies. I added Greek and Spanish to the repertoire. Spanish I am doing to make sure I don’t forget years of schooling but Greek is very new and exciting. I can now say stuff like, yes, the water, or at the mini market!
στο μίνι μάρκετ! Doesn’t that just look cool? I think it does. Σωκράτης here I come.
I am also working on a hadith commentary project with someone I love and respect very much. I will add a little snippet of something we worked on at the end of this letter ⬇️ Would love your feedback if you have any. Cheers! 💐
Listen 👂
Lorde’s Solar Power is out and although I don’t like picking favorites, I am in love with Dominoes and have been listening to it on repeat.
Read 👀
Hot or Not by Elizabeth Barber — A great read on beauty standards and growing up with parents who expect physical perfection from you. This is something I personally relate to but have always found hard to write about or share with others because it feels humiliating. I am glad the author was able to articulate the different strands of self-inquiry and criticism as well as broader cultural currents in her analysis.
The Real College Scandal by Agnes Callard — in 2019, I was a senior in college and decided to show up at a meeting which would determine the fate of my dorm’s graduation ceremony. One aspect of this ceremony was choosing a speaker and I had a candidate who was one of my favorite professors at the university (the author of this article). Of course, everyone had ideas and so the race was on. We all reached out to our own candidates and whoever replied and confirmed first would get to speak at our ceremony. Thanks to Agnes’s swift email reply, I won that round and she came to speak at my graduation. I graduated on June 15th, it rained in Chicago, my black cloth covered cardboard graduation cap had become soggy, pink faux suede shoes agonizing that the first time they were being worn was over puddled gravel and soggy Midway grass… And yet — it was a great montage of a day, full of my family and friends, tears and laughs, the speech that Agnes gave (which was sort of a prototype to this essay I would argue), and the feeling that I’d never be able to thank God for all the good He constantly showers me with.
All that is to say, I miss college. Or the American university. Or more accurately, what Agnes is describing here. I was in that class about Iliad and courage. I have been in classes where it feels incredibly nourishing to be a part of that arduous and fulfilling process we call learning. The siren call of academia perhaps. It is true that when you strip away all the bureaucracy and ill-spirited competition and false notions of meritocracy, what remains so alluring and at the very core of academia is this heterodidactic environment it promises. 🧜♀️
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold — I listened to this on Audiobook, narrated by the author herself, who is a rape survivor and has a very personal and intimate connection with the story she has written here. It was extremely touching and well-written. But definitely heavy and requires an emotional resilience to get through.
Watch 👀
Mythic Quest (prod. Chris Smirnoff, Jeff Luini, 2020 ) — A fun, fast-paced, and refreshingly humorous TV show about the inner workings of a video game company. The cast features some personal favorites like Danny Pudi from Community and Rob McElhenney from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, with a cameo from Jake Johnson of New Girl. I binged the first season in a day 😅 but it really is that good.
Cry 💧
This grandma’s story was so incredible and I pray that I can have her level of conviction in her faith and devotion to her community.
This story really cemented in my heart that we are born with a primordial and precious disposition (or fitra) that only needs to be nurtured and protected to shine through. Read through to the end to see why.
Subscribe 🗞
on when to break up with someone
on what it feels like to ask someone to love you just the way you are
on representation, and being your own Harriet
on creating commonplaces for your writing practice
on trying to make sense of everything and failing
Preview 📖
Here is a snippet from the hadith project. Our purpose is to relate the hadith and the teachings of the Prophet to our lives in a consistent and non-superficial way. We don’t want to read a hadith narration once and then forget about it. We want to see how it’s applicable to our lives here and now. All feedback is welcome! If it makes sense, doesn’t make sense, you still can’t relate, or if you have questions, please let me know 💛
It was narrated from Ibn ‘Abbas: “When Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) (p.b.u.h) sent Mu'adh to Yemen, he said (to him), "You are going to people of a (Divine) Book. First of all invite them to worship Allah (alone) and when they come to know Allah, inform them that Allah has enjoined on them, five prayers in every day and night; and if they start offering these prayers, inform them that Allah has enjoined on them, the Zakat. And it is to be taken from the rich amongst them and given to the poor amongst them; and if they obey you in that, take Zakat from them and avoid (don't take) the best property of the people as Zakat."”
This narration outlines the stages of inviting people to Islam. First, the foundation of the teachings of the Revelation, which is belief in God and His Messenger, must be established. After this foundation is established firmly in the minds and hearts of the people, then they must be invited to do the five daily prayers. After people establish their daily prayers, then they should be asked to pay zakat, which is to be taken from the wealthy and given to the poor.
The Prophet also takes notice of the sensitivity of people while collecting the Zakat by not making them feel that the best part of their property was taken away. This ensures that the wealthy do not develop a negative or resentful attitude toward religious obligations.
We also learn from this hadith that the Zakat is to be taken from the rich and distributed to the poor of the same community. So that those who pay the Zakat will understand that the Zakat is not taken from them to benefit a certain group of elite people, especially amongst the ruling class. It is in Islamic tradition that the Zakat must be paid first to one’s poor relatives and then to the poor among one’s neighbors.
Another, and perhaps deeper reading of this hadith is about our relationship to revelation itself. We see here, that Islam starts with the self. We shouldn’t understand this as selfishness but instead as a call to define who we are and what things are expected from us in this world. Once we answer these questions in accordance with our faith in our Creator, we can start to use our human feelings while bearing in mind that they are given to us to be practiced with God-consciousness.
The modern world urges us to practice our feelings as though they are ours. This makes us proud of ourselves and comfortable about using them for our own satisfaction. The Quran tells us that when we use our feelings correctly, we will feel satisfied, but this is not meant to inspire personal pride; it is meant to inspire a sense of gratitude towards God for creating us with such feelings and senses. Here we see that the orientation is different. Where modernity enables us to escape ourselves in complicated and self-satisfying ways, the Quran is adamant that we start by understanding who we are and what exactly we are meant to do here.
For example, most of us do not know our neighbors. We don’t know who lives in the same apartment complex as us or who lives in the house across the street. Yet, we all have a profound sense of knowledge and righteousness about people and things miles and miles away from us. Admittedly, we are fueled by senses like justice or compassion, but we do not know why or how we are given these senses. Why we feel infuriated about injustices or why we feel so compelled to help those in need. Simply following these senses without understanding their purpose is fueled by egoism and self-satisfaction. We feel that there is an injustice on the other side of the world and we mobilize to help. This makes us feel good about ourselves, like we are doing something and setting ourselves apart from people who do nothing. But we do not know why we feel this need to help or who gave us the sense to differentiate between justice and injustice. And why? Without knowing, could we really or properly fulfill the purpose of that sense?
This is why the Quran tells us to start with ourselves, then move on to close family members and then to extended family members. When the Prophet first received revelation, he was told to call on his relatives first, and then the whole world. We learn here that understanding our existence starts within ourselves and expands gradually outward. We are expected to be aware of the situations of those physically close to us because using people we don’t know personally and people who are far away is just a way to avoid confronting our own existence.
The hadith above thus demonstrates that a foundation has to be set before zakat can properly be practiced by people. Only after we have firmly believed in God and His Messenger and have established our prayers, do we know that everything, including “our” property belongs to Him. Within that framework, we can practice giving without thinking we are better than those who don’t give or the people we are giving to. We can think, “God is the owner, and He has asked me to give to you. He created you in your situation and me in my situation so that I can practice what I believe: that He is the real Owner of everything.”