along the way

"This is why the question of the veil is complex. It raises questions philosophically, politically..."

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 14:03:11 -0500

“This is why the question of the veil is complex. It raises questions philosophically, politically and personally. It is influenced by events in the outside world. The veil is elusive, recurring, a symbol of private matters made public and public matters made private. What is most amazing is how many threads of history it has taken to weave together this most complex of cloths.”

- The veil: a declaration of independence

“The Veil: Meaningfully Meaningless or Meaninglessly Meaningful” - Someone should write that book

(via kawlture)

touba: [Untitled], One of 274 Vintage Photographs, late...

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:43:40 -0400

touba:

[Untitled], One of 274 Vintage Photographs, late 19th-early 20th century, Iran (source).

autorickshaw: from Khamsa of Nizami, 1524-25

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 06:43:01 -0400

autorickshaw:

from Khamsa of Nizami, 1524-25

A Border Passage

Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:46:33 -0400

From Leila Ahmed’s “A Border Passage”

“What it was to be Muslim was passed on not, of course, wordlessly but without without elaborate sets of injunctions or threats or decrees or dictates as to what we should do and be and believe. What was passed on, besides the very general basic beliefs and moral ethos of Islam, which are also those of its sister monotheisms, was a way of being in the world. A way of holding oneself in the world—in relation to God, to existence, to other human beings. This the women passed to onto us most of all through how they were and by their being and ways, thoughts, and how we should be in the world by a touch, a glance, a word—prohibiting, for instance, or approving. Their mere responses in this or that situation—a word, a shrug, even just their postures—passed on to us, in the way that women (and also men) have forever passed on to their young, how we should be. And all of these ways of passing on attitudes, morals, beliefs, knowledge—through touch and the body and in words spoken in the living moment—are by their very nature subtle and evanescent. They profoundly shape the next generation, but they do not leave a record in the way that someone writing a text about how to live or what to believe leaves a record. Nevertheless, they leave a far more important and, literally, more vital, living record. Beliefs, morals, attitudes passed on to and impressed on us through those fleeting words and gestures are written into our very lives, our bodies, our selves, even into our physical cells and into how we live out the script of our lives.” (121-122)

now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are...

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 08:24:00 -0400

now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened
- E.E. Cummings

[image from Walter Chappell’s “Metaflora” series - photographs of plant auras]

Muslim Habitus

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 09:21:33 -0400

Muslim Habitus:

margariaziza:

Some thoughts on Habitus and Islam. I love Bourdieu! This is by no means a good explanation of his sociological theories. But an exploration of inculcating Islamic principles into our daily life so that we move from just verbally saying we submit to having sincere belief.

Photo

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:25:28 -0400

Photo

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:50:39 -0400

Raw/Cooked

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 17:56:51 -0400

The spiritual fire will cook you.
If you retreat like a coward you will remain raw.
If you don’t flee the fire you will be cooked completely,
you will become lord of the table.
Come to the table, be served to your companions,
like bread, become help for the soul — become soul.
-Rumi

How Michael Pollan Made Me Muslim

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:59:36 -0400

How Michael Pollan Made Me Muslim:

A little something from a new project I’m working on called Beyond Halal.

Photo

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:57:09 -0400

The Fixed

Wed, 25 May 2011 09:09:32 -0400

“It is the fixed that horrifies us, the fixed that assails us with the tremendous force of its mindlessness. The fixed is a Mason jar, and we can’t beat it open. The prophets of Baal gashed themselves with knives and lancets, and the wood stayed wood. The fixed is the world without fire—dead flint, dead tinder, and nowhere a spark. It is motion without direction, force without power, the aimless procession of caterpillars round the rim of a vase, and I hate it because at any moment I myself might step to that charmed and glistening thread. Last spring in the flood I saw a brown cattail bob in the high muddy water of Carvin’s Creek, up and down, side to side, a jerk a second. I went back the next day and nothing had changed; that empty twitching beat on in an endless, sickening tattoo. What geomancy reads what the wind-blown sand writes on the desert rock? I read there that all things live by a generous power and dance to a might tune; or I read there that all things are scattered and hurled, that our every arabesque and grand jeté is a frantic variation on our one free fall.” Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (68-69)

Prayer Rug

Thu, 19 May 2011 15:29:51 -0400

I went into the musalla on campus today to pray dhuhr and saw a prayer rug that I had donated, its front corners folded back, in the women’s area. I hadn’t been using this particular rug for quite some time, as in my travels and through gifts I’ve collected a number of others that I use regularly which are quite beautiful. This one is plain, blue and gold, mass-produced. But seeing it there was like coming across an old friend. It was my first sajada, gifted to me by two women who I had reached out to when I was first considering converting. After jumaa’ one day we stopped by a Turkish grocery in the suburbs of New Orleans, and while I wasn’t looking they bought it and gave it to me when we went back to the car. It was always around in my apartment, folded in a corner, out on the floor, stuffed into a bag, but spent most of the past year in a closet. I gave it to the musalla because I wanted people to use it, and I thought that perhaps I could tape a note underneath saying that this one is special! but decided not to. Seeing it there, though, being used, being whispered into, folded with respect, I liked the fact that it had this secret history of its own, its own baraka, and smiled as I went into sajda.

aperfectcommotion: Meg Hitchcock, from the series Mantras &...

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:12:38 -0400

aperfectcommotion:

Meg Hitchcock, from the series Mantras & Meditations

[She dissects religious texts such as the Bible, Koran, and Torah and uses the individual letters to create maddeningly complex, interwoven collages of typography, creating a visual mantra of devotion.]

Photo

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 15:15:22 -0400

Quake and Blossoms

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 11:57:55 -0400

The cherry trees will soon blossom in Japan.

For the Japanese, it will be a particularly poignant sight. Even in normal times, the flowers are a cause for rejoicing tinged with sadness, because they fall at the moment of their greatest beauty. They are the embodiment of a notion that is central to Japanese culture — “hakanasa,” a hard-to-translate word that conveys the fragility, or evanescence, of life.

For Japan, this sense of transience is also a source of strength.

In this time of national grieving, the cherry blossoms will bring home the awareness of hakanasa with a strange kind of force — one that doesn’t strike but sinks into the soul like heat from a hot spring or fire from a sake bottle, bringing sorrow and solace in equal measure. The fragility of technologically-advanced Japan was exposed in the most terrifying way in the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the northeast, leaving more than 10,000 people dead, some 17,500 missing and about a half-million homeless, and spawning a nuclear disaster.

Hiroyuki Yoneta, a monger at Tokyo’s bustling Tsukiji fish market, reflected on life’s frailty as he took a break from loading crab and shrimp onto his rickety stall a couple hours before his 4 a.m. opening time.

“Thinking about how these people living normal lives suddenly disappeared, you can’t escape the feeling that humans, like the flowers, are transient things,” Yoneta said.

From Quake and Blossoms, Joji Sakurai and Jay Alabaster, NYTimes, 3.26.11

Photo

Mon, 21 Mar 2011 18:46:31 -0400

“If the palm of one touching this cup is stained red with...

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:53:09 -0400

“If the palm of one touching this cup is stained red with its wine, he will not go astray at night, the lodestar being in his hand.”

- Ibn al-Farid

Journal Entry, September 4, 2003 11:20pm

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:28:02 -0400

I can’t sleep. My head is full of little conversations.

“So you don’t believe in God?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then how do you explain memory, or inspiration, or consciousness?”

“I believe they occur spontaneously. The human brain is a great and complex thing composed of innumerable neural connections. I think that such an intricate network is capable of creating consciousness.”

“Like a computer,” the other voice says.

"Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? Or the..."

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:40:36 -0400

““Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? Or the heart? For it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself. Which is also knowledge, she had thought.””

- Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse