Decency
Suppose you were the mother of an 11 year-old little boy. For some time now, he has been interested in Islam. He sees you, starts to be aware of his roots on both the Moroccan and Afghan sides beyond kababs…
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Suppose you were the mother of an 11 year-old little boy. For some time now, he has been interested in Islam. He sees you, starts to be aware of his roots on both the Moroccan and Afghan sides beyond kababs…
I look back at the past few months. As COVID-19 with its little crown staged its coup d’état and took over our lives, there was talk of a resurgence of inwardness, of spirituality, of solace through holy scriptures. Social media…
I am the morning rose. At dawn, I stand erect. The breeze carries the scent of my dreams. My petals form a thousand smiles, the ones Hafez once wrote about. I will gently wither. I am patient. My petals will…
Words matter. The response to the novel coronavirus is not a war and the belligerent language used in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic could do more harm than good. The reasons are simple: the use of war metaphors, be it…
As I ponder the Covid-19 pandemic, I can only humbly defer to intellectuals who addressed epidemics through fiction. I think of The Plague by Albert Camus (1947), where the town of Oran in Algeria is slowly overtaken by an epidemic….
My ten-year-old son has become inquisitive about Islam. He is slowly discovering it through my answers to his questions, through books and mostly through the Internet. There is only so much I can tell him though. What I really want…
Can you hear them? The prophets are leaving. They have had enough. The mountains no longer go to them, no sea is churned, while the sky hides its moon and the stars are too blurry to read. The earth lays…
Kenza Saadi reviews Maha Zimmo’s debut poetry collection “rose-water syrup” released on June 1st. The scents of roses, of rose water, of pomegranate, of bread baking in the clay oven, and of salt in the air by the sea mix…
We are free. We are free to do harm or not. We are free to lie or tell the truth, to say hurtful words or remain silent. We are free to steal or not, to kill or not, to respect…
‘Beauty will save the world’, declared Prince Myshkin, more than 150 years ago. And they called him an idiot!* Is this really true? Beauty – is that the answer to all the barbarities that surround us? These days, beauty, the…
Compartmentalizing — even writing the word requires placing your concentration in boxy syllables! Yes — placing things in compartments, labelling them with a neat, unequivocal tag. When you put items in boxes, you have to be clear. You cannot have,…
She stood at the entrance of the garden. She was tall, very slim, her skin of dark amber. She delicately wrapped her long cloth around her, the sound of chimes giving away the presence of a few silver bangles. She…
I do not know if any of you share my feelings, but I find no serenity when I read about issues related to the Muslim world. Aside from some poetry, most of the ideas and arguments presented seem to stir…
She managed to escape in the very early morning. She walked the 50 kilometres that separated the house she had been living in for the past seven years and her parents’ home. When she arrived, she saw her brothers and…
She shivers as more noise assails her, like blood splattering on a dirty wall. Moans and the sharp hiss of bullets. A large tank shakes the fragile walls. Did you know that the birds have stopped singing? In fact, most…