You cannot receive healing from the very person who has oppressed you. You cannot sit there and pray without “tying your camel”. You know you’ve waited long enough, you know he’s never going to change. You know if you keep staying, you will lose every single bit of yourself.
Seeing the need to create an alternative solution, Muti’ah Badruddeen, a Saudi-based physician and Author of three books founded The Muslimah Virtual Parlour, an open, honest, relaxed and non-judgemental arena to share our ideas, views and experiences on matters that affect us as Muslim women in today’s world.
In retaliation, the patriarchy did what the patriarchy does best. It fought and rallied for the disappearance of women. Many fans of female reciters and other female Sheikhas protested against the fatwa but to no avail. Radio stations soon stopped playing Sheikha Munira and other Shiekhas’ recitations. The Sheikhs refused to rescind their fatwa even though some scholars saw it as a form of intellectual regression.
Muslim women telling our own stories is empowering and necessary, since we’re all aware of the perverse misrepresentations that can occur when our stories are told by others. If you look at the great cultures and societies throughout the history of the Islamic tradition, you will find a strong history of artists, craftspeople, and distinct artistic styles.
Patriarchal studies along the years had relegated her work as emotional, typical of a woman, and even hysteric and obsessive. However, in a world, where Arabs believed themselves the fathers of poetry, her poetry would not have risen to popularity let alone survived had it just been emotional or beautiful.
Coming to terms with the truth that it will never be enough, no matter how much I do, renders me powerless. But now, it just makes me want to do my part even more while resting in the knowledge that other humans are holding up their ends of the sky.
Freecycling is an act of sustainable conscious living, and it challenges the concept that the act of giving is not only a Top-to-bottom activity done between the haves and the have nots, but can be done by people within the same class as well.
For much of history after the advent of Islam, multitudes of figures arose who wrote several invectives against the Prophet, yet none of them had any problem acknowledging his marriage to Aisha (RA). It just was not a concern until the early 20th century.
Documentation from Ibn Hajar indicates that Zainab bint al-Kamāl never married. It also tells us that she suffered from ophthalmia – an inflammation of the eye, though it did not seem to impair her career.
Is this the truth of Islam? That a man can only leave behind a legacy when he has sons? That a woman, in herself, wholly and independently, is nothing but a trophy?
