@zumurruud-blog / zumurruud-blog.tumblr.com
i feel like muslim dudes have this fantasy of their wives taking off their hijabs for the first time and it’s gonna be so beautiful and picturesque with pantene commercial curls falling ever so gently and framing her face
no it’s gonna be sweaty and her hairs stuck to her head and she’s gonna look like yoda for a good minute and it’s going to be molded into the shape of the bun/ponytail it was in until she runs to the bathroom to fix it. don’t expect so much from us.
by Nazik al-Malaika, translated by Josh Moore
Why do we fear words when they have been as rosy palms, cool and fragrant, passing softly over our cheeks, or as cups of ambrosia sipped, one summer, by thirsty lips?
Why do we fear words, when among them are hidden bells whose echo announces, in our troubled lives, the coming of an enchanted dawn, drenched in feeling, and in love, and in life? Why, then, do we fear words?
We sought refuge in serenity, became quiet, not wanting the secret to emerge from our lips. We believed that in words laid an unseen ghoul, crouching, hidden by letters from the ears of time. We bound the thirsty letters, denied them from spreading the night before us as a banquet, dripping with music, desires, and warm cups.
Why do we fear words? Among them are words smooth and sweet, whose letters have drawn the warmth of desire from two lips, and others rejoicing in pleasure, crossing through rosy joy with two drunk eyes. Words, poetry, turning softly to caress our cheeks. Sounds, sleeping with rich colors lying in their echoes. A rustling of intense, hidden longings.
Why do we fear words? Though their thorns have once wounded us, they have also drawn their arms around our necks to leave their sweet scent upon our desires. Though their letters have pierced us, though they have turned away from us, they have also left an oud in our hands, and tomorrow they will shower us with perfume, and flowers, and life. Ah, fill our glasses with words!
Tomorrow we shall build ourselves a dream-nest of words, towering, with ivy trailing from its letters. We will nourish its buds with poetry and water its flowers with words. We will build a terrace for the timid rose, with pillars of words and a cool hall swimming in deep shade, guarded by words.
We dedicate our lives as a prayer; to whom shall we pray…except to words?
The Original:
Cecilia Woloch, “Grace” (via heteroglossia)
I found out today about a student in my intermediate Arabic class who’s missed close to a month’s worth of classes, sort of scattered throughout the latter part of the semester. When he was in class, he was often disheveled, looked distraught. Always nice enough, always interested. But also very behind. Not a stellar student, even if he was a nice enough guy. I’m conflicted because I think I have to fail him.
I found out today from someone who knows him well that he’s apparently just been madly, overwhelmingly in love with someone. The kind of love that is a deep, burning madness. He can’t think. He can’t work. She consumes his thoughts, his energies. He’s apparently considering dropping out of university because, at a certain point, just fuck it, right?
For most of my adult life, I would’ve scoffed at this and told him to get a fucking grip. There’s a scene in The English Patient (the book and the film) where Almásy, who is entirely consumed by his passion for his lover, Katherine Clifton, asks his friend Madox to identify the name of a part of her body that, in his maddening love, becomes the fetishized totem for his obsessive connection to her.
Almásy: This… this, the hollow at the base of a woman’s throat, does it have an official name? Madox: Good God, man, pull yourself together.
Pull yourself together. That’s what I want to tell my student. But in my survey of the Arabic and Hebrew literature of al-Andalus for the paper I’m writing on nostalgia, what strikes me in addition to nostalgia as a poetic convention is the maddening, burning love described by its poets and scholars, both men and women. As if the only kind of love to be experienced was that which burned, made hollow, consumed, destroyed. That could only be satiated by a deeper, more intense love.
July 25, 1839. Thoreau scribbled in his journal, there is no remedy to love but to love more.
In the literature from the 11th-13th centuries in al-Andalus, love is a sickness, and the ministrations of the lover as a cure, or a healing, are common in these poems. The Jewish poet, Yosef al-Katib, writes in a triple register of Hebrew, Arabic, and Romance:
I love you so much, so much, so much, my love, that my eyes are red with weeping and forever burn.
An Arab poet at the same time, Abu Isa ibn Labbun, accepts the suffering that love brings; he asks for nothing but a kiss to save him:
Tell me, when will you give me, o love– O God! when will my love give me– the only medicine that can cure me? A kiss from my lover’s lips.
Plato once remarked that “love is a serious mental disease,” and Socrates added that “love is a madness.” Love as illness has been written about seriously in medical literature for centuries.
It seems to me that the madness of love takes two primary forms: elation and excitement when lovers are together, when love is shared and reciprocal; or depression and distress when lovers are apart, or when love is unrequited.
There’s a line from Rumi that appears in the Coleman Barks interpretation (Coleman Barks doesn’t actually read Persian):
Gamble everything for love, if you’re a true human being. If not, leave this gathering. Half-heartedness doesn’t reach into majesty.
In everything I’ve read, everything I’ve ever felt or experienced, there seems to be only one resolution to the burning pain of loving someone: don’t.
If you do, then accept the risk, and understand that the only way through the suffering is to love more.
Adrienne Rich, “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying,” On Lies, Secrets and Silence (via mamma-wolf)
Nayyirah Waheed (via wordsnquotes)
I watched the miss muslima from bbc with dina tokia, and it kinda irritated me. I love dina but she said things like i was learned that a woman can't travel on her own, and other things in the documentary really irritated me. I was happy bc it was shown on a tv show here in west-europe. I thought this will be positive but then I watched it and it really just creates more stereotypes and that makes me so sad ugh :(
Do you have a link
Some solid information on the fiqh of women traveling/living alone.
why is Sandra Bland lying down in her mugshot picture?? why is she already in a jumpsuit and why does she look so disoriented if not already dying? who thought that they’d be fooling anyone with this mugshot
This is so haunting…they’re suppose to take the mug shot first thing.
WAIT. omfg all of this went over my head. I can’t take this at all
I showed this to my dad, who had been going to school to become a mortician before he found it was just emotionally overwhelming.
To him, and with his trained opinion based on photos I found of Sandra Bland with as close to a neutral resting position as possible- these two-
Compared to the Mugshot here
To him, he sees clear signs of sinkage in her skin, even just from the photo.
Take note of her cheeks- even in the first photo I’ve shown, they’ve got a fullness to them, and her features are far from the bone-y visage we see in the mugshot. Her eyes seem to have sunken back, and her face looks a bit lopsided. This isn’t uncommon, it’s pretty normal for a cadaver’s facial features and skin to look like it’s slouched or lopsided if not treated or maintained correctly.
Parts of her skin also seem very VERY pale, which you typically see in a corpse. This is from when blood and fluids leave the skin, especially in the face where there’s a thinner layer of flesh over the bone, which causes a sickly white look.
Her lips are also very off-color, further indicating a lack of bloodflow or inhibited bloodflow.
Her eyes seem out of focus, her cheeks are sunken, her clothes aren’t touching her shoulders completely- further indicating she’s laying on the ground. (If you look at her hair, it’s clearly being pulled back by gravity.)
There’s no way she’s alive in that picture. They dressed up her corpse to make a cover story.
-Coffie
Y’all stressing me out. I need to know what happened in that place man
*thinks about death* *fears death* *does next to nothing to fix my akhirah*
I honestly disgust myself
These Birds Walk (2013)
“…but if you want to find me, you will find me among the people…I come from ordinary people…and to find me…look among ordinary people. My story is there.” - Abdul Sattar Edhi
by Jakob Wagner
R. MCKINLEY, DEC. 1, 2012 (via intractably)
Francis Chan // Crazy Love (via analyticalmuslim)
Bourgery, Jean Baptiste Marc ; Jacob, Nicolas Henri [Hrsg.] Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme: comprenant la médicine opératoire Band 3 digitised by Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg click photo for source
