Letters from a Muslim Woman Podcast

Happy June, my friends. This week, as a treat for paid subscribers, I wanted to bring you my recently published essay in WAYF journal. You can purchase a digital copy of the whole journal here if you are interested. It’s full of beautiful poems and pieces, including a stunning one by Ambata Kazi. I’ve been eagerly awaiting publication so I could share this piece with you. It’s a segmented essay that explores themes I come back to again and again in my writing: belonging, faith, the immigrant experience, but all through the lens of Names and what they say about us and who we are. Instead of simply sharing the essay with you, I decided to try something fun and read it for you on video. (A short excerpt is available below for free subscribers.) Let me know how you like it, and what your own feelings are about your names. Are they complicated? Do you feel as though your name fits you? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you Marc Typo, Debbie Weil, Alex Dobrenko`, Mona Ramadan, and many others for tuning into my live video with Malak Silmi! Just this Tuesday, I wrote about the complexities of writing from the non-dominant culture, so it was super refreshing to chat with a fellow Arab/Muslim child of immigrants about the trajectory of our lives through the lens of Ramadan. I hope we didn’t throw too many unfamiliar terms at you all 🤣🤣. Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

A couple of weeks ago, the boys and I had an epic sleepover in the basement while M was away. We inflated the air mattress, draping bedsheets over it to make a fort from one side of the room to the other. We brought down blankets and sweet and salty popcorn and a bowl of jelly beans and sour peaches. Then, we watched a cheesy Will Ferrell musical and sang karaoke, belting our songs out at full volume, the Apple TV remote our microphone. The boys are 13 and 11 now. They are fairly independent when it comes to the hard work of keeping them alive. We get the groceries, but they make their own breakfast. We double check that their homework is in their backpack. That they’ve packed a hat in case it gets cold. Still, those heady days of heavy lifting are over, at least physically. There are no car seats to lug from the back seat into the house. No strollers to fold and open one handed. No babies hanging on hips. Nine years ago, M was away for two weeks in July. This was the stage of our life when summer was choreographed down to the day, with scheduling and coordination starting in March. Daycare spots booked. Day camps reserved. Vacation requested. The boys were 4 and 1. I gave M my blessing and booked off work for the same two weeks he’d be traveling. My mind, my delusional mind, imagined regular sleepovers with my sisters and the niblings. There would be no need for day camp, because the kids would be in a camp of sorts with their cousins, my sisters and I the counselors. I saw late night shenanigans. I saw my own idyllic childhood, replayed. No so. Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience Somehow the date approached and I found myself alone with a toddler and a kindergartner for two straight weeks. No childcare. No camp. No sisters or cousins to entertain us. Grandparents dispatched to another country, to the aid of another mother, her hands full with another set of grandkids. What I remember most was the oppressive heat of that July. The air still. The windows and backdoor opened in the desperate hopes of a breeze that never came. Without my sisters’ company, I didn’t have the energy for the city pools. Instead, I would muster my strength and gather the big blue Ikea bag of sand and water toys, loading it onto the back of the stroller. Then I would wrestle A in and buckle the harness, keeping an eye on D to make sure he hadn’t followed a rolling ball into the road. In this way, we would make our way to the water playground, where I would pray for them to get into a groove. To find wonder in the water splashing and gathering in their buckets. In the way an older kid might spray them with a soaker. In the way their feet left a trail of little wet prints as they ran to me in anger or delight. Sometimes, we’d last 3 hours at the park. Sometimes 30 minutes. And then we’d come home and the whole rest of the day would yawn ahead of us. Endless meals and snacks and dishes and diapers and baths and tantrums, and I would kick myself for my poor summer planning. Once the boys were asleep, I would reach for the remote, craving the voice of an adult, even one who would only talk at me, rather than to me. One night, I clicked on The Walking Dead. Even though I despised Zombies, even though M had asked me again and again if I wanted to watch it and I had said no, again and again, afraid of the gore and the nightmares. Still, it was hours of plot and character and stakes. And I needed stakes after negotiating between two small children all day. By the time each episode ended, I would find myself sucked all the way in. Too invested to stop, but also too afraid to be alone with my thoughts in the dark. My husband, my parents, my sisters all hours away, and me alone in the night. The adult in charge. The next day, D would wake me bright and early. His chubby little hand shaking my heavy shoulder, his thick little voice repeating, “Mama, mama, is-hee”. Or A would demand release from the crib across the hall by screaming with all his might. And we would start all over again. I have long felt guilty about being a working mother, a mother whose children spent hours each day being fed and cared for by another adult. More than once in those early years, I would Google “homeschooling” and find myself scrolling a fantasy on Pinterest. Idyllic images of women in flower print dresses baking in sun-drenched white kitchens. Their children gathered around enormous quartz islands. The youngest finger-painting. The oldest midway through a baking soda - vinegar volcano. The problem with all of this, of course, was that I hate finger paint, I hate crafts, and I am a terrible teacher. But the guilt? The guilt was real. That summer, two warring ideas became abundantly clear to me. The first was that I would have made a terrible homeschooling mother. That my children were definitely better off at school and camp, where educators would tend to their learning. The second was that I felt like a horrible mother. A mother who couldn’t (or wouldn’t) conjure art projects out of thin air. A mother whose pancakes and cookies did not take the shape of beloved Disney characters. The boys and I would bake and run and play with Duplo. But the house was a mess. And I never cut the crust off their bread. And I had kept a baby book for maybe one week before the whole charade of tracking memories in anything other than a hard drive had collapsed in on itself. I love to play with babies. To tickle their little bellies and watch them howl with laughter. To hide my face and hear them cackle when it is revealed again. I love to chat with 3 year-olds. To watch their delight as they find the shape of a sentence, to discover their ability to make magic. My niece, Rania, called me her second mom when she was still a toddler. “Khalto Noosa!” she would shriek at the sight of me, running over to be scooped up and cuddled and loved. And yet, for all the precious joy of babies and small children. For the miracle of having them melt into your arms for a nap. For their impossibly chubby cheeks and pudgy fingers, I am more at home in motherhood now than I have ever been. The boys are little humans now, which isn’t to say they weren’t always humans. But before, their babyhood trumped their personalities. Now, I can see them more clearly. Their curiosities and their habits. Their favourite books. Their favourite games. Not so long after that summer where I momentarily experienced single parenthood, I read an article online that soothed my guilt, called This stage of life? It’s hard. “In this stage of life, you are bombarded daily with a whole host of decisions. Some of them life-changing, some of them not. None of them with clear cut answers… Do I send (my kids) to public school? Homeschool? Charter school? Do I continue to breastfeed? Do I blow the budget so that I can buy all organic? Do I force my child to apologize, even though the apology will be insincere? You don’t know the answers to ANYTHING, but you feel constant pressure to figure out EVERYTHING.” Reading that article, something finally clicked for me. Nobody doing that early parenting had it together. Not me. Not my friends whose houses were always clean when I went over. Not the moms in the photos on Pinterest. It’s supposed to be hard, I realized. I’m not failing because it’s hard. The nigh of our sleepover, when we finally went to bed it was nearly 1 a.m. The next day I woke up cranky and a little annoyed with everything, and of course, the guilt kept trying to resurface. Cue the inner voices shouting over each other: ‘Don’t undo all the bonding by snapping at them’ versus, ‘You spoil them so much! You’re doing it all wrong.’ This time though, I recognized the turmoil for what it was. Parenting is not for the faint of heart. If you’re lucky, you walk a never-ending tightrope of struggle and reward. And the guilt? The guilt will never go away. We just learn to recognize it. Soothe it, lull it to sleep the way we used to lull them, when they needed us simply for survival. Let’s chat in the comments: * Are you a parent? Do you have a lot of mom guilt/dad guilt? * Are there other things you feel “not enough” on? * How do you quiet the “I’m not doing enough” voice in your head (yes I’m looking for advice) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

A couple of weeks ago, Soraya, Baba and I took a trip the Grand Canyon. I’ve written about Soraya’s wanderlust before, and about my lack of it, but I’m grateful to her for inviting me along on the short trips. For dropping an itinerary at my feet that is too tempting to resist and dragging me along to see the world’s wonders. We were in and out in 4 days: landing in Phoenix, driving north through Arizona, staring at this wondrous, cavernous beauty, and driving south again through the Red Rock region of Sedona. Every moment seemed tinged with anticipation, both good and bad. Here we were, in America mere days before the election, before the re-ascendance of Donald Trump. Here we were, so close to a cliff’s edge, both literally and figuratively. The South Rim of the Grand Canyon is wider and deeper than it has any business being. You expect to see the whole thing with your eyes. And then you get there and you realize that you can see maybe 2% of it at any given time. And the 2% you’re seeing is as far as your mind can fathom, and even that is overwhelming. Just looking down is enough to feel as though you’ll tumble. Enough to feel as though there is no end to the drop. And yet, it is breathtakingly beautiful. It is mindboggling and mind blowing. It is perspective shifting. Last Wednesday, after being home for a few days, D and I went to a presentation by a Canadian astronaut and he spoke about the wild shift in perspective you get, looking down at Earth from the vast emptiness of space. I think the next closest thing to that is looking into the Grand Canyon. Perspective. We are so small. We are so small so let’s not sweat the small stuff. And yet. On our last morning there, Soraya and I saw the sunrise over the eastern-most point of the South Rim. The earth around us there was desert-like, dusty and red. Everything felt precarious. If the magic of what we had seen the two previous days was wearing off, well then, that moment brought it all back. Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience I try to remember the glory of God in these moments, to look at the Sun, a miracle, rising over the Canyon, a miracle, and let my remembrances accompany my awe. So I was watching the sun come up, and praying, and taking photo after photo, when I noticed that the glove of my right hand was missing, had fallen away from me some time between the shuttle bus we’d gotten off and the craggy walk we’d taken to the cliff’s edge. It’s amazing how much the loss of a $10 Costco glove will affect your mood, even when you are witnessing a natural wonder, a miracle of creation. We are so small, not only in size but in perspective, in heart, in the things that might worry us. A perfectly replaceable glove. “We can look for it,” Soraya said and started to walk around, so caring is she for her older sister. “After,” I told her, “We’ll look for it after. We can’t get this sunrise back.” And so we stood and we watched and we prayed, but now our utter focus had been pierced. The loss of a $10 Costco glove loomed over our moment, and the future of a Trump presidency, and the anxiety of flights home, and every other potential moment of fear or loss. There is a verse in the Quran that says, Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. This translates to verily, humanity was created anxious. I think about this when I’m spiraling. When I’m in the middle of contemplating literal miracles and I’m derailed by the most ridiculous of things. When I’m overtaken by a sense of foreboding. In the chapter in question, God goes on to talk of the healing power of prayer. How that anxiety can be mitigated. I think of Marcellus Williams and his last words, and I think he understood that. I am a long way, but I am trying. The sunrise, by the way, was glorious. The red rocks around Sedona where we drove later that day were incredible. My heart yo-yoed, falling to the pit of my stomach and rising to the opening in my throat as Baba drove the car along the switchback roads on the mountain in Oak Creek Canyon. We descended from 7000 feet to 4000 feet of elevation. Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. Earlier that morning, Soraya and I looked for the second glove as we walked back to the shuttle bus stop. We didn’t find it. “Never mind,” I told her as another bus pulled in to the stop. If the cost of the sunrise over the Grand Canyon was a glove, I would pay that a hundred times over. And yet I still felt disappointed. By what? The loss of control. The smallest thing having gone wrong. And then I noticed something black being held by a small rock on a larger boulder. My glove! I snatched it up quickly and we boarded, my heart buoyed. “Oh good! So that was yours,” a man said. He’d been there on the cliff too. “Thank you!” I told him and we sat down, flushed and energetic. I’m not sure why this moment is cast in such prominent relief. Why the smallest thing having gone wrong is so crushing, and the smallest thing having gone right is such a boost. But here we are. Sweating the small stuff in spite of ourselves. Inna al-insaana khuliqa halu’a. I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. This week I’d like to several recent posts on Substack that spoke to me. The first is from Evan McDermod, wherein he discusses a recent Al-Jazeera documentary about the forced starvation that is being perpetrated in Gaza. There is a link to the documentary within his piece. The second is testimony gathered from Northern Gaza gathered by Elad Nehorai and others. Northern Gaza has become a genocide within the genocide. These stories are painful, but I think it’s important for us to know what is happening, what is being obfuscated and justified. To know so we can insist that it stops. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

I am beyond split-brained at this point — split-hearted? Split-souled? These are the words I write to my friend in our text chat, trying to explain the overwhelm of conflicting feelings, the overwhelm of conflicting states of being that have settled inside me as the genocide continues to unfold. I keep searching for a word to articulate this and falling short. Simultaneous doesn’t feel accurate. Simultaneous is when you do two, maybe three things at once. But this is not about juggling or multi-tasking. This is about a deluge. About trying to wrap my mind around one awful thing when another hits and another and another and another until I am buried beneath a blanket of suffocating layers of horror. Multiplying. Compounding. Accruing interest. An exhibit of the my split-hearted state: I finish reading Maggie Smith’s book, You could make this place beautiful. Or more accurately, I start reading it, cannot stop, and finish reading it within 48 hours. I want to dog-ear every second page and highlight every word with thick yellow marker, except I’m reading on my phone. I want to tell you that this book made me cry, but it didn’t. Because of course I can’t seem to cry anymore. My tears have been giving me the silent treatment for about three years now. Partway through the pandemic, my whole emotional coping system broke down, but since the genocide, this struggle has reached a whole other level. I am dry and shriveled, like the pit of a prune, not even the flesh of it. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I try the things that have always brought me tears — cheap tricks, but they’re reliable. I play Castle on the hill by Ed Sheeran and my eyes water a little at “singing to tiny dancer” but as I try to catch the crescendo, the lump in my throat disappears and I am dry. I am a drought, papery thin and ready to set alight. I am the beginnings of a forest fire. So I go searching for my tears in the songs that used to get me when I was younger. I search in To Sir with Love, in Adia and Joey and One Sweet Day, but my sobs stay trapped inside me. I go searching in a book of poetry called Water & Salt by Arab-American Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Her poem, Immigrant, catches in my throat, the way she describes America as, “…the place where the planes are madeand the place where the presidentwill make the call to send the planesinto my storybook childhood..” I can feel my tears trying to awaken, but the numbness gives them a sedative, shushes them back to sleep. No. It’s not time for you yet, the numbness tells the tears. She won’t be able to cope if you show up today. Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim Experience I read Sharon Simmons words about keening. I discover that to keen is to wail for the dead and I think yes, I want to keen. Please God let me keen but I don’t keen, can’t keen. Instead I load the dishwasher. I fill out forms for endless field trips. I winterize the basement and change the settings on the furnace. I read a poem that Amal Kiswani shares called I translate the names of boys killed in Gaza. In her Note, Amal calls it “a beautiful poem that made me cry.” I read it and I still don’t cry, but I feel the feelings that would have made me cry before. I share it with my sisters, with my friends, because sharing poetry is a gift. Sharing poetry says, I read this and I felt something and I want you to feel it too. I want to tell my sisters and my friends that these poems made me cry because that is the highest compliment, and the most accurate description. Except that they haven’t. When I say I want to cry what I mean is that I want to be spent, is that I want the relief. What I mean is that I want for the the dam to break and the well of emotion to escape instead of sitting, trapped on my chest. Trapped and building pressure along the walls of my temples. Trapped behind my forehead. Trapped in my lungs each time I try to take a deeper breath. What I mean is that I want the catharsis. I want the sleep of the dead that comes after crying for the dead. The sleep that sucks you down down down away from visions of boys on fire, visions of babies taking their last breaths, visions of men in a line, walking to their open graves. What I mean is that in a movie, you cry at the climax, and that every day I’ve seen another horror and thought to myself this must be the climax Dear God this has to be the worst it’ll get Dear God let it get better let this be rock bottom let it end. How do you deal with hard things? Do you shut down? Do you cry? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

For nearly a year now, whenever I close my eyes I see bloodied Palestinian children covered in dust that used to be concrete. Now, my mind’s eye brings me a new vision. The bright, beautiful face of Marcellus Khalifa Williams, a Black Muslim man who was executed several days ago by the State of Missouri for a crime he did not commit. In the aftermath of his killing, my feed was flooded with pictures of his poetry, written for the children of Palestine, and his last words, a testimony. All it takes to become a Muslim is the utterance of a simple statement, a testimony called the shahada. Ash-hadu anla illaha illa Allah, wa ash-hadu anna Muhammadan rasool Allah.I bear witness that there is no god but God, and that Muhammad is the messenger of God. I’ve sat in the mosque a hundred times and heard these words spoken as new Muslims are welcomed into the fold. I’ve heard them in the call to prayer before salah. I utter them myself during the prayer, a reminder of what I believe and what I declare. God is One. His prophet, Muhammad, is my guide for His teachings. Would I have put my hopes in God, or in my executors? All of this to prepare me for the time that these words will matter most. At death. My biggest fear is that I will be on my deathbed and not manage the shahada. That I will forget the words. That my carelessness in life, my lack of attention, my insufficient faith, will show in what doesn’t come out of my mouth. In the moments before death, we are reduced to our very core, and what if the testimony isn’t at my core? What if my core is empty? In Arabic, the shahada is so called because it’s a statement from a witness. I imagine a court, but not the broken courts of our broken criminal justice systems. Not the courts in which America can kill its own Black citizens, nor the ones in which it can veto any statements for the end of occupation, the end of genocide, the end of one massacre after another, after another. In Arabic, a witness is called a shaheed. This is the same word for martyr. Marcellus Williams, who wrote poetry for the children of Palestine, is a shaheed, much like the children of Palestine. Marcellus Williams, in his moments before death, was not reduced, but elevated to his core, a core that was content. A core that praised God and knew it was going home, to God. Our faith teachers have written volumes about diseases of the heart. About envy. Covetousness. Greed. In Islam, the original sin, the one that cast the devil out of heaven, is arrogance. The cure to arrogance is humility. The cure to envy and covetousness is contentment. This is why you will hear the mothers of murdered children in Gaza say, Alhamdulillah between their tears. Alhamdulillah alaa kol haal. All praise be to God in every situation. The same words Marcellus wrote for his final statement. They mean, I’m hurting, but I still trust you, God. They mean, I’m hurting but you are still worthy of my contentment. You are always worthy. They are the words of a true believer. I imagine myself in his place, asked for a final statement. I imagine my denial, my refusal. I would have written an essay on my innocence. Would I have put my hopes in God, or in my executors? In our tradition, when someone dies, we say inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’oon. To God we belong and to him we return. Marcellus knew this. We do not belong to the executors. We belong to God. Subscribe to Letters from a Muslim Woman Demystifying the Western Muslim experience. If you haven’t already, you can read the details of the ways that the criminal justice system failed Marcellus’ specific case below. Click through the carousel to read. Marcellus from an earlier interview. Such conviction. The always eloquent Hanif Abdurraqib on Marcellus and the concept of “innocence”. Click through the carousel to read. Marcellus’ poem for the children of Palestine. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

The day we brought our baby home from the hospital nearly 14 years ago, I felt like I was wading through water. The air itself was thick and viscous. Exhaustion had descended so that people’s voices seemed to travel through a tunnel to reach me. M and my mom were carrying my bags and the car seat, respectively. I was carrying my weak body and unsettled heart. We had left our 18th floor apartment two days earlier in the maddest rush I had ever experienced, missing an emergency car delivery by a matter of minutes, gotten through the insanity, and come home with a healthy baby boy. And yet, rather than feeling tethered to a line of women through time immemorial who had managed the same feat, I felt oddly, increasingly isolated. D was born in the middle of December in Montreal, where dusk falls at 4:25 p.m. Mama, (my mama, even though apparently I was now a mama myself,) was with us for 8 weeks, tending to my every need so I could tend to the baby. She brought me bowls of chicken soup and buckwheat bread, lest my wheat sensitivity trigger his indigestion. Glass after glass of fenugreek and caraway tea, an old Egyptian concoction for increasing milk. Sliced pears and frozen mangoes and little pieces of broccoli to scoop up hummus. Mostly, I just wanted coffee with too much cream and sugar, and a croissant from the bakery in the underground metro tunnels five minutes away. Despite Mama’s waiting on me hand and foot, I never emerged from our bedroom before 2 p.m., barely grasping at the remains of weak sunlight the winter sky had to offer. Mama held the baby while I slept, and encouraged me to sleep when he did. But I couldn’t, despite my exhaustion. My body was both lacking and restless. On the fifth morning after we came home, we ran out of apples and tomatoes. Before either M or Mama could argue, I blurted out, “I’ll get them.” There was a small grocery store two blocks away where we made minimal purchases because it was so overpriced, but this was going to be my outing, high prices be damned. M and Mama looked at each other, looked at me, and nodded. All day, I dreamed of this walk to the store, of how I would make my way down the street, alone. I would pace the aisles, taking my time, considering random sauces and marinades, rolling firm fruit around in my palms. After D was fed and swaddled, I left him with my mom to burp and put on my winter coat and boots. It was the first time I’d walked out since I’d come home from the hospital as a mother. The store was bright and airy and I walked through it slowly, attempting to savour each moment. When I was done, I came home, put my shopping bag on the kitchen counter and went to sit on our bed, where I started to cry. I couldn’t have explained to you what the tears were for, beyond the fact that I had expected my grocery run to be life-changing, and yet here I was, still swimming through the soup of my new existence. In hindsight, I think I was mourning the woman I had lost in gaining my motherhood. Every day, I wept. Sometimes, it was because D wouldn’t burp, or because he would manage to extract his little hand from his swaddle and hit his tiny face with his tiny fist. Sometimes, it was for no reason at all. Sometimes it was because I didn’t want to cry, and the shame of the tears brought them on all the more. Mama sat with me, hugging me and telling me again and again, “you’re a wonderful mother, Noha. All of this is normal and all of this will pass.” I am so grateful for her faith in me. For telling me I was doing a good job when I had no idea what I was doing. For not shaming me when I was ready to shame myself. And then by some miracle, 6 weeks after they had flooded my system, the tears stopped. It was as though someone had found the source of the leak and plugged it. Winter still dragged on but the days grew ever-slowly longer. My little baby, who ate like a champion, became the love of my life. His smiles rejuvenated me, his burps delighted me, his little fingers and little toes were delicious and so, so kissable. I am lucky that my postpartum blues didn’t morph into full blown depression. That my mother was there to tend to my every need. That my husband held my hand through it, despite being as lost as I was. I am lucky that the feelings inside me subsided into love and connection, and that my heart reset its sensitivity gauge. But I remember that sense of being untethered when I see a soul in the throes of depression, even when everything on the outside looks and sounds and seems normal. What kindness can I hold for those souls? How can I pay it forward? I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing this incredible video of a mental health support person explaining feelings of fear to an injured child in Gaza. There really are angels among us. Let’s chat in the comments: * Is there something you experienced that was supposed to be “all good” but wasn’t the storybook version? * If you’re a parent, or have a parent in your life, have you seen someone struggle post partum? * Do you think there’s enough honesty in the culture about how hard the first few months of parenting really are? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

If you’re like me, you’ve been following the US election even though you’d rather look away. As a Canadian, I have no vote, and yet, I care more than I’ve ever cared before. It’s hard not to care when American policy affects so much of what happens not just within its own borders, but across the world. My first thought continues to be Palestine. The killing of Palestinians now not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank. The destruction of whatever little civil infrastructure still exists. The annexing of more and more and more land. This is the first thing on my mind as I watch a speech, a rally, a debate. And last week’s presidential debate was no exception. Last week, after the presidential debate, I furiously wrote this out on my phone when I found myself unable to sleep. If you’re enjoying Letters from a Muslim Woman, consider upgrading your subscription for access to my unfinished letters series every other Tuesday. The world’s most lethal fighting force When you promise”the world’s most lethal fighting force” what I hearisCraters the length of football fieldspregnant with tentsfilled with familieswho fledafter the school was bombedafter the friend’s house was bombedafter their uncle’s house was bombedafter their house was bombed What I seeisA girl who wakes up to the chaosin the burnt husk of another hospitalshrapnel covering her little faceA girl who asks her doctorin a panicif this is the heaven her mother promised She is concernedbecause it’s noisyand it’s scary and it still smells like death(the stench is unbearable, you see, and we can’t smell it through our screens,but it is blood and rotting flesh, and raw sewagemixed together with the sharp sting of still-hot metal.)and the dust? The dust is everywhereit cakes her face it lines the beds and the windowsillsit is the remains of every building no longer standing. Her mother said that if the bombs comethe next time she woke up, she’d be in heavenand her mother has never lied before, but this?this does not seem like heaven What I see is A father of newborn twinscelebrating new lifeso rare in these partsA father who walks the rubble-filled streets to get his babies’ birth certificates and walks back to find the apartmentwith his wife and babies (those perfect, tiny creatures! 10 fingers! 10 toes!) GoneA blackened hole in its place What I see is A man abducted off the streets of GazaReturned months laterHis eyeshauntedunable to hide the animal fear of what they’ve endured When you promisethe world’s most lethal fighting forceI’m not impressed but terrified But thenyou were never trying to impress mewere you? Every scenario I’ve described above is real. The craters are the result of a recently bombed tent camp in Khan Younis, Gaza, where Israel dropped 2000 pound bombs on families sleeping in tents in the middle of the night, killing or burying alive whole families in a matter of seconds on the night of September 10th. The girl in the hospital asked this doctor if she was in heaven in this clip below. The father of newborn twins’ story can be found here And finally, this man. This poor man’s face is haunted, and will haunt me to my dying day. This poem could have been hundreds of pages long. I’ve left out some of the most indelible images, because I cannot bring myself to write extensively about beheaded babies, pregnant women and their husbands, killed and hung by soldiers on the roof of their house, innocent men taken into torture camps called prisons and raped, hungry dogs eating human remains on the streets. We need more than a ceasefire. We need an arms embargo. We need unfettered access to aid and health workers. We need a massive influx of everything required to rebuild society in both Gaza and the West Bank, and we need the authority figures who led this charge held to account. Anything less is not justice, and not enough. Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week, where I share my most tender, unvarnished thoughts on topics like Islamophobia, sincerity and hypocrisy, the visibility in being a visible minority and the pressure to be perfect. If you’d like access to these thoughts and want to support me, consider upgrading. If you can’t commit to a monthly subscription, but still want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee below. It helps me more than you realize. Let’s chat in the comments: * Have you been following the US presidential election? * What are your thoughts on Kamala? Are you conflicted like me? * Are there statements you’ve heard, political or otherwise, that were meant to impress you but instead terrified you? Tell me about them. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

The day before school started again last week, D and I went out for long, languid bike ride. The weather was perfect, just a hint of cool in the air, and a bright, clear sky with loads of sun. We only had an hour or two, so we headed south through Little Italy to Dow’s Lake, took the route by the Rideau Canal, circled through downtown and headed home. D mostly rode ahead of me, too tall for his bike, shoulders set, the wind catching in his t-shirt like a sail. I caught myself 5 or 6 times about to call out safety reminders. A little warning about the loose gravel on the path, a reminder of sudden drops and sharp turns. Instead, I held my tongue. This boy was heading to high school the next day. Whatever I have taught him of bike safety, he already knows it. Along Queen Elizabeth Drive, I saw two figures ahead of us. A man on a bike, and a small child beside him, riding in perfect unison, side by side. I marveled at their synchronicity. Because our pace was leisurely, it took some time to catch up, to see them in the light of the sun instead of always turning ahead at the next curve in the road. When we were finally close enough to see them clearly, it all made sense. The man was riding with only one hand on the wheel, the other on the little girl’s shoulder. And now, instead of marveling at them I marveled at him. At his balance. At his self trust. How much maturity, how much confidence, not just physical, but psychic, must you have to continue along, threading forward, only one hand to yourself and the other so clearly guiding? She didn’t have training wheels, she had him. My own confidence is still a little shaky since my fall, still focused on the worst case scenario. Despite the glorious whether I couldn’t help but widen sharp turns, avoid curbs, go very slowly. My son, for his part, didn’t seem to notice. He rode easily and silently. Not in a boasting way but just the way a boy might enjoy the open air and the trees and the grass, and the acorns littering the path and the water running alongside. Every once in a while, a bike would come along behind us and overtake us, and sometimes, they would only overtake me for a bit, before they sped up again and passed him too. And I noticed that this was new. Strangers had never separated us along the path before. He’d always been so clearly my child, but now, he was taller than I was, and so clearly his own person. They didn’t realize we belonged to each other. And this made me both very happy and very, very sad. We overtook the man and the little girl as we approached downtown. I looked over as we pedaled by, and for the first time, now that we were at their level, I noticed a baby in a carrier in front of him. He caught my eye and we both smiled. He couldn’t have known that in that moment, he’d made me consider the possibility of trusting things to go well. The possibility of believing you can ride a bike with one hand on the wheel and the other on your daughter’s shoulder, with your baby in the front. The possibility of the gorgeous day instead of the potential fall. Of beginnings instead of endings. I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing the testimony of Palestinian children that the Israeli military is detaining, torturing, and using as human shields. To quote Jewish Voice for Peace, and incredible Jewish American organization working for justice and peace in Israel/Palestine, “The enforced disappearance and torture of Palestinian children violates international law and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which the Israeli government has ratified. Despite this, the Israeli military’s actions constitute war crimes and endanger Palestinian children.” I’m also sharing this incredible NY Times Opinion piece by Palestinian American author and professor Dr. Hala Alyan, This is who Kamala Harris Fails, asking Harris to live up to consistent applications of justice and law. Let’s chat in the comments: * How’s the “back to school” fall vibe treating you? Are you caught up in it? * Are there kids in your life who are suddenly bigger than you can believe? * How do you manage riding your proverbial bike with one hand while guiding others, or do you? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and Salaam, my friends. Deep breath… When I started writing unfinished letters, it was with the intention to explore the unvarnished parts of myself. The parts the aren’t quite so polished and sanded down. And to do it behind the safety of a smaller space here in this little corner of the internet. Writing today’s post felt like an exorcism, the release of words I haven’t trusted myself to explore publicly before. And sharing it? Hitting that publish button? That is terrifying. Which is why I know I have to do it. Thank you to my friend Isabel Cowles Murphy for being my test reader, and for walking me back from the “I can’t publish this everyone will hate me” ledge. We should all be so lucky to have a sounding board like you. Thank you also to poet Maya C. Popa, whose work inspired this post… A gentle note that there is a paywall in this post. If you’d like access to the whole post, consider upgrading your subscription. Ok, I can’t think of anything else to put off sharing this. Deep breath… exhale… here goes! When they go low, we go high. I’m not entirely sure where I first heard that, but a few years ago, it suddenly felt like that phrase was everywhere. Taking the high road is not a new concept. It’s been seen as a sign of character for as long as humans have written their history. It has religious implications too. Jesus is famously known for eschewing, “turning the other cheek”. The Quran, Islam’s holy book, tells adherents to “respond with what is better”. I’m a follower of both Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Jesus, may God’s peace and blessings be upon them both. So why do I find myself struggling with taking the high road? A few weeks ago, I read an incredible essay, here on Substack, by a writer I admire greatly. The essay was about the racist responses to a poem she had shared on social media, that asks people to consider PTSD for war survivors. It was beautiful, thoughtful, and internally focused. It rightly pointed out the fact that much of this racist abuse and rhetoric was a symptom of internal anger, of what she called a ‘virtual wound’. It asked us to consider how much we look down on those with this virtual wound, rather than looking inward at our own wounds, and being grateful that we haven’t been afflicted with this particular one. I am sharing the link to the post here, but I need to tell you that it is now behind a paywall, so I hope I’m forgiven if I’m misremembering. I hit the heart on the post, as I usually do. I may even have restacked it. Then, I added the following comment: I have a lot of complicated feelings here. On the surface, I agree, but I wanted to say that for some of us in marginalized communities, we need someone else to do the heavy lifting, because we face ugliness day in and day out. Somewhere, on some level, there needs to be that balance between: 1- kindness and walking along with the people you can move in the direction of kindness, and 2- firmness on what the red lines are, on what is unacceptable. The dehumanization so many experience goes beyond words on a screen. It becomes fodder that fuels decisions to ban refugees from entering a country. To enact violence against Black and brown bodies, to send more weapons to kill people far away. How do we accept this? Or balance the kindness with the practical implications? I don’t have the answer. I left my comment up for maybe 10 minutes. Then I deleted it, afraid that I might offend the author when she was so clearly an ally. I could dedicate a whole essay to my anxiety and people-pleasing. To how it is so severe that my worry about offending someone — someone with which I have no relationship, however much I admire her — lead me to delete the comment above in a panic. And perhaps I will dedicate a future essay to that subject, but for now let’s get back to taking the high road. Before I deleted the comment, I saved it to my phone. A part of me knew I wasn’t done grappling with these ideas. As I reread the words I wrote, I could see that I wasn’t responding to the original essay. My discomfort had less to do with the author asking us all to look inward, and more to do with my fear of being asked to overlook injustice, which she had never suggested at all. Here I was, projecting, because people of colour have been asked so many times to overlook injustice in order to keep the peace. But what do we lose when we turn the other cheek? Doesn’t the idea of turning the other cheek come from a longer sermon? Doesn’t the whole sentence, together, say, “to the one who strikes you on the cheek, turn to him the other also?” Who has the privilege to lose again and again? To let someone strike you on the right cheek and then the left? Who is asked to take the high road instead of fighting? And yet, even as I write this, I feel the pang of not living up to the ideal of my prophet. Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, was so honest, so trustworthy, that even his enemies kept their most valuable material possessions at his house. After he narrowly escaped Quraysh’s attempts to assassinate him, and had fled Mecca to Medina, he sent his young cousin, Ali, to them to return their valuables. As a child, I heard this story in Saturday school when all I wanted was the clock to run down and my weekend to start. Now I marvel. Can you imagine? A group of bullies chase you out of your city. The only home you’ve ever known. On your last night there they try to kill you. And you give them back their money? Who among us wouldn’t take the money and call it justice? Today, in our current climate, we watch a criminal justice system that incarcerates and kills Black men in America and Indigenous men in Canada for cigarettes, or walking down a street where a white person deems them “suspicious”. While rich, white men who’ve been convicted of multiple felonies can run for president, never mind avoid jail time. Today, in our current climate, we watch bombs rain down on millions of civilians, besieged, with no where to go. While the man who signs off on dropping those bombs gets a standing ovation in the halls of congress, and the one who sent him those weapons is the president of the most powerful country in the world. Who is asked to turn the other cheek? Not these men. It’s easy to be magnanimous when you hold all the cards. It’s easy to be a gracious winner. And yet, we don’t even ask this of them. These men are allowed and encouraged to fight. These men are allowed to be angry. I think that I believe in righteous anger. I think that I believe in a rage that demands equality for all, that asks the hard questions. A rage that can hold hands with softness and love. A rage that births justice. Let’s chat in the comments: * What do you think about turning the other cheek? In theory or in practice? * Do you believe that the principle is asked equally across society? Do we expect forgiveness and forbearance evenly, in your opinion? Or do you believe it’s lopsided? * Do you hate me? Are you about to unsubscribe? 😰 I’m continuing to share resources about Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing a link to John Oliver’s excellent explainer on the West Bank. This link doesn’t work in Canada unfortunately but should work in the US. I highly recommend it for context and history, as the news rarely gets into these details. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

My mother and I send each other voice notes crossing oceans and time zonesmessages sent in the early morning in the westand received late at nightin the east. I know we haven’t talked in days,I might say I just wanted to tell youI’m thinking of you,I just want you to hear my voiceto think of youlistening to my voice. The messages are a blend of English and Arabic — my English and her Arabic most of the time, but not always. Sometimes, my Arabic makes its way in. I say Arabic things I know how to say properly. Prayers. Comments on the weather. Updates about the kids. Other times, I try to get poetic. I tell her, inti 3ala alby. Inti fi baaly. You’re on my heart. In my mind. Flipping the prepositions in a game of reverse grammar psychology. I don’t trust my Arabic, so whatever sounds wrong is probably right, right? This is the source of my mistake above. I thought in English. I started in the first person, with myself. Mama replies a few hours later. After her updates on the heat, on her sleeping patterns and fasting routine, on my sister and my nieces and nephews, she gently corrects my Arabic. So you know for next time, habibty. It’s fi alby and 3ala baaly. I write it down, knowing I will never commit it to memory. How much affection have we traded in broken grammar? Does it lessen the value of the words? Or maybe it elevates it, that effort in spite of the discomfort. The attempts to tell her, in her native tongue, just what she means to me. My memory is filled with a litany of traumatic language faux pas. There is the time, at 12, I stood in front of my entire extended family in my grandparents’ house in Alexandria and said, “ya koll had” when everyone who knows their Arabic knows it’s “ya kollokom.” There is the time, at 23, I left a voicemail for the seamstress who was making the bolero I would wear over my dress at my sister’s wedding. Arab etiquette dictates that, in any business transaction, you frontload your messages with layers of superlatives. We are obsessed with niceties. Why say thank you once when you can say it a hundred times in a thousand ways? Nervous as I was, I switched the subject and the object on one of those phrases. I said, “Ta’abtoona ma’akum” when I should have said “ta’abnako ma’ana”. Effectively, I told her, “You’ve caused me so much trouble” when I meant to say, “sorry for the trouble”. Arabic has a class of verbs, like French, that invert their subjects and objects. To say, I miss you in Arabic or French, you don’t say I miss you. You say, Tu me manque. Wahashteeny. You are lacking from me. The focus is on the object. And the lacking. The focus is on the one being missed. This is the source of my mistake above, when I insulted the poor seamstress. I thought in English. I started in the first person, with myself. My mother must have a litany of English mistakes, but she doesn’t dwell on them. I want to be eloquent. She wants to be understood. And so she has spoken in her second language to full lecture halls, government officials, principals, teachers, tv stations. Classes full of snarky 6th graders. To my mother, there is no ego in this equation. The message is more important than the medium. I think about the difficulties of conveying your heart in another language as I watch my children struggle to express themselves in the tongue of their ancestors. The inverted sentence structures. The sounds that come from different areas of the throat. There is the 7a and the kha and the gha and the qa and 3a. There is the soft t and the thick t, the soft d and the thick d, the soft s and the thick s, and on and on. I take my overwhelm and multiply it by orders of magnitude. I wonder if they hear the beauty in the simple Arabic poems my father used to recite. In the folk songs that lose so much in translation. In the verses of our holy book. I wonder about the loss of nuance. About the translation of both 7ub and wud as love, when there is more. Always more. My children are polite. They sit before me, eyes glazing over but bodies still, when I launch into impromptu explanations of Arabic linguistics. Did my mother feel this way about me, too? Let’s chat in the comments: * Do you struggle to communicate with a loved one? Is the communication a linguistic issue, or is it due to something else? Age? Culture? * How do you think language affects the way we think? And do you think language is changed by place? For example, is Arabic in Canada different than Arabic in Egypt? I’m continuing to share resources about Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing an open letter sent to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, published in The Guardian from 45 American Doctors and Nurses who volunteered in Gaza. I’m also sharing this beautiful, heartbreaking poem from Palestinian poet Musab Abu Toha. Abu Toha and his wife and children were allowed to leave Gaza to Cairo months ago because his youngest son was born in the US while he was in the country for an MFA program. I think of him daily… He has left behind his parents, siblings, and entire extended family. His writing shows severe anguish. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

How to Spot a Girl-Family I grew up in a family of sisters, the third of four girls. Then my husband and I had two boys. The world looks different when you go from girl-sister to boy-mom. Today I’m exploring life as a girl-sister through vignettes of my born family. In a later essay, I’ll write about life as a boy-mom. 1- The family that cries together, stays together When I was pregnant with D, my sister Zeinab was pregnant with his cousin. In the summers, we all spent time at Mama and Baba’s house, piling onto the couches and beds. Someone always walking in or out of the backdoor, in or out of a bathroom, in or out of a conversation. I had a weepy pregnancy. Come to think of it, I was consistently weepy until I turned 35. Now, at 41, I’ve dried up. Shriveled? There are no more tears. I rage sometimes. I roll my eyes with frustration, but the tears are rare and precious gifts that overlook me. As if to say, there! you wanted to be free of us and now you are. How do you like that? That summer of the double pregnancy, I walked in one evening to find my other two sisters, Soraya and Aminah discussing open houses. Aminah lived in California. Soraya lived with me in Montreal. Why were they looking at houses? By this point, I’d been in Montreal two years, but my homesickness had not yet abated. I cornered Soraya. Promise me you’re not moving. You have to stay. Promise me. Promise. And the weeping began. Soraya was non-committal. Look, I don’t have plans to move, but I can’t promise anything either. She’s always been a vagabond. At 17, she finished high-school a semester early and absconded to Egypt, coming home with loud clothes and a louder voice, all brash comedy. Mid-way through the pandemic, she left me and went to London. My adult life can be charted by a series of repeat incidents of Soraya, leaving. Mama stopped tidying in the kitchen. Came and sat next to me. Held my heaving shoulders, started the ruqya. But a dam had been breached. The tears were tidal. Sobs wracked my whole body. I couldn’t get over the possibility of Soraya moving back to Ottawa, but if I could block it from my mind, perhaps my tears and I might reach a détente. The storm of emotion took thirty minutes to pass. By the end, I had the hiccups. Soraya and Aminah watched their every word, careful not to set me off again. That’s when Zeinab came down from her nap. How were the open houses? she asked brightly and they all leapt to their feet, waving their arms - danger! danger! Zeinab recoiled, not sure where the attack was coming from. Noha’s just barely calmed down, Mama told her, recounting the whole ordeal. To me, Zeinab’s response was the summation of what it means to grow up with sisters. I’ve been crying upstairs for the last 30 minutes. If I’d known, I would have come down so we could cry together. 2- Pregnant and hiding My sisters and I traded off being pregnant the way you trade off a relay race. Nausea. Food aversions. The smell of flowers delivered to the door by one fiancé sending another to the bathroom to throw up. The sight of chicken. The smell of chicken. The taste of chicken. Sometimes we didn’t trade off. Sometimes we broke the rules and decided to run the relay together. Zeinab and I spent hours in Mama and Baba’s walk-in closet, nestled between the hanging clothes, shifting this way and that to make room for our bellies. We didn’t start out in the closet of course, but in the hallway, where the smell of chicken and onions cooking on the stovetop threatened to send us into bouts of gagging. Step one would be to barricade ourselves in the first place we could find, which was my parents’ master bedroom. Step two would be to notice that the smell was still discernible to our oversensitive olfactory nerves. Step three would be to put another door between us for fortification. Step four would be to wait. Zeinab’s kids would inevitably find us, needing this or that. Complaining of a brother or a cousin who had hit them, taken their toy, said something mean. Close the door! Close the door! We’d say, in a panic, needing to protect our gag reflexes before we could mediate and send them on their way. The closet was stuffy, a cocoon of summer heat. The A/C hardly reached us. But we were back in each other’s confidence. The interruptions few and far between. And wasn’t that something like our childhood? Like the nights we’d spent, whispering late, taking turns falling in and out of sleep and waking? 3- Dolls and Pretend We never bought new Barbies when we were little. Mama would scout garage sales for cast-offs, dolls no longer loved by another little girl within a 6 block radius. We would fight over the blonde ones, but only if their hair hadn’t been chopped off. Someone was always stuck with Christie or Becky. We had lots of brand new paper-dolls, flimsy cutout cardboard drawings you could dress any way you wanted. For the office. For the park. I have a memory of sleeping over at Tante Lynne’s house, of her buying a new paper-doll for each of me and Soraya. Of eating candy and drinking hot chocolate. For all the paper-dolls we accumulated, only one entered our collective consciousness: Wishnik. Aminah, my oldest sister, had invented this name out of thin air. Long after Wishnik the doll was gone, Aminah played pretend as Wishnik the schoolgirl. In the game, she was a naughty student who had to be scolded by a stern teacher named Mrs. Soraya. Soraya was maybe 6 at the time, and there was nothing she loved more than scolding her oldest sister. Wishnik! You didn’t write your name neatly enough! Wishnik, come back and clean up your desk! Wishnik, why didn’t you finish your homework? Mrs. Soraya’s arms would be folded across her chest, her eye-brow perpetually arched, her lips pursed. Aminah was game then and she’s game now. She’s always been the sweetest, the smiley-est, the easiest to amuse. I keep saying when I grow up I want to be Aminah, but I’m grown now and I’m still much more snarky than she’s ever been. 4- Thirteen Tangents Here is a story that has been told repeatedly to illustrate conversational dynamics in the Beshir household. One night over dinner, many moons ago, one of my sisters started to tell us all about something that had happened at school that day. Twenty-five minutes later, Baba quietly interrupted us all to say “thirteen”. We stopped to look at him. Thirteen what? Thirteen is an unlucky number, but we don’t believe in luck? Thirteen servings of bissilla. Thirteen rides to school and back? Thirteen tangents, Baba told us, since the sister in question had started to tell her story. And we still weren’t at the end. Poor Baba has always been the ragil ghalban in the midst of five female voices, the outnumbered, out-talked, out-storied man. But Baba is a girl-dad, through and through. He may never have untangled the knots in our hair, but he taught each of us to ride our bikes, and then he took us for long rides along the river. Or he played soccer against us and our friends, one to 7, and dribbled the ball as though it was tied by a dainty little rope to his foot, a dance partner, refusing to leave him. Or he watched hockey with us, and tennis with us, and Columbo and Get Smart with us. Or he bought us secret ice creams at the mall before dinner, secret donuts at Tims on the way home, picking us up late from the bus stop when we had to stay at the library, working on group assignments. Baba is my inverse identity, a man with a wife and daughters to my woman with a husband and sons. I look to his example when I’m struggling to read a complicated Lego manual, when the boys are yapping my ears off about an obscure Batman villain. I look to Baba’s shrugged shoulders, to his pretend resignation hiding secret delight. He loves every minute. I know this because I do too. Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A shoutout to our newest paid subscriber, Karima. Thanks so much for the support, Karima! A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week, and my full archive. If you’re enjoying my perspective and want to support me, consider upgrading to help me spend more time on writing and share a voice that isn’t often heard. If you can’t commit to a monthly subscription, but still want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee below. It helps me more than you realize. I’m continuing to share resources about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing this post from Breaking the Silence Israel, a whistleblower group of former Israeli military officers, about the apathy of Palestinian civilian deaths deemed “collateral damage”. Please click through the carousel and read all the content, then ask why these lives are irrelevant while others matter. I also wanted to share this haunting poem that has stayed with me. Let’s chat in the comments: * Do you have sisters or brothers? Was your family dominated by one or the other? How did it affect the vibe in your house? * Were you an emotional kid? Are you still emotional? Has your threshold changed as you grew? * Were you a mama’s boy or a daddy’s girl? How did that manifest for you? This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

Salaam my friends, I sent this out yesterday to my paid readers, but I felt so deeply about sharing it with all of you that I've decided to take it out from behind the paywall. Without giving anything away (read the post!) I'm curious what people think in the scenario I discuss below. Leave me a comment and let me know, please! I'm wondering if my fear of stereotypes is actually me stereotyping everyone's perception. I am looking at my face in the bathroom mirror at 5:45 on Wednesday morning. The bruise on my right cheekbone is more pronounced than the night before. It gives the impression of contouring, of those fake Kardashian cheekbones I don’t have. I press on it gingerly, waiting for the feedback of the pain. Will my Nars tinted lotion be enough to cover this? My other hand comes up to the red-brown on my chin. This one whines like a high-frequency radio station, the feedback sharp and sudden. No Nars will cover it. Riding my bike home from work last week, I miscalculate the height of the curb and go down hard. My right side takes most of the impact - cheek, chin, knee, both palms for good measure. By the time I untangle myself from the bike, there’s a crowd of 7 or 8 around me. Water bottles are offered, pupils checked. What day is it? Where are you? Thankfully, I know the answers — there is no concussion. My phone and my glasses, by some miracle, aren’t broken. I call M, who comes to retrieve me and the bike. The ringing in my opposite ear doesn’t stop for ten minutes. When it does, the sound waves are replaced by waves of pain and pressure. The right side of my jaw may have taken the impact, but the left side is suffering the after-effects, silent but screaming. At home we apply ice and Advil. Call my mom-in-law for a virtual consult, take down instructions to rest. No chewing, no stretching or yawning. “Think of this like an ankle sprain for your jaw.” The emergency having passed, I am on to the next worry. What do you think of when you see a bruised hijabi? Is her husband beating her? Did her dad trap her in a room for refusing to marry a man 20 years her senior? My mind is filled with snatches of scenes from the procedurals I’ve flipped away from on TV. Brown women with light eyes, poorly wrapped hijabs, and thick accents. Bruises painted on their cheeks at exactly the spot mine sits. “I fell down the stairs,” the woman on the tv says, unconvincingly. The white detective raises an eyebrow. He cares so much that he stays after her terrorist husband/brother/father until the bad guy slips. By the end of the episode, the woman’s face will have healed. She’ll stop by the precinct to thank her white saviour. She is free. She is in America. What more could she ask? What do you think of when you see a bruised hijabi? Do you think she might have fallen cycling? Do you ever picture a hijabi cycling? Swimming? Paddling along down a river? Exhibit one of why I assume the worst: My father has four daughters. He is a tall Arab man with a beard. Because he has been happily married for 50 years, and he’s a girl dad four times over, he is often surrounded by women. It has happened more times than I care to admit that we’ll be out and a stranger will say something about my dad and his wives, looking over to me and my sisters. I have no broken bones, no open wounds. I have no need for a hospital, and if I did I’d have an embarrassing number from which to choose. I stay home and ice my face and rest in the air conditioning. I take multiple paid sick days. M goes to the grocery store and calls me (perfect reception on our functioning cell phones.) Do I want corn chowder soup? Minestrone? Chicken noodle? I turn down each one — I’m not in the mood, and I have cupboards full of food I can slurp right here at home. I start with the cherries I love so much - bite through them with my front teeth and gum them up by pressing down on them with the roof of my mouth. I imagine I am woman who’s teeth are gone, and who can’t find her dentures. The juices release. I can swallow the cherries down, nearly whole. The red skid marks on my cheek fade in 3 days, but my chin takes longer. I search longingly in the mirror. Is my jaw tilted to the right? If that was the case, wouldn’t I feel it? Or is the bruise under my chin swelling on one side, making me lopsided? In the grand scheme of things, my jaw is fine, and yet I can’t look away from the slight asymmetry. I saw a picture last week of a little girl in Gaza whose jaw had been blown off one side of her face. Two days later, I saw another picture of her, post stitches, a bandage holding things together, and I thought of Picasso. I read an article about doctors performing surgery in rooms so hot, their sweat drips into their open patients. Flies buzz around the operating theater. There is no electricity. There is no anesthetic. I wonder about our capacity to care. I wonder if I’ve lost you, my reader. If your sympathy is blunted. If you feel as though I’ve taken advantage of your concern for me, a woman on a bike (personal, relatable) to instead give you a lecture about tens of thousands of dead Palestinians (political, not what you signed up for). Do we still have room in our hearts for this? Are we too tired to hear and read about it? Do we all just want it to go away? I’m continuing to share resources about Gaza and the West Bank. This week, I’m sharing an article from the Lancet, one of the world’s foremost medical journals, providing analysis on the death toll in Gaza. The Lancet conservatively estimates that at least 186,000 deaths could be attributable to this conflict. That number accounts for 7-9% of the population of Gaza. Here’s a second article about the Lancet’s analysis. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this, about this unfathomable number, about the fact that it could be so much higher. The news cycle has mostly moved on from Gaza. Even before the assassination attempt on Donald Trump a couple of days ago, there’s been a general fatigue about this war. Coverage is fading. Instead, there is talk of the Presidential Election. Of elections in England and France. All of these are important events. But this is too. This is life and death, for millions of human beings. As Russia’s attacks on Ukraine have intensified, seeing the way the media covers the news vs. the way they cover the news of Israel’s attacks on Gaza is quite something. Below are only two examples. Note the passive vs. active voice. Note the way horror is expressed for the deaths of Ukrainians, and the way it’s clear who’s committed the attacks. I won’t relent to the dehumanization of Palestinians. One of my favourite accounts to follow out of Gaza is Mohammed Subeh’s. Subeh is a Palestinian American ER doctor who’s been volunteering in Gaza. His accounts are full of empathy and detail. Please watch him discuss his day to day below. Let’s chat in the comments: * This whole essay felt very navel-gazing to me, the point where I thought about not sharing it. The reason is that I know it shows just how much I care what other people think. Do you care what other people think? Do you worry that someone will see something in you and jump to conclusions? * What do you do with your feelings of privilege? Do you express gratitude and leave it at that? Or does your privilege lead you to a sort of survivor’s guilt? I’m trying to find the balance between these two points for myself and would love to hear how others manage it. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

Our 8th grader, D, did a week-long business program at Carleton University back in April. He came home everyday with a new discovery: Carleton’s library! Carleton’s food court! Carleton’s quad! The boy was ready to skip high school and go straight to uni. The campus is tree-lined, picturesque, and easy to get lost in. Or maybe I just think that because I didn’t spend enough time there. The University of Ottawa, where I studied, was twenty minutes away in the heart of downtown Ottawa. What we lost in trees, we made up for in rapid transit stops and nearby shopping malls. My father came to Canada from Egypt in the fall of 1973 to get the entire post, upgrade to a paid subscription. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

I had a completely different post lined up for you this week, but this one was writing itself in my head as I drove the three hours home from a soccer tournament for our little guy. Enjoy! Today is the 3rd day of Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim celebration that commemorates Prophet Abraham’s sacrifice and coincides with the Hajj in Mecca. A had a soccer tournament this past weekend, three hours away, on Saturday, which coincided with the holiest day of our calendar. We packed up the car on Friday afternoon. We drove the scenic route, went to the team dinner, jumped on the bed and struggled to sleep, slathered ourselves with sunscreen and oohed and aahed at the shots and the saves and the dekes and the fancy footwork and the goals. At 3:30 on Saturday afternoon, we were loaded back up and ready for the trek home. The day of Arafah is the 9th day of the last month of the Islamic Calendar, and the pinnacle of the Muslim pilgrimage. Those who aren’t in Mecca are still encouraged to spend it in worship, fasting, praying, reading Quran, making thikr and asking God for forgiveness and goodness. Subscribe for the rest This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

Alice Munro, Canadian literary giant, died on May 13th at age 92. This essay is part of the virtual memorial organized by in her honour. Head over to in about a week to find a curated page of all the tributes. In 8th grade, I applied and was accepted into a specialized arts high school for their creative writing program. My acceptance confirmed my identity as a writer. Perhaps even more importantly at the time, it confirmed my identity as someone who belonged. For the next four years, I took multiple buses across town to get to school, spending two to three hours in transit. I carried a little notebook in my crossbody purse, and a blue fountain pen with which to capture my observations and the snippets of lines I didn’t want to forget. In 1996, when I started high school, literary works by BIPOC authors were not taking the English-speaking world by storm. I cannot remember a single piece we were given to study that told the story of non-white protagonists. Which isn’t to say that I was bothered by the lack of representation. I wasn’t. Rather than wonder if there were books out there with people whose lives more closely mirrored mine, I fretted about why my life looked nothing like theirs. The poems and stories I was assigned were steeped in landscape and wildlife. Lines could be dedicated to describing the way a specific flower bloomed. Pages could be given over to explaining the movement of a fawn in the forest, the specific species of trees it passed, the specific treads on the ground it left, the specific shrubs from which it ate. I would reread these passages religiously, trying to drink in the details, to familiarize myself with the plants and animals. To learn enough about a birch and an oak and a maple and a dogwood that I could write my own paragraphs about them.  But what is and what isn’t political? The story of an Irish immigrant from 1880 written in 1980 is not political, because no one still doubts the Irish immigrant’s humanity. It didn’t work. On my street,  there was a canopy of trees, but I hardly paid attention to the species, only to the shade it gave us and the branches I could climb to look out over the neighbourhood.  The plants I knew intimately were the grape leaves my father picked along the forest path that led to the river, down the street from our house. While I couldn’t tell other tree species apart, I would always pride myself on the ability to distinguish a grape leaf from a maple leaf, mainly by the rounded indentation around the stem.  Baba would come home from his walks and bike rides with plastic grocery bags filled to the brim with these foraged leaves. He would boil and salt them, prepare the filling of rice, chopped parsley and ground beef, spicing it with cumin and black peppers. He would spend his evenings wrapping each boiled leaf around the stuffing to make the little fingers of his favourite Egyptian delicacy. Then we would feast, and the taste of Egypt would be there in our dining room in Ottawa. There were other books, of course, even if they weren’t on my syllabus. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance was published in 1995. It spoke of another country, another set of challenges and difficulties and triumphs. I was wholly unequipped to write about Egypt the way he spoke about India, notwithstanding the fact that he was a master writer and I was just starting out. I, who had spent an accumulated total of 7 months of my life in Egypt, spread over various holidays, couldn’t possibly tell its story. I wanted only to write CanLit, because CanLit was what I was being assigned at school. That particular aesthetic, that story of “sad small towns… or heartwarming ones… of white-bread literature that was mostly about the past, with its sepia-toned covers, all with the back of a woman’s neck on them.” CanLit stories weren’t political. They weren’t about immigrants or their children navigating life in the new country. Or, when they were about immigrants, those immigrants came from Scotland and Ireland, and had arrived no later than 1905. If a language other than English was spoken in CanLit, it was Gaelic or Celtic. If an ocean was crossed, it was the Atlantic.  But what is and what isn’t political? The story of an Irish immigrant from 1880 written in 1980 is not political because no one still doubts the Irish immigrant’s humanity. If that story had been told in real time, it would have raised more eyebrows than something written with the benefit of hindsight. To qualify as apolitical is a luxury, a privilege. Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul laments that “in order for me to write poetry that isn’t political / I must listen to the birds / And in order to hear the birds / The warplanes must be silent.”  In the 10th and 11th grade, I  fell down a Jane Urquhart rabbit hole, reading everything of hers I could get my hands on. Truthfully, I  didn’t understand a single story. The plots were so sparse, so subtle. What I did understand was the mood: serious and intense, not about much of anything at all to my 15 year old mind. Page after page where the landscapes described blankets of snow in the wilderness. Action happening beneath the surface, barely perceptible. Thick, lush forests. Characters who hunted or painted or lived in their cottages year round, away from the city. I read Urquhart with equal parts fascination and dismay. This was what CanLit sounded like, I was certain. But try as I might to emulate it, my heavily researched stories about old artists living in small northern towns fell apart as quickly as I could get them down. Where Urquhart mesmerized with subtlety and minimal action, my imitations did nothing but make me bored and sleepy. Write what you know, my teachers had told me, but every example we read in class had so little to do with what I knew. Every epic family saga traced back to a farm in the prairies or a small town in Scotland, landscapes and rituals I had never seen, a world assumed to be the default for which I had no reference. Discouraged, I turned my attention to another giant in Canadian literature, Alice Munro. Here, I found hope. Munro’s stories, unlike those of Urquhart — or Michael Ondaatje, another writer I was desperate to emulate — were less fussy. For one, I was able to follow the plot without losing myself in the scenery. The prose was elegant but spare. For another, Munro’s characters weren’t all artists and soldiers, or at least, that wasn’t a prerequisite. Munro’s characters were ordinary people. Teachers, wives, sisters. Their concerns might be their boredom, their families, their expectations for life, their money or lack thereof. Alice’s stories – and I call her Alice not out of a lack of reverence but because she made me feel at home in her words – Alice’s stories were concerned with the mundane and the interior, and what made it human.  I have always loved the way Alice’s writing centers women and the challenges we face. But this is where my double consciousness kicks in. Recently, I reread Runaway, the story of a woman named Carla, navigating life with a controlling, emotionally manipulative husband. So much about Carla spoke to me. Her uncertainty and impulsiveness. Her imperfection. The way she cried constantly. The way she sought connection with animals like Flora, the goat that found a home in her barn.  Despite my love for this story, I hesitated to share it, to make it a part of this essay. Why? Because Muslim women are already perceived to be oppressed by the men in our lives. Because someone might wrongly take my mention of Carla’s struggles as a clue leading back to my own life. When there are so few examples of a group in the media, each representation holds inordinate weight. No matter how many times I say I am speaking only for myself, if you’ve never seen another Muslim woman, I have just become an avatar, a projection for millions of other people.  Alice wrote the stories of women before women were common protagonists. In fact, it was her writing that normalized us on the page. I don’t know if she struggled with this issue of representation. If she worried that her impulsive characters might make women seem hysterical or irresponsible. If she did, she pushed through to give us rich layering, to give us CanLit that was universal in its specificity. Even if you didn’t live in a small town in Northern Ontario. Even if you were the daughter of Egyptian immigrants, trying to find yourself in a classroom reading assignment.  I am trying to internalize this lesson. To write my reality because of the mess and humanity, not in spite of it. I am trying to widen what CanLit means so that there is room for stories like mine within it too. This is what Alice taught me. Thank you for reading Letters from a Muslim Woman. I share the joys and challenges of being a visibly Muslim woman in a sometimes-unfriendly world. A special shoutout to our newest paid subscribers, , , and . Thanks so much for the support! A paid subscription is $5 a month and gives you access to my unfinished letters, published every other week. If you’re enjoying my perspective and want to support me, consider upgrading to help me spend more time on writing and share a voice that isn’t often heard. If you can’t commit to a monthly subscription, but still want to support my work, you can buy me a coffee below. It helps me more than you realize. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and Salaams, Before we get to today’s essay, I wanted to say how grateful I am for everyone’s support over the past week. Being told to go back to where you came from is always a shock to the system. Something happened physiologically when I was hit with the hate. My whole self shrunk. My chest tightened and grew heavy, my breathing became quick and shallow. Even though I know better intellectually, even though I know who I am and where I belong. But something also happened physiologically when I responded. I felt my heart opening and expanding, felt the weight on it lift. They say the body keeps the score - I know my body kept it. Being able to write my way through this, and then to have those words be received by so many, has been affirming. I’m so glad to have you all here. Thank you especially to those who’ve shared their own stories in the comment. I want you to know that to me, you are always at home. Recently, I started writing unfinished letters for a more intimate community of paid subscribers every other Tuesday. This is where I share ideas that are more tender or unvarnished. Today’s essay is an unfinished letter about grief and graduation. I’ve included a preview for all subscribers below. Last week, my 18 year old niece, Rania, had her high school graduation. I followed along, awaiting the gorgeous photos and videos my sister Zainab shared to the group chat, the stories she posted to Instagram, pressing the heart down on every one. Rania was my baby before I had my own babies. On days I would stay late at my sister’s apartment, I slept in her room, inches from her crib. I kept a few work-ready outfits in her closet, lined up next to an organizer full of onesies and bibs. On Saturday mornings, bleary-eyed and wanting just 30 more minutes of sleep, I would stay hidden under the blankets, avoiding her curious gaze, until the the little calls of “khalto noosaaaaaa” got too much for me to resist. Upgrade your subscription to get access the rest of the episode. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit nohabeshir.substack.com/subscribe