It was not for lack of effort that Rabi’a Al-Adawiyya never reached Mecca. According to some reports, Rabi’a was enslaved until her owner emancipated her out of shame for keeping in servitude someone who was obviously a friend of God (waliyya). She faced a number of difficulties when she eventually set out on the pilgrimage, difficulties which seem to symbolize the spiritual journey of the aspirant to God. Rabi’a’s donkey dies unexpectedly and seemingly without cause. In characteristic Rabi’a fashion, she vents her frustration to God and proclaims to God that He was denying her the opportunity to serve Him, her only passion in life. If God wants her to drudge through the elements by foot, she will certainly do it.

Some say that if human beings could only give up old ideas of gender, we would experience true freedom and advance to the next frontier of human progress. I’m sure there are plenty of women and men who would feel relieved to throw off their heels and neckties, respectively. But this is hardly the sort of existential freedom that precipitates utopia. People who think this way are only really concerned with what they call the social performance of gender, things like dress, mannerisms, and who opens the door for whom

We’ve all experienced knowing what needs to be done, but feeling like you might not have what it takes. Attaching a prayer to that feeling of overwhelm before it happens or during it might be the lifeline we need to pause and re-center ourselves for the journey.

According to Hisham al-Kalbi, who chronicled the beliefs and practices of the ancient Arabs before Islam, polytheism crept into the culture for one key reason: No one visited the Ka’ba without carrying home one of its stones.

We all know the story of Ta’if. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ delivered the message he was commissioned to and the people, by and large, cruelly rejected it.

In response, he did not engage in self-pity. He also did not deny his feelings of sadness and overwhelm.

Limitations are all we know, and we can only know through our limitations. But a limit is just a tool. Everything that we use for our benefit is limited. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be able to use it. Every hammer has to fit within our grasp for it to be useful. We use limited tools to help us grasp things that would otherwise evade us. Limits make us human. They are the intentional design of God that enables us to experience existence how He desires us to.

I read David Foster Wallace’s speech "This Is Water" as a senior in high school. And, my English teacher must have had a dark sense of humor because after we read and discussed the essay together in class, he handed us a printout from a New York newspaper. Two paragraphs down the article we discover that Mr. Wallace, the author whose thoughts we’d been discussing for the past 30 minutes died by suicide just a year prior.

People ask the question: Should I bring children into such a dismal world?

Here are some thoughts based on Qur'an:

It's interesting to note that "bringing children into the world" figures prominently in the Qur'an (and Bible as well). In Surah Maryam alone, God tells us of the miraculous births of three children.

When things are hectic, it’s easy to lose sight of the end goal. That’s how I was starting to feel along the journey that got us here. The discomfort of moving so quickly and not as we had planned got to me. That is until I saw the out-of-place English style grandfather clock in the hallway of the apartment we’re renting.

Some disbelieve in what they can’t see. They say that things must be proven empirically and scientifically, or else, they can’t be proven at all.

Yet, science itself argues that much of what exists in the world is unseen. These unseen things are detectable through advanced technology yet unperceived by the senses. They are known by their effects. They resist direct observation. How curious.

I felt like God was calling me to "bury" myself so that He could do the private and unseen work of nurturing me. Others were pushing me to sprout and bloom before it was quite right for me. I felt that if I continued to sprout because of outside forces, that I would be a bright but quickly fading star. The bloom would be fragrant, but it wouldn’t last for long. I would be stuck talking about a handful of things I was known for—and I’d be incentivized to do so. I don’t have any regrets about that time. It showed me what I am capable of, and for that I am so grateful.