Light Upon Light: A Collection of Letters on Life, Love and God

Mostly written while she was traveling, living and studying in Malaysia, South Africa and Yemen, Light Upon Light is a heartfelt and sincere conversation, sprinkled with humor and self-doubt, on the challenges of a modern-day Muslimah.

Rest. Read. Reflect. What is He trying to tell you?

We live in a time where it is normal to think that everyone is out to take something from us.

We go to school thinking we are educating ourselves, when in fact we are being pressed to become unthinking citizens. We work for companies that care nothing about our well-being, but only for their own gains. We wash our minds daily with content spewed out by media conglomerates who do not care for the quality of our lives, but only for the quantity of their profits.

So. if since young we are exposed to a global culture that by and large aims to take as much as possible from the other, it is not surprising that we find ourselves clutching on to whatever we perceive is left of our “selves”.

Allah…

I remember a conversation I had with Shaykh Ebrahim. He mentioned that the more religion becomes one’s identity, the less it is an agent of transformation and change. I was puzzled; shouldn’t Islam be one’s identity if one is to become a true Muslim?

He smiled, and said (I paraphrase), “When you think of Islam as an identity, you are, in fact, associating your ideas of what Muslims need to be. When a person has to be a certain way — and no other — then the identity becomes heavy, and thus the religion, becomes heavy. Religion is meant to transform us, and to transform, we need to be light.”

The world today is filled with people who cling on to theiridentities with all their might, thinking that everyone else is out to get them. In the Muslim world, all of us form certain ideas of how Islam and Muslims should be. Because we form our identities around these ideas — and our identities are after all the only possession we have left that is within “our control” — we find ourselves rejecting all other thoughts different from ours, even if they are derived from the Qur’an, Sunnah, ijma’ of the ‘Ulama, and through qiyyas.

Four years ago when I first returned to Islam, I dressed myself in a certain “Islamic” way, became almost tyrannical protecting my notion of what Islam is, and in the process, became extremely judgmental of others… whether or not I realised it. In the words of my best friend, “You were so over-bearing with your religiousity and your beliefs; it was hard for me to be with you.”

And it showed (even if I was too blind to see it then) — for my first two years on campus, I barely made any new friends; I was too “heavy” to be around.

A few weeks ago I attended a class on fiqh meant for the general public. During the class, the ustadh began to criticise other groups that had a different understanding of the religion, and he started to openly mock the actions of some people in the class… all the while sharing the “rightfulness” of his Islam.

By the end of the class, I found out that many had withdrawn from it — even those who who were “new” to the religion and wanted to truly learn.

The truth is that the world today is filled with broken hearts (mine inclusive). Whether we realise it or not, our hearts long for the nourishment of the Light and the moment of unity with the True Love.

When we, as a people, hold on to our identities and force our identities upon others, we are breaking more hearts as we subconsciously look down upon them. We too are hurting them as we force them into square holes despite the various shapes and sizes they come in. In this way we dilute Islam into an identity — our identity — instead of allowing it to be the powerful tool of change and transformation that it is.

The alternative to this is to look beyond our selves — or our so-called identities — and to start looking into souls. We need to see not just the shape and manifestation of things, but to see the underlying meanings of each. In this world where everyone is out to take from the other, we need to surrender our own agenda, and to learn to truly give.

And in moments we manage to do this, broken hearts get mended… and broken hearts begin to love.