Alternatively titled: Selected Readings of a Southern Life. Let us start with a discussion about landscapes and memory. If you are from the rural American South, know what the dirt smells like. There are fields to the left, sometimes to the right, and maybe on all sides. I grew up in such a place, at an intersection of a river and familial history where fields and dirt roads determine the boundaries of tradition and ceremony. Big Momma’s house stood at... Read more
From the moment I was admitted to my first psychiatric ward, I was desperate to get out. I hated the smell, the food, most of the staff, the routines, the magazines. I hated the sagging mattresses, the glassless funhouse mirrors, the furniture, the isolation rooms. But as much as I despised the place, there was one saving grace for me there: the other patients. Many had absolute horror stories. Stories of abuse, self-mutilation, combat, rape, starvation. Stories that made this... Read more
A Man’s Chest How come no one ever writes about a man’s chest, that forested mountain and how we love its bluffs and jagged edges and the crags in it where a woman can hide and forget the city and be safe from every fanged and clawed creature? How come no one ever writes about a man’s belly that smooth river and how limpid are its waters running low, where a woman can wade barefoot like a Gypsy? (more…) Read more
Love, Inshallah Author Interview: Melody Moezzi, Haldol to Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life Narrated and produced by Deonna Kelli Sayed DKS: In the 2011 anthology, Love, Inshallah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, Melody Moezzi wrote about her struggle with chronic physical illness and how her husband provided love, support, and compassion. Melody’s latest book-length work, Haldol to Hyacinths: A Bipolar Life, is a deeply personal, often humorous memoir that explores her journey with Bipolar 1 Disorder and how... Read more
Bless the lips of women who recite the word of their Lord, and bless the ears of all who are comforted by the recitation. http://youtu.be/QJ05yNYmFrk For the first time, a woman, Usthadha Tahera Ahmad, Associate University Chaplain and Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University, opened the main hall session of the 50th Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention on Aug 30th, 2013 with recitation of the Holy Quran. Alhamdullilah. Read more
When The Love, Inshallah call for submissions found its way into my email inbox, I had just finished the draft of a memoir inspired by strikingly similar ideas. I, too, believed in the power of love stories to challenge stereotypes about Muslim women. At the time, however, I was still fiercely committed to the advice of writing with the door closed. Digging through the memories that became my memoir had been emotionally if not physically volatile. I cringed and shook... Read more
The first Muslim wedding I attended was my own. When I was twenty-seven and working in New York City, I connected with a fellow Georgetown Law grad. He had a first name I’d never heard before, a Mustang I hated, and an apartment near the Long Island Sound where he took me the first time I visited. Standing in front of the salty sea, I was filled with the overwhelming conviction that I wanted to stay. When we got engaged,... Read more
Love is poetic, rapturous, and inspiring. If you haven’t seen this wonderful poem from spoken-word artist, Neil Hilborn, this is the Friday to do it. He speaks candidly, heartbreakingly, about his Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and the woman who first loves him in spite of it, and then leaves him because of it. It is refreshing to hear a man reveal his vulnerability in his love for a woman. (more…) Read more
Ten Considerations when Searching for the One “I’m afraid of getting married,” she told me. She, like the countless other women who had approached me, confessed what she thought was unique to her. “I’m constantly told by older married women that I should enjoy my life being single because marriage is a burden. I’ve never seen an example of a happy marriage. My married friends call me to complain about their husbands and ask me for advice. How am I... Read more
Love, InshAllah
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