Eid Mubarak Again!

Greetings, salutations, and Eid Mubarak! I hope that you all have had a wonderful Eid. This year, because Eid falls on a Tuesday so close to Thanksgiving, we had the day off before and now we are back to school the day after. Leaving one day for fun-filled celebration is just exhausting!

Last week, our Islamic School had its Hajj Day production. Basically, they set up all of the checkpoints of the Hajj journey(a moc-Kabbah, Safa and Marwa, tent city, Arafat, throwing the stones, ZemZem water etc.), and the children go through the motions – mimicking the Hajj so that they will learn the steps, and they will have a better understanding of Eid ul Adha and why we celebrate this event.

Because this is such a large undertaking and our school is one of the largest in the area, I was blessed with many orders for Hajj Day outfits. It was a gauntlet to get them all done in time for the parents and the students to feel relaxed and prepared, but with the help and understanding of my husband and children, we were able to have all of them finished on time.

I’ve also just finished reading the novel Butterfly Mosque by G. Willow Wilson.  (Thank you to UmmLayla for suggesting the book to me.)

This book is a biographical account of Willow’s reversion and the story of how she met her husband.  Of course it has the love story, but it also has the honest talk of how hard it was for Willow to accept that the beliefs she had had all her life were Islamic, and she didn’t know it until learning about the religion.  It was a very good, fast read, and had I had more free time, it would have been finished in a day. 

Once I finished the book, I wanted to go search out Willow and send her an email, thanking her for writing her book.  I wanted to invite her over for tea and talk to her about her story some more.  I wanted to know more about her.  I still may do that.  But now it’s got me thinking and wondering, how many other American women (or men) were Muslim before they really knew that there was an organized religion that encompassed what they believed?