“When a culture focuses on the outer aspects of a faith—like a headscarf—their religion just becomes about identity,” Akram cautions. “At the end of the day, people are carrying a dead body, with no soul.” Go back to the sources, back to your prayer mats, and make your faith your own, he counseled. Don’t do what everyone else does. Read. Think. Brush off the dust of tradition, and with it the certainties of your ancestors. True worship requires one to look past burqas, beards, and sharia laws, which too often are just the props, not piety itself. True worship was taqwa, consciousness of the
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