A Place for Us

by Fatima Farheen Mirza

What was it about an apology that was so difficult? It always felt like it cost something personal and precious. Only now that she was a mother was she so aware of this: the stubbornness and pride that came with being human, the desire to be loyal and generous that came too, each impulse at odds with the other.

“Living is interesting enough. Don’t make the mistake of confusing a sad state with an interesting life.”

She could hold in her heart a belief in Islam as well as the unwavering belief that every human had the right to choose who they loved, and how, and that belief was in exact accordance with her faith: that it is the individual’s right to choose, and the individual’s duty to empathize with one another. Didn’t the Quran itself contain the verse, We have created you from many tribes, so that you may know one another.

Theirs was a love that acknowledged the individual as separate from the whole, from the family as a unit.

What use was a life lived out of fear of hellfire and nothing else? He thought: if the fires exist and I am to burn, let me burn for my own actions rather than force me to behave another way and be saved by a lie.

Even if it was just sympathy, the least personal of investments.

The Prophet was the leader of the entire ummah, his every action an example, but when his grandson climbed his back, he had bent the rules, and what if it had been because it was more important to protect a child from pain than to be unwavering in principle?

They have enlarged my life in a way I could not have anticipated and cannot fully express. I have no duty toward them except loving them, and because of this I am only loved in return. I am so unwilling to hurt them in even the slightest way that I spoil them instead.

But I have looked up at this sky since I was a child and I have always been stirred, in the most secret depth of me that I alone cannot access, and if that is not my soul awakening to the majesty of my creator then what is it?