NaPoWriMo Day 27: The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

NaPoWriMo Day 27

The Pen is Mightier than the Sword

by Ruqaiyah Davids

The distant sound of your treachery
Rudely shakes me out of my reverie.
My life is in jeopardy.
The story told
Is a fable old.
You’ve lost me again in your conspiracy.
True, this!
I am lost in the abyss
Of your lies and your myths.
Ignorance indeed seems like bliss.

The pen is mightier than the sword
And the lies you write have me floored.
And for the record,
This ending has already been told.
Unequivocal.
Not radical—
It’s emphatical.

Mightier than the sword
Is the Promise of my Lord.
The truth is a whisper
While your lies roar.
But hold on,
Just wait.
No, we won’t retaliate.
We won’t duplicate
And replicate
All your lies and hate.
We’ll only try to educate,
And abrogate
Your inaccurate and distorted
Version of this story.
And we’ll restore our glory—
No, not by the sword,
But by the Pen of our Lord.

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Image in My Head

So, if you’ve followed my blog posts recently, you’ll know what’s been foremost on my mind over the past couple of months. Can you guess it? Can you?? There’s a special prize to the first reader to get it right. Come on, you can do it!! (Uhm… just give me some time to figure out what the prize is going to be.)

So, the answer is ‘change’, and in the spirit of change, I wrote a poem a while ago. The poem is about who I want to be, in-shaa-Allah (Allah-willing), since I am constantly a work in progress. It is an incomplete poem, I am still working on the second half (There is actually an unintended pun in that 😛 When you eventually see the second half of the poem you’ll probably get the pun :D). Please read it and share your thoughts with me.

Image in My Head

I have an image in my head

Of the type of woman I want it to be said

I was.

The type of woman who,

To good deeds and righteousness,

Had sped.

The type of woman who,

For fear and love of her Lord,

Tears she had shed.

I have an image in my head

Of a woman who is so well-bred

That she doesn’t allow herself to be misled

By the evil one whom we all dread.

She is a woman who wouldn’t dare tread

The sins of the poisonous arrowhead.

She wouldn’t allow

The goodness of her soul to be shred,

Nor the love in her heart to be bled.

She is a woman well-read

In the verses that her Lord had said.

A woman whose arms are outspread

To the orphans and the poor,

The ones her Prophet

SallAllahi ‘alayhi wa Sallam*

Had told her to hold near.

I have an image in my head

Of a woman—

Chaste

And with grace.

One who has never, before marriage, been embraced.

A woman who does not, her own value, misplace.

-Ruqaiyah Davids

* SallAllahi ‘alayhi wa Sallam – May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him

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What image do you have in your head about the person you want to be? Or are you already that person? Tell me a bit about this person.

Love, As We Know It

I’ve never before fully understood how love really works. Growing up, I loved my mom, my dad, my sisters and my brother. I loved them because they were my family. I loved them because I had to–as cold as that sounds, it is the truth. I didn’t know what ‘love’ meant, I just fell into it (excuse the unintended pun). Being the last born, I just had all these people in my life, and I had no choice in the matter. Love was compulsory. Even while hating them and fighting with them, I loved them. Later in my life, though, I met some people, some amazing women. And I love them–I love them with a love so strong that, almost from as soon as we met, we stopped being strangers and became sisters. A sister–a woman who I had just met! Can you imagine that? And what’s more is that, this love that I have for them, it’s not the kind of love that I just ‘fell’ into like I did with the sisters and brother I was born loving; this is a love for the sake of Allah. Now, for a long time, this was mind-boggling to me. Love for the sake of Allah. Love for the sake of anything other than ‘I-love-you-just-because’ seemed unfair to me. Why should I be loved for someone else’s sake, and not just because I am great and amazing and loveable all on my own? I was jealous. I’ve always been a selfish person when it comes to love. But do you know what makes this jealousy even more ridiculous? I was jealous of Allah! That is downright laughable! SubhaanAllah (Glory be to Allah). What kind of silly do you have to be to be jealous of your own Creator, the Creator of Love itself? But the only reason that I was jealous was because I didn’t understand what it meant to love and to be loved for the sake of my Lord.

After much pondering on the matter, I eventually understood. To love for the sake of Allah is to love someone because you love Him, it is to love those who love Him and because they love Him. Love for the sake of Allah is not selfish and it is not about the individual, it is not about loving someone because of what that person brings into your life, superficially, or because of how great and amazing and loveable that person might be. Ultimately, it is about loving Allah. If we love Allah, we love those who love Him and those whom He loves, without expectation and without discrimination. A love borne out of a love for Him only strengthens the relationship between two people, and that relationship, in turn, serves to strengthen your love and your relationship with Allah. It is a beautiful cycle, indeed. A love like this ends up being a form of worship, subhaanAllah. Can you imagine that just loving someone for the sake of Allah is a form of worshipping Allah?

So, last night, my love for these women, whom I love as sisters, sent my blood pumping through my body. We met for supper, (almost) the whole gang of us (after each of us being absorbed by our own separate lives for far too long) and it was amazing to be reminded of why I love these women so much, and to be reminded of how indescribably blessed I am to have them all in my life. Our sisterhood was founded on a Divine Love, and it is only because of this love that it works. We’re all different–different personalities, different ages, different stories–but we’re bound by one, single Love.

Abu Hurayra (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that the Messenger of Allah (may the Peace and Blessings of Allah be upon him) said:

 “Allah Almighty will say on the Day of Rising, ‘Where  are those who loved one another for the sake of My Majesty? Today, on the Day  when there is no shade but My Shade, I will shade them.'” [Muslim]

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What is your understanding of love?