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Muslimah at a Public Pool
This is where your invisibility stands out at its starkest. Where teenagers snog in bikinis with recently-inked tattoos in styles that will go out before the summer does, fitness fanatics show off...
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Post-Ramadan Ramblings
Between long fasts and temperatures that hit 50 degrees Celsius here, its been an intense month. Although I haven’t been able to fast (Cavebaby is only just four months old and is fully breastfed), so...
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Shamanism
Poetry is shamanism for people who have lost the hang of it whose bond has been severed by the glass-shard-sharp edge of brutality or lost in the muddle of forgetting abandoned in a frenzy of updating...
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Andalusi Calligraphy: Here’s How You Learn More
The first time I saw Andalusi calligraphy I was hooked on the exaggerated curve of the ‘ayn, the large swooping nuun like a crane dipping down to a river for water, the zigzag kaf, the boxes and...
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Afterbirth
The carob seedling that took two years to grow two feet was planted over half of the placenta that took nine months and eleven days to develop and forty minutes to birth into a bucket, so dense with...
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Hidden Under the Things They Grasped
They carried a plague on their fingers when they went to seek gold and sell guns took a ruler and pen to a map birthed nations by caesarean sliced human terrain in hot places where their germs settled...
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Cleaning the Jungle
cavemum:One of the most thoughtful frontline accounts of the Calais Jungle. Originally posted on rosbayeswriting: Photograph courtesy of Viv Dawes, http://vivdawes.wix.com/vividpictures From the first...
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Duff Eid Trauma
It all starts so well: the night before the celebration, everyone is excitedly ringing family members with their Eid Mubaraks, kids are fantasising about presents (if they haven’t persuaded their...
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West is Not a Direction
Map on gazelle skin dated 1513 CE by Turkish navigator Piri Reis West is not a direction It’s a limo on a dirty Bombay street an architecture masters from the university of Madrid hanging on a wall in...
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The Mother With No Mind
The angle he sees me at makes me all triangles jawbone, earlobe, nose elbows everywhere A table is an overhanging rock on a wind-bitten mountain path the room a cave cathedral with electric stalactites...
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The Inner Baby and Tweetaholism
It seems I have been singing so many qasidas* lately that new depths of my own vanity, ambition, immaturity, wounded pride and overall silliness are being clarified, like ghee simmering over a low...
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After Paris: What to Do With The Grief
Having spent the last three days glued to screens, viewing hundreds of people’s responses to the Paris attacks – expressions of grief, solidarity, outrage, hatred at the perpetrators (and...
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Like Gardener’s Hands on Silk
I am all elbows leaning on ledges strangers’ shoulders eyelids falling involuntarily after nights fractured by screams as gums are lacerated slowly by a knife tip tooth My corners catch on everyone...
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Muslim women scholars of Islam, the question of qualifications, and...
Source: Muslim women scholars of Islam, the question of qualifications, and romanticized images of the “Islamic tradition”
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Fires of Regret and Relief
You sleep curled in a hungry embrace filling the space your father left her lips pressed to your forehead eclipse the absence of his kiss she strokes your hair and forgets the hand that would sting if...
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Hiatus in the Reasoning Mind
When they pulled us out through the broken side window the one I smashed with my cheek as the car behind hit ours – oh my God oh my God oh my God – I saw a couple in their late 30s, perhaps, soft,...
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Empty Chairs
The empty chairs are not empty they are fuller than before when her husband the father of her four children did not yet have seaweed in his hair eyes salted shut no: he is still there her heart ripped...
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Love is a Traveller…For Sale Online Now!
It gives me great pleasure to announce that my first collection of poems is now available to buy online here! According to the publisher, Daniel ‘Abdal-Hayy Moore at Ecstatic Exchange: “With Medina...
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Lone Wolves
Running is falling when fear’s at your heels Good men turn lone wolves in failure’s mirror It’s safe on the hills but one day they’ll ask Where he was when mama cried while she cooked Until shocks ran...
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