Just want to say, that in addition to reading Noha’s wonderful essays every week, the thoughtfulness that she puts into each response to a comment is just as beautiful to read 😊.
This essay has so much love and information for me, a non-Muslim. I’m thinking about how to best support my Muslim students during Ramadan. Maybe let them take that nap in class :)
Jenna that's amazing! Thank you for being THAT teacher. Some ideas:
-Let them stay in at recess if they want, to take a nap.
-Let them skip gym.
-Let them go somewhere else (library? quiet room?) over lunch and snack breaks.
-check the dates of when course work is due / exams are happening to avoid the end of Ramadan/Eid. So often, my kids have had special events or big tests scheduled on Eid and it's very disruptive. Teachers will agree to move it just for them, but that's often complicated and it would be so much easier if the test date was just moved for everyone, when possible.
-Ask them if there's any specific things they'd like - your students might have specific ideas but be too shy to share them.
Wow! Thanks for this!! I’m a high school teacher, and have already made sure that the days around Eid don’t have any major assignments or new learning. I’ll open up my class for nap time during lunch though :)
Another valuable advance in my education. Thanks Noha. And the below was so beautiful, truly a parent's dream scenario and something I bet your boys will remember forever.
"Again and again, I asked the boys if they’d rather go up to their beds. Every time the answer came back a resounding “no”. It was a worship-focused sleepover with Mama. There was a novelty to being together alone, past midnight, in our conversations with God. I can see them in my minds-eye, curled up on the mattresses, blankets pulled to their chins, prayer beads inches from their heads."
I'm so glad you enjoyed it, David. I think, I hope, they will remember it forever. I expect there'll be impromptu worship-focused sleepovers on weekends we can't make it to the mosque some days this year too, so hopefully we'll continue to build those memories...
Good morning, Noha! What a gorgeous, evocative, fully immersive essay to start my day. Thank you. This sentence is probably the most tender and joyful affection of love from a mother to a child that I've read. Lucky you! “There was a little song she’d sing to wake us up. I can still hear her voice, remember the words as she’d gently shake us awake and hold the sandwich inches from our mouths, the smell rousing us from sleep.”
During the pandemic, I was taking postoperative chemotherapy. I'm not going to sugar-coat it — the isolation was brutal for me and my husband. But as the world fell apart, we grew closer than we'd been since we married twelve years prior. Holidays and birthdays were simple affairs mostly because I was relearning to eat after a massive abdominal resection — food was a non-issue (for me). My husband learned to cook. Haha. Interestingly, I'd spent two decades working in the food industry, and during lockdown, I had a major shift in perspective. The change was not only necessary (away from cookbook writing and speaking) but also essential and life-changing. I prayed a lot then. Still do. This brings me to say I admire your practices and rituals and love learning more about you and your cultures. I don't often comment but I always read. Have a beautiful, blessed Ramadan Noha.
Maureen, I'm so glad you enjoyed it and I'm so appreciative of you sharing your story. Postoperative chemotherapy on top of the isolation sounds brutal, but it also sounds like you and your husband leaned into your love and companionship in a way that brought you peace and contentment, or at least helped to stave off the isolation.
Thank you for being here and for reading - I so appreciate you!
This piece is full of beauty and magic. I love the way you contrasted shifting and making yourself small in the ordinary (non-pandemic) world; but that when you had to go inward, your family found an expansive, underground place to pray and return to your shared mystery and mythology. Your writing gives me a strong sense that those private, quiet years--while so lonesome and frustrating at times--will also be so firmly cemented in your boys' sense of family. And their faith, too.
It was such a surreal time, Isabel. Overall, I look back and I found it so painful, but when I deconstruct it, there were so many beautiful, quiet, slow moments and hours and days that anchored us in our little family unit. A forced reflection period we had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards.
I feel the same way. We moved out of our apartment to live with my mom who (thank godness) had a bigger space, with a yard. And every morning I would hide in the bathroom reading Eckhart Tolle so I could just get my head into "staying present" because otherwise the long, grey, claustrophobic days were almost unbearable. And YET there were so many bright spots and I'm confident those will be what the boys remember.
OMG the hiding in the bathroom. I love love love my family but I reached a point where I just needed to not see the same faces again and again. I craved a different landscape, a different set of faces to look at, just some form of stimulation.
The first few weeks, our province set up actual physical checkpoints along the highway to limit movement not just between provinces (we were living on the edge of the Quebec line of the Ontario Quebec border, in the same metropolitan area - think of NY/NJ). They went beyond that: they closed off the roads from quarter to quarter within the province. Being that we were in a little village, we couldn't even go to bigger town next to us IN QUEBEC to do our groceries. The world felt unbelievably small.
I had the most vivid dreams during that time. Just screaming with colour and light and sound, and then I'd wake up and I'd see the same grey spring sky, washed out in front of me. I remember telling my husband, I think the dreams are my brain's way of exposing me to some form of visual stimulation because I cannot just see the same 10 roads again and again.
The yard was a Godsend. It was big enough for the boys to play (alone) and us to join them every so often. I'd take these long naps on the couch out on the patio, bring out a blanket and just sleep in the sun during my lunch break as soon as it was warm enough. And that was lovely. When we finally started interacting with other people, they'd have friends over in the yard but no one would come inside. What a life.
I especially loved the tender words of nostalgia for your mom’s sweet devotion and care and how you braided that together with all the ways you shared your devotedness with your children when you could not gather in community 💕
Thank you so much, Allison. I thought about sharing her actual song, in Arabic, but it's a) in Arabic, and b) just this adorable little jingle she made up that stuck in my head. I like to think I got my silliness and my impromptu love-showing from my mom. I'm glad her sweetness and devotion shone through even without the actual song.
I appreciate, probably more than I can say, these glimpses into your home, into what’s precious to you and yours, into your heart and into your beliefs. Knowing each other like this is what the world needs more of. Thank you for sharing, Noha.
Holly, reading these words means so much to me. I couldn't agree more that we need more closeness, more humanity, more humanization. Thank you so much for always making room for me.
I’ve enjoyed various types of fasting periods annually for spiritual connection/re-connection since I was in middle school. To be of the spirit and not of the flesh is so hard but worth it and taught me how to dig deep to find the willpower to continue on. We’re finishing a fast of our own this month and wow I feel immensely closer. It’s been easier to do this time because we’re “hibernating” and have removed ourselves fully off social media to isolate. So sorta like how the panorama was. Thank you for sharing your heart always!
OMG moving off social media seems so much harder to me than fasting!
But I do hope to spend less time on social media during Ramadan - that's a good goal and one I should definitely aspire to. I expect I'll find time to read Quran and pray more if I'm not scrolling. Thank you for the motivation.
We came off IG, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok on New Year’s Eve and won’t go back on until after spring equinox (maybe?). Life changing! I found Substack in January because of my new free time so I could read more long form stories like yours. 10/10 recommend. I believe in you 🫶🏾
I would say the only thing that is stopping me from jumping off is the fact that social media is one of the few ways of sharing info on the genocide in Gaza, which I feel a duty to do in order to share awareness and hopefully change the situation for the people on the ground. Maybe what I'll do is limit myself to a window of time to use it. Even that will lessen my online footprint intensely.
How lovely of an essay...and oh so timely. I have spent the past 6 months going through a deep dive of every book of the Bible from an Eastern perspective (being, I grew up in Western culture, I have learned about the Bible and God through that lens).
I can say that I have been blown away by the context of the Bible, the context of the people and situations of the Bible, and how context means everything.
Your essay speaks directly to what I have been immersed in over 2023 and 2024.
Thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing your story with us!
Jordan thank you so much for your comment. I'm so glad it resonated. Yes, it's so interesting to think about the Bible, and the Abrahamic religions, from an Eastern perspective. There's a wealth of information, literature, and scholarship there. I think people often look at the Middle East and assume it's monolithic and all Muslim but there is a wealth of diversity of culture, faith, spiritual tradition, and philosophy there. You may also enjoy my piece on the "flattening of the minority identity" - it's behind a paywall but I believe you can opt for a 7 day free trial if you're interested. https://nohabeshir.substack.com/p/muslim-in-3d-looking-beyond-faith
If it doesn't give you that option and you'd like to read it for free, let me know and I'll comp you a week or month.
The other thing is thinking of the Quran in the context of not just the Judeo-Christian tradition, but thinking about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition. The stories in the Old and New Testament are also in the Quran. It's all part of the same tradition and we share so much in common, and I think that recognizing that is something that could bring us closer together.
I love the paragraph of your mother laboring in the morning to prepare your stomachs with food for the day. The transition how you become your mother is so beautiful to see- you are such a wonderful mother. When I read this I’m reminded of the responsibility God has given us as parents to lead our children to him- we are their first shepherds.
The pandemic was when I grew closer to God as well. Forced to find the time and place to commune with God on my on terms. There’s something a lot more intimate that happened during that time it’s hard to get back too. I think in the backdrop of people being sick, and the ever present feeling of isolation, made us cling to him more.
Enjoyed this so much. To learn about these aspects through someone I care about, you, feels like truly a gift.
Marc, I love that sentiment of parents having the responsibility as their children's first shepherds, and I couldn't agree more. It's an enormous responsibility, and one I sometimes find overwhelming. But then I remember that our job is to lead them and show them love and pray for them, but that they are, at the end of the day, their own people who will make their own decisions.
The pandemic definitely brought me closer to God too. It was the first Ramadan I succeeded in reading the Quran from start to finish (this is something a lot of Muslims attempt during Ramadan but I had always lapsed with the rush of life, until that year). I think like you said, having so much sickness around helped me see this world for what it really is, the worldly life, not the eternal life. The Prophet tells us to go to the cemeteries and visit the sick often. I think part of that is to remind us of the fleeting nature of this life in which it's so easy to get caught up...
Noha - I loved reading this. I grew up in Wisconsin and your descriptions of folding tables and aluminum trays remind me so much of the iftars I attended as a kid. It also makes me want to go to Taraweeh, I've been working a lot but will make time next week. Thanks for the inspiration/reminder. Keep writing please!
Just want to say, that in addition to reading Noha’s wonderful essays every week, the thoughtfulness that she puts into each response to a comment is just as beautiful to read 😊.
awwwww that is so kind - thank you for that.
Agree!!!
This essay has so much love and information for me, a non-Muslim. I’m thinking about how to best support my Muslim students during Ramadan. Maybe let them take that nap in class :)
Jenna that's amazing! Thank you for being THAT teacher. Some ideas:
-Let them stay in at recess if they want, to take a nap.
-Let them skip gym.
-Let them go somewhere else (library? quiet room?) over lunch and snack breaks.
-check the dates of when course work is due / exams are happening to avoid the end of Ramadan/Eid. So often, my kids have had special events or big tests scheduled on Eid and it's very disruptive. Teachers will agree to move it just for them, but that's often complicated and it would be so much easier if the test date was just moved for everyone, when possible.
-Ask them if there's any specific things they'd like - your students might have specific ideas but be too shy to share them.
Wow! Thanks for this!! I’m a high school teacher, and have already made sure that the days around Eid don’t have any major assignments or new learning. I’ll open up my class for nap time during lunch though :)
15 year old me is crying at the sense of being seen. What I would have given for a teacher who let me nap in her office at lunch ♥️♥️♥️
Another valuable advance in my education. Thanks Noha. And the below was so beautiful, truly a parent's dream scenario and something I bet your boys will remember forever.
"Again and again, I asked the boys if they’d rather go up to their beds. Every time the answer came back a resounding “no”. It was a worship-focused sleepover with Mama. There was a novelty to being together alone, past midnight, in our conversations with God. I can see them in my minds-eye, curled up on the mattresses, blankets pulled to their chins, prayer beads inches from their heads."
I thought that, too, David—how the boys will forever have that memory with them.
I'm so glad you enjoyed it, David. I think, I hope, they will remember it forever. I expect there'll be impromptu worship-focused sleepovers on weekends we can't make it to the mosque some days this year too, so hopefully we'll continue to build those memories...
Good morning, Noha! What a gorgeous, evocative, fully immersive essay to start my day. Thank you. This sentence is probably the most tender and joyful affection of love from a mother to a child that I've read. Lucky you! “There was a little song she’d sing to wake us up. I can still hear her voice, remember the words as she’d gently shake us awake and hold the sandwich inches from our mouths, the smell rousing us from sleep.”
During the pandemic, I was taking postoperative chemotherapy. I'm not going to sugar-coat it — the isolation was brutal for me and my husband. But as the world fell apart, we grew closer than we'd been since we married twelve years prior. Holidays and birthdays were simple affairs mostly because I was relearning to eat after a massive abdominal resection — food was a non-issue (for me). My husband learned to cook. Haha. Interestingly, I'd spent two decades working in the food industry, and during lockdown, I had a major shift in perspective. The change was not only necessary (away from cookbook writing and speaking) but also essential and life-changing. I prayed a lot then. Still do. This brings me to say I admire your practices and rituals and love learning more about you and your cultures. I don't often comment but I always read. Have a beautiful, blessed Ramadan Noha.
Maureen, I'm so glad you enjoyed it and I'm so appreciative of you sharing your story. Postoperative chemotherapy on top of the isolation sounds brutal, but it also sounds like you and your husband leaned into your love and companionship in a way that brought you peace and contentment, or at least helped to stave off the isolation.
Thank you for being here and for reading - I so appreciate you!
3. No I don’t celebrate Ramadan so I enjoy hearing your perspective! I pray God will reveal Himself to you this Ramadan
This piece is full of beauty and magic. I love the way you contrasted shifting and making yourself small in the ordinary (non-pandemic) world; but that when you had to go inward, your family found an expansive, underground place to pray and return to your shared mystery and mythology. Your writing gives me a strong sense that those private, quiet years--while so lonesome and frustrating at times--will also be so firmly cemented in your boys' sense of family. And their faith, too.
It was such a surreal time, Isabel. Overall, I look back and I found it so painful, but when I deconstruct it, there were so many beautiful, quiet, slow moments and hours and days that anchored us in our little family unit. A forced reflection period we had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards.
I feel the same way. We moved out of our apartment to live with my mom who (thank godness) had a bigger space, with a yard. And every morning I would hide in the bathroom reading Eckhart Tolle so I could just get my head into "staying present" because otherwise the long, grey, claustrophobic days were almost unbearable. And YET there were so many bright spots and I'm confident those will be what the boys remember.
OMG the hiding in the bathroom. I love love love my family but I reached a point where I just needed to not see the same faces again and again. I craved a different landscape, a different set of faces to look at, just some form of stimulation.
The first few weeks, our province set up actual physical checkpoints along the highway to limit movement not just between provinces (we were living on the edge of the Quebec line of the Ontario Quebec border, in the same metropolitan area - think of NY/NJ). They went beyond that: they closed off the roads from quarter to quarter within the province. Being that we were in a little village, we couldn't even go to bigger town next to us IN QUEBEC to do our groceries. The world felt unbelievably small.
I had the most vivid dreams during that time. Just screaming with colour and light and sound, and then I'd wake up and I'd see the same grey spring sky, washed out in front of me. I remember telling my husband, I think the dreams are my brain's way of exposing me to some form of visual stimulation because I cannot just see the same 10 roads again and again.
The yard was a Godsend. It was big enough for the boys to play (alone) and us to join them every so often. I'd take these long naps on the couch out on the patio, bring out a blanket and just sleep in the sun during my lunch break as soon as it was warm enough. And that was lovely. When we finally started interacting with other people, they'd have friends over in the yard but no one would come inside. What a life.
This is so gorgeous Noha!
I especially loved the tender words of nostalgia for your mom’s sweet devotion and care and how you braided that together with all the ways you shared your devotedness with your children when you could not gather in community 💕
Thank you so much, Allison. I thought about sharing her actual song, in Arabic, but it's a) in Arabic, and b) just this adorable little jingle she made up that stuck in my head. I like to think I got my silliness and my impromptu love-showing from my mom. I'm glad her sweetness and devotion shone through even without the actual song.
The love-showing sings on the page when you write. A perfect melody! Thanks for sharing it with us all.
I appreciate, probably more than I can say, these glimpses into your home, into what’s precious to you and yours, into your heart and into your beliefs. Knowing each other like this is what the world needs more of. Thank you for sharing, Noha.
Holly, reading these words means so much to me. I couldn't agree more that we need more closeness, more humanity, more humanization. Thank you so much for always making room for me.
I’ve enjoyed various types of fasting periods annually for spiritual connection/re-connection since I was in middle school. To be of the spirit and not of the flesh is so hard but worth it and taught me how to dig deep to find the willpower to continue on. We’re finishing a fast of our own this month and wow I feel immensely closer. It’s been easier to do this time because we’re “hibernating” and have removed ourselves fully off social media to isolate. So sorta like how the panorama was. Thank you for sharing your heart always!
OMG moving off social media seems so much harder to me than fasting!
But I do hope to spend less time on social media during Ramadan - that's a good goal and one I should definitely aspire to. I expect I'll find time to read Quran and pray more if I'm not scrolling. Thank you for the motivation.
We came off IG, Facebook, Reddit and TikTok on New Year’s Eve and won’t go back on until after spring equinox (maybe?). Life changing! I found Substack in January because of my new free time so I could read more long form stories like yours. 10/10 recommend. I believe in you 🫶🏾
This is fantastic!
I would say the only thing that is stopping me from jumping off is the fact that social media is one of the few ways of sharing info on the genocide in Gaza, which I feel a duty to do in order to share awareness and hopefully change the situation for the people on the ground. Maybe what I'll do is limit myself to a window of time to use it. Even that will lessen my online footprint intensely.
And that is incredibly important work to do so very understandable, Gaza must never be forgotten
🙏🏽🙏🏽
Noha,
How lovely of an essay...and oh so timely. I have spent the past 6 months going through a deep dive of every book of the Bible from an Eastern perspective (being, I grew up in Western culture, I have learned about the Bible and God through that lens).
I can say that I have been blown away by the context of the Bible, the context of the people and situations of the Bible, and how context means everything.
Your essay speaks directly to what I have been immersed in over 2023 and 2024.
Thank you for being so vulnerable and sharing your story with us!
Jordan thank you so much for your comment. I'm so glad it resonated. Yes, it's so interesting to think about the Bible, and the Abrahamic religions, from an Eastern perspective. There's a wealth of information, literature, and scholarship there. I think people often look at the Middle East and assume it's monolithic and all Muslim but there is a wealth of diversity of culture, faith, spiritual tradition, and philosophy there. You may also enjoy my piece on the "flattening of the minority identity" - it's behind a paywall but I believe you can opt for a 7 day free trial if you're interested. https://nohabeshir.substack.com/p/muslim-in-3d-looking-beyond-faith
If it doesn't give you that option and you'd like to read it for free, let me know and I'll comp you a week or month.
The other thing is thinking of the Quran in the context of not just the Judeo-Christian tradition, but thinking about the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition. The stories in the Old and New Testament are also in the Quran. It's all part of the same tradition and we share so much in common, and I think that recognizing that is something that could bring us closer together.
I love the paragraph of your mother laboring in the morning to prepare your stomachs with food for the day. The transition how you become your mother is so beautiful to see- you are such a wonderful mother. When I read this I’m reminded of the responsibility God has given us as parents to lead our children to him- we are their first shepherds.
The pandemic was when I grew closer to God as well. Forced to find the time and place to commune with God on my on terms. There’s something a lot more intimate that happened during that time it’s hard to get back too. I think in the backdrop of people being sick, and the ever present feeling of isolation, made us cling to him more.
Enjoyed this so much. To learn about these aspects through someone I care about, you, feels like truly a gift.
Marc, I love that sentiment of parents having the responsibility as their children's first shepherds, and I couldn't agree more. It's an enormous responsibility, and one I sometimes find overwhelming. But then I remember that our job is to lead them and show them love and pray for them, but that they are, at the end of the day, their own people who will make their own decisions.
The pandemic definitely brought me closer to God too. It was the first Ramadan I succeeded in reading the Quran from start to finish (this is something a lot of Muslims attempt during Ramadan but I had always lapsed with the rush of life, until that year). I think like you said, having so much sickness around helped me see this world for what it really is, the worldly life, not the eternal life. The Prophet tells us to go to the cemeteries and visit the sick often. I think part of that is to remind us of the fleeting nature of this life in which it's so easy to get caught up...
Thank you, friend, for sharing your thoughts.
Noha - I loved reading this. I grew up in Wisconsin and your descriptions of folding tables and aluminum trays remind me so much of the iftars I attended as a kid. It also makes me want to go to Taraweeh, I've been working a lot but will make time next week. Thanks for the inspiration/reminder. Keep writing please!