Gather your horses of hate,
I have a waterhole of love,
they’ll eventually have to drink from.
I’ll outstrip you in patience,
and know you’ll come full circle,
back to oblivion,
as to why you floundered,
knee deep in ignorance and regret,
panting just like your horse.
-Wesam El dahabi
You’re lacking,
if you think lip service offers you the escape,
if your repentance is marred with recurrence of the vice you want to abandon,
if you can’t regret having to regret.
How are you going to climb out of yourself,
that basal carnality,
oft repeating,
oft indulging,
gluttonously sinful,
consciously neglectful.
When will you topple its reign,
choke its life to within a breath,
and make it ever grateful,
aware of the frivolity it keeps dragging you into,
making regret your staple.
W.E.
Hope is but a finger polishing a rosary bead,
prayer upon prayer,
begging, in acknowledgement your slave-hood,
and what of prayer,
simply a whisper between you and your Lord.
The question then is,
perhaps disbelief is but a lack or fear of intimacy,
perhaps they just don’t know how to soften their voices.
W.E.
Some things,
you just don’t get.
I know,
somewhere along the lines,
you were never taught chivalry,
never shown nobility,
never practised withdrawing your ego,
until you punish yourself with silence,
content with being the doormat,
the shoe sorter,
the one in servitude,
slave-hood,
peasant appearing,
brave-hood.
You’re much too fragile to ever be spat at,
to be mocked and jeered at,
made to look like the scum of the earth,
and smile,
and say,
Ey Vallah!
W.E.
Music: Pesrev, ilahi (hicaz-homayun) Karaca & Tanrikorou
Poetry: mine
-compost of being
I’ve become so good at recycling regret
-Wesam El dahabi
Take to the soil of your soul,
with a spade so big,
that you cannot miss.
Turn it over,
and over,
until the worms are dancing,
then you know,
there is life left in you,
and there is hope to rejuvenate.
Tend to it with the compost of love,
the hands of truth,
the water of life,
and expose it to be burned with the sun of hope,
and know,
you’re not going to be a garden,
without the grit of time.
W.E.
You hear about people having spiritual awakenings all the time and without discounting peoples experiences, it is safe to say that most are passing through a realm of social fashion, changing the decorum of their being like an accessory.
Spirituality has become a commodity, near hipsterish to negate all things religious and claim a spiritual platform whilst bereft of all spiritual exercises.
The wanting the cake and to eat it too of social conformists, looking for the next hot thing.
This severing, ironically of spirituality from it’s source is only going to lead them into further frustration and confusion and if anything, even less spirituality.
It is a worship of the self with hidden crevices of utter egotism, that their soil, becomes a hardened clay, unwilling to absorb the water of life giving true spirituality.
Sorry to say hipsters, spirituality involves God, which ever route you take, it involves God.
Don’t sit there creating fashionable palettes of what you desire and call it something that it isn’t. Call it what it is, your own creation, it is anything but spirituality, more specifically, it is your own religion, the worship of you.
W.E.
In a talk about hopelessness and depression, Hamza Yusuf drives home the message for all humankind to stand strong, look up, have hope, change their focus and know their destination.
Don’t despair, be in it, be in it until your last breath!
Watch the short talk here:
Thank you for taking the time to talk to me homeless man,
For even though you appear to have nothing,
The world beams out of your hand.
As for me? The ingrate!
I have all possessions in the world,
But it is I, not you with demands.
From a very young age, my mother taught us a tradition of the Arabs. The Arabs, – and I’m talking about the very traditional ones with rich history and wisdom of the ancients, not the modern media hystericism’s stereotypes inexperienced people have come to believe – were never ingrates. Being people from nomadic desert areas, they were an environmentalists delight, respecting the land and water, they were a humanists friend as no ethic or moral was left unturned, they were philosophers muses as they could relate life issues so enchantingly it would silence the staunchest of opponents and they were the scientists assistant, their arts and sciences taking them to the peak of unified experiences across the world.
They understood the blessings of whatever it is they had, be it a plentiful harvest of fruits for the season or a single goat that they drank milk from. The tradition my mother taught me was never to leave bread on the floor or allow any piece of food to be on the floor for that matter. But it went one step further, we were to pick it up, kiss it and put it on our forehead and that would show God we were utterly appreciative of what we had and we’d never look down on the tiniest and most taken for granted of things. That action made the food magically ok in our little minds, we’d eat it. Of course I am going to get many of you conjuring images of germs and bacteria, that is not the point. The point is forging gratitude into a child’s utter being and letting it run course through their veins.
We grew up never forgetting this and we have passed it on to our children.
All of my five children have this wonderful trait of gratitude and empathy with those less fortunate but one in particular is moved by it. When you ask all seven years of him what his aspirations are, he’s quick to quip in his partly Australian, partly American, somewhat European accent with strangely Turkish-European-Mongol-Philipino looks, warm dark eyes that he wants to open a burger shop and he’s somehow convinced his older siblings to forget their previous aspirations and to join him, his ultimate aim was to feed the homeless.
For the last few weeks though it seems to have amplified. He has been bringing his own pocket money wherever we go and takes it out and gives it all to destitute people wherever he sees them. He empties his whole little velcro wallet into their hands. When I ask him why, he says “It’s ok, I have more at home and can get more later but they have nothing”. Broke my big alpha male heart!
Sometimes if he forgets his wallet, he asks of us to give him some money, always offering to pay us back. Not that we need his money of course but to see that he is that conscious of the act and how it’s intention should be, is inspiring.
The latest of his actions had his mother crying in the middle of a super market. She looked behind her to try and find him as she noticed he wasn’t near her after entering the store. Finally he came walking through the doors crying profusely like he was in pain. My wife was shocked and thought someone had hit him or he fell over and asked him why he was crying. His reply was, ” I feel so bad for the homeless man outside, why are there so many homeless people?”
This is a seven year old who has been taught to kiss bread and put it on his forehead, ask yourself, how do you teach kids gratitude? Prattle your tongue as you may, you have to let them feel it in their bones.
Always let them see and talk to the less fortunate so they never learn to forget that they are humans like them.
As my teacher would say, ‘The world is still in spin and we never know where we may end up.’
-W.E.
Who is going to deny where we come from now?
Look at this picture.
Look at her face.
The road maps in her face resembling dried cracked crevices of the earth she came from and the earth she will return to.
Glory be to He, who created us and fashioned us with The command Be, and we Were
-WE
Know my sons, men have codes.
Bravery is calling fear a liar.
Courage is proving fear a liar.
Chivalry, is knowing when to use courage or bravery.
Nobility is having the fortitude to follow through your conviction in both.
Honour is not straying from the code.
Honesty is the light that the code is illumed by
Truth is the gnawing at the soul that flat lines your ego.
Love is the energy that fuels all.
I hope that whatever I teach you or whatever I leave behind become firm foundations for you to build mountains upon and your progeny to build mountains on but no matter how mountainous you all may become, you remain grounded in the valleys of humility,
with people,
serving them,
being exemplar with the codes of being men,
of being human.
Do not forget that to be harsh when it is needed even in the face of relentless scrutiny is far nobler than laxity to please the lazy folk,
the unmotivated,
the detached,
the deprived of soul.
Know that kindness and gentleness in the face of a storm of violence and ridicule is more praiseworthy than siding with the masses.
Do not slip boys,
Hold to each other,
Hold to the above codes.
-ME
I cringe every time the ‘moderate’ label is applied to me. I understand it is probably meant to be a compliment, but the truth is that it is offensive in the way it would be to be called a ‘moderate intellect’. It carries the connotation that one’s faith is somehow diluted. It implies, condescendingly, that it is socially acceptable to be a Muslim, as long as you are not too Muslim.
– Waleed Aly, People like us.
I agree.
lonerloaner 