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Iqra, When My Mind Is Full
A quiet reminder for the days when everything feels like too much. When my mind is full, I don’t usually think about revelation. I think about what’s next. Who needs what. What I forgot. What I’m already late for. My thoughts move quickly—like tabs opening and closing faster than I can keep up. And in the middle of that noise, it’s hard to imagine a cave. A quiet place. A single word. Iqra. Read. In a world that constantly demands we do—to produce, to cook, to manage, to solve—it feels like a quiet mercy that the very first command given to our Prophet ﷺ was not a list of instructions.…
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The Forty Days Postpartum Rest We Forgot
We spend nine months preparing the nursery, but we spend zero minutes preparing our souls for the “void” that comes after the storm of birth. In Java, where my roots are, we don’t “prepare” for postpartum with a shopping list; we prepare with a shift in tempo. There is a quiet, deeply practiced understanding that a mother must be held for forty days. Traditionally, her body is considered “open” and her energy fragile. She is surrounded by her mother or her mother-in-law—whoever brings her the most peace. There are helpers, traditional masseuses, the warming heat of Jamu tonics, and specific foods designed to “seal” the body back together. But for…
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Birth and The Raw Truth of Surrender
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Birth and The Raw Truth of Surrender
I have birthed ten children. My journey has taken me from a delivery room in Surabaya, through the busy hospitals of Riyadh, into the sacred quiet of my own bathtub at home in Riyadh, and finally to a hospital room in Sharjah. I have been the woman handled like a procedure on a hospital bed, and I have been the woman surrendering to the water in her own home—bringing life into the world on her own terms. If I could sit you down in my home today, I wouldn’t teach you how to prepare a “birth plan.” I would give you the truth about what it actually means to surrender…
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Vulnerability as a Woman’s Strength
In our Deen, the roles of men and women carry a divine logic that is both simple and profound. The husband is the provider and protector—the Qawwam. The woman is the heart of the home, the one who nurtures and builds what cannot always be seen. On paper, the balance is clear. But in the lived reality of a long marriage, the heart often feels the gravity of that arrangement. The Smallness of Asking There is a specific kind of vulnerability that comes with not having your own income. It’s quiet. Subtle. Hard to explain to those who haven’t stood in those shoes. It shows up in the smallest moments.…
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From Surabaya to Riyadh: The Barakah of the Empty Hours
Foreshadowing of a Future Sixteen years before I ever called the UAE my home, I sat in the Dubai airport for a transit flight. I didn’t know it then, but sitting in that terminal was a quiet foreshadowing of my future. I was just a young girl leaving the lush familiarity of Surabaya, Indonesia, bound for Saudi Arabia. I was making Hijrah.Following a man. And honestly… I was terrified. The Sea of Black and the Souq I arrived in Riyadh in March. The weather was mild, almost gentle—completely hiding the fierce desert summer waiting ahead. But while the weather was soft, the culture shock was not. I remember walking into…
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Tangled Hair and Me
As an Indonesian, my hair has always been simple. It is straight, fine, and easy to manage. I rarely keep it very long; once it grows past a certain point, it starts falling like rain in the monsoon back home. So I had to cut it shorter. It is always like that. It is predictable. It is quiet. My daughters, Allahumma barik, are the complete opposite. Their hair is a wild, beautiful crown—curly, dry, coarse, and long. In the Arab world, this is the “ideal.” People love to see it flowing. But the reality of living with that beauty is a weight I don’t always have the energy to carry.…
