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Faith Is Also Built on Ordinary Tuesdays
I think when I was younger, I imagined faith would feel more cinematic than it actually does. I imagined spiritually strong people as calm and refreshed all the time. People who prayed every salah with perfect focus. People who read Quran peacefully for long stretches without interruption. People who woke up for tahajjud with glowing skin and emotional stability. I thought closeness to Allah would feel quiet and uninterrupted. But adulthood, especially motherhood, feels very different from that. On a Tuesday morning in Sharjah, faith sometimes looks like searching frantically for one specific white school sock while the clock is ticking and we should have left the house five minutes…
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Ordinary Mondays Feel Like Mercy
Today I opened WhatsApp to do one thing. I still do not know what that thing was. Somewhere between replying to a cousin, checking a message from another mother, and opening Telegram for a school update, my original reason for picking up the phone disappeared completely. For the past couple of weeks, the sky had been quiet. No interceptions. No sudden sounds overhead. Just stillness—the kind of stillness that slowly tricks you into believing life has returned to its normal rhythm again. Then last Monday, there were a few interceptions again. Suddenly, the Telegram school groups became alive all over again. The groups themselves are actually very organized; alhamdulillah, only…
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The Trail I’m Leaving Behind
I really have to share why I started Barakah Roots—not as a “brand” or a project, but so you can understand why I am here, opening up my house and my head to you. I was born in 1981. I’m a child of that bridge generation—the ones who remember the silence of a house before the internet lived in our pockets. Now, it’s 2026. I live in Sharjah, managing a house of twelve. Ten children. A multicultural marriage where we are constantly translating our very souls across different languages and unspoken codes. Most days, I am the logistics officer for a small army. My mind is a Forty-Tab Brain. I’m…
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How I Feed 12 People Every Week (The Logistics of Barakah)
People say the kitchen is the heart of the home. In a house of twelve, the kitchen is something else entirely. It hums. It spills. It overflows. It is less a heart and more a high-traffic terminal … where someone is always arriving, leaving, asking, hungry, or waiting. Between ten children (from a twenty-year-old with a real appetite to a three-year-old who survives on whims), my husband, and me, we are not just cooking meals. We are managing an ecosystem. Somewhere between the rice cooker and the sink full of cups, I realized: this was never meant to be done alone. Feeding a large family is not about culinary perfection.…
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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.…












