Thousands upon thousands of my people are dead, and part of me has died with them. Yet, I still have enough life to be ashamed of this world, of its indifference, of everyone who has watched and not internalized the violence we scroll past so easily.

And somewhere in the last few months I have went on autopilot and I haven’t found the switch to turn it off. And underneath all of it, a voice that has been screaming for two years: it is not normal to carpet bomb cities full of people. Every person under those bombs was a universe, and those universes are being snuffed out by people who have made a deliberate choice not to see them as human.

 

I went to a qiyam last week and the sheikh talked about Al-Latif, اللَّطِيف, and I sat in the back row and tried to feel what I was supposed to feel. Al-Latif. The Gentle. The one whose care operates beneath the surface of things, bringing benefit and deflecting harm in ways you cannot see and are not meant to see. Tawakkul, he said. Trust, a surrender that requires everything from you. The man to my left was crying. I watched his shoulders move and I thought: I used to be able to do that. I used to cry in qiyam. Now I sit with my hands on my knees and I wait for something to happen.

Lebanon is burning… again. Iran buried 171 children from an elementary school this week, children who had nothing to do with anything except being alive on a Saturday morning when the US and Israel decided this was the week for regime change. Gaza’s Rafah crossing closed the moment the bombs started falling on Iran, because there is always a new use for the leverage of starvation. The world allowed Gaza, so the world will allow this too. Gaza was the proof of concept. Now the cancer knows what it can do, and it is metastasizing everywhere at once, during Ramadan, while I make soup and try to remember how to feel something that isn’t exhaustion.

That’s where I am this Ramadan.

I prefer to break my fast alone, and I make the same soup every night, lentil, because it’s what my mother made and because chopping onions is something my hands know how to do without my brain having to be present for it. I sit down and I eat and there are three people at my table who did not RSVP. Guilt is the one I know best by now, the one who has been living with me for two years and has stopped apologizing for taking up space. Bitterness arrived sometime around month six and never left. And then there’s anger. I used to describe it as grief that learned to stand up straight, used to treat it like a phase. It has not metabolized, in fact, it has done the opposite. It has put its name on the lease. There is a hatred that has taken up permanent residence in me and I am not sure I want it to leave anymore, because at least it is honest, at least it does not ask me to be reasonable about people who are not being reasonable about whether my people deserve to live and who take pleasure in the cruelest ways for us to die. I know what the deen says about anger, about the man who came to the Prophet three times asking for advice and each time was told: do not be angry. I have read that hadith my whole life. I am reading it differently now. I am reading it from inside a world where the anger is the only part of me that has never once lied to me about what is happening.

This is not that essay about Ramadan and Palestine. Not the one where I list everything I have and everything they don’t and then ask you to feel bad with me. I don’t want to perform guilt. I want to talk about something that takes more out of me to say, which is what these three years have done to the place inside me where God used to sit without being questioned.

Because I was raised believing in the mercy of Allah the way you believe in the floor under your feet, not because you tested it but because it had always held. And then it started to feel like the floor was still there but I couldn’t feel it anymore through what was underneath me. And I don’t know how to explain that to someone who hasn’t felt it. I don’t know how to explain what it does to your faith to watch a genocide happen in real time for over two years while the people around you argue about whether it is one. And now, this Ramadan, I am not only watching Gaza. I am watching Lebanon be razed again. I am watching Tehran burn.

The hadith I keep turning over is this one: the Prophet was asked who among people is most severely tested. He said the Prophets, then those nearest them in piety, then the next, and the next, that the strength of the trial is proportional to the strength of the faith. I learned this young and it settled something in me. The beloved are the most tried, and, thus suffering is not a punishment.

I am trying to hold this against what I know now. I am trying to hold it against Rahaf, eight months old, who drowned in rainwater inside a tent when the winter floods came to Gaza. Against Hadeel, nine years old, who died of cold in a shelter west of Gaza City. Against the thousands upon thousands shot, maimed, hunted, or evaporated.

The Quran says and they were so shaken that the Messenger and the believers with him cried out, when is the help of Allah? And the answer: indeed the help of Allah is near.

Ibrahim, peace be upon him, stood before God and asked to be shown how He gives life to the dead. Not from doubt, the scholars say, but because his heart needed to rest on something it could see. And the Prophet commented that we are more likely to doubt than Ibrahim. I think about that hadith often. If Ibrahim needed his heart settled, if even he asked to see, then maybe what I am carrying is not a failure of faith but just what faith looks like when it is being honest about the weight of what it has been asked to hold.

But here is what I cannot stop thinking about this Ramadan, the thing I did not ask the sheikh. If Al-Latif is gentle in ways I cannot see, if the mercy is real and I simply lack the vision for it, what does that ask of me, the one who can see the parts that are not hidden? The children freezing. Rahaf. Hadeel. The 19-year-old, Nasrallah Abu Siyam, shot and killed by settlers in Mukhmas two weeks ago while the news cycle was already being consumed by Iran. What does tawakkul mean for those of us who are watching from the outside of the tent? What does it mean to trust in God’s gentleness when the people doing the killing have decided that this month, this Ramadan, is the right moment to open four simultaneous fronts — Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Iran — and the US government is not restraining them but flying the planes alongside them?

I know what it asks of the people inside the tent. I have seen what it asks of them. I have watched them pray over rubble, watched them say alhamdulillah over the bodies of their children, watched them demonstrate a faith so large I cannot comprehend it from where I sit with my soup and my three dinner guests. That faith is not mine to claim or explain. But what is mine, what I have to account for, is what I did with the watching.

And that is where Yawm al-Qiyamah enters this Ramadan for me in a way it has not before. The Day of Standing. The opening of accounts. The Quran says you will be witnesses over the people. We were made into a witnessing community, and witnessing in that tradition is not passive, it shares a root with shaheed, with martyr, it is a thing you stake yourself on. What will I say when I am asked what I did. Not what I felt. Not how much it cost me to watch. What I did with the watching, while Beirut burned again, while Tehran buried its children, while while children are being murdered every day during the holiest month of the year, while I made lentil soup and tried to remember how to cry.

I don’t think I have a sufficient answer yet. I don’t think any of us do. I think that’s the question this Ramadan is trying to force me to sit with instead of the one the sheikh offered, the one about trust and gentleness and the hidden workings of mercy. Both are real questions. But one of them lets me off the hook and one of them doesn’t, and I have been living too long inside the one that lets me off the hook.

So I sit with my guests. The soup goes cold while I think. Outside my window the city is doing what cities do during Ramadan, a particular softness to the streets at this hour, people moving toward their tables and their families and their rituals, the beautiful ordinary business of the month. And I am glad for it, genuinely, and I am also sitting with the fact that on the other side of the world the month looks like this: the same hunger, but without the soup. The same darkness, but without the electricity. The same God, invoked over the same rubble, by people who have been given no reason to trust that the floor will hold and who somehow keep trusting anyway. And on another front, mourners in the streets of Minab weeping over 150 children, lifting their hands to the sky, and those hands look exactly like the hands in Gaza, like the hands in southern Lebanon, like the hands everywhere this evil decides to turn next.

I don’t know what to do with that. I genuinely do not know what to do with the faith I am watching them demonstrate from this distance, in country after country, Ramadan after Ramadan, rubble after rubble. So it stays at the table with the other three. Another guest I did not invite. The one that looks the most like God of anything I have seen in three years of watching.

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