When I was a tween, I visited my aunt and her family in Hyderabad, Pakistan. She had heard from my parents that I had become agnostic, and, as someone who had survived a lot of hardship by clinging to an intimate, present sense of God in her own life, she…
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Zainab Sarwar has been helping altM readers for years with their diet and wellness. Here’s some advice from her to help us through this difficult time. Asma: As we are trapped at home, how do we stay focused on eating well? How do we avoid eating excess food out of…
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Asma: Zainab, one of the biggest struggles of motherhood is the struggle to lose weight while also balancing the hectic, sometimes overwhelming task of being a mom. I know that motherhood posed that challenge for me, until I met you and you made it easier for me to work in…
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Remember the clock kid, Ahmed? He was honored by President Obama for his ingenuity and scholastic achievement after he was put in handcuffs and arrested at his own school for the same. He lives with his family in Qatar now, because of safety concerns after he became a target of…
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Genetics counselor Lama Eldahdah spends most of her time thinking about reproductive probabilities, but when she sits down with Muslim patients who are battling infertility, the conversation rarely focuses on odds. “Religious people say it’s God’s will, non-religious people say it’s statistics,” said Eldahdah, who works for Chicago’s Reproductive Genetics…
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Dear Elizabeth: Should book reports be expected of elementary school children? Confused Dear Confused, It is my belief and experience that when children are in elementary school, book reports are neither important nor advisable. The goal in the early years is to nurture a love of reading in children–reading…
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In 1982, I began fasting half-days during Ramadan for the first time, my hands painted with henna in celebration. I was in Mrs. Campbell’s third grade class; the only Muslim in a school of more than three hundred children. She growled my name “So-fee-AAH! We do not write on our…
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This article responds to Yusra Gomaa’s piece on altM, Placing Muslim orphans into real homes. In 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote his seminal work The Wretched of the Earth. In the section of the book entitled “On National Culture”, he indicts the colonial system of both his native Martinique as well…
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Bare, grey walls tinged with a hint of yellow inside this familiar Moroccan orphanage. Crib after crib lined up next to one another with no spaces in between. Toddlers, laying silently on their faded green polka-dot sheets, likely funded by a charitable relief program. One child, perhaps walking now, is…
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This election cycle has been difficult to experience, even for adults. Civil conversations and respect for diversity have been sidelined, and the loudest voices in politics and on television now are frighteningly extreme. Unsurprisingly the hateful rhetoric has filtered into American schools. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has just…
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