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Bringing the Nonmaterial to the Fore: Reading Harry Potter as a Muslim

8 min read إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَأْمُرُ بِٱلْعَدْلِ وَٱلْإِحْسَـٰنِ وَإِيتَآئِ ذِى ٱلْقُرْبَىٰ وَيَنْهَىٰ عَنِ ٱلْفَحْشَآءِ وَٱلْمُنكَرِ وَٱلْبَغْىِ ۚ يَعِظُكُمْ لَعَلَّكُمْ تَذَكَّرُونَ “Indeed, God commands justice, excellence, and generosity toward relatives…” (Qur’an 16:90) At the turn of the 21st century, Muslim hot takes on the Harry Potter series included censorship and online fatwas to preempt the corruption of young minds […]

Priming the Wandering Mind for Mindfulness

5 min read In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. We’ve all been there before. We want to focus on something, but our mind keeps racing. The thoughts keep gushing out like water from a broken fire hydrant and we just can’t seem to turn them off. We feel helpless and frustrated. What do […]

The Islamic Uncertainty Principle

12 min read I learned precious little about the coronavirus during our month-long acquaintance, but it taught me much about the regime of numbers that it has casually usurped. We’ve accepted numbers as our rulers, but rarely do we perceive their rule. Now, a medieval insurgent has come for the throne— that virus with the crown— and our […]

Soft Skills: The Importance of Personal Development

8 min read “It doesn’t really matter how good they are at their job if no one wants to work with them.” That’s what my dad told me when I posed a question to him a couple of months into my job as a hospital pharmacy technician. I was confused about the turnover rate of pharmacists. These were […]

Building Focus in an Age of Distractions

6 min read Between high school and university, something shifted in the way I consumed information. Whenever I sat at my laptop to get work done, I inadvertently ended up with dozens of tabs open, down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, or watching a completely unrelated YouTube video. Why was it so hard to sit through a class without […]

The Power of Personal Narrative

6 min read Albus Dumbledore’s final words in the Harry Potter novels didn’t make much sense to me when I read them for the first time as a kid in elementary school. After coming face-to-face with death and being knocked into an unconscious state of limbo, Harry saw a vision of Dumbledore for the first time since his […]