மஹ்திதாசன்

     In remembrance of Bibi Zainab S.A.— an older piece of mine titled, "Zainab in the Garden of Ibrahim, in the Furnace of Namrood," and another piece titled, "Amamah."      The first piece compares the state of Zainab S.A. in the court of Yazeed with the condition of Abraham A.S. in the furnace of Nimrod; when Abraham is thrown into the fire, his faith in God is embodied as a garden, a cooling oasis that springs forth from the flames. Similarly, Zainab S.A., when forcibly de-veiled and marched through Yazeed's court, responds with strength, power, and resilience. When Yazeed asks her to recount the humiliation of her brother and companions at Karbala, Zainab throws the question in his face by famously responding, "I saw nothing but Beauty." This Beauty of just anger and resistance—of seeing Allah SWT's grand plan in the face of oppression, in dwelling within His ever-existing Jannah in the face of a transitory, illusory world—elevates the formida...

Growing up, Hindi was the language spoken at me by other Indian Americans, and frequently a a source of derision against my mother tongue, Tamil. When I converted to Islam, suddenly I was expected to speak Urdu by those in Indian Muslim spaces. "We care about our faith," an Urdu Muslim friend from Chennai had told me. "Culture is from this dunya; it's not that important. That's why we speak Urdu at the mosque and at home instead of following this Tamil culture." I have nothing against Urdu Muslims and none of the weird xenophobia that hyper-nationalists sometimes inflict onto poor, vulnerable migrant communities. But it was disheartening to hear, time and again, Urdu being framed as of the "Deen" and Tamil being of the "Dunya." Is Urdu also not culture? And is a Tamil Muslim's Islam lesser just because he rejects Urduization?  As a Tamil Shi'a, I find myself not having much of a choice when it comes to distance from Urdu. The vast...

  A few years ago, in the wee stages of my “official” conversion to Islam (though I had been dabbling in and out of Islamic practice even as a Hindu in my years prior) I had a strange visitor in a dream: a radiant, angry village woman, teeth bared, with large nose studs and a pockmarked face, who said she had a message for my mother. As any Tamil could tell you, these visuals would instantly translate as a visitation from an Amman, an ancestral matriarch of Dravidian societies—and this was precisely the answer my mother gave me when I approached her in the morning and delivered the message meant for her (which contained a prediction that would, shockingly, come true…but that is a bizarre story for another day). Only there was one tiny problem: the woman I had seen was dressed in a pale blue hajj outfit and was not wearing pottu.  A Pakistani friend of mine with a Sufi background had a different reply for me, one that would puzzle me even more. “I’ve heard of this before,” ...