In some world, we will be seen as equals.
Standing hand in hand with the rest of humanity,
Letting everyone know that we are united.
A religion that literally translates to peace.
Most people do not know that, but now you do.
We are peaceful and would want nothing less than the best for everyone around us.
We have our beliefs that some people may not agree with, but before judgments and assumptions are made, just listen to me.
We worship one single God alone because there is no other God but Him.
We pray five times a day as a way of praising our Lord and thanking Him for all our blessings.
We give Zakat (charity) to those less fortunate.
We fast for a month every year to be reminded of how blessed we are and to feel empathy for those less fortunate.
We perform pilgrimage once a lifetime, if financially able, to visit the house of God on earth and to take part in religious historical acts.
We cover ourselves properly to conceal what should be left for our own eyes.
We respect our elders because they are more knowledgeable than us.
We treat those younger than us with patience because we must show them how to be respectful of everything and everyone.
We obey our parents because of all the sacrifices they continue to make for us to live a better life – don’t forget that heaven lies underneath the feet of our mothers.
We recite the call to prayer in a newborn baby’s ear, and the prayer that is prayed at their funeral has been called for since they were born – that is how short our life is.
We know how valuable life is,
We have our respectful ways,
We respect those around us, so why do we not receive that same respect.
We have majority people accept us, but there are always the ignorant few who do not care to seek knowledge in this religion to gain respect for it.
We try our best to get people to realize how peaceful we are,
then again, our religion literally translates to peace.
This poem was inspired by a writer’s seminar done in class by Maria and Faryal. The writer they did it on was Muslim and he wrote a lot about God and belief in Him and about the religion in general. He used a reliable source, the Quran, to back up a lot of what he said in his poems. This got me thinking about how many people choose to turn the blindside to this peaceful religion and how I hear stories of people converting to Islam after they hear verses from the Qu’ran. I take a lot of pride in my religion and I wanted to write something that puts out just a taste of what this religious practice is about.
January 9, 2020 at 10:09 pm
Dear Sarah,
This is something that many more people need to read and understand. In today’s world, the media controls the ideas and thought of millions of people, but those few who decide to learn about the topic themselves, are not only scarce, but also priceless and wonderful people.
The world today, unfortunately, has a lot of prejudice against Muslims, not because they’re prejudicial people, but because the media puts forward incorrect and completely false ideas. Terrorists, extremists, rapists. Just because one person or one group who claims themselves followers of Islam does something horrible, it doesn’t mean that all Muslims (Nearly 2 billion) are like them. For example, if the KKK clan claims that they’re christian, and they hurt people, it does not mean that all Christians are like that whatsoever. Sorry for my short-rant, but yeah, I like how this post sort of agrees with this central anti-prejudicial idea. Overall, the piece is incredible, and I hope many other people read this!
For any possible constructive criticism, you may want to edit the following:
…We perform pilgrimage once a year…
to
…We perform pilgrimage once a lifetime…
I just wanna say thanks for writing this piece, and I look forward to reading your next posts!
Sincerely,
Unas
January 11, 2020 at 8:40 pm
Thanks, Unas for taking the time to read it, and I really appreciate your mini-rant because it’s true. This world is all about stereotypes and waiting for a single reason to hate everyone. Like you said, around 2 billion people are apparently the same as the small group of people who decided it was a good idea to mess up the image of everyone else. No one would think this of other religions, but just because our has the name Islam, people always have something negative to say.
I will definitely change once a year to once a lifetime. I was a little confused about which word I should use because I know people have done Hajj more than once, and I thought that would be too much to explain for the simplicity I wanted in this piece.
I appreciate your comment a lot and also can’t wait to keep up with your next post!
January 17, 2020 at 7:56 pm
Dear Sarah,
I was smiling the whole time I was reading this. I love it so much, not only because I myself am Muslim, but because this whole piece felt so relaxing and beautiful to read. I love how you had such a strong voice all throughout it. That’s really hard to do, especially when you’re stating facts, but I loved the way you were able to state these facts in your own poetic voice.
I would’ve loved it if you added specific judgments and then proved them wrong. So formatting them as one line being the judgement and then the next line proving it wrong. That would be really cool.
Thank you for this piece because I really believe that we need to bring awareness to this topic as many people either choose to ignore it or are simply scared to speak out. It was really brave of you to write this, so good job!
Sincerely,
Maira
January 19, 2020 at 8:35 am
Awe, thanks so much Maira, I really appreciate the feedback and I am glad you liked this piece. I agree, this is a topic so many chose it to ignore and I want to see change, so with my little voice on this blog, I will try my best.
I also like that idea of like a line of assumptions and then the next one is a line crushing the false assumptions. I could also add hadiths and verse of the Quran which would be really cool because it would be a more powerful way to break these assumptions. Thank you so much once again, I’m genuinely thinking of how I can change this to make it based on hadiths and I really like that idea, thank you.