Status Updates From The Butterfly Mosque: A You...

Some unspoken part of me always assumed the Disney version of love was the truth. that falling in love removed all obstacles and patched up all broken things!
Love is not a benign thing!
No corner of my life remained unaltered by the consequences of what I loved. The most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me, brought me neither peace nor comfort. But it did bring me him. And this was more than enough!

The life of that dress, like my own, was the work of many hands.

It had been sunset, the only time of day when Cairo seems forgiving :)

So much of life seemed to be about separating the people who would hurt each other.

The Prophet, his role model, never beat or belitted his wives. Omar took it very seriously.

To him, the old Islamic saying that Marriage is half of religion was absolute; his duty to love and protect me was part of his duty to Allah.

-Sometimes I am afraid of you. I said, surprising even my self
=No. (He looked hurt)No. No. Be angry at me, frustrated with me, but NEVER be afraid of me!

He'd never give me a reason to be afraid_ never lift his jand in anger, or call me a demeaning name, or even raise his voice. The Prophet, his role model, never beat or belitted his wives.

"We cannot leave the places in which we have suffered without regret; that these places become our second skins".


Cairo was mine.. It made me sick and dirty and endlessly hassled, and gotten me in trouble, and gotten me out of trouble. And it had given me Omar.

Coming from anyone else, it might be annoying, but love, if not blind, is certainly deaf!
_
He had the intellectual enthusiasm of self-taught, and it was infectious!
I learned more wandering around with Omar than I had in four years of college!

Omar was one of the few people whose soul could stretch out in a city most found stifling. Through him, I was learning to be unbothered by walls_ to accept them as part of the landscape instead of struggling against them or pretending they didn't exist.

- It is hard to make a good start in life here, but..
= Someone has to stay!
- Yes. Someone has to stay.

There were questions being asked of all of us that had no answers. But there were too many good things and good people at stake not to fight for those answers.

Festivals and fasts are unhinged, traveling backward at a rate of ten days per year, attached to no season. Even Laylat ul Qadr, the holiest night in Ramadan, drifts--its precise date is unknown. The iconclasm laid down by Muhammed was absolute: you must resist attachment not only to painted images, but to natural ones.