Im not a big crier but i cried this morning because a saw a video of a man walk into a mosque and ask a 22 year old to teach him to how to pray. The man stabbed the 22 year old while he was prostrating.
the greatest miracle of prayer is that the creator of the heavens permits the creature to speak. between the Infinite and the finite there ought to be only silence, yet mercy has made conversation possible.
“It was easy to be dead. It would be easy. But how does one become dead! how to kill oneself and yet live? The voice says, 'I would like to be dead' - and that voice is life.”
-Simone de Beauvoir
Ah, exactly what I feel about death & suicide but never had the right words!
I cannot emphasize this enough: as an adult, you need to reapproach islam, and this time from a lens that is not influenced or tied to your upbringing, or religious community, or family. approach the religion as a scholar would. ask the questions.
📍 Sarajevo — Qur'an recitation on film, 1942 CE
This footage shows recitation inside Sarajevo's mosques during one of the most dangerous periods in the city's modern history. By 1942, Sarajevo was under occupation by the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), a Nazi puppet regime — not Yugoslavia, which had already been invaded and dismembered by Axis forces the year before.
It was a fraught moment for the city's Muslims. NDH propaganda courted them as "Croats of the Islamic faith," yet in October 1941, 108 prominent Muslim citizens publicly condemned the Ustaše's persecution of their Serb neighbours — even as Muslim communities elsewhere in Bosnia faced massacre by Chetnik forces. Through it all, recitation and prayer in Sarajevo's mosques continued, as this footage quietly shows.
That continuity would be tested again. Under socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1992), religious life was pushed into private — mosques nationalised, sermons vetted, Islamic schools closed — yet belief endured in homes, and by the 1970s restrictions eased and mosques were rebuilt. Then came the Bosnian War (1992–1995), when up to 80% of Bosnia's 4,000+ mosques and Islamic buildings were damaged or destroyed, and Sarajevo endured a siege lasting nearly four years.
Today, Gazi Husrev-Beg Mosque and others are once again full for Friday prayers, the call to prayer sounds five times a day across the city, and Sarajevo's Muslim community — one of Europe's oldest — continues the same recitation this footage captured over 80 years ago.
Palestinian children and women break down in tears as they watch Israeli occupation forces demolish their home in Khirbet al-Deirat, Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank.
“Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.” - George MacDonald
There is nothing more financially ruinous than getting inspired by an English teacher. I’d rather they have signed me up for twelve different credit cards instead