Ramadan 2020/1441: Ramadan Food Love

One of my favourite things in Ramadan, being a bit of a greedy guts, is the lovely platters and dishes that friends and neighbours send each other. Although I cook mostly every day, having a big family, I do sometimes get tired of the taste of my own cooking and crave something else.  I like how sisters try to be creative and send their best dishes. I love the days when I don’t have to cook as much or at all. I am grateful for the love and dua’s that are poured into the food and that someone thought of us specially. I also like tasting food from different cultures.

I wanted to share some of the pics for inspiration, but realised I have deleted many of them, so these are downloaded from my Instagram stories.

This is from a very beloved Bengali friend, chicken biryani, sweet vermicelli (sevaiyan), black channa chaat and a platter of savoury treats including wraps, sausage rolls, bhaji’s and potato cutlets:

This is from a sweet Bengali neighbour who lives across the road who moved in recently and who we have ended up on very good terms with. Fresh piping hot biryani, chicken wraps, pakoray and shahi tukray, a kind of desi bread pudding.

More biryani: 

This was from a Gujarati family who I have a lot of love for. I have a weakness for Gujerati food having grown up with Gujarati neighbour whose daughter was my best friends and class mate. Their mum was an amazing cook and often sent food to us. The giveaway here is the dhokla which no Gujarati special occasion seems to be complete without. My fave is the sweetcorn bhaji which I have had at their house and is very nice.

One of my fave dishes, lamb pilau. This sister has just had a baby, I’m not sure I approve of her being in the kitchen already, may Allah (SWT) bless her and baby with health and comfort insh’Allah.

This was from a young sister from Karachi, so I fully expected the biryani to be on point and spicy, both of which I definitely was.

Another platter from a Bengali friend, a very sweet natured sister. She sent us channa chaat, aubergines fritters, bhaji, pakoray, mini pizza’s and another of my fave foods, aloo cutlets (tikki).

Noodles, chicken fillets and chips from my neighbour. She also sent me the milk cake which my siblings and friends have been making and not sharing. She shared and it tasted extra good.

Desserts and sweets from my sisters:

I can’t say what a pleasure it is to try these gifts of food from my sisters. So far the scorecard is:

Bengali’s - 3

Pakistani’s – 3 (counting neighbours but not sisters)

Guajarati’s – 1

 We still have a few days to see if this changes, I will be waiting for the doorbell to go at iftar time with baited breath 😊

May Allah (SWT)bless all of these sisters with an increase in their rizq, with the blessing of  a happy home, pious children and lazzat (the knack of cooking tasty food) always in their fingers. May Allah (SWT) be pleased with them and reward them with al of their hearts desires. I pray that Allah (SWT) is pleased with all of the women of this ummah who work in the kitchen cooking to the best of their ability, for their family to break fast with the foods they love. Ameen.

For the latest updates and  stories (including what we get up to during our days and what’s cooking for iftar) please do follow me on my Instagram account and Insta-stories. 

Joy in Your Faith

I came across this today:

image source

And it reminded me in a roundabout way of this quote by the late, wonderful, wise, Toni Morrison:

“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

Part of my job involved looking at inequality, and this is a quote I live by when it comes to my work.  But I hadn’t thought to apply it to my faith and practice of my faith. As a community and as a minority, we spend so much time being defensive, defending ourselves against racist and trolls, justifying our value and right to exist, that we forget we have work outside of defending our faith to anyone that decides to pass a comment. That work is, to get on with our good deeds, to revel in the goodness and beauty our faith, to enjoy being Muslim, part of a beautiful and blessed ummah (community). We should do this with confidence and a smile.

So often we associate religion with being serious or even grumpiness (certainly an association I have grown up with, I see way too many practising sisters looking a bit scary). But Islam teaches us to have good akhlaq toward others – good conduct, good manners, kindness, gentleness, a smile, and a good attitude:

The Prophet ṣallallāhu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him): “There is nothing weightier in the scales than good morals and manners.” (Abu Dawood).

I love this little reminder from Imam Suhaib Webb: Feel good about your religion, about what we have gained from it - our Creator (SWT), our beloved Prophet ṣallallāhu 'alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him), and a beautiful practice when it comes to faith.  Smile and carry on with the work you need to do and that in itself is an act of resistance.

Our Changing World

We are four weeks into being at home as the Corona virus pandemic goes on in the UK and the whole country at a standstill. One of the things that has really bothered me throughout is all those people that will no longer be able to work or have an income.

So many people live from pay cheque to pay cheque, barely making it through the month or out of their overdraft. We know of so many single people and families through the masjid and friends that don’t have recourse to public funds, this could be for various reasons – their case is being processed by the home office, they are appealing after their asylum case has been rejected, some that are even here after their visa ran out. If these people can’t work right now, even if under the radar doing low paid work, they can’t eat.

There must be so many others that are just getting by and are wondering what will happen over the next few weeks and months and where that will leave them.  With the country heading for a recession, perhaps the worse for many generations, it is easy to believe that the world will be a very different place when we come out of the other end of this horrible situation.  Just the sheer number of people at risk of losing their homes is terrifying.

Many of us are thinking about how we can get through, others about how they can adapt and ride the changes to their benefit. But there are those that will only be at the mercy of events, the vulnerable, the elderly, those too sick or mentally unable to keep going.  These are the people we will have to look out for, to think of and to find ways to support so that they are not left behind.

May Allah SWT have mercy on all of our brothers and sisters, on all of humanity insh’Allah

image source

Picture of the Day 09.11.19: Changing Seasons

A crisp, cold misty early morning walk in the park with some ladies from our local residents’ group. Lots of good discussion and ideas on how we can make our neighbourhood safer and better to live in.

It was a nice way to start the day: greenery and signs of the changing season from autumn to winter. Vibrant holly berries, all the colours of autumn in the trees and Egyptian geese of all things.

Aunty-Zoned - Blaming the Victim, Reclaiming the Title

It seems that the word Aunty has become a bit of a bad word in recent times. Being called an Aunty is offensive because it implies you are old and old-fashioned, in a world where being young an attractive is everything. Auntie’s get grouped like a pack of wolves, or hyena's – upholding toxic traditions and the patriarchy. They are made to look like a bunch of sneering, gossiping, judgemental women. I'm seeing this lazy labelling more and more and it's bothering me for two reasons.

image source

Firstly, the group of women we are talking about are often the most vulnerable in society. Women in their 40's to 60's, often with difficulty speaking English, no job or income, dependent on their families.  They are usually immigrants who have struggled through being uprooted, facing poverty and isolation to build communities and families around them. They often still have poor health outcomes (which we satirise as the Auntie’s talking about their various illnesses and complaints, or hypochondria). They are often still the most vulnerable to racism or hate crimes due to their faith or race.  They have spent a lifetime caring for others and then find themselves looking forward to the prospect of caring for elderly parents and in-laws whilst not getting the support from their children they had hoped for.

Secondly, I think young people forget the foundations they are standing on. I was the same.  I used to wonder what on earth my parents did with their lives, why they didn't fight back against racism, why they put up with so much unfairness. Until I started to see what they did do. Keep our faith and culture alive, build our places of worship, work hard and make sacrifices so that we could have the best chances at education and life.  We dismiss it because they weren't all on Instagram shouting about it, they did it quietly and without thanks.  My generation of newly-minted Auntie's built on this, we had jobs, money and a voice.  We knew how the system worked and we have tried to use it to benefit our children and our communities.

I have to admit, the first time a grown person called me an Aunty (in my thirties) I was offended. After all he was balding with a big belly and I looked young for my age (I think I used to get it because of my hijab).  A few years later, in my late thirties, I started to get used to being called Aunty by people in their twenties and took it as both a sign of respect and their short-sightedness, after all to many young people thirty is the limit to do anything and forty is as old as death.

There are two things that come from this for me. The first is the need to advocate for our mothers and auntie's not belittle them.  I believe part of the reason why Asian women of a certain age have poor health outcomes is that they are not taken seriously by health professionals, who will try to send them away with advice to take a paracetamol instead of looking into their problems seriously until they become serious. I have seen this time and again.

The second is to own our power as the new generation of older South Asian women, both to uphold our values where they are beneficial (e.g. faith and family) and to challenge where they are not (racism, casteism, misogyny). In a culture that mourns the birth of a daughter, look everyone in the eye and celebrate loudly. Where we are seeing young people being forced into marriage or religion being used to harm others – take people to task. Stick up for our young women, but hold them to account also when they take all of their education and opportunity and decide to focus on petty drama, make-up and materialism instead of all of the good they could do.

Where we see bad behaviours, those things that cause us to label people Aunties, don't lump women under one moniker as if to excuse, but call out the individual behaviours. Also, see them for what they often are: the actions of women who are bitter or isolated, lacking in self-respect or self-hating to the point they have bought into the most toxic parts of their cultures. 

Art courtesy of paper samosa Instagram

This doesn't give young women a free pass either to misbehave (read be disrespectful, lazy or rude) and then expect older women to defend them when they are called out on it.

For now, I am taking up the Aunty label with a view to owning and re-defining it. As the women you go to for help, the ones that can take care of their communities, lead their young folk and stand up to and up for others.  One of the people who has really inspired me to own the word Aunty is The Village Aunty who hangs out on Twitter and talk about interesting stuff, you might want to check her out.

Art courtesy of Maria Qamar Instagram

Srebrenica Memorial Week 2019

This week (7^th July to 14^th July) is Srebrenica Memorial week and is dedicated to commemorating the lives that were lost in the genocide at Srebrenica in July 1995: 8,000 Bosniaks, mainly men and boys.

This is something that is very close to my heart.  I was in high school when the Bosnian war broke out and I remember the child refugees from Bosnia coming to my school. The whole Bosnian war made me re-think my place in society.  If these people who were so well-integrated and even intermarried, who weren’t visibly religious, who even looked like everyone else (i.e. white) were separated out and targeted - what hope did we have? We who looked so different – brown, in hijab, from another country.

The children who came to our school also made me realise how similar they were to us – the music they listened to, the things they were interested in, it brought home how war had come to Europe, to people like us, who could ever imagine such a thing – war happened to those far away who were nothing like us.

At the start of the week I attended a minutes silence for the victims of the genocide where the Remembering Srebrenica flag was raised.  

After this, we went to a local masjid where a talk was held with accounts from a survivor of the Bosnian war and an Ughiur Muslim, both talking about their experiences 

Aziz Isa Elkun talked about the history of the Uighur Muslims and their current plight in China.  He shared a moving documentary he made about his story. This was followed by his recitation of a poem he had written dedicated to a friend that had been placed in a re-education camp.

Safet Vukalic, a survivor of the ethnic cleansing in Prijedor, Bosnia shared a harrowing account of how Bosnian men were taken to the camps including his brother and dad.  He survived as a 16-year-old because his mother stopped him from going with the men.  His was a devastating account of the way the international community failed those in the concentration camps and the language the media used to create doubt about the victims.  He explained how although some of the lead perpetrators of the genocide are dead and gone, the structures, the politics, the rhetoric of the genocide prevails in Europe.

A moving commemoration but also a call to speak up about the situation of the Uighur and not be complacent.

Community Day and Flower Planting

I have been getting a bit more involved in my community recently, something I have wanted for a long time.  There are two big reasons for this:

Firstly, when my family moved into this neighbourhood 33 years ago, it was considered a nice area, somewhere we could be proud to call home. Over the years it has degenerated with poverty, crime and anti-social behaviour increasing and the whole area becoming overcrowded and starting to look dirty and rundown.  To make things worse, the area became known for prostitution, with people having sex in residents front gardens and parked cars and leaving used condoms all over the road for our children to step over on the way to school in the morning.

By this point, the people who were proud of the area moved out into nicer areas and many of the houses were bought by landlords to let out, often to multiple families or groups of young men.  My husband would often speak to neighbours to try and organise people to complain or do something about the problems, with little luck.  Sometimes he would return from fajr (dawn) prayers and would chase away men trying to use prostitutes in alley ways behind shops or in neighbours front gardens.  He would complain to shops and ask them to gate their alleyways, to no avail.

I tried asking about neighbourhood watch and found our area no longer had one.  So you can imagine I was desperate for a neighbourhood watch, a residents association or some groups of neighbours to try and come together and do something – whether it was lobby the police and local council or to take some other steps.  It has only been in the last eight months, when things got so bad, that there were young girls prostituting themselves on every street corner with thugs in cars watching them (we were told by the police these are organised criminal gangs that often traffic girls for this purpose), that a group of neighbours came together and tried to do something.

In a short time they have lobbied so hard for the Council and police to do something, that enough resource was deployed into the area that the girls left (to go to neighbouring areas I hear).  Residents started Street Watching (including my husband), standing next to the prostitutes and staring down punters as well reporting to the police.

It has been an amazing piece of activism, but only very much the start of things.  Part of the reason that things got so bad was that the community became partially transient, moving in and moving on fairly soon and not staying long enough to feel invested in the community.  We also had tensions between the settled communities (mainly Asian and some black and white) and the new communities (various Eastern European communities, including Roma who often face abuse here).  So part of the solution has been about dealing with the anti-social behaviour and prostitution, but part is about re-building the community and building bridges between different parts of the community.  To that effect the groups of residents has been undertaking litter picks and community planting days.  They have applied for money for new bins and for parks to have new play equipment and fences put in.  They have tried to set up walking groups for women. I have tried to get involved as much as I can.

At the recent community planting day, I ran a card-making stall for the kids.  They had a great time and went mad with my stickers and stamps.

The flower bed that my husband helped to build, we all planted flowers in it and keep an eye on it during the school run, it is now in full bloom:

The second reasons I wanted to get involved is that I have developed so many skills through work that could benefit my community: identifying funding, bidding for funding, creating a website (which I have done last week), connecting people with ideas and projects that they would be interested in,  researching and information gathering.  I really wanted to use these in a way that could make a difference. Now I am grateful for the chance to do so. 

My next two dreams/projects for this neighbourhood are an art club and sports and activities for children and young people as neighbouring areas have both and truly benefit from them, we have neither and desperately need them.

Super Sisters Eid Event

I love anything Eid related, sisters only events, any excuse to get dressed up and party and also inspiring people.  So I was more than pleased to hear about the SuperSisters Big Eid party which ticked all of those boxes.  Tickets had sold out by the time I heard, but a colleague from work organised some for me and Little Lady to go along.

The event had a host of young and inspiring women: Quran reciters, spoken word poets, inspiring speakers and nasheed singers.  I was impressed by the courage these sisters had to get on stage and perform and share their stories.

This sister had a gorgeous voice and I thoroughly enjoyed her rendition of Hallelujah/Ya Ilahi:

The event had free food, although we spent so much time talking and networking that we missed most of it. There were stalls and there was a very talented henna artist (Asma Ali) who did Little Ladies henna , much to her pleasure:

 

I love this tray of colourful body paint that was being offered as an alternative to henna:

It was a really nicely organised events, with plenty to keep us interested and entertained and I couldn’t believe it didn’t cost us anything (including the food and henna).  I hope there is a lot more like this insh’Allah.