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thought about the life my grandmother envisioned for me and my future children, my parents and my siblings, my aunts and my cousins. Every day, my grandmother goes to sleep with these dreams and wakes up because of them. She would rush to pray in the last third of the night, patiently making dua that they would become a reality. And I feel that I am living half the dreams she had told me. When I think about what I want to be remembered for, I immediately think about my acts of kindness. In my experience, I have learned that the process of legacy-making is one that combines creativity and spirituality: imagining the life we want for ourselves and our descendants, and continuously asking for Allah’s SWT guidance in connecting those life experiences. Legacy should not be thought of merely as an endpoint—it is an accumulation of processes. Our legacies are partly empowered by the duas of our loved ones, which tie the strings of fate that nurtures us to be better Muslims as we mature through life. I was grateful that I never had to challenge my belief— of the constant opportunities for acts of kindness, of meeting the right people at the right time, of the promise of a future. I witnessed the vitality of my grandmother’s duas, how they align fates that bring me closer to my goals. But to believe that this is true for all my Muslim brothers and sisters around the world seems to be imprecise. And by the will of Allah SWT, my belief was challenged. 10 | THE MUSLIM VOICE | NOVEMBER 2023
Two weeks ago, I visited my friend’s apartment to study together, where I met a Lebanese postgraduate student. He is a friend of my friend, and since we were sitting at the same table, I introduced myself. I ran him through the template introduction - I’m Hasna, I’m a third-year student, I study International Relations and Public Policy. These days, the mention of my field of study would lead to a long questioning about my thoughts of the occupation in Palestine and the resistance movement, and this time, it was no different. “The world is very polarizing now,” he sighed, after I asked him if he’d heard of the killing of the Palestinian child in Chicago. “People keep telling us to make duas, but what’s the point anymore? Where is God in all of this?” As I reflected on his remarks, I started rethinking specifically about my pitch for this piece, the one you’re reading. If a Muslim’s legacy is their acts of kindness and their encounters with opportunities for those acts are empowered by their loved ones’ duas, to what extent can this be true for our brothers and sisters in Palestine? Palestinians make more duas for those who passed than those who remained. They pray more janazah prayers than they do the fard. How can they practice kindness when the world is unkind? How can they maintain steadfastness in their duas when the promise of a future, a liberated Palestine, seems like a distance away?
