#this is my haram thing

[atimefordragons]

if it is true that Joost punched someone from the zionist's delegation, I will use all my votes for Netherlands.

[roses-and-elixir]

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[randomravager]

mother taught me how to spend money freely, father taught me how to spend money tightly, and I taught myself how to be an anxious wreck about those two sides yippee!

[p2ii]

I hate when you feel like shit but are still expected to fulfil (non compulsory) religious obligations but when you try to be like 'hey please not today I feel like shit' the only answer you get is. 'well this stuff Is supposed to relax you and make you feel better/at peace so do it anyway' so all you can do is bite your tongue 'cause if you even so much as implied that doing them dosnt actually make you feel better and not everyone is the same and you can't force someone to find peace in something you'd basically be outing yourself.

[telomirage]

me: nervous about my first fansign experience despite being assured it was just as fast as hi touch

my first fansign experience: EXTREMELY POSITIVE and also so fast I feel like I blacked out and can't remember the order the members were sitting in (except for that I think Haruna might have been first and Tsuki was definitely last in line at the table)

I went through the line saying hi hello thank you, etc etc to everyone and I'm still riding the high of 1) one member telling me she liked my hair and thought it was pretty, 2) another member brightening up over my eyeliner + gems and saying I looked pretty, and 3) tsuki signing my album, looking up, and pausing with the album held aloft to tell me I was very pretty before handing the album to the staff so they'd give it back to me :')

[boimgfrog]

sims 4 please give us better hijabs and head coverings I'm begginggggggg

[magnoliamyrrh]

does anyone have an analysis of why andrew tate has been embraced by so many muslim dudes and sheikhs and etc

[navramanan]

Always crazy to see what some muslims consider being "strict" just cuz they dont follow the rule

[damneddunya]

Oh God, I'm so confused

[kashmirichaiwithmehr]

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[sotruebritney]

bts fans suck but their gay fan fictions did turn my homophobic cousin into an ally i'll give them that

[kavehater]

People for some reason always like to tell me that it’s nobody’s responsibility to “save me” which is so fucking stupid to tell me because where have I ever implied that ?! It’s so unfair to hear that because clearly you don’t know shit abt me if you say that. But why am I the only one who gets to hear that ?! Maybe for once I’d like to be saved maybe it’s not a sin to want that, and I think that it is peoples responsibilities to do better but no. The reason it doesn’t happen is because I’m simply not worth it.

[magic-in-onyx]

I have no emotions and I have too many at the same time. All I am sure of is that I still persevere in my love for the haiku bot.

why are islamic dietary restrictions so unbelievably stupid

It’s not so bad, for example, it’s halal to eat your mom’s pussy

[solarismp3]

Y’know I feel like when ppl are overly religious it’s cuz they have something to hide

[elumish]

In the wake of what's going on in the world, I see a lot of rhetoric that basically boils down to the idea that everyone has a responsibility to watch every bad thing that's going on in the world all the time. That awareness itself is a responsibility that everyone has always.

I'm not going to say that people do or don't have a responsibility to be aware of things, but I want to talk about how to take care of yourself and others while doing so.

For some context, I spent close to a year and a half reading about every terrorist attack in the world as part of my work on the Global Terrorism Database. It was 2015/2016, so this was the height of ISIS/Daesh, it was a major time for Boko Haram, and it was when there was a lot of political violence that we weren't sure how to classify in places like Yemen, Crimea, and Libya (stuff the GTD didn't know how to classify had all of is information recorded, and then it went into purgatory until someone above my paygrade decided what to do with it). What this means is that I was spending 10-20 hours a week reading about hundreds or thousands of attacks a month and, in my case, recording infomation about the type of attack and the type of weapon. Much of my life was reading terrible things.

Limit what you do in isolation. One of the worst changes for me during that time, mental health-wise (even though it was great for my commute) was when I went from working in-person to working remotely. With other people, there are ways to diffuse the pain. A burden shared is a burden halved and all that. That may mean talking about it, or joking about it, or finding some other way to engage with it that isn't just reading about the most horrible things in the world and then stewing in your own thoughts about them.

Find something to do that's totally unrelated. I highly recommend finding something to do with your hands, if you can (knitting, Lego, cooking, whatever), but regardless of what it is, you should have some time when you entirely switch away to something different. During a fair amount of my time with the GTD, I was also doing my undergrad thesis about terrorism on TV, so a huge amount of my life was about terrorism in some way. The only other thing I watched was Great British Bake Off, and I would just rewatch the episodes, over and over.

Be compassionate about how you share information and with whom. Use trigger warnings, and consider using consistent tagging on places like Tumblr so people can blacklist it if they need to. Also consider whether it's appropriate or necessary to share photos of bodies or other results of horrible violence. What is it accomplishing, to show that? Can that goal be accomplished other ways that don't require the equivalent of jumpscares of unexpected photos of dead or brutalized people? Are you just showing it because you think that everyone should have to see it? If you are showing it, are there ways to mitigate against harm it may do?

Do what you can to avoid an echo chamber. Sometimes, when everyone around you is upset or angry about the same thing, it just amplifies itself, and you all get angrier and more upset in perpetuity without accomplishing anything.

Work towards action. Watching terrible things happen for the sake of saying that you haven't looked away isn't as meaningful as taking action in some way. Write to your Congressperson. Donate. Do whatever is appropriate for the thing you want to stop. But penance via watching terrible things happen doesn't accomplish anything.

Recognize compassion fatigue and do what you can to mitigate it. If you spend long enough doing this, you start to lose context, and you start to become less able to have compassion about things. If you're reading about attacks with dozens or hundreds of deaths regularly, five can start to not seem like that many. If you're reading only about the worst suffering in the world, "lesser" suffering of those around you can start to seem unimportant and petty. Do what you can to mitigate that.

Be kind to yourself. You do nobody any good if you burn out. Look away, if you need to. Take a break. Do things so you can enjoy life, because otherwise you are just another person suffering in the world. Other people's pain isn't a hair shirt for you to wear.

[radfemsiren]

Remembering my Afghani American best friend from my islamic elementary and middle school whose dad would get drunk every night and beat the shit out of her mother. She begged and begged for sleepovers because strangers in the house would make him leave, and I never told my parents about the situation (I lied and said she had no father or brothers) because I loved spending time at her house and staying up the whole night doing all the things we weren’t allowed to do that was “haram”… watching rated r movies, playing horror computer games, dancing to music videos on YouTube, cat walking in heels and makeup, scaring ourselves with creepypastas.

I remember we had a million stupid ass discussions about who the purple guy from five nights at Freddies was, or what a slenderman proxy meant, or if there were illuminati signs in Katy Perry music videos, or if emo drawings of Jeff the killer were hot. We’d whisper fight if Beyoncé or Lana del Rey was a better singer, or if teen wolf or maze runner had cuter boys. She was team Beyoncé and teen wolf.

We had to constantly be separated in school for talking, and we hated the creepy janitor and would throw wads of wet paper towel on the bathroom ceiling for him to clean up later. We got into so much trouble together, and would always smirk at each other in detention when we got yelled at. We’d shoplift lipsticks from the mall, and throw away expensive Quran transliterations from school, and sneak into the teachers break room and steal handfuls of ice and throw them on the imam/principal’s desk when he was gone to ruin his paperwork.

I moved away like I always had to do with my constantly migrating family and we lost touch. The last time I saw her in person was when we were still kids at her brothers wedding. I was laughing while I tried to ask her why the bride kept changing into different brightly colored dresses throughout the night. She wasn’t listening, and she burst into tears and cried about how her brother was just like her father and did every horrible thing he did. I held her and squeezed her so tight I thought her bones would break.

I recently tried to reconnect with her again but she’s already married, pregnant, and has abandoned social media and texting because it’s “haram.” Trying to talk to her was like speaking to a stranger… she had no interest in any of the things we would spend hours playing with before. “Islam is important to me now, I’m a new woman. We were messed up kids, it’s time to grow up.” She told me to never contact her again and hung up the phone.

Sometimes I feel like I failed her, and sometimes I understand that I was a girl trying to survive too.

One day I’ll save money to travel back there and talk to her in person. I’ll snap her out of it. We’ll spend all night up together again doing every terrible thing our teachers and parents and religious leaders warned us against, and laughing the whole way through it. We’ll get kicked out of bars and get into trouble and snicker our way through it all, knowing we’ve already won. I still have her dirty, worn, my littlest pet shop horse she gave me when we first met. I hold it in my hands when I see news of the what’s happening to the women of Afghanistan, and I feel like I’ve failed her again. That I’ll forever be stuck an immature child and her a miserable adult, both of us doomed, unable to be saved from our fates in the end.