Coping With War From Afar Through Faith

The hardest kind of suffering can be the kind you watch from a safe distance. Your body is in peace, but your mind is stuck in alerts, timelines, and the ache of knowing people you love or people you identify with are living through war, hunger, and fear. That disconnect can bring guilt when you sleep, guilt when you eat, and a heavy feeling that never really lifts, especially during Ramadan. I want to name that pain clearly and tell you something you may need to hear: if you feel it deeply, you’re not abnormal.

Transcript

Ramadan Grief And Community Pain

The Trauma Of War From Afar

Believers As One Body

Why Gaza Changed Our Comfort

Desire As A False God

Algorithms And Moral Blindness

Step Back To See The Story

Inna Lillah And True Submission

Khadija And The Cost Of Freedom

Turning To Prayer For Patience

Peaceful Pain And Staying Awake

Closing Reflections And Farewell

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Welcome to Purpose and Peace with Sister Julie, a place to slow down and reflect. In a world full of noise and distraction, this podcast invites us to ask deeper questions about meaning, faith, and what truly brings peace. Through reflection and lived experience, we explore how reconnecting with purpose can guide us intellectually, morally, and spiritually. Wherever you are on your journey, you're welcome here. Auddu billahimina shaitan al-Rahen, Bismillahir Rahina Al-Rahim. As Salatu Wasalamu ala ashraf al-Mbiya waqir al-Mursaleen, Wahhabi Ilah al Haalameen, Abil Kasimi Muhammad, Allahum Sanihana Muhammad, Wa Ali Muhammad, Waala Ahlibaitih Tayyubin U-Tahirim. Salam Alaikum everyone and welcome to another episode at Purpose and Peace. It has been a little bit of a while, and I did promise some more episodes in the Holy Month of Ramadan. But as I'm sure you're all aware, it's been quite an eventful holy month of Ramadan. So there's been a lot to absorb, a lot of emotion, a lot of frustration, and a lot of pain, a lot of pain in the community. So just observing and reflecting and praying over the past few weeks, I thought it's a timely moment to share some insights, some support, some ideas, I guess just some comfort really to a community that's really hurting at the moment. You know, particularly with the events in Iran and in South Lebanon, the continued events in Palestine across the world. So, inshallah, my aim is today to just provide a little bit of I guess just strategies to cope and to move forward and continue to kind of soldier on spiritually during these foggy times, inshallah. So I guess for many people that are living abroad or have taken another country to call their home, whether they were born in that country or whether they migrated, the reality of the struggle of experiencing a war secondhand is very much distressing. You know, if and if you ever have been, you know, inshallah you haven't, but if you have, and I guess for many people from the Middle East it's somehow quite familiar, if you've been in a war zone, there's as difficult as it is, you're in the reality of it. So you're not in the hypotheticals, you're you're there, you know if this place is dangerous, if it's not, you're kind of getting updated on what you need to be updated on. But when you step away from that war zone, especially if you have loved ones overseas, it's although you're in this place of peace, you're almost in a constant mental turmoil because A, you have to continuously check all news platforms. So you're not just receiving your news from one particular source, you're trying to explore all news platforms to stay up to date, and so you have this constant feed of negative information drowning your mind, so much so that it almost sometimes feels so overwhelming, it encompasses us. Um, it shifts our personalities, our mindsets, we become very easy to trigger. So I can't say it's worse living abroad, however, I can say it's it's definitely a different type of trauma. So, you know, whether we be sleeping, we carry this guilt of having a bed and a blanket and the sound of peace enveloping our bedrooms. When we eat flavorsome food, we struggle somehow to swallow each morsel. Not because it's dry, but because the reality of hunger that our brothers and sisters have at the moment seems to choke us. And being in the holy month of Ramadan really just exacerbates this feeling and this situation. We laugh at ordinary life, but then we quickly feel like we need to recover to our sombre mood because of the lack of laughter in some of our homelands. And the question arises about this pain, this palpable pain that we feel, that some people try to get us to shut off or ignore, but it's very real, and there's so much agony. And if you've felt this pain over the past few weeks, then you should really rest assured that you are normal, not vice versa. That you are normal and this pain is normal, particularly from the lens of a mu'min. It's not a situation that needs to be ignored or a cheek turned to. And in the words of our Holy Prophet, he talks about believers as one body. It's a very famous narration where he says that surely the believers, in relation to the mercy and compassion and affection that they show for one another, they're like one body. And therefore, if one part of the body is feeling pain, then it complains about this pain to other parts of the body, so that that part of the body can come forward and help with that injured or that part of pain within the body. So, subhanAllah, you know, when you consider the ummah to be one body, if any part of it is hurting, we should only naturally be hurting two if we are part of this collective ummah. So, through this episode, we're going to talk about how to move through this storm from a spiritual perspective and try to take some light from the source of light back to our bank of knowledge to try and allow us to allow it to carry us through this turbulent time. And I guess in some ways, we can question why it's kind of hit us so hard this time. And we can say since the genocide in Gaza until now, something in the world has shifted. And a part of that could very much be because it somehow was this rude wake-up call that evil and good still exists. And there are moments in our lives, and probably pre-Gaza's genocide, that we kind of became so comfortable in our routines, in our setways, in our in our ways of really deep comfort that was taken so much for granted, that not only did we ignore some of the atrocities that were happening behind the scenes, but we even came to forget about our origin and our destination at the same time. Now, the reality of there being good and evil in this dunya has been there from the beginning of time. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, right in that initial drama, as he kind of beautifully depicts it for us, and he's having this conversation with the angels, and he mentions to them Awda Billahim in a shaitan al-Rajim, that I'm going to be placing a successor upon the earth. Now they objected to this, and we usually always talk about Shaitan's objection that he considered himself greater of a creation than Adam. But the angels objected too, but they done it with substance, with wisdom. It wasn't coming from a place of ego, where they they question Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala and they say, are you gonna really place in there someone who causes corruption and they shed blood? And here we are, you know, singing your praises, sanctifying you. And so from the very onset, and it's there's some beautiful reasons as to why or how the angels knew this, and I'd encourage you to go back into a tafsir, tafsir al-Mizan has a beautiful part on this, and look at what are some of the possibilities or some of the knowledge that these angels may have known. But Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala ends this ayah so beautifully, and it's really it's it's a part of the verse that gives so much hope, where he responds to them and he says, That I know something, I surely know something that you do not know. And I don't know. For me, it feels like Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala is always almost telling them, just hang in there, wait until you see the potential within this human being, not just what they may carry out from an evil lens. So Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala made it very clear to us that there is going to be mischief makers on this earth, that there are going to be people guided by the shaitan, because shaitan's kind of counter-argument to God when he was removed from the garden was he says, and this is so important to recognize this, he's still calling him his Lord. He never disbelieved in his Lord, rather, he disobeyed him because he genuinely believed he was better than that human creation. That my Lord, because you have made my life evil to me, I will certainly make evil fair seeming to them. So I'm gonna make this evil way of life, I'm gonna make it seem like it's so okay that it's absolutely fine, there's no problem with it. And I'm gonna cause them all to deviate. And Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala then tells him, Go ahead, but you'll never be able to touch those true mu'min, the true servants on the straight path that are doing their best. And so one of the byproducts of us continuously following our desire and following these footsteps of shaitan and not seeing anything wrong with it, is that it places us into this deep state of comfort. And sometimes when we're so comfortable, we start to somehow think we're invincible. I've got it all down packed, everything's working smoothly, nothing can go wrong. And at times we fail to even realize that our enemy was in our own backyard. And I think, you know, just knowing from community sentiment post Gaza's genocide, or I know it's actively still happening, unfortunately, but when it was kind of at its peak, a lot of people really struggled when they started to realize how ingrained the enemy's ways were in our everyday life and everyday living circumstances. So, such a life that is completely based on desire, on achieving a deep comfort and just satisfying every single want that I have. So, in other words, they've completely submitted to their desire, to that, whatever I feel like. And this is this is, I guess, my reservation with this whole idea of you know the YOLO way of living. You only live once, and you do you, and I'll so in other words, like just do whatever you want. You know, you've only got this one chance, just smash it. But a mu'min or a mukmina sees life in a very different lens, and they see everything they do in this world as planting seeds for their hereafter. Every action has a consequence that we're going to have to bear either the bless or the bliss of or the punishment. And so sometimes we ask ourselves, you know, can't everyone see the truth? Like it's right there. Can't you see that this is wrong and this is right? And you know, it doesn't really help with our AI feed and the way that the algorithm works to kind of pump into your feed everything that you agree with and that you're going to give attention to. So you start to kind of feel that everyone thinks like you and everything is working, or everything makes so much sense according to how you understand the world, but on the flip side, someone who might have a polar opposite perspective and opinion, or they're being fed the exact opposite. So they're also looking at you, maybe, and thinking, how can they not see the truth? And look, you know, everyone's talking about this, everyone's commenting about this. So it's a bit of a scary place that we're entering in this digital world, particularly as AI starts to pick up and take a little bit more shape in the digital world, because we are in many ways only able to see things through one perspective. So it's important that at the very least we try our best to broaden that that thought. But I guess anyway, that's on that's another story altogether. But sometimes you'll see something that's black and white. I mean, bombing a child's school. There's nothing vague about that. There's nothing that needs to be broken down and understood and investigated. It's utterly wrong. And subhanAllah, if you remember back the first time that it happened in Gaza, you know, the world was up in arms, oh my god, how could this happen? And you know, they lied about it initially, and there were so many different ways of analyzing it. But now it's just something that just happens, and the world just turns the next page. So we might get to this point and think, like, how can they not see the truth? In that very same ayah where Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala talks about them taking their low desire for their God, he then continues to say that, and we set a seal upon their hearing, upon their heart, and a covering upon their eye. And who then can guide them after Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala? Will you not then be mindful? Afala tata tatadakkaroon. So, in other words, every single action of ours has a consequence. And some of these consequences help us see more clearly, and some of them help blind us to the truth. And some actions that we might do may even go further than have an impact on ourselves. They may even start to shed light to those around us. And that's why it's been so pivotal to have people of consciousness, of knowledge come out and speak the truth, albeit at their very own sacrifice. You know, many of these people have been cancelled or been ridiculed, but subhanallah, there's an inner strength because they can now see the truth that keeps pushing them forward. Now, as the world is starting to wake up, we have a long way to go. And within our own souls, especially as a Muslim um, we've got so much waking up to do. But it's important to note that the sacrifices, whether they be in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, in Iraq, in any place that's standing strong to terror and to occupiers and to genocidal regimes, the blood that is pouring out of these countries of these innocent people, is flooding the streets of the world. And it's waking people up from a very, very deep slumber. And waking up sometimes is extremely painful. I mean, just take the simple example of you being asleep and someone just comes and turns on the light. Even physically, it's painful for the eyes. It burns, it takes some time to readjust. But once you're up and your eyes are awake, then who's going to choose to turn the light back off? Once you can see reality, who's going to choose to turn the light back off? And sometimes, however, we get stuck in the video, in the article, in the post, and that's all we kind of seem to see. Just that pain of that video, of that mother's cries, of that father's wailing. And it's unbelievably painful. But it's very important that we stop and we take a little step back and we pause to try our best to see the bigger picture, to try our best to remember that there is an artist still creating an artwork, that the story hasn't come to an end. And that is the reality of our dunya. We can't get stuck in the pain. As human beings, we don't like pain. In fact, we try to come up with any way to relieve ourselves of pain. And as believers and mu'minen, it doesn't mean that we don't get overwhelmed, that we don't feel down and depressed and we lose strength. No, we're human. But again, we turn to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala for guidance. In moments like this, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has encouraged us to do something. He's described those believers and how they're able to get through this deep suffering. Where he mentions Al Ladina, Ida Asaabatu, that these believers are the kind of people that when a calamity befalls them, a misfortune, a tragedy, they turn and say, Surely we are Allah's and to Him we shall return. Inna Lilla, we belong to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. What a beautiful phrase. Inna Lilla, I belong to God, and I'm going back to God. And so a believer, rather than only using this at the time of someone's death, they see the importance of this verse in a calamity. They see the importance of this verse when tragedy strikes because they are able to see the ending and they know their destination. And they know that what happens between the innalillapa, that we belong to God, and ilahiraj, it's not going to distract me from my ultimate goal, from the purpose. And subhanAllah, this is true submission. This is Islam at its finest. That believing wholeheartedly that nothing can be done without the permission of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. And that everything that's done with God's permission is never done for no reason. Now, what do I do if I'm not there yet? It all sounds nice, and I'd love to kind of have that as a reality. But I'm not really there yet. I'm still struggling to see the wisdom in so many things in my life or in the world around me. The Holy Prophet's submission, sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, is my aim. It's the goal. But to get to that level, I'm not there yet. So how do I journey to get to at least developing wherever I'm at at the moment? I wanted us to take a quick lesson from one of the first who ever embraced the religion of Islam. Before it was a global religion, before it was a brotherhood and a sisterhood and a huge ummah and a recognized remedy to so many of society's ailments. There was a time where these early Muslims were terrorized, they were boycotted, they were defamed, they were outcast from their very own people and their own communities. Why? Because they believed in one God and they would not submit to the social norms of supremacy or slavery. Full stop. And there's this freedom, an incredible liberation that comes when you submit to the source of all goodness. When you submit to Rabbul Alameen, it removes the shackles of needing to submit to anyone and anything else. And these were the likes of Prophet Muhammad and say the Khadija alayhi salam. Now, for many of us, particularly women, we pride ourselves on the fact that this noble woman was one of the most noble women of Arabia. And in today's terminology, we label her a billionaire, a successful businesswoman back in that time that was dominated by men. Look at what she'd done, and we we go on this rant and look at all of the great things that she'd done. But very rarely do we ever talk about her struggle. There was never any freedom anywhere in the world that was ever handed down on a silver platter. And Islam, true submission to Islam, is our ultimate freedom because it frees us from fear, from desire, from intimidation, from bribery, from oppressors. They just can't shackle you down anymore. But when you look at someone like Sayyid al-Khadija, how was her ending? Being in the valley of Sha'bu Abu Talib for three years, encountering unbelievable hardships, but she never ceased to invite people to Islam and submit to this path. Giving up wasn't an option. When you understand the reality of inna lillah, wa inna ilahi rajun, there's no giving up. It doesn't exist. Now, how? Now, for some of us, I'm sure all of us, we've probably earnestly cried to God for help to alleviate the pain and suffering, to make this all stop. And if in that anguish, for a very brief moment, you questioned, where are you, God? Why aren't you hearing me? Then our spirituality needs some attention. Because here is our role model. Not because I chose him to be our role model for this particular topic, but because Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala has placed him as an exemplary role model, as our guide, as our messenger, and as a most beautiful example. Someone who didn't keep going because of the benefit of what he was going to receive in dunya. He didn't keep going just to amass wealth and expand the Muslim empire. That wasn't his intention. Every person he touched, every person that submitted at the time of the Holy Prophet submitted through heart. They done so because they saw a remarkable example in his character. Where Allah reminds us of that by saying, Inna kalallahuluk alhade, what an exemplary character you have. So to draw this into a close, are we overwhelmed? Yes, absolutely. Are we sad? Yes. Are we broken? Are we confused? Quite possibly. But are we weak? No. Are we faithless? Hopeless? No. Because we know that the artist is still at work. And we know that we have a part to play. We know it's not the end. And when our hearts get heavy and we feel like we just can't take it anymore, then we turn in prayer, like Nabi Dawood, Prophet David, taking up the greatest giant of his time, where people ridiculed him because he just wasn't strong enough. But what does he say? He says, Rabbana, afralay nasabran, kafi, and what a beautiful prayer. That O Lord, pour down on us patience and make our steps firm and assist us again against the unbelieving people. Sometimes we need a trickle of patience, but sometimes we need it to be poured down on us. So recognizing the overwhelm, the distress, the challenge, we should be calling more in prayer, not away from it. While some people see buried bodies buried under the rubble, those who know that this blood will not go in vain recognize that even if everyone is wiped out, the power and resistance of their souls will ignite thousands of other living souls, and the blood spilled from their veins will seep into the veins of the lovers of truth. And while they are alive with their Lord Yur Zakun, they inspire others to be alive in this world standing with justice. So I tell you guys, let's try our best to not expect to know the answer to everything or the details of the outcome, but rather to hold firm to the rope of Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, to believe in His word and in His promise. And we know it's not easy, but there is a wisdom that this has shaken up almost the entire world, perhaps to heed a lesson, perhaps for me to take a lesson, and to keep that lesson alive and not to lose it again and go into a deep state of slumber when this is all over. So on an end note, if you are in pain, it's normal. Just like the prophetic saying of a Muslim being like one body, we should be hurting, but we should aim for a stage of peaceful pain, a pain that's embraced by the peace of ultimate tawakun on the one who neither sleep nor slumber overtakes him. We should know in whose eye the entire war is unfolding, and all other atrocities around the world. We need to do our part, we stay focused on the truth, we hold firmly to God, and if you just wake up, then try to stay awake, and know that ultimately truth and justice will prevail. Kulja al Hak Wazaha albatil inalbatila kana zahuka. Thank you for being here. If today's episode gave you something to think about, I hope it stays with you beyond this moment. Purpose grows through reflection, and peace follows when we return to what truly matters. Until next time, may your life be guided by purpose and grounded in peace. As salamali.