On Sovereign Womanhood
Marking Mother's Day in this new dark age built on brute domination, immorality, and spiritual sterility, the feminine principle in Islam reminds humanity of the forgotten school of mercy + justice.
This is the most cited aphorism in the 13th century classical Sufi manual, the Hikam of Ibn ʿAtaʾillah. It is often invoked to warn of the hidden dangers of arrogance and the desire to be seen:
“Bury your existence in the ground of obscurity, for what “springs” from what is unburied will never flourish.”
ادفِنْ وُجُودَكَ فِي أَرضِ الخُمُولِ، فَمَا نَبَتَ مِمَّا لَم يُدفَنْ لَا يَتِمُّ نِتاجُهُ
For some, it is easy to heed this aphorism a little too well.
After all, in many cultures, the obscure woman, “the woman as martyr” is celebrated, exalted. But even the selfless path can lead to women become society’s sacrificial lamb. Too often, women entomb themselves in their labor, in their children or their households and delay their own spiritual actualization. Comfort in obscurity is their more natural state, it is almost ontological. It is as if burial in obscurity is the feminine modus operandi.
This inward inclination is reflected Qur’anically. Maryam, the mother of Jesus, said “I wish I were buried before this,” and even fasted from speaking. Swallowed by grief, the mother of Moses tasted the sorrow of grief and separation. The mother of Isma’il, Hajar ran in the desert of solitude with her crying, hungry baby. Yet despite being buried in the womb of oblivion, they became one of the most influential women across the ages, changing the very arc of human history. Even sorrow seems to be fused with the feminine, with Allah repeatedly enjoining women in the Qur’an in particular against sadness “lā tahzanī.”
Women are praised for endurance so often that their suffering itself becomes romanticized. In this distortion, the “selfless” woman is expected to absorb pain without complaint, to nurture without replenishment, to forgive and overlook dysfunction without ever receiving justice. This is an aberration. Excessive cultural expectations of playing the role of the “obedient” silently suffering woman is neither holy nor Prophetic: it is merely sanctified exploitation under the guise of piety, virtue and patience.
Because authentically transformative obscurity is freedom from the ego’s incessant demand to be seen, not outright erasure. It is an inner, dignified posture. It is the freedom from needing constant validation. A woman can therefore teach, write, lead, or serve visibly while still remaining inwardly “buried”, even while she does not see herself, only Allah.
For many women of my ummah, however, they posses no such luxury as to disappear into solitude only to return renewed. They are forced to bloom in the midst of catastrophe, to rise from the wreckage before their soul could even grasp for air, or a chance to grieve.
The persecuted women.
The exploited women.
The women living in genocidal conditions.
The imprisoned, shackled women.
Countless women are quite literally buried under the rubble of anti-Muslim state violence.
Marking North American Mother’s Day, I wish to pay tribute to these forgotten women of forced obscurity. To the millions of nameless, faceless suffering women concealed in the cruel gulags of the belly of the beast.
I think of Kashmir’s Asiya Andarbi, the 64-year-old grandmother serving one of the harshest convictions of three life sentences in India’s prisons on baseless accusations, without ever committing a single crime. May God fortify her son, Ahmed, who gratefully interviewed me on his podcast, Koshur Musulman, on the topic of Sufi Warriors, the transcript of which you can read here.
I think of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, the mother and scholar who was betrayed by her home country’s government of Pakistan, whose children were snatched from her arms as babies. She was sold to the Americans, and has been unjustly kept in solitary confinement since 2008, serving an 86-year sentence in Texas, in one of American’s most notoriously inhumane prisons.1
I think of the countless mothers of Palestine, Iran, Lebanon or Sudan, who bury their husbands and children—and pieces of their soul along with them—daily. I think of all the women this oppressive world has failed. How long must they carry the weight of abandonment? What does it even mean to recognize Mother’s Day when mothers are etched with scars of the spiritual exhaustion that come from inhabiting a morally inverted world?
Earlier this year, women in Turkey threw headscarves from the upper prayer hall at the men at a mosque during last ten nights this past Ramadan, to remind them that al-Aqsa is besieged and closed, longing for its worshippers to rerun to it and protect it. As if to say, “wake up oh men! Rise up to the honor that being a Muslim man demands of you!”
From Iran to Texas, the Muslim woman has become the site upon which modern societies project their deepest anxieties about secularity, autonomy, submission, tradition, and transcendence. They have been the nexus of a fierce civilizational, colonially-charged battlefield for centuries. The colonizer is obsessed with ‘saving’ her, undressing her, and killing her. Culturally, all of the intra-Muslim postcolonial frustration, impotence and angst is hung on her like a coat hanger of trauma and insecurities.
But the inverse, unseen reality of this is that the rooted, believing woman is a mirror of truth so powerful it can restore the world’s kilter. Fearless Muslim women are the class the Epstein cabal fears the most: for she represents the ultimate moral reminder of an extinct collective duties of honor and basic humanity. She is the witness. She represents the earthly/celestial. The strong/soft. The emotional/rational.
She is the Sovereign Woman, the holder of the balance this wounded world is sorely crying out for.
Some call this force the “sacred feminine.” Regardless of its name, what I call Sovereign womanhood is indeed a buried power, waiting to be sprung, strangulated beneath the weight of history, yet quietly preparing to take root and bring forth a different world.
Sovereign womanhood is not rooted in rebellion against masculinity, nor in the modern impulse to dissolve distinctions between men and women. It emerges instead from proximity to the shari’a as a wellspring of dignity, to Divine qualities that sustain life, neccesitate justice, and anchor human beings in the universals of mercy, dignity, and moral duty.
And the doyens of sovereign womanhood are our honored mothers. It is often forget that one lauded got resembling the Prophet ﷺ the most, is his daughter, the resplendent mother of believers, the matrilineal line bearer of the Aal al Bayt, the lady liege of the people of paradise, Fatima az-Zahra. They used to say of her, “her walk is exactly the same as that of the Messenger of Allah,” making Fatima both the figurative and literal feminine continuation of her father’s footsteps.
She moved in this world precisely as the Prophet ﷺ did.
This reminds us that the word rijāl means men, but also in Qur’anic terminology it means to be walking, to be literally upstanding.
Saintly women in West African Muslim circles are frequently referred to as a rijāl, not as biological men, but as spiritual men, as people carrying inner, spiritual distinction, wisdom and clarity of insight.
Shaykh Ibrāhim Niasse used to say, “secrets are in the hearts of the distinguished folk (rijāl), not in the bellies of books.” He also said, “Our women are like men and our men are like mountains.”
Even Rabi’a al-Adawiyah, the early female mystic was called “Taj al-Rijal” (the crown of men) and Farududdin Attar praised her and said of her:
“She wasn’t a single woman, but a thousand men over, robed in the quintessence of pain, from foot to face, immersed in truth, effaced in the radiance of God, and liberated from all superfluous excess.”
This framework invites women away from the noise of cultural expectation, political trauma and material excess, to step into the universe of Prophetic womanhood: a powerful, forgotten life force and primordial way of being in a world corrupted by brute power. She wears a metaphysical armor so powerful, it is indestructible.
For many companions, this power was literal. ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib narrated that in fierce fights, they hid behind the Prophet ﷺ for safety. In the Battle of Badr, Ali stated, “...when the fighting became very intense, we used to look for the Prophet & we used to hide behind him... He would walk all the way to the front & stand out there in the front line...”.
“Women are the counterparts (shaqa'iq) of men" - Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
But for Palestinian women and female warriors of light the armor is figurative: they are also the upstanding rijāl, so to speak, carrying the Prophetic armor alone in the wilderness of the 21st century, when it feels like the whole world has both objectified and failed them.
So many faceless, nameless women the world over carry this heavy weight, this responsibility of the ummah on their backs. Their faith and resilience has produced generations of freedom fighters and fearless men and women. Their very existence revives what it means to live and breathe true faith, a faith beyond mere external symbols of private piety, a rooted faith that makes the mountains shake and tyrants crumble.
Palestinian mothers have been carrying an unfathomable load on behalf of the ummah: the weight of abandonment, the prayer niches of Al-Aqsa, a sea of tears, a grove ancient olive trees, the chains of the prisoners in Israeli torture dungeons, all on their weary shoulders and within the chambers of their beautiful hearts.
Their ribat (remaining steadfast in a besieged land) under impossible conditions is sustained through the stubborn insistence and ingenuity of women and mothers who feed their families when even when food became scarce, when even flour became soaked with blood. They stitch dignity from scraps, turning sacks into garments, and warm blankets from the cold stars, while demonic, supremacist, settler women use their strollers to block food aid from entering Gaza and cheer and sneer as Palestinians suffer and starve.
They nurture, sustain, and quietly generate hope, insisting on life against conditions that are designed to extinguish all traces of it. History will write down that the valiant ribat of Palestine has subsisted on the insistence of powerful, honorable, women who upheld their faith, who stayed true to their covenant with their Maker.
And the symbol for this historic ribat is the humble isdal, the prayer clothes of the Gazawi women. Their genociders ridicule them and their prayer clothes after exterminating them on TikTok. The same prayer clothes they would sleep in so that in case they are bombed, they made sure their bodies would not be found uncovered.
The humble isdāl is more precious than all the expensive, pricey oud-drenched, silken abayas of the decadent capitals of the Gulf. It is more precious than the finest haute couture of Paris and London, for their humble prayer clothes revived for us in real-time the valor of Nusaybah bin Ka’ab Radiya Allah anha, the companion who participated in the battles of Uhud, Hunain, and Yamamah.
The flowing isdāl of Gazan women calls to mind the steadfast grace of Sayyida Khadijah, who stood beside the Prophet ﷺ when the world turned against him—just as today the men of Gaza are maligned and defamed by those in power.
The simple prayer scarf evokes the quiet courage of Asma bint Abi Bakr, who, even while pregnant, fashioned her own belt to bravely carry sustenance and provision in dangerous conditions.
It calls to mind that searing moment when Sayida Zaynab, this Substack’s muse, when she was marched from Iraq to Damascus stripped of her head covering. Her first plea was not for food or water, but for her scarf, for dignity, even when everything else had been taken. There, in a moment intended to break her, the tyrant Yazid taunted her: “Did you see what Allah has done to your family?” But she answered with a defiance that has echoed across centuries: “I saw nothing from Him except beauty.”
Fourteen centuries later, that same testimony lives on in Gaza, constantly evoked by my dear sister, Dr. Alaa Al Qatrawi, who, despite having lost her four children, refuses to let their story be reduced to grief alone; she carries them forward through the force of her words and the steadiness of her faith, declaring once more: “I saw nothing from Allah but beauty.”
The betrayal, she reminds us, does not belong to the Allah—it belongs to the likes of those cowardly “Muslims” who quibble online over sectarian, theological, or gender wars, instead of rushing to fulfill the forgotten code of honor as protectors and as men, who failed their trust as khulafā’ lillāh.
Surely for Muslim men and women, believing men and women, devout men and women, truthful men and women, patient men and women, humble men and women, charitable men and women, fasting men and women, men and women who guard their chastity, and men and women who remember Allah often—for ˹all of˺ them Allah has prepared forgiveness and a great reward. (Ahzab: 35)
Along with them, Gaza’s men and children were also abandoned. Gaza’s example refuses the shallow binaries of gender wars, because there, men and women have endured the 21st century nakba together. Fathers carrying children from rubble, sons digging graves with bare hands, husbands starving with their families rather than abandoning them.
The men of Gaza did not flee their covenant; many died trying to uphold it. They stood, often with impossible odds and abandoned by the world, between protecting their loved ones and annihilation.
The tragedy of this affair is not that modern Muslim masculinity itself failed, but that so much of the broader world reduced manhood to puffed up chests, pearl-clutching keyboard warriors, extra testosterone, subjugating women as objects and empty posturing while Gazan men reaffirmed it through the Prophetic ideal of active sacrifice, tenderness, endurance, and protection.
Palestinian women have long carried unbearable burdens, yes—but often alongside their men who bled beside them, were buried next to them, and together, they refused to surrender their land or their dignity. Both men and women were abandoned, left to shoulder horrors no human being should ever have faced alone. They redefined what it means to be truly sovereign. Zionism and its active bloodlust, then, is the real source of war on the Muslim family, not American culture wars.
Despite being the most dehumanized people on earth, they established a school of humanity, reviving a model of Islamic societal ethics for the 21st century. Despite all, they still stand tall, and give birth to lessons of hope and resilience from the womb of tribulation, acting as living reminders that no other than Allah is worthy of obeying and fearing in reality, boldly proclaiming no/lā.
Lā to occupation, lā to normalizing with Zionism, and lā ilaha ilaha Allah.
Despite living through the holocaust of our times, they still manage to turn their loss and pain ألم alam, into canvasses of beauty and أمل amal.
The intention is not to romanticize or valorize their suffering. The intention is to honor their struggle, to heed its lessons, as an āya, a sign for us, to awaken, introspect, and act. To re-assess our metrics.
Because the sovereign mothers and women of our time offer a radical redefinition of what beauty truly means. In this vapid world, beauty is often reduced to surgically modified faces, towering skylines, and hollow displays of luxury. To soulless Arab princesses and vapid influencers.
But to the mu’minīn, true beauty reveals itself in a rose pushing through rubble, in the worn hands of an elderly umm shahīd, in the tears of joy from a child completing his ḥifẓ in a tent, in the scarred body of a survivor who endures. It is in ṣabrun jamīl— beautiful patience—when every nuclear force demands them to surrender.
Muslim women have historically always acted as agents of difficult missions, as the foundational teachers of generations of warriors and scholars, as the ribat-sustainers, as the co-builders of civilization. Most importantly, Muslim women have served as moral reminders of duty for men, and have acted as vessels of truth and courage, especially when the ummah was weakest.
The battle for the soul of Islam right now has reached its zenith: Gaza has been the revealer. It exposed every hypocrite, every complicit entity, it ended the myth of the liberal “ruse-based” order, it has exposed every lie of liberalism and human rights.
The moral vacuum is so stark, it must be filled by those most licensed and equipped to inherit it.
And despite being the symbol that this system hates the most, the rooted, fearless, powerful Muslim woman, she holds up the clearest mirror to this system. This makes Muslim women not simply victims, but as the ones most positioned to offer a powerful antidote to all this neoliberal hypocrisy and moral decay. But so long as we are stuck within the realm of the cultural, legal and the rational arguments, we will not get very far.
To counteract this darkness, nothing short of a soul-based revolution will do.
An inner transformation, led by a light that emanates from the heart. Perhaps the very rage women have been taught to suppress as “too emotional” is, in truth, one of the last remaining forces capable of shaking this world from its cultivated indifference.
Perhaps the rage women buried for generations under the command to remain pleasant, composed, and quiet is precisely what will rupture this age of moral anesthesia.
May it become a furnace so fierce that it sets this ailing world ablaze, clearing the ground for another to be born; a world that teaches us once more what it means to be human, and what it means to live with Prophetic purpose.
Serious inner work is required of Sovereign Women. To walk away from the idols of one’s ego and constant need for external validation, from neo-jahili cultural norms or the status quo, to become vessels of truth-telling and upholding justice like our mothers currently living under unbearable conditions in their ribat or their prisons cells.
Ultimately, the “feminine” in Islam is sacred not because it is shallow, counter-cultural or transgressive, but because it carries a primordial amānah (a trust.) It is embodied today in Kashmir, through Asiya Andarabi’s defiance before tyranny. In Dr. Aafia Siddiqui’s steadfastness. Through the courage of Palestinian women despite facing abandonment and catastrophe. These women are not sanctified through their opposition to men, but through their direct dhawq (tasting) and witnessing of truth, achieving inner reliance on their Prophetic armor and upholding their covenant of sacrifice, patience, discernment, and internal, unyielding strength.
Thus, the sacred feminine is not a political or cultural category, but a metaphysical covenant, a pathway of revival for a holistic human code of ethics unbeholden to the shackles of perpetual victimhood or cultural baggage. It does not seek to erase men or compete with them, but to restore balance alongside righteous, Prophetic masculinity, each completing and dignifying the other under the sovereignty of Allah.
In a new dark age increasingly built on brute domination, immorality, and spiritual sterility, the feminine principle in Islam reminds humanity of the forgotten school of rahma (mercy), the sweet reckoning justice of al-Qahhar and the sanctity of life itself.
On this Mother’s Day, we must make a collective confession that we have failed our mothers and sisters like nani Asiya in Kashmir, Dr. Aafiya in Texas, or the women of Palestine. But their sacrifices cannot and will not go in vain.
They cannot keep sacrificing on behalf of the rest of us on the own. They remind us that we too must carry our sacred duty of walking in the footsteps of the past and present great lionesses of our time, to awaken the sleeping ummah, to inspire in our children and in the men in our lives what it means to be a shahada bearer for the final revelation in this most critical, existential time for humanity.
As Ibn ʿAtaʾillah taught centuries ago, “bury yourself in obscurity since what is not buried cannot truly grow.” And those who heed this aphorism best are the sovereign women of this cruel moment, hidden beneath rubble, grief, anonymity, and sacrifice, who carry within them the seeds of another world, because Allah often causes renewal to emerge precisely from what everyone else overlooks or discards.
From exhausted mothers, suffocated mourners, patient daughters, and forgotten widows will spring forth a moral horizon no tyrant can destroy: a world watered by a faithful mothers’ tears, ironed by the fire of suffering, and born from pained hearts that refused surrender.
So Salam, peace be upon our mothers and teachers, and upon all the martyred men, women and children of Palestine, Yemen, Iran, Sudan and Lebanon, who revived for us our hearts and awakened us from slumber to reorder our priorities.
Peace be upon our beloved mothers who carry the weight of the ummah on their shoulders but are promised heaven underneath their blistered feet.
May their sacrifices transform us, may we love them, may we serve them, and most of all, may we be granted the honor of carrying a bit of that heavy armor they have carried too long on their weary backs.
