“Once you have started seeing the beauty of life, ugliness starts disappearing. If you start looking at life with joy, sadness starts disappearing. You cannot have heaven and hell together, you can have only one. It is your choice.”
Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world, because it goes against your training, education, your culture. From the very beginning you’ve been told how you should be; Nobody has ever told you that you are good as you are
“I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.”
Tomb of Mohammad’s granddaughter
Zainab, the daughter of Ali in Damascus, Syria
Zainab accompanied her brother Hussain, as did most of his household to Iraq. After Hussain and all his 72 companions were brutally killed at the Battle of Karbala by the order of Yazid, Zainab was taken captive by the army of Yazid. Zainab and the other survivors of Hussain’s expedition, most of them women and children, were marched to Damascus, Yazid’s capital, where they were held hostage.
Zainab, already in anguish due to the death of her brother Hussain and her sons was forced to march unveiled and beaten. This was an extreme indignity to inflict on a high-ranking woman, the granddaughter of Muhammad.
“It seems to me, that if we love, we grieve. That’s the deal. That’s the pact. Grief and love are forever intertwined. Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable.”
