In Saudi Arabia, there is an abundance of religious books and lectures about the way we should live our lives in order to save our souls in the Hereafter. However, there is a surprising scarcity of education and awareness regarding end-of-life (...)
"How are the boys?" is a question that I am asked in Arabic all the time even though I am a proud mother of girls! Arabic like many other languages is a "gendered" language where all nouns are either masculine or feminine, and the grammatical gender (...)
"Insiders" in any community seem to be the best qualified to research and write about their community's history because they have the advantage of better understanding the intricate cultural and linguistic context necessary to validate the accuracy (...)
Simple acts of kindness toward others, such as smiling or holding the door open for the person behind you, are most of the time spontaneous and do not require much consideration. However, the more complicated performing the action becomes, the more (...)
The "Trumps" of the world reveal themselves in all of their shapes, colors and sizes speaking in different tongues and raising different faith flags.
They live in packs with their own "kind" and believe that anybody who does not look like them, (...)
TO many Muslims, philosophy is an evil that should be avoided as much as possible because of its alleged inherent incompatibility with Islamic teachings. Recently, some Arab writers and scholars have been trying to break this taboo and are (...)
Endings and new beginnings usually provide some people with a sense of closure and a hope for a "fresh start," which could give them the necessary motivation to change and develop. As the Hijri year is coming to an end and we get prepared to (...)
Two groups of Saudi women have made news headlines this month and they could not have been more different. The first group is the female Olympic team representing Saudi Arabia in Rio de Janeiro taking us a step further in the development of Saudi (...)
It seems like the "sin" of bringing "shame" to one's family has become a "legitimate" reason for killing women around the world. The recent murder of Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani social media celebrity, by her brother made international headlines (...)
"O my Lord, if I worship You for fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if I worship You for hope of Heaven, exclude me from Heaven. But if I worship You for Your Own sake, do not withhold Your eternal beauty from me." This is a famous prayer and a (...)
After a long day of fasting in Ramadan, breaking our fast at sunset allows us to reflect on our blessed life when we can satisfy our hunger and thirst and sometimes even overindulge realizing that some people live in constant starvation and (...)
Ramadan is the month of finding and cultivating love, peace and tranquility in ourselves and in our relationship with God as well as with other people. Thus, it was only befitting that we welcomed it in Saudi Arabia with the awareness campaign Ehna (...)
Many of us wish for a compassionate and peaceful world free of racism, discrimination and war. However, this will always remain an unfulfilled wish because such a world will never exist and whether we like it or not, we cannot achieve or even (...)
After seven years of the failed attempts of the non-Muslims to kill Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) or to stop him from calling people for Islam, a social boycott and an economic sanction was imposed on his whole clan for about three years in (...)
One of my first interactions with a person with mental and physical disability occurred several years ago during one of my trips to a play area with my kids. While I was playing peek-a-boo with my eight-month-old daughter, a child in a wheelchair (...)
Looking back in history, we find that scientific and economic development in the West did not happen overnight, but that it was rather a gradual process, which took Europe out of the Dark Ages into the Renaissance and then the Enlightenment paving (...)
I was born into a family who happened to be Sunni Muslim Saudis; hence, I grew up by default to be a Sunni Muslim Saudi influenced while growing up by my parents' religious, educational, intellectual, cultural and ethnic backgrounds. As an adult, I (...)
Belonging to a group provides a unique sense of security where individuals give their allegiance to the group they belong to and trust in return that they will be protected by the group they pledged their loyalty to. However, as countries transform (...)
Regardless of how chauvinistic a totalitarian theocracy can be toward women, they cannot live without them because of women's obvious role in reproduction and the domestic support they provide for a family as wives and mothers. Daesh (the (...)
The Taliban used to be the most prominent example of women's oppression in modern times, but Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS) seems to have surpassed their level of viciousness and exceeded all expectations. Sex slavery has been the highlight of the (...)
Many researchers have found that our native language connects us to our culture, heritage and sometimes even to our religion, as is the case with Muslims and Jews all over the world who usually teach their children Arabic and Hebrew, respectively, (...)
In 2003, the Saudi Manpower Council mandated that the number of foreign workers and their families in Saudi Arabia should not exceed 20 percent of the total population by 2013. It is almost 2016 and expats still account for about third of Saudi (...)
Daesh, (the self-proclaimed IS), has been killing innocent people indiscriminately regardless of their religious or ethnic background demonstrating that their only religion is terrorism and inhumanness. Saudi Arabia alone has suffered from eight (...)
Words are powerful tools that contribute to shaping our beliefs, behavior and way of communication. As Muslims, we believe that a word has the power to get us to Heaven or could lead us straight to Hell, and some of us have created a hell on earth (...)
Negativity in the news was discussed in my previous article along with how it psychologically affects people as well as their perception of the groups the news is about. Muslims, Palestinians and Africans are some of the many groups who seem to have (...)