We are very pleased to invite all to this Sunday’s Choral Contemplation as we’re joined by Dr Zainab Kabba, who will come to offer a reflection on the topic ‘The Garden Between Us’.
Dr Kabba is an educator, writer, researcher, and strategist, the Founder and CEO of Quotidian Strategies, and holds a DPhil in Education from Oxford’s Department of Education. Contributing to both discourse and practice, she has also published a book on the topic of ‘Knowledge, Authority, and Islamic Education in the West’ -- very thoughtful insights and vignettes of ‘emerging adult Muslims on their quest for religious knowledge’.
She also curates creative and supportive spaces that centre on the human need for belonging, and over the last few years has focused on facilitating spaces for women from different walks of life. For example, ‘The Literary Salon for Black Muslim Women’ and ‘Gathering on God’s Names’.
Dr. Kabba’s reflection will be accompanied with choral music by John Rutter, Giovanni Palestrina, and Eric Whitacre. We’ll also have a poem by Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī translated by Haleh Liza Gafori, an excerpt from ‘Questions for Ada’ by Ijeoma Umebinyuo, and an excerpt from Zainab’s book.
As always – all welcome, and we begin at 5:30pm on Sunday 17th May in the Chapel, and please feel free to share and invite your friends, families, collaborators etc. We look forward to connecting then!
Ordinary Reading: Clouds
Do you remember cloud-spotting as a child?
Searching the sky for something you’d recognise.
Faces
Animals
Buildings
Vehicles
Whole stories drifting across the sky.
It was a quiet way of learning how to see, alone or sometimes with siblings and friends.
Now, when I look up, my reading is different.
I’m no longer reading for characters or recognition.
I’m reading for texture and movement.
The light
The edges
The changing colour palettes across the day.
Shades layered on top of each other.
Clouds stacked or dispersed.
Sometimes stretched thin.
Sometimes fluffy.
Some just a wisp of presence.
And sometimes, nothing at all.
If I could speak to my younger self,
I’d tell her: enjoy this season of discovery.
Know that you won’t always be searching.
There will come a time when you will simply sit with the clouds, letting them be.
Watching them seemingly hold still or shift.
And one day you will need to learn to do the same.
Today, look up or look out once and stay for one full minute. Just be.
Ordinary reading begins when you stop overlooking the mundane.
#reading #clouds #slowliving
Ramadan is a month of intensification. Worship increases. Recitation increases. Charity increases.
But the month now unfolds within a religious learning ecosystem designed for continuous engagement.
The desire to learn more is sincere. Yet when increase becomes equated with volume, participation, and visible activity, something subtle happens.
The question is not whether to intensify, but what logic governs that intensification.
If fasting reconditions appetite, should it also recondition how we consume religious content?
This essay considers what governs our increase and what Ramadan may be asking us to discipline beyond food.
Full essay 🔗 link in bio
Over the past decade, repeated cases of abuse and harm have surfaced in American Muslim communities from prominent religious teachers who have abused their positions of authority and responsibility.
Each instance carries its own context, its own details, its own immediate fallout, and while the particulars are different, the responses are patterned.
Abuse does not become systemic because harm is inevitable, but because the same responses are repeated.
When responsibility is narrowed to the individual, continuity is preserved and reckoning is deferred.
This essay traces the pattern we return to again and again and asks what a Quranic imperative to strive toward justice might require of us beyond individual blame.
Full essay 🔗 link in bio
#harm #meic #accountability #justice
❄️🧣This Winter for me is about what reflection has gathered and what now asks to be carried forward. Attentive to the ordinary, oriented toward presence, texture, and rhythm. A season of creative flow, steady building, quiet observation, slow reflection, and the small practices shaping who I’m becoming and bringing into the world.
#winter2026 #quotidian #ordinary
Between 2023–2025 we gathered across five seasons to read works by Black women. We read slowly, relationally, and in companionship.
In our final season, we sat with Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and lingered in Earthseed’s refrain:
“All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is Change”
We didn’t resolve the theological tensions. We lived with them. The questions themselves became instructive.
Each Salon Sister was invited to imagine a spiritual text that reflected where she was in this season of her life, and to offer a mantra or refrain to anchor it. What emerged was profound: language born from our collective reading, rooted in faith, shaped by our lived realities as Black Muslim women.
🗓️This calendar is a visual manifestation of those reflections. It’s a living archive of thought and literary response—a record of where we paused together, long enough to name what has formed.
Systemic oppression has fractured cultural memory through migration, colonial education, and exclusion from archival spaces. We refuse to remain footnotes to our own intellectual histories.
The 2026 Literary Salon Calendar is available for limited UK purchase.
Illustrations by @nawaal_illustrations
Visit literarysalonbmw.space
🔗 Link in bio
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#lsbmw #blackwomen #blackmuslim #reading #literature
The Black Muslim Women’s Literary Salon is a space for collective reading, reflection, and re-imagination.
It brings Black Muslim women together to read works by Black women and to engage those texts slowly, relationally, and in conversation. The Literary Salon centres our racial, cultural, spiritual, and intellectual lives in order to make space for voice, healing, and meaning-making.
This is not a book club organised around speed, mastery, or critique. It is a shared practice of reading as witnessing: holding one another’s lives, sitting with complexity, and resisting urgency or performance.
The Salon gathers online and in person across seasons, shaped by shared etiquette, gentle prompts, and collective dialogue.
If this way of reading resonates, sign up to our mailing list to learn about upcoming Salons, gatherings, and resources.
visit us at literarysalonbmw.space - link in bio
#LSBMW #goallin2026
This reflection draws from my research on knowledge, authority, and Islamic education.
The #winter #solstice marks the longest night of the year. The light does not rush back. It returns slowly, almost imperceptibly.
I’m sitting with the solstice as an invitation to pause, especially as #Ramadan approaches, and to pay closer attention to the religious learning environments shaping us.
Not only what we are learning, but how our attention is trained, how trust is formed, and how practice is sustained or eroded over time.
It’s an invitation to discernment: to notice what draws us in, what asks for our dependence, and what quietly reorients us, toward embodiment and return to the #Divine, or toward something else entirely.
I’m considering the direction different bodies of knowledge and practices are turning us: toward Allah, or toward something else.
These questions sit at the heart of my book📕 Knowledge, Authority, and Islamic Education in the West: Reconfiguring Tradition 🔗 Link in bio
