A Bouquet of Muslim Blossoms: Fictional Stories for Refreshment & Resistance
Blog Post 42
July 30, 2021
Al-Hamdulillah!
A Bouquet of Muslim Blossoms: Fictional Stories for Refreshment & Resistance is an original Muslim fiction collection of 22 Muslim writers from around the world. It is an anthology that was a long time in the making. But, All Praises to Allah, the Most High, it is here!
The story started with the call-out from Inked Resistance Islamic Publishing in February 2020, but then the virus
"plandemic" hit the world, little by little, then all at once, and over and over again. It is still raging as we write this. Inshallah, it will be extinguished soon.
But more than the virus, the brutality of US police against Black people was brought onto the world stage, highlighted by the zionist-trained tactics of knees on necks, a sinister lynching caught on video. And this murder of George Floyd and other Black men and women throughout the US and elsewhere brought the people onto the streets, even during the “plandemic,” to voice their disgust with and hatred of the forces of evil that work towards racist, greedy, shaitanic goals. Allah Subhanahu wa ta’ala is certainly exposing these mechanisms, these corrupted, oppressive, shirk-filled individuals and governments and systems clearly for all of us to witness. In Canada, the long-buried Native children of the ungodly residential schools have been brought to light, busting the never-forgotten longings of their families’ memories into pieces of trauma-filled nightmares once again. The January 6, 2021 white supremacist attack on the US congress should make it clear to whoever hadn’t understood yet that the US government and all western governments are on their way out, inshallah.
Whether the virus or some other mechanism(s) caused the slowness of submissions or not, we decided to not rush the creativity that we know is out there. And what came our way were stories that we knew the world needs to hear. These are stories from Kashmir, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, Qatar, South Africa, Nigeria, England, Canada and the United States. Most of the writers live in these countries, but a few live elsewhere – in Germany, the United Arab Emirates and the US. The majority of the writers are in the 20-35 year-old range, but there are a few older folks thrown in in the mix, and the vast majority are female. Indian and Southeast Asian writers, or those who have ancestral roots there, make up a lot of the authors, but there’s also a mixture, including a Francophile Canadian, a Swiss-Mi'kmaq, a Black-Trinidadian-European-American-Canadian and a Black Britain.
The writers in this collection have put forth stories of what they are living and, in their living, their humanness reveals clearly that it is the determining factor uniting us in our fitrah journeys back to where we came from. Topics range from working through traumas to relationships to birth to death to Islamophobia to work to oppression to war to activism to revolution to romance to healing the self to identity to worship of, reliance on and trust in Allah Subhanahu wa ta’ala. The return of the characters in these stories to their Allah-Given strengths of gratitude, love, truth, faith, courage, perseverance, hope, justice and fighting the ego is necessary for us to understand that we have been given what we need to travel through this world so we can return to the Garden, inshallah, as whole, resilient and submissive believers in Allah Subhanahu wa ta’ala.
Every culture has its fiction. What is interesting is that in this anthology the Muslim writers, no matter where we were born or brought up or live today, no matter what gender, what age, what madhhab, prove to us a very important fact:
Islam is our culture.
This is what we write about because this is what we live, inshallah. The recordings of our imaginations, emotions and intellects within are done so you can activate yours, inshallah. Our fiction, our imagining, is a must for bonds to form and barriers to demolish.
When our imagination is controlled by our intellect, justice is the result.
A Bouquet of Muslim Blossoms: Fictional Stories for Refreshment & Resistance includes flash fiction, short stories, novel excerpts and a few personalized poems. The pieces are offered as refreshment and resistance to readers and we hope they will provide you with renewed and abundant gratefulness, certitude, happiness, faith and courage, inshallah. So take a breath of the blossoms within and refresh your life with the universal Truths and shield it from the blows, inshallah.
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