A True Pioneer

A True Pioneer

When mama decided to leave the city to raise her children in an islamic environment, her husband at the time, Brother Fateen supported her whole heartedly. She left us with trusted friends while she went out the first time to get the desert ready for us. I stayed with her friend, Sis Halimah Mu'min while Mas and Lehm stayed with sister Khadijah Fuqua. When mama set her heart on something, she went into it wholeheartedly. When she first told Brother Fateen her plans of buying land and moving to the desert, he said okay. He left her that morning and when he returned home that evening she had sold the house and was in the process of selling off furniture. A group of them, my mom, step-dad and a couple of friends, rode out together. When they got to the property my mom had purchased, all that was out there was "land". They arrived in the night. All hyped up about the move, they laid out a large tarp and laid out their sleeping bags. They were going to sleep out under the Allah (swt) big beautiful star filled sky. Mama was on cloud nine. As they laid under the starry sky, it was not long before they began to hear the pitter patter of small feet. When they turned on the car lights, they saw mice scattering around. That ended the first night of the fearless settler attitude. They slept that night with their head lights on, while my mom had slept in the vehicle they came in. The next morning, when they picked up the tarp they had slept on, they noticed they had been sleeping on an ant hill. Mama used to laugh and say "Allah (swt) protects fools and babies" every time she recalled this story. Her first night in the desert did not deter her from wielding that land and making it our home for the next ten years. She learned to live with the mice by letting us have cats. She was the fittest woman I knew, at the sound of a rattle or rustle, she could sprint from 0mph to home in a few seconds. My mom faced the hardships that presented itself living in a harsh environment like a true pioneer. No sacrifice was too large for her to make if it meant the well being of her children. Ironically, this was not her last pioneering move. Our story continued!

Belief Comes Even to the Hearts of Children.

Belief comes even to the hearts of children

My mom (May allah (swt) have mercy on her soul) instilled in us at an early age that Allah (swt) listened and answered the prayer of His servants. Of course, as children, we simply believed because our mother believed and we always knew her to be a truthful woman. But our faith in what she said would one day be tested. My mom raised us in the high desert of California. She wanted us to be raised in as near an islamic environment as possible; since living in a muslim country was out of her reach, she chose an isolated place (desert) where we could be raised islamically. I can remember spending hours and hours exploring our "desert land" with my younger sisters, something we could have never done in the city. The highlight of any day would be to find "desert treasures" which ranged from beautiful stones, lizards, desert flowers, and the occasional lost items of desert travellers. Near our home there was a huge hole that had been dug to build a masjid. While the masjid was never built in that spot, the hole served as a recreational center for my sisters and I. We would ride our bikes up and down the slopes wishing we could be like the boys with their bike flips, trips and flies. We would also have little tea parties, play hide and seek. It was our wonderland. It was also a spot to take our spoils from our scanvenger hunts. On one particular day, we found what looked like ordinary stones but once cracked open, turned out to be beautiful on the inside. They had somehow crystalized on the inside of the stone. We had hit the jack pot! Now, we had only one problem, remembering the stories of the gold rush, we had to protect our new treasures, especially if we were going to get rich off of it. So, we decided to hide our precious stones. Our mother always told us the power of dua, so we decided to put it to the test, after all, this was important. We found a nice spot in the big hole to bury our treasures. We put our stones in the hole and made dua, "Oh Allah, please protect our treasure and don't let anyone ever find our stones. Ameen" After a couple of rained in days, we went back to check on our treasure and could not find it in the spot we put it. We knew it could not have be stolen as one, no one lived out there except us, two, it had been raining, and three, the place had not been touch since we left it. Then it suddenly dawned on us, we forgot to exclude ourselves from that dua, Allah (swt) was answering our dua, no one was going to find our treasures, not even us! Well, from that day, we learned to coin our duas to say exactly what we mean :) But we also learned that Allah (swt) does indeed answer the dua of His servants. From that day on, we truly believed in the power of dua, not just because my mom said so, but because it had truly worked for us. That was not the last time we made a dua that came to pass. Years later, Alhamdulillah, He continues to answer our prayers and somewhere in that big hole lies protected our beautiful stones.