What is it about love that captivated the quest of all the wise women and men for centuries? Rabia spoke these words of her Beloved: “I have found nothing in all the worlds, That could match His love, This love that harrows the sands of my desert.” “Gamble everything for…

My maternal grandmother, my teta, in my memory is like the summer: proud, powerful, determined, and calm. Her name was Najibe, the Arabic feminine form for a person of nobility, generosity, and integrity. She very much embodied those traits too. She was…

I am different than most of you. I’m really different than most of you at so many levels. Allow me please to demonstrate. I was born a refugee, both in the literate sense of the word and also figuratively. My father was born in Palestine in 1948, and at 2…

I have an arduous relationship with the Middle East. The first I ever fell in love was with it’s Arabic language at a very young age. It’s vast treasures of poetry struck my heart early on. The ability to express so much in such few words. The ways the words…

Algor mortis. It’s the second stage of death, marked by the change in body temperature post-mortem until the ambient temperature is matched. I know the term because it was the experience I remember as being the most bizarre when my father passed away. At that time, and after his body…