All this broohaha over the ‘draw Muhammad (peace be upon him) day’, where people are rioting in Pakistan and all that kind of stuff, just makes me so sad. Yes the cartoons are hurtful.  Yes, the very thought of them shocks me to my core. That’s exactly what they’re trying to do. There’s no doubt that [...]

There are a lot of Chinese malls around here, and my daughters, who all wear niqab, have often gone into them to go shopping. Surprisingly they said that the feeling they get walking around in Chinese malls is nothing like what they get in ordinary shopping centres. The Chinese people completely, hmm, I don’t know [...]

Sometimes it amazes me that people can look past other people’s differences and see the humanity behind them. I find it fascinating that as societies, communities, we develop a certain collective consciousness, where, even though we might have some conflicts, we’re a cohesive whole. Along come some outsiders, ‘others’, and at first they’re viewed with [...]

Frankly, I’ve never really thought about how school boards and PTA’s decide who to invite to visit their school. I just go when I’m called, but today I had a very interesting conversation with a former teacher who was privy to just such a conversation. She’s Muslim and she was hired by a particular principal [...]

I always used to wonder why God seemed to put so much emphasis in the Quran on sending a messenger to a people from among their own people. It’s repeated over and over again. I thought, what’s the big deal if an outsider were to come and point out what they were doing wrong? After [...]

There’s a line in Patricia McCormick’s book Sold where the mother says any man is better than none. It’s an interesting line because there are indeed some women who feel that way. In fact in writing Wanting Mor, I thought the stepmother was a bit like that too. But actually my stepmother is much more [...]

Just finished reading it, even though my head’s all plugged up and my eyes are watering. First of all, the good stuff: it’s kind of well written. A bit wooden, but not bad. I thought some of the imagery, her wanting to fly away like the bird Abdo was a bit nice. There seem to [...]

Can’t figure out the right consonants and vowel mix that perfectly imitates the groans coming out of me. Woke up with a sore throat. Took my Cold Fx but sometimes you just have to be sick I guess. Got through the day without sneezing too much, it hit hardest when I got home. Bought three [...]

Sometimes, when I dwell on it, I can’t help cringing about the way I behaved when I was first starting out. And sometimes, when I’m feeling generous, I don’t even blame that instructor for asking me to leave that writing workshop I’d paid to join. I made all the typical newbie mistakes. Probably every single [...]

One thing I can’t seem to comprehend is why people suddenly jump on the bandwagon to help one country and not another. On the one  hand you have Gaza which is slowly being strangled to death because they had the chutzpah to elect people we didn’t approve of, nobody makes a peep out of that, [...]