A Man Died and Was Buried in Gaza
Our kids should know that our connections to Palestine, to Jerusalem and to Gaza, include past and present, but more than that, too. So much more.
I’m sure for all of us, the last month has been incredibly hard. How do we make sense of the awful things that are happening? What’s our spiritual responsibility right now? And how do we navigate these conversations with kids, with families, with schools, with communities? I turned to writing to help me make sense of what’s happening.
I kept writing because we need more space to think out loud about what’s happening. And to do that thinking, and talking, and exploring, in our own terms and frames.
While sometimes we hear Muslim voices and perspectives in mainstream conversations, we are rarely given the space to talk about our faith, our commitments, and our convictions as they deserve. For Muslim parents especially, that matters: We commit to our values and translate those into the world.
Our kids and students need to know that those values are capable of speaking to the world we live in, meeting the challenges we confront, and shaping the futures we’d like to live in. That’s why I wrote A Man Died and Was Buried in Gaza, and this is why I’d love for you to read it, share it—and add to it.
Jerusalem is an anchor of Muslim history, reaching back to Adam and Eve, peace be upon them, and into the present, with the heaviness we feel, whether we live in Kuala Lumpur or Kansas City. Those connections include Gaza too, reaching beyond time and space as we understand them, to God and destiny, to purpose and prophecy.
I wrote this story for us as parents, educators, and community leaders, to reflect on what we do, Who we do for, and what determines what matters. I wrote this story for us to step back, to reflect on the cosmic connections at play, and to hopefully strengthen our faith, our worship, and our work in the world.
Because when I started writing, I kept coming back to the life and afterlife of a remarkable man, a man without whom Islam today would not be, but a man whose story has been missing from nearly every conversation I’ve been in, a man named Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, who died and was buried in Gaza fifteen hundred years ago.
Do we know his story? Do we share his story? I wonder about Hashim, long deceased but, I can’t imagine, peacefully asleep, for the ground breaks around him. So much is packed into that man’s life, his accomplishments and his absence, his legacy and his lineage, and what he opened the door to—though he wasn’t there for it.
Do our kids know that the things they do open doors, too? That it doesn’t matter if we see what happens as long as God sees? That generosity and nobility go hand in hand, that the world is bigger and deeper than we think, and that all of us can make a difference, as long as we do so for the right reasons.
A friend asked me again how to talk to kids about Palestine, and I keep coming back to these points. The first is to see and know how they’re doing. To let them talk about it. The second is to give them and reinforce a moral framework—right and wrong don’t change because we’re invested in a certain way.
The third is to provide resources for them to learn, including understanding why people might disagree (even if we disagree with their disagreement, you need to understand where folks are coming from to change minds). And the fourth is to find ways for them to think out loud, in age-appropriate ways, about what they can do.
Do they have opportunities to engage? Be active? Be heard? To build? To debate? To volunteer? Those are always vital questions, and all the more so know. And fifth and finally, if they see our engagement is just doom scrolling, then that’s the strongest lesson of all. But if they see us out there, making a difference, they’ll want to, too.