Sakinah Abdul Aziz

I finally understood what it was which truly bothered me through this passage of time where I was feeling bits of dissatisfaction from being in some social groups. It has to happen when I was abroad and living a much quieter and simpler life in order to realise the type of conversations which tend to dominate some group text conversations from friends back at home. It then became more obvious when I return to Singapore, and having to be in a few social gatherings to observe with a fresher pair of eyes, the types of conversations which hold those social gatherings and social bonding. It is worrying how we have allowed certain lifestyle come to dominate our lives and how we have normalised it. The dominant lifestyle I'm referring to is one that is driven by capitalist forces in feeding into this so-called rosy version of what life is supposed to be, which entails the modern notions of 'productivity' as well as hyper-consumerism and hedonism to appease us and compensate for ...

I had one of the most interesting but harrowing conversations today with one of the interviewees for my research. She is one of those people known for her bluntness and tends to say things in the most candid and unfiltered manners. During our exchanges, it sounded like she had a lot of frustrations and needed to ventilate about many things. For some reason, the conversation became something about death. She was trying to make a point that death is inevitable and can happen at anytime. So she told me that, death can even happen after I left her place. While I can understand where she was coming from, I really shudder at the thought. I walked out and made prayers. I returned home and told myself that if I die that same day, that woman must really have an impeccable intuition and superpowers i.e. premonition. May God have mercy on us all.

Before I forget the jobs I may want to venture at some point in my life, I think I better start listing them. I was thinking about the whole settling down in UK and how it must be like to start anew and to find jobs. I know that I need to start paying my dues first, and that means I may not land in ideal or dream job at the first attempt. This got me excited because then I could then explore all the other random things I want to do: - Tour Guide. Yes this is an irony because I am a traveller who avoids going with a tour group at all costs. I take on tours only when some places I'd like to go to are inaccessible and challenging to go to on my own. This is also an irony considering that I don't like how the places tour guides tend to bring you are the MAINSTREAM and touristy places. But I tinkled with this idea for a bit when I was going through a serious burnout while I was Probation Officer. I looked at the Tour Guide courses they offered in Singapore. So, if I'm going to...

One of the things that has become a part of my lived reality living abroad is the reduced noise - probably in every sense and meaning of it. Besides the literal meaning of noise, which is quite a given considering that I live in a quieter neighbourhood with lesser number of constant people I have in my physical life, I am really far from the noise and conversations from people back at home. Yes, I do have exchanges with them through video calls and text messages from time to time. But it's really not the same, though I'm aware that what I'm perceiving is something imagined and may not be the full reality. Particularly when it comes to friendships. Sometimes it feels like I'm always the last to know about things, sometimes I'm not even aware about anything at all, unless my friends choose to tell me the things they want to tell me or I see some updates on the social media. But back in Singapore, because we are in touch from time to time, it feels like I get almost th...

There's so much sadness and pain when we keep hearing of tragedy and atrocities happening in this world. It is even harder not to want to cry when we witness the outpouring of support and acts of solidarity across the globe in response to the shootings in Christchurch last Friday. There is something in such an energy of shared humanity and the spirit of solidary. It moves you, it makes you want to cry. Goodness and kindness trumps evil.

Yesterday reminded me of an incident which happened when I was 7, remembering the Primary 1 version of me who was trying to fit into her new environment. I remembered requesting my two Chinese female classmates, "Can you speak english?". They responded with peals of laughter and giggles, like laughing at an inside joke I wasn't a part of. I remembered even questioning them what was so funny about it. When I thought about this incident, it just reiterates how we are all social beings, and that this desire for belonging and wanting to be a part of something bigger than ourselves, could be felt even at a young age. People often think that fitting in is easy for me. I can understand why people perceive me in this way - I think I'm generally easy when it comes to breaking the ice with any stranger, initiating small talks and even holding deeper conversations steering to the interests of the other person. My openness, warmth and friendliness make it easy, and I have recei...

At the turn of 30, I never thought I had to navigate an area I thought I had already come to terms with before and addressed back then in my early - mid 20s. Could it be because I'm far away from everything I've known to be familiar with which drove me to reevaluate certain things again? It is nonetheless necessary to reevaluate and have multiple checkpoints, especially when I'm responding to a new environment, to new situations I would otherwise have not been in. I have been gruelling with the process of managing my own expectations of others. Somehow when you're far away, your expectations on people back at home seem more inflated in their importance than they were before. I've always taken the position that we are responsible for our own emotions, therefore when I feel slightly let down by some people, the problem lies within me and I need to regulate my emotions better. If I feel upset with someone, then I need to question myself - how could I make myself less...

There is the tendency to associate growth and productivity in relation to movements and in situations when things are happening and buzzing. This has a lot to do with how we locate our understanding of growth and productivity within the context of today's modern liberal age of quick results, outputs and KPIs, the rat race, the busyness and noise. I disagree with this. Growth, through inspiration and retrospection, could happen even in stillness and when your surrounding is quiet with nothing much going on. We don't quite realise that we run the risk of neglecting on the more important aspects of it, in particular, psychological, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions of growth. Just a reminder to self to not see my mundane lived experiences as any less than the days when I'm occupied, running from one task to another. For great things really do happen in quietude and stillness, especially the internal processes that we often don't see as important markers and measur...

The aim is not to deconstruct Islam, but to radically reconstruct the tradition from within; in particular, to incorporate ongoing human intellectual developments, with a specific integration of gender as category of thought. In addition, at the epistemological level, the aim is to leave open the idea... that the Ultimate is unknowable. What humans have come to know as the divine always evolves within the limitation of mundane human knowledge against the ultimately unknowable divine. Allah cannot be fixed any one moment, any one text, and any of the multiple interactions with that text. But as human knowledge and epistemology continues to develop, so do human ideas about Allah. Most importantly , the pro-faith agenda created a mandate to include women, women's experiences, and perspectives in reformulating the creeds and codes on the basis of underlying principles essential to being human within the Muslim intellectual processes. - Amina Wadud

The lives of students studying abroad are often inaccurately portrayed to be all fun, posh and just overall, positive. Being in the UK almost close to 6 months now has taught me that it isn't all that rosy. Of course experiences differ from one individual to another, and there may be many others who disagree with me. But whatever that I'm sharing is purely based on my own unique experiences. There are both ups and downs to living abroad and the main message of this post is really to offer a balanced depiction of it. Surely, there are perks to studying and living abroad. For me personally, the biggest perk out of them all is having the opportunity to study and being a student all over again (considering that I last graduated in 2012). The joy of learning and attending classes, and the wide array of resources at my disposal is an experience that is second to none. I often find myself feeling torn with what I should be unpicking and reading because there is so much to learn. S...