Plant the Tree, Seek the Fountain, Believe.

Some of us won’t make it.

But that’s not the end of the story.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, it’s only going to get more uncomfortable in here the more we lean into unsettling, dismantling, disturbing and disrupting theology and ideologies that have done the most harm. It’s going to mean that we will have to surrender more than we may have expected.

If we are believers and not just basic Muslims it’s going to mean that what we write, teach and present isn’t going to be as consumable as we thought and we’re not going to get the validation and affirmations that we believed we needed. Those whose foundational paradigms our work disrupts and disturbs aren’t going to want to pay or support our work.

Our work, unlike therapeutic intervention, isn’t covered by insurance.

The tools we use will be unfamiliar and disorienting. The methodologies we employ and the frameworks we build will sometimes be troubling to those who most need to understand and implement them.

Because we aren’t here to support the assisted spiritual suicide that passes for theological discourse and scholarly guidance these days.

We weren’t sent back from the deaths and rebirths we had to pass through to shove red and blue pills into the mouths of those whose souls have been captured and enslaved by chains they cannot understand and captors they are afraid to name because naming them would mean admitting how much they trusted them.

We’re not here to count and cultivate subscribers or clicks of the small red hearts that are supposed to indicate love but actually represent something more like consent.

We are the triage team that faces the present threats first, whose scrubs are stained deeper and remain so for longer than other staff. We will first hear the screams and catch the tears that don’t make it into the depths of the hospital.

And sometimes we go home to the bare minimum sustenance it takes to survive another shift.

We will take what we have been given and bind the wounds that no one else has the stomach to look at, we will administer the medicines that sting and cleanse and purge before healing can even begin.

We will be called all sorts of demeaning names by those in pain, cursed at by those who are still in shock, who don’t understand what happened to them or why they are there.

We will face the threats that leak into the emergency room and protect the sanctuary we have been trained to create for the worst of the worst injuries and conditions. We will tell the uncomfortable truths to those who have been told convenient lies.

And sometimes.

We will fail

Because we are believers.

We have made the decision to put our endowments into service where they are needed most, not where they will benefit us. We aren’t the cosmetic and plastic surgeons who cater to the self indulgent.

We are the writers and the creators and the innovators who understand the cost of real and lasting change, healing and restoration is often the deceptive comforts of denial and disassociation.

We throw down the staff like Moses that consumes the diseases of deception.

We scrub our souls with remembrance and submit our hearts to the light of Allah for cleansing over and over again so that we can survive our service.

We bandage our own wounds so that the infectious and toxic belief systems we encounter don’t spread and don’t render us unfit or too weak to fulfil our purpose.

No. You’re right. They’re not like us.

The theological clinics and clinicians have been compromised. The physicians of the heart have corrupted their inheritance. Those entrusted with the community’s care have become complicit in spreading communicable doubt instead of hope and healing. They unbind wounds to sell more bandages and drugs. They inflict more pain on patients to punish dissent. They blame the patient for his illness to shame them into submission.

Even as the wounded revile us.

We will continue to revive them.

Even as they spit out the medicine we will continue to treat them.

Even as they deny they are dying we will speak the truths that will guide them towards the light and not into further darkness and ignorance.

We will not be thanked. We will not “do numbers” or go viral. We will be forgotten when some of them are well, thriving and no longer afflicted.

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And when many of them go right back to the same spaces, leaders, communities, institutions and ideologies that wounded them in the first place—

Even as they return to the hands that harmed them.

Even as they choose familiar captivity over unfamiliar freedom.

Even as most of them go back again and again to the same situations that brought them to our work in the first place—

We will continue.

We will start over.

We will remain at our post.

Because we are in this for the long victory, not the short-term fix. Not the Band-Aid solutions that looks like healing but leaves the infection to spread beneath. Not the meaningless “numbers” that trend for a week and disappear. Not the vacuous validation that evaporates when the work gets harder.

We might grow weary watching the emergency room doors revolve. We might feel the weight of witnessing the same wounds reopened by the same hands, the same souls returned to the same cages, the same hearts choosing the poison they know over the medicine that stings.

But we continue.

The writers. The creators. The innovators. The artists. Those whose craft has been consecrated to Islamic healing—to shifā’ in an age that markets maraḍ as remedy.

We continue because the Prophet ﷺ taught us that even if we were to find ourselves at the last moment of the last hour of the last day of existence on this earth, if we are in the middle of planting a tree, we finish planting it.

Even if the Hour rises before the tree bears fruit.

Even if we never see the shade it casts.

Even if no one remembers our hands in the soil.

We plant.

Because the planting itself is the purpose. Because the work itself is the worship. Because Allah sees what no human eye witnesses and records what no earthly metric captures.

So we write what needs to be written.

We create what needs to be created.

We speak what needs to be spoken.

Not for the harvest we might see, but because we were given the seed and the soil and the commandment to plant.

And that—that alone—will always be enough.

I apologize for the incomplete credit. I believe the photos of Malcolm are by/from the Times of London.