Newsletter: Turning the Tide

Dear Reader,

With each generation, women have had to face unique challenges. A study by the Pew Research Centre in 2013 revealed that, as most would expect, mothers today spend more time engaged in paid work than their counterparts in the mid-1960s, but mothers today are also somehow spending more time taking care of their children than mothers in the 1960s.

Much ink has been spilled trying to square this circle, but the data does reveal what most women already know:

the world today is driving them to exhaustion.

In common with mothers, younger women and women without children face another challenge. Today the 'image' reigns supreme, and this is often taken as a kind of reality, as a way of existing.

Modernity's punishing work culture and obsession with image births a child wracked with self-doubt and is spiritually hollow inside.

How should we turn the tide?

The author Suma Din first put pen to paper in 2000 when she was a new mother. Four years later, in 2004, the first edition of Turning the Tide was published. Over the years, Suma Din would revise her book three times, each edition attuned to the needs of the day.

Now in this extraordinary year of 2020, the latest edition has been published, and as the author says in her reader dedication:

"This edition of Turning the Tide emphasises the inner, the struggles, the hairline fractures in our soul that no one other than Allah knows about. In the time between the first edition and this, the fourth one, the world has moved in unanticipated new directions...".

Each generation of women has had unique challenges, a different tide to turn.

Turning the Tide: Reawakening the Woman's Heart and Soul is very intricately written, and a cursory reader may not appreciate the beauty of its construction. The book is designed to uncover layers and layers of reflection, like waves lapping on the shore, at the edges of our spiritual awareness.

May we be among those who turn to the Most Relenting.