The Nightingale

Writing also helps us learn about ourselves. And this is why many people journal as a daily practice. The more we learn about ourselves, the more we understand our strengths, weaknesses, relationships, goals, attitudes, biases, preoccupations, the more we can reflect and grow.

We cannot allow pessimism to dominate for this will lead to negativity, ineffectual bickering, and dejected passivity. We must instead look deeper than the events of the day to consider the bedrock of our existence with its substructure ontologically suffused with mercy and compassion. 

However one looks at it, these schools still matter; even to those who never went to the schools. They matter because they represent our cultural aspiration and actualisation.

Were it not for books and historical record, it would be hard to fathom the lengths human beings have gone to eradicate not just the lives of individuals but whole ethnic and religious groups. And we have to know this because it keeps happening.

Reading is much more than mere literacy: it is a cultural accomplishment through which meaning is gained.

An increase in the public display of Muslim identity (not just in uniform groups) need not be cast as something to be feared, or indeed as something trivial, rather it could instead be a pathway towards healing Muslim self-hate as well as healing stigmatisation.

People share articles they don’t read, they enjoin ‘praying for’ something even as they continue to scroll their social media feed, they comment without understanding or context; because there is no time for reading, no time for ‘prayer’, no time for context in the all-consuming attention economy.

If you spend less time for beauty, truth and reading, your valuing of beauty and truth will diminish. It’s that simple. Multiply this by the number of people in our population, and it is no surprise that the practice of skim-reading texts on social media has been implicated in the rise of the post-truth media environment — with all the ugliness and anarchy it brings.