Voice of British Muslim Women

Iffat Mirza, Cambridge

‘Generate hope. Be ever hopeful. This also fosters self – respect. Continue to be optimistic.’

(His Holiness Mirza Bashiruddin Mahmood Ahmad (may Allah be pleased with him). ‘The Way of the Seekers’ p. 104)

Looking back on 2020 is like looking at your reflection in a rippling pond in the dark of the night yet still expecting to find a mirror-perfect reflection.

We want to look back on it and think that we understood it all and took it as it came when the reality is that very few of us did and it brought about great changes that are truly once in a life time occurrences (or at least let us hope a pandemic will only be once in a lifetime). We can be forgiven if we look back and instead see a shadowy image of ourselves.

As I look back, I think I can draw two conclusions.

The first is that time is not as linear as I had previously thought.

If anything has proven that we’re all living in our own imagined worlds, to our own individual extents, it was trying to figure out how simultaneously there could be so much hurt and pain on one hand and on the other news of achievements and personal milestones being achieved around me. I saw how we could receive bad news which was completely divorced from what we were hearing about on the news channels. Devastating personal news, we expected to hear knocking on our door, only to open it and find a completely different shade of bad news. Equally, hand in hand, blissful news knocked and made herself home in my heart.

I learned that, yes, time moves on, but it gives you enough to know that you can also pause it when you need to. And when you can’t it’s for the best.

Time is not linear. I learned this as I sat in my new bedroom and my parents drove away after dropping me off in a new city. I was once again a scared little girl on her first day of school, wondering why my parents had left me. I once again learned; they didn’t leave me at all.

Time is not linear. I saw my mother’s tears fall at the diagnosis of my grandmother and suddenly I was the seventeen-year-old whose tears fell at her own mother’s diagnosis four years ago.

Time is not linear. 2020 is the year I picked up the paintbrush after far too long and it is the year that I stayed up all night with my eyes burning because I was desperate to finish a book – something  I haven’t done for at least five years.

I learned that things got better before and they’ll get better again.

That’s my second conclusion.

We are prone to optimism. As desperately and pathetically as we attempt to fortify the walls of our hearts’ cities, we want to be optimistic. Despite a pandemic, a looming economic depression, and heart-breaking realities of injustices across the world, we remained optimistic. We saw the world pour out onto the streets to demand a better world, because we believe that it is in our power to make it better. Though I do not recall where, I read this year that according to studies Generation Z and Millennials are more optimistic than previous generations. Who can blame us? Sometimes all we have left is hope. Maybe Pandora opened the box on 2019’s New Year’s Eve.

I learned that it doesn’t matter if hope is all we have – it’s all we need – and what’s more? I learned that we aren’t weak to believe this.

There’s a strong chance that I am just looking at a rippling pond in the dead of the night. But now I’d much rather see the shadowy image of myself because for the first time in too long I feel that I can recognise myself. I don’t want a mirror perfect image of myself anymore, one that lies to my face. In the shadow of myself I see hope and I see desire for a future that is coherent with my past. I see myself learning the same lessons over and over again. I see myself tripping over the same pebbles but I also see myself dodging bullets that pierced my heart and brains in the past.

I see my mirror shatter.