Throughout one’s lifetime, each person experiences, at a certain point, the feeling of fear, which may vary in strength or intensity, and may come in many guises. Firstly, we might fear Allah and his Divine punishment. We fear natural disasters, for example. Sadly, many a time even true believers fear their fellow men, thinking that they might hurt us, emotionally, morally or even physically.
The paths of my life took me, at a certain point, to a refugee camp in Syria. And in a place such as this, one encounters and experiences many types and kinds of fear: from fearing natural disasters, to anxieties related to other people in the camp.
I shall start my story by telling a little bit about the natural disasters that one might have to face in a refugee camp in Syria. The first thing one must fear are the strong winds in the areas where the refugee camps are. Most often, during spring and autumn, there are ravaging sand storms. The perils of severe weather are hard to depict using only words and the feelings cannot be properly conveyed into text unless one lives them. But I try nonetheless to recount for you some of the strong emotions I felt during these sand storms.
A sand storm usually starts with a mild wind. However, soon enough, the wind increases in intensity and you start to see, in the distance, an immense wall of brown sand that rapidly approaches. As the winds grow stronger and you sit in your tent, the fear slowly creeps into your soul and begins to increase and become stronger and stronger, echoing the increasing strength of the winds blowing outside.
You remain in your tent (what else could you do in a situation like this? Where else could you take cover?), as everything around you moves chaotically, listening to the powerful howls of the wind outside. The fear you feel inside grows and grows, reaching its peak just as the storm also reaches its climax. When the winds seem to settle down for a little bit, the fear also diminishes and, in those moments, you start to think only of Allah, His Infinite Mercy, and you start to pray to Him to spare you, your tent and the tents of you neighboring Muslim sisters from destruction. You pray to Allah that everyone in the camp remain safe and sound, as we are all one big family, united by hardships and by the Faith in Allah. Finally, by the Will of Allah Almighty, the wind stops. If your tent remained intact from the storm, it usually looks like it was covered in snow, a small joy from Allah after a hard trial.
The fear and the suffering are not only related to the bad weather, which you can overcome when Allah gives you strength and determination, but also with the huge problems the women in the camps have to face afterwards. After the storms end, when you finally go outside your tent, you can easily understand not every sister in the camp was as fortunate as you were to escape unharmed from the disaster. Some sisters had their tents blown away or torn apart, other sisters lost their provisions or the shelters they built next to their tents to keep their clothes or other goods (these shelters are usually made up temporary constructions, put together by using pipes wedged in the hard ground of the desert, with walls and roofs made of thick, large pieces of plastic sheet).
Apparently, it would seem that everything is calm – the storm passed and everything is over – but fear appears to linger on. Some of the tents, by the Grace and Powerful Will of Allah, have remained intact, other were only slightly knocked down and could be restored, but there were others that have been severely damaged. And you can easily see that the fear from the eyes of the sisters whose tents have been destroyed does not go away. You can tell that this fear comes from the fact that they have no longer a place to live, nor a roof (albeit improvised) above their heads. No one will give them a new tent -that is a big issue in the camp, as they are extremely hard to get. To buy another tents is, in most cases, almost impossible, as they are very expensive. And money is something not easily gained in the camp. Some of the sisters receive some financial support from their families, friends or acquaintances, who send them money regularly, but others desperately need them and have nobody to help them. In difficult times like this, you can see how our Muslim sisterhood begins to work and you can witness the true meaning of Islam in action. The sisters start to help each other, naturally and without any expectations. One sister helps to fix the tents, another invites those who have suffered significant loses in her tent, to live together. Usually, when something dreadful happens in the camp, the sisters unite and help each other. This also brings them closer to Allah. Everyone, every sister is different, they each have their own, unique personalities and characters, but each and every sister wishes to offer aide, assistance and relief in the Name of Allah Almighty, so they can all receive their reward in Heaven.
But, in the long run, there is still one immense, incommensurable problem to deal with: the time passes, eventually you are able to leave the camp and go back to living in a „normal” world. A world where there are proper houses, a world without tents or sandstorms. But that fear you felt in the camp stays with you for many, many years afterwards. You begin to settle down into your new life as time passes, and your mind, your thought also begin to calm down. However, your soul is still restless and refuses to let go of the fear, as it need more time to forget all the suffering it has endured, to forget the despair it felt during those kinds of storms that took place in the camp. There is only one thing, and one thing only, that gives peace to the troubles and fears of the soul – we pray to Allah and ask that, by His Infinite Mercy and Grace, He may ease our trials, tribulations, past fears and traumas. And we hope that, when Allah will wish it, everything shall pass and be forgotten, and the fear will finally go away, like a bad dream you let go of when you wake up to the blissful dawn of a new sunny day.
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