In the stillness of dawn, just as the sun began to stretch its light across the sky, my grandmother would already be rising from bed, as if sleep had only brushed past her without ever truly settling in.
Whenever I happened to be awake at dawn, I watched her rise with grace, moving softly through wuduu (cleansing ritual) before standing to pray Al-Fajr (dawn prayer). Then, she would sit at the table in the living room, open the Holy Qur’an, and begin to recite in a voice so gentle it felt like a breeze moving through the house.
I still carry that image with me to this day. And maybe the reason it has stayed so close is because it makes me reflect on how prayer moved so gently in line with her own life, like it was part of her breath. She breathed prayer in a way that felt so effortless, like it came as naturally to her as waking up with the sun.
She carried a kind of lightness about her. A light that touched every part of her day, that rested beside her as she slept and rose with her when she woke. The way faith lived in her life always reminded me of that verse in the Qur’an that describes God as ‘light upon light’ in verse 24:35.
When I was younger, I would hear that verse and imagine God as light in the most literal sense, glowing and radiant. But as the years passed and I began to reflect more deeply, I came to see the verse differently. I began to understand that light is a metaphor; a way of expressing how God’s presence moves through the world, gently and endlessly, like sunlight seeping into every crack and corner.
This is the kind of light that flows through NOUR, a poetry publication by WePresent in collaboration with Sudanese-Canadian artist Mustafa the Poet. With contributions from Pedro Pascal and Channing Tatum, the book is a meditation on how faith has come to find its space in our modern lives, even when it feels like there is no space for it at all.
The act of prayer and worship moves through the pages the way light moves through a room. And the deeper you dig, the more you sit with each line and verse, the more you begin to understand what prayer is truly about: it is a sense of returning, of being held, and of feeling, at last, at home.
In the first poem, Mustafa reflects on the struggle of finding faith, and the light of God, in a world where darkness clings to everything, and where ash and fire seem to consume all that once held meaning. As he writes: “What ceremony can be found where the ash covers everything? What ceremony can be held in a mass grave?”
In a world marked by destruction, and where violence lingers in every direction, he asks what it means to still seek prayer, to perform worship, in places where there is no room, and no breath, for ceremony.
The imagery of fire stands in sharp contrast to the imagery of light, and for a moment, he draws us into that tension: how do we see light through the flames? How can fire, which destroys, ever give way to the healing nature of light?
But just as light has a way of appearing when we least expect it — glinting across the surface of a river, or slipping through the cracks of a dark tunnel — it also knows how to move through fire and how to outlast it. Because fire, for all its power and rage, eventually consumes itself, leaving only the presence of light behind. In this way, even destruction can give way to something luminous.
As Mustafa writes so beautifully: “The fire stole everything and still became my only memory of light. The fire illuminated the world around me.”
Following this poignant reflection on light, the publication then shifts into a conversation between Mustafa and American writer George Saunders. Together, they explore the terrain of religion and spirituality; how it feels to lose touch with it, and what it means to find a way back.
In a world that sometimes feels too fast and too loud, they speak softly about the search for stillness and gentleness, and how one might begin to reconnect with the sacred in everyday life.
What is particularly moving about this conversation is how it brings together two spiritual paths—Islam and Buddhism—each providing its own way of reaching toward a higher spiritual state, whether through prayer or through meditation.
Both Mustafa and Saunders arrive at something universal: the spiritual state is not something permanent or unshakable. It flows and drifts, and even sometimes disappears. And it has to be found again and again. It is not so much about having arrived, but about always returning, and always remembering to return to that spiritual state even in the most unexpected, disorienting, or disheartening moments and places.
In a series of tender, contemplative photographs by Yasin Osman, this idea is brought to life by showing the everyday ways that prayer takes shape across different spaces and moments. Whether in a backyard, on a street corner, or in a small room, the images reveal that prayer is not always wrapped in ceremony. It can happen anywhere and at any moment.
There are times when we pray with our mind, seeing only the future we long for, or the version of ourselves we thought we’d become but never did. And then there are times when we pray with our body, when we fall into sujood (prostration) just to feel the weight of the ground and ground ourselves back into reality.
And sometimes, even without knowing it, we are still praying, like when we suddenly remember to check in on someone we love, or when we feel the pull to give back to our community.
There are so many ways to pray, to worship, and to feel tethered to something greater than ourselves, even when we do not yet have the words for it, or cannot quite make sense of what that something is.
For instance, in one poem in the publication, Channing Tatum reflects on how he never knew religion, yet “felt the magic of so deeply caring for another I never knew what exactly to call it,” capturing the emotion of trying to hold something as vast and spiritual as this world within the fragile space of our own bodies.
For him, religion was never a part of his life. Yet, he found his own form of worship and prayer through love, because love, in its essence, felt like something greater than himself, something beyond definition and explanation.
Because even when we reach out in prayer, even when we give all that we have, there are still moments when it does not feel enough, as the beauty and brutality of the world feels too large to carry in just one act of prayer.
Whenever I remember the image of my grandmother praying, reciting the Qur’an as the morning light poured through the windows and wrapped itself around her, I hold that memory gently in the palm of my hands, then press it close to my heart. Because sometimes, in the noise of our modern world, it feels like the magic of prayer has faded, or has been forgotten altogether.
Just as this publication reminds me, and just as my grandmother always did, maybe it is not always about the ceremony. Maybe it is simply about rising each morning and returning, even briefly, to that sacred space within us. A moment to remember that something larger, something luminous, still lives inside us.
As Saunders says so simply in the publication, “you get a little glimpse of, ‘Oh yeah, I have God in me.’”
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