Tunisians

So it's not the questions I wa- It was not what I was questioning, but this identity thing was a little bit of a mix.

So when I started university in Tunisia, I got to meet Tunisians, real Tunisians, and they were telling me that I was not because I didn't speak Arabic properly, because I didn't...

Even if I was in my jeans and, and, and, and pullover, um, I didn't look back, like them, and I, in terms of integration also, I had to do something in ord- in order to, to, to, to, to belong.

Right.

It was a, you know, the church is maybe half full of people.

Tunisians, of native Tunisians, people who were born in another faith, as they say, and have found this one.

That's sort of interesting to me.

And then I also was in Georgia, in the country of Georgia, in Tbilisi.

When we had our military coup in 2013, that emboldened Hafez-- that emboldened Bashar al-Assad to launch gas attacks.

Uh, that emboldened the Tunisians to start cracking down on, on their post-revolution democracy that they had.

That emboldened the Arab regimes in the Gulf to even crush their own local Shia population even more, because they are proxies of Iran, as they, uh, called it.

So everything started going down the drains regionally.

After daytime temperatures peaking at 45 degrees C, 113, the coldest point in their night was 35.8 degrees C, 96 in the night.

Feel for people roasting in North Africa, including Tunisians running out of water, more on that later.

Every day, people across two continents suffer through heat beyond human endurance.

That is where the United States continues a war which itself pushes more greenhouse gases over the limit.

You know, we don't have that name.

The Tunisians have that name, like Rabbi Tzemach Mazuz.

That's David ben David? No, there's-- 'cause there's one place that says David Shemo.

There's one pasuk that says that.

If we are, for example, tasked or obligated to do something, we kind of project, why does Allah command me to do this? Because another human being or another creature, if it were to ask you to do something, then by default it means that it needs it.

So you come to think of, does Allah need my prayer? Does Allah need my dhikr? Does Allah need me to worship him? That's a very common question, by the way, that was addressed in a very beautiful book by Sami Amri titled, Why does Allah command us to worship him? He's a Tunisian philosopher and thinker.

And in his book, he touches on this idea, this concept.

Why does Allah command us to worship him? So here he's saying, Allah transcends beyond these faults and these qualities that exist in human beings.

The King, the Most Holy, the All-Perfect.

That's the translation used here for As-Salam by Mustafa Khattab.

Ibn Ashur is another Tunisian scholar, mashaAllah, tabarakAllah, we have two Tunisians mentioned today, in his book, Tafseer al-Tahrir wal-Tanweer, a beautiful book of Tafseer that I recommend that you check out.

Unfortunately, it is only in Arabic, but I heard it is being translated, so maybe one day it will come out soon, inshaAllah.

In today's white houses, just like the six-story buildings of the ancient city, apart from their domes.

In the faces of living people, many Tunisians today may carry the genes of the Carthaginians, mixed descendants of Middle Easterners and the Berbers of North Africa.

Carthage had been built by the Phoenicians, master mariners from the Lebanon, merchants who founded the great maritime trade routes, the superhighways of the ancient Mediterranean Sea.

And for an encore, they gave the classical world its first alphabet.

Arabs and Muslims women paid the bills, paid hard bills because of the terrorists.

Libyans, Algerians, Moroccan, Mauritanian, Malians, Tunisians.

It's us.

It's us who are in the front line against extremism, against religious violence, isn't it? As we are the victims and as that phenomena comes from most of these country, we have to be in that conversation.

And the worst now that machines can discuss and take decisions among each others.

So it makes me awake at night thinking about my humanity.

And as my computer can write poems, do I still Mahajwini, the author and the artist of the Tunisians and the Arabs or not? It makes me, these questions makes me awake at night.

And I mean this sincerely, Maha.