I was raised Muslim by my mother, but even as a child, I questioned the rituals and expectations. Why did I need a mosque to pray? Why did faith need to be displayed? Growing up between Tunisia and France, I was exposed to different religions and their contradictions. It fostered scepticism. I believed goodness didn’t need validation from religion. In fact, the most outwardly devout people around me often seemed the most deceitful.
Something didn’t add up. I made a game out of avoiding my aunt Najet when it was time to pray, hiding until they left without me. I knew I was good and I felt that was enough. I didn’t need to parade my faith or prove anything.
Years later, as a teenager, I decided to give Islam a chance on my own terms. At the time, there didn’t seem to be any reason other than a calling to do so. There was of course more, but this is for another story.
I bought a book that would show me how to pray and started praying five times a day. This was my private practice—just between me and myself, or maybe me and God. I very soon was touched by a deep sense of inner peace. The more I prayed, the more I entered deep trances, shifting between physical and altered states of consciousness. It became clear to me that religion had depths beyond what I had been taught, depths often overshadowed by cultural traditions imposed upon it.
But eventually, I let it go. It clashed with the life I wanted—parties, freedom, sexual experiences. Yet Islam remained in me. I observed Ramadan, avoided pork, carried its values: kindness, generosity, honesty. I was taught to acknowledge everyone. I was taught to look at homeless people in the eyes and to gift them a smile. Connecting to their humanity instead of looking away in the face of suffering. I was taught to be generous and to give or share when I could, which if we were honest was always the case.
I still had a connection to God. But then my mother got sick. Pancreatic cancer.
The doctor who announced she had three months left, turned to me and said, “You’ll have to take good care of her.” As we left, and were about to walk downstairs to the exit, he told me to walk ahead—my job was to stop her from falling. That moment sealed a lifelong habit: putting other people’s safety first. No doubt this was compounded by my upbringing, being my mother’s daughter, being the daughter of a Tunisian, being a woman. All of these engrained in me the thought that I had to come last.
My mother fought hard, enduring surgery after surgery, trying anything, even acupuncture, which I dismissed at the time. She managed to survive over a year and a half, pushed by the goal of seeing my little brother graduate high school. But in the end, she died.
And with her, my faith.
Allah, El Rahman El Rahim: The Most Merciful, The most Compassionate, as he was called, had not spared my mother—the strongest, most loving, and forgiving person I knew. If God existed, how could He allow this? My mum who was a God in my eyes. A woman who grief, hurt, violence, loss, estrangement, abandon had not managed to take down. A woman that had beat illness after illness, that had survived countless surgeries, that had always managed to stand back up. That kind of woman could not just be human, she had to be immortal. But she died.
The facts were clear: life ends. My mother, my maker, my indestructible force of nature—was mortal. And if she was mortal, so was I. God was fiction. I lost faith in God. And with that, the concept of afterlife vanished too.
That realisation crushed me. If there was no afterlife, my mother had simply ceased to exist. Her body, mind, and soul—gone. Swallowed by a void into nothingness. Obliterated. The weight of that truth made grief unbearable, so I buried it so deep, it didn’t resurface for another thirteen years.
Not until I broke my back. Forced into stillness, I could no longer outrun the pain—first physical, then emotional. It was too profound to handle with just my humanity. I had to turn to something greater. Something that made death just a pit stop.
That’s what led me where I am now. I connected to a force beyond religion, something that showed me I was part of everything—past, present, future, seen and unseen. God wasn’t in a temple, a church, or a mosque. God was within me. I am God, just as you are, just as my mother is. There is not beginning and no end. I was never born, and I will never die. Neither did my mother.
She is me, I am her. My brothers are my mother, and she is them. I am what I love and what I despise. We are the same as our neighbours, our enemies. I started to understand different levels of reality, composed with impermanence, cycles, individuality and at the same time oneness and timelessness.
I understood nothing is ever lost. And yet I had to lose something to grasp this. I had to lose my faith to find myself. To find all that is. To find the God within.
Pain buried me in the dark, and that is the only place I could truly see the light.
My mother’s death was a death of me too. And also, a birth.
