I have been ruminating about Feminism (and Education) for a while. Finally, at least about the former, I managed to write down some of my reflections in this essay published by Savage Minds. I hope you will find it interesting, at least a trigger for discussion and debate. I feel that nowadays there is a real disconnect between the reality of the life we experience and the formality of the language we are forced to use in social interactions. It is as if flat office language etiquette becomes the dominant mode of conduct in our social interactions. Somehow, this is my way to break it.

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Feminism Intercepted

June, end of the school year. In Rome, Italian educational institutions are inviting families to attend the end-of-the-year play, a ritual that forecasts the beginning of summer. I attended one o…

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a month ago · 35 likes · Laura Cesaretti

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Italy’s Manufactured Islamic Threat

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3 months ago · 29 likes · Laura Cesaretti

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This review was published by The Bookslamist back in 2020. Unfortunately, the website doesn’t exist anymore, but the book is still one of the most relevant and precious resource available on Afghanistan. Thus, the re-up.

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It is difficult to tell Afghanistan’s character without falling into stereotypes or enforced myths. Night Letters, which takes the name from threatening letters still nailed across doors and mosques of local villages, carefully avoids any of those, guiding us instead into the vibrant political soul of a country, too often depicted simply as isolated and backward. In this book, Afghanistan stops being the passive battleground of international games to became the main connecting point and home of the events that shaped the world as we know it today.

Islamic movements, usually depicted as a regressive force standing against modernization, emerged from the book as a social force, a pushing factor of modern history. The main protagonists of this politics are not tribal thugs, but members of a young, urban and educated class who aimed to change the world on their very own terms. It was – in fact - not the illiteracy of stubborn peasants to lead the world -known Afghanistan resistance, but a long established conscious that communism had no future in a country with little if nothing in common with the proletariat described in books such as Gorky’s Mother.

It is indeed a brave book, which takes us on a journey that starts from the first protests against a lavish monarchy and a docile cleric, throughout the years of the Soviet Invasion and Afghan brutal Civil war, till the still taboo years of the Taliban regime and beyond.

“The communists and the islamists had come to the same diagnosis about the problem afflicting Afghanistan, with very different ideas about the cure”

The story is told not from a Kabul-centric liberal perspective, but from the periphery. This time, other voices of the country are allowed to speak. Beside the leader of Hizbi-e-Islami Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Sands and Qazizai reconstruct the role and story of minor yet key figures such as Jan Mohammed (murdered for being a spy of the Daud regime in a trial which involved also the notorious commander Ahmad Shah Massod), Kashmir Khan (the commander defeated in Kunar the first-ever Salafi Islamic State in the1990s), Mazari (the Shia leader who permitted the Taliban to enter Kabul in 1993), or Awal Gul (whose militants escorted Bin laden and Zawari to Tora Bora).

In a captive storytelling, the authors explain the contestations, letting the reader to feel vividly the exhaustion of the war. The struggle of the thousands of Soviet troops deployed in Afghanistan, told to fulfill their international duty of helping locals and becoming infamous for their brutality, recall the PTSD of many American soldiers deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, ending up tormented by the atrocity committed and witnessed.

“The land was soaked in blood (…) many troops took refuge in drugs and alcohol to get through the hours of duty, selling weapons and ammunition to the very Afghan they we fighting in an effort to find their addiction”

Night Letters is an indispensable read not only for those interested in Afghanistan, but for all those seeking to understand the causes behind what is happening today around the world. All facts and protagonists are put under scrupulous scrutiny and assigned to history with the right dose of dignity and responsibility. West-loved mujahedeen commander Ahmad Shah Massoud is revealed under a new, little known light, Hekmatyar’s fanatism confirmed while dismantling the lies and misconceptions surrounding his life. More importantly though, the commitment and role of Hizb-e Islami to global Islamic militancy find in these pages an indelible testimony.

“It was the evening of 25 April 1992. The crimson carpets on the sweeping marble staircase bore no sign of the terror that has swept the city just hours earlier. Ming vases and mounted antelope heads lined the walls near gold brocade couches and antique French wardrobes. Presidential guard uniforms hung pressed and clean, their epaulettes immaculate. The Hizbis had never seen such luxury, yet they were uninterested in the splendour. Beards matted, feet caked in dirt, eyes heavy with fatigue, they wanted to search every corner of the vast complex to make sure it was secure for Hekmatyar imminent arrival”

It is an extraordinary work of investigation, which took the authors six years and over three hundred interviews across Afghanistan, the Middle East, and Europe. Night Letters does not fell into aseptic descriptions of the mujahedeen factions as in Roy’s Islam and Resistance in Afghanistan. The powerful narrative in which the story unfolds, the details and description of places and characters will most likely let Sands and Qazizai’s work become a new touchstone in the field, as it has been the Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright before.

“Ever since Massoud’s forces first established control over Kabul in 1992 they had torn around the city in old Russian jeeps, music blaring from boom boxes, gesturing obscenely at passers by. From the vantage point of their mountain outposts, Jamiat gunmen shot civilians from sports in the street below, betting cigarettes on who could score the most kills. Dostum’s troops were notorious from the Afghan practice of bacha bazi, a form of pederasty in which effeminate young boys are made to dress as women and sexually abused. The fighters of Wahdah hammered nails into the skulls of their prisoners and stole ancient artefacts from Kabul’s museum. None of the faction were winning. All they had succeeding in doing was tarnishing the legacy of the mujahideen’s historical victory over. The Soviets. In the south of the country, a group of rural Pashtuns had finally had enough. A new revolution was stirring.”

This is because in the very end, this is a poetic book, a veiled declaration of love for Afghanistan, its mountains, beliefs and attitude toward life. The descriptions of Kabul transcend the western view of spoiled hippies’ storytellers and journalists crossing the land in the search for fame. The harsh beauty of places such as Shaygal district in Kunar and the oppression felts inside the cell of the Kabul prison Pul-e Charki cover the reader with smells, views, and tears from the first till the last page.

Night Letters is the story of a country which has witnessed no mercy, but was capable of holding strongly to beliefs rather than pragmatic survival. The heroism and stubbornness of each of the principal characters is petrifying, frightening, but also fascinating. Yasser Arafat, the notorious Palestinian leader that will attempt to mediate a peace deal within Afghan warring factions two times (in Baghdad and Tripoli, Libya), is reported to have told Sulaiman Layq, co-founder of the Afghanistan community party: “All fights are born from misunderstanding”. The key indeed, is to disclose them. And Sands and Qazizai do that with magnificent intellectual honesty, overwhelming narrative, and journalism rigor.

“He [Hekmtyar] predicted that America would soon invade Afghanistan and the Taliban government would fall. ‘Then we will continue our Jihad against America,” he said matter-of-factly. These seemed like preposterous claims to make in the prevailing geopolitical climate, but Hekmatyar knew something that the rest of the world did not: an Al-Qaeda attack, one which would provoke just such a response from the US, was going to happen”

At times, it can be felt this is an opera prima. Names and connection to the story of international jihad key figures such as Al-Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, ISI founder Al-Zarqawi and Mohammed Khalil Hakaymah, author of the infamous manifesto The Management of Savagery leave the readers with many questions open and the need of further investigation. Yet the book is permeated with hidden truths that seem to have waited so long to be heard, that would not leave any disappointment just the hope there will be soon be more we can learn.

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There was a time when Mussolini, the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, sat in a living room in Milan surrounded by cushions, floor couches, and inscriptions of Quran verses. He sipped there Arab coffee amid the smell of sandal and incense in the company of an Italian anarchist, muslim woman: Leda.

It was 1913 and Mussolini was only a provincial man just arrived in Milan to direct the socialist magazine “Avanti”. He was an outsider called to bypass internal political disputes, and amid many career vultures, the not-yet Duce was fascinated by the sincere and fearless soul of Leda.

They exchanged few polite letters, and their friendship began.

Leda Rafanelli was already a prolific writer, a revolutionary anarchist, and a sharp observer of society. She converted to Islam during a stay in Alexandria, Egypt, finding in the Islamic thought the unity between heart and mind that is missing in the western approach to religion.

Once back in Milan, she continued a close, contemplative “Maomettanian” life, while studying Arabic. She was also in touch with the famous Italian Arabist Carlo Alfonso Nallino, which complimented her for her progresses, without ever realising though who she really was.

Mussolini was fascinated. He wrote to her: “You gifted me the illusion of the wonderful and mysterious Orient”; “We will read Nietzsche and the Quran.” He was a typical modern man, anxious, always unhappy about family and work, yet clearly fascinated by a human strength that will never be bold enough to embrace.

Leda politely avoided any advances. She was an observer, curious intellectual and she simply liked to converse about political ideas. Mussolini’s knowledge instead, was limited to the utility of the immediate. Leda lamented: “He knows nothing about religion or theosophic ideas (…) He knew Gandhi only because the Indian Apostle was in the newspapers, not to delve into him.

Thus the socialist guest would usually leave at the sunsets, time for the Magreb prayer, and Leda’s night work at the typography. Along with her comrades she was in fact already writing and printing, “La Libertà”, an anarchist magazine of that time.

I discovered the account of these meetings at the Gramsci Foundation in Rome, where I found a copy of Leda’s book “A Woman and Mussolini”. Here, I also read some of her precious pamphlets with titles such: “Against school”, “From God to Freedom”, “Workers!”.

All Leda’s writings are permeated by profound passion for humanity and a unique equilibrium of social justice and understanding of human soul. She believed in God’s essence and put her faith in a religion that doesn’t demand to overlook the injustices of man-made laws.

She was a woman of the people, and she put her eloquence at the service of the people.

Her feminist thought today sounds even more revolutionary because it will be labeled as reactionary. She spoke to the heart of womanhood, and looked at emancipation as a tool to serve humanity, not egotistic needs. Her essay “To the Italian Mothers” is a brilliant, libertarian, acknowledge of that, and focuses on the fundamental role of motherhood in a society.

In her articles Leda urges mothers to protect their sons from the prejudice of society, and to nurture in them noble altruism and passion for freedom: “Teach them the love for the good and the hate for evil, and you will know that your mission will be fulfilled, that you can exclaim with joy, I have done my duty”, she incites.

She was undoubtedly a dreamer, but she had also a clear sense of life as a reality. “Not every woman will be a mother (…) Some will have many children, others just one, others no one”. However, every woman should dedicate herself to feminine mansions, she acknoledge, tasks whose aim is to be useful to society.

Overall, her writings are moved by the noble cause to move humanity toward an enlighten freedom. In her, Bakunin and Islamism find no contradiction: she thought religion as an inwardly tool to raise the soul, and she firming believe in a life dedicated to the interests of the community.

Mussolini would listen to her for hours, inebriated by the smell of bukhur, the incense burning. He usually go along with any of her ideas, although Leda spotted him publicly professing the opposite several time. He was intellectually a quite average man, and he used to comply with anything convenient to him. In that living room, taking Leda seriously was Mussolini’s main interest.

Then, the thunderbolt of the war arrived.

Mussolini openly claimed a neutral position while behind the scenes advocating for intervention. When exposed, he was kicked out by the Socialist Party. The rest is history: he will unstoppable continue his run to power, till he became the Duce.

Leda writes that after his military deception she was not interested in his destiny anymore: “To me, he died when he sold his belief for money”. Separated from the poetry of Leda’s living room in Milan, the ambitious, power seeker, revolutionary for envy, provincial man will conduct colonial wars in Africa, and will dared to ask the Italian mothers their wedding rings to finance these very wars.

“The strongest win, but reasons belong to the weak”, she acknowledge with her spiritual, anarchist wisdom.

And that is the story not only of Leda and Mussolini, but of the Indios and Columbus, the colonial powers and traditional societies, modern economics and those who stand against them. Indeed, it is the story of history itself.

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A statue of the Virgin Mary lies under a small bridge crossed by southern Italy’s regional train, standing amid Calabria’s countryside. Ahead, the Ionian Sea, an elongated bay of the Mediterranean immersed in lush vegetation.

The underpass connects the seaside to the urban centre of Locri, an historic town of this Mediterrenean region, whose name derives from the ancient Greek region of Locris.

The Locride, this is how the whole urban centre is called, is an area on the coastline whose inhabitants proudly carry their Hellenic legacy, considered by many to be the cradle of Western civilisation.

It is also the utter place of Italy with the gaze turned firmly toward the East. From here, Palestine is straight ahead.

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For a while, my family and I commute daily under that bridge hosting the Virgin Mary. Each time the statue was lying on the street. We pick it up, put it on the top of the wall that ran along. The day after it was on the street again.

From Rome to Beirut, the public devotion toward the street Madonnina is palpable. Yet that one crushed on the concrete, desacralised amid the indifference of all.

I was sure the statue did not fall due to natural events, such as winds or vibrations from the train crossing. Only later though, I had an hint on perhaps why in that god-fearing town of southern Italy a statue of a Virgin Mary was dishonoured.

The statues represented one of the few black Madonnas of Spain, Our Lady of Guadalupe. And our lady of Guadalupe enshrined in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Guadalupe, is mete of pilgrimages, but also home of a horrific past.

In 1484, the Inquisition Tribunal burned 52 Jews who converted to Christianity, accused of not being truthful enough. Those were times when even the breast milk of a Jewish woman converted to Christianity was considered impure. It was a time in which the Catholic church was obsessed with converting Jews, and excluding those who resisted from Christian society.

It was a time that continued for centuries, with one constant litany: the good Christians pray for the cunning Jews, may God forgive them for being so cunning.

Unspeakable secrets

It is widely believed that 40 per cent of Calabria’s population has Jewish background. Although some scholars assess this percentage to a much lower number, around 15 per cent, is still make it a relevant fringe of the population. It is a cultural heritage largely withheld by locals, and Italians in general.

Traces of our eastern roots are usually ignored in the mainstream culture, or simply pinned as estranger forces coming from the other side of a far away world. Yet, Jewish footprints in southern Italy go back to the earliest Christian years, and they form the very essence of its soul.

Many Jew landed to this side of the Ionian coast around the 4th century from Palestine and Egypt due to the Byzantine persecutions. Some began to live in the cave of the Aspromonte mountains as hermits, living a life of confinement and prayers, which would lead to the widespread monachism, a tradition of the area.

Others lived in hiding, secretly passing on practices that would preserve the history of their roots to the next generations. The Locride presence of hermits and saints is permeated by Jewish spirituality.

The Genius Loci of this land, a distinctive character that ancient Roman beliefs shape places according to its people, is a tale from the East.

The Mediterranean coasts served for centuries as conjunction of routes, before becoming the modern merciless frontier. Even in literature, Italy its often described as western civilisation tied to eastern culture. Yet, this past remain largely ignored, and not accidentally.

While much focus is put often put the Shoah and the crimes of the Nazis, too little is still talked about the anti-Semitic policies that characterises the history of the Catholic Church, and shapes the destiny of areas such the Locride, in Calabria.

The Vatican has often dismissed this period of history as dogmatic, claiming that it is primarily related to the Jewish rejection of Christ as the Messiah.

However, the violent rhetoric against Jews, accused of plotting and serving the liberal system to destroy the religious status quo has been behind the policy of forced conversions, which pushed many Italian Jews to formally abandon their faith.

The traumatic generational drama of these persecutions is still undoubtedly felt across the country. I always wonder why many jewish feel constantly attacked by any challenges or attempt to debate the Israeli-Palestinian questions, and I believe too little reflection is given to the latent, condiscending anti.-semitism that shape Europe way before the Shoah, as told by Andrè Schwarz-Bart master novel, “The Last of the Just”.

“Hasn’t the West colonised half of the world?”; “Have NATO soldiers in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia, been lesser brutal than the IDF?” “Why the focus, outrage of media and public opinion on the crimes in Palestine if not because the one perpetrating are Jewish?”

After all, it was Pope Pio XI, praise for its stand against the Fascist racial law in Italy, that refused to cut off from the liturgy of the Holy Friday the words “perfidious jew”, reiterating the then widespread idea that if Jewish have always been persecuted it was due to their cupidity, thus their fault.

Radicate hate

I still remember a lesson about my first lesson about war journalism at university. They show us first a reportage of UK soldiers in Iraq advancing the line in clean uniform, disciplined, as if war could be something aseptic and neutral.

Then a dispatches from Liberia, where militias composed largely by teen and covered with blood, shoot randomly, all edited with some hip hop song as sound track. Warfare changes, according to how you tell.

In western public perception the brutality of war is usually relegated only to certain populations, extraneous to any western moral code. It is also used quite strategically.

It was by slaughtering Western journalists that ISIS gained notoriety and rose to quick fame, self-declaring an Islamic State. The calculated media exposure of Gaddafi’s abuses prepared the public opinion to accept his quite violent murder and overthrow guided by the UK, US and French leaders.

I believe Israel is intentionally being so disgracefully inhuman and brutal, causing outrage but also exposing latent cultural bias, and used them to re-iterating the very reason of its own existence: Jewish can be equal - and safe - only within a Jewish State.

Alfter all, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern zionism, received no Jewish religious education but formed his idea of the need of a jewish State in Paris, during what has come to be known as the Dreyfus Affair, which exposed the widespread anti-semitism even in the post-revolutionary, egalitarian France.

Rather than some messianic promise, it was the gradual yet firm acknowledgement that no civic emancipation would ever solve the Jewish position in European land, if not their complete assimilation to the western world and society, that convinced him of the essential need of a Jewish State.

The very idea that Jews needed a separate citizenship, or they will be a threat to their nation they live in, was actually the leitmotiv for centuries of discrimination’s policies. By contrary, soon after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Morocco was accused of antisemitism for not sending its Jewish population to Israel.

In Jerusalem, group as the Naturai Karta, literally the Guardians of the City, choose to live amid Arabs in the old city, fearing to be contaminated and assimilated by Israel, which they consider a secular western state.

Manifesting the unseen

Jewish had always feared assimilation more than annihilation. The very first wave of Zionism was a call to spiritual revival of Judaism, promoting a simpler, mindful way of living and a return to the safer Orient to avoid being fully assimilated into the modern western world.

Only later it became a colonizer project, aim to establish and promote that very lifestyle they were escaping. “They want us to go to live in the city”, said Basel Adra in the movie No Other Land (2024) meaningfully.

With the Israeli-Palestinians conflict we are witnessing the ultimate brutal attack to the oriental culture and history, and the consequential gradual full assimilation of custom, practices, way of life.

It is not only about the annexation of Palestinians as a population, but it also regard the need to assimilate them as people into a modern world, like what happened to the oriental Jews arriving in Calabria.

It is something advanced restlessly locally in Europe as well as other part of the world such Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia by the soft hand of international Agencies such UN, the IMF, World Bank.

It is not casual that even among Palestinian defenders no one has dared to challenge the labelling of terrorist of Hamas as terrorists despite in-depth analysis, research, and books such as “Hamas, unwritten chapters”, written by Azzam Tamimi, academically confuting those claims.

Whether or not the people of Gaza and the West Bank will hold their ground won't matter in the long run. Their resistance already open pathways for many to be inspired, and follow.

And spread a certainty: the only way to peace is to acknowledge, and understood the past. Otherwise, its soul will always resurge, even randomly through a Vergin Mary lying abandoned in the dirt of a underpass.

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Afghanistan’s Solitude

It is a hot day in Rome, too hot even for the Italian spring. I head to the local agency to make a money transfer to Afghanistan. Since the Taliban took over in August 2021, the US and the other Western allies constrained the country into economic isolation. International bank wires are not allowed to Afghan banks…

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a year ago · 29 likes · Laura Cesaretti

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There is a specter that is hunting the Western World. No, it isn’t communism again, it is Islam.

After the end of the cold war, and the consequential unrestrained spread of modern capitalism, the revolutionaries of the world felt that a real alternative to the “ills of the world” was missing. Certainly, there have been many well articulated critics on modern society, but nothing able to offer a comprehensive system to substitute it.

Then October 7 happened.

Hamas, like any other resistance movements, rose amid the extreme poor conditions of its people, in its case of the Gaza Strip and the West Banks. It soon became clear though that they differ from the secular Palestinian resistance, which had developed into professional funds receivers1.

The islamic movement was diligence, stayed away from the Ngos bureaucracy, and focused mainly on self-sustainability and local community support. By rejecting the ideological framework of international aid, Hamas offered to its people freedom to act. Elsewhere, mediating within the western framework, led to a different path.

In Afghanistan, the US – backed up by the Western allies – developed an economic system completely dependent on foreign aid. Then, when the Taliban humiliate them by entering in Kabul without their green light, they cut it all, leaving the whole country in economy despair.

A similar destiny seems upholding to the newly president of Syria Al-Sharaa, formerly known as Al Jolani. The military commander, who led the end of Syrian conflict, is now tied between the belief which has allowed its victory, and the fear to upset the ego monsters that has back them up for geopolitical convenience.

“Where the danger lies, also grows the saving power”, wrote the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, and Hamas, with the Operation Al Aqsa flood turned upside-down the tables of the international scenario. No hope belong to the oppressed if they play according to the oppressors rules, now everyone knows.

Hamas inundated the river banks in which modern society funded its legitimacy, and offered to the Palestinians, and the oppressed of the world, a way out from permanent subordination. Like in “The Skin” by Curzio Malaparte, in their struggle to avoid dead they found the means to preserve dignity. And dignity indeed, means also rejecting an enemy system as a whole.

Any attentive observer of the world affairs has well clear that aid, development, mainstream journalism and international law, are certainly not friends of the oppressed, but the soft hand of the oppressors2. However, our sophisticate society has mastered the technique of discipline through language, and even the harsh critique remain within a predefined framework that legitimise its existence.

The constant threat of possible crisis has transformed every individual into a diligent citizen, ready to mediate without negotiation, and condemn ahead any form of violence as a civic duty. Rather than means for changes, peace has been reduced to formality, often used to educate at the adaptation of a status quo.

By making again politics a means for social changes, Hamas not only is giving to the Palestinians a hope of liberation, but is sparkling over the world the light of awakening. The video coming from Gaza shows people with an undoubtedly dedication to self-sacrifice for the greater good, and this can be nothing but inspiring.

While our feeds were summoned hedonistic blathering, we all witnessing Palestinian facing their fate with dignity. While Trump, the president of the so called liberal world, dream about building “a riviera”, the people of Gaza pray amid rubble. While the Israeli government talk of hate, Abu Obeida, Hamas spokesperson, speeches are guided by rationality; while the IDF soldiers appears as mental child on a spring break with a gun, Hamas fighters are praised for straight and humanity also by their Israeli captives3.

Yet, it is Hamas to be listed as terrorist organization by a number of western countries, and anything in its support can be labelled as apology of terrorism.

That is not sorprising. Power has always used the label terrorism against anymore that take up the arms, and challenge its monopoly of violence. Jacobins suffered from an infamous campaign that pinned them as brutal animals, the Italian partisans were called terrorists by the Nazis. Even the Communards of the short-lived 1871 Paris Commune were victim of what we would have called bad press.

But the lacks of meaningful and truthful debate around Hamas actions is clearly an attempt to take away the psych resources needed to resist any systematic form of oppression. The ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict is then challenging power in ways that are unprecedented for the last generations.

I am not simply talking about social trends such as youth discovering the thought of Osama Bin Laden, the inexplicable inconsistencies of Western institutions undoubtedly exposed. I am referring to the re-opening of the space of imagination: the courage to questioning the very forma mentis in which we perceive and analyse reality.

Think about Zionism, for instance. European Zionism began as romantic dream to return to East, and live side by side with fellow Arabs as in ancient time, it then became a colonial project that defined Palestine an almost desert land4. In the modern days, it has become nothing but a fully secular project, perpetuate in the name of liberalism and civic rights against what they define uncivilized lands.

Exposing the lies in which it is frame it, which often use religious references, allow people to question everything in the way it is thought, and put it under scrutiny. The world as we know it quickly fell down with a domino effect: the universalism of modern human rights; the idea of development and progress, the prejudice of materialism against the soul.

The old establishment is aware of the power of imagination, and has entered into an alliance to exorcise “this spectrum”, like they did back in the days with anarchism, socialism, and anything system of thought able to challenges its power. Now, it is Islam.

Since 9/11 in US, but way before in Europe, Islam has been victim of misinformation, persecution, pinned as religion of war and accepted only when compromise with the Western framework5. However, Islam means an idea of society as a whole, it is a framework of social and psychological equilibrium that embrace all the life of an individual.

It is well know that this, to the occidental mind, means to be a Christian of the Middle Age6. The western attitude is trained to simply ignore any societal structure and idea that doesn’t belong to its tradition. But now, Palestinians are forcing everyone to witness what it means faith, unity, and sense of justice for muslim. And the western modern mind have to measure this, with their own world, led by individualism, subjugation, cruelty.

History teaches that struggle has never ended with oppression, on the contrary, it enhanced its flourishing. And the process of consciousness is slow but persistent. No doubt, a new generation of professional revolutionaries, is coming.

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The desert heat doesn’t make you sweat. Instead, it burns inside, especially when you wear a long heavy, synthetic abaya. I used to wear one at least once a week when we had to leave the madrassa where I studied to attend lectures outside our buildings.

We were in Hadramout, a region in southern Yemen, the land of pious as it is known in the Muslim world. “I wanted to live like in the time of the sahaba (the companions of the Prophet Mohammed) – a teacher explained to me.

I could feel her, and I hope you will too.

Islamic, and traditional society in general, are either considered backward or romanticized, rarely observed for what they actually are: a net of practices moved by wisdom and harmony, not subjected to time and needs.

To some, the heaviness of a three-layer niqab under the heat might be perceived as suffocating; but to others is the demands of fashion and social appearance the real cage. The Nacirema Essay, a classic of anthropology literature, proves well how in the ends, it is all a matter of perception, and how it is narrated.

What you don't see doesn't mean it doesn’t exist

The opportunity to live in an environment detached from modernity was enlightening for me. Being covered from head to toe helped me to reconnected to my inner womanhood, and allowed me to switch my attention on what I am, rather than how people perceive me.

My daily beauty routine was a tiny mirror, homemade face cream, natural khol and random masks of coffee grains and lemon. My wardrobe had 4 or 5 long dresses and an abaya for going out. Free from worrying about trivial things such as how to dress and how people would think of me, I spent a large part of my time focusing on contemplation, and writings.

I felt radiant.

I rediscovered the power of concentration, I could sit for hours without the need of checking anything else around me. It was a practice quite common in the ancient world till the era of multitasking practically banned it as “slackers activity.”1

I realised how much my perception had changed when a group of Western women came to stay in the Madrassa for a few weeks. Their eyebrowns, hair, even gaze carried the aesthetics diktat of the modern world. Beauty, Isabella Rossellini said in an interview, is a matter of expression. And to express ourself we need to be free from external conditioning.

That is why, I believe, it was segregation, modesty, and a basic lifestyle that allowed me to truly free myself. Isolated from all, I feel connected as never before. It wasn’t just a personal perception. I read a cloister nun said in one of their rare book interview:

we don’t live of seclusion, but contemplation (..) life in the monastery help us to be woman in the world, and to the world2.

This form of womanhood, however, are always more often looked at condescendingly, and rarely valued as meaningful choices.

Liberating society by declaring war on motherhood

My experience in eastern traditional societies helped me to see the reality of lifestyle different from what now seems the only norm. It enhanced my believes that woman emancipation had been a very westernise journey, strictly connected to escaping the slavery of working class labour, and the “problem that has no name” of the bourgeoisie life style.

Those thoughts mature clearer when I become a mum. The words of Ali Izbegovic, the Islamic intellectual and former Bosnia president, resonate in my mind3:

It was a civilization that proclaimed motherhood to be slavery and promised to free woman from it

I felt it every day. In a society where some people put their little dog in a bag, me baby-wearing caused constantly discomfort and enquires, although it was a practice diffuse also in the west before the advent of consumerism - thus strollers.

Even not sending the baby to the nursery is generally perceived as reactionary, or worst, an act of arrogance. Daily care was established as necessity, but now is largely considered good social practice.

In Italy, where I come from, a blind trust in scientific and economic progress was signed the end of traditional practices on motherhood, and a drastic change on our perception of womanhood.

Rural women, distinguished for their strong dialect and naïveness, would have found in work a means to emancipate themselves, but it become also a way to normalise the separation from new born babies from their mums.

Any objections to those new trends were dismissed as illogical chain of belief that would have tied Italian society to a pre-industrial, savagery way of living. It was a rush to prove to ourselves – and others – that we belong to the developed and modern world that forced us to change without carefully ponder possible spill-over effects.

The main narrative was simple: in a civil society, institutions and scientific methodology could raise children better than their – most likely – uneducated or unprepared mum4.

That, indeed, is not the case.

Anthropologist Jean Liedloff explains well how tendencies toward self-hate and self-doubt are diffuse in modern societies largely because of this early separation in the first years of life5. As a paediatrician posed to me: there is no more time from breastfeeding. The rights of the baby remain unheard, and beyond the “freedom of choice” there is usually lack of information, and marketing needs.

As a woman, I never ever thought how essential is to cover these topics for our emancipation struggle. The motherhood experience is usually detached for young woman from its true political meaning, and simply regarded as a passage that led to a hit of personal self realisation or by contrary the end of freedom.

Indeed, neither is true. It is very clear for islamic and traditional society. Not for the so consider “civilised” world, aka private market. Public campaign, often led by governments, made us believe that a woman really gave contribution only if is part of the productivity system.

In reality, woman workforce collide just by accident with the rightful quest of woman liberation, and the majority of us have boring, dead-ending jobs, that have little to do with self-realisation.

It said though, that kids are expensive. Nothing is farer from the truth. The need of formula, baby aliments, and other useless -when not damaging -products sold as essential, life-saving to a generation of women seeking for truthful allies while breaking with an oppressive past, but found only marketed books and professionals interested more in sails than well-being.

The push against patriarchy is been reduced to nothing but a kick into consumerism.

Rather than free themselves, women in Western society have been detached from any inner and natural aspect of womanhood, which had devastating consequences on how we nurture our child, which one day will become the people who form the world.

Our existence was built around profit, not people. Kids are took care in dedicated spaces, and they are not part of the adult world anymore, which is always busy doing something. When you go east, on contrary, kids are everywhere.

In Yemen, almost all my Arabic teachers used to bring their babies to school, and young mum attends regularly all the activities of the madrassa. Men might have been excluded from our world, but our world was at measure of baby, and women of all kinds.

It was possible because toddlers were usually calm, self-aware enough to not be guided, or entertained constantly. They crawl around the room under the seemingly nonchalant supervision of their mum, who would carry out a lecture on Arabic grammar brilliantly and not interrupting herself continuously to shout some kind of commands.

Everything seemed possible, simply because it was in harmony with our natural rhythm.

It is not a matter of culture. The very Italian, and European, Maria Montessori considered mandatory to create environment at measure of children, and make them part of the adult world instead of making toy copy for them.

Despite being acclaimed widely, however, Montessori’s legacy in the westernized world has become nothing but a fancy brand for expensive childcare. Everyone likes wooden toys and large garden, but radically changing a lifestyle is a big no for most.

Afghanistan - and some others - continue to resist!

Back in the 70s, the Italian intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini warned of the upcoming dilemma of woman leaving the family space:

From the moment a woman moves toward independence, all humanity deteriorated, as the institutions of modern society have no interest in nurturing men, only consumers.

It should be not surprising then if traditional societies in the Middle East and South Asia sense this very unresolved issue, and activate forms of resistances to the international gender agenda, that instead pushed intensively for reform, often using economy or internal societal fractures as tool for blackmails.

When I was in Afghanistan during the Western-backed republic of President Ghani, I worked for a research organization that monitored the government implementation of Woman, Peace, and Security UN resolution 1325.

The resolution taken in 2000 links gender equality to the maintenance of international peace and security, and it is an enormous effort to push governments around the world to implement the inclusion of women in the public domain, from the military to the civilian sector. Sadly, it was all reduced to a matter of numbers: number of women in police, the number of women in local council and so on.

What was generally pushed though, was the idea that a woman in a suit and with a lousy headscarf is more emancipated than a woman that covers up. The result was to exclude from social activities much of the women who refuse to engage in that narrative, and leave alone without social parameters to whom refer the women who instead believe in that.

Afghan women, despite the constant denigrating rhetoric, are not the invisible, passive bodies the West liked to describe. Even in traditional settings, more than one family lives in a compound which works as a small community with daily assigned tasks and duties.

I met many of them who author books, covering various topics, from natural herbal medicine to short novels. I heard some have the habit of visiting neighbors to borrow books on legal matters related to family issues, or biographies of scholars or women from the prophetic time.

In Yemen, I found a similar environment. The madrassa where I studied, was a hub of knowledge, open to different generations of women. Same I heard is the traditional Mahdara, the desert-based educational institutions of Mauritania.

In my experiences, the traditional educational system, usually belittle by foreign observers for their curricula and different teaching methods, produce way more educated and intellectual engaged woman that the average school system of western society.

It doesn’t produce profitable knowledge, though. and perhaps, this is the real reason of its criticism.

While denigrating segregated society and their way to limit a woman work environment, we forgot that education foremost has the purpose of personal growth rather than professional purpose6.

The ultimate revolutionary act

I found baffling how in light of this, the modern world keeps imposing abroad a model of emancipation that has actually proven a receipt for social disaster7.

Any legitimate doubts about the role of women in modern society are nowadays either simplified as backward and silenced or considered a violation of women's (and human) rights even in proven doubious by the very own western intellighentia.

During my trip to the rural eastern provinces of Afghanistan, families, women an men alike, always expressed mistrust and vocal resistance to anything that seemed an imposition of the international gender agenda: “ They want to weakness us”, I was often told.

At first I politely dismissed these voices as conspiracy. But now I feel it, and I know that a large vast of western literature too support their skepticism.

Family planning, vaccination, women and LGBTQ rights have been used in many poor countries as form of exploitation rather than a tool to improve health and lifestyle condition. It is then not surprising the reaction of extremist organizations such as the Taliban, which are perpetuating stubborn and extremely harsh policies against woman education.

I believe it has more to do with figuratively slammed the door to any appeal of the international community, which demands without ever listening. In times of fear, people tend to shield themselves. And to actually break the line require to acknowledge first all forms of violence. For instance, the one that for 20 years, the US led coalition along with international organizations used against Afghanistan to destroy and then reshaped society as they pleased.

Progress too can be a sign of social regression, and despite global economy tend to annihilate all form of societies, the hubs of resistance still pulsing need to be heard and emerge from the underneath of modern storytelling.

Our society has become so sofisticate that reduce the debate to emancipation or defeat patriarchy, is nothing but a trap. We need to address the various form of oppression we want to emancipate from, and learn to observe, humbling, existing strategies of resistance, especially those that challenge our very forma mentis.

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It is said to that live in the Yemeni town of Tarim, you need only three qualities: ‘sabr’ - perseverance - ‘adab’, or good manners, and positive thinking. And as a student in a madrassa there I was told I needed just five possessions: a piece of wood from an arak tree to clean my teeth, a set of prayer beads to commune with God, a watch to keep control of time, and a pen and a notebook.

Now that I have returned to the comfort of my life in Rome, I often wonder how I can apply that advice to a world that appears to be coming apart at the seams. But even in my darkest moments I take heart from knowing that Tarim has not been dragged into war or fratricide like other societies in the Middle East, a region in which governments routinely conflate tradition with extremism for their own political ends.

A brutal conflict has ravaged much of Yemen for the last eight years, killing hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of the strategic interests of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The British and American arms industries have fueled the violence. Yet Tarim was - and is - extraordinarily peaceful. It does not live in the shadow of its neighbors, nor is it in thrall to the West and the trappings of globalization. That the majority of the local people I met there had no wish to move abroad still strikes me as an admirable kind of resistance in the face of our increasingly cruel, commercial and homogenous international order.

This, then, is a very personal record of what living and studying in Yemen was like for me, an Italian convert to Islam. But it is also my way of celebrating a place that is not meant to exist in the fractured post-9/11 world, somewhere that hums with a communal spirit and a passion for learning at odds with its surroundings and its time. More than anything, I want this to be a message of hope - something that Muslims, and the Middle East, are not meant to have.

I left Italy for Yemen on December 9, 2020. It was my 37th birthday - a coincidence that has come to seem more like fate with each passing day. I would go on to spend nine months in the madrassa, separated from my friends and family, and untethered from many of my old assumptions. It would prove to be one of the most challenging, exhausting and rewarding experiences of my life, but not for the reasons you might imagine.

In that small corner of Yemen, willfully cut off from television, the internet and cell phones, I met people of all kinds, many of whom I am still in touch with today. Some of them came from other parts of Yemen, but there were also students from Indonesia, the UK and the US. All of us adapted to the privations and isolation of life in Tamim in different ways. We were forced to give up the freedom of the self and submit to a regime of physical and intellectual discipline. Only later did we realize that this gave us a different kind, and perhaps more authentic, form of freedom.

As a girl growing up on the outskirts of Rome, I had felt constantly haunted by a search for meaning and truth. This made me restless and angry in my teenage years, until I found a certain solace in travel and books. The ferocious eloquence of nineteenth century anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Enrico Maletesta spoke to my sense of injustice and desire for social change; In my twenties I backpacked solo around Australia and South-East Asia, and then did my MA in London.

Gradually, I started to confront the orientalist clichés I had been taught to accept in school, but it was still not enough. I wanted to turn my anger into something constructive, to change myself and the world. In those years it never even crossed my mind that becoming a Muslim might help me do this. Islam remained contradictory and confusing for me back then, a mix of poetic platitudes and bigoted instructions. I regarded it in much the same way as the Catholicism I had been trying to escape since childhood.

That perception began to change when I decided to move to the Middle East to began my career in journalism. I spent some time in Kilis, a small town on the Turkish Syrian border, and Beirut. Then, in 2015, I moved to Kabul and stayed there for five years, working for NGOs and as a freelancer. Experiencing Islam through its people, rather than through news headlines or literature, forced me to examine many of the certainties that had shaped my understanding of the world.

In particular, the impeccable manners of the Afghans I met, especially those in the Pashtun areas near the Pakistan border, opened the way for my gradual conversion to Islam. No one forced me.  All the best teachers lead by example and the patience my Afghan friends showed towards dealing with injustice, coupled with their sense of humility and empathy, impressed me greatly. I identified with their natural distrust of authority and admired the fact they went out of their way to please people who earned their respect. It did not take me long to realize that I had always been a Muslim, I just didn’t know Islam. I converted in Ramadan 2019.

When I returned to Italy the following year it was difficult to readjust. The Islam I found in Rome felt strange and unwelcoming compared to the one I had come to embrace and love. The reasons for this were complicated and even now I find them hard to articulate. Part of the problem was the lens through which Islam seemed to be viewed by much of Italian society. A kaleidoscope of political, cultural and social assumptions colored the views people had of Muslims. Their prejudices were not necessarily born of animosity; more often they were the result of misunderstanding and ignorance.

My decision to become a Muslim was greeted with suspicion and, at times, incredulity. Even the simple gesture of praying was seen as a hostile, childish, and rebellious act. Unfortunately, the local Muslim community I tried to engage with in Rome didn’t provide much solidarity. The pious, humble and familial behavior I had come to expect from Afghans felt a world away. In its place, I found only egotism, political generalizations and backbiting. For the Afghans I befriended, Islam had been the essence of life. For many of the Italian Muslims I met, it seemed like just another possession they clung to in order to secure their social standing.

I regained my focus one Friday at the Grand Mosque in Rome, when I bumped into a Somali woman who had the same demeanor as my Afghan brothers and sisters. We became friends and one day she mentioned a Sufi madrassa in Yemen that might be a good fit for me. I was intrigued by the idea but not yet ready to take the leap.

I’d always had a very romantic idea of Yemen that had been shaped by the films of the Italian intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose fascination with its landscape, architecture and culture was so vividly captured in ‘The Walls of Sana’a’ and ‘Arabian Nights.’ The little I knew about the country reminded me of Afghanistan; it seemed like a harsh but poetic place, misunderstood and marginalized. I wanted to go, I just needed to be reassured that my instincts were right.

After several months in Italy, I went to Pakistan and consulted a scholar in Lahore who encouraged me to pursue the idea. Then I returned to Kabul for a short time, where an Afghan friend helped me buy the abaya I would need to wear if I decided to go ahead with my plan. My mind was now made up: Yemen felt like destiny, the next logical step in the new direction my life had taken. For the rest of 2020, the network of close friends I had developed on my travels gave me the moral and practical support I needed to prepare. One friend in London took time out from her job to help steer me through Yemen’s labyrinthine visa process; another calmed my nagging worries.

In Rome, a man who is now my husband, took care of ensuring I had some small but important things that would come to feel like a godsend during my lowest moments at the madrassa: vitamins and good books, including ‘To Have or to Be’ by Erich Fromm. Finally, the Somali woman who first told me about the madrassa gave me some dresses and scarves, and, more importantly, lots of ‘dua’ - prayers of goodwill. Her grace and generosity reminded me of the way my grandma used to hide quotations from the Catholic saints in my travel bag every time I left Rome. All the world seemed to be moving in support of me. My bag for Yemen was ready, and I was too.

It was a gloomy, rain-drenched evening when I left Leonardo da Vinci airport wearing a jumpsuit and t-shirt, listening to ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie on my phone. It was even darker when the plane touched down in Cairo, the first leg of my journey complete. There, I met an American woman the madrassa had put me in touch with who would accompany me on the rest of the trip. We spent a few hours in Cairo but were back at the airport before sunrise. Leaving Rome, I had been unveiled. In Cairo I changed into a black abaya with a niqab covering my face. All the women in the waiting room at the airport wore similarly modest clothing.

After a three-and-a-half-hour flight, the plane landed in Seiyun, a city in Yemen’s Hadhramaut Valley. It was a Thursday. Neither I nor my American companion spoke Arabic or knew anyone local, but after showing our documentation we quickly passed through the border checks at the airport. Two men from the madrassa were waiting in the arrivals hall to escort us. Jostled by crowds of young boys offering to carry our bags for a few rials, we were ushered into a car.

Hadhramaut is one of Yemen’s most remote and beautiful regions. A vast green valley of palm trees, rocks and sand that burns orange in the sun, it is surrounded by dry, barren mountains that serve as a natural fortification. Osama bin Laden’s family is originally from the area and in 2015 Al Qaeda was openly active there, running the coastal city of Al Mukalla for a year. Bordered by the Arabian sea, Hadhramaut has traditionally been a point of arrival and departure for Muslims from across Southeast Asia and the Horn of Africa. Even today, Indonesians come to pursue their Islamic studies in the valley - pulled in by a mixture of geographic convenience and spiritual yearning. The key to Hadhramaut’s appeal for Muslim students like me lies in the Tariqa Ba’Alawiyya, a sufi order founded there in the 12th century. It was this legacy that I wanted to study.

On leaving Seiyun, we drove for 30 minutes before reaching the town of Tarim, Yemen’s spiritual capital - a place of saints regarded by the Sufi community as a lodestar for people who might otherwise have nothing to guide them. Driving through its old neighborhoods, I looked out from the car window at the narrow dusty alleyways separating ancient mud-brick buildings. Motorcycles whizzed past, ridden by men in baggy Yemeni ‘futa’ while women in long dark abayas sat perched on the back, both legs flung over one side. Tarim is said to be home to 365 mosques - enough for a devout Muslim to pray in a different one each day of the year. The ones I glimpsed that first day were simple structures perfectly in-keeping with their surroundings.

Throughout the drive, the two men from the madrassa made us feel safe, shy away their gaze and talked to us just if needed, while making sure to anticipate any needs we might had. The car radio did the talking. It was tuned into the station of Dar al-Mustafa, the twin male institution of Dar Al Zahra, and played a constant stream of the islamic litany will later became the familiar routine of our days in the madrassa. The hypnotic rhythm of the chanting was the ideal soundtrack to  the landscape and the fading light. The tone of the voice seem synchronise to the vibrations of the heart. Then, before I knew it, we had arrived.

The Dar al Zahra madrassa is a large white building surrounded by sand and dusty roads outside Tarim’s old city. We pulled up shortly after the Maghrib prayer, greeted by the chatter of kids who appeared near the entrance and showed us inside. Before anything else, I noticed hundreds of shoes at the entrance hall - then came a vibrant explosion of color, voices and laughter. I do not remember much of the evening after that. My American companion and I found ourselves in a room with the woman we would come to know as Ustada Muniba, a very high educated lady in both western academia and Islamic Science. In time, she would turn into a mentor and a true inspiration, teaching us the secrets of humility and leading by example. That night though, I didn’t realise how much she would have meant to me. Instead, I was enchanted by the chorus of drums and nasheeds - Islamic hymns - other students were doing to greet us. Then I was shown to the mattress on the floor that would serve as my bed and I immediately fell asleep.

Dar al Zahra is a madrassa for female students only. Opened in 2001, it was envisioned as a parallel institution to Dar al Mustafa, the higher education institute for men established on nearby grounds in 1994. The madrassa is three stories high, with each floor including a large prayer room, dormitories, library and classrooms. What Yemenis refer to as ‘habibs and ‘ubabas’ - male and female scholars who claim to descend from the Prophet Muhammad - hold regular lectures and meetings for students, but the laughter and drumming that greeted us that first night made it quickly apparent that this would not be a cold, emotionless place. The madrassa serves as a community centre as much as a school. Anyone from the surrounding neighborhoods can visit to attend lectures, or just for the chance to enjoy food and companionship. I was still focused on the formal aspects of study to appreciate what it meant. I had gone there to learn and for the first couple of months that was all I was focused on. My intellect was working, but my heart was still deaf.

The rules for attending Dar Al Zahra were spelled out clearly in the application form I had completed in Kabul months earlier. I knew that access to my cell phone would be allowed only once a week, and even then I would not be allowed to use its camera or connect it to the internet. My access to the web would be limited to one day a month, when I would be allowed a pre-arranged day trip to the home of a local family.

Only the strictness of the dress code surprised me. The shalwar kameez I used to wear in Afghanistan without a second glance from locals was considered too short and revealing even in the privacy of my own dormitory room. Instead, I was required to wear a long, loose-fitting robe. When I slept, I still had to wear a headscarf.

We were encouraged to recognize the all-encompassing nature of Islam and a key part of our learning happened when we were not in the classroom or the prayer room. The teachers wanted us to practice the Sunnah, the Prophet Muhammad’s way of life, in all our behavior. The basics, like eating with our right hands, sitting down while drinking or beginning the morning with a simple meal of dates, were easy. The hard part was internalizing the Prophet’s character traits: cleansing ourselves of selfishness, ostentation and resentment; granting forgiveness deep inside our hearts, always thinking the best of others, talk only if and when is beneficial.

All of us struggled to meet these expectations at various times. We found we were unable to truly forgive personal grievances that had been with us for years. We also argued about everything that ordinary young women anywhere are liable to argue about. There was jealousy, judgement and misunderstanding like in any normal school environment. But every day we were all trying to question ourselves, and behave differently.

Some of the students hung around only with their best friends or tried not to mix with people from different cultural backgrounds. Others tried to befriend the local ‘stars’ - prominent personalities from the families of the habibs, or imams with storied histories in the Hadhramaut. Some of the girls who were the most eager to behave perfectly were the first to fail in giving up resentments and grievance any occurred chance. At times for a convert like me, the hypocrisy was surreal; like an MTV show regulated by Islamic etiquette.

Most days though, I was enchanted by these fellow travellers of a spiritual path, who seemed genuinely focused on trying to make the world a better place by make themselves better people. We all had flaws, but we recognized that fact and knew that deep down we were there to heal ourselves. And that became our indissoluble bond.

Almost all of the girls I met, and those who later became my close friends, proudly wore the niqab in their home countries. Many of them had never shown their faces, or even spoken to, men outside their own families as adults. It is surprising how quickly even such extreme behavior can come to feel normal. I have always considered myself a socially progressive and politically radical woman, but I began to find the seclusion and segregation strangely comforting - liberating, even.

The men in the madrassa became like Oompa Loompas to me, busy working in the background, fixing problems and organizing things, without ever interacting with us. The few lessons we had with male teachers were conducted with them talking to us from a separate room via a microphone. We wrote our questions on a piece of paper that we passed through a crack under the door. It was a women-only world and after a while that felt natural.

Life in the madrassa was shaped around the five compulsory prayers of the day and this routine left us with little time to do anything but study and worship. After a while, there was a certain hypnotic, meditative, quality to it all. We woke around 3.30am and headed to the Musalla, the prayer room, located a few steps from the dormitories, near the entrance to the building. We stayed there reciting liturgies, until Fajr, the first formal prayer of the day. Then we would try to memorize passages from the Qur’an and catch up on homework, before taking breakfast and beginning our actual classes.

When school was over for the morning, we had time to hang out with friends or go shopping in the tiny supermarket and bookstore within the school. Then it was time for lunch, which usually consisted of rice with chicken or fish. In the afternoons, the majority of us indulged in a siesta, known as alqaylula in Arabic and considered in keeping with the Sunnah. We were usually woken by the call to the asr prayer, after which we would again study. Then, between the maghrib and isha prayers in the evening, we recited verses from the Qur’an or chanted Hadhramaut poetry. After dinner, it was again time to study before all the lights were switched off at 10.30pm and we went to sleep.

This kind of timetable may sound draconian, but it didn’t feel that way. The teachers were very flexible with me, perhaps because I was older than most of the students and had a relatively limited Islamic background. For the first couple of months, I was allowed to study only what I found easy. I struggled to memorize the Qur’an and didn’t place much importance in the madrassa’s routine. My main concerns were prosaic: I wanted to get the muscles of my tongue and glottis used to the textures of Arabic speech, with its words that roll from the top of the mouth, and I tirelessly repeated the sounds of letters I found difficult to pronounce.

At the same time, I devoured almost every English-language book on Sufism that I could find in the library and studied extra books on Arabic grammar that I had brought with me from Italy. When I felt bored or alone, I reminded myself that I had taken this sabbatical from work and life to study the intricacies of Arabic and Islam. I was here to learn, and to learn fast; everything else seemed ornamental, a cornice unworthy of much attention. But I could not have been more wrong. I had become too accustomed to secular education, with its emphasis on critical thinking. I needed to trust the different processes and teaching methods of the madrassa, where memorization was the key to unlocking the truth.

Dar al Zahra is organized to teach its students a new approach to life, one that finds meaning not in the pursuit of wealth or pleasure, but in the pursuit of knowledge that is both intellectualized and practiced. The staff do not dictate how this should be done; even within the confines of its walls, and the regimentation of its routines, a freedom of sorts is encouraged. Our dorm rooms were routinely locked during school hours, or when we were meant to be reciting liturgies, but it was not uncommon to find girls lying in the corridors, trying to steal an extra hour’s sleep or chatting with friends like teenagers in the bathroom of a high school.

The senior teachers knew this was going on, but they never reproached us. Dar al Zahra was not the Islamic equivalent of an austere monastery, nor was it the kind of madrassa so often featured in Western media accounts of Islamic schools, with corporal punishment imposed on misbehaving or under-performing students. Instead, it felt more like the cramped, street-level bassi houses of Naples, which are vibrant and full of life.

While the world was struggling with COVID, we were happily self-contained in a natural social bubble. I ate rice from the same plate as ten other students. If there was any food left, we all took it back to our rooms and shared it there. Just moving around the building was a communal activity. We talked with each other while queuing to wash or use the toilet, and gossiped about our lectures. If we wanted isolation and solitude, we had to go actively looking for it, often in the Musalla or in a remote corner of the building.

At times I felt a tiredness deep in my bones, but that wasn’t because of the studying, it was because of the desert wind that kept me awake at night, sweeping down from the chain of mountains that guarded the horizon. Some of the students grew so tired they spent whole days in the medical room just trying to catch up on sleep. In the end, I found that the only way to cope was to synchronize my mind and body to Dar al Zahra’s schedule, rather than try to fight it. When I did this, I felt synchronised with the whole world rather than isolated from it.

I realized how different life in the madrassa might be from the rest of Yemen during a rare trip outside, to Daw’an, a historic town in the middle of the desert, surrounded by palm trees. I was travelIng with a couple of students, and one of the ubaba that used to teach us evening lectures. The first time I had met her she was in the Musalla, praying behind me. I made some mistakes and she kindly corrected my movements once I had finished.

As soon as we arrived in Da’wan to visit the grave of a local saint, some kids showed up and passed on an invitation to lunch from a well-known family. We were all fully covered in our abayas and niqabs, yet somehow word of the ubaba’s arrival had already spread through town. The women of the family welcomed us with food and chanted prayers. Although my Arabic is still only basic, I could tell the respect they had for the ubaba. All the women we met that day were dressed fashionably, but my friends from the madrassa refused to remove their abayas despite the unbearable heat.

As the conversation flowed, I understood that a lot of young people in Da’wan looked to Saudi Arabia as place of excitement and modernity, with social and economic opportunities that Yemen lacked. It reminded me of the way young women in the West regard London or New York. They spent time chewing Qat, frustrated by the lack of jobs locally, and had little interest in tradition or the grave of the saint we had come to visit. “Please, take my son to study with you back in Tarim,” one of the women said to the Ubaba.

The veneration of shrines that is so common among the Hadhramaut’s Sufi community has often caused tension with local Wahhabis. But the real source of the discontent seemed to be a realization among many people that modernization has consistently failed them. Hadhramaut’s history is defined by a long series of wars between tribesmen of various clans and the lack of a strong central government has tended to result in arbitrary authority and economic insecurity. Locals who aren’t in Tarim often travel overseas in search of better lives, while the land they leave behind remains isolated and forgotten. Even when Hadhramaut was part of a British protectorate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it lay on the desolate fringes of the empire.

For local people then, Tarim stands as a symbol of pride and righteousness - separate from this surrounding despair. The lessons taught at the madrassa are seen as not only being tools for dawah - the spread of the Islamic faith - but as a route to a type of economic progress that is in keeping with the best of Yemeni culture and history. Tarimis often tell the story of Al Faqih Muqaddamm, the sufi scholar of the eleventh and twelfth century founder of the Ba’Alawiyya tariqa we followed.

At a time of political instability and local power struggles between tribes, Muqaddam chose not to fight but to break his sword. “The only sword I will use is the sword of knowledge,” he is said to have proclaimed. Since then, the people of Tarim have revered knowledge and abhorred violence. When I was at the madrassa, it was considered disrespectful not only to leave books on the floor but also pens. We were told that pens should be placed on tables or, since we always sat on the floor anyway, cradled respectfully in our crossed legs.

This reverence for learning has probably helped protect Hadhramaut from the turmoil around it. From the late 1960s to 1990, South Yemen was a communist one-party state, leading to the persecution of religious scholars. But the people of Hadhramaut clung to their faith and their history. Even today, the valley is regarded as a sanctuary for visitors of all kinds, including criminals on the run and people seeking respite from the on-going war. Around 13 million Yemenis are at risk of starvation because of the conflict. Some of the Yemeni girls studying at the madrassa could not return home to their families during holidays due to insecurity on the roads. Others who came from cities like Marib, where battles were ongoing, left without knowing if they would be able to return to pursue their studies. In Sayun, I was struck by the number of drivers desperately queuing for petrol in the cars - a staggering sight in a country with ample oil reserves.

Tarim, however, was the first place I had been to in all my traveling through the Muslim world where the wealth of the west had no discernible influence on the perceived social value of an individual. In Dar al Zahra, I met students from the US who were looking forward to getting good dental care in Yemen, which they could never afford in America’s private health system. Some families had left their homes in Europe and settled in the madrassa because it was cheap to live there. The very basic narratives about life and well-being that we in the west are taught to believe from childhood were overturned or, in my case, revealed. The rush towards a uniform kind of progress, in which knowledge is commodified and the individual is prized over the collective, has led us to forget that their are many ways to have a fulfilling existence, not just the one we are sold.

Leaving Dar Al Zahra was not easy for me. The hugs, love, and tears while I was about to leaving the door still hunt me. As per tradition, I shout: “ La ilaha illallah– there is not God but Allah” three times before leaving, while the girls replied in chore each time: “Muhammadur Rasulullah –Mohamed is the Messeenger of Allah. The power of what I experienced lies in that moment, and those words so meaningful for every Muslim.

Ultimately, I knew that Dar al Zahra was an idea as much as a physical location, a way for me to live that I could carry into the future. Back in home in Italy I struggled to navigate between the thousands of choices I am expected to make each day on things as trivial as what to wear or what to eat. And at times, I still do.

It feels harder to have a fulfilling life here when I am constantly hit with images and narratives that seem impossible to avoid. I know these narratives clash with my direct experience of the world, with the hard-earned knowledge I have acquired, but I worry that they still affect my understanding of who I am and what the future holds for us all.

When I was at the madrassa and told that a watch was one of only five possessions I needed, I did not immediately grasp the full significance of the advice. But as I stayed there it began to dawn on me: time was elastic and the opportunities it provided infinite. Here it vanishes without me even realizing it, choking me. I catch my breath again with the calls I make on Thursday to some of the girls back at Dar al Zahra. Their life reminds me that self-discipline is capable of heal the soul, and bringing freedom. “The world is in crisis because of a lack of role models.” a sheikh once told me. It was among the students and teachers of a madrassa in Yemen that I found mine.

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