You are somewhere comfortable right now.
Maybe you don't think of it that way. But you are reading this, which means you have light, and a moment, and enough stillness to be here. That is not nothing. That is, for a lot of people in this world, everything.
Ramadan is almost over. Twenty-two nights have passed. Eight remain.
This month was always about the unseen. The meal before dawn that no one watches you eat. The prayer in the dark that no one hears. The giving that you don't announce. Islam didn't invent that impulse but it named it, and protected it, and said: this is the purest form. To give without being seen. To do good with no witness but God.
There are women tonight who are not comfortable. Not safe. Not still.
They are in places that have been taken apart by war. Slowly, or all at once. They are keeping children close in the dark, or trying to find out where their children are. They are surviving in the specific, exhausting way that people survive when survival is the whole of the day. They don't know this email exists. They don't know you exist. And they never will.
There is doubt in this. There is always doubt in this. The distance between your hand and theirs is long. You give anyway. That is the whole of it.
These last eight nights of Ramadan are when the door is widest.
Not just spiritually. Practically. What comes in before the month closes reaches the next cycle of care. The next supply run, the next safe space, the next woman on the list who has been waiting.
Eight nights. That is what is left. Not as a threat. As a fact. As an open door that will, quietly, close.
Every year, when Ramadan ends, I sit with it. I go back over the month. the prayers, the fasts, the moments I gave and the moments I hesitated. And every year, without fail, it is not the big gestures I remember. It is the quiet ones. The ones I almost didn't do. The sadaqah given on a tired night when it would have been easy to wait until tomorrow. Those are the ones that stayed with me. Those are the ones that stayed. The ones I believe mattered to someone I'll never meet, and to me as well.
Eight nights is enough to do something you'll carry for a year.
You don't need to give a lot. You need to give before the door closes. Because Ramadan has a particular quality of mercy that doesn't linger once it's gone and these last nights, the odd nights among them, carry a weight that the whole rest of the year doesn't.
Don't let them pass without putting something in them.
To give into the unknown, toward lives you might never meet, that is not charity in the ordinary sense. It is closer to faith. It is what love looks like when it asks for nothing back.
Donate tonight.
Not because you're certain. Because you're human, and somewhere a woman is awake in the dark, and eight nights is not very many.
For the women still waiting,
Hafsa