God(ess), the Intercessor
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Among many things she taught me, Roya demonstrated the reality of instantaneous divine intervention.
As I have mentioned in several pieces of writing and in a latest podcast, one morning in early 2015 we heard some serious commotion going on outside our bedroom window in Berlin at the tram stop below us. Roya looked out to find a drunk racist derelict accosting a local Turkish hijabi woman (a lawyer by profession and a second generation German) with the most vile, most violent, most sexually explicit and most racially charged language imaginable. This degenerate was openly doing Hitler salutes, threatening to both sexually assault this woman as well as to kill all Muslims (all first rate felonies in Germany)! There were two dozen people waiting for the tram as this was all going on - all Germans - and not a single one did anything to help this lady in distress.
Seeing this, Roya suddenly flung open the bedroom window on that cold January Berlin morning and, as if possessed by an entire African Savannah of lions, then roared with such ferocity at that deranged drunk Nazi bastard below us that the guy nearly tripped over and fell over himself while she simultaneously indicated to me to go and immediately call the cops on that vile degenerate!
The assault on Zeynep, who would soon become a close friend to Roya, and who later helped me beyond anything I can ever repay to navigate the German bureaucracy after Roya passed away, stopped dead in its tracks right there and then.
In this incident, I beheld divine intervention in real time with Roya becoming the instrument to that end. Zeynep later told Roya that while she was being subjected to this unconscionable treatment, she kept reciting the Name Ya Shaafi' (يا شافع) (O Intercessor) -- and then Roya showed up from behind her. Among other tools, this became one of the many ways in which we fought the far-right on our street in Schillerstrasse, Niederschonhausen, Pankow, Berlin: Dhikr as a weapon to protect the innocent and disarm perpetrators, and it worked like a charm every time.
So those over-privileged First World mutassawifun who want to preach fluff and puff Sufism to me, I have walked with lionesses, with warriors and real life Valkyries, who would eat a tariqa full of your lot for breakfast because they have walked their talk like my Roya always did! I just hope and pray that our little Nuriel (who is slowly beginning to bloom) grows up one day to be just like her fearless mama was: a woman with an ingrained and innate sense of justice - and (unlike certain contemporary self-aggrandizing pretenders and shameless white racist cultural appropriators downunder) one truly worthy of standing in the rank and station of a Qurratúl-'Ayn - that would allow nothing to stand in her way and who paid the ultimate price and became a martyr at the hands of faceless cowards, existential vermin, who will eventually receive their just desserts at the hands of Providence whether in this life or the next!
