I Stand for Peace

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

(click here for a raw shot)

There is an open challenge going on by the White Canvas Gallery in Second Life. You can click over to my flickr to read more about it and if you want to participate, make sure to share your image in the I Stand for Peace flickr group.

The challenge is pretty straight forward; You create an image with the theme of “Peace” in mind and then you share it in the flickr group. You can also nominate some of your friends to do the challenge too. To those that nominated me last week, sorry I took so long to get to this, it’s been a busy week for me in real life.

I nominate anyone that is reading this right now and wants to do it. I figure it is a good way to express ourselves and distract from all of the chaos and destruction going on in the world on a daily basis. I hope you can also participate.

I also want to thank L’Amour Diversity Magazine for interviewing me and featuring me in their June 2016 issue. My interview starts on page 64.

Rhiannon Colclough reached out to me to ask me a few questions because back in November, after the Paris attacks, I had done a facebook post about all of the negative comments that I saw from my facebook friends about muslims. Being a muslim myself, those comments hurt me at the time so I spoke out, you can read the post at this link if you are interested. Rhiannon wanted to know more about that and wanted me to explain my feelings in detail, so you can read the magazine to see what I said.

I know I may sound like I’m playing the victim card in my facebook post or the article, but I’m not. I don’t feel like a victim by any means. I know my life, I know my privilege, I know I’m very fortunate and I’m thankful everyday for this life that I live. But there are others that are victims and that are not as fortunate so I just wanted to remind people of that. Hope you take the time to read both my post and the article.

A big thank you to Rhiannon Colclough and the whole L’Amour Diversity team for featuring me.

UPDATE: a few people have said they are having a hard time reading the text in the magazine so I am copying and pasting what I said below:

I’m not an incredibly religious person. I consider myself more spiritual and call myself a Muslim because that’s the way I was brought up. I still do many things that Muslims do such as fasting, praying, avoiding certain foods, etc… but if you were to see me in the real world, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell that I was a Muslim woman.

In the real world, I keep my prayers and spirituality mostly to myself. In the virtual world, I often shared my ethnic and religious background through words on my blog and images I took of my avatar on certain religious occasions. You can see many of them on my flickr in this album. So I assumed everyone that followed my avatar on different social networks was aware of my ethnicity, religion and background. I also assumed since they had seen my work and words for so many years on my blog and social networks, they knew what kind of person I was. I assumed they knew that I had compassion and consideration for the human race.

When the Paris attacks happened last November, there seemed to be a shift, especially on my Facebook. I saw more and more people blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few psychopaths that have hijacked the religion. They used misrepresented quotes from Holy Books to try and prove how all of us are the same and we have no compassion for anyone but ourselves. It shook me to see that, and it hurt. Not only did I need to escape the hateful rhetoric of Political leaders, and protect myself from crazy terrorists, but now I must also defend myself to people that were once my social media friends.

So I wrote a status and poured my heart into it. I am not sure how many people it affected, but I did have many people reach out to me, which helped incredibly. It made me realize that we’re all in this together and we can’t let hate and terror build a wall between us. We’re all the same no matter what race, religion or gender. We’re here just trying to make it through life and give a little back whenever we can.

Thank you for reading everyone! Stay safe, love and be loved! <3

Credits:
1st picture:
Shape: StrawberrySingh.com Zara Shape by Strawberry Singh
*Mesh Body: Maitreya Mesh Body – Lara V3.5 by Onyx LeShelle
*Mesh Head: .LeLutka.Mesh Head-KARIN v1.6 by JadenArt
*Skin Applier: Glam Affair (Lelutka) LiuLy – India 02 by Aida Ewing (flickr)
*Hair: TRUTH HAIR Thea by Truth Hawks (@ Uber)
*Clothing: Zaara : Chandni *olive* by Zaara Kohime
Head Veil: .aisling. Karishma Veil RARE by Druunah Esharham (flickr)
*Jewelry: [MANDALA]TENSEI by Kikunosuke Eel (@ Uber)
Candle in hand: Mesh Nation Jasmine Candle by Twistia Twine
Candles on water: CHEZ MOI Floating Flowers by nanda Marjeta
Pose: I made it myself

2nd Picture:
Style credits for 2nd image in this post: Happy Ramadan!