On Sacrifice: The Road to Jena & The Plain of Arafat

Notes on the necessity of difficulty and discipline

A couple weeks ago, I took a six-hour bus ride to Jena, Louisiana to attend a protest during Mahmoud Khalil’s immigration hearing, outside the ICE facility in which he has been held for two months (as a permanent resident, without any criminal charges, and with his first baby born while he was detained).

“I don’t want to go,” I told my husband (also named Mahmoud) the night before. “I want to spend time with you and the kids. Do you think I need to go?”

“I know that feeling,” he said. He told me he felt the same way leaving us for his medical mission.

And like him, I knew I must go. I wonder sometimes if these acts of protest are a fard kifaya¹—a communal obligation.

Someone has to go. A critical mass has to go.

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I got up at 4 AM and drove across town to catch the bus. To my pleasant surprise, it was one of those nice charter buses, and I even had extra room because the seat next to me was vacant.

Then we got to Louisiana, and I stepped off the bus into a pile of fire ants. I jumped when I felt the bites, then took off my shoe and shook them off. Everyone was asked to hold something that had been packed under the bus—snacks, water, cooling packs. I grabbed a banner and some picket signs.

It was hot. There was just one tree a little further from the shoulder we had gathered on, with not enough shade for everyone. We prayed dhuhr on the road, and despite the tarp over the pavement and the keffiyeh over the tarp and me wearing socks, my feet burned so bad through the layers that I had to keep moving.

And yet, it was worth it. Mahmoud’s wife Noor came outside to address us and tell us she could hear us during the hearing. Mahmoud could hear us.

This protest ultimately required little: 12 hours seated on a bus, 4 hours standing in the heat. As Sh. Omar said, it wasn’t easy, “but I can guarantee you,” he pointed to the ICE facility, “it’s nothing like being in there.” And as difficult as it is being in there, he went on, “I guarantee you Mahmoud would say it’s nothing compared to being in Gaza.”

Going to Jena reminded me of the importance of leaning into difficulty, into the inconvenient, into the thing you don’t want to do. I remember feeling a similar way over a decade ago when I went to Hajj. I revisited my old Hajj journal and found this:

“Arafat was a lesson in patience, discipline, and gratitude. There was a lot of heat, stuffiness, smell. Our shaded tent had a fan but not AC—it was broken. It was difficult not to join in the complaining, but instead to say alhamdulillah.”

The collective march along the country road in Jena, though brief, reminded me of the march out of Arafat–shoulder to shoulder with my fellow humans, moving through the heat. Then, the next stop: Muzdalifah, where we spent the night on the pavement. I remember that pavement being warm, just like the dhuhr prayer on the road in Jena.

Of course, like everything else in the modern era, Hajj has been made much more convenient than it once was–particularly for the wealthy. I remember the odd feeling I had sitting on top of another chartered bus, also air-conditioned, on the way to Arafat, watching pilgrims from poorer countries walking in the heat I was not in. I felt shame.

Even so, while relatively easier, Hajj wasn’t easy. It too was hot and physically depleting. It too involved desperately craving a shower. But it too was an obligation, and an exercise in sacrifice.

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“Sacrifice” is almost always a religious word. I usually don’t see it in mental health language except with the express message of not sacrificing. Not sacrificing is sacred in the context of individualism, when we think of life as zero-sum, in which helping others means losing something ourselves.

But collectivism doesn’t think in those terms, nor does religion.

The secular world seems to be acknowledging that we’ve gone too far in erasing the inconvenient, in telling people to follow their passion with reckless abandon. Feeling inconvenienced is, after all, an essential part of personal growth, and sacrifice is an essential part of sustained relationships: it is the basis of the parent-child relationship, and it elevates romantic love to companionate love. Simply put, we cannot have committed relationships without reciprocal sacrifice.

“I think the question to answer,” a mentor of mine in psychiatry once said about successful marriages, “is how much can you tolerate with losing yourself?” This is what is missing often in modern-day relationships that ask more about what you can get (the qualities you want the other person to have) rather than what you can give (the person you want to be).

Sacrifice isn’t self-erasure, but it is giving up some part of yourself for the betterment of others.

But it’s not necessarily laziness or selfishness that can keep us from wanting to go the extra mile for someone else. It can be anxiety too that can shrink our comfort zone to a suffocatingly narrow sphere. “What if something bad happens?” we think, and so we don’t get on the bus to the middle-of-nowhere. We don’t put ourselves or our stories out there.

But what that question is really asking is this: “What if I’m not capable of withstanding difficult situations?”

The catch-22 here is that that is the way we become capable: by stretching our capacities and doing difficult things. Choosing to do something difficult doesn’t necessarily come from a place of altruism. It can come from a place of sheer tenacity.

This is just not a lesson easily learned anymore in a world that offers on-demand everything from TV (remember when we had only live TV? And ads?), quick service from food to ER waits, and it’s 2-day shipping for those new shoes or bust. In a world that is constructed around eliminating difficulty, how then do we develop any sort of willpower?

I am convinced that developing the skills of discipline, of delayed gratification, of the ability to carry on when things are hard is going to get increasingly harder in a world designed around convenience—but it will become increasingly more essential in fostering the communities we need to survive.

For me personally, that is one of the central outcomes of the praxis of my religion: a consistent commitment to strive against the self.

If you liked this essay, you might like Ramadan Is Meant To Be Challenging and How To Say Yes Even When You Don’t Want To.

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📚 Highlights:

On a somewhat similar note of doing difficult things, I recently read Free-Range Parenting by Lenore Skenazy, who wrote a viral essay years ago about letting her 9-year-old ride the subway and got labeled “America’s Worst Mom” (and recently interviewed with

Dad Saves America

here).

For all the high-anxiety parents, I highly recommend this read. A few takeaways:

• Your child will (very very likely) not be abducted the second you take your eyes off them in public. This is a fear that so many of us have been conditioned to from the 80s missing-kids-on-milk-cartons to sensationalist 24-hour news and social media reels.

• Constant supervision and attempting to be omnipresent can backfire into kids who don’t develop self-efficacy. It’s not neglect to, say, let a kid ride their bike to a neighbor’s house—it’s having a long-term view of building up their resourcefulness vs. developing anxiety that the world is a dangerous place and they need to stay inside to be safe (recall the shrunken comfort zone I mentioned earlier).

• Children are capable. From the earliest days of toddlers trying to climb, children relish the idea of overcoming a challenge. Resist the urge to step in right away to “help”. Let them take age-appropriate risks. Let go, Skenazy argues, to let them grow.

1. I highly encourage watching this episode of The Thinking Muslim by Muhammad Jalal with Dr. Khalid el-Awaisi, in which he discusses are collective obligation in the face of a genocide.