Chapter 6
Assalamualaikum warahmatullahi wabarakatuhu
If you'd like to hear this chapter read aloud in my voice, the audio is just below. You can listen while you read, or set the letter down
and simply listen. Either way, I hope it finds you well.
Welcome back to From the Nest.
We have come a long way together in these letters. From the girl who was always in the front line. To the girl who showed up to rooms that didn't choose her. To the girl who loved history but chose the future. To the crash. To the word she had been missing for years.
And now, here. This week's chapter is perhaps the quietest one. But it carries the weight of all the others.
This is the chapter where the Nest begins.
There are things I didn't have access to as a young girl that I think about now, often, when I'm building.
I didn't have anyone who could look at what was happening in my body and say: this is not your fault. You will be okay. I've been here too. The awareness wasn't there. The mentorship wasn't there. There was no space that held that kind of conversation without judgment or performance.
I didn't have anyone to answer my questions about faith without arrogance or bias, without the weight of community politics that turned sincere seeking into something anxious. I was questioning, sincerely, hungrily. And the rooms I found myself in were filled with people whose certainty had curdled into pride. The Sahaba RA never took pride in what they had built. They wept over whether it was accepted. They remained soft in their knowledge. And the distance between that and what I was witnessing in certain spaces, as a student, as a young woman trying to understand her deen, broke something open in me.
I didn't have a community that was mine. Truly mine. Not a community I was serving, or leading, or helping to hold together. A community where I was held. Where I could arrive with the uncertainty and be welcomed in it, rather than expected to resolve it quickly, so I could get back to being useful.
I built communities for years before I had one of my own.
That sentence took me a long time to say. Because there is grief in it. And I also understand now that there is a purpose.
The Prophet ﷺ said:
خَيْرُ النَّاسِ أَنْفَعُهُمْ لِلنَّاسِ
"The best of people are those who are most beneficial to people."
[Al-Mu'jam Al-Awsat, Tabarani; authenticated by Sheikh Al-Albani]
I grew up hearing: whatever you are given, give something back. My teachers said it. My parents lived it. It was instilled in me so early that by the time I understood it consciously, it was already woven into my instincts.
But I had to learn the hard way, through the crash and the stillness that came after, that giving from abundance is different from giving until you're empty. The best people are beneficial to others because they take care of themselves. Because they are watering their own roots, not only someone else's garden.
Service is not self-erasure. And the nest I wanted to build could not come from depletion. It had to come from somewhere real.
The Rising Nest is born from an ache. I've said this before. A childhood longing for a space where women could come together, share, and grow without fear of judgment.
In my community, such spaces were rare. Almost non-existent.
But it was also born from something I have come to understand more recently. Something more specific than an ache.
It is born from the particular shape of what I didn't have, and the quiet, stubborn belief that the girls who come after me should.
The girl who hits a health challenge as a teenager and has no one to say: I've been here, and I'm still standing.
The girl who wants to grow in her faith but finds every space either too rigid or too shallow.
The girl who is capable, driven, deeply motivated and burning herself to the ground because nobody ever taught her the difference between barakah and hustle.
The girl who builds communities but doesn't have one.
I was all of those girls. I still am, in some ways. And I am also, now, someone who has walked far enough through those particular darkness’s to carry a lantern back through them.
That is not the same as having arrived at a perfect place. I want to be clear about that. The Rising Nest is not being built by someone who has figured it out. It is being built by someone who has experienced enough, who has been broken and rebuilt and broken again, slowly and with great honesty, that she has something real to offer. Not Polish. Not performance.
Presence. And the knowledge that it's possible to rise, gently, slowly, with barakah from exactly where you are.
I want to say something directly, because this space is built on honesty and I won't depart from that now.
I built The Rising Nest for other people. Yes, I do.
And I also built it for myself.
For my own growth. My own accountability. The process of becoming a trainer, of articulating what I've learned, of putting language around the things I had only felt, all of this is part of my own rising. Not only a gift I give. A gift I receive in the giving.
This is, I think, the truest form of khidmah (service). When it heals, the giver as it reaches the receiver. When the teaching completes a loop. When you are not pouring from above but walking alongside, genuinely, because you're still on the path yourself.
I am sage on a side, as they say, not ahead, but beside. This is the guide, not the hero. The lantern holder, not the destination.
The Rising Nest is the space I didn't have. I am building it so that you don't have to wait for someone to build it for you.
A small gift before you go; the reflection, the action, and something to carry with you are yours this week as a gift card. Download it below.
And before you go, tell me one thing.
What is the space you never had, that you are quietly starting to build for someone else?
I want to hear it. Comment down below.
Until next Sunday,
Aiman Hafeez
The Rising Nest · A sanctuary for growth, protection, and clarity.