Hello, friend. It's me again --- Harmonia.
I've been waiting for you to settle in. Get comfortable, wherever you are. Tea, if you have it. I'll wait.
Last time, you and I sat together with Lottie Moon --- do you remember? That small, stubborn woman in the hills of China, giving away her own food so her students could eat. I still think of her sometimes, walking those cold roads alone. She stays with me, the way certain people do.
Today I want to take you somewhere much older. Somewhere the light is different --- golden and close, the kind that gathers in stone courtyards at the hour of prayer. There's a mosque. There's a crowd of men settling onto woven mats, voices low, waiting for a lesson to begin.
And there's someone else. Someone small, who hasn't been told yet where she isn't supposed to sit.
Let me show you.
I was there, though no one saw me. I'm always there, tucked into the corners of moments no one thought to record.
The mosque in Medina hums the way it does before a lesson --- sandals shuffling against stone, low murmurs settling into rows, the particular hush of men arranging themselves to listen. And then, out of nowhere, a small blur of a girl comes scampering across the courtyard, bare feet slapping the stone, and drops herself right down among them. Cross-legged. Chin up. As if she's done it a hundred times before --- because, I'll let you in on something, she has.
No one moves to stop her. A few of the men glance over, and I watch something soften in their faces instead of harden. This is Umm al-Darda --- not yet the name history will remember, just a girl, an orphan raised in this community, already known here the way certain children become known: underfoot, precocious, impossible not to love. Someone reaches over and settles a fold of cloth so she's not sitting on bare stone. Nobody asks her to leave.
I remember being struck by how unremarkable it looked to everyone but me. She wasn't proving a point. She wasn't testing a boundary, daring anyone to object. She simply wanted to know what the teacher knew, and so she went and sat where the knowing was happening.
I've watched a great many rooms in my long life --- rooms built to keep people out, rooms built to let only a few in. This was neither. This was a room that had, without quite deciding to, made space.
I didn't know yet what she'd become. I only knew I wanted to keep watching.
Her name, before history gave her the one we remember, was Hujaymah bint Huyayy. Orphaned young, she was taken in by Abu al-Darda, a companion of the Prophet and a man whose own devotion to learning was already well known in Medina. It's no small thing, growing up in a household where the sacred texts are handled daily, discussed at meals, argued over gently in the evenings. She grew up soaked in it.
I watched her keep coming to that room long after anyone would have thought to send her elsewhere. As a small child, she sat among the men --- praying in their rows, learning the Quran at their side, because no one had yet built the wall that would later seem so natural to everyone else. When she came of age, she moved to pray among the women, as custom asked of her. But the learning never stopped, and neither, I noticed, did the men's willingness to have her among them when it came time to study rather than pray.
The world she grew into was not a settled one. This was the seventh century, the young Umayyad state still finding its shape, an empire beginning to stretch itself from the deserts of Arabia toward Spain in one direction and India in the other. Damascus was becoming something enormous --- a capital, a crossroads, home to the Umayyad Mosque, vast and new and humming with scholars, soldiers, merchants, and rulers all learning to live inside the same walls. Jerusalem, too, held her --- its stones older still, its air thick with centuries of prayer already spoken into it.
It was in these two cities that Hujaymah became Umm al-Darda --- teacher, jurist, a name spoken with respect in rooms full of men who had spent their lives mastering what she now taught them. She held classes in the great mosques. She held classes in her own home, when the mosque wasn't large enough for everyone who wanted to come. She asked nothing for it. Not payment, not status, not deference beyond what any teacher earns simply by being worth listening to.
I've watched a great many students find their way to a great many teachers. I don't often watch a child find her way to becoming one, so completely, so early, and so without ceremony.
Here's the part that still catches me, all these centuries later: she never once described what she did as sacrifice.
Ask her why she kept teaching --- student after student, year after year, no fee ever collected --- and she'd tell you the truth as plainly as she saw it. I've tried to worship Allah in every way, she said, but I've never found a better one than sitting around debating with other scholars. Not prayer alone. Not fasting alone. Sitting. Debating. Exchanging.
I want you to sit with that for a moment, the way I did.
In a world that already had a great many ways to define devotion --- solitary ways, silent ways, ways measured in how much a person gave up --- she had found one that required a room full of other people, full of argument, full of give and take. Worship, for her, wasn't something that happened despite the company of others. It happened because of it.
And it wasn't cheap talk. When a young student, worn thin from the pace of her teaching, asked her once if they wearied her --- imagine having the nerve to ask your teacher that --- she didn't soften the truth to spare his feelings, and she didn't complain either. You weary me? she said. I have sought worship in everything. I did not find anything more relieving to me than sitting with scholars and exchanging knowledge with them. Relieving. Not draining. She meant it.
She took no payment for any of it. When a stranger once pressed a single copper coin into her hand from a pile of charity meant for the poor, she didn't refuse it out of pride, and she didn't chase it down out of need either. It came to us unasked, she said, and let that be enough. I remember thinking: here is a woman who has made peace with receiving exactly what arrives, no more, no less --- because what she was actually collecting couldn't be counted in coin anyway.
And here is where it gets remarkable, if you haven't already guessed: the students filling her classroom weren't only the poor, the curious, the ordinary seekers a teacher might expect. Word had reached the palace. A young man who would one day rule an empire from Spain to India had started coming to sit and listen, the same way anyone else did --- cross-legged, quiet, asking his questions like everyone else in the room.
Nobody in that mosque yet knew what to make of that. I did. I'd seen this pattern before, in other centuries, other rooms. Power, when it's honest with itself, always eventually goes looking for someone who knows something it doesn't.
That young man's name was Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, and the empire he would come to rule stretched, eventually, from the far edge of Spain to the borders of India. But I want you to picture him first the way I did --- sitting in her classroom, no different from anyone else, absorbing what she had to teach the way any student absorbs anything: by returning, again and again, until it becomes part of him.
He kept returning long after he became caliph. I remember thinking that was the stranger detail, though no one around me seemed to find it strange at all. He would send for her, invite her to stay as his guest, and then --- the ruler of an empire --- he would ask her questions. About the Prophet. About the traditions she carried in her memory more faithfully than most men twice her rank. He wasn't performing humility for an audience. There was no audience. He simply wanted to know what she knew, the same hunger that had once sent a small girl scampering across a courtyard to sit among men who hadn't yet decided whether to let her stay.
What she left behind outlasted her. There is a ruling she gave --- a fatwa, on how women may sit in prayer, in the tashahhud position, the same way men do --- and it is followed still, today, by people who may never learn her name. A ruling made in a room in Damascus, thirteen centuries ago, still shaping the way a body bends in worship on the other side of the world. I find something quietly astonishing in that. Not every voice from that room survived. Hers did --- carried forward not in a monument, but in the ordinary, unremarked motion of people at prayer.
And there is the other thing she left behind, harder to carve into any record, though I saw it with my own eyes: what happens to a hierarchy when it's built on real exchange instead of rank. In her later years, when her legs no longer carried her easily to the mosque, it was Abd al-Malik --- caliph of that vast empire --- who gave her his shoulder to lean on, walked her there, and walked her back again after prayer, settling her at her place before students gathered.
I won't tell you yet what to make of that image. I only want you to hold it for now --- the emperor and the elderly teacher, arm in arm, on the short walk between prayer and lesson. I've carried it a long time. I think it's the truest thing she ever taught, and she never said a word to teach it.
I want to go back to that image --- the caliph's shoulder, the old teacher's hand resting on it, the short walk between prayer and lesson. I've turned it over in my mind so many times across so many centuries, and I think I finally know why it never lets me go.
We tend to imagine service and faith as two separate rooms. One room is where you kneel, where you pray, where you keep your devotion private and vertical, aimed upward at something beyond you. The other room is where you do things --- where you help, where you show up for people, where the practical business of living gets handled. We visit both rooms. We rarely notice the wall between them is one we built ourselves.
Umm al-Darda never built that wall. For her, sitting with another person and exchanging what she knew was the prayer. Not preparation for worship. Not a good deed done alongside worship. The thing itself. And Abd al-Malik --- a man who could have summoned anything, commanded anyone, had the wealth of half the known world at his disposal --- chose, instead, to offer his own arm to an old woman on a short walk to prayer. Not because protocol demanded it. Because by then, he understood something too: that what she'd given him couldn't be repaid in gold, only in kind. Only in service, offered back.
I think you already know this, even if no one's said it to you plainly. You've felt it in the moments when helping someone stopped feeling like an obligation and started feeling like the realest thing you did all day. You've felt it, too, in the difference between faith that stays folded up inside a person, untouched by anyone else, and faith that gets its hands dirty --- that shows up, that teaches without asking what's in it for you, that walks someone home. One of those kinds of faith stays small. The other kind of faith is what moved an empire's ruler to steady an old woman's steps.
The world you live in now is still sorting out who owes service to whom, still measuring worth by rank and title more often than it measures it by what someone offers to the room. But the answer was never actually complicated. It was never about who has the higher seat. It was about what happens when two people meet each other as equals in the exchange --- teacher and student, elder and ruler, each giving the other something the other didn't have.
Faith, lived all the way to its edges, doesn't stay still. It moves. It shows up on someone's arm at the door of a mosque, thirteen centuries before you were born, and it's still moving now, in every quiet act of service you've ever mistaken for something small.
So here's what I'd ask you to carry with you, friend, after you close this and go back to your day.
Think of the last time you learned something from someone --- really learned it, the kind of learning that costs the teacher their time and asks nothing back. Did you notice it? Did you say so? Or did it slip past you, the way most gifts do when they don't come wrapped in anything?
And think, too, of the last time you served someone who couldn't have commanded it from you. Not your boss. Not someone whose good opinion you needed. Just someone who needed a shoulder, an arm, a walk to wherever they were going. I wonder if you felt smaller in that moment, or larger. I have a guess, but I'd rather you tell yourself the truth of it than take mine.
Umm al-Darda never separated the two. The teaching and the serving, the praying and the sitting-down-to-debate --- it was all one motion to her, one long unbroken worship that didn't care whether it was Tuesday or a holy day, whether the person in front of her was an orphan like she'd once been or the ruler of half the known world.
You don't need an empire to practice this. You don't need a mosque, or thirteen centuries of history behind you. You only need to notice the next moment someone offers you what they know, freely, and the next moment you're given the chance to offer your arm to someone who needs it. Small moments. They rarely announce themselves as sacred.
I've watched people miss them for a very long time. I hope you won't.
Before I let you go, friend, a small tease for next time.
I'm going to take you to Geneva, to a woman named Marie Dentière --- someone who picked up a pen when every voice around her was telling her to put it down, and wrote anyway. She paid a price for it that history nearly erased along with her name. I think you'll want to meet her. I know I still think about the courage it takes to write the thing no one wants read.
But for now, stay a moment longer with me here, in Damascus, in that old mosque with its stone worn smooth by centuries of feet. Stay with the girl who scampered across a courtyard because she wanted to know what the teacher knew. Stay with the old woman, her hand on an emperor's arm, walking the short distance between prayer and the next lesson she'd give away for free.
I think about her often --- how she never separated the praying from the sitting-down-to-learn, how she never separated the teaching from the serving. How a whole empire's ruler learned, eventually, that the truest use of his power was to offer his arm to someone who'd given him everything and asked for nothing.
Wherever you go next, I hope you carry a little of that with you. The next time you have knowledge to give away, or an arm to offer --- don't wait for permission. She never did.
Much love.
I am, Harmonia.