House of Wisdom
Beit Alhekma (House of Wisdom)
"The value of every person lies in what he is best at"
Instagram PageMy story with House of Wisdom and Munir Fasheh
Every night, I let my soul travel out of my body and reflect on what I did on that day. I always find truth that takes me further away from illusions. I believe that I am good at poetry and meditation helps me do that.
I feel that my relationship with meditation fixes all the destruction that lies within as a result of European values, modern civilization and distractions. It rearranges everything within and all that revolves around me and my relationships with people. It helps me get rid of intellectual toxins, and I feel way more comfortable. This has made me better understand my own value and create my own meaning, making myself the only reference.
In October 2020, I started having one-to-one talks with Munir, and found out about Mujaawarah as a medium for learning. Through continuous meetings over the span of a year and a half, Munir told me about the research paper that he had sent to universities in Palestine, asking them to encourage ten students to embark on the path of wisdom, to no avail. I told Munir that we didn’t need any university to start this initiative. We only needed the space to bring together people who wanted to join us.
Munir got very excited, and connected me with the director of Qattan Cultural Center, Nihaya Abu Nahleh, who initially agreed to host us for three months as the center couldn’t host us permanently. During this time, I told my friend, Mohamed Ghuneim, about the idea and he told me “Great, count me in”.
Mohamed writes and plays oud, and I have known him for years. We didn’t realize at the time that we had been engaging in a form of Mujaawarah together for years without even knowing. We had always shared stories and reflected on all that had been happening around us. We had only missed Munir’s presence with us.
I later invited a number of people who wanted to take part in this, and we formed a group of ten people as a pilot experience to test the success of the idea. The center then invited five adolescents from the writing club to live this experience with us. Our meetings lasted for three months, as the center could only host us for that period. We stopped this activity for two months, because we didn’t have the space to meet. During this period, we took part in meetings organized by Hakaya project in Jordan via Zoom. The project is run by The Arab Education Forum, and connects organizations and different individuals and groups who believe in the centrality of storytelling in the healthy growth of individuals and societies. We also took part in Radical Fridays, a series of online symposiums tackling radical education in Palestine.
We are currently working with Munir to find a venue, where we could independently meet for a day every week and further strengthen relations between groups in Palestine, Jordan and Mexico. We hope to turn this into a global group, and add new stories from different cultures and countries around the world. This is an invitation to everyone to share stories with us and help us conduct this meeting either online or through visiting Gaza in person.