I love Islam and cream soda

I’ve always believed you don’t owe explanations to anyone. The people who walk with you don’t need them. And the people who don’t were never going to believe you anyway. That belief has guided me for most of my life—especially in moments when silence would’ve been more convenient, but truth was more necessary. Survival Is Not a Secret In 2020, I was shot multiple times with .40 caliber bullets by my ex-wife’s boyfriend, at her direction. I’ve never hidden that fact. Not because I enjoy reliving it, and not because I’m trying to shock anyone—but because survival is part of my story, and witnesses don’t erase chapters to make other people comfortable. I didn’t treat that moment as the end of my life. I treated it as another chapter in a long story of resilience, refusal, and survival. That honesty made some people uncomfortable. I didn’t—and don’t—care. Silence has never been my role. Witnessing is. When Chaos Escalates After the shooting, the harassment continued the way it ...

If our criminal justice system is the "New Jim Crow", and if our prisons are neo-plantations, then our network of county and city jails are akin to slave ships - the "New Amistad", if you will.  There's an appropriate visual when you consider cells like those in Colorado's Arapahoe County Detention Center that have been modified from double to triple bunks - at a glance they resemble the cramped bowels of slave ships where African inmates-as-cargo were lain in tight stacks and rows.      Appropriate analogies abound - like slaves, jail inmates are a valuable commodity; local lockups get paid per body and operate like any business by cutting costs of operation as much as possible to maintain create revenue. Slave traders made and maintained profits by providing the barest minimum for slaves to survive transport to auction, often leaving them naked with no medical care and feeding them scraps for food. Jail menus provide so minimal calories and...

For several reasons might voting in this year's midterm elections. I was proud to have voted in a state with the second highest percentage of voter turnout. Colorado trailed only Minnesota, who I was happy to see voted another Muslim into Congress. On the candidate front, two races were of interest to me: governor and Atty. general. I voted for the victorious Jared Polis mostly because walker Stapleton was an offshoot of his races grandfather (I did not know Polis was gay, and that is the point, is it not?) Stapleton touted a policy of stripping funding from schools to use torch prisons - a policy of doubled-dipped racism. The woeful state of education in our country is a consequence of white rage over school desegregation, and the cancerous growth of incarceration is a product of similar origin, aimed to steer blacks and other minorities out of mainstream society. I voted against George Brauchler running for the Atty. General in response to his malicious over prosecut...

By 2007, I had been training at Edge MMA (then known as Grapplers Edge), for about 3 quiet years, concentrating mostly on Jujitsu and nogi grappling. One Saturday, I was visiting the Denver County Jail as a volunteer chaplain for Islamic services​, driving directly from an Open Mat grappling session, so I was wearing an Edge t-shirt at the time. One of the deputies approached me in the hallway and asked me where I had gotten my shirt. I told him that I got it from the school that I train at. The deputy frowned and replied that he trained there as well and had never seen me there... “Hmmm…Is this another of those challenges?” I wondered - it was commonly known at the jail that I was an ex-con who was now providing religious services to inmates and I had clashed with a deputy or two who did not necessarily respect me or what I was doing because of my past; so my hackles went up immediately at this possibly becoming another one of those incidents. I told the deputy that I had prima...