Dream Du'a Do: Helping Muslim millennial women live larger than life

Over the last two years, the shock of the coronavirus pandemic forced us out of hypnotising restlessness and into our homes for deep self-reflection. People looked to self-help and spirituality to find what’s beneath their hyperactive nervous systems and meaning to the beautiful journey that is life.

Many took to hobbies and creativity to take their mind off the fear of a deadly virus creeping into their households and ended up finding themselves through expression, while others fell into the lockdown slumpy blues. Wanting out became common, and taking to books for guidance is what many did.

 "Ruzina found a lack of self-help literature that spoke to manifesting blessings through her Muslim faith. Rather than wanting her book to be placed into sections such as 'world religions' or 'Islam' in bookshops, she wanted it to sit proudly in the genre of self-help"

When Ruzina Ahad wrote her book Dream Du'a Do: A Millennial Muslimah's Guide to Achieving Your Wildest Dreams, she had the exact audience of millennial Muslim women stuck in between lifeless routines with larger-than-life dreams. Drawing from her Islamic faith, she wrote a three-section book that helps readers identify their wildest dreams, create a prayer ritual and take actionable steps that are rooted in spirituality.

Ruzina writes her three-part book with a rush of optimism and each chapter ends with short activities for the reader to carry out to cement her teachings in a cross between a self-help pick-me-up and a practical workbook.

The first part of the book sought to help readers to release identities and labels and dare to dream of what it is they want to be or achieve. The second part is all about dua, Arabic for prayer, and perfecting its etiquette by encouraging readers to inject emotional intelligence and prophetic practices in prayer. The final part of the book gives practical steps to work with a large framework to cement dreaming and prayer.

She adds a profile of an inspirational Muslim woman after each chapter to ground her teachings into their reality and takes deep Islamic concepts such as creating energetic momentum behind prayer and discovering the self after being clamped by a life of disconnection and dissonance.

The language wasn’t overwhelming and did not project a spiritual ego, rather it seemed like listening to a friend from East London passionately knock sense into you with gentleness and humour.

“I talk a lot and I was always texting essays to my husband, so he bought me a journal. Because it was 2020 and we were starting a new decade, I was jotting down my dreams and the first three words I wrote were ‘dream, dua, do’ – as if I was meant to write this book,” Ruzina told The New Arab.

“However, consider this the clean version of me – my editor had to remove so many swear words,” she joked as she dives into the story behind her writing the book.

"All Muslims need to do is connect to their faith in a deeper manner and they’ll see how many of these New Age principles such as conviction, asking and receiving and having gratitude to increase wealth are already embedded in the faith"

As a teacher by profession and someone who managed to beat odds and live her wildest dreams, thanks to the power of prayer and application of what is commonly known as the law of attraction principles, she realised that writing this book may be part of her destiny.

While those three words carried her throughout various parts of her life, she never thought they would produce her book. It wasn’t until she experienced lockdown and realised the importance of creating a legacy and wanting to write something that would inspire her daughter to dream as big as she did.

The lockdown period, she said was the perfect time for her because she had extra time, while death by an invisible was feared to be at everyone’s doorstep.

“I’m a mother to two children and I used to find time to write while taking care of them. My laptop became synonymous with my book and it feels like my book is my third baby,” she explained.

Ruzina set out to research the power of the brain, spiritual self-help principles and primary Islamic sources to write a simple, no-nonsense guide that could be applied by many and understood by all.

“I tried to write the book the way I speak, which is a lot harder than it seems, considering the depth of the topics I spoke about. It was worth it because I don’t want to be a spiritual writer on a pedestal, I want to show people who I really am”, Ruzina told explained.

Some principles, such as psychological perspectives surrounding forming an identity, prayer and taking action were very simply explained without going deeper into the science behind them, but she urged that her intention was to show that such explanations exist rather than to delve into them.

“I took some very complex theories and had to break them all down simply. Doing this with the Quran was the hardest part because it’s so complex, but taking huge concepts and simplifying them into simple language is my superpower,” she explained.

Muslims can do self-help too

On her journey, Ruzina found a lack of self-help literature that spoke to manifesting blessings through her Muslim faith. Rather than wanting her book to be placed into sections such as “world religions” or “Islam” in bookshops, she wanted it to sit proudly in the genre of self-help.

“There are self-help books written by people of all religious and spiritual backgrounds – all of whom take inspiration from the tradition they follow. If Jay Shetty, a Hindu, can be read by non-Hindus, why can’t I do the same and inspire people with stories of prophets in the Quran and Muslim women who have superseded expectation?”

While she didn’t shy away from discussing principles such as the law of attraction, which is based on the belief that thoughts and feelings attract life’s events, she made it abundantly clear that “manifesting a perfect life” doesn’t need to come from going outside Islamic traditions.

"Dream Du'a Do is a witty and practical book that makes the reader feel in the presence of a comforting friend who has an ocean of wisdom under her belt"

“Everything I manifested was with the power of dua and the blueprint that I set in my book. All Muslims need to do is connect to their faith in a deeper manner and they’ll see how many of these New Age principles such as conviction, asking and receiving and having gratitude to increase wealth are already embedded in the faith,” she urged.

This point was consistently communicated in her book but was done gently and by teaching Muslims how to access such treasures, rather than actively discouraging a secular approach to spirituality. She consistently drew on her personal experience to show how her principles work in a down-to-earth tone that was easily relatable and allowed her personality to shine through the pages of her book.

Not only did Ruzina want to represent Muslim women by writing a book that they will relate to, but she also wanted to represent Islam.

For this reason, Ruzina took heed of the advice given by her editor and set out to write the book for a millennial Muslim woman and her non-Muslim best friend. This was impeccably done by breaking down every Islamic point and assuming the reader knows nothing about the Islamic language she used.

She only used translated excerpts from the Quran and transliterated duas, or prayers, that are often said in Arabic to make it easy for everyone to follow.

“Even non-Muslim women loved my book,” she said, sharing a story of how a non-Muslim woman in her 50s was inspired to mend family ties and seek to find the love of her life after reading Dream, Du'a, Do.

“I was just being myself when I was writing. I admitted to not knowing what I didn’t know much of and I didn’t try to be someone I’m not and I feel like that’s what made my book so relatable,” she said.

Dream Du'a Do is a witty and practical book that makes the reader feel in the presence of a comforting friend who has an ocean of wisdom under her belt. She takes as much depth as she needs to from different concepts and explains them only as much as she needs to without digressing from the original point of the book.

The exercises she has with each chapter are easy enough to be done while reading the book, but can also be expanded upon as much as the reader wants to.

While it is well organised and strictly structured, it has an aura of fun, innocence and peace that has the potential to not only inspire a Muslim woman to root her spirituality into Islam through action points but to laugh in the process.

Diana Alghoul is a journalist at The New Arab and a spiritual blogger.

Follow her on Twitter: @yinfinitewrites and Instagram: @yinfinitewrites