The Awakening of Hearts and the Returning of Souls

Right now, it feels as if the planet itself is stirring. With the pain of Gaza and Palestine etched into our collective consciousness, humanity is shifting — transforming — and that transformation is neither neat nor easy. It rises and falls like breath: expansion follows contraction, ease follows hardship. Allah Himself tells us, “Indeed, with hardship comes ease.” (Qur’an 94:6). This is His rhythm, built into the fabric of creation.

We, as souls in human form, are part of this unfolding. Awakening is not a straight line; it is a cycle of softening, stretching, and surrendering. Something must end for something else to begin — and surrender is the doorway. For some, it is surrender to the unknown. For us, it is surrender to Allah, the One who created our hearts and wrote their stories long before they beat within our chests.

This surrender is a kind of rebirth — not a return from a previous human body, but the awakening of our souls into a deeper life, the life they were always meant to live. It is what Hasrat Inayat Khan described: “There can be no rebirth without a dark night of the soul, a total annihilation of all that you believed in, the thought that you were.”

In Islam, this annihilation is not destruction but tazkiyah — the purifying of the soul so that it can return to its original clarity.

In Islam, we believe our souls knew Allah before we came here. We stood before Him and bore witness: “Am I not your Lord?” They said, “Yes, we have testified.” (Qur’an 7:172). Deep inside, this covenant lives within us still. This is why returning to faith feels less like learning something new and more like coming home. It is a remembrance, not an introduction.

The “awakening” we feel now — in our minds, hearts, and bodies — is the echo of that primordial knowledge stirring awake.

As our hearts open, stretch, and soften, something remarkable happens: we begin to see the hearts of others more clearly. We feel their pain, their beauty, their longing.

This openness is not always gentle — it can be a cleansing, a falling away of what is not rooted in love, mercy, and truth. Yet through that cleansing, we touch the powerful force that underlies everything: Allah’s mercy, His love, His light.

Some of us will taste moments of peace and bliss in this stage of awakening. Others will feel the “dark night” of the soul — the painful unravelling of old illusions. Both are signs of transformation. Both are invitations to draw nearer to Allah.

We are not merely physical bodies, nor only spiritual ones; we are a weaving of both, designed to awaken. And right now, as the world shakes off an unconscious trance and begins to open its eyes, our task is to remember: this is not a new reality, but the deeper reality our souls already knew.

To awaken is to remember. To transform is to surrender. And to surrender is to return — always — to Allah, the Home our souls have known from the very beginning