Leadership carries a particular loneliness: the sense that eyes are always watching, that every decision carries weight beyond your own experience, that what you choose often ripples outward in ways you cannot always predict.
As head sister of your university Islamic Society, you carry this weight daily. You are the one sisters look to when questions arise, whose example — whether you intended it or not — shapes what they believe is possible.
Trials & Tribulations calls to you specifically for this reason: not as a test of your strength or worthiness to lead, but as an invitation to demonstrate that leadership means choosing difficulty alongside the people you serve rather than remaining comfortable whilst they struggle.
You don’t need this challenge to be a good leader, but undertaking it makes you a different kind: one whose guidance carries weight because it comes from embodied experience rather than theory alone.
What your presence makes possible
Consider what happens when the head sister — whose schedule is already impossible, whose reasons for declining are entirely legitimate — says yes to something difficult and voluntary anyway.
The sister who doubted her own capability watches you prepare and thinks: if she can do this, perhaps I can too. The sister who believed modest dress meant avoiding physical challenge sees you adjust your hijab somewhere along the journey and recognises that the limitation was hers to impose, not Islam’s to require.
This is not pressure to be perfect. You may finish last, need help over obstacles, question your decision more than once between dawn and dusk. None of that diminishes what your participation offers; your struggle may be the most valuable gift you give, since it grants others permission to struggle too.
Your presence at the starting line turns the challenge from an interesting idea into a genuine possibility, and that shift is the particular power of leadership: not that you must be strongest or fastest, but that your choosing makes space for others to choose.
You will be watched by more than your sisters: by brothers who carry unexamined assumptions, friends of other faiths curious what Islam actually teaches, family who worry or celebrate depending on their own understanding.
Many will misunderstand, and that’s fine; you cannot manage how everyone reads your choices, only act with sincere intention and leave the rest between yourself and Allah. But others will see, in your muddy, exhausted, undeniably faithful presence, permission they didn’t know they needed. Some may never trace their own later courage back to you. The seed will still have been planted.
The education that only comes through doing
You’ve likely organised many events for your iSoc — lectures, fundraisers, study circles — and listened to countless talks about refugee experience. This work matters. But there is a knowing that comes only through the body: tired muscles, cold mud, the particular exhaustion of continuing when everything argues for stopping.
Standing at iftar after finishing, muddy despite showering and tired despite resting, you will speak about refugee experience with a different authority. Not because your chosen difficulty compares to their forced displacement, which it cannot, but because your body now carries memory of persistence through hardship and of community support turning what seemed impossible into what was merely very difficult.
This doesn’t mean only those who suffer can speak for those who suffer; it means that advocacy carries different weight when it comes from someone willing to step, however briefly, into a discomfort that mirrors what she asks others to care about.
The particular joy of shared struggle
Leadership can be isolating: meetings, decisions, conflicts, responsibility for outcomes beyond your control. Trials & Tribulations offers something different — the levelling that comes through shared difficulty.
Covered in mud alongside your sisters, all of you struggling and helping each other over the same obstacles, hierarchy dissolves. You are not head sister and members; you are simply sisters, equally exhausted and equally determined to finish.
This doesn’t diminish your leadership; it enlarges it. The sisters who help you over an obstacle when your strength falters don’t respect you less for it, but differently, having watched you continue anyway.
There’s a fierce, unexpected joy in this: the laughter when someone slips in mud, hands reaching automatically to help, the collective satisfaction of having carried each other through rather than left anyone behind. That joy feeds your leadership in ways formal authority cannot, reminding you why you took the role in the first place: to serve, not to be served.
The invitation before you
You don’t have to say yes. Your leadership isn’t contingent on this challenge, and there are many legitimate ways to serve your iSoc well. If it doesn’t call to you, decline without guilt.
But if something in you stirs, if curiosity mixes with nervousness, it’s worth considering. Not because your position demands it, but because leading well sometimes means going first into difficulty so others might follow.
The London iSoc blueprint makes this practical: adapted to student schedules and budgets, the logistics solved, the path already marked. Expect to be cold, muddy, exhausted and hungry, and expect to question your decision at least once. Those are certainties.
But you’ll also discover what your body can do when comfort is stripped away, watch sisters in your iSoc find confidence in real time, and finish that evening at iftar knowing differently what becomes possible when a leader chooses to go first rather than direct from a safe distance.
May Allah guide your discernment, and may your decision — whichever you make — draw you closer to Him. Your worth was never measured by mud and obstacles, only by faithfulness and service. But should you say yes, may the journey teach you strength you didn’t know you had, and may you finish grateful for what you discovered.