You will ask participants to wear full Muslim dress through mud and exhaustion. This much they understand: the solidarity it represents, the empathy it builds, the doors it opens to understanding refugee women’s reality.
But there is another question, quieter and more personal, that many will wrestle with alone: Should I really wear a garment I treasure? The Eid abaya that still carries the scent of celebration? The wedding outfit that witnessed a sister’s joy? That first abaya from when modesty became choice rather than inheritance?
This is territory where you can only guide, never command. Yet understanding what this choice offers, both its cost and its profound gift, allows you to help participants navigate toward their own truth.
Friday evening: the ritual of beauty
It begins, as so many sacred things do, with preparation. Friday evening unfolds in that beloved ritual known to sisters everywhere: the transformation from day’s practicality into evening’s elegance.
Before mirrors they stand, straightening fine fabrics, taking long minutes to perfect every fold in elaborately draped hijabs. The careful attention and quiet pride of presentation, in anticipation of meeting with others who will recognise the effort invested in beauty.
They arrive at your gathering dressed as if for celebration, and in a sense they are celebrating: the sisterhood, shared purpose and energy of women united. Sisters compliment sisters, admiring garments rarely seen except on special occasions. The halaqa feels charged with something more than usual, as joy mingles with solemnity, beauty preparing to meet purpose.
When they stand together for tahajjud prayer, the night witness so often neglected in ordinary life, their flowing garments seem fitting for the moment. This is how one stands before the Lord of the Worlds, with effort and honour, dressed as if to say: “Now we recognise Your glory.” The prayer feels noble and right, like the beginning of something they cannot yet name.
Then comes the strangeness: sleeping on the floor in these same beloved garments, with no pillow or blanket to soften the hardness beneath them. Some manage to sleep. Others lie awake in their finery, uncomfortable and wondering, feeling the first tremors of vulnerability.
In the early hours they rise again for suhoor, that tired, awkward breakfast that will be their last meal until sunset. Still dressed in gorgeous abayas that have witnessed Eid feasts and walima celebrations, they eat in circumstances those clothes were never meant to see.
After fajr prayer, Qur’an and elongated duas, there is no return to sleep though exhaustion calls. Instead they wait their turns for the bathroom, straightening and perfecting hijabs once more. And then the real journey opens.
Regret: the first wound
The initial muddy ditch appears before them like a threshold they suddenly wish they had never agreed to cross. As they step into it, as the first cold splash strikes fine fabric, regret hits with physical force. Why did they agree to this? What possessed them to choose this particular treasured garment for such an ordeal?
Each subsequent splash brings fresh waves of second-guessing. They try at first to negotiate banks with delicate care, angling their bodies to protect cloth from the worst of the assault.
But the course is relentless, designed to make protection impossible. Soon mud reaches their knees, climbs toward their waists. Once-pristine fabric grows heavy with brown coating, beautiful embroidery disappearing beneath the earth’s embrace.
Watch how they move now: the careful lifting transformed into resigned trudging, the dignity of Friday evening giving way to something rawer, more desperate. This is the refugee woman’s first steps away from everything known and loved.
Decorated homes abandoned in haste, prized possessions left behind because hands can only carry so much, sentimental keepsakes sacrificed to the simple mathematics of survival. If fortunate, family walks beside them. If not, even that comfort is stripped away.
The regret participants feel — sharp, immediate, focused on a single garment — is but a whisper of the thunderous regret refugee women carry. Not regret for their choice, for there was no choice, but regret that the world became a place where such departures were necessary. Regret that locks could not hold, that borders could not protect, that home was not the safe haven every human soul requires.
Grief: when beauty dies
Further into the course, as obstacles grow more demanding, regret transforms into something deeper and more difficult to bear. Grief arrives quietly at first, then overwhelms. An outfit celebrated mere hours ago — admired, photographed, complimented by sisters who understood its significance — becomes battered and unrecognisable. Drenched through, caked with mud that no amount of careful cleaning may fully remove. No longer a source of pride but evidence of loss.
This is genuine mourning. Small in the grand scheme of human suffering, yes, but authentic in its ache. They grieve not just for the garment but for what it represented: the special occasions it witnessed, the care invested in its selection, the moments of feeling beautiful and valued and seen. All of that seems to drain away with each new obstacle, each fresh soaking, each tear in delicate fabric.
And in that mourning lives connection to refugee women’s infinitely heavier losses. The homes that held lifetimes of memories, the kitchen where a grandmother taught her to cook, the garden tended across decades, the bedroom where children were born and grew.
The livelihoods built through years of patient effort, now reduced to nothing. The neighbourhoods where every shopkeeper knew their name, where safety was woven into familiar streets, where belonging was not questioned but assumed.
Refugee women carry this grief even as they hurry forward, even as survival demands they keep moving. They cannot stop to properly mourn because stopping means vulnerability, means danger, sometimes means death. So they walk with grief as a companion, heavy and persistent, a weight that never quite lifts even when physical safety is finally reached.
Your participants discover this truth in miniature: that grief and forward motion can coexist, that you can mourn what is being destroyed even as you participate in its destruction, that sometimes the only way through is through.
Resignation: when resistance ends
Somewhere in the middle of the course, after regret has burned itself out and grief has settled into a dull ache, resignation arrives. Not peace, but a kind of exhausted acceptance that this is happening, that there is no returning to Friday evening’s pristine beauty, that the garment they wore with such care will never be quite the same.
They stop trying to protect it. There is a moment you will recognise if you watch for it, when shoulders drop slightly, when the careful navigation through obstacles gives way to simply going through them, when preservation ceases to matter because preservation has already failed. The abaya is muddy. The abaya will be muddier still. Fighting this fact only adds suffering to suffering.
This resignation carries its own teaching. Refugee women must resign themselves to circumstances they never chose and cannot change. They must accept that the refugee camp will be home not for weeks but months, not for months but years, perhaps forever. They must resign themselves to lives suspended in uncertainty, to being defined by displacement, to building some semblance of normal in the most abnormal of circumstances.
They must resign themselves to exile, forced separation from the land that shaped them, from the language spoken just so, from the particular quality of light at sunset in the only place that ever truly felt like home. They resign themselves to being always the outsider, always explaining, always carrying the invisible but undeniable mark of not-quite-belonging.
Your participants, in their small resignation about a garment, touch the edge of this much vaster resignation. They learn that sometimes strength is not about resisting what is happening but about continuing forward despite it, that dignity can survive even when what dignifies you is destroyed.
Acceptance: the transformation complete
Finally, somewhere near the course’s end or perhaps only after crossing the finish line, acceptance arrives. Not the resignation of defeat but something gentler, more spacious. Acceptance of what they did not want but happened anyway. The garment is irrevocably changed. They are irrevocably changed. And both changes, they begin to recognise, carry meaning worth the cost.
The abaya that was pristine now tells a story. Every mud stain is a sentence, every tear a phrase, every discolouration a word in the narrative of this day. It will never again be what it was on Friday evening, for that moment of perfection is gone, sealed in memory. But it has become something else, perhaps more valuable: a testament to solidarity, a witness to sacrifice, a teacher that will continue instructing long after the event concludes.
In this acceptance, participants mirror what refugee women must eventually find or be broken by its absence. Acceptance that the life left behind is truly gone, that longing for its return will only deepen suffering, that meaning must be found in what is rather than in what was. Acceptance that they are now different people shaped by different experiences, that trauma and displacement have rewritten their stories in ways that cannot be erased.
But within that acceptance, when or if it finally comes, lives possibility. The possibility of building new lives from the rubble of old ones. The possibility of discovering strengths they never knew they possessed. The possibility that even in the deepest losses, something essential survives: faith, dignity, the stubborn human capacity for hope against all reasonable expectation.
Your participants complete the course carrying this knowledge in their bodies, written into the ruined finery they wear. The stages they have moved through — regret, loss, grief, resignation, acceptance — have taught them what no lecture could convey: that refugee women’s journeys demand not just physical endurance but emotional and spiritual survival through losses that would shatter those who have never been tested.
Guiding their choice
You cannot make this decision for them. But you can offer wisdom about what different garments might mean to their experience.
The Eid abaya, worn for festive celebrations and prayers, carries memories of joyous occasions with loved ones, moments of gratitude when they felt most confident and beautiful. The wedding abaya, celebrating a friend’s or family member’s marriage, holds shared happiness and community blessings. The first abaya from their initial embrace of conscious modesty often represents a spiritual turning point, a deep connection to faith made visible. Each garment carries its own resonance, its own capacity to deepen the experience through meaningful loss.
And then there is that expensive purchase: the one they wrestled over, the extravagance they justified once before consigning it to the wardrobe’s depths, waiting for a moment worthy of it that never came. Until now and this.
Your own witness
Here is where your leadership transcends guidance into testimony. The choice to wear their finest, most treasured garment cannot be enforced upon participants. It remains optional, suggested, encouraged, but never demanded.
For you, however, as the one who leads? No. Here there is no option. You must lead by example, choosing your best, dressing as if for the most important of gatherings. Because that is what it is.
You will select your finest abaya, delighting in wearing it again after however long it waited. You will style your hijab with love and care. You will stand before your participants in dignified pride, showing them through your own vulnerability: “I can do this. So can you.”
This is the cost of leadership: not commanding sacrifice but embodying it. Not asking others to risk what you protect but going first into the vulnerability, grief and transformation. Your muddied finery becomes the most powerful sermon you will preach that day.
The gift you steward
As organisers, you hold something precious: the opportunity for participants to transform the Trials & Tribulations challenge into something even more profound and personal. By wearing garments that carry significance, they create connection to the cause that touches heart as well as mind, that deepens commitment beyond what mere sympathy can reach.
When the abaya they cherish becomes soaked, muddied and battered by elements, they taste something of the emotional toll refugees endure, seeing their cherished belongings destroyed, losing not just possessions but homes, communities, and sometimes their very sense of self. The shared discomfort fosters empathy that settles deep and lingers long after the mud washes away.
There is also that foundational Islamic principle made visceral: that worldly belongings are temporary, whilst rewards for sacrifice are eternal. The challenge of potentially losing something valuable confronts participants with where their true strength lies. Not in what they own, but in perfect contentment with divine decree.
Perhaps the greatest gift of all is the memory created. That abaya will forever carry the story of their participation. Whether it was a treasured piece or an everyday garment transformed through this experience, it becomes a reminder of strength, unity and solidarity demonstrated in standing with refugees. The marks and wear spark conversations afterwards, raising awareness in circles the challenge itself might never reach.
Guide them gently toward this choice if their hearts incline toward it. Honour those who choose otherwise; there is no shame in preserving what they love, nor failure in protecting what they treasure.
But for those who choose to risk their beloved things, help them understand what gift they are giving themselves. The visceral knowledge that refugees endure losses you can only approximate, that sacrifice creates solidarity, that sometimes things must be broken open before their deepest meaning can emerge.
And when you lead them forward in your own finest garment, muddy and proud, they will understand what words could never quite convey: that some truths must be lived in the body before the soul can fully grasp them.
May your guidance create space for transformation. May the garments that emerge changed carry stories worth telling. May those who choose vulnerability discover, as refugees have always known, that what survives the journey is never what you expected.
