Title: Untitled Story
Artist: Participant A (Boy, Age 12)
Year: 2025
Transcribed story
Title: Untitled Story
It all started on Friday, when I was on my way home from Jumu’ah, when two guys grabbed me. I recognized them from one of our previous encounters. Last time we met, I was running for my life away from them.
I could understand why they would come back to get me, because of something I did to them not worth mentioning here. As they put a sack over my head, I thought back to what I heard in the Jumu'ah khutbah.
* * * * * *
“Reading dua is one of the ways to gain closeness to Allah. Duas can help you through everyday difficulties, and some, such as the dua before leaving the house can protect you. They can sometimes change people’s lives.”
I wanted to change. After all, I was just another Muslim schoolboy, another Yunus in the world. I wanted to be closer to Allah, especially after all the things I’ve done in the past. So I decided to start with dua. So I said the dua before leaving the house (because that was the only dua I knew), trusted in Allah, just like the Imam said “Tie your camels and trust in Allah” and left for home, and that’s when the incident happened.
* * * * * *
At first, I was panicking and didn’t know what to do, but then I called down and trusted Allah. All of a sudden, I couldn’t feel their harsh grip on my arms, and the sack flew off to the ground, where I saw the two men, lying there, unconscious. I tried looking around to see who helped me, but all I saw was a man walking away. I tried to catch up with him, but he turned the corner and disappeared. I realized that it was Allah who helped me, by making that man come to save me. After that, I always trusted in Allah and read duas.
Curatorial Note:
This piece was created by Participant A, a 12-year-old boy based in the UK, during an individual Story Design Workshop conducted as part of the Sufi Storytelling Project at the University of Edinburgh.
The young storyteller described what he wished to narrate:
What I really want to narrate it is that, if you really trust in Allah, you can do like anything and you'll always be protected by Allah. And of course, reading duas [prayers] is one of the ways to gain closest to Allah. And yeah, and if you want to change and you can change, anything is possible even if you're getting, like kidnapped, you can always be saved. That's what I'm trying to say. (…) So like I imagined it in my head, like, what would happen? And I thought like this, this would happen, then it would be like a good way to make him, like become closer to Allah like through this event, this test that happened to him.
Themes:
Environment, Islam, Dua (Prayer), Trust
Citation:
Participant A. (2025) Untitled Story. In: Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art by Children and Families (curated by H.E. Üzümcü). University of Edinburgh. DataShare Repository. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/8172.
Copyright & Licence Statement:
© 2025 Participant A. This work is published in anonymised form with the consent of the participant and his caregiver as part of the Digital Museum of Sufi Stories and Art by Children and Families, University of Edinburgh. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. You may share and adapt this work for non-commercial purposes, provided appropriate attribution is given.
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