 I share this story with some of the sisters here. I think it was last week in our Halaqa. But it really, really hits the heart really much, masha'Allah. It is a story that takes place when I'm actually doing my Tasmiyah, my memorization to my recitation rather, to get ready for my Ijaz exam. And in this case, it was for the Qiraat of Wadish. And I'm sitting in front of, talk about giants. One of the giants of Damascus, masha'Allah. Somebody who all of the women and all of the men knew to be a master of Quran. Someone who was so diligent and so well-versed in Quran, that it is said that the, not said that it's true, that the main in Damascus, the way the setup was for receiving your Ijaz on Quran, is you have to recite to your teacher. Then your teacher takes you to their teacher. That teacher takes you to their teacher until you reach the final, basically the top Muqri'een of Damascus, which were five. And you had to recite to one of the five in order to actually receive your Ijazah that had the official khatim from Wazarat al-Aqaf of Damascus. It's a very rigorous process. And so here I am reciting to my teacher's teacher's teacher. And I'm getting ready, just about ready to go to the sheikh and recite. So I've prepared for some time. And I'm sitting there, reciting to her and her haibah, her presence, the vibes, masha'Allah, this amazing person, despite all of my studies, all I could get myself to read was, And so she said, Rania, Rania, Rania. You know, take a break. Sidoka was so embarrassed, masha'Allah. She said, take a break. And then she decided to like, call me this beautiful story, masha'Allah. who'd set it to calm me down by telling me a story. And she said, do you know my story? You're a giant. And she said, no, no, no, no. I'm also, I had no idea. I'm also a professor of mathematics at the University of Damascus. And I have been, and since the 70s, the only female faculty member in mathematics in the department of mathematics in the University of Damascus. I had no idea. I was blown away, amazed. And I just sort of, and she said, did you know? I wasn't always a sheikh. I wasn't always a Muqri'a Jamia. She had all 10 recitations completed in Ijaz on all of them. And she said, I wasn't always this person. In fact, I came to Islam late. I thought I came to Islam late, masha'Allah. And then she said, you know, when the wave of feminism hit Damascus, so many of us were taken by it. And all of the people that were thought themselves to be educated and more advanced, maybe socioeconomically, we all took off our hijabs, you know. And she said, I just was raised in a family that wasn't at all religious. So it's not like she took off her hijab. She just was raised in a family that wasn't religious. And I thought to myself, I can do what any man does. And I'm going to study the most complicated thing. And so she chose mathematics. And she became very good at it. She's an incredibly brilliant woman. Very good at it that she became a professor. The only professor was a female in her department, in a very male-oriented department. And so she said, there I am. And I wanted to affirm that I, as a woman, can do this in that kind of mentality. She said, one day, the girls of the college came up to me and said, we want to have, there's very few women on campus. We want to have a woman's gathering, a woman's talk about being a woman on campus. So she said, yes, anything for a woman. So she met with them. She's not very busy as a professor, but she went ahead and met with them. And so she's sitting in the circle of women. And she said, I don't know how I didn't realize what I saw later. So here we are at first. The discussion is just going on about academics and being a woman and how difficult it is and so on in education. This discussion is back in the 70s. And she said, I don't know when the conversation switched from the discussion of academics to the discussion of the Prophet Muhammad, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. I don't even, because if someone had told me they were going to discuss the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam, I would never have showed up. I was so closed off to this idea. But as they were talking, as the girls were talking, she said suddenly something hit my heart and it just opened. This heart that had been so close to anything related to religion, to Islam, to the Prophet anything was so closed off. And when Hidayah is meant to come, the moment and how and that on the tongue of whom it comes with, Allahu Ta'ala Alam, and it just opened. And she said, there I was, suddenly I was hit with this wave of love for the Prophet, Sallallahu Alaihi Wasallam. And I found myself listening intently. And then I realized, wait a second, this group is almost all hijabies. And she said, and do you know what I was wearing that day? And this is where the real crux of the story is. I said, yeah, and you, could you possibly be wearing? So she says that the whole conversation is happening in Arabic. And then when she came to this point, she said, mini skirt. Then I said, what? So in English, she repeats again, mini skirt. Clearly it showed on my face, I was just, and she said, you know, Yarania, if the woman had judged me for how I looked, I never would have entered into that room. If they judged me for just what my outside was, I never would have been invited in to study the Dean. If they had judged me and said, ah, she's one of those women, she's one of those feminist, I don't know what woman, right? I would never have begun this journey. And there I was, fully welcomed by this group. And one thing led to another, one halakha led to another, one teacher led to another, and that brilliance that she took to get a doctorate in mathematics at a time when all their women had a doctorate in mathematics, imagine putting that brilliance into the memorization of Quran. She became so learned in Quran and so accurate in all of her pronunciation that the sheikh, the head sheikh that we received Ijazah from, ar-Rahimahullah, ar-Rahimahullah, both of them, ispahallah, that when he would travel to go on Hajj, even though he had hundreds of students, hundreds of male students underneath him, he would choose her in his post to fill in for him, to give Ijazah on his behalf when he would travel. That's how qualified she was. And she said, had they judged me, had they looked at me and said, ah, you can't enter the message like that, sister, here's a blanket. I'm being very serious. I tell the story to you because it really resonates with me and it resonates the kind of woman that I studied with and it resonates that anybody, this dean is for everybody. This dean is accessible to men and to women. This dean is accessible to your daughters. This dean, I'm talking to the woman and to the men. It is accessible to your sons. It is accessible to kids like me who grew up in America.