the face of hunger, the face of god

searching for divinity in times of despair

Last year, I took a course on Tantric Hindu goddesses. Known as the Mahavidyas—or the Great Wisdoms—they are a collection of ten supreme beings envisioned as female.
Each week, we explored a different archetype of the divine feminine—forms of the sacred that defied neat and sterile categories. Fierce, wild, erotic, grieving, grotesque, primordial. I joined the class as a Muslim, not in contradiction to my faith, but as an act of expanding it. I wanted to learn to recognize the divine in more places, more textures. To let God surprise me, especially in times when divinity feels so far away.

Now, in this long and grueling season of grief for Gaza, I find myself returning to one goddess in particular: Dhumavati.

She is the widow. The embodiment of the void — smoke, absence, hunger, and loss. Her myths say she once devoured her husband, Lord Shiva, and was cast out, made to wander the world alone. In iconography, she rides a chariot pulled by a crow. She is not young, not adorned. She is considered inauspicious. And yet, in Tantric traditions, she is revered as the ultimate truth—because she reveals what remains when all else is gone.

Dhumavati holds a winnowing basket — a tool that sifts inedible husks from grains—symbolizing the separation of illusion from reality.

I think of Dhumavati today as I sit with messages from friends in Gaza who are starving. Their words are full of a pain that shouldn’t exist in this world. No flour. No produce. Nothing to eat for days. Children crying over empty plates. Hungry civilians shot as they gather for aid trucks. And those trucks—full of food—sit idle, blocked at Gaza’s sealed borders.

This is not metaphor. This is not poetry. This is famine, engineered and enforced, while the world watches.

I have done what I can for nearly two years—protested, fundraised, organized, prayed, cried. And still they are hungry. Still the borders are closed. Still the bombs fall.

In these moments, I return to Dhumavati not for comfort, but for clarity.

Because she reminds me that divinity does not always arrive as light. Sometimes, it comes as the smoke after fire. As the sound of a stomach growling through the night. As a man whose body is breaking but who still sings lullabies to his child.

Gaza is full of Dhumavati right now.

Not because starvation is holy—it is not—but because the people surviving it are.
Their love is holy. Their endurance. Their memory. Their refusal to be erased.

In Islamic tradition, one of Allah’s names is al-Sabur—The Most Patient. Another is al-Qarib—The One Who is Near. Even now, I choose to believe in that presence.

And that Dhumavati, too, has her place in this cosmology. Not to glorify pain, but to testify to what persists in its wake. The sacred that lives on the other side of devastation. The divine feminine in her most exiled and truthful form.

I do not want to romanticize starvation, but I do want to stay beside it. To witness it. To name it. To say: this is happening. This is unbearable. And still, this is not the end of Gaza’s story.

Gaza is not empty.
Gaza is full—of spirit, of love, of God.
Even now. Especially now.