صحيفة الصبر
Ṣaḥīfat al-Ṣabr
The Scroll of Patience
This work begins where I end.
What remains is a single method held under pure and sustained constraint. The only instrument is a .30 mm technical pen. Nothing is planned in advance, nothing is corrected, and nothing is taken back. Every mark is final the moment it meets the paper. Under that condition the work continues as an open-ended corpus of drawings — Ṣaḥīfat al-Ṣabr.
The practice began in 2011 with a profound rupture: on the day of the Shahādah, as an image-maker, I was confronted with the threat of severe punishment for those who make images. That sudden, reverential fear of Allah’s punishment — khawf— became the refusal to depict anything that possesses a soul. What continued under that single, irreversible limit became a method of pure accumulation.
In 2011 the vision received the name Kitāb al-Ṣabr — The Book of Patience.
In 2025 it became Ṣaḥīfat al-Ṣabr — The Scroll of Patience.
In 2026 the work took its lasting form: a standardized protocol, a public register of the minutes, and a system of authentication that binds every sheet to the life that continues to be given.
Individual sheets are serialized and stand as discrete records of time and labor within the larger body. The corpus remains open, closing only when the hand that sustains it falls still.
Patience is both the theme and substance of the work, actualized through nusuk al-qalam — the procedure of the pen — across seconds, hours, days, and years. The accumulation of marks that results is not a picture. It is the visible cost of a limit accepted and held without return. The practice has been one of sustained fidelity founded on taqwa, keeping artistic expression and identity inside the limit first accepted in 2011. The artwork that emerged is received and committed to as a mercy from Allah.