Explore Voices from Volume 1
Call for Submissions | Issue 2
Home: Where We Belong
What makes a place home? Is it where we are born, where we live, where our ancestors are buried, or where we finally feel that we belong? Can home be found in a language, a memory, a familiar voice, or the rituals of everyday life? And what happens when the place we call home no longer recognizes us?
For some, home is an inheritance; for others, it is something they must build, sometimes more than once. It can be a refuge and a source of joy, a hope and desire, but also a place of tension, constraint, and longing. Home may be rooted in a particular geography, or it may travel with us across borders and generations.
In this issue of Navā, we invite writers, artists, poets, and storytellers to reflect on the many meanings of home in Muslim lives and beyond. We are interested in the homes people remember, inhabit, question, leave, return to, and imagine for the future.
We welcome intimate, unexpected, and imaginative responses. Home need not be understood only through displacement or loss. It can also be found in friendship, laughter, food, neighborhood life, creativity, love, and the ordinary acts through which people make a world their own.
Above all, we ask: What does it mean to make a home, and what does it take to feel at home in the world?
Submissions close: January 31, 2027
Prompts for contributors
We want to keep the submission invitation open-ended to stimulate creative thinking. We are offering some ideas, but they are not rigid categories.
01: The Home We Remember
What is your earliest memory of home? Is it a place, a smell, a sound, a person, or a moment? How has that memory changed as you have grown older?
02: Where Do I Belong?
Have you ever felt like a stranger in a place you call home? What makes belonging possible, and who has the power to decide who belongs?
03: Women Making Home
How do women create, sustain, negotiate, or resist the expectations of home? Can making a home be an expression of agency rather than simply an obligation?
04: Home Across Generations
What does home mean to parents and children who have grown up in different cultural worlds? What is preserved, transformed, or lost between generations?
05: Faith as Home
Can a mosque, a prayer, a religious practice, or a community of faith become a home? What happens when religious spaces offer belonging to some but not to others?
06: The Home We Choose
Can friends, neighbors, and chosen families become home? Tell us about a place or relationship in which you unexpectedly discovered belonging.
07: Everyday Geographies
How do kitchens, gardens, streets, markets, workplaces, and neighborhood spaces shape our sense of home? What can ordinary objects and routines reveal about who we are?
08: Imagining Home
If you could create a home without inherited boundaries of gender, race, class, nationality, or religion, what would it look like? Who would be welcome, and how would people live together?
Special Feature
"One Object, One Home"
We invite contributors to submit a photograph or drawing of a single object they associate with home, accompanied by a 150–300-word reflection. It might be a prayer rug, a handwritten recipe, a key, a book, a piece of clothing, a family photograph, or something entirely unexpected.
Future Themes
