a magazine of longing
A literary witness to religious experience in Pakistan and beyond — belief, doubt, ritual, and the absence of God, told in essays, prose, and poetry.
Launching 30 October 2026Three lines from the same note we keep pinning back up on the wall.
Shawq is dedicated to religious experience — not doctrine or dogma, but the lived, felt encounter with belief, ritual, God, and the absence of God.
Every tradition is welcome. Every position is welcome — belief, doubt, atheism, ambivalence, and anything in between.
Identity shaped against inherited belief, the experience of religious and sectarian minorities, queer and marginalized identity within or against faith, and what it means to hold faith against the pressures of modernity.
Personal essays, literary fiction, nonfiction, short prose, and poetry rooted in lived experience — never sermons, never abstract theology.
If you'd rather not publish under your own name, that's entirely fine.
Accepted pieces appear on this site and Instagram, credited to you. First publication rights only — the piece stays yours.
We read essays, prose, and poetry on belief, doubt, and everything caught between them.
Belief, doubt, identity, and the negotiation of faith against modernity, minority experience, and societal expectation — that's what we're passionately searching for.
We publish essays, prose, and poetry that explore how religious or spiritual experience is felt and given form. We won't be entertaining writing that argues doctrine or theology in the abstract. Every tradition, every position welcome: belief, doubt, atheism, ambivalence, and anything in between. Pseudonymous submission is totally fine if you'd rather not publish under your name.
Please submit as a Word document (.doc/.docx) in standard Shunn manuscript format — 12pt Times New Roman or similar serif, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, with your name, title, and word count in the header. Check the format here: shunn.net/format/story. If you're unfamiliar with it, don't stress — do your best and we'll help tidy it up.
Accepted pieces appear on this website and our Instagram page, always with full credit to you as the writer. We ask for first publication rights only — the piece stays yours to place elsewhere afterward.
We ask that submissions be your own original writing. We have a strict no-AI policy — work found to be generated or assisted by AI will be rejected. Using AI for light editing or proofreading is fine, just let us know.
Submit through our form — you'll attach your manuscript there as a .doc/.docx file.
shawq (شوق) means longing. This is where we're trying to put it into words.
Shawq is a magazine dedicated to religious experience in Pakistan — not doctrine or dogma, but the lived, felt encounter with belief, ritual, God, and the absence of God.
shawq started as a passion project because there wasn't really a space for people in Pakistan to sit with and talk about their relationship with religion — not sermons, not debates about who's right, just people's actual experiences. The doubt, the certainty, the in-between, and the questions that don't resolve.
It's still very much a work in progress. We'd genuinely love to hear what your relationship with religion, faith, God, or meaning looks like, what you wish existed, and what you'd want to read or write about.
Every tradition, every position welcome: belief, doubt, atheism, ambivalence, and anything in between. We're especially interested in:
Pseudonymous submission is completely fine if you'd rather not publish under your own name.
Submissions should be your own original writing. Strict no-AI policy — assisted or generated work will be rejected. Light editing or proofreading with AI is fine, as long as you tell us.
Nothing is published yet — this is where the stories will live once they are.
Launching 30 October 2026shawq started as a passion project because I kept noticing there wasn't really a space for people in Pakistan to sit with and talk about their relationship with religion. Not sermons or debates about who's right or wrong, but just people's actual experiences — the doubt, the certainty, the in-between, and the questions that don't resolve.
shawq is my attempt at building that space. It's still very much a work in progress, and I'd genuinely love to hear from you: what your relationship with religion, faith, God, or meaning looks like, what you wish existed, what you'd want to read or write about.
Drop a comment or a DM — no pressure, just curious what this could become with more voices in it. 🕯️
No pressure — just curious what this could become with more voices in it.