Allah is great.
This past Monday was Ashura; a day of fasting and contemplation in tranquility as to how 1444 might unfold.
As a non-practising, yet deeply spiritual Muslim — I needed a reset day, to slow everything down, to quiet the disjointed buzzing of transient ideas flying around my feverish brain; a day to put aside the chaos of an outside world spinning out of orbit.
Today — yom el gom’aa in Arabic — I awoke before first light, and listened for an hour on YouTube to a looping adhan, which reminded me of the plaintive chorus that arises from countless minarets every dawn in my native Cairo.
My mind quieted from the rancor of uneasy slumber. I voiced aloud that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad (PBUH) is His prophet. I asked him to relieve the suffering of those who are currently being bombed in Gaza, and elsewhere, yet largely ignored in the day-to-day bustle of an America transfixed by the latest examples of the foolish pride of its sulfuric iblees.
I asked myself: what is today going to be about? Shall I do the same? Shall let myself be consummed by the poison?
La’a, yabni. I have other fiseekh to fry — so to speak, as fiseekh is in fact never fried, but dried under the sun, by the salt lakes of distant Alexandria.
Not to make light of a dangerous, and possibly pivotal moment in American history, but the answer emerged from the crepuscular shadows: I must today go to Al Rayan. I must go and draw water from the well. And following that, it was clear to me, it was time to again harvest poppies from the field.
Time for my ablutions.
If I should be so lucky, my own foolishness shall not today divert me from staying on the revealed path ahead. 😉
Leaving Amerika 