On December 26th 2007 I had written, "I'm attacked by some for not being "moderate" enough, and others for not being "religious" or "faithful" enough. I think I must be doing something right - but does this have to be such a lonely path?"

On October 30th 2009, the answer is still... silence...

I await patiently. In ma' al 'osr yusra...

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There has been no reply...

The first time I had sent the message was months ago - but it never arrived. The connection had been already been severed...

Sending it again and being answered by a predictable silence is not as painful as realising that I may have been right...

Fate can deliver cruel and sad blows.

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The small jump from austerity to cruelty...

The Islamic society at the university I'm attending is quite organised and provides good facilities for me to come and pray when I need to, but there is something I feel uncomfortable about with the "regulars" that I'm coming to recognise there. The Saudi, and in particular Wahhabi influence, is dominant. The people are friendly enough when you talk to them, why would they not be when you are praying with them, but any mention of 'those' other people at the university and you get the k-word. Kafir. Or the absolute certainty that everybody else is going to hell because so and so, and so and so, said this and that, and as they fulfill all the criteria, then, the logic goes, surely they are going to paradise. It is then that I notice the glazed smile of a person who is lying to themselves as they talk about how a non-believer will roast in hell fire. It is written and so they are just basking in the aura of being saved, aren't they?

The Wahhabi's are not teaching or believing in anything formatively different from the main body of Islamic teaching, but substantively there is something subtle and extremely aggressive about it. Puritanical is the word.

The other thing I notice is that with non-Arabic Muslims over there, words like Inshallah, mashallah and jazak Allah kheir are used so completely frequently as to go beyond having any meaning, they are sometimes used as speech fillers, or perhaps in the belief that every utterance must adhere to a strict Islamic teaching. There's nothing wrong with that I guess, but it just strikes me as odd and I can't see how you could live comfortably with yourself and still live in such a confined manner. Perhaps that is why many of them seem to live an insular life, with nothing to do with the city they are living in. I thought I was a hermit!

I think I understand peoples worries about me when I discuss ideas and books I've read about Islam, and about things like my view on morality, when I look at the "flip side of the coin", I see something equally disturbing, but I cannot see how I could subscribe to such severity. Islamic belief to me is much more of a guiding and stabilising core within me as I sail through my life and mix and mingle with people from mosques to nightclubs and of all sorts of mindsets and beliefs. My belief is that this core comes from a 'cleaner' source than others and is much more likely to lead me to happiness than the other paths, but that doesn't mean I view others as inferior human beings somehow. A Muslim should be like a jar of honey, sweet to everybody who tastes from it regardless of their background. I don't think these guys would agree with me entirely.

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When you think you are blazing a path to glory, you stop for the first time in your life and look behind you to see a pathetic little track beaten into the undergrowth. What do you feel at that moment? What is your reaction when it dawns on you that "It's over"?

You are how you choose to deal with that reality. You can carry on running from yourself, a prisoner of your own ideas, or not...

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Where are you? I hope you are ok...

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Note to myself - wait..

Today I got another lesson in humility. The university where I am doing my law conversion degree has a basement hall for Muslims to go and pray. Today I was rushing there after my last lecture to catch the Maghreb (post-sunset) prayer. They had already begun and through the microphone I could here the young man, who usually leads the prayers, reading some verses from the Qur'an out loud. However the pronunciation was off, way off. As I performed my purification I remembered shaking my head. I was sure he seemed really knowledgable when I had met him previously, how could he be making such mistakes? I joined them and listened as we began the next verses. This time he repeated the same segment, but pronouncing it the way I had always heard it.

As soon as we finished, he turned around and explained to us what happened. The Qur'an was taught to the Prophet Muhammad in seven different ways. Two of these ways were lost forever at the time of the Prophet, but the last five were preserved. He had been reciting an alternative pronunciation of some commonly used verses and of course this was perfectly legitimate, if unusual to me. Inwardly I was humbled as to the arrogance I assumed internally at being a native speaker of Arabic. It turned out I knew nothing and it was meant that this evening I was to be humbled by an Asian man whose pronunciation and recitation of the Qur'an is better than anything I can muster.

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Some people think that not to hate means they must be loving and accepting of everyone and everything that people do. I do not love and accept everyone and everything that people do, but it is such a hard battle not to hate as well. In every aspect of my life I find the serat al mustaqeem gently encouraging me to take its difficult path. Yet it is so easy to hate, to be angry and violent or else to be something incoherent like a high hippie or the Dalai Lama. I never think about the fatiha as I say it so often. Al maghdoub aleihim (those who have wrath upon them) or the Daleen (those who are astray). The world seems to only want to offer us a path from these two choices but I don't want this. I want something else.

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Last night a good friend of mine insisted I join them in the Zebrano club near Carnaby street, one that I hadn't been to in years. As I walked in, I felt that old familiar thump in the chest, the mingle of perfume and cologne and the different drinks on offer. We walked down into the dark basement where the beautiful people were all mingled, chatting, dancing or drinking happily. I must have been to hundreds of clubs, pubs and bars over more than a decade, but walking back into one made me feel like a fish out of water. I needed the change of scenery desparately though this was not what I had in mind.

"Has it been that long?" I thought to myself, it must have been. I sipped my mineral water quietly. We stayed for a few hours, I then made my excuses and left. As I walked back to Oxford circus tube station I watched the clubbing crowd in their short skirts and flash suits stagger around. I recited al kafiroun silently. It was not in a hateful manner, I was like them once. But I needed to make a point within my soul that I do not worship whatever these people worship. They have their beliefs and I have mine. I remain so very tired though...

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My grandfather's brother (rest both their souls), was a Minister of Culture for Syria, a long long time ago. He was a remarkably sensitive, cultured and very well educated man. He was thrown into a cell in one of Syria's many coups and upon his release spent the rest of his life in Saudi Arabia. During my visit to Turkey I found one of his poetry books that had been published. In one of his books was a library form with his signature dated 1942 for some book on economics he needed for his research I think. He had a line at the end of his introduction, "To whom am I writing?! I dedicate this book to...?!"

I ask myself this question today...

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The Qiblah

Five times a day I face one direction, one focal point. Yet in my life I have mistakenly faced different focal points. These false Qiblah's have all led me to misery, hardship and unhappiness. Some of these false Qiblah's were incredibly convincing. Whether 'Music', 'Arabism', 'Marxism' or even Palestine. Yes, Palestine is a false Qiblah too. There are people I have met and dear friends of mine who worship Palestine, it is the yardstick against which they measure all and with which they can identify themselves. It gives cause and meaning to their life. I don't feel that is healthy though. As the Prophet said, there are many paths, but only one is the sound one. It is by turning away from all the other false qiblah's and listening more closely to my fitra that I found myself going through Jerusalem, caring for the weak and downtrodden and even caring about the environment. All these would lead me astray individually, but when my Qiblah was true, they all fell into place...

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"The Way"

My visit to Syria had comforted me with regards to Sufism. Up until that point I would get wound up when the media mentioned it or when someone told me how much the postcard Rumi Sufism of the West is appealing to them. I am a very big fan of Imam al Ghazali and there is much I rediscover in his books each time I read them again (I am nowhere near completing the ones I have either) and there are faint trails left by this great man in his works to those with sharp eyes and an inquisitive mind. That is my belief anyhow.

This September I had wanted to discover more in Damascus than just the tourist whirling "dervishes" that grace the kitsch restaurants like the Damascene Gate and the Ali Baba style restaurant on the road to the airport. I would not be disappointed. Whilst I had always thought he was a religious nut, it turned out that my cousin's husband was actually himself a closet Sufi. His views had softened considerably in the last two years and I was to discover this was due to the soothing influence of his father, a bona fide Sufi Muslim and follower of 'the way'. M's father is a wonderful warm man with a kind and gentle face whom I was to meet once briefly as I passed by their shop. He had wanted me to sit and talk a while but I had errands to sort out that day. I wish I did now. M was surprised to see that I had actually bothered reading the works of Ibn Sina, and we had some good discussions on al Ghazali and his works and what he tried to achieve. He had promised to get me some booklets for Ibn Arabi but I had such little time and so much to do that we never got around to it. We were also going to visit a Sufi Hadra but that plan did not work out either. One of M's concerns was that I might feel uncomfortable with the way people would be swayed whilst remembering Allah, and I thought for a moment to tell him that I had seen people in the UK sway to the idiciocy of pills and alcohol in a far more disturbing way than anybody ecstatic with remembering Allah. I thought better of it but still I tried to allay his fears.

M discovered I wished to visit Ibn Arabi's mosque in Sheikh Muhyi al Din and we went there a few times to pray and hear some of the lessons. Sitting there and reading the Qur'an was uplifting to say the least, but in the cool interior of the mosque my mind was wondering to my visit last summer to the Mesquita in Cordoba. Ibn Arabi had walked there too and it was there that he had stood watching Averroes' burial procession before leaving Andalusia forever and returning to the Middle East. Here I was now, with his body buried only a few feet from me, having in the space of twelve months gone from his place of birth, the glory of al Hambra and the beauty of Spain to the Ummayad Mosque, where I sat at the famous Ghazalian corner, and then to the mosque of Ibn Arabi himself, where I read the Fatiha for his soul. For a brief few moments, torments, longing and regrets melted away into the peace I crave so much.

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"The company charged with finishing the Ryugyong is Orascom Telecom, part of an Egyptian conglomerate that took on the rebuilding work - "in partnership with a local firm" - as part of a $400m deal to build and run a 3G mobile phone network in North Korea."
Orascom Telecom are also a major provider in Iraq from what I remember. Somebody told me that they are commonly believed to be behind the sabotaging of the countries communications infrastructure (ie. blowing up exchanges) to drive demand for mobile telephone services. Allegedly. I don't know...people talk...

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I placed too much of a burden on you, I am so very sorry. I was a fool.

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Some very close friends of mine have just become the parents of twins. It is fascinating to watch them grow over the past few months...I think there is something very profound about life and how it starts. This evening I put one of them to sleep, he refused to let me put him down earlier and wanted to be carried around the house as I hummed to him. Already, he has worked out a way to communicate what he wants and what he does not want, and all this from being a complete tabula rasa only about 2 months ago...One year ago they did not exist and like them, at one time, neither did I. Man is such an arrogant being.

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حضرة - ذكر

Sufi dhikr music.

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There is a sad irony in hearing of an Iraqi dying from a suicide blast in...Pakistan. Talk about jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

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