THE GUIDE

We have indeed sent down signs that make things manifest: And Allah guides whom He wills to a way that is straight.  (Quran 24:46)

I spoke to a young man who said only this: 
On the street I saw a woman who was so beautiful I stopped breathing.  I just stood and stared.  She was fully covered in a khimar and long, loose, flowing dress.  She was beautiful, elegant, graceful.  I followed her without ever realizing I was doing so.  I just wanted to look at her.  I didn’t try to speak to her, didn’t think to speak to her.  My thoughts didn’t go that far.  I just looked. Looked and followed.

An Empty Shell

A man spoke of his dream. He said:

I was walking with my wife down a street in the city. There was no one else around. The area we were in was an abandoned neighborhood of old, brick buildings. There were many old-fashioned little shops and storefronts with apartments above them for the shop owners and other tenants. My wife and I reached the corner where another of these derelict shops stood. It had been a prime location in its day, with large plate glass windows facing both streets of the corner on which it stood. The windows had long ago been broken out. Shards and slivers of glass were still scattered on the floor inside where the overturned, broken remains of a few dark, wooden furnishings lie amid the dirt and crumbled plaster from walls which had once been painted in various shades of brown. Some wires still dangled overhead, the only remains of fixtures long since spirited away.

The Cemetery

 

A man said, “We would speak of dreams”.  This is what he said:
When I a new Muslim, I was fascinated by the knowledge that the dead are punished in their graves for their sins–their screams unheard by the living.

An Opening

 

Another woman told me this:
I did not see it.  It was a small space.  The smallest of spaces.  No more than a quarter of an inch between my knee and that of the woman sitting next to me on the floor in the upper level of the Haram.  And so far in the back we could not even see the railing that overlooked the Kaaba below us in the center.

An Empty Sky

And We have made the heavens as a canopy well guarded: Yet do they turn away from the Signs which these things point to! (Quran 21:32)

A man spoke to me, saying:

I was beset by bills and responsibilities to my family which I could not fulfill.  I lost my job, my house.  We were all piled into my brother’s small place. 

The Warrior

O you who believe! Seek help with patient perseverance and prayer; for Allah is with those who patiently persevere. (Quran 2:153)

I spoke to a man who said some thought of him as a war hero, and what he said was this:

When I was young, I made salat everyday.  I went far away to the war.  I fought the enemy.  I hid from the enemy.  I chased the enemy.  I killed the enemy.  I killed my salat.  I left the enemy behind and returned home and found salat was not dead; it had just returned home before me.  It was waiting for me.  There was also a young, fertile woman who gave me 6 sons in 10 years.  Everyday of that time I made salat.

A Ramadan Story

I spoke to a woman who told me this:

She wanted to divorce her husband.  He was not what you call a bad man, but he was irresponsible.  He’d abandoned his university education while she’d finished hers.  He was sometimes out of work.  He brought in money when he just had to.   But he loved her, though, and his children.  As the years passed it was her professional career that bought the house they lived in. As the years passed, she grew tired of his passivity and of his presence.