It is Night. It was night when i began this letter, but Night has spread over the globe. Piles of filthy lucre litter the Temples--piles of half-eaten meals thrown into the next brutal wars, the next epics of weapons made to plough earth and burn flesh off limbs--because the poverty of nations is not the poverty of nutrition or subsistence, it is the poverty of growth. It is not the poverty of body, it is the poverty of Spirit--because change has come, tomorrow is always today, here are a dozen options but none of them frame an alternative. "We've 'evolved', see, look at these new platinum scars" "these purple eyes" "the finesse of polished skin". And relativism: you live in your house and your language is made up of your words and the sun shines on them all. And new is better. And time is money. And who are the neighbours' eyes, who do they see.
The last time i wrote this letter i was in my last year of high school. i was learning things "for the sake of learning", which was code for "for the sake of the exam", and sometimes not even that. i was living in a world where stars were bright and snow was soft and moose passed by my window, but society and culture committed suicide together. Poetry and art and flowers fell before the mocking pincers of Walmart, plastic bags. Philosophy was worthless. He said "God is dead", and was too early. He wasn't too early. Is this lens too damningly dark? Do its eyes slant overmuch? i want physical proof.
Here i write this letter, and it is morning in Damascus, many thousands of hundreds of tens of meters away from what for years i called home. It's been three and a half long months--counting time not by seconds but by what the seconds held, measuring ideas not by neurons but by what the thoughts hold--since i left, and there is no soft snow here. Rain, to merge with the panes of my room in a third-floor apartment halfway up a red mountain in a gray city. There are cobblestones under the concrete, hundreds of years old. The language is different, its life is one triadical with Armaic and Hebrew and Arabic, but faces change. This is Damascus--i am here, writing this letter.
This is a land holding its history its own, though all else may pass. Because it is in the dust, even though society mirrors the double-suicides of the West at every move, outdoing itself in its morbid graces. In the middle of this grey cement, in the middle of these nicotine fumes, there remain fonts of mercy: because here there is Knowledge of things we have thrown away in the West. Nietzsche said "God is dead", and that is why i am here. Because traditionalism is not anti-modernity, it means one lives with the past, not in fear of it--it means the meaning to anything is lasting, it means religion and outlook and all can coexist without paranoia.
Specifically now: I'm not here to become a baby-eating terrorist. I'm here to learn, who i am, how deep these roots run, to think in the ways thoughts must flow. I'm not here to learn for the sake of learning, but because the things i learn here i must use to try to prove things at home--to prove life is not futile, to myself first of all and to the world thereafter. I'm taking classes in Arabic language and in traditional Islamic law and in basic belief, in the method of reading the Qur'an properly, in a few other related things, from people who live their Islam, who are 'physical proof' that the West can hope, yet.
This is me. Hello world.
Merry winter and a truthful new year.
Basit Kareem Iqbal
--ps: MSN IS A HORRIBLE CIA PLOT.
