and then our exile

"this the month of the russet doe / ... / final verge before the silent Sea..."

[October] 2nd i transferred into RuknedDin, and actually arrived in this city. emad of texas, zahid of london, pir amjad of birmingham, as roommates for the first time in my life: i moved into an apartment several hundred metres up a red mountain and then up sixty or so stairs where successive generations of tullaab (as in, young single men.) had gone through their daily rituals. as such it was not the cleanest house, but it held people who were devoting portions of their lives to seriously studying the Deen. given a room which after i spent hours cleaning became where i would sleep and read and pray and talk and watch movies and lie in bed sick and write poetry and watch the ceiling slowly drift down, for the next six months. i was still trying to decide what to do after finishing the month-long course at JD; after a week of waffling i joined level five a week late. months later emad would explain the reasons the foreigners in the pictures i'd taken were studying arabic: 'he is trying to be the next famous orientalist', he would point to one, 'and those two are training to be FBI translators. oh, and that one's going to die far too young.' i was learning how to love damascus in ways of quiet contentment, and secondly how incredibly vast the Islamic tradition of knowledge actually is. "memory is the cruellest trick of all" and "the thorny path to heaven." to the UofD in the mornings, meeting Shaikh Anas or 'Aamir in the afternoons, and Nur ul-Iydah in the evenings. Fiqhul-Manhaji too, now and then. Ramadan then began, which was a totally different experience, and i fell into it much as i did with the city itself: initial elation, at the space in time and place, and then plunging disappointment that it was so unoutwardlyspiritual, but then a gathering growing appreciation of what it actually holds. "hyphen through modernity"

As i type there is a kitten at the window, quietly mewling.

[November], though Ramadan continued. i mosque-hopped for taraweeh, cycling through fifteen or so separate buildings of light over thirty days. some of these were good experiences, others not, but tahajjud at Jaami' Rifaa'i alongside hundreds, thousands of others, and iftar with roommates and friends remained, to show how things should be. the earlier quiet contentment continued to blossom, despite paining doubts both that the devil's tasweef had me in shackles i would not break and that i was not applying what i had learnt. was mildly sick once, and upkept extremized sleep schedules; had thoughts, surrounded by this new life, of staying here for another year after august came around: the west become a prison, of sorts, in contrast. the university course finished, and other classes continued; after Ramadan i started tajweed rules with wali and Arabic with an algerian, abu 'abdur rahman: duroos un-nahwiyyah, though we later switched to the aajurrumiyyah. whitening hair: "these wounds of our grief" and "sown salt in our / fields of mercy", and i tried occasionally to make the tajweed tasmee' at muhyiddin with [shaikh Samer]. Cold then, and we would go about life dressed in three layers as it would snow briefly outside, collecting on the red mountain above to shine in after-dawn light. expecting a falling blade, but He of the Beautiful Names! latenight yemeni rice with roommates, walking home in the early hours; hours of discussion and extrapolation. arguments on what defines art, and "silence given by night / in the night's passing."