and then our exile

thrice a week i leave the house before the sun is fully risen, drive through the countryside as morning mist lies heavy over the earth. into the city, where i sit for twenty minutes on a bus carrying dozens of human beings to the distinguished campus of an esteemed institution hard at work to produce thousands of people upholding the set order of society. it spits us out onto the pavement and we disperse, clutching tight styrofoam cups of dark caffeinated water.

sitting behind people i will guess from the frequency they used the word "like" to be first-year suburban girls, i found myself smiling at their conversation: ear-candy from social butterflies, it would flit about, punctuated by little laughs and changes in tone, so normal, so comfortable, so safe.

wandering the shelves of the library’s russian literature, scanning the musty spines of foreign cyrillic script for short stories by pasternak, eyes snagging on occasional titles in more familiar alphabet. and then later stepping high so as not to trip on the railway ties walking down the train-tracks curving around the river valley, reciting mandelstam aloud to the wind and the autumn leaf.

leaving the "meditation room", zacharia pauses at the door, reciting a verse from the Qur'an, revealed text: wa jahidhum bihee jihadan kabeera. "and strive with them using it (the quran) with great striving." we pretend not to know muntaka as his voice gets louder for the benefit of all those in line next to us, waiting to return textbooks: "why don't we just say it louder," he calls out. "why don't we talk about this all the time. we should just wear signs or something. we should write a rap about it." the word jihad, "holy war", the history-man says, has so many implications.

when studying any other discipline one approaches it from within its own field, on its own ground, in terms it will itself understand. religion, though, is no scientific discipline but dogma, and so must be sterilized that it not be dangerous. an "objective" secular history, then, will explain sacred law and the development of belief. to do otherwise were to jeopardize what the education itself symbolizes, which would be a great travesty.

in sociology i write a note to farooq. "bruce cockburn had a song about that." "so did tupac," he replies.
"is spirit reality," the white man in a suit up-front pauses for rhetorical effect, "or is reality reality?"

"and oh, before i forget," the anthropology professor waves generally in my direction, "i should say something about ibn khaldun, there was a question last time. he was a great muslim anthropologist, very famous, who came up with the first what we would call modern definitions of culture, classified different peoples, etc etc." and "we owe a great deal to muslim scholars such as him, there was great impetus for systematic study, because for them when they were studying the world they were studying God, etc etc." how many muslims know the name of ibn khaldun?

driving home, tired after nine hours in the city and the inefficiency of the bus system. the brilliant albertan countryside, wind carrying leaves and sun bright over rolling hills and interceptive treelines. hayfields and grazing horses, intermittent bodies of water, light blue sky.

deer in the back field, my mother says: four fawns racing about, leaping and twirling, each in its own right, white flags alight in bounding flight.

i wake up early, 3.45am, after murky dreams in four hours of sleep. i go upstairs, thirsty, and then try to catch up on readings before fajr, dawn prayer. i'd fallen asleep at my desk twice the day before, prophecy coming alive.

"i miss Shaam," i say. wistfully. mourning.

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sometimes immediate history is made up of undated images strung-together.