as the poison wilted his body, Alexander turned his gaze upwards, searching the sky for the heavens no longer visible to him; ‘why, why! have you abandoned me, Zeus? why, why have you held your friendship from me?,’ he cried.

he had has lost the conditions that made him good, and hence, he could no longer be good. was the goodness then circumstantial or innate? both, but in a different semantic sense: circumstantial insofar as the consequential aspects of goodness were lost, but innate insofar as the recognition of that loss were still pillared in the consciousness.

fixated disciplinary thinking is dangerous; the Verse teaches you the Quantum in the verse of Abdus Salam.

the existentially colonized subject in India was not necessarily produced during the Raj period, yes the stage had been set and structures installed, but if we speak en masse, that, we can make a case, was rather only after Partition, primarily through the the proliferation of particular modes of imposed post-colonial citizenship building models in under the guise of nationalist sovereignty; arguably the accelerating age of information coinciding with political decolonization only proliferated the process of colonial domination as it was now throughly indigenized; yes, again, the apparatuses had been constructed during direct colonial rule, yes certainly, but there was now something more insidious by this new mass colonization of the post-Partition period; these histories shall becomes more and more apparent as there is more proper work done by the proper people. in any case, it has to be said, the State is still raw and moldable; there is no “steel frame,” and what is perceived is solid is not so at all; the entrenched columns of domination are not as indissoluble as they appear on first sight; it is only that the single point of failure we covet so much in our search of dignity is yet to be discovered in its fullness, and in this contingent process of finding that point, we may very well come to the conclusion that there may not be this single point, but multiple nodes that need to be carved open, skewered with the rods of a dignified freedom.

you do not tell the truth, and hence are not free.

be with the wretched, always; the body may break, but the soul will prevail.

the Punjab is prone to unnecessary spiritual ecstasy, unnecessary in the sense of modern utility; there is now an acute material problem of channeling this ecstasy into modern life without deracinating the very spirit of the ecstasy that opened Hind for us.

more people than ever in the history of time are formally educated in some sense, but now more than ever before, even the most educated of people have an arguably poorer perception of reality than the most educated of before, even when taking into account this assertion relative to the amount and quality of knowledge available respectively; the binding webs of knowledge the created older cosmologies of the past cannot be replicated by “inter-disciplinarity” of the now, but a newer redemption we seek is has to be possible through a sincerity not of of method, but an honesty of character.

the feudal likes to be the “youngest” or the “first” to “achieve” something, to thump his chest as if he is a miracle right from God himself; is he filled by the Spirit or the spirit?

sometimes when surprise ourselves at the wonder of realizing how many people exist, have exist, and may yet exist.

an infatuation with the collaborators that you have, to carve out your piece of the pie, at any cost necessary, has put you on hell on Earth. if it were even a consequentialism, one could stomach it, but here in the pure lands, there even are no good ends, let alone good means; doom is currency of speech, and the merchants never go out of business.

thrust into a world made unstable by the celestial arrangement, and hence the heart may find no rest until it is pierced by the dagger of brutal anguish, and a devastating love.

when the fire is lit, does it know it has been lit?

the feudal master cannot but help to look at the wretched laborer with certain degree of disgust because he can never see himself in the worker, the weathered clothes, the pungent odor, all reminders of the master’s aversion to a state he sees beneath him, sub-human: this is the politics of disgust.

when status is achieved through collusion, euphemistically colored as a “conflict of interest,” there is to be no justice, and that is the ultimate prevailing story of the Musalman; you sell your kind for meagre profits, and wish to see yourself as the galloping knight of enlightenment, but you are a leech; at the very least, leech on me, maybe your casuistry may heal me: this is the politics of disgust.

why do you wish to be reborn in a new world? I do understand why, I would too, but the truth is that this is all we have, this existence, this minute, this repetitive pain; the dichotomy between an existentially burdensome realism and a romantic defiance to loss are not enemies; they are not even on the same plane of perception, and hence, it is this friendship of the apparently conflicting facts of life that redeem us even as we turn into carcasses.

I am the colonial slave, and I must remain the colonial slave longer before the pardon is granted from the first realm; the inhabitants of this realm currently adjudicating over our future, and now we await the rubber stamp of being grated movement in Time from the mighty Lord. yet, in the meanwhile, the decolonization that we see is only through the hard labor of education, not through the industry of education, but the proper processes that produce the necessary cosmological envelope needed to light the fire; no longer are there are any shackles left; yes, I remain a prisoner of the demon of historical context, but there is also this freedom that has already been induced through the alchemical effects of fate; and now, language itself has to disappear for our new freedoms to appear, and it shall be so, because our grunting egoic articulations themselves perpetuate a delay in the adjudication in the first realm, whose judges take sides on what case to make to the Mighty Spirit; the danger now is the technologies being readied for the further degradation of our perceptive strength, and in exchange for mere Franklin, our friends sell us. as we wait, we remain attentive to the critical need to combine words and numbers, because the facts of life that are we looking for so intently, those that are so elusive, not so much for the mystics might it be said, but we are not mystics, but the mere men of lackluster intuition, which more properly defines us, can only arrive at a proper understanding of perception through this combination of words and numbers, the syntactical consciousness with the lines of the graph, art and the material; there is no other way that is apparent yet, and the language that we are necessitated to kill today for our freedom, or rather are allowed to, after a decree of allowance is passed, may very well be the final sequence of the final sequence time itself; the man of the now always thinks he is is the only man that ever lived, who knows, there may yet come a time that all of man, everything ever spoken, acted, built, destroyed, may culminate into him.

the purported flourishing of dying kingdoms, civilizations, and cultures are sometimes useful academic lies in times where the masses that reside therein have still not experienced the full flavor of a dignified freedom, so the thinker is compelled to manufacture hope; how very unfortunate that such a burden cannot be crucified in favor for the real facts of life, for the belief that a full, absolute imprisonment is substantively more liberating than poor perception of these facts of life. do not lie, and in this defeat of ours we will find peace, until matter shifts nature and the tides of history are kinder to our kind.

God had made all men distinct and their shares of burden distinct.

why is grief real and happiness illusory?

casualness is the primary symptom of societal collapse and excess speech its adjutant; here, by casualness is not meant the petty arrangement of one’s room or a “respect” for time, as if Time demanded any emotional signifier, but rather it the feudality in man that wishes respect for time, and there is a time and place, a certain utility for that properness, but no, this casualness that is devastating in its aftereffects is more a laziness in thinking, of articulating and bringing into existence a certain matter, a particular particularity through language, the fecal matter of rapid ideology.

invisible beggars crushed by the devil’s spawn, broken backs, death the only dignifying force left.

with the Law embodied and spiritualized to the capacity of the particular man, the religion dissolves into nothingness, becomes irrelevant as a category, summoning no attention.

the total destruction of reading, in due course will be, perhaps, may merely be a return to pre-literate society or perhaps, maybe even worse because this time we may have no articulable oral traditions of the narrative art to redeem us.

using religion as a total analytical category is imbecility.

an undeserved but desired attachment to the Lord makes the man beloved.

a half-hearted attempt at humanistic study is the worst form of education, but a proper devotion to it is its best form, and with or without material gain, there is nothing that may replace it; a loss of hope in it indicates a loss of hope in its more superficial elements, and by half-hearted is not meant the the duration allotted to study, but rather by the entitled attitude of the student in expecting a return on his investment, and not necessarily even financial, but rather purely intellectual, for if it is expected that grand explosions from the combustion of ideas are guaranteed, then that is capriciousness.

day and night, toiled to mend the scars, waiting for the moment they would no longer be enveloped by the clouds of fear.

for when you have been tasked by the weight of conscience itself, there is no more I.

the creator is not the aggregator, he produces but does not collate, because if he collates he becomes a lier, a pretender.

the introduction of plastics into the colonized world: a proper history to be written.

can mercy be held for the worst of the tyrants whilst seeing justice dispensed or would it be for you a moment of shameful glee? choose, and with a burning heart, plunge the dagger.

things had been left unresolved, and there was no great need to integrate the cracks.

be wary of the butcher doctor; as pain becomes the constant companion, it becomes God’s friend.

harness demonic agitation for good; it has to go somewhere, it always exists, in some form.

wrestle back the people from the State, not the State from the people, one by one, arm by arm, unbreakable bonds of dignified brotherhood, and if not, wither away and find that an acceptable and honorable end, but do not despair.

God gives the paints, what shall we make? new colors emerge, and the sky makes itself know, the grass reveals its blades now.

destruction induces new modulations of bravery previously unknown, the timid psyche is coerced to draw a new self-architecture to just survive calamity.

fires in the mind, soul, and body, alchemies. in such a state, centuries are traversed in seconds, where the words of the masters are admixed with the strokes of the masters, with the weeping of the ney.

burdened not with great lineages of these lands, not sardar nor mir, not khan nor mian; the sons of the masters, Ali and Hussain, may God be pleased with them, sully themselves not with theatrical self-perception. nay, it is the sound of the flute from which they conjure their worlds, and the all the real, the material, that they need is alchemized in their very hands without schemes of feudality, for when the decree delivers it often delivers through grace not works.

modernity splits the constituent parts of the body into discrete entities, yes, we all understand this by now that the whole is dismantled into the parts and is less than, yes this is all known certainly. but, what was to be done has been question poorly answered. there are many an answer, but none sufficient on their own for doing so would neglect the circumstantial elements of one’s particular history of being dismembered. so, you must speak to the body, to the mind, and the soul, to convince them with your spirit, that that they must make amends with one another, to remember o their shared covenant with the Lord; they are to be plead with if need be, and if the spirit fails, the Lord must intervene himself on your behalf, for if He finds mercy for your torn being, His mending will not be the healing of the tyrannical physicians or the foolish men of the Oracle, but rather one that is real, material, pure, then, and only then, are you, the man able to write what has been so ever the goal of the man, a new history of man that we so dearly long for today; for in every time memory is ravaged by the prevailing spirit of the ages, but man may be, under celestial favor, allowed to step out of the unit of time he is held captive to, and it is only then that he has the requisite capacity to speak, tell, and write this much coveted history of the new man we speak of, a history that breaks the chains of our slavery from the poison of the egoic tentacles of context, from the clutches of the Devil himself, who is the great Limiter, and then next from the feudal man that is no longer even a man; when the dam withholding the possibility of the amalgamated, fused, the whole man, is burst, there shall be no return to the olden times of when men were broken into their discrete subcomponents, rendered impotent in their minds, souls, and bodies, with their dignity stolen.

the body is broken, yet the spirit remains.

the times have always been bad, from Egypt to Rome to now, but there is a limit to how much negative input a human may perceive, so it may very well be so that the new post-post-modern psyche of man may be become very well-adapted to the trials of the future.

repair is done, not articulated, unless the repair is of an emotional sort, then speech is necessary if the repair is to be whole, for even a pat on the back may constitute a partial repair of the aggrieved; an intellectual wound, however, may be patched without speech because intuition can rearrange the problem without words.

“into the ragged meadow of my soul” cummings uttered, but you, something else, you say, right now as you are, into the burning spire of my soul!

after tragedy, the unreliable narrator becomes downright untrustworthy; while previously he had hoped to retell an account of his life to the best of his perceptive biases, now as his grip on the very facts of life begins to slip, for what had initially been a casual interpretation of the facts, now transmutes into an almost concussed fantasy.

the four horsemen: the feudal, the judge, the petty administrator, and the general.

fools ruled by fools, an infinite regression, and what is received is what is deserved, all the while the mighty thinkers wait for the wings of ideology to cast the shadow of redemption on these unholy lands; perhaps, they are the mightiest of fools.

wretched as we are, what may would we have done if afforded any substantive material ability? this induced wretchedness is the blessing of divine pity, the slave is blessed in poverty, in his ability to not commit crimes, but on the arrival of the celestial approval, he becomes not precisely “worthy,” for this is not a moral adjudication, but merely able of now to wield the matter of doom, for he is now, hasty and vain as he remains, deemed not fully bereft of an intellect; what an optimistic view on existence to assume the achievability of “realization,” we only toil and are betrayed at every step by the multitude of cognitive, emotional, and spiritual alchemical reactions in the body. the subaltern may very well declare that his time be now! that he now charts his own destiny, that he is writing a new history of man, of his own development, and that the there is no master that can say: not yet! that may very well be so, and yet, does the Lord not hold authority over all of time? rage and ask, demand, but do not question, for He is not questioned.

somehow, is it not a wondrous affair, of how “God” wills whatever the capricious mind so fortuitously desires.

was it not then the case that the meek morality of the righteous, who had the simple task of crafting out of that meekness a morality of great ruthless incision, wrecked the wretched farther still?

to reject the times is akin to attempt grasping the wind in the palm of one’s hands: there is no grasping, no rejection, only abdication of the moral demands of the times, and such an abdication comes in two types: an abdication out of perceived incapacity and the other out of a crude calculus to accrue material benefit; the feudal rejects time to satiate his unceasing hunger, and the poet rejects time for being the romantic he is, he is uniquely unable to accept how brutally torn apart the landscape of existence is.

one of the fundamental problems of prolonged isolation, you see, is the destruction of our world-making language as we begin perceiving what is around us not through words but primarily through images, as without the company of man, there is no need for language to act as the stitch for any collective perception we require to communicate; the fundamental problem with this over-reliance on images then is the lack of any self-correcting dialectical process.

the philosophers concocted theories of noble lies, of shadows, of hidden realities and perceptions, because they could find no reason their way to any proper logic as to why men should not be graded based on their perceived intellects, and who could blame them when the lunacy of the gathered masses was observed in practice, the ruckus. but, within that lunacy there is yet much more they often did not perceive, or did not want to perceive. this had not been a philosophical or religious question in the disciplinary sense, properly observed, it had been, and has been, a deeply spiritual problem that would and sets the tone for how one is to even conceive the very concept of the human; for if I am to now take the position that there is no utilitarian need for this noble deception, despite all the misgivings of the masses, and that there is a deep fractured hope in the soul of every man, wretched as he may be, truly miserable as his soul may be, a hope that transcends the domain of the perceived intellect, I free myself from the problem of class, of the shackles of measurement, of the demon of status.

feel the walls, the grains in the paint, it is a reminder that you live in a material world.

proper belief cannot be upended in any circumstance; to “lose belief” based on any contingency means that it was only whimsical inkling to begin with, merely a flirtatious affair with the divine architecture of being.

the industrialization of medicine, its capitalization, destroyed the moral fabrics of the vocation, and now it remains wasteland; being able to avoid the medicine men is now a life achievement; the noble few exist in corners of the world, but, by and large, it is all evil, a death cult. the “wise” religious man sculpted in the cauldron of modernity insists in that action is a necessary co-constituent to belief, he does not wish to be categorized as the lackadaisical oriental, so he insists on action, and it is his insistence on an already intuitive point that proves his lack of perception on two points: first, while there is a definite relation between belief and action, it is not by any means co-constitutive. second, there is no reason to assert a point that does not require an expression in language.

a story that rips the fabric of time.

what are proper first thoughts when the world extinguishes?

poor countries are labor camps for the global empire: the poor-peasant in the poor country serve their own master-peasants, who then, through the manipulation of capital and brute force, serve the global empire in more ways than one, even offering their sons and daughters with pride, as an offering to the gods of the empire, to bless this offspring of the master-peasant by etching on to their social-being the marks of elite approval, a baptism by the fire of status. the master-peasant desperately flings around his weight in efforts to catch the last train out to the perceived final journey, to an arbitrarily coercive financial system, to eden! and how curious then that the last compartment on the last carriage on the last train has its back door wide ajar for the master-peasant, almost as if now the horse that pulls the master must now push from the back; this is modernity, the grand affair of perceptive blindness, but how silly then is this master-peasant for feeling in his being this self-assuredness of having survived, of in the heart of his hearts feeling that he has been saved by what he deems to be the very hands of gracious fate! but what has been written has only been delayed as the mighty Lord tells, and then as it always turns out, somewhere along the way, one son of this brutish feudal peasant-master is struck by some poorly granulated sense of history, “tradition,” or even the color of his skin, but by then it is too late, for now the child, and he remains a child even as his hair turn white, is simply the product that had been designed, manufactured, assembled, and long already dispatched; he thinks himself the savior who has understood his own predicament, has self-diagnosed his postion in time, but he is merely now a moral liability towards the journey to the day on which the Ascension is to be truly realized.

the work must have a calculated frenzy, a controlled storm, a vigorously oscillating mind, on the basis of these tensions, through the negotiation of competing impulses and thoughts, comes what is worth speaking.

the crackling thunder often pacifies the distressed, momentarily overwhelming the capacity to perceive immediate pain.

man is not completed by child, but only by the shoves of life, and this completion is not an absolute one, rather it is the stitching together of the mosaics of his life where the scar lines always remain visible even when fused in a whole.

the modern Anglophile world has destroyed literature, the historical moment is such that the beautiful English language itself is held captive to its societies, and with the literatures of the third-world long buried into meekness, the limitations of language grow day by day, extinction of the word looms.

the idol is first worshipped, only then rejected; wealth is first acquired, only then renounced.

gamified religion is a joke.

the hostile reader’s first response is always is to negate the contents of his study and then persist in that negation, even if the evidence of the material’s truth arises upon further investigation. comparatively, the compassionately skeptical reader of the text also similarly denies the content upon first examination, but continually revises and refines his stance as the contingent process of disclosure proceeds.

pride in lineage destroys the individual, for he no longer remains an individual.

billions shall continue to be poured into “technological progress” for the coming years, that is now the very nature of capital, a mesh that continues to colonize digital space. concomitantly, an expendable army of soldiers able to manage this development shall also continue to be produced in perpetuity, and without any proper sense of themselves in time, they shall be useful instruments on further degrading the realms of law and ethics, with notions of financial autonomy, the right to private conduct, and so on, continually being eroded further, towards the aim of domesticating man. cardinal sins often lurk beneath all tectonic shifts in human history, on the pry for a chance to infect the transmutation of time; here, it is greed, masked by its more palatable sub-categories of status, prestige, illusions of stability, and a domineering world-making arrogance, that we, the army of this new capital, can make the world anew for the better. yet, it is the case, as it has always been, a feature of existence, that these regimes can always be shattered in an accelerated manner by the spontaneity of the redeeming reaction between time and agency.

first came the fall of the monastery, then the madrasa, and now then the university. the time is ripe again for a new spiritual heart of moral education; the technological monastery shall see out the end of time.

a casual pessimism is anti-religion, but a true pessimism is world-making.

relinquish your share.

the truth lies in alchemy; alchemical thoughts require instrumentalizing the mind as the field for reactions to occur, and as all reactions demand time, it must be freely allotted for ingested ideas to properly combine with the existing structure of the mind. this is the secret, as we know not what can be produced through the admixture of various intellectual elements. alternatively, biological thoughts can sprout more indigenously, more intuitively, but that is the harder path, one on which God must burn all illusions.

because historically minded writers, ironically, have naive assumptions about time, they often say egregious things without realizing the conditions of their own words. take something bizarre like “the future man will be astounded at how man had historically treated his fellow man” or some rendition of this idea. it would be rather historically sound to state something like “the future man despaired at how little had changed in how men treat other men despite all the trappings of these new times.” but a writer of the former sort is so imprisoned by the bars of his own position in time, that while he may even recognize the concept of context, he has no tools to shatter the glass of context in any meaningful sense, and shatter is the best that can be done, inducing cracks in the glassed cages of context are the limits of human capacity, but fortunately, these splits are adequate enough to let the gleams of other times filter through, to mediate against the insularity of the now, but even this is beyond the capacity of the “historian.”

every epoch has a fundamental political problem so deeply entrenched in the very fabric of political thought, produced in the crucible of that context, that without its resolution, by whatever method, the normative understanding of where we are in history remains stationary, i.e., narrative time, not physical time.

land reformation is a necessary condition of resolving the problem of the post-colonial situation. without it, there can be no substantive reorientation of the feudal architecture of society.

the reckoning is nigh, this house of cards, nay, a house built on the crystals of sugar, on the uniform, on the Seat, on the land, on a spirituality stolen, will not only crumble, it will erupt into flames, reducing its inhabitants into ash. as the doors of forgiveness are closed by the Lord upon death, so shall they be closed upon these predators right as they live; as the hermetic realm wails, rubedo, and as the numinous reckoning comes forth, the deeds and records will be struck on the Church doors for all to see.

a pharoah in every house, street, village, town, city, district, province, country, a pyramid of barbarity.

no one ever said to the birds, silence!

defining the term religion, the linguistics, the essences, is for the scholastics, whose vocation it is to define, and for the rest, it is intuition.

will is not invoked, it arises autonomously from the conditions of soul, mind, body, and their celestial arrangement. once it does emerge exogenously, it takes root in the human, and even a once derelict self is alchemically transformed, his scattered perception united upon the singular point, the nuqta, which the will now desires.

making sect politically irrelevant is a necessary precondition for the material integration of the Muslim. at the twilight of time itself, the world of petty fiefdoms is over.

when the mind stops perceiving time, it at first loses the logical strictures that create images of life, and then it is made free, and with this newfound autonomy, he ventures into a new world, back into time, but not from it, of it, just through it.

the cruder temptations may be rebuffed with ease, but the imprints of childhood, those that create the most persisting of temptations, have a more suffocating grip on the self: say, why does the dying old man still feel in himself the urgent necessity to please others who are not yet dying, not yet indisposed like him? this is the temptation of the existential sort, he remains what the psychoanalysts of the day call “unhealed”; yet, he is not unhealed, he is just himself, and he will always be like that in a fundamental sense, and the more he attempts the prescription of self-healing, the further he erodes the fabric of his world-making sense, but when he accepts his wound, he is not “healed,” he is liberated by the burden of being whole.

the less the contradictions in the desires of the self, the more well-adjusted the soul remains through the ebbs and flows of life. for instance, if you covet two, seemingly, incompatible objects, the innate reality of their incompatibility notwithstanding, you will always have some degree of regret, for if you acquire the first, you shall miss the second, and if the second, you mourn the first, and if both, you are unable to contain together in the mind your own perceptively contradictory possessions, and without this integration, which at times may truly very well may be impossible, either due to historical circumstance, say the childhood, or even metaphysical contingencies, you are destroyed.

third-world art, unless liberated from the strictures of a particular liberal secularity, remains impotent; a restless focus on the self, on desires, on abstractness, and on memories, do not particularly serve the cause. this art is an affair with the self, and this type of bourgeoise artist perhaps even realizes the limits of his own context but knows nothing else, for if he tries now to be “traditional,” barring exceptions, he often corrupts the very object of his gaze, and in trying to induce agency into the marginal, he changes the very elements of its being.

God can impede the effects of the contingencies of history on the self.

upon witnessing destruction the believer seeks refuge in God’s mercy, while the lost curse and wail, with sullied tongues, with meaningless assemblage of words, a vital epistemic difference.

the capacity and possibility of circumstances worsening exponentially is often cast aside as an improbability.

entitlement will bring about the end of time, over land, air, food and water; a tiny minority becomes the instruments of the fates and yet, men are not owed any of this, and in the final calculus, God shall restore the oppressed.

the mother’s tear is the greatest tragedy.

for the most intimate relation, of man’s with himself, there is no need for an audience.

once a request for intimacy is accepted in the heavens, God has to, nay, wants to, radically restructure the inner composition of man, bit by bit, thought by thought; the vessel must be made anew.

the mountains remain to be crushed, the sky yet to be folded; from the mountains you descend, through the valleys and glades, on to land that is holy and pure.

casual degeneracy admixed into the mundane aspects of life rusts the pillars of society, step by step walks the devil, bit by bit, chipping away like a woodpecker.

the talismanic tunics must be retrieved, the reckoning is nigh.

there never have been any rules in the egalitarian sense, crude power is always found lurking beneath facades of language and structures, only sterling resolve accepts and then simultaneously resists this fact.

accelerated time aides to impale the iron rods of secularity into the mundane aspects of life; these are the chores of a globalized modernity, from which there is hardly any escape, and through this colonization of time itself, the objectives of human enslavement are met.

precedents may have a place in law, but in the domain of History, being dominated by specters of the past for normative orientation, which, while may have some incontrovertible role, can be deadly. in fact, to rely on them is even sacrilegious when it becomes an insult to the human capacity to create something new.

purely existentialist approaches caricatured the mechanism of meaning making by removing God as a normative field; it was assumed that there was a liberatory aspect in inducing in an act or thought a wholly independent structure of meaning, a costly mistake when it was God himself who had enabled the language that was assumed as sovereign in itself.

man’s hubris may be cured through the simple impairment of his eyelid’s ability to move, and yet this is man, waging war, oppressing the weak, a certainly foolish creature, a thoroughly wretched animal.

God will dominate in one way or another, so pray it be through His beauty, not by His grandeur.

the old direction extinguishes, cherish it.

worship can only be intended, not performed in an agentive sense, and the heavenly adjudication takes that into its account. works and acts are circumstantial, while faith is true vertically, from man to God; “willing is acting,” Ludwig is right, and that the “wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it.” but what if the will fails to deliver the action to its intended end? God is merciful.

the demonic capacity to poison the intellect increases with every generation, the very same base corruptions are expressed in progressively more injurious manifestations; what had previously harmed one, now harms a thousand.

industry must be harnessed and capital moralized, pierce forward into future with radically good intentions; once there is a shift in the material arrangement of societies, there is no return to an imagine Eden, hence the tools must be taken before they are taken. the final story of moral capital remains yet to be written.

a society reliant on the moral opinions of celebrities is already a carcass, to need such steps to create awareness for any of the world’s many tragedies is an easy abdication of individual responsibility; it is like expecting the court jester to emancipate the serfs.

the chains of morality have geographical axes too, many of which have definitively cracked in multiple poles. take this site: the plethora of empty churches, some vacant physically, some intellectually; there is nothing there, and the saints gone into hiding.

upon the decimation of the psyche, ask to be gifted dreams in your sleep, and God may yet reveal answers.

if given the opportunity, the study of mathematics and the arts, in a pure sense, without any immediate compulsion to find utility for them, must be embraced; revel in the abstract even if application later becomes an obligation.

Ludwig uttered truly, ah yes! a value judgement so disliked by the “historian,” that “what cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about,” and so, what can be imagined can not only be talked about, but must be talked about, not in the superfluous sense of Jane has a wonderful cat, although, arguably, that is not superfluous at all if Jane’s cat produces beauty in this miserable world, and perhaps, here we have, through language, arrived at the conclusion that there may very well be an obligation to speak about everything that can be spoken about, the moral obligation of discovering beauty.

the historian can be a worse lier than the newscaster; both speak authoritatively but the latter’s facade is not assisted by the weight of “expertise.” the caster often knows the depth of his fraud, but the historian remains unaware of his own lies.

mythical thinking in the Punjab has turned to stone, completely frozen, still, the songs of the birds are still heard echoing over the fields of mustard.

there is vital difference between anonymity to protect communal interests and pontificating without consequence.

melancholic chronology.

believe in demons in a real sense.

humor in the vulgar sense is amongst the lowest modes of interacting with the world, it is arrested development. there is no contradiction between having proper wittiness and a sober life, there just is no space for a casual and profane response to the facts of life.

taking pride in the flesh is idiotic for the multiple reasons, amongst them is the basic fact of fate, and another is that it is not even clear whether the flesh is even coterminous with man.

do not squash the bug, it is alive in its own world.

if crushing the bug does not induce severe mental disturbance in the mind, then either one has habituated himself to a life of inattention or he has a clear acceptance of where he thinks he stands in the order of this world.

the voices from the forest will fall on your ears like hushed whispers, calling you back, and at the end of time, the trees that remain will always be there, and under their shade you would rest your broken back as perception diminishes.

desiring an object or state is not necessary, and certainly not sufficient, but rather accidental, in the achievement of a particular end.

a fundamental confusion about Muslim time is linear intellectual decay, which eschatologically is an acceptable thesis, but if we overlay linear time with a sketch of nodal time, meaning time in a singular unit, there is no reason for divinely orchestrated flourishing of the intellect to not take effect.

at the end, insularity becomes pleasurable to even the most cosmopolitan of sober minds.

if strong of resolve, voluntarily imprison yourself in a room without any mirrors; the bonds of material attachment will shatter.

on this wretched Earth, we deserve to exist only if refashion ourselves in the image of Caesar, and even then, when there is a great fire, even that mask will not save us.

new age writing demands total clarity, an irritation against any esoteric or mystical elements to speech; a travesty.

denigrating the beggar comes from a soul not fully cognizant of its own needs. is one, anyone, not a beggar in some sense?

the Empire crushes the external and at times, the internal, while the brave resilient resistance just crushes its own.

there is no break from coloniality without land redistribution; it is land that makes all real.

upon the destruction of life before death is the complete unveiling of this fact of life that one is utterly alone, in a full sense. certainly, one may have appendaged company in the form of a family or a friend, but that is not total, and it is this drive towards completion that alerts one to his solitude upon the devastation of his life. hence, God.

certain behaviors and thoughts of others appear as preposterous because one is often unable to achieve perspective; if they could inhabit the circumstances that someone may have underwent to come to that position, judgement would be rendered almost useless, apart from edification.

the acceptance of mortality, in a true sense, is perhaps amongst the highest of realizations.

thought is co-constituted with the facts of life, and so the solutions sought to the problems of life cannot be ascertained intellectually with any great resolution without the actual process of life.

how is that one is to reach the beloved when millions crowd this path?

after overwhelming tragedy the adult does not necessarily always age in the sense of psychological movement of personality; often, there is a rather severe regression to child-like templates of the world and existence, the reason being that when tragedy demolishes the scaffolding of adult perception, one has to subsist on the most primal, here child-like, maps of the world.

every night is the most melancholic night for someone.

the vulgarity of the times gives more and more credence to traditional grief rituals, which, while at other times may be viewed as “excessive,” now provide a much needed sobriety to the crudeness of the times.

prolonged imprisonment breaks the linearity of time, and once freed, the immediacy of the next moment becomes less imposing.

compulsion understood properly would reconfigure improper views on guilt and forgiveness.

the manhole is missing, all speech of decolonization is insanity.

trials are in the margins, in the intersections of competing domains of life, of morality, not in the centers.

God owes nothing, and is not compelled by the logic of His justice; His provision is not a payment but a gift.

understand exile as a loving blow of fate.

the unremarkable becoming remarkable indicates either great tragedy or great beauty.

spontaneity can descend into madness if not tempered. take the example of the film script, where the dialogue often expresses itself in a such an over-crafted way that it feels overly spontaneous, overly-constructed, as if it comes not from lived human experience but rather primarily through the genre of the script, which often erases the social mooring of dialogue itself, and what we are left with is an often whimsical understanding of the writer that narrates the story as he wishes it were, rather than it really is. yet, there is something instructive in this desire to over produce dialogue, a yearning to move past the strictures of social life. perhaps then, infusion of script into real life may still prove to be a path against psychological stagnation. so either spontaneity must be introduced to a diminished life or reduced from an overly manic one.

when one says, rather capriciously, that prison is a state of mind, or rather accurately, a condition derived from sense perception, one can quite easily criticize such a statement for being naive. however, if the definition is actually developed further, it becomes much more difficult to do so. taken to its most polished form, this is true. however, any crude proposition of the matter will leave the aggrieved and the oppressed duly agitated at what they would conceive as a misunderstanding of their true state, a brutal invalidation of their suffering, for the broken must believe that his suffering is both unique and universal, for if it is not the former, he would be rendered invisible, and if it is not the latter, the desperation of unbelonging would crush his spirits.

tangible effects of memory are often overstated and intangible ones often understated. take, for instance, the notion of some phrase like the “stain on history” of x, often strutted around after some tragic or seemingly immoral event. by that what is generally meant is the tradition of memory operating as some omnipresent world-making moral force. the facts of life are such that it is often the case that the grand tradition of “memory” is fractured, deceptive, and sometimes just plainly forgetful. and it is also often the case that what cannot be remembered is often revealed not by traditions of memory, story, and narrative but in the the very composition of the body, of its minutest movements.

what room is there for even a particle of arrogance from the one who is imprisoned in time, one who cannot even see the start or the end, has no agency over birth or demise? hence, they say that if you knew yourself, you would know God.

true tragedy prevents any philosophizing in the moment. yet, the saint can still do so.

you can find God in squalor while recognizing the need to leave it.

self-blame over self-hate, the spiritual answer.

the realization of the wish to produce beauty, to create into this world something of joy, without having the ability to do so, is hell.

modernity is a relativistic abstraction that makes sense, in an absolutist way, in the present moment. perhaps, in a few hundred years, “modernity,” despite its radical alteration of material existence, may be considered quite ancient. another leap of change outstripping sense perception’s ability to integrate it into its existential architecture is very possible, even likely. or, perhaps change will burn out on itself, a regression to stone and iron, that too is possible; with history, nothing is inevitable.

literary critique is often more dogmatic than it realizes; it is the opposite of anthropology’s self-hatred.

accepting that one’s incivility needs to be rectified is a precondition for a normal society; it is wildly dangerous to believe that acts of such incivility are in any sense a fixed and vital part of “culture.” it needs to be excised and burnt away to leave what is good in culture, like a tree fire line.

“God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons” says Muir, and he is right, but he discounts human nature for man immediately asks God “could you not have taught me such lessons without inducing such suffering?” there will always be a primal dislike towards pain, it is always that وعسى ان تكرهوا شيئا وهو خير لكم وعسى ان تحبوا شيئا وهو شر لكم والله يعلم وانتم لا تعلمون.

every act of justice, of love, care and calm, is freedom.

belief in agency, despite not having it, is free will.

the funeral is the only reality.

every age needs a new configuration of human, for the problems of the now differ, at least to some extent, and it is important that this new humanity that we discover be always rooted in a deepest optimism that things may be okay.

there is no erasure of the life already lived; like poorly erased pencil marks on paper, it can just fade enough to write something new.

the first real marks of grief on the human souls can never be erased, a grief that crosses the threshold of one’s capacity remains, it needs life to be built around it, nurturing it like a plant that refuses to live until forced through suitable conditions.

legitimate pride presumes immortality, and if one is mortal, pride only makes him an impostor.

however one defines happiness, as a feeling, a state, or an orientation, in its truest form, in its most honest expression, it is an exceedingly rare phenomenon. it would not be an exaggeration for someone of a sound mind to say that they have perhaps only been happy for an hour in their entire lifetime. then, to “be” or “feel” happy all the time or even most of the time, in this particular sense, is insulting.

the beauty of God’s existence is the unveilings with time that would have left a people of the past astounded.

moralizing is best done through beauty and love; how torrid is a regurgitated moralizing, how empty when it rejects pain, brushes it away as an inconvenient fact of life.

perception is a wondrous affair; if you could truly realize that animals exist, that a bird shares this world with you and looks upon you, it would shake your being.

the sub-continent is dead. it’s a feudal primitive hell, with primitivity having nothing to do with “modernity” or “development,” but with attitudes about law, order, beauty, right and wrong. there is no future because there is no plan for one; there is no regard for the trees, the animals, the air, or for man; only the beauty of the mountains remains, and that too man has had no part in. does God look upon with favor and pleasure? yes, it is perhaps true that men of God still reside here, but they are ineffectual and consigned to interiorities. besides, wherever the masses are moralizers, there is little room for the beauty of the spirit, as hypocrisy becomes the dominant orientation. in beautiful societies, morality flows as an outcome, not as a theoretical first principle. the question of fault is also a quagmire of the more pernicious sort: it is just hard to say at this juncture in historical time. yes, colonization and its remnant, nationalisms, and others are some common explanations, but there is a malaise, a pscyho-physical malaise that prevents civility, beauty, culture; now, hope itself is parasitical as it promotes the inertia that coddles. in fact, hope in its cruder understanding is fundamentally regressive. those cannot keep a street clean are not properly humans, just flesh masquerading as such. we have betrayed not only ourselves, but God, and all that is beautiful about the human experience. look at the dogs outside! they lie dying, their bones tearing through their emaciated decomposing flesh, majestic birds falling out the ruined grey skies; countless children, women, and men, abused and ended. what else is left? a cataclysm must be brought forth, for this state is simply untenable.

man can slowly acclimatize to the worst of conditions, which do not necessarily become “easier” from a perceptive sense, but rather simply not the unexpected anymore, which in itself reduces any sense of shock to one’s predicament.

the highest orientation towards God is love; when the world, its peoples and its structures, kick you to the curb, it is God who is the balm, his oneness dissolves the most desperate of situations.

the sky makes itself majestic over everything, making you minute, yet when it is rolled up, you will persist.

idol-worship has returned to Persia, and its great sages sob in the heavens.

the birth of the Prophet, may all the peace and be blessings upon him and his progeny, cracked the fabric of the universe, a schism in time itself; it is the reason that the imagination of many a muslim does not effectively conceive of time before him. still, wherever there has been excess, the specters of the time before him return: idol worship.

how can you depart this world without exerting yourself to bringing forward all the beauty that you can? how can you die as such?

there is a lack of Muslim thinkers in practice, most are exegetes at this point in time, and that is perhaps a consequence of material conditions — the poet has to be reborn, stitching the the antidote within the word rather than further footnotes. but naturally, the question that arises is whether he can emerge without the the necessary conditions of society that give birth to thought, which further invokes the question of the relationship, in the first place, between thought and material, which will always, unequivocally, not have a conclusive resolution. all the same, perhaps, there may yet be a kindling of spirits without the necessary preconditions, which would ultimately make them unnecessary: essentially, a miracle — a rupture in natural causalities. still, this search for the poet too can be dangerous, as it presumes a certain aesthetic requirement, or a specific perfection, for change, which may or may not be necessary.

you can be the ancestor you did not have.

doing “ethics” academically is akin to taking pictures of a burning man rather than lending an arm.

in the greatest of tragedies, there oft are no reasonable answers, nothing that comforts one’s sense of meaning; ask the mother that loses her young child, how do you get along now, mother? that, in itself, is a question only borne in the psyche of the unharmed person; what “good” answer would the mother have? she will say something, she has to, but it wouldn’t be what she truly feels, experiences every hour of the day, with brief guilty reprieves; the truth is that she does not get along, she perhaps never will, and yet, at the same time, she cannot just die, and hence, lives without answers, resigning in hope that she may yet again see the child, in dreams or after all that is solid becomes nothing.

there never is a good time to die, yet how to make sense of our almost innate anguish at seeing a life taken “too early,” one not permitted to take part in all the joys and catastrophes of life in contrast to an old woman passing away gently in her sleep, after a life “well-lived.” the infant that dies is viewed as an almost inanimate object, not yet conscious enough of the consequences of its own demise, not stripping away with itself decades of memories, tales, and love created. the man at the cusp of vigorous adulthood, of a particular psychological maturity, is mourned the most, not necessarily only from an emotional standpoint, but rather a sociological one for he represents an unfinished project, in whom we see shadows of our own lives, whose memory will linger on the longest. the grief unexpected is the grief that wrecks, these are the burdens of life, and there is no other option but to cultivate a love so cavernous, so deep, that sustains oneself, makes it slightly easier to breathe, until its time for one to follow whom they lost into the next world.

there are a good number of theodicies developed by the thinkers of the past, to make sense of the calamitous nature of misfortunes that befall men; some even reject these theodicies to protect their fellow men from ones that attribute blame to the afflicted. in either case, there is an impulse to ask the why. depending on one’s pre-existing beliefs some of them are movingly powerful: take perhaps the most powerful theodicy through which many a men have survived through the faith that God is to recompense one’s pain in the after-life, removing all memory of sorrow. yet, it will always still hurt in the present moment, no conceptualization of the after-life can in actuality mend what is broken in the now. even if it is mend in this world, until the moment it is not, there is the devastation of the now. man may very well be asked in the heavens if he suffered, and he may very well answer, no! لا والله يا رب ما مر بي بؤس قط ولا رأيت شدة قط! this is the human condition: he would forget even the most utterly excruciating of circumstances, but now, right now, he cannot, and hence the theodicy does not succeed in a full sense. this, too, is the human condition: no questions may be asked, no language possible, that solves the problem of pain as a temporal good; this, likewise, is nothing but the manifestation of God’s sovereignty that obstructs the very act of questioning for He is not asked what he does.

in repeat encounters, if you are unable to form fond memories with those in your vicinity, you are better served being in solitude.

through socialization, and perhaps also through innate dispositions, men adopt certain heuristics to evaluate whether they are extracting the maximum possible meaning from their lives, and they get anxious when the answer to that query is anything less than optimal; it is a frustration that festers as they try to amend the course of their lives, attempting to glance back in the past to ask the dreaded question of what-if, and then almost instinctively, the question of what now, and every so often rather than continuing to excavate newer possibilities of meaning making, they default to accepting “the way things are.”

government must be made to obey the common man; unquestioned subservience to man is a rejection of God.

it is a myth that only a petrostate deploying quasi-enslaved labour can effectively steward the Holy Lands; the devotion of the ordinary, of the wretched, in conserving their holy spaces is often dismissed.

the best philosopher has to be the best mathematician or, more contentiously, the best architect, for there are few disciplines in which ideas can be reproduced materially.

the death drive of our times: nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, technologies that disrupt historically stable economic systems, “developments” that seek to detach the human mind from nature and spirit, to deracinate man’s love for his land and his brother. there is in this drive a fundamental disrespect for life, or for life after death, which is a natural outcome of atheistic nihilism, found also in the most religious of psyches, and not “materialism,” indeed, a rightly ordered materialism is even needed for spiritual refinement.

keeping alive is a daily task.

average person thinking civilizationally is not useful. water your plants, be kind to the weak. civilization is a second order outcome. it is not a “political” instrument.

sovereignty is an abused concept. in its most crude sense, that of “political” sovereignty, expressed by some vague notion of exerting unilateral power within fixed borders, is often harmful to the ordinary people. great crimes and suffering have been imposed based on some fractured understanding of maintaining sovereignty. power players would rather exert this sort of vulgar sovereignty even at the cost of decimating the lives of their constituents. this sort of sovereignty is only perhaps liberating or life-enhancing if coupled by a corresponding increase in the quality of life of the people.

cry everyday; there are always reasons to cry every day, and to not do so is a step towards death, وتولى عنهم وقال يأسفى على يوسف وابيضت عيناه من الحزن فهو كظيم.

do not get lost in being a “muslim.” pray, obey your Lord and love the Prophet, submit but do not reduce yourself to this thing that you are that has to defend its existence on the civilizational scale, you are much more precious than that.

surviving tragedies comes with the tethered effect of joy and pleasure migrating from lofty social ideals to the fundamental facts of life: steps, plants, air.

and so it continues, long after you are dust, the spirit of man lives on, in memories, traces, and synchronicities.

remember the dead. read obituaries from towns you do not belong to. would you not want to be remembered when you die? remembering the dead accords them a dignity that is so basic to the proper human experience.

the “doctor” is often the tyrant.

learn to feel like the cripple, the forsaken, the orphan, the widow, the poor, the dying, even if you are not.

the idea of legacy generally populates the mind at an older age when man is more cognizant that he is mortal. the notion of being remembered is not primarily about “leaving behind” something of value for those in one’s circle of socialization, but rather it is a presentist act that comforts the mind and the ego, it is a self-soothing attempt to solidify the feeling that one really exists.

there was moment, a period, during the technological revolution when utility of invention became inversely correlated to human well-being. the threshold of utility was crossed, and while it made sense to reach that point, the forces of production, obviously, could not be stopped at the equilibrium where mental well being was perfectly harmonized with the levels of mechanical change.

being dogmatic is unintelligent for many reasons, but the primary one is the mere fact that we do not know enough about the nature of the universe, of matter, to be so.

to feel persistent shock over tragedies requires excessive entitlement.

retrospective moralization after the fact of tragedy is a devastatingly human trait.

anger can never be a primary virtue, rage can never be productive. it’s self-defeating, pyrrhic. the tough things must be done out of love. anger as expression versus anger as motive are very separate.

when you break the pillars of common sense, there is no longer a referent to guide action, anything goes.

it is unclear whether weeping and silence, or laughter and outbursts, constitute the best medicine for the soul. perhaps both. there is no clear reason either should not have the same underlying mechanics.

one more day, it might still be.

ever since I have gained consciousness, I have been trying, my lord.

in the first moment sleep breaks, God leaves an impression on the mind of what’s to come.

every tragedy is all consuming, until the next bigger one.

what is miraculous or not is often defined by frequency in an inverse relation, not essentially by the quality of the event.

there is no wrestling with destiny once it has imposed itself. before it does, one can, at least in perception, wrestle with the outcome of time.

I remain too weak to force my will to coincide with yours, Lord. Forgive us for what we aim but fail to do. Is it not your will that is too lofty?

gratitude is modulated on a sliding scale. more precisely, increasing gradations of deprivation and suffering is the only way, for the ordinary, to develop and refine their sense of gratitude.

anything may destroy you, that is life.

the quranic ethos is an umbrella over all other scripture; it pulls closer their cracks, gives them merciful shade.

take a bath 3 times a day, drink bottled water ruthlessly extracted from hundreds of miles away.

a year is not long.

the only three states of freedom: death, disability, or annihilation in God.

help me! to trust you, God.

winter abound, make or break.

the devil has disappeared from discourse, partly explained by the hypertrophic growth of the self, which, with its associated bloating, affects perception, in turn allowing the spirit of the devil respite to dissipate into structures of society.

yet, if this is to be age of the individual, of the self, then so be it. it does not necessarily have to be the age of the meretricious self, it could be the age of the divine self, of the glorious flourishing of the human spirit, of one man, not a great man, just a man able to unite the part to the whole, totum simul.

wash yourself with tears from the sky, of divine nature crying to give life to the dying, to the rotting.

forgiveness derived from guilt is an inferior type, a negative virtue, than the one derived from the conscious or unconscious abdication of potential, a positive virtue.

karbala is islam’s christian suffering.

saviors are stupid, save yourself.

Faith: belief without experience, not belief without evidence. evidence may be repeated frequently on separate occasions, but it is not real unless subjective. However, experience, the subjective and visceral contact with the object of belief, is real, in a material way.

theorizing or opining about the ummah is indulgent at best and harmful at worst. it is not an idea to be thought and implemented. it is a second level outcome of acts, not a first level one.

cleaning a dirty street is piety.

I saw the Prophet sitting on a mat, with his back against the stone wall. I sat by his crossed legs, with my head bowed as in severe need of him. He looked at me with a mending smile and held my head to let me cry as I held his leg like a drowning man. and his companion then said: you had made a wish to join this highest of assemblies, but did you pay your dues? I asked: what dues as I held on to his leg as he stayed silent, onlooking. the companion replied: you made a wish for the loftiest of heavens, for the gift of our presence. I commend you for your ambitions, but then you, unready as you were, asked for a life of grief, your entry to this gathering.

“I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will guide them and restore comfort to Israel’s mourners, creating praise on their lips. “Peace, peace, to those far and near,” says the Lord. “And I will heal them.”

a basic islamic premise may be said to be the fact of religion being for all times and places. a priori, then, modernity has to be a friend of religion. anything less is just a failure of imagination or will.

The value of a clear sky, with glimpses of a cloud, is lost on the free. Only the imprisoned can understand, in earnest, what a sky is. perhaps even on a more basic level, the sky may very well be a child’s realization of divinity. what else can captivate the soul, the senses, to that degree? specks of orange in the sky? the great painters of our and previous ages have always took to the sky to find refuge from the superficial dimensions of society. arguably nothing represents man’s innate disposition to find release from bodily experience than his desire for the sky, for the mysteries harbored within, for the potential of life yet witheld.

The template is there, so it can be achieved. It exists in a moment, so it can exist in many moments.

Is death momentous or merely just there? A grand rupture or?

why would you not wish to be united with your Lord? when you know even the most pleasurable moment of your life, in which you felt no pain or grief, was so ephemeral. is it not true that the entire map of human history is splattered with an aching desire to eradicate the perception of pain? from the debauchery of the wayward to the trance of the mystic, whatelse is the goal? man knows innately that there is the possibility of a creating permanence to unending relief from pain, but he also innately know that it cannot be brought into existence into this world, the famed kingdom of God. perhaps, it can to some limited extent, but never fully, even the highest of mystics would concede to the claim that we have to settle for good enough, that death is the precondition for what man pursues so fervently. what is to be done then? the realization that this world is both an anemic iteration for heaven and for hell is dizzying at first to the man who yields to it fully in spirit, when he moves beyond an intellectual acceptance to a total agreement to the fact. even in the most wondrous of meadows, with lush tapestries of green, you will always find the rotting dead wood and dying patches of grass, but then even in the gulag, you might witness the piercing beauty of a speck of the sun, lancing through the tiniest of cracks to plant a kiss of divine warmth on to your cheek. all of life is that, unstable, so why would you not wish to be united with your Lord?

glorious resolve.

“corruption” is very simply just incompetence, needs no great analytical efforts.

many critiques of secularism are remarkably stupid because they wish to rescue religion or tradition from the clutches of a modernity seeking to regulate them. the only useful ones are perhaps those that imagine religion or tradition as friends of modernity, of the awful nation state, and if it is innately violent, temper it, soothe it. it is simply a failure of imagination of being so beholden to the past, that one is almost afraid of imagining a future that accepts the present, the status quo, the raw hard empirical facts, now that is a romanticism of the highest order. idealism can be an excuisite good but not as a general principle of thought. no room for idiotic fatalism and its deceptively warm refuge of history.

structured chaos, within the bounds of certain organizing principles, rapid movement, the daze of spontaneity.

choice and free will are perhaps the most privileged concepts in human history.

fate accounts for the “random,” for the statistically unpredictable on the subjective level.

the heart must burn even for the worst of men, for how they desecrate their souls, for how they erect an impermeable wall between themselves and all that is kind and beautiful, divine.

I know not what is better for me, constriction or expansion.

take a bath, what a wondrous affair.

expanding the boundaries of life, of experience, directly constrains the enormity of tragedy.

even after being ravaged, being undone by loss, the human spirit has to persevere, until it can return to its maker.

near death experiences, the only real chance to burn the impurities of gold away. often missed in the relief of being delivered.

the blessing of suffering can only be called as such by those who have suffered.

death opens doors.

of suffering, there remain many a kind. yet, ultimately, when logic and casuistry, or both, end, the only split, the dividing line so to speak, in material experience remains the state of health or sickness. religionists or others may speak to other forms of intangible maladies of the soul or else, but phenomenological experience reaches its boundary of reality in the viscerality of pain.

childlike wonder, elderly wisdom.

the magnitude of the tragedy is decided by the psyche. it is thoroughly subjective on the singular phenomenological level. objective analyses assume a wrongful conformity of perception.

for a man, sons or daughters often represent a perpendicularity of aspirations, never quite meeting even if the desire for that intersection remains, for that equity. the daughter whose love is supremely unconditional to the father is the object of redemption, of a love not predicated on any productive value. the son is frequently a referent towards mimetic potential, meaning a vessel, a being, in which the father, rather anxiously, see himself projected in future time. as such, the son faces the brunt of being burdened with remediating the father’s misfortunes, failures, abdications, of bringing to fruition a desire of an egotistical triumph over material existence. what is lost in this architecture of familial ties is hard to ever know fully. the son is the patriarch reproduced, without volition, a savior for dreams yet unfolded. what is the daughter? a savior too, but from another self-construed prison of the father, she is the sunlight to a perception otherwise blotted out with whimsy.

shamelessness within the norms of shamefulness is radical.

we are a defeated people, and will remain so for the foreseeable time. lack of dignity, excellence, glory.

it’ll be okay, uncertainty, hope.

I know I have not met the conditions of your love, my lord. But! Love me! You are not bound by your conditions, to say that you are would be wholly disgraceful. And I know I cannot meet those conditions in that state you have bound me to. So, love me because the anguish is too great otherwise. “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

what does religion have to do with being conquered? let’s say for instance the case of the modern French army routing a band of undisciplined Mamluks in Egypt. is that because the latter’s beliefs were not in order? preposterous. even if that may have been the case, who is man to pontificate or adjudicate about it? to attempt to do God’s work is in itself grounds for defeat. the only task would have been to excel, materially, tangibly, solid, something they could not do.

the most decolonial act is to have a functioning society.

the time to think has been over for a long while. action is the only proper mode of living now.

and I would not have granted you my kingdom if I had not burned you, you would have never, on your own accord, come to me with your full heart and soul.

you’re not where I wanted you to be, so I chose this for you, so you are where you need to be.

buy gold in dubai, become party to an economy of holoucaust.

historically, most “old money” is also dubious.

I could not bear his stench and cursed it in my head, until it came to me that I, too, had been lying to die, rotting away, by everyone, those dear to me and those not. a wave of compassion overcame my heart.

I am the miracle! It is me! Why are you incessantly looking for something else?

and the pain stopped, not because it did not hurt anymore, but because the capacity to feel it had extinguished itself.

bravery from us, patronizing tears from you.

traumatic suffering radically alter the constitution of the self, the elemental blocks upholding the self have to reorganize to stitch the gaping wunds, a new man is produced and the past is sequestered away as an entity alien to the present condition.

trust no one but God, not even your mother, for she may love you but may yet cause harm to you. as for God, He does not harm for if you get harmed you will merely say that the fault was your own, or that the harm is gain in some way not yet revealed.

and it will be decades before these crimes are recognized, and by then the harm would have already occured.

very little gained from critiques of things not malevolent; it breeds attitudes of contempt not commensurate with faith and goodness

tragedy, tragedy, grief, grief ; constant self-flagellation is not respectful to memory, even if out love. there is no other choice than hope, logically, spiritually, intuitively.

dubai, doha, riyadh, hell. karachi, delhi, dhaka, hell-like. samarkand, bukhara, khiva, lost pasts.

of course, things can be developed indefinitely, but you must stop at some point.

don’t be forced to feel religious experience.

all loss can be lived through; the mind will always find an architecture of belief to compartmentalize it, be it death even.

destroy a society, let your children study said destroyed society, extracting cultural artefacts, be it art or poems, then uphold your findings as definitive understandings of said societies, teach these findings of yours to the sons of the destroyed natives, but when those native sons try to break away from the norms you create, you let them know their place, and best if it is other sons of the native that do your bidding, marry into them too if need be, always reminding them their pasts are made by you and that they have no presents until the presents become fossilized pasts.

enjoy your sandwich.

it cannot be wished away, it must end on its own

grace is dead, the minds are shattered, technologies of evil.

so self-conscious that no self-consciousness.

the anatomy of fear: terrror stricken blood, passed down generations.

often what is “impressive” is mostly grace and fortune

what is prison? it is any state of perceived constriction. time dies in prison. more precisely, it loses meaning. time becomes undressed of its social bearings. it is the theft of time. then, what is freedom after prison? it is the realization that there is still life left to live. as soon as that is grasped, there is possibility again, but first there is great instability. Kierkegaard, albeit slightly differently, speaks about anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” here, leaving prison creates a fundamental dilemma in one’s mind: to live as before imprisonment or to live as a new man. now, any reasonable man would determine that it would be folly to live as before, but what exactly is he supposed to transmute into? what kind of man? it is not a simple question at all. at first, he would crave to return to his habits of mind and action before he was taken prisoner. it is not unnatural to desire a return to the “pure” before. however, the problem that faces him is that he is not who he was and cannot occupy his old being. then, moving into this new life of his has to be dizzying.

by September, my dear, to see you walk on your two feet and breathe the air that has been so denied from you, would be more than all the world combined and more to me.

asking for the civilian to be supreme, but not demanding neither ensuring his excellence is just infinite regress

act with radical and absolute free will and accept your destiny

beauty can come from evil, and ugliness from piety, but only as outcomes, not as intentions

medical centralization will destroy mankind, an instrument of control, domination, and desecration of human totality, incompetency masked by veneers of authority, satanic. an ethics of care lost to greed and vanity. we think animals are domesticated, but we forget we can be too, maybe we are now. in modernity, the profession of the physician is amongst the most prone to corruption. this is because certain professions require the highest degree of ethical attention. however, such attention most readily debased by financial considerations and an inordinate fixation on vocation rather than duty. ancient and medieval philosophers in the Perso-Greek vein often used the the figure of the physician as an ideal surrogate for the just ruler, precisely because the ideal ruler like the good physician reduces harm.

i wish you made it, my friend. you were meant to do such amazing, such brilliant things. the light in your eyes, you were always so curious like a child, with those absurd button-downs.what could contain your unending spirit? your time had just come, what else could be done? what is left of you? nothing that looks like you remain, to hold and cherish. are memories enough? you were so scared that you thought you were not yourself anymore, but you were always you, and i feel sorry that we could not make you believe that. we hope you can find that home of yours now, near the trees, cliffs, and the ocean that you always imagined, with your friends near the mejlis on the meadow. we could not go there with you, and that is a tragedy. what is left behind when you took all this love with yourself? you were there, absolute in presence, resolute in perception. what now? our lives are just fragments of attention, sometimes we cannot put ourselves back together, force ourselves back into shape, through jabr, He can but who can claim to be able to ask that of him. a good spirit you were, and it was remarkable how you could be equally happy and grieved in the same moment. through eyes different than your own, if you saw yourseld, maybe you could start to believe the joy you brought us was real and solid, material. you never allowed yourself the joy of being visible. be well now.

the piano, its harmony across the breeze; van gogh’s greens and blues: the ocean and the cliff; a boat sailing away in the distance, gentle.

i was harmed! greatly harmed!

alive as I am, despite these wounds.

critiques of colonialism have reached a strange impasse. there is little on offer. repetition of trite points makes any study immediately unhelpful. critique requires a certain energy that cannot be simply conjured from one’s library. thought has exhausted itself and it cannot just emerge from a mind that has not lived through the change that it wants to bring. the restoration has not come yet because the hearts are not yet pure, free from envy. it will come but the alchemy needs to be correct. the alignment needs precision, heart, love, and care, not desire, coveting, or tartuffery.

strands of his hair started gray at speed. it was not the natural and gentle unfolding of age. it was the weight of death, imprisonment, and torture.

“right side of history” is an asinine way of moral reasoning. it unjustifiably accords “history” the final adjudication on the limits of imagination; it’s an emaciated perception of History that resembles a dead reservoir of precedents and examples, one that only passes judgment on criminality ex post facto. if, as Nietzsche warns, history is devoid of a “higher force,” a “life-giving influence,” it only serves to diminish human capacity for its highest imaginable possibilities.

field work, interrogating the archive, grappling with the sources: this is the death of love, art, and care

profits will end time

eschatological view: pessimistic futures, hopeful ends

“bloody chap, shine my shoes.” “yes sir.”

“i must write! to save myself! there is not much else left!”

what to work towards? why can it not just stop? inertia? progressing into death, destruction, and folly. the smoke, the tide, the flood. that is the natural undoing. then there is the totalitarianism of technology — complete decimation of the psyche, slow and sinister, boiling frog; gradual relinquishing of sovereignty, theft of time. yet, yet! God speaks through it all, in control always.

the “old world” was probably “better” in some ways, more primal, but there is always a way back to such a world, because it is neither old nor new, it is just there, hidden, covered by time. go sit on a mountain top, you will very quickly feel the so-called “old world.”

have hope in the miracle. If not now, then after death. if the pain does not subside now, and if it feels a journey across a dark shoreless sea, that too is okay. think of your passing not as a divide between life and death, but rather a bridge between unequal levels of perception, wherein there is little need to be scared. like the pain you felt, the mercy of your Lord is equally unending and overwhelming. we know not what minute act, thought, aspiration would tilt the scales and allow for a meeting with the assembly of the best of men, and with our Lord, and then you would say that you never suffered.

and the mercy of your Lord will shatter your sense of self, of how from utter strength to weakness He compels you, and of how from raging humiliation He brings you forth, delivered and rescued. קָר֣וֹב יְ֭הֹוָה לְנִשְׁבְּרֵי־לֵ֑ב וְאֶת־דַּכְּאֵי־ר֥וּחַ יוֹשִֽׁיעַ.

sometimes there is an anxiety to worship your Lord at all times, to feel disturbed in the moments where the mind wanders away from the realization that He exists; it is important to nurture this anxiety but to keep it internal, not as a source of chaos for others.

proper morality is a mesh, not a wall. it has shape, substance, strength, but it allows stretch, elasticity, a proper way to buffer tension. running into it won’t destroy one. rather, at its best, it softens the blow.

sometimes the same moral objective may very well be achieved through a veneer that doesn’t look so.

everything must be done with a degree of madness, nonchalance brings death.

God can create a rainbow just for you. He can orchestrate the clouds to provide shade just for you. الم يعلم بأن الله يرى.

do you not feel the wall of divinity? have you not exerted yourself, having faith in your “agency,” in your self-perceived capacity of enacting a re-arrangement of the world through your work, and wound up bound, unable to be efficacious? that is the wall of divinity, constraining you and then expanding you. make peace with it, for if the Lord wanted, you would be in a different state than you are.

using “muslimness” as a mark of spiritual superiority, of distinctiveness. over other muslims and ones who are not is a mark of immature metaphysics. metaphysical racialization has both spiritual and political ramifications, usually not beneficial.

if you could fully grasp where people come from, what constitutes their being, you would realize that judgement as a social concept would mean very little.

take your share of joy whenever you can, even if it may be very small.

romantic attachment to loss, subaltern characteristic, can be powerful, but often misused.

loss is meant to be a future oriented state, temperament, akin to a person rolling down a hill, downwards but forwards.

you know the people you love through the voice of their footsteps.

a mechanical attitude towards “self-improvement” makes a person worse in their being. improving the self in a modern sense is alienating. it is better to learn how to “live” than to improve the self.

deaths emancipate the spirit from the drudgery of socialization, imbues in it not a simple hatred for it, but rather a radical acceptance, a love, of the brokenness of society, culture, and time.

الإنسان الكامل, the isthmus, can see colors that other cannot, it can be a station or a state, all this can be inferred. the one at the station can see those color at all times. the state can be just be ephemeral gift from God, for the man to experience the divine in the material. however, once the man loses that state, he may experience severe bouts of melancholy, for to have experience the divine and then be shrouded by the metallic darkness of the world, by the incapacity of perception, is infernal.

speak to people in the barzakh, they might be able to put in a good word for you.

honoring tradition, the past, is done best by a radical futurity, not by being haunted by loss. the two extremes of finding in the past material for soapy romanticism or attempts to revive cold logic are both just that, extremes. complaints of the modern world being too mechanical or too emotional are self-perpetuating caricatures. just live, it’s not complicated, God will announce Himself intuitively, and with that, the perfect synthesis, the proper blend, of love and reason will dominate.

there is little that is “traditional” about “tradition.” most understanding of it comes from perception, which by its nature is not static, it jumps from point to point in time and space.

spiritualizing of the spirit, of the rūḥ, can be a sickness. make it real, make it material. to do so is not a crude materialism, it is the acceptance of the fact that perception/s splinter so much as to become useless. hence, the geist needs mass to be real, otherwise it becomes abstract reflections and refractions of the mind. time exists and it doesn’t exist, but to make it not exist, one has to annihilate himself into it, right through the empirical facts of life, being and non-being then are the same.

nothing about the past and present is irreconcilable or incommensurable; that is the glory of God. the assumption and then the knowledge of His existence necessitates this. yes, eschatological time is generally considered as degenerative, but from a Higher vantage point, it is is value-neutral. the locally divine, meaning the God-given ability of man, is able to produce perfect alchemies of existence, of love and beauty, at all times, even a second before what is perceived as the cataclysm.

you are born on the day where you realize you exist, as something real in time, as something that is material, capable of movement.

the first time a man says “back in my day,” he surprises even himself. after that, it becomes a self-indulgent balm for the psyche.

having mercy on one’s self is infinitely harder than God’s willingness to be merciful.

the cracks in your self are worthy of God’s love.

at the height of suffering, when all days recycled without much joy, there was always a very brief moment of light, extinguished shortly after by the overwhelming reality.

the highest pleasure is perhaps merely sitting by a cliff, letting the sea breeze touch your face, what else could surpass that? to be whole in mind, body, and soul and witness a perfectly crafted tapestry, what a shame for the many who are restricted from even that.

often the pain of others for your own is more devastating for the self.

hope is not a feeling, it is an orientation, that despite suffering, there are always modes of moving forward.

remember God at all moments and take care of people, there is nothing else that matters.

a desire to delve into logic, in supposed opposition to love, to compensate for some sense of perceived loss, be it individual or civilizational, will not result in the positive outcomes one hopes for. to delve into love to find refuge from the reality of the now will neither. only merging the substructures of logic and love will do.

only God can adjudicate moral superiority of one man over another. yes, there are signs and symbols, but they are not the definitive ḥukm. to deliver such a verdict towards the end of gratifying the self is dangerous.

a space that cannot accommodate the unorthodox is destructive.

the past cannot be recreated, all movement is forward. if you could recreate the past, time would cease to exist. if you are recreating the past, what would those in the future do when looking at you?

hoppípolla.

God may induce such a darkness onto the believer’s perception to only make the light clearer.

miracles unveiling themselves at glacial pace make themselves imperceptible to man. indeed, خلق الانسان من عجل ساريكم اياتي فلا تستعجلون.

what miracles are you looking for? is there more a miracle than being in heaven, seeing the face of your Lord?

God may induce a hundred deaths before physical demise, and the purpose may remain perplexing.

there is no other viable course of action than to submit in the measured arrangement of your life in face of unchangeable circumstances.

tragedy is the best revealer of the level of attachment one has to the material existence.

settled urban life induces strange attachments because civilization erases the spontaneity so constitutive of nature.

don’t worry about the “caliphate.” check up on your neighbour, clean your street, pet the cat, all this is not “apolitical.”

under appreciation of purpose is a disease, obviously. yet, an over fixation on purpose too is a disease. in the latter state of being, one forgets to live, overlooks that the highest form of life can be feeling the joy of walking on your two feet, to be able to smell, to see. a proper cognition of these abilities frees man from said over fixation. the same level of work towards a purpose can exerted without unnecessarily exerting one’s spirit.

the sick man is rendered invisible first to himself and then to the outside world. he stops existing.

do you not wonder why the child that falls of the tall monkey bar often comes away scratch less? do you not think something eases the fall of the sinless?

rather than humbling yourself to the reality of your own existence, you squander your time bartering with God to rid you of your misfortunes.

a man of God may be a brute, but he cannot be a villain.

wounds are theophanies. the scars your Lord inflicts on the body, mind, or soul, are marks of domination, of asserting ownership over his servants.

new cars are analogous to smart phones. they are means of alienating man from the built environment he is treading upon, and rather than one operating a vehicle, it is the case now that the vehicle aims to operate itself, making the user increasingly superfluous, inducing a sort of distracted state so reminiscent of the information era.

being blessed and feeling blessed do not always coincide, the latter can often be a delusion.

why are you in love with a grief that exerts itself viciously to escape? even in your being, you know you are able to declaw your spirit from the pleasure that this grief induces, yet you don’t. to find this joy in grief, it must then be elemental. in that case, is it really grief anymore? it is just you.

care is all we have.

pain is real, but for the believer it ends. that is greatest of realizations. it ends. it cannot go on forever, it burns out, even if takes a hundred years.

grief exists in both thought, as in cognitively, and in the soul, more diffused without location. in the aftermath of tragedy, grief takes root on both these levels. it makes a difference if the traumatic episode was a singular event in time or recurring one. in any case, to move forward requires a broad array of techniques, from excision to nurturing.

phenomenological experience is unstable, viciously changing its perceptive angles. Such a basis of experience can, by its nature, not provide steady bearings for the soul. this is evidenced by basic empirical proof: even if nothing goes “wrong,” subjectively determined, a person may complain of feeling forlorn. psychoanalysts may seek to attribute such a state to some hidden factor that is imperceptible to the patient. Nonetheless, the person afflicted may still say nothing is causing them grief, the eternal existential problem. If something goes “wrong,” based on more commonly agreed upon metrics like sickness or death, at the very least there is clear cause. In either case, the soul recognizes a persistent unmooring, a material sense of impermanence, and without a proper psycho-spiritual orientation, ان الانسان لفي خسر.

better people than you have suffered utterly more than you, let the sense of shock go.

all of life comes down to perception, we are born with perceptive biases from the start to the end, and everything else is a creation of that. the sea, the anger, the coveting, the road, the wall, divinity; it is all perception.

probability becomes a hundred when it happens to you.

even good doctors and good science can belong to a tyrannical dogmatic cult.

low trust societies exhibit certain symptoms: intense staring, aiming to estimate danger, animalistic.

the believer in expansion often aims to pray five times a day. the one in suffering prays all day, often without prostration.

we are also organisms of this Earth, we are inscribed in its dna. there is no distinction between man and nature, just as there is no separating your blood from your bones.

leaving your affairs to your Lord is not complacence, it is the material acceptance of the limitations that are constitutive of yourself.

we imagine all sorts of differences with others upon whom immense suffering has been imposed. moral difference, cultural difference, familial distance, political difference, existential difference, and so on. it is just fate, donning the garb of life.

never comment on the quality of food; imagine the scenario where you could not even get food down your throat.

the prosperity of modernity is structured around particular axes of geography and the built environment. most of it has been produced, obviously, through a dominating relationship to land. it’s always hard to analyze how geography operates as a historical fulcrum.

amongst the worst traits of man, particularly modern man, is the annoyance he exhibits when his life veers even slightly from the track he imagined it to be traversing.

good and evil cannot occupy a vessel at the same time without explosive alchemies, there is no admixture that does not exude a viscous mess. if there is indeed this adulteration, that is corruption, good becomes tainted, by being covetous mainly, evil becomes tempered by guilt and repentance.

it is habitual to love your own tribe, your own people, first, to prioritize their ends and aspirations. there is good in that, especially if your people have rightful ends, ones either demanding justice or producing beauty. still, if it can be helped, one has to transcend the love for the tribe, and habituate himself to love what are the ideal averaged ends for all of society.

medicine should be taught in monasteries.

“wrestle” with God while knowing there is no wrestling with God, لا يسأل عما يفعل وهم يسألون.

in the gulf lie the true enemies of faith, goodness, and the truth, consumed by gold, a false sense of religion, buried by prosperity, a trial of the highest order, at least the nomad with punctures in his shirt, wandering the streets of the Punjab, is not bewildered or deluded by the jewels of the world. all wealth must be depersonalized, to have it and hold one’s hand at the bare minimum is the right struggle of the soul. ἀκούσατε, ἀδελφοί μου ἀγαπητοί. οὐχ ὁ θεὸς ἐξελέξατο τοὺς πτωχοὺς τῷ κόσμῳ πλουσίους ἐν πίστει καὶ κληρονόμους τῆς βασιλείας ἧς ἐπηγγείλατο τοῖς ἀγαπῶσιν αὐτόν.

undignified poverty breeds barbarity, especially in its patriarchal iterations, wherein men oppress women and women oppress other women, as on show in most of the the so-called post-colonial third world. whereas, a lack of material resources in a societal setting that is able to organize relations in a more refined fashion is still fairly bearable, even something a primal good, potentially even better than hyper-financialized capitalistic societies that come with a whole set of associated spiritual, societal, and economic issues.

love the cripple, he may be freer than you.

help others even if you are the cripple.

death lurks in every corner.

exerting oneself to determine the “religious,” for example the “islamic,” is frequently a low level academic activity. often done to produce analysis where none is emerging intuitively from the self. time would be better spent on refining the heart, mind, and the soul so as to enable one to ask better questions in the first place.

his loss blotted out the sun. lately, the brightest of days looked like days of the eclipse.

what is more real? pain or joy?

opression looms large in the pure land. what spark can remedy centuries of rot.

true tragedy is an epistemic event, meaning it alters the architecture of one’s beliefs on the level of the soul. most vulnerable to this is one’s own self-perception. after severe material loss, the man asks the question “who even am I?” tragedy then is not the event, not a focal point in time and space, it is what remains behind, or rather what remains ahead.

all intellect fails as fate strikes.

the nation-state is not some exogenous franksteinish entity. it is just lackadaisical to think that it is one thing, one general structure that only oppresses, that it is merely an arrangement of oppressive power. certainly, it is an arrangement of power generally, but it is not always a foregone conclusion that it should be sauronish entity.

tissue is created to mature perfectly as man is born. later, as wounds injure him, he matures through scar tissue, but not perfectly. that, in some ways, is the story of man. he is born through divine programs, connected to the space he comes from in the world that was before. once on this earth, there is no perfection. what is broken must be mend, through tears, scars, sutures, welds. there is always a mark left in the lesion, which sometimes cannot be seen by the naked eyes, but the imperfection remains. but, but! God has no limits to what is possible. if later, the scar heals without trace of the wound, it would mean eternal divinity has entered a new stage in human history.

who can dignify the sullied sick man, with wounds all across his body, soul, and mind, who no longer has space in society or even in his own personhood? al-laṭīf.

it is a pity that the eyes only open after death. the highest of mystical tasks has always been to see here and now what one is ordinarily only able to see after death.

a good intellect can still lack introspection, a clear understanding of the progression of their life, a grasp on the passing of time.

critique as an academic tool starts corrupting the soul when employed outside of a narrow healthy epistemic domain.

average person thinking civilizationally is not useful. water your plants, be kind to the weak. civilization is a second order outcome. it is not a “political” instrument.

sovereignty is an abused concept. in its most crude sense, that of “political” sovereignty, expressed by some vague notion of exerting unilateral power within fixed borders, is often harmful to the ordinary people. great crimes and suffering have been imposed based on some fractured understanding of maintaining sovereignty. power players would rather exert this sort of vulgar sovereignty even at the cost of decimating the lives of their constituents. this sort of sovereignty is only perhaps liberating or life-enhancing if coupled by a corresponding increase in the quality of life of the people.

cry everyday; there are always reasons to cry every day, and to not do so is a step towards death, وتولى عنهم وقال يأسفى على يوسف وابيضت عيناه من الحزن فهو كظيم.

do not get lost in being a “muslim.” pray, obey your Lord and love the Prophet, submit but do not reduce yourself to this thing that you are that has to defend its existence on the civilizational scale, you are much more precious than that.

surviving tragedies comes with the tethered effect of joy and pleasure migrating from lofty social ideals to the fundamental facts of life: steps, plants, air.

and so it continues, long after you are dust, the spirit of man lives on, in memories, traces, and synchronicities.

remember the dead. read obituaries from towns you do not belong to. would you not want to be remembered when you die? remembering the dead accords them a dignity that is so basic to the proper human experience.

the “doctor” is often the tyrant.

learn to feel like the cripple, the forsaken, the orphan, the widow, the poor, the dying, even if you are not.

the idea of legacy generally populates the mind at an older age when man is more cognizant that he is mortal. the notion of being remembered is not primarily about “leaving behind” something of value for those in one’s circle of socialization, but rather it is a presentist act that comforts the mind and the ego, it is a self-soothing attempt to solidify the feeling that one really exists.

there was moment, a period, during the technological revolution when utility of invention became inversely correlated to human well-being. the threshold of utility was crossed, and while it made sense to reach that point, the forces of production, obviously, could not be stopped at the equilibrium where mental well being was perfectly harmonized with the levels of mechanical change.

being dogmatic is unintelligent for many reasons, but the primary one is the mere fact that we do not know enough about the nature of the universe, of matter, to be so.

to feel persistent shock over tragedies requires excessive entitlement.

retrospective moralization after the fact of tragedy is a devastatingly human trait.

anger can never be a primary virtue, rage can never be productive. it’s self-defeating, pyrrhic. the tough things must be done out of love. anger as expression versus anger as motive are very separate.

when you break the pillars of common sense, there is no longer a referent to guide action, anything goes.

it is unclear whether weeping and silence, or laughter and outbursts, constitute the best medicine for the soul. perhaps both. there is no clear reason either should not have the same underlying mechanics.

one more day, it might still be.

ever since I have gained consciousness, I have been trying, my lord.

in the first moment sleep breaks, God leaves an impression on the mind of what’s to come.

every tragedy is all consuming, until the next bigger one.

what is miraculous or not is often defined by frequency in an inverse relation, not essentially by the quality of the event.

there is no wrestling with destiny once it has imposed itself. before it does, one can, at least in perception, wrestle with the outcome of time.

I remain too weak to force my will to coincide with yours, Lord. Forgive us for what we aim but fail to do. Is it not your will that is too lofty?

gratitude is modulated on a sliding scale. more precisely, increasing gradations of deprivation and suffering is the only way, for the ordinary, to develop and refine their sense of gratitude.

anything may destroy you, that is life.

the quranic ethos is an umbrella over all other scripture; it pulls closer their cracks, gives them merciful shade.

take a bath 3 times a day, drink bottled water ruthlessly extracted from hundreds of miles away.

a year is not long.

the only three states of freedom: death, disability, or annihilation in God.

help me! to trust you, God.

winter abound, make or break.

the devil has disappeared from discourse, partly explained by the hypertrophic growth of the self, which, with its associated bloating, affects perception, in turn allowing the spirit of the devil respite to dissipate into structures of society.

yet, if this is to be age of the individual, of the self, then so be it. it does not necessarily have to be the age of the meretricious self, it could be the age of the divine self, of the glorious flourishing of the human spirit, of one man, not a great man, just a man able to unite the part to the whole, totum simul.

wash yourself with tears from the sky, of divine nature crying to give life to the dying, to the rotting.

forgiveness derived from guilt is an inferior type, a negative virtue, than the one derived from the conscious or unconscious abdication of potential, a positive virtue.

karbala is islam’s christian suffering.

saviors are stupid, save yourself.

Faith: belief without experience, not belief without evidence. evidence may be repeated frequently on separate occasions, but it is not real unless subjective. However, experience, the subjective and visceral contact with the object of belief, is real, in a material way.

theorizing or opining about the ummah is indulgent at best and harmful at worst. it is not an idea to be thought and implemented. it is a second level outcome of acts, not a first level one.

cleaning a dirty street is piety.

I saw the Prophet sitting on a mat, with his back against the stone wall. I sat by his crossed legs, with my head bowed as in severe need of him. He looked at me with a mending smile and held my head to let me cry as I held his leg like a drowning man. and his companion then said: you had made a wish to join this highest of assemblies, but did you pay your dues? I asked: what dues as I held on to his leg as he stayed silent, onlooking. the companion replied: you made a wish for the loftiest of heavens, for the gift of our presence. I commend you for your ambitions, but then you, unready as you were, asked for a life of grief, your entry to this gathering.

“I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will guide them and restore comfort to Israel’s mourners, creating praise on their lips. “Peace, peace, to those far and near,” says the Lord. “And I will heal them.”

a basic islamic premise may be said to be the fact of religion being for all times and places. a priori, then, modernity has to be a friend of religion. anything less is just a failure of imagination or will.

The value of a clear sky, with glimpses of a cloud, is lost on the free. Only the imprisoned can understand, in earnest, what a sky is. perhaps even on a more basic level, the sky may very well be a child’s realization of divinity. what else can captivate the soul, the senses, to that degree? specks of orange in the sky? the great painters of our and previous ages have always took to the sky to find refuge from the superficial dimensions of society. arguably nothing represents man’s innate disposition to find release from bodily experience than his desire for the sky, for the mysteries harbored within, for the potential of life yet witheld.

The template is there, so it can be achieved. It exists in a moment, so it can exist in many moments.

Is death momentous or merely just there? A grand rupture or?

why would you not wish to be united with your Lord? when you know even the most pleasurable moment of your life, in which you felt no pain or grief, was so ephemeral. is it not true that the entire map of human history is splattered with an aching desire to eradicate the perception of pain? from the debauchery of the wayward to the trance of the mystic, what else is the goal? man knows innately that there is the possibility of a creating permanence to unending relief from pain, but he also innately know that it cannot be brought into existence into this world, the famed kingdom of God. perhaps, it can to some limited extent, but never fully, even the highest of mystics would concede to the claim that we have to settle for good enough, that death is the precondition for what man pursues so fervently. what is to be done then? the realization that this world is both an anemic iteration for heaven and for hell is dizzying at first to the man who yields to it fully in spirit, when he moves beyond an intellectual acceptance to a total agreement to the fact. even in the most wondrous of meadows, with lush tapestries of green, you will always find the rotting dead wood and dying patches of grass, but then even in the gulag, you might witness the piercing beauty of a speck of the sun, lancing through the tiniest of cracks to plant a kiss of divine warmth on to your cheek. all of life is that, unstable, so why would you not wish to be united with your Lord?

glorious resolve.

“corruption” is very simply just incompetence, needs no great analytical efforts.

many critiques of secularism are remarkably stupid because they wish to rescue religion or tradition from the clutches of a modernity seeking to regulate them. the only useful ones are perhaps those that imagine religion or tradition as friends of modernity, of the awful nation state, and if it is innately violent, temper it, soothe it. it is simply a failure of imagination of being so beholden to the past, that one is almost afraid of imagining a future that accepts the present, the status quo, the raw hard empirical facts, now that is a romanticism of the highest order. idealism can be an excuisite good but not as a general principle of thought. no room for idiotic fatalism and its deceptively warm refuge of history.

structured chaos, within the bounds of certain organizing principles, rapid movement, the daze of spontaneity.

choice and free will are perhaps the most privileged concepts in human history.

fate accounts for the “random,” for the statistically unpredictable on the subjective level.

the heart must burn even for the worst of men, for how they desecrate their souls, for how they erect an impermeable wall between themselves and all that is kind and beautiful, divine.

I know not what is better for me, constriction or expansion.

take a bath, what a wondrous affair.

expanding the boundaries of life, of experience, directly constrains the enormity of tragedy.

even after being ravaged, being undone by loss, the human spirit has to persevere, until it can return to its maker.

near death experiences, the only real chance to burn the impurities of gold away. often missed in the relief of being delivered.

the blessing of suffering can only be called as such by those who have suffered.

death opens doors.

exclusively needing religion to be “good” is a betrayal to nature. religion can be so much more than a tool to be “good” in the narrowest sense. art, beauty, and science, now these are religious. religion is not the purview of scared clerics, it is the universal spark that animates life itself, bewilderment, amazement, light, and the magical. mutating the religious into only norms is the death of it; norms are only the elemental step, and to make them the apex is criminal to the potential of the human spirit. there’s quite little need to speak about the “religious,” what had to be said has mostly been said, what remains is the easiness, the flowing, the river like action of the religious that is left, haranguing people about it, making them sit down to “remind” them is mostly an impulse of the ego, to “impart” knowledge may be exhibited as virtue but more often than not it is an industry of doom. this sort of religion has hamstrung society, a sort of severe arrested development, with no relation to the modern sense of “development,” but rather a more a primal one.

of suffering, there remain many a kind. yet, ultimately, when logic and casuistry, or both, end, the only split, the dividing line so to speak, in material experience remains the state of health or sickness. religionists or others may speak to other forms of intangible maladies of the soul or else, but phenomenological experience reaches its boundary of reality in the viscerality of pain.

childlike wonder, elderly wisdom.

the magnitude of the tragedy is decided by the psyche. it is thoroughly subjective on the singular phenomenological level. objective analyses assume a wrongful conformity of perception.

for a man, sons or daughters often represent a perpendicularity of aspirations, never quite meeting even if the desire for that intersection remains, for that equity. the daughter whose love is supremely unconditional to the father is the object of redemption, of a love not predicated on any productive value. the son is frequently a referent towards mimetic potential, meaning a vessel, a being, in which the father, rather anxiously, see himself projected in future time. as such, the son faces the brunt of being burdened with remediating the father’s misfortunes, failures, abdications, of bringing to fruition a desire of an egotistical triumph over material existence. what is lost in this architecture of familial ties is hard to ever know fully. the son is the patriarch reproduced, without volition, a savior for dreams yet unfolded. what is the daughter? a savior too, but from another self-construed prison of the father, she is the sunlight to a perception otherwise blotted out with whimsy.

shamelessness within the norms of shamefulness is radical.

we are a defeated people, and will remain so for the foreseeable time. lack of dignity, excellence, glory.

it’ll be okay.

uncertainty, hope.

I know I have not met the conditions of your love, my lord. But! Love me! You are not bound by your conditions, to say that you are would be wholly disgraceful. And I know I cannot meet those conditions in that state you have bound me to. So, love me because the anguish is too great otherwise. “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”

what does religion have to do with being conquered? let’s say for instance the case of the modern French army routing a band of undisciplined Mamluks in Egypt. is that because the latter’s beliefs were not in order? preposterous. even if that may have been the case, who is man to pontificate or adjudicate about it? to attempt to do God’s work is in itself grounds for defeat. the only task would have been to excel, materially, tangibly, solid, something they could not do.

the most decolonial act is to have a functioning society.

the time to think has been over for a long while. action is the only proper mode of living now.

and I would not have granted you my kingdom if I had not burned you, you would have never, on your own accord, come to me with your full heart and soul.

you’re not where I wanted you to be, so I chose this for you, so you are where you need to be.

buy gold in dubai, become party to an economy of holoucaust.

historically, most “old money” is also dubious.

I could not bear his stench and cursed it in my head, until it came to me that I, too, had been lying to die, rotting away, by everyone, those dear to me and those not. a wave of compassion overcame my heart.

I am the miracle! It is me! Why are you incessantly looking for something else?

and the pain stopped, not because it did not hurt anymore, but because the capacity to feel it had extinguished itself.

bravery from us, patronizing tears from you.

traumatic suffering radically alter the constitution of the self, the elemental blocks upholding the self have to reorganize to stitch the gaping wunds, a new man is produced and the past is sequestered away as an entity alien to the present condition.

trust no one but God, not even your mother, for she may love you but may yet cause harm to you. as for God, He does not harm for if you get harmed you will merely say that the fault was your own, or that the harm is gain in some way not yet revealed.

and it will be decades before these crimes are recognized, and by then the harm would have already occured.

very little gained from critiques of things not malevolent; it breeds attitudes of contempt not commensurate with faith and goodness

tragedy, tragedy, grief, grief ; constant self-flagellation is not respectful to memory, even if out love. there is no other choice than hope, logically, spiritually, intuitively.

dubai, doha, riyadh, hell. karachi, delhi, dhaka, hell-like. samarkand, bukhara, khiva, lost pasts.

of course, things can be developed indefinitely, but you must stop at some point.

don’t be forced to feel religious experience.

all loss can be lived through; the mind will always find an architecture of belief to compartmentalize it, be it death even.

destroy a society, let your children study said destroyed society, extracting cultural artefacts, be it art or poems, then uphold your findings as definitive understandings of said societies, teach these findings of yours to the sons of the destroyed natives, but when those native sons try to break away from the norms you create, you let them know their place, and best if it is other sons of the native that do your bidding, marry into them too if need be, always reminding them their pasts are made by you and that they have no presents until the presents become fossilized pasts.

enjoy your sandwich.

it cannot be wished away, it must end on its own

grace is dead, the minds are shattered, technologies of evil.

so self-conscious that no self-consciousness.

the anatomy of fear: terrror stricken blood, passed down generations.

often what is “impressive” is mostly grace and fortune

what is prison? it is any state of perceived constriction. time dies in prison. more precisely, it loses meaning. time becomes undressed of its social bearings. it is the theft of time. then, what is freedom after prison? it is the realization that there is still life left to live. as soon as that is grasped, there is possibility again, but first there is great instability. Kierkegaard, albeit slightly differently, speaks about anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.” here, leaving prison creates a fundamental dilemma in one’s mind: to live as before imprisonment or to live as a new man. now, any reasonable man would determine that it would be folly to live as before, but what exactly is he supposed to transmute into? what kind of man? it is not a simple question at all. at first, he would crave to return to his habits of mind and action before he was taken prisoner. it is not unnatural to desire a return to the “pure” before. however, the problem that faces him is that he is not who he was and cannot occupy his old being. then, moving into this new life of his has to be dizzying.

by September, my dear, to see you walk on your two feet and breathe the air that has been so denied from you, would be more than all the world combined and more to me.

asking for the civilian to be supreme, but not demanding neither ensuring his excellence is just infinite regress

act with radical and absolute free will and accept your destiny

beauty can come from evil, and ugliness from piety, but only as outcomes, not as intentions

medical centralization will destroy mankind, an instrument of control, domination, and desecration of human totality, incompetency masked by veneers of authority, satanic. an ethics of care lost to greed and vanity. we think animals are domesticated, but we forget we can be too, maybe we are now. in modernity, the profession of the physician is amongst the most prone to corruption. this is because certain professions require the highest degree of ethical attention. however, such attention most readily debased by financial considerations and an inordinate fixation on vocation rather than duty. ancient and medieval philosophers in the Perso-Greek vein often used the the figure of the physician as an ideal surrogate for the just ruler, precisely because the ideal ruler like the good physician reduces harm.

i wish you made it, my friend. you were meant to do such amazing, such brilliant things. the light in your eyes, you were always so curious like a child, with those absurd button-downs.what could contain your unending spirit? your time had just come, what else could be done? what is left of you? nothing that looks like you remain, to hold and cherish. are memories enough? you were so scared that you thought you were not yourself anymore, but you were always you, and i feel sorry that we could not make you believe that. we hope you can find that home of yours now, near the trees, cliffs, and the ocean that you always imagined, with your friends near the mejlis on the meadow. we could not go there with you, and that is a tragedy. what is left behind when you took all this love with yourself? you were there, absolute in presence, resolute in perception. what now? our lives are just fragments of attention, sometimes we cannot put ourselves back together, force ourselves back into shape, through jabr, He can but who can claim to be able to ask that of him. a good spirit you were, and it was remarkable how you could be equally happy and grieved in the same moment. through eyes different than your own, if you saw yourseld, maybe you could start to believe the joy you brought us was real and solid, material. you never allowed yourself the joy of being visible. be well now.

the piano, its harmony across the breeze; van gogh’s greens and blues: the ocean and the cliff; a boat sailing away in the distance, gentle.

i was harmed! greatly harmed!

alive as I am, despite these wounds.

critiques of colonialism have reached a strange impasse. there is little on offer. repetition of trite points makes any study immediately unhelpful. critique requires a certain energy that cannot be simply conjured from one’s library. thought has exhausted itself and it cannot just emerge from a mind that has not lived through the change that it wants to bring. the restoration has not come yet because the hearts are not yet pure, free from envy. it will come but the alchemy needs to be correct. the alignment needs precision, heart, love, and care, not desire, coveting, or tartuffery.

strands of his hair started gray at speed. it was not the natural and gentle unfolding of age. it was the weight of death, imprisonment, and torture.

“right side of history” is an asinine way of moral reasoning. it unjustifiably accords “history” the final adjudication on the limits of imagination; it’s an emaciated perception of History that resembles a dead reservoir of precedents and examples, one that only passes judgment on criminality ex post facto. if, as Nietzsche warns, history is devoid of a “higher force,” a “life-giving influence,” it only serves to diminish human capacity for its highest imaginable possibilities.

field work, interrogating the archive, grappling with the sources: this is the death of love, art, and care

profits will end time

eschatological view: pessimistic futures, hopeful ends

“bloody chap, shine my shoes.” “yes sir.”

“i must write! to save myself! there is not much else left!”

what to work towards? why can it not just stop? inertia? progressing into death, destruction, and folly. the smoke, the tide, the flood. that is the natural undoing. then there is the totalitarianism of technology — complete decimation of the psyche, slow and sinister, boiling frog; gradual relinquishing of sovereignty, theft of time. yet, yet! God speaks through it all, in control always.

the “old world” was probably “better” in some ways, more primal, but there is always a way back to such a world, because it is neither old nor new, it is just there, hidden, covered by time. go sit on a mountain top, you will very quickly feel the so-called “old world.”

have hope in the miracle. If not now, then after death. if the pain does not subside now, and if it feels a journey across a dark shoreless sea, that too is okay. think of your passing not as a divide between life and death, but rather a bridge between unequal levels of perception, wherein there is little need to be scared. like the pain you felt, the mercy of your Lord is equally unending and overwhelming. we know not what minute act, thought, aspiration would tilt the scales and allow for a meeting with the assembly of the best of men, and with our Lord, and then you would say that you never suffered.

I often think of my life through objects that lie across my room, pasted on to my walls, resting in my drawers. Cards, presents, pictures, candles, journals. I keep them shelved safely, looking at them periodically without much thought, but never putting them too far out of reach lest I lose them.

Last winter, I met my friend, A, in Chicago. He had just come into town after being overseas. It was a strange time. The pandemic still raged on, and without the comfort of vaccines, we were told to keep to ourselves.

It was very cold. The sun would not come out for days, and I would wake up everyday and push aside the blinds by my bedside window just to see ever rising hills of white. The blinds would hang peacefully all night, only convulsing occasionally to express their displeasure at the howling winds outside.

On some mornings, I would see David from pest control lean his ladder across my window as he went up the roof. With the onset of winter, the squirrels that had been foraging for food out in the yard all fall were now to make home in our walls. The landlord had called David in to do something about them as they kept scratching away at our walls all day long. I did not mind them much. They were just keeping warm like us. But I did worry about David as his head would often hover near the sharp downwards pointing icicles that had latched themselves tightly on to the edge of the roof.

Sometimes the sun felt gracious enough to cast down specks of warmth. I would hasten to stand outside in our yard to catch any and all of the gentle hugs it sent down, any and all of the crisp yet soft rays that it emanated. I loved the fleeting feeling of it gently baking the sides of my cheeks, cherishing the sunburn as it made my skin feel like it were back home. As a child, I would try to find Saturn’s rings in the sky, not knowing how space worked; now I was content with just a fleeting glimpse of our shared star.

Snow had lined our alleys like trees, imitating tall hedges, often trying to reach up my shoulder, trying to dominate me. Many of the people I would spend time with had left town for one reason or another. Isolation weighed heavily on all those who remained.

My neighbour J’s car would often need to be excavated from the snow that had turned into hardened ice but trying to jettison it from its prison without strategy was worse than a hamster on a wheel; the tires would lose all traction, roll over themselves, and screech like a bat.

J would sometimes send me an apologetic text at night asking for my help. Hold on, coming, I would reply. J, could we not have done this just a teeny bit earlier in the day, I would think to myself as I rolled out of whichever blanket I was hibernating under. I would don on my hefty flannel overshirt, grab a shovel from storage, and head out, strangely filled with purpose.

I would hammer the shovel into the ice, sometimes not knowing what I was doing, while J would try to accelerate out at the right moment. In ordinary times, I might have been less thrilled to partake in this fitness challenge, but I did not mind this strange mixture of sweating and freezing now. To stay sane required an intense appreciation for the mundane, to reduce one’s vision from days or months to minutes.

I had always been protective of my solitude but there was something cruel about it being involuntary. I started going out on long walks despite the frigid weather. The monotony of walking the same paths made me feel stuck oscillating in an endless loop. Still, I liked having my face aggressively caressed by arctic winds better than entertaining the eery quietness that would visit my room without invitation.

It was important to find life where one could; the leafless trees and the frozen lake would have to do, I thought. The lake would become covered with menacing looking shards of ice but I did not think them to be brutal. They would bobble and brush against the stoned waterfront. They were lovely but in the way sad things are lovely. I could hear the water move. It was comforting. I would stand by the edge, my hands numb in my jacket pocket, gazing at the lake that pretended to be an ocean. The wind would bounce off the water as it leaped ashore to embrace me, snapping me out of this or that reverie, nuzzling my cheeks, brushing my hair aside into tousled waves, making me feel like a little child.

With time, the shards would transmute into a delicate plain of white. As soon as I would put on my shoes to get some air, my feet would, without much volition, take me towards these sheets of cotton gently resting atop the great lake, like imbricated loved ones reunited after a long separation. I wondered if it were a stupid idea to try to walk across it, to run towards the looming skyline. The thought filled me with an unfamiliar exhilaration. My irises would pull at my pupils, nudging them to expand more, to make it all seem more real. It felt like I could not see enough, and at this I felt a strange yet tender sadness.

I would walk past the cafes where we had used to laugh, read, and eat; now they stood darkened against the horizon: empty, forlorn, desperate for company. I missed one of my friends and his coffee snobbery; like the purist he was, he would roll his eyes if I ever made myself instant coffee.

I would often order take-away lattes from one of these cafes that we had frequented, one ostensibly inspired by the French coffee scene, and as I would, I would also hear his voice ring in my head: It’s probably too cold, or too frothy, or too milky. I don’t even know why we come here, I could probably make a better one at home!

Well, you aren’t here, I would think.

Catching a glimpse of someone walking their dog was the grandest possible outcome of any given walk, yet even they seemed more sombre than usual. My feet could feel the ice despite my thick woolen socks. My boots had been giving way for some time now but the idea of going shopping seemed too much.

I would recognize little oddities around Hyde Park that I had put to memory. I had started giving distinct looking houses rather unimaginative names: the red house, the weird house, the big house.

As winter ravaged on, I hoped dearly for spring to come. I could not find solace in the words of many a great writers who had sung praises of winter. It was still beautiful but in the way sad things are beautiful. I missed home; I missed the thought of my mother engrossed in prayer while my father nibbled away at peanuts despite being told off for doing so by my mother. Memory is strange, I thought. Those I held closest to my heart were the very ones whose faces kept dematerializing in my mind, amorphous like undried sculptures.

But the bare trees did feel less distant now, and it felt like I disturbed their gentle slumber with my soliloquies as I drew closer to them. They stared back, meaning to ask why I was gallivanting alone by the water. Without the chador of their leaves, they either seemed to bleed great worry or an immense unfiltered joy. I suppose it depended on who was looking, I thought.

A’s arrival could not have been better timed. I would often walk with him, or I would simply go to his house. His apartment was calm and undramatic. It made me feel home, like I could relax my body.

Whether in reality or in our imaginations, we had all been exceptionally busy that time of the year with this or that. But he would make time.

It seemed like he did not segment time like I did, like how I divided it into neatly splintered fragments for me to impose my will on it. The way he spoke about his life made me feel that the time he inhabited was fundamentally different than the one I did; the streams of time that he lived through seemed to converge harmoniously in the now: moving yet still.

I had imposed on time a misplaced order. I had, perhaps, unknowingly, sought to extract from time its divinely imbued spontaneity. My meticulous yet inexpertly sketched to-do list, that I neither followed fully nor could I dispose off, bore witness to this. I had demanded control, I had tried to possess time, and for that I would feel my heart become smaller. The world would seem smaller. Perhaps, I had, like others before me, disturbed some law of nature.

We would walk together often, A and I, talking about many things; how life weighed heavily on the ways we had imagined our lives to unfold, or whether the stories of our dreams would ever come true.

We spoke about the ethics of friendship as we saw bonds being decayed by the seemingly unending reign of disease. We knew that being a friend without knowing how to be one was a pyrrhic achievement at best, and so we asked what it meant to be a good friend in such times. We had no good answers except that friendship was either difficult, easy, or both. It was easy when you found those who saw you as a human with needs, cared how you were, saw value in your fragility, and held you close despite your fragmented soul, while you did the same for them, sometimes equally, sometimes less than, and sometimes more than, but always in cognizance of achieving an equitable mean, of meeting each other at the confluence of our mutually constituted visions of life. Yet, friendship was difficult when you could neither find nor be found by such people.

Other people were the main characters of their own lives, not appendages of ours, that much was clear, and we did not expect anything else. We spoke about being burned by the vicissitudes of time, of how its illumination broke us, how it left in its absence pain and eventual clarity.

There was also the problem of kindness. I did believe in kindness, just not very much in words of kindness. One could either do the ethical thing or the pragmatic thing; one could either believe to see kindness everywhere or to not do so unless given good reason. I oscillated between the two, in the grey, my hope often colliding with my experience, both strangling one another, trying to come out on top.

A would listen intently, not hurrying to intervene. Not having to edit myself much, something still unfamiliar even after all this time, must have impaired my generally adequate ability to listen, but I do remember that he, one way or the other, had reassured me that it would all be fine, that we were okay.

We would walk by campus. It seemed like another world, sheltered from the city outside like it was, it felt warmer. The trees lining its wide avenues were undraped too, but they felt different from the ones by the shore. They seemed less anxious, less worried, maybe because they saw me with company.

We would walk together till late at night even though cold Chicago winds would try to coax us back inside our heated walls. Our little back and forth colloquy would be warmth enough.

He would have his tasbeeh with him always. It was long, with many beads, lightly brown, and always wrapped around his fingers as we spoke back and forth about this or that. Sometimes it would rain, but we would keep walking unbothered, hopping over puddles by the crosswalk, stopping to take shelter under sides of darkened apartment buildings as we continued conversing, gesticulating excitedly to make this or that point.

But soon enough, it was time for us to part ways. I was unsure of when we would see each other again. I did not know what to leave with him except my Qur’an. This particular copy had been bestowed on me by a friend some years ago; it was a mystical translation from a South Asian branch of the Naqshbandi sufis.

I had met this friend and other members of their spiritual path, their tariqa, in Makkah. I became drawn to them because they exuded a stillness I did not have. When we parted ways, my friend gave me his Qur’an; it was published in some printing house in Pakistan but it came to be in my hands in a land far from home. With A, it was time for it be passed on again, and doing so was not any logical decision. I am not sure whether there was much choice: I felt impelled.

While I had always adored its pretty calligraphed cover, I had not read much from it. Yet, I did often hold it in times of need; I thought feeling it or looking at it would do something, and maybe it did. I held it out to A, asking him to take it from me, and he did, his head swirling a bit as it usually did.

As he took the Qur’an with one hand, the fingers of his other hand unfurled from around his tasbeeh, and he asked me to have it. Despite my internalized conditioning that compelled me to question the need for this takalluf, I did not hesitate much to accept it.

Things received from those in your heart were never like the perfunctory offerings made in service of fulfilling some formulaic societal obligation. Our exchange was not a matter of choice, of any calculation, nor of an expectation of reciprocation: it just was. In some ways, it transcended us. We had not been possessors but mere caretakers of these companions of ours. Yet, in our watch over them, we had left imbued in them little indelible bits of us.

He had gotten his tasbeeh in Egypt, I think, from whom I do not know, but it had been through much — that much I could tell; its beads contained in them an entire tradition, an entire history.

Now it was mine to hold. In our exchange, light and uncomplicated as it was, we were not bestowers of meaning onto these objects, but rather it was them that would hold our friendship in absentia.

I would not speak much with A after we parted ways for it was a relationship nurtured by physical presence, but parting was not separation. And even though I did not know what would become of us as friends, I would keep his tasbeeh close; I still do.

We have so many memories that dance around in our hearts. They come and go without any declaration. Yet in the physicality of the objects that live with us, we find an anchor that keeps the remnants of our memories safe much better than the fallibility of our minds can. In their unnerving ability to transcend space and time, distort them, make them less than linear, they let our memories collide in unexpected ways, letting them coalesce into stories that we hold dearly. These objects are far from inanimate; they hold in their architectures the fragments of our conjoined lives, of our happiness, of our grief. In doing so, they make it slightly easy for us to not miss the years disfigured, misconstrued, or simply erased by our minds.

With time, they gently transition from being simulacra of our relationships to being placeholders of who we were as people, of how we changed slowly, in indistinguishable increments, and of how things remain familiar but never exactly the same.

I don’t know if I could ever have such a harmonious relationship with time as A did, but I do know that time ill-spent is time rushed through, and despite our haste, such moments pass slowly, agonizingly, in agitation of not being somewhere other than where we are, in anger at our inability to bypass the pains and aches of inhabiting the here and now.

Time well spent defies linearity; it flows slowly in our minds but quickly in objective measurement. This slowness is gentle, calm and curative, unlike the harsh slowness of rushing. When time lets us into its private garden, our perception of it collides with our norms of quantification. Our minds start to loosen their infatuation with the orderly fidgeting of the hour hand; we start resisting its pull, one that beckons us to walk our lives in subservience to its unrelenting ticking. And as we do, we become engrossed, captivated, fixated — in the best way possible.

In its warm embrace, time makes us acquiesce to the demands of its creed. It demands of us to see things for what they are, not what we wish them to be. It asks us not to profess our wholeness but only our brokenness, it asks us to not be good but to do good, and if we fail and fall, it lifts us back up, telling us it’s okay, just like our mothers did when our feet were smaller than apples.

And like that, we become members of this creed of fallibility. And like that, time lets us in, if not fully, then enough for us to see hopeful futures and gentler pasts. And like that, it lets us feel that we are enough, even if we may have some ways to go in being the people we could be. And like that, it lets us enter its cradle, where it allows us the ultimate gratification of being free from thinking about it.

And it is precisely when we stop thinking about time that we come alive. And it is then that our eyes light up even without the sun, our pupils expanding concomitantly as if to make space for the acceptance of our finitude to enter us. And it is precisely then that our half-loves, tainted by our distracted grazings in this world of ours, alchemize into something more, something fuller, something less lonely. And it is then that every moment with those whom we love becomes like our last moment with them, without any pretension of control, like we are fully there, but always ready to let go if time summons.

I was a quiet child. I was, as they would later call it, selectively mute. I don’t know why but these technical categorizations of human experience always amuse me; they sound ludicrous, even when they express tragedy. They make you feel little, they put you behind bars made of words. This particular one makes me imagine a little boy, with a frown on his tiny round face; his forced bowl haircut betraying the waviness in his hair. Strung along to a boisterous wedding ceremony by his parents, he meets everyone by saying: “Hi, it is nice to meet you, but you may leave me alone now.” Then he wraps his arms around himself and tilts his head upwards as if about to painted by an amateur yet balding French painter in a dingy Parisian studio. Well, that might have been easier than feigning sickness whenever my family decided to drag us to this or that inane social event. Weddings were the worst; the child me had rather simple reservations about them; he thought them to be too much: the colors, the sounds, all the bodies, the rites, and rituals. How could one person feel so much and not have their head burst open?

But I would talk. I would speak within the shelter of our home; the walls of our home felt like a long deep hug that warms one on the coldest of nights; it would feel like the first sip of hot coffee that I would sip many years later on a frigid Chicago morning.

I would speak with my mother, and with my brother. I do not remember what we spoke of, but I did speak. My mother says I said rather strange things. With the assertiveness of adulthood, I do, of course, question what she means by strange, and when I do, she is nice enough to change her words; she says: “Not strange, I mean interesting! Interesting!” Well, I don’t know what’s worse, so I do not question her any further.

I don’t remember if I spoke much with my father; he insists that we did, and that I just don’t remember. In pictures of us together, I do seem attached to him, so it’s a fair bet that I did. My brother remembers more than I do; I had been afflicted more by the merciless yet rudimentary shedding of images deemed unnecessary by the more mechanical parts of my mind, ones that just wanted to ensure survival by making sure that thoughts that ought not be thought remained unthought.

I did not mind going to my grandmother’s house. My nano’s place was safe; I could speak there, and I could also laugh there. My grandpa, my nana, had left us before I was born; I never knew him as one knows people who live and breathe, but I knew him through a touch and sight that transcends presence. I would often rummage through the old brown, rather clunky, drawers in my nano’s house, trying to find any and all belongings of his; trying to understand who he was, how he dressed, or whether if he wrote anything for us. I don’t know why but I wanted him to have written us something; I had hoped that he had left us something, anything: some ancient wisdom that only elders knew, but I didn’t find anything; only my nano was left.

My mother told me that he had known Persian — that he was the only person in our family to do so. But how? I knew that the language was taught at schools back in the olden days, but his knowledge was much more than the perfunctory “این صندلی است” (“this is a chair”) or at least, that is what I was told. Maybe it wasn’t.

My training as a historian began with my grandmother; I would pester my nano, like little children do, tugging at her sleeve—emerging from nearby nook and crannies in her maze shaped house; like a tiny house elf, I would startle her from behind despite her tall stature; I would badger her to tell me tales of all those who came before us. Who were they? Why did they have “Khans” in their names? “We are not Khans, it does not make sense!” I would say with an air of self-assuredness. Of course, I had not yet been acculturared to the complex world of South Asian naming conventions. I do not remember what she said in response to my vexing queries, but if I were to guess now it was probably some iteration of “menu ni pata” (“I do not know”). Did she even hear me? Her auditory capacities were intact, she was not even that old, but I was not sure whether she, like most other adults, heard things that children said.

After my nana had passed away, she would often remain sick for extended periods. She also spoke in a very thick Punjabi. I do not know which of the two was the bigger barrier for me; it would still take me some years before I would get fully fluent in her language, and she would remain sick for a long time. But till then, I had to make do; I made note of whatever I could understand about him, and about everyone else. I would always confuse my relations; it was almost if my brain would seize to function if I pushed it to move past two degrees of relationships on our genealogical tree. But I never took this inability as a slight on my logical abilities; afterall, it was not my fault, I would think to myself, that we had strangely interconnected and vast families.

I would also learn Persian much later; I like to say that it’s for my research, that it helps me connect to the immense beauty of Persianate culture, but I know that, in my heart, it is, in some sense, for him. I would nick tiny possessions that belonged to my grandfather. It was not like anyone really saw them; they just lay aimlessly in nondescript places across the house. I wagered that no one would miss their presence; to them, they were just like other inanimate objects, unworthy of much thought, but to me they were a bridge that held the possibility of taking me to him. I took his stainless steel watch; it was broken, and therefore, partly for that reason, worthless to anyone else.

The number on the date window stood still; it had not moved in a long time; it was not the date on which a motorist had run him over, when he was rushed to the hospital; neither was it the date when he passed away a few days later. He had only just gone to run a few errands, as dads do, but he never came back. It was not the date when the hospital rang home and when my mother answered the phone; pregnant with me, she had been staying at her parents for a short while my father was at sea many a miles away. She heard the scratchy voice on the other end tell tales of what had transpired. I imagine her clutching the telephone receiver in horror: bewildered, lost for words, rendered motionless.

That horror would transmute into a physical pain that would be sedimented in the recesses of my unborn body. When I finally did live, it would spur back sporadically over the years: insisting to be felt, demanding a recognition of its presence.

I kept the watch; its crown was also dented; was this where he had landed when he fell to the ground on impact? If so, it were to link the end of his life with the rest of mine. I never figured out the story behind the date that peered back from the broken dial; maybe it was just the day when it decided that without its wearer, it, too, no longer had a place in the world.

Why did I love him when I knew him not? Maybe, it was easier to love those whom I did not know. I was a child, and like all children do, I also believed in the power of expectations. But, even when I tried my best to stretch back and forth in time, I could never know him. He was not there; I never felt him like other people feel the ones they lose, but I wanted to. I felt guilty of not feeling so; there was no phantom pain, no sixth sense of someone looking over my shoulder, nothing. For him to exist, I had to conjure him up; I could not unearth him, so I had to be the conjurer. I don’t know whether that makes him unreal or the realest.

I still love him, and perhaps now, it’s a different sort of love, but I do; now I think it to be a love rooted in a cognizance of my own impending mortality: I will join him beyond the veil soon enough; I do not know whether we will be sorted into the same mejlis, the same gathering of good men; I hope we are for he is sure to be onboard the train carrying those who did not acquiesce to the evil that ensnares the hearts of men. He is sure to be in the kingdom of joy, where we forget the pain that separates us. Yet, which kingdom falls in my share remains a matter yet unsettled.

As a slightly older historian now, I realize that knowing someone by possessing knowledge of their being, of their habits—the way they speak, the way they twirl their fingers when they argue, the way their cheeks curl up when they smile, the way they bite into their food, or the way their eyes light up at things that make them happy—is not the only way of knowing; knowing is done in memory, and our memories are boundless, but even if they are bounded, the space they afford us to paint the canvas of our mind with vivid images of those whom we have lost is enough to last us many lifetimes. But memory is not imagination, you object. No, my dear friend, memory is exactly that; it is imagination.

My nano had lovely tall trees in her house. The mecca of nature in her house was a jamun tree; purple black plums rested on its short bent branches and had the rather curious habit of falling all over the grass without much care for what happened below its trunk. Charles Hermann, the creative concoction of the theatrical John Nash’s mind, said something remarkable about things that fall down. When Nash broke down—unable to temper his emotions, and at a loss to come up with his “original” idea: governing dynamics, Hermann, like any decent illusion would, offered Nash to beat him up: to let loose, to feel, to be human. After they exchanged a few half-hearted blows, they joined hands to throw out Nash’s desk out from their Princeton dorm room window. The desk had been littered with failed theoretical scribblings, evidence of Nash’s failures and his misfortune of not being understood; to throw the desk out was to stop playing the game.

After they did so, Hermann gasped for air and cheekily exhaled:“That was heavy!…that Isaac Newton fella was right.”

Nash, also winded, with a quizzical grin that soothed his pain, replied with a matching grin: “He was on to something!”

Hermann shot back: “Clever boy!”

Then, weakened by their exertion, they fell to the floor, unable to reign in an explosion of laughter sparked by a match of self-amusement. Nothing could have been more liberatingly hilarious in that moment, and for just that second, Hermann was as real as any real person ever could be.

Nash and Hermann were both right about Newton. In my nano’s lawn, the fruit would also keep falling down. For what seemed like all year round to me, it kept falling, making everything it touched purple. It would simply not stay up; I wished that it would not fall so often; that way, we would always have an excuse to look up the sky; that way, we could always find respite in the consistency of their gentle bobbling against the soft breeze that would visit us habitually. Even if its visitations could not be predicted, they were always welcomed.

I remember being in love with everything purple. Perhaps, it was because of the jamuns, or maybe, it might have been because of my rather out of place fascination with Roman emperors. My parents were no connoisseurs of ancient Roman history, but I think they bought us a book with images of these dazzling men. Donning their imperial togas, dyed in a bright regal purple, their faces shining incandescently, they stood tall and proud: Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, Marcus Auerlius; I did not believe them to be human; they did not look like me.

Just like these men, the jamun tree is also no more; someone had it severely pruned; what is left are just its bones. Even on the most blistering of summer days, it remains captive to an endless winter, with dreams of its spring lost to time.

Lahore was still a peaceful city back when we were little; it was even quiet at times, if you can imagine that. Fireflies still lighted its evenings. We would often try to catch them, but it was to no avail of course. I was always a bit scared of them; I thought my fingers might burn like they did when they wandered too close to the old halogen lamps burning too hot at nano’s house. I never found out if they did hurt.

I liked going to the park close to my nano’s home. I would find joy at seeing the animals they kept there; I wanted to keep a pet animal of my own, but I did not ask my parents for it; I assumed they would say no. But because I could always come here, it was okay. I was relentless in pleading my mother to take us there. I told her I wanted to see the peafowls, even if just for a few minutes. I had loved the feeling of my imagination catching fire at the sight of their intricate feathers expanding and collapsing, moving gracefully like the diversely hued leaves of a tree caressed by the arrival of autumn.

I would always fall short of breath trying to elevate myself up the wired fence that kept the peafowls away from me. I would clutch at the fence, trying to stay steady, and my tiny fingers would curl along its thin wires. I would try to peer in, and if I tried hard enough, I could rest my cheeks against the barrier and push my nose just inside their world. Gawking, my eyes would remain fixated on their graceful movement, only breaking my gaze to glance back to see if my mother was calling yet. When she did call, I had to let my hands go; the spots where the fence had brushed my cheek would redden as I broke contact to run back to her; those marks were all I that could take of them with me.

We would go to this park often, sometimes just before sunset when the sky would be set ablaze by the descent of our star. We spoke amongst ourselves: my cousins, my brother, and me. We would climb up the slides or hang carelessly from monkey bars, and spoke about things children spoke about. What do children talk about anyway? It’s hard to remember now, both in memory and in imagination. I suppose that is testament to all that is lost in our jostling with time.

I would be amazed by the wide expanse of the ground that they used for the polo games. In my mind, it was endless. We saw all kinds of horses there: short ones, lanky ones, and even striped ones; their riders wore clothes that seemed from a land far away, and the sunglasses they donned would make me feel strange. My grandfather had also worn sunglasses, but those were not like theirs. I had seen a picture of them once; he looked like a gentleman, albeit a rather mischievous one. But I never found them; I wonder who took them.

The still blue sky of the city would touch the lanky trees that lined the edges of the park; the sheer joy we felt looking at the horizon would be an allusion to the dreams we saw as children; it was all for the taking: vast, endless, and infinite. When it would be time to leave, we would steadily clutch the thirty or forty rupees that we had in our hands. It was almost ritual to buy a cold juice and chips from the canteen housed in a decommissioned school-bus. Stationed at the edge of the park, it was a peculiar sight; it was bright yellow with flower patterns painted all across its facade; maybe they had children do it. “I could paint that,” I would think to myself.

The park was called the Polo Ground; now it is called the Pakistan Park because they wanted to be sure that it was not in India; just like much of life, geographies, too, are a tricky business. I had always thought polo a rather strange game. Why would one exert animals in such theatrical idiocies? My mind would slightly change when I learnt to ride a horse myself. I was scared at first; and like all novice riders, I would fall, get stitched up, and the cycle would repeat until the animal would start accepting me, if not as a friend, then at least not a threat. If it didn’t trust someone, its strides would immediately reveal its feelings. Falling off was a lesser rejection than the horse allowing one to ride without accepting them. But I would stop riding horses with time; it felt unreal, and not in a good way. I did not need to ride them; I could just seem them.

Growing up meant that I could no longer be quiet — I had to be more; I had to unfold. This came with problem of learning how to be social — what a dreadful proposition, I thought at the time. I had learnt well to read cues: changing intonations in speech as they spoke about how their life had been so busy could mean different things; the here and now would always provide enough input to make sense of what someone felt, but I was either highly accurate in my estimations or an absolute imbecile who would miss life for it was; there was nothing in between. Having in-betweens would demand a kindness I had not yet learnt how to hold in my heart.

But as I did grow up, the prospect of emanating my being outside the borders of my body was still something strange and new, not new in the sense of being untried, but rather, the newness I felt was akin to the nauseating sensation one feels as they fall seriously sick for the first time; the medicine they are meant to ingest is supposed to hurt before it starts to mend, and just as the coagulation of blood often leaves remnants in the shape of scars, so does learning to live differently. This newness was forced upon me by the vicissitudes of time, by its demand to not stay still, and I had no choice; either I could comply or be rendered timeless. I knew the words to be said, but I did not know how to speak them; the division between my thought and speech was as jarring as an emotional cleavage that is erected when a couple madly in love separates.

Some linguistic-minded philosophers argue that speech is the highest form of communication: unadulterated by the pen and untarnished by one’s ability to edit retrospectively. I do not know what think of that; I only know that it is truly the one form of exchange that pierces the heart the most: It exacts its dues from both the speaker and the listener; it gives them something of the other, but it also claws away fragments of their own being, leaving them less than whole.

Many years would pass, and I would talk more, and it was precisely when I was learning to expect again that Newton was to make a cautionary reappearance; “every action” demands “an equal and opposite reaction,” he would whisper. Well, as it turns out, the smart fella was on to something again; he was right and not only in the realm of the physical, but for all of life; his message was to hold for everything across the skies; it was to hold for everything beyond us, within the galaxies inside us; it was to hold for even beyond the stars, which, in their burning glory, escaped both the limits of our vision and imagination.

From then till the remainder of my sojourn in time, the physicality of my words, the pleasure brought by the communion of my speech with those I liked, or even loved, would always be tinged with a concomitant silence inside, one suffused with pain.

It is in such moments that fear still seeps into the crevices of my mind, but I remember my grandpa, and I remember Nash’s laughter, and I think about the little boy I was and the dreams that he saw, and I remind myself that I owe them to not be afraid, even if I be scared.