1. A Pamphlet at the Gate

I was nineteen when I returned to Livingstone High School to complete my matric.

The year before, in 1983, I had left Cape Town to attend As Salaam at Braemar, near Umzinto in Natal. But the school collapsed, and I found myself back at Livingstone, trying to complete the final year of an education that had already taken an unexpected detour.

One afternoon, at about three o’clock, I walked through the school gates at the end of the day. There were people standing outside handing pamphlets to the students.

I took one.

The wording has disappeared from my memory, but the promise was something like:

We can help you improve your writing in examinations.

That caught me.

I took the pamphlet home and showed it to my mother.

“I want to attend these classes,” I told her. “It is in the City. If we have the money, let me do this.”

My mother said yes.

That yes mattered.

It meant two buses from where we lived into central Cape Town. It meant finding the fare and paying for the classes. It meant allowing her nineteen-year-old son to follow a small possibility printed on a pamphlet handed to him outside a school gate.

I think the classes were held somewhere in Strand Street.

2. Seven Words on a Blackboard

On the first day, the man teaching the course walked to the board and wrote down seven words.

“Look at them,” he said. “You have one minute.”

We stared at the words, trying to force them into our minds.

After a minute, he erased the board.

“Now tell me the words.”

Between us, we could remember perhaps three.

He wrote another seven words. Again, we had one minute. This time we managed four or five.

Then he asked us to recall the first seven words.

Most of them were gone.

He had allowed us to experience the problem before offering us the solution. Isolated information, however intensely we stare at it, slips away remarkably quickly. The mind is not necessarily persuaded by our desperation.

He spoke about abbreviations, initials and acronyms. We could take the first letter of each word and try to form another word or sentence. That might help, he explained, but even an acronym could become another meaningless piece of information that had to be remembered.

3. The Image That Remained

Then he showed us something different.

Take the actual words, he said, and make sense of them as an image.

Join them together. Turn them into a scene.

The funnier the image, the better.

The more absurd, exaggerated or impossible it was, the more likely we would be to remember it.

Suddenly the words were no longer seven separate objects lying on a board. They were moving. They were colliding with one another. They had colour, shape and action. They had become part of a small theatre inside the mind.

When the board was erased, the image remained.

And because the image remained, the words could be recovered.

4. The Architecture of a Story

At the next class, the teacher told us a story.

When he had finished, he asked us to tell it back to him.

We struggled.

We remembered fragments. A character here. An incident there. Perhaps the beginning, perhaps the ending, but not the movement of the whole story.

He then taught us to break the story into blocks.

Each block represented one part of the narrative. We had to reduce each block to a single word. Then we had to take those words — again, roughly seven of them — and turn them into an image.

“Now,” he said, “tell me the story.”

This time, we could.

We were no longer trying to remember every sentence. We were walking through the image. Each object within it opened another part of the story.

The image became a map.

At the following class, he gave us an essay of about two pages.

The same method applied.

Break the essay into movements. Reduce each movement to a word. Turn the words into an image. Let the image carry the structure.

The method was simple, but it changed something fundamental in me.

5. The Examination That Proved It

When I wrote my matric examinations, I used it for history.

History was no longer a heap of dates, names and events. I divided the material into parts. Each part became a word. The words became images, and the images allowed me to move through the argument in sequence.

I aced the examination.

I received an A for history.

But I made the mistake of not using the same method for biology.

I almost flunked it.

The contrast could not have been clearer. In one subject, I had transformed information into structure, movement and image. In the other, I tried to hold information through repetition alone.

I never forgot the lesson.

More accurately, perhaps, the lesson became part of the way I remembered.

6. When Method Became Muscle

Throughout my life, I continued to use the method. When I wrote speeches for other people, I often arranged them in approximately seven parts. When I prepared an essay, I thought in movements or blocks. When I had to speak publicly, I did not always need to remember every written sentence. I needed to remember the architecture.

One image could hold the whole structure.

I could enter it through the first object and move from one part to the next.

Over time, the method became a kind of muscle memory. I used it to recall engagements, conversations, discussions and debates. I could remember not only what had been said, but the sequence in which the ideas had unfolded.

Perhaps this is also how I came to write.

I do not experience an essay as a straight procession of sentences. I see rooms, scenes, turns and openings. One part leads to another. An object or memory carries an argument. A school gate becomes a pamphlet. A pamphlet becomes two buses. Two buses lead to a room in Strand Street. A blackboard becomes seven words. Seven words become an image.

And the image remains long after the board has been erased.

7. Passing the Method On

Years later, I taught the same method to Jude, the son of a dear friend.

Jude learned differently. Conventional memorisation did not always meet him where his mind was. But he loved music — and music gave us another way in.

So I adapted the method.

We worked through song lyrics.

Lyrics already have rhythm, repetition, emotion and image. We broke them into parts, identified the key words and used them as anchors. Instead of demanding that his mind submit to a method that felt foreign, we worked through something his mind already loved.

Today, Jude is a sports presenter at a radio station. He has received awards for his work and is doing remarkably well.

Sports broadcasting requires precisely the capacities that the method helped to awaken: attention, sequence, recall, timing, improvisation and the ability to turn rapidly unfolding events into a coherent story.

I cannot claim responsibility for Jude’s gifts or achievements. Those belong to him. But I recognise the thread.

A man in a classroom in Cape Town taught a group of students how to remember seven words.

One of those students carried the method for decades.

Then, when another young mind needed a different door into learning, the method was passed on through music.

We often imagine that the teachers who shape our lives will be famous scholars, celebrated authors or towering public figures. But sometimes a teacher appears for only a few afternoons in a room whose exact location we can no longer remember.

I do not remember his name.

I do not remember the organisation that offered the course.

I cannot remember the exact wording on the pamphlet.

But I remember the seven words.

Or rather, I remember what he taught me to do with them.

He taught me that memory is not merely the storage of information. Memory is association. It is architecture. It is movement. It is the art of connecting one thing to another until knowledge becomes inhabitable.

He also taught me that imagination is not the enemy of serious learning.

Imagination is often what allows learning to survive.

The ridiculous image, the impossible scene, the strange combination of unrelated objects — these are not childish distractions. They are handles by which the mind lifts what would otherwise be too heavy or too shapeless to carry.

The lesson reached far beyond examinations.

A speech needs structure. An essay needs movement. A story needs a path through which both the writer and the reader can travel. Even an argument, if it is to be understood and remembered, must become more than a pile of facts.

It must take form.

Looking back, that small course was one of the hidden beginnings of my life as a writer.

I had walked out of Livingstone High at three o’clock and accepted a pamphlet from a stranger. I carried it home to my mother. She found the money. I caught two buses into the City.

And somewhere, perhaps in Strand Street, a man erased seven words from a blackboard.

More than forty years later, I am still recovering them.

I was watching F1 when a line suddenly opened something inside me.

A journalist was interrogating the older driver harshly, almost mockingly. Trying to expose failure. Trying to reduce an entire life into headlines and disappointments.

And he answered:

“Yeah. All the way. I loved it.”

Not defended.
Not bitter.
Not ashamed.

Just true.

And later, another question appears beneath the noise of the racing:

“What you doing, Sonny?”

It stayed with me.

Because beneath the engines, the sponsorships, the money, the spectacle, the film is really asking a deeper question:

Why do some people keep returning to the track after they have already crashed?

As I watched, I found myself thinking not only about racing films, but about Cars, about Lightning McQueen and Doc Hudson. The older driver. The wounded mentor. The man who once knew speed intimately and now carries its memory inside his bones.

These stories are never really about cars.

They are about people trying to understand what remains worth loving after loss.

I understood that question immediately.

I lost my company.

And then, after the stroke, I lost parts of my language, my rhythm, my certainty, my mind as I once knew it.

A stroke is a strange kind of silence. You are still present, still alive, but parts of yourself suddenly refuse to obey. Words stand at a distance from you. Thought becomes fog. Identity flickers.

And yet something survives.

Something underneath performance.
Underneath success.
Underneath applause.

That is what moved me in this film.

The older driver no longer races because he believes he can become young again. He races because there is still something inside him that comes alive in motion, instinct, danger, timing, precision, surrender.

The world often misunderstands people like this.

It thinks they are addicted to glory.

But sometimes they are simply refusing spiritual paralysis.

At the end comes the line:

“It’s not about the money.”

What is it about then?

Maybe it is about aliveness.

About those rare moments when body, memory, intuition, suffering, and presence suddenly align into a single movement.

Maybe it is about refusing to become parked before death actually arrives.

Maybe it is about discovering that even after collapse, there are still roads inside you asking to be travelled.

And perhaps that is why I continue writing.

Not because writing repaired everything.

Not because the race was easy.

But because somewhere, even after the wreckage, I discovered that I still loved the track.

The Things We Carry Into Fear

There is another detail in the film that stayed with me long after the engines quietened.

Before every race, Sonny reaches into a pack of cards. He takes one card — any card — and places it into his pocket before stepping into the car.

At first I misunderstood it.

I thought perhaps it was gambling. Superstition. An old racer’s eccentric ritual.

But slowly I realised it was something else entirely.

It was steadiness.

It was a small act of ordering the self before entering danger.

Human beings have always done this.

A tasbīḥ held quietly between the fingers.
A repeated dhikr before surgery.
A whispered duʿā before battle.
Prime numbers counted in panic.
Prayer beads.
Breathing patterns.
A verse repeated in darkness.

In Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov’s work, the character Gaal Dornick counts prime numbers whenever fear overtakes her. Not random numbers. Prime numbers. Stable numbers. Indivisible numbers. Numbers that hold their own structure against collapse.

I understood that immediately.

Because panic scatters the self.

Fear fractures time.
Thought becomes noise.
The soul searches for something to hold.

And so we count.

SubḥānAllāh.
SubḥānAllāh.
SubḥānAllāh.

One breath.
One bead.
One lap.
One number.
One card inside the pocket.

Not because the object itself possesses magic.

But because the ritual gathers us back together.

After my stroke, I began understanding this differently. When language itself becomes unstable, repetition becomes mercy. Rhythm becomes structure. Dhikr becomes not only spiritual remembrance, but shelter.

A way of returning to yourself.

Perhaps that is what Sonny was really carrying into the car.

Not luck.

Remembrance.

A Conscience Inside the Machine

It struck me afterwards that Lewis Hamilton, one of the producers behind F1, has also spoken publicly about the suffering of children in Gaza.

I found myself thinking about that strangely.

Because Formula One is a world built around speed, money, branding, precision, spectacle. And yet somewhere inside all that machinery, a human being still pauses long enough to say: children are starving.

Perhaps that too is part of what this film is circling beneath the engines and adrenaline:

How do we remain human inside systems that constantly pressure us to become performance alone?

Maybe all of us carry something small into fear.

A prayer.
A number.
A memory.
A conscience we refuse to abandon.

The Revolution Was Never Televised

Long before smartphones and social media, another voice had already recognised the danger.

I still remember wearing a T-shirt that simply read:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

It was during my years at Bush Radio. One day my mentor, Zane Ibrahim, looked at the shirt and reminded me that the words belonged to Gil Scott-Heron. He wasn’t merely identifying the author. He was quietly pointing me back to the source.

At the time, the phrase belonged to another struggle. It warned that liberation would never arrive as entertainment, neatly packaged for passive spectators. Freedom demanded participation.

Looking back now, I hear those words differently.

Today, almost everything is televised. Livestreamed. Shared. Clipped into reels. Measured in views.

Yet the deepest revolutions remain stubbornly invisible.

No camera can record the moment arrogance gives way to humility.

No algorithm can measure repentance.

No notification announces the return of remembrance.

The greatest revolutions still occur in the unseen territory between the human heart and its Lord.

Perhaps Gil Scott-Heron was never really speaking about television.

He was warning us against confusing visibility with transformation.

“Things are big that should be small...” — Jamiroquai (1996)

Most of us heard the song.

Very few of us listened.

It arrived in 1996 with a bassline impossible to ignore, a floor that moved beneath the singer’s feet, and a title that sounded futuristic enough to belong in a science-fiction film. We danced. We sang along. We admired the music video. Then we moved on.

Three decades later, we find ourselves living inside its warning.

Jamiroquai was never really singing about computers. He was singing about civilisation. About a world becoming increasingly artificial. About humanity confusing progress with wisdom. About technology promising liberation while quietly reshaping the human soul.

He simply gave it a name:

Virtual Insanity.

Today, that phrase no longer feels poetic.

It feels diagnostic.

When We Handed Over Our Attention

Every civilisation is ultimately shaped by what it gives its attention to.

Ancient Egypt raised monuments.

Rome organised empire.

The modern world built factories.

Our own age has built something less visible, but perhaps more powerful:

the economy of attention.

The Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert Simon recognised it long before smartphones existed. He observed that a wealth of information inevitably creates a poverty of attention. He understood that the scarce resource of the future would not be information. It would be the human capacity to notice.

Today, billion-dollar industries compete for a few seconds of our concentration. Every notification, every recommendation, every endlessly scrolling screen asks the same question:

Can I have just one more moment of your life?

We thought technology was selling products.

In truth, it was buying us.

Things Big That Should Be Small

One line from Virtual Insanity has never stopped echoing:

“Things are big that should be small.”

Perhaps no lyric has described our century more accurately.

What should be immense?

Prayer.

Friendship.

Family.

Silence.

Reading.

Neighbourhood.

Mercy.

Wonder.

What has become immense instead?

Algorithms.

Metrics.

Followers.

Notifications.

Outrage.

Endless consumption.

We have not simply changed our habits.

We have inverted our sense of proportion.

The Qur’an calls this mīzān—the balance by which creation stands. A civilisation begins to lose itself when it can no longer distinguish what deserves its attention from what merely demands it.

The New Idols

Every age fashions its own idols.

Some carve them from stone.

Others cast them in gold.

Ours are made of light.

Not the light that descends in revelation.

The light of screens.

They glow in our hands before dawn.

They accompany us to the table.

They interrupt conversations.

They follow us into our bedrooms.

They greet us before Fajr and often receive our final glance before sleep.

The tragedy is not that we use technology.

The tragedy is that technology has quietly begun to use us.

The Mountain Does Not Send Notifications

Growing up beneath Table Mountain taught me something I only understand now.

The mountain never hurried.

She never demanded attention.

She simply remained.

Faith often works in the same way.

Allah does not compete for our attention.

He calls us.

The adhān does not interrupt life.

It restores its rhythm.

The Qur’an does not flood us with information.

It teaches us how to see.

A mountain waits.

A book waits.

A teacher waits.

Revelation waits.

Only the algorithm panics.

Reading Slowly Is an Act of Resistance

Some books are read quickly.

Others read us.

The older I become, the slower I find myself reading.

Not because age has slowed me.

Because wisdom has.

Perhaps this is why I find myself returning to writers like Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. They remind us that reading is not the consumption of information. It is the formation of perception.

A civilisation survives because some people still read slowly.

They refuse to confuse speed with understanding.

They know that wisdom ripens.

It cannot be downloaded.

The Forgotten Appetite

Technology did not invent appetite.

It industrialised it.

The appetite for novelty.

For affirmation.

For outrage.

For distraction.

For endless stimulation.

Months ago I found myself writing about appetite in another context. I realise now that the subject was always larger than I imagined.

The greatest battle has never been against machines.

It has always been against the nafs that wishes to consume without end.

The screen merely discovered what Shayṭān already knew.

An undisciplined appetite can never be satisfied.

Islam Was Preparing Us All Along

None of this means technology is evil.

A knife may prepare bread or spill blood.

The question has never been the tool.

The question is the soul holding it.

Long before anyone imagined artificial intelligence, Islam had already been training human intelligence.

Five daily prayers interrupt the algorithm.

Ramadan interrupts appetite.

Dhikr interrupts forgetfulness.

Sujūd interrupts the ego.

The Qur’an interrupts heedlessness.

This is not a religion afraid of technology.

It is a religion determined that nothing should replace remembrance.

Beyond Virtual Insanity

Perhaps Jamiroquai saw something coming.

But the Qur’an had already given it a name.

Not virtual insanity.

Ghaflah.

Heedlessness.

The slow forgetting of who we are.

A civilisation can survive poverty.

It can survive political defeat.

It can survive disaster.

What it cannot survive is the loss of its moral and spiritual centre.

When attention is captured, memory begins to fade.

When memory fades, identity follows.

And when identity is forgotten, people will willingly surrender their compass to whoever promises the next notification.

🌙 Closing Reflection

Perhaps the greatest question of our age is not whether artificial intelligence will become more intelligent.

It is whether human beings will remain wise.

The future will not belong to those who can process the most information.

It will belong to those who can still recognise silence.

Who can still read slowly.

Who can still sit with a teacher.

Who can still climb a mountain without photographing it.

Who can still open the Qur’an before opening a screen.

Who understand that attention is an act of worship.

And who remember, even in a world of virtual insanity,

never to hand over their compass. 🌿

A Note of Gratitude
Some essays begin long before the first sentence is written. This one began when my friend Abubakr Shabudien shared his reflections on Virtual Insanity and, through them, introduced me to Herbert Simon’s remarkable observation that “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” I had never encountered Simon’s work before. That single insight opened a doorway. The journey that follows is my own, but I remain grateful for the conversation that made it possible.

High above the valley of Makkah, carved into the rough flank of Jabal al-Nūr — the Mountain of Light — there is a narrow cave between stones.

It is not large.

It is not majestic.

It is simply a small opening in the rock, just wide enough for a man to sit alone.

This was غَارُ حِرَاء — Ghar Ḥirāʾ.

Even its name is not light on the tongue.
Ḥirāʾ begins with a breath drawn from within —
as if the place itself is teaching you how to enter.

Today pilgrims climb the mountain to see it, often surprised by how modest it is. The cave is barely a few meters long, its floor uneven, its walls raw stone. There is no sense of grandeur here.

Only silence.

Yet from this narrow space began one of the most transformative moments in human history.

The Climb of Solitude

Before revelation came, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ had already begun withdrawing from the noise of Makkah.

The city below was alive with trade, poetry, tribal rivalry, and the rituals of idols. But something within him sought a different horizon.

The early sources describe how he would climb Jabal al-Nūr and remain in the cave for periods of contemplation, especially during the nights of Ramadan. The Arabs called this practice taḥannuth — a retreat from worldly distraction to reflect upon creation and the One who made it.

Some later traditions speak of extended retreats — long periods of withdrawal. But what is certain is this: he returned again and again to that cave, remaining for many nights, until silence itself became a kind of knowing.

There were no followers.

No scripture yet.

No public mission.

Only a man climbing a mountain in search of truth.

In that cave he prayed, reflected, and watched the vast desert sky above Makkah.

History often remembers the moment of revelation. But the cave reminds us that before revelation there was silence.

The Crack Where Light Enters

Inside the cave there is a narrow opening in the rock — not a grand window, just a slender gap where light slips through.

It is a small detail.

But sometimes the smallest openings change everything.

One night, in that quiet place, the silence broke.

The angel Jibrīl عليه السلام descended and embraced the Prophet ﷺ with words that would echo through centuries:

اقْرَأْ

Read.

Recite.

Proclaim.

He was unlettered — and yet commanded to read.
Not from a page, but from what had been placed within him.

Not the decree of a king.

Not the command of an empire.

But the first word of the Qur’an — a call to knowledge, awareness, and remembrance.

The Qur’an did not descend into a palace or temple.

It descended into a cave carved into stone — into a heart that had already learned how to listen.

He Descended Trembling

Revelation did not arrive as calm certainty.

It came as an overwhelming encounter.

When the angel Jibrīl عليه السلام first appeared in the cave and commanded “Iqraʾ”, the Prophet ﷺ was shaken by the intensity of the moment.

He left the cave and descended the mountain quickly, his heart racing.

Imagine that descent.

Night over the mountains of Makkah.
The path of stone beneath his feet.
The words of revelation still echoing within him.

He hurried home.

When he reached Khadīja رضي الله عنها he said:

“Zammilūnī, zammilūnī — Cover me, cover me.”

She wrapped him in a cloak until the trembling subsided.

Then she listened.

Not with doubt.
Not with fear.

But with the steady faith of a woman who knew the character of the man before her.

She reassured him with words that history has never forgotten:

“By Allah, Allah will never disgrace you.
You uphold family ties, you help the poor,
you honour the guest, and you stand with those in need.”

Her reassurance was not mere consolation. She looked at the whole of his life. The man who honoured kinship, carried the burdens of others, welcomed the guest, and stood beside the afflicted could never be abandoned by the Lord who had fashioned such a character. Her comfort was born not only of love, but of a clear recognition of the truth she saw before her.

In that quiet home in Makkah, before the message spread to the world, there was a moment of profound loyalty and recognition.

Khadīja رضي الله عنها believed in him.

She became the first Muslim.

Before the public proclamation of Islam, before the gathering of companions, before the Qur’an flowed across Arabia, there was this intimate scene:

A trembling prophet.
A faithful wife.
A cloak of comfort.

The first revelation did not begin with crowds.

It began with trust.

Wrapped in Revelation

Soon Revelation itself would speak to that trembling state:

“O you wrapped in garments…”
(Yā ayyuhā al-Muzzammil)

And then:

“O you enveloped in a cloak — arise and warn.”
(Yā ayyuhā al-Muddaththir)

It was as if the Qur’an was addressing not only the Prophet ﷺ, but also the trembling human being beneath the cloak.

The cave had prepared him for silence.

The cloak prepared him for the weight of revelation.

For the words that followed were not light words:

“Indeed, We will cast upon you a weighty word.”
(Qur’an 73:5)

The man who sought solitude in a narrow cave would now carry a message vast enough to transform the world.

A Heart Turned Toward the Sacred House

Years later, after migration to Madinah, another moment of longing would come.

For a time the Muslims prayed toward Bayt al-Maqdis in Jerusalem. Yet the Prophet ﷺ would often raise his face toward the heavens, hoping that the direction of prayer might return to the Kaʿbah in Makkah — the sanctuary built by Ibrahim and Ismaʿil عليهما السلام.

The Qur’an records this moment with remarkable tenderness:

“We have certainly seen the turning of your face toward the heaven. So We will surely turn you to a qiblah that will please you. Turn your face toward al-Masjid al-Ḥarām.”
(Qur’an 2:144)

A quiet longing became revelation.

And the direction of an entire community changed.

The gaze of one heart became the orientation of a civilisation.

The Lesson of the Cave

The cave of Ḥirāʾ teaches something profound.

Revelation does not descend into crowded hearts.

It enters hearts that have made room for silence.

The mountain remains today — still rugged, still quiet, still overlooking the valley of Makkah. Pilgrims climb its slopes and peer into the narrow space where the first words of the Qur’an were spoken.

But the true journey of Ḥirāʾ is not a climb through rock.

It is a journey inward.

Every soul carries its own mountain.

Every heart has its own cave.

And sometimes all that is needed is a small opening — a crack in the stone of our distractions — through which light can enter.

For the first light that entered Ḥirāʾ did not spread across the world immediately.

It first descended a mountain, trembling, and found shelter in the arms of Khadīja رضي الله عنها.

From a crack in a mountain…
to a home in Makkah…
to a message that would illuminate the world.

غَارُ حِرَاء
Cave of Ḥirāʾ

Where silence opened, revelation entered.

Shaykh Allie Khalfe draws attention to this moment as an early example of istiqrāʾ (analytical induction): Sayyidah Khadīja رضي الله عنها observed the Prophet’s established character and reasoned from it that Allah would never disgrace him. Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī discusses this line of reasoning in Fatḥ al-Bārī.

My daughter, Bilqis, is an architect. I have often told her that if I ever had the opportunity to build a house of my own, I already knew what kind of house I would want.

I would not begin with its façade.

I would not ask how impressive it would look from the street, or whether people passing by would stop to admire it. I would begin somewhere else entirely.

How will the people inside this house live together? Where will they meet, eat, talk, laugh and rest? Where will the children play? Where will an elderly person sit in the afternoon sun? Where will guests feel welcomed without disturbing the family’s privacy? Where will one go to be alone, and where will everyone naturally come together again?

I have always imagined a house built around a courtyard.

The outside could be plain—even unremarkable. Its beauty would be kept for the people who lived within it. Once you entered, however, the house would open itself to you: rooms gathered around a protected courtyard, with a garden, a water feature and shaded places to sit.

There would be sunlight without exposure, privacy without isolation, and air that moved naturally through the building.

The Courtyard as the Heart of the Home

The courtyard would be the heart of the house.

People would have their own rooms and their own privacy, but their doors would open towards a shared centre. Simply by moving through the house, family members would encounter one another.

Someone crossing the courtyard might stop for a conversation. Someone preparing food would still hear the life of the household. Children could play under the watchful eyes of parents and grandparents. A visitor could sit beneath a tree, listening to the sound of water.

The architecture itself would hold people together.

That is what many modern houses seem unable to do. They may provide rooms for every conceivable function, yet they do not always provide a true centre for the family.

There may be a formal lounge that nobody uses, a television in every bedroom and an impressive kitchen designed to be photographed—but nowhere that naturally gathers people into one another’s company.

Every person retreats into a separate room, a separate screen and a separate climate-controlled box.

Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil and the Architecture We Lost

These thoughts returned to me when I encountered the Egyptian architect Abdel-Wahed El-Wakil speaking about the failure of modern architecture. A student of Hassan Fathy, El-Wakil has spent his career recovering an architecture rooted in local materials, climate, craftsmanship and human community.

What struck me was that he was not simply defending an old architectural style. He was defending a different understanding of human life. The courtyard, the shaded passage, the garden, the fountain and the naturally ventilated room are not decorative relics. They belong to an architecture that understands our need for beauty, nature, privacy and one another.

His criticism gave words to the house I had been describing to Bilqis for years.

From Sakan to Sakīnah

El-Wakil also draws our attention to the Arabic word sakan: a dwelling, a home, a place of rest.

Sakan and sakīnah come from the same Arabic root, s-k-n—a root carrying the meanings of dwelling, stillness, rest and tranquillity. The connection between these words is profound. A home is not merely a structure in which people reside. It should be a place where agitation subsides, where the human being becomes settled and where tranquillity enters the heart.

The Qur’an says:

“And Allah has made your homes a place to rest.”
—Surah An-Nahl, 16:80

The Arabic word used for that place of rest is sakanan. A house, then, is not merely shelter from the weather, nor an asset to own, display and eventually sell. It is meant to give its inhabitants repose.

This helps us understand why the courtyard, garden, fountain, shade and moving air matter. They are not decorative luxuries. Nor are the spaces where families meet, eat and speak to one another. Together, they create the conditions in which sakīnah becomes possible.

A house may be spectacular and still fail as a sakan. It may impress everyone who sees it from the street while leaving those inside it restless, isolated and dependent upon machines merely to breathe.

El-Wakil is therefore asking us to recover more than a lost architectural tradition. He is asking us to recover the meaning of home.

The Prophet’s ﷺ Home and Mosque

When I think about such a house, I think about the home and mosque of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in Madinah.

It was not grand or ostentatious. The private rooms—the hujurāt—adjoined the mosque, while the mosque itself was open, spacious and alive with many forms of human activity.

It was a place of worship, certainly, but also of teaching, consultation, hospitality and community. Family life, spiritual life and public life were distinct, yet they were not torn apart from one another.

The simplicity of the structure did not diminish the richness of the life it contained.

This is an important distinction. Modernity often confuses richness with luxury. But a building can be expensive and still feel spiritually empty. It can be visually impressive and still fail to nourish the people inside it.

The Prophet’s ﷺ home and mosque remind us that architecture does not need to be extravagant to hold a complete and meaningful human life.

The Inward Beauty of the Andalusian House

I also think of the courtyard houses of Andalusia and other parts of the Muslim world.

Their street-facing walls were often restrained. They did not reveal everything to the passer-by. But inside, another world appeared: gardens, patterned light, flowing water, shaded arcades and rooms arranged around a common centre.

Their beauty faced inward.

This was not merely an aesthetic preference. It expressed a particular understanding of dignity. The purpose of a house was not to display the wealth or taste of its owner to strangers. Its purpose was to nourish the people entrusted to it.

The most beautiful part of the house belonged to the family.

It was where people sat together, where children grew up, where visitors were received and where memories accumulated over generations. Beauty was not something pasted onto the exterior of a building. It was woven into everyday life.

When the House Could Breathe

The courtyard also possessed an environmental wisdom that many contemporary buildings have forgotten.

Thick walls protected inhabitants from heat. Shaded openings moderated the sunlight. Trees and plants cooled and softened the air. Water brought both physical and psychological relief. Windows, screens and wind catchers encouraged ventilation while preserving privacy.

The house breathed.

By contrast, many modern houses seem unable to survive without machines. They are constructed as sealed boxes and then made habitable through air-conditioning. If the electricity fails, the building can quickly become unbearable.

Of course, air-conditioning can be necessary, especially in extreme heat. The problem is not the existence of the machine. The problem is that we have designed buildings that cannot live without it.

Instead of assisting the natural intelligence of the house, technology has been asked to replace that intelligence altogether.

What kind of progress produces a house that cannot breathe unless it is connected to electricity?

The Suffocation Is Also Social

Perhaps this is why the caption “Modern homes are suffocating us” affected me so strongly.

Suffocation is not only the absence of moving air. It can also be the absence of relationship, warmth, memory and belonging.

A house can suffocate its inhabitants socially. It can separate parents from children and one generation from another. It can give everyone private space while depriving the family of a meaningful shared space.

People may live under the same roof without truly living together.

Architecture cannot create loving relationships by itself. But it can either support those relationships or make them more difficult. It can create opportunities for meeting, eating, talking and sharing—or it can encourage everyone to disappear behind a separate door.

The arrangement of a house quietly teaches its inhabitants how to live.

Modernity’s Mistake

This is not an argument against everything modern, nor is it simply an argument against Europe. European traditions also gave us the Roman atrium, Mediterranean patio houses and monastic cloisters.

The deeper problem is a form of industrial modernity that treats the house as an object: something to be viewed, marketed, photographed and sold.

It asks what a house should look like from the road before asking what kind of life should unfold inside it.

It designs for visual impact, resale value and mechanical convenience. It forgets climate, culture, extended family, hospitality and the human need to belong somewhere.

Modernity celebrates the individual, and its houses increasingly reflect that individualism. Every person receives a private room, a private bathroom, a private television and a private screen. We gain personal convenience while gradually losing the spaces that teach us how to share.

Architecture Must Begin With Human Life

A humane architecture must reverse that order.

It must begin with the human being—not an isolated human being, but a person embedded in family, community, nature and spiritual life.

It must understand that privacy and togetherness are not opposites. A good house makes room for both. It gives each person a place of retreat while continually drawing the household back towards a shared heart.

That is the house I have always tried to describe to Bilqis.

I do not dream of a mansion. I dream of rooms gathered around a courtyard. I dream of a tree casting shade across the paving and water moving gently in the centre. I dream of doors and windows that can remain open, of breezes passing through the rooms, and of several generations finding their places without becoming strangers to one another.

I dream of a house whose beauty is not offered first to the street, but to the people living inside it.

Modern architecture so often asks:

How should a house look?

The more important question is:

What kind of human life should this house make possible?

A Message from Gulshan

The message arrived on WhatsApp with the warmth and familiarity of community:

“Salam Uncle Adli. Shakeel asked me to keep you informed about my exhibition on our Malay community in Joburg, which is currently showing at Wits Art Museum.”

It was from the photographer Gulshan Khan. Her words were informal, almost incidental, but the exhibition she was inviting me to see concerned something much larger: the movement of a people, the survival of their religious traditions and the ways in which memory is carried across generations.

Bilqis and Sadia joined me at the Wits Art Museum. We arrived too late for the formal speeches, but perhaps the afternoon still gave me what I needed. I met Gulshan beside her photographs and had the opportunity to speak with her about the community she had documented.

Bilqis later sent me two photographs from our visit. In one, Gulshan and I are standing in conversation before her work. Her hands are open as she speaks; I am listening with my hand resting against my chin. Behind us are photographs of ordinary people engaged in ordinary acts—although nothing about them feels ordinary once one understands what those acts have survived.

The picture captures a conversation, but it also captures a meeting with an inheritance.

The Question on the Wall

Gulshan’s contribution to the exhibition is titled The Joburg Jama’ah — Cape Creole in the City of Gold. It forms part of What We Do Not See, a wider photographic exhibition at Wits Art Museum exploring the physical structures, cultures and domestic relationships through which Johannesburg becomes home.

At the entrance to Gulshan’s work, a question is printed on the wall:

“What do we carry with us when we are made to move, not once, but across generations?”

It is a question about migration, but not only migration. It is about memory. It asks what remains when people are separated from familiar streets, homes and neighbourhoods. What survives when governments rename people, divide them into racial categories and remove them from the places in which their communal lives have taken root?

The people in Gulshan’s photographs are descendants of the indigenous, the enslaved, political exiles and others who came—or were brought—to the Cape from different parts of Africa and the Indian Ocean world.

Over generations, these different histories met and formed what came to be called the Cape Muslim or “Cape Malay” community. The name “Malay” has endured, although the community’s ancestry is far more complex than the word suggests. It includes African, Southeast Asian, South Asian, European and other lineages brought together under colonialism.

Some Cape Muslim families later travelled north to the Transvaal, settling in places such as Fietas and Sophiatown. There, as at the Cape, they created dense networks of family, faith, commerce and neighbourliness.

Then came another forced movement.

Under the Group Areas Act, communities were again broken apart. Homes and neighbourhoods declared “white areas” were destroyed or appropriated. Families were dispersed to Bosmont, Eldorado Park, Riverlea, Ennerdale and other parts of Johannesburg.

The movement was not singular. It happened repeatedly: across oceans, across provinces, across cities and across generations.

Gulshan’s photographs ask what these families carried through all that displacement.

What Could Not Be Confiscated

The answer appears in the practices she photographs.

There is the Ratiep, with its embodied rhythm, movement, recitation and swordplay. Rooted in Sufi tradition and adapted over centuries at the Cape, the Ratiep has become a distinctively South African expression of devotion, discipline and communal identity.

One of the images that arrested me shows a man performing the Ratiep. He holds a long, curved sword before him. His free hand is extended, while a gathering watches from behind. The photograph contains movement and stillness at the same time. His body is concentrated, but the scene around him is communal.

The body itself becomes a bearer of memory.

Another group of photographs turns towards women: women gathered in a kitchen after a Gadat, women greeting and embracing, and women participating in Moulood. These are not grand public spectacles. They take place in homes, kitchens, mosques and community halls—the intimate spaces in which belonging is repeatedly made.

A Gadat is a communal gathering of remembrance in which portions of the Qur’an, supplications, devotional poetry and dhikr are recited. Historically, men and women sometimes formed their own Gadat jama’ahs. Such gatherings did more than sustain individual devotion. They held communities together.

Research into Cape Muslim oral history records elders remembering how they learnt by sitting and listening. They attended the Gadat, heard the recitations and committed them to memory. Religious knowledge was carried by the voice before it was carried by the page.

This is important. A colonial archive ordinarily preserves what governments, officials and powerful institutions choose to record. But a living archive is different. It may be held in melody, pronunciation, bodily movement, recipes, greetings and the arrangement of people in a room.

It is preserved by doing.

Women at the Centre of Memory

I found myself particularly drawn to Gulshan’s photographs of women.

In one, women gather around sliced watermelons in a kitchen after a religious occasion. In another, two women greet each other with an embrace. Elsewhere, women dressed in white sit closely together during a devotional gathering; one holds a frame drum as she leads the recitation.

These photographs reveal a part of community history that formal accounts can easily overlook.

Women have often been the custodians of the domestic and devotional spaces in which communal memory survives. They prepare the food, dress the children, teach the recitations, welcome visitors and ensure that an occasion becomes a gathering rather than simply an event.

This labour may be described as domestic, but it is also historical. It carries language, faith, taste and belonging from one generation into the next.

The women in Gulshan’s photographs are therefore not merely participants in tradition. They are among its archivists.

The kitchen, too, becomes an archive. So does the embrace. So does the hand striking the drum and the voice leading the congregation in remembrance.

Entering Rabiʿ al-Awwal

The timing of our visit gave the photographs another layer of meaning.

According to the published South African Islamic calendar, Rabiʿ al-Awwal 1448 began on Friday, 14 August 2026, subject to the local sighting of the moon. We entered the museum on Saturday, at the very beginning of the month.

Rabiʿ al-Awwal is the month in which many Muslims commemorate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him. Muslim communities do not all mark the occasion in the same way. Within the Cape Muslim tradition, however, Moulood has long been an important expression of love for the Prophet and of communal remembrance.

A Moulood may include recitations from the Qur’an, the narration of the Prophet’s life, poetry in his praise, salutations and supplications. Food is prepared and shared. People gather not only to hear the story, but to participate in its retelling.

The history is written, but it becomes alive through its oral performance.

That is what made it so affecting to encounter Gulshan’s Moulood photographs at the beginning of Rabiʿ al-Awwal. I was not merely looking at images of a religious occasion. I was looking at the ways a displaced community continues to remember the Prophet through voice, rhythm, hospitality and collective presence.

The month had arrived, and on the museum wall were the people who give the month its local colour and sound.

Gulshan’s Act of Witness

Gulshan Khan is an independent South African photographer whose work engages with memory, identity, belonging, justice and human dignity. A National Geographic Explorer and former Agence France-Presse photographer, she became the first African woman to be regularly assigned by AFP.

Yet the significance of The Things We Carry With Us, the ongoing project from which these Johannesburg photographs emerge, lies not only in her professional accomplishments. It lies in her relationship to the people she photographs.

Gulshan is not approaching Muslim life as an exotic subject. She is working from within a community and history to which she herself belongs.

Her photographs therefore carry a particular intimacy. They do not reduce faith to spectacle. A religious practice may be visually striking, but her camera also attends to the quieter gestures surrounding it: a look, a touch, a greeting, a group of women cutting fruit together.

Her work is an intervention in the historical archive. Muslim communities in South Africa were frequently recorded through the language of colonial classification. They appeared as racial categories, labouring populations or administrative problems. Their interior lives—their love, faith, humour, tenderness and dignity—were much less likely to be preserved.

Gulshan turns the camera towards those interior worlds.

By photographing her community in the present, she is also leaving something for those who will come after it. Extracts from The Things We Carry With Us have already entered the permanent collection and archive of the Iziko South African National Gallery.

The people in these photographs are no longer absent from the national archive. They look back at it.

The Archive Is Alive

Standing with Gulshan in front of her work, I began to understand the exhibition’s title differently.

What We Do Not See is not necessarily what is absent. Sometimes it is what has always been present but has not been recognised. A community may live in a city for generations and still remain unseen by the city’s official memory.

Gulshan’s photographs make that presence visible.

But they also suggest that sight is not enough. We cannot understand the Joburg Jama’ah merely by looking. We must listen—to the recitations, family histories and names of neighbourhoods that no longer exist in the forms people remember them.

We must notice what was carried when so much else was taken away.

The Ratiep carried memory through the body. The Gadat carried it through collective recitation. The Moulood carried it through love for the Prophet. Women carried it through food, teaching, song and gathering. Families carried it from the Cape to Johannesburg and then from Fietas and Sophiatown to Bosmont, Riverlea, Eldorado Park and Ennerdale.

None of these practices remained completely unchanged. Living traditions seldom do. They travelled, adapted and found new homes.

This may be the most important insight in Gulshan’s work: memory is not static. It is practised.

We missed the speeches that afternoon, but we did not miss the conversation. I met Gulshan among her photographs. Bilqis and Sadia were there with me. Around us were images of a community remembering itself.

And outside the museum, Rabiʿ al-Awwal had begun.

The archive was not silent. It was not confined to the walls, the captions or the museum collection.

It was, as Gulshan writes, “held in the breath of the community.”

When Rabīʿ al-Awwal comes,
the moon is not the only thing
newly seen.

In kitchens and masājid,
hands gather the leaves—
lemon and orange—
cut fine as green remembrance.

Rosewater releases its perfume.
Rampies pass from palm to palm.
The room becomes a garden
the eye cannot see.

Then the riwāyah rises:
one voice finding another,
the old story crossing oceans again,
entering the mouths of children.

Ṣallū ʿalan-Nabī—

until the walls remember,
until the heart softens,
until love for the Beloved
is not merely sung,

but becomes how we greet,
how we feed,
how we forgive.

This is how the Cape keeps memory:
not beneath glass,
but breathing—

in scent,
in sound,
in the blessed work of hands.

O month of salawāt,
come gently.

Find us gathered.
Find us remembering.
Find us sending peace
upon the one
who taught us mercy.

I thought my teacher was sending me something new.

In fact, he was returning me to something he had placed in my hands many years before.

I had sent Shaykh Allie Khalfe the draft of an essay on al-Fātiḥah. In his reply, he included an attachment and one short instruction:

“See attached Shaykh Yasin Fadani’s silsilah for reciting the Fatiha in a single breath.”

The attachment contained an Arabic chain of transmission recorded by Shaykh Muḥammad Yāsīn al-Fādānī al-Makkī in al-ʿUjālah fī al-Aḥādīth al-Musalsalah.

As I looked through its names, something stirred in my memory.

I went back to a book that had stood upon my shelf for years: A Fellowship of Faith, written by Shaykh Allie and published by the IslamicText Institute.

He had given the book to me personally. On its opening page, beneath his signature, he had written:

To Adli, with love, Allie.

I turned to the section on Sūrah al-Fātiḥah.

There, on pages 26 and 27, was the heading:

In a Single Breath

The English transmission had been there all along.

The Chain Waiting in the Book

The pages in A Fellowship of Faith introduce a practice attributed to Ibn ʿArabī: the recitation of al-Fātiḥah connected to the Basmalah “in the same breath, without stopping.”

What follows is not simply an instruction in breathing. It is a silsilah—a chain naming those through whom the report travelled.

The Arabic document Shaykh Allie later sent preserved that chain in greater detail. Across cities and centuries, teacher names teacher, each one identifying the person from whom the transmission was received.

Among its later links, the report passes—as it is presented in the text—through Anas ibn Mālik, Sayyidunā ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, Sayyidunā Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, Jibrīl, Mīkāʾīl and Isrāfīl.

The narration also carries a repeated expression:

Wa-Llāhi l-ʿAẓīm
By Allah the Immense.

This repeated formula gives the transmission its musalsal character. A musalsal chain preserves a recurring feature as it passes from one narrator to the next. The transmitters do not merely hand onwards a piece of information. They repeat a particular phrase or preserve a particular manner of receiving and conveying it.

A chain of transmission is therefore not merely a list.

It is memory given structure.

It answers a question that modern writing often neglects:

From whom did you receive this?

The presence of a chain does not, by itself, settle every scholarly question concerning the grading of a report. Nor should extraordinary promises associated with a narration be repeated carelessly or without the guidance of those trained to evaluate them.

That caution is not a reason to dismiss the chain.

It is a reason to return to the teacher.

The book may preserve the words. The silsilah may preserve the names. But the teacher helps us understand how the key should turn.

What Does “In a Single Breath” Mean?

The practice is literal.

The reciter gathers the breath, begins with Bismillāh, and carries the whole of al-Fātiḥah upon one continuous exhalation.

Praise.

Mercy.

Judgement.

Worship.

Dependence.

Guidance.

The path of those who have been blessed.

At the conclusion of the sūrah, the reciter completes wa-lā ḍ-ḍāllīn. Without taking another breath, one may make the brief recitational stop that distinguishes the end of the Qur’anic passage, and then say:

Āmīn.

Āmīn is not a verse of al-Fātiḥah. It is the worshipper’s response to the prayer contained within it:

“O Allah, answer,” or “so let it be.”

The practice therefore begins with the Name of Allah and ends with the human being asking Allah to accept the prayer.

From Bismillāh to Āmīn.

One breath.

When the Pauses Disappear

When al-Fātiḥah is recited verse by verse, we ordinarily pause at its familiar endings:

ar-Raḥīm.

al-ʿālamīn.

ad-dīn.

nastaʿīn.

al-mustaqīm.

Each pause gives the verse room to settle.

But continuous recitation reveals another dimension of the Arabic. Endings normally concealed by a pause become audible, and the opening vowels of certain words fall away as one phrase flows into the next.

Thus:

…r-Raḥīmi l-ḥamdu…

The kasrah of ar-Raḥīmi is heard because the reciter has not stopped. The hamzat al-waṣl at the beginning of al-ḥamdu yields to the movement already underway.

The sūrah begins to sound less like seven separate stations and more like a single unfolding journey:

Bismi-llāhi r-raḥmāni r-raḥīmi l-ḥamdu li-llāhi rabbi l-ʿālamīna r-raḥmāni r-raḥīmi māliki yawmi d-dīni iyyāka naʿbudu wa-iyyāka nastaʿīnu-hdinā ṣ-ṣirāṭa l-mustaqīma ṣirāṭa lladhīna anʿamta ʿalayhim ghayri l-maghḍūbi ʿalayhim wa-lā ḍ-ḍāllīn — āmīn.

The transliteration itself begins to teach.

It shows where one word leans into another.

Where a vowel must be carried.

Where an alif becomes silent.

Where the tongue cannot depend upon the comfort of a pause.

This is not merely the absence of stopping.

It is the presence of connection.

The Turn Carried Upon One Breath

In an earlier reflection, I wrote about the extraordinary grammatical movement at the centre of al-Fātiḥah.

The sūrah begins by speaking about Allah:

All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all worlds.
The Entirely Merciful, the Especially Compassionate.
Master of the Day of Judgement.

Then comes the turning:

Iyyāka naʿbudu wa-iyyāka nastaʿīn.
You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.

We are no longer speaking about Allah.

We are speaking directly to Him.

In the language of Arabic rhetoric, this movement is called iltifāt: a turning in the mode of address.

When al-Fātiḥah is recited in a single breath, the grammar turns—but the breath does not.

The worshipper is carried across the threshold without interruption.

One moment we are speaking of the Lord of all worlds.

The next moment we stand before Him:

You alone.

The lungs do not announce the transition. No fresh breath separates recognition from encounter.

The same breath that praised Him now asks Him for help.

The same breath that remembered the Day of Judgement now pleads for guidance.

Distance becomes address.

Praise becomes presence.

The Difficulty Is Not Only in the Lungs

The first time I tried to recite al-Fātiḥah in a single breath, I thought the difficulty would be in the lungs.

It was also in the attention.

The practice is not a competition in endurance. Nor should the words be rushed, distorted or stripped of their proper articulation merely so that the reciter can reach the end without inhaling.

If the breath causes us to mistreat the words, we have misunderstood its purpose.

Breathing capacity differs from one person to another. Age, health, training and circumstance all matter. This is not an obligation placed upon every worshipper, nor is lung capacity a measure of spiritual rank.

Its meaning lies elsewhere.

For the duration of that one breath, there is nowhere for the attention to wander.

The reciter must remain with the words.

The tongue, lips, palate, chest and mind are gathered into one act.

The breath cannot be reclaimed once it has been released. It must be spent carefully.

That finitude creates attention.

Every phrase matters because the breath carrying it is already diminishing.

By the time the reciter reaches:

Guide us upon the straight path,

the breath itself has become a small enactment of dependence.

We discover that even the capacity to complete the prayer is not entirely ours.

A Created Breath Carrying Revelation

There is no divinity in the human breath.

It is created, fragile and finite. It shortens with exertion, trembles with emotion and eventually leaves the body altogether.

Yet this ordinary human breath can be disciplined to carry the words of revelation.

The Qur’an does not remain an abstraction before us. It enters embodied recitation.

Air rises from the lungs.

The vocal cords give it sound.

The tongue and mouth form its letters.

Meaning reaches the mind.

Remembrance reaches the heart.

The body becomes involved in the act of understanding.

This is why sacred recitation cannot be reduced to the production of sound. Breath becomes speech; speech carries meaning; and meaning calls the human being towards response.

The words travel through the body, but they are not meant to end there.

They must reach the will.

What the Email Returned to Me

Years ago, Shaykh Allie gave me A Fellowship of Faith.

I read the section titled “In a Single Breath.” I attempted the practice. But over time, the book, the practice and the chain became separated in my memory.

Then an email arrived.

Attached to it was the Arabic silsilah.

I initially believed that my teacher was giving me something new. Only afterwards did I realise that he was returning me to something he had already given.

The Arabic returned me to the English pages.

The English pages returned me to the practice.

The practice returned me to the breath.

And the breath returned me to al-Fātiḥah.

Perhaps this is one of the quiet mercies of teaching. A teacher may place something in our hands long before we are ready to recognise its full significance. The knowledge waits without resentment.

Years later, a sentence, an image or an attachment turns the key.

The old page opens again.

But the reader is no longer the same.

Preserving the Breath

Preserving Our Roots cannot mean merely placing old documents online.

Preservation must reconnect what time has separated:

The book and its source.

The practice and its meaning.

The student and the teacher.

The words and the people through whom they travelled.

The breath and the chain that preserved it.

A silsilah tells us that knowledge did not simply appear before us. Someone carried it. Someone received it with care, repeated it, protected it and entrusted it to another.

In this instance, the image is almost irresistible.

A chain of people carried the teaching of a single breath.

Each human breath ended.

The transmission continued.

Now the chain has reached another page, another reader and another moment of recognition.

I begin:

Bismillāh.

The breath moves through praise, mercy, judgement, worship, dependence and guidance.

Then, with what remains:

Āmīn.

The breath ends.

The prayer continues.

And so does the chain.

This reflection draws upon “In a Single Breath” in Shaykh Allie Khalfe’s A Fellowship of Faith, pp. 26–27, published by the IslamicText Institute, and upon an Arabic silsilah recorded by Shaykh Muḥammad Yāsīn al-Fādānī al-Makkī in al-ʿUjālah fī al-Aḥādīth al-Musalsalah, shared with me by Shaykh Allie Khalfe. The connected transliteration should be reviewed by a qualified teacher of Qur’anic recitation before publication. Any errors in presentation or interpretation are entirely my own.

The Return of the Strongman

A woman stands before a tank. She is unarmed. Behind her are children, damaged homes, the ordinary remains of a life that war has suddenly declared expendable. The machine before her is made of steel, fuel, money and command. It carries the authority of the state, the confidence of superior force and the assumption that whoever possesses the greater weapon possesses the greater right.

She stands there because there is nowhere else to stand.

For much of the modern era, the struggle for women’s freedom has been narrated through the image of the glass ceiling: the invisible barrier preventing women from entering the boardroom, the parliament, the university and the professions. It remains an important image. It names structures that were designed to exclude women and struggles that have transformed public life.

But ours is also the age of the collapsing ceiling: the ceiling shattered by bombs, falling upon bedrooms, classrooms, clinics and kitchens. Beneath it are women who may never enter a boardroom because the building in which they slept no longer exists. Their exclusion is not metaphorical. Their struggle is not only for representation, but for shelter, food, safety and the right to remain alive.

Any feminism equal to our time must be able to see both ceilings.

The Culture of Domination

Patriarchy is commonly understood as the power of men over women. That remains true, but it is not the whole truth. Patriarchy is also a culture of domination: a way of organising the world according to those who command and those who obey, those who possess force and those expected to submit.

Its language is familiar. Strength becomes entitlement. Violence becomes necessity. Obedience is renamed order. The suffering of the weak is treated as regrettable but unavoidable, while the ambitions of the powerful are presented as history itself.

The patriarch is therefore not only the man who controls a woman in her home. He may also be the ruler who controls a population through fear, the occupier who decides where others may live, the general who speaks of civilian deaths as strategic calculations, or the politician who turns cruelty into proof of resolve.

These figures are not identical. The home is not the battlefield, and intimate violence cannot simply be collapsed into war. Yet the moral grammar is recognisable. In each case, power imagines that it has the right to determine the boundaries of another person’s life.

The scale changes. The instinct does not.

Gaza and the Moral Test

Gaza has forced this contradiction into view. The world has watched women carry children from beneath rubble, search for relatives among broken buildings, give birth without adequate medical care and move from one place of displacement to another. Mothers have been expected to preserve life in conditions deliberately stripped of the means by which life is preserved.

These women are often described as victims, but the word is too small. They are witnesses, caregivers, mourners, organisers and survivors. They hold families together while the machinery of war attempts to reduce human beings to numbers.

If feminism opposes violence against women, it cannot remain morally coherent while treating the bombardment, starvation and displacement of women as matters belonging to some other political category. The woman threatened by a missile does not become less relevant to feminism because the violence against her is sanctioned by a state rather than inflicted by a husband.

This does not mean every war can be explained by patriarchy alone. It means that a serious struggle against domination cannot stop at the front door. It must recognise the forms of power that enter from the sky, close borders, destroy hospitals and decide whose grief will be believed.

Gaza is therefore not a distraction from the question of women’s liberation. It is one of its most severe tests.

The Women of Sudan

The women of Sudan confront another landscape of abandonment. War displaces them, armed men terrorise communities, and sexual violence is used not only against individuals but against the social fabric itself. Women carry children across borders, negotiate checkpoints, search for food and try to hold together families dispersed by violence.

The language of international concern is often at its most eloquent when it is least consequential. Statements are issued. Meetings are convened. The suffering continues.

Sudanese women reveal the limits of a feminism that speaks confidently about empowerment but has little to say about the collapse of the conditions in which human agency is possible. There can be no meaningful autonomy without safety, no equality where hunger is weaponised, and no liberation where women’s bodies become territory in the wars of men.

The question is not whether these women fit neatly into a familiar theory. The question is whether the theory is large enough to recognise them.

Lebanon and the Geography of Grief

In Lebanon, as elsewhere, women have repeatedly rebuilt lives interrupted by political failure, economic collapse and war. They hold families together through blackouts, shortages and bombardment, often while carrying the emotional weight of communities that have endured loss across generations.

The geography changes from one conflict to another, but the expectations placed upon women remain strangely constant. They must absorb the shock, tend the wounded, feed the living, bury the dead and somehow continue. Their resilience is praised so often that it risks becoming another way of accepting what should never have been demanded of them.

There is a danger in romanticising endurance. To say that women are strong can become a way of excusing the systems that require them to survive the unbearable.

Women should not have to become heroic because governments, armies and institutions have failed to be humane.

The Limits of Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism achieved necessary victories. It challenged laws that excluded women, widened access to education and employment, and exposed the structures that kept power overwhelmingly male. Those gains should neither be dismissed nor forgotten.

But a feminism shaped primarily by access can become trapped by the institutions it seeks to enter. It may ask how many women sit at the table without asking what decisions the table exists to make. It may celebrate a woman’s ascent into power while remaining silent about the people beneath that power.

A female minister may authorise violence. A woman executive may enrich herself through exploitation. A woman may occupy the highest office in the land and govern through the same habits of domination once associated only with men. Representation can alter the appearance of power without transforming its moral character.

The deeper question is therefore not simply whether women possess power. It is what kind of power they possess, how they exercise it and whose suffering makes that power possible.

Breaking the glass ceiling is not enough if the institution above it continues dropping bombs through other people’s roofs.

Beyond the Binary

This is where the conversation must move beyond the exhausted binary between men and women. The struggle against patriarchy cannot become a struggle against men, just as the inclusion of women cannot be mistaken for the end of domination.

Men can resist patriarchy. Women can reproduce it. Both can internalise its assumptions about authority, strength, conquest and control. The problem is not masculinity itself, nor is virtue guaranteed by womanhood. The problem is a moral order that mistakes domination for leadership.

A wider feminism would not abandon the particular ways women are harmed. It would understand those harms within a larger ecology of power. Domestic abuse, occupation, racism, militarism, economic exploitation and authoritarianism are not interchangeable, but neither are they strangers to one another. They are sustained by habits of dehumanisation: the belief that certain people may be silenced, controlled, removed or sacrificed for the comfort of others.

The task is not to flatten these differences. It is to recognise the imagination that travels through them.

Beyond the Glass Ceiling

The glass ceiling remains real. Women are still excluded, underestimated, underpaid and punished for entering spaces that once belonged almost entirely to men. These struggles deserve attention.

But the image can no longer carry the whole burden of liberation.

For millions of women, the ceiling is not made of glass. It is made of concrete. It does not prevent them from rising; it falls upon them. Their struggle is not to enter the structure but to survive its destruction.

The distance between these two ceilings is the distance between two worlds of feminist concern. One asks whether women may share power. The other asks whether power will permit women and their children to live.

A morally serious feminism must refuse the choice between them. It must defend the woman excluded from the boardroom and the woman driven from her home. It must oppose the intimate tyrant and the imperial one. It must understand that dignity is violated not only when a woman is denied opportunity, but when her entire community is treated as disposable.

A Woman’s Place Is Everywhere

On 9 August 1956, more than 20,000 women marched to the Union Buildings in Pretoria against the extension of pass laws to women. They came from different communities, different racial backgrounds and different political traditions, but they stood together against a system that sought to regulate movement, dignity and belonging.

In rejecting the old idea that a woman’s place was in the kitchen, they declared something larger: a woman’s place is everywhere.

And then came the phrase that entered the political memory of South Africa: wathint’ abafazi, wathint’ imbokodo — you strike a woman, you strike a rock.

Seventy years later, that phrase still carries force, but perhaps it asks something more of us now. The woman is still being struck — by law, by war, by occupation, by hunger, by displacement, by the machinery of power. The rock is not hardness for its own sake. It is endurance. Refusal. The insistence on remaining human when power would prefer submission.

A woman’s place is everywhere: in the university, the parliament and the boardroom, yes, but also in the refugee camp, at the checkpoint, in the hospital without electricity, in the home reduced to rubble, and before the tank.

The women of 1956 understood that women’s freedom could not be separated from the larger machinery of injustice. Their struggle was not merely for inclusion within apartheid society. It was against the system itself.

A Feminism Equal to the Times

The woman before the tank unsettles every comfortable theory. She does not stand there as an abstraction. She has a name, a family, memories and a life that existed before the world reduced her to an image of war. She may be frightened. Courage does not require the absence of fear. It is often the decision to remain human in the presence of something determined to erase your humanity.

She asks whether our solidarity extends beyond those who resemble us, vote like us, live near us or belong to nations regarded as worthy of grief. She asks whether we can speak of freedom while accepting occupation, whether we can celebrate empowerment while overlooking bombardment, and whether we can defend women’s dignity only when doing so costs us nothing.

These are not questions for feminism alone. They are questions for civilisation.

Yet feminism has a particular responsibility because it has taught us to examine power where power once appeared natural. It taught us to look again at the household, the workplace, the law and the body. The same moral courage is now required before the tank, the prison, the checkpoint and the collapsing ceiling.

A feminism equal to our times must be more than a project of access. It must become a refusal of domination. It must oppose the belief that force creates moral authority and that the powerful may determine whose life is grievable.

The woman before the tank is not asking to be rescued by our theories. She is asking whether those theories can still recognise her.

She stands before the machinery of power because behind her is everything power has failed to value: the child, the home, the vulnerable body, the ordinary life.

Perhaps this is the true measure of liberation. Not only whether a woman can rise within the structures of power, but whether those structures can be transformed before they crush the people beneath them.

Not because thinking is dangerous — the Qur’an commands reflection — but because unmoored reflection can quietly drift into distortion. What begins as inquiry can end as re-description; what begins as devotion can end as misnaming.

I have been sitting with a recent conversation where Islam was described as “theologically monotheistic, but practically henotheistic.” The claim was offered thoughtfully, not maliciously, yet it signals something worth pausing over — not to rebuke, but to re-anchor.

Because Islam has always distinguished between love and lordship, between honour and divinity, between tawḥīd and the human need for exemplars.

Tawḥīd Is Not Fragile

Al-Ghazālī reminds us — repeatedly in the Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn — that true tawḥīd is not threatened by reverence, but by misplaced ultimacy. The danger is not that the Prophet ﷺ is loved too much, but that something else quietly takes the place of God as the final object of fear, hope, or reliance.

This is why al-Ghazālī speaks less about speculative theology and more about the diseases of the heart: ostentation (riyāʾ), attachment to status, craving approval, surrendering moral judgment to power. These are not intellectual errors — they are spiritual dislocations.

Henotheism, properly speaking, is not the presence of honoured figures; it is the fragmentation of obedience. It occurs when the heart bows in too many directions.

Ibn ʿArabī and the Discipline of Naming

Those of us who drink from the Akbarian well know that Ibn ʿArabī was meticulous — even severe — about language. He understood tajallī (divine manifestation) not as diffusion, but as disclosure. The Real is not multiplied by appearing; appearances are dignified by dependence.

To speak carelessly about “multiple centers of divinity” is to miss the very heart of his project.

The Prophet ﷺ, in Ibn ʿArabī’s cosmology, is not a competing object of devotion, but the most complete mirror of divine servanthood. His elevation safeguards tawḥīd — it does not erode it. The seal (khatm) is not an alternative axis; it is the final articulation of ʿubūdiyyah.

This is why Ibn ʿArabī never loosens adab even while stretching metaphysical language to its furthest limits.

Why the Scholars Still Matter

When al-Ghazālī insists on the role of the ʿulamāʾ, he is not policing thought — he is protecting proportion. The scholars are not gatekeepers of God, but custodians of balance: between reason and revelation, love and law, insight and humility.

To say “God commanded us to think” is true.
To imply that thinking requires no formation, no lineage, no ethical containment — is not.

This is precisely where the absence of a murshid becomes visible: not in disbelief, but in overreach. A guide does not stop one from thinking; he teaches where to place the weight of a thought so that it does not crack the vessel.

The Ghazālian Check on the Akbarian Flight

Al-Ghazālī saves us from two equal dangers: spiritual dryness and spiritual intoxication. The Iḥyāʾ is not a book of metaphysics; it is a book of moral attentiveness. It asks again and again:

• What does this belief do to your humility?

• Does it increase mercy or contempt?

• Does it make obedience easier or dispensable?

• Does it soften the heart — or harden it?

Any theology that makes it easier to name others astray, or harder to submit oneself, has already failed its test.

Holding the Line Without Hardening

This is why I am not alarmed by questioning — but I am attentive to drift.

Islam does not need to be rescued from tawḥīd by reclassification. It needs to be returned to the careful grammar that has always held love, reason, and devotion together without collapse.

We are Akbarian in depth.
We are Ghazālian in discipline.
And we remain people of adab before articulation.

Guarding the Heart Before the Tongue

What al-Ghazālī ultimately teaches is that the gravest danger to faith is not confusion, but confidence untethered from humility. The heart hardens not when questions arise, but when answers begin to license suspicion, dismissal, or moral superiority.

This is where ḥusn al-ẓann becomes more than a social courtesy. It becomes a form of worship. To guard the heart against corrosive interpretation is to acknowledge the limits of one’s sight — to concede that inward states belong to God, not to the cleverness of observers.

Ghazālī understood that much religious harm begins before speech. It begins at the moment we decide what another person’s devotion “really means,” what their intentions “must be,” or what a tradition has “effectively become.” At that moment, the heart quietly assumes a prerogative it was never given.

The refusal to harden, then, is not a refusal to think. It is a refusal to enjoy suspicion. It is the discipline of pausing where the ego wants to conclude, of choosing interpretation that preserves dignity rather than diminishes it. This is why Ghazālī binds moral clarity to restraint of the tongue and vigilance of the heart: not to weaken truth, but to protect it from becoming cruel.

Islam does not require rescue from its own categories. Tawḥīd is not so fragile that it must be defended by reclassification, nor so insecure that it collapses under love. What it requires, again and again, is the moral grammar that has always accompanied it: proportion, humility, and charity in judgment.

We may think deeply.
We may speak carefully.
But we are not entitled to harden.

And perhaps this — the guarding of the heart through ḥusn al-ẓann — is one of the last disciplines capable of keeping faith from turning against itself.

The Iron Collar of Suspicion

Shaykh Allie Khalfe reminds us that ḥusn al-ẓann—holding wholesome thoughts of others—is one of the most liberating sunnahs of the Prophet ﷺ. Its opposite, sūʾ al-ẓann, does not merely imprison the person we judge; it imprisons the one who judges. The Qur’an captures this condition in startling imagery:

“Indeed, We have placed iron collars around their necks, reaching to their chins, so that their heads are raised. And We have placed before them a barrier and behind them a barrier, and covered them, so they do not see.” (Yā Sīn 36:8–9)

The scholars describe this as istiʿārah al-tamthīliyyah: a powerful metaphor that presents an entire moral condition through a single image. One sees a person shackled by iron, unable to bow the neck in humility, trapped between barriers before and behind, unable to see clearly either where he came from or where he is going.

So too is the person consumed by suspicion. Negative thoughts become chains of one’s own making. Convinced that “my way is the only correct way and all other ways are wrong,” one remains imprisoned within one’s own interpretations, mistaking conjecture for certainty and hearsay for knowledge.

Relief begins with the discipline of ḥusn al-ẓann: by seeking first-hand understanding, by resisting gossip and broken telephone, by speaking directly and patiently to others, and by refusing to surrender the heart to resentment. Our teachers also taught us to leave argument behind, even when we believe ourselves to be right. For if someone has already decided to think poorly of us, there is often greater wisdom in praying for them and continuing one’s journey than in fighting endlessly for vindication.

Imām al-Shāfiʿī is reported to have said, “The delusional person believes that everyone will agree with him.” Even the prophets, peace be upon them, were not granted universal acceptance. That reality should console us when we encounter misunderstanding, criticism or rejection.

Ultimately, the measure of our lives is not what people think of us, but what our Lord thinks of us. To cultivate ḥusn al-ẓann is therefore not merely to think well of others; it is to loosen the iron collar that the ego places around the heart and to recover the humility that allows us to bow before God.

Perhaps this is why Sūrah Yā Sīn is called the heart of the Qur’an: because it teaches us that the greatest prisons are often the ones we build within ourselves, and that liberation begins with mercy, restraint and the courage to think well of others.

The key

is older

than the child

who carries it.

It has opened

no door

for generations.

Yet every hand

that receives it

also receives

a house.

Not of stone.

Of memory.

Its teeth

no longer

recognise

the lock.

The lock

no longer

recognises

the street.

The street

no longer

recognises

its own name.

Only the key

remembers.

It remembers

the olive tree

that leaned

towards the courtyard.

The call

that drifted

through an open window.

The scent

of bread

before dawn.

The laughter

that once

belonged

to these walls.

Empires

change maps.

Settlers

change names.

Time

changes faces.

But memory

keeps

its own address.

So the key

passes

from grandmother

to daughter,

from father

to son,

from one exile

to another.

Not because

metal

cannot rust.

But because

hope

must always

have

something

to hold.

One day,

perhaps,

it will open

a door.

Until then,

it opens

the heart.

There are teachings that remain in our notebooks, and there are teachings that quietly enter the way we worship.

Years ago, at Janet Street Mosque in Florida, Johannesburg, I listened as Shaykh Seraj Hendricks—may Allah envelop him in mercy—opened a way of seeing al-Fātiḥah that has remained with me ever since.

Drawing upon an insight he connected to Imām al-Ghazālī’s Mishkāt al-Anwār—The Niche of Lights—Shaykh Seraj invited us to notice a movement within the Qur’an between what appears distant and what draws near.

It was not distance in the physical sense. Allah is not absent from one verse and present in another. It was a movement in language, attention and relationship.

Al-Fātiḥah begins by speaking about Allah.

Then, almost without warning, it turns and speaks to Him.

That turn changes everything.

The Moment the Grammar Turns

The opening movement of al-Fātiḥah is composed of praise and recognition:

Bismi Llāhi r-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm
In the Name of Allah, the Entirely Merciful, the Especially Compassionate.

Al-ḥamdu li-Llāhi Rabbi l-ʿālamīn
All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of all worlds.

Ar-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm
The Entirely Merciful, the Especially Compassionate.

Māliki yawmi d-dīn
Master of the Day of Judgement.

We speak of Allah through His Names and Attributes.

Allah.

Lord.

The Merciful.

The Compassionate.

The Master.

The worshipper has not yet spoken of the self. There is no declaration of what I believe, what I need or what I intend to do. We begin by recognising before we begin asking.

Then comes the turning:

Iyyāka naʿbudu wa-iyyāka nastaʿīn
You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.

The grammatical relationship changes.

We are no longer speaking about Allah. We are addressing Him directly.

This is not a shift into the first person, as I wrote in the original version of this essay. It is a shift into direct, second-person address: You alone we worship. You alone we ask for help.

Arabic rhetoric calls such a turning iltifāt: a movement in address that awakens the listener and alters the relationship between speaker and subject.

A moment ago, we were praising the Lord of all worlds.

Now we stand before Him.

Nothing announces the transition. No doorway becomes visible. Yet, with a single word—iyyāka, “You alone”—the distance collapses.

Praise becomes presence.

Description becomes encounter.

Knowledge becomes address.

The One Who Is Beyond—and Near

Shaykh Seraj’s teaching helped me recognise that al-Fātiḥah holds transcendence and intimacy together.

Allah is beyond everything that our minds can contain. He is not one being among other beings, nor can He be confined by time, place or imagination.

Yet He is also near.

The Qur’an tells us:

“Indeed, We created the human being and know what the soul whispers within. We are closer to them than their jugular vein.”
—Qur’an 50:16

The opening of al-Fātiḥah teaches us to hold both truths.

We begin in awe before the Lord of all worlds. We remember mercy, sovereignty and the Day of Judgement. Then, from within that awe, we discover that we may speak.

Not into emptiness.

Not towards a distant abstraction.

But to Allah:

You alone we worship.
You alone we ask for help.

Distance has not been abolished. Majesty remains majesty.

Closeness does not make Allah ordinary. It makes worship possible.

Heaven and Earth, Mind and Heart

Shaykh Seraj also reflected on the recurring Qur’anic imagery of the heavens and the earth.

The heavens can evoke height, vastness, transcendence and the reaches of the intellect. The earth can evoke nearness, embodiment, feeling and the intimacy of lived experience.

These are not rigid definitions. The Qur’an does not reduce the heavens to the mind or the earth to the heart. Rather, the images allow us to contemplate different dimensions of our relationship with Allah.

The mind looks outward and upward.

The heart receives and draws near.

We need both.

Intellect without humility can become cold and self-sufficient. Feeling without discernment can lose direction. Al-Fātiḥah gathers them into one act of worship.

We recognise.

We praise.

We submit.

We ask.

The entire human being is summoned.

Steward and Servant

There was another balance in Shaykh Seraj’s teaching that remained with me: the human being as both steward and servant.

We carry responsibility upon the earth. We are entrusted with choice, care, justice and moral agency. We must act with courage and accept responsibility for what our hands have done.

Yet we never cease to be servants of Allah.

Stewardship without servanthood becomes domination.

Servanthood misunderstood as passivity can become an escape from responsibility.

Al-Fātiḥah holds the two together.

You alone we worship.

This is servanthood.

Guide us upon the straight path.

This is the prayer of those who know that they must walk.

We are neither abandoned to ourselves nor excused from acting. We seek guidance precisely because a path must be travelled.

Confidence must be balanced by humility.

Authority by accountability.

Movement by remembrance.

Allowing Al-Fātiḥah to Enter the Self

Over time, this teaching changed the way I recited al-Fātiḥah.

I began developing a personal contemplative practice around its movements. This is not a tafsīr of the sūrah, nor is it something I attribute to Shaykh Seraj. It is simply a discipline I use to gather my distracted attention and bring my mind, body and heart into the recitation.

With the Basmalah, I gather my intention:

In the Name of Allah.

I remind myself that I do not begin alone. The act does not belong solely to me. It is undertaken through the Name, mercy and permission of Allah.

With al-ḥamdu li-Llāh, I gather the mind into gratitude:

All praise belongs to Allah.

Before asking what is missing, I recognise what has already been given.

With ar-Raḥmāni r-Raḥīm, I allow the heart to soften:

The Entirely Merciful, the Especially Compassionate.

Mercy is not an ornament placed at the edge of existence. It is repeated at the centre of the Opening.

With Māliki yawmi d-dīn, I remember balance and accountability:

Master of the Day of Judgement.

Nothing is forgotten. No injustice disappears merely because people refuse to name it. Every life returns to the One who knows its complete truth.

Then comes the turning:

You alone we worship, and You alone we ask for help.

Here, the recitation moves from recognition into relationship. Worship and dependence are joined. I cannot sincerely say that I worship Allah while imagining that I am independent of Him.

Then the prayer becomes movement:

Guide us upon the straight path.

Not merely show us the path.

Guide us upon it.

Keep us upon it.

Return us when we wander.

Finally, I remember that the path is not travelled alone:

The path of those You have blessed.

There were people before us.

Prophets.

Saints.

Teachers.

Parents.

Communities of remembrance.

Those who carried knowledge carefully and handed it to another generation.

The straight path is not an empty road. It bears footprints.

Words We Do Not Merely Say

Sacred recitation is more than the production of sound.

When we recite al-Fātiḥah, breath becomes speech, speech carries meaning, and meaning enters the body. What begins upon the tongue can awaken the mind, soften the heart and redirect the will.

But this requires attention.

We can repeat words while remaining absent from them. The tongue may travel while the heart stands still.

Contemplation allows us to return.

Words such as ar-Raḥmān, iyyāka and ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm are not exhausted after a single translation. They open gradually. Their meanings accompany us through different seasons of life.

The “straight path” encountered in youth may not feel like the path sought in old age.

Mercy understood after comfort is not the same mercy recognised after loss.

“You alone we ask for help” changes when our own strength has failed us.

The verses remain the same.

We are the ones who keep arriving differently.

The Path Between Distance and Closeness

Al-Fātiḥah begins by teaching us before Whom we stand.

Then it teaches us how to speak.

It moves from the Divine Names to human response, from praise to prayer, from apparent distance to intimate address.

And then it sends us onto a path.

Perhaps this is why al-Fātiḥah accompanies every cycle of our ritual prayer. We never outgrow the need to begin again.

We return to praise.

We return to mercy.

We return to accountability.

We return to worship and dependence.

We return to the request for guidance.

The path is walked by returning to its beginning.

Al-Fātiḥah is therefore both map and mirror.

It shows us where to walk, but it also shows us who we are while walking: forgetful, dependent, hopeful and continually invited to draw near.

Whether recited aloud, whispered in prayer or traced silently within the heart, its words continue to open.

May our steps be made straight.

May our recitation become remembrance.

May those who taught us be rewarded for every word that continues to live within us.

And may the One who is near draw us nearer still.

Āmīn.

First published on AdliYacubi.blog in July 2025. This substantially revised edition forms part of Preserving Our Roots*, a series gathering reflections from our teachers and the living Islamic tradition. The series was established through the encouragement of Shaykh Allie Khalfe, whose careful reading also guided this revision. Any errors in recollection or interpretation are entirely my own.*

A Rumour Reaches the Water

A message appeared on social media.

Something had changed in Spain. A court had opened a door. Those who reached Ceuta or Melilla would not be immediately returned. Europe, which had remained sealed behind fences, patrols and paperwork, had suddenly become accessible.

The message moved faster than any correction could follow it.

According to Morocco’s Interior Ministry, misinformation about Spanish legal and administrative procedures combined with human-trafficking networks to propel tens of thousands of people towards the two Spanish enclaves on the northern coast of Africa. The precise numbers and death toll remain contested between Moroccan and Spanish authorities, but the consequences are not: people entered the sea, bodies were recovered, and an online rumour became a physical catastrophe.

A falsehood did not remain inside a phone.

It entered feet.

It entered lungs.

It entered the water.

And as I read the report, I found myself thinking again about Nongqawuse.

Then, unexpectedly, I thought about smallpox.

The Prophecy Does Not Begin With the Lie

Nongqawuse has too often been reduced to a cautionary tale about superstition: a young woman who persuaded the amaXhosa to destroy their cattle in the belief that the dead would rise, the colonisers would disappear and abundance would return.

But no prophecy capable of moving an entire people begins only with foolishness.

It begins with a wound.

The amaXhosa world had already been battered by colonial invasion, cattle disease, dispossession, military defeat and the progressive destruction of political possibility. The prophecy entered a society whose ordinary means of survival were already being closed.

That distinction matters.

The point is not to turn Nongqawuse into an insult for every contemporary political deception. Nor should one woman be made the sole author of a catastrophe created within a far larger colonial assault. The more serious comparison is between structures: real suffering is given a simple explanation; deliverance is promised; an irreversible sacrifice is required; and the promise can be tested only after the sacrifice has been made.

At the southern edge of Africa, the modern prophecy says:

Remove the foreigner and the country will recover.

Schools will have space. Hospitals will function. Jobs will return. Crime will disappear. The nation will rise.

At the northern edge of Africa, another message says:

Cross now and the border will open.

Reach the water. Climb the fence. Enter the enclave. Europe is waiting on the other side.

The first directs suffering towards a scapegoat.

The second directs suffering towards an imagined escape.

One persuades the poor to turn against their neighbour. The other persuades the desperate to risk their own bodies.

Yet both messages arise from the same unbearable distance between the life people are living and the life they have been promised.

The Smallpox That Arrived at the Cape

In 1713, smallpox arrived at the Cape through the colonial shipping routes of the Dutch East India Company. Historical accounts connect the outbreak to infected linen from a Dutch ship. The epidemic devastated the Indigenous Khoisan population, whose communities had far less resistance to the disease than many of the colonists and enslaved people living at the settlement.

The disease was biological.

But the conditions through which it travelled were political.

Ships carried more than officials, soldiers, merchandise and enslaved people. They carried pathogens into populations that had not previously encountered them. Colonial routes became epidemiological routes. Trade, conquest, displacement and disease travelled together.

This does not mean that every colonial smallpox outbreak was deliberately engineered. In many places, disease travelled without a central command and without Europeans fully understanding how infection occurred. Yet its effects repeatedly assisted conquest by weakening Indigenous societies, disrupting leadership, emptying settlements and making resistance more difficult. In some documented cases, infected materials were deliberately used or threatened as weapons.

Here lies the distinction that matters for our present moment.

Empire did not have to invent every disease.

It built the roads along which disease travelled. It created the concentrations of power and vulnerability that determined who would survive. And when catastrophe arrived, colonial power frequently stood among the ruins as beneficiary.

The pathogen might not have received an order.

It could still serve conquest.

The Migrant Is Not the Contagion

The metaphor must be handled carefully.

The migrants are not the contagion.

The rumour is.

The young Moroccan entering the water is not carrying a disease into Europe. He is carrying his own frustrated hopes, unemployment, humiliation and longing for another future. He is the person upon whom the message has acted.

The pathogen is the false or manipulated promise.

The host is a society already wounded by economic exclusion, failed institutions and the closure of ordinary pathways towards a dignified life.

The vectors are social-media platforms, trafficking networks, political entrepreneurs, anonymous accounts and ordinary people forwarding messages they have not verified.

The fever is the collective rush towards a border—or the collective turning against a neighbour.

A lie does not become powerful merely because someone has written it. It becomes powerful when it finds an untreated wound.

This is why fact-checking, though necessary, is never sufficient. A person who has waited years for work cannot be rescued from a political deception by a graph alone. A parent standing outside an overcrowded school will not surrender suspicion because an official has corrected a percentage. A young man who can see Europe from the African shore may believe the rumour because the alternative is to believe that nothing will ever change.

The political lie succeeds because it does not merely deny reality.

It gives pain a direction.

South Africa, Spain and the Shadow of Gaza

There is another connection that cannot simply be dismissed, even though it cannot yet be proved.

South Africa instituted proceedings against Israel at the International Court of Justice under the Genocide Convention in December 2023. Spain later filed a declaration of intervention under Article 63 of the Court’s Statute, addressing the interpretation of the Convention in the South Africa v. Israel proceedings.

Now, in two very different locations, migration has become the centre of political disturbance.

In South Africa, African migrants are repeatedly constructed as the hidden cause of national decline. They are blamed for unemployment, public-service failures, crime and the incapacity of the state.

At Spain’s African border, desperate Africans have become the human material of a crisis capable of overwhelming institutions, inflaming nationalist politics and placing the government under pressure.

The migrant occupies opposite positions within the two narratives.

In South Africa, the migrant is manufactured as the enemy.

At Ceuta, the migrant is mobilised as the pressure.

In both cases, African bodies become the surface upon which wider political struggles are written.

But intellectual honesty must remain our discipline.

South African xenophobia existed long before the Gaza case. Tensions surrounding Ceuta and Melilla also predate Spain’s intervention at the ICJ. The present sequence does not prove common authorship, coordinated retaliation or a hidden imperial operation.

I cannot say that those who defend Israel manufactured the Moroccan rumour.

I cannot say that the same hand is directing xenophobic mobilisation in South Africa and irregular migration towards Spain.

Suspicion is not evidence.

Resemblance is not proof.

Yet the absence of proof does not require the abandonment of political curiosity. It asks us to formulate the question more carefully:

What happens when societies that challenge imperial power possess old wounds that can be easily located and pressed?

Empire Does Not Need a Control Room

We often imagine conspiracy as a room filled with powerful men issuing coordinated instructions.

But systems of domination do not always work like that.

The trafficker may want money.

The politician may want votes.

The platform may want engagement.

The frightened citizen may want an explanation.

The young migrant may want a future.

An organised hostile actor, should one be involved, may want instability.

None of them needs to understand the entire structure. Their separate motives can still converge upon the same result.

A rumour is produced somewhere. An algorithm discovers that it attracts attention. Influencers repeat it. Traffickers give it practical instructions. Thousands of people act. Television cameras arrive. Opposition politicians speak of invasion. Governments are placed on the defensive. Borders harden. The far right gains another image of Black and brown bodies overwhelming Europe.

The message has done its work even when its author remains unknown.

This is why empire should not be understood only as a secret committee. Empire is also an arrangement of roads, markets, military alliances, media systems, racial hierarchies and unequal access to credibility.

It can benefit from an event without having directly commanded it.

It can amplify a crisis it did not originate.

It can enter an existing conflict and push where society is already fractured.

Empire seldom needs to manufacture the wound.

Sometimes it needs only to discover where to press.

The Old Ship and the New Platform

The old colonial ship carried infected linen.

The new platform carries the infected message.

At the Cape, the linen was brought ashore, washed and circulated. The disease crossed from cloth into bodies and from bodies into communities.

Today, the message is posted, shared, translated and repeated. It crosses from screen into imagination, from imagination into action, and from action into history.

The technologies are different.

The political lesson is not.

Contagion thrives where movement outruns understanding.

It also thrives where people have no reason to trust official voices. Once the state has repeatedly lied, failed or abandoned its people, even a truthful warning may sound like another attempt at control. The rumour enters the space once occupied by public confidence.

That is the danger.

The false message does not have to be more credible than the truth.

It needs only to arrive in a world where truth has already lost its authority.

Our earlier analysis of South African xenophobic discourse reached a similar conclusion. The migrant is made hyper-visible while the failures of government, capital and administration recede from sight. Public anger is directed towards those whose economic position may be as precarious as that of the people being encouraged to oppose them.

The foreigner is blamed.

The structure is acquitted.

Building an Immunity of Solidarity

A society does not acquire immunity from disinformation merely by deleting accounts.

It develops immunity by becoming more difficult to deceive.

That requires trustworthy institutions, credible journalism, political education and public officials who speak before the rumour has already conquered the imagination.

But it also requires material repair.

A school with enough classrooms is less vulnerable to the claim that migrant children have stolen the future.

A functioning clinic is less easily transformed into a battlefield of nationality.

A society with lawful pathways for migration is less easily captured by traffickers promising miraculous openings.

Workers protected from exploitation are less likely to be divided into “citizens” and “foreigners” while the employer who underpays both escapes scrutiny.

Immunity is not only knowledge.

It is justice.

It is the restoration of the social body so that every message of purification, invasion and miraculous deliverance does not find immediate shelter inside it.

This is where counter-discourse matters. Instead of moving from pressure to invasion, it moves from pressure to responsibility. Instead of turning the migrant into a burden, it insists upon the neighbour. Instead of demanding removal, it demands rebuilding. The danger is no longer the foreigner; it is the destruction of solidarity, truth and democratic imagination.

The real question is not:

What are foreigners doing to us?

It is:

What are we being persuaded to do to one another?

When the Contagion Serves Empire

I do not know who began the Moroccan rumour.

I do not know whether its arrival beside Spain’s position on Gaza is merely coincidence, opportunistic exploitation or part of something more organised.

We should resist the intoxication of certainty.

But we should also resist the innocence that treats each crisis as isolated from history, power and geopolitical interest.

Colonialism taught us that devastation does not always need a visible commander. A disease may travel through the routes power has built. It may enter bodies power has made vulnerable. It may destroy communities whose disappearance benefits those waiting to inherit the land.

The same may be true of informational contagion.

The message may be released for profit rather than empire.

It may spread through fear rather than command.

Its carriers may have no knowledge of one another.

Still, when it divides societies, discredits governments, converts migrants into weapons and turns the poor against the poor, we must ask whose world it helps to build.

Empire need not command the contagion.

Sometimes it is enough that the contagion serves empire.

And our work is not merely to expose the lie.

It is to heal the wound in which the lie finds a home.

The word found me before I understood it.

Ilāhī.

At first I heard it in supplication.

Later I found it in the writings of Muslim scholars and seekers.

Eventually I realised that I had stopped translating it.

Some words refuse to travel neatly from one language into another.

Ilāhī is one of them.

Somewhere between those two meanings, I found myself lingering. At first, it seemed simple enough. It comes from the same root as Ilāh—God, the One worthy of worship. Yet the more I encountered it in the language of Muslim scholars, poets and seekers, the more I realised that it carried two meanings at once.

It means “My God.”

Yet it also carries something of what English calls “the Divine.”

Sometimes I find myself lingering over a single letter.

Between ilāh (إله) and ilāhī (إلهي) stands only a solitary yāʾ. Such a small mark, and yet it carries us from the universal to the intimate, from God to my God. The distance between theology and prayer, between transcendence and love, can be no more than a single letter.

Perhaps that is why the word has remained with me.

It reminds me that faith is never merely about ideas. It is about relationship.

Recently, a friend remarked that one of the things that first drew him towards Islam was the extraordinary breadth of its mercy. Allah is not simply the God of one tribe, one nation or one civilisation. The Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ was not sent to a chosen few.

The Qur’an declares:

“We have not sent you except as a mercy to all the worlds.”

Not merely to Muslims.

Not merely to believers.

But to all the worlds.

The Qur’an repeatedly addresses not only “those who believe” but also “O humankind.” Before it forms a community, it speaks to humanity.

This universal horizon has always been one of Islam’s quiet strengths.

The Window of Divine Love

Perhaps that is why I find myself drawn to expressions such as Divine Love (الحب الإلهي).

This is not simply our love for Allah.

It begins with Allah’s love for His creation.

The Qur’an speaks repeatedly of a Lord who creates, sustains, forgives, guides and calls humanity back to Himself. Even before we know Him, He knows us. Before we remember Him, He has never forgotten us.

To speak of Divine Love is therefore not to escape the world. It is to recognise that every act of compassion, every undeserved mercy and every sincere return to God reflects something of a Love greater than our own.

The window teaches us that love is not merely an emotion.

It is a way of seeing.

The Window of the Divine Presence

The language of the Divine Presence (الحضور الإلهي) is equally beautiful.

It does not suggest that Allah is contained within creation.

Rather, it speaks of a heart that has awakened to His nearness.

The Qur’an reminds us:

“We are nearer to him than his jugular vein.”

The world itself does not become divine.

It becomes transparent to the One who created it.

Prayer is no longer only ritual.

Silence is no longer empty.

The mountain, the sea, the stranger and the neighbour all become reminders that we live continually before Allah.

The window of Presence teaches us attentiveness.

It asks not merely where Allah is, but whether we have remembered that we are always before Him.

The Window of Divine Beauty

Then there is Divine Beauty (الجمال الإلهي).

The Prophet ﷺ taught:

“Indeed, Allah is Beautiful and loves beauty.”

Beauty, then, is not an ornament added to faith.

It is one of the ways by which the heart is educated.

A flower does not prove God.

Neither does a mountain or a sunset.

But each can become an āyah—a sign—through which the attentive heart glimpses something of the generosity, harmony and majesty of its Creator.

Beauty is not the destination.

It is the window.

And through it, the soul learns to look beyond itself.

Learning to See

The Qur’an calls these signs āyāt.

The sea is an āyah.

The mountain is an āyah.

Mercy is an āyah.

Beauty is an āyah.

Even the human heart, restless in its longing, is an āyah.

Perhaps faith is not learning to escape the world.

Perhaps it is learning to see through it.

That is what Ilāhī has begun to mean for me.

Not simply “My God.”

Not merely “the Divine.”

But the discovery that every true act of love, every moment of presence, every glimpse of beauty is a window through which the heart catches sight of the One to whom it has always belonged.

The windows are many.

The Light beyond them is One.

There is a scene in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in which politics is revealed not merely as a struggle for power, but as a struggle over memory itself. Regimes rise and fall, photographs are altered, heroes become traitors, and entire chapters of history quietly disappear. Forgetting, Kundera suggests, is never innocent. It is political.

Watching South Africans argue about housing, corruption, inequality and the promises of 1994, I sometimes wonder whether we are living through our own version of that struggle.

We speak endlessly about failure, betrayal and disappointment. We argue about parties and personalities, about who governs Cape Town and who governs Pretoria. We exchange statistics, insults and slogans. Yet beneath all of this lies a deeper question: what have we chosen to remember, and what have we chosen to forget?

The laughter of liberation

There was a time when liberation was not an argument but a horizon.

Millions of South Africans stood in queues in 1994 carrying hopes far larger than the ballot papers in their hands. For some, liberation meant dignity after centuries of humiliation. For others, it meant land, housing and education. For many, it meant the simple possibility that their children might inherit a different country.

The laughter of liberation was not naïve. It emerged from funerals, prison cells and exile. It was the laughter of people who had survived.

To forget that moment is to forget something essential about South Africa: that democracy itself was once an impossible dream.

The disappointment that followed

And yet disappointment arrived.

Corruption hollowed out institutions. State capture looted the public purse. Unemployment remained stubbornly high. Informal settlements expanded while the promise of housing receded into the distance. For millions, freedom did not bring prosperity but only a different vocabulary for old struggles.

The poor, who had carried the heaviest burdens of apartheid, often carried the heaviest burdens of democracy as well.

This disappointment is real. It cannot be explained away by nostalgia, nor hidden behind liberation songs.

The politics of forgetting

But something curious has happened in our public life.

Some South Africans speak as though nothing changed after 1994, as though liberation produced only corruption and disappointment. Others speak as though liberation itself absolves those who govern from criticism and accountability.

Both positions require forgetting.

The first forgets the expansion of education, the constitutional order, social grants, political freedoms and the emergence of opportunities that previous generations could scarcely imagine.

The second forgets the corruption, the arrogance of power and the millions who still wait for the promises that were made to them.

Our political debates have become contests over memory.

The architecture of memory

There is a tendency, thirty years after 1994, to speak as though apartheid were merely a government that disappeared with an election. But apartheid was never only a government. It was an architecture of space, a psychology of hierarchy, and an entire way of organising human life.

Apartheid built roads, suburbs, railway lines and industrial zones. It decided who would live near the city and who would live on its edges. It determined where schools would be built, where investment would flow, and where poverty would be concentrated. It shaped not only the landscape, but the imagination.

Look at Soweto. Look at the Cape Flats. Look at Khayelitsha, Mitchells Plain, Gugulethu and Manenberg. Look at who owns the centres of our cities, who spends hours commuting to work, and who inherits property accumulated over generations. These are not simply economic accidents. They are the physical afterlife of colonialism and apartheid.

And then there is the invisible inheritance: the psychology of inferiority and superiority, the habits of fear and mistrust, the ways in which race became entangled with dignity, aspiration and belonging. Laws can be repealed in parliament; landscapes and consciousness take far longer to transform.

Perhaps one of the tragedies of our public debate is that we demand from thirty years what history itself often takes centuries to repair.

The resistance and its inheritors

Perhaps one of the cruellest forms of forgetting is to judge an entire liberation struggle solely by the failures of those who inherited its institutions.

Many of those who fought apartheid did not fight for tenders, patronage or political office. They fought because apartheid itself was intolerable. They fought because they believed that human dignity demanded resistance.

Like the partisans who opposed fascism in Europe, they carried visions of a future that history never fully delivered. Some returned from prison, exile and military camps to discover that the organisations they had served had changed beyond recognition. Others watched opportunists, careerists and profiteers enter spaces built through sacrifice.

Yet disappointment with what followed does not erase the justice of the struggle itself.

The young activists who crossed borders, organised underground meetings and buried their comrades did not struggle in vain simply because freedom proved more complicated than they imagined. The liberation movement and the political parties that later claimed to embody it are not the same thing.

To confuse the two is itself a form of historical amnesia.

The long shadow

Liberation casts a long shadow because it was never meant to be an ending.

The struggle against apartheid was, in one sense, victorious. But the struggle against inequality, exclusion and poverty continues. The geography of apartheid still shapes our cities. The distances between wealth and hardship remain visible in our roads, schools and neighbourhoods.

Perhaps this is why our conversations become so heated. We are not merely arguing about policy. We are arguing about the meaning of freedom itself.

Thirty years later, South Africa still lives between laughter and forgetting, between gratitude and disappointment.

The real challenge before us is not whether we remember liberation or condemn its failures. It is whether we can hold both truths together without allowing one to erase the other.

For nations, as for people, maturity begins when memory becomes large enough to contain both joy and regret.

I remember

only

one street.

Not the government.

Not the speeches.

Not the maps.

One street.

Thousands

pouring

from the mosque.

White jalābiyyas.

Dust.

Heat.

The Nile

moving

without urgency.

Buses

arguing

with bicycles.

Children

running

between

their elders.

And somewhere,

high above,

my brother

leaned

over

a balcony,

trying

to understand

how one city

could hold

so much life.

Years later,

I hear

the same street

without

its footsteps.

Silence,

too,

can become

a refugee.

The Nile

still remembers

their names.

Do we?

There are some inheritances that do not arrive as money or land.

They arrive as names.

For years, I thought Kano was simply the name my father had given our family home in Primrose Park, on the Cape Flats, after we had left District Six behind.

Only much later did I realise that it had been a lesson all along.

A House with a Name

When we lived at 28 Olifants Street in Primrose Park, my father did something unusual.

We had left District Six in 1971. The following year, my parents left for Hajj. They departed from District Six, but when they returned in 1972, they returned to Primrose Park. Perhaps somewhere between Makkah and home, my father's map of the Muslim world widened. It was after that pilgrimage that he gave our house a name.

He called it Kano.

Not Noor.
Not Mecca.
Not Medina.

He called it Kano.

As children, we accepted it without asking too many questions. A house had a name. That was all.

None of us really knew what Kano meant.

Or perhaps more accurately, none of us realised that our father had quietly placed us inside a much older story.

The Journey Back

This week I read Hamilton Wende’s beautifully written account of visiting the Emir’s Palace in Kano, northern Nigeria.

As I followed him through the ancient gates of the palace—past the Sudanic arches, the geometric mud architecture, the ceremonial courtyards and the Hall of the Elephants—I felt something unexpected.

It was not simply that I was learning about Kano.

I was remembering it.

Or perhaps remembering why my father wanted us to remember it.

Suddenly, the name on the gate of our little house in Primrose Park no longer felt random.

It felt deliberate.

Before Colonial Maps

Kano is one of Africa’s oldest cities.

Long before the modern nation-state called Nigeria existed, Kano was already a thriving centre of trade, scholarship, craftsmanship and Islamic civilisation.

Caravans crossed the Sahara carrying salt, leather, indigo, manuscripts and ideas.

Scholars travelled there.

Merchants prayed there.

Kings ruled there.

And around 1353, the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited Kano during his remarkable journey across Africa.

I have often wondered whether my father knew that story.

Knowing him, I suspect he did.

My Father’s Geography

My father rarely explained himself.

He was not a man who announced his philosophy.

He left clues.

A book.

A story.

A conversation.

A name.

Looking back now, I realise that naming our house Kano was not an act of decoration.

It was an act of memory.

Without saying a word, he reminded us that our Islam did not only arrive from Arabia.

It also travelled through Africa.

It crossed deserts.

It built cities.

It shaped kingdoms.

It carved beautiful arches into mud walls.

It became part of the intellectual life of an entire continent.

Long before European maps tried to redraw Africa, African Muslims had already been drawing maps of their own.

The Civilisation We Forgot

Perhaps the saddest part of this story is not that my father knew Kano.

It is that we did not.

Somewhere along the way, many of us lost the geography of our own civilisation.

We could tell you where London was.

We knew Paris.

We recognised New York.

But Kano?

Timbuktu?

Agadez?

Walata?

These names slowly slipped out of our imagination.

Not because they ceased to matter.

Because we stopped telling their stories.

Growing Into an Inheritance

Hamilton Wende ended his essay describing the evening call of a holy man whose chanting drifted through the night air of Kano.

As I finished reading, I found myself thinking less about Nigeria than about my father.

About a modest house in Primrose Park.

About a name fixed quietly to its gate.

He had given us more than a place to live.

He had given us a direction.

It simply took me decades to recognise it.

Perhaps that is how inheritance often works.

Not everything our parents give us is meant to be understood immediately.

Some gifts wait patiently.

Like a city.

Like a story.

Like a house called Kano.

On the day my daughter, Sara Nida Jacobs, married Phabiann Ross De Carvalho, I sat beneath a canopy instead of climbing a minbar.

There were flowers instead of carved wood.

Three simple chairs.

One for the bride.

One for the groom.

One for the khatib.

Families sat together.

Muslims.

Christians.

Those who pray every day.

Those who perhaps have not prayed for years.

Some understood every Arabic word I recited.

Others understood none.

Yet every face was turned toward the same moment.

Toward a covenant.

Toward two young people preparing to say yes before Allah.

My daughter, Sara Nida Jacobs.

And now, her spouse, Phabiann Ross De Carvalho.

More Than a Ceremony

A nikāḥ is often mistaken for the paperwork that makes a marriage lawful.

It is not.

It is the public announcement that love has accepted responsibility.

It is where affection becomes covenant.

Where hope becomes promise.

Where two families begin the slow work of becoming one.

Islam calls this covenant mīthāqan ghalīẓā—a solemn and weighty pledge.

The same phrase the Qur’an uses for the deepest commitments human beings can make.

Marriage is therefore never merely private.

It belongs to the community because communities themselves are built upon homes.

Strong families build generous neighbourhoods.

Generous neighbourhoods build compassionate societies.

The Sunnah Was Never Stationary

Sometimes we imagine that the Sunnah lives inside architecture.

Inside domes.

Inside pulpits.

Inside familiar arrangements.

But the Sunnah has never been stationary.

It travelled with the Prophet ﷺ through the valleys of Makkah.

Across the open plains of Madinah.

Into homes.

Under palm trees.

Along dusty roads.

Around simple meals.

Beside graves.

Inside markets.

The Sunnah was never imprisoned by a building.

It was carried by people.

Why then should it not also sit beneath a canopy?

Three Chairs

There were only three chairs.

One for Sara.

One for Phabiann.

One for me.

Nothing elevated.

Nothing theatrical.

Just enough space for a covenant to be spoken aloud.

The people sat before us as witnesses.

Not divided into spectators and performers.

But gathered as family.

Grandparents.

Children.

Aunts.

Uncles.

Cousins.

Old friends.

New friends.

Muslims and non-Muslims together.

Each carrying their own story into this new story.

That, perhaps, was the first khutbah before I even opened my mouth.

Speaking Two Languages at Once

I began, as generations before me have begun.

Al-ḥamdu lillāh...

The Arabic flowed through the gathering.

Ancient.

Measured.

Beautiful.

Some followed every syllable.

Others simply listened.

Then came English.

Not as a replacement.

But as hospitality.

The Qur’an remained Qur’an.

The Prophetic words remained Prophetic.

But their meanings were opened.

Sakīnah.

Mawaddah.

Raḥmah.

Tranquillity.

Affection.

Mercy.

Words that every human heart recognises, even before it knows their Arabic names.

A Lesson from Nabi ʿĪsā

One of the passages I shared came from the Qur’an’s description of the followers of Nabi ʿĪsā عليه السلام.

Allah does not first praise their miracles.

Nor their learning.

Nor their influence.

He says that He placed within their hearts compassion and mercy.

That is extraordinary.

Tenderness becomes a sign of revelation.

Marriage, too, is sustained less by certainty than by mercy.

Less by winning arguments than by refusing to make victory more important than kindness.

The strongest homes are often built by those who quietly ask,

“How can I show more mercy today?”

Two Hundred Rand

Then came the mahr.

Two hundred rand.

And a silver ring.

Someone unfamiliar with Islam might have wondered whether such a gift could really matter.

But Islam has never measured gifts by their market value.

Only by the sincerity that accompanies them.

The silver ring will one day gather scratches.

The notes will long since have disappeared.

But generosity leaves marks that no inflation can erase.

I invited my brother-in-law, Al Amien, to come forward.

“Inspect the ring.”

“Count the money.”

He did so with great seriousness.

The gathering laughed.

So did we.

But beneath the laughter was a lesson.

The mahr mattered.

Not because it was expensive.

But because promises deserve witnesses.

Sometimes theology smiles.

When Nobody Objected

There was something else I noticed.

Before the ceremony, I wondered whether someone might object.

Not because anything essential to the nikāḥ had been abandoned.

The Qur’an was recited.

The khutbah was delivered.

The witnesses were present.

The mahr was given.

The proposal and acceptance were clear.

The duʿā’ was made.

Everything that mattered remained.

Only the setting had changed.

But afterwards...

No one came to question the canopy.

No one asked why there had been no mosque.

No one objected that families had sat together to witness a marriage.

Instead, they came one after another.

Muslims.

Non-Muslims.

Young.

Old.

“This was the most inspiring wedding ceremony we’ve ever witnessed.”

I heard it again.

And again.

And again.

What They Had Really Witnessed

I do not think they were praising me.

Nor the flowers.

Nor the décor.

I think they had encountered something they had not expected.

They had met a tradition that was confident enough to explain itself.

A faith that did not retreat into unfamiliar language.

A Sunnah that welcomed rather than intimidated.

Perhaps they discovered that Islam is not held together by inherited forms alone.

It is held together by meanings.

When meanings remain alive, forms become doors rather than walls.

Building Rather Than Defending

For many years I have become less interested in defending Islam.

Defence is necessary at times.

But defence alone builds very little.

Building is slower.

Building asks different questions.

How do people encounter beauty?

How do strangers become guests?

How do guests become family?

How do ancient words become living words once again?

Perhaps that is what happened beneath the canopy.

Not a performance.

Not an argument.

Just an encounter.

After Everyone Had Gone Home

The flowers will disappear.

The canopy has already been folded away.

The chairs have been returned.

But somewhere in my memory, they remain exactly where they stood that afternoon: beneath the winter light, surrounded by family, waiting for two young people to begin a life together.

Years from now, I suspect I will not remember the decorations or the menu.

I will remember the three chairs.

And I will remember that, for one afternoon in Joburg, the Sunnah arrived beneath a canopy instead of a minbar.

In the tall branches above our garden,
he appears — a spark of yellow and will.
A small craftsman with a heart of thread,
turning palm leaves into homes for light.

He works upside down,
swaying with the wind,
as if prayer itself had feathers.
He steals a strip from my garden fern —
looks me in the eye,
as if to say,
“You do what you do —
I’m busy making love into architecture.”

Each leaf becomes a promise.
Each knot, a verse of devotion.
He doesn’t speak of love —
he builds it.

And when she arrives —
the quiet judge of grace —
she inspects every curve,
every seam of his offering.
Sometimes she stays.
Sometimes she tears it down.

He doesn’t curse her silence.
He begins again.
Because love, for him,
is not about being chosen —
it’s about choosing to build.

There’s a sermon in that.
The courage to begin again.
The tenderness of work done without applause.
The faith that small hands,
even beaked ones,
can weave heaven into grass.

Maybe that’s what we’re all learning —
to make something lasting
out of what is fragile.
To keep building,
whether anyone notices
or not.

Epilogue: The Intention Behind the Thread

In the language of faith, niyyah is everything.
Even a single blade of grass — if lifted with love — can become worship.
The weaver teaches this without words.
His labour is not loud; it is consistent. It is dhikr in motion.
To build, to rebuild, to offer beauty again and again — that is his prayer.

He gathers what the wind leaves behind and gives it a place to belong.

And perhaps, in some unseen register of mercy,
The Divine counts each strand he weaves as a remembrance,
each nest as a small dome of devotion.

He owns none of the threads.
Yet he leaves behind a home.

Maybe that’s how we, too, must live —
thread by thread,
building what will outlast the storms,
and trusting that even our smallest intentions
are seen,
recorded,
and carried back to the One who first taught the birds to weave.

for Jacinta, and for every future we have mistaken for a stranger.

Listen.

Can you hear it?

Not the shouting.

Not the slogans.

Not the boots
teaching the tar
another lesson
in certainty.

Listen more carefully.

There—

the sound

of empty hooves.

Every March

they march.

Left.

Right.

Left.

Right.

The street remembers
the rhythm

long before
it remembers
the reason.

Once,

they said,

Kill the cattle.

Tomorrow

will arrive
on its own.

The bones

are still listening.

Now

they have learned
new words.

Foreigner.

Makwerekwere.

Illegal.

The prophecy

has changed
its vocabulary.

The hunger

has not.

An old man

steps out
into the afternoon.

Children

have invented
a country

using nothing

but laughter

and a ball.

He opens
a knife.

The football

collapses

before

it can become

tomorrow.

Jacinta.

The crowd

knows

where she came from.

Nobody asks

where mercy

comes from.

We have become

masters

of small victories.

A punctured football.

A broken window.

A burned shop.

Another frightened face

walking

towards another border.

We call this

strength.

The cattle

never returned.

The jobs

never appeared.

The future

missed another train.

Still

we sharpen

our certainty

against strangers.

Listen.

Can you hear it?

Not the chanting.

Not the speeches.

Not the promises.

Listen

beneath them.

The sound

of empty hooves

crossing

the country

again.

Looking

for cattle

we have not yet

finished

killing.

Cry, beloved Africa.

The hooves are empty again.