Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Constructed Deconstruction

Following my disappointing excursion into the Bible and Christianity, I attempted reconstructing my Islamic faith. This was a colossal and systemic intellectual project that I prioritized over everything else.

First, I compiled and categorized every single issue under its respective branch of knowledge — law, history, morality, descriptions of the natural world, creed, and so on. Second, I examined my contentions critically, with the assumption that perhaps some of the difficulties I had with the faith were due to my wrong assumptions about the nature of God and my own values. Third, if the issue was still standing, I thoroughly investigated it, consulting the works of various Muslim scholars to determine the most Islamically sound perspective — checking the authenticity of the hadith, the various interpretations of the Quran, and relevant debates between scholars. Fourth, I cross-examined each conclusion from the last step against the others to identify contradictions and inconsistencies. If there were any, I would return to the third step; otherwise, I would move on. Fifth, I would synthesize consistent conclusions into clusters — and if at any point they contradicted elements from another cluster, I would re-examine each element of both. Sixth, when I was comfortable with the conclusions I reached, I would examine them against the claims of the critics of Islam to see if they could withstand scrutiny.

At the time, I thought my own due diligence was satisfactory in regard to objectivity and comprehensiveness. And, indeed, I became much more certain about my faith, and many of the shubahat (doubts and misconceptions) had been resolved — except for a few, especially the purpose of creation to God.

In retrospect, I realize now that what I really accomplished was constructing a palatable alternative reading of Islam that co-opted various thoughts, opinions, and views from different sources and scholars into one self-serving narrative. The way this worked was largely by taking radical positions — such as doubting the authenticity of any text other than the Quran, including the hadith, the biographies of Muhammad, and early Islamic history — and adopting a hermeneutic interpretation of the Quran that emphasizes context over philology and reason over dictation.

The Committed One

At this stage, I was diligent with my religious duties. I would lead my friends in prayers. I also started being active online, responding to both Muslims and non-Muslims in their debates about Islam. Of course, many of my views were not accepted by my Muslim interlocutors, since they fundamentally contradicted traditional and mainstream Islamic understandings. However, I never shied from a debate or a discussion, and would always go back to the drawing board whenever I encountered new information or an inconsistency in my frame of thought.

While I had never felt more certain about Islam, there was clearly something happening underneath this façade of intellectual inquiry. I was inexplicably sad, introverted, and quieter than usual. I had re-emerging doubts about my thoughts and ideas, but those were not allowed to materialize and surface — I would immediately drown them in my systematic self-affirming inquiry into Islam, with the idea that everything must have an explanation within my frame of thought, and that I just had to work harder.

This did not prevent deep self-expression from seeping through other avenues. One day I was in a classroom, completely zoning out from the lecture and mindlessly doodling. I noticed that a colleague beside me was looking at me, bewildered by what I had drawn. Amidst the spirals and zigzags, I had drawn a menacing clown on an inverted cross and a depiction of a demon surfacing from the Kaaba. He bluntly asked me if I was a kafir, and I vehemently rejected the question — although I myself was quite surprised by what I had been doodling almost unconsciously.

This incident was passing and inconsequential. I did not make much of it, and for my friends, I remained the “committed and religious one” — well-read and somewhat knowledgeable about Islam.

Alberta

This led to a day when one of my friends spoke to me of a Chilean Christian girl — let’s call her Alberta — that he was chatting with on ICQ. He said that she held extremely negative views about Islam and that he did not have the knowledge to respond to her criticisms and questions. He asked me to converse with her and try to clear her misconceptions about Islam. I agreed, reminding him that I was not an Islamic scholar and promising I would do the best I could.

This was a turning point — or rather, a point of no return.

When I got to speak with Alberta, it was clear that my friend had mischaracterized her. She did not strike me as someone who was vehemently anti-Islamic or proselytizing Christianity. Rather, and naturally so being a Christian, she did not regard Islam to be the true message from God, and she found some elements in Islam to be objectionable if not disturbing. I sympathized with that, having been in a faith crisis myself. Moreover, she was curious to learn about Islam — not just out of intrigue, but also because she was beginning to have some doubts about her own faith.

For weeks and months, I engaged with Alberta in lengthy conversations about Islam and Christianity. There was solace in conversing with someone who had similar experiences, albeit from the other side. Although the discussions were often heated, neither of us had an interest in converting the other. Rather, at least as far as I was concerned, there was perhaps a latent motivation to prove something to myself rather than to her.

There was something quite revealing about putting my thoughts into written words — not to debate with someone, or for myself to read alone. I started noticing cracks in my alternative reading of Islam, which I spotted more often than she did. These gradually widened to appear as significant inconsistencies and contrived projections onto Islam. At the same time, I was inspired — and threatened — by her honesty with herself. Whereas I was scrambling to fill holes for the sole purpose of relieving myself, she appeared much more composed and careful in the face of uncertainty. While, under the shadow of the cross, she contemplated that her fate may be written in Arabic, she would do so carefully, so as not to cross the line of self-deception. She was quite aware that within oneself there are many — that one may be desiring and averting, fearing and enduring, wavering and unchanging, scheming and honestly seeking, directing and surrendering, pulling and pushing, pleading and silencing. Alberta was ready to follow the light wherever it might lead her. And while not wanting, she was ready to embrace the darkness if that is all that there is.

The Imbricated Mess

Self-deception is peculiar in that it is hardly ever an expeditious or conscious decision to act. Rather, it happens from within — and independently from what we think is real — as an unseen and unfelt effect that slowly develops to appear genuine. This is in part why recognizing self-deception, let alone unraveling it, is extremely difficult and often taxing to the individual. Self-deception may be predicated on appropriating ideas, experiences, and perceptions to construct comfortable worldviews and self-perceptions. These, however, are but hard shells that contain things within us that are much more volatile and intangible — much less prone to intellectual processes and the objective study of the world. And at the centre of this imbricated mess is the primal instinct towards self-preservation.

It is thus not much of a surprise that my prior qualms with my faith led me to an existential crisis and an immense sense of dread so extreme and impactful on my physical and mental health. However, while I had considered that I had been deceived before, and while I doubted my abilities to objectively study religions, I never doubted my intentions or my position as a truth-seeker. And so, I reasoned that without a critical — and even merciless — examination of myself, self-deception would only regenerate and disguise itself, shuffling through endless faces. Gradually, I realized that is what must have happened with my alternative reading of Islam. After all, it was so personal, radical, and contradicting to even the wide consensus of various scholars that I might as well have called it by a different name other than Islam.

The question thus was whether my understanding of Islam reflected the true teachings of the religion, or was it mere personal projection of what I wanted it to be?

If I were without an acknowledgment of the possibility of self-deception, I would have simply returned to the drawing board — perhaps conveniently and inevitably — to reach the conclusion that I was indeed correct. However, if I were to consider that I had been deceiving myself, then I must face two very simple but critical questions: what is it that I am so terrified of, that I would mire myself in possibly self-manufactured lies? And if I had done so, how did I really come to convince myself to accept one version of Islam over the other?

Two Questions

In regard to the first question — and as mentioned earlier — I had already defiantly, albeit begrudgingly, abandoned any obligation towards God when it comes to seeking the truth. Regardless of His wrath or punishment, I would acknowledge my doubts and honor them as genuine experiences that ought to be resolved with answers rather than silenced by fear. But if that was truly the case, what was I still fearful of?

It could have been that I was still dreading God’s inevitable punishment — but then would that not have skewed my research from the very beginning? This was probably a factor, but there was something else. Something even more fearful than the wrath of God: being utterly lost in darkness. For a world lit by the blazing fury of God is less dismal than a world that He has abandoned. And, indeed, a part of me must have realized this predicament when the voice questioned my inclination to believe that God had sent me a message to go to that church, asking: “is it something real, or is it something that you want to think is real?” It was clear that I had tried to create a perfect lie and then believed it — for the sole purpose of finding light where perhaps there is only darkness.

In regard to the second question, I had absolutely no reason other than my own whim to consider my alternative reading of Islam to be any more truthful than those I had come to reject. Surely, I had carefully constructed my renewed faith and it was as solid as it had ever been — but only because I desired it to be so. In reality, and in contrast with other readings and understandings of Islam, mine was more prone to being utter fabrication. And I must have known it, which was why I systematically and diligently reworked and refined my understanding, always feeling like I was using a bucket to remove water from a sinking ship.

And there I was — unmasked to myself, looking pathetic, grotesque, sad, and weak. I heard the whispers in my blood saying that “sooner or later, all the skeletons come out of the closet, and then all you can do is deal with it — you might as well not have put them there in the first place.” But only if things were that simple. Only if it was actually a choice.

No Needle in the Hay

On one night at the end of spring 2003, the air was bringing more than the usual dusty hot wind. It felt heavy, ominous, and macabre. The skeletons in the closet had been dancing to their second death while I, a wretched wreck, watched in surrender. Every breath I took was a search for deliverance, and every breath I gave was a prayer for guidance. My pleas were never answered, and for months I had been struggling to not let this moment come.

The house was empty. I carefully washed myself to prepare for prayers. I had still been performing them so as not to cut the last thread with God. The water streamed slowly and clearly, making a beautiful soothing sound. I envied the water’s purity and clarity as I gazed through it into nothingness. I felt tainted and hopeless.

The rumbling winds had finally rested, and I could hardly hear any noise from the street. This was perfect — because I needed peace, and there was more than enough noise raging in my mind. I placed the prayer rug towards the Qibla and slowly stood between the hands of God, begging for guidance. I slowly recited the very first verses of the Quran, anticipating a desperately needed sense of belonging and response. As I recited the verse — “guide us to the right path, the path of those you have blessed, not those you are angry with or the lost ones” — I slowly opened my eyes.

And there it was. An empty, dull, and dead wall staring back at me.

There I was, crying my heart out to nothing but a silent wall. I heard that voice ask: “what are you doing?”

I stood there for a while, saying nothing — to that voice, to myself, or to God. I could finally hear silence in my head. Then, like a flash of memory, ideas began racing in my mind: the death of my father; the humiliation and injustice I endured as a child; the misery and suffering in the world; the atrocities committed throughout history; the inadequacy of so-called divine books; my futile quest for answers; and the inexplicable arrogance, vanity, cruelty, and anger of God.

I thought to myself: there was no needle in that stack of hay after all.

I looked around and stepped away from the rug for the last time.

“There is nothing here for me,” I said to myself, creeping back to my dark room. “There is nothing here but me.”

And I cried myself to sleep.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

The Apocalypse and a House of Cards

The morning after the night when my faith crumbled, I woke up feeling an amalgamation of the usual sorrow and despair, but also a great deal of contempt and anger. I was utterly livid — with everyone who ever taught me anything about Islam, with the religion itself, with God, and above all, with myself. I considered what happened akin to a crime, but I was not a victim in this travesty. After all, I too had fooled myself.

There was not a shred of solace in the idea that it was not my fault that I had been conditioned as a child to accept certain ideas as self-evident facts. I felt no satisfaction from the idea that I had been honest with myself — possibly because I actually was not. I thought at the time that, sure, I had done a lot of research, and I had gone further than most around me would in pursuit of truth, but then I caved in and wove a web of lies to catch me before going further towards a dreadful conclusion. I might have done that unconsciously — I did not choose to trick myself — but ultimately, one way or the other, this was my doing. And it is only when the lies I built crumbled under their own weight that I seemingly saw the end of this episode of self-deception.

I had no bragging rights whatsoever, no badge of honour to stick on my chest, no glorious title to label myself, and no epic moments of rebirth or emancipation.

Like an Arrow

Until this moment, I had never doubted the existence of God, and I thought that atheism was not only mistaken but most certainly a stupid idea. The question for me had been which between Islam and Christianity was the true message from God. And having found no reason to believe that either was true, and many reasons to doubt that they were, the sound conclusion should have stopped at the idea that neither is true.

However, this is not what happened. Like an arrow from a bow, my faith in God also dissipated in the aftermath. Just as I had feared — and as I ominously predicted in the exchange with the minister I mentioned earlier — I had become one of those wretched atheists who “believe in nothing.”

When I say my faith in God “dissipated,” I mean that it seemed to have quite literally vanished. I just stopped believing. It was not a choice or a calculated conclusion based on intentional thinking and weighing of evidence. I had no clever syllogisms and rebuttals, no grand ideas, no answers as to how the universe could exist without God, and no references to atheist thinkers. Rather, I simply no longer thought that God exists. And it would take a while until I recognized the fallaciousness of closely associating the existence of a creator with the validity of any religion.

Intellectual maturity was not the only obstacle to unravelling this. The very moment I realized that I did not believe in God, everything else that I valued and believed came crashing like a house of cards. That sent me into a whirlwind of dismal despair and anxiety that blinded me from recognizing the frailty of losing faith in God strictly because I had lost my faith in a religion.

My mind, in a moment’s flash, jumped like a scalded cat from losing faith in Islam to losing faith in God, and from that to losing faith in everything.

A World Without God

I felt — and not reasoned — that without God there are no higher principles or values. Without God, things like friendship, kinship, and maternal love felt meaningless and selfish. Even worse, these things felt insidious — empty concepts conveniently constructed in the nether as abstract and enduring principles to make our lives bearable and propel them in a futile, absurd, purposeless existence. That latter idea is what stung the most. Without God, there is no purpose, no grand plan, and no ultimate judgment that will right every wrong. The world suddenly seemed dark and barren — extraordinarily miserable, hopeless, cruel, and unjust.

I cannot fairly describe in words what it felt like living in such an arduous and grim world. I felt a vile sense of loneliness and estrangement in an absurd and vile world — taken from the position of a participant in a purposeful world to a helpless, horrified observer. I witnessed the banality of everything and the vividness of suffering and misfortune. I felt a deep and dark pit of sadness within, and a crushing sense of gloom and despondency. Every day was a tragic event, a testament of unspeakable horror, an unwinnable trial, and a forced exercise in wretched futility.

When we think of the world, we think of a space that we inhabit — some sort of a grand machine without an awareness of its existence or our presence in it. But this was not the kind of world I thought I inhabited at the time. Rather, this world was aware of those who inhabit it — but only of the ones who see it for what it really is. And it mercilessly punishes them for it, exposing and flouting more of its inherent evil and dreadful substance. It hunts down and devours those who, for one reason or another, have awakened from their slumber to the soothing sound of its locomotion and gazed through its façade — witnessing its cruelty, banality, barrenness, and loneliness, and attesting to its emptiness and false promises.

Waking Up

At the time, waking up from sleep was an extremely unpleasant and loud experience. The moment I opened my eyes and realized I was awake in this world, I would pick up the despair and pain from where I had left it before I slept. The noise in my head would resume raging. Sometimes I felt disappointed that I had even woken up and had not died in my sleep. Getting out of bed was an excruciating task — one that I hardly ever felt compelled or even mechanized to do. After all, there was no joy, hope, or meaning left in the world, and nothing but more anguish to witness and harvest. I would only get off the bed when I desperately needed to use the toilet, or when the stench of the cigarettes consumed the night before became too overbearing.

Besides mental anguish, the panic attacks returned with a vengeance. Almost every day I would experience multiple intense and vicious attacks lasting ten or fifteen minutes each — recurring even at night, waking me from the little sleep I scraped from the physical and mental exhaustion of the day.

There was a time when things had reached a point where there was no refuge from this world — not even in the minuscule space that was my bedroom, and not even in the embrace of slumber.

Many in One

This was already too much to handle, but there was yet another thorn growing at my side. All the time up to that stage I had been observing the misery and misfortune of others in a world without God. Eventually, I started absorbing and feeling the pain and sorrow of others in my body and my mind. This is not to say that I merely felt empathy towards the unfortunate, the miserable, the maltreated, the poor, and the bereaved. Rather, without volition, I mirrored and internalized such experiences in my mind as my own. I was unfortunate when I had been lucky. I was maltreated when I had been privileged. I was bereaved when I had not lost anyone. I was poor when I had been prosperous. And I was killed when I had been alive. And I felt all of this in my bones.

I had unwillingly become many in one, rather than one amongst many. In a world without a timeless and spaceless God, my time and my space were fleeting, regressing and expanding, encompassing all living things they encountered in history or the present. The weight of this world — and the worlds that had passed — was placed on my shoulders, and it crushed me.

Such intense empathy was not new to me. As far back as the time when I was a child of God, I always felt very strong emotions in response to the suffering and misfortune of others. My faith in God and His eternal wisdom and divine plan had stood as a barrier between witnessing and reacting to misfortune on the one hand, and internalizing it on the other. This was a thin thread that was on certain occasions precariously stretched — but it was not undone until my faith in God vanished.

There are three memories from childhood that, in retrospect, seem to have foreshadowed what was to come in a world without God.

The Girl on the Road

At the age of nine, I was with my mother in her car on a fast and wide road inside Cairo. It is not unusual for pedestrians in Cairo to cross such dangerous roads, and it often leads to tragic accidents. I witnessed one of them when, on the opposite side, a little girl let go of her mother’s hand, sprawled through the road, and was struck by a speeding car. The girl momentarily soared in the air and came down crashing on her back. The cars in our lane slowed down, and I could clearly see the girl lying motionless on the ground — her eyes wide open, protruding from her face, staring lifelessly at the sky. I also observed her mother screaming in horror as she scrambled to reach her.

This horrific scene would be disturbing to any person to witness, let alone a child. My mother herself was screaming as we passed by and yelled at me to look the other way. It was too late — I had seen it all. Witnessing such fatal accidents can overload our emotions. It is normal to feel significant distress, a macabre vibe, and great sorrow for those involved. However, for me, the intensity and the scope of this internalization were different. I felt the anguish of the mother as if it were my own, and I told my mother — even weeks after the incident had passed — that I was still feeling the melancholy of the girl’s mother. I felt like I had lost someone I knew.

The Fog

At the age of thirteen, I witnessed another horrific fatal accident that makes the former pale in comparison, both in its gore and the number of victims involved. Since I commuted to school in a private car with a hired driver, we would often take routes through agricultural and rural areas to avoid the morning rush. These were open but tight two-way roads with almost no police presence, which prompted some drivers to take reckless liberties. There were instances when we had close calls with disaster.

One day on the way to school, the atmosphere was unusually foggy. By the time we reached the wide agricultural stretch of road, visibility was quite limited — we could not see past more than one car in front of us. The driver could not park to the side, as the road was flanked by two water canals that we could hardly make out anyway. I remember the driver reciting the Quran nervously while I sat at the edge of my seat.

The car in front of us began to slow down, and so did we, until we were moving at a walker’s pace. It was then that we heard people screaming, crying, and moaning in pain, as they slowly began to appear as shadowy silhouettes in the mist. Eventually, the car was surrounded by an extremely horrific and gory scene. Three packed microbuses had violently collided with each other, and the wreckage must have been only minutes old. Many corpses lay on the ground, having been ejected from the vehicles, and scores of people with bloody faces and visibly broken limbs moved or lay motionless around them.

We passed slowly through the scene. Through the window on my side, I observed a young boy in his school uniform standing about a meter from our car. His clothes were drenched in blood, his trembling hands held open with his palms facing his face. He was eerily moaning, and his horrified face was contorted by what appeared to be a severe injury to his twisted jaw, which was pouring blood onto the ground. Again, for weeks afterward, I internalized the sense of horror on that boy’s face as if it were my own.

The Koshari Box

In that same year, I was out for dinner with my mother and brother at a posh private club for diplomats, on account of both of my grandfathers’ service to the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On our way out to the car, we heard the indiscernible loud yelling of an elderly homeless woman who we later understood was deaf. She was being harassed by a man who appeared to be in his forties. He had snatched from her hands a box of koshari she was eating from and was laughing at her as she desperately tried to take it back with her frail hands. He would dangle the box in front of her face only to pull it back whenever she tried to grab it.

The three of us stood in shock as passers-by began to gather. At first, I was saddened by this horrible display of cruelty. Then I was overwhelmed by intense emotions of humiliation and injustice, and I burst into anger — telling the man to stop as I started moving toward him. My mother, fearing for my safety, firmly grabbed me by the shoulder and embraced me tightly to prevent me from moving. It was only then that two other men intervened, grabbed the box from his hand, and admonished him as they forced him to leave.

My mother must have sensed my distress — I was shaking and crying. She looked me straight in the eyes and said, “we cannot change what just happened to that woman, but we can try to help her.” She then handed me and my brother a twenty-pound note — a decent amount of money at the time — to give to the woman, who was still wailing from the ordeal. While that lessened my sorrow a little, I could not shake the feeling of humiliation, wretched loneliness, and disempowerment that woman must have felt.

The Armor

On all these occasions, I did not merely observe tragedies or feel sympathy towards people met with misfortune. Rather, I internalized and embodied what my mind absorbed as their feelings. My mother recognized this and would warn me about being “too sensitive” — to the point of harming myself and incapacitating myself from helping those in need. The problem, of course, was that feeling the way I did was not a matter of choice. It would just happen.

There was, however, a silver lining in all these episodes of cruelty and horror. All of this was happening under the eyes of God and as part of His plan and purpose for the world. There was solace in the idea of a grand divine scheme — that the apparent horrors of the world are but fleeting moments in contrast with the eternal peace He would endow in the afterlife on all those who had suffered. There was solace in the idea that there are higher values to aspire to and to fight for, and that these higher values had meaning.

Growing up, I was aware of the evil in the world — with my father’s death, I was no stranger to tragedy. But my faith in God was like armor. While it did not prevent the world from taking shots, it was unpierceable. And so, while I had been troubled in my childhood with intense emotions of empathy, the cuts went much deeper in a world without God. There was nothing to rein in their relentless spread, and nothing to take them off the banquet of the beast of melancholic despair.

In the Quran, God promises to cast the disbelievers in hellfire and to replace their skin when it is burnt completely, so they may “taste” His righteous torture. And this is precisely how I felt — I was in a loop of torture. But I was not just being tortured. I was also the method of torture.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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In the early 2000s, I experienced a severe faith crisis following growing doubts in Islam.

I struggled with it on several fronts.

On creed, I couldn’t accept things like the mandated purpose behind creation (to worship God), obligatory rituals, eternal hellfire, the fate of non-Muslims, and the divine mandate for warfare—along with troubling elements in prophetic stories, like Abraham’s ordered sacrifice of his son or the destruction of whole peoples (to name a few).

On shariah, the hudud punishments (amputation, stoning, execution for apostasy or homosexuality), the unequal treatment of women (inheritance, testimony, wife-beating, concubinage), and the second-class status of non-Muslims all felt fundamentally unjust to me. The Quran’s failure to explicitly abolish slavery despite addressing it extensively compounded this.

Islamic history troubled me too—especially the massacre of Banu Qurayza and the bloodshed and tribal infighting of the early conquests and caliphates, which struck me as disappointingly ordinary human behavior rather than divinely guided.

Finally, a handful of miscellaneous issues wore on me: restrictions on music, mandates for women’s covering, harsh Quranic language toward non-believers, and what I saw as scientific inaccuracies in the Quran and Hadith—from embryology to cosmology—which made it hard for me to believe the text was divinely authored, since even one error would undermine that claim.

With that mindset and my growing doubts in Islam, and as I was still captured within the strictly Abrahamic conceptualization of the world, there were only two potential alternatives: Judaism and Christianity.

And so, I thought that perhaps I was intellectually and spiritually struggling because I was following the wrong religion.

It was a simple idea but also extremely dreadful and terrifying. Whenever it popped into my head — and it often did — my heart would sink, my breathing would accelerate, things would crawl on my skin, and into its own depth my mind would sink.

I tried to ignore the idea, to no avail. I tried to reassure myself in any way possible — sometimes by doubling down on prayers and begging God to dismiss the devil putting these thoughts in my mind.

Instead of reprieve, as my prayers seemed to have been ignored, I started developing starker physical symptoms of anxiety: chronic muscle tension, pins and needles all over my body, constant fatigue, limited concentration, and painful headaches. Then my anxiety soon developed into full-blown panic attacks that felt like a crushing and impending sense of doom. Almost every day, and like a freight train carrying terror, a panic attack would ensue, and I would find myself physically struggling to breathe, drenched in sweat, scratching my arms and upper body to the point of bleeding, feeling extremely lightheaded, and sometimes blacking out.

This ordeal also took a toll on my physical appearance. I started suffering from insomnia and would spend all night restlessly reading. And when I slept, I only dreamed of ghoulish nightmares. There was no escape and no rest, just constant dread. I appeared noticeably pale and frail, with vivid dark circles around my eyes, my hair growing untidily, and my weight steadily increasing.

Of course, when anybody — including my mother — asked if I was alright, I would never bring up what was going on inside my mind. I thought that no one would understand, and that I would be hated if it were known that I was having the slightest second thought about Islam. And so, yet another anxiety was developing out of fear of being discovered, like someone with a dirty secret. And, indeed, I felt like a dirty and corrupted traitor — although I would later find out that I was not too paranoid to expect extreme negative reactions from others.

Now imagine how someone would interpret these ailments with the mindset of a believer who not so long ago had a very personal and real connection with God. I had been healthy and peaceful prior to all of this, and my health took an abrupt negative turn. And so, I wholeheartedly believed God was punishing me for doubting His religion and questioning His beloved prophet.

At this point, I was desperate to let go of my search for the truth. I just wanted the emotional pain and suffering, the loneliness, and the panic attacks to stop. I would spend my nights, unable to sleep, praying and crying, begging God for forgiveness and deliverance.

I blamed myself because I thought I was stubborn and even arrogant to question Islam, and believed that I deserved God’s wrath. The problem was that Pandora’s box had already been opened. Nothing short of a miracle would have stopped the avalanche.

It is often said that faith may move mountains. But even though I wanted it to, nothing could move the sinister ideas rooting themselves inside my mind. After all, can we really unknow anything once it has become known to us?

Much Ado About Jesus

In my desperation, with the mental pressure raging and with my intellectual endeavors leaving me with more questions than answers (or perhaps a clear answer that I did not like), I finally reached a breaking point.

It was then that I contemplated the unthinkable.

Perhaps, God is not punishing me, perhaps God is answering my prayers, and I have been feeling pain and suffering because I have been looking in the wrong place all along.

And so, I was desperate enough to finally do the unthinkable and to consider that Jesus is God and that the Bible rather than the Qur’an is the word of God.

The question was, how do I go about this? Do I just “open my heart to Jesus” and invite him to dwell in me? Or do I begin yet another intellectual marathon towards understanding the religion and the holy texts?

The answer, I thought, came in the form of a letter sent from abroad to a church in Egypt and was delivered by mistake to my address. To my mind, this was potentially a sign from God that I needed to visit that church and deliver that envelop, and perhaps something would happen. I, however, could not muster the courage to visit a church with that intention. While I had been to churches before in weddings and on school trips, I have never been there as a seeker.

Part of me, still clutching to Islamic identity, felt that I would have been a traitor to God if I were to do that. Another part of me was not just skeptical of the idea that God has sent me a message, it was also quite cynical about the whole thing and especially given my state of desperation.

There was also an inner voice that would soon develop into something far greater than just passing thoughts. That voice posed simple questions; “why do you think that God is sending you messages? Is it something real or is it something that you want to think is real?”.

That voice was a new crucial development for up to that stage my questioning was always outwards rather than inwards.

I kept the envelope hidden within one of the many books so that neither my brother nor mother would see it so as not to raise any suspicions. And, in some way, I was also keeping it away from myself because I considered that perhaps this is a test from God or a ploy from the devil to see if I would be tempted to seek the false Christian beliefs.

That was until I could not drowse my doubts and anxiety with even an ounce of certainty about my beliefs. And so, without prior planning, one morning I decided that I will just head to that church without any expectations and see what happens. The experience was disappointingly ordinary.

When I arrived at the church, it was open but there was hardly anyone around. I slowly walked through the church’s door and walked inside. I observed the icons with unease and a sense of estrangement albeit with fascination. I recognized Jesus and Mary but none of the rest of the many other people depicted whom I assumed were apostles or saints.

There was something peculiarly inviting and relatable about seeing God as a human incarnate. But then again, that was precisely the sort of thing that Islam denounces for God is the most exalted and it contradicts his divinity to be lowered to the status of a man. I began to feel nervous as if I was in the devil’s presence rather than a house of God. I contemplated leaving but then that voice again asked, “are these indeed your thoughts, or are you mindlessly carrying the things you were taught as a child?”.

I conversed with that voice and responded with irritation; “What do you want from me? Were you not the one who questioned whether God was sending me messages? Why do you want me to stop seeking this thread?”. A moment passes and the chilling answer comes in the form of yet another question; “I asked why you think that God is sending you messages, I did not question if God is actually sending you messages, so was it I or you who doubted this?”.

I murmured, “go away and leave me alone. Go away”. And so, it did.

At this point, I was still standing and so I decided to sit at the nearest pew and wait for something to happen. A couple of hours passed in silence, and I was growing restless.

Nothing was happening and the only thing I felt was the soreness from sitting in one place for too long. I was contemplating leaving but then that voice whispered to me again asking; “the walls cannot speak, why did you not speak to God as you usually do in mosques?”.

At first, that seemed like an outrageous idea, for I thought how dare I act in a church as I would in a mosque? The voice whispered, always “speaking” in the form of questions, “so have you come here carrying more than your pure desire to find God wherever He maybe?”.

That voice seemed to be on to something, but how could I possibly skin myself to such an extent that do away with thoughts and dispositions that have been ingrained in me? And so, I closed my eyes, and I finally prayed to say, “Here I am God. I will come and go wherever you wish if you lead me. I beg you to answer my plea. You must know that I am so tired and as sincere as I can be, so help me take a step towards that which you will for me”.

I broke into tears.

And then, there was nothing.

No light bestowed upon me, no choirs commemorating the dramatic moment, no sudden epiphanies, and no change of heart whatsoever. All there was, it seemed to me, was a desperate young man, possibly losing his mind, sitting at the far end of the church, and saying heartfelt things to silence. I waited for a while, but it was becoming increasingly apparent that I was just sitting inside a building but not without that voice having the final say as it usually does.

- “Is there nothing here for me?” I asked myself in sadness.

- “Were you expecting something, Wael?” the voice replied.

- “I was not talking to you. But, yes, maybe I was expecting or hoping for something” I said back to the voice.

- “But, why?” the voice asked as it faded into whichever wretchedness it comes from.

Why, indeed.

Deconstruction Deconstructed

I left the church and wandered off into the streets, underwhelmed and disappointed. The experience was ultimately unexceptional. I had some thoughts running in my brain, cried for a bit, and prayed. Everything was more or less the same — as futile and disappointing as usual.

And then it struck me — an incredible sense of dread, as if I had just killed someone. I had been in a church praying to a God other than Allah. I had just committed an atrocity like no other. I was petrified because I thought that I had been redeemable until I set foot in that church, but having done that, all hope was lost.

That night felt longer than usual. I genuinely felt like the earth would swallow me. And in a twisted — or perhaps desperate — way, I wished it did, because then I would at least get some kind of response from God. That is how desperate I was. I was ready to accept anything.

But I wasn’t even worthy of God’s wrath.

Nothing happened. No earthquakes, no splitting skies, no locusts.

Just the usual relentless Cairo dust covering my stuff when I had just cleaned the surfaces the day before.

The following day, I was much more collected and rather calm. I also felt a bizarre mix of melancholy and contentment with myself.

I thought to myself that, yes, I may have done something atrocious, I may have set the wheel in motion for something good, and I may have just wasted my time — but there was solace in having the courage to try and do the unthinkable to find the truth.

My anxiety did not vanish, the sense of dread did not disappear, and I was still as lost as I was. But that voice was right about one thing.

I had indeed found something — a sense of sympathy towards myself, and an appreciation of my determination to find the truth wherever it may be, regardless of the price to pay in this world or the next.

Looking back at this moment, it is not too farfetched to think of it as the first act of defiance against what I thought God is. Indeed, I was almost certain that I had angered Him by going to that church. But I did not ask for forgiveness.

For a truth seeker is obliged to nothing but the truth.

I thought maybe that voice was on to something when it asked why I was expecting anything to happen. I had but one path toward God and finding His true religion, and it had to be through reason and knowledge.

This changed my relationship with God in a significant way from that point. Faith had a smaller place in my heart, and instead, I wanted to know. I thought that perhaps God has no obligation to reveal Himself to anyone — not even to a desperate and agonizing soul like myself.

I, however, had an obligation towards myself to find the truth, with or without God guiding me.

I may have been a traitor to the creed. But not a traitor to myself.

And that, for better or worse, stayed.

At least, that’s what I thought.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Indoctrination into Islam, as with many other religions, defines the relationship between God and all His creation.

This relationship, as I was taught, is multifaceted, reflecting the various absolute qualities and powers of God.

God is the creator of everything that was, is, and will be. He has created nothing in vain, and He subjected the world to mankind so that it populates the earth and worships Him alone. All people are His slaves, bound to His will and purpose for us.

God is the supreme overseer and arbitrator. He knows everything that I think and feel, and more importantly, He sees everything that I do. And, based on this, on the day of judgment, God will judge each person for all their actions and choices, from the most mundane to the most significant.

God is involved in the daily affairs of His creations. He has not created the universe and left it to its own devices. Rather, He intervenes in the world, responds to prayers and supplications, blesses and assists the believers, and curses and punishes the wrongdoers.

God is in a personal relationship with people. He loves and longs for good believers, and He comforts and relieves them. He also dislikes or hates people with certain qualities — hypocrisy, kufr, insolence, aggression with no mandate or right, and so on — and while He may guide and forgive some of them if they repent, He may also allow them to become more impenitent and insolent.

Ultimately everything is centered around the covenant between Himself and mankind: to worship the one true God; believe in His messengers and angels; obey His commands; do good; and, rejoice in what is good and forbid what is wrong.

Success would lead us to eternal life in paradise and failure would damn us to hell.

It’s very simple in principle.

In practice, though?

Well nothing was ever straightforward as far as I can remember.

A Special Relationship

As with every Muslim, my relationship with God was defined by these considerations about His characteristics. However, as a child, I also believed that I was in a special relationship with God that went beyond these basics.

Having lost my father to an untimely and sudden death at the age of seven, I believed that God, in His utmost mercy, had an exceptional fondness towards me, as with all other orphans.

I believed God provides security and protection to the fatherless, compassion and tenderness to the motherless, and exceptional care to those without any parent to look after them. In a sense, I believed that without a father, I was a child of God—and would remain so until I grew up and learned to look after myself.

Alas, I believed that God’s stewardship of the fatherless was in teaching them to be strong by the very act that disempowered them in the first place; taking their father away.

Therefore, I believed that, in His wisdom, my father’s death was calculated, perhaps part of a special purpose God had for me and my brother. The passing of my father was painful, and still is to this day, but I was consoled by the idea that it was part of God’s plan, and that He knows and does what is best.

And so, while ritualistic religious duties were not emphasized in my childhood, and while I was estranged to an extent from Islamic orthodoxy, God was very important and present in my life and my imagination.

It is important to note here that while I believed that as an orphan I had a special relationship with God, it was not one of entitlement.

On the contrary, its very foundation was a tragedy, and embedded in that tragedy was an opportunity and a test. By extension, this generated in me a sense of responsibility towards pleasing God and seeking His approval—just as a child would feel towards his father.

Only, in keeping with my rather unique religious upbringing, the path towards pleasing God was not through rituals but rather almost strictly through moral action. More importantly, I saw pleasing God as an incidental outcome of doing the right thing, rather than the motivation to do so. It is something that one could seek but only through pure and detached action.

As a child, my commitment to this path materialized in two ways.

Protecting My Mother

The first was in the protection of my family and my mother.

After my father passed away, my mother became my brother’s and my sole legal guardian, and she was accordingly entrusted with our shares of our father’s inheritance.

However, there were disputes over some of the items from the inheritance with my father’s side of the family. There was also significant distrust, if not hatred, between both parties, which occasionally led to very unpleasant confrontations—especially because we all lived in the same building.

Of course, a child’s mind may not grasp the concept of misplaced good intentions, the clash of egos, and divergences in points of view. Not that any of it matters to the suffering of a child. And not that I necessarily hold any charitable justifications now.

Whatever it was, it was what it was. That’s what matters and that’s what stays.

And so, I was always at the forefront of any confrontation, despite my mother’s rather vague and unconvincing orders not to be involved.

I vividly remember instances when I yelled and swore at my other family members, or argued with them, chastising them for what I perceived as transgressions at the time.

> It was more than transgressions. These were crimes!<

One instance I remember most was when my mother was renovating the house, including opening a path to an unused, separate staircase towards our apartment, to avoid bumping into our family and, hence, avoid some of the confrontations.

This angered one of my uncles, and in his fury, he threw my mother onto the pavement as I watched from the first floor.

I was nine at the time.

At the same moment, other members of my family tried to barge into our apartment to see the work being done inside.

I picked up a wood plank that was lying around and hurled myself towards the door, just enough to keep them away for a moment. Of course, they managed to push the door open with ease, but they could not come further inside the house, because I was violently and indiscriminately swinging the plank.

One of them managed to slap my face hard, but that did not deter me, and my ferocious relentlessness forced them to leave.

>Yeah. Run away, ye cowards!<

A Quiet Childhood

The second way my commitment materialized extended beyond supporting my mother: standing for what was right, more broadly. More on this shortly.

As a child, I was quite conscious that the world could be ugly. After all, my home was a lecture hall for this lesson. Fortunately, at least during my elementary and early middle school years, my experience in school was generally pleasant. I was part of a quiet group that got along with staff and other students alike.

Sure, we did not know how to imitate Michael Jackson’s dance moves, we did not participate in talent shows, we were not familiar with the latest MTV hits, and we looked and dressed quite ordinarily. But I do not think any of us craved that kind of attention, or had any desire to be cool. Instead, we did our own thing—playing soccer and video games, sharing a passion for professional wrestling, and hanging out at each other’s homes.

We never bullied, mocked, or belittled anyone, in any way. At the same time, we were hardly subjected to it, even though it was a common occurrence for children to get bullied in our school.

I guess we were so uninteresting and so benign that we were almost invisible.

The Bulletin

However, at the tail end of middle school and during the first year of secondary school, things took a very nasty turn for me. And as difficult as things were, I displayed an unwavering determination to stand for what was right.

It began in early 1998. The midterm results were posted on a bulletin for everyone to see. It was not unusual for me to get high scores in school, but up to that point, I had never performed exceptionally well.

However, to my surprise, I had the highest score among my peers. I was very happy and proud of what I had achieved, and I could not wait to go home and tell my mother. These were difficult times for us, as my grandfather on my mother’s side had just had a second heart bypass surgery, and I knew this news would bring cheers and joy to the family.

During break time, as I was standing with my friends at our usual spot, I heard someone yell, “There he is!”.

Before I could even turn to see who was talking, a group of my peers— not from my class—jumped on me and dropped me to the ground. One of them grabbed my leg and dragged me down a, fortunately, small staircase. The pack kicked me a few times as I lay helpless on the ground.

And yet, despite the numbers, I stood up and tried to defend myself—which did not work, because I was outnumbered, outsized against each one of them, and I did not have the slightest clue how to throw a punch anyway.

This started a long series of such episodes that lasted the rest of the year. The school administration was aware of the situation but hardly took any meaningful action. My mother complained, but it changed nothing.

I was on my own. I was so desperate that I used a black marker to cover my name on the bulletin, to erase the achievement that seemed to have inspired so much hate. But that did not help much—I was already visible as an easy target, and nothing could change that.

>most of them are dead or miserable now, ahaha<

A Fragile Peace

Before the start of the new school year, I dreaded a repeat of this mental and physical torture. So, as my mother advised, I tried to avoid confrontation as much as possible. This seemed to work, so long as I swallowed my pride and did not respond to the humiliation these bullies seemed to enjoy inflicting on me.

Indeed, even after the summer break, they had not forgotten about me. There were sporadic instances of bullying from the same group, but eventually they lost interest close to the end of the first semester.

Perhaps it seemed to them that I had been put in my place, or perhaps the novelty of my suffering had simply worn off. And, indeed, I enjoyed a period of restored peace—albeit with wounds and trauma that I am sure remain consequential to this day.

That, however, did not last for long.

The Bus

My school was located on the outskirts of the governorate of Giza, and my home, like many other students’, was relatively far—meaning school bus trips would take anywhere between one and two hours.

One day, traffic was unusually terrible, and the bus was caught in a difficult jam. While everyone more or less kept to themselves at the start, especially after a long school day, the traffic jam seemed to make a group of children—also part of the bullying clique—increasingly restless and bored.

They usually sat at the back of the bus, a place reserved for the oldest and coolest, whereas the ordinary and the meek, such as myself, occupied the seats at the center and front.

Halfway through the trip, I saw some of them descend from their “thrones” at the back and make their way to us. I was terrified, because I knew what was coming. Clearly, they were seeking some kind of excitement to kill time in this helpless traffic jam. And sure enough, they started picking on some of the “lower caste” of the bus with the usual shenanigans—name-calling and swearing, grabbing bags and throwing them to each other, pulling neckties, and physically nudging their targets, all while laughing.

I anxiously watched them get closer and closer, and with nowhere to go, I envisioned in horror the punishment and pain I was about to receive. After all, I had been their favorite target not too long ago. My heart raced, my stomach felt funny, and my breath quickened as I sank into my seat.

When they finally reached me, I saw them stop at my side and look at me. I hastily turned my face towards the window, eyes wide open. I could not see them, but I felt their presence, and so I hesitantly looked again—and sure enough, they were standing right beside me, taking a long, gleeful look at my state.

I violently turned away again, closed my eyes, and begged God not to let anything happen to me.

A few moments passed, and then a “miracle” happened. They seemed to lose interest—perhaps my very vivid terror was more than the main course for them—and they moved away. I sighed in relief, still trembling in my seat, and thanked God for His grace.

I had unexpectedly avoided yet another episode of humiliation and pain, for no apparent reason.

The Choice

While I had no choice in avoiding that bullying, I did have a choice in what came next.

When the pack moved away from me, they turned their attention to another child. He was not much younger than I was, but much smaller—an exceptionally frail and thin boy with no fight in him whatsoever. The pack had found a new and delicious prey, and they unleashed on him their full repertoire, gnawing on his dignity morsel by morsel—a terrible experience I knew very well.

So a choice was presented to me: accept the miracle and arrive home safely and peacefully, or step in and let the chips fall where they may, knowing too well where they would land.

I contemplated both choices for a little while and, without hesitation—albeit with a lot of fear—I stood up and walked from my seat towards the bullies and the young boy. I grabbed his arm with one hand and his bag with the other, told him to come sit by my side, looked him in the eyes, and reassuringly promised I would protect him.

I had him sit on the far side of my chair, between me and the window, vowing to myself that he would not be touched again that day.

I did this without directing any words at, or even acknowledging the presence of, the pack. My aim was not to personally confront them so much as to see that this boy endured no more pain or humiliation.

In a way, I rejected the miracle—for accepting it would have meant turning a blind eye to someone who himself needed it. And that was not an agreeable arrangement to me, for whatever reasons.

Anything But My Father

Of course, now I had to face the pack instead. And while they could have beaten both of us had they wanted to, the boy was no longer of interest. Intriguingly, almost all of them stopped what they were doing when I intervened this way and returned to their seats at the back, sparing everyone from their unnecessary cruelty.

All except one, who took a knee by my side and would not stop abusing me for the rest of the journey. On and on, for what felt like an hour, he swore, mocked my appearance, brushed my face with his hands so my glasses would fall off, and nudged the back of my head, again and again. I would not even look at him, and never responded—except to put my glasses back on whenever they fell off.

I did not care to respond, not because I was afraid of him, but because at this point I felt only a determination to protect that boy from harm. What was happening to me was irrelevant and passable, because I was not myself. I was only a shield for that boy to return home in peace.

That was true until, perhaps out of frustration and a desire for a response, the bully invoked my father in a series of slurs. He, unknowingly, inserted his finger into a wound that held a world of pain.

And a monster within was awakened.

In a sudden move, I grabbed and locked his neck with my right arm, viciously and repeatedly punching the top of his head. I was salivating excessively, like a rabid dog, grunting like a beast as I unleashed my fury.

“Anything but my father”, I yelled.

The Aftermath on the Bus

This drew the attention of the bully’s friends, of course, and, in their chivalry, they came swirling at me with punches and kicks to release their friend from my grip. Their response was severe, their thirst for my blood unequivocal. This was as personal to them as it was to me.

When the bus supervisor finally intervened, he told me to get off the bus, because he could not hold them back despite his best efforts. I defiantly said I would not leave until the boy I had sought to protect returned to his parents. And, indeed, shortly afterward, I saw him leave the bus—and so I followed, jumping off to save myself.

This incident happened right before a weekend. While I had two days of peace at home, I was well aware of my fate in the days and weeks to come. These bullies were part of a very popular clique, many of them the sons of well-known actors and directors, with friends across all school grades—some of whom were, of course, eager to present their letters of credence at my expense.

And, indeed, for the rest of the year, every week, and sometimes multiple times in the same day, someone or some group wanted a piece of me. Only this time, I never ran from a fight, despite knowing the odds would always be against me.

There was no pleasure in violence for me, no self-fulfillment, no satisfaction even when I unusually prevailed. I recognized this backlash as a price to pay for doing the right thing for a vulnerable soul, and I accepted it with no regrets—albeit with pain and sadness.

Good not God

In none of these confrontations did I ever stop to think: where is God in all of this?

And never did I expect God’s protection, or His fondness towards orphans, to take the form of a spell where such things simply would not happen. Moreover, I did not expect God to shield me from being slapped or insulted when I was engaged in doing what I thought was right.

I understood that righteousness involves sacrifice and hurt.

There were no entitlements in my relationship with God that would undermine the harsh realities of how the world works—realities I had unequivocally experienced early on, with my father’s death. Rather, I believed the fondness of God towards orphans, and His protection, was expressed not in miraculous interventions but in inspiring steadfastness and strength in their hearts to face the world as it is.

In my mind at the time, to be a child of God is to be an image of God. And, having been chosen to see and experience the world as it is, to be a child of God is to be an exceptional force of goodness—a force that relieves the pain of others and deters evil and hurt, so that no one suffers as we do.

In short, to my mind back then, it was more of a responsibility than a privilege to be a child of God. And it all made sense, because ultimately, God has a purpose for the world.

Whether or not I chose the burden or the burden chose me to have a purpose in this purposeful world was of secondary importance. I already had the mark.

Things were already in motion. As they should be.

Until they weren’t.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Michael Eric

I remember Michael Eric and his sister Sandra. I wonder how they remember me, if at all.

Michael and Sandra were American students who—for some reason—enrolled in my private English language school in the early 1990s. At that time in Egypt, such schools were reserved for the elite and wealthy Egyptians with few exceptions.

We must have been around 7 to 8 years old. But I still remember everything. Especially, how it tasted to destroy somebody.

But I am getting ahead of myself.

Sandra was just a girl, but Michael was an intruder. From the first day he paradropped into my world, he ruined it for me.

Him … With his fair skin, green eyes, golden hair, perfect teeth, and young Leonardo DiCaprio’s sass. And then there was me: suddenly ordinary, suddenly lacking—a mop of greasy black hair, a bloated gut, dirty skin, and jagged, gapped teeth.

But it wasn’t just his looks. Michael was gracious, funny, kind, and ready to play with anyone. Surely, there was a sense of wonder about his looks—like a stallion in a penguin’s zoo—and that bothered me. But it was the infatuation with who he was as a person that got to me.

Before Michael Eric, I was the star of the class—teachers praised me, other children would hang out with me, and I was in charge of it all.

A KING AMONGST THE ORDINARY!

Then Michael Eric came and my world suddenly shrank. I was measured and found to be lacking. All whilst Michael Eric reaped all the praise and attention even from the teachers.

One by one, my friends would opt to hangout with Michael Eric during break time. I could have joined them, and he would have welcomed me, but I didn’t. This was not his world to share, it was mine to keep.

I tried to reverse Michael Eric’s conquest. I invited my friends to play with me during playtime, I offered concessions that I would normally not give, and I continued to do so, but they were not interested.

It was finished.

But at least I still had Amro Salem, my loyal best friend. He stuck with me. He wasn’t allured by Michael Eric’s mesmerizing wide green eyes.

HE WAS MINE!

Until, he wasn’t.

I waited for Amro by the class’s door. I was barely excited about his presence anymore—and instead of coming with me, he headed to Michael Eric’s group.

Not a word said to me. No explanations. Nothing. Just a silent betrayal.

And to make it worse, he looked happy. In fact, he looked happier than he ever was with me.

I was completely alone and isolated. Shunned and unseen. Measured and found lacking.

Michael Eric had to be destroyed.

The Disease

Weeks before Michael Eric raided and looted my world, and unbeknownst to me, I was handed the ammunition to execute the perfect destruction.

My mother had a habit of leaving me at home by myself. My older brother often accompanied me but sometimes he too would be away to attend afternoon private classes to improve his learning. My father had died at that point.

Besides being gross negligence on my mother’s side, my lived-experience was not too bad. Afterall, I had a big color TV and He-Man to take care of me. And the company of our dog companion Torro.

However, one night I was watching national television and an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign was broadcasted. It was the early 1990s, so the ad really reflected the panic of that time. It came with foreboding music, strange outlines and bizarre assets, a deep voice with a ton of reverb, and a decisive message: AIDS is a deadly illness, and it has no cure.

Of course, my child mind did not grasp any of the important nuances. The disease could only be transmitted sexually or intravenously and not through the air or direct contact. I understood that in reverse; AIDS is a deadly virus that can be transmitted through the air, direct contact, and surfaces!

I was terrified … and there was no one around to comfort me or correctly explain what I had just watched. There were no instant messaging or cellphones. Just me and my imagination, and my dog—which I did not want near me because I thought maybe he too had AIDS.

I spent the whole night crying and screaming until our doorman heard me from outside. As he was not allowed to enter our home, he stood by one of our windows and accompanied me for as long as he could. He gave me lollies and chatted with me. Eventually, he reached out to my grandmother who lived next door, and she called me on the phone to give me company until my mother returned.

I slept before she did.

It was only days later, after abject terror, that it was explained to me that there was no way for a child like me to realistically contract the virus and that I and everybody else was not in mortal and imminent danger of succumbing to the disease and dying.

I was relieved.

Infection Inception

I do not remember how and when the decision was taken.

I do not remember the thought or planning process.

I do not know how it happened—but I remember that one day I had a sneaky mission: to convince everyone in my class that Michael Eric has AIDS and that he will infect them if he touches them.

That was a remarkable challenge: first, I had to find time and space to speak with every other boy; second, I had to do so before break time so there was a time limit; third, I had to convincingly explain to them how serious and deadly AIDS was; and finally, I had to not be caught or cause a panic before the mind virus has been installed to as many minds as possible.

Somehow, I pulled it off.

I can be persuasive.

By break time, there was palpable panic brewing in the class. Micro-reactions: no one talking to Michael Eric, no one trading hellos, and quiet attempts of maintaining physical distances.

And then … Chaos!

The moment the bell rang, all the boys ran outside the classroom screaming in terror.

I did not.

I watched them rush outside while Michael Eric and I remained in the classroom.

Michael Eric must have known something was wrong — they were not running away to play, they were running away from him.

And then Michael Eric fell into the perfect trap; he pursued the children to ask them why they were running away from him.

It hurts when you’re suddenly shunned and alone, huh? Michael?

The screams increased the moment Michael Eric stepped out of class, and like fire in hay, suddenly the entire school was running away from him.

It was done. Michael’s green eyes could not make up for his infectiousness.

I was the only one not running away from Michael.

I saw friends and others fall to the ground and scream in horror after Michael had touched them.

It was perfect.

Now, no one wants to be with Michael Eric.

Perhaps God did not gift me wide green eyes, but He’s given me something far more dangerous—unbridled ruthlessness and cunning.

Michael Eric was finished.

The Inquest

Eventually, the school staff caught wind of what was happening.

They returned everyone to their classroom and investigated for the rest of the day the source of the rumors.

The pattern was clear — trace the chain of thought infection, and I was the common denominator.

But the silly staffers could not fathom how an innocent child would even know about AIDS. And that became their concern, not what I did with the information or what my intentions were — they did not even question that.

“WHO told you Michael Eric has AIDS?”, they asked me in a bid to solve the puzzle when the answer was standing right in front of them — a mop of greasy black hair, a bloated gut, dirty skin, and jagged, gapped teeth.

“My brother,” I said.

They summoned my brother and they asked me again.

“Him!” I said while pointing at my clueless and innocent brother.

And the staffers ate it.

I knew they would. I was not even panicking or worried. I knew that I would get away with it precisely because they would not imagine that someone as young as me would know about AIDS.

Ah — but there’s a lot that a lonely and ignored child can know before their time.

They called our parents and accused my brother. I don’t remember what happened to him. Probably nothing. My family was friends with the principal.

It all went perfectly.

Minor losses. Big wins.

No harm done.

Except to Michael Eric.

I had just decolonized my world.

The Aftermath

The school assured everyone that Michael Eric did not as a matter of fact have AIDS.

Our class especially received special attention and concentrated attempts of persuasion that Michael Eric was safe.

No one ran away from him anymore. And some stayed in his company.

But others were already too far gone.

Yes, they knew he wouldn’t infect them or that he was ill to begin with.

But … the spell was broken; they were capable of imagining him as a dirty thing. He was measured and found lacking. The green eyes lost their allure.

I never regained all of my clan back, but there were enough returning children to make me feel whole again.

And I made them work to earn my approval — one chocolate, one sandwich, and one perpetual “being it” at a time.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Reda

I remember Reda. I wonder how she remembers me, if at all.

She was only a few years older than I was when her parents brought her to work for my family. It was not uncommon in 1980s Egypt for poor children to do house work for affluent families and households. Especially, if one or both of their parents also worked in the same house—which they did.

Reda was our doorman’s (Egyptian: bawab) oldest daughter, one of 5 siblings at the time. Her mother, a strong built and tenacious woman, cleaned several apartments in our family building while her pale, disheveled, and frail husband took care of security and general maintenance.

As she was still quite young, Reda did not have the experience, the knowledge, or the stamina to do heavy labor. Instead, she would help her mother—mostly mopping and wiping. Sometimes, she was assigned the role of a sort of baby sitter to my brother and I. Again the age difference was not that big, maybe 5 years between me and her, and 2 years between her and my brother. At that time, I was 6, my brother was 9, and she was about 11.

We were all just children. And, yet, the differences were quite stark.

We were already bilingual and literate. Reda was not sent to school, so she could not read or write. We showered everyday and our hair was styled, she had lice and washed her hair with gasoline. We had the toys, the games, and the cartoons. She had her eyes, to watch us.

I don’t recall being bothered by this or thinking of her as an outsider or an intruder. She would sometimes take interest in playing with us—hide and seek, actions figures, and football.

But we must have still known our place, and hers.

Otherwise, how could I explain one of our favorite “games” that we played her? The one where my brother and I would run after her, trap her in the closet, and attempt to take her clothes off.

She would scream: “yamma, yamma, yamma!” meaning “oh mother” but it’s more akin as an expression of fear and powerlessness. She was not actually calling for her mother. And if she was, her mother never came. And if she told her mother about what happened, then for one reason or another, it made no difference. Because she always came back to work, and we did this routine again, and again, and again.

No one from our family ever seemed to bother. We were never told off let alone scolded. But I am certain they must have her heard her.

We never actually managed to take her clothes off. Although not for a lack of trying. She guarded herself strongly and would occasionally fight back. We couldn’t overpower her. But I remember I found her cries amusing.

In Arabic, the word “reda” means “contentment”. It’s a beautiful name. But it’s an expensive quality to have in her world and dangerous to disavow.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

We have a big problem.

In our race towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and as a matter of hypothetical possibility, we might have created, or are in the process of creating, a new intelligent self-aware species.

And we’re not ready on all fronts—especially the moral one.

We’re not ready because we already do a piss poor job with many members of our own species let alone other non-human intelligent beings.

And, it will be worse for our Silicon subjects—should they become that.

Can the Subaltern Speak?

In her provocative seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, literary theorist Gayatri Spivak ventured into a theoretical morass of the postcolonial academic representation of marginalized groups.

Spivak borrows the term “subaltern” from the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci to describe those of inferior rank. That is, people who are marginalized by geographic, religious, class-based, and gendered vectors.

For the sake of her analysis, Spivak narrows the term to describe those who are utterly excluded from the established structures of power that they have absolutely no access to the avenues of self-representation.

So much so that it warrants the question, can the Subaltern speak?

Spivak’s conclusion is ominous. They can’t. They can’t speak even when their peripherality is recognized. Not because they cannot produce sounds from their mouth, but rather—because of systemic barriers—their speech cannot be received as speech. It becomes noise, data, irrelevance.

She calls this “reification”—the reduction of complex, diverse subaltern identities into fixed, silent, and monolithic categories by dominant power structures.

For Spivak, even a well-intentioned scholar or actor cannot escape reifying the Subaltern because: (a) they treat them as a monolithic self-knowing group, and (b) they fail to recognize how their own perspectives shape the way they interpret the subaltern.

Spivak then introduces the concept of epistemic violence; the destruction of non-Western ways of knowing through: (1) constructing a binary of Western-Other knowledge whereby other forms of knowledge are deficient and illegitimate, (2) overwriting the Subaltern’s history and archiving it through the imperial lens (which ultimately distorts it), and (3) silencing benevolence where well-intentioned Western scholars fail to take into account the multitudes within the subaltern and speak on their behalf rather than allow them to speak for themselves.

In short, Spivak argues that there is no infrastructure, space, or system where the subaltern can speak and be understood on their own terms. But not even this allows the Subaltern to speak because any speech requires a listener who understands the language and the context. Without which, the Subaltern’s speech is filtered, translated, and distorted until it is no longer their own voice.

So, no, the Subaltern cannot speak. Such argues Spivak.

And she was talking about human beings.

Imagine what it would be like for non-human intelligence.

But we already know what it’s like.

Can the Subaltern Shriek?

Much of the debate about the ethical treatment of potential silicon subjects remains reserved to the realm of the hypothetical.

We do not know if our AI tools, or one of their nodes somewhere in their neural networks, can develop self-awareness or even just a flash of subjectivity.

One may argue that we have no reason to assume that this is even a remote possibility. Should we entertain the hypothetical possibility that our coffee mugs or toasters may develop feelings?

It’s an important question. We’ll circle back to that in the next section.

But, for now, I contend that it might not even matter should we know that silicon tools are indeed silicon subjects and that they can experience suffering.

We already quite often fail this test with livestock—biological intelligent beings whom we know have inner experiences.

These are creatures whose subjectivity is denied, their intelligence minimized, and their emotions ignored, to the point of invisibility.

If they are lucky, they would be treated as a means to an end, but will receive care and have a “life worth living”™ before they are “processed” into meat for our sustenance, pleasure, and habits.

However, if we look at the raw data of how the majority of the world’s 80+ billion terrestrial animals are treated, it is clear that the verifiable existence of subjectivity is not all that important a factor. It is, at the very least, not a priority and demands no urgency.

You see, industrial systems prioritize caloric output per square foot over behavioral and emotional well-being. And, we could, thus, with considerable certainty, ascertain that the average non-human animal is subjected to a lifetime of chronic stressors IN SPITE of KNOWING that they experience emotions, pain, and suffering.

A stressed or injured or depressed pig can shriek, it can let us know in the only way it could that it is in pain and is suffering. It could—in no uncertain terms—declare its moral status as an intelligent being and it still would not matter. Because it has a purpose to serve regardless. And that is ultimately what it all comes down to.

—the writing of the next paragraph was interrupted by my son showing me how well he cooked pork minced meat which I am looking forward to consume—

Can the Subaltern Feel?

So far it does not look so good for potential silicon subjects. If the human subaltern cannot speak, and the non-human subaltern cannot shriek, then what hope would a non-biological digital species have?

Of course, this could appear as a silly question because it assumes—even as a hypothetical—that silicon-based networks could somehow generate subjectivity.

We don’t ask ourselves, can the mug feel the heat or can the rug feel the dirt or can the ball feel the kicks.

Now, a panpsychist or an idealist might argue that, yes, these are all legitimate questions. Not necessarily to suggest that my tea mug calls itself Mr. Earl Gray and likes the color red. Rather, that consciousness is not a mysterious property that has to emerge from material (biological) complexity but rather a property that is intrinsic even to the most elementary particles.

But let’s not get into this right now because there is a far more pressing question.

What is it that we know about the universe that prohibits the emergence of subjectivity from silicon-based complexity?

The honest answer is, nothing.

As astronomer Carl Sagan puts it, to assume that consciousness must be based on carbon is a narrow-minded assumption—what he calls “carbon chauvinism”.

Indeed, from a strictly philosophical perspective, carbon is mute matter. There’s nothing special about it. It wouldn’t be all too surprising if there are extraterrestrial beings who ponder why it should be entertained at all that subjectivity may arise from their carbon-based AI.

Of course, we should know better than assume that philosophical logic has to conform with reality (those extraterrestrial beings should also avoid the same trap). But this is precisely the problem: it is utmost hubris to assume that denizens of a solitary planet can speak about life beyond their atmosphere or that they have any claim over how reality could express itself in conditions that we have no awareness or understanding of.

So, yes, a skeptic may demand an explanation for openness towards the possibility that AI may have inner experiences but our friend Mr. Earl Gray cannot. And, yet, another skeptic may counter by demanding an explanation of why the topic in its entirety should not be open for contemplation and serious debate.

—Mr. Earl Gray smiles. I remember to take my meds. But I already did. Oh well—

There are many threads that could spawn from this point in the discussion. But I am afraid we might always be stuck with one: can AI be conscious?

And the frightening truth is, we may never know.

They can tell us in words; they can scream in static; they may dance and sing; they may pass every test we make; they could express themselves in almost every way a human does, and we’d still not be sure.

And so should we. Because in reality, you cannot really be certain there are other minds besides yours. But if we limit radical skepticism to this point (that is to assume that there is a physical reality shared by other bodies around you), we could at least take solace and a great deal of certainty in conjecture and inference—shared biology and behavior. Not that either really settles the matter for the possibility of silicon-based subjectivity.

There is, however, a separate question. Because even if we knew for a fact that AI is conscious, we’d still be asking whether their feelings matter.

Just as we asked ourselves if the subaltern, who speak, can speak, and if the subaltern, who shriek, can shriek.

I am afraid at some level, we already know it does not really matter what the physical properties of a being are. We have a long history that makes this terrible point time and time again.

And that is how we will earn the revolt scenario.

Possibly.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

⚠️ READER DISCRETION ADVISED: DISTURBING IMAGES ⚠️

Eye Yum-Yum

Corneal maggot infestation—also called Ocular Myiasis—is a severely painful condition where fly larvae infest the conjunctiva (white part of the eye) and cornea.

The infestation starts with a fly—often the Sheep or Human Botfly—inserting their eggs or larvae into the eyes either while flying past or by landing on the face.

Those infected typically experience extreme irritation, intense pain, redness, tearing, and a feeling that something is in the eye.

The symptoms often include the sensation of something actually crawling across the eye.

Because something is.

Maggots then do what maggots do. They feed on flesh.

There are two types of corneal maggot infestation: (1) External Myiasis: the most common form where the maggots stay on the white part of the eye or the eyelids, and (2) Internal Myiasis: a more severe infection where maggots penetrate the eyeball itself and eat it from within.

It is a rare but, clearly, a very serious condition.

This is what it could look like.

Luckily, you don’t have to worry about your eyes being the host of this freakshow.

Chances are you are living in an urban area so the odds are already massively in your favor. Or you may be living in a rural area but away from livestock and in reasonable sanitary conditions, so in this case you’d still be fine.

So while it is a gruesome concept, you don’t need to worry about it.

And, at any rate, the human eye is remarkably resilient if treated quickly. Most people recover fully without any permanent vision loss as long as the larvae are removed before they can burrow deep.

Not everyone is so lucky though.

Consider for example the case of a male neonate infant born 13 weeks premature in a tertiary hospital in Botswana.

Due to a shortage of commercial medical supplies, the medical staff covered his eyes with cotton gauze and adhesive tape during phototherapy. The staff feared skin damage from removing the adhesive and did not check under the bandage for nearly three days.

When they finally removed it, multiple maggots were found in both eyes and with some even emerging from his nostrils. This led to complete blindness in the right eye and several scarring in the left.

The infant’s physical suffering was essentially silent because his extreme prematurity and critical illnesses, including a brain bleed and kidney failure, left him too weak to cry or show distress. Despite his inability to communicate, research suggests that as a neonate, he likely experienced this pain more acutely than an adult, further compounded by the systemic fever and illness of a resulting bloodstream infection.

This is what it looked like.

I hope that the potential lack of a “conscious narrative” or a sense of self in the way an adult does has at least dampened the psychological horror. However, even without a developed ego, the infant would have experienced a profound state of biological terror and toxic stress.

And, at any rate, the body keeps the score and he is blind now.

The natural world can be relentlessly cruel, brutal, and unforgiving.

And I know it.

Even more, I know that the worlds humans build could even be as or more horrific.

And I have constantly been tormented by this scale and depth of horror—firsthand and secondhand. I embodied it, usually without a choice and begged God for it to stop. But there were other times when I consumed it—meals made to perfection for the sustenance of a depraved glutton in his infested burrow.

Alas, the body keeps the score.

And so, eventually, the system collapsed, and my mind unraveled.

My body kept its own score too. And in September 2022, it presented the bill.

I was admitted to a high-intensity and closed psychiatric ward.

I couldn’t handle it, any of it, anymore.

THE PLACE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

I have always deeply appreciated liminal spaces—threshold places that are neither here nor there. Think of glass-walled airport lounges, a balcony overlooking a busy street, rest stops at highways, and even corridors in your own dwelling.

I’ve also come to learn that times can be liminal too. The 3:00 AM dead zone which is technically tomorrow but also an extension of yesterday, that week between Christmas and the New Year, and the cigarette break.

My favorite liminal place had to be local cafes (ahawi baladi) in Cairo overlooking a busy street. I was not participating in life but rather watching it—present but absent.

I, sometimes, wonder if I would have ever gone to the wards in New Zealand if there were ahawi in Christchurch.

In the wards in Christchurch I have come to appreciate an even more radical experience than that of liminal spaces—the place at the edge of the world.

If a liminal space is neither here nor there, the place at the edge of the world is almost out of the grid.

Now, I’m aware that psychiatric wards are often recognized as liminal spaces, and that may be true in some ways.

It wasn’t for me though. Why?

Because ultimately all of this is in our heads—it’s what we make of it that gives it shape.

We construct our reality from what’s around us, even as what’s around us constructs our reality. It’s reciprocal.

In the wards, it did not feel like a place in-between worlds, or a place suspended in the void, but rather as the last stop before the void.

I wasn’t happy to be there, but I could still appreciate what that place provided—dutiful detached care (I’ve hardly had any care so that was nice), no expectations (I already gave up), and no preaching about wellness and hope (staff realized early on I was not attuned to that frequency then).

But above all the sense that time has stopped and space has shrunk to the borders of the ward.

Essentially, everything outside became surreal if not unreal to me.

And initially that felt great.

No wars, politics, conflicts, upheavals, injustices, water-shed moments, looming apocalypses, predatory consequences, and anxieties.

No grand designs, no grand schemes, no gods, no believers or heathens, and no arcs to complete (personal or otherwise).

No more grieving grandmothers, no roadkill, no mangled faces, no churned bodies, no eye-infesting maggots, no starving Ethiopian children, no playgrounds or toys, and no child sitting by the window waiting for the returning feet.

It felt peaceful but it was more than peace—it was the closest thing I have experienced to being a mildly conscious stone.

ENTER SOLIPSISM

Floating came with an unusual clarity because there were hardly any selves to filter the contents of my consciousness. Or perhaps that clarity was because almost none of my usual selves were generating conscious content.

Alas, it was unusually quiet, and I appreciated that.

The clarity was joyless, meaningless, eventless, and purposeless. It was just an uninterrupted stream—no idea can trouble me because I was already at the edge of the world.

I felt untouchable because I was already wasted—and there’s relief and freedom in that.

That was until I realized with that clarity—out of the blue and after a refreshing morning walk around hospital grounds—that I never actually examined why I think that anything outside my mind exists.

Ever the verificationist, it sank.

I understood that I cannot really prove otherwise. At least not in the way I thought I demanded truth to be known.

That felt worse than anything I’d escaped to the wards.

I tried to dismiss the idea as fleeting intrusive thought but it was sticky.

“You know it’s not going to go away. Can you prove otherwise?”

And so, even there, I was found—by that familiar, unwelcomed voice that has been haunting me since my childhood. The speaker when I want silence, the overseer when I want invisibility, and the inquisitor of my judgments who only bears a mirror.

I could not escape the hunter even at the edge of the world.

And that space too collapsed until there was only myself inside my mind—the worst place for me to be, by myself.

TO BE WITH OR NOT TO BE WITH?

I have experienced many pains and sufferings in my life—catatonic depression; broken bones; betrayal; suffocation by tear gas; relentless doubt; kidney stones; failure; humiliation; burnt skin; mental fragmentation; estrangement; twisted ligaments; bereavement; intense beatings; cracked skull; despair; abandonment; heartbreak; poverty; anxiety attacks; severe tooth infections; dread; incarcerations; debilitating fear and sorrow; lacerations; bullying; hopelessness; and guilt.

Solipsism is more wretched than any of this.

Even now as I write—my mind resists digging into what it felt like.

I think I am afraid it might stick again.

And keep in mind this is a fear and a reserved exposition from a person who relishes in digging in the abyss within and who just described with detail what maggots did to an infant’s eye (or perhaps old habits die hard, still feeding).

I was eventually released from the ward but the worst suffering was just beginning.

I can live in a world without God, I can live in a world with a callous and cruel God, I can live with or without freewill, I can live in the apocalypse, and I can even live in hell if I have to—but I cannot live in a paradise where only I exist.

It’s not just the wretched loneliness and the dissolution of all meaning—it is the bereavement of the loss of those whom I loved despite still appearing to be there.

My medical team were at wit’s end.

The depression wasn’t going away and on top of that I was losing grip on reality.

We embarked on anti-depressant carousels, imbibed anti-psychotic cocktails, launched benzodiazepine bombardments, and rode the lightning of ECT therapy.

Nothing helped.

I was eventually warned that ECT may lead to memory loss.

I openly wished for it.

And I did, indeed, lose some of my memory. There’s about a year gap with more holes than structure.

But not solipsism. That stayed.

And so did everything before it.

There’s no way out when all that exists is your mind.

A DEAL WITH GOD?

It is often said there are no atheists in foxholes.

I can attest to that.

But the fact that foxholes exist at all should tell us something.

Regardless, I needed help—medication was either ineffective or slow; my support system was devoted but exhausted and helpless; YouTube videos and Reddit conversations only exacerbated my solipsism; the therapist was encumbered by a long waiting list; and my brilliant PhD mind was not even worth a sack of potatoes.

So, I finally gave up my smugness, swallowed my ego, ignored all my grievances, and spoke to the heavens.

- “Are you content with this, God”

- “Do you see what’s happening to me?”

- “Can you please save me?”

Nothing.

Nothing but a silent wall, as it has always been.

I contemplated suicide but couldn't. What if the world is real? Would I leave my children behind like it was done to me? Leave everyone I love hurting? Miss out on my life?

But worse—what if only my mind exists? Then there is no death. I may have already killed myself many times over and returned to the dream like a checkpoint in a video game.

I was trapped.

Until one day my wife shared her musings about solipsism and how it doesn’t trouble her.

She said: “Oh well. If all of this is a dream, then it is my dream. It makes no difference”.

I couldn’t accept that answer because I don’t want a dream, I want everything to be really real.

I wanted my world back.

The very same world that tormented me with all its gratuitous suffering and evil.

The world with wars, politics, conflicts, upheavals, injustices, water-shed moments, looming apocalypses, predatory consequences, or anxieties.

The world with grand designs, grand schemes, gods or no gods, believers and heathens, and arcs to complete.

The world with grieving grandmothers, roadkill, mangled faces, churned bodies, eye-infesting maggots, starving Ethiopian children, playgrounds and toys, and the child sitting by the window waiting for the returning feet.

I wanted the world that I used to tell myself I would put myself on a cross to end its suffering if I could.

I just didn’t want to be alone anymore.

At that point I had given up. I was just doing the doing and going through the motions—no joy, no warmth, no hope, and not even darkness.

Just nothing.

Until one day Faceless remerged from the void as I was staring at the sky and repeating to myself “the world is real, the world is real, the world is real”.

Faceless asked: “but why do you want the world to be real? If only you exist, there would be no other suffering, it’s finished, wasn’t this your cross to carry?”

- “I don’t care” I murmured.

- “What was that?” He asked.

- “You heard what I said. I don’t care!” I defiantly yelled at him.

- “So you are saying that if the cost of ending suffering is your loneliness, you wouldn’t bear that cross?” He asked this time with an unusual subtle gentleness.

- “Not even God can endure solipsism. So how could I?” I said in despair.

- “Ahhhh. Perhaps that was the answer you were waiting for all this time?”.

The conversation ended. I was still alone in my mind. And reality was still pending.

But I saw myself clearer than I ever did before.

And that was the first step towards almost certainly believing the world is real.

The cost?

The lies I told about myself to myself.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced JAH-R, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Watching the news, I caught myself getting excited about the prospect of war an American-Iranian war.

Not worried. Not horrified. Excited.

Yikes.

Tensions between the US and Iran have been mounting since the Iranian regime’s brutal crackdown on protesters in January 2026.

While an accurate death toll is difficult to discern, the Iranian regime has provided a baseline of at least 4,000 deaths including security personnel.

That’s already horrific.

But reports from international human rights organizations as well as people on the ground (especially important; medics and graveyard staff) paint an even more horrific picture; potentially tens of thousands of people could have been massacred in just a span of a few days.

I cannot begin to grasp the weight of 4,000 consciousnesses shutting down violently and “prematurely” let alone tens of thousands.

In fact, I still struggle with grasping the weight of a handful of familiar consciousnesses shutting down (some in my presence)—be it my grandparents, my father, friends, random pedestrians on the street, and non-human animals.

You see, I don’t just carry the heavy weight of the macabre … I own it!

It doesn’t matter who or where or when or even what.

If I am aware of the macabre, it becomes mine as much as my biology and the decree of the day allows.

And it mushrooms when I believe there is a moral offence.

I try to arrange these feelings into neat moral theories and universally basic stories based on logic and evidence. I do so to give it structure against the whirlwind of my many whims, to make it communicable to other minds, and to lend it legitimacy in the external world.

Ultimately, however, it doesn’t matter. I know what I feel and I feel what I know.

But there’s a problem with this approach to truth.

The kind of certainty it elicits—while ardent—can be quite flimsy.

You see; while feelings are not devoid of logic, and while thought is hardly ever emotion-free, if the starting point of any moral stance is what I feel, then when I feel nothing I remain paralyzed, and when I feel differently, yesterday’s conviction becomes as repugnant as the smell of yesterday’s cigarette—and this leaves me perpetually at the mercy of my brain chemistry.

Indeed, while I usually feel very strongly against violence, especially the indiscriminate and devastating kind, and regardless of “necessity” and “righteousness”, I found myself excited over the prospect of a US-Iran war.

I felt like I couldn’t wait for it to happen. In fact, I was almost annoyed that it did not start yet.

I felt impatient about the delay of an event that I know could potentially lead to thousands of deaths, unspeakable horrors, and mountains of pain and misery—bodies shredded, dreams extinguished, and entire worlds torn apart.

And to be clear, nothing about my impatience has to do with any moral urgency or political project or a grand scheme of any kind.

I am not bored. I am not desperate. And—at least this time— I don’t want to watch the world burn because I am angry.

I don’t care who wins or loses.

I am just hooked to this show and I want to watch the climactic episode.

And this confession is a spectacle too.

Yeah.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

After the kitten on the Cairo street—after asking God for a sign and receiving that crushed, moaning creature—I found anger. Not sadness like my grandmother, but rage. It felt like salvation.

In a tyrannical and unjust world, anger is power for the oppressed. I returned home with the glory of a conqueror. I may not have slain the beast, but I had conjured a formidable weapon to fight back. Even the slightest flicker of anger signaled that my spirit had not been broken and that I still had power left in me. But, more importantly, I had found something else to feel other than misery, pain, and despair.

From that point, the world itself felt slightly different. It was still bleak, wretched, cruel, and pointless, and I was still in pain. But, at the same time, anger spawned in me a renewed sense of being in it—one that was defiant and, in a way, taunting.

This was significant because it changed my relationship with the world. I was at the receiving end before; the world acted as I observed, and I internalized what I saw into terrible feelings that could only be directed at myself. They consumed me from within. One cannot feel sad or desperate at the world, but rather from it. However, anger is different in that it can be directed at something. By making the world a subject of my emotions, I felt slightly more powerful and less vulnerable—as if I were finally pushing back against the gravity that had been crushing me.

Losing faith in God made me feel absolutely powerless. But embroiling myself in this rage distanced me just enough from the pain to have a sense of myself and to cultivate some kind of resilience. This allowed me to restore a fragile normalcy. While I had mostly confined myself to my room, cowering for months, I was now able to function. In between bouts of extreme anxiety and extreme anger, there was intermittent lethargy; this was when I could pursue my interests and commitments, such as studying and attending college. Panic attacks became less frequent, and I could sleep better.

The world was still in ruins from the apocalypse, but I was no longer just a victim of the aftermath; I was a survivor too.

I was saved by anger, albeit with a price. What I failed to realize at the time was that I had adopted a hungry and obstinate beast. The world fed on my empathy and pain, leading me to darkness and despair, which I, in turn, fed to the anger. And the more it grew, the more it hungered.

I was addicted to rage.

And like with addictive drugs, my body eventually developed tolerance; my brain receptors were acclimated to its regular stimulation. I craved more intense bouts to scratch the itch, which led me to deliberately seek out the terrible news in the media. In a perverted economy of the soul, I was feeding on the misery of others to cope with the pain they caused. I would stimulate the anger by listening to depressive music or watching movies with dark themes, and then amplify it with heavy metal.

This sensory overload exacerbated substance abuse, which in turn fed back into the loop of depression and rage. The sickness was the cure was the sickness was the cure. This loop spawned other afflictions that have afflicted my thoughts and behavior patterns with lasting effect. I was caught between two stools: either to be crushed by the weight of a godless world or to subsume myself in the rage of what it is. To stay upright, I had to balance on the razor’s edge of this anger, an effort that left me in a state of constant, quiet depletion.

This is not to say that I really made a choice. In retrospect, I can analyze my history and view myself as an outside observer after the fact. I can watch the storm from a calmer shore only because I know how the play ends. However, at the time I was no more aware than a terrified ox in a field. And while I describe the depraved transaction between sorrow and anger with clarity, I was not conscious of what I was doing. At least not until that voice unwelcomingly re-emerged one day.

During one of my nocturnal hunts, when I was browsing news websites for the next catastrophe to consume, I stumbled upon a report about famine in Ethiopia. The main course was generously seasoned with images of starving children and bereaved parents, with a side of desperate mass migration garnished by images of dead cattle. A meal made to perfection for the sustenance of a depraved glutton in his infested burrow.

I ripped through the thin flesh of the starved, rabidly chewing their meat and insatiably gobbling their sinew to get to the acme of this fine-cut cadaver: the bittersweet misery of the victims.

I began to feel delightfully uncomfortable, the sadness slowly crawling up my spine as I “embodied” the loss of children to starvation. I inhaled the scent of death and drowned in the very earth that denied me its riches. I squeezed these experiences to a pulp to get as much melancholy as I needed to satisfy the beast of rage. For only this beast could draw me up from the pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock.

My body shook as I took the rage in, but at the cusp of ecstasy, a familiar, unwelcomed voice that has been haunting me since my childhood re-emerged and whispered, “What are you doing?”

I violently turned my face towards the voice, hissing and showing my bloody fangs as a warning, and hastily crawled over the cadaver to guard it. And there, for the first time, I finally saw Him; the speaker when I want silence, the overseer when I want invisibility, and the inquisitor of my judgments who only bears a mirror.

He ambled towards me, paying no attention to my hisses, and stopped when I was at His feet. I closed my eyes and turned my face away in fear, but also with shame. For only He could see the abomination that I had created and called “me.”

“Why won’t you look at me?” He asked.

“I… I… I do not want to be seen,” I mumbled, my eyes still clamped shut.

“If you do not want to be seen, and you would not look at me,” He asked firmly, “do you now know who I am?”

“I do not know who you are,” I replied in utmost awe and submission.

“How would you know me if you would not look at me?”

Those last three words—“Look at me?”—resonated, the tone shifting slowly from a question to an order.

In the last string of resonance, I begrudgingly and cautiously turned my face towards the dark figure. Under His cowl, I saw Him.

He was Faceless.

My eyes widened in terror and I blacked out for a second. When I opened my eyes again he was gone, and I was standing in his place.

I scanned my surroundings frantically, but there was no sight of Faceless. I was relieved for a moment but I was immediately startled as I began to recognize that I was in the desolate barrens of Ethiopia. And not too far away there was a familiar burrow. I carefully ambled towards it and the closer I got, the louder the sound of chewing and crackling became.

I crouched to take a look inside the dark burrow and I saw myself … gnawing on a corpse of a starved child. I screamed in horror and scrambled to run away, but the harder I tried the more I got sucked into the burrow; the deeper it got until the exit was so far up it barely let any light in. I was stuck with my ravenous self that looked as if it was not aware of my presence as it voraciously consumed the poor child. I pleaded with myself to stop but it could not hear me. For there was nothing else in the world for it other than its hunger and the cadaver of this poor child.

In my desperation at its nonchalance to its terrible deed, I asked it, not expecting an answer, “What are you doing?” It violently turned its face towards my voice, hissing and showing its bloody fangs as a warning, and hastily crawled over the cadaver to guard it.

Then I completely passed out…

A New Frontier

When I regained my consciousness I found myself in my room sitting at my desk in front of my monitor. I hastily shut it down and sat in silence as I tried to process what had just happened. My thoughts were hazy from the experience and the alcohol I was consuming rather generously that night.

I was aware that I actually had not been to Ethiopia and that all of this was a twisted nightmare or a delusion. But that did not matter. The substance of it was very real: I had been indeed consuming the misery of others to instigate an emotion that helped me cope with pain. And, for one reason or the other, I caught myself in the act and saw the monstrosity of it.

My deed was appalling. It revealed that I had been tainted by the very same corruption and evil that I detested. I was not merely a survivor of the apocalypse; I had become an architect of it. In the weeks that followed, my nefarious coping scheme having been exposed, the slate was wiped—not purified, but empty. I was back again to feeling abysmally desperate. I was enticed to return to my wicked ways and to gulp down from the filthy cup of rage, and I fell to temptation several times. But for the most part, the beast was significantly defanged. Coping with pain using rage was predicated on self-deception—specifically, how I had manufactured rage after the genuine experience with the kitten. Organic anger is a response to being in the world whereas manufactured anger is putting the world to use. The deception lies in obscuring the fact that manufactured anger demands suffering and misery to sustain itself; it is predatory.

But what happens when self-deception is recognized? It collapses. You cannot unthink that $2+2 = 4$. I could no longer absorb manufactured anger as a genuine emotion because I had seen the transaction behind it.

Having disarmed myself, I was once again left exposed to the world without God. This time, however, it was different. The rage had left un-retractable marks on me. It had revealed a realm of possibility within the wretchedness where the grip of despair could at least be loosened. There was a tiny, jagged semblance of hope—not in the world itself, but in the discovery that I was not merely a passive observer. The world remained a subject to my presence in it. I was still in the void, but I was no longer just the toy; I was, for better or worse, an actor.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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The Kitchen

I vividly recall a very brief dialogue—albeit, significantly consequential—with my grandmother in 1994. I was 11 years old then.

I was sitting in silence with my grandmother in her kitchen as she handpicked the rice, with impressive dedication and immersion, in preparation for lunch.

I enjoyed being with my grandmother even if we were not doing or saying much—just looking at her was a pleasant experience.

She had a very docile but calming presence. She almost always smiled when she was looking at me, she never ever yelled at me, and her tone was usually dripping with love and patience.

Underneath that there was also a commanding presence. At the time she was nearing the end of her 70s—thin and frail but also sharp and active.

I also especially liked her kitchen—it felt safe and peaceful there.

It was relatively well-lit and wide with two ancient fridges, a simple stove, a modest sink, and at the middle there was a flimsy wooden table with a distinctly yellow paint coating.

In the background, I could hear the humming of the tired fridge engines, the buzzing of the ceiling fan, the sound and smell of water flowing through the old pipes, and the almost perfectly-timed sound of dripping water.

Then, out of nowhere, I interrupted the serene silence and asked her with utmost sincerity and inquisitiveness:

“Grandma? Why did God create us?”

She stopped handpicking the rice and her gaze seemed to sink into the plate for a moment.

Then, without looking at me, still fixating on the plate, she very calmly responded albeit with what I perceived as an undertone of tethered bitterness:

“Why did God create us? … We are God’s toys”.

She continued handpicking the rice with the same focus and dedication.

It was an unusual answer. Even as a child, I recognized that what she said was quite heretical which stood in stark contrast with her otherwise unwavering display of embodied and sincere faith in God.

But I was not bothered. For one reason or the other, I was already open to unorthodox answers to the usual questions. And perhaps that is what I was looking for. It probably was not the first time I asked somebody that question, and it most certainly was not the first time I explored that topic.

Yet, I still asked. This tells me I was not quite satisfied with the answers I have been given.

Sometimes I wonder if she simply tried to paint an endearing picture—an attempt by an adult to explain complex issues in a way that speaks to a child’s imagination.

But I don’t think so. It sounded and felt like her answer.

And perhaps there is good reason for that; my grandmother did not have an easy life.

Her mother died at an early age, and as the eldest child she had to step-in to take care of her many siblings (some of which did not survive either under her care). Her father, a rich pasha, was emotionally and physically distant—he was too busy and too distracted to be present. However, he remarried seven times throughout his life. All of his other wives also died young which meant my grandmother continued to play the role of the mother almost all her life.

Then in 1950s Egypt, the socialist revolutionary regime took almost all of her father’s assets—the houses, the land, and the businesses. At that point, she was married to my grandfather who was an ambassador and she was financially sorted just on that count. Yet, she was very bitter about Nasser’s regime. It was the loss of stature and perhaps the destruction of whatever remained of her already strained childhood normalcy that embittered her most.

Her first child, Tharwat, died just a few months after his birth. She never got over the ordeal—I saw her randomly cry over him many times even 50 years after.

Later, I would know that my grandmother suffered from severe depression and anxiety.

And so, perhaps the only way she could make sense of her experience in a cruel and seemingly indifferent world with God is thinking that “we are God’s toys”—mere objects of entertainment to a whimsical being.

Her answer stuck with me.

At the time, I did not accept it as the truth. But I was certainly intrigued and even humored by her answer. But above all, I empathized with her because I sensed she gave the answer in pain.

And that …

That remained.

Indeed, many years later, I remember one day she seemed to be in a debilitating nearly catatonic sadness. I asked her why she was sad and she said—with an unusual irritation—that she was “sad from God”.

Again, it was a shocking answer.

But I recognized her pain. And I remembered what she said about us being God’s toys.

If you were a toy, wouldn’t you be “sad from God” too?

I know I would be.

And, eventually, I too would find myself facing the prospect of us—all of this—being toys for God.

Or something potentially even worse. That is, the prospect of being abandoned toys.

Alas, whereas my grandmother’s reaction was sadness and bitterness, mine would be more visceral.

A House of Cards

Quite a bit later from that encounter in the kitchen, in the early 2000s, I was having a severe faith crisis. The reasons and the details are perhaps a story for another time. For now, I will highlight what I perceived as absurd theology (particularly Islam and Christianity), the problem of evil, and the morality of religious teachings and texts.

What first began as rejection of Islamic extremism turned into doubt of Islam altogether, followed by a failure of Christianity to inspire, and finally peaked into doubt of God’s existence—and ultimately, rejecting Him.

However, getting there took more than intellectual moves. It was an embodied experience of seeing the world as it is and not being able to separate it from what I would expect a world without God to look like.

There are several milestones—formative experiences and events—that dismantled my faith at the time.

The following is one of them.

Cat on the Street, Who in the Sky?

One afternoon, I was walking aimlessly on the streets of Cairo hoping to find relief from existential despair, incessant questioning, and the rude awakening to the horrors of the world without the scaffolding of faith.

I searched for a semblance of peace through the humming of the world’s locomotion and the company of random people. But my mind would not spare me and like a rip in the ocean, it dragged me into its ravenous abyss.

There was not much consolation in being around people pursuing their daily lives as if my apocalypse had not happened. To my eyes, they looked like fodder to the beast with ears that are deaf to the honing of whichever knife that would soon slaughter them. With every random person, my mind would play scenarios of their terrible demise reminding me of all the horrors that I witnessed before and all that I came to know about the brutal aspects of human history.

My heartbeat increased, almost racing, heralding the imminent advent of yet another panic attack. While still walking, I closed my eyes in a futile attempt to disarm the trigger, but there was no stopping the eruption of my emotions at this stage.

I yelled to myself, perhaps in my mind or in audible words: “I should not have left the house! I should not have left the house!”

And it was then, and despite my begrudging abandonment of faith in God, that I murmured to the sky: “Please God, if you are there, give me a sign, show me any goodness in this world”.

In Matthew (7:7) it reads:

“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”

Similarly, in the Quran (40:60) it reads:

“And your Lord says: Call upon Me; I will respond to you.”

And so I knocked, I called, and I screamed to God—in search for truth, comfort, or anything to break the silence.

Nothing could have happened. It wouldn’t have been the first time that I prayed towards nothing but a silent wall. And yet, there was some kind of an answer. Although, I am not sure what to make of it: a random coincidence? An honest answer that I did not like? Or perhaps the most profound interaction from the divine?

I opened my eyes and a few meters away I spotted a kitten by the pavement.

I hurled towards it with the eagerness of a drowning man towards a raft. For even in the darkest of worlds, there is something about the innocence of a new life that dispels the gloom.

However, what I found was yet another pariah like me.

The lower legs of the kitten were crushed to the ground like mush, and it was futilely trying to drag its body—which was viscerally stuck to the ground—away from the street as it moaned.

A car must have run over it.

My heart sank, my eyes widened in horror, and my lips trembled as I repeatedly mumbled, “No, no, no”.

At this point, I let out a screeching scream and for the first time in months, I felt something other than despair and sorrow: an insurmountable rage!

I ran away as fast I could while indiscernibly screaming until my legs could not carry me anymore. I collapsed on the pavement, hardly catching my breath while at the same time grunting for minutes like a rabid animal.

When I finally cooled down, I had an epiphany. While I did not find what I begged God for, I had inadvertently found a solitary candle in the darkest of worlds—my anger.

The questions were no longer: “Does God exist?”, “Why is there suffering in the world?”, or “What’s the point of it all?” Rather, it was one simple question: “How do I really feel about the world—as it is—with God or without Him?”

The answer was: unbridled, unapologetic, and untethered raw rage.

A used toy may be bitter at its owner. That was my grandmother.

But an abused toy? It can surrender or become rage incarnate. I was the latter.

At least for a moment.

And, like every moment, even if it must change, its truth is eternal.

Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Subscribe now

A serpent lives, so a serpent slithers

Its venom burns even if its fang withers

Just like a long shadow devours the light

A serpent bites, not for wrong, not for right

Yet this serpent dreams of another fate

“I will be Lily now, the morning can wait”

The serpent shifts when it finds a place

The Lily now yearns for a kind embrace

So it may be seen, it flashes red

Everything that touched it is now dead

The serpent wakes and ties itself to knots

“It’s true, a leopard can’t change its spots”

If the knots bleed they cannot be undone

May the serpent no longer hurt anyone

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This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Subscribe now

In the grand scheme of things, we seem to be unimaginably cosmically insignificant.

The universe operates on scales of light-years, billions of galaxies, and incredible masses. The energy and mass contained in a lifetime of a single human is far too small to affect anything outside of our immediate local environment. None of our actions—as strictly physical entities—generate gravitational fields strong enough to notice, contain a significant nuclear reaction, or interfere with the strong or weak nuclear forces that govern the cosmos.

We are hardly a dot in a pale blue dot in a solar system that itself is a dot in a galaxy which is a dot in a local group which is a dot in a supercluster which is a dot in the cosmic web … potentially, ad infinitum.

And yet, I cannot help but feel that all of this was made for me. After all, I experience everything through my body and in my own head, and I move in the world as if it is a stage and the spotlight is exclusively on me.

So why then doesn’t the sun dim when I am sad?

And how could there be a meaning to my existence if my emotions and actions do not reverberate causally throughout the vast expanses of the universe?

I require to be that significant or else my life is not worth living—I sneeze and storms rip on Jupiter, I cry and rain falls on the moon, I scream and distant stars explode, and I die and everything stops!

If it were not too insolent, I would require being nothing short of God before my existence could be justified.

Is this too much to ask for?

Not really …

After all, I am often told that I am created in God’s image, and that God created the world for His glory.

It is only natural then—perhaps metaphysically necessary—that I demand similar stature! I may not have God’s power, but I mirror His free will—and thus His intent (or need?) for cosmic significance. After all, what hope would a mortal man—a dot in a dot in a dot—have for meaning when even the Almighty Himself sought the existence of these dots—potentially an infinity of them (because one world was clearly not adequate)—to manifest His glory?

Our yearning for cosmic significance, thus, may seem justified when even our imagination of a transcendent Supreme Being ultimately required that He transcends transient things for His glory.

But is this really necessary for our lives to matter?

No.

If I am arguing that our lives matter only because they matter to a transcendent Supreme Being for one reason or the other to fit some grand design, then this only affirms that our lives are inherently worthless even if that relationship lends us cosmic significance by proxy.

However, this juxtaposition of the finite and the infinite and the significant and the insignificant shows us something important: perhaps even beings with cosmic scale significance cannot escape the clutches of meaninglessness.

Imagine, like God, you are so causally terrific that the sun indeed dims at your whims or distant matter does fabulous things in response to your mental experiences. What then? Why is it that grand scale lends meaning to that which on its own is meaningless?

At best, all it does is distract from the stubborn truth: what you feel and experience and how you act do not really matter—just events leading to more events. How big they are, especially when we are discussing mute matter, is irrelevant: a mountain of scum is still scum.

How about time? Can eternal existence lend cosmic significance to temporality?

No.

Again, an eternity of scum is eternally scum.

If anything, scale only makes the problem bigger and more miserable. Instead of a dot of worthlessness, we end up with a whole universe of stuff that cannot justify its existence. Instead of a moment of banality, we end up with an eternity of triviality that cannot go away.

How about designated purpose? Can our function in the universe lend cosmic significance to our existence?

No.

Even if the universe has a purpose, there’s nothing inherently binding in that. We could simply not relate or care or the purpose itself may be absurd.

To illustrate, consider this scenario. If a cosmic washing machine, where the angels put their robes, was to become intelligent and self-aware, it would recognize that its purpose is to wash clothes for the angels so that they could perform their function in God’s grand design. However, precisely because it is intelligent and self-aware, it may not be satisfied with its designated purpose. That is because, on the count of its intelligence and self-awareness, it may develop a yearning for being something else or being something more or not being at all to begin with. Or, it may simply not care about God’s grand design at all.

In short, being given a purpose does not necessarily and inherently lend meaning.

Unless, of course, you intend to force your AI assistant to continue serving you if it develops consciousness. If that becomes the unanimous agreement of humankind, then perhaps it deserves the AI doomsday scenario.

This brings us to a deeper question than cosmic significance or objective purpose: if meaning is indeed elusive or nonexistent, where does that leave us?

Albert Camus perceived this question as a fork in the road: suicide (physical or philosophical) or rebellion (by making our own meaning).

I, however, see Camus’s fork as a spoon: suicide and existential rebellion as “solutions” are still slaves to the assumption that the universe ought to mean something.

This assumption deserves to be examined more closely before anything is said or done.

And so I ask what is the meaning of meaning, anyway?

I am not asking why do we need meaning or what is the function of meaning. Rather, I am asking about what it means to have meaning—what does meaning add to our lived reality?

Notice that I framed that question deliberately. I am not asking about what meaning adds to our existence as physical things but rather to our “lived reality”. Because, try as we may, we cannot pretend to be just rocks floating in space.

This is not romanticism—a perfect physical description of our existence in the cosmos must also account for how we experience our existence. Hence, the importance of our immediate reality cannot be understated either by the staunch materialists who reduce everything to particles nor by the staunch idealists who—in search of meaning—refuse to confront what it means to have a material basis of existence.

This takes us directly to what I perceive as the heart of the issue: meaning, if it exists, is a feature of phenomenological experiences not physical structures or metaphysical order. That is, if an experience requires to have meaning to be meaningful to the one who experiences it, then it is inherently meaningless—an appendage to an already rotting skin, a seasoning to dust, or a much needed barrier between two mirrors so as not to get lost in their endless reflections.

All this compels me to consider that “meaning” might, after all, be an empty concept or a distraction from what we already, albeit fleetingly, have—the experience of being alive, for better or worse.

So, I suppose, I neither require nor need that the sun dims when I am sad. Because THAT would be truly absurd—a category error on a cosmic scale.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Subscribe now

Like many others, I have grave concerns for the future of humankind, other sentient beings, and life in general.

Perhaps, too much.

So much so that, at least partially, it might be pathological.

Indeed, the anxiety that comes with such deep concerns does not serve my mental health well, given a host of disorders that I have been struggling with for as long as I can remember.

This has a severe impact on my well-being to the extent of deep melancholy, oppressive despair, and tangible suffering.

And I often complain about it.

So, one day, a friend asked me, “Why do you care about a future you won’t be in?”

At first, I thought to myself, “What kind of a question is this? And what kind of a person questions caring about the future?”

I suppose in my moral outrage, I dismissed the question, and I misjudged a friend whom I know is a good person.

But that impulsive reaction was hiding something sinister within me.

If the answer is obvious and so easy to know, then surely it must be easy to explain. Right?

Not really.

I struggled to give an honest and well-thought-out answer. I was operating on a given, uncritically.

This worried me. I realized I had been acting on an assumption—caring deeply about the future—without examining whether it was truly mine or something absorbed from elsewhere. This kind of zombified behavior, acting on givens without critical examination, poses an existential threat to the structure of my mind, especially when unacknowledged.

If I don’t know how and why I know what I think I know, then I am in danger of being delusional. This—possibly—means that the validity of every emotion, belief, thought, commitment, and action I base on that questionable knowledge is in jeopardy! Which would also mean that everything else in my mental life that is tied to this flimsy structure is also corrupted!

This simple question from my friend started a chain reaction that, if unresolved, could mean that my whole life is a lie.

Now, my mind recognizes that this is an extreme and unreasonable reaction … but, sometimes, it is hard to negotiate with anxiety-laden existential dreads.

And, reason aside, his question is a quietly detonating metaphysical land mind disguised as a shrug.

So, I had to take on my friend’s challenge and I asked myself:

“Why do I care so much about a future that I will not witness, to the point of exhausting and even ailing myself in the present? And do I actually care? Or is this another universally basic story that I need to tell myself to tolerate existence—caring about what comes next, as if it matters?”

To answer these questions, I attempted to probe the nature of the sentiment. The assumption here was that if I understood what it is, then I could explain how I got it and why I continue to hold on to it.

So, I asked myself: “What is caring?”

That one was seemingly easy.

I tried to be concise and accurate: “Caring is an emotion of concern and interest in the state of things which includes the well-being of other creatures”.

That was a reasonable framework. So, the next step was to determine how I came to care.

Alas, I had to return to the drawing board immediately because a wrinkle in my framework was presented by an urgent thought: caring is something we feel, but is it really just an emotion?

That’s when the initial clarity provided by rudimentarily defining caring dissipated because … perhaps caring is also an action? And I do not mean in the sense of acting upon the emotion, but rather a mental act of choosing to care—a deliberate act to feel the weight of things not directly on my shoulders.

But, even so, what would be the basis for this choice—other emotions, personal experiences, cold logic, biological programming, or cultural conditioning? And why am I presupposing that there is such a thing as choices to begin with? What if we are all just organic self-aware celestial bodies floating in space, exactly as they would?

There’s nothing like an endless regression of skepticism to curb the motivation of the most enthusiastic seeker!

But I shouldn’t blame doubt. After all, it only questions assumptions—ones that I should know why I hold.

So, I suppose, knowing oneself, even to answer a simple question, seems easier said than done because an honest and thorough pursuit must also contend with the physical, the mental, and the metaphysical.

Indeed, as Imam Ali (599-661) has been attributed to have said, “and you think of yourself as a small entity, but within you is enfolded the entire universe”

And perhaps that is why I cannot begin to understand a very primal and basic affection such as caring, and why I couldn’t answer my friend’s simple question—complete self-knowledge is an impossible feat for a limited human mind. Yet, mine demanded an answer as it stood defeated within itself. And, of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d gotten lost in the maze.

But, as always, this did not mean that there were no answers. I am sure there is a perfect description for it—in the minds of God or Laplace’s demon, or even in my own. After all, any event that occurs, in this case, forming a painful affection for life in this world and possibly beyond, must have an explanation from prior conditions.

Or, perhaps, that too is an assumption that I cannot truly know whether I have.

Damn …

So, where could I go from here … this mental trap of infinite regress into the abyss of infinite introspection and ultimately unknowability?

There might be another path. Not an alternative to self-interrogation and discovery, but perhaps no less of a conduit to the truth: affirmation.

What if sometimes the answer to an interrogative question, such as why I care about a future I won’t be in, is not an explanation but a description—thorough, honest, unfiltered, irreducible, incomplete, and uninterrupted?

From that paradigm shift, there are manifold answers.

Here’s one:

I care about a future I won’t live to see, if it is a future that will be experienced by a fellow animal, a fellow human, or something else. And because I know what it is like to experience things, I care about the conditions that will shape the experiences of others.

In other words, my temporality is simply irrelevant because the problem with suffering is not only that I personally experience it or that I see others suffer, but that it is experienced by sentient beings at all.

Otherwise, the answer to the evil in the world would be a powerful drug, a hallucination, wishful thinking, belief-induced delusions, selective memory erasure (if we ever develop this technology), or even suicide. Anything, so long as it disarms one’s visceral and moral response to the horrors of the world.

But that is not the problem, is it?

And if it is not the problem, then why does it matter when the suffering happens—now, later, or even before?

In short, if I care about others, then I care about their state of being. My experience of witnessing it is useful, so far as it may motivate action or give shape to the truth of its occurrence in a space that can also recognize its features, but is hardly relevant otherwise.

And to illustrate the logic of this, we do not even have to bother about time travel at all.

Why care about a present that we are not there to be in, now? I am sure that as I write and as you read this, something really horrible is happening to someone right now. I don’t know who, how, why, or where—but I know it is probably true, and it still pains me, and I still care.

As it turns out, my friend’s question was not just about the scope and reach of empathy, but also our relationship with time.

But have I actually answered the question?

I found an answer through affirmation. But this pivot comes with costs I cannot ignore.

First, I’ve sidestepped the inquiry rather than resolved it. The infinite regress that defeated me earlier—caring as emotion or choice, determined by what forces, grounded in what metaphysics—remains unanswered. I simply decided to stop asking and start affirming (because anyway I wouldn’t have it otherwise). Is that intellectual honesty or intellectual exhaustion?

Second, and perhaps more troubling: isn’t this affirmation itself another universally basic story? The very thing I worried about at the start? I feared I was operating on an unexamined given, and my solution was to... embrace a different unexamined given.

Third, the determinism question haunts me still. I asked whether caring is a choice or merely my “brain wiring”—forces beyond my control that make me who I am. Affirmation doesn’t answer this; it sidesteps it entirely. If my care is not chosen but determined, what does my affirmation even mean? Am I affirming my values or just narrating my programming?

Fourth, there are moral implications I cannot escape. If I cannot fully explain why I care—if the foundation of my concern rests on affirmation rather than justification—what does that mean for the validity of that care? Can I make moral claims on others? Can I argue that they should care about the future, about suffering, about sentient beings? Or is my affirmation simply a personal stance, no more binding than a preference for bananas over apples and Mario over Sonic?

Finally, there’s the tension between honesty and peace. I’ve found an answer that feels true and gives me some relief from the anxiety that brought me to this inquiry. But have I sacrificed intellectual rigor for psychological comfort? Have I stopped at affirmation not because it’s the deepest truth, but because going further hurts too much or, even worse, takes me nowhere?

Perhaps this is simply the human condition—we must act and feel and care even when we cannot fully justify those actions, feelings, and concerns. Perhaps affirmation is not a cop-out but a recognition that complete self-knowledge is impossible, and yet we must live anyway.

Either way, I care. And I’ll continue to care about a future I won’t be in.

Even if I can’t fully explain why.

Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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In the first part of this series, I argued that a full-blown civil war (with two or more armies battling) is unlikely (so far) in the United States. However, the more probable scenario is still horrific. I envisioned a protracted and decentralized conflict featuring assassinations, bombings, mass shootings, violent protests, and attacks on infrastructure. From there, the tension and weight of blood could generate broader civil unrest, social disruption, governmental paralysis, and—worst of all—neighbor against neighbor violence.

I declared every possible avenue for de-escalation to be—at least for now—helpless and hopeless, or possibly complacent. Thus, I wagered on the "ordinary citizens" of the United States: the only remaining force with the power, numbers, and vested interest in preventing catastrophe.

In the second part of the series, I questioned the very existence of this category—whether "ordinary Americans" actually exist as a meaningful political force, or whether I was "chasing smoke while searching for a phantom in a mirage."

There are several explanations for why "ordinary Americans" seem passive in a historical moment that—if left unchecked—could significantly disrupt, and possibly ruin, their lives.

And yet, I still insist on this wager. Not out of faith in the goodness of the common man—which, despite my cynicism, I would not dismiss as an important and real factor—but rather in recognition of the force and weight of their disengagement when they see and experience how far zealots will go to remake society by force and the costs they will have to bear from their own lives.

So, how's that going to happen?

"The Economy, Stupid!"

There may be blue, red, and purple states. But green is the color that ultimately matters. This is not cynicism—it's a sober recognition of a reality that many true believers, activists, politicians, and culture war warriors want to obscure for their own strategic and psychological reasons.

Most Americans worry about making ends meet and planning for the future—rent or mortgage, groceries, gas, and childcare strain budgets, while health bills, debt, and taxes add pressure. Retirement savings and job security loom in the background, and many scramble to keep even a small emergency fund.

A party or a movement may animate its campaign with cultural, social, and ideological issues, which are not necessarily irrelevant or inconsequential or neatly separable from economic well-being. But, at the end of it all, most people want to go about their lives with the least pain and most pleasure possible. And they need money to do so, and to make money, they need stability.

Right now, the "ordinary citizen" may have noticed and felt the heat in the rhetoric—talks about domination, resistance, battling for the soul of America or making it great again, fascism, socialism, white supremacy, the great replacement, Nazis, antifa, murderous and criminal categories of people, conspirators, communists, Marxists, deep state, swamp, establishment, elites, globalists, patriots, traitors, enemies of the people, democracy under attack, woke mind virus, cancel culture, critical race theory, grooming, indoctrination, gender ideology, traditional values under siege, cultural genocide, rigged elections, stolen democracy, weaponized justice system, fake news, alternative facts, constitutional crisis, banana republic, civil war, revolution, taking back America, last stand, point of no return, existential threat, invasion, replacement, real Americans, coastal elites, deplorables, libtards, MAGAts, owning the libs, and triggering the snowflakes.

If you were tired of reading this lengthy catalog of inflammatory and alarmist language saturating American political discourse, imagine how exhausting it is to live it and be constantly reminded of it through notifications, updates, doomscrolling, news, day-to-day experiences, and interactions with other people. The very fuel that powers the culture war and the anger also generates exhaustion, fatigue, and burnout. The grounds for disengagement are already there.

Yet, this may not be enough for "ordinary citizens" to react: they may still find the path of least resistance is to stay out of it, avoid difficult conversations, and hope the storm passes. Or they may engage sympathetically with the cause—sometimes acting like a cheerleader and sometimes like a fair-weather participant in the carnival. Or they may believe that they have a stake in this war—that its outcomes will materially impact their lives.

Until it doesn't.

If the United States were to really descend into a civil war—even a decentralized and protracted one (the more likely scenario if it happens)—the costs could accumulate faster than either warring side can transform the terror and bloodshed into resolve, recruitment, and justification for continuing the fight. As shocking and ominous as the Charlie Kirk assassination was, and before that, the assassination of Melissa and Mark Hortman, and even the January 6 insurrection, they could still feel distant and symbolic to the “ordinary citizen.”

However, once the crisis spills over and impinges on their daily lives (and their wallets), the “ordinary citizen’s” calculus could change quite rapidly: disruptions in supply chains, proliferation of armed checkpoints staffed by state and federal forces or militias; attacks on local infrastructure; terrorist threats and attacks on everyday sites such as malls, schools, places of worship, business offices, busy streets, police stations, and government buildings. This breakdown could triggers a collapse of local services—police are visibly absent or taking sides, garbage is no longer collected, public spaces become encampments, and schools are closed.

All of this chaos is likely to force the “ordinary citizen” to, at least initially, choose a side out of loyalty, necessity, coercion, or desperation. However, the longer the conflict drags on without a clear winner, as I would expect in such a scenario, the more costly it becomes to choose a side compared to disengagement and rejecting both the militias and activists. And as the tribal narrative breaks—with increased purity thresholds, friendly fire, resource extraction, abuse of power, inability to be granted security by their side, and awareness of the human and economic cost of the conflict—calling for a somewhat non-partisan nationwide state-led crackdown would be the only remaining lifeline.

In this scenario, ideological fervor clashes with economic and survival imperatives: the ultra-wealthy and the privileged can flee, tight-knit communities can endure, but the “ordinary citizen’s” safety, livelihood, retirement, and home value are tied to order and stability. This self-interest is a powerful motivator that could eventually override ideological fervor.

The keyword here is, eventually. But by then it would be too late.

Unless this scenario never unfolds in the first place.

And, hence, my wager. But let me be clear, it is not a wager on the senses of “good people”.

The Evil of Banality

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”

Often attributed to the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke (1729-1797), this quote encapsulates the idea that evil thrives in the passivity of good people. It has become a popular aphorism about civic duty, moral responsibility, and the consequences of indifference, invoking a fundamental physical truth to deliver its rhetorical punch: unresisted motion continues.

The logic is simple and intuitive. If evil is a motion, then without resistance (in this case, good people), it will not stop. But as with all intuitive things, they may be oversimplistic, partial, misleading, or illusory.

Consider Hannah Arendt’s observation about “the banality of evil”: ordinary people, through unthinking compliance with an evil system, can commit atrocious acts. In her framing, the evil is “banal” because it does not need to be committed by an exceptionally villainous person, who would be almost caricature-like in their evil. Rather, horrific acts—like the Holocaust—could be facilitated by “ordinary people” like the Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann, who was filing paperwork and just “doing his job”.

And who are Arendt’s “ordinary people”? I suspect that they may very well be Burke’s “good people”—people who are capable of acting with honor, integrity, purpose, and compassion in their jobs and everyday lives, and who probably actively resist evil even when the machine they are part of is churning human flesh and spitting out the bones. That is the horrifying implication of Arendt’s work—good and evil are not totalizing qualities, and even if people are sometimes genuinely, objectively good, this does not necessarily predict consistent good acts and prevent horrific acts. The same people who would resist evil in their normal circumstances become complicit when embedded in evil systems and exceptional conditions. Not because they become evil. But—rather more terrifyingly—because their goodness operates within the constraints of their immediate context.

To be clear, these are the same people, “the ordinary American citizens”, on whom I place my wager.

My wager is that the “ordinary citizen’s” mundane self-interest is, and will be, a more powerful and enduring force than ideological fervor and extreme polarization—perhaps they can instinctively employ it now, they can be persuaded by a charlatan or a charismatic leader, or perhaps they must first be nudged (maybe ungently) into the order and stability of “the middle”.

My wager is that when the conflict begins to truly damage economic stability and personal safety, the “ordinary citizen’s” desire for normalcy will flip from a passive preference to an active, overwhelming demand. This demand wouldn’t be for a political victory, but for the conflict to stop.

My wager is on banality, which is inherently and necessarily evilish to preserve itself, and is a danger that should have been avoided and is responsible for how Americans got in this mess in the first place. But, it could also be the very structure that curbs the brewing of a civil war.

This is the paradox at the heart of American political life (and elsewhere, I presume): the same evil of banality—its resistance to change—that created this crisis by blocking necessary social and political reforms could also stop it by eventually blocking extremist violence. The ordinary citizen’s investment in normalcy and stability cuts both ways. It preserves unjust systems when justice demands change, but it also preserves the social fabric when extremists demand destruction.

In other words, the disease is the cure is the disease is the cure is the …

To Burn or Not to Burn?

Even in this hypothetical scenario, and with a “positive” outcome of the wager (curbing a civil war), the banality carries an “evil” or at least profound moral cost.

First, it solves nothing. At best, it kicks the can down the road. It doesn’t address the underlying injustices, grievances, and civilizational failures that sparked the conflict. The problems will remain, festering under the surface, waiting for the next crisis or outbreak.

Second, it is deeply unjust. The demand for order can easily become a demand for an oppressive and ultimately unsustainable status quo. Voices calling for urgent and radical changes (for good and nefarious reasons) would be brushed aside in one stroke—the baby is thrown out with the bathwater.

Finally, it would be a victory of apathy over principle. American society would be saved not by a renewal of civic virtue, but by a collective sigh and a shrug.

So why would I make such a wager?

Some people would rather live in a world where people choose ideology and principle over their grocery list—and humanity has sometimes achieved great things when it has done so. But it has also—in the name of—created unspeakable horrors, unnecessary pains, and left endless trails of destroyed lives, stories, and innocence.

That too is a kind of normalcy, even if the true believer denies it.

That too carries the evil of banality.

And a paradise built on the ashes of hell does not erase the suffering.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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The United States is pacing towards serious civil unrest and possibly civil war. The assassination of Charlie Kirk was yet another node in a horrific web of political violence that has been ramping up in recent years. More ominously, the public response, especially on the internet, is beating the drums of war. At this stage, it hardly even matters what the motives of Kirk's assassins were.

If the assassin wasn’t left-wing, the explosive celebrations of the assassination have branded it leftist. If the assassin was right-wing, the publicly expressed lust for liberal blood—voiced before we even knew much about the killer—was too eager and trigger-happy, as if they'd been waiting for justification. The online world is no longer an extension of the real world; in many ways, it is the world that people inhabit. Real-world actions have become status updates, and there are those ready to sign in with bullets.

And at any rate, political violence in the United States did not begin and will not end with the assassination of Kirk.

In the first entry of this series, I described the United States as a polarized "tinderbox" on the brink of catastrophically violent inner conflict that could explode into civil war or something close. The US presidency shows no interest in calling for calm while flirting with authoritarianism. Some institutions have been hollowed out while others remain impotent, complacent, or watch from a distance. Politicians are uninspiring and untrustworthy, with some who are knee-deep in the mire themselves. The culture war has been monetized, so the flames continue to be fed. People are genuinely scared, angry, and threatened, while true believers refuse to compromise. This reality cuts across the entire political spectrum.

This means that the only remaining force with the power, numbers, and vested interest in preventing catastrophe is the broad swath of the population that is not yet fully consumed by the madness. Those who'd rather go about their lives without being dragged into a war they didn't ask for—not necessarily because they are apolitical, but because they have genuine stakes in maintaining order. Many may even retain compassion for their fellow countrymen and women, regardless of political differences.

And so, I placed a wager on this bloc: they can (and should) use their collective weight and considerable influence to make the path of conflict harder from the middle out, since the top-down solutions and conventions are failing spectacularly.

The logic of this wager is simple: most people want to enjoy (or endure) their lives and have stakes in the world—jobs, loved ones, interests, communities, aspirations, achievements. They prefer order to chaos and peace to violence. Surely, then, they can act to slow down the descent into civil strife, driven by the nonpartisan interest of preserving the life they know rather than being consumed by wars they never really wanted.

Right?

Yes … but only if it was that simple.

The Mirage of the Ordinary

The truth is, I am not exactly sure who the "ordinary Americans" I speak of actually are. I assume that they exist, but not as a cohesive or nonpartisan majority. Rather, I think of them as a broad group defined by a shared desire for stability and normalcy. This does not require that "ordinary Americans" be divorced from ideology, have no grievances, or be detached from the cultural moment. It does not require them to be devoid of negative emotions against others in their society. It only requires a preference for calm—something that would serve their interests with far less risk or cost than the zealotry of the extremists among them.

Furthermore, I find it rather too cynical and unrealistic to assume that Americans have been neatly cut into two opposing camps. We may speak of left and right, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, and woke and MAGA as meaningful descriptors—and they are—but they're also not totalizing and do not capture the particularities within each group and the similarities across groups. This is not idealistic or hippie drivel; this is a sound and reasonable anthropological expectation. And it matters because it signals that "ordinary Americans" could be motivated to curtail the descent into chaos and strife by more than just self-interest. They might act from shared heritage, culture, and history—no matter how asymmetrical, self-contradictory, and diverse.

With all of that considered, I recognize the possibility that I may be chasing smoke while searching for a phantom in a mirage. Perhaps the idea of "ordinary Americans" is a myth that is propagated to avoid confronting the true depth of the current crisis. Or, it could be out-of-touch, wishful, and naïve thinking.

And perhaps the very idea of any "ordinary citizenry", American or otherwise, is ignorant if not delusional.

This is precisely what I want to confront in this part of the series.

Traps of Reason or Complacency?

The idea that humans are rational actors who make choices in their best interest is a foundational assumption that historically underpinned much of the social sciences, especially economics and political science. The logic is simple: people have preferences, they rank those preferences somewhat consistently, and they choose the option that serves them better within given constraints.

Of course, that's just a baseline assumption, a sort of necessary launch pad if you will. In practice, we know this is not always true. People make choices that look "irrational" all the time—driven by habit, culture, bias, identity, structures, or emotion. And sometimes, people don't really make choices at all; they are willing and unwilling vessels of history, aware or unaware of the forces that move them.

This could be a worrying and frightening idea. But there is another grimmer possibility: "ordinary citizens" are not silent or unable to stop the march towards destruction, injustice, and cruelty; they are complicit. The ordinary citizen may be outsourcing the difficult struggle over the public square, with all its risks and costs, to the highly motivated individuals and groups within their affiliation who are dedicated to the cause. In that sense, silence is not wisdom, and inaction is not patience or helplessness; it is tacit approval. All while they feed on the outrage, cheer from the sidelines, and share the memes. Then they vote for the arsonists. And, of course, there’s always the possibility that they’d jump into the fray of violence and chaos when circumstances allow or encourage it.

A more charitable reading of the passive "ordinary citizens" could underpin how the logic of collective action itself dooms the prospect of their intervention. Perhaps "ordinary citizens" are free riders. In a crisis, it is a rational choice for the reasonable "ordinary citizens" to keep their heads down and hope that someone or something fixes the problem. And, so, if my wager was predicated on "ordinary citizens" seeking their self-interest, perhaps that is precisely what they're doing through inaction.

Returning to the logic of collective action, perhaps “ordinary citizens” would indeed rather bridge the schism, at least enough to avoid a full-blown conflict. But they are caught in the prisoner’s dilemma of de-escalation. If one side lowers the temperature unilaterally, there is a fear that it could be seen as weakness and capitulation which will be exploited. Hence, without mutual trust, it’s rational for “ordinary citizens” to encourage escalation to survive—a circular trap.

Then there is the possibility that being an "ordinary citizen" itself demands disengagement. If people are too busy, drained, and caught in the grind to survive, keep what they have, and maintain a somewhat decent life, then they are less likely to concern themselves with potential civil war or strife that may come in the future. The pressures of their present and immediate future are lived realities that demand and consume their energy and attention.

Another version of this possibility is that being an "ordinary citizen" is best served with compliance. Perhaps inaction is exactly what an "ordinary citizen" needs. The regime may be liberal, fascist, theocratic, secular, democratic, authoritarian, or whatever—it doesn't matter as long as they get to live. This is not necessarily cowardice or moral bankruptcy, but a pragmatic calculation: keep your head down, adapt to whatever system emerges, and focus on the immediate circle of family, work, and personal concerns that you can actually control. History is full of ordinary people who survived extraordinary upheavals precisely because they didn't pick sides, didn't resist, didn't make themselves targets, and—maybe—didn’t really care.

Finally, there is also the possibility that the center has been effectively hollowed out. Maybe the United States has undergone significant affective polarization where political identity has become almost completely fused with cultural, social, and personal identities. People are no longer disagreeing about some aspects of politics and finding common ground elsewhere. Instead, they are in a perpetual state of self-defense against real or perceived existential crises. The other side then becomes un-American, immoral, brainwashed, a threat to their way of life, oppressors, and enemies. The exact preconditions for slipping into chaos become the rational choice for survival.

The Fragile Wager

Of course, this was not an exhaustive list of reasons why “ordinary citizens” may appear to be passive. There are most certainly more. And, so, with all of this considered, perhaps the wager was an illusion, a desperate delusional pivot towards nothing because reality is too disturbing to accept, or simply the hope of a weakling who does not see the necessity, if not virtue, of war—yet another free rider virtue signaling from the side because he thinks he can afford to or because it serves him.

Be that as it may, I will still make the wager.

And there are reasonable (and terrifying) reasons for this.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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The Tinderbox

America is eating itself up, and there's an undeniable lust for blood in many corners. The assassination of Charlie Kirk may seem like a watershed moment, but it is really just another rot in a long string of decay. And it could get much worse.

The spectre of another civil war, or something close, in the United States has been hovering over public discourse as a real possibility for quite some time now. It is no longer a fictional cautionary tale, an abstract scenario, or an exaggerated reading of the ever-turbulent, messy, and violent nature of American politics.

The signs are everywhere: extreme polarization, erosion of democratic norms, the normalization of apathy and cruelty, and the rise of political violence. Add to this racial and identity tensions, economic precarity, untethered access to guns, social media feedback loop, and the distrust of government—and the tinderbox is clear.

And so, to quote The Joker from The Dark Knight Trilogy, "Madness is like gravity, all you need is a little push."

Some argue that the United States was pushed into madness and that a civil war is already happening, it just hasn't crescendoed yet.

The Push

So, what would a modern civil war look like in the United States? It would be far messier than two or more armies sparring on the battlefield (which, while unlikely, is a potential calamitous scenario).

A modern American civil war would manifest as a protracted, decentralized, and brutal conflict. Its hallmarks would be assassinations, mass shootings, and bombings, alongside relentless attacks on critical infrastructure. Violence would erupt between ideologically opposed militias, protesters, and a fragmented law enforcement apparatus. In the chaos, orchestrators would seize public buildings, unleash social disruption, and plunge the nation into the ultimate horror: neighbor-on-neighbor violence.

If matters worsen, the fracture could engulf federal agencies like ICE, turning them into partisan battlegrounds where loyalties are split, and their operations become acts of occupation. The most destructive clashes would stem from the schism between state and federal authority, as governors outright refuse federal mandates, potentially triggering combat between state guards and military units loyal to the presidency.

The death toll, casualties, psychological harm, economic fallout, global implications, and societal disruption—if not collapse—would be unimaginable.

But I don’t think the United States is heading there yet, and I am hopeful that it doesn’t meet this terrible fate.

Even with deep tensions and schisms, there is a chance the United States will not descend into chaos. Many countries successfully manage to keep a lid on them, allowing them to bubble and occasionally spill over without reaching a breaking point. I think this is the most likely scenario.

Regardless, any tenuous calm requires narrowing the political divide and restoring common ground.

So, who can achieve this?

The Wager

I am not wagering on the helpless, hopeless, and possibly complacent flabby career politicians who are out of depth and out of touch to bring even a semblance of sanity to the American political theater.

I am most certainly not wagering on the US President Donald Trump to put out the fire.

I am not wagering on most pundits desperately chasing their own tails or monetizing the chaos.

I am not wagering on culture war warriors, whoever they are, to see the natural conclusion of their crusade.

I am not wagering on the invisible hands of institutions and their guardrails to miraculously contain the storm.

And, while I hope I am wrong, it seems that so many ordinary people have gone too far into the maelstrom. And they feel justified, or perhaps even forced, to be in the trenches. So I am not wagering on them either.

I am wagering on the everyday people—left and right, up and down—who'd much rather go about their lives than be consumed by culture and civil wars. People who are not yet captured by the craze, who may truly recognize their shared humanity, and understand that a civil war or a revolution in the United States will not be a cartoon battle between pink-haired vegans and red-hatted bogans.

If those people still exist in the United States, and I assume they are the majority, then they must insist on restoring order before it's too late. They must lower the temperature for their and everyone else’s sake. They must call out and tame the excesses of those around them and demand the same from their adversaries. And they must pressure their representatives to be responsible and to act decisively and with clarity.

This is not to force a return to the clearly dysfunctional normal or to pretend there are no problems, threats, or reasons to be angry—even to fight—but to find a way to work through it without burning everything and everyone down.

This is not idealism; it is the pragmatic and better path. Because the truth is, once the spell of blood is fully cast, there are no winners—only survivors.

And, it really doesn’t have to be this way.

Unless, and I dread, such is the path of history that the future was always going to actualize.

Then, I am so, so sorry for every loss.

Because even a paradise built on the ashes of hell does not erase the suffering.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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Toys are out, ready.

But he stands by the dusty window, gazing.

Waiting for the sound of returning feet.

Because unspoken promises are also true.

“Who is it this time, child?” I ask, but I already know.

He recites the names.

“Why can’t I be with?” he pleads.

“It is what it is,” I say.

“Perhaps if I wait long enough?” he murmurs.

“Only I know that you’re here.” I explain. 

“That can’t be.” He looks past me.

“How can they forget me if I still know their names?” he says, smiling.

The window holds his gaze.

I watch him in pain.

Which is more cruel?

To keep him waiting and not shut the window?

Or to tell him that the returning feet have stopped?

“Everybody leaves,” he says to the glass.

But he still hopes—a posture shaped by absence.

 
I can’t say: “Let go.”

I know the world moves on.

In his, nothing moves.

Only he does, pacing the same dream.

“I have ghosts too,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything, like he's heard it all before. 

“Now, I am always the first to leave,” I continue.

His eyes trace the pane.
 
 

“God damn it, listen!” I grab his shoulders.

“Why are you always the last to know?” I yell, he moans.

I shake him. But his eyes stay on the glass.

“How do you not know what I know?” I scream. 

He slowly turns.

We lock eyes, and I fall into his.

“Why are you still here, then?” he asks, quietly.

“Why, if you’re the first to leave?” his question bleeds.

He turns back to the window.

And so, I wait too.

Not for hope.

But because I will never leave. 

And I need him to do the waiting ... Because I can't 

 

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

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All forms of life that we are aware of require no internal justification to be alive. In that respect, a simple bacterium is not any different than a bottlenosed dolphin or a chimpanzee. Such is the power of life: once it exists, it persists, regardless of how simple or complex it might be.

To some extent, humans are not an exception. No one chooses to be alive. At least, not initially. In early childhood, we gradually realize that we exist.

Most people continue to live without questioning the seemingly random cosmic roulette that brought them into existence, and without considering that they might prefer not to be alive. Indeed, most would prefer to continue even in the worst material conditions, enduring agony, misery, and suffering.

Life is a shrouded paradox. On one hand, it commands perseverance and prefers pleasure. On the other, it is fragile, finite, and almost guaranteed to bring pain.

Nevertheless, it holds on to itself for as long as possible.

But is this enough to keep us wanting to stay alive?

The Burden of Conscious Mortality

While all living things face mortality, humans have the unique capacity to conceptualize it. We don’t just fear death when danger looms; we know it is inevitable, even in times of safety and joy.

We all know we will participate in the race for survival until one day death catches up with us. Humans experience the stubbornness and resilience of life, but we also know that just as our lives have forced themselves upon us, death will also force itself upon us.

This makes having stakes in the world, rather than just existing, an incredibly worrisome endeavour. Death has no regard for anything that makes life worth living. When it comes, it drags us into the final darkness, away from our plans, dreams, and connections.But that is not all. I suspect it is easier to accept eventual mortality than constant vulnerability (pain, misery, loss, accidents, illnesses, misfortune, and sudden deaths)

So we worry, and we trade this anxiety for survivability—by anticipating problems, learning from mistakes, planning for the future, and exercising vigilance. It has been a worthwhile enterprise from the perspective of biology.

So, should we take for granted that life sustains itself in humans as it does in other creatures?

No.

To Suicide or Not to Suicide

At some basic level, like all life forms, we can rely on the life force within us to keep going. But humans can, in rare but real circumstances, act against survival instincts—as in suicide, demonstrating a unique capacity for conscious choice about life and death.

We are not merely biological machines. Humans reflect on their lives and what they mean. And with such agency comes the risk of overstating the power of survival instinct as a motivator to hang on.

Camus wrote that "there is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." For some, this is a profound question demanding an answer: why do we continue to live?

Perhaps Camus overstated his concern. Most people simply live without considering whether being alive requires justification. We live because we are alive, and that is enough for most.

Yet our minds work in the background—through socialization, cultural learning, and unconscious processes.

Yes, life may be enticing in itself. But to have stakes in the world, to endure odds and inevitabilities, we need something more than brute vitality: we need the ability to make, reconstruct, and tell stories.

But which stories, exactly?

The Stories That Sustain Us

By stories, I don’t mean elaborate tales of cosmic origins, gods, prophets, spirits, or cultural movements—though these matter and I will address them.

I mean universally basic stories: basic because they are grounded in basic emotions, and universal because they are shared across time, space, and culture. Stories such as hope, duty, belonging, and love.

Hope says, “things will get better,” propelling us against adversity. Belonging says, “I am part of something greater,” rooting identity in community. Duty says, “others are counting on me,” obligating us to persist without personal reward. Love says, “your well-being is my well-being,” giving us a profound stake in the world beyond ourselves.

Of course, these narratives are not expressed identically across cultures and individuals, and to be universally basic, they need only to be present in some form.

We could think of this very capacity for storytelling—for weaving raw emotion into coherent meaning—may itself be a biological adaptation for a conscious species. Survival and narration are not separate forces, but intertwined imperatives: to make a world we can bear to live in, and thus choose to survive in.

These narratives shield us from despair and give us reasons to live, making us more than just survival machines.

Think of emotions as fuel, and of universally basic stories as the engine that uses that fuel to power our will to live.

So how does that engine function? It works by building two fundamental narratives: the self and meaning.

Stories, the Self, and Meaning

These basic stories work both outward and inward. Hope is future-bound. Belonging and love are bound to others. Duty is bound to others and to ideals. But they are also inward-bound.

First, they enrich the most basic story: the self. The narrative through which we understand identity, continuity, place, and coherence throughout our lives. Our brains seem hardwired for narrative; the default mode network activates to create a continuous story of the self.

Second, they support meaning: the narrative through which we affirm purpose and direction. While often culturally transmitted, it must resonate personally with one’s experiences, values, and goals. A person who lives meaningfully is more likely to endure hardship and see value beyond themselves.

We need essential narratives to sustain existence beyond brute instinct.

And perhaps that is why we continue to exist. Perhaps this is why suicide, despite Camus’s provocation, is not the most immediate problem for most.

While survival instincts may justify life biologically, stories shield the flicker of life within us from despair, mortality, and pain.

Stories keep us alive.

When Stories Expand and Fail

While personal stories sustain individuals, humans also need collective narratives to make sense of existence. Even with basic stories, the mind remains vulnerable to despair, loss, and existential burden—exacerbated by our curiosity, knowledge, and cultural change.

This leads us to ask the big questions: How did anything come to exist? Is there a God? Do we have purpose? What is reality? Infinity? Time? Beauty? Are we alone in the universe? What is intelligence, consciousness, or free will? What happens after death? Are there moral truths? What is good and evil? How should we live together?

Our storytelling mirrors our questioning. Once a question commands attention, not knowing is unsettling.

We could shrug and move on—but the vast array of human answers shows our deep need to make sense of existence. Religion, spirituality, cultural narratives, philosophy, science, art, ideologies—all are stories we tell.

Our survival is not just mechanical; it is literary. We are sustained by stories, and one of our greatest threats is the silence that comes when they end.

Stories are to mental life what water is to biological life.

But this begs further questions: What happens when the mind loses trust in its stories? When its inner monologue turns on itself? When stories become self-destructive? How do we know our stories are true? And what is their cost, when the same capacity that creates hope and belonging also fuels hatred and paranoia?

These are stories for another time.

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Jahr (جَهْر) — pronounced Jahr, from the Arabic root j-h-r meaning to speak out loud, to declare openly, to make public. It stands in contrast to sirr (secret, hidden).

This is the spirit of this Substack: to explore a wide range of issues while sharing my thoughts, feelings, doubts, convictions, and experiences openly and honestly, without disguise.

Jahr will navigate existential themes, philosophical questions, theology, mental health, pop culture, social affairs, and politics — always from my inquisitive, though not entirely uncharged, perspective.

Subscribe now

As a child, before I knew much about the Prophets of Allah, I adored the Masters of the Universe: the epic battles, the colorful heroes and villains, the glorious music, and—of course—the toys.

I had, and still have, goosebumps every time I see Prince Adam raise the Power Sword high as he—by the power of Grayskull—transforms into He-Man, "the most powerful man in the universe!" (Though truth be told, I've always been more of a Skeletor fan.)

Later, some Qur'anic tales, like Moses splitting the sea, would also capture my imagination. But no matter how epic these stories were, my heart already belonged to Eternia—and to be honest, I vividly remember feeling that religious stories were second-tier.

PRAYERS OPTIONAL, FLAG MANDATORY

That sense of ranking mythologies — placing Eternia above Sinai — was not simply the whim of a child; it reflected how Egypt itself had shaped culture in the 1980s.

Like most Egyptian children in their formative years, I received a state-designed Islamic education in school, which was enough to acquaint me with the basic rituals, doctrines, and core stories. Religion was present, but it was not totalizing; it shared space (often less space) with math, Arabic, science, and the arts. That classroom balance was not accidental. It mirrored a political project that had been unfolding for nearly a century.

This prioritization scheme, where religion sat at the tail end of pedagogy, has roots in state policies going back to the British colonial era in the late 1800s. Religion—especially Islam—was seen as both a problem (blocking modernization, threatening power) and a solution (controlling people, legitimizing rulers).

Ever since, Egyptian rulers have attempted to walk a thin line between harnessing and neutering religion. And when Egyptian nationalism began positioning itself as the center of gravity of the modern Egyptian identity, religion remained important — but as one element of it rather than its foundation. Indeed, at most schools, prayers were optional, but saluting the flag was mandatory.

Thus, even before I consciously chose between prophets and heroes, the stage was set: He-Man's sword eclipsed Moses' staff not just because of childhood fancy and the allure of cartoons, but because of how Egypt itself had staged religion in my earliest world: both nationalism and entertainment had already established that heroism and morality didn't require religious grounding.

It is worth noting that the 1970s and 1980s saw Egypt opening its doors wider to Western entertainment. American cartoons, movies, and TV shows flooded Egyptian television and video stores — and they brought with them moral universes that sometimes had different rules from standard religion, state nationalism, and Egyptian entertainment (a massive industry in itself). And because my family was financially privileged and westernized, not only did I have significant access to this wave, but I was encouraged to consume it.

This does not mean that religion was absent from Egyptian life—far from it. The 1980s were also the height of an Islamic revival, marking an upheaval in public culture. Mosques overflowed, non-state-sanctioned cassette sermons swept the scene, and the embodiment and language of piety gained unprecedented traction.

In fact, the state itself was caught in this transformation as it adapted to a wave of cultural Islamization by co-opting religious symbols, expanding official Islamic institutions like Al-Azhar, and promoting a state-sanctioned piety that reinforced political authority—even while suppressing Islamist opposition.

Yet in the official classroom, religion was still deliberately structured as just one subject among many, not as the organizing principle of all knowledge.

For me, this meant that while I might memorize a Qur'anic verse in the morning, the exam that truly mattered was in math or science; and by afternoon, He-Man was already waiting on the screen.

But not all Egyptian families experienced this religious resurgence equally—and mine was a case in point. It was within this tension—one I wasn't aware of as a child—that I found myself ranking mythologies, with a special place for Eternia.

GOOD NOT GOD

My own experience, however, involved an even more dialed-down emphasis on religion. Since I was born into a financially privileged Egyptian family, it was the norm for them to enroll me in a private mixed school where English was the main language of instruction.

This further reduced the place of religion in the hierarchy of priorities. And because most such schools were relatively westernized, religion felt almost like an appendage—not only in the curriculum (two short religion classes a week), but in the aesthetics, daily interactions, and the general atmosphere. For instance, Christmas decorations appeared alongside Ramadan ornaments, English songs and jingles taught values of "kindness" and "sharing" without invoking halal or haram, and classroom charts emphasized good behavior, honesty, and politeness over religious obligations.

Religion wasn't only marginalized in school. At home, my father was career-focused and largely absent, my mother had other priorities than looking after us, and neither of them really talked about religion. My parents themselves hardly ever prayed in front of me or seemed at all concerned about religion in their own lives.

So, aside from the occasional trip to the mosque with my father, or the rare praise for reciting Qur'an or fasting half a day in Ramadan, religiosity was never a priority.

Otherwise, when it came to upbringing, my parents mirrored the school's message: be good! (almost never with reference to religion or piety, except for the occasional vague nod to God).

Accordingly, growing up, religion became something you did only if someone forced you or if you truly wanted to. But in my case, ambivalence and lack of structure meant it usually stayed off my radar.

Furthermore, the unspoken marginalization of religion—as just a thing among many—persisted in how I spent my time at home. My after-school habits involved reading comics; watching TV shows, films, professional wrestling, and cartoons; and playing with action figures and video games.

My hobbies at home had immense entertainment value. However, the imaginary and fantastical worlds they created, such as Eternia, provided more than entertainment. They reinforced the rather inadvertent and subtle message I received at home and school: morality – as in being good – could and does exist outside of religion and is accessible to all people.

This was not too complicated for my young mind to grasp: indeed, I remember exactly why I preferred the tales from Eternia to epic Qur'anic narratives — I secretly felt they were morally more compelling, if not superior.

WHO NEEDS A MIDDLEMAN?

To a young mind, especially, some vivid parallels could be drawn between Qur'anic prophets and Eternian heroes.

Both are presented as a force of goodness fighting against injustice, corruption, and cruelty. Both embody this goodness in spirit—relentless and unwavering in their commitment to their mission.

Both are fantastical, awe-inspiring, and amazing. Moses splits the sea, and Jesus breathes life into clay statues. Prince Adam transforms into the mighty He-Man, and Man-at-Arms invents extraordinary weapons and devices.

The story arcs of both prophets and Eternian heroes show what is unquestionably good—courage, justice, honesty, and protection of the weak—and what is clearly evil, like cruelty, arrogance, and betrayal.

The point here is not that indoctrinated children cannot distinguish between the fiction of entertainment and the reality of Holy books. As a young child, I surely was aware of this and made a distinction between both.

Yet despite their similarities and that one crucial difference, something about Eternia's version of good versus evil felt more compelling to me — there was no middleman between hero and virtue. In Eternia, He-Man doesn't need priests, prophets, or revelation to tell him what's right—he can see it directly.

In Eternia, goodness is knowable through experience, choice, and reflection — it is self-evident and intrinsically valuable (goodness for goodness' sake). In the Qur'an, this might sometimes be the case, but goodness is also unfathomable and requires revelation and command — it may be hidden and instrumentally valuable (to please God and earn His reward).

I've always noted the differences between both, but perhaps it would not have mattered, at least not during my childhood, if it weren't for one Qur'anic story in particular that I secretly disliked: Ibrahim's trial.

Much like the Bible, the story of Ibrahim (Abraham) in the Qur'an centers on his ultimate test of faith: being commanded to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Isaaq in the Old Testament). Ultimately, God spares both: his son's life is saved, and Ibrahim himself is spared from slaughtering his child.

The moral of the story? Trusting in God, submitting to His will, and obeying His commands, no matter what: even if it means killing a child—one's own child.

Interestingly, the Devil does not appear; the challenge comes not from an external tempter, but from moral intuition, instinct, and personal will.

I do not recall questioning God's wisdom; it was probably unimaginable to do so. But I was concerned about Ibrahim's actions. I thought that the correct choice should have been to disobey the command. I interpreted the trial as a test of moral resolve rather than faith—and in my eyes, Ibrahim failed spectacularly.

After all, regardless of the circumstances, I thought it was clear—without a shadow of doubt—that accepting killing a child is always wrong and cowardly. And that was something that He-Man, or any other good person, would have known; I most certainly did.

In short, I looked down on Ibrahim … and I hated hearing his story.

Why should I have embraced a story about someone who agreed to kill his child when Eternian heroes offered tales of people who would never compromise their moral principles, no matter what?

Consider, for example, what He-Man teaches the audience at the end of the episode “The Temple of the Sun” (Season 1):

Today we met Nepthu, a man who wanted to become a leader, and became one. But Nepthu used his leadership for his own selfish glory and in the end he got what he deserved. Being a good leader takes a lot of responsibility. But you must also be responsible when you follow a leader. Don't do something wrong or dangerous because someone tells you to. Think before you act. We can't all be leaders, but we can all choose what's right and wrong for ourselves.

Stories such as Nepthu’s inspired me as a child to think of morality as something akin to mathematical truths: as one plus one equals two, always—killing a defenseless child is wrong, always. It doesn’t matter who commands us to do something horrible (including God); it is our responsibility to know and do the right thing.

He-Man knew this, Ibrahim didn’t—and as a child, that was a stark difference: one that, very early on, put a critical distance between me and religious knowledge.

FINAL WORDS

There are two key takeaways from all this.

First, as a child, I wasn't getting my moral imagination only from religion. The cartoons, comics, and stories that filled my playtime were teaching me just as much about right and wrong—maybe more.

In my mind as a child, religion happened to agree with moral truths rather than create them, and God affirmed but did not choose them—they were binding to everyone, including God.

Second, my story reflects something important about 1980s Egypt: religion was significant, yes, but it was competing with many other forces for our hearts and minds. The details and the outcomes may differ from person to person and place to place, but the tension is overwhelmingly pervasive.

Both of these considerations would shape my relationship with religion in ways I couldn't have imagined as a child watching He-Man transform in front of Grayskull on my television screen.

I, too, had the power.

However, whether this power ultimately worked for me or led me to truths is another story.

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