Young Writers Society

Chapter One

Did I love Allah?

Sometimes, I asked myself that question at the sound of Fajr Azan, and sometimes I forced myself not to ponder the matter for too long, lest the answer was shameful or boldly sinful. Because as beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and as I hardly managed to behold any kind of beauty in this wretched world, I also failed utterly to feel even the least warm spark of love inside my clamping heart.

And of that, I was ashamed and shyly disgraced. How would a man dare not search for love and admiration for his own creator? When one believed in a creator, an upper hand, a superior self that moved and made all in perfect consistency and flawless power, one would fall in deep respect and a somewhat divine adoration for him at once. Only shame reached my chest, nevertheless, especially when I remembered my slain mother’s favorite verses of Quran.

Slain, yes, but mind not the horrors and truths behind my murdered mother and try as intently as I always did to concentrate on the pure Godly words, eh?

‘Successful indeed are the believers. Those who offer their Salat with all solemnity and full submissiveness. And those who turn away from evil and vain talk. And those who pay the Zakat. And those who guard their chastity.’

Allah said those words, but in evident Arabic of course. Hm… I always wondered how difficult it would be to try and achieve all those marvelously ethical deeds that would satisfy God with my life, but… Well, I never succeeded to let the matter go any further than mere wonder, let alone the strength to obey such clear orders.

Docility was recently quite… arduous. I wasn’t one of those who rushed hastily to their praying mats several times a day, nor did I bother much to give away a part of my adequate wealth for those in need. Even my chastity, it wasn’t a quite fatal matter to think about and try to preserve.Maybe because I was a man that I cared less about ethics and good deeds? Yes, a young man in his very early twenties would bother himself more with succulent pleasures of life than to speculate in sacred words of God.

But then, what difference did it make to be a man or a woman in this day and age? We were equal, they said, were we not?

Well, I certainly had a different opinion, while I couldn’t see, feel or think of any sort of similarity between the two heavenly created genders. Heavenly, while muscles and soft skin danced in utter harmony around us every single day on sidewalks and in workplaces. And it remained so terribly monotonous, the life that we gulped down so swiftly, so recklessly like a glass of vodka until the mystical beauty of our own nature- our own bodies!- failed to reach us as radiant, but merely existent.

I used to care so utterly for such radiance; such abysmal and endless divinity used to tantalize me till the point of drunkenness. But… it didn’t last for as long as I imagined, and all of that later reached me as unnecessary and hated one year ago.

Seven months had passed, to be so brutally precise, since I became a changed man. It was the very second when my greatest hope was to resurrect my mother’s soul by kissing her blood that spilled on the white Bedouin rug. It was the paralyzing stigma of loss and defeat that altered me, as I rubbed the sharp bits of her shattered skull until my hands had wounded and bled over the spot where her calcified corpse used to lay.