‘How about some christian music’ he asked of the Naga masseur called Andrew.

‘Excuse me sir?’

‘Some Mozart, Beethoven or Wagner perhaps.

‘Sir?’

Musicians of another woof than the buddhist world music of now’.

Silence is gold beneath the wastling sheets of silk and oil glidened hands.

La Forteresse of Mount Mgouna

Sensing, diving, swimming and drowning  – open to all with courage

The nafs, the self, this thing which tends to congeal and harden into a pseudo-reality through habit, had been shaken up. This self, born of two and a half decades of European democratic culture and the structural propaganda of school, university and the media. Shaken by poverty, by the exotic character of Morocco, by the reputedly ‘difficult’, ‘foreign’ language of Arabic, by illness, by the super-chlorinated water, by hashish, by opium and the occasional chemical trip, and by the changes inherent in physical travel. Shaken to the point of disintegration, to the point of no longer ordering one’s affair, to the point of seeing the moment, reading the moment and being only in the moment. The moment was ripe. An awareness of the heart and something other than the world of the sensory made its entry. A need for meaning. A readiness. A surrender of the self despite one’s self.

A shabby town-square perhaps Zagora, perhaps Ouzarzate, perhaps somewhere nearby, mint tea in the café when an English registered car drew up.

In it were Shaykh Abdal Qadir as-Sufi and Dr Abdalkhabir al-Amirki. I went over and asked the latter, the driver, if we could continue down the road with them. With great majesty and force the former said ‘get in’. I mentioned my companionne in the café.  ‘Get her!’

We stopped after leaving the town. F. and Mason’s with toast on a gas primus in the desert. They were westerners no doubt, and surely interesting in their relationship to each other – most polite and crisp.

Almond blossom in the ochre qasbah of Qalaat Mgouna, against blue, with pomegranate trees, apricots, and rivulets running to the side of our sufra, our table cloth, spread on the ground, served by a black man, ex-slave but by preference still around after the voices’ decree of ‘liberté‘, the booming thumping around us of the workers pounding the moist adobe earth between the shuttering to make the new walls, accompanied by Allah, Allah, Allah

Sight of veiled girls and woman half hiding as they look on at us from an outbuilding. When I asked Shaykh Abdal Qadir why, he said you will understand later. Shaykh Muhammad al Basri asks for a room with reed matting to be prepared for the night for both of us. With hindsight, most accommodating.

Singing evening in the pink room of geometric designs, then eating together with Si Muhammad al Basri, the Muqaddam of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al Habib and the father of the present Shaykh Mortada Elboumashouli, and his brother. The enormous platters of meat and prunes, of chickens, of sweet angel hair pasta with raisons, following one after the other, culminating in the tea-making of a man in the corner of the room surrounded by the utensils and served by another with boiling water – all an explosion of colour, and sensual for us, the poor, the unknowing, the seeking. The sharing too, the many hands, the conversation.

A realisation that everything was beginning to make sense, that the turbulence of the past was just a shake up for this. Meanings rushed in to every scene, every conversation, every movement. I was moving now into something written, destined, I had no choice. It was only afterwards that I came upon the rational explanation for what was happening – in the Quran where Allah ta’ala says ‘When Allah desires to guide someone, He expands his breast to Islam.’ Despite the overwhelming changes in existential perception, I was to know later that it was quite normal.

Shower, purity afterwards, without knowing formally that a ghusl is necessary before becoming Muslim. It had happened despite my self, my heart had recognized the truth in those men from Qalaat Mgouna and those who had called me in. This I realized later was called fitra, that natural awareness of each of us of what is right. My fitra could dominate after the structures of childhood dissolved. I began to perceive that Islam was not a religion but a way of being, a way of right acting, and an ever present awareness of the Truth which was not out there, foreign, but rather already contained within oneself – and covered variously by the fantasies and structures crystalized by the self into a personal history which one worships to a greater or lesser degree. This worship of personality yields unwillingly to this fitra also residing in the self. The colour, the joie de vivre, the affirmation of life, the social reality of Qalaat Mgouna was the deen, was a way of living far from the christian stereotypes of being in the world. So this becoming Muslim was not a sudden conversion but a gradual uncovering to myself of the veils of the self. The initial uncoverings were mind-blowing, as the term went then, i.e. the mind or the usual parameters of thinking were blown upon to be able to receive the – as I later understood – the nafahaat of the Lord, the breezes of mercy and knowledge; wave upon wave of new seeings engulfed my conscious self. They became less reduced in size but continued and still continue to this day for the self, the veil, is vast, as vast as the universe itself.

I was aware that my companionne was not subject to the same, I was losing her or she was losing me. A break ensued. Painful. Kataba Allah ma kataba.