“Why are some bits fard and some bits sunna and some bits mustahabb?”

he asked unwittingly.

“So she can do it fast when the croc appears, briskly when the northwind blows and at leisure then the sun appears.”

Three in all, one larger leading, but gathered in one étincelant flash, schillernd in the rare Med. sun of the north, three aras from that half of the island in Nusantara or from the Sud Americas perhaps, but in fact fleeing freely flightly from the local zoo on the Baltic. “An opening for sure” he said,”like that of Rilke’s caged panther”. “Yes! indeed, three muses, after we had talked yesterday of Sulaiman’s hudhud, the Wiedhopf might have called them up, its sister birds overreaching it in splendour and exoticism”. “But why, where’s the wisdom?” he asked. “O Wachet auf!” said Bach and see Him who inspired me.” So we woke up together and woke others – for the aras arrested us in time’s moment to point to the Greater Time of man and woman’s life, broke us out of the moving steel box as it kept aligned to the regulatory white road lines beside the Tierpark, stopped the car for just a moment, only to move on in the trafficked rush of forgetfulness.

The three could not now return to their aviary; would rather die in the snows of the north.

Are its changing tentacles becoming darker? its hunt for the small fry – resigned to the obligatory schooling in literacy in order to read the daily press and of course the tax forms; submitted to enforced payment of octopuz tv and radio; accepting of coerced jabs for health’s sake – when 13 of a hundred normal cits are winos, 18 hypochondriaks, 14 with ment-health issues, 29 in deep debt, 15 druggies and a whole lot more of zomboid insomiaks unable to follow the enlightened discours – is becoming more difficult.

It has swum into a rock pool, unable to rise, colours fading, visible for all to see. The gastro-man from the pizza ghetto may spot it and may yet give the coup de grâce.

It has time to reflect as the hungry sun dries its skin to leather: “The more small fry, the less my Maker, for I am intelligent and despite my machinations, came from HIm”.

“The private sphere is heilig“, he proclaimed on the radio, and so it might seem from the endless codes, passwords and encryptions; but does it also mean that holiness has even been transfered from the kirk in the mind of the faithful – faithful to what? – to the net. “No! concepts, brain-bound, are still heilig”, said the Texan shooting the black intruder with his blunderbuss from behind the family shrine.

Some have Shaykhs of instruction who command to gnosis through action;

others, shaykhs of spirituality.

He, may He be recognised as sublime, has said “When you see them, their outward form appeals to you, and if they speak you listen to what they say. But they are like propped-up planks of wood”. Nifaq is also a luke warm trust in Him, not just out and out hypocrisy.

Talking heads and wooden posts. Mozart is a must for the arabs im Nu.

Or: a listening to Tamburlaine’s resonance across the centuries and across desert wastes to Europe’s door; or: at least a glance at Webern’s diamonds. Tamburlaine would have felt most uneasy weighing up with predatory eye the unguarded supermarkets. C’est pas vrai!

Tough the task of editing The Surging Sea, a recent tafsir and scientific work of tasawwuf, when tasting the states of aforesaid; grammar in delerium, beyond the furrow, aus der Reihe muss manchmal getanzt werden.

اللهم اشفي الشيخ كما شفاني

Fahrenheit 451

As he entered the house with no books he felt ill at ease, but cheered at the sight of the dazzling pool midst the pecan trees, of the turning turners clothed in white, much later, in the last bastion of the deen in Andalusia.

O Gott! he, the local, vocal, known humanist, exclaimed for a slight social faux pas in company – using an unpurified language sprung to perhaps return and purify him, or his offspring. Thank the Lord, those present responded for the deep embedded linguistic habits o’er bridging the seven or eight generations of a-theeizm,

but o he said I cannot record this until I have gained experience of the world and this meant diving into the sea of the state mafiosi, keep company with the I.T. misfits,  thieving whales and petty fishes.

He, may the peace and blessings on him, at his death, left only his weapons, his white mule and the waqfed real-estate for the son of the way.

The clever-heads from amongst those who cover up do not light brigade the deen but rather urge to an alteration of the fitra, the natural state of man: without the vigour of this, anyone, however submitted to the Haqq, will have great difficulty in finding the strength and balance required for worship of Him, ta‘ala.

The nervous pecking energy of spring in the exquisite splendour of the wagtail on the tarmac, just flown from the med perhaps,

raised him from the winter sleep to see the dead short-eared kid grasped by him, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, to make a likeness to the Companions of its lesser worth than the dunya,

and then back to the red smear of first-flush linden leaves and on back to Queen Consort Eleanor, as a likeness of early immigrants to England from Normandy,

only to demonstrate, he thought, how the people of the wool, deem the present time to be the Age of the Nafs, where the wagtail for many is one of 350 000000 and so not on the endangered list, and the kid is religious abstrusity, the linden leaves from a numbered tree, logged at the Amt, Eleanor a foreigner who led a crusade.

So he disappeared for a month or two, took a swim, unhinged himself from himself, and looked again at the wagtail who flew to the blue of the sky, again at the kid and the one who had grasped it, again at the linden to its winged, therapeutic, summery leaves and again at Eleanor’s  struggle prior to the parameters the Age of Nafs.