How Red Sneakers Changed My Life

Saudi Village Yamama Painting - Saudi Village Yamama Fine Art Print -  Yvonne Ayoub With a wide, vague , almost sensual turn of his arm he describes a circle in the air - a circle which encompasses everything that belongs to this life: the poor, dusky room, the wind and its eternal roar, the relentless advance of the sands; longing for happiness, and resignation to what cannot be changed; the platter full of dates; the struggling orchards behind their shield of tamarisks; the fire on the hearth; a young woman's laughter somewhere in the courtyard beyond: and in all these things and in the gesture that has brought them out and together I seem to hear the song of a strong spirit which knows no barriers of circumstance and is at peace with itself. Excerpt from The Road to Mecca by Muhammad Asad

How else then should we worship God? Did He not create both, soul and body, together? And this being so, should man not pray with his body as well as with his soul? Listen, I will Tell you why we Muslims pray as we pray. We turn toward the Kaaba, God's holy temple in Mecca, knowing that the faces of all Muslims, wherever they may be, are turned to it in prayer, and that we are like one body, with Him as the centre of our thoughts. First we stand upright and recite from the Holy Quran, remembering that it is His Word, given to man that he may be upright and steadfast in life. Then we say, "God is the Greatest," reminding ourselves that no one deserves to be worshipped but Him; and bow down deep because we honour Him above all, and praise His power and glory. Thereafter we prostrate ourselves on our foreheads because we feel that we are but dust and nothingness before Him, and that He is our Creator and Sustainer on high. Then we lift our faces from the ground and rema...

Frere Hall, Karachi There’s something unforgettable about Karachi. There’s something raw and sensuous about this city, something that unfailingly tugs at my heart and always manages to hit a nerve. It is my home town after all. The sight of a familiar restaurant or just the sun setting over the city is enough to draw out memories I thought I’d had enough of. When we’re driving down Shahrah-e-Faisal, past the surprisingly tidy roadsides and the palm trees swaying in the ever-present Karachi breeze, and we pass the PAF Museum flags fluttering in the cool air and the railway track beyond which is easy to miss (unless of course, if there is a train barreling down it) and the green shrubbery-probably the only greenery you’ll be seeing for a while-then on past the formidable Air Force Base gates flanked by armed guards and the Quranic verse inscribed on one of them ‘…prepare any strength you can muster against them’ which never ceases to impress me, I feel an overwhelming emotion r...

I feel I should go to Norfolk Virginia and drink gin with sailors on leave from the Alabama , talking baseball and Polaris missiles and Steve Martin movies, another gin with lime juice, then Balto, Balto, hitch-hike in and out of Baltimore for days back and forth for days in a row discussing the jobs of whoever gives me rides, salesmen, shippers, small-time dispatchers of the much that can be dispatched. For the ACTUALITY of it! Books dominate my head. I read in them, I read at them, I'm well into my thirties. What about real life? The woman in the light-blue skirt on the cigarette billboard has such big thighs! What is it about thighs? Smooth and weighty, weighty and smooth: you can tell there's really something there. And to think that the woman must really exist, it's a photo after all not  a painting, she is somewhere in America - and to think that some guy gets to lie down on her and her thighs…She's a model, she probabl...

Today is the 25th of December, the Quaid-e-Azam's birthday and Christmas. I've gotta admit I haven't been feeling too good today. I'm trying to be optimistic, I'm trying to think positive, I'm trying to convince myself there's hope for this country yet. But maybe I'm being a gullible fool, thinking that this country can miraculously pull out of the downward economic, lawless spiral it's gotten sucked into.  Consider this,11 people died in Karachi today according to Dawn.com ( http://dawn.com/2012/12/25/karachi-violence-claims-seven-lives-3/ ), but that's nothing unusual, right? Pick up the City News ANY DAY of the week, and rest assured you'll find at least three or four violent deaths (murders? target killings? Is there a difference?), if not more. And it's always the same 'two unknown armed men on a motorcycle' who descend out of nowhere, do their dirty work and always manage to 'escape', to 'flee the scene of the...

Where to begin? I haven’t written about anything that’s happened for too long. I’ve probably been MIA from my own journal for a year or so, okay, fine at least half a year. Sometime during 2012, I stopped turning my thoughts and emotions into words. I suppose this implies that I’m not an emotional wreck anymore.  At least, I’m more stable than I used to be, Alhamdulillah. My emotions aren’t much of a rollercoaster ride either, and that’s because I made a much-needed internal change. I made an effort to return to Allah SWT and THAT has made all the difference in the world. Obviously, I’m not the person I used to be. And I slowly begin to see the pieces of my life falling into place, like a clouded up picture that’s beginning to clear. I won’t say I’m in a position to see it completely, but I perceive the shape it’s likely to take on at the end, Inshaa Allah. When I started my blog, and wrote that first post talking about how it was going to be a story where red sneakers ch...

" It is the road to God  that matters now, the ragged road, the wood...W ould   that first world, bared now to the word  God,  wade  with you, through wood, into the weald and weather   of the stars?" The Road Home - Gillian Allnutt Tall, sweeping trees line the sidewalk, leaving me to duck under their branches laden with red and yellow and brown Autumn leaves as I make my way down the street. It's a quiet, sunny afternoon and a slight breeze is in the air. For once, I am whole and unbroken. For once, everything around me is startlingly clear, and detailed, and I can see each groove carved in the aged tree trunk beside me and the patterned veins in the dead leaves that lie at my feet and I can hear the silence of this street and the sound of my blood pounding through my ears and the buildings have never seemed so square and the cars so glaringly bright with the sunlight bouncing off their roofs and the people never so solid. The world around m...