If one day we should state our intention to head for the hills and disappear, may our words be true. Let not the lusts of the narcissistic self drive us back to the crowd, reinvented and redefined, to seek out undeserved praise once more. Let us not forever live a life seeking to be known, but grant us instead a hunger and thirst to know You.

May God protect us from leading others astray, and from being led astray, and from misguided followings, fan clubs, groupies and admirers. May He purify our hearts, keeps us straight, grant us humility, make us prayerful and gentle. May He not let us be a trial for others, may our words not be the cause of great harm. May He be the source of all our pleasure, may He tame our hearts and grant us peace. May He decree for us a blessed return.

May God preserve us from fame, celebrity and great acclaim.

What do people think of when they hear the words of Surah al-Ankabut, ‘Do the people think that they will be left to say, “We believe” and will not be tested?’

Who sits this side of the computer terminal, tapping out words that shoot out across the web? Nobody knows.

I have passed through those phases of great despair — despair at my own propensity to overwhelm myself with the same sins over and over — when a voice from within whispers, “There is no hope for you.”

God is Most Merciful insists optimism in one ear. But my sins are too many, too consistent, too repetitive, too foolish, too inexcusable… too much to bear. The pessimistic soul feels them weighing on him too heavily. It is not long before he is contemplating abandoning his soul to destruction, not because he disbelieves in God, but because he disbelieves in himself.

This blog has documented many such troughs in my own life, but I am not alone. A friend’s words were once littered with sentiments such as these, though few noticed at the time, attributing them to modesty or humility instead. “Be who I am not,” they once said, telling us how far we had misjudged them: “From these depths, I see what goodness is, and this is why I want you to aspire to it.”

These were not the words of one who had lost their faith in God, but of one who had lost faith in their own capacity to rise above whatever dragged them down. They saw what faith could do for you, but they had already given up on their own self. Such is the nature of despair.

But who despairs of God’s mercy except one who has gone astray? This verse reverberates in my mind each time I descend into that heavy gloom under the weight of my sins. There remains an intense fear that we take His forgiveness for granted, and that He might withdraw it from us. The fear remains that those sins will come back to haunt us, but hope must prevail for it is the antidote to despair. The ultimate outcome of despair is simply giving up: my sins are too many, too vast, too great, so why bother?

The answer, I have found over recent months, is to make gradual steps towards rectifying one’s condition. For a decade I was unable to read the Qur’an in Arabic, for I told myself that the task of learning it was beyond me, but these past few months I have begun to make progress. For five years my Qur’an teacher instructed us to make a regular habit of reading the Qur’an, but only in the past few months have we begun starting the day with a portion of Ya-Sin and ending it with Surat al-Mulk.

My shortcomings outweigh my progress for sure — and I am not immune to continuing to fail — but it is necessary to put in place an antidote to despair. It is necessary to take small steps now, in order to make greater strides in the future, if the Most Merciful wills. “Certainly,” says our Lord in a Hadith Qudsi reported by al-Tabarani, “I run the affairs of My servants by My knowledge of what is in their hearts.”

In these past few months when our little universe has changed immensely, when great blessings have descended upon us unexpectedly, I have come to appreciate the rope of Allah all the more. In God is the remedy to all of our affairs.

When I wandered back downstairs, Somali boys came to me grinning. “Salam alaikum,” they said, hoping I would recognise them, for they clearly recognised me. “It’s been years,” one of them replied when I finally ventured, “Long time no see.” These boys have grown up since I saw them last, when this was my local mosque. I suppose I have too.

Some of our fellow Muslims, many of them converts to the deen, had already lived through the Salafi inquisitions of the late 1990s that had demanded that the enthusiastic new faithful declare exactly which type of Salafi they were. Some Muslims, distraught by the collapse of the structures that had sustained their nascent faith, found their iman shattered and left the fold soon thereafter. Others held on, trusting in the guidance of Allah, recalling that they became Muslim for the sake of God, not for the sake of people, insisting that the schism would not shake them.

For some, salvation came in the form of what would later be called Traditional Islam. Early websites introduced them to material that had largely been unavailable in the English language until then and a new way forward emerged. Their old enthusiasm for their faith returned as they grasped hold of isnads and ijazahs connecting them back to the Prophet, peace be upon him. The sunnah sprang back to life in their lives, revealed in their conduct and words, and in their appeal to the words of the Prophet, peace be upon him, whenever they perceived shortcomings in themselves and those around them.

For a while it seemed that they had found themselves in the midst of a different kind of community, one that would not succumb to the very human failings they had witnessed previously. This community was, it was thought, less self-righteous, gentler, more grounded in the humility that faith promotes.

All of sudden, however, that illusion was blasted to pieces. In the tempest of an argument that came from nowhere, the very voices that had called people to faith now raged with a sectarian intolerance that stunned those who had benefitted from them in the past. It was apparent to me as an outside observer—still just a Muslim lacking investment in any particular group—that many of the participants were oblivious to the impact of their involvement in the new schism. They certainly did not see how their standing fell in the eyes of people who had once respected them immensely, and what that loss of guidance meant for them.

Some, distraught by the apparent disintegration of a firm foundation beneath them, found their iman teetering on the brink and left the fold soon thereafter. Others held on, trusting in the guidance of Allah, recalling that they became Muslim for the sake of God, not for the sake of people, insisting that the schism would not shake them. But just as this was not the first, it would also not be the last, and the aftershocks and convulsions went on, buffeting believers to and fro over the weeks and months that followed.

For some who had invested heavily in their faith, it was a calamity amongst calamities that severely tested them. Alas, for some it was the catalyst for a certainty that none of us would wish for now: that certainty in nothingness, that those of us who have been atheist have had the misfortune to experience in full. It was, if you like, The End.

Yet all of us are tested by degrees. Some of us by the call of our own nafs or childlessness. Some by divorce and in bringing up severely disabled children alone. Some by the destruction of their homeland and being forced to live as a refugee until the end. Some by a great flood, or by the pollution of their livelihood. Some by the death of a loved-one to cancer. Some by their own terminal illness. Some by slaughter and oppression. Some by wealth, and ease, and love and light and happiness. And some by the fitnas that return time after time.

My Qur’an teacher taught his class one day that the word fitna is of the Arabic root alfatn. In days of old there were people who would mix lesser metals with gold for personal gain, but their deception could be detected by tossing coins into the flames of a fire. The process of separating true gold from false in this way is know as alfatn. It is the law of God, our teacher taught us, to put people through tribulation to separate those made from gold from the rest:

2. Do the people think that they will be left to say, “We believe” and they will not be tried?

3. But We have certainly tried those before them, and God will surely make evident those who are truthful, and He will surely make evident the liars.

4. Or do those who do evil deeds think they can outrun Us? Evil is what they judge.

5. Whoever should hope for the meeting with God—indeed, the term decreed by God is coming. And He is the Hearing, the Knowing.

6. And whoever strives only strives for the benefit of himself. Indeed, God is Free from need of the worlds.

7. And those who believe and do righteous deeds—We will surely remove from them their misdeeds and will surely reward them according to the best of what they used to do.

8. And We have enjoined upon man goodness to parents. But if they endeavour to make you associate with Me that of which you have no knowledge, do not obey them. To Me is your return, and I will inform you about what you used to do.

9. And those who believe and do righteous deeds—We will surely admit them into Paradise among the righteous. {Surah al-Ankabut}

Nothing that happens in our lives occurs without the will of God. And it has been said that those most loved by God are often tested to ever greater degrees, raising their standing before their Lord beyond our wildest dreams. At times, when the darkest and most difficult moments descend, we may stumble and err, for of course we are but human. But our Lord is known as the Most Merciful, the Compassionate, and He leaves the door to repentance open for us repeatedly.

They said: “We give thee glad tidings in truth: be not then in despair!” He said: “And who despairs of the mercy of his Lord, but such as go astray?”  {Qur’an 15.55}

The door is open for as long as he prolongs our lives.

O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you for what you have done, and I shall not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of Me, I would forgive you. O son of Adam, were you to come to Me with sins nearly as great as the earth and were you then to face Me, ascribing no partner to Me, I would bring you forgiveness nearly as great as it. {Hadith Qudsi}

Here I am reminded of that old parable of the lost sheep from my childhood. Indeed of the parable of the prodigal son. May God keep us all on the straight path and raise us in a good state on the Day of Judgement. And may He guide those who have lost faith back to His Way, raising them stronger than before.

The Prophet, peace be upon him, was once asked, ‘What actions are most excellent?’ He replied, ‘To gladden the heart of human beings, to feed the hungry, to help the afflicted, to lighten the sorrow of the sorrowful and to remove the sufferings of the injured.’

He, peace be upon him, also said, ‘Give glad tidings and do not repel the people. Make things easy for the people and do not make it difficult for them and make them calm with glad tidings and do not repulse them.’

Are any more words required?

Yet when the talk ended, it was followed by almost half an hour of hysterical tears and sobbing. At this point my wife got up from the back of the room and disappeared into the kitchen to wait for it to end, but as I had taken my place close to the imam I was unable to move without causing disruption. So I just buried my eyes in the carpet and tried to work up some sympathy for their distress, wondering if my more muted reaction to terrible events centuries earlier betrayed my insensitivity to the suffering of mankind.

I began, I regret, to start wondering if the wailing around me would ever end. Grown men on my left and right were choking on their tears, the ladies at the back of the room the same. Of course I began asking myself if there was something wrong with me; if my heart had turned to stone and turned cold. But as it turned out, I needn’t have worried at all. All of a sudden, just as abruptly as the weeping had started, the great lament ceased.

Before me, the recently tearful imam rose to his feet and asked for the massive flat-panel television to be switched on for the match. Within thirty seconds of the sobbing ceasing, their great distress had seemingly been forgotten. As the screen brightened, all of the eyes already glued to the screen, the scene had completely changed. I offered my seat—the best in the house for TV viewing—to the imam, apologising that I wasn’t really into football. I can’t even remember which team we were supporting, only that it was playing Denmark.

I remembered this experience last week when I encountered a young man wailing about the injustices suffered by the people of Gaza at the hands of the Israelis. I don’t think any reasonable person would disagree with him. It was just that I watched as his mourning suddenly gave way to a lengthy discussion about the merits of one football team over an other in the upcoming World Cup. It seemed sort of symptomatic of our state these days.

A kind of amnesia has overcome us, our attention-span severely stunted. One moment we are on a knife-edge, poised in anger and rage. The next moment we have forgotten, wandering on obliviously, until the next crisis strikes.

The 1,040 mile pipeline will run from Turkmenistan’s Dauletabad gas field to Afghanistan. From there it will be constructed alongside the highway running from Herat to Kandahar, and then via Quetta and Multan in Pakistan. The final destination of the pipeline will be the Indian town of Fazilka, near the Pakistan-India border.

I asked for directions from Google Maps. You may recognise some of the names on the southern end of the route (click to enlarge).

In the course of the war on terror, we have slipped into the alternative fictional world of 2000AD in which Street Judges sentence and execute offenders instantly in their effort to enforce the law. We have lost all sense of moral proportion, shrugging off the actions of the squadron of MQ-9 Reaper “hunter-killer” drones as some kind of norm. Judge Dredd now sits at a computer terminal at a military base in Nevada, sending his robotic army wherever he wills. All the world is Megacity 1: Pakistan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq. In this alternative reality—now our tragic actuality—the world is his oyster. And we dumb clones.

How can it be that the deaths of wives, children and grandchildren are all considered an acceptable side effect of a policy of assassination? We no longer even talk of collateral damage: it is only necessary to mention that the target was an Al-Qaeda militant and anyone around him is suddenly non-human, whose death is inconsequential.

Some would point out that this is nothing beside the German blitz of British cities during World War Two, or in light of the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What is the death of a few children to the massacre of 50,000 civilians and the destruction of the entire city of Hamburg during one week in July in 1943? It is the way of war, is it not?

Not last time I checked. While it goes without saying that the targeting of civilians is absolutely prohibited in Islamic Law, with clear conditions laid down to avoid accidental civilian casualties, the Geneva Convention also makes plain the status of combatants and civilians on the battlefield.  Civilians may well have borne the brunt of military action over the past century, but under humanitarian law they are supposed to be protected people.

It is claimed that a man said to be a leading militant in Al-Qaeda—that great spectre of the war on terror—was killed last week by a missile fired from a robotic drone in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, near the town of Miran Shah. Nobody advocates capturing those charged with terrorism or rebellion and bringing them to trial, for this is war; indeed to even make such a suggestion is to admit some sort of sympathy for the worst of the worst.

Dare we speak up for those killed alongside him though? For it is claimed that his wife, three of his daughters, his granddaughter, and other men, women, and children, were also killed in the missile strike. They were collateral damage? They were guilty by association? Or is this a new post-patriarchal age when we dare not speak of women and children for fear of patronising the victims of war? Must we remain silent in reverence to the new wisdom of our age?

If not now, when will we awake? Last July, the US Air Force released a report entitled, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047,” in which it proposes a drone that could fly over a target and then make the decision whether or not to launch an attack, all without human intervention. The drones are not going away, nor the so-called war on terror.

So I see those crocodile tears for Israel’s actions this week are already dry, for if the nations truly cared then, surely they would condemn these other breaches of international humanitarian law too. Isn’t it this the death of civilisation?

A dear Puerto Rican friend who has lived in the UK for the past twenty years with her English husband has recently decided to move back to the States due to the increasing racism she has faced in the job market over the past few years. One of her managers told her, ‘Go back home, Paki.’

Some people don’t even bother to ask, ‘Where you from?‘ before they jump to a conclusion and tell the person to go back there anyway. Case in point: the Hindu family who were victim of an apparently anti-Muslim attack last week, during which a mother had a pig’s trotter thrown in her face.

An elderly Armenian friend of ours was also the victim of an anti-Muslim assault on a London bus a few years ago. Her attacker showered her in hate-filled words about Muslims being the source of all the problems in the world as she repeatedly punched her in the head. Yet that friend of ours is an Armenian Christian, who fled persecution in Iran.

And then there was the circle for Muslim converts I attended several years ago during which a Sikh convert was made to feel decidedly unwelcome by some white sisters who made a point of insisting that this was an event for converts only. Our brothers and sisters of Hindu and Sikh origin¹ are too easily cast aside.²

So it’s really quite easy for me to laugh off my Palestinian-Bosnian roots when it has no real impact on the way I live my life. Were it to become an obstacle, however, I have a feeling I might not be quite so jolly.

Anyhow, a funny thing happened today. As I sat eating my lunch at work, which included some lovely North African cakes from a friend, my Director began probing my roots. Did I have Moorish ancestry, he asked, Spanish blood or a connection with the Middle East?

As you can imagine, I laughed just a little more, and thought to myself: if only he knew!

A Palestinian friend I often walk back into town with after the midday prayer at lunchtime told me that he thought I was Syrian or other-Arab when he first met me. In my own town, England is the last place I could possibly be from when a Muslim shopkeeper interrogates me about my roots. Are you Palestinian, asked one of them? Are you Bosnian, asked another.

On Monday as I made my way to mosque following my new more pleasant route, another old man stopped to offer me a lift. He didn’t say much at first and then he suddenly piped up with the question I’ve become used to from my kind volunteer chauffeurs. ‘Where you from, brother?‘

Until that day, I had always heard it as, ‘Which town are you from?’ because I know they don’t see me in the evening when I have driven back home. So I offered my usual reply. ‘Chesham,’ I said.

‘No originally?’ he asked.

‘Ah, you’ve noticed my funny accent? Originally I’m from Yorkshire. Well Hull, but I won’t go into that.’

‘No brother, where you from originally?’

Hmm, I thought, that must have been what all the other drivers meant, and they were just too polite to pursue my origins to the end, concluding I was either stupid or obstructive. ‘Well I’m English,’ I said, suddenly realising that the identity I am so comfortable with just doesn’t figure in their minds. ‘But my grandmother’s Irish if that’s any help. How far back do you want to go?’

‘Oh no, brother,’ he said, his laughter causing him to choke, ‘it’s alright.’

Last night my wife’s Qur’an study partner gave us a clue about the misgivings of some in our community. Her children, she explained, believe that all brown people are Muslims and all white people are Christians. They were once much perturbed by the sight of our white faces in the mosque, but we can excuse little children their strange questions.

I was reminded then of that strange conversation on my way back from tarawih prayers in Ramadan one year, when a man of Pakistani lineage ran though a list of all the East European and Caucasian states I could possibly be from, before telling me that he had lived here for forty years. I have no idea why I strung him along with monosylablic replies to each ethnicity he proffered, or if he just could not accept my, ‘I’m from here’ and had to delve deeper. Either way, by the time we parted company, I knew my place as the fresh faced arrival from a modern EU state: there was a pecking order here. It was all quite surreal. I knew about the north-south divide, but this was ridiculous.

I’m sure most people don’t think this way, but all of these experiences have got me thinking. When I moved to this town I never thought to introduce myself formerly, to stand up in the mosque and announce that I was an English Muslim. I just assumed, as people tend to when they’re content in their skin and culture, that my from-here-ness was taken for granted. But now, digesting my Palestinian-Bosnian-Czech-Syrian-Ossetian-Tunisian roots, I am starting to think that maybe I should have said something.

But then, does it really matter? What difference does it make? We’re all strangers, really. I can’t say as I write this that it consumes me inside, making me burn with rage. Instead I sit here smiling as I type it out. I don’t know about anybody else, but I just find it bloody hilarious. Though I do understand my more serious friends don’t quite see it that way. Skin heads and bovver-boots.

I realised that almost a decade had passed since then, but my mind was somehow back on those days before I became Muslim in 1998. I only had a partial copy of the novel on my computer, which I managed to retrieve with some recovery software about 2 weeks after I deleted everything in 2002, but I had destroyed every hard-copy I had at the time. The copy with my friend was the possible exception, but I was unsure; I may have destroyed that one too.

Apparently I have asked this question before, and it couldn’t be found last time either, so that was that.

On my return home this evening, however, my thoughts turned to a basket filled with old disks, wires and obsolete gadgets. While I threw out the ancient PalmPilot, floppy-drive and modem in December, I had decided to keep hold of my father’s old zip drive. My own drive went to the tip, for my computer is incompatible with its serial port, but my father had the USB version. I wondered if I might find those files on one of the old 100mb zip disks in the drawer.

And so I set about connecting the bulky hardware to my computer. It froze at first, confused by technology of the last millennium, but it was finally there. The disk whizzed round in the drive reassuringly, and then a box popped up on my screen. Did I want to open the folder? Indeed I did.

Alas, as I thought, none of the files were there. In my purge of my past I had been scrupulous: CDs went in the bin, floppy disks were reformatted and the zip-disks wiped clean. But a thought occurred to me: if I had just deleted the files from the zip disks, they might still be there underneath. I was only able to partially recover the files on my computer two weeks after the purge, because in the intervening days new files had been written over the hidden files marked for deletion. But if I had not used the zip disk since then, the files would still be there.

Without giving it any more thought, I paid a visit to filehippo and downloaded Recova straight away.  Within three minutes it was up and running, and I was already scanning the first of the disks. This one proved fruitless; the few fragments that were there were marked red, meaning that they were too corrupted to be recovered. I was disappointed, but undeterred. In my stack of disks there was another labelled, Data Backup 23.08.97.

With the apparently empty disk connected, the retrieval software set to work, and gradually a list of over six hundred files reappeared. This time only a dozen of them were marked red; the rest sat before me with a refreshing green icon placed on their left. I searched first for my novel, and it was there: all 28 chapters, complete.  I retrieved those to my desktop first, but soon I was wondering about the other forgotten files. They spanned a period of five years, from 1994 to 1999, divided by that May Day event in 1998.

Opening each of the files over the next hour was like a trip down memory lane. Here was some sort of record of my path towards Islam and beyond. It reminded me not just how far I have come, but also what led me here. I may not have known it at the time, but many of those angry words would be answered as if they were the supplications of a believer. I do wonder what happened to all the folk I came into contact with over that period. I know there are some I should thank for their prayers.

Life is strange. We meet others momentarily, but wander on, forgetting them. I wonder what became of my companions, of my friends and supposed enemies. I wonder if they remember those days too. Or if it is just me, caught in the past, wondering, wondering.

The past is sealed to us now. But we will revisit it, that’s for sure. A Day is approaching when all of it will come back to us. The past is sealed, but we have repentance and the opportunity to make today and tomorrow better. Today’s regrets are a great reminder. The past is sealed, but the future is open. Do I want to look back on my life from my deathbed with more regrets like these?

A Day is coming when we shall be handed a record of all things. The retrieved data on a zip disk is but a faint reminder of a reality drawing near.

I have seen many blogs and have don research on many but most of them lack of good substance but I would say that you are doing a great job and keep the good work on

…until it occured to me that it had a familiar ring. I scooped it up wholesale and plopped it into a Google search. It seems I’m not alone in receiving such wondrous praise. A marvel to behold!

There was nothing remarkable about the book itself, except for its particularly sloppy style and poor punctuation. Indeed, I suppose the same story has been recounted a million times before, only with mildly different characters. This was no ground-breaking tale or spectacular innovation; it was, perhaps, just another tired-out rewriting of a quite ordinary life.

Yet as I occupied the lives of those characters for a few short months — mainly in the darkened hours — as I hammered the story into the keyboard and burnt my retinas with the word processor’s midnight glow, a whole new world opened up before me. It is quite true to say that this project started my writing habit, having avoided any kind of hard work throughout my schooling, but this is not what I have in mind. Rather, though completely unintended, my investment in those semi-imagined lives carried me along a path towards an unexpected destination.

The story accompanied two quite unlikely companions: a young Sikh woman from an irreligious family attempting to rediscover her faith and a young white man running away from his. But the story was not about religion, for these faiths were purely markers of identity. For the jumble of atheist, Sikh, Christian and Muslim characters race was the defining identity that caused tensions between them. The fact that I had never in my life met a real Sikh, except in passing, did not seem problematic.¹

So a tale began of how two insecure characters could have become friends were it not for the intervention of their other acquaintances: the Pakistani Muslim girls who befriended the Sikh at school and warned her of the white boy’s crimes, and the boy’s Muslim friends who derided the girl for her odd ways. The Muslim characters were one dimensional, with few redeeming qualities. The girls were judgemental and racist, while the boys befell one misfortune after another.

Naturally, as these tales almost always go, eventually the two saw through the machinations of their advisers and decided to become friends. And so of course the Sikh girl’s brother threatened to break the white boy’s back, and her friends turned their backs on her, and a friendship was exaggerated into something akin to fornication, and though they denied that it was anything more, the girl finally faced the consequences of insinuation and was thrown out of the house and sent away.

And yet that was just the beginning. Fifteen chapters and a hundred thousand words later, a period of fifteen years having passed by in its pages, the novel ended on her son’s first day of school. Her job now ‘was to see that Benjamin-Piara, and Laila, would succeed the way she did, but without the heartbreak and the struggle.’  Apart from the terribly poor writing, it was quite a grim novel — the encounters with racists and criminals were hardly light entertainment — but it had a happy ending, of sorts.

For me, however, that was not the end of it. About four months after completing the project I moved down to London to begin a university degree. A few of my fellow students read copies of my novel, but they were all far too polite to offer any constructive criticism. It did not matter, for I had already come to terms with its flaws. Finding myself in a hugely cosmopolitan environment, interacting with people from all sorts of backgrounds, I was suddenly conscious of the one dimensional nature of the characters in the book and the great complexities of real people. Gradually I was becoming sympathetic to some of the antagonists in my novel and more critical of the two main characters.

As the year wore on and I honed my writing skills penning essays on environmental degradation and theories of economic development, I knew that I had to rewrite that novel. At first I just wanted to improve the quality of the writing, which I knew was poor and immature, but as I committed to revisiting the story it began taking on a life of its own.

The Sikh girl’s Muslim friends were not as bad as I had thought. One was just principled in her beliefs. She had her faults like anyone, but her objections to the boy came not from malice, but out of genuine concern for her friend. The Sikh girl was not as certain about beliefs as I had thought: she was just putting out feelers, stumbling to find her way in an environment devoid of guidance. The boy was no pure victim of the vindictiveness of others: he had played an active role in messing up his life.

By the time I returned to my word processor at the start of the summer break and began the novel anew, it was already a different book. Where it had once been clearly about race, now it was threaded with ambivalent questions of faith. Where there was once a certainty about the rightness of some characters and wrongness of others, there was now uncertainty in everyone. The Muslim girl that was the thorn in the side of the main players in the first draft had somehow won my respect.

In the process of writing a piece of fiction, it was as if the writer had moved a thousand miles. My summer break proved too short and by my return to university to begin my second year of studies I had only completed half of the rewrite, and that was as far as I ever got. My writing had carried me — though not alone, for there were other influences too — towards another world.  Before the following summer I would be a Muslim myself. Not a well defined, one dimensional creature, but a complicated, ambivalent character that a far greater Creator had willed into existence.

I shall forever be grateful for the pen, for bringing me this far from home. And to the publisher who recognised that the manuscript was best consigned to the bin.