Minhaj Firdaws’ diary
Today is Friday.
I am spending my weekend holiday in Umm Salal Muhammedh, Qatar.
I am lucky. I came to Qatar at a time of the year closer to the winter. My main concern before I came here was about the climate. I could not even think of the tropical desert weather.
Sri Lanka, of course, being situated close to the equator, is a tropically hot country. However, the temperature in the hill country is somewhat lower than the average temperature of the rest of the country, and it is a cold place by national standards.
It is one of the main reasons many tourists prefer hill country in Sri Lanka.
Qatari weather in early December closely resembled that of rainy Kandy weather. It made me feel at home, not in a desert land. Despite its original identity as a desert, Qatar is not a desert land where people still travel on camels. It is a fabulously wealthy modern country.
I did not have much work to do in the morning on Friday. I had to wash my clothes. However, I would do it in the evening. After a whole week of working, people in the dormitory where I stayed preferred not to do anything on Friday morning hours except sleeping. Probably, this is one of the luxuries only the ones working abroad could enjoy. They do not have family or social commitments at their arm’s length.
I feel that life in Qatar is boring. There are no overcrowded buses and no noisy markets. People here possess too much wealth. An average citizen is wealthier than the richest men in my village. It is not surprising. This country possesses God-given natural gas resources. The government has implemented several community welfare measures.
An uneducated South Asian labourer here in Qatar would earn much more than that he can earn in his own country. With the small amount of money he earns here, he would be able to build a comfortable house or save enough money to start his own business in his home country, which would help him spend the rest of his life comfortably.
I feel sorry that I did not come here right away after my university studies finished. The truth was that I loved my village, Marudur.
I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the village. I wanted to be around my mother and siblings. I wished to engage in a few valuable activities beneficial to my townlet, peculiarly for the benefit of the youngsters. However, Allah’s plan has been different. All my efforts in the village went in vain.
I earned many powerful enemies around me. Those were, despite many of them being my father’s age, used to look at me as one of their rivals. Instead of using me for the society they are obliged to serve, these people had been looking for an accurate moment to character-assassinate me to sideline me from mainstream society. They did it at last.
Uncle Shareek and Aunt Fauzia have been literally my enemies for all my life. These two enemies could walk into our house and create damage like a thunderstorm whenever they want. They successfully broke the hope my mother had for me. That made it impossible to gain moral support from my mother for the fruitful projects I involved myself. The Marudur-First leaflet came as the climax point for all these things.
There is godly wisdom behind everything that happens in our life. When I look at all such turbulence by staying in overseas land, everything looks small and tiny, and my wound no longer hurts me.
****
The time was around 6.30 am.
Everyone in the dormitory was sound asleep. It was not my routine habit to sleep after dawn prayer. So, I thought of going jogging in the sunlight. I used to go jogging on Fridays for the last couple of weeks since I arrived.
I passed through the dormitory corridor to get outdoors. The room next to the corridor was where some Moroccan employees resided.
“Hello, brother, where are you going?”, one of the men from Morocco called me. He was a very friendly, God-fearing man.
“Going jogging. Just thought of getting some direct sunlight, are you coming?”.
“Yeah, bro, wait a minute, I am on the way”, he said.
I kept waiting.
On the television screen in his room, Al-Jazeera Arabic network was broadcasting another live air strike Israel had targeted in Gaza.
My mind could not digest the magnitude of destruction and devastation that occurred in Gaza. Once again the targets were the children and women. All these butcherings occur when the whole world is watching.
In the next breaking news, an European foreign minister in Doha was making his usual typical, hippocratic shameless threnody : “Israel has the right to self defend”.
In another breaking news, the US had utilised its veto power in the United nations security council to put aside a security council decision favouring ceasefire. This occurred when the whole world stood against the war.
Democracy seems to be something that only the Western white skinned people deserve to enjoy in their home countries. It has no place in the international arena. An overwhelming majority decision could be put aside in the name of veto. After all, the country named Israel is an occupying power and a colonial project which did not exist in the world map prior to 1948. What sort of world are we living in? “May God’s curse be upon oppressors, oh Allaah, protect our children, our women and the people of Gaza,” I prayed from the in-depth part of my heart. I could only pray just like any other helpless Muslim do.
My personal wounds sounded as if they were meaningless when I looked at the sufferings of the people of Gaza. At the same time, the international hypocrisy revived the vivid memories within myself of the hypocrisy of people in my own townlet, of the lies they propagated.
My Moroccan brother came soon after getting ready for the jogging. We started walking.
“I am not an Arab”, he said in the middle of our conversation.
“Really?”.
“Yeah, I am an Amazghi. Have you heard of Amazhag?”
“No… I haven’t”.
“You have probably read about Tariq bin Ziyad…!!”.
“Yeah, Tariq bin Ziyad was the commander of the Arab-Islamic army that occupied Spain in early Islamic history”.
“Absolutely right. He was an Amazighi".
“I have heard he belonged to Berbars”.
“Yeah, Berbars are Amazhighis”.
“Really?”
“I learned Arabic later. I was not an Arab by birth”.
“Any way you speak Arabic very fluently. You are an Arab by tongue and heart. I also want to learn Arabic”.
“I have heard that the Sri Lankan muslims are the descendents of Arab traders. Are you an Arab descendent?”, he asked me.
“I don’t know. Until recently we haven’t secured our family history as Arab people do”, I said, “but, there is a very high chance of myself being an Arab descendent. History says that Arab travellers were in touch with our country for hundreds of years, even before the birth of Prophet Muhammed”.
“Peace be upon him”.
“They brought Islam to our country after the spread of Islam in Arabia. Then the Portuguese arrived in our country in the early sixteenth century”.
“Alright”.
“They were looking at Arabs as their rivals”.
“Okay”.
“The Portuguese rule had been a hard time for Muslims in Sri Lanka. So, many of the Muslims migrated to the inland hill country. Hill Country was not under Portuguese control. It was under the Kandyan Kings. Kanyan kings welcomed Muslims and settled them in various locations within their Kingdom. History says that such settlements are the number of present-day Muslim villages in the Hill Country. Even my own townlet, Marudur, is among them”.
“So, Islam has spread in Sri Lanka by traders”.
“Yeah, to some extent, but it appears that it was not a mass spread. There seems to be no evidence of mass scale conversions to Islam. So, most of the Muslims in Sri Lanka today are Arab descendents, except Malays and Indian migrants”.
“You have learned a lot of history”, the Moroccan brother complimented me.
“Not much. I used to teach history sometimes. So, I used to read history”, I said, “any way, there is no superiority to the Arabs over non-Arabs, or to non-Arabs over Arab, except through Thaqva (piety)”.
The conversation continued. I felt light-hearted. I realised I had made many new friends in this strange land. Maybe I will no longer be a stranger after a few months. Despite my close attachment to my own village, I felt content that I got out of Marudur. The travelling had made my horizons bigger. It was splendid not being confined within a hamlet that few people recognised, even within my own country.
After all, Allah’s plan is always the best. He knows the best. Our knowledge is too narrow to grasp the complete wisdom behind the turbulence we walk through. Even the present trial of the people of Gaza walkthrough might be a breakeven point for their bright future. Moreover, death is not the end of our lives.
The most remarkable thing in our life is not to lose hope.
The Qatari Winter sun is splashing its bright rays on my face. My heart filled with novel hopes.
((To be continued))
_ _ _ _
Previous chapter: chapter 26 - the demise and the downfall
Next chapter: Chapter 28 - Before I close my eyes
* Characters, events and the places in this story are fictional and a mere product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to real-world events or characters is merely coincidental.
** Vijayapura and Marudur are fictional places.
Riza Jaufer
Akurana -Kandy,
Sri Lanka
