Reaffirming the Ibrāhīmic Accord

It is just before midnight as I write these words under the clear brilliance of the moon on the twelfth night of Jumādā II, 1447 lunar years after the Hijrah of the Prophet Muḥammad—upon him blessings and peace— to Yathrib, which would immediately change its name to become al-Madīna al-Munawwara, the Radiant Madina; may it ever be radiant with the
guidance of the One who made it his home for the last eleven years of his life on earth. As I approach the hour when the arc of my life would move by one calendar year, I feel the stillness of the night—its silence, its luminosity— opening a widening inward horizon through reflection on the seventy-one years that have passed.
As a child, I slept often on the rooftop of our home in Lahore—a city that, in the 1950s, was still a constellation of gardens and open skies, its night sky densely populated with brilliant stars. From that height, the world felt nearer to heaven than to earth. I can still hear the sound that would rise after the fajr prayer from the mosque of ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Hujwīrī—Allah sanctify his secret—the slow, insistent cadence of remembrance: Lā ilāha illā Allāh, Lā ilāha illā Allāh… It would spread through the neighborhood like breath through a body, filling the air with a gravity that seemed to loosen gravity itself, as though the words, freed from their earthly anchors, hovered between roof and sky. That shrine, and the one buried there—then in a very simple, square-shaped enclosure—became a constant presence in my life long before I understood it, and the book that sought to unveil the veiled--Kashf al-Maḥjūb—still rests beside me as I write these lines, a companion across decades, as faithful as the moon that has never ceased its course.