Almodovar inspires: Life is not just an endless, onward push into oblivion

Van Gogh's "The Olive Trees" 1889

In the small masjid that flanks the west side of the house, we sit fanning our faces with our hands, the air heavy and warm against our necks. Maghrib prayer has just ended and our hosts are seated at the front of the masjid, their voices soft in the din of cicadas that rises from the grove outside. They speak of their efforts with Junta Islamica, an organization dedicated to the establishment and integration of Islam in Spain and Web Islam, a project of Junta Islamica that focusses on the dissemination of information about Islam in Spanish. 

Over the years, Web Islam has become the primary Spanish language website providing information about Islam. It aims to fulfill what we've quickly come to recognize as a hunger for information related to Islam. There is a genuine curiosity among the local populations to investigate a history that weighs heavy with Islamic influences, a history that simultaneously seems to coincide with and provide new light on modern day events. I make note of the website and then slide my journal into my satchel, my eyes drifting to the doorway.

Outside, there is a fountain-tap – a tiled structure with taps that stream cool water used for ablution before prayer. The masjid spills a circle of light onto the pebble-flecked dirt that is packed around the fountain. I step over ankles and knees and slip my feet into my shoes.

The sky is inky blue, almost black, and it rises in breaths of stars. I stand at the edge of the grove, where long strands of dry grass have webbed themselves into heaps that scrape at my ankles. I look into the darkness between the trees. Olive trees are squat; their branches drape low and I can reach out and hold a young green olive between my fingers. The leaves are small and slim, they taper to a point and I think of what my mother – an avid gardener – would notice if she were standing here in my place, these stems of olives in her hands.

"Olive Grove Night Drive"

But as I look into the trees, I am frustrated with my own insistence that there must be meaning, that there is something to be gained from simply making an effort to find it. This insistence that meaning must exist wherever I look is the kind of hunger that isn’t satisfied. It doesn’t allow for a moment to simply exist, for you to exist in it as a point among many points in a diagram of infinity. It dismisses insignificance and makes an appeal for purpose, for signs, for something that tells you that you are here and you matter, this matters, the world itself matters. But as I stand in the grass, brushing my ankle with the toe of my shoe to disperse imagined insects, I want to simply be still. To allow myself the simplicity of existence. Of being here just because He decided to put me here.

Something lands with a thud by my shoe. I bend and find a purple, plastic pony, its nylon hair gleaming in the light. I turn, pony in hand, and find a small girl standing a few feet from me, a half-smile tilting her lips. She wears a cotton flowered dress, her hair in a slim braid that juts out from the back of her head. I smile and fling the pony into the air, watching it arc into the sky. As it rockets down, I reach out and catch it in midair. The girl skips and breaks out a smile. I toss the pony to her and she reaches out to catch it. It bounces off her shoulder and hits the ground.

She picks it up, throws it to me, and I catch it. She jumps, clapping her hands together.

            Me llamo Khadeeja. She points to her chest. Como te llamas? She points at me with her chin.

            Me llamo Shoilee. I press my hand to my chest.

We toss the pony back and forth skirting the edge of the olive grove, the moon a saucer behind us in the sky. As the pony arcs through the air, sometimes landing at our feet, sometimes hitting an elbow or flicking off the tips of our fingers, we trade words.

            I point to the olive trees.

            Oliva, she says.

            Oliva, I repeat. I turn and point to the sky. Moon.

            La Luna, she waves her hand in the air.

            I toss her the pony. She catches it and her eyes widen. I cheer.

 She flings the pony into the air. It sails past me and rolls into a heap of dried grass.

We toss the pony back and forth – oliva, la luna – before I head to the fountain. The group has begun to spill outside, women reclining against the fountain, breathing in the night air. One of the women turns on the faucet and splashes water onto her face, leaning forward into the spray. Even after sunset, the heat is thick, the air like a sodden blanket on our faces. The tiles are wet from splatters of water. I find a dry spot and sit, leaning back on my arms. Khadeeja stretches out on her back next to me, her eyes squinting in the dark. She asks me a question in Spanish, her brows furrowed. The words spin from her mouth in quick succession. I shake my head and offer her a half-shrug. She wrinkles her nose.

             I ripple my fingers towards the sky.

             Stars. What do you call them?

             La estrella. 

Khadeeja raises her hands in the air and then clasps them over her chest. She turns to me, her gaze insistent. She repeats her question twice, then three times and I can do nothing but shake my head and smile weakly.

I have no words to offer her – I wish for the ability to say something more, to have words click with meaning in my mind and roll off my tongue in those fleshy notes of Spanish that seem to dance out of peoples mouths so musically. I lean toward her and smile.  She sighs. She speaks to the sky. She speaks with such emphasis, her brows furrowed, her lips screwed tight, her hands playing with the air. In moments, her voice drifts into soft, dreamlike tones and it is as if she is the only one here, lying under that giant platter of a moon, ripples of light painting stripes across her face.

Gathering for our evening meal. Photo: Khalidah Ali

In a few moments, everyone trickles out of the mosque and gathers on the verandah for a home-cooked dinner. The walls are a burnt-orange and in the light that spills from fixtures that look like lanterns, everything glows. We balance small clear bowls of brothy soup on plates piled with potatoes that are so soft, they fall apart on our tongues, with stewed eggplant that boast a tart, but heavy-bodied flavour that heats us from the belly up. There is warmth and simplicity in this food; it fills us up and our hunger is stayed, but it does something else too. In the best possible fruition of clichés, it fulfills the most basic of bodily needs, while triggering our souls into a state of gratitude.

It is awe that propels us into gratitude – look at where we are, our legs dangling over the edge of a verandah that overlooks an olive grove, the soft burn of conversation rising around us, this limitless sky, this gift of a perfect evening. But, there is also fear, this unrest that curdles in the centre of your chest and spreads out in a paralytic haze. This is the burden of gratitude.

Home cooked meal at Almodovar. Photo: Memona Hossain

Dua – the act of calling out to Allah (swt) is something that we consciously do, but it is also something that our hearts, in commune with our souls, is in a constant state of doing, sometimes without conscious effort. Our souls attach themselves to their Creator and it is as if when our existence begins, we are in a lifelong battle to return to Him. When there is pain in our lives, often so overwhelming it creates a state of numbness inside us, it is a manifestation of our need to connect, to be understood, to rise from the daily infliction of pain in its multitude of forms and simply be relieved, to exist in a state where you no longer have to get up.

With our hearts in their vulnerable, even nightmarish states of pain, disease, and disillusion, I don’t wonder at our inability to articulate what it is we need to heal ourselves. And I think, it is in these stretches of silence that the duas we never thought to make, are taken up by Him and fulfilled. When we are given moments like this, when we experience connection and unity and fulfillment, when we find ourselves standing up with every cell in our bodies somehow revived, it is thrilling, but it is also terrifying.

Awe can bring us to gratitude, but gratitude is also a state of awe. And perhaps this is it – the acute understanding of His magnitude, His endless mercy, His understanding of every shadow that spreads like a watermark across our hearts – perhaps this is what brings us to our knees. This is what makes us know how small we are, but also how much what we do matters. The realization that everything matters – moments don’t just blip on and on into an endless compendium of other moments. They exist as pinpoints in a map of our life, every moment contributing to the next one, every destination a prerequisite for how we can or will be in the moments to come and how those moments affect and collide with moments in a million other lives in ways we can’t begin to imagine.

And so, this evening with the Almodovar community of Muslims, this witnessing of community revival and survival, this experience of how vast and varied the spread of Islam was and continues to be, this union of goodness among people of such diversity – it places the tremendous weight of gratitude upon our hearts. But, with this weight, there is hope. Life is not just an endless, onward push into oblivion. There is hope that what we do with what we are given, however small and labored our efforts, is accounted for, is part of something bigger that we haven’t come to comprehend, but we believe in. It’s how we go on.

Almodovar: Against Soft Sighing Skies

Early evening light drips through the giant windows of the tour bus and we lean our heads against the glass. We've spent the morning at the Grand Mosque in Cordoba and now, as the sun slowly makes its way across the sky, we wind our way up a road that twists round hills of dry earth. We are just outside Cordoba en route to a family farm in the hills, where the Almodovar community of Spanish Muslims are hosting us for salat al-maghrib (evening prayer) and dinner. As the bus heaves up the hill, I place my hand against the glass and feel the warmth against my fingers. I hardly know where I'm being taken, but this sense of submission, of being lead to where you need to be, no input required, is liberating.  

"Look up there -- " Our guide, Tariq (from Andalucian Routes), points to the hills. We shift in our seats and follow his gaze. The skies are already yellowed from the onset of evening. "Do you see that building? That's Madinat Al Zahra -- that's where we're going tomorrow." Tariq holds the microphone loosely in his right hand and there's a furrow in his brows as he explains how we will visit the ruins of a palace built by Abdur Rahman III, that we'll walk through the remnants of what was once the most functional, advanced, and prosperous city of its time. 

Tariq has a particular way of speaking that even on this -- the second day of our travels -- I've come to enjoy. He is impassioned, but not overbearing. His accent doesn't have the grating edge of a posh Londoner and though I know he's from Birmingham, his intonations are soft, but quick, one word kicking into the next in quick succession. Combined with his placid demeanour, his voice has the unique effect of simultaneously engaging and calming you. 

Out the window

I scan the hills--mounds of green shrubbery dot rippled earth that alternates from ruddy brown to light shades of dry brush. I spot a sprawling building perched against the rocky cuts of earth -- its walls are a soft, butter yellow and the ledges are carved into delicate motifs that seem to scrape gently into the surrounding scenery. I glance around the bus to see if I've spotted the right structure and as if reading my mind, Tariq leans over and looks out the window. 

"No--no--not the monastery. That big yellow building is the monastery. There -- up, on the left." He points again and as I shift my gaze, the bus rounds a curve and the view is lost. 

Shaykh Abdullah Hakim Quick sits at the front of the bus, just in front of where Tariq now stands, and when Tariq pauses, he turns in his seat and speaks to the group. 

We are immediately attentive. As anyone who has grown up listening to the Shaykh's lectures knows, his measured, but direct manner of speaking has the effect of making you pay attention. Every sentence seems to have a push of energy behind it, an intensity that exhales into a state of awe--it's as if he is always marvelling at how things are and how they could be. 

"Madinat Al Zahra is the point when the idea of building palaces for yourself, the idea of a leader somehow deserving a palace--this marks the beginning of a loss of imaan (faith)." He nods, his glance flitting up the aisle, then resting at some distant point out the window. He turns back, handing the microphone to Tariq. 

Already, there is a sense of loss that accompanies each site we visit. As the bus lurches on, up this winding road that seems to curve on and on into the burning horizon, I have the distinct feeling of being placed in a story, of knowing what it truly means to be a traveller. You step forward into new landscapes with your chest split down the middle, your ribs yanked open like a gateway. The good --  it flows in easy and you walk on eager, chin lifted to the sun. But to lead with an open heart, is to walk forth vulnerable and exposed, every branch in your path scraping your heart raw, every moment you experience taking hold and not letting go. And though this can injure, I think there really can be no other way to travel -- not if you want the experience to be more than fleeting. 

We have moved deep into the hills and as the bus curves round, we see the first signs of the village -- lines and lines of whitewashed houses stacked like lego bricks at the base of a hill. Tariq points out the window again, half smiling. 

Almodovar Castle, Cordoba

"They've got a castle in their backyard." 

High up on a hill, rising up from the earth like an ancient fairytale is the Almodovar Castle. Built by Muslims in the year 760, it was lost almost five hundred years later to Fernando III in the year 1240. It stands today on one of the highest points of the landscape, perched like a crown against soft sighing skies, a testament to the way history will unravel itself in slow, but deliberate turns, every catastrophic loss a pinpoint on a map we can only see in fragments. There is perfection, but we see it in hindsight; we hardly recognize the light or the beauty until we stand at the very edge looking back.  It could not have happened any other way.

The eastern sky sighs from blue into white and we circle round and round, higher, then deeper. We snap pictures, our shoulders pressed up against the glass, the reflections in the window showing up as gleaming streaks in our photos, the flashes from our cameras as flaring, artificial moons. 

The bus pulls to the side of the road and exhales, slowing to an abrupt halt. 

Into the bush

Cicadas -- we are off the bus and trekking down a wide path of hard-packed dirt into a deafening cacophony of shrieking cicadas. The path is lined with thick vegetation -- short, stubby pomegranate trees with nubs of small fruit, low draping branches of olive trees, the giant, dinosaur-like aloe vera that looks monstrous enough to eat you. The incline of the hill is not severe, but we are breathless once we reach the clearing. Here, the rest of the group has already gathered. Tariq stands next to a young man -- he is slight, his features gentle. He smiles wide. 

"Welcome--" He addresses the group in English, a Spanish lilt edging his words in thick strokes. He tells us that this place -- a family farm, but also a hub for Islamic gathering and learning -- was started by his father, a Spanish Muslim, and continues today through the efforts of his children and the local Spanish Muslim community. As the day slips out from under us, I smile. There is loss at every turn, but then there is this -- a small community of Muslims amid groves of olive trees. Muslims, here in Spain, passing the branch of Islam from one generation to the next, and the next -- 

Almodovar, Cordoba

The horizon deepens to rust and we climb an iron staircase that leads to the rooftop.  From here, we stare out at the plains where lines and lines of olive trees roll over the dry earth in calligraphic strokes of brooding green. We lean over the railings almost breathless -- the sun burns low behind the hills and the sky sinks from bright white to purple shadow, the air still. And all the while, cicadas buzz like electricity in voltage lines -- everything seems electrified. We take turns posing for pictures with the backdrop of the castle behind us and at sunset, a hush spreads through the group. The adhan, quiet amidst the hum of the cicadas, undulates outward into the plains, or emanates from it -- it seems part of the landscape, rolling out from the earth itself. 

                          

The call to prayer is just a human voice that beckons people to submit. To come, acquaint yourselves with success, to walk forth in the name of your Creator, to press your forehead against the earth and know with certainty that He made you. That your heart, that nub of flesh that winds in upon itself in hurt, in grief, in anger, in rebellion, in abandonment, in hope -- that your heart is made by Him and He knows, He knows. Every pulse of pain that makes you cave inward -- He knows. Every grief that has you press your hand against your chest to dull the ache  -- He knows. And the adhan -- it calls you to Him, to return again and again and again to the one thing that will relieve and revive you, to the one thing that will carry you through.

Adhan in Almodovar
Photo Credit: Khalidah Ali

The group slowly files back down the steps to the mussalah (a dedicated prayer space) to join in congregational prayer. I turn back and rest my arms on the railing -- I know that this was written for me, for each of us. To think that He wrote this moment for me -- standing on a rooftop in the plains outside Cordoba, me and these brilliant burning skies -- to think that He put each of us here so we could speak to Him, so we could bear witness to the perfection of His plan -- is this not a blessing? Is this not mercy? 

The sun has sunk low and the horizon is ink against the fire of the sky. I am alone on the rooftop and the cicadas still hum, their buzz like the white noise of rainfall all around me. I hurry down the steps to join my companions. 

Stay tuned for Part II of our visit to Almodovar.

Greetings from Al-Andalus: Contemplation (1)

My journey to Al-Andalus -  the Medieval Islamic empire that covered what is now Spain, Portugal, and the Southern bit of France -- was something I'd booked with hardly a second thought a few months ago. It was a historical tour of Islamic Spain with Sh. Abdullah Hakim and guided by Andalucian Routes. After a quick browse of the website and an additional week in Morocco added to supplement the time we would spend in Spain, it was booked and almost forgotten.

In the days leading up to my departure, I found myself in a such a hectic frenzy of obligations, I hardly had the time to reflect on what I was doing. I didn't pack until the night before and I barely checked our itinerary until the day of our actual flight. I relied on my friends to tell me when to be at the airport -- and for someone as OCD about flight times and details as I am, this was just something else. I wanted to avoid this kind of frenzy, this mindless onward push through life, but there I was yet again, in the midst of it all, barely breathing. 

“[Those] Who remember Allaah while standing or sitting or [lying] on their sides and give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth, [saying], 'Our Lord! You did not create this aimlessly…'” [Quran 3: 191]

Contemplation. This is what leads us from one peak of our life to the next. It's what guides us out of our valleys, up onto the rocky sides of mountains we don't think we can climb, to the brief plateaus where we marvel in awe, in grief, in submission, and up, up, up to the highest point of our lives. 

Life pulls you on and on and sometimes it pulls you so far in, you are pulled apart. You wake each morning and you fulfill your obligations in a state of numb disarray; you do because you must, or simply because it's what you've always done. A litany of destination points stretch out before you--you will meet each one and then you will move on to the next and you will go on doing and doing. And the years will pass. 

There is a point high above you on the horizon that you never reach -- perhaps you're not even aiming for it. It's a point that remains in your peripheral vision all your life, and though you can see it, you don't always know how to get there. Sometimes the desires of the self, rather than the soul, lead you down other routes. Other times you are lost in the syncopated rhythm of life, every step another beat in an unknown direction. But that point was placed for you in your line of vision and it never moves -- in His wisdom, it's there even when we look the other way. When we turn towards it, He pulls us in. It's the point that leads us home, to Him, to the kind of fulfillment that holds your heart and fills it with light.  

Our hearts -- our hearts -- they are strong and resilient, but when they are in a state of pained existence, or worse, when the heart is in a state of such worn fatigue that it simply wants to lie flat in a plane of nothing, because in the absence of everything at least it can find rest -- in this state, the rest of the body suffers, the minds suffers, and the soul--it wants to flee. Because truly, how does one exist when nothingness replaces your heart? 

Al-Andalus was a point placed on my horizon and when I reached it and looked up, I felt my heart unfurl in the way a leaf uncurls itself to soak in the morning light--hesitant, but so eager for nourishment. I am no great human being; none of us deserve the blessings we receive; they come to us in blinding waves of mercy from Him because even as we cradle our own hearts in fear, even as we build fortresses around our hearts in a desire to protect, He knows our hearts more than we do. He knows, and so He gives. 

I do not want to be the traveller who stands before the wonders of His creation and can only see the inside of her own mind. To contemplate the state of your heart and relate what you see to your own life, desires, and purpose is beneficial. But left unbalanced, it can very quickly draw you into a vacuum where you trap yourself inside your own struggles and fail to truly see the blessings that have been placed before you and the responsibility that has been laid gently, but pointedly into the palm of your hand. If you do not lift your head to breathe, you will miss the brilliance of how the world works so beautifully, you will miss the warmth that exists between your fellow beings, you will miss the miracles. 

Contemplation. This is an all-encompassing act - it combines the necessity of inner reflection with the twin necessities of external connection and individual action. Contemplation stirs the heart so it can beat in the world again, purposefully, with direction. It is what allows us to receive the blessings we are given with humility and gratitude. 

“[Those] Who remember Allaah while standing or sitting or [lying] on their sides and give thought to the creation of the heavens and the earth, [saying], 'Our Lord! You did not create this aimlessly…'” [Quran 3: 191]

He did not create all this, or us, aimlessly. Every moment has a purpose. Our lives sometimes seem like maps of scattered constellations -- how do we make sense of it all? But there is wisdom in the way our lives spin out before us, wisdom that we don't understand until we're standing at the edge of the map looking back and taking everything in. Only at the edge of not knowing can we look back and see so clearly how everything in our lives is laid out in precision, how every moment had a distinct purpose and that we are brought to where we are by virtue of a thousand moments that only He could place in our path.

I pray these records of my contemplations in Al-Andalus will be ways of striving towards an understanding of our ultimate purpose. May they be sources of goodness for me, and for others, InshaAllah (God Willing).