allahu.cipher

Muhannad cowered in the darkness of the cave, pulling the woolen blanket closer to his face. It was the only sensory impression available for him to hold onto, other than the damp, cold, amorphous nothingness that pushed inward through his nostrils and in through the holes of his ears, and soaking into the pores in his skin. It was just him, blanket, and darkness.

Local custom had it that a young man spent a night alone in that cave. It was an ordeal meant to stimulate a vision, an unveiling that would show him his purpose in life, and would thus serve as a gateway to manhood.

Purpose was something Muhannad desperately needed. Most of the other boys looked to their fathers for guidance. For role models. Most of the boys’ fathers, to be honest, beat a sense of purpose into them. Muhannad didn’t suffer that particular misfortune. Sometimes he wished that he did. His own father died when Muhannad was just an infant, followed soon thereafter by his mother.

They say his father was a blade merchant. He sold every manner of knife and sword, from tiny blades the size of a finger to the longest of longswords. That’s how Muhannad got his name, for a legendary sword from India, one of the finest available.

The ghosts of his father and mother haunted him here, their faceless forms looming close to him, like they were inspecting him, probing his thoughts. But their inscrutable visages – empty space – revealed no sentiment at all, neither love, nor pride, nor disappointment. Not even indifference. Nothing. Then they dissolve dinto grainy atoms, and then they vanished altogether, and he was alone again. Still alone.

It was impossible to know if a minute had passed or three hours. He couldn’t see any stars or hear any dogs howling in the night outside. He thought about that world outside, and how it would appear to him when he emerged from that cursed hole. Warm and illuminated, the little people in it going about their routines. They tilled the soil. They ate. They copulated. They bowed to their personal idols. It was the ordinary everyday, the world he longed to return to, the refuge from this pit of torment.

And then everything flipped upside down.

It came like an eruption, or like a tremor that shook Muhannad’s cosmos to its core. Now it was this darkness, this was the real world, and the other world, the world of sedate, sunlit routine, that was a diversionary world. The tremor dislodged the neat circle that bounded his life, and it now overlapped with other circles, circles that contained angels and stars, fire and bones.

The center was obliterated, the origin lost, and Muhannad became all these things and nothing at all, and so he lost consciousness and slumped into the dark waters of the void.

The illuminated objects in the proliferating circles saw that Muhannad needed a name for the absence of origin and center that made all things possible, and so they came together in a form he would recognize, a form that could mediate the impossible absence. And so they chose a number, which is one, and they chose a name, which is Allah, and they chose a body, which is the Angel. They pulled Muhannad’s limp body out of the darkness and woke him.

“Muhammad,” they said to him.

“Wha – ? My name is Muhannad. Who … who are you?”

“Iqra,” they said to him sternly. “Read …”

“But I can’t …”

They grabbed him by the throat until he thought he would expire. Then they released him and he fell to the ground.

“Read!”