رحلة ( journey)

 Bismillah rahman rahiim, alhamdulillahi rabbil alamin, aarahma-nir rahim, maliki yaumiddin, iyyaka n’abadu wa-iyaaka nasta’in..

The first poems I ever knew, ever loved, were written in a language I didn’t (and still don’t) understand.

In my very early childhood, I would just watch my family, mimicking their movements as best as I could. Mostly, their prayers were whispered, barely audible, so instead of sounding like them I focused entirely on moving like them—cupping my hands before my face as if they were full of water, then “splashing” my hands up to my ears, bending at the waist, kneeling, touching my head to my janamaz, my own tiny embroidered prayer mat.

So every day my family gathered together to pray in a language we didn’t understand, to repeat these gorgeous, rending strings of sounds together as a way of building direct channels to God. For most of my early childhood, I just moved through the postures along with my family, listening to their whispered words, watching with reverence and fascination as they knelt and cupped their hands in worship. 

When I was six or seven, my father decided it was time to teach me to say the prayers on my own. He got us (me and my sister) dua books written in various colorful inks. He laminated the pages, and every day he and us would spend an hour together sitting on the couch, studying the plastic pages. The line would say “alham dulillahi rabbil alamin, ar rahman ir rahim,” & slowly we would make the sounds together, we’d practice saying it all together, moving through the postures right there on the old couch, us both laughing at my forgetfulness, growing tired and eventually hungry.

This way of hymning directly to God, was my first conscious experience of mellifluous charged language, and it’s the bedrock upon which I’ve built my understanding of calligraphy as a craft and as a meditative practice. I learned from an early age language was a way to court the great unknowables, provided it was charged and earnest and true. It’s irrelevant if I understand consciously exactly what I am saying, only that I say it urgently enough, speak it with enough beauty of breath and spirit to earn a tiny moment of God’s attention.