I'm in Egypt, walking behind a cart drawn by a tired horse and piled high with fresh grasses, fodder for animals in the city. The grass is a verdant green against the fine sand in the air and the coating of desert dust on everything. A man in a dark jalabiya and head scarf sits atop the mound of grass holding the reins of a small, sad-looking horse straining against her harness to pull the whole conveyance up a steep hill. Her knees quiver as though about to buckle with each step.
A woman with a sleeping toddler on her lap sits outside the gate of the mosque, begging. The baby's head lolls back over one knee, peaceful and pitiable. I put a 50-pound note in the mother's hand and she nods without looking up.
Cars drive in crazy, self-organizing patterns on roads with no lines, accompanied by the steady honking of horns like the random sound of water running over rocks in a brook.
Stepping through the gate, the walled courtyard of the mosque is a calm refuge from the chaos of the surrounding neighborhood.
A woman wearing a hijab presses her head against a rectangular black stone framed in the wall outside the mosque. As I approach she gestures for me to join. I stand beside her and press my forehead into the stone. I feel the cool, rough surface against my skin, and then, as though drawn by a greater scale of perspective, I see the inside of my mind. It is black, luminous, and seems boundless, like I am looking from everywhere at once. I feel a moment of vertigo as though I might fall through the stone into a limitless void.
I stay in this pose for several minutes and then, drawing back and regaining balance, step toward the doorway. I take off my shoes and give them to the attendant before moving across the stone threshold and into the mosque.
A few men are in various attitudes of sitting, praying, and leaning against the walls fingering prayer beads. I join the group facing the stone tomb of the saint, a nephew of Muhammad. The men pray in the presence of the tomb on one side of the mosque, and women on the other. I recall that someone told me that the body of the saint, Ali ibn Husayn Zayn al-Abidin, lies eternally on its side, facing in the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca.
Looking around, I see that one of the men is standing with his elbows at his sides, hands extended, with palms up. His lips move almost imperceptibly, eyes closed. The manner of his prayer seems to be an offering. This impression surprises me as I generally associate prayer, when it is not an empty outer form, with petition, asking for something one feels invested in. Seeing the manner in which the man prayed, I have the sense he is making an offering of his prayer as a substance, charged emanations for the place, the saint, or simply as a means of relating to a vast, unfathomable mystery.
Sitting before the tomb I feel an amplified current of energy in my body. I experience it as a source of help to be naturally inward and balanced, to align my bodies of sensation, feeling, and thought in an inner gesture that is both offering and receiving at the same time. I take the same gesture as the man beside me, elbows at my side, palms up, and recite the one Quranic verse I can remember, the first passage, or Surah Fatiha.
I sit on my heels facing the tomb reciting the words silently with my lips and in my heart in Arabic, and at the same time bringing to mind the translation of the prayer in English. I become available to a fuller depth of meaning of the prayer, in its address to unfathomable Source. I offer the results of this work at divided attention prayer to the tomb, and mosque, which I experience as a kind of repository of prayer-stuff for all who come here, and beyond.
In this inner posture of inward and outward activity and receptivity I feel the possibility of a new degree of freedom, as though this is the right organization of the parts of my nature to be useful in a larger world.
When I leave the mosque, the mother and child have departed. I make my way through the streets choked with cars, people, and animals, smell the mingled aromas of burning garbage and incense, sewage and perfume, and smile at the perfect beauty of all that is.
