You are a gem. Your experience within Islamic society and your linguist stic knowledge, clarity of thought and enchanting turn of phrase leads me to think there are books there that could reach and touch millions.
Hassan, I'm happy to exchange the following treasures for that one fatherly hug you gave me after I had got very silly: the choicest books in my home library, my signed copies, first editions and penciled writings on their margin (the small, most Satanic ones), my first ever going on a holiday last month to picturesque Fort William where I, for five days, camped and tried to commune with nature, maybe more peacefully when midges were not being very optimistic.
What I didn't tell you about my childhood swamp is that my dear father was always there, always at hand to ogre the swamp. The best way he knew how to get me to do something, when beating didn't always work, was reverse psychology (the twenty five or so beating scars on my body have fooled a torture and injury expert to write a report substantiating my asylum application: this is using the United Nations' 1999 Istanbul Protocol -- I was, in other words, scientifically beaten). Thus, I have always felt that in order for me to be right, I must prove others wrong. And for a very long time, I lived in perpetual watchfulness of what others thought and said about me. Just like my father who has always had set incredible store by his clannish reputation.
My father, with whom I didn't speak for 9 years now, is only one year older than yourself, Hassan. So, on the journey home from meeting you the second time, I furiously thought to myself; why was it so easy for you to make me feel good about myself, valued (as an end in myself) without saying anything? I felt crushed and defeated all over again because it should've been his unconditional hug to give, it should've been him.
I'm unashamedly full of quotes because I'm not always able to verbalise that which I know that I know but cannot name; I started to want exactly what #three has in her signature -- want not to be good but to be right (I think I need to PM her about this lest it gets across as a subtweet). I stopped caring about what other people think of me - what father thinks of me. (That doesn't mean in some strange, circuitously creepy, unshakable way I don't love him -- in fact, to do another subtweet, I find it incredibly insensitive and crass for anyone to merrily tell #Aqua to cut all parental ties as if it were pushing an open door!!!)
I had to stop caring what others thought of me as a person to limit my self perception from being massively informed by people whose regard for and link to my inner world (my unknowable consciousness and developing character) could not be more tenuous. Some people choose to focus on the tangible, positive side of me because they are good people, like yourself, Hassan. Other more people, in unconnected instances, found me a stupid, misanthropic, fatalist weirdo. But I don't see these things mutually exclusive, after all stupidity and wisdom are on the same continuum of what it really means to be human. I think more of my flaws and soberly consider, at the one and same time, my capacity for good as well as for bad. I think of myself as Popeye The Sailor Man thought and said of himself: I am what I am, and that's who I am.
Topic: Agnostic Muslim Rambling