Worlds Colliding

6 Ramadhan 1434

I'd intended my reading for Ramadhan to be a reprise of last year's: Pickthall's translation of The Holy Qur'an - which I didn't read end to end - and Seyyed Hossein Nasr's essays in Islamic Life and Thought - which I enjoyed but felt worth another go, to grapple once more with the density of thought therein. I also thought that I would have been able to put aside Kafka's The Trial which had been my main pre-Ramadhan reading before fasting began. However, I've found the three overlapping as I was enjoying reading The Trial again so much at a very slow speed that I really couldn't find it within myself to speed up; and the overlapping has been, of itself, quite fascinating - like traversing radically different terrains, only to  find that what's underfoot is pretty much the same earth after all.

Today I finished the final sections of Kafka's masterpiece (and unfinished as it may be it hangs together as integral to itself as any of the Old Master's) namely the haunting allegory on the door to the Law that Josef K listens to, and has dizzyingly explicated for him, in the Cathedral, and the final chapter in which K dies like a dog. Then immediately I moved onto Nasr's essays on The Concept and Reality of Freedom and The Shari'ah and Changing Historical Conditions - both essentially dealing with the Islamic concept of Law.

It was an odd transition. The thought-worlds were so different and yet, at their centre, were dealing with the same ideas. And I found myself entirely sympathetic to both, which on the surface might be thought impossible. But they really represent different sides of a coin - one dark and forbidding; the other attempting to illuminate those dark corners.

It is only in our relation to the Law that some kind of freedom is available.