Why I am beginning

Who knew I would ever write? Certainly not my school English teacher. I was always the math geek, happy to hammer away at numbers and symbols as an otter with a succulent crab.

But then I started feeling things when I was reading. A particularly well crafted paragraph by D. H. Lawrence or a startling insight from Jane Austen would give me the same tingles up my spine that concepts of geometry once inspired. But I didn't want to write.

I'd always had ideas. Ideas people would sneer at. Ideas that I would love for their complexity and their simplicity, but would be ashamed of. It was only later that I realised that people sneered not because they were ridiculous, but because they did not have the capacity to understand them. Much later, I began to realise that other people had had these ideas much before me. Philosophers, scientists, theologians. Men had become great by speaking about these ideas. Yet I still felt ashamed, because their discourse of these ideas was far above my ability to carry an idea forward. Yet, I still didn't want to write.

And then, I realised the history of my people. I am a Muslim. It means so many things, this simple declaration of identity. Many complex things. What it means to me, is that I am one member of a great community. A community that is over a billion strong today, and once was one of the leading lights of the world. The decay of the Ummah and the rise of the west is a magnificent, beautiful, and tragic story stretching over 500 years.

And it appears to me that one of the chief reasons for this decline was the turning inwards of the Muslim mind. After the Mongol invasion, after the gates of Ijtihad were shut, after we abandoned the exploration of all of the signs of God's wonder, our slow decline and defeat in every part of the globe was inevitable.

And now, I want to write. I cannot know if what I write will have any impact, but by God I want to write. If I can develop one idea into something meaningful, if I can inspire one more person to write, if I can make any contribution to the necessary mission of kicking open the doors of Ijtihad and letting in the light of reason onto the Muslim mind, I must write.

It is about 2 years since I met Bapsi Sidhwa at a book reading, and asked her how a person should start to write. "Just take the plunge and start writing." was her reply. Two years have passed, and today I take the plunge.