1. If Light is in Your Heart
You Will Find Your Way Home
Mahkisma’s mouth was dry. Her heart felt like it was ricocheting around her ribcage like the prisoner she’d seen the last time she was here, dashing in his metal cage from corner to corner in the middle of the huge open square at Muscamden Mosque.
The black cloth tightly encircling her forehead was drenched with sweat. Its cotton cloth impregnated with wires ten times thinner than human hair, flowed over her shoulders, to the midpoint of her stomach. The voluminous black skirt was supposed to be cooler than the traditional all in one cloth that women used to wear all across the Messenger’s Lands (PBUH). Now, as she approached the enormous mosque in Muscamden for her ‘big day’, she was grateful for this black cloth, whatever its design, covering her from head to toe. Nobody could tell unless they got up very close, that she was sweating on this cool November day. She needed to calm down, get her breathing even, or she would get noticed. About a hundred metres ahead was the permanent ‘artwork’, installed at the same time as the Crescent Light Pods.
And now, vivid memories of Mahmood appeared spontaneously in her mind. She knew only too well that those whose heartbeats reflected thoughts they should not be thinking, were the ones who were easy targets for Re-Education. And so for weeks, she’d managed to avoid coming to this part of the domed city. Today, she was getting married. Her life depended on going through with it. Women who refused to marry were sent to the RARS. Being sent to a Red Alert Radioactive Site was a death sentence. Nobody lasted more than ten weeks. Upon their death, the nearest relatives would receive a medal, a commendation and in her case, it would be three months of a nurse’s salary. Except she had no relatives left to collect.
‘Submission is the Key to Salvation’, ‘Submission is the Key to Salvation’, the message, formed in 99 languages, was clearly visible on the huge minaret that towered above all the buildings in North Londonistan. Mahkisma slowed her pace as she entered the cavernous open square with palm trees on three sides. This mosque was built entirely from the bank accounts confiscated from the exodus of people who escaped to Canada or Australia, in 2029. It’s message, “Submission is the key to Salvation”, pulsed out 24/7 in various subtle shades of green. The minaret was supposed to represent a lighthouse sending its guiding beams of light to save ships from getting wrecked. And what rocks remained in the sea changes of Londonistan of 2033? They were the possibly still lingering sins from the White-Washed Times.
The flashing words made every passer-by blink faster in subconscious self- defence. It took thirty seconds to flash the sentence in four languages, the fifth language being invariably of course, Arabic. Each time a particular nation was conquered, its language was added to this installation at the heart of Londonistan’s creative sector.
Despite all she had lost, perhaps because of all she had lost — there was not a day when Makisma didn’t cast a thousand panted prayers on the dying embers of her hope. It was for him that she was keeping herself alive. Him. Mahmood. If he was still alive, if his memory and sense of self was intact, surely he would try to find her? But almost a whole year had passed and he had not. Makisma groaned, her despair increasing with every step towards the mosque. A passing black shape stood still and stared at her. Makisma held her jaw, as if she had toothache, and the shape nodded and continued past.
She wondered if she had gone insane. Why had she agreed to this marriage? The groom had chosen to marry her against his elderly mother’s wishes. It was an act of gratitude on his part. Makisma understood she was supposed to be grateful too. She was the off-duty nurse who’d saved his life when he had a heart attack on his way to fajjr prayers. Now he was returning the favour. Saving her life. He must have heard about her case on the Sharia law channel.
Mohammed Ali Al Bagdadi was one of the original fighters for Islamic State back in 2015. Makisma could not really see his face in the video. It had been obscured by his huge black beard and thick moustache. He however, had been shown photos of her. As was the custom, she would not see him until their wedding night. All she knew was that he was 18 years her senior and she would be his third wife. It was thanks to his intervention that she had not been sent to the RARS or at the very least, to the Thought Translation Centre. She was a tangled mess of emotions, a swirling mess of conflicting thoughts. Makisma tried to breath slowly, deliberately, the way her grandmother had taught her.
The number one rule to help keep the heartbeat regular out on the city streets, was by moving slowly, at an almost zombie–like pace. Thus, you were less likely to attract attention to yourself. Chameleon-like, all those walking by absorbed different degrees of the irradiated green light, depending on their thoughts. Makisma decided to focus on the words dancing around the minaret ahead of her. ‘Submission is the key to Salvation Submission is the key to Salvation…’ The words flashed on and off, every five seconds, in sword-like flourishes, now, it was French, then German, next Bulgarian. Makisma recognised the Cyrillic mirror image R, as the words snaked down the length of the minaret, then they were dancing horizontally across its girth. She was reminded of how people used to dance at Bulgarian and Turkish weddings that she’d attended as a child. Lightly, rhythmically, lift each foot up, dance three steps to the right, three steps to the left, with an extra step or two, along in the direction the whole group were moving in.
The smells in the air brought her back to the present. Recently, in addition to the light show and its helpful reminder, ‘Submission is the Key to Survival’. No, she meant to say, Submission, not survival’. Makisma took a deep breath, her steps faltering again. The scent was good… she savoured it, breathing deeply through her nose again and then again. It was a pleasant and lingering odour that wafted across the 500 metre wide square around Muscamden Mosque. The Dome that extended across most of London, dipped low here for just this reason. The smell was an alluring combination of the feel-good hormone, oxytocin plus frankincense and mandarin. What a clever combination of the ancient and the modern! The resin of the frankincense was heavier than the other oils, and so the smell lingered in the air around the pedestrians.
Everyone had been grateful to the United Bedouin Emirates for funding these domes in the most heavily populated areas of Britain in the mid 2020’s. These enormous, near transparent domes were designed to keep the worst of the sun’s rays away from the surface of the earth. Little did the Brits realise that the domes were modern-day Trojan horses. Built-in, were microscopic particles of the most sophisticated software. It was a particular resonance in the first call to prayer, on the phrase, ‘Allah hu Akbar’ that disabled all the computing systems of hospitals, water cleansing and sewage works, the military computing systems, and the World Wide Web servers controlling the banking system, the communications systems with satellites… everything was overnight, in the hands of the former desert-dwellers of Arabia.
‘Breathe in calm, breathe out chaos”, Makisma could hear her grandmother’s loving voice guiding her. She had stopped walking, pretending to admire the snaking green words shooting around the minaret. Now she resumed her walk. Breathe in for 4steps, hold your breath for four, out for four…
They were getting more and more sophisticated. In many ways, that was good. Nuclear fission was under control, the rich could go off to man-made islands around the coastline of the United Bedouin Emirates. Most importantly, the extinction of bees had been prevented, and food sources were being grown both in the deserts and amidst huge fields of plankton in the oceans. Even the greatest challenge of all was within reach of the Mullahs — the inner environment of the human mind had become increasingly accessible to external monitoring. In fact, the major conundrum of the third decade of the 21st century for those who still yearned for privacy and the sanctity of the individual’s right of self-ownership, was that very few knew how to keep their thoughts just to themselves. In the past couple of years, bio-chemical nano technology had been getting much more sophisticated.
We, plebs and PaPs of conversion, with only our labour and our time to sell to the Islamic State, had fewer and fewer places to hide, fewer and fewer moments of our time, to ourselves. Because tell me, what is time, really, if not our Life-Time? And as she thought this thought, the green light from the minaret flashed directly into Makisma’s eyes. She would pay for thinking that thought. It would have got picked up. Her foot caught the hem of her black gown and she tripped, such was the fear, embedded since childhood. As she recovered her balance, she kept her gaze down, but she knew it was too late.
She felt rather than saw the people trudging along around her, move away. The black-clothed shapes, like sliding daleks, moved much faster than the white-clad ones — the males who were more valued and more confident of their right to exist. The empty space around her grew wider and there she was, vulnerable as a gazelle, separated from the rest of the herd. She now stood out, probably a hundred hidden cameras were on her. She was no longer a part of the collective female mass going obediently to work or to the mosque’s Spiritualisation Programme.
All females had their ID number printed on top of their headscarf. It linked them to the male officially in charge of them, whether father, husband, brother or uncle, or a designated Police Officer if no male was alive in the family. Four zeros signified the lone women like her, with no family-linked male protector. It was a much-feared state to be in, only one step away from being despised as a PaP.
Plebs and PaPs who had been the last to convert, or were apostates, were watched even more closely than single women with no male relatives. Since the Disobedient Thoughts Act was passed earlier in the year, the authorities understood that though there would be no immediately obvious acts of rebellion or protest, Random Thought Crimes (RTC’s) were seen as the seed from which every revolution arose.
‘Random Thought Crime’ — how did they come up with this term thought Makisma. A flash of fear weakened her legs. Her tests a week before the wedding had shown that her adrenal glands were much weakened. The doctor had told her aggressively, “Our Esteemed Leaders have made society secure from White domination and exploitation so you have nothing left to fear, you silly girl”. The male doctor had berated her for ten whole minutes and she had smiled sheepishly, when she’d actually felt like kicking his balls in.
Today, Makisma felt helpless to stop the rush of thoughts and feelings crowding through her. Her wedding day was derailing her, when it was supposed to be saving her.
She stood still in the square, under the glittering green lights festooning the trunk of the circle of palm trees arranged to resemble an oasis. She could hear the tinkle of water from nearest of the four fountains. As the green lights from the minaret, now shimmered Arabic words like slashes across her head, face and chest, she recalled the fateful day she was walking across this very square, with Mahmood just a step away. And he’d whispered, ‘I love you’. Within seconds, the nail bed of both his thumbs had turned red. Now, the nail bed of her left thumb was turning that same fluorescent red. Only one thumb. Not both.
Makisma looked down at her nails and started to tremble. Her whole body went into a kind of shivering spasm. It was the fate of organic matter, imbued with thought and feeling, what they used to call in the Rumi’s language, ‘ru’, to feel pain and to fear its own cellular destruction. Trying to keep her thumb hidden under her fingers, she looked around as calmly as possible. Despite his hero status, even her husband-to-be would not be able to save her from reaping the bitter fruit of her thought-crime. He might even be glad of it, as the punishment would surely make her a more suitably submissive wife.
Over there, on her right, by the huge cactus glittering with green lights, there was a new Armstrong Pod. These were named to honour the one and only Karen Armstrong, who’d been a major force in lulling the West European Kaffirs into a false sense of security about the Muslims proliferating in their midst in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Those useful idiots, as Alan Lake had called them on the website that her mother used to read. What would her mother say to her now? To marry the enemy and survive or … or what?
Trembling, Makisma crept over and stepped carefully into the Pod. Once seated and empty-eyed, she focussed again on calming her heartbeat. The POVPOV was working hard to eradicate all Thought Crimes. Erotic thoughts were always their obsession, but they had been directed to prioritise Thought Dissent.
Last Spring, these Armstrong Pods had appeared at every crossroads in Londonistan, in a matter of weeks. Soon, if someone did something stupid, it was said they’d been Einsteined. It was a grimly sarcastic term, for by the seventh visit, the ‘Re-Educated’ person would become decidedly stupid, fit only for work on the RARS.
Click on link below for Part 2
https://readmedium.com/2-if-light-is-in-your-heart-ce2089f40715