Castle Salah ad-Din

Pictured are the remnants of a Frankish castle laid waste during the Crusades by Salah ud-Din Ayubi. It's now garrisoned by flowers and snakes.





The fortifications were strong but the Muslims attacked over terrain the Crusaders had assumed was impassible with siege weapons. After the walls were breeched by catapults the castle fell to the Muslim assault. I was standing in the dry moat when I took this photograph.







Among the foliage you can still see some of the stone missles here and there, but I was more interested in the foliage!






The current state of the castle's keep. The castle was possibly built by the Knights Hospitaler, a Crusader religious order. I think Prince Charles is a current member, and they do charity work.

Some of the Muslim religious orders of the Crusades still exist as Sufi Tariqah, and many branches have remained true to the same traditions of meditation and prayer in use at the time, and still perform the same religious music composed by those who witnessed the rise of Salah ud-Din. Some of their mosques in Halab still contain the arms of this period. The martial arts of the 12th Century Muslims are mainly used for display at weddings these days.







We are near the sea and the Orontes river. The landscape is quite lush in the area, and the mountains are heavily wooded and cool. The Crusaders must have felt comfortable here where there were few Muslims living and the climate was more European. I wonder how it felt to be awakened one day by boulders hurling themselves at you out of the dark forest. The sound of stressed timber and the impact and shattering of stones must have made it seem as though the mountains themselves were lashing out in anger.

I can more easily imagine the euphoria at seeing the previously invincible and rather arrogant Franks having the tables suddenly turned on them after over 100 years of unpopular occupation.







A group portrait of some of the castle's current residents. The flowers have proved a tenacious army and are on good terms with the local population. Many Muslims see the rose as a symbol of the Prophet Muhammed (s.a.w.), and it is considered pious for a man to wear rose perfume. It was with great difficulty I parted with the habit upon returning to America. Rose is also a popular flavor in nearly all types of Syrian sweet.






Is this the quarry were the Crusaders took some of their stones from? I wonder if stones from the same quarry were used against them. You see this beautiful multi-colored stone in many of the old Syrian buildings.







I wonder how a Crusader who had been garrisoned here would feel if I showed them this photograph from the future. Would they be able to see the beauty I see in it? Or would they just see an image of disappointment, a reminder of lost friends and impossible dreams? How much of the beauty I think I see is due to my nostalgia for a seemingly better time from a Muslim's point of view? Was it really a better time? Probably depends on the individual case, as always! But it would be nice to have someone effective as well as reasonable like Salah ud-Din representing Islam instead of those fringe characters modern Americans think of as our celebrities.

The castles are destroyed, but several churches and monasteries built by the Crusaders have functioned without interruption and are active today.






You can just make out the edge of the Mediterranean in the distance here, almost lost in the mist. The slang term among the Franks for their little state was "Outremer". It means "The land beyond the sea". From the viewpoint of those for whom this is home, the sea lies beyond the land.

Ramadan

May Allah protect me and you from any error in the following, and may He be remembered if any benefit comes from Him through it.




I fasted my first Ramadan as a non-Muslim, in about 2003. Out of an interest in world religions I had started praying an ad-hoc version of the Muslim prayers shortly before. I found out that Ramadan was approaching, so I decided to try it.

At first the hunger was just a vague feeling of emptiness which led to nothing more interesting than a daze. The thirst seemed not as bad, just a bit of dryness in the throat. It was the hunger which reverberated through me like a bell. It was a feeling of dull pain which came in waves, and which I associate now with a kind of subtle sound. Was it the just the rushing of my own blood that I heard?

I was working as a slate roofer at the time. No one knew I was fasting or had any inclination towarfdd Islam. Some of my coworkers, junkies or Army Reserve soldiers in many cases, might have disapproved zealously. Alhamdulillah, they interpreted my eccentricities as a quirky species of homosexuality and/or LSD usage and left me to do as I pleased.

(It should be noted that there are some exceptionally intelligent and kind people in the field of roofing as well, particularly but not exclusively among the Jews I knew in the industry. May Allah reward them and all considerate people. I had heard some of them defending the rights of Palestinians when they had no idea I was Muslim.)

Roofing is a dangerous job, and in terms of total fatalities per year it is far more deadly than being a British soldier in Afghanistan and Iraq combined . I worried sometimes that I would get dizzy and fall from the roof. Alhamdulillah the desire to at last make some physical gesture towards Allah, Who had for too long seemed distant and theoretical, prevented me from giving up my fast. Allah's greatest blessing on me has been this love, may I live up to it in some way before what comes to all but Him comes to me.

We roofers spent our days far from the city center, in a desert of valuable Tudor homes and hundred-thousand-dollar lawns. I saw the gardeners there uprooting whole shrubs which had gone out of season or fashion, tossing them in dumpster trucks to clear the way for more attractive replacements. Exotic flowering bushes, little palms trees, florescent ferns and the like are changed there as one might spontaneously change some arrangement of knick-knacks on a shelf.

There were no restaurants or markets nearby, and fast food is wisely prohibited by law in those lands. On the long commute home, which occurred on a train as I was carless, I usually broke my fast with cereal bars and water stashed in my backpack, the cereal bars inevitably flattened by the weight of iron tools and excess nails. American cereal bars are essentially sugar-coated pieces of trash in a foil wrapper anyway, but I soon learned that a laborer in Ramadan will remember the "bismillah" and "alhamdulillah" with heartfelt sincerity regardless of what's for iftar.

At some point in the month the hunger's character started to change. Maybe it was two weeks in, if I remember correctly. Instead of feeling hollow and distant, I began to feel a sort of humming, a subtle energy. The emptiness started to take on a kind of meaning. The hum and the reverberating pain became articulate. It was now a constant reminder, a dhikrullah. This was especially noticeable when I was working alone, in silence. It was impossible not to remember Him with nearly every breath. With each surge of soft pain, my body would ask me, "Why on Earth are you doing this to me?" To the question posed by my hunger, the answer could only be, "I'm reaching out for Him, oh stomach." The awareness of Allah, which had been a pleasure/chastisement chiefly associated with my prayers or leisure time, began to flood my days like a spring rising up from deep below the Earth as this call and response between my body and I continued.

I also became increasingly aware of my interior state. For example, I suddenly noticed that riding on public trains seemed to have a slightly detrimental effect on the level of my iman. To various degrees the same seemed true of entering buildings and other such transitions of place or activity. I had never detected this before. The dua's Muslims say on such occasions started to appear less like tiresome superstitions and more like practical tools which would be beneficial to learn and make use of. I was able to identify specific problems (in terms of iman and taqwa) within myself and look for specific solutions for the first time. The Buddhist ideal of 'mindfulness', something which had seemed to me a sort of esoteric metaphysical delicacy for the pleasure of a few enlightened masters, proved surprisingly accessible through the elegant mechanism of the fast.

Of course what's perhaps even more remarkable than this is our ability to forget what we've learned if we stray from our proper disciplines or give in to some distraction, may Allah forgive us!

Eventually, the effectiveness of the practical tactics Islam contains convinced me to say shahada. If people want to judge the truth or reality of a thing, they look to the effects of the thing. For example, we may argue over whether some bit of iron is a wrench or nothing more than an odd piece of slag. In order to truly settle the argument we don't need words, we need to take the bit of iron in hand and through sincere effort see if we can turn a bolt efficiently.

If we still refuse to call the thing a wrench, well, it may as well be one despite our choice of terms!

I felt my perceptions alter rather dramatically during that initial Ramadan. Ideals about awareness exist within all of the other religions I've looked into, but what I could never find in any of them was an agreed upon, well documented, and above all effective approach to experiencing those ideals, which was adapted for the general mass of adherents with day jobs. I found such a valuable device in Islam, and alhamdulillah through my experimental practice of Islam I witnessed some rusty bolts within myself turned by what I had thought was just a scrap of history.

Of course this is only a start. For me, the pursuit of arguments and theories has come to an end. It's by reason and effort we struggle toward God, but He takes us in hand around the last bend.