Ramadan Vignette III: Qiyam-ul-Layl
Short Story Archive #6
Issue #037
It is that time of night when—in expectation of dawn approaching—the absence of birdsong is most keenly felt. There is stillness in the silence that stretches over the waiting night, but this is not a dead silence. Whispered movements are sensed elsewhere, movements which don’t disturb that stillness, which instead absorb into the quiet and breathe a faint, phosphorescent life of their own.
For this is after what some call the witching hour. A unified purpose weaves together these quiet persons that venture from the confines of sleep and into the solitude of nooks and corners that they’ve saved as their sacred spaces for the night. They are varied in their appearance and garb, hold their provisions, or merely a copy of the Qur’an, or the burden of a heavy heart, and yet there is something in the well of their eyes that is identical.
In a dorm room, fairy lights strung over a desk switch on. They dimly illuminate a small room that holds a single bed, a tallboy and a clothing rail. And the cluttered desk with the little lights hanging above it. It is littered with paraphernalia that hints at the likes and habits of the room’s occupant: lightweight grey laptop with beige wireless headphones resting on top, a box of dates hastily closed, a pile of ramen packets (extra hot), pastel highlighters, a candle scented with sea salt and sage, Korean sunscreen, a scarf scrunched up and tossed beside Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and three other books with spines turned to the wall, a rosewood tasbih, a Qur’an.
A girl—a young woman still getting used to the label woman—comes to sit at the desk and cups her face in her palms for a moment. Her dark hair is in an unkempt plait, ends flicking out of the braid and at the nape of her neck. She breathes deeply, shoulders hunched, her mind untidy. She is attempting an emptying, wants to force the deadlines and assignments out, alongside the critical words her parents had spoken to her in their last conversation.
It doesn’t happen, so she straightens anyway, winding the tasbih through the fingers of her left hand and picking the Qur’an up. Then she pushes the chair back, stands and walks to the cramped square of space at the foot of her bed where she has already laid out the prayer mat. For a moment she pauses, considering something, pivots suddenly to the desk and grabs the scarf. With one practised motion, it is wrapped around her head.
She doesn’t look like she has rested much recently. The circles under her eyes are darker than usual. When she kneels on the prayer rug, part of her dips out of the light that shines aslant through the window. Her face, then, is cast in shadow while her hands remain burnished by the glow of yellow streetlights. They are still for a few seconds, the tasbih and Qur’an unmoved and unopened. Then a whispered word in Arabic (‘bismillah’) leaves her lips and she opens the Qur’an.
For a while, there is only a muttered recitation and the occasional turning of a page. She is aware of music pulsing mutedly in a dorm room somewhere else in the building and feels the difference in her actions that marks her with awkwardness. It is an awkwardness she barely tolerates and completely despises, but it is one she feels nonetheless. An imaginary conversation plays in her mind unbidden, where her explanation of ‘I was up all night’ falls flat in the midst of mirth, wrangling the atmosphere.
She pushes the thought aside, changes tactic and closes the Qur’an. Now her fingers find the first bead, marked by the tassel, and become busy as they flick each bead backwards, as if gradually subtracting something to nothing. She settles into the rhythm of this. She has chosen what is known as the ‘du’a of laylatul-qadr’, made up of three parts: an acknowledgment of God’s power, a declaration of God’s mercy and then a b plea for forgiveness.
She finds herself lost in it, thanks the random person on TikTok that posted it, feels herself softening, reflecting, unzipping from the jadedness that had settled itself over all her other feelings. She reaches the end of the tasbih and stops, her hands stilled. Abruptly lifting the Qur’an from where she’s placed it on the bed, she flicks to a page near the end. There’s something in here, surely, that is exactly what she’s looking for. She has a vague memory of it. A verse for this precise feeling of wandering and disillusionment that she has succumbed to in her day-to-day. She turns the pages backwards and forwards, eyes roving over verses, skipping verses, then needing to come back to a verse again.
It is about being lost, that verse. It is about the wide-open, vulnerable part of her, isn’t it? It is about the draft in the window and the ice-cold fingers of the wind that grip her face, her nose, her head as she tries to bury deeper into her duvet, it’s about the ache of homesickness that sits in the pit of her all the time, it’s about the modules she has to sit through and which she feels immensely guilty about hating every minute of, it’s about watching the clothes in the washing machine spin and all the conversations she’s fumbled rotating torturously round her mind, it’s about lying in bed, a long list of things left undone, and her finger and eyes scrolling, scrolling, scrolling…
Here, she tugs the bookmark ribbon in the Qur’an and snaps the pages so they fall back to her place. She continues reciting. It isn’t avoidance that she gives in to, it is the need to stop the thoughts in their tracks. Sometimes she finds herself hours in the same current of thought, spiralling deeper into the why and if and but and if only that sprout with every thought.
And at some point, the quiet enters her. Today, perhaps because she hasn’t slunk so soon back into bed, bored and scared of the thoughts that rear their heads in the rare moments she allows them to. The invisible rope of something seems to tether her now. And loneliness, too, parts from her. she forgets it, actually. Reads a little more surely the words of God.
Everything has sloughed off. In this moment there is just her and Him.
She doesn’t wonder how she got here in this space. For the moment, she is content to be here. Feels rooted, calm.
Her alarm sounds, signalling the time she has set to eat suhoor. This moment usually takes a lot longer to arrive, but today there is not impatience. She stands from the prayer rug, but doesn’t fold it. There are still a few mouthfuls remaining in her water bottle, which she believes are enough to excuse her from a trip to the communal kitchen. She gulps it down, her thirst suddenly apparent, then opens the box of dates. Her mum always said something about dates being hydrating. She opens it, checking for insects and finds none. As she lifts the date to her mouth, she smiles suddenly, remembering.
‘And He found you lost and guided you.’
Beautiful. Just beautiful ✨️ May Allah bless us all with the honor of continuing worship and tahajjud throughout the year. Ameen