Medina
Each step you take pleads for the next and even if you turn round the dome and minarets time and time again you still want more.
Inside the mosque you first encounter people of every race wearing colorful clothes ranging from snowy white to jet black. You walk along with the same steps that took you around the dome enjoying the soft and warm energy that seems to run into your soul with each step you take under the vaulted sky of this land.
You kneel down and have a drink of water and this is the first stage of your fall from the mountain of pride. Then you sit down and look around. So many pillars! It makes you feel dizzy just looking at them.
Reading the Holy Qur’an in the vast and open space inside the mosque gives you a feeling of delightful bliss. Your extreme haste to read the holy revelations of God that once descended upon the heart and soul of Mohammad (S) in this very place forces you to read the next verse before finishing the previous and this is the state that you are always in while inside and around the holy space of the great mosque surrounding the green dome.
Only with a contented soul, holy love of God and his prophet, a feeling of oneness with all believers, and losing yourself in Divine love can you reach the unity and trust you seek.
The reward of congregational prayer in Masjid-al-Nabi is equal to the reward of one who has prayed in the first row behind the prophet himself. How can you turn away from the congregational prayer at Masjid-al-Nabi when Mohammad (S) himself is its leader and when Mohammad (S) himself does look upon your sincere prayer with kind eyes? Invitation! One that calls for all our hearts! And now, action! (This is the soul of the Shia ideology.)
We do not walk but run and fly toward our destiny, even though we know nothing of it but a name and conceive not its way but the signs that lead to it. However, our hearts beat along with our group leader’s heart. When he makes a good decision, we too get a good feeling in our hearts as we follow him with indescribable sincerity.
Gradually our lips become dry and our faces red from exhaustion as we gasp for breath.
But our steps once more quicken with excitement and anxiety to reach the promised congregational prayer before the end of the evening Azan (call to prayer) fills our hearts with hope.
Suddenly we all feel afresh with the sight of a garden door opening into a magnificent palm grove. We run delightedly toward it. What a familiar scent! What a pleasant atmosphere! We drink a little water and hastily enter an old, worn-out building called "Husseinia."* A Husseinia is in Medina! We shiver, not out of fear but with delight, the delight of looking at a familiar face, a kind smile. For here, we see another Arab. A sincere and faithful Arab!
Indeed one is reminded of Abouzar, Salman, Ammar and all the other companions of the great prophet over and above his everlasting brother Imam Ali (AS).
Inside the old but pure and simple space of the Husseinia stands a library which holds pictures of the shrines of Imam Reza (AS) in Mashhad and Imam Mousa Kazem (AS) and Imam Hussein (AS) in Iraq. The books on the shelves are all in Arabic and include valuable sources of Shia belief. A number of Arab, Shia boys are reading together from a book with the help of two great men, their Shia teachers.
How different this scene is from what we have so far seen of the Arabs of this land and how lonely and faraway this sincere and faithful group seems from the eyes of their nation.
Tonight this little group is hosting a large group of guests who can hardly fit in the space inside the building.
Despite exhaustion from the walk, the heat, the extreme thirst, and the crowded space, the prayer that we say here lightens our hearts more than any other prayer that we have so far experienced in this land. And no! Indeed it is the only prayer that lightens our heart and the only prayer in which we see, feel, and find the loneliness of Shia in this town, the meaning of unity and concord and the value of consentience and cooperation.
After the evening prayer, the little group offers us dates and water, which is their only nourishment, and the fruit of their daily labor in the palm grove. We all know that such delicious dates will not be our portion in any other place in the world and thus eat them with haste and greed.
A number of them announce that they will be holding a mourning ceremony for the martyrdom anniversary of Fatima (SA) and invite us all sincerely to dinner. We have no choice other than refusing their invitation respectably while choked with tears. While parting they see us off with more dates and we long to stay there forever.
And we leave with dragging feet from the garden that we are thinking about all the way home. -