Dedication

To my father — he taught me that a word is a trust before it is an ornament, and that Arabic is not loved by the claim but by the nights spent over it. He would straighten a letter for me while I thought he was straightening my handwriting; he was straightening me.

To my mother — her prayer used to reach the doors before I knocked on them, and still does. No door ever yielded to me but I knew she had reached it first, and none ever held fast but I knew there was a good in its holding that she had asked for me while I did not know.

And to every person sitting in a hall he does not see, thinking the time is long — to the Muslims at large, in the east of the earth and in its west: there is no preaching from above here; the one who wrote it is in the same seat you are in, and heard the bell as you heard it.

O God, place what is in it in the scales of my father and my mother, and grant me of it what will profit me on the day the papers are raised.