Tags
bukhari, child, discharge, father, mother, progressive islam, resemblance, Sufism
The Professor and Builder had come for a barbeque, held at the house of their mutual friend, the Geography student (or rather, Geography doctorate, as he had recently passed his PhD in that subject at the Professor’s college).
The Geographer possessed an multiplicitous network of muslims of all backgrounds — from those who identified with the religion culturally but were ostensibly secular in outlook, to progressives, revivalists, adherents of Sufi tariqas and, of course, a majority who simply maintained the five pillars of the religion and neither deserved nor would desire another label. And this afternoon, presumably with the touchingly idealistic spirit of Islamic revival and common brotherhood and sisterhood in mind, the Geographer had devised this gathering as a sort of modern day Islamic salon, with beards and hijabs instead of wigs and port.
The Professor and Builder had agreed to meet and use the event as an excuse to continue their discussion of the Symbolic might be reconstrued to offer insight into the nature of our journey’s relationship to God and Prophecy and to, perhaps, gauge the potential response of their peers to the trajectory of their ideas. (The Symbolic here taken in both the senses of the Lacanian Symbolic and the Jungian notion of archetypical Symbolism within the collective unconscious.) They also agreed that it would be nice for their families to meet (this had not happened before): a particularly pleasant notion as both men were each recently blessed with the arrival of new baby daughters.
That sunny summer morning the two families made their separate ways out to the Geographer’s house. The Professor driving north, from his house in south London, the Builder driving westwards from his house in the East End.
