The Epic of the Hijri Year That Walks Against Time

The Hijri new year is told here as the story of an hour that changed history: a man who left Makkah by night with no crown and no treasury, carrying a message, and whose city never left him. The book follows the Prophet Muhammad to the cave, where the verse “Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us” becomes an architecture of reassurance, along the desert road and into Madinah, where the Ansar turn exile into brotherhood and the mosque takes the place of the palace at the heart of the new community. It then reads the lunar calendar as a migrating year whose months travel through the seasons, watches the years walk past like characters, from Badr and Hudaybiyyah to Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba, al-Khwarizmi and Ibn al-Haytham, and puts us before a court of the clock that asks what each of us will build and whom we will forgive. Writing from New York, the narrator smells Damascus jasmine among the skyscrapers, asks the new year to pass gently over Damascus, Ghouta and Deir ez-Zor beside the Euphrates, and sees New York as a migrant city where almost everyone carries an old key. Its closing prayers and questions call for an inner migration away from hatred, arrogance and despair, and end with the thought that the most beautiful years are those in which we change.