The Zones of Heaven and Earth

THE ZONES OF HEAVEN AND EARTH

by Saad Omar Khan

edited by Sonia Urlando

Content warnings: Parental death

We left for the Old New World after the waters swallowed our city. 

This is what you’d told me, Abba, as a youth. The history of our blood. Delhi to Karachi. Karachi to Sacramento Bay. Everything by God’s will. “God took it slowly,” you would often say. “A slow Judgment Day.”

Yawm al-Qiyamah was always on your mind. The Day of Judgment. You would speak of the signs of the final days. That the graves of our ancestors would be lost to us. That the nations of the world would compete in creating tall buildings. But these and so many things had already come to pass. We had already lived in a mutilated world for generations. Where were the graves of our forefathers but under water? What choice did humankind have but to build up towards the heavens, to house our lives on whatever land we had remaining to us?

I could never tell whether you were disappointed by these turns of history. You taught me of the Hour. When the trumpet is blown. When the moon is cleft asunder. I see you, my father, in your white kufi, sitting on the ground with the children of the community, giving them lessons on the Prophet’s life, or how to pay zakah, or on the end of days. Your eyes, alight with kindness, calmed our juvenile fears, assuring us that as Muslims our fate was secure, that our belief was a life raft keeping us afloat in a world that didn’t belong to us; a world we did not belong to, either. The hereafter was our reward: an afterlife of abundance, of fruit trees and fountains, of verdant landscapes and wafting breezes that spoke of a peaceful coolness we could scarcely imagine. 

I remember when Dada passed. His home was still in BackTown, where climfugees and other immigrants lived, away from the endless scrapers that overlooked the Bay. His eyes were like yours, full of the same warmth, the same longing for a purer life than what we were bestowed. “I wish I could have had more children,” he once said to me in one of the sundry parkettes BackTown had at the time. “That way we could have had more grandchildren. Strong little ones like you, Safir.” We walked together over the turf, the paint of the jungle gym and the slides peeling away under the filtered orange light. “The kuffar don’t allow it, though.”

His eyes drooped. I know what he meant. Even at that age, we were told in school of how all families were limited to a single child by law, that child licenses had to be earned, rules enacted just after the last climfugees were allowed in the country. It was a cruelty designed to be kind, to the country and planet. So we were told. The Climate Security Agency already decreed the single child policy decades ago. It was a sunnah, a tradition of the Prophet, to marry and have as many children as God permitted, a tradition we could never carry out in the Old New World. I accepted the policy, absorbing the logic of its rigidity. Only later would I know what it really meant to him, and to you, Abba. A limited lineage. The blessing of children unmet. 

It didn’t seem such a restriction growing up. I never knew whether you felt the pain of your parental life being so limited, but I can tell you my childhood was one of joy. I knew the privilege we lived in, a privilege granted by your job teaching at the university half the time, the other half at the madrasa. Look what it gave us—life away from the BackTown tenements you grew up in, in the scraper overlooking the seabarriers, the UV dome giving us visions of the dikeworkers mending the granite-coloured walls, over towards the ocean where the forests used to be, the Pacific drowning the pines in a black-blue ink. 

Most of all, it gave us the sun. Through the dome at the border of the coastline, we could be a witness to that which had caused the state of the world we were in. I couldn’t see its destructive power and could never appreciate how cocooned we were. I could only feel the blessing of its weak light, visible through the dome on our school playground, the type of light only the wealthy could afford to see near the seabarriers. Our apartment villages—where every home, grocery, office, and school were connected by conduits and transit corridors—were shields for us, allowing us to live like ants or termites or whatever hardy insect still walked the Earth. It was the sun that made me feel human, Abba, imagining what it might have felt like when our ancestors gazed towards it, shielding their eyes but embracing an intensity we could never feel. “ ‘God is the Light of the heavens and the Earth,’ ” you said once, quoting the Qur’an, when we walked with Amma on the Bay promenades together. “Before our family became scholars, they were probably farmers at one point. Imagine them ankle-deep in water in rice fields after the rivers flooded over. Subhanallah.” 

You sighed as you glorified God. I looked up at you, bewildered at the words and the images veiling your mind. “Abba, have I ever seen a ‘river’?” I asked. 

You looked down on me with a smile. “No, but you will, inshallah. In Paradise.”

You would each hold my hand, you to the right of me, my mother to the left. You were both so large to me as a child, large enough that I could barely see the hawkers selling locusts and chapulines to the side, Amma coaxing me into trying them (“They’re halal,” she would say, laughingly, as the hawker offered me a pick of the toasted reddish-brown hoppers. “This is one of the few meats you’ll get, so eat up, beta.”). The warmth of your palms clasping my hand was stronger than the insipid heat the filters allowed. I already lived in Paradise, Abba, with you and my mother at my side. It is only now, as I hurtle beyond the mesosphere seeing the airglow surrounding the Earth, that I realize all I have lost: The luminescence of your love gone, God’s grace reflected through your eyes, dimming with time.

•••

Our faith was another shield, a mirror with which we could shine back the light of the world, back to the desiccated fields and gluttonous oceans of the Old New World. I felt you resented this dunya, still the abode of the kuffar, those who lacked belief. I can’t blame you, Abba.  “They built everything after destroying everything,” you once told me. “They brought their own Judgment. A slow Judgment. On all of us. Once the real Day of Judgment comes—” you stopped yourself short. “I shouldn’t curse anyone, astaghfirullah,” you said, holding back your anger. 

  At moments, you seemed to welcome this reckoning, infatuated by the apocalypse. Perhaps the end of days would vindicate everything you believed in. It seemed odd to me, even in my youth, that it took so long to come. Even still, I believed in it for some time. But what you longed for, I feared. This slow burning was horrendous as it seemed beneath divine power, a destruction God’s children were more than capable of creating for themselves.

As time went on, however, and as my childhood ended, questions erupted within me. If so many signs had come to pass, why had the Judgement not come? I kept these doubts to myself, but others expressed what I held within me. Do you remember one of your students posing that very same question? These were the days you taught at the Madrasa al-Salihin, in your office overlooking the Bay. From the ninety-seventh floor I gazed over the seabarriers when students would come to your office. You wanted me there as often as possible. I surmised as a teenager it was a way of indoctrinating me to the future life of a scholar. It felt enchanted, the way the students would respectfully bow to you, the sincerity with which they hooked onto every word. They were a fading fraternity, those would-be scholars. In a world where the kuffar saw us as a curious anomaly, believers in an ancient religion that was scarcely practiced in the Old Old World, your students looked to you as a follower of a tradition: an inheritor of the Prophet’s mantle, as all scholars were. 

When Younus, one of your younger students, came to you while I was visiting after school, his face seemed worn and desperate. The conversation turned to a khutbah you had made on the Judgment. “You mentioned that one of the signs would be the cleaving of the moon when the Day of Judgment comes. Is this to say that the lunar settlements are somehow haram? Or perhaps we should be looking at the signs a different way?”

“There is no different way to look at them, Younus,” you said, calmly, if somewhat abruptly. “What’s been said about the signs is true. We should expect the cleaving of the moon as is said in the hadith. As for whether it is unlawful for a Muslim to be in the settlements, the scholars make clear that we can use the moon for its material wealth if and only if we use those resources to benefit humankind on this planet. After all,” you said with a smile, “what value is there to make roots in a rootless place which will be split in half anyway?”

“Yes, sheikh,” said Younus, with hesitation. “But I’ve heard of scholars who’ve stated that we must consider the possibility of what may happen to the planet and to the ummah.”

“The signs speak of milestones to be met,” you said with an impatience I had never seen before. “Allah subhana wa-ta’ala gives no time limit for when they must be met. What is important is for us to be patient for the time the Hour comes.”

You had nothing but confidence in the End, and you tried to instill that confidence in Younus. I thought he seemed convinced when he left your office, standing to embrace you before he walked out the door. You were a leader who exuded the reassurance that the promise of our deen was secure. 

But not all the scholars agreed with your opinion. 

I would accompany you to the debates between the Fiqh Council of Turtle Island and your organization, the Islamic Jurisprudence Committee. Those discussions were heavy with the air of rancor. The divisions became clear. The Council thought lunar settlements were perfectly within the bounds of the shariah and was, indeed, a new territory for the believers to spread Islam. They felt the Committee was shortsighted. The Committee lobbed similar volleys against the Council. The loudest voices yelled munafiqun, “hypocrites,” amidst other outrages and insults, stopping short of accusing the other side of outright apostasy by ignoring Islamic eschatology that decreed that the world would end with the moon being split.

It was you who stood up to calm the space, standing up to remind the Committee and the Council of the proper etiquette in discussing such matters, while also being very clear where you stood. “For us to answer this question, we must ask ourselves several others,” you said, the attention of the scholars in the university hall directed solely on your voice. “How do we direct our prayers if the Kaaba is no longer in the same world as us? How do we determine the start and stop of the months of Ramadan and Dhul-Hijjah if we sit on the very moon we must sight, according to the Prophet’s sunnah, to create our calendar? Do we ease our hajj obligations if it becomes impossible to go back to Earth and the Holy Cities? How do we even calculate when hajj is to be performed? Do we let our children’s children stay on a body we know God himself will split in half when Yawm al-Qiyamah comes? What good will spreading our presence as Muslims do when we violate every directive, every obligation, and every fundamental principle of jurisprudence? We may stretch the Law only so much—stretch it too thin and the connection we have with God snaps.”

•••

Those debates never abated. You’d continue them at home, Amma always agreeing to what you said. She was placid, a lake of calm more concerned with her tiny family than with details of Holy Law that seemed too abstract to be of consequence. She would take me whenever she could through the conduits to our school in the Sea Bank region where we, the children and grandchildren of climfugees, could learn under the domes. Even as a youth, when I still believed in Yawm al-Qiyamah with the same fervor you did, Earth seemed so small, a dried shell of a planet that held no potential or mystery. In the playgrounds, where the sun shone on us through the filters, I looked through the screen bubbles with a wonder fueled by classroom stories of the brave first lunar colonists planting the first seeds of civilization. 

I never really spoke with you of this fascination. I never knew if you’d be interested. The thought of the moon drew me closer to the heavens. Not the heavens you believed in, not Paradise, but space. That fearsome blackness charged with radiation, breached occasionally by the light of the sun. Luminous and blanched from afar, the moon was a lodestar in the dark that allowed me to think of a different paradise as I inched closer to adulthood, one where curiosity could not be slaked.

You and Amma encouraged me to work and keep up with the study of my deen, as well as the study of worldly things. But it was the worldly things that captivated me the most, more than being a hafiz of the Qur’an like you wanted me to be. Amma understood me. She took me to museums, the hologram exhibits of the planets and ancient space shuttles giving my imagination fuel. She knew my mind, how my curiosity veered to wanting to know the order of things, the sequence of how the lands and planets were formed, the building blocks of the universe of which I only saw a small sliver. I chose engineering when I had to decide on what to do for my future career, thinking it would give me an exit, a door that could take me away from domes, from the cities, from the spiderweb of the conduits, and the rush of pale, unhappy urbanites. I wanted to go towards…something. Something wild. Something new. Something that spoke of discovery. 

They gave me the iron ring when I graduated, Abba. I remember how proud you and Amma were. But you feared me going outside the domes, supervising the cobalt mines in Chena River. I assured you both that we were safe from the heat underground. I know that troubled Amma the most, perhaps thinking, in the subterranean, that I had come close to hell. I think now she was more concerned that I was far from her, and from you. 

Perhaps too far. I was in the underground when I heard Amma had passed. It was sudden and fast. “Her heart just gave way,” you told me over the Vodoscreen. “Verily we belong to Allah, and verily to him we return.” I know you’d dried your tears, but I could see with clarity bits of moisture still present, creating a sheen of sadness from your cheekbones to the border of your beard. 

I came back to you for the janazah, too stunned to weep. You led the funeral prayers, stoic when we both stood in front of Amma’s coffin. You never told me of the pain of losing her. You accepted the qadarullah, the net of destiny that scooped us all into God’s plan. Amma’s passing was part of that. You spoke little, except to ask me if I was well, and when I was going home. In your apartment, the sun hazy before dusk prayers, I told you I had to return to Chena. A part of both of us broke then, you understanding my commitments, me understanding the overwhelming loneliness you were left with, a solitude I was unsure even prayer could assuage. 

•••

They needed people, I was told. Chang’E Consortium. Selene Mines. Lunacore Exploration. Corporations had been vying for years for mining rights. The colonies were increasing rapidly, in size as well as in profit. Opportunities abounded. A former colleague, Bragg, had me for lunch on one of my visits back to the Bay. He suggested I consider working for them.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “You’ll be inundated with offers from the Big Three companies. They’ll be coming with stories about bringing families there, and how they’re try to recreate Earth in the sky—”

“And I shouldn’t believe them—” I interrupted.

“Oh no, believe them. I’ve talked to some buddies through Skylink. But you don’t want to go just because you get to see the movies with your friends there. What they’re really saying is—this is it. This rock is our life raft.”

Abba, you never wanted me to leave. I had already moved away from the faith that guided your existence, away from the life you wanted me to lead. You sensed, with the intuition of a saint, that I was also veering away from you. I had no family of my own—nor did I desire one. I made excuses, of work mostly, but perhaps you already knew that I was different, that my wants and needs were limited to my studies, my career. 

I blistered your heart more when I told you about the opportunity. At your kitchen table, where we ate with Ammi all those years, you asked me what they wanted me to help mine.

“Titanium.” 

“No titanium mines on Earth?”

I said nothing. Your sense of betrayal was apparent, that I was going to those very same colonies that you’d admonished others from going to. 

“I was afraid of telling you,” I said. 

You leaned forward, moving your cup of tea delicately to the side of the table. “You know where I stand in all of this.”

“I do.”

“What do you think this deen is, Safir? It’s a way of life. A way of looking at the world. I’m not a naive literalist, despite what people say of me. Think of all that we stand to lose.”

“Abba, we’ve already lost this world.”

“I know that more than anyone,” you said, sighing. “The kuffar created this world. We just followed them.” You looked outside. Orange horizon filtered through the window as the sun sank slowly behind the seabarriers. “Producing and despoiling in cycles without end.”

I wanted to interject, to speak my own mind—would only the unbelievers have created the world as it is? Were our ancestors not part of the same trap they had put their children’s children in? 

“It’s in the Qur’an,” I said, wanting to interrupt your reverie. “ ‘If you have power to pass beyond the zones of heaven and earth, then pass.’ ”

“What does the Qur’an say after that? ‘But you will never be able to pass them, except with authority.’ Who has the authority, beta? Exploring God’s universe to benefit humanity is a duty. But the moment we cross the bounds of this planet and abandon the Earth, we lose our ability to worship, to organize our prayers, to determine the Holy Month.” You stopped talking, exhausted. 

I leaned over the table, clasping my hands together in a vain gesture asking for understanding. “Every modern mufti has said we have a duty to be on the moon.”

You pushed back in your seat. “Follow them,” you said softly, in a voice that betrayed nothing. Was it anger or resignation, Abba? To this moment I can hardly discern the difference. 

“They’re allowing families now. I want you to come with me.”

“I won’t go.”

“There’s nothing here.”

“I still teach when I can. I have your mother’s grave in the plot in BackTown. We haven’t lost the ground here yet.”

“We will.”

“And then it will be lost with me.” You rose to leave your cup on the countertop, returning to put your hand on my cheek. “But you have to forge your own path. That I know. It’s the duty of fathers to let go of their sons.”

Your palm drifted away from my face, and you turned your back to me, silently shuffling towards your bedroom. I was broken by your sad tenderness, Abba, obliterated by the sight of your shoulders hunched over in resignation at the knowledge I wouldn’t join you in your dusk prayers. The breach between us expanded. I nearly wept thinking that this distance would only grow wider, that gap between spirit and mind, between bodies that would no longer exist on the same plane.  

•••

I never wanted to let you go, Abba. If only I could have let you feel that. 

Skin cancer. Another victim of the sun. It had happened so rapidly, a matter of weeks. Selene gave me time before I transitioned into the new assignment to be with you. In those days before the launch, if you saw me looking away from your face while you were in bed, it was out of pain, a limp hurt compared to what ravaged you, damaged your skin, enervating you to the point that even asking for water was impossible. 

I knew your heart. You had only one wish. To be buried according to the shariah near where Amma was buried. Burying you under the tenebrous lights, in the grey-green catacombs where the Muslim section was segmented off. I saw your students put you under the ground, in that artificial turf we called “earth,” but was really a crude proxy for actual soil. 

My soul sank with your body. The thought of losing you further, of being unmoored from what was left of your presence. What a cold existence I had been put in, Abba, cold as the void I would be passing through soon.   

•••

I left the dome into the sun that kills and creates life. They gave us salves for our exposed skin before we left for the pad. From the windows of the second floor, I could see families waving at us from the LunarGate. We were workers of all types: miners, engineers, accountants, and sundry corporate astronauts attempting to create the germ of a community on the moon’s surface. There was no one to wave me away, Abba, no one to weep at my departure as I walked across the pad under the unmerciful heat to the shuttle. I saw no familiar faces at the Gate’s mezzanine before the attendants strapped us in, the shuttle banking to the launch center, hoisted into the scaffolding before turning perfectly vertical to face the sky. Before the roar of the launch, I only imagined the land that would be our new home, an oceanless ball, perhaps what Earth had been before God’s incubation brought forth the mountains, forests, and waters. 

I see wondrous things, Abba. The exquisiteness of creation. The blue of the firmament darkening into a blackened chaos. You’re with me, you and Amma, at the end of the shuttle in storage, your bodies bereft of the souls now with God. The company gave me that dispensation. “We want to create a home for our employees,” the HR representative said. “A new home. And with talent like yours we allow limited space in our craft for workers to make them feel like they can start a new life.” What life and what home would I have without you both? 

The moon is whole, uncleft. And I will bury you whole, in sealed coffins, shrouded in the ihram with which you went on pilgrimage as a couple under the giant Meccan canopies. 

This world is a dream, you once said, a prison for the believer as much as it is a paradise for the unbeliever. But there are many worlds gifted to us from God. 

The second janazah has been arranged. I’d asked permission from the masjid if the rules of fiqh accepted disinterment. Tranquility Station 3 has believers in the New New World, as they call it. Cremation was allowed only until they fought to purchase a plot of land, a few acres of grey silicate, where your bodies can lie in wait for a Judgment I no longer believe will take place. But I did it for your sake, the love I have for you and Amma more vibrant than the vacuum in my soul for God. 

I can’t tell if you’d be angry at me, taking your bodies so far from where you and Amma had been raised. But can there still be anger in death? Does it evaporate when we pass this life? I won’t think of that. I will only think of all the things you’ve taught me every time I visit you under the transparent bowl with which I will see the Earth’s radiance illuminate your graves, the simple mounds composed of the dark dust of heaven. If only you could see the haunting blueness, the seas covering the graves of our forefathers. We can still see them from here, with you and my mother beside me, floating in this land together, tied to each other as the family of stars and planets are bound in their own solitude.