Journey to Bosnia (15)

Journey to Bosnia
(14)
Saturday, 13 Dhul-Hijjah 1447 AH
By Dr Muhammad Akram Nadwi
Oxford

I awoke for Fajr at a quarter past four. At that hour an odd blend of freshness and fatigue prevailed over me—energy mingled with weariness, wakefulness tinged with a longing for rest. After the prayer sleep eluded me, and I was unwilling to force my soul into what it disdained. I therefore sat at my desk, attending to some tasks and leafing through letters and notes that had piled up during the trip. The hours passed in a calm stillness, broken only by a distant, muffled sound or a fleeting movement in the hotel corridors.

At seven o’clock I went down to bid farewell to my friend Dr Omar Khan, who had come from California. In these days we had enjoyed warm companionship and continuous conversation about scholarship, daʿwah, and the state of Muslims in East and West alike. How often farewells stir thoughts in the heart! Rarely does a person part from a companion whose company he has cherished without feeling a certain emptiness, as though a portion of his own days were departing with the traveller.

While I mused thus, my mind turned to a matter that has long preoccupied me: ideas that lodge in people’s minds and, over time, harden into unquestioned axioms. Many sayings are born of conjecture, error, or misunderstanding; then tongues transmit them from generation to generation until they are taken as established truths. An old maxim frequently comes to mind: the origin of most doctrines is sheer ignorance; the second generation passes them on as stories, and the third inherits them as articles of faith. When ignorance crystallises into creed, reform becomes among the hardest of tasks. People may bear being told that an opinion of theirs is mistaken, but they cannot bear to hear that what they inherited as belief needs review or correction.

This is not peculiar to any one nation or sect; it is a human trait wherever man is found. Many illusions that rule the lives of nations sprang from ancient ignorance and, with time, donned the cloak of sanctity. Hence intellectual reform is one of the heaviest and most daunting missions: it confronts not error alone but also familiarity, habit, and the psychological inheritance to which individuals and communities cling.

Afterwards I went to the restaurant and met my wife and daughters for breakfast. In that morning gathering there was a quiet joy that precedes parting: faces smiling, conversation gentle, yet deep down we all sensed that the journey’s days were nearly over and that soon each of us would return to ordinary life and daily work.

I then went back to my room, collected my books and papers, prepared my bags, and cast a final look at the place in which I had stayed a few brief days. One never quite knows why a person grows attached to a place even after a short stay and then feels a mild sorrow on leaving it. Perhaps the reason is that a place retains something of the memories that lived within it; when we depart, we leave behind a portion of those memories.

A little after half past seven I went down, ready to leave for the airport. Around eight o’clock we boarded the coach that was carrying about fifty-five fellow travellers. It moved gently toward the nearby airport—the hotel was only minutes away. The roads still held the hush of morning; it was as though the city had not yet fully awakened.

At the airport the wait was longer than we had expected. The procedures consumed a great deal of time, as is the custom of airports in this age of growing regulations and endless checks. Once I had finished everything connected with the journey, I returned to my reading and other work, making use of the time as best I could.

We boarded the plane at eleven, but take-off was slightly delayed. How much travel teaches one patience! It is a chain of successive waitings: waiting for the bus, waiting for the plane, waiting for the luggage, waiting for arrival. If a person knew how to invest these moments, he would realise that waiting itself is an integral part of the journey, no less significant than motion.

At last the aircraft lifted, and Bosnia began to recede from view. Through the window I watched mountains, valleys, and tiny villages shrink until they disappeared beneath the clouds. I then recalled the scenes of the past days: the meetings with brothers, the sessions of knowledge, the conversations on daʿwah, the visits to towns and mosques, the gracious faces that honoured us with their generosity. The trip was short in days yet rich in meanings and memories.

We landed at Luton Airport at half past one in the afternoon, but the return journey was not yet over; obtaining the luggage took a long time, and we waited until after three before we could board the car bound for Oxford.

The car set off along the familiar road between Luton and Oxford while I felt myself gradually re-entering the rhythm of daily life after days spent away from it. The English sky, true to form, was veiled with a light layer of cloud, and across the horizon spread that tranquillity the soul has grown accustomed to after many years of residence.

When we entered Oxford before evening, I sensed that a page of this year had been turned and that the Bosnian journey had ended, carrying with it its quota of knowledge, companionship, reflection, and experience. The value of the trip lay not only in the places and sights we saw but also in the thoughts it stirred, the encounters it afforded, and the lasting imprint it left after the days had passed.

Thus our journey to Bosnia came to an end, yet its memory remains alive in both heart and mind, reminding us that travel is not merely movement between places. It is passage between ideas, emotions, and experiences. One may return from some journeys as one departed, but from others one comes back having added to the soul something new—something that does not vanish with the road.