My Heart Is Not Mine

I have called many things my own in life: my books, my dreams, my thoughts, my efforts, and even my sorrows. Yet the more I have tried to understand myself, the more a certain truth has unfolded before me: the thing closest to me, dearest to me, and most deeply felt within my existence is, in reality, not mine at all. It beats within my chest, it shares in my sleepless nights and the whispers of my prayers, yet it is not my possession. Alas, that thing is my heart.

If my heart were truly mine, I would have authority over it. I would command it, and it would obey. I would call it back from those streets where no one waits for me anymore. I would shut the doors of those memories behind which only longing resides. I would forget those people whose companionship now survives merely as a faint echo from the past. Yet my entire life bears witness to the fact that my heart has never been subject to me. I wished to stop it, but it chose to journey on. I wished to make it forget, but it deepened its remembrance. I wished to silence it, but it only began to recite its laments with greater intensity.

Often I feel that my heart is not merely the organ beating within my chest, but a traveller separated from some ancient caravan of time, wandering endlessly through the deserts of the past in search of lost traces. My intellect advises it to remain in the present. It reminds it that days once gone never return, and that people who have departed remain only in memory, like pages of an old book. But the heart pays no heed. Again and again it turns to look behind, like the last traveller of a caravan who, even after reaching the destination, continues to gaze wistfully at the dusty roads left behind.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of my heart is that it loves eras more than it loves people. Sometimes I do not miss a person; I miss an entire age. An age that has ended, yet remains alive within my heart.

I miss my village.

Its quiet evenings, the fragrance of its soil, the scent of earth soaked by rain, the paths upon which I once walked without ever imagining that one day those very paths would become dreams. How many times have I tried to convince my heart that a person should belong to wherever life takes him? Yet even now, my heart occasionally sits beside those fields, wanders through those lanes, and searches for scenes that perhaps no longer exist as they once did.

And then there is Nadwat al-ʿUlamāʾ.

Allah alone knows what my heart saw in that place, for even after all these years, a part of it remains there. No matter which city I am in, no matter how absorbed I am in my work, there comes a moment when my heart suddenly lifts me and carries me back to the hostels of Nadwah. Once again I am walking through those corridors, looking at those doors, descending those staircases where life once felt so simple and so beautiful.

I remember the classrooms. Perhaps the lessons themselves no longer remain fully in my mind, but I still remember the serenity of those places of learning. I remember the voices of the teachers and their kindness. I especially remember the company of Mawlānā Shahbāz Ṣāḥib and Mawlānā Wāḍiḥ Ṣāḥib. The moments spent with them now feel like a few preserved fragrances of spring remaining within an autumn-stricken garden. At the time, perhaps we never realised how precious those hours truly were. Human beings often appreciate a blessing only after it has slipped from their hands.

And those hours after ʿAṣr…

Ah, sitting outside the Nadwah canteen with friends after ʿAṣr!

Looking back now, it feels as though those were days from another life. No grand purpose was being discussed there, no great plans were being made. Sometimes there was poetry, sometimes jokes, sometimes aimless conversation, sometimes half an hour spent debating a single verse, and sometimes a friend’s quick wit would unleash a storm of laughter.

At the time it all seemed ordinary. Today I realise that perhaps the true wealth of life consisted precisely of those seemingly purposeless joys that we never recognised as wealth.

I remember the evening descending, the colours of the sky changing, and we friends simply sitting together. A poem would rest upon someone’s lips. Someone would revive an old memory. Someone would tell a joke that left everyone doubled over with laughter. Little did we know then that one day these very moments would be preserved within the heart like the last burning lamp in an abandoned mosque.

Today, at times, I sit among people and yet feel a strange loneliness. The gathering is there, but it is not that gathering. The people are there, but they are not those people. Conversation continues, but it lacks the ease and intimacy that once existed among friends.

Then the heart quietly opens a door to the past, and suddenly I find myself in one of Nadwah’s evenings. I hear the voices of friends, the laughter, the echoes of poetry. And when I return to the present, my heart feels emptier than before.

I have tried hard not to let these memories dominate me. I have told myself that life means moving forward, that one should not live behind in ages that have passed. I have explained to my heart that the Nadwah of those days belongs to the past, that those friends have scattered into their own worlds, that those evenings will never return. Yet every time my heart listens in silence—and at the very next opportunity it sets off once more toward those same streets.

Sometimes it seems to me that my heart is an old emigrant who left his homeland many years ago, but whose soul still resides there. The body has moved forward, but the heart remains behind. Perhaps that is why a peculiar sadness sometimes descends upon me in the night—a sadness with no obvious cause, yet with roots that run very deep. I know that I am not remembering a single person. I am mourning an entire era. I am remembering days when friendship was easy, laughter was spontaneous, hope was simple, and life had not yet become so complicated.

Time has taken much from me, but perhaps what it has taken most is the age in which my heart once dwelt. That is why when I say, “My heart is not mine,” I do not mean merely that I have no control over my affections. I also mean that my heart still wanders along roads where my feet can no longer return. It still sits in gatherings of friends where my seat now lies empty. It still smiles over a verse of poetry outside the Nadwah canteen after ʿAṣr. It still converses late into the night in some hostel room. It still counts the shadows of evening in a quiet lane of my village.

And I…

I am merely a weary traveller walking behind my heart—trying every day to bring it into the present, and losing it to the past every day.