Fully titled For[god]: a remembrance of love in the path of losing, the volume is a collection of short prose and poetry spanning 2014 to 2018, based on Noor Iskandar’s observations and ruminations during his travels. Many of the pieces in the collection are centred on the interplays of spirituality and the earthly states of human existence. Just as his journeys often took him down roads and to places less travelled, Noor chose to self-publish his debut collection. His reason was that he wanted to be more actively involved in the book’s production, including the book’s cover design, which depicts a scene from Khaju Bridge which he photographed while in Esfahan, Iran, in 20151. The book’s cover also depicts two women in dark dress and shows a line where a sand-coloured wall seems to meet water. Behind the title stamp, what appears to be petals, Noor described, are designs he had extracted from “[an] image of the white robes donned by the dervishes” during the whirling dance performed during the Sema, or Sufi worship ceremony2. The design of the book’s cover is testament to Noor’s talent in using the medium of composite photography to express his spiritual and artistic philosophies.
Noor’s journeys are featured prominently in the collection, expressed in lines such as “Mosques in Iran are exceptionally beautiful” (“Your Body is a Mosque”, p. 37), “I saw her as we were making our way to the car after the Nowruz festivity at Najjar” (“At All the Right Places”, p. 11), and “I remember praying in Kargil in darkness save a small oil lamp in a grand mosque” (“Ninety-Nine”, p. 56). However, journeys, and also sojourns, figure into the very structure of the works themselves, expressed most distinctly by the meandering streams of thought. In the prose “A Poet’s Soulmate is Salt” for example, the poet writes,
I dropped my shawl in Barcelona when alighting the taxi. The one I bought in Bursa. Segments of blue, earth brown and concrete grey. I lost the ring bought at the Sunday market in Lisbon, a copper ring with a shield as the core plate. On it, an insignia of doves and ferns. I skid sentimentalities across my skin. (p. 33)
Here, the reader is able to trace a journey bound in the items that one may buy from places we visit, either out of some resemblance of necessity – for example a winter jacket from a thrift store because temperatures were colder than expected,or perhaps even the shawl that the poet has lost – or as commemorative tokens of having been to a place – like the poet’s shield ring, maybe a fridge magnet or a mug with the city’s name emblazoned on it. However, as with the nomadic life where moving is a necessity and one brings only what is most essential, the poet shows that the material, in being lost as he moves from one place to another, is an impermanent thing – a non-essential – “skidding” across one’s skin. In some other instances, the meandering seems to emulate the fluidity of thought and memory. In “Your Body is a Mosque”, the poet’s exaltation, “Mosques in Iran are exceptionally beautiful”, segues into,
A friend in Kuala Lumpur brought this up the other day, ‘What if your mouth is a burning mosque?’ And all that you do profess and don’t are both heaven and hell. (p. 37)
Later, when the poet and another persona are at the Esplanade, “deliberating if to know someone is to understand them” (p. 38), the poet goes on to muse,
I like the word ‘discover’ better. It connotes a certain mystery, the desire to get deeper with the comfort of knowing there is no ground. No walls. No mosques to burn because a mosque resides within your heart and your heart alone. (p. 38)
Places in For[god] often serve as sites for trajectories into more spiritual and philosophical musings – on the nature of our existence, the forms of our worship, and the embedded places within our Selves. Apart from places, the very geographies of the pieces are reminiscent of travel, and of the twin, often combined, acts of wandering and wondering.
These musings, and the meandering, streaming mode of philosophical exploration would play a key role in shaping the next prominent theme within the collection, that of religion and spirituality. Here is where Noor’s writing seems to bear echoes of much earlier Muslim poets such as Rabi’a al-‘Adawiyya, Rumi and Muhammad Shams ad-Din Hafiz, all of whom are described to have “poetically convey[ed] the relationship of love between human beings and God, between lover and the Beloved”3. This concept of love in the sense of “apophatic4 mystical” or religious experience[5] comes through in many works within the collection, most notably in pieces like, “To Unholy” (p. 2-5), “In Prayer” (p. 16-17), and the titular one that sums it up in the end, “For God” (p. 67-69). In these pieces, there is no clear distinction as to whether the “beloved” that is mentioned refers to what we would think of as a conventional romantic partner, or to God. Often the references fold into themselves, erasing distinction, thereby bringing the “beloved” intimately closer to the poet. There is also a distinct focus on inwardness when it comes to the processes of discovering and connecting with one’s spirituality and religion. Noor’s writing ruminates on the idea that prayer and worship need not be bound by place or institution, and neither should it be governed by any group or boundary. Rather, both prayer and worship involve a coming into one’s self. He also hazards that this journey of selfhood should not fall to the judgement and policing of any individual or society. We see this recurring critique in “Masjid Kita”, when the poet questions,
I begin to ponder the faces of your guardians the way they question my name. My art is humble, my passing here is simple. I wish they see that my way to God is a different stroke of faith, but still very much in shade. Why are mortals the ones governing my conversation with You, within Your Womb, anyway? (p. 42)
And in “Yuna”, he hopes that “your heart does not make space for words like ‘kaffir’, ‘infidel’, ‘shirk’ and instead be a room with gardens as walls, an ocean of calmness as floor and ceiling, permeating skylight” (p. 64). In “To Unholy”, the poet writes the following closing verses,
Perhaps, I don’t want to be a temple had I known my prayers won’t reach you- I want to unholy If to be unholy is to love you. (p. 5)
To “unholy” oneself here can refer to stripping oneself off the vestiges of ritual practice, convention and institution, in order to arrive at a more transcendent religious experience. In other works, such as “Khayal” (p. 48-49) and “We are Alright” (p. 57), Noor also shows how religious experience can be a multi-layered one, where religion and spirituality often have to coalesce and even contend with the real and the mundane. For many Muslims, their faith is woven into the fabric of their lives, governing their hours, actions and thoughts. Noor’s writing acknowledges how, in our daily existences, remembrance can become a challenge. And we tend to forget – our religious obligations, the minuteness of our first world sufferings in the vastness, as well as our own mortal state. This close duality of remembrance (for God) and forgetting (forgot) within the faith-driven life we lead is also a prominent theme within the collection. Surely, works such as “I Keep Forgetting” and the words, “The sides of my palms are straying apart. Keep them close. Keep us closer” (p. 15), resonate with many Muslims living today – fighting to keep their religion and God close, but who are also swept by the dizzying experiences and demands of the mortal world. To this, it seems that remembrance is embedded in contemplation, looping back to the earlier point on meandering and wondering:
I have questions, full. Questions on salvation, civilisation, the origin of the veil, the conditions of a mosque, the verses of the Quran, thoughts on sexuality, lust, on love, death and the afterlife. (“On Will and Worship”, p. 18)
Questioning and seeking, rather than falling into the traps of absolutes and certainties, may well be the best process of remembering.
For[god] speaks to the minds of the faithful and to the hearts of those who are on spiritual journeys of their own. As such, Noor calls for us to respect another’s journey – freeing ourselves of malice, judgement and ego[6]. He also asks that we be “more sensitive and recognise the different struggles we all carry within ourselves”[7]. In the afterword, he expresses that his intention is for the book to encourage “deeper introspection and meditation” without offering any answers. To all these effects, I believe that the collection has lived up to what it had set out to do – but of course with every new reading, one can expect to still find more, for the mortal seeking is never-ending even as the material self will be gone one day.
Dr Nuraliah Norasid is a writer and literacy arts educator in Singapore. She graduated with a PhD in English Literature from Nanyang Technological University. Her thesis looked at the conceptualisation of marginality through the medium of literacy and creation and revisionism. The creative portion of that thesis has since been published as the novel, The Gatekepper, which won her the Epigram Books Fiction Prize in 2016. Nuraliah is currently working on a new novel and enjoys quiet pursuit, such as reading, penmanship and stamp-collecting.