DAY 3: WHO IS THINKING INSIDE MY HEAD?

 

Ever since the strange being left me, his last question had been echoing in my ears like a bell that refused to fall silent.

Was the separation between religion and politics something Islām had actually taught us?

Or had we accepted it because, somewhere along the way, we had stopped imagining anything else?

I had repeated the answer so often that I had never stopped to ask where it came from.

“Religion belongs to God, and politics belongs to the people.”

It sounded reasonable. It sounded modern. Most importantly, it sounded like my own thought.

But was it?

I tried to push the question away. I couldn’t. I tried to sleep, but that didn’t help either.

I hated the question. Perhaps that was why I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I was still caught in that spiral of thoughts when another being appeared before me. No sound. No flash of light. No opening door.

One moment the cell was empty.

The next, he was standing in front of me.

I jumped to my feet and studied his face. He looked like the professor, only several years younger.

(The professor was the name I gave the alien who kept interrogating me. I had my reasons.)

He was slightly shorter and less imposing, yet somehow colder. He wore a grey metal suit that clung to his body like a second skin. The blue light reflected off his hard features, making him look like a statue designed to conceal the slightest trace of emotion.

He stared at me for several long moments.

“Do you need anything besides the food and water you have been given?”

I seized the opportunity to ask whether I could perform ablution before prayer.

He blinked, as if the request had surprised him, and disappeared.

A few seconds later, he returned carrying a small bucket and a neatly folded prayer mat.

I opened it and stopped.

Across the elegant mat, in bold letters, were the words:

MADE IN CHINA.

I stared at it in disbelief, then couldn’t help smiling at the absurdity of it all.

It was the first time I had smiled since my abduction.

The alien looked at me with obvious confusion, as if he couldn’t understand why humans laughed at the worst possible moments.

I performed my ablution, spread the mat, and stood to pray.

I didn’t know which way the Qiblah was. I didn’t know the time. I didn’t even know which planet I was standing on, let alone whether it had the same relationship with the sun as Earth.

But I prayed.

And something unexpected happened.

For a few minutes, I forgot the argument entirely.

The newspapers. The politicians. The slogans. The accusations.

Even the question that had been haunting me faded.

I was alone.

Completely alone.

And yet I didn’t feel abandoned.

I had lost my country.

My family.

My freedom.

Even my certainty.

But somehow, I had not lost God.

I had never imagined that, with almost everything else taken from me, my faith would be what remained.

When I finished praying, I remained seated for a while.

Then I heard the professor’s voice.

“Are you finished?”

I looked around.

He was nowhere in sight.

“Where are you?”

“That isn’t important.”

His voice seemed to come from everywhere.

“Are you going to spend the rest of your life praying, or are you ready for a journey through time?”

I swallowed hard.

A journey through time?

Questions began racing through my mind.

What if we arrived in another era?

What if the history we knew was less accurate than we thought?

What if I knew far less about the Prophet’s life than I had always assumed?

And, most importantly, how would I know we were really seeing what had happened?

I suddenly felt embarrassed.

How many times had I heard stories from the Prophet’s life? And how many times had I actually studied them?

It had never occurred to me that one day I might have to defend those events as though my life depended on them.

I remembered the words attributed to ʿAlī ibn al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī:

“We were taught the battles and expeditions of the Messenger of God ﷺ as we were taught a Sūrah from the Qurʾān.”

As for me, I knew the names, the dates, the battles. I had never really learned the story.

I shook my head.

“Regret isn’t going to help me now.”

Then I began reviewing what I knew, trying to put the dates in order.

The Prophet ﷺ was born in the Year of the Elephant, around 570 CE. He received his first revelation at the age of forty, around 610 CE.

My heart eased a little. At least I knew where to begin.

Before I could finish my thoughts, his voice boomed through the room.

“Finished with your calculations?”

I forced confidence into my voice.

“Yes. I’m ready.”

There was a brief silence.

Then his voice returned

“You humans are strange.”

The professor appeared again, raising his left eyebrow.

“Why do you believe time travel is possible? Have you ever tried it?”

He asked almost casually.

That was what unsettled me. He wasn’t mocking my ignorance. He seemed genuinely surprised that I had accepted his claim so easily.

Of course I had never tried it.

I stayed silent for a moment, searching for an answer. Then I gestured toward everything around me.

“I’ve seen what your technology can do.”

“That isn’t proof,” he said.

“No. But it’s evidence that the limits of my experience aren’t the limits of reality.”

A cold smile crossed his face.

“Does seeing something you can’t understand make everything possible?”

I said nothing.

“You saw something beyond your understanding and concluded that the only explanation was the one I gave you. You saw our technology, so you assumed we could do anything.”

He paused.

“You believed me because I seemed to know more than you, didn’t you?”

Then came the question that stung the most.

“Or have you learned to surrender your judgment whenever someone appears more advanced?”

I felt a sharp pain in my chest. I swallowed hard, but I couldn’t answer him.

Perhaps part of me knew he was right.

He waved his hand. The walls of the cell transformed into a sea of images: newspapers, television channels, schoolbooks and slogans. Words repeated endlessly around us:

“Secular democracy.”

“Moderate Islām.”

“Religion belongs to God.”

“Politics belongs to the people.”

The words moved around us like ghosts.

Then he said:

“This is how minds are colonized.”

I looked at him, confused.

“Not always with tanks,” he continued. “Sometimes all it takes is teaching a people to see themselves through someone else’s eyes.”

The images shifted, as though the words were being written onto minds rather than paper.

“They didn’t need to burn your books.”

“They only rewrote the footnotes.”

I spoke quietly.

“Some people separated religion from politics because they had seen what happens when political power claims the sacred. They weren’t necessarily trying to destroy religion. They were trying to prevent rulers from using God to make their own authority untouchable.”

He remained silent for a moment.

“Perhaps.”

“And perhaps they were right to be afraid.”

“Perhaps.”

I looked at him.

“Then why are you treating their fear as proof that they were wrong?”

He answered immediately.

“I am not.”

He studied me for a long moment.

“You may not have escaped tyranny. You may only have found another way of giving power a language it can’t be questioned in.”

Anger rose in me again.

“What does that mean?”

“It means your ancestors may have feared the abuse of religious power so much that they handed authority to institutions that claimed they needed no sacred justification.”

I had no immediate answer.

He looked at me for a few seconds before speaking again. His voice seemed to rise from deep underground.

“You weren’t imprisoned by iron chains, but perhaps by ideas you never stopped to examine.”

I shook my head.

“Are we the only ones? Aren’t all civilizations built on inherited ideas? Even yours. What makes you certain you escaped yours?”

He hesitated.

“Of course not.”

“Then why should I trust you to tell me which of my ideas are truly mine?”

He looked away. I noticed his hesitation and wondered what had happened on his world.

Then he turned back toward me.

“You may have finally asked the right question.”

I took a moment to regain control.

“Not every idea that came to us was imposed upon us. Some took hold because we were tired, frightened, or simply convinced they were true.”

“I didn’t say it was a conspiracy.”

His gaze remained fixed on me.

“I said they were ideas. Conspiracies are convenient. Ideas are harder to escape.”

He pointed at my head.

“And the question I care about is simpler.”

“Are they your ideas?”

A long, heavy silence followed.

Then he asked:

“How many ideas in your head have you actually examined for yourself?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Finally, he continued.

“A wise person doesn’t reject an idea because it came from an enemy. And he doesn’t accept it because it came from someone who seems more advanced.”

He stepped closer.

“The wise person tests it.”

A small smile touched his face.

“A person who never examines his beliefs can replace one master with another without ever realizing he has changed masters.”

I frowned.

“And how am I supposed to test everything? I can’t reproduce every scientific experiment. I can’t personally verify every historical source. I can’t master every field before deciding whether to trust someone who has.”

He watched me carefully.

“No,” he said. “You can’t.”

“Then trusting someone isn’t automatically surrender.”

His expression changed slightly.

“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”

He leaned close enough that I could feel his breath.

“Now think for yourself. Set aside everything you were taught. Do you really believe time travel is possible? Or do you believe it because I told you it is?”

My throat was as dry as a desert.

I stared at him.

For the first time, I understood the trap.

If I believed him simply because he was more advanced, I had learned nothing. If I rejected him simply because he was an alien, I had learned nothing either.

I had fallen into the same habit again. We trust people who know more than we do, but that isn’t the same as knowing they are right.

In one last desperate attempt, I asked:

“Then what do you want from me? Am I supposed to distrust every scientist, every scholar, every expert simply because I can’t verify everything myself?”

He answered with infuriating calm.

“No. A wise person knows the difference between justified trust and surrender.”

“And who decides which is which?”

He looked at me.

“That,” he said, “is what you have never stopped to investigate.”

Before I could respond, he was gone.

Again, I was alone with the blue walls.

But I could no longer tell which thoughts were truly mine and which had merely become familiar.

Had I really been thinking all my life, or had I simply been rearranging ideas I had inherited?

I began to understand what the professor wanted.

Not belief.

Investigation.

He didn’t need my agreement. He only needed me to stop assuming that I already knew.

I felt as though I were running my hands along the walls of my own mind, discovering that some had been built before I was even born.

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