"Whosoever loves for Allah, and hates for Allah, and gives for Allah, and withholds for Allah, has perfected faith."
(Hadith - Abu Dawood)
As Jamal made his way through the dusty lanes toward his workshop, the dream clung to his memory like smoke from firewood, faint, persistent, and impossible to shake. He was not a man prone to fantasies, certainly not the romantic kind. Yet today, it had gotten out of hand. That woman, the one with the blurred face, had returned again. She haunted his sleep like a specter with unfinished business.
His sandals scuffed the dry earth as he walked the two-kilometer stretch westward, but the path felt longer with his mind snagged in restless knots.
When he reached a narrow lane that curved behind an old oak tree, a shortcut he rarely took, he veered sharply. Time pressed, and the morning sun was already making promises it would keep.
That's when he saw him.
Fawas stood at a vegetable stall, animated in full theatrical defiance, locked in what could only be described as a war over potatoes.
"Khalti, wallahi, you're cheating me!" Fawas declared, slapping his palm to his chest like a wounded poet. "Ten pounds is more than enough. These potatoes look like they've survived hijrah and returned twice!"
The vendor, a stout woman in a charcoal jilbab with arms like she could lift a mule, glared at him, unamused.
"Ya ibn ukhti, don't bring Allah into your stinginess," she snapped. "Fifteen. And if you don't like it, go argue with the tomatoes."
She squinted at him like she still remembered him as a boy, caught stealing dates from her window ledge.
"Fifteen?" Fawas gasped, scandalized. "Khalti, I'm family! Practically an orphan..."
"You're over thirty and still spoiled," she cut in, wiping her hands on her apron. "Your mother fed you lamb and lies."
A few shoppers chuckled nearby, forming a small circle like spectators at a street play. One of the younger boys whispered, "It's Fawas again, fighting for his life over potatoes."
With a dramatic sigh, Fawas surrendered and counted out the coins. "Here. May Allah bless your business, and your stubbornness."
She snatched the money and muttered, "And may He grant you a wife to tame that mouth."
From a shadowed alley across the road, Jamal watched. His lips pulled into the faintest almost-smile, then flattened. Something tugged behind his ribs. Memory.
Just the night before, they had sat together under the last stars, legs dangling off the rooftop of Fawas's house, a chipped kettle between them, tea still warm. And Jamal had spoken, truly spoken, for once. About the dream. The feeling. The woman.
Fawas, of course, had laughed. That belly-deep, wall-shaking kind of laugh that could turn death into village comedy.
"Dreams? Soulmates? Ya akhi," he'd said, still grinning, "those are tales from bored aunties stirring qahwa. Life's about flesh, not phantoms!"
Even now, Jamal could hear it. that laugh, reckless and echoing. He had wanted to believe him. They were men of the visible world, men who trusted the weight of wood more than whispers of the unseen.
But something had shifted.
The dream carried weight. And Jamal... he was standing at a threshold now. Would he dismiss it as madness, or accept the strange aching truth that perhaps the ruh knows what the body cannot yet understand?
He lingered, watching Fawas from the shade. His brother in all but blood, yet suddenly a stranger to the hunger twisting in Jamal's chest.
Fawas: tall as a date palm, face sun-kissed and ever-smiling, the kind of man who unraveled both mothers and their daughters with one grin. The town jesters always joked:
"If you can't marry him, keep him as a concubine."
He wore his charm like a misbuttoned cloak, handsome, magnetic, generous to a fault. Women followed him like breeze follows jasmine. Veiled or unveiled, shy or bold, they fluttered in his orbit.
They called him Abu al-Niswan. Father of Women. Half in jest, half in prophecy.
And yet beside him, Jamal felt a gulf. Fawas chased what eyes could see. But Jamal? Jamal was being chased by something unseen. A whisper that didn't come from the lips of any woman, but from within. soft, relentless:
You were made for more.
He turned, quietly slipping toward the alley that led to his workshop. But it was too late.
"Aywa, Jamal!" came the shout behind him, bright and irreverent. "Don't act like you didn't see me!"
Jamal stopped, exhaling slowly. Fawas jogged over, holding up a triumphant potato like a trophy.
"And ya zalameh, you left like a thief in the night yesterday. No salam, no 'I'll see you.' What happened, dream-boy?"
Jamal raised a brow. "Didn't know you wanted to mock me till Fajr."
Fawas clutched his chest theatrically. "Mocking? Ya rajul, I was saving you from madness."
He glanced down at Jamal's hands. "Still carrying wood and wudu'? Wallahi, time is running past you like a wild donkey. Marry before you turn into an ayah no one recites."
Jamal shook his head, lips twitching. "You say that like your name isn't echoing through every tent and teahouse."
Fawas scowled, mock-wounded. "You? Afraid of women. That's all it is. All this talk of sacred bonds and dreams... are tales for poets and soft-hearted Sufis. There's no such thing. Only what you can see, touch, and taste. Like these!" He slapped the potato in his hand and laughed.
Jamal gave a slow shrug. Words were wasted on Fawas when he was like this. Loud men always drowned quieter truths.
But Fawas wasn't finished.
He leaned in, voice dropping. "Speaking of faces, you heard about Almeida's cousin? Back from the city. They say she wears silks, perfume you can smell before she turns the corner. Skin like polished copper. Hair like black silk. And the way she looks at a man..."
He whistled low. "You, Jamal. You need a woman like that to wake you from this... mystic nonsense."
Jamal's steps faltered, just for a moment. His expression stayed even, but his eyes darkened. He turned slowly, voice cold.
"I've told you before... haven't I? Don't bring Almeida's name to me again."
The shift was immediate. Fawas blinked, hands raised in mock surrender. "Forgive me, old friend. You know my tongue. It runs faster than my sense."
Jamal shook his head, not angry, just done. A faint smile tugged at his mouth, not from amusement, but from long-suffering tolerance. Fawas had always been this way, relentless with his teasing, even when he danced too close to old wounds.
But the wound wasn't just old. It was deep. Almeida...;
He used to think the world of her. When they were younger, she was the lens through which he saw every other girl. He had thought she was his sanctuary, a friend close enough to hear his unspoken prayers. But then she...
He didn't like to say the word. Not even in his head. But it had happened. Almeida and her circle, angry at his refusal to taste what they were offering, had turned his virtue into a reason for violence. They mocked his abstinence, then punished it. He had barely escaped that night.
Left Nur Afiya behind like a scorched past. Seven years away, wandering, rebuilding, healing piece by piece. And now, for five years he had returned, with silence still coiled in his throat like barbed wire.
So no, he would not hear Almeida's name spoken like it meant nothing.
With a small nod, He stepped away. body turning back toward the road, as he continued in his track to work.
Fawas watched him go, grin fading. He squinted against the morning light. "Is this the same Jamal I grew up with? La hawla... The man who never turned down a story about a beautiful face? Now he walks like a dervish..."
He shook his head again. "May Allah protect him... or he's going mad."
Behind him, the vendor watched Jamal's retreating back, her hawk-like eyes narrowing.
"Aib," she muttered. "A young man like that, strong, upright, worth his weight in gold. And still no woman beside him? Neither from here nor the city? Something's not right."
Fawas smirked. "Khalti, if you want him, shall I pass along your proposal? Applications go through me now." Then he picked his bag and turned to leave.
The woman arched a brow, showing a grin full of wisdom and one missing molar.
"Ya ibn al-halal!" she called after him. ""It's rude to leave without hearing an old woman out!"
Fawas groaned, turning back, arms crossed.
"May madness not cloud your head today," she snapped, then softened. "But mark my words, boy. A man like Jamal? They're already circling. From here to the city, women enough to fill his dreams. It's only a matter of time."
Fawas grumbled and turned to leave. "That's your tea, Khalti. I've had enough of this kind of discussion about him with almost every woman in Nur Afiya." He mumbled beneath his breathe as he continued in his track toward his bicycle.
The old woman watched him disappear, dust rising in his wake. "Ya ibn al-halal, Always running," she muttered. "Never listening."
__________.
Jamal didn't look back.
The market faded behind him. Its clamor, its colors, all faded like a memory that no longer fit. His feet led him down the winding slope toward the western edge of Nur Afiya, where the town thinned, and the dust deepened.
Here, the street narrowed into a crooked row of half-painted shops and rust-bitten stalls. A bicycle repair boy with grease-stained fingers barked at a goat nibbling his tire tubes. Two sisters sold fried dough beside a red umbrella that never quite opened fully. Laughter rang out from an ajar barber's door, where an old man dozed mid-shave.
This was the street of the hands, the road of labor, where things were made, mended, imagined.
To the locals, it was just "Work Line."
To Jamal, it was breath. A second home. A stretch of dust and devotion.
The scent of lacquer, smoke, and turmeric clung to the air like worn prayer beads. Familiar voices called out greetings: a nod from Yusuf the welder, a wave from Binta, the old scarf vendor whose kiosk leaned like a tired elder.
He passed a wall covered in layered posters: births, deaths, weddings, and forgotten political slogans. A child traced over one with a charcoal stick, sketching wings on a man's face.
Jamal paused, watching.
Then moved on.
Finally, he reached the door. His door. The workshop stood there like an old friend. Modest, earth-toned, spine straight. The wood was sun-kissed and weatherworn, but it stood firm. As always.
Inside, the scent of cedar and dust wrapped around him like an old shawl. The quiet swallowed the outside world. His tools waited where he left them, each one resting like a verse from a forgotten scripture.
He opened the shutters. Light poured in like truth.
His hands moved by memory; bag hung, tunic changed, prayer rug spread.
He faced the qibla.
Prostrated.
And as his forehead met the cool earth, the ache returned.
Not the ache of loneliness.
The ache of knowing something is near, but not yet.
Then without meaning to, He whispered "If this is madness, Ya rabb... Then let it be Yours."
And in the hush that followed, it was as if the wood itself listened.
Waiting.
Like him.
For something that had not yet arrived... but would.
Whatever this was, it was pulling him inward. Stripping him down to something simpler. Something truer.
And as he bowed in sujud, his heart raced through a longing that would not name itself.
Not yet.
Even as his lips whispered Ameen... her face hovered behind his eyes. Unformed. Unnamed. Unclaimed. Still waiting somewhere, just beyond the veil.