I Was A Muslim First Poem by Mystic Qalandar

I was a Muslim first,
in that primordial hour—
when God asked from the dust:
"Am I not your Lord? "
And every soul sighed:
"Yes—balā."
A witness etched in eternity.

I am Muslim the way
all particles of sand are Muslim—
surrendered utterly
to the Will that spins the stars.

I became a lost Muslim,
wandering with borrowed certainties,
veiled in the marketplace clamor of worlds,
until the road dissolved.
There, I learned that endings
are where tawbah breathes awake,
a lover's first sigh toward home.

Through violent waters of borrowed names,
I battled drowning shadows' pull—
clutching at straws.
Yet every step was a hidden mercy,
drawing me, unseen, to the threshold.

At my road's silent edge,
the veils grew thin.
I saw I had never been forsaken—
only summoned, with infinite tenderness,
through fana's fire,
back to the One I had forgotten,
the Friend whose nearnesss ears away the false.

There, a lost Muslim,
where striving fell mute
and the screech of the ego dissolved,
a single flame ignited—ishq,
the wine of divine madness.
No road remained, only vastness;
no seeker, only the Sought.

In that hushed vanishing,
only God endured—
the Mirror where I found myself
cast from His own image,
a drop feeling the ocean's pull in its own tide,
knowing, at last, 'I was already the ocean.'

—December,16,2025