The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim

I stood for twenty years a chess piece in Córdoba, the black rook.
I was a parrot fed melon seeds by the eleventh caliph.
I sparked to life in a Damascus forge, no bigger than my own pupil.
I was the mosquito whose malarial kiss conquered Alexander.
I bound books in Bukhara, burned them in Balkh.
In my four hundred and sixteenth year I came to Qom.
I tasted Paradise early as an ant in the sugar bin of Mehmet Pasha’s chief chef.
I was a Hindu slave stonemason who built the Blue Mosque without believing.
I rode as a louse under Burton’s turban when he sneaked into Mecca.
I butchered halal in Jalalabad. I had been a vulture just ten years when I looked down and saw Karbala set for me like a table.
I walked that lush Hafiz home and held his head while he puked.
I was one of those four palm trees smart-bomb-shaken behind the reporter’s khaki vest.
I threw out the English-language newspaper that went on to hide the roadside bomb.
The nails in which were taken from my brother’s coffin.
My sister’s widowing sighed sand in a thousand Kalashnikovs.
I buzzed by a tube light, and three intelligence officers, magazines rolled, hunted me in vain.
Here I am at last, born in a city whose name, on General Elphinstone’s 1842 map, was misspelt “Heart.”
A mullah for a mauled age, a Muslim whose memory goes back farther than the Balfour Declaration.
You may remember me as the grandfather who guided the gaze of a six-year-old Omar Khayyám to the constellations.
Also maybe as the inmate of a Cairo jail who took the top bunk and shouted down at Sayyid Qutb to please please please shut up.

  • Amit Majumdar

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/early-europe-and-colonial-americas/ap-art-islamic-world-medieval/a/the-great-mosque-of-cordoba