Habibullo-Eugene Kiselev
A Synopsis of my Life
March 23rd, 2018, Friday, 11:08:15 p.m.
Yekaterinburg, Russia. GMT 05:00
This holy day in Islām was kind of an unusual one. Not only because of the unusual circumstances and spiritual experiences, this Friday was also odd from the emotional viewpoint.
Okay. When I came to the mosque named “Ramadan” today, I dropped into the barber’s where I found Xasan alone. I said “As-salāmu ʿalaykum”, and we had a short conversation. Having entered the mosque, I took the tahara and went to the prayer hall. Soon, the jumuʿah began. Ənvər Xəzrət took the floor to communicate some of the organizational issues. He also introduced the new guest from Uzbekistan. His name is Sahobiddin Hazrat Satimov and he is currently serving as an imām in “Tulkin Akrom Ugli” Masjidi (Uzbek Cyrillic: «Тулкин Акром угли» масдиди) in Tashkent. When it was time for the khuṭbah, Ahmed Hazrat read some prayers in Arabic, following him Sahobiddin Hazrat began his sermon. He began to speak Russian; I could only catch him saying that all of us, men, are equal before Allāh. Afterwards, he switched to Uzbek. I could understand some of the words and names, but I could not catch the general idea of the sermon. After the jumuʿah, I had an opportunity to have a short talk with Sahobiddin Hazrat. When all was finished, Murad gave me his skullcap as a present and said it was “magic”. He again offered me a lift home, we talked a lot on our way, Murad even tried to treat me with his prayers when I said I was a bit sick.
When I came home, I looked for my e-mails and found a letter from the Bashkir State University. One of the teachers, a certain Gөlşat Xasanova sent me some tasks. She communicated to me I was supposed to write the answers to the questions manually in a copybook and bring it to her. Moreover, she sent me a copy of a textbook, which was published in Russia. She offered me to study the topics from this so-called “textbook”,which was written in the most illiterate English I have ever encountered during my work as an ESL Teacher. Apart from all of that, she offered me to copy out the words from that lousy textbook into the copybook and learn them! I have known those words since the age of three! All the more so, they were written with a whole bunch of mistakes in that foolish textbook for idiots! I was scandalized. I gave her a call, she again told me that. When I said “that is nonsense”, she immediately took offense and said it was “disrespect to the teacher”. So, I faced the problem of getting transferred to another university. I told that to Xәlidә Nurƣәlina, she supported my idea.
Just think: someone in this world is dumber than I am. I involuntarily recalled a story I read in my childhood. Socrates’ famous dictum is “Εν οίδα ότι ουδέν οίδα” (Latin: “Scio me, nihil scire”. English: “I know that I know nothing”). Once, Socrates had a meeting with a wise man from the East. Having had a conversation with him Socrates said, “He is even sillier than I am. I know that I know nothing. He does not even know this”.
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