Except the Countenance of Thy Lord

My wife, daughter, and I, all physicians, were volunteering time seeing patients at an earthquake relief center at a remote location in Kashmir in a village called Bugna.  The camp is run by an NGO called the “Human Development Foundation.”  It was Friday, and I was invited to the congregational prayer at a Mosque close by that had been completely devastated by the quake and now was being rebuilt. 

The climb up the mountain to the Mosque would have been easier if I had been a mountain goat.  When I did arrive at the top of the mountain out of breath, I found the location to be stunning in its beauty.  The Mosque itself was a 30 x 40 foot area that had been cleared and covered with carpet.  There was a four foot high stone wall around three sides and a tin roof on wooden poles.

When I arrived, the sermon was in progress.  “God (Allah)” said the Imam in Urdu, “is what you want Him to be, what you imagine Him to be.  He could be One that is Powerful and Subdues or Compassionate and Merciful,” he continued. “It is clear that He is everywhere.  When you are lonely and if you wish Him to be your companion, he could be your friend and confidante.”  Remember, said the Imam, “He is closer to you than your jugular vein.” (Koran 50:16)

He closed the sermon by reminding the congregation of a story Prophet Muhammad used to recount.  When a man complained to God that he searched for Him all his life but could not find Him, God responded by saying that if he had gone to visit the sick the needy or the homeless in his neighborhood, he would have found Him.

Isn’t that what my family is trying to accomplish I wondered?  Weren’t we on a quest to find God?  Aren’t all those who volunteer their time in disaster relief on the same mission?  In some ways it is a very selfish motive. We were up at the camp for a short while, limiting how much we could do to help the victims.  Although our intent was to help them, their courage paradoxically helped us, as we were inspired by their valor.  They seemed to be happy and even grateful to see us and motivated by our presence.  They were heartened by the fact people even in distant places had them in their thoughts and would take the trouble to visit them. 

On our first day we noticed that the road up to Bugna was mostly dirt with short and sparse stretches of pavement.  To cross each other, each vehicle had to pull aside to the very edge of the road to make a pass.  Sometimes the edge was literally inches away from a drop hundreds of feet into the bottom of the valley.  The drive was a nightmare.

The scenery was pure heaven—snow covered peaks in the distance, slopes with terraced farms, homes dotted on the most improbable spots, scattered narrow streams that flowed into the Chenab River at the bottom of the valley.  The bright and sunny days made the area even more splendid.

Once I was able to overcome my fear, I started noticing the tents.  They were spread all over the landscape mostly in ones and twos, although one large collection formed a tent city.  Many of the tents were donated and set up by an American company, Alaska Structures.  A closer look revealed that next to each of these tents, there were small homes the quake had destroyed.  The winter had been mercifully mild which had allowed people to resume a semblance of a normal life.  We drove by signs, which proclaimed that some of the tents were schools.  We saw kids in uniforms holding books in hand.  That itself was a minor miracle.  The 7.7 Richter earthquake had killed over one hundred thousand people, thirty five thousand of which were school age children who had just begun the first class of the day.

My wife, an Obstetrician/Gynecologist, started seeing patients in a cubicle and, predictably, was inundated.  Many were in advanced stages of pregnancy and had not had any pre-natal care; all were anemic.  There was a history of one or two miscarriages for each of the mothers.  Babies are routinely born at home, and Naheed had a difficult time convincing even those with obvious breech presentations that they should go to a nearby hospital for their delivery.  To move someone in labor to go to a hospital one and half to two hours away is of course another logistical nightmare.

Goiter is endemic in the area.  Its prevalence was so high that the community health program to prevent it must be a failure.  Both my daughter and wife were impressed at how clean the patients’ clothing was and overall good body hygiene.  Their success in maintaining this level of personal hygiene while living in tents without toilets was impressive.  As reported by the WHO, they have had no epidemics related to earthquake and therefore no second wave of deaths from the quake.  This is quite a remarkable feat given the extreme living conditions!

As we started examining this group of polite and stoic people, who had obvious faith in God, which had sustained them through this unimaginable tragedy, we realized they were also depressed.  Even though we are not trained in mental health, the emotional impact of this tragedy was obvious.  A sweet little seven year old girl shall remain in my memory for ever.  She had gone to school that day but started having chest pains and was brought to the clinic.  I found no abnormal physical findings and started asking her about her school, her grades, her school teacher and her class mates.  The cause should have been obvious.  “Her four year old brother died in the quake” said one of the women with her.  “Since then she has had chest pains,” she added.  I sat back stunned, knowing there was little I could do.  I tried to make her smile, joked with her a bit and reassured her.  There may have been many others whose emotional scars were manifesting as physical pain.

After the Friday prayers ended I stood marveling at the setting.  I have been fortunate in my life to visit many monumental Mosques in the world.  Yet the setting of this small Mosque was unique.  It was as if the sky was the ceiling and the distant mountains the walls.  The sun was above us and the valley looked picturesque.  But my eyes kept wandering back to those destroyed homes and the tents next to them.  A verse of the Koran kept coming back to my mind.  It was as if the valley was echoing with it.

“Everything on this earth shall perish except the Countenance of Thy Lord.”  (Koran 55: 26-27)

Javeed Akhter, a physician, is a founding member of a Chicago based Muslim American think tank “The International Strategy and Policy Institute” and author of the book “The Seven Phases of prophet Muhammad’s Life.”