It may be that those who are deemed the furthest from us culturally, scripturally or imaginatively are not at all so. I learned this lesson in school, not from the blackboard or the pulpit but rather adding one and two and coming up with me and you. It's not that simple and I don't remember the exact time or place, but it was winter and I was fifteen. Something had gone wrong, terribly wrong. Everybody was looking at me.

They were starting to sneer, chatter, mock. It was all the more difficult because I didn't know who I was, to be or not to be: to be the same or not to be; to be an Indian or not to be; to be a human or not to be. My mother said we were actually from Iraq; my father said there was no heaven. The school was giving me hell for having a Muslim name.

One day I met a Christian luminary. She was my mentor and taught the English language, and it was a short story called The Needle by Isaac Bashevis Singer that first introduced me to the idea of culture itself. Both the Jewish culture and the yearning for moral good painted by Singer appeared remarkably close to what I grew up with. Singer didn't talk about God or His Revelations, and it seemed totally appropriate for a boy who didn't think too much about all that either. In due course, I wound up reading a lot of comics and anything to do with religion in the stillness of the library, picking up even the cheesiest novels marked by the lamb's blood (or to be exact, what looked like lamb's blood). The next year we were introduced to The Merchant of Venice. Selling  to anti-Semitic Elizabethan crowds, Shakespeare had concocted Shylock. But in this grim, wily figure, I could sense peoples who had borne the brunt of persecution everywhere and how eloquence and Art were used in the cause of rapacious power.

All this was a long while back, but it is somehow very fresh, like the line "...where the Gentiles walk...." in The Needle, which perhaps means more than what it says, like the two roads in the hill-town where I stayed, the upper one for the British Empire and the lower one for the colony before 1947. As a lost boy with a Muslim name in a Hindu neighbourhood, at first I was searching for my own humanity, but then it was as if I had seen, in a sudden burst, a thousand suns burning in the chapel kaleidoscopes. It was not about me, but about everyone. It was like the sickness in my stomach I felt two years ago at iftar in the university, when as we sat down to eat and I heard a racist comment against Hindus. It was really against all of us.

The road would take me from searching for an identity to that of a shared identity and disappear into what Lao Tse called Nothingness. This Nothingness I discovered when I tried to turn to God. From merely seeing reflections to wiping clear what Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani called the 'polished mirror' of the heart.

Often I feel very grateful to my parents for not forcing upon me the yoke of tradition for it is not without its ills. A problem with tradition is that it cannot sieve all the issues that come up, especially the political. Not only do misplaced laws impede social progress but they, in conjunction with tradition, can move in a dangerous political trajectory. To be fair, in their book The Vision of Islam, Murata and Chittick write that even in tradition the issue of politics is peripheral. This was radically altered by Mawdudi and Qutb, intellectual fathers of the modern terrorist movement al-Qaida, who were viewed as heretics by the Muslim orthodoxy.

In retrospect, the way a fiery, misguided Muslim talks about Jews becomes extremely disconcerting. Not only is it a desertion of humanity but also of Islamic teachings. There is no theological basis for an iota for contempt. It is and always has been political. Once when the Prophet Muhammad was seated at some place in Medina, a funeral procession passed by. He stood up. When one of his companions protested that the funeral was that of a Jew, the Prophet replied: "Was he not a human being?"

The Prophet Muhammad objectively and morally looked beyond the political betrayals and attempted assassinations by the various tribes, of which Jews were but one. The oppression of Palestinians cannot justify the wave of anti-Semitism in the Arab world.

"Shall I not inform you of a better act than fasting, alms, and prayers? Making peace between one another: enmity and malice tear up heavenly rewards by the roots," said the Prophet Muhammad.

Abraham's fire was that which wouldn't burn him. Again and again, we are flung into what we conceive of as flames but instead find a home, a shelter, a friend.