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I thought Black Thought had an obsession with Somali Bars unti I had a Black Thought that he was simply pronouncing sommelier like Somali-yay instead of sommelier. Then I Black Thought that I might be the one with a Somali Bar Obsessison. We don’t even drink. At least, we not posed to. I wanted to tell that to my old neighbor in Mogadishu. Asked him why he was day drinking and swerving his white Prado through army checkpoints, throwing bribe money out the window, his kids at home waiting for their Quran teacher to come teach them how to memorize but not understand the meaning of the Holy Quran. Going through the motions.
I asked him why he was going through the religious motions of showing up to Friday prayer, reading his Quran, giving charity money – all when he was a hopeless addict? He stopped me right there – “I might be an addict,” he said, “but I’m not without hope.”
“I cling to my prayers and my Quran because I know one day Allah will show me mercy and give me the strength to give up this habit. But if I leave off my prayers, my remembrance of Him, then there is no hope for me. As long as I’m doing sin, I may as well do good to try and balance it out. I’m not perfect, but Allah still has rights over me. The prayer is not optional, and neither is the drinking in my life, but one of those things is beyond my control, and the other I can choose to do. Prayer is not beyond my control. Prayer I choose to do. Alcohol, I wish I could choose to say no, but right now, I just can’t.”
And that’s real.
Why is it that some of the wisest aphorisms come to me from people who’ve lived the hardest lives, and not from the clergy who are supposed to help us find the light in this dark world? Why is it that when I look at them, I feel hopeless, like I’ll never be good enough for Allah. And when I look at my fellow addicts, all I see is acceptance and compassion. None of us wants to be where we are in our battles with addiction, but all of us know what the other goes through. And we try to hold space for understanding. We extend compassion to our fellow addicts that we don’t often extend to ourselves.