The fire does not run.
Mumin repeated the words to himself as the Fajr adhan drifted from the mosque for the second time that morning. The muezzin's voice sounded thick and heavy, as though it were carrying the exhaustion of the whole world with every call. The notes travelled through the pale hour before sunrise, rising above the sleeping street and settling somewhere deep inside Mumin's chest.
"Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…"
He remained where he was. Sweat still clung to his skin, and the pillow beneath his head was damp. Yet he could not bring himself to move. His body felt as if it had been cast from lead: arms heavy, legs unresponsive, eyelids dragging downward. It was not sleep he wanted, and it was not ordinary tiredness. It was a strange numbness, as if the night had left something behind inside him.
The running never ended. Even when he escaped a dream, waking up became another kind of flight.
He turned his head towards his phone. Its screen glowed on the bedside table. A notification waited there—not a message, but a suggestion from his gallery app. A familiar little prompt, asking what had happened on this day.
He did not tap it. He had no reason to open it, no wish to see whatever memory the phone had chosen for him. And yet his hand moved almost by itself, his fingers brushing the screen before he had decided to do so.
The photograph appeared.
Zara.
She was smiling. It was the picture she had sent him late one night the previous year, while they were playing a game together. He could still remember the casual delight in her message: "Look how my city looks in the morning."
Behind her stood a blue door, painted in that deep, unmistakable Moroccan blue that seemed to belong to no other place. Zara wore a black burqa, her hijab drawn over her head. Only her face showed: her eyes, her small nose, and that smile. There was a light in her eyes that he had once thought could make even the most ordinary morning feel full of possibility.
Zara was his wife. The words formed quietly in his mind, intimate and painful. They had been living apart for months, separated by a problem he still could not bring himself to name. They were not divorced; nothing had formally ended. Still, silence had stretched between them until the distance felt wider than any border. He kept the details locked away, even from himself. Some memories hurt more when he tried to explain them.
He could almost hear the conversation that had followed the photograph. The game had been forgotten. Their talk had wandered, as it often did, from small things to the questions that waited beneath them.
"Do you think the one who commits injustice and the one who silently endures it are really the same?" Zara had asked, her smile lingering even as the question grew serious.
Mumin had not answered. He had wanted to, but the words had gathered inside him and refused to come out. Zara had waited for a moment, then laughed softly—not at him, he thought, but at the way his thoughts could take him somewhere he could not easily follow.
Now, staring at her picture, he felt his eyes fill. Zara—the woman he could not forget for even a second. The woman he still loved, even across the silence that separated them. After the Fajr adhan, beneath the hard glare of noon, in the long dark hours when sleep would not come, his thoughts returned to her. Her smile. Her voice. The small, ordinary words that had once belonged to their life together. And that one message he could never stop remembering: "Miss you."
Three months. Fifty-two days. One thousand nine hundred and twenty-nine hours. Which was correct? He had counted and recounted until the numbers no longer seemed to agree. Perhaps that was why he kept counting: numbers gave the passage of time a shape, even when they could not make it move any faster.
A misunderstanding. A few harsh words. Then silence. Zara had not replied again. Mumin had sent one message after another: "I'm sorry." "Please reply." "I don't understand anything." At first he had watched for an answer every few minutes. Later, he checked less often, though he never truly stopped. One tick, then two. Delivered. Seen. Silence. Every small sign on the screen seemed to open another door that led nowhere.
He wanted to see her—not as a name on a screen, but as the person he had first met face-to-face years ago in Morocco, during a trip he had taken with his family. Even now, the memory came in fragments: unfamiliar streets washed in morning light, blue doors set into old walls, and the strange feeling that one ordinary encounter had quietly altered the shape of his life. He did not let himself linger over how that meeting had begun or what had followed. Those parts of the story were locked behind the problem that now kept them apart. He could not simply appear before her while that silence stood between them; the distance was no longer measured in miles alone. What could he tell her, anyway? That he was not losing his mind, only that someone sometimes spoke inside his head? That the voice had a name—Musa—and could sound more real than his own thoughts? He could not bear to put those words into a message, let alone say them aloud.
He had told no one else about it. There had been people around him once, people who tried to talk to him, who expected him to laugh at the right moment or answer an ordinary question without making it strange. But Mumin had never known how to do that reliably. He could not tell when a response was expected, which words were safe, or how much of what he thought should be said aloud. Sometimes the answer came too late. Sometimes it came out wrong, and he replayed the conversation for hours afterward, hearing every awkward pause as if it were a mistake that could never be undone.
So he had grown quiet. Conversations became things to avoid, not because he had no thoughts, but because he never knew how to turn them into the right words. And how could he explain that the thoughts inside his own mind could become so loud they seemed almost audible? How could he tell anyone that, at times, he felt as though another presence lived there with him?
Slowly, Mumin pushed himself upright. The adhan rose again from another direction—the third call he had heard that morning. He had not performed wudu. He had to get up, whatever the weight in his limbs told him.
He lowered both feet to the floor. The tiles were cold beneath his soles. This cold was real, he told himself. He could feel it clearly. He needed things he could trust: the hard floor, the running water, the morning air. Things that did not change shape when he looked away.
In the bathroom, he turned on the tap. Water splashed against his hands, startlingly cold. He washed them three times, cupped water to rinse his mouth, drew water into his nose and cleared it, washed his face and arms, wiped his head, and washed his feet. He moved through the familiar steps slowly, giving each one his full attention.
This is real, he told himself. The water is real. The cold is real. The tiles are real. The fire is not real.
But if the fire was not real, why could he still feel its heat in the palm of his hand?
He raised his eyes to the mirror. A boy stared back at him: dark circles under his eyes, beard grown unevenly along his jaw, hair disordered from sleep, shoulders sloping as if he carried something too heavy to set down. Fear lived plainly in his expression. He knew that face. It was his own.
Then, at the very edge of the mirror, he thought he saw someone standing behind him.
Mumin turned sharply. The bathroom was empty. No movement, no shadow, no one hiding by the door. Only wet footprints marked the floor—his own, leading from the tap to where he stood.
He needed to reach the mosque. It was only a five-minute walk, a short stretch of familiar street. On most mornings, he could have crossed it without thinking. Today the distance seemed to lengthen with every step he imagined taking. Along the way, there might be people. People might greet him or ask a question. He would have to answer. He might choose the wrong words, fail to answer at all, or leave a silence that made the other person uncomfortable. He had never learned how to move through these ordinary moments without feeling that everyone else had been given instructions he had somehow missed.
He put on his shoes and opened the door. The morning air met his face, cool enough to raise a faint shiver along his arms. It was not winter, yet the street carried the chill of the hour before sunrise. The road lay nearly empty. Far away, a dog sat beside the pavement, watching him without moving.
Mumin began to walk.
With each step, a question drifted through his mind. Who are you?
He did not know where the question had come from. It seemed to have been waiting for him somewhere between the dream and the dawn. But once it surfaced, it would not leave him alone. Who was he, really?
His father used to tell him that he had been born on a night of relentless rain. "It was pouring," he would say. "We thought we might not even reach the hospital in time." His mother remembered another part of the story. "I named you Mumin," she would tell him. "Your father wanted a different name, but I said, let him grow up to be a true believer."
As he walked, Mumin wondered whether he truly was one. He feared Allah. That much he knew. But was fear the same as love? Did he love Allah, or had he spent his life worrying about what might happen if he failed Him? The question followed him along the empty road, step after step.
As a child, he had been called foolish. His class teacher had once complained, "Nothing goes into Mumin's head." Yet everything did. Lessons entered him, but so did the world around them—every question, every imagined possibility, every injustice he saw and could not stop thinking about. His mind had always been too wide a place for one lesson at a time. While the teacher spoke, another world unfolded inside him.
In that world, he was Musa. Musa was the person he wished he knew how to become: someone who could face what others looked away from, someone who would not mistake silence for innocence. He had wanted to grow up and find an answer to the question Zara had once asked. Were the one who committed injustice and the one who endured it without resistance truly the same? He thought that one day he would understand how to stand against wrong without becoming cruel himself, how to speak without hurting people, and how to act without freezing in uncertainty.
But growing older had not brought him the certainty he expected. The world did not seem to change. People repeated the same injuries, the same excuses, the same silences. The only thing that grew reliably was exhaustion.
At last, he reached the mosque gate. He placed his shoes neatly on the rack and stepped onto the cold marble. Inside, the adhan had ended, and the iqamah was beginning. Its measured words travelled through the prayer hall, calling those present to stand together.
A few people were already inside. No one paid him much attention; each seemed occupied with his own thoughts. Mumin found an empty place in the row and straightened it, aligning his feet with the others.
Then he remembered the first time his father had taught him how to pray. Mumin had been small enough to sit beside him without reaching the floor properly. His father had leaned close and said, "When you stand before Allah, remember that you are alone. Just you and Allah."
"Abbu, does Allah hear my thoughts?" Mumin had asked.
"He does," his father had answered. "And He knows what you think."
Back then, Mumin had thought that Allah must therefore know he wanted to become Musa—and that Allah must also know how afraid he was that he never could.
Now he stood in the mosque, his eyes lowered, preparing to pray. Before Allah, he was alone. The thought should have frightened him. Instead, for one brief moment, it felt like relief.
Then another voice stirred in his mind. Musa's voice.
You can do it, it said. I will help you.
Mumin frowned. No. This was imagination. He had to be quiet now. He had come to pray.
Why are you running? Musa asked again. I am with you.
Tears slipped from the corners of Mumin's eyes. He did not wipe them away. He began his salah.
"Allahu Akbar."
He folded his hands. Slowly, the noise of the world seemed to settle into place. There was no fire in front of him, no shadow at the edge of his sight, no message lighting his phone, no image of Zara asking him to explain what he could not explain. There was only Allah, and Mumin standing in that moment. No argument to win. No one to chase. Nothing to escape. Only the prayer, and the possibility of sujood.
He bowed, then lowered himself until his forehead touched the ground. The floor was cool against his skin. Solid. Real. He remained there, letting the words he had carried all morning finally loosen from his chest.
"Ya Allah," he whispered, "I want nothing. Just a little peace. Just the certainty that I am not losing my mind. And Zara… please let her understand, even a little, how much I love her."
No answer came. Allah remained silent.
Yet Mumin wondered whether silence could be an answer of its own. Perhaps, when the world stopped speaking, a person could finally hear what was already inside him. And perhaps, in that difficult listening, a truth might begin to surface.
The truth was that Mumin did not know who he was. But until the prayer was over, he did not have to solve it. He was not the imagined Musa. He was not a man trying to force Zara to understand him. He was not a failed dreamer. He was simply a servant of Allah, crying in sujood.
The prayer ended. One by one, the others rose and left. Mumin remained in his final prostration long after he should have lifted his head. His feet were numb; his thoughts felt just as distant. For a while, the simple act of standing seemed beyond him.
At last, he pushed himself up. The mosque was nearly empty. An old man sat in a corner, moving prayer beads through his fingers as he recited tasbih. When he noticed Mumin, he gave him a small, kind smile.
"Son," the old man said, "what you ask of Allah, you may receive. But before you ask, think carefully about whether what you want is truly right for you."
Mumin stopped. He had not asked for anything—not really. He had only cried into the ground.
The old man's fingers moved along the beads. "What you have become, you have already become," he added. "Now you must learn to accept it."
Mumin had no answer. He only nodded, then walked out of the mosque.
Outside, dawn was opening across the sky. Orange spilled into blue above the rooftops, and the first sunlight touched the edges of the buildings. The street that had seemed cold and empty on his way in was slowly returning to life. In his hand, his phone vibrated.
A message.
An unknown number.
The words were brief: "The fire does not run. Neither do you."
Mumin looked up and searched the street. No one stood near him. There was only the waking morning, the quiet road, and the dog in the distance, still watching him from the same spot.
He could not tell whether the message was real or imagined. But the phone was real. The message was there on the screen. And the fire—was the fire real?
He began the walk home. Inside his head, Musa was laughing softly.
"See?" Musa said. "You are not alone. I am here."
"You are not," Mumin answered aloud. A passing bird startled from a nearby ledge, but he barely noticed. "You are only my imagination. I created you."
"Then where is the line between imagination and reality," Musa replied, "if imagination is what keeps you alive?"
Mumin stopped walking. The words struck somewhere deep inside him and remained there, resisting an easy answer.
He took out his phone and opened Zara's photograph. Beneath it, he began to type.
"I think of you every night. I pray for you in every prayer. I don't know whether you'll read this, but I want you to know that I have never forgotten you. If you ever come back to me, I am here. Always."
His finger hovered over the send button. He moved it away. Brought it back. Hesitated again. The message seemed so small beside everything he wanted to say, and so dangerous beside everything he had left unsaid.
At last, he closed his eyes and pressed send.
The message was gone.
Mumin raised his face to the sky. The sun was rising. Night had ended, at least outside him. But would the darkness within ever lift?
Musa said nothing.
Far down the street, the dog still sat watching him. For one strange instant, Mumin thought its mout
h had curved into something like a smile.
No. Surely that was imagination.
Surely.