This is a personal blog written from experience and metaphor, not doctrine or authority. It reflects how the world looks to me right now, not how it should look to others. Reading it is a choice, as is interpretation.
Image by Jakob Linser
I have many names.
Abdo, after my grandfather.
Abu Saleem (ibn Fatima), after my parents.
Muhammad.
Iskandar (Alexander) — the name I sign with.
Roumani (Roman) — my family name.
Rou — a name given to me by Kholoud.
Mani — a name given by Manar.
Manilein — a name given by my mother-in-law.
Hob (love), as Sarah has called me for the past ten years.
But truly, I am Damascus in bits — and I’m writing this Letter to Vienna.
I was born in October 1987.
My legal birthday, on my passport, is January 1, 1988.
It’s January 1st today, so let me start properly: Happy 2026, Vienna. Happy Gregorian, fiscally optimized, administratively elegant New Year.
I understand why you chose January. Winter travel was limited. Fewer disruptions. Cleaner accounting. A neat separation between agricultural cycles and state planning. Time made legible. Time made governable.
Very imperial of you.
Very Roman. 😉
As for me — I keep a different clock.
My New Year begins on April 1st (Nīsān) — the old Near Eastern instinct: spring, renewal, agriculture, the world restarting from the soil up, not from the Ministry down. Akitu energy. The seasonal year, not the bureaucratic one.
You call me a fool every time I celebrate that.
I forgive you. I love you. I’ll still use your calendar on all my paperwork.
You want to govern? Please do.
I’ll keep what belongs to God in my heart — and hand you everything that belongs to Caesar. If that sounds paradoxical, good. I live in paradox. For all I know Caesar belongs to God in the end, and God belongs to the universe. That’s my post-religion posture: reverent, but not possessive.
A Guest, Not a Citizen — A Student and a Merchant
Let’s start on the right foot.
I arrived at your airport 11 years ago as a student and a guest. I came with enough money to pay for a roof over my head and food. You gave me free education, a degree*, and an experience — and for that, I’m grateful.
I’m returning to you now, offering the goods I gathered because of that education.
I do so as a guest still — and as a merchant.
Think of this blog as my small wooden stall that stays open in your Christmas market after the crowds thin out. Buy what you like. Browse without buying. Or walk past if this isn’t for you.
Damascus has never forced its goods.
It has always displayed them.
Love, Not the Shell
What I brought with me from Damascus is not religion as Europe remembers it.
I didn’t bring rituals emptied of pulse.
I didn’t bring Sunday manners or inherited symbols.
I brought love as physics.
The Christianity I carry is closer to a Big Bang than a courthouse. A white-hole Christianity — outward, gravitational, relational. Love that expands, pulls, binds without force. The Christianity of Jesus Christ, not as an administrator of morality, but as a radical redistributor of meaning. And the Christianity of Nizar Qabbani, who understood love as rebellion against suffocation.
That Christianity passed through my mother — Sufi in her marrow — through my Bahá’í godmother, for whom God was never threatened by difference, and through my father, a Fatimid Shiʿi public servant who dedicated most of his life — and at times risked his own — to serve people, not power.
This is not faith as obedience.
It’s faith as orientation.
Europe kept the shell.
It forgot the pulse.
A Different Good on the Table
Although I don’t personally live by Islamic discipline, I still carry it with me — because I am a merchant, not a missionary.
For many people I love, discipline is the bridge to meaning. It works for them. It doesn’t work for me.
It works for my little brother in Saint Petersburg.
It works for people who need rhythm before light, routine before freedom.
Islam excels at governing density — Baghdad-like worlds, crowded and overheated, where love alone isn’t enough to hold things together. In those conditions, ritual, law, and structure are not oppression; they are survival.
I profit from love, not discipline.
But if discipline is what you need, take it — and you will still have my love, unconditionally, free of charge.
A good merchant never insults the customer’s needs.
Reform Is Older Than We Admit
History is stranger than Europe likes to remember.
Reform — in the sense of confronting corrupted priesthood and flattening access to God — did not begin with Martin Luther.
It arrived earlier, with Muhammad.
Not as “Christian history,” but as a recurring civilizational pattern: a reformer resisting spiritual monopoly, indulgence economies, and moral gatekeeping. Islam standardized ethics and stripped mediation at a moment when imperial Christianity had become dense, entangled, and exhausted.
Europe could not make that leap.
Converting was too much.
So it kept the cross —
and, in many places, emptied it.
What followed was Protestantism: Christianity with the form preserved but the gravitational love weakened. Faith became private, disciplined, moralized. Useful — but thinner.
I’m describing patterns, not ranking religions.
Density, Not Darkness
If we’re being precise, the early black hole was not Islam.
In the 7th century, it was imperial Church Rome.
Early Islam was comparatively open — especially in Umayyad and Fatimid contexts — which is why creativity surged. The later shift came with Baghdad, a city so dense that regulation became necessary just to function. When diversity turned into fragmentation, conservatism followed. That’s what large hubs do, everywhere.
At maximum structural power, Islam gave us Baghdad.
When it loosened, it gave us Córdoba and Cairo.
At maximum structural power, Protestant Christianity gave us London.
When it loosened, it gave us Amsterdam and New York.
This isn’t light versus darkness.
It’s density versus expansion.
Even the Qur’an captures the cost of over-containment:
We placed a barrier before them and a barrier behind them,
then veiled their sight, and they could no longer see.
— Qur’an, Surah Yā-Sīn (36:9)
Walls can sustain systems.
They also narrow vision.
This isn’t a moral failure. It’s how the universe works. In Einstein’s terms, mass bends space; concentration alters perception. What feels like contraction is often the only way structure can exist at all. Not because the universe has a preference for limits — but because without them, nothing would hold.
Reformation 3.0: Love Restored
Over the past 11 years, I’ve noticed something about you, Vienna.
The internet unsettles you. It strains your social strings. Families fragment. Institutions grow nervous. You sense something fundamental is shifting, but geography alone can’t stabilize it anymore.
I think I have something that could help — not to replace what you are, but to sustain you.
Not a new religion.
Not a new order.
Christianity’s foundation was never command. It was alignment — a way of living in sync with an expanding universe. Not centralized. Not dense. Not over-regulated.
The early intuition was cosmic before it was moral:
Expand, don’t hoard.
Relate, don’t dominate.
Gravitate, don’t coerce.
That intuition belongs to Jesus — and to poets like Nizar. It belongs to mystics, lovers, and wanderers more than to institutions.
In an internet age, this matters.
The world doesn’t need heavier systems. Heavy systems demand heavy regulation — quantum-level policing of human behavior — and they collapse under their own mass.
Love decentralizes.
Meaning self-organizes.
Why This Gets Me in Trouble
I’ll be honest with you.
Merchants like me don’t have steady lives.
What I sell sounds unrealistic. Too poetic. Too much. I get into trouble with my own friends more often than I’d like.
I speak Christian love without church loyalty.
I respect Islamic structure without conversion.
I trust science without worshipping control.
I honor history without obeying it.
For people whose truths are fixed, this feels destabilizing.
For me, it’s fidelity.
Damascus taught me that only cities that burn and rebuild survive. Vienna prefers preservation. That tension is real — and necessary.
I didn’t come to convert you.
I came to open a stall.
Damascus in Vienna is not invasion.
It’s an invitation to remember that truth was never meant to stay still.
*My degree came through Graz, Vienna’s quieter sister, and through Bamberg in Bavaria, where I spent most of my student years — shaped as much by listening as by speaking, within a wider European joint-degree network.
Dedication
To the stranger from Vienna on the plane who entrusted me with the keys to her apartment while she was away.
To Roba and Nassem, my anchors.
To Tarek and Mudar, for laying the foundation.
To Dr. Hanan and Dr. Waddah, who helped me pack my bags and take flight.
To Gaby and Nancy, who granted me access to the city.
To Maria and Robert J. G., for walking me through Vienna.
To Christina and Robert R., for gifting me the book of light.
To Joe and Leo, for setting an example I could recognize and trust.
To Ermanno and André, for teaching me about love and sacrifice.
To Oana and Alex, for the challenge.
To Rosa and Touhid, for the welcome.
To Drew and Nino, my little Venice and Dublin in Bamberg.
To Georgos and Pablo, for Greece and Buenos Aires — and everything in between.
To O.J Band and Mr. Grill for the vibe.
To Pascal and Georgiana for the light.
To Ioana and Zuzana for the tribe.
To Jess and Melissa, for gathering my bits through two decades of digital jazz.
To Liza and Maria, for receiving me, again and again, at the other end of the call.
To Martin and Tye, who always kept the channels open.
To Ben and Marcus, who always lent an ear.
To Clara and Marion, who always kept an eye on me.
To Kerstin-Anja and Rudi, for the space to decompress.
To Mariame and Roselyne, for a human light that felt older than distance.
To Kris and Jake, who welcomed me into the practice of bridging discourse.
To Yahya and Rani, for final cut.
To Abdelrahman and Muhsen, where art met science.
To Thomas and Father Martin, who kept the gate — and kept it human.
To Professor Penz and Roberta, who shaped my education before EU life began.
To Udai and Ahmad, who carried me forward without breaking my orbit.
To Manar and Deniz, a Christmas pocket of air when everything else collapsed.
To Ali T. and Ali H., fellow voyagers, paths entwined.
To Inas and Sjena, for one love that remained.
To Abu Safi and René — who kept me on the road, and showed me the way.
To Astrid and Michi, who’ve always met me on the road.
To Niko and Chris, for a connection that carries hope ahead.
To Riham and Fida, for light under gravity.
To Noor and Areej, for clarity that held steady.
To Razan and Elma, for light unbound.
To Bashar and Shamel, my brothers — my eyes beyond sight.
To Nassem and Roba, who held the family thread.
To Bassem and Jalal, maternal uncles across my father’s line.
To Nadeem and Nour N., for keeping Maha’s spirit alive.
To Zuhair and Jihad, who stood firm.
To Abdelghani and Nidal, keepers of peace.
To Samer and Huda, my elder kin — siblings by choice.
To Hadia and Kholoud, where belonging was found.
To Amani and Hazem, for innocence untouched.
To Housi and Mones, for helping me see it all.
To Bertosa and Regazzi, who sheltered me through it all.
To Fatima, Saleem, and Zaynab, for being there when it all began.
To Jiddo and Teta — Baha al-Din — and Ammoneh, my grandparents.
To Maha, granddaughter of Abdo — keeper of his spirit.
And to my steady point of light, who rose like the sun in Vienna when everything else went dark.
Relevant Links
Decompressed: Between Damascus and Vienna
My Theory of Everything
We, the Orphans of the Signal
Roumani Line 
2 thoughts on “Damascus in Vienna”