The hardest part of any personal calamity is that which directly affects your loved ones. That was the case for me during three years away from my family. Not knowing what had happened to them, how they were surviving or who might be looking after them was perhaps the most consistent and internally destructive source of worry during that period. Still, I could reasonably assume who might come to their assistance. 

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

الحمد لله وحده والصلاة والسلام على من لا نبي بعده

I first read the Dickens’ classic, Bleak House, in solitary confinement, Camp Echo. The concentric part of this story is based on the fictitious – though accurately representative – and never-ending case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce which ultimately consumes and destroys the lives of its central characters, rather like the Supreme court decisions relating to the Guantánamo detainees. But it was the first sentence of another Dicken’s classic, A Tale of Two Cities, which reads, ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,’ that captured my imagination back then. For that is precisely how I would have described the noble months of Ramadhan spent in US custody.