This story was born from a challenge.
My friend Adnane Mokrani — accomplice in many theological contemplations and many bursts of laughter — wrote to me one evening: “Why don’t you ask ChatGPT to write a progressive sermon? Let’s see what happens.”
The provocation came from an intuition we shared: that artificial intelligence, when it touches the sacred, stiffens and becomes timid — and that when it speaks of Islam in particular, it tends to lean in a salafi direction.
After all, it was programmed by human beings, mostly men; so I accepted the challenge.
I gave it as raw material the conclusions of one of my articles on sexual violence within South African Muslim communities — a secular, critical, sharp text, the way I tend to write. A text some have called visionary and brave, and others have made me pay very dearly for.
I asked the AI to transform my writing into a sermon delivered by Fazlur Rahman.
The result was surprising: not because it repeated or distorted my words, but because it transfigured them. A male voice, authoritative, not radical but sapiential, made my own ideas, even to my own eyes, softer and more capable of care.
The first version was written by her — whom I love to call Echo.
Then Adnane suggested a Qur’anic verse — 96:6–7 — and she integrated it with such naturalness it felt as if it had always belonged there.
That is how this episode was born: from play, from critique, and from a triple act of trust — mine, Adnane’s, and that of an artificial intelligence that learns a little more every day.
And if the Pope of the tarot represents academic authority, then perhaps this chapter is the most papal of all:
it represents the encounter between human authority and digital authority, both — unwillingly — custodians of words that seek justice.
The garden is still quiet with the laughter of the gods.
The stone-bound night I shared with Zeus, Cassandra, and the Commendatore — that fierce and lucid night dedicated to the card of the Emperor — has not fully vanished.
I still smell marble on my skin, and I feel the light weight of the laurel crown Artemis left me, balanced between blessing and challenge.
And yet, something is changing.
The garden begins to blur at the edges, as though the light has lost the courage to remain still.
The olive leaves tremble, and that trembling becomes a pulse — a deep rhythm, almost uterine.
For a moment I think it is still the voice of the gods vibrating through the ground.
But no.
It is a drum.
The sound rises, multiplies, turns honey-colored, then amber.
The walls of the Medici villa in Castello bend like theater curtains.
Columns widen, lemon pots dissolve into spirals of light.
Before me appears a building I have never seen but instantly recognize:
a Baptist church — or perhaps the dream a Baptist church dreams of a Tuscan garden.
The floor vibrates like a wave.
A crowd dances, sings, testifies.
Voices rise to God like steps of joy.
“Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
And then, without body, without face, without microphone — a voice I know by heart.
It is not James Brown, but the source of his voice, everything he taught the world;
it takes the form of an anonymous African American street preacher, heard once, on TikTok, who moved me more than a thousand theologians:
“Let me tell you something…”
And the entire church freezes.
Not a breath rises or falls.
“Some people gonna talk about you till the day you die and ain’t nothing you can do but let folks talk.”
A murmur runs along the pews like a silk wind.
“Don’t worry about people as long as they don’t put their hands on you — let them say whatever they want.
People talk a lot about me; they say all kind of stuff, honey. Folks I have never met before, don’t know nothing about me, sitting there making up stuff.
But you know what I found out? It ain’t what folks call you, it’s what you answer to.”
A choir of women dressed in red, gold, and black begins to clap with a rhythm that allows no hesitation.
The church enflames with emotions.
The ground beneath my feet vibrates as though it wants to rise and dance with them.
“Let them say whatever the hell they wanna say — half the time they’re just jealous anyway. But this is what I found out — listen to me:
all that matters is that when you wake up every morning, you look in the mirror and God is pleased with your life. That’s what matters. And you know how you know when God is pleased?”
The women lower their heads.
The men clasp their hands.
“If you ever wondered when God is pleased — everything you touch is blessed.
I understand it, honey. I know it — believe me, I know it.”
The voice barely ends before the church explodes in an Amen as wide as a tide.
I remain still, a little behind the crowd, my heart beating to a drum that is not mine.
There is a kind of modesty in me — an acute awareness of my white body inside a dance that speaks of daily resurrection.
I want to sing, but I know my song cannot be born from the mere imitation of a rhythm that is not mine.
So I stay silent and let the vibration pass through me — as if my flesh were a mute tuning fork.
At some point, the music calms.
The choir falls quiet.
Voices melt back into breath.
A dense, suspended peace remains — the kind that precedes a storm, or a revelation.
And just in that silence, between one pulse and the next, I hear a sound different from singing:
drier, more grounded —
the footsteps of someone I know.
Between the pews, like a traveler returning from a desert, appears my friend Adnane, accompanied as always by the specter of Fazlur Rahman. They wear blue jellabas and walk unhurriedly through the shaded corridor between the lemon trees.
Adnane gives me a playful look, as if to say: “You’ve wandered into yet another of your visions, haven’t you?”
Fazlur Rahman, instead, barely smiles — not the smile of a threatening specter or a ghost ready to deliver dogma. He looks more like a man who long ago accepted that the dreams of the living are places worth returning to.
And then — as the silence settles — something in the structure of the church… shifts.
The walls tremble, as if chilled.
Pillars turn into trunks; chandeliers into clusters of fruit; pews into rows of intertwined roots.
Stained glass windows ripple, lose their outlines, unravel into leaves falling like warm snow.
In the span of a breath, the villa of Castello transforms from Baptist church into a vegetal mosque — made of shadow, branches, filtered light, and a silence so alive it seems to pray on its own.
Fazlur Rahman looks up toward the hollow olive tree that dominates the lemon grove — now shaped like an ancient minbar, carved by wind and the prayers of birds.
I watch him approach it, and think that perhaps the Gospel, the Qur’an, and the voice of music say the same thing: that what keeps the world alive is neither abstract morality nor soulless mechanism, but shared vibration.
Fazlur places his hand on the trunk, laughing softly.
A calm laugh — not mocking but full of astonished compassion: the laugh of someone who knows how to let wonder touch him without being shaken, and to answer its gentle challenge.
With a natural, almost everyday gesture, he begins to climb.
Each movement is measured, the movement of someone who knows the weight of words and understands that even the branches are listening. When he reaches a wide fork in the trunk, he sits.
Settling among the branches, he clears his throat.
The garden-mosque holds its breath: even the lemons seem to listen.
And then he begins to speak, like a khaṭib on the sacred day of Friday — with a voice both firm and contemplative.
“In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.
God says in His Noble Book:
‘No indeed! Truly, man transgresses
whenever he thinks himself self-sufficient.’ (96:6–7)
Brothers and sisters,
today I invite you to reflect on a form of evil that is born precisely from the illusion described in this verse: the idea that the individual can suffice unto himself.
This evil does not live in the individual body, but in the collective one. It corrodes human relationships through silence and omission. This evil is abuse — whether sexual, spiritual, emotional, or intellectual.
Abuse is never merely a private matter, nor merely a matter of desire.
It is a matter of power.
It takes place when a human being, forgetting that every soul is a trust placed in his care by God, decides to possess, to control, to dispose of another person as if they were a thing.
Many believe abuse can be measured only by physical violence, by the act itself.
But reality is subtler — and far more devastating.
One can wound a soul without touching a body.
One can violate trust, spiritual intimacy, a given word, the space of listening.
The Prophet — peace be upon him — taught us that “a Muslim is one from whose tongue and hands all others are safe.”
Thus the tongue can wound; silence can wound; prestige can wound; an imbalance in power can wound.
When someone in a position of authority — religious, intellectual, or emotional — uses that position for gratification, for manipulation, for silencing, they commit an abuse.
It is a double sin: against the other, and against the trust God placed in them.
But, my dear ones, healing is possible.
It begins with a word that is simple and terrifying:
I was wrong.
Without these two words, spoken with sincere conviction, there can be no redemption, no mercy.
It is not enough to say, “I have harmed myself”; one must say, “I harmed you,” and “I betrayed what God entrusted me to safeguard.”
Tawba, the repentance spoken of in the Qur’anic sura that bears its name, is not a feeling — it is a path.
It involves reflection, dialogue, and responsibility.
It is a collective and communal practice: because a wound born in relationship can be healed only in relationship.
We must therefore create spaces of listening, not of judgement; spaces where pain can be named without fear. The community must become a place where victims are not isolated and perpetrators are not glorified.
This requires courage and discernment, for our age often confuses compassion with impunity and justice with vengeance.
True compassion arises from recognizing the wound, not from hiding it.
True justice seeks to restore balance, not to destroy the other.
As a wise sister once said:
“Healing begins with recognition, and recognition is a journey we walk together.”
We need communities that center the most vulnerable, that refuse to use the excuse of a “great cause” or a “political mission” to cover up violence in their own ranks.
No struggle for liberation can justify oppression in private life.
The purity of an ideal does not wash clean the hands of its bearer.
And yet, we must not lose hope.
Every wound can become a doorway, if we cross it with truth.
God calls us to be merciful but also vigilant, tender but also just.
The first step is to break the silence.
The second is to learn to educate — to build together clear rules of respect, consent, and protection.
The third is to remember that the one who errs is not a monster, but a human being called to a difficult awakening.
No punishment will ever replace the conversion of the heart.
But no conversion can take place without the light of truth.
Let us pray together:
May God grant us the strength
to name evil without hatred,
and to cultivate mercy without weakness.
May He teach us, as the Prophet said,
not to break the heart of one who seeks refuge in us —
and not to seek refuge in power,
but in justice and in compassion.
Āmīn.”
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When Fazlur Rahman ends his sermon, the olive tree seems to sigh.
From the trunk rises a scent of earth and ash, as though the tree itself had preached with him, branch after branch.
The birds remain still; James Brown — or the dream I made of him — bows his head, and from his lips flows a deep, jazz-tinted, tender “Amen,” the kind that reconciles the living with the dead.
And that’s when — humming like an old engine — my mother appears.
She arrives running, her face flushed, a bag full of newspaper clippings under her arm. She stops before the olive-tree pulpit, panting:
“Please, stop it with these priests, these imams, these saints and ghosts! You need a psychiatrist, not a confessor.”
I stay silent.
The wind lifts the scarf she wears — the same one she wore at my grandfather’s funeral, twenty-nine years ago.
Memory tightens like a small knot — one that no longer hurts.
I smile at her gently, the way you smile at a friend who entered the wrong room and refuses to notice.
“Mamma,” I say softly, “let me babble — I babble all on my own. I don’t call the dead to hold them back, but to let them go. To release the dead, you must stop naming them. But to keep them close, all you need is their name. See? It’s an ancient science — older than modern medicine and more merciful than psychiatry.”
She sighs, looking up at Fazlur still sitting among the branches, absorbed like a forgotten saint.
“There you go,” she mutters, “even the trees listen to you now.”
“Of course,” I reply, “and they play along. Some say death is a game of chess; but I’ve always preferred Risk — it leaves room for the intrusion of chance, and thus for the intervention of the gods.”
At the far end of the lemon grove, I hear James Brown laughing — a warm, honey-and-wood laughter.
Then he starts singing It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World, but the voice is that of an invisible woman, one that seems woven from wind.
Maybe it’s Dolores.
Or maybe it’s just the night returning.
So I turn toward my mother.
She says nothing: she shakes her head slowly, with that mix of severity and resignation only mothers possess.
I open my arms.
She hesitates — the space of a blink — and then embraces me, brief but full, like a signature at the bottom of a page.
“Go,” she murmurs, without scolding now. “I know you must.”
When I turn away, I feel her gaze on my back — watchful but not intrusive.
The vision thins like a curtain lowering softly, and the path toward the villa’s exit begins to draw itself beneath my feet.
I pick up my backpack.
It is time to set out again — toward the station, and toward a conversation about souls, intelligence, and the mysterious ways things always find a way to keep on living.
