This morning I consumed a cup of water from a spring that has provided water for men since the time of Abraham the Patriarch. I am speaking of the Water from ZamZam. I took the first sip and wondered whether I should feel touched by novelty. I didn't. However, by the second, and then the third, it was no longer I, Ali Eteraz, drinking the water. I was everyone who had preceded me, the old man from Persia whose pilgrimage to Mecca was two long years; I was my great grandfather who used to call me Ala'uddin and thus provided a precedent for when Southerners called me Aladdin; the woman brought to the Kaba upon the shoulders of her two sons. I was all the billions of men who had pilgrimaged to Mecca, and I drank with their mouth, and saw with their eyes, and I smelled of all them, and it was not disgusting, or filthy, or bacterial, to be composed of so many colored people, and broken people, and poor people, and old people. It was a moment in which the primordial memory -- of the period before existence -- percolated inside me, shrieked with the authority of a dragon and then receded. Who are you, Ali? It looked down upon me. You are just one of the children. You are just one sip of water in a spring that does not cease.

Who knows whether Zamzam was dug by the tip of an angel's wing. Or if it was discovered by the kicking of the babe Ismail, son of Abraham, as his mother went running to Saffa and Marwa looking for water leaving him in the shade. Who knows whether the power of Zamzam is that it has fed a thousand caravans and a thousand and one pilgrims and a hundred and twenty four thousand prophets and a million angels and a billion Muslims and an infinite number of the heretofore uncreated humans. Who knows whether the power of Zamzam lies in the fact that it is tied to the story of a woman who happened to have the misfortune of marrying a man whose ambitions were too big for his marriage. Who knows whether the power of Zamzam lies in the natural filtration system that the angels of God, turning aquatic, placed below the desert. Who knows if there is a sea of natural water below the Kaba. Who knows whether Zamzam are the tears of God. Who knows whether Zamzam is supplied by the milk from the stream of Kawthar in Paradise. Who knows if its expiration will mark the end of the earth. No one knows. I do not care.

This morning I consumed a cup of water from a spring that provided water for men since the time of Abraham the Patriarch. It ressurrected inside me the hesitatant but always present stream that is freedom. It shattered the tyranny of existence (which was given to me without consultation with me and without consent). It restored my innocence.