A Sky Full of Lamps

Dawud was ten, and he had never slept in a tent before.

He was camping beside a lake in the mountains of Eryri, in North Wales, with Dad and his big sister Nusayba, right at the end of the summer holidays. All afternoon it had been brilliant: skimming stones, toasting halal marshmallows, watching a duck chase Nusayba for her sandwich. And the tent had collapsed on Dad's head. Twice. But now the sun had gone down, and the dark out here was a different kind of dark. Not city-dark, with streetlights and car headlights. Proper dark.

Dawud kept his torch switched on. For seeing the path, he told himself. Not because he was scared. Obviously.

"Right," said Dad, once they had eaten supper and prayed Isha together on the groundsheet. He zipped up his coat. "There's something I want to show you two. But you'll have to switch that torch off, Dawud."

"Off?" Dawud's stomach gave a small lurch.

"Trust me," said Dad. "Some things can only be seen in the dark."

They walked down to the lake, pebbles crunching under their boots. Somewhere across the water an owl called, soft and far away. A thin curl of moon had already slipped behind the mountains, following the sun. Dawud took a deep breath and clicked off his torch.

At first there was only blackness. Then, slowly, like a curtain lifting, the sky began to appear.

Stars. Not five or six, like at home. Hundreds of them, more than he could ever count, spread like silver dust across the whole sky. And running through them was a faint, glowing river of light, like a ribbon of mist laid gently over the darkness.

"Whoa," breathed Dawud. He forgot all about being scared.

"That's the Milky Way," whispered Nusayba, who was fourteen and knew a lot about space. "It's our own galaxy, seen from the inside. At least a hundred billion stars. And some of that starlight set off towards us hundreds of years ago, long before any of us were born."

They lay down on a broad, flat rock, side by side. The longer Dawud looked, the more stars appeared, as though the sky was saying, wait, there's more… and more… and more.

"Your eyes are getting used to the dark," said Dad. "Give them twenty minutes."

"So Allah made every single one?" Dawud asked quietly. "Even the ones too far away to see?"

"Every single one," said Dad. "And do you know, in the Quran Allah invites us to do exactly what you're doing right now? He says you won't see any flaw in what the Most Merciful has made. So look at the sky again: can you see any breaks?" Dad traced a finger across the dark. "Any crack? Anything out of place? Then, Allah says, look again, and again, and your eyes will come back to you humbled and tired, without finding a single one."

Dawud looked. And looked. The stars glittered. The Milky Way glowed. The silent sky stretched from mountain to mountain, perfect from edge to edge.

"I can't find one," he said at last.

"No one ever has," said Dad. "None of this happened by accident. A painting needs a painter. A tent needs someone to put it up, as we found out today." Nusayba snorted. "And a sky full of lamps needs the One who made it."

Dawud lay very still. He felt tiny under that enormous sky, tinier than a single pebble on the shore. A hundred billion stars, Nusayba had said. And one boy on a rock.

"Dad," he whispered, "with all those stars, would Allah even notice someone as small as me?"

"Remember what Allah calls Himself in that verse?" said Dad softly. "The Most Merciful. The same Allah who placed every one of those stars made you too. He knows your name, and every beat of your heart, right now, on this rock by the lake."

Dawud still felt small. But it wasn't a frightening kind of small any more. It was a safe kind.

"SubhanAllah," Dawud whispered. He had said it a hundred times before, but tonight he felt what it meant: Allah is perfect, far above any flaw.

Back in the tent, zipped snugly into his own sleeping bag beside Dad, with Nusayba on Dad's other side, Dawud didn't need his torch any more. He knew what was up there above the canvas: a whole sky full of lamps. The One who made them never sleeps, and He would be watching over him all night long.

And to the sound of the lake lapping softly against the stones, Dawud fell fast asleep.