Engraved Light

On my recent travels through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, I found myself returning to the same realisation again and again: the human condition everywhere is the same. Beneath the shifting languages, rituals, and landscapes, human beings are united by the same twin currents of existence—we fear harm, and we long for peace.

Yet peace is painted differently across cultures. In Pakistan, it may take the form of the joint family system: three generations living under one roof, with care, duty, and belonging woven into the daily rhythm of life. In the West, peace is often imagined in the nuclear home: privacy, independence, and the intimate circle of parent and child. One offers stability through togetherness, the other through autonomy. Both are expressions of the same yearning—for safety, for continuity, for love.

The Futility of Labels

Nations are divided on maps into developed, developing, and underdeveloped. These words carry a certain arrogance—as though people themselves were incomplete, unfinished, or superior. But a human being is never “underdeveloped.” Infrastructure may be scarce, institutions may be fragile, but the man in a Sindhi village or the woman in a Riyadh souq feels no less deeply, hopes no less fiercely, than their counterparts in London or New York.

The statistics reveal what these labels obscure. According to the World Health Organization, nearly 80% of suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries, yet high-income countries report some of the world’s highest rates of depression: nearly 1 in 5 adults in the United States lives with a mental illness (NIMH, 2023). In Pakistan, one in four adults experiences anxiety or depression (Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association, 2021). Saudi Arabia reports similar struggles despite immense wealth: studies show up to 30% of university students meet the criteria for clinical depression (Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2021). Clearly, money, modernity, and infrastructure do not insulate the soul.

Durkheim, in his seminal study Suicide (1897), showed that despair thrives not only in collapse but also in rapid progress, where traditions are unsettled, and individuals feel adrift. Labels of development do nothing to address this restlessness—they merely rearrange the packaging.

Masculinity, Femininity, and Culture’s Substitutes

In Saudi Arabia, I was struck by how conceptions of masculinity and femininity diverged from those I had seen in Pakistan or Britain. Strength, restraint, and honour are valorised differently in each context. These differences reveal something essential: culture is always trying to supply meaning in areas where only revelation offers an anchor.

We face a choice: do we trust tradition for tradition’s sake, simply because repetition makes it feel solid? Or do we trust what claims a divine source? Sociologist Émile Durkheim saw in rituals the power to bind communities together. Consider football: millions gather weekly, at fixed intervals, for a shared drama of loyalty and enmity. It is a secular ritual, mimicking religious cadence, except the “devil” is no longer Satan but the opposing team. The form endures, but the object has shifted.

Anaesthesia in Steel and Leather

Wealth, too, becomes a substitute. Fancy cars, fine watches—these are often less about utility and more about anaesthetising the ache for true peace. But they are transient. In Pakistan, a Haval SUV is hailed as a luxury, where in Europe it might be considered mid-level. A Rado watch may command respect in one economic sphere, where in another it is eclipsed by the Rolex. The object itself does not change; its assigned value is relative to circumstance.

And so we must ask ourselves: how real are our friendships, our relationships, our possessions? Or are they all shadows, destined to perish under the marching doom of time? Materiality is not reality—it is projection.

The Best Colour

The Qur’an offers an image more enduring than these shades of culture and consumption:

“[We take] the colour of God—and who is better than God in colouring? And it is Him we worship.” (Al-Baqarah 2:138)

Cultures paint life in different tones—joint families, nuclear homes, Riyadh skylines, Punjabi villages, neon stadiums, luxury cars. But these are only colours layered on the same canvas. The truest colour, the one that does not fade with time, wealth, or circumstance, is the colour of God. To live in His shade is to discover the only peace not dependent on culture or circumstance.

All other colours are mere reflections. The best colour is His.