Where is 'Islam'?

As we walked away from the bank with our wallets and pockets loaded, I recalled what happened during the transaction. At a first glance there was nothing particularly interesting, but when I thought about it again and again, its gem slowly unveils. It's another gift to human life, a dimension of Allah's infallibility, scarcely appreciated by our proud people of the modern day. The transaction involved quite a line of procedural details, including agreeing on a specific amount, emphasising the rates, informing the commission, signatures, etc.; moreover I had to do the whole cycle twice. Interestingly, neither of us spoke each other's language. My English was replied with their Bosnian, vice versa. At no point did we stumble, in fact, as far as I could tell the transaction went as smoothly as it would for a Bosnian customer. "If so, was language important at all?" I wondered.

Funny, after a few minutes wandering in the streets of Mostar we felt like home already. There was this undescribable similarity between Malaysia and some parts of Bosna. Perhaps it was the arrangements of its stalls and mobile kiosks (selling phone cards and magazines- how similar!) that resembles our country most. On top of that, the weather was gorgeous- we had to walk without having our coats on, another resemblance to Malaysia. One thing was nonetheless completely different- they drive on the left. However trivial it may sound, we had several times neared 'martyrdom' when trying to cross the roads. Since very small we were taught the formula of looking right-left-right before crossing, but it did us no good in Bosna. Nubli was worse in adapting to it; he persisted until the very last day we were in the Balkans. "It's left-right-left, not the other way round!" I reminded him to no avail. All thanks to Allah, we survived to the end- or did we really?

30 minutes deeper into the direction in the east, or what we thought was east, and there was no signs of any one of the two we expected to see by then. The first is of course the Stari Most, an old, historical bridge overflying Rijeka Neretva (Green River). I must admit that I became more and more impatient to see the bridge I've heard about so many times, but it wasn't too much of a worry. I assured myself that the bridge will not come and go or simply walk away from us; as long as the sun stood, there will be plenty of chance for us to find it. After all, I expected it to be big enough for our eyes to perceive. What concerned me more was the absence of Islamically-clad women, the second of the two 'phenomenon' I dyingly expected to see. Conversely, as far as our eyes could go, the women were all typical-European or Europeanized sect, coloured hair, blue to brown eyes, and most distinctively little clothing. Hang on a minute, we're in Bosna now, not Croatia or-God forbid,- Serbia!