“Bacha! I have returned from the future.”
I looked up from my writing table.
BāBā-Tāl [the Bell-man] was standing before me.
For three days I had been wondering where the old Darvesh had disappeared. And now he was back — without explanation, without announcement, and as always, with those little brass bells sewn into his navy-blue robe quietly betraying his arrival.
He was wearing, as usual, blue jeans turned near the knees and white joggers.
“I was sitting in your Eyrie — your Eagle’s Nest — 120 floors up, in THE Plaza on Shahrah-e-Faisal…”
I stared at him.
“Shahrah-e-Faisal?”
He smiled.
“In NEOM. The Line City.”
For a moment I wondered whether BāBā-Tāl had finally crossed the boundary between imagination and mischief.
He fell silent.
His gaze travelled beyond the western window of my little studio apartment on the rooftop of a high-rise plaza at F-10 Markaz, towards the Margalla Hills — or perhaps farther still, towards a horizon invisible to me.
“You must be wondering about the time machine,” he whispered. “About travelling back from the future.”
He paused.
“Do not wonder, my child.”
Another pause.
“The same miracle happened some fourteen hundred and fifty years ago in Makkah — during the Night Journey and Ascension of Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him].”
I looked at him.
“BāBā… were you really in NEOM, the city of tomorrow?”
He nodded.
“And what did you see from that Eyrie?”
His eyes brightened.
“From up there, the cars looked like matchboxes — tiny things moving along roads and sky bridges.”
He smiled.
“Everything looked so small from the height.”
“Everything?”
“No.”
He looked at me.
“People.”
I waited.
“People still looked exactly as large as people have always looked.”
The bells gave a faint chime.
And suddenly I understood.
BāBā-Tāl had not returned to tell me about a city.
He had returned to ask me about a dream.
Utopia.
The dream of generations.
Where do we go to find one?
Or who will step out to build one?
Humanity has been asking that question for thousands of years.
We have searched for Paradise in mountains and gardens, islands and kingdoms, philosophies and revolutions. We have drawn ideal cities on paper, imagined perfect societies in books, promised them from political platforms and, every once in a while, attempted to build them with stone, steel and money.
Perhaps that is why Abdul Halim Sharar’s Firdaus-e-Bareen came back to my mind.
I had read it again only a few months ago.
Written at the turn of the twentieth century, Sharar’s novel enters the legendary world associated with Hasan bin Sabbah and Alamut and gives literary form to the idea of a manufactured paradise — a carefully created environment in which the senses themselves can be persuaded to believe that they have entered another world.
The important thing is not whether every detail of the old Hasan bin Sabbah “paradise” story belongs to established history. Much of that account travelled through later, often hostile or legendary traditions.
What matters for us is the idea.
A paradise can be constructed.
A landscape can be arranged.
Water can be made to flow where nature did not place it.
Gardens can be planted.
Buildings can rise.
Beauty can be choreographed.
Sounds, colours, fragrances and movement can be brought together until the environment itself begins to speak to the human mind.
And suddenly, a story from more than a century ago begins whispering to the architecture of tomorrow.
THE LINE CITY.
The extraordinary Saudi Arabian project within NEOM is conceived as a radically different form of urban life: a linear city designed around proximity, walkability, high-speed mobility, technology and the preservation of surrounding nature.
Its physical ambition is difficult to comprehend.
A city envisioned on a scale of 170 kilometres in length, only 200 metres wide and up to 500 metres high.
A city where essential services are intended to be within a five-minute walk.
A city in which high-speed transportation is meant to make the conventional experience of urban distance almost irrelevant.
A city attempting to place nature, technology and human habitation inside one radically compressed urban model.
The Line is still a project under development, not a completed Utopia.
And perhaps that is precisely why it interests me.
Because the unfinished city permits us to ask the question before the concrete has finished answering it.
What exactly are we trying to build?
A city?
Or a way of life?
There is a difference.
A city can be designed physically.
Utopia cannot.
At least, not entirely.
We can design buildings.
We can design roads.
We can design transport systems.
We can design parks.
We can design energy networks.
We can even design the distance between a home and a hospital.
But can we design trust?
Can we design dignity?
Can we design friendship?
Can we design justice?
Can we design compassion?
Can we design a society in which the powerful remain accountable to the ordinary citizen?
That is where the dream becomes difficult.
Because environment matters.
Environment shapes behaviour.
Behaviour shapes relationships.
Relationships shape society.
And society gradually becomes a way of life.
Therefore, Utopia is not simply the physical environment.
It is the relationship between the environment and the human beings living inside it.
And human beings do not live in architecture alone.
They live in rules.
Daily rules.
The rules of work.
The rules of family.
The rules of movement.
The rules of commerce.
The rules of privacy.
The rules of speech.
The rules of worship.
The rules governing disagreement.
The rules determining who gets opportunity — and who does not.
The visible city may be made of concrete, steel and glass.
But the invisible city is made of customs, laws, institutions, relationships and power.
That invisible city will decide whether the visible one becomes Utopia.
Or merely another beautiful place where old human problems have been given futuristic clothing.
BāBā-Tāl had been unusually quiet.
I asked him:
“BāBā, what is the greatest enemy of Utopia?”
He looked at me.
“Parasites.”
“Oligarchic parasites?”
He nodded.
“Those.”
And suddenly the conversation became uncomfortable.
Every great collective project creates opportunities for private capture.
A dream announced for millions can become a marketplace for a few.
A public ambition can acquire private gatekeepers.
An extraordinary concentration of wealth can create an extraordinary concentration of influence.
And when influence begins to purchase access, access begins to purchase privilege, and privilege begins to influence the rules themselves, the architecture of equality starts collapsing from within.
The danger is not that oligarchic power necessarily destroys Utopia from outside.
The more dangerous possibility is that it enters through the front door.
It may praise the project.
It may invest in the project.
It may build part of the project.
It may even claim to protect the project.
But gradually, the collective dream can become a private estate.
The city remains magnificent.
The towers remain spectacular.
The technology continues to sparkle.
The advertisements continue to promise tomorrow.
But ordinary people discover that the real city has invisible gates.
Who owns the land?
Who controls the capital?
Who controls information?
Who writes the rules?
Who interprets them?
Who benefits when the rules change?
Who can challenge those who make the decisions?
And perhaps the most important question:
Who protects the citizen when wealth becomes powerful enough to influence the system created to protect the citizen?
These are not questions directed at one country or one project.
They are questions for every Utopia humanity has ever imagined.
Because the enemy of Utopia is not technology.
It is not wealth.
It is not even ambition.
The enemy is unaccountable power.
Technology can multiply human ability.
Wealth can finance human dreams.
Ambition can take humanity beyond old boundaries.
But when power escapes accountability, the very instruments created to serve humanity can become instruments for controlling it.
Here, an old Western voice suddenly joins the conversation.
Oscar Wilde wrote:
«“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at…”»
And then he added the thought that perhaps matters even more for our argument:
«“Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”»
Perhaps.
But progress without accountability can also become merely a more sophisticated way of concentrating power.
The Qur’an reminds us:
«“Indeed, Allah commands justice, excellence, and giving to relatives…”»
-Qur’an 16:90
Perhaps that is a remarkably simple foundation for an enormously complicated civilization.
Justice.
Excellence.
Responsibility.
Not merely spectacular construction.
Not merely speed.
Not merely wealth.
Not merely artificial intelligence.
And here, another voice — this time from the Holy Prophet Muhammad [Peace and blessings be upon him] — gives the question an even sharper edge.
He said:
«“Everyone of you is a guardian and is responsible for his charges…”»
-Sahih al-Bukhari, Hadith 7138, Book of Judgments
The principle reaches far beyond a household.
If leadership is responsibility, then power is not ownership.
If authority is a trust, then the powerful are not owners of the people beneath them.
And if every guardian is accountable, then perhaps the first stone of Utopia is not marble.
It is accountability.
The old question of Utopia therefore returns in a new costume.
Plato imagined an ideal state.
Al-Farabi imagined the virtuous city.
Sharar imagined Firdaus-e-Bareen.
Modern civilization imagined planned cities.
And now NEOM is attempting something extraordinary in the desert.
But perhaps every generation makes the same mistake.
We imagine that if we can construct the right environment, the right environment will automatically produce the right human being.
Perhaps it can help.
But it cannot choose for him.
A perfect road does not make a just driver.
A beautiful city does not automatically produce beautiful conduct.
A five-minute walk to every service does not guarantee that neighbours will walk five minutes towards one another.
And no algorithm, however intelligent, can manufacture wisdom.
BāBā-Tāl leaned towards me.
“Bacha…”
“Yes?”
“Do you know what I saw from your Eyrie in the future?”
“THE LINE?”
“No.”
He smiled.
“I saw the same thing I see everywhere.”
“What?”
“Human beings trying to build outside themselves what they have not yet built inside themselves.”
The sentence stayed between us.
At that very moment, an alarming sound came from my kitchenette.
My old brass kettle’s whistle was sounding.
The tea was ready.
I stood up, stepped out of the room into the open sky to fetch the teacups from the kitchenette, and returned with two mugs of hot tea.
BāBā-Tāl took one.
Outside, Islamabad was turning gold.
The Margalla Hills were losing their sharp edges in the evening haze.
For a moment, NEOM seemed very far away.
And yet, perhaps, it was sitting right there — in our own questions.
I looked down towards the road.
My mustard-coloured Foxy was waiting below.
The old Volkswagen had carried me through countless ordinary roads — roads that had no futuristic sky bridges, no artificial intelligence, no five-minute urban promise.
And suddenly I thought:
Perhaps that is the real test.
Can the magnificent city of tomorrow learn something from the humble car of yesterday?
Foxy does not know algorithms.
She does not know smart infrastructure.
She does not know artificial intelligence.
But she knows the road.
And the road, unlike the blueprint, has always taught humanity one simple lesson:
No matter how advanced the vehicle becomes, someone still has to decide where it is going.
BāBā-Tāl smiled into his tea.
“Bacha…”
“Yes?”
“Even Foxy knows that.”
I laughed.
Then the laughter faded.
Because the thought was serious.
Utopia is not ultimately about where people live.
It is about how people live.
How the strong treat the weak.
How the rich treat the poor.
How the majority treats the minority.
How authority treats dissent.
How neighbours treat strangers.
How institutions treat citizens.
How wealth behaves when nobody is watching.
And how ordinary people behave when they finally acquire power themselves.
That is why the unfinished nature of THE LINE may be more intellectually interesting than any completed photograph of it.
The blueprint is still open.
The city is still becoming.
And therefore the question is still alive:
What kind of human life should this new environment produce?
Perhaps the greatest achievement would not be to build a city without traffic.
Perhaps it would be to build a society without humiliation.
Not merely a city without distance.
But a society without exclusion.
Not merely a city surrounded by nature.
But a civilization in harmony with nature.
Not merely a city powered by advanced technology.
But a human community in which technology remains the servant — never the master — of humanity.
And above all:
Not merely a city protected from oligarchic parasites by laws on paper, but a system strong enough to prevent wealth from quietly rewriting those laws.
At this point, another line of Western poetry comes quietly to mind.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, looking towards a horizon that did not yet exist, wrote:
«“Come, my friends, ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”»
Perhaps humanity is still sailing towards that newer world.
But a newer world is not necessarily a better world.
For that, we need something more than newness.
We need wisdom.
We need justice.
We need courage.
And we need the humility to understand that the tallest structure can still cast the darkest shadow.
BāBā-Tāl stood up.
His bells moved.
One tiny sound:
Chim chim.
Then another.
“Where are you going?”
“Back.”
“Back where?”
He smiled.
“To the future.”
I laughed.
“But you just returned from there.”
He turned towards the western window.
“Bacha, every morning is the future until you reach it.”
Then he disappeared.
Or perhaps he simply walked beyond the door.
I am still not certain.
But the question he left behind has remained with me:
Perhaps Utopia is not a destination waiting somewhere beyond the horizon.
Perhaps it is a daily discipline.
Perhaps we do not discover Utopia.
Perhaps we build it — one just rule, one decent institution, one accountable leader, one humane neighbourhood and one honest human being at a time.
And perhaps the greatest city of tomorrow will not be the one with the tallest walls, the fastest trains or the most astonishing technology.
Perhaps it will be the one where an ordinary human being can finally say:
I am free.
I am safe.
I am respected.
I have a voice.
And the future belongs to me too.
That, BāBā-Tāl might say, is where Utopia begins.
Not in the height of a tower.
But in the dignity of a human being.
□■□■ POETEARS ■□■□
[coined by T. Hejazi — where tears become poetry and poetry becomes tears]
We built the walls and called the place a dream,
We dressed the stone till every tower seemed to gleam;
But Utopia waits beyond the gates we raise—
Where human hearts make justice more than a dream.
Also Read: PRESIDENTIAL MODEL AND THE RASHIDUN LEGACY — A CLOSER ALIGNMENT THAN PARLIAMENTARY POLITICS
Today's E-Paper