Epistle to the Texas Judiciary

On July 28th, 2026 I reported to the George R Brown convention center to sit for the Texas Bar Exam. 

During that first session, there was an issue with my laptop's charger that led to the laptop shutting down shortly after i completed the first MPT part. 

I tried to remain calm despite the panic that I felt in that moment. I reminded myself that people have been taking Bar Exams using pen and paper since they first start holding them. 

I simply raised my hand and informed the proctor, whose name I believe was [REDACTED] or something similar, and told her my laptop died and I would like to submit my responses using handwritten means. 

This poor lady, who I later found out had been hired temporarily and barely been trained in the duties entrusted to her by the Texas Board of Law Examiners, looked at me perplexed and confused as if I was speaking Japanese. 

She then slowly reached into her purse, pulled out a dollar store composition notebook of the type typically seen in grade school, tore of a page and handed it to me. 

As I looked at this single, hand torn piece of paper I was clumsily handed by someone who clearly did not appreciate the gravity of her duties or the event she had the honor of being asked to oversee, it was almost everything I could do not to have a full blown panic attack and run out of the hallway shrieking at the top of my lungs and tearing the hair out of my scalp. 

Thankfully, I was able to take a deep breathe, remain calm, and politely ask if maybe there was not an official notebook of some kind for handwritten submissions to the Bar exam. 

Thankfully, another proctor showed up to let mine know that there are in fact official notebooks for handwritten submissions, and pointed out the box containing them under her desk. But this time, the steady trickle of remaining exam time was adding to my stress and sense of urgency. 

Thus, as soon as the proctor finally was able to hand me a notebook, I immediately opened it and began scribbling my responses away as fast as I could using the writing implement closest to me, which happened to be a pencil. 

At no point did the assigned proctor who handed me the notebook, who was sitting right in front of me and could see me writing out my responses, or for that matter any of the other protectors who swept by to commiserate and, dare I say, essentially just rubberneck my unfortunate situation, think to inform me of the Exam instruction that all handwritten responses must be in black ink. 

No, that information was first revealed to me during an announcement over the subsequent session.

An announcement made with the type of terse aggressiveness one hears from people who attempt to lean on their authority and pedantic, nitpicking interpretation of 'the Rules', to excuse their personal and leadership failures and avoid taking accountability for their errors, shortcomings, and sins. 

Made over a scratchy speaker by an angry and likely underpaid government official, giving the whole experience the air of a prison camp run by some callous and contemptful warden. 

At that point, having already submit my pencil scrawled response hours ago, all I could do was smile and keep moving forward. To console myself with the knowledge that all happens due to God's will. 

But the disappointing experience has led me to conclude it is important to express that disappointment in it's fullness. 

Not to attack or disrespect the State of Texas or it's Judicial branch, but to remind them that as excellent as they are as far as earthly forums of justice go, they must be vigilant in regard to their honor and duty and maintain that standard in order to be worthy of the respect and deference they expect from the rest of the people. 

Because sometimes, people in positions of power and authority tend to forget not just the humanity of those over whom they have power, but their own as well. 

Sometimes, it bears reminding them that it is only at the sufferance of those very people that their "Authority" has any validity to it to begin with. That they ultimately serve in this glittering democratic experiment called America, that stands distinct from all other collective human endeavors anywhere in space and time, solely in furtherance of the good of the People. 

I don't need to remind you how stressful the Bar exam is even under perfect conditions. 

I understand and appreciate that part of the Bar admission process is precisely to ascertain the ability of prospective attorneys to remain rational and make the right choices even when everything seems to be falling apart. 

To rise above the free and fray and make our best effort at honoring our commitments to Truth and Justice, that we may as officers of the Court, facilitate the growth and nurturing of an ever more perfect Union. 

Because the Law is the antidote to both Chaos and Tyranny. 

It is only fair that those who seek to serve the law be expected to have the ability to not allow our reason and judgement to be clouded by fear or anger despair when we come in contact with either of those forces of nature, chaos and tyranny, which may as well be termed the soil of the field where the American attorney sweats most of his labor. 

But ultimately, the Law is only as good as the humans who bring it to life with their service to it. As lawyers, judges, administrators, jurors, even witnesses. The quality of justice that is available to us is directly proportional to the quality of the souls that have taken up the labor of apportioning it. 

This is why so often, the law is unable to articulate a precise standard or principle, and delegates final decision making to the discretion of the one applying it. There is no way to entirely remove ourselves from reliance on human honor and integrity in the pursuit of justice. 

That discretion is a truly heavy burden. I would think a thousand times before assuming it, and every day I would kneel in fear before God and beg for the wisdom and compassion to faithfully execute such a tremendous duty. Lest through my hand be done some injustice or inequity to an innocent, for which I will face inquiry on the day of Gods final judgement. 

Because I bear witness that when a people begins to drift from the Law and the covenants they swore to uphold, or worse yet begins to use them as a means of oppression, then that people has become lost and has set itself inexorably upon the path that leads to their utter ruin and humiliation. 

I was born to a nation that once was the wealthiest and one of the most powerful nations on Earth. 

From that peak, the steady erosion of their integrity by their own hands, from a thousand different corruptions and injustices committed by those for whom no amount of wealth or power could ever be enough, led to the descent of that nation into that very hell of Chaos and Tyranny. 

A hell of a magnitude that leads one to think that it must surely have been divine retribution for their dishonorable selfishness and the arrogant temerity to think that their fleeting worldly blessings absolved them from their obligations to Truth and Justice. 

My Lord saw fit to remove me from that accursed land and deliver me to these shores. And it is not my place to question the will of my Lord. 

And these shores have been good to me, all in all. Better than the people who were supposed to be my countrymen but instead were my earliest and worst tormentors, in any case. I will say that doing better than them is not by itself a very high bar. 

Still, petty injustices aside, I have enjoyed my time in America and Texas, and am grateful my Lord chose this corner of the world to make my refuge. It truly is a beautiful land, and you have built some marvelous things upon it. 

Thus, this letter is not even so much criticism as it is well meaning advice from someone who admires even the patterns on the spider that stings him. From someone who looks upon America, its land, its law and its people, with a degree of admiration, affection, even love. 

When I moved here to Texas in 2018, my first job was at [REDACTED]. 

Almost immediately I noticed something discomforting:

There were about 15 analysts on the team, and about 3 or 4 managers. The vast majority of the analysts were African American women, and the management layer was entirely white men. 

 

I tried not to think about it too hard. 

I had come down to Texas in spite of prevailing stereotypes about Texas being a “racist backwater hellhole of heat and humidity” that would be less than a fly-over state if it did not happen to hold the majority of American crude oil resources under it's surface. 

However, even as I drove down South from New York, as I crossed the Mason-Dixon with all my families household possessions in our economy hatchback, as I watched the trees turn from temperate pines to the gnarled and twisted oaks alive with the unmistakably ominous drone of cicadas, I could not help but wonder if I was making the right decision leading my family, my children and any posterity after them that might be affected by that decision, to try and build a life in this particular corner of the Earth. 

I could not help reflect on the fact that this was a state founded by slave owners who invaded a foreign country under pretext of settlement, and then attempted to claim sovereignty over that invaded territory because their otherwise hospitable and welcoming Mexican hosts decided to outlaw slavery. 

And we all know how important slavery was to the Southern White Aristocratic class whom Tocqueville so presciently described as being “arrogant, quick-tempered, irascible, violent, ardent in his desires, and impatient of obstacles, but easily discouraged if triumph is not immediate". 

I mean, they started murdering their own American countrymen at Bull Run and Manassas and Gettysburg just a few years after barely surviving a thrashing from Santa Anna. They really…REALLY didn’t want to work in the heat to pick that cotton, did they? 

In my review of American history, I have come to the conclusion that a great part of the racial animosity that has undermined American social cohesion for over a century is attributable to the fact that the South was not properly and adequately punished for their treason and rebellion against the Union, and their horrific crimes towards the Africans they dragged against their will to these shores. 

In my estimation, a full and satisfactory resolution to the rebellion of Southern states, including Texas, would have involved taking all the plantation owners who worked slaves to death by the boatload, and then working them to death on the very same plantations as their former slaves. 

And then distributing their landholdings to their former slaves, to give them a fair chance to eke a living off the soil that is common to all mankind, by the honest sweat of their brow and the ability to enjoy the full fruits of their labor. Then we could have chided their lineages for failing to make use of fair opportunity. 

General Sherman had the foresight to initiate such reforms under his martial authority. It's a shame that do-gooder Lincoln tied the vengeful hand of Tecumseh behind his back after Atlanta, when it had only just begin to deliver unto the rebel tyrants the blood and fire they had bought with the lives of those who fell next to him in battle.  

I wonder sometimes, if as Lincoln heard the sound of Boothe’s gun go off in his ear, as felt the hot lead round rip through his skull just before his consciousness was short circuited in a wisp of blood and brains and cordite, before he was sent as an unwilling groom to that lovely and terrifying darkness he struggled his whole life not to be seduced by, I wonder if in that space between spaces where eternities may lie, if Lincoln realized "Oh wow Sherman was right. We should have burned MORE of their cities to the ground."

Lincoln paid the ultimate price for his failure to bring to justice the rebellious. treasonous, slave-abusing servants of Satan himself who had the temerity, the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to take up arms and spill the blood of their fellow Americans because they just could not tolerate the thought of recognizing the "niggers" as human beings made in the image of God just as they were. 

That is what happens when you take half measures. When good people decide to allow their compassion to be interpreted as weakness by the wicked, and then weaponized against them. When you do not fully and thoroughly break and shatter the pride and arrogance of those who defy the law, their word, and the will of the Living God himself, before the eyes of the world in Affirmation of our collective commitment to Truth and Justice. 

I thought about the ramifications of that miscarriage of justice on the drive down south, that led to the re-enslavement of the Black man in the most abhorrent possible way; under the pretext of the Law itself. About how I was walking into a region where the systems of society are routinely hijacked and harnessed in furtherance of the interests and desires of hateful, arrogant, entitled racist criminals and tyrants. 

I wondered if I was condemning my progeny to membership in a type of permanent underclass on account of their racial and religious heritage.  To what the South had reduced the Black and Native and Hispanic populations to before us. 

If they would always find themselves tightly constrained in a glass caste system, where one's role and scope of action in society was parameterized by the politely unspoken "values" of an identitarian culture that had evolved to find ways to keep humans divided, subjugated, subservient and excluded from the full fruits of the land they worked or the labor they performed. 

Where the hateful bigotry, cynical demagoguery and unrepentant racial narcissism and arrogance might have died out or at least atrophied to irrelevance were it not given renewed life and fuel by the discovery of vast reserves of the single most critical commodity to modern existence: Oil.  

Where the bounties of Spindletop and the Permian would give a windfall to those who would have otherwise been at the bottom of the national rankings on productivity, economic impact, scientific progress, cultural achievements or great public works right next to Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi; recklessly ridiculed as bucktooth illiterate hicks with nothing worthwhile to offer to the world, the nation, or even their own communities. 

Where, armed to the teeth with unearned oil money that erupted under their feet and from which they were able to benefit by doing little besides simply having the good fortune to be born in the right place at the right time, hatemongers would pour vast resources into inciting hatred towards Muslims like me and my parents and my children and those of my brothers and sisters, just so the conniving race-baiting overlords could convince their own poor and disadvantaged to go fight die to help them steal our oil and add it to their stockpiles. 

Or towards effecting whatever demented, Christian-Fundamentalist flavored, Zionist engineered vision of Apocalypse they wished to effectuate in the Holy Land, that entailed the mass murder and ethnic cleansing of Muslims from places where they have lived for millennia. 

I packed my wife, my children, all my earthly possessions, and moved down to this State, despite being fully aware of all of this. 

Why did I do that, you may be asking? I can almost hear the snarl of contempt I have heard so often every time I have even gently tried to remind someone deeply infected by majoritarian, identarian arrogance that their actions do not align with their stated "values" and the identity they present to the world and was met with “well if you don’t like it why did you come here buddy?”.  

Because I have faith. 

And I was told, Texas was a good place for those who kept faith. 

I understand well, the power of faith. Despite the perverse caricature that religion is sometimes twisted into by the settler to justify stealing land, the slave master to justify stealing the labor and humanity of his slave, the Klansmen to not merely justify but glorify lynching and burning the bodies of innocent colored folk, the politician to justify inciting hatred towards the Muslims who dare to live on top of land and oil that belongs to their racial and spiritual superiors, even the terrorist who mistakes his wounded pride and need for vengeance as some kind of perverse justice; in spite of the violence that the arrogant and wicked do to the glory of faith by working evil in it’s name,  I know well the power of true faith to transform the heart of Man all the way to it’s depths. 

I have witnessed it myself from the time I opened my eyes into this world. I have seen that those of sincere faith, who truly and deeply believe in a power greater than themselves and affirm the moral imperatives to truth, justice, compassion, charity and the active striving to implement these virtues individually and collectively, tend to make better choices and be better people. 

That more than color, caste or creed, more than the circumstances of one’s birth or the lack or abundance of power or privilege or means or influence, it is faith that serves as the most reliable marker in assessing the trustworthiness and value of any human. White, Black, Rich, Poor... this will always be the best assurance of the credibility of a person in my book. 

The humility to recognize that despite our most impressive achievements we are still insignificant in the context of a grand design that extends far beyond us and at whose mercy all our fates unfold. 

The courage to honor our covenants and our word and chose justice and compassion over infidelity and cruelty. 

The strength to confront their own faults and hypocrisies and errors, make amends where needed and pledge in good faith to do better in the future. 

The good sense to treat others as we would like to be treated in their situation, for ultimately this is the highest test to which the gift of free will my Lord gave to the children of Adam can be subjected and serves as the method whereby my Lord separates the wheat from the chaff as we work our way through the season back to His threshold. 

I understand that as a faithful people, Texans express that faith in their political lives, as they do in all other aspects of their lives. 

As well they should. I do not fault Texans for attempting to build their community in accordance with the teachings of Christianity and the Bible, to the extent permissible by the American Constitution which they have repeatedly sworn oaths to uphold and shed blood to deliver on that oath time and time again. 

In fact, that is partly what drew me here. I have more confidence in the word of a Godly sinner than a faithless and performative pietist. I was willing to give Texas the benefit of the doubt, to accept its repentance of it's past sins and give it a fair chance to live up to it's promises of freedom and fair treatment for all. 

What concerns me is the latent tradition of subverting faith and Constitution to sustain and perpetuate the unearned privilege of tyrants who feel entitled to the labor and property and even the very souls of other people. Who have a demonstrated tendency towards a willingness to treat their fellow human beings as less than human, and mistake their arrogance for evidence of their own superiority. 

What concerns me is that instead of the spirit of Christ influencing what is meant to be an impartial judiciary that upholds the law of the land above the political and ideological leanings of those who are called upon to serve it, that judiciary will become infected by the type of Pharisaic pedantry that Christ stood so vehemently against.   

The type of Pharisaic pedantry that preaches what it does not practice, that ties up heavy burdens hard to bear and lays them on people's shoulders. That does it’s deeds to be seen and loves the place of honor at feasts. That insists on tithing spices and observing trivialities and formalities while neglecting the weightier matters of the Law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. 

The type of Pharisaic pedantry that might penalize the use of a number two pencil instead of a black ink pen, as a pretext to keep in his place an uppity "hellbound heathen" Muslim, as I have been called by some self-professed devotees and acolyte of Jesus of Nazareth, may his name be forever exalted on the lips and hearts of humankind.  

Yes, I am sure there is a statue or a regulation or some provision of some waiver or agreement I signed somewhere that legally entitles the State of Texas to deny a Muslim the ability to practice law, for making the egregious and unspeakable error of using a number two pencil where the law required black ink and only black ink. 

A rule that feels akin to the hollowed-out ritualisms and petty formalisms of those that clamored for Christ to be nailed to a cross for daring to point out their hypocrisies and cruelties and arrogant substitution of communal pride as the object of their worship over a God whose good graces were the only thing keeping them from horror and damnation beyond their conception. 

A rule that would only be weaponized by the same type of people who once comprised the ranks of a priestly caste that would inspect sacrificial animals for blemishes at an Altar and a Temple that was cursed by Christ himself, whose prophecy of its destruction came to pass and serves as among the single greatest proofs of the truth of the Abrahamic God in all of history. 

The type of people Christ felt compelled to flog in the very temple of the God they defiled by their Pharisaic pedantry and stubborn and obtuse insistence on legal formalisms even as they hollowed out any blessing from the Word and the Law they purported to serve with their hands and tongues. 

Whatever. One less uppity, troublemaking, smart mouth foreigner walking around with a law license thinking he can remind us of the rights and obligations we owe to all, regardless of the fact that they are non-Christians standing in the way of our material lusts or our delusions of spiritual grandeur, am I right? 

It is my fervent hope that the State of Texas has not fallen to such low depths of moral and spiritual decay. That the stain of pride and hate and dishonor has not soaked so deep into the altar of it's justice that it will never wash out. 

Because if it has, then you know what comes next. And if you don't, let me remind you. 

What comes next is the judgement of God, that has befallen many a wicked nation before, and will most likely continue to reap many a nation yet to come, until the end of history and the final battle between good and evil that will mark the end of humanities sojourn in this world, that is one among other worlds. 

America was founded on secluded shores separated from the rest of the world. 

It sometimes loses touch with the history of humanity. It lacks the visible reminders of the shattered works of arrogant tyrants who walked the earth pridefully and were turned into reminders of the fate that awaits those who allow their arrogance to lead them towards rebellion against God and tyranny over their fellow man. 

It forgets that blood and fire are the counterpoint to the forgiveness and mercy of my Lord, on which presumptuous tyrants like to rely to excuse their abandonment of humility when they are utterly undeserving of the compassion and forgiveness and tolerance and grace that they deny others in their turn.

Even Christ reminded us that he came not to bring peace, but a sword. And the sword of my Lord is raised time and time again to confront the arrogant from places they did not conceive. 

I do not say all this to judge you or shame you or prove you less than myself. 

How could I? 

Me? A sinner, born of sinners, forget the lesson of humility I seek to impart to others? 

May my Lord save me from such a terrible condemnation to the oblivion of ignorance and damnation. 

I say this to beg you to be mindful when invoking the God who is jealous when His name is invoked, and wrathful when it is invoked in furtherance of the oppression of the meek who are his dearest creatures; the stranger and the orphan and the slave, the weak and the infirm, the voiceless and the broken and those who cries are heard only by the Master of masters, who have no patron to protect them besides my Lord himself, who hears their petition before all others. 

The God who is not afraid to return to his orchard and chastise the keepers entrusted with his estate, who not only exceeded the scope of their duties but deigned to set themselves up in my Lords stead. 

The God who does not hesitate to cast the vine that is rotten into the flames. 

Once, my ancestors were also delivered a Canaan over which they were granted dominion, of a type unparalleled in history as the gift of the Holy Land to the Israelites was in it's time. 

They charged down the mountains into India as your ancestors stormed across the oceans.  Almost miraculously, they overpowered the inhabitants of one of the oldest and grandest civilizations on Earth, into submission. 

They, too, were rewarded immensely with the ample bounties of the rich dominions that were practically gifted to them by a Lord whose justice is exceeded only by His generosity.  

They were given large land grants for their part in assisting with the conquests of the great dynasties they would serve as vassals. They set themselves up as lords and feudal aristocrats, working the land and the people upon it for their benefit. 

For a while, they earned and deserved that benefit by establishing greater justice and order than what preceded them; a heinous caste system and the practice of burning widows alive on the pyres of their husbands and various other abhorrent practices that seem to be the inevitable end state of idolatrous and demonic spiritual calcifications. 

But soon, like so many before them and many to come after, they grew greedy and selfish and arrogant and prideful. 

They gave in to the idolatry of their own vanity, and began to abuse their grant of dominion in service to their blasphemies, that assumed the form of so many elaborate marble shrines to their heroes and lovers and sometimes, their pets. 

They sold the legacy of their forbears to foreign merchants peddling frivolous luxuries and novel intoxicants; to that first international drug cartel that was the British East India company. Who carried away in leaky boats, the birthright of the fallen and craven scions of once great Kings, their powdered wigs shaking and their swollen pink tea-dribbling colonial jowls chortling with glee at having obtained our crown jewels, which featured the most precious gems known to exist at the time, in exchange for bundles of dried tea, tobacco and opium. 

And then, as the inevitable decay began to set among the Muslim kings of India, they watched their empires fall apart piece by pieces steadily over time, helpless to reverse the trend even when they could summon the courage to admit it's inexorable unfolding before their staring eyes. 

The resentments and enmities they had sowed among those they oppressed to sustain their bottomless pride and ego and desire for glory and power would take root in the soil itself. In the hearts of the Hindu and the Sikh and the heterodox Muslim deemed to be an apostate for refusing to submit to the dictates of a self-appointed priestly caste, oppressed by dynasties descending into degeneracy at an exponential rate, in the name of religious conformity but really in violation of their oath of maintaining freedom from compulsion in matters of religion. 

The blood they spilled soaked the land of my birth as the blood of the Native and the Negro, of the pagan and the Catholic soaks this land. It would go on to yield the most bitter harvests for their distant progeny, like my grandparents generation who found themselves at the terminal end of the process of civilizational decline during the Partition of India; the inevitable rock bottom to which the ostentatious kingdoms of the Mughals were pretty much destined to crash into eventually when they decided to leave the cold northerly climates they came from and set themselves up as the minority overlords of most resource rich region on the planet at the time, in the midst of a population that grew to despise them and bide their time to seek their vengeance.  

What did not help was that the register of their petty tyrannies had grown thick over successive generations of increasingly ineffective governments who attempted to compensate for their failures and loss of glory by lashing out against perceived enemies, and only creating more in the process. 

The Sikhs and Hindus....they remembered what we did to their priests and holy men. 

Their resentments never dissipated, only grew stronger as we watered them with their own blood. And the blood of martyrs grows the tree of liberty faster than that of tyrants. 

As we were weakened and displaced from prominence, as the privileges of power our forbears had obtained through conquest (as yours did) began to reach depletion, the chickens came home to roost. 

The sword of God came to visit us to demand an answer for our infidelity, our tyranny, our lack of honor, but above all the cruelties and oppressions we inflicted on the innocent to desperately cling to an undeserved pride that only became more rapidly reduced to a hollow echo of glories past the more we tried to hang on to it. 

I understand the miscegenated descendants of the natives you yourself subjugated, who today mow your lawns and work on your construction sites and do most of your manual labor, also once demonstrated that vein of cruelty and bloodlust that leads to human sacrifice and ritual torture. 

Perhaps my ancestors made the mistake of not beating their religion into the widow-burning, human sacrificing pagans of India the way Europeans beat Christianity into the American natives, both north and south of the Rio Grande. 

Being Muslim and thus beholden to the strict injunction of the Quran against compulsion in matters of religion and the absolute inviolability of freedom of individual conscience, my forbears probably did not feel as comfortable bashing the people they conquered in the face with their scriptures to beat the pagan out of them the way the Spanish Catholics did at their schools for natives for instance. 

It certainly came back to bite us in the rear after the British colonialists somehow managed to snatch up our empires for outstanding debts owed with barely a shot fired, and then decided to vivisect India before discarding the depleted and destroyed husk of the crown jewel of the Old World, as they made their hasty, drunken exit from their own career of colonial "conquest".  

When that happened, the Hindus and Sikhs....they settled scores. 

Much has been said and written and filmed about the Holocaust, especially in the context of a Western society whose largesse was necessary to effectuate the ethnic cleansing of Muslims from the Holy Land so you could dump those Jews you've been torturing for 2000 years on our doorstop after turning them mad from centuries of persecution on charges of deicide. 

Then again, maybe they had it coming too. Just like maybe we got what was coming to us when we were massacred in the Punjab in 1947. 

Far less is told of the horrors of the Partition of India, the largest single population transfer in history to date, that was attended by bloodshed and rapine of a similarly unprecedented scale. 

My grandfather worked in the railways at the time, at the Lahore railway station. 

He was there to witness the scenes that would become burned into the consciousness of a nation and become it's foundational trauma. 

Trains packed to the brim with refugees fleeing the wrath of a people they once ruled over with such smug superiority, all hacked to pieces by machetes and farm implements as the peasantry descended on the trains making their way through the farmland that had sustained the luxuries of the urbane existence of a ruling elite that had tried to cash one too many checks against the glories of it’s more worthy ancestors. 

Blood trailing onto the platform from the doors as the carriages rolled onto the platform. Severed limbs and heads and corpses mutilated beyond recognition from spasms of long festering communal rage, some as tiny as the fetuses torn from the wombs of expectant mothers. 

Trying to locate the relatives of whatever women were able to be rescued from the rape camps that were set up to ritualistically defile once noble Muslim bloodlines using gang rape and sodomy and the cruelest conceivable forms of sexual torture the human mind is able to dredge up once it is drenched in the intoxication of demonic rage and hate and the urge to dominant to the utmost. 

By what were otherwise ordinary men, friends and neighbors who forsook the warm beds of their wives and lovers and came from miles around to partake in the opportunity to perpetrate abhorrent humiliation rituals that theretofore had only been the dark fantasies of fanatics. 

The soil remembers. The hearts of men do not forget. That is why you have to be mindful of every seed you sow, for sooner or later the reason of reaping comes. 

And when your scales weigh so heavy against you, you may want to be careful as you hold the fates of others in scales currently entrusted to your hands, lest they finally tip against you. 

It is said that the great Muslim Mughal kings had a penchant for building elaborate marble gardens and verandas with ornate fountains and water features, because they pined for their mountain homeland in the oppressive humid heat of the vast Indo-Gangetic plains that sustained the civilizational glories they coveted. 

You would think they would have considered maybe just not living in India, instead of trying to bend it to their will and turn it into something it was not. 

Then again, the Scots Irish "original family" nobility of Texas never seemed to have taken their susceptibility to sunburn and turning into lobsters under the tropical heat as a sign that maybe this is not a climate they are cut out for in the long run. Instead of stubbornly insisting on clinging to patterns of personal dress and home construction and daily routines and other adaptations intended for colder climates than this. 

To consider the possibility that air conditioning is just an unreliable crutch propping up an unsustainable presence in a soil drenched with the blood and hatred of all the black and brown people you have oppressed to build your grand suburban palaces and steel and glass monuments to your own sense of self-importance. 

That gabled roofs are a vestigial architectural remnant whose utility is outweighed by the added complexity of their design and construction in places where it never really snows, and at this point are just a collective emotional support blanket for people who need to drag pine trees into their living rooms once a year to feel connected to a Jew born on the edge of the desert two thousand years ago. 

Perhaps it is as inevitable for Southern whites to endure the horrors of the pogroms that lie in wait when the systems they built to sustain their dominance over the poor and the native and the slave inevitably collapse or crumble, as they did for my nomadic Turko-Mongolic ancestors who thought it would be good sport to raid the lowlands and subjugate a weaker population into their subservience and that their subsequent elaborate courtly pretenses would keep their progeny safe from machetes and rape camps. 

Despite your nativist protestations and your blood-and-soil rhetoric, you are strangers to this land no less than me. This land that has become a strange cross-roads of humanity and a point of interface among such disparate populations: the natives who were always here, the migrants who moved here or the slaves they forced to come here under duress. 

I trace my descent to the same central Asian stock that wandered over the Berring strait in the last ice age and seeded the populations that had been living here for millennia when the first pale, cross-wielding Europeans accidently showed up on these shores looking for the dominions of my forbears in India. If my Comanche cousins had steel and horse before Colombus, European presence on these shores would not have exceeded a handful of coastal port colonies at best.  

I would argue you are strangers even more than me given the fact that I'm still more adapted to the oppressive heat and humidity than you are. In my experience, heat and humidity seems to have deleterious effects on the European constitution. Y'all start doing some crazy and/or stupid things in the heat. 

Even if you cannot avoid the punishments of famine, war and exile that have been visited upon arrogant nations before you, nations who began to worship the idol of their own vanity and no longer of service to highest Truth, you can always try to mitigate and soften the impact of the inevitable. 

It is never too late to repent, to seek forgiveness, to make amends and to try to reduce your sentence. It could be the difference between a polite holocaust and truly savage one down the line. 

It is going to happen sooner or later. Your best hope is still to try to do better, to make amends and serve, to be charitable and generous and just and compassionate, in the hopes that you are able to offset the debt that you owe by any means necessary to whatever extent possible, to claw away some of the weight that hangs heavy in the balance against you. 

Because a day may come when you find yourself willing to trade everything you ever owned for even the slightest momentary reprieve from the flames where you will first have to seek purification before being considered for entry into the eternal and undying gardens that lie at the threshold of my Master.  

That's what I would do. That's what I wish my people had done. Might have been a few less rape camps and train cars with hacked up children and in '47 if they did. 

You may want to be mindful that if you start holding accounts tightly, if you start demanding a level of moral perfection you yourself could never dare to come near, you may be held closely to your own accounts by the One whose knowledge is complete, whose justice is perfect and whose compassion is limitless to the point of subsuming even punishment in it's ambit. 

If you start to hassle a stranger in a strange land, friendless and fatherless with no support besides the Lord of strangers and slaves and orphans and widows and the meek to whom he has promised the Earth itself as their inalienable birthright, for using a number two pencil instead of a black pen to submit an answer to a Bar exam question, then that God may begin to question you.  

And His inquisition will be far more uncomfortable for you than any Pharisaic pedantry ever would be for me. 

If the State of Texas refuses to grade my MPT test because I wrote it with pencil, instead of pen, it will be a shameful and embarrassing disgrace that is unworthy of it's dignity and honor. 

Less importantly for your purposes, but for the record, it will break my heart and tip the scales of disappointment towards resignation and disengagement with this land, without hope of reset. 

I would feel silly and stupid trying to litigate this. I am exhausted just thinking about how I will be called a whiny snowflake or a pushy foreigner or any of the other insults hurled at people who try to speak up against the hypocrisies and injustices that are inflicted on them by a system that increasingly seems utterly disconnected from the lived experience of the people it is supposed to benefit and designed only to serve the interests of select powerful minorities instead of all Americans. 

But the State of Texas will look sillier and stupider if it denies a brown immigrant Muslim man the right to practice to law when he is otherwise qualified to do so, simply because he wrote an exam response in pencil instead of pen. 

Maybe the State of Texas doesn't care. 

Maybe the State of Texas will tell me It is ultimately my own fault for not following the rules to a T. My egregious error in using a number 2 pencil instead of a black ink pen obviously gives Texas all the justification it needs to exclude me from participation in the fabled bastion of Liberty and Justice that is the American courtroom. 

After all, what does it matter to the Great State of Texas for showing any degree of fair exercise of discretion towards a Muslim of all people? 

And If I don't like how things work around here well then I'm just free to mosey on back to wherever I came from, ain't that right hoss? 

All right. 

But I will be sure to make that decision of the Texas judiciary and it’s representatives, and the reasoning and justification behind it, explicit and public. 

Again, not to harm the interests of the State of Texas, but to put other Muslims and foreigners and those who think about moving to Texas to contribute to it's economy to try make something useful and worthwhile of the bounties my Lord has showered on it, on alert with regard to what to expect from a place that puts poorly trained proctors to administer exams and penalizes examinees for the effects of their short sightedness and lack of consideration. 

To let them know that the downside to doing business in this state that is flush with unearned oil money that funds hateful, anti-Immigrant and anti-Muslim political movements and embeds its legacy of Christian-themed White Supremacism into its legal system, is that you have to  expect the State and it's officials to be perpetually hostile to you and on the lookout to find some excuse to beat you into submission and make you grovel and beg for their favor. 

 That this abiding sense of superiority and sense of entitlement to treat people with callousness and brutality, infects the Law itself with the cynical hatred that has always lurked inside the heart of the Southern ruling class who still hold most of the power and authority in this state and carry forward the tradition of arrogant cruelty that enabled chattel slavery and Jim Crow. 

 Power and authority that once got to their head so badly that they had the nerve to rise up in rebellion against the Union, simply because the good people of the rest of the Union had lost their patience with the barbaric cruelty of slavery and racism. To the point that they felt it necessary to meet with unrelenting force, the egregious insult the existence of these practices on American soil offered to the dignity of it's Flag and it's Constitution, it's very commitment to Liberty itself. 

If you read this long letter, roll your eyes and say "tough luck. Use a pen next time", so be it. I am not here to beg you for reprieve or compassion or concession or even my rights under the law anymore. 

I'm done begging in front of you people. It does no good to anyone, including you yourself though you might be too arrogant and hopped up on your own dominant role in society on account of your membership in the Good Ol' Boys fraternity to realize how you debase yourself by trying to use words like Truth and Faith and Justice to excuse your own selfish grandstanding arrogance and your submission to the idolatry of your own vanity. 

Go ahead and penalize me for using a pencil instead of a pen. I'm sure you will issue some long winded justification for the slavish adherence to formality the Legal profession is roundly despised for cynically weaponizing in order to facilitate unjust outcomes for the rich and powerful. 

Please, explain to me with citations to statue and precedent why western civilization itself is at risk of collapse because I used a pencil instead of a black pen for Part 2 of the MPT. 

I will simply take note of your obtuse and stubborn insistence on shoving your fleeting worldly authority in my face just because you could. I will simply add my grievance to the long list of grievances that already weigh heavy on your scales. 

I will submit my petition, not merely to the nauseating farcical theatres you would have proven your courtrooms to be by denying me admission to them because I used a number 2 pencil and not a black ink pen on one question on one part of one day of the Bar exam, but to the court of the living God himself which is the highest court of authority in all existence. 

I sincerely hope that my petition to my Lord is not the one that finally tips the scales that already weigh so heavy against you and becomes the feather that brings the weight of your sins crashing over your heads. 

Believe it or not, I have no desire to be either the straw or the camel or the broken back. neither the traveler stranded in the wilderness with a dying mount.  

God Bless Texas. 

God Bless the United States of America.