[i]Saturday 24th of March 2018, 07.00 
Sitrah
[u]Kingdom of Bahrain.[/u][/i]

At exactly seven o'clock every morning, Ali Musa al-Abasi, better known as 'Sheikhna', 'Abu Musa', 'Sheikh Ali' or 'Hajji Ali', returned from the mosque and opened his shoe shop. At ten minutes past seven, the cassette player (the Sheikh could never really get over those) rattled to life and began playing, the Qur'an in the voice of that most grand Egyptian reciter, Abd al-Basit Abd al-Samad. By 15 minutes past seven, the 58 year old was seated on his stool, among the tables and shelves, the odd machine and innumerable pieces of leather, with his first set of shoes for the day.

Today, the shoes happened to belong to Zainab, a girl in her second year of Architecture at the University of Bahrain. She also happened to be a partisan of [i]Saraya al-Mukhtar[/i], and had actually managed to do a pretty good job of bringing more university students into the fold. It was, of course, a dangerous thing - government spies and affiliates had their tentacles everywhere. But the girl seemed to have some wit about her and was, as of yet, undetected. Or perhaps she had been detected long ago and they were preparing something...

You could generally tell quite a bit about a person from their shoes. A man in the profession for nearly four decades, Hajji Ali could tell considerably more. The completely worn out pair of [url=http://www.shoebuy.com/pi/crocs/jb/crocs509395_99415_jb.jpg]black flat crocs[/url] before him said quite a bit. There was a level of conservatism, modesty - professionalism even. There was also a level of parsimoniousness - the shoes looked like they had been used non-stop for a considerable period of time, and replacing them did not seem to have yet become an option worth consideration. But then again, the upper was of good quality leather so she did not seem miserly when it actually came to buying something. There was a level of pragmatism and practicality too, and admittedly some taste if you were of the 'less is more' mentality. He could only imagine the utilitarian buildings someone like her would design. But there was one last thing that had to be considered, and that was the fact that the girl was an abaya-wearing tigress of Sahib al-Zaman. It was in her character to hide what could be hidden, whether physical or otherwise, and the shoes reflected that too.

At exactly 20 minutes past seven, the old man finished his observation of his customer's shoes and began working on them. The soles were worn thin and the leather would need restoration. It was going to be a lengthy process, but such was the price of battling the tide of modernity and technology and endeavouring to keep the traditional ways alive. His eldest son, Musa, would arrive at 07.30 - for he worked with him from Saturday til Tuesday every week - and the boy had always been rather deft with his hands. Musa would be able to deal with the leather while he focused on the simpler task of fixing the sole.

As he set to work, he allowed his mind to drift back once more to what had happened last night. Another shipment of weapons had come in. It was getting to a point now where the warehouse would soon have more weaponry stored inside than shoes. If a raid should occur it was more likely than not that they would be discovered. But a raid had never occurred, not even when tensions were at their highest in the '80s, why would it happen now? He was probably just anxious because a general meeting was taking place tonight. They would start drifting in from just after dhuhr time and the meeting would begin at 18.00, exactly one hour after Hajji Ali closed the shop. Things had been picking up in the last few months, and he knew that whatever would take place at tonight's meeting would change the rules of the game completely...