The fetishists, p.38
The Fetishists, page 38
He cut to the chase: “The clans have split into three factions. If you don’t accept the leadership, the tribe will not only splinter, but these one-time fellow tribe members will become each other’s foes.”
Adda was obliged to yield. He later realized that nobility consists of relinquishing personal happiness and abandoning even the road to Waw to respond to a heavenly call known as duty.
Then he discovered that he had involuntarily bartered religious fulfilment for the fulfilment of a duty.
6
Over the long haul a man is forced to renounce many ambitions and to forget other goals. This leaves him with nothing but signs, allusions, and his initial insights. From childhood he retained a hankering to master the principles of religion and an antipathy to gold. He associated his grandmother’s tragedy with the demon called gold dust and the path to Waw with his frustrated hope to master the religious sciences from the dervishes of the Nafusa Mountains. This perennial yearning induced him to persuade the Qadiri shaykh to stay and enlighten the tribe with illuminating true belief at a time when the entire great desert was plagued by phony dervishes and mercenary jurists. Those men exploited religion till many tribes lost most of their Muslim identity and deviated from the straight path. Islam was in danger of returning as a stranger—as the Messenger had once prophesied.2
Had it not been for the apostasy that began in Timbuktu and the perverse influence on Islam of the teachings of the Fetishists and their fellow travelers who adopted gold dust as a new god, these thieves would not have dared to enter the desert disguised as jurists who sometimes pretended to stress the obligation of Muslims to return to their Islamic roots and at other times advocated Quranic rule. These gales of deviant practice blew in from the South with the trade caravans and the Qibli. The number of people who had actually memorized portions of the Quran decreased then, and the hold of religion on life was shaken. Mountebanks and mercenaries seized the opportunity to use religion to gain a living, acquire wealth, and dupe the Saharans searching for the truth—whether the truth of the desert, of life, or of the Lost Oasis. These rascals penetrated deep into the naked continent, either accompanying camel caravans or traveling alone on a donkey or a mule. Indeed the more prosperous among them arrived mounted on horses. Indigent individuals, who had only just begun their mercenary careers, came to tribal encampments on bloody, bare feet that the rocks of the long trail had scarred. They came from all four directions—from Fez, Marrakesh, and Kairouan, from Zliten, Touat, and the land of Shinqit, and from the eastern desert, too, by way of Zuwayla and Murzuq. They announced their Sufi dhikr sessions by beating the tambourines used in their ceremonies, burning incense, roaring like lions from some jungle, stabbing one another with knives, and spitting into the mouths of simple folk (claiming this would fill their spirits with purity and blessings). Their befuddled hosts never realized that all this commotion was just a trick to persuade the tribe to prepare a fine banquet at the end of the evening in honor of these visiting saints. The next morning these thieves would reveal their hideous faces and begin plundering people openly. They would confiscate female camels, goats, the alms tax, women’s silver jewelry, and even the garments and weapons of the nobles. All that looting was done in the name of the Messenger of God, his Companions, and Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani—in exchange for prayers or bogus amulets written on yellowed slips of paper with frayed edges. The desert dwellers would slip these into gazelle-skin pouches to prevent them from disintegrating. It never occurred to anyone that the leather pouch, not the scrap of yellowing paper, was responsible for the efficacy of such an amulet.
The most dangerous groups in the history of the desert arrived from Marrakesh, Fez, and Meknès disguised as ascetics. They wore coarse wool tunics that resembled gunny sacks in coarseness, thickness, and abrasiveness. They carried secret maps drawn on the skins of different animals: Barbary sheep, gazelles, camels, wild buffaloes, and even snakes and serpents. They came with an extraordinary grasp of the Saharans’ psychology. So they declined offers of banquets, ate no meat, and were content to live on barley bread baked in the sand. They recited the Quran all night long and then volunteered the next morning to teach adults the prayer ritual. They gained the people’s confidence and erected a special tabernacle for the instruction of boys—and even girls at times—in the Quran and the principles of religion. No one paused to reflect that these cunning schemers were treasure hunters with maps tucked into their belts. They volunteered to teach children, because they wanted to search their innocent eyes for a magical point where these brutes discern a divine hint or a sign the jinn imprinted there. If they could find this, they might be able to break the power of the talisman safeguarding the treasure by sacrificing the child to the treasure’s guardians. Many children and treasures disappeared in this way. Desert people typically attributed the disappearance of their children to their neighbors—the jinn—as they had for thousands of years. The plundering of treasures might have remained a secret forever, especially since normal people avoided the ancestors’ remains and the ancients’ ashes like the plague; what awakened people’s doubts was the disappearance of the self-styled ascetics. Then it was not difficult to track the victims and discover their bones. Thus people learned that these trusted stoics were nothing but devils from hell itself disguised as dervishes and ascetics.
Adda, himself, had traded a camel of piebald parents for a folded piece of paper from an itinerant jurist. This young camel actually did not have a piebald coat himself, but his noble lineage sufficed to raise his value among herders, experts, Adda’s peers, and the maidens of his encampments and of other tribes as well. The jurist would accept nothing less than this camel for the amulet, and Adda yielded. When he opened this folded paper, he found some suspect lines that did not resemble Arabic calligraphy at all. The letters looked more like Tifinagh than a verse from the Quran. Feeling queasy about this, he showed his amulet to a shaykh he knew in the Adrar oasis. When the shaykh unfolded the paper to spread out the sheet, he burst into laughter. His hysterical chortles seemed totally out of character for such a dignified shaykh. He guffawed for so long that tears came to his eyes. Then he sat up straight, asked God’s forgiveness, and cursed all demonic human beings and jinn. He explained: “This isn’t an amulet, and the marks aren’t letters of any alphabet. Your jurist is illiterate.”
From that day forward, Adda knew that deceit is not practiced only with weights and measures but is found even in religion itself. He was wary of jurists and Sufi shaykhs during his first years as the tribe’s leader. The Qadiri shaykh, however, had been able to gull him with a simple weapon: liberty! That man must have spent years studying the psychology of the Saharans till he discovered their Achilles heel and found something they love passionately and value more than any other treasure: liberty. He must have realized during his desert treks that their morbid hankering after Waw is simply another internalized manifestation of passionate love. So he decided to target their yearning for liberty.
Within days of his arrival, he had popularized this philosophy and focused on divine love as the sole means of achieving liberation. He had no difficulty convincing people—not because of some special skill at dissimulation, but because passionate love is the cornerstone of all the Sufi brotherhoods that entered the desert. He likewise had no trouble tracing back to the principle of passionate love all the spiritual struggles and psychological issues that Saharans had experienced throughout history—including their yearning for Waw, bouts of seclusion, lengthy fasts, ecstatic states induced by beautiful singing or the exaltation occasioned by amorous rapture, and even their practice of listening to stillness.
He began his war on heretical innovations by attacking supererogatory prayers and hymns in praise of the Prophet. He forbade inflaming the emotions of an ecstatic lover with songs about a terrestrial beloved—replacing this with hymns of celestial love. He prohibited treating rapture with singing and dancing and described this practice as filth derived from the activities of demons and of Fetishists from the African forestlands. Instead he initiated treatment of these aberrations with the chanting of Quran verses. He was the first person to point out that the Lost Paradise is not located in Waw but in the Believer’s heart. In short, this dignified man whose thick, white beard was flecked with delicate yellow strands, appeared to Shaykh Adda and other sages to be a genuine religious reformer who could be relied upon to fortify the faith and protect the tribe from the onslaught of the Fetishists’ religion. The Qadiri shaykh was also a master of his craft, and his proficiency in it rivaled the fox as portrayed in legends. Even years later, the leader experienced an irrepressible feeling that this man’s intentions had been sincere. This whispered insinuation forced him to acknowledge a painful truth, which the shaykh had always tried to ignore, namely that a man who becomes a tribe’s leader is not corrupt at first; the corruption hides in the dirt throne on which the leader sits. He would attempt to repulse this idea because he heard another voice suggest that he was trying to use that maxim to find an excuse for the shaykh from the Sufi brotherhood, not out of some love for the truth but to explain the defeat Adda had suffered at his hands. These two voices had continued to clash in his heart to the present.
His withdrawal then had not been a defeat. No one realized that his retreat had been far more bitter than even the cruelest defeat. Why? Because he saw he had not been betrayed by the Qadiri shaykh but by his own tribe, whom he loved. He had sacrificed for their sake his solitude in the northern Hammada and his intention to study Truth and the principles of religion. It naturally took some time for him to learn that people are nothing but a herd of pathetic livestock walking behind a herdsman who tempts them forward by holding out a handful of grass. They usually do not make the effort to question the herdsman’s intentions. They do not know he is certainly not leading them to grassy pastures when he tricks them with a handful of straw. A herdsman who tries this trick is usually leading them to slaughter. All the same, it is inconceivable that these poor animals will understand this until they see the knife. The Qadiri shaykh had played the herdsman, perhaps unconsciously. Adda could not accuse him of being ill-intentioned if corruption lurked in the tent of leadership itself. At least this was what he intuited during hours of solitude spent in the afternoon shade. Indeed, that this recklessness and corruption were embedded in that space was the worst aspect of the whole affair. His fear of this phantom, ghost, and ghoul—the ghoul of corruption found inside leadership’s tent—obliged him to search for salvation by grasping the staff by the middle in hopes that the unencumbered intellect could overcome the nasty aspects of leadership.
7
What Adda did hold against the Qadiri shaykh was his exile, even though he had withdrawn from the tribe voluntarily. The volatile situation the shaykh had created in the tribe, however, had necessitated his withdrawal—not to save face as the tongues of mean-spirited people suggested, but to offer the people their full right to exercise free choice, free even from the advice of sages. He had also hoped to enjoy the solitude and stillness of the Hammada. The strangest aspect of the matter was that he had not thought of crossing the Hammada to the Nafusa Mountains to resurrect his cherished dream of searching for the truth by learning the religious sciences. Perhaps serving as ruler had dug trenches into his soul and erased all traces of his early enthusiasm, which was characteristic of every young Saharan.
Although a burden had been shifted from him and chains had been removed, could he enjoy his liberty when he saw other people fettered? These were also not just any people; they were his tribe, his kin.
He reflected for a long time about this dilemma concerning destiny when he left the tribe’s encampment in the company of one vassal and three slaves. Bobo, his companion from a vassal clan, suggested seizing the opportunity to gather his camels, which were scattered in various areas. Bobo thought they should pass by Dembaba, because wayfarers had reported seeing a herd of camels there. His shaykh’s thoughts, however, turned to the shackling, burdensome responsibility of possessions. He realized intuitively that the encumbrance of goods is by its very nature demonic and can easily slip from a camel’s hobble, enter the pouches in the baggage, and become a peg that restrains the owner himself. The more his possessions multiply, the more firmly this peg becomes planted and plunged into the ground. This murky intuition performed the miracle of sketching the future in the wink of an eye—like the jinni that fetched the Queen of Sheba’s throne for Solomon the Wise.3 Adda would turn aside to visit Dembaba and might head from there to Ramlat el-Fezzan, because camels seen somewhere a month ago might now be a month’s march from there. No wayfarer could specify in which direction animals would head, not even an expert on animal behavior. After that he would head west, or east, to catch up with another herd that had been spotted in those regions. He would be forced to divide up these tasks. He would tell two slaves to head to the deserts of Messak in the south while he, Bobo, and the third slave would search for camels scattered in the Hammada and the western desert near Ghadames. He would begin asking herders, travelers, and wayfarers about the other missing camels, which had been neglected and set free, bearing the tribe’s brand—an ancient, magical symbol inspired by ancient priests’ texts carved on boulders: [+]. That was how the proposed the journey would start—a journey of searching and suffering.
The journey would not end, however, when the herd was rounded up. Once the camels were found, the inventory would begin, and that would be followed by treating their mange. So another search would begin for salves and veterinary experts. A different type of care would also begin: the care of camels in grazing lands that offered little grass. He would be obliged to descend to the nearest oases, to Ghadames or Adrar, to trade a number of camels for bundles of dry clover or sacks of hay to feed camels on the verge of perishing until God in His mercy sent rain. He would forget about his spirit. He would lose his peace of mind. He would discover he was even more agitated than when the Qadiri shaykh prepared to hunt for the promised freedom in order to present it as an offering to fulfil the promise he had made. Thus . . . he would experience headaches and misery!
This is what his intuition told him.
He covered his ears with his veil to keep from hearing Bobo’s proposal and remained silent till they had traversed the sandy strip and the peaks of the mountains wrapped in blue turbans were visible.
8
Exile. . . .
For months he nourished his hunch that he had left the encampment voluntarily, until a chance conversation disclosed the truth of the matter to him. Despite his long-standing passion for the Hammada, his secret belief, which he had concealed even from Khamaidu, that it was the primordial land that had been blessed by the presence of the Exalted, who had cleared it, lived there alone, and molded the body of the first ancestor from its clay, and his yearning for the land of caves and rock walls, decorated with the texts of the first people, he resisted the yearning. But then it grew more intense, suffocating him till it imposed itself on him. His companions had no difficulty grasping the secret reason for his long silence, his refusal to share their ash-baked barley bread, and his insomnia. It was also not difficult for Bobo to grasp this secret before the others did, because he was used to detecting the language of yearning for the earth and this mysterious gleam in the eyes that far surpasses normal sadness. His long experience with this pathetic type of person in his migratory tribe also afforded him the ability to discover yearning even from details that might seem trivial like a mercurial temperament, a tendency to become hostile, and other types of behavior exhibited by a person afflicted with this noble malady.
Yearning is the Saharan’s primeval destiny. His dual heritage creates this destiny the day he separates from his mother, the earth, and the power of the divine spirit blows some of its breath into a lump of clay. So he is compelled to suffer a double alienation: he is exiled from the heavenly paradise and separated from God. He descends to the earth but does not unite with the desert. He does not gain access to the desert’s expansiveness, barrenness, or freedom. He inhabits a handful of clay before he reaches that other greater, more compassionate, and mightier source that is the desert. So this creature continues to dangle between sky and earth. His body strives to return to its homeland, the desert, and his spirit yearns passionately to liberate itself from terrestrial captivity and fly to its heavenly source.
Herein lies the desert dweller’s predicament—the problematic struggle between celestial and terrestrial in his very being. If he settles on a naked piece of land for a number of days, the mysterious call summons him to fold his tent, pack his possessions, and start migrating again on his long trip to Him, to his celestial origin, to God. If the journey lasts a long time, his spirit flies with the wind, his body protests, and his heart bleeds with longing for his homeland, for his mother, the earth. The earth’s cry begins when his mother resolves to take her share of her prodigal son. A Saharan’s entire life is a struggle between earth and sky, between his mother and father. Each claims the greater right to their shared son. The mother says she provided his body, the vessel without which Adam could not have existed. The father argues that the other part, the creature’s inner, spiritual aspect, granted this jug of dirt its power and spread life through the sperm. Without this spirit, the creature would have remained a pathetic mound of clay. Suffering began with this struggle, with this dual heritage that the creature did not share in creating. Two forces tugged at him, and he was split in two. He suffered and did not possess the right to protest or to curse destiny’s cruelty. Of all of Adam’s descendants, the Saharan is most sensitive to the cruelty of his dual origin. His migration, his endless wandering, is an eternal quest for freedom and a return to God. His pathological yearning, the fire of which he attempts to alleviate with heart-rending Asahag ballads, is a quest for his lost homeland and an embarrassed plea for forgiveness from a mother who lost him the moment she gave birth to him in the desert’s open countryside. To state the matter bluntly, it is a longing for stability, and stability is a shroud and a natural preparation for death.
Adda was obliged to yield. He later realized that nobility consists of relinquishing personal happiness and abandoning even the road to Waw to respond to a heavenly call known as duty.
Then he discovered that he had involuntarily bartered religious fulfilment for the fulfilment of a duty.
6
Over the long haul a man is forced to renounce many ambitions and to forget other goals. This leaves him with nothing but signs, allusions, and his initial insights. From childhood he retained a hankering to master the principles of religion and an antipathy to gold. He associated his grandmother’s tragedy with the demon called gold dust and the path to Waw with his frustrated hope to master the religious sciences from the dervishes of the Nafusa Mountains. This perennial yearning induced him to persuade the Qadiri shaykh to stay and enlighten the tribe with illuminating true belief at a time when the entire great desert was plagued by phony dervishes and mercenary jurists. Those men exploited religion till many tribes lost most of their Muslim identity and deviated from the straight path. Islam was in danger of returning as a stranger—as the Messenger had once prophesied.2
Had it not been for the apostasy that began in Timbuktu and the perverse influence on Islam of the teachings of the Fetishists and their fellow travelers who adopted gold dust as a new god, these thieves would not have dared to enter the desert disguised as jurists who sometimes pretended to stress the obligation of Muslims to return to their Islamic roots and at other times advocated Quranic rule. These gales of deviant practice blew in from the South with the trade caravans and the Qibli. The number of people who had actually memorized portions of the Quran decreased then, and the hold of religion on life was shaken. Mountebanks and mercenaries seized the opportunity to use religion to gain a living, acquire wealth, and dupe the Saharans searching for the truth—whether the truth of the desert, of life, or of the Lost Oasis. These rascals penetrated deep into the naked continent, either accompanying camel caravans or traveling alone on a donkey or a mule. Indeed the more prosperous among them arrived mounted on horses. Indigent individuals, who had only just begun their mercenary careers, came to tribal encampments on bloody, bare feet that the rocks of the long trail had scarred. They came from all four directions—from Fez, Marrakesh, and Kairouan, from Zliten, Touat, and the land of Shinqit, and from the eastern desert, too, by way of Zuwayla and Murzuq. They announced their Sufi dhikr sessions by beating the tambourines used in their ceremonies, burning incense, roaring like lions from some jungle, stabbing one another with knives, and spitting into the mouths of simple folk (claiming this would fill their spirits with purity and blessings). Their befuddled hosts never realized that all this commotion was just a trick to persuade the tribe to prepare a fine banquet at the end of the evening in honor of these visiting saints. The next morning these thieves would reveal their hideous faces and begin plundering people openly. They would confiscate female camels, goats, the alms tax, women’s silver jewelry, and even the garments and weapons of the nobles. All that looting was done in the name of the Messenger of God, his Companions, and Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani—in exchange for prayers or bogus amulets written on yellowed slips of paper with frayed edges. The desert dwellers would slip these into gazelle-skin pouches to prevent them from disintegrating. It never occurred to anyone that the leather pouch, not the scrap of yellowing paper, was responsible for the efficacy of such an amulet.
The most dangerous groups in the history of the desert arrived from Marrakesh, Fez, and Meknès disguised as ascetics. They wore coarse wool tunics that resembled gunny sacks in coarseness, thickness, and abrasiveness. They carried secret maps drawn on the skins of different animals: Barbary sheep, gazelles, camels, wild buffaloes, and even snakes and serpents. They came with an extraordinary grasp of the Saharans’ psychology. So they declined offers of banquets, ate no meat, and were content to live on barley bread baked in the sand. They recited the Quran all night long and then volunteered the next morning to teach adults the prayer ritual. They gained the people’s confidence and erected a special tabernacle for the instruction of boys—and even girls at times—in the Quran and the principles of religion. No one paused to reflect that these cunning schemers were treasure hunters with maps tucked into their belts. They volunteered to teach children, because they wanted to search their innocent eyes for a magical point where these brutes discern a divine hint or a sign the jinn imprinted there. If they could find this, they might be able to break the power of the talisman safeguarding the treasure by sacrificing the child to the treasure’s guardians. Many children and treasures disappeared in this way. Desert people typically attributed the disappearance of their children to their neighbors—the jinn—as they had for thousands of years. The plundering of treasures might have remained a secret forever, especially since normal people avoided the ancestors’ remains and the ancients’ ashes like the plague; what awakened people’s doubts was the disappearance of the self-styled ascetics. Then it was not difficult to track the victims and discover their bones. Thus people learned that these trusted stoics were nothing but devils from hell itself disguised as dervishes and ascetics.
Adda, himself, had traded a camel of piebald parents for a folded piece of paper from an itinerant jurist. This young camel actually did not have a piebald coat himself, but his noble lineage sufficed to raise his value among herders, experts, Adda’s peers, and the maidens of his encampments and of other tribes as well. The jurist would accept nothing less than this camel for the amulet, and Adda yielded. When he opened this folded paper, he found some suspect lines that did not resemble Arabic calligraphy at all. The letters looked more like Tifinagh than a verse from the Quran. Feeling queasy about this, he showed his amulet to a shaykh he knew in the Adrar oasis. When the shaykh unfolded the paper to spread out the sheet, he burst into laughter. His hysterical chortles seemed totally out of character for such a dignified shaykh. He guffawed for so long that tears came to his eyes. Then he sat up straight, asked God’s forgiveness, and cursed all demonic human beings and jinn. He explained: “This isn’t an amulet, and the marks aren’t letters of any alphabet. Your jurist is illiterate.”
From that day forward, Adda knew that deceit is not practiced only with weights and measures but is found even in religion itself. He was wary of jurists and Sufi shaykhs during his first years as the tribe’s leader. The Qadiri shaykh, however, had been able to gull him with a simple weapon: liberty! That man must have spent years studying the psychology of the Saharans till he discovered their Achilles heel and found something they love passionately and value more than any other treasure: liberty. He must have realized during his desert treks that their morbid hankering after Waw is simply another internalized manifestation of passionate love. So he decided to target their yearning for liberty.
Within days of his arrival, he had popularized this philosophy and focused on divine love as the sole means of achieving liberation. He had no difficulty convincing people—not because of some special skill at dissimulation, but because passionate love is the cornerstone of all the Sufi brotherhoods that entered the desert. He likewise had no trouble tracing back to the principle of passionate love all the spiritual struggles and psychological issues that Saharans had experienced throughout history—including their yearning for Waw, bouts of seclusion, lengthy fasts, ecstatic states induced by beautiful singing or the exaltation occasioned by amorous rapture, and even their practice of listening to stillness.
He began his war on heretical innovations by attacking supererogatory prayers and hymns in praise of the Prophet. He forbade inflaming the emotions of an ecstatic lover with songs about a terrestrial beloved—replacing this with hymns of celestial love. He prohibited treating rapture with singing and dancing and described this practice as filth derived from the activities of demons and of Fetishists from the African forestlands. Instead he initiated treatment of these aberrations with the chanting of Quran verses. He was the first person to point out that the Lost Paradise is not located in Waw but in the Believer’s heart. In short, this dignified man whose thick, white beard was flecked with delicate yellow strands, appeared to Shaykh Adda and other sages to be a genuine religious reformer who could be relied upon to fortify the faith and protect the tribe from the onslaught of the Fetishists’ religion. The Qadiri shaykh was also a master of his craft, and his proficiency in it rivaled the fox as portrayed in legends. Even years later, the leader experienced an irrepressible feeling that this man’s intentions had been sincere. This whispered insinuation forced him to acknowledge a painful truth, which the shaykh had always tried to ignore, namely that a man who becomes a tribe’s leader is not corrupt at first; the corruption hides in the dirt throne on which the leader sits. He would attempt to repulse this idea because he heard another voice suggest that he was trying to use that maxim to find an excuse for the shaykh from the Sufi brotherhood, not out of some love for the truth but to explain the defeat Adda had suffered at his hands. These two voices had continued to clash in his heart to the present.
His withdrawal then had not been a defeat. No one realized that his retreat had been far more bitter than even the cruelest defeat. Why? Because he saw he had not been betrayed by the Qadiri shaykh but by his own tribe, whom he loved. He had sacrificed for their sake his solitude in the northern Hammada and his intention to study Truth and the principles of religion. It naturally took some time for him to learn that people are nothing but a herd of pathetic livestock walking behind a herdsman who tempts them forward by holding out a handful of grass. They usually do not make the effort to question the herdsman’s intentions. They do not know he is certainly not leading them to grassy pastures when he tricks them with a handful of straw. A herdsman who tries this trick is usually leading them to slaughter. All the same, it is inconceivable that these poor animals will understand this until they see the knife. The Qadiri shaykh had played the herdsman, perhaps unconsciously. Adda could not accuse him of being ill-intentioned if corruption lurked in the tent of leadership itself. At least this was what he intuited during hours of solitude spent in the afternoon shade. Indeed, that this recklessness and corruption were embedded in that space was the worst aspect of the whole affair. His fear of this phantom, ghost, and ghoul—the ghoul of corruption found inside leadership’s tent—obliged him to search for salvation by grasping the staff by the middle in hopes that the unencumbered intellect could overcome the nasty aspects of leadership.
7
What Adda did hold against the Qadiri shaykh was his exile, even though he had withdrawn from the tribe voluntarily. The volatile situation the shaykh had created in the tribe, however, had necessitated his withdrawal—not to save face as the tongues of mean-spirited people suggested, but to offer the people their full right to exercise free choice, free even from the advice of sages. He had also hoped to enjoy the solitude and stillness of the Hammada. The strangest aspect of the matter was that he had not thought of crossing the Hammada to the Nafusa Mountains to resurrect his cherished dream of searching for the truth by learning the religious sciences. Perhaps serving as ruler had dug trenches into his soul and erased all traces of his early enthusiasm, which was characteristic of every young Saharan.
Although a burden had been shifted from him and chains had been removed, could he enjoy his liberty when he saw other people fettered? These were also not just any people; they were his tribe, his kin.
He reflected for a long time about this dilemma concerning destiny when he left the tribe’s encampment in the company of one vassal and three slaves. Bobo, his companion from a vassal clan, suggested seizing the opportunity to gather his camels, which were scattered in various areas. Bobo thought they should pass by Dembaba, because wayfarers had reported seeing a herd of camels there. His shaykh’s thoughts, however, turned to the shackling, burdensome responsibility of possessions. He realized intuitively that the encumbrance of goods is by its very nature demonic and can easily slip from a camel’s hobble, enter the pouches in the baggage, and become a peg that restrains the owner himself. The more his possessions multiply, the more firmly this peg becomes planted and plunged into the ground. This murky intuition performed the miracle of sketching the future in the wink of an eye—like the jinni that fetched the Queen of Sheba’s throne for Solomon the Wise.3 Adda would turn aside to visit Dembaba and might head from there to Ramlat el-Fezzan, because camels seen somewhere a month ago might now be a month’s march from there. No wayfarer could specify in which direction animals would head, not even an expert on animal behavior. After that he would head west, or east, to catch up with another herd that had been spotted in those regions. He would be forced to divide up these tasks. He would tell two slaves to head to the deserts of Messak in the south while he, Bobo, and the third slave would search for camels scattered in the Hammada and the western desert near Ghadames. He would begin asking herders, travelers, and wayfarers about the other missing camels, which had been neglected and set free, bearing the tribe’s brand—an ancient, magical symbol inspired by ancient priests’ texts carved on boulders: [+]. That was how the proposed the journey would start—a journey of searching and suffering.
The journey would not end, however, when the herd was rounded up. Once the camels were found, the inventory would begin, and that would be followed by treating their mange. So another search would begin for salves and veterinary experts. A different type of care would also begin: the care of camels in grazing lands that offered little grass. He would be obliged to descend to the nearest oases, to Ghadames or Adrar, to trade a number of camels for bundles of dry clover or sacks of hay to feed camels on the verge of perishing until God in His mercy sent rain. He would forget about his spirit. He would lose his peace of mind. He would discover he was even more agitated than when the Qadiri shaykh prepared to hunt for the promised freedom in order to present it as an offering to fulfil the promise he had made. Thus . . . he would experience headaches and misery!
This is what his intuition told him.
He covered his ears with his veil to keep from hearing Bobo’s proposal and remained silent till they had traversed the sandy strip and the peaks of the mountains wrapped in blue turbans were visible.
8
Exile. . . .
For months he nourished his hunch that he had left the encampment voluntarily, until a chance conversation disclosed the truth of the matter to him. Despite his long-standing passion for the Hammada, his secret belief, which he had concealed even from Khamaidu, that it was the primordial land that had been blessed by the presence of the Exalted, who had cleared it, lived there alone, and molded the body of the first ancestor from its clay, and his yearning for the land of caves and rock walls, decorated with the texts of the first people, he resisted the yearning. But then it grew more intense, suffocating him till it imposed itself on him. His companions had no difficulty grasping the secret reason for his long silence, his refusal to share their ash-baked barley bread, and his insomnia. It was also not difficult for Bobo to grasp this secret before the others did, because he was used to detecting the language of yearning for the earth and this mysterious gleam in the eyes that far surpasses normal sadness. His long experience with this pathetic type of person in his migratory tribe also afforded him the ability to discover yearning even from details that might seem trivial like a mercurial temperament, a tendency to become hostile, and other types of behavior exhibited by a person afflicted with this noble malady.
Yearning is the Saharan’s primeval destiny. His dual heritage creates this destiny the day he separates from his mother, the earth, and the power of the divine spirit blows some of its breath into a lump of clay. So he is compelled to suffer a double alienation: he is exiled from the heavenly paradise and separated from God. He descends to the earth but does not unite with the desert. He does not gain access to the desert’s expansiveness, barrenness, or freedom. He inhabits a handful of clay before he reaches that other greater, more compassionate, and mightier source that is the desert. So this creature continues to dangle between sky and earth. His body strives to return to its homeland, the desert, and his spirit yearns passionately to liberate itself from terrestrial captivity and fly to its heavenly source.
Herein lies the desert dweller’s predicament—the problematic struggle between celestial and terrestrial in his very being. If he settles on a naked piece of land for a number of days, the mysterious call summons him to fold his tent, pack his possessions, and start migrating again on his long trip to Him, to his celestial origin, to God. If the journey lasts a long time, his spirit flies with the wind, his body protests, and his heart bleeds with longing for his homeland, for his mother, the earth. The earth’s cry begins when his mother resolves to take her share of her prodigal son. A Saharan’s entire life is a struggle between earth and sky, between his mother and father. Each claims the greater right to their shared son. The mother says she provided his body, the vessel without which Adam could not have existed. The father argues that the other part, the creature’s inner, spiritual aspect, granted this jug of dirt its power and spread life through the sperm. Without this spirit, the creature would have remained a pathetic mound of clay. Suffering began with this struggle, with this dual heritage that the creature did not share in creating. Two forces tugged at him, and he was split in two. He suffered and did not possess the right to protest or to curse destiny’s cruelty. Of all of Adam’s descendants, the Saharan is most sensitive to the cruelty of his dual origin. His migration, his endless wandering, is an eternal quest for freedom and a return to God. His pathological yearning, the fire of which he attempts to alleviate with heart-rending Asahag ballads, is a quest for his lost homeland and an embarrassed plea for forgiveness from a mother who lost him the moment she gave birth to him in the desert’s open countryside. To state the matter bluntly, it is a longing for stability, and stability is a shroud and a natural preparation for death.
