by Ryad Girod
I paced around the office like a caged animal. In circles. Something was stirring in the bottom of my stomach, something urgent and infuriating that prevented me from concentrating on my work. Nadine’s face appeared to me, insistent, in the reflection on my computer screen or on that of the window in front of which I isolated myself and outside of which Riyadh’s heartbeat continued to thump away. I chased away the image of Nadine, and the heavy wave of desire that came with it, by remembering our years spent at the French high school in Damascus, where Mansour and I had become inseparable … spending the majority of our time deep in discussion, in the back of the classroom or a corner of the schoolyard, about politics and about religion, but also wondering, together, if Faisal had or had not been a good king, if the trembling of his voice hadn’t been fake and if his tears hadn’t been theatrical and if his outbursts of rage had been no more than political acumen … We had the facts and knew how things appeared on the surface, and we attempted to see in behind them, to separate the real from the false and to bring the realest of the real out into the light … Oh my brothers … please forgive my emotion … if my voice trembles, if I tremble before you … but when I see our sacred sites profaned, defiled, trespassed upon … I ask God with all sincerity, if he has not destined me for jihad, to not leave me among the living for one more instant! And despite his Islamic emphases and his at times simplistic nationalism, nothing could diminish the admiration that we reserved for him or the influence of his gaze.
Mansour had religiously told me the story of his great-great-grandfather and, even if it sometimes bored me, I listened just as religiously … as if there was something sacred about it and as if it was, at least in part, the story of my country. For hours on end, during which we could wander, without even quite knowing how, from the story of Abdelkader to a scientific question. Innocent and quite excited to discover the powers of our minds, the pleasures of reasoning, we dove without restraint into the vast seas of algebra, of geometry, of physics and astronomy, without restraint and without any fear of drowning as we attempted to solve equations that were far too complex at our age and without concern about getting lost as we attempted to imagine the galactic clusters that danced through the infiniteness of the universe … Those beautiful discussions, which often lasted hours and sometimes entire nights, they bore a resemblance, all things considered, to those Abdelkader may have engaged in, in Pau, with Bishop Dupuch and General Daumas. Discussions that touched on everything and in particular on mathematics, not for a particular use but to develop a spirit of reflection and to balance, even to harmonize, the two ways of understanding: a rational way and an intuitive way … so that thought could advance on two legs, or so they said. The three of them in the genteel salon of a castle in Pau, trying to solve Zeno’s mysterious paradox, repeatedly trying to catch a glimpse of the solution only to have it escape them once again, physically, even, because Abdelkader held out his arm toward Daumas, or perhaps toward Bishop Dupuch, explaining that he still needed to reach across half of the distance to touch his friend’s shoulder and half again of that distance and half again of that half and so forth right up until Abdelkader’s hand, his fingers were infinitely close to Daumas’s shoulder, close enough to feel the warmth and then the agitation and finally the substance … perhaps alluding to Descartes on the one hand and to al-Khwarizmi on the other in order to understand why Abdelkader’s hand ended up reaching the shoulder of Daumas … and it was through that word, perhaps uttered at that exact moment—infinitely—that they had all felt, all three of them, that only a passage through the infinite could explain that Abdelkader’s hand had indeed ended up touching Daumas’s shoulder … or perhaps that word was never uttered and they had had nothing but dubious, erroneous, absurd explanations … Either way! The very act of trying to understand and to solve such a heavy mathematical problem could do nothing less than elevate them, improve them, and bring to them nobility and ease when it came to resolving much more concrete and everyday questions … and perhaps Abdelkader thought back with affection on those long discussions in the castle, discussions that nourished their friendship and fed the benevolence and the admiration of the people of Pau then Bordeaux then Amboise then Paris … perhaps he remembered this in his corner of the great Umayyad Mosque even as, at that same moment, perhaps at precisely that moment, in Algiers, Henri Poincaré, while he gave his lecture on light cones, his talk on the new mathematics of his time, quadratic forms and non-Euclidian geometry … having interrupted his conference for a moment to collect himself or the thread of his reasoning … perhaps for a moment, turning his head toward the large window of the amphitheater of the university in Algiers and catching a glimpse, in the distance, of the Moorish houses, perhaps he spared a thought for Abdelkader and a smile for the long drawing room discussions that had often ended in laughter but that bore witness, at least, to the spiritual and intellectual vitality of those final years of the nineteenth century … or maybe not, maybe Henri Poincaré was only thinking, during that short breather in the middle of his long explanation, of his wedding that was to take place four days later …
This crowd that separates me from you is infinite.
From the terrace of the Starbucks at Al Faisaliyah Center, a sort of futurist pyramid that forms an axis with the Kingdom Tower, I watched, and not without trepidation—or was it contempt? or maybe it was disgust? or simply a failure to understand?—the comings and goings of the people between those two monuments … a flood that flowed the length of Olaya Street in taxis or luxury 4-x-4s and poured forth in swarms of women in black and men in white, all rushing forward, albeit nonchalantly, into the two multi-use complexes to spend or earn their money. The noonday heat had left me isolated on the terrace and had sent the few other customers running for the café’s interior and the cool of the air conditioning. A dry and burning heat that added to the feeling of trepidation that had come over me and that kept me company through the duration of my lunch break. How was it possible for us to live in such conditions? Under that oven-like heat, scurrying like rats to take refuge in the frozen galleries of shopping malls to frantically purchase all manner of pointless objects that we then make absolutely indispensable … alarmed to notice that the only mechanism to have endured since the golden age of Baghdad or Damascus was that of the souks and the market stalls … transformed these days into glittering buildings and luxury signs with, all around them, the throng of unskilled workers whose job it was to maintain the city’s artificial shine. Perhaps this is the Arab people to whom Faisal had been calling, the rich people and the millions of poor people who live only to become rich, that’s the incoming tide, with, transversely, the thousands of poor people who are convinced that they will never be rich people and who want to blow it all up, and the hundreds of rich people who subsidize this desperate initiative in case it one day becomes profitable … Where are you, people of Arabia? shouted King Faisal on the television, on the radio, with the trembling voice of a little girl and tears of incomprehension, to nations too busy making money or too busy dreaming about making it. This is all we have retained of the grandeur of our civilization … souks full of overflowing stalls! And I unreservedly included myself in this dark tableau since I was taking a break on the Starbucks terrace before returning to the office to draw up plans for the new buildings that we would soon be erecting in the city of Riyadh. This is where we had ended up, the Arab peoples that Faisal’s big eyes had sought out before the cameras of the entire world. What good had come of the great thoughts of our philosophers? I asked myself, still sitting in the hell that was that terrace, to which the Starbucks servers no longer even dared to venture … sitting there roasting, boiling, and thinking about those two, Nadine and Mansour, who were miraculously escaping from the natural course of things … By loving each other … my God, by loving each other … while I sat shivering in the dry noonday heat, in the middle of a deserted terrace. I was able to make out the sound that the sun was pulling from the branches of the poor palm trees
lined up along the side of the avenue … a shiver. This is where we had ended up, and we were taking part in the Nahda, the renaissance of the great Arab-Muslim civilization, upon which King Faisal called with all his hopes for the liberation of Palestine … here, to spend and to make money, under a debilitating sun and surrounded by the hum of the grieving palm trees. Maybe because everything had become too complicated for us to understand … impossible to understand, and Ibn Sina himself, in that universe of knowledge that would have required the longevity of Abraham or of Noah to be able to produce a synthesis of it all and to understand what connected one problem to the others … Ibn Sina himself, if he were permitted to return from the dead, would immediately turn around and return among them or would make some cash and then spend it frantically at Zara or Swarovski.
This insurmountable world that separates us.
Or, Faisal’s tears were no more than an avowal of his impotence when faced with what was being woven discreetly but powerfully before his eyes, that backward and violent religious practice inherited from ʿAbd al-Wahhab and Ibn Hanbal. Were Faisal’s tears those of a prisoner? He would have wanted to exhibit a look so full of ardor that the light of his eyes would unify the crowds into a single man who could shine the dignity and grandeur of the Arabs back onto the world, but instead unexpected tears sprang forth and his voice cracked, reminding him before the cameras of the entire world that he was a prisoner to himself, because he was the emblematic heir, the noble protector, the guarantor by blood of the dark side of Islam that no mind or spirit, no matter how great, could ever illuminate. Faisal’s eyes may have revealed, before the cameras of the entire world, the end of a civilization.
And it was perhaps also to cries of Gassouh! Gassouh! that the great minds had gathered before the fortress of al-Maʿmun with al-Kindi or al-Khwarizmi at their head, chanting at the top of their lungs, Gassouh! Gassouh! so that their beloved caliph would cut short his decision on the case of Ibn Hanbal so that no trace of that retrograde perspective remained, or so they thought at the time, simplistic and binary, or so they thought already, such that it would be possible to go on reflecting peacefully between the walls of the house of wisdom, such that it would be possible to continue serenely transcribing and annotating the ponderous pages of Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus, and to serenely let the long process of mutating Greek and Latin letters into Arabic letters take its own course … So that Baghdad might continue its influence over that entire region thus pacified, prosperous, and drawing toward it all the intellect of humanity, whether it was from Persia, India, or China … So that Baghdad might continue to be, they must have then thought, the womb of a new humanity … So that Baghdad might continue to be Baghdad. Or maybe not. Who is to say? Al-Kindi and al-Khwarizmi, too busy solving their equations, had not responded to the call of the crowd and had perhaps downplayed the words of Ibn Hanbal in considering, erroneously, that an elementary thought, simplified, dark, would inevitably have no power in that radiant Baghdad … erroneously, for it to end up there, in that hall of the United Nations where the entire world’s press awaited the arrival of King Faisal, to hear what he had had to say about Jerusalem or his calls for the Nahda of the Arab peoples … in that antechamber of the United Nations where Faisal’s voice had broken into a million pieces and where his tears hadn’t flowed solely to save Jerusalem … readjusting his white shemagh and his gold-embroidered cape while the eyes of the entire world were trained on his own, emphasized by thick and angular brows … while the eyes of the entire world were focused on his face, the face of a royal eagle, stately, penetrating, aquiline … during that moment of silence, readjusting his white shemagh and his cape and perhaps realizing his error, before shattering on the screens of the entire world … during that moment of silence, still maintaining the appearance of an invincible warrior, until he broke down in tears … What are we waiting for? What is it that holds us back? Are we frightened of death?
… An error in judgment like a simple calculation error? Who is to say? And would it even be useful to know, today, while everyone is shouting Gassouh! Gassouh! like a doleful song to accompany Mansour in his slow procession toward the center of that square of purity where he will be purified, they think, as if he will be liberated from some evil … from evil itself … And those men who sing … and my God how they sing! … to be purified as well through Mansour’s passion. History is also made of all that we do not say, asserted Ibn Khaldun as he relativized the contributions of the great caliphs … Well of course! What was growing among the people? What were the bonds that united them? What ambition drove them into Ibn Hanbal’s arms? … despite Caliph Faisal’s invincible appearance, his dense eyebrows framing his intense gaze, despite his tears and his voice in a thousand pieces but continuing to appeal to the renaissance, to the grandeur … What was it that kept the people in Ibn Hanbal’s arms? Who is to say, my God? Who is to say? History is an art where the wise and the ignorant find themselves on the same level, said that same Ibn Khaldun as well … and what he very well could have said right here, in my place and with my ignorant voice, watching Mansour advance laboriously toward what is supposed to be the center of the square and the center of humanity and the center of the universe.
And so I close my eyes to no longer hear their cries. I let my voice resonate inside my head, telling myself that history is being made right here and now, through the energy of those in this entranced crowd, by this crowd gathered and bound together in this state of inebriation that it will abandon once Mansour is divided in two but which it will remember and which it will want to live over the same old way it lives, breathes, exists … like something essential and vital that no witness will inscribe in the annals of history as being notable, significant, foundational … and no one will know anything of Mansour or of the role he played in history. And yet Mansour advances in a straight line … he moves forward with his eyes held high. Mansour, you are the most beautiful of the stoics! You have the grandeur of Marcus Aurelius and the humility of Epictetus! You are the lord we sacrifice for a new world! And yet nobody will remember your name, Mansour, nobody … You are the last man of a civilization. After you, Mansour, mankind will scatter into savage hordes to destroy Palmyra, Damascus, and even Medina … into savage hordes to burn everything that the Arab mind has been able to establish as the jewels of knowledge … After you, Mansour, black and savage hordes will ride about in luxury 4x4s and roam the sterile deserts to raze entire cities and erect new ones, adorned with glittering buildings and verdant parks and improbable lakes … but which will be, in reality, new sterile deserts … vulgar mirages. After you, Mansour, no more Arabs! You are the last of the Arabs. Even I, Mansour, I will forget you as everyone else was able to forget King Faisal’s tears, and I will ride about in the back of a pickup across seas of sand crying Gassouh! Gassouh! just to live, Mansour, just to keep on living.
Or else I was mistaken, full of bitterness in front of my Starbucks coffee, thinking evil thoughts before the back and forth of all of that money circulating between Faisaliyah and Kingdom Tower … perhaps the souks and the stalls, in their abundance, were the path required for the Arab-Muslim renaissance that King Faisal called for … but it would take time and a lot of patience and most likely some selflessness and maybe even some abjuration for him to see that renaissance with his own eyes. Because it probably wouldn’t see the day for another fifty years or maybe even for a century or two … the time it would take for us to overdose on yogurt, on clothes and on cars … for other needs to emerge, spiritual and intellectual this time … What a mess, my God! Who is to say? Or maybe nothing will be left of this civilization, each region will turn back to its own distant and less controversial beginnings and attempt to formulate a new identity … if so, I will become a Mesopotamian … The Phoenician Lebanese, the Egyptian, they will handily find a way to converse and to write in the language of the pharaohs, the Maghrebi will reestablish his Berber identity by making a clean break with his frustrated Arabness and Emir Abdelkader w
ill be perceived, by some, as an Arab invader who ended up falling in with the French and betraying the earth that had welcomed his ancestors … The statues of him will be destroyed and he will be buried once and for all among all of those to whom he said he was the heir, Ibn ʿArabi, Ibn Sina … What a mess! All that will remain of the Arabs will be these mega-urbanized tribes between the Hejaz and the eastern region of the peninsula by way of the Najd … and still … some differentiate themselves from others for strategic reasons, political, economic … What an incomprehensible mess!
Perhaps you’re actually nothing more than an ass that we sacrifice in order to be able to understand something of this world.
Abdelkader, astride his black stallion, his drinker of winds, was pounding across the plains of the Tafna in the middle of which, perhaps, he abruptly came to a halt, as if someone had called to him. He turned around and saw, perhaps, in the stares of his men, determination and joy even though their destination, which is to say gunshots screams blood death, ought to have instead engendered stares filled with concern and solemnity. So perhaps Abdelkader dismounted his majestic black horse and he ordered his men to do the same, and perhaps he decided to interrupt for a moment the momentum of that charge which was to be resolved at the first village or the first encampment they found on their trajectory and inevitably had to be resolved, as expected as appointed as foreseen, in the din of gunshots and screams, in the smell of gunpowder and blood, among the lamentations of the women and the silence of death … perhaps right then, Abdelkader decided it ought to be otherwise, which is to say not so much in its form because it couldn’t begin other than in screams and couldn’t end other than in silence … otherwise, then, and he had his men get down off their mounts, asked them to sit in circles around him, had them recite prayers and, perhaps, to go even further than prayers, bid them to take refuge within themselves and to go off in search of the reasons for their fight and the source of their religion so that, as he often said, the Muslim not be in protest against Islam … and perhaps he went even further by asking them to try to see the beauty in that coarse and stony plain which surely had the look of a desert of stones and dust that spread out endlessly around them and maybe he went even further by tracing for them the great paths of those in whose footsteps he faithfully followed … traced and bequeathed across the centuries, by his father and his father’s father and by ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Jilani and by Ibn ʿArabi, his great master, and by Ibn Sina as well and by Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, indeed by Suhrawardi as well, and by Muhammad of course, and by all of those who had seen the desert and who had wanted to trace their trajectories in its sand … and just as certainly mentioning Isa, Musa, and Ibrahim … as well as those who had maybe never seen the desert but who had sensed it all the same and thus mentioning Plotinus, Aristotle, and the divine Plato … Who knows what Emir Abdelkader may have said to his men during those breaks, in their circles … who knows how Abdelkader transformed those circular positions into vertical ascensions? Worry-provoking positions for the traitor’s encampments or for Bugeaud’s ranks, who wondered as to the significance of the warriors waiting, seated in their circles around their leader, or their master, really, he too perhaps sitting with his eyes closed, tirelessly recounting to his men not a synthesis of the thought of the divine Plato or Plotinus or Ibn Sina … but simply their names so that, should they be victorious, they would simply be saved from the obscurity of forgetfulness … so that those names themselves should be bequeathed … and suffice it to say that while they fought among the stones and the sand, while they struggled in the wind and the dust … suffice it to say that they fought so that the thought of Aristotle the first master and that of Averroes the second master might live on … among the stones the sand the wind and the Arabs … Then perhaps he rose up majestically from among his men, at the end of a prayer or at the end of an explanation, and he leapt up nobly on his mount and proudly drew his saber from its sheath and launched the attack in the name of God but also in the name of Muhammad and of his daughter Fatimah and of her husband the Imam ʿAli as well as in the name of all those who had brought life to Islam and made it grow, which is to say in the name of Ibn ʿArabi in the name of al-Farabi of Ibn Sina of Ibn Rushd of Ibn Khaldun … launched the attack while crying out all of those names to the surprised but admiring stare of General Bugeaud … And even, on occasion, going one against ten versus the tribes of traitors or the ranks of the French king’s soldiers, who were mystified and dumbfounded to hear amid the deafening clamor of cannonblasts and gunshots and swordstrokes … to hear amid the clamor of war all those names but also those of Aristotle of Plotinus and of the divine Plato and even that of Jesus, as if those warriors from another world were defending, in the name of Islam, humanity in its entirety. And that plain transformed itself into a vast battlefield upon which the horsemen, dressed in simple cowls of white or brown wool, charged from every direction against the King of France’s elegant soldiers … elegant soldiers who were surprised to see, at the last minute, these ghostly horsemen spring at them … surprised to see, at the last minute, sabers being raised into a sky full of dust and surprised, finally, to feel their throats cut.