Mansour's Eyes

by Ryad Girod

  I was surprised to find a lot of people inside … Thinking at first that they were defendants waiting for their turn, I soon understood that it was actually a public invited especially for the trial. Behind the reading desk where Abou Daoud al-Qassimi delivered his judgments, they had set up mats and Bedouin cushions in red and black, embroidered with gold thread. In front of the reading desk, they had also installed a kind of bar that the witnesses and the accused could lean against … they had wanted, evidently, to make a spectacle out of it. Rows of chairs, here and there, filled the hearing room, which was still entirely without prestige. The staff member showed us to our places while Abou Daoud sat silently behind his desk, seeming to wait for the VIPs who would park their asses on the gold-embroidered mats. Two other judges entered, took their positions next to Abou Daoud, and they waited as well. The ambiance of a long-gone era gradually came over the place without us noticing the details. It was as if we had been propelled back a thousand years into the past, into the days of the Abbasid Caliphs, the days of al-Muktafi or al-Muqtadir, the days when the first enemy of a Muslim was another Muslim, the days of the Qarmatians and the Zanj, in the days of denominational uproar and bloody revolts where despite everything they attempted to preserve the wealth of Arab knowledge of that stunningly contradictory tenth century … That tenth century where the houses of wisdom abutted the Caliphate jails and where every learned man could, from the silence of his contemplation, hear the cries of the tortured. Each learned man, to gain entrance into those houses of wisdom, simply had to hold out his arm and push open the door, above which it was no longer necessary to write that no one ignorant of geometry was to enter, because the ornamentation was so eminently geometrical … These same ornamentations were replicated in friezes, mosaics, and tiling in all the great mosques of the empire, if not to forewarn, then to remind every Muslim that he was entering a place of prayer, of worship and reflection … while only a few yards away, the blood of the tortured soiled the marble of the dynasty’s esplanades … That completely incomprehensible tenth century. Eventually, a delegation clearly made up of members of the royal family and several ulamas, after having greeted the three judges, hastened to take their places on the raised mats and to give the go-ahead for the heresy trial. Then Mansour was led in. Head shorn and wearing a long white tunic. Shorn like an animal. He was seated in the front row, beside the stranger who had been appointed as his defense, and Abou Daoud launched into a long introduction during which he reminded everyone of the principal tenets of the religion, the pillars that every Muslim was bound to protect, body and soul … and then, perhaps because of the lack of sleep or because of what I had recently smoked, I switched off, so to speak, and could from then on grasp only discontinuous sequences of reality and of the time that shaped it … Mansour’s shaved head, Maarafi’s outbursts, Abou Daoud’s moving lips, the drab walls of the tribunal chamber, Maarafi’s inopportune whispering … Time had lost all of the continuity that composed it and I no longer had the mental acuity or the energy to put it back together. I drifted, from one moment to another, from one image to another and from one sentence to another without there being the slightest link or connection or meaning … and I only vaguely understood the point of the trial … or rather, I understood that there really wasn’t one, that Abou Daoud wanted to make Mansour confess, wanted him to admit his crime so that he would be saved, or so that his soul would be, so that he might escape the anathema and perish instead by way of the purifying saber … and I felt Maarafi leap up at every contradiction and I felt myself drift away until the moment Abou Daoud called me forward to the bar.

  Even the purest of geometries break down, sometimes, into crude scribbles.

  How long it seemed to take and how endless a path for me to arrive in front of the three judges who interrogated me as witness to the life of Mansour. That suspended time during which I’m not sure by what miracle I had remembered the first trial of Mansur al-Hallaj, that time just full enough of gaps for me to remember the pretext that the Vizier Nasr had found so as to avoid the death of someone with whom he was close … and on that little stage, as I faced all of those who awaited my responses, when I opened my mouth to speak, the word jahil, ignorant, slipped out like a sigh of relief … And so I described Mansour’s life as that of an ignorant man who passed his days in the mall spending his money indiscriminately, which was his only passion, the only meaning in his life … I expressed loud and clear that Mansour had neither the time nor the desire to concern himself with religion, that he knew nothing about anything, and specified, along the way, that he drank whenever the opportunity presented itself and that he never prayed … thinking, naively but sincerely, that if the use of jahil had worked in the days of al-Hallaj, then it was because it must appear in the legal texts, in black and white, irrefutable … I continued, specifying that Mansour had never received a proper Muslim education, that he had been schooled by the French in Damascus, and I overstated the attributes of a life of debauchery by revealing that he sometimes visited the whores in Bahrain and that he was well known at the French Embassy because of his rather undiplomatic drinking sprees. Can we judge an ignorant man? I asked. One of the members of the royal family stood up at that moment, went over to Abou Daoud and whispered something to him. The president then thanked me for the clarification I had just provided to the court and summoned Mansour to the bar to verify, he said, the extent of his religious knowledge. I saw Mansour’s shaved head and I heard his voice state his faith in Islam and recite the Surah of Light to the courtroom, silent and astonished. I saw Mansour’s head and everything plunged back into the darkness, everything fell apart, returned to its starting point.

  A scribble teeming with lines, verging on total blackness.

  You have arrived at the center, Mansour. You’re there! Your executioner is a giant who holds you in place by the strength of his arm alone. He’s wearing a long white tunic covered by a black cape embroidered with gold, he has a shemagh rolled around his head and he holds a long saber with his other arm. But you don’t see any of it. You’re standing up straight, your head lowered and your eyes riveted on the unrolled mat that is to collect your parts … Just like yesterday, when you stood up straight, head lowered and eyes riveted to the floor of that sad tribunal chamber where, across from you, the judges likely hoped to meet your gaze so they could see what kind of eyes you were made of. As if you were at prayer, you offered them nothing but your words … and those were as clear as your eyes. The wind picks up around us more and more and the billions upon billions of grains of dust multiply themselves in order to become the visible atoms of this reality. Your executioner releases you from your chains and yet you appear more enchained than before … Your executioner, with an abrupt gesture, rids you of the veil that covers your head and you suddenly seem naked … naked and at prayer, eyes riveted to the mat that is to collect your parts and, just like yesterday, you stand as straight as the line of a destiny. Just like yesterday, when you stood up straight, head lowered and eyes riveted to the floor of that sad tribunal chamber where, across from you, the judges likely hoped they could see what kind of eyes you were made of but you offered them nothing more than your words … I found myself to be sand among the sands … Violent pains came to slow my frantic flight and to retrace the trajectory my destiny was following. Those violent pains were the manifestation of a miracle. And I found myself to be sand among the sands … I sank into incomprehension of everything that surrounded me. I questioned myself about the simplest things without grasping even the least bit of their meaning. And yet I possessed, as a legacy, all the wisdom of our ancestors and all the words of those who had shaped our civilization. But I had never known how to read them … and I found myself to be sand among the sands. Until Nadine appeared to me. Like a miracle. Her fingertips guided me along the lines of the open books and her lips opened my heart … and I was remade, reassembled, from among the sands, by His will alone!

  Or perhaps you said nothing, Mansour. Mute and
stunned, as would be an animal that has strayed into a courthouse. Or perhaps you only managed to pronounce a few words. Nearly inaudible. Her … Him … Me … His will … And you again recited the Surah of Light before the distraught eyes of Abou Daoud.

  Be quiet! one of the two judges seated beside Abou Daoud had cried. How can you associate this adultery with the will of the Almighty? It all seemed so unreal to me, Mansour, when the people present in that room began to shout as well and when the guards had to come in to reestablish order. One of the other two judges had begun to recite verses from the Qur’an and to explain them, in order to reestablish serenity and calm, he clarified, so as to carry on with the trial under the best possible conditions. It all seemed so unreal to me, Mansour, I didn’t understand anything about anything. And I also didn’t understand what you had just revealed to us … Her fingertips guided me along the lines of the open books and her lips opened my heart … and I was remade, reassembled, from among the sands, by His will alone! Images superimposed themselves on the yellowed walls of that hearing room, which reeked of the Old Kingdom, while the judge continued his recitation and while I pictured you atop your dune, following the thread of your thoughts, continuously, until an accident took place, until an unexpected leap revealed something else to you, something out of the ordinary, a moment outside of time that was maybe equivalent to the one experienced by Poincaré in Coutances, when he was preparing to leave on a walk with his friends to take a break and forget about his mathematical work, which wasn’t progressing, when he was about to climb up into the bus that was to take them, he and his group of friends, gathered together in a vacation-like ambiance, festive and happy and carefree, right up until the moment he took that famous step which was to reveal to him, in a manner that was as unexpected as it was powerful, the connection between Fuchsian functions and non-Euclidian geometry. That moment of madness and rapture was perhaps the same as the one that removed you from the world, from atop that dune, as you stared out onto the cliffs of the Najd. Or perhaps it was God, did he reveal Himself atop that dune, by way of a voice or an image, allowing you to clearly understand His will? … and it wasn’t that tale of adultery, vulgarly associated with the name of God, that provoked the indignation and the condemnation of that old hearing room but rather the fact that God had revealed himself before you that they found unbearable … much as with Emir Abdelkader, who they reproached not for his surrender so much as for the way he explained it: When God enjoined me to stand up, I stood up. I went the way of the gun to the far limits of my means and my possibilities. But when He ordered me to cease, I stopped … and I gave myself up … How had God ordered, spoken, to he who was after all, in the eyes of his fellows, no more than a nomad like they were, an Arab like they were? And how did God reveal himself to you and through you, the ignorant man, the Arab?

  It all seemed so unreal to me and I no longer understand much of anything at all about how the trial unfolded. A headache progressively set in and a strange sound resonated in my brain … and I could feel it vibrate, actually, as if echoing the strange ziiiiiin or zooooon sound, that continuous and metallic noise that grew louder as the judge continued his lengthy lecture, which seemed like a torture he wished to inflict upon us before returning the floor to the accused. Abou Daoud then asked Mansour to clarify the phrases he had spoken at the initial trial, which the judge seemed reluctant to bring up but did so all the same, his lips moving reticently and to the indignation of all of the believers who begged forgiveness of God for having heard such words. Mansour remained silent, or at least it seemed so to me, for a good long moment. Maarafi whispered something into my ear once again but I didn’t understand it … he insisted a second time then turned to the lawyer. I sensed something terrible was happening without it frightening me any more than you would expect and everything, without my truly grasping the meaning, seemed to unfold along a straight-line trajectory, as straight as the line of a destiny. Although this representation allows you to see my appearance, it cannot offer you our supreme image. For behind what you see lies a veiled personality. That, all in all, is what I had expressed through the sentences you reproach me for, Mansour had finally admitted, after that long silence. And if, at that moment, I still understood anything, it seemed to me that he had specified having heard that one day when he had felt completely abandoned by God. That terrifying image had left him on the ground, in the street, in front of a mall and in front of dozens of people whom he already saw as dead … Dead who wouldn’t even make up the humus of our earth. Old, dry bones that would end up as sand … on that earth where God’s desertion seemed absolute to me. And it seemed imperative that I affirm God at a time when he had disappeared from the world … by saying “I am Him.” New protests rang out in the chamber and Abou Daoud interrupted Mansour by asking him, now that he had admitted and detailed the facts, to repent by praying for the mercy of the Almighty. And everything grew dark before me … a swarm of atoms flying in from every direction clouded my sight and my mind and I heard Mansour’s voice, which seemed distant to me, infinitely distant, evoking his journeys into the desert, atop his dune … After they listened closely to him, he was asked if it had been anything like a pilgrimage … to which Mansour replied that it was his Hajj, that once he arrived atop his dune he turned about within himself and around himself until he saw himself in procession around the Kaaba and in procession around the Earth and the Sun and in procession around the galaxy … until one of the members of the royal family stood up, so it seemed to me at the time, and interrupted him by crying out: Be quiet, unbeliever! Your words soil this hallowed ground! Then he strode over to the president of the session and whispered something to him. Then he returned, quietly, to sit down on the gold-embroidered divan. The cadi, Abou Daoud, conferred with his two coadjutors and the sentence was what it had to be and was pronounced in that same language, that same Arabic that Hallaj heard spoken during his second trial, as if shifting a thousand years backward. At the reading of the judgment, I didn’t feel much of anything, apart from the sensation of falling into the infinite void that separates two atoms.

  11.

  WHERE HAD ALL OF IT GONE? Through which fissure had it all escaped? What winds had carried away our desires and our hopes of understanding something that was sufficiently fixed, stable, and true? When, still naive in the back of the classroom at our French high school in Damascus, so excited to discover the power of our minds, the pleasures of reasoning, we dove without restraint into the vast seas of algebra of geometry and philosophy … Naive and audacious, we attempted to make out the legacies and the transmissions from one civilization to another, from one thinking to another, and what joy and what delight in our discovery of the incredible resemblance between the Treatise on Unity by Ibn ʿArabi and Spinoza’s Ethics … what delight and what joy to discover, as if by dominoes falling, across the centuries, the same intuition in Plotinus, Ibn Sina, and Bergson. Which winds, my God, which winds could have been able to carry off our souls? The naivety, the audacity, and the certainty that Abdelkader, Poincaré, and Bergson all had the same eyes … and the fantasy that they could have possibly made eye contact, even if it was only once. What sands, my God, could have so deeply buried our selves?

  It all seemed so unreal to me, Mansour, as unreal as this esplanade and this crowd … I understood nothing of the words of the cadi Abou Daoud al-Qassimi, no more than I do those he speaks at this very moment, directed toward this silent and attentive crowd, which is also trying to understand the point of your martyrdom … or perhaps not, perhaps it had understood from the beginning, perhaps it had decided from the very beginning and all of this is really no more than a farce, no more than a dramatic performance, and everything will resume its course without leaving the slightest trace of your passage. In 922, the same sentence, word for word, must have been handed down at the trial of Mansur al-Hallaj who, the same as you, allowed himself to be led to the center of the great esplanade in Baghdad to lose his head … That Thursday, March 26, 922,
a great crowd gathered to see Hallaj’s lengthy torment, to see his limbs cut off one at a time, his head torn off and then displayed, his body burnt and his ashes scattered, on Friday, March 28, from atop a minaret, and carried by the winds that blew that day to the banks of the Tigris … and they spread far beyond the Tigris and its confluences and the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea, coming to earth in Persia, returning, so to speak, to the tortured’s place of birth, and creating in this way a martyr of divine love and perhaps participating in the prosperity of the Shiite thinking that had been borne by men who devoted hours and days and years … entire lives to the seeking out and the understanding of all of the substance of the texts. And yet, beyond the Najd and beyond the unending Arabian desert and beyond the immense sea that separated the two peoples of a same civilization, it all came back to the same point, as if shifting a thousand years backward … Across the way, in a manner of speaking, in Tehran or Isfahan, maybe two guys and a young woman had lived through the same shipwreck as we had and were about to founder just like us after having clung desperately, just like us, to the texts of Suhrawardi and the thinking of al-Shirazi or Tabrizi in hopes of not leaving this world without having understood anything about it. But was it necessary, as Poincaré wrote, in order to live in this world, to know the number of ladybugs it contained … or did he just think this while admiring Algiers through the window of the great amphitheater and while Bergson calculated the variations of the section of a cube and while Abdelkader mathematically unwound the interlacing of the divine Umayyad Mosque …