When the Imam Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri reached this point in his speech, voices from enthusiastic members of the crowd asked, “What should we do then?” A profound silence reigned while the imam responded. His answer was decisive and dumbfounding this time: “We will turn toward God.” The multitude did not quite comprehend the meaning of this lofty phrase. Therefore, he added, “It’s true that Hameed Nylon was sacked, but the affliction is even greater than that, for we are all threatened by the drought, since not a single drop of rain has fallen. If God does not show compassion by sending His clouds over the city of Kirkuk, we shall starve to death. So let’s all go to the open area in al-Musalla to pray to God and His Messenger for the advent of rain and the diffusion of goodness and blessings to everyone.”
Thus, to the beating of drums and the rattle of tambourines, people carrying their green flags and their placards demanding justice for Hameed Nylon headed to al-Musalla Square, which they crossed to the open cemetery, which concealed among its gravestones hoopoes and larks that took flight and soared into the air, until the human throng reached the open space that Turkmen called Yeddi Qizlar, where remains of abandoned stone grist mills could be found. Everyone stood facing God with dignified submission, raising their hands to the sky in common prayer and tearful, heartfelt entreaty for rain to fall and for Hameed Nylon to be reinstated to his job. They remained there more than an hour, asking God to cleanse their soot-stained faces with copious amounts of rain. Suddenly the sky darkened as black clouds approached from the east. Then affirmative cries glorifying God’s compassion and might resounded in thanks to Him for hearing the appeal of the inhabitants of the Chuqor neighborhood. In fact, there was thunder and lightning; the prayerful demonstrators were caught in the rain and only reached home by the skin of their teeth, soaked and nearly drowned in the torrents that swept through all the neighborhoods. The miracle that had occurred made them forget the story of Hameed Nylon, who could now joke with the others about his escapades with Mrs. Helen McNeely.
This miracle left an indelible impression on people’s memories. They debated and quarreled for a long time about who deserved credit for it. Had God answered the plea of anyone in particular, or simply their joint appeal?
They reached a degree of consensus on the notion that God would not have answered the prayer of one of the few Arabs participating in the procession, for they never washed off their butts and would be regarded as traitors for ever and a day because they had assisted the infidel English in the war against the Muslim Ottomans, fighting against their Turkish brethren without any consideration whatsoever for the religion uniting them. Since the Turkmen disparaged the Arabs in any quarrel that erupted between them with references to “traitorous Arabs” or “those shit-assed Arabs,” many Arab children began to wish that God had created them Turkmen. Some Arab children even joined with Turkmen children in their enthusiasm and support for Turkish political parties, of which many Turkmen youth considered themselves members. The portrait of Kemal Atatürk, recognizable by his lengthy face, military uniform, and medals, was displayed on the walls of most homes, whereas only Arabs dared hang a picture of the king, the prince regent, or even of Queen Aliya, who was loved by many, especially women, perhaps because she was a widow or possibly because it was the English who according to widespread rumors had killed her husband, King Ghazi, in revenge for his campaign to slay the Assyrians who had wanted to establish an independent state for themselves in Iraq under the leadership of Mar Sham‘un, who escaped with his life, fleeing to America. Women told their children with pride how the people of Kirkuk had once gone out to welcome the return of the victorious soldiers and armed men of some northern tribes, each of whom carried the head of an infidel Assyrian in his hands. The women said that the eyes in these heads were impudent and kept staring at them, casting impertinent glances their way, so that many women had been forced to pull their headscarves around their faces as they cursed Satan and the Assyrians.
Similarly, if the Arabs were ruled out as deserving any credit for this miracle, there was naturally no cause for the Kurds to claim such a favor. The truth was that the Kurds themselves, the two or three families that had settled in the Chuqor neighborhood, denied playing any role in this case, which was God’s doing alone.
It would not have been possible, in any event, for them to claim the opposite, since they were not very bright and could not even distinguish black raisins from dung beetles. (Everyone in the Chuqor neighborhood knew that a group of Kurds who were served a platter of raisins mixed with dung beetles had begun capturing fugitive beetles to devour, telling each other, “Eat the runaway raisins first; the others will stay where they are.”) Would it have been conceivable for God to answer the prayer of such ignoramuses? The matter deserved no debate or reflection.
It was clear that God had answered the Turkmen’s prayer and not anyone else’s, but had He answered their communal prayer, or that of one or two of them only? It was admittedly difficult to be sure about a complicated matter like this, for opinions were totally irreconcilable.
Some claimed that this miracle should be credited to the madman Dalli Ihsan, who had raised his head to the sky, as he always did, and ordered the clouds to give rain, so that it rained. These people had an irrefutable argument, namely that Dalli Ihsan was not a human being but a jinni, one of the Muslim faction of the jinn. This was no secret, since everyone said so every day. He would walk through the Chuqor neighborhood, stroll through the great souk, and stop repeatedly to scream in the faces of jinn who apparently were trying to pick a fight with him or to upset him. Then he would continue on his way only to turn round once more and curse the void. He was allowed to stop at any stall and take whatever he wanted without anyone asking him to pay, although to tell the truth he never took more than he needed for himself: an orange from here and an apple from there. At times he would sit in a deserted corner of a coffeehouse and drink a tumbler of tea—without paying for it, naturally—and listen attentively to the coffeehouse’s rhapsodist as he recited the story of Antara ibn Shaddad or Sayf ibn Dhi Yazzan or the choice exploits of Mullah Nasr al-Din. He would smile, shake his head, and leave. Then some patrons of the coffeehouse would mutter, “What a lucky fellow! The queen of the jinn has summoned him.”
The story of his relationship with the jinn had come to light many years before, and even the children of the Chuqor neighborhood knew it. What actually happened was that al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji, a wholesale cereals merchant and the community’s richest man, was awakened one night by a voice, which did not sound human, outside his bedroom. He pretended to be asleep while sharpening all of his senses. Someone whispered in the dark, “Harun, Harun, are you ready?” The query came from a cat he had never seen before. Then he saw Harun, the household cat, join the other cat, which he greeted. He said, “I’ve borrowed some of my master’s clothes for us.” The second cat replied, “I was afraid you’d forgotten or succumbed to fatigue and fallen asleep.” Harun replied, “No other night’s like this one. How could I forget our annual party?” They leapt quietly onto the wall and from there descended to the street.
Curiosity got the better of al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji, who also went out to the street and followed the pair from a distance. The two cats, each carrying a bag by the neck, set off in the direction of the souk. Then they turned right, slunk down a side alley, and ended up on the public street parallel to the citadel. Slowly and calmly they continued on their way to the women’s baths. He saw his cat Harun and the other one change into men in front of the side door to the baths, open their sacks, and then put on the jilbabs they had brought. Next they shoved open the door and disappeared inside. For a time, al-Hajj Ahmad heard heady, inebriating music coming from within, from the courtyard of the baths. His heart pounded fiercely, for he had recognized one of the two men as none other than Dalli Ihsan.
Al-Hajj Ahmad hesitated for a few moments, not knowing what to do. Should he enter too or not? He was terrified but recited, “In the name of God t
he Compassionate, the Merciful” and then the Throne Verse from the Qur’an. After that, he thrust open the door and entered, surrendering his fate to destiny. There he beheld a sight no human eye had ever seen before—nor would al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji ever see anything comparable for the rest of his life.
The courtyard of the baths, which his wife visited once a week with the children, taking along her bundle of clothes, had been transformed into an astonishing chamber of colored glass. Hanging from the ceiling were huge chandeliers of pearls. Around the sides were solid gold benches on which were engraved magical inscriptions he could not decipher, not a word. Green, blue, red, yellow, and white birds soared through the higher reaches of the chamber, making music like jinn singing. Al-Hajj Ahmad inhaled the fragrance of intoxicating incense that made him forget he was in the Kirkuk baths. In fact, he forgot he was in this world at all. He was especially incredulous when he discovered something he could in no way explain: the chamber opened onto the shore of a vast ocean traversed by ships arriving from afar in the command of cats of every variety. These leaped to shore the moment the ships and vessels reached it and then changed into young men and women of ravishing appearance. He knew, since he had spent his entire life in the city, that there is no ocean in Kirkuk and that the Khasa Su, which runs through town, is an unusual type of river, since it dries up completely in the summer but turns into a torrential, raging river in the winter, flooding its banks at times and threatening to drown the Chay neighborhood. The many people present wore the most splendid clothes. At the center of the hall sat the king and queen on a throne studded with pearls and rubies. Surrounded by their ministers and courtiers, they were served by comely youths and maidens, who were clad in silk and who carried around platters of pure gold containing finger foods and fruit. Al-Hajj Ahmad realized that these were Muslim jinn and that the names of their king and queen, respectively, were Hardhob and Murjana.
Dazzled by the lights and the elegance of the place, al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji mingled with the guests without anyone noticing him. When he saw people singing and doing line dances, he joined them so that no one would realize that a human being had crashed their party. They were all singing in unison to a beat like a magical incantation:
I saw my Love with my heart’s eye.
Then he asked: Who are you? I said: You,
You who surpass every limit
To erase “where”; so where are You,
Now that there is no “where,” where You are
And there is no “where” wherever You are
And there is no image for imagination to use to imagine You
So that imagination can know where You are?
Al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji personally memorized these verses, passed down from al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, and started repeating them along with the others. He learned from the partygoers that this poet, who was crucified on a palm trunk in Baghdad, was actually not a human being. He was, rather, one of the God-fearing jinn. They cherish him very highly, and his standing with them is just below that of King Solomon the Wise, who possesses limitless sovereignty over all factions of the jinn.
During the exuberant enjoyment shared by everyone, al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji decided to make a mark that would provide irrefutable proof later on. Thus he approached Harun, who was wearing his navy-blue jilbab, and burned the sleeve of the garment from the rear with a cigarette butt that left a small hole, without Harun noticing. Finally he found an opportunity to slip back to the street again, more than a little concerned for his safety. On the way home through a darkness attenuated at intervals by feeble street lamps, he met thieves carrying their bags on their back, sentries who blew their whistles from time to time, solitary drunks singing Turkmen folk songs as loudly as possible while drunks in other streets responded with their songs in response to the songs they had just heard as they awaited an answering song. But al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji, plunged into another world, was oblivious to everything—the stealthy thieves, the night watchmen, and even the Turkmen folk songs, which he normally enjoyed. Shaking with stress and fright, he might almost have been a prophet upon whom divine inspiration had been bestowed.
As soon as he reached home, he slipped into bed to ponder the events of his amazing night. He tried to sleep but could not and stayed awake until dawn, when he heard Harun jump onto the wall once more, slink into the house, and then—through the keyhole in the door—tell Dalli Ihsan, who had apparently stayed outside, “It was a great night, wasn’t it?” He heard Dalli Ihsan whisper, “Naturally, of course,” and then add, “Good-bye.” Harun replied affectionately, “May the Prophet Solomon be with you.” Al-Hajj Ahmad did not close an eyelid all night long and did not leave bed save to perform the dawn prayer, when he saw Harun stretching by the threshold, as if nothing had happened. Al-Hajj Ahmad deliberately donned his navy blue jilbab, in which he found the hole he had created with his cigarette butt. Then he turned to Harun and—to his wife’s astonishment—asked the cat, “Do you see, Harun? You’ve burned my jilbab. You ought to have asked my permission before you wore it.” Harun understood that al-Hajj Ahmad had found him out. Lowering his head, he left the house, never to be seen there again.
From that day forward, ever since al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji had told his story in the coffeehouse, Dalli Ihsan wore a halo of sanctity. It is true that most people, especially the unsophisticated and the children, feared him, but the neighborhood’s sages considered him a gift from God and a blessing for them from Him. As a Muslim jinni in human form, he could only bring them good fortune. This madman, unlike all the other ones in the city, was quite fastidious, always wore clean clothes, and acted with admirable composure, except for his public conversations with the jinn. He naturally did not have a staff he rode like a hobbyhorse the way other madmen did. Moreover, not a single child dared follow him or chase after him, even though the neighborhood was crawling with children. Not one man could think, even think, of teasing or taunting him, since a matter like that could have cost him his life.
There was thus no doubt in anyone’s mind concerning Dalli Ihsan’s true nature. Indeed, they were even able to trace his jinni lineage. There was first of all the account of al-Hajj Ahmad al-Sabunji, whose piety, righteousness, and honorable actions no one could question. But this was merely one of the proofs, since Dalli Ihsan’s mother had been forced, when an elderly woman of more than a hundred years, to admit under pressure from her neighbors that a king of the jinn named Qamar al-Zaman had been her lover, visiting her secretly at night, and that she had married him according to the precedent established by God and his prophet Muhammad. Ihsan was his son, although she had attempted to conceal his identity from everyone. Her spouse, who had later been taken prisoner in one of the wars he waged against Jewish jinn, had died of grief and sorrow at being separated from his wife and son.
Clearly the madman, who would not have spoken to anyone, was responsible for the miraculous rain that suddenly inundated Kirkuk, for who else would be able to order the sky to fill with clouds and have it obey, or to order the clouds to rain and have them do so? As always, however, there were people ready to wrangle and to express extreme opinions recklessly. They claimed that the rains had fallen in torrents for Hameed Nylon’s sake, since had he not been sacked by the company and had there not been a demonstration on his behalf in which the Chuqor neighborhood had participated fully, the miracle would never have occurred. This theory seemed rather logical but did not clarify the miracle. Others responded to this theory, saying, “If we were to adopt this logic, then it would be necessary for us to proceed even a step beyond Hameed Nylon.” By this they referred to the flirtatious Englishwoman, since without her affairs with men and her fickleness, Hameed Nylon would not have been sacked. They concluded, “Such an opinion would inevitably lead us to a denial of the faith.”
Mullah Zayn al-Abidin al-Qadiri was disturbed by all these views, which he considered heretical and noxious. He announced that neither the jinn nor Hameed Nylon was responsible for the
miracle. God had quite simply accepted the plea of the Muslims and had caused the rain to fall abundantly on them. Truth to tell, this view appeared totally logical and was welcomed by the hearts of the inhabitants of the Chuqor neighborhood, especially since Hameed Nylon himself had joked about the idea that he had caused the miracle, saying, “If I were able to cause miracles, I would have made the English whore sleep with me.” And he meant what he said.
The Last of the Angels Page 2