by Rafik Schami
Hamid had begun weeping quietly. His tears were because he was angry with himself and disappointed in his master. There was so much that he wanted to say, but he held his tongue all day. After that he could not help seeing that his master was right, and was grateful to him for advising a day’s silence, for he would have lost his mentor Serani forever if he had told him what he thought at once.
A month later, just as Hamid was about to leave work, Serani kept him back. He closed the studio, made tea, and sat down.
He said nothing for a long time.
“From the very first moment,” he said at last, “as I have told you before, you were like the son I always wanted. Nine years ago you came to me, today you are head of the workshop and my right-hand man, and even more. The other journeymen are good fellows and industrious assistants, but the fire has not caught their hearts. Today I would like to give you the title of a master. It is the custom for the man chosen for that distinction to write out his own certificate, as his last piece of work for his own master, so to speak. The only prescribed part of it is this official text, which should be roughly in the middle. Otherwise you are free to design it and choose its wording as you will. You can quote the maxims of the Prophet, or passages from the Quran, or words of wisdom that are important to you, and incorporate them in the whole certificate. Look at the collection of certificates in this volume before you design your own.”
Serani gave him a small piece of paper, which said that Master Serani gave him, Hamid Farsi, this certificate because he had shown proof of all the requisite qualities for a master of calligraphy. “Prepare the certificate at your leisure, and bring it to me for my signature at the beginning of next month. And as soon as I have signed it, take it home with you. You are still very young, and the envy of the others could injure you. Let it be a secret between us.”
At that moment Hamid was the happiest man on earth. He took his master’s hand and kissed it.
“For heaven’s sake,” said Serani, half joking but also slightly shocked. “What’s come over you? Even as a little boy you never kissed my hand.”
“Because I was too stupid to understand who you are,” said Hamid, suddenly shedding tears of joy.
When he had finished the certificate a month later he brought it to the studio wrapped in a large scarf, and hid it in his drawer until all the other assistants had gone home.
“Today you can make the tea,” said Serani, and he went on working until Hamid brought him the fragrant Ceylon tea.
Then he examined the certificate with visible satisfaction. “Good heavens, can you design one for me as well?” he joked.
“Yours is heavenly. This is only dust,” replied Hamid.
“I was always a creature of the earth, so I like dust. Curiously enough, all the sayings you have chosen are to do with change. In my own time, as you can read on my own certificate, I wrote only of thanks and more thanks. I was rather naïve at the time, and could think of nothing but my gratitude.”
Serani signed the certificate with the words: “Salem Serani, the poor slave of God, hereby confers and confirms the title of Master.”
“Now,” he said, “sit down with me today as a master calligrapher for the first time. There is something very important with which I must burden you.”
And his master began telling him about the Secret Society of the Wise. About the heaven of ignorance, the purgatory of semi-wisdom, and the hell of wisdom.
A week later he was solemnly admitted to the Society.
He leafed through his notebook, and found the pages that, like all members of the Society, he had written in the secret Siyakat script.
Hamid remembered the first meetings he had attended. He was fascinated by the encyclopaedic knowledge of the men he met, but they seemed to him rather apathetic, and the majority were elderly. And then those emotional sayings: “This world is hell for the wise, purgatory for the semi-wise, and Paradise only for the ignorant.” It was apparently something said by Ibn Muqla. Here in the Council of the Wise, the committee of the Society, he noticed nothing reminiscent of hell. All the masters were well-to-do, many of them married to younger wives, and they cast respectably rounded shadows of their well-nourished existence.
He had understood why there was a vow of silence, for since the founding of the Society deadly danger had been lying in wait for all its members, and they must do all they could to protect themselves from being given away.
Their greeting consisted of a code to assist them in the recognition of foreign calligraphers. This was a ritual from the past, and had no significance in modern life, because the branches of the Society were confined to a single country in each instance, and the number of members was limited. They all knew each other, had contact with members in other cities, and always provided letters of recommendation for visiting foreign calligraphers.
When Hamid learned about the secret Siyakat script developed by calligraphers for the Ottoman sultan, he was so fascinated that he wrote pages in his diary in it. Under the sultans, Siyakat looked like a sequence of Arabic shorthand characters, and it was very complicated for the world of its time. All the sultan’s reports were recorded in this script to shield them from the eyes of the curious, but every gifted calligrapher could lift the veil of secrecy.
The Council of the Wise later agreed to Hamid’s suggestion of abandoning Siyakat, because the secret script made communication between friends more difficult, but did not prevent it from being deciphered by experienced potential enemies.
At the time he felt buoyed up by a wave of enthusiasm, and he realized that he was in a position to make many changes. But soon he felt a cold wind blowing. His proposal to exploit the general sense that the country was making a new beginning to make radical reform of the script a subject of public discussion was brusquely rejected. It was too early, said the others, it would endanger the Society.
Later, when the minister of culture did put through some radical reforms, the members of the Secret Society were jubilant, but no one recalled that he, Hamid Farsi, had made these suggestions long before the minister. Nor did any of them say a word of apology to him.
Now he read what he had angrily written at the time. “The Arab clan system allows no one to admit mistakes, yet civilization is no more than the sum of all mistakes that have been corrected.”
He shook his head. “Theirs was not the counsel of the wise, but of simple shepherds,” he whispered. And they opposed the next steps, so that apart from the founding of the School of Calligraphy not one decision had been taken in favour of his ideas within a ten-year period.
“Envious, every last one of them,” he said, closing the thick notebook.
And in the Society they only smiled pityingly at the two styles of calligraphy that he had developed over the years. Hamid defended his innovations, wrote a round letter to all the members and introduced his two new styles. Damascene Script, very elegant, was open but had much to do with the geometry of the circle. Young Script was very slender, smooth, free of all flourishes. It moved with verve, keen and full of energy. It preferred slanting to vertical lines. He asked for criticism, hoping for encouragement and praise, but he received not a single answer to his letter.
That was when his isolation had begun to taste bitter.
9
Hamid closed the notebook, put it back in the box, and pushed the box under his bed again. He stood up, went to the opposite wall and let his gaze travel over the work of calligraphy hanging there. The wording, “God is beautiful and loves beauty,” was traced in gold leaf in Thuluth script on a dark blue background, and it dated from the year 1267. The picture was no larger than the palm of his hand, but it was unique and of incalculable value. He had sent, unobtrusively, for this jewel of calligraphy to be brought with seven other calligraphic works from his studio to the prison. No one knew that the small picture concealed a secret: a document certifying his membership of the Secret Society of the Wise and his appointment as Grand Master two years later. The document
had been given to him by his master in a secret ceremony of the Society. In his own time, Serani had received the document from his master al-Sharif, and he in turn from his own master Siba’i. The list of all holders was hidden in the frame of the picture; it went back to the year 1267 and was evidence of the association’s existence right back to Grand Master Yaqout al-Mustasimi. He had founded the Secret Society of Calligraphers, and in the document he described himself as a humble pupil of the master of all masters, Ibn Muqla.
In the twentieth century, the Secret Society still aimed to remain true to the ideas of its founder. At the time he had sent out twelve of his best students and loyal supporters to twelve regions of what had then been the great Arab empire, reaching from China to Spain. The seat of the Master of all Masters had been in Baghdad at the time, but was later moved to Istanbul, where it remained for four hundred years. After the collapse of the Ottoman empire, and the decision of the founder of the modern Republic of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, to write Turkish in the Roman alphabet after 1928, a bitter quarrel flared up between the masters in Damascus, Baghdad, and Cairo, all of whom wanted the seat of the Society to be in their cities. The matter remained undecided for another half a century, but the principles of the organization were still the same. In each of the Arab countries, depending on its size, there was a Grand Master in the Council of the Wise and three, six, or twelve other masters, who headed small circles of calligraphers known as initiates. Each of the initiates must exert his influence over a circle of other persons known in the Society as “the semi-wise.”
The business of the Society was to work not publicly, but in secret through the circle of initiates and the semi-wise to root out weaknesses of the Arabic language and its script, so that one day it would truly deserve to be called divine. Many masters had lost their lives through treachery. The word “Martyr” stood beside their names.
Hamid remembered the moment when he had knelt before his master. Serani stood in front of him, and placed his left hand on his head. He laid the forefinger of his right hand vertically on Hamid’s lips. “I am your master and protector, and I command you to repeat in your heart that you will spend your life in the service of script, and never give away the secret.”
In a daze, Hamid had nodded.
He and his master had to say a prayer of thanks together, and then Master Serani led him to a table on which a small loaf and a dish of salt stood. The Grand Master shared bread and salt with him. Only now did he bring out the small gold ring and put it on the ring finger of Hamid’s left hand, saying softly, “With this ring I bind your heart to our aim, given to us by the great master Ibn Muqla.” After that Serani turned to the Council of the Wise and took his leave of them, promising to pledge himself always to the Society and to stand by the new Grand Master.
The twelve masters came up to Hamid, kissed the ring and embraced him, each whispering as he did so, “My Grand Master.”
A few days later Serani told him, when all the others had left the studio, “I am old and tired, and glad that I have found you for the Society. It is my greatest achievement. I had the same fire in my heart as you when I was young, but increasingly I feel the ashes of the years stifling its embers. I have not much to my credit; perhaps most important were a few small improvements to Taalik style, but in thirty years I have doubled the circle of the initiates in this country, and trebled the circle of the semi-wise. Now it is for you to educate, encourage, and instruct these two grades between the Masters and the great mass of the ignorant, sending out initiates again and again so that they can enlighten the people and, with them, defend the cause of Arabic script against the sons of darkness who call themselves the Pure Ones.
“You are the Grand Master now. God has given you a wealth of talent for that position. Your office pledges you, young as you are, to love and protect the twelve masters as if they were your own children. You must always maintain equilibrium between the security of silence and the necessity of disturbance. You must not intervene when the semi-wise enlighten the ignorant and win one or another of them over to membership of their own circle. For they do not know what might harm the Society, and can easily be excluded again if they offend against our principles. But it is you who must judge if a semi-wise man may be elevated to the rank of initiate or not. And you must be even more careful in choosing a successor in the Council of the Wise for a member whom death has taken away. Do not let a master’s fame dazzle you as you make your decision. You are the head of the Society, and ultimately you will administer the oath of loyalty to the initiates and masters, thus putting yourself in danger.
“For another five years, you can consult me. I know all the masters and every initiate personally. After that you will know them for yourself.
“I am tired. I have noticed it for some time, but my vanity stood in the way of admitting it. Seeing you, however, I know what fire and passion mean. So I hand on the banner willingly to you. From now on, I am only a toothless old lion.”
Serani was not even fifty yet, but he did look battle-weary.
They sat together for a long time that night. “From tomorrow morning,” said Master Serani, smiling, as they parted, “you must begin looking for a master pupil of your own. You can never start too soon. It took me twenty years to find you. And do you know what was the crucial factor? Your questions, your doubts. No one can learn such questions as you asked me. The characters were and are accessible to all students, but only you asked questions about their content. You had no answers, but answers are never more important than questions,” he said forcefully. “Do not look among your pupils for the one whom you like best and who is the most agreeable company, but for the one who is the absolute master. Never mind how much you may dislike him, you’re not going to marry him, just confirm his acceptance into our Society.”
“Master, how am I to know who will be the best successor to me if several men not only have fire in their hearts, but are equally good at calligraphy?” Hamid asked.
“He will be the one you begin to envy, the one you think secretly is better than you,” said Serani with a kindly smile.
“You mean that I am… no, no.” Hamid dared not think that sentence out to its end.
“Yes, yes, you are better than me,” said Serani, with a kindly smile. “Where likeability is concerned, my journeyman Mahmoud comes out a hundred times ahead, Hassan ten times ahead, but you know them. Hassan comes to grief with Diwani style, Mahmoud with Thuluth style, and neither of them can stand geometry. It is as if a mathematician didn’t like algebra,” he added. “And what about you? You write characters following the invisible diameter of a circle to the nearest millimetre. I once gave both Mahmoud and Hassan a ruler and asked them to show me a single letter in a poem written by you in Diwani script that deviated by more than a millimetre from its line. They knew as well as I that you do not use a ruler, and do not trace circles in pencil before you can fit the letters into them. They came back to me an hour later with pale faces, their eyes cast down.”
The list of calligraphers hidden behind the picture contained the names of Arab, Persian, and from the sixteenth century, above all, Ottoman masters who had brought Arabic calligraphy to its finest flowering. Hamid was only the third Syrian master since the fall of the Ottoman empire.
He had spent a decade looking for a successor, but none of his colleagues or his own journeymen was more than an average calligrapher.
But only a month before his wife ran away, an old master drew his attention to Ali Barakeh, an extraordinary calligrapher from Aleppo. His hand was bold and his script full of virtuoso music. Hamid sent for photographs of his calligraphy, and on close examination of them he felt sure that Ali Barakeh would be the man to follow him, if he had the heart of a master to match his technical achievement in script.
When, after the foundation of the School, the Society was in a state of crisis, Ali Barakeh stood behind him like a rock. His decision to make the young calligrapher his successor was made.
Th
e tragic events of his life, however, had prevented him from telling Barakeh in good time. In prison, Hamid waited until, early in January, the governor expressed a wish for a large-scale calligraphic work. It was to be given to a large new mosque in Saudi Arabia in the summer as a present from the al-Azm family. The prison governor offered him the large joinery workshop as a studio for work on the calligraphic saying, which would be eight metres long. The fine, durable cedar wood on which the saying was to be inscribed had been brought in from Lebanon. Three master joiners, under Hamid’s supervision, had worked it to a huge surface, smooth as a mirror, with an elaborately carved frame.
Hamid now wished he had the assistance of that calligrapher from Aleppo, who had done outstanding work in many of the mosques of his native city, and he showed a few photographs of it to the governor. Governor al-Azm was enthusiastic.
So Hamid wrote Master Barakeh a letter with a letterhead in the form of a complex ornament that only a master could read. The letter itself contained the courteous official invitation. However, the ornamentation concealed the secret message telling Barakeh that Hamid Farsi wanted to give him the document that would make him Grand Master of the Secret Society of Calligraphers.
Ali Barakeh sent the prison governor a friendly letter by return of post, saying he would feel honoured to provide a religious maxim for the mosque in the holy land of Islam. Such was the honour that he would ask no fee, only a modest place to spend the night and a single meal a day while he was working on it.