by Rafik Schami
The work on the church took two years, and the governing body of St Mary’s was generous. Hamid bought his house and furnished his studio with the money he earned. He was the only calligrapher in this rich neighbourhood, and he soon made sure, through his powerful customers, that no other calligrapher set up in the street to compete with him.
However, his master Serani boycotted him, and at the latest after his daughter Maha’s death he kept out of his former protégé’s way as far as he could. Many said the reason was that Hamid did not revere script as sacred, and not only worked for Christians and Jews but also adorned letters, death announcements, and even bathrooms with his calligraphy in return for pay. The whole city talked of the love poems he had written out on large tablets for the prime minister who, at the age of seventy, had married a wife of twenty who loved the poems of the learned Sufi master Ibn Arabi. The Damascenes called the poet, who was buried in their city, “the philosopher of love.”
From now on Hamid was almost overwhelmed by commissions from parliament and the ministries. Some said that Master Serani thought him a genius but a man of poor character who would write calligraphy for anyone in return for his fee. But it was also said that Serani avoided Hamid because he secretly blamed him for his daughter’s death.
Hamid did not discover the real reason until his master, now seriously ill, visited him in prison. Serani had cancer. He came to say goodbye and to persuade Hamid to stand down as Grand Master, leaving the way clear for a successor.
His master’s visit had shaken him. Not only because Serani asked for the certificate conveying the post of Grand Master back, but because the old man frankly explained why he had not been able to get in touch with him earlier: his reason was fear.
Hamid had raced forward too fast, making too much noise about it, he said, and had impatiently brought the reform of Arabic script to public attention.
“And you had not only the conservatives against you but all the fanatics as well. That frightened me,” his master admitted. “You can argue with conservatives or progressives, but the fanatics don’t talk, they simply murder their opponents.”
“You knew about criminals who had been set on me?” asked Hamid indignantly.
“No, I knew nothing. You never do until it’s too late. There are four or five fanatically religious groups. They have more calligraphers and philosophers on their consciences than pimps. They go more carefully there.”
“But those are just crazy…” Hamid began to dismiss what his master was saying. Serani looked at him despairingly. “They are not crazy,” he said. “That’s how it always was and always will be. That and that alone shames me, because I myself realized that our Society was on the wrong track. I ought not to have involved you in it, I should simply have burnt the documents and continued to encourage you as a fortunate and gifted master calligrapher. I drew you into it, and I ask you to forgive me.”
“Oh,” said Hamid, dismissing this, because he could not understand why his master felt guilty, “they are just a few crazed souls, and you’ll see, we will…”
“Crazed, crazed, oh, stop that,” his master interrupted him angrily. “They are everywhere, and lying in wait for us. They lie in wait for everyone who deviates a single step from the prescribed path, and suddenly he’s found with a knife between his ribs, or dead drunk with a whore although he never touched a drop of alcohol. In Aleppo some twenty years ago they got a rent-boy into a great calligrapher’s bed, and the boy swore to the Kadi that Master Mustafa had seduced him for money. All lies, but the judge found one of our best calligraphers guilty and sent him to prison for ten years. What more do you want by way of proof to open your eyes? Ibn Muqla built a world of philosophy, music, geometry, and architecture for the Arabic characters, for calligraphy. If the Prophet came into the world for the sake of morality, Ibn Muqla came as the prophet of script. He was the first to make it both an art and a science. To Arabic script he was what Leonardo da Vinci was for European painting. And was he rewarded? He ended worse than a mangy dog, with his hand hacked off and his tongue cut out. So we are all condemned to downfall.
“Look at the Ottomans, were they worse Muslims than us? Never! Their sultans revered calligraphers like saints. In times of war many a sultan hid his calligraphers like a state treasure, and it’s a fact that when Sultan Salim I captured Tabriz he left its doctors, astronomers, and architects behind, but took all sixty calligraphers back with him to adorn Istanbul.
“Sultan Mustafa Khan held the inkwell for the famous calligrapher Hafiz Osmani, and asked the master to accept him as a pupil and initiate him into the mysteries of script. Have I ever told you what his last wish was?” asked Serani, smiling, as if to cheer his pupil with a story. Hamid shook his head.
“When Hafiz Osmani died in the year 1110 his pupils granted him his last wish. All his life he had collected and kept the shavings of wood that fell from his bamboo and reed pens as he cut them, ground them down and pointed them. There were ten large jute sacks full of them. His pupils were to boil up the shavings and use the water for the final washing of his body.”
Serani looked sadly at his favourite pupil. “You know,” he said, smiling, “when I was twenty I wanted to change the world and devise a new alphabet that everyone could use. When I was thirty I wanted only to save Damascus and carry out a radical reform of the Arabic alphabet. At the age of forty I would have been happy if I could have saved our street in the Old Town and brought about a few urgent reforms of Arabic script. I have given you all I could, as you know. When I was sixty, I still hoped that I could save my family.”
Serani shed tears as they said goodbye in the visitors’ room, asking his former pupil once again to forgive him, and Hamid assured him with emotion that he bore him no grudge at all, and his heart was full of nothing but gratitude to his master.
Stooping, and with dragging steps, the old master went out, escorted by the guard. He turned and waved, but Hamid could not summon up the strength to wave back.
He felt wretched, for he now knew that his master had not exaggerated. Some things that used to seem inexplicable or absurd to him were becoming clear.
But when exactly, he wondered, had the turning point come? He did not have to look for the answer long. The month before the opening of the School of Calligraphy had been full of activity. He had travelled widely, had written articles about the School for newspapers, and had been extremely cautious. Again and again he had indicated the necessity for reform, but always stressing, for the sake of reassurance, the fact that the Quran must remain inviolable. Only the correspondent of a small Lebanese newspaper, a great admirer of Hamid, gave away more than Hamid himself wanted. In an interview, he had asked directly about the necessity of reform. Hamid had replied that there were weak points in the alphabet, and it needed to be expanded to provide a more modern language for everyday use. As a second step – “and it need not be taken by our children and grandchildren for some fifty or a hundred years” – superfluous letters could be removed and the shape of the characters improved to the point where they would be less and less liable to be confused with each other. Without asking Hamid, the journalist cut the part about children and grandchildren and the long time-span, adding on his own initiative that the alphabet should be more like the Persian alphabet.
That laid Hamid open to abuse and three unpleasant phone calls, but then the situation calmed down again. Criticism from his own professional ranks was harder to take. Sunni calligraphers wanted nothing to do with Persia. He reassured them, knowing all the time that he was lying to them, because he was indeed planning to expand the alphabet and bring it closer to the Persian model.
Hamid smiled bitterly. As long as the idea of radical reform of Arabic script was merely a pipe dream discussed in the Society, all was harmony. But when it came out into the open, the entire organization split into groups and sub-groups. Suddenly he was no longer at the head of the Society, as the rules had prescribed hundreds of years ago. Instead, a many-headed hydra ca
me into being. All this had come at the same time as the founding of the School, when he needed all the strength and solidarity he could get. Many of those who envied him thought it was just the right moment to get rid of him as Grand Master. Some thought his ideas of reform too tedious and watered down, others wanted to introduce a new alphabet at once when the School was opened, one that would do away instantly with all the weaknesses of Arabic script, a third group again suddenly wanted no change at all that had anything to do with Persia, but satisfied themselves with wailing about the inadequacy of the Arabic alphabet.
Hamid demanded discipline and obedience, and he had to throw his high reputation into the scale to achieve unity. Curiously enough, all the masters from the north of the country were behind him, but the two representatives of the city of Damascus left the Society.
Then there was a calm period. The opening of the School seemed to show that all the turmoil within the Society had been only a storm in a tea-glass. The elite of the country were delighted that this step had been taken.
However, soon Hamid realized that he had been mistaken. When the thugs wrecked and besmirched his school, the sheikh of the Umayyad Mosque gave them his backing, and in an interview deliberately misquoted Hamid. After that he was denounced as an apostate for the first time. And the democratic, allegedly civilized government banned his school, instead of declaring the Pure Ones enemies of the state.
His opponents in the Society of the Wise kept quiet, but only until he was in prison. Now the majority of masters in the south began insisting on a democratic election to choose a new Grand Master. The northern masters, led by Ali Barakeh, were solidly behind Grand Master Hamid, and asked him to choose his successor himself.
Yet it was not only in the ranks of the Society that Hamid had been rejected. From the day when he began taking steps publicly to make his ideas of radical reform known the religious patrons who commissioned his work shunned him. Two mosques instantly withdrew their commissions. Only now did it strike him that such incidents were always attended by dark hints.
And Serani’s reasons for avoiding any contact with him were also clear to him now. Serani had feared for his own commissions and for his life.
13
Had he underestimated the Pure Ones because their bearded henchmen belonged to the most stupid stratum of humanity? Were the leaders of the Pure Ones perhaps clever enough to have planned all of it with cold calculation in order to destroy their enemies on several levels at once? Did they want more than the death of their adversaries?
Had the Pure Ones even infiltrated his Society of the Wise? He had noticed a certain sympathy for the Pure Ones in the views of many devout and conservative calligraphers in the Society of the Wise and even its Council, but could not speak to them openly on the subject, because the dividing line between religious conservatives and religious fanatics was blurred. Had they perhaps been involved in the resistance to him that broke out in the Society exactly when he needed the solidarity of all its members?
Had Noura maybe been abducted to dishonour him? Had the role of that goat Abbani been only to commission him to write letters that would read, to an outsider, as if he were pimping for his own wife?
Had he killed the wrong man?
Why had the café proprietor Karam given evidence against him? Had he perhaps been blackmailed by threats of statements incriminating him as a homosexual that might have landed him in prison? It had not been difficult for Abbani’s brothers and lawyers to find out that Almaz, his fourth wife, had something to do with the murder. Abbani had only recently moved his hiding place to her house at the time.
But why had Karam set him on the track of Abbani? All because of that matronly figure his niece? It was hard to believe. Had the murder been planned as punishment for the lavish donations that Abbani had made to the School of Calligraphy. Or must Karam have wanted Abbani dead before he could tell Hamid the truth about the love letters?
Hadn’t his neighbour Najib, a tight-fisted goldsmith who had never been to his studio before, suddenly visited him, indicating that distinguished personages had requested him to ask whether he, Hamid, would be prepared for an interview with Nasri and his business manager Tawfiq to clear the whole matter up? Hamid had thrown the man out in a fury, calling after him to go on steering clear of his studio, as in the past.
How could Karam have known of that attempt at mediation? He had given him advance warning of the goldsmith, describing him as an unbelieving Christian who had been cuckolded several times himself. Najib Rihan was almost sixty, and had married a young woman of twenty who was performing at the time as a third-class singer.
If Abbani had not been his own wife’s lover, then why did he have to die?
Had he himself been made, by these events, an instrument to destroy the Society?
Hamid froze at the thought, and shook his head vigorously not in denial, but to rid himself of such a terrible idea.
He had no answer to any of these questions.
14
Hamid had been around twelve or thirteen when he first heard the lines of verse: The rational suffer misery in heaven
And the ignorant take their heavenly ease in misery.
At the time he had thought it was just an acrobatic play on words.
But no, there was bitter truth in it. His knowledge of Arabic characters and the deficiencies of the Arabic language had brought him to hell, to a body of ignorant people who wallowed in their sins daily and the majority of whom were illiterate, who did not see script as an instrument of reason but as an inviolable shrine.
In Europe, the minister had said to him at the time, they would have put up a monument to him; here he had to fear for his life. His lips tightened at these thoughts, and he looked at his bare feet in a pair of shabby shoes that had once been elegant. Now, cut down at the back, they had to serve him as slippers.
What, he wondered, has become of my life?
15
For a long time Hamid Farsi thought the attacks on him had begun around the year 1956, at the time when the founding of the School of Calligraphy was announced.
However, one morning he found a remark in his secret diary that alarmed him. He must have overlooked it time and time again. It was just an inconspicuous little line: “An unpleasant phone call, an agitated man calling me an agent of unbelievers.” It was dated 11 October 1953.
A page later he read: “Two large commissions for the renovation of the Umayyad Mosque cancelled.” This was followed by an exclamation mark and the date of 22 November 1953.
Of course he had paid no attention to all this at the time because he had too many commissions anyway, and his assistants were working flat out.
How often had he overlooked this hint? Now, in his cell, he realized that his enemies had had him in their sights considerably earlier than he had previously thought.
That date was no coincidence.
Soon after his marriage to Noura, he and several other calligraphers had tried to convince liberal sheikhs, Islamic scholars, professors and conservative politicians of the necessity of a reform of Arabic script. They got nowhere.
His father-in-law Rami Arabi, regarded as one of the most radical champions of modernization in the country, was sure that corrections to the Arabic language and its script were needed. But he suspected that not a single Muslim would venture to make them, because so many thought, erroneously, that it would run counter to the Quran to do so. He too therefore withheld his support from Hamid.
When Hamid asked him why, as a highly regarded sheikh and scholar, he did not speak up for reform, particularly as his name reminded people of the highly esteemed poet and Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi, who was very popular in Damascus, he just laughed out loud. Hamid was naïve, he said; didn’t he realize that he, Rami Arabi, had ended up in his little mosque because of many small differences of opinion with great sheikhs? A fanatic had come to the mosque recently with provocative questions about calligraphy and his son-in-law, and he had been afraid the young man
might physically attack him as well, but God had been merciful. However, he added, even without a knife in his ribs his relegation to such a small mosque was bad enough. Sending a man of the Book to a congregation of ignorant illiterates was worse than the death penalty.
And had not Hamid understood yet, he asked, that the crucial question was not one of courage or cowardice, but of might and power in the state? Any radical alterations to the Arabic language and script had only ever been made by state decree. And the Arab state was never the result of the will or reasoning of the majority, but of the victory of one clan over another. So he did not have to win him, Rami Arabi, over to his cause; he needed the support of ten men of the strongest clans in the country. Then the Pure Ones would accept even a proposition for the Arabs to write their language in Chinese characters.
Hamid knew that his father-in-law was right, yet he was disappointed. He mustn’t look like that, said his father-in-law as they parted, what was the sheikh of a mosque like him to do if he was finally dismissed from service? He couldn’t beg, and he was too ugly for a singer. He patted Hamid affectionately on the shoulder and said maybe he could boil up ink for him and sweep the studio.
A week later Hamid had an even more sobering shock when he met Sheikh Muhammad Sabbak, considered a courageous reformer among Muslim scholars, and the author of daring and provocative works on the liberation of women and social justice. There was a joke in Damascus to the effect that the sheikh couldn’t set foot in half of all Arab countries because of his ideas about women, nor in the other half because he was regarded as an undercover communist there.
However, he was highly thought of in Syria, particularly as he was the defence minister’s father-in-law. In a private conversation between the two of them, Hamid told him his idea of the necessity for reforming script, and asked for his support. The stocky sheikh jumped up as if a scorpion had stung his buttocks. He looked at Hamid, wide-eyed. “Are you really crazy, or just putting on an act? I have a wife and children. Who’s going to feed them if I die in disgrace as a godless unbeliever?”