Land of No Rain

by Amjad Nasser

  * * *

  ‘The man was taken aback by my sudden arrival. I assumed he felt embarrassed by what the receptionist had done. He was wearing glasses that seemed thicker than in the blurry photograph. I was about his height when I stood next to him. He smiled at me. His smile conveyed a message I guessed at immediately. A message I had been expecting ever since I realised there were eyes following me in the hallway, in the lobby, in the lecture room, on our magical tour through the winding lanes of the old city, in the restaurant. The man with the glasses put out a fat, hairy hand and said, “Pleased to meet you, Mr Younis.” Then, emphasising all the consonants, he added, “I’m Adham Jaber!”’

  XI

  In his first days back home he did no more than laze around and browse through his papers, old books and photo albums. Maybe it was a deliberate attempt to reconnect with the past, or perhaps to distract his mind from what had happened in the City of Red and Grey. His family didn’t ask him about what had happened, whether he was ill or not, or about the coughing fits he had, or the pocket handkerchiefs he was always changing, or why his face was so pale. They left him time to tell them about all that, but I know he didn’t forget the images of people staggering down the streets, the coughing, the blood they spat out, the faces covered in masks and the X signs marked on particular houses. Sometimes these images were combined with images of death and destruction in the City of Siege and War, of people hugging the walls for cover against the constant shelling, or looking for something to eat in the rubbish bins.

  He knew how he was, and he didn’t want to waste time.

  He drew up a plan in his head and decided to carry it out.

  He rediscovered the summer house, which had become the family’s base after his father retired. He knew that their neighbours in the housing estate, which the Grandson had given to an elite of junior officers and civil servants, and which had now become a large town, were originally his relatives and acquaintances of his family. That was no longer the case. The Hamiya civil servants had mixed with people who worked in the ‘free city’ that had been built near by. This surprised him somewhat. Accompanied by young Younis, he continued to go round the bedrooms and reception rooms in the house. He would sit for a time in his own room, which his family had preserved roughly as it was, then go to the kitchen in the hope of reconnecting with old habits he had known, smells that still nestled in his nose and in his memory, or of rediscovering his father in the cellar.

  He clearly tried to make up for his neglect of his father’s works by taking a fresh look at them. He spent a long time in his father’s workshop. Sometimes young Younis would swoop down the twelve stairs with him like a little bundle of energy, but sometimes he would give his nephew the slip and sneak into his father’s temple alone. Young Younis was so firmly attached to his legendary uncle who had come to life after long wanderings that he brought him the grandfather’s white cotton skullcap and put it on his head, just as grandfather used to wear it. The skill and precision of his father’s handiwork amazed him. He saw lines he had never seen before. Innovations in the thuluth style, experiments with the mansoub, in which there is a fixed geometrical proportion between the letters and the letter alif, softened versions of the harsh Kufic style with its perpendicular letters and square blocks. There were a few works by his grandfather too. Less severe and less observant of the rules. Like lessons in calligraphy. Long sentences. Black and white were dominant. Ornamental elements. They seemed to be independent of the text itself. Lots of decoration and foliage. Almost no empty spaces. The thuluth that fascinated his father had also fascinated his grandfather. He stood in front of his grandfather’s design. He smiled, then laughed. It bore a common line of poetry: Do not regret the treachery of time, for many a dog has danced on the corpses of lions! He liked dogs. He remembered his dog Antar, who had died shortly before he came back, as if he had been waiting for him. But dogs don’t live long. Antar lived close to twenty years and that’s a long life for a dog in our country. He had seen lions only in zoos or in pictures but he had definitely seen many dogs wherever he lived. He thought about the metaphor ‘the treachery of time’ in his grandfather’s design. It wasn’t the word ‘treachery’ that caught his attention but the circularity of time. Actions and consequences. The cycle of the body and the cycle of the seasons. He knew how his father admired Ibn Muqla, whose name he heard often in the Thursday salons. He used to call him ‘the master of calligraphy’. He tried to remember who wrote that frightening sentence that went, No blood money for a hand that does not write. He didn’t know. He used to hear his father quote the saying, sometimes with a kind of irony. Whenever he heard his father say it, he thought it was aimed at him. But his father didn’t mean him. In fact his father didn’t agree with the saying. In the cellar he found many of his late father’s notebooks. Some of them contained what looked like notes or diaries. In others there were comments on previous works and on his contemporaries, and quotations from various people, some named and some not. Perhaps the latter were his father’s. He browsed through the notebooks, then put them aside. He was frightened of finding something that would spoil the pleasure of the moment, particularly something about their own charged relationship. He put them aside as if to say, ‘Not now.’ He started to read his father’s notebooks on calligraphy and calligraphers. In one of the notebooks he read what looked like a summary of Ibn Muqla’s calligraphic masterpieces and vignettes of his life, which fluctuated dramatically between high points and low points. Apparently Ibn Muqla’s strident fame eclipsed any mention of his brother, Abu Abdullah, who also excelled in calligraphy. His father suggested in passing that the two brothers devised some twenty-four scripts, of which he mentioned six: the thuluth, the rihan, the tawqia, the muhaqqaq, the badia and the riqaa. But his father only mentioned Ibn Muqla when he wrote about his theory of the geometry of calligraphy. His father wrote, ‘The Master of Calligraphy was inspired by a heavenly idea that started with the dot and the circle. He took the height of the letter alif as the diameter of the circle and correlated all the other letters to it.’ His father speculated, ‘Alif is the first letter in the Arabic alphabet and also the first letter in the name of God, Allah. The alif and the circle are both tokens of the absolute.’ His father, or maybe someone else, wrote this phrase: ‘It is the trunk, and everything else is a branch.’

  He was surprised at the fate in store for Ibn Muqla. He hadn’t known he had gone through such ordeals and faced death so many times in such strange ways. He was vizier to three caliphs: al-Muqtadir Billah, al-Qahir Billah and al-Radi Billah. He was exiled three times, died three deaths and was buried in three graves. First he was buried in a well, then his corpse was dug up and buried in his son’s house, then it was dug up again and buried in his wife’s house. During his life he underwent oppression, political persecution and the confiscation of his assets, and his end was appalling. He was denounced to al-Radi Billah and his right hand was cut off. In his dark cell, the calligraphic master of his age said, ‘A hand with which I served caliphs and copied the Holy Quran, cut off like the hand of a thief?!’

  He didn’t know what the denunciation was that cost Ibn Muqla his hand. His father didn’t mention it in the notebook in which he summarised part of Ibn Muqla’s life and the foundations of calligraphy that he had set out. There were sayings. Lines of poetry. Including this line that his father attributed to the Master of Calligraphy when his hand was cut off: ‘If part of you dies, weep for it, because the part that has died is close to the part that is left.’ The strange thing is that, after his hand was cut off, his tongue was also cut out and he was jailed and remained in prison until he ‘surrendered his soul to his Creator’ – that was precisely his father’s expression. He wondered, ‘Why did they cut out his tongue? His hand was his weapon. Cutting it off made sense. But why did they cut out his tongue? Was it because he was outspoken? Or to deprive him of any form of human expression?’ He didn’t know. Many people apparently wrote elegies for him too. Including al-Sah
ib ibn Ibad, who said, ‘The calligraphy of the vizier Ibn Muqla was a delight to the heart and to the eye.’ But his father, writing what amounted to a short biography of this extraordinary calligrapher, concentrated on his calligraphic works and largely ignored the man’s ruthless pursuit of luxury, prestige and power. The man seemed quite the antithesis of his father. More like our intellectuals today, in their relationships with authority and rulers. It occurred to him that events recur in a vicious cycle. The subject preoccupied him. It reinvigorated him. He didn’t need to go to the public library to find out more about Ibn Muqla. In his father’s library there were several reference books, both classical and modern, on the pioneers of Arabic calligraphy and aspects of their lives. There he saw the calligrapher’s other face. He found out why he was imprisoned, and why his hand was cut off and then his tongue. It was a troubled period with many intrigues and conspiracies, and the Abbasid empire was starting to fall apart. It seems that the historian Ibn Kathir hated Ibn Muqla. Hated his character, probably not his calligraphy. He said Ibn Muqla was hapless and impecunious in early life. But he managed to accumulate wealth, which he then began to spend lavishly. He began his political life collecting the land tax from parts of Persia, and his business affairs turned from bad to good, and from good to better, and his good reputation reached the ears of the caliph al-Muqtadir. When the office of vizier fell vacant after Ali ibn Issa, three candidates were proposed to the caliph: al-Fadl ibn Jaafar ibn al-Furat, Abu Ali ibn Muqla and Muhammad ibn Khalaf al-Nirmani. The three names did not appeal to the caliph’s entourage, because for each one of them there was some story or some good reason why he was unacceptable. They told al-Muqtadir, ‘As for Ibn al-Furat, we killed his uncle, the vizier Abul Hassan, and his nephew, and we confiscated his sister’s property, so we don’t feel safe with him. As for Ibn Muqla, he’s a complete novice with no experience in the vizierate and no prestige among the people. As for Muhammad ibn Khalaf al-Nirmani, he’s an irresponsible ignoramus who’s no good at secretarial work or scholarship.’ But the fact that al-Muqtadir’s entourage rejected Ibn Muqla’s name did not discourage the power-hungry master of calligraphy. He was shrewd. He was determined to catch the caliph’s attention by any means possible. He wanted to become vizier whatever happened. But how? He went to the town of Anbar with fifty homing pigeons to carry reports of the constant intrigues and conspiracies that came close to threatening the caliphate itself. News of the far-flung empire came to him on the wings of the fifty birds that had been dispersed in all four directions, and he would pass the news on to al-Muqtadir’s office. Finally, some of the caliph’s aides said to the caliph, ‘Ibn Muqla has done this on his own initiative, so how would he perform if you actually gave him a job?’ So the caliph gave him the vizierate on the basis of what he had heard about him. Reading all this in the basement, he was struck by Ibn Muqla’s infatuation with birds. Why birds in particular? He didn’t know, but he read an amusing story about how the calligrapher, when he was vizier, became obsessed with breeding animals in general, and birds in particular. One of the reference books said he had a large and flourishing garden that he filled with rare trees, birds and other animals. The net he used to cover the garden was made of silk. Under the net there were types of birds beyond description. Ibn al-Jawfi wrote about this garden and its unique contents, and noted that in it he bred birds which are usually bred only on farms, such as various types of turtle dove and wild pigeon, as well as nightingales, parrots, bulbuls, peacocks and partridge. There were also gazelles, wild cows, ostriches, camels and wild donkeys, which made it a zoo that was comprehensive for its time. One day one of his workers saw a seabird mating with a land bird. He monitored them and when the female laid eggs and the eggs started to hatch, he rushed to Ibn Muqla and told him what had happened. Ibn Muqla gave the worker a hundred dinars as a bonus for bringing him the news. After he had read extracts from the biography of the man who founded the discipline of Arabic calligraphy, the question that overwhelmed him was this: How did Ibn Muqla find time to invent twenty-four scripts? How did he manage to bring about the great leap from one stage to another in the progress of calligraphy when he spent most of his time manoeuvring, arguing, forming alliances and hatching conspiracies in order to obtain the office of vizier?

  He knew of his father’s interest in al-Suhrawardi, but he didn’t know he had spent so much time collecting and editing his works. Al-Suhrawardi’s works have never been published in a single collection. In Arabic he is known mainly for his famous poem with ha’ as the rhyme letter. He knew most of the lines by heart, but not for the same reason as his father. He discovered that his father had made good progress collecting al-Suhrawardi’s poems and poetic fragments from three manuscripts, one of which was preserved in the al-Zahiriya Library and numbered 5576. The second was in the Berlin Museum numbered 7669, and the third includes an extension of the ancient poem that begins Suad appeared and is in Tubingen with the number R137. He also found a letter from the director of the Berlin Museum, signed Dr George. The first manuscript is written in a Persian-style script, the second and third in naskh. There is also an unfinished copy in thuluth that his father had started to write out, based on the poems available to him by the Sufi master, who is said to have been killed by Saladin or his son. His father opened the manuscript with a quotation that goes: He who seeks the truth by means of proof is like someone who finds the way to the sun by means of a lantern. There’s no attribution for this saying but it must be Suhrawardi’s. The truth. Proof. The inner and the outer truth again.

  He stood for a long time in front of a calligraphic design written in the thuluth jali script and his heart pounded. It was a poem that read:

  Life has no savour now that you have taken leave of it,

  The night has no magic now that you are gone.

  He thought the poem was about him.

  Did his father write this poem in excellent thuluth jali about him?

  Was his father’s life after the flight of his rebellious son without savour, and his nights, after he was gone, without magic?

  His feeling didn’t change when he discovered that the line was by al-Sharif al-Radi in mourning for Ibn al-Bawwab, the master of calligraphy who came after Ibn Muqla. He told himself his father was in the habit of writing things in which he read a second meaning. It also surprised him that young Younis could read the riddles in the Kufic design that hung in the corner by the entrance to the cellar. He had learned from young Younis things he hadn’t given himself a chance to learn when he was twenty years old. The fact that the child had outdone him didn’t necessarily mean he was more intelligent. He may have learned the secret of the Kufic labyrinth from his father Shihab, who was very close to his father, or because the boy himself was attached to his grandfather, who had passed away when he was four or five years old. ‘It’s either familiarity or repetition,’ he told himself.

  * * *

  He had to visit the house where he found his feet as a child, the house where he left his family when he took flight into the unknown. On the great journey from which people, if they return at all, do not return as they were. Everyone expected him to visit the house. He didn’t take anyone with him on the tour of inspection of his old haunts. He went alone. He came back dripping with sweat and stifling constant bouts of coughing with his handkerchief. He closed the door of his room and did not come out for the rest of the day. He didn’t tell his brother Shihab about the trip, but everyone knew he had gone. In one of our lengthy exchanges on the balcony of our house, he told me in surprise how he found the old banned books, the ones that many people were once punished for possessing, on display at the pavement bookstalls in the commercial centre, covered in dust, next to books on cooking and interior design. He told me he couldn’t understand how the books were on display like that, in broad daylight, while other books that used to be on display on the pavements, and that no one read, were now deemed more dangerous than drugs. He said time had a strange cycle, and ideas had even stranger cycl
es. He recalled the proverb that says that every age has its dynasty and its heroes, to which he added his own observation: ‘and its ideas too’. Because how was it that a book such as The State and Revolution, which had left an indelible scar on his stomach, could be displayed in the middle of the pavement, next to the feet of passers-by, while books such as Governance is God’s, The Hejab is a Sharia Requirement, Sacred Jihad and other books that used to be on sale openly were now more dangerous than heroin? He wasn’t unaware of the changes that had taken place here, but he was surprised by the dramatic transformation of the Grandson’s allies into dangerous enemies. Enemies who had once held an honoured place in the alliance against poisonous imported ideas but who had now descended into dark cellars where they turn the bodies of their young men into bombs. Because in the days when people like him were being hunted down and thrown in jail, the former allies of the Grandson had been preoccupied with fatwas about sexual intercourse and with debating what would invalidate their Ramadan fast or their ritual ablutions before prayer. ‘Praise be to the One Who brings about change,’ he said, as if someone other than himself was uttering the words.