Radius Islamicus
Page 1
RADIUS ISLAMICUS
ESSENTIAL PROSE SERIES 148
Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.
RADIUS ISLAMICUS
Julian Samuel
Copyright © 2018, Julian Samuel and Guernica Editions Inc.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.
Julie Roorda, editor
Michael Mirolla, general editor
David Moratto, interior and cover design
Cover Painting:
Julian Samuel, Get Dinner Ready on 14 or 15 August
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017960394
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Samuel, Julian, author
Radius Islamicus / Julian Samuel.
(Essential prose series ; 148)
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77183-254-0 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-255-7
(EPUB).--
ISBN 978-1-77183-256-4 (Kindle)
I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 148
PS8587.A3623R33 2018 C813’.54 C2017-907290-0 C2017-907291-9
For Michael Neumann
Contents
1Retirement home, Pierrefonds, Québec, Canada; 13 Jumada t-Tania AH 1455
2Chanel Vegas Collection
3Lahore, Atlantic, LHR
4Christopher Marlowe, Muharram
5Diary
6Blue blankets, Russell Square
7Bereavement support group
8Perfidious Albion
9Haeinsa Codex
10Bernadette Aodhfionn
11Mild Cognitive South
12Wrinkles
13Prayer bruises
14Pilots Integrated with Allah
15Van Gogh
16Teleportation
17Servant
18Frankfurt School
19Ha’sha’shin
20Toothbrush
21Gasoline, guilt
22Dairy Queen
23Schnittke, Stravinsky
24Strait of Hormuz, Bernadette Aodhfionn
25The milk of human kindness
26Panther’s claw
27Calendar
28Damascus, toothbrush
29El Kairaya-El-Ma’ha’russa
30Silver platter
31Your humble servant
32 No brothers. No sisters No. children
33Ezekiel 4.47
34Milt Jackson on the River Ravi
35Late-Camel Linear B
Acknowledgements
About the Author
A mullah’s prayer is different from a mujahid’s
— ALLAMA IQBAL
1
Retirement home, Pierrefonds, Québec, Canada; 13 Jumada t-Tania AH 1455
Couldn’t be me, I haven’t any sons. I have young followers, far better than having sons. My progeny will have sons and daughters — daughters well-trained in the sciences. I might’ve had a wife but I can’t always remember. The letter I’m holding appears to have been written by a young woman or perhaps it’s a son writing to someone here. Sunlight, shaped by the window, frames the words in a trapezoid.
. . . I hope you find this. I’ve made notes, just like you . . .
After replacing the letter, I finish my cup of tea, and then I get up and walk along a wide hallway toward my room.
Behind the plasterboard wall is a concrete wall and behind that is the French-Canadian weather. In between these walls, there are wires, pipes, and a telephone connection attached to a CCTV network. On one of the monitors, the night nurse saw an old man fall out of bed and hit his head on the bedside table. Last week, two of us died. I had chats with some of the dead — I mean before they went — during breakfast or at lunch or in our library of forty volumes. They die in uric splendor in this home for the well-off.
Old people nowadays are more robust than old people in previous eras. Certainly, we’re better off physically than during the time of Mohammad (PBUH). Scientists have found ways to slow aging to a snail’s pace, and they study markers which make going to the toilet bright as flowers.
A woman walks past, using the corridor handrails and a walker. She has a welcoming eighty-five-year-old smile, but her health is from that previous era, before the current medicines. Her eyes had, moments ago, jealously noticed me reading the letter. Does she remember the act of reading? The letter means I have been in touch with the world outside. She says: “Hello.” The walls are jaundice coloured, so I look at the trees outside under the white sun. Her name is not Martha; I am sure it’s Jennifer. I say, “Hello Martha.” Outside, the water curves out to Rivière des Prairies and eventually into the Saint Lawrence. Martha leaves an odour of boiled Brussels sprouts. Except for the shrieking woman in diapers, it’s quiet here. Not much talking. Some of us do talk because we are off our Halcion. Jennifer, thank God, worked with us.
My friend Anver and other counter-Christians are aging beside me. I’m here to see them, and myself, through to the shahre khamoshan, el muckbura, the kubristan. I worry that some of my friends will start telling people what we did. Anver is sitting on a red chair beside a window. He tells stories about our past, especially about our crossing the Atlantic Ocean after the events we created. The chair remains an even colour of red, despite the shifting sun.
He was an old-young man when I brought him into what we did. This tradition is passed down through the ages from Palaeolithic times. Even back then, we had members who looked like part of the tribe but weren’t. We acted independently, far more rationally than the long forgotten Ha’sha’shin. We had money from someone. Yes. But we still had independence of mind and the will to level the playing field. Now, almost the entire world has turned its back on us.
He reminds me how we flew, via the small organization, to visit a Third World dictator’s helper to get the supplies; money was considered part of the supplies. The business models we had to work with did alter our vision of the world. We had angel investors with billions, not mere millions.
A few women on our side invented an Islamic Exchange Traded Fund which would be listed and instantly de-listed and then listed again — all nanoseconds apart — to avoid being detected by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our index names: BAW (Bomb’s Away Wahhabi); CUBA (Cultivated Urban Banchood Arabs); TAH (Terror At Home) — all traded on the TASE. Of course there was some religion here and there, but the religious material was not top on their list. The real battle was one series of equities competing with other equities set in an iniquitous value system — call it the stock market — that has been around since 600 years before Jesus Christ. The mamluks in the media made everything gloriously Islamic but it wasn’t: it was about money and having access to clean water and drainage and enough black cloth on earth to cover all women head
to foot; to cover all trees (their swaying in the wind could cause sexual ideas and images to emerge in the mind); all lakes and all mountains all covered in black cloth; the Milky Way covered in black.
We’re sitting in the library in the home outside Montreal. I’m in a chair which is not as red as Anver’s. With my hand actions, I pretend I’m showing him my passport. He looks at the travel document and looks at me, amused.
The sea enters his head and puts us in the middle of the ocean, a few days after the events we created. The sea is smooth now, but we’ve had storms during the crossing. Anver tells me he can see the curvature of the earth, even though we are in very low orbit. A group of geezers walk along the decks like spectral beings, not offending anyone with farts smelling of limp carrots, just walking. From his chair in the home, Anver tells me our story set at sea on a luxury liner. “Wouldn’t you like to see just one more glassy sea at twilight?” I ask him.
“If I see another pretty sunset, I’ll ask the captain to eject dirty engine oil all over, killing all the fish, rare whales, and other creatures.”
A day passes. Yellow walls pull in the early morning sunlight through the blinds. Layers of ice on the black driveway melt, causing massive floods in developing countries. Throughout the fast spring, dimensionless robins, loaded with undefeatable viruses, sing in the pine trees, making my attempt at getting any sleep nearly impossible. I’m sitting in a red leather chair watching the river flow outside. I’ve been looking at a picture book about zoos — photographs of shiny black panthers in cages. I put the book aside and pick up the Koran. As I turn a page, an oval-shaped patch of light settles on a passage. Who remembers dreams after seventy-five years of age?
Anver is fatigued and his face is well beyond the skills of even the best face-lifter surgeon to make young again. A happiness hovers around his eyes; he inhales the air in front of him and exhales a story with faulty linkages because his memory is not as vast as mine. This is not a consequence of old age, nor a consequence of class. We went to Lahore together and to Sussex and to Oman, and to see the Marsh Arabs, and to Jordan to see the King but he wouldn’t see us, so we made friends with locals. We met a Hafez El Assad Syrian lookalike, whose name could have been Dmitri or something like that and who gave us tea and biscuits. Anver reminds me that we never went to Dagestan. Dmitri told us not to go because he said South Asian Englishmen like us were far too broadminded, that we spoke English far too well, that we knew how to eat properly with forks and knives, and we shouldn’t talk to people with names like Dzhanet Magomedov or Umalat Abdullayeva. I told him we weren’t exactly South Asian Englishmen.
Anver shifts in his chair and, with his prattle, has now taken me, in thought, somewhere we were. I’m again on the deck of the ship that is crossing the Atlantic. We had to cross the Atlantic after the flash and bang in London. It’s a coincidence we ended up in the same old folks home. He smiles and walks down the hall to his room.
During some months at our old folks home, he does not show up for lunch, or for dinner, or for breakfast the following day, but today we’re sitting together again at the end of a hallway, the windows giving out to a view of the river outside. It’s the afternoon and, somehow, another twilight approaches as we cross the Atlantic during a day in a month in the current calendar. We did sometimes use the other calendar, but the numbers were always lower; in fact everything was lower.
Portside, a gull glides along with us on the moving ship. It sheers back out to the sea, does a stall turn, and is back beside the ship. It nicks the window and flies off, unhurt. Anver observes: “Gull. Beak. Blood. Death.” The seeds of a lifelong operational friendship are sown at forty-five degrees latitude and the same longitude, just down the street from another ship. I just hope no one comes to interview him.
As planned, two days after the event, we left the U.K. on this passenger ship from Southampton. The authorities caught the wrong people and then, these authorities — who when you get right down to it are all patrician idiots — flashed brown faces all over the newspapers.
I have difficulty sleeping on water. Anver suggests that I focus my eyes on one star. This will help me sleep. I turn down the well-lit corridor whose windows give out on to the sea. I go to my room and look out of my window and stare at a star outside.
Although the ship is cutting the sea, I hear the trickling of a canal somewhere underneath me. Canal and ocean in the same place? How can I hear a canal with all this sea and wind around me? Is it not the old water table that is drying out under the old folks home? With the dry summers in Pierrefonds, the clay on which the home is built is contracting because the tarmac on the roads prevents rain water from maintaining the density of the clay. The home, like the ship I was on, is moving, slithering on soft clay, propellers slowly churning through it, moving it forward in small increments. I see a spot of sunlight on a bottle of wine, and then I see the bearded man in a painting by Manet. Or is it a photograph by Cartier-Bresson, 1938 — what’s it called? “Au bords de la Marne”? Perhaps it is “Le déjeuner sur l’herbe,” 1863. One of the kids looks like the young Malcolm X. I read art history with a minor in bomb making at a university east of Cardiff or Toronto, I forget.
Within a canvas someone trickles wine into a glass. The trickling sounds like the canals in Amsterdam, where we did lots of work to make Dutch society truly liberal. In the canvas, they’re having a picnic: table cloth, French culture, cheese, long rowboat with a pointy bow in the background. The man in the painting has a wife who is beautiful by the standards of the period. She is black, not white as in the original painting. Mulatto kids play in the sunshine with a Sikh boy who has a kirpan attached to his belt and looks like a kid in Kabul. The white kids keep their distance. This painting of the middle classes, once populated by white Europeans, now has various sized Malcolm X figurines standing in the same places, eating paan and samosas and drinking lassi.
The painted characters run out of their frozen positions, play on the river bank and then return to their previous postures. The lips and mouths in the canvas open. The wife in the image says: “Passe-moi le something, something,” as the surface flutters in the fresh sea air. The bearded man replies: “Voilà.” Everyone makes rustling noises when they move because they are speaking and moving in canvas. Bones poke through the painting. Painted flesh and clothing make the image bulge like a wave. Particles fall off the painting. The European canvas rises upwards revealing a foaming sea.
Days and nights pass. I smell land, but there isn’t land anywhere. Anver used to stand on the highest deck to look for land. Now, I’m looking for Canada. What am I looking at — the sea behind a see-through canvas? White grammar school kids have appeared in the canvas. They are dressed in school uniforms and make tick-tock sounds as they shift through the scene. They too have small kirpans attached to their sides.
At noon, the day before our arrival, I look down into the moving water. Is it possible that I can see the Russell Square tube stop under the Atlantic? Just my imagination — must be. When the tube doors open, passengers with lead shoes walk the ocean floor among the telegraph cables from the last century, attending to a service in an underwater mosque. The passengers put their ears to the barnacle-covered steel and hear the conversations between Eisenhower and Tony Blair, trapped in cable memory which has a low decay rate. I hear rustling sounds behind me. The shoo-shoo of the deciduous leaves in wind and the sea waves mix. Bits of the altered European paintings return to my mind. Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” changes into women wearing tight blue jeans made by a fashion company that stitches their brand name in gold letters on the back — Hejaz Jeans, their finger nails painted flesh silver pink, holding cubist chickens in their hands. The mummified canvas breaks up. Snowy particles now fall over the North Atlantic; these European models, once living things, are wrapped in a thin gauze.
We’re approaching the coast. I hear the seagulls in the distance. Am I carrying guilt with me? Generally, guilt is an influential interpretation of
interpretation. The land smells confirm that we’ve been smart enough not to leave a trail for the British authorities: we’re safely on a luxury ship which has almost crossed. A few hours later, the land approaches us; chain links, heavy as elephants, moor us to the Canadian land mass. We walk down the steps into a harbour.
We were young and had to pull Canada from her deep slumber. And now, we’re old. At breakfast in the home, Anver asks me if I know what Benzene Pars is? Farsi for British Petroleum I tell him.
At conception, within my Moslem mother, was I destined to be a mole? A mole all my life or just part of it, and which part — the front or the back part? Terrorism and cellular reality — inseparable. Anver and the others who were from various cellular backgrounds had been given an understanding of Islam, and I helped them to understand a white fist in the face. I use the word various: he doesn’t. The mullah at a mosque in a topical part of London also helped Anver to understand things as they are. This mullah was such a liberal that he had a Cornish pig as a pet, a pet he would bring to the mosque on Fridays. With his new enlightenment, Anver would assert views like: Integrated middle-class Moslems can’t appreciate the extent to which we have been screwed by the West. This is why Iran has to test a nuke. They don’t need a nuke, they have the Strait of Hormouz, I used to reply. He didn’t have the knowledge to go much beyond this level of reasoning. We didn’t require more reasoning. He himself suspected that his class origins were behind the fact that he didn’t have and couldn’t develop a deeper understanding, but this only made him a better team player. And, there were others like him. Others came and went — none went in the media sense. He’s here with me today, not in paradise or Nymphenberger petting the drum-tight hymens of virgins.
I’ve thought about how he grew up. He had training in chemistry, physics, and West Yorkshire English. His father ran a garage which serviced a few Islamic cars and where, as a young man, Anver worked part-time. His father sent him to good schools where science was taken seriously and encouraged him to distance himself from friends with green cars. Anver understood the modernism in his father but liked, or should I say loved, to work at the local level, and far from his father’s control. We took many trips in small lorries to London and to small towns near the western tip of England, and parked overnight. Then, at some point, we decided the lorries would flash apart with a fifty-two minute delay between bangs. But they were modest bangs — even Anver’s integrated father said that they were very modest. We bombed a part of little England. Any rational, left-voting English Moslem could see that exploitation was increasing. We knew this small non-event counted only for practice. The ruling classes had to hire more journalists to cover the flash and smoke. These humble events we conducted pulled in the larger funders. And then things got far, far from conventional. This required us to imagine things we never thought of. We conducted events vaster than the liberation armies of Northern Ireland, Spain et cetera el Europa.