Collected Stories
Page 33
The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv
To Angélica Ocampo
If I am not mistaken, the chief sources of information concerning Mokanna, the Veiled (or, literally, Masked) Prophet of Khurasan, are only four in number: a) those passages from the History of the Caliphs culled by Baladhuri; b) the Giant’s Handbook, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the Abbasids, Ibn abi Tahir Taifur; c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, wherein we find a refutation of the abominable heresies of the Dark Rose, or Hidden Rose, which was the Prophet’s holy book; and d) some barely legible coins unearthed by the engineer Andrusov during excavations for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins, now on deposit in the Numismatic Collection at Tehran, preserve certain Persian distichs which abridge or emend key passages of the Annihilation. The original Rose is lost, for the manuscript found in 1899 and published all too hastily by the Morgenlandisches Archive has been pronounced a forgery first by Horn, and afterwards by Sir Percy Sykes.
The Prophet’s fame in the West is owed to a longwinded poem by Thomas Moore, laden with all the sentimentality of an Irish patriot.
The Scarlet Dye
Along about the year 120 of the Hegira (a.d. 736), the man Hakim, whom the people of that time and that land were later to style the Prophet of the Veil, was born in Turkestan. His home was the ancient city of Merv, whose gardens and vineyards and pastures sadly overlook the desert. Midday there, when not dimmed by the clouds of dust that choke its inhabitants and leave a greyish film on the clusters of black grapes, is white and dazzling.
Hakim grew up in that weary city. We know that a brother of his father apprenticed him to the trade of dyer that craft of the ungodly, the counterfeiter, and the shifty, who were to inspire him to the first imprecations of his unbridled career. In a famous page of the Annihilation, he is quoted as saying:
My face is golden but I have steeped my dyes, dipping uncarded wool on second nights and soaking treated wool on third nights, and the emperors of the islands still compete for this scarlet cloth. Thus did I sin in the days of my youth, tampering with the true colours of God’s creation. The Angel told me that the ram was not the colour of the tiger, the Satan told me that the Almighty wanted them to be, and that He was availing Himself of my skill and my dye stuffs. Now I know that the Angel and the Satan both strayed from the truth, and that all colours are abominable.
In the year 146 of the Hegira, or Flight, Hakim was seen no more in Merv. His caldrons and dipping vats, along with a Shirazi scimitar and a bronze mirror, were found destroyed.
The Bull
At the end of the moon of Sha’ban, in the year 158, the desert air was very clear, and from the gate of a caravan halting place on the way to Merv a group of men sat gazing at the evening sky in search of the moon of Ramadan, which marks the period of continence and fasting. They were slaves, beggars, horse dealers, camel thieves, and butchers of livestock. Huddled solemnly on the ground, they awaited the sign. They looked at the sunset, and the colour of the sunset was the colour of the sand.
From the other end of the shimmering desert (whose sun engenders fever, just as its moon engenders chills), they saw three approaching figures, which seemed to be of gigantic size. They were men, and the middle one had the head of a bull. When they drew near, it was plain that this man was wearing a mask and that his companions were blind.
Someone (as in the tales of the Arabian Nights) pressed him for the meaning of this wonder. ‘They are blind,’ the masked man said, ‘because they have looked upon my face.’
The Leopard
It is recorded by the Abbasids’ official chronicler that the man from the desert (whose voice was singularly sweet, or so it seemed in contrast to his brutish mask) told the caravan traders that they were awaiting the sign of a month of penance, but that he was the preacher of a greater sign that of a lifetime of penance and a death of martyrdom. He told them that he was Hakim, son of Osman, and that in the year 146 of the Flight a man had made his way into his house and, after purification and prayer, had cut off his head with a scimitar and taken it to heaven. Held in the right hand of the stranger (who was the angel Gabriel), his head had been before the Lord in the highest heaven who entrusted it with the mission of prophesying, taught it words so ancient that their mere utterance could burn men’s mouths, and endowed it with a radiance that mortal eyes could not bear. Such was his justification of the mask. When all men on earth professed the new law, the Face would be revealed to them and they could worship it openly as the angels already worshipped it. His mission proclaimed, Hakim exhorted them to a holy war a jihad and to their forthcoming martyrdom.
The slaves, beggars, horse dealers, camel thieves, and butchers of livestock shunned his call. One voice shouted out ‘Sorcerer!’ and another ‘Impostor!’ Someone had a leopard with him a specimen, perhaps, of that sleek, bloodthirsty breed that Persian hunters train and it happened that the animal broke free of its bonds. Except for the masked prophet and his two acolytes, the rest of them trampled each other to escape. When they flocked back, the prophet had blinded the beast. Before its luminous dead eyes, the men worshipped Hakim and acknowledged his supernatural powers.
The Veiled Prophet
It is with scant enthusiasm that the historian of the Abbasid caliphs records the rise of the Veiled Hakim in Khurasan. That province much disturbed by the failure and crucifixion of its most famous chieftain embraced the teachings of the Shining Face with fervour and desperation, and it laid down in tribute its blood and gold. (By then, Hakim had set aside his brutish effigy, replacing it with a fourfold veil of white silk embossed with precious stones. The symbolic colour of the ruling dynasty, the Banu Abbas, was black; for his Protective Veil, for his banners and turbans, Hakim chose the very opposite colour white.) The campaign began well. In the Book of Precision, of course, the armies of the Caliph are everywhere victorious; but as the invariable result of these victories is the removal of generals or the withdrawal from impregnable fortresses, the chary reader can surmise actual truth. At the end of the moon of Rajab, in the year 161, the famed city of Nishapur opened its metal gates to the Masked One; at the beginning of 162, the city of Asterabad did the same. Hakim’s military activity (like that of a more fortunate prophet) was limited to praying in a tenor voice, elevated toward the Divinity on the back of a reddish camel, in the very thick of battle. Arrows whistled all around without ever once striking him. He seemed to court danger. On the night a group of hated lepers gathered around his palace, he had them let in, kissed them, and given them silver and gold.
The petty tasks of government were delegated to six or seven devotees. Ever mindful of serenity and meditation, the Prophet kept a harem of a hundred and fourteen blind women, who did their best to satisfy the needs of his divine body.
The Abominable Mirrors
However indiscreet or threatening they may be, so long as their words are not in conflict with orthodox faith, Islam is tolerant of men who enjoy an intimacy with God. The Prophet himself, perhaps, might not have scorned this leniency, but his followers, his many victories, and the outspoken wrath of the Caliph who was Mohammed al-Mahdi drove him at last into heresy. This discord, though it led to his undoing, also made him set down the tenets of a personal creed, in which borrowings from old Gnostic beliefs are nonetheless detectable.
At the root of Hakim’s cosmogony is a spectral god. This godhead is as majestically devoid of origin as of name or face. It is an unchanging god, but its image cast nine shadows which, condescending to creation, conceived and presided over a first heaven. Out of this first demiurgic crown there issued a second, with its own angels, powers, and thrones, and these founded a lower heaven, which was the symmetrical mirror of the first. This second conclave, in its turn, was mirrored in a third, and this in a lower one, and so on to the number 999. The lord of this lowermost heaven is he who rules us shadow of shadows of still other shadows and his fraction of divinity approaches zero.
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The world we live in is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and confirm the parody, are abominations. Revulsion is the cardinal virtue. Two ways (whose choice the Prophet left free) may lead us there: abstinence or the orgy, excess of the flesh or its denial. Hakim’s personal heaven and hell were no less hopeless:
Those who deny the Word, those who deny the Veil and the Face [runs a curse from the Hidden Rose], are promised a wondrous Hell: for each lost soul shall hold sway over 999 empires of fire; and in each empire, over 999 mountains of fire; and in each mountain, over 999 castles of fire; and in each castle, over 999 chambers of fire; and in each chamber, over 999 beds of fire; and in each bed he will find himself everlastingly tormented by 999 shapes of fire, which will have his face and his voice.
This is confirmed in another surviving versicle:
In this life, ye suffer in a single body; in death and Retribution, in numberless numbers of bodies.
Heaven is less dearly drawn:
Its darkness is never-ending, there are fountains and pools made of stone, and the happiness of this Heaven is the happiness of leave-taking, of self-denial, and of those who know they are asleep.
The Face
In the year 163 of the Flight (and fifth year of the Shining Face), Hakim was besieged at Sanam by the Caliph’s army. There was no lack of provisions or martyrs, and the arrival of a host of golden angels was imminent. It was at this point that an alarming rumour made its way through the fortress. An adultress in the harem, as she was strangled by the eunuchs, had cried out that the ring finger of the Prophet’s right hand was missing and that all his other fingers lacked nails. This rumour spread among the faithful. From the top of a terrace, in the midst of his people, Hakim was praying to the Lord for a victory or for a special sign. Two captains, their heads bowed down, slavish as if beating into a driving rain tore away the Veil.
At first, there was a shudder. The Apostle’s promised face, the face that had been to the heavens, was indeed white but with that whiteness peculiar to spotted leprosy. It was so bloated and unbelievable that to the mass of onlookers it seemed a mask. There were no brows; the lower lid of the right eye hung over the shriveled cheek; a heavy cluster of tubercles ate away the lips; the flattened, inhuman nose was like a lion’s.
Hakim’s voice attempted one final stratagem. ‘Your unforgivable sins do not allow you to see my splendour—’ it began to say.
Paying no heed, the captains ran him through with spears.
Et Cetera
To Néstor Ibarra
A Theologian in Death
The angels told me that when Melancthon died he was provided with a house deceptively like the one in which he lived in this world. (This happens to most newcomers in eternity upon their first arrival it is why they are ignorant of their death, and think they are still in the natural world.) All the things in his room were similar to those he had had before the table, the desk with its drawers, the shelves of books. As soon as Melancthon awoke in this new abode, he sat at his table, took up his literary work, and spent several days writing as usual on justification by faith alone, without so much as a single word on charity. This omission being remarked by the angels, they sent messengers to question him. ‘I have proved beyond refutation,’ Melancthon replied to them, ‘that there is nothing in charity essential to the soul, and that to gain salvation faith is enough.’ He spoke with great assurance, unsuspecting that he was dead and that his lot lay outside Heaven. When the angels heard him say these things, they departed.
After a few weeks, the furnishings in his room began to fade away and disappear, until at last there was nothing left but the armchair, the table, the paper, and his inkstand. What is more, the walls of the room became encrusted with lime, and the floor with a yellow glaze. Melancthon’s own clothes were now much coarser. He wondered at these changes, but he went on writing about faith while denying charity, and was so persistent in this exclusion that he was suddenly transported underground to a kind of workhouse, where there were other theologians like him. Locked up for a few days, Melancthon fell to doubting his doctrine, and was allowed to return to his former room. He was now clad in a hairy skin, but he tried hard to convince himself that what had just happened to him was no more than a hallucination, and he went back to extolling faith and belittling charity.
One evening, Melancthon felt cold. He began examining the house, and soon discovered that the other rooms no longer matched those of his old house in the natural world. One was cluttered with instruments whose use he did not understand; another had shrunk so small that entrance was impossible; a third had not changed, but its doors and windows opened onto vast sandbanks. One of the rooms at the back of the house was full of people who worshipped him and who kept telling him that no theologian was ever as wise as he. These praises pleased him, but since some of the visitors were faceless and others seemed dead he ended up hating and distrusting them. It was at this point that he decided to write something concerning charity. The only difficulty was that what he wrote one day he could not see the next. This was because the pages had been written without conviction.
Melancthon received many visits from persons newly dead, but he felt shame at being found in so rundown a lodging. In order to have them believe he was in Heaven, he hired a neighbouring magician, who tricked the company with appearances of peace and splendour. The moment his visitors had gone and sometimes a little before these adornments vanished, leaving the former plaster and draughtiness.
The last I heard of Melancthon was that the magician and one of the faceless men had taken him away into the sand hills, where he is now a kind of servant of demons.
From the Arcana Coelestia (1749-1756),
by Emanuel Swedenborg
The Chamber of Statues
This tale, taken from an Arab source, is of uncertain authorship. From internal evidence, we may infer that the writer was a Spanish Muslim:
In ages long gone, in the kingdom of the Andalusians, there was a city, whose name was Lebtit or Ceuta or Jaén, where the kings had their dwelling place. In this city stood a strong castle with leafed gates meant neither for going in nor for coming out but only to be kept locked. Whenever a king died and another king took the high throne after him, he set with his own hands a new lock to the gates, until these locks numbered twenty-four one for each of the kings.
After this time, it befell the kingdom that an evil man, who was not of the royal house, usurped the throne and rather than add a new lock, had a mind to open the twenty-four old locks so that he might see what lay within the castle. The vizier and the emirs beseeched him not to do this, and they hid the iron key ring from him and told him it was easier to add one lock than to force twenty-four. But the king persisted with wondrous craft, saying, ‘I want to look upon the contents of this castle.’ They then offered him all the wealth their hands could gather in flocks, in Christian idols, in silver and gold. Still he would not be denied, and, with his own right hand (may it bum forever!), he prized off the locks.
Inside the castle, they found figures of Arabs in metalwork and in wood mounted on their swift camels and horses, with turbans hanging down over their shoulders and scimitars dangling from their belts and bearing long lances in their hands. All these figures were sculptured, and they threw shadows over the floor. The forelegs of the horses, as if they were rearing up, did not touch the ground, and yet the mighty steeds did not topple or fall. Great fear was implanted in the king by these skilful figures, the more so for their discipline and perfect silence, since they all faced the same way which was toward the west and not a word or a trumpet blast could be heard from them. This was in the first chamber.
In the second, they found the table set for Solomon, son of David peace be on them both! It was carved from a single emerald, whose colour, as everyone knows, is green, and whose hidden virtues are real yet indescribable, for they quiet tempests, protect the chastity of the owner, dispel dysentery
and evil spirits, assure a favourable outcome in litigations, and bring great relief in childbearing.
In the third chamber, two books were found. One was black, and it set forth the properties of metals, the use of talismans, and the planetary laws of the days, as well as the preparation of poisons and antidotes. The other book was white, and although its letters were quite clear, no one could decipher its teaching.
In the fourth chamber, they found a map of the world, figuring all its kingdoms and cities and seas and castles and perils each one with its true name and exact shape.
In the fifth chamber, they came upon a circular mirror, made for Solomon, son of David peace be on the twain! whose worth was priceless, for it was of mixed metals, and he who looked into it could see the faces of his fathers and his sons from the first Adam down to those who shall hear the Trumpet.
The sixth chamber was filled with an elixir, a single dram of which was enough to turn three thousand ounces of silver into three thousand ounces of fine gold.
The seventh chamber appeared to be empty. It was so long that even the most skilled of archers could not have shot an arrow from the entrance and hit the opposite wall. On that wall, they found carved a dire inscription. The king read it and understood it, and its words were these: ‘If any hand dare open the door of this castle, living warriors after the likeness of the figures here depicted will conquer the kingdom.’