The Lover

by Laury Silvers

  Some nights, Mustafa’s mother would send him out to get some chick pea stew and barley bread from a nearby shop and they would eat together in the courtyard. After they finished their meal, Mustafa’s mother would get out her daf, and their mother would bring out a long, light brown wooden drum. Zaytuna loved to rub her fingers along the carved triangular markings at its base and the curled edges of the skin at the wide end that had been pulled tight with rope and knotted every few inches, as if the drum would tell her the history their mother refused to divulge. Mustafa’s mother had found it for sale in the market one day and brought it to their mother as a gift. The seller spoke grandly of its provenance, saying it had been found in a Pharoah’s tomb in Egypt. But Zaytuna and Tein’s mother, eyes wide and smiling, took the gift in her hands as if it were a newborn baby she recognized as her own and said, “Not Egypt,” and no more. Those nights, they would warm the drums over the fire, tapping and thumping until the sound was just right. Then they would begin to lightly beat their drums. The drums would begin speaking to each other, drawing the women into their secret conversation until one of the women would call out in ecstasy, “Ya Mustafa, Ya Chosen One,” and the women would begin improvising on long-adored songs about the Prophet’s beautiful characteristics.

  Mustafa leaned over to Zaytuna one night and confided, “When I was very little, I thought that song was about me.”

  The energy of their drumming and song would pull the neighbours from their rooms. They would move into the courtyard and join in. Tein would move away from the cluster of people, as always, sitting against the far wall, but clapping his hands in the rhythm of a drum as their mother had taught them. Sometimes Zaytuna could hear him sing when they came to “Talaa’l-badru alayna,” welcoming the Prophet’s arrival to Medina. Still young enough while their mother was alive that his voice had not yet changed, it rose up over the others like a nightingale,

  The full moon rose over us,

  from the valley of wada,

  and we must be grateful,

  for the call is to Allah

  ***

  Walking together now to Uncle Abu al-Qasim’s home, Zaytuna wanted to take Mustafa’s arm and lean on it, but it wouldn’t do in the street. They weren’t exactly family and weren’t more than that, either. Mustafa was a scholar now; there was no room for talk. Too quickly they reached the door. It was shut and locked. Mustafa took hold of the knocker and brought it down against its plate three times.

  ***

  She’d heard the door was never locked before the trials. Some years before she and Tein were born, some of the Sufis of Baghdad had been hauled before the caliph’s court, accused of heresy and other crimes. Uncle Abu al-Qasim denied he was anything other than a legal scholar and was let go. But Uncle Nuri and many of the others declared their passionate love of God openly before the court and were sentenced to death. The community was torn apart. Old resentments from that time carried forward into their day. Uncle Abu al-Qasim taught them all to hide their mystical states. They should speak so that outsiders would not understand. They should control themselves even when it was just them, especially during their remembrance ceremonies, the sama, when the music and poetry mystically transported them into the arms of The Beloved. But Uncle Nuri called the seekers to speak the truth whatever the consequence.

  She had been told the story so many times she could see it as if it had happened before her eyes. As the accused Sufis walked single file before the executioner’s block, Nuri rushed forward, begging to be killed first, if only to give the others another moment in this world to remember God. They say that the executioner felt the words more than heard them. They hit him like an ocean’s wave coming full force, then somehow, suddenly, halting to softly wash through him. He looked down, marvelling at a watery light pouring around him that only he could see. His hands opened to touch the light and his weapon fell beside him. The clanging of the metal on stone raised him back into consciousness. He said, aloud, to no one, to everyone, to God, “I will not execute these men.” He ordered the Sufis be brought back to their cell while he brought the case to the feet of the chief judge himself to plead their case. They say that Nuri’s light still shone through the executioner and illuminated the judge’s wisdom, and the judge ultimately ordered the men released into exile in nearby Raqqa, instead of to death. He declared, “If these men are heretics, then there is no one who truly worships God.”

  When Mustafa began his studies, one of his teachers had told him the story was not to be believed. Zaytuna was angry when Mustafa told her this. She was angry he did not speak up to his teacher. She was angry he did not tell him exactly what kind of loving man their Uncle Nuri was. Didn’t he sneak in and out Baghdad to see his wife and children, and his friends, despite the risks? Wasn’t it on one of these trips that he met their mother and brought them to Junayd’s circle, thus saving their lives and finding them a home? And even when he returned from exile did he not keep a respectful distance from Junayd’s circle, visiting only now and again, to keep them safe from reprisal? Had he not fed her and Tein out of his own bowl when he himself had not eaten? Had he not always sacrificed himself for others? She yelled at Mustafa, her face mottled with anger at his betrayal, “It’s all true!”

  But Mustafa kept quiet and took what knowledge was to be had. He told her that Uncle Abu al-Qasim advised him to hold his tongue. He told Mustafa that the scholars were suspicious of the Sufis and were only testing him to see where his loyalties lay. It wasn’t that they were bad men. On the contrary, they only wanted to preserve their way to God’s truth, just like the Sufis did. Uncle Abu al-Qasim said each has their way, and each way has its value and place. So he must learn as his Uncle had, from as many masters as he could, and let it all pass through the test of knowledge of the heart.

  As they stood waiting for someone to open the door, Zaytuna watched Mustafa. So patient and at ease. How different they were. She would have slapped every one of those scholars and told them that their knowledge was nothing but shit piled on top of corpses. But this is exactly why Uncle Nuri had been exiled and Uncle Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd remained in Baghdad to hold the community together in the face of all that distrust.

  Zaytuna’s loyalty was with Uncle Nuri, and her mother, risking everything for the truth. But she also understood what made some scholars so angry about the Sufis. It wasn’t just that women worshipped God openly among them, were counted among their numbers, and taught women and men alike. It wasn’t just that some of these Sufis declared themselves to be passionately in love with God, and worse, to their pedant accusers, that God was passionately in love with them. It was not even that some declared themselves to be nothing other than God in moments of ecstatic seizure. It was their confidence that drove so many of these scholars mad, that the Sufis knew God intimately, directly, in a way that the scholars would never know through their books. The Sufis saw themselves drinking from the Wellspring of Knowledge directly, while they accused the scholars of cupping their hands to drink muddy water off the street. And oh how the people attached themselves to this confidence. What rivals they made themselves to the scholars! Zaytuna knew too well there was no reasoning with someone who drank from that Divine Source. The scholars would never be able to regulate that knowledge and what it made people do. She knew there was no way to get your mother to stop preaching and simply be with you while she was in that state of experiencing being chosen by God.

  ***

  Some months before her mother died, Zaytuna watched a man in a tall judge’s cap and hooded cloak follow her and a crowd that had been gathering around her in the street, where she had suddenly fallen into ecstasy, into a home that had opened its door to them. Zaytuna looked back for Tein, to make sure he was watching the man. Tein was already moving next to him, carefully, ready to push him over if he needed to so that they could run. But the man simply stood and watched as the crowd wept at her mother’s every word. When her mother returned to herself, sitting on the floor, wiping the te
ars from her eyes with the sleeves of her qamis, the man approached them. Tein continued to shadow him, nodding to Zaytuna.

  The scholar stood over her and her mother, looking down on them. Zaytuna thought he looked confused. He said, “The way you speak, it’s piercing. But I’m worried. I’m afraid. I’m afraid it might be nothing but pride.”

  She replied, “Pride comes from within one’s self. How can I be proud if my self is not the One Who Speaks?”

  And she fell again into a mystical state, her eyes closing, her head turning slightly, lifting as she exhaled, saying,

  There are elect who are chosen for His love,

  He chose them in the beginning of time.

  He chose them before the splitting of His creation,

  as ones entrusted with wisdom and eloquence.

  ***

  Finally someone came to Uncle Abu al-Qasim’s door. A young man she didn’t recognize opened it. Mustafa greeted him by name. As they made their way through the vestibule opening into the main reception room with its great archway leading out into the courtyard, she expected to see the halls and courtyard full of seekers sitting in clusters, reciting litanies, talking, or in quiet meditation, but it was nearly empty. Zaytuna peeked around the stairs leading up to the second floor, where Uncle Abu al-Qasim’s family lived. No one was there, seated, under the stairs in silent retreat, like Uncle Abu al-Qasim had done himself when he was first on the Path. So unlike the earlier years.

  When she was a child, the seekers of mystical knowledge came in waves from the farthest reaches of the Empire. Her mother never had any patience except for those who were truly gifted. She would grumble at these seekers, restraining herself from saying anything to them directly—they were not her students, after all—until one day when she finally broke her silence as a group nearby her was reciting, “There is no god but God,” over and over again.

  She and Tein were sitting with her, eating some wheat bread with raw onions and drinking fresh goat’s milk they got from Old Bakr in the kitchen. They stayed quiet, keeping an eye on their mother as she became more and more frustrated by the group’s ineptitude, her head ticking to the left, then her chin up, then ticking her head to the left again along with her every muttered word. The students only succeeded in hyperventilating, becoming more and more distracted as they tried to bring themselves into even a slightly felt state of presence with God. Finally her mother couldn’t take it anymore. She yelled across the courtyard at them, “Look at you trying to shake off the robe of non-existence and pull on the robe of Existence! As if one could take off what does not exist and put on something that is All there is! There is no losing or finding when All is One!”

  Her mother turned to her and Tein, grabbing Tein by the wrist and her by the chin, pinching her chin hard with her thumb and forefinger and looking into their eyes, said, “Remember that, andudugu, my babies!”

  ***

  As she and Mustafa stepped from the dim light of the reception hall into the bright courtyard, she heard in her mind—clear as a falcon’s call in an empty sky—the words her mother said to the man in the judge’s cap who stood over her that day after having declared herself, in poetic form, to be chosen by God for His love before creation itself.

  Looking away from the man and flicking her wrist, her mother said, “You can leave whenever you like.” And Zaytuna heard then, and ever since then, in her memory of that day, that dismissal as if it had been delivered to her, too.

  Chapter Eight

  Zaytuna looked for Uncle Nuri in the courtyard, but didn’t see him anywhere. Mustafa called out to those in earshot, “Assalamu alaykum!” His greeting was returned and they walked across the courtyard to where Uncle Abu al-Qasim al-Junayd was sitting on sheepskins with several of his closest companions. She had not visited in over four years and seeing him now, his kind face, she felt ashamed. He wore thin white linen sirwal and qamis with only a simple unembroidered robe over them, and with even less ostentation, a shorter length of cloth for his turban. Abu Muhammad al-Jurayri sat closest to him, as always, ready to serve his master when needed.

  Junayd turned to her as she came in and she felt his presence move through her, enveloping her. His light was like no other. Not even her mother shone like this; it felt full across the spectrum, perfect and nourishing. With each step she and Mustafa took toward him, her heart seemed to lose its sense of itself, such that by the time she sat on the sheepskin at his feet, it was beating with his. Her muscles softened. Her fingers unclenched. Her shoulders fell back. Her heart was held open to him completely. The pain and anger she carried spilled out before him to see.

  She tried to pull herself back from it; she fought with herself, and him, inwardly, knowing he could see her so plainly. She forced herself to reach out to kiss his hand, as she should, but did not give voice to the necessary greetings. As is the custom, he pulled his hand away before she could kiss it, but placed it tenderly on her head instead, saying, “My daughter. Should I give you a candy like I did when you were a child so that you will know that I will always love you as my own?”

  He paused, then said, “You lost your mother in this world, it’s true. But you never lost your family. You have Tein and Mustafa. You had Mustafa’s mother, God rest her soul, for much of your life. You have all your family here. All of us who love you. God has told us, With every hardship there is ease. God gave you to us out of His love for us and out of His love for you.”

  He touched her cheek so that she would look up and take in his words, her eyes now filled with angry tears, and said to her, “God is The Guardian, so leave yourself in His care, leave yourself in His wisdom. Zaytuna, leave those children with Him, the dead and the living. And consider carefully why God brought their case before you.”

  She trembled before his knowing, without her saying anything, about Layla and Zayd. But this was one of his knowing ways; he typically hid what he knew, out of graciousness and humility, revealing it only when it was necessary.

  He continued, “They are no more lost to love than you are. God is The Lover through Whom we all love. His love speaks through every moment and every thing even if you cannot hear it or understand it. Trust this. Trust God’s love and begin to let the rest wash away.”

  “I cannot,” she wept.

  “My dear one, do you think that God does not know you are angry? Do you think you can hide anything from Him?”

  She knew she sounded like a child, but she didn’t care, “God should know I’m angry. He made my mother love Him so completely that she had no room in her heart for us. She left everything behind for Him. Then He killed her. Brutally. He chose her to die for His sake. But why did it have to be so horrible? What good did that do Him? What good did that do anyone? We were only children when He took her from us.”

  She dropped deeper into her pain, sitting with it openly, instead of coming at it obliquely, as she usually did, allowing herself to feel it only through other people’s vulnerabilities and suffering, being angry for their sake, rather than her own. She nearly spit out the words, “We were abandoned. God left us with nothing, nobody.”

  At the word “nobody,” Junayd looked at Mustafa with concern and nodded slightly to him, asking for his understanding. Mustafa understood, but there was no need to ask. He had loved her since childhood. He wanted her still despite what she had done to her body, despite her sorrow and anger. He reached out and held her hand, wanting to say to her, Here is somebody. Here is somebody who loves you like no other.

  She felt his hand as it gently lay on top of hers and turned to look up at him, her eyes red, “I’m so sorry, Mustafa. Your mother became our mother. You became our brother. That is not nothing. You are not nobody. That was everything to Tein and I. It is everything, but still. What we’ve been through was just too much.”

  Abu Muhammad shifted uneasily and looked with concern at his shaykh. Junayd watched her closely. This daughter of their community had done almost everything that he required of his companions, withou
t him asking. She had turned away from the pleasures of this world, she prayed through the night, she recited her litanies every day, she fasted often and ate little when she did eat, she was scrupulous in every little thing, but she had done it all without love. Another seeker would have been ready to dissolve into the ocean of God’s oneness through all that prayer and fasting, having learned that nothing in this world, no pain, no pleasure lasts. Like the prophet Ibrahim watching the stars, deep into the night, sighing with love, as each star rose before him, saying, This must be my Lord, only to find that each also set in its turn. He declared as they fell, one by one, toward the horizon, I do not love the setters. This world is nothing if not a crusher of hearts and God calls the crushed to Him. So here she was, spurred to this moment, by a girl who begged for her help and a boy who died.

  The shaykh’s face became grave, his voice was still gentle on the surface, but the tone underneath had become more intense, its frequency pushing her, just so, to shift her from where she was stuck, “Zaytuna. You are no longer a child. It’s been seventeen years and still you will not accept that everything other than God dies. Everything perishes but His Face. Not just people die. Not just the creatures of this world die. Even pain must die. I will say it again. Listen to me. Only love lives. Love lives forever because all love, wherever we find it, its source is God, The Lover’s love. You know this. Your mother’s love was an open stream from God to you. You lost the woman. You have not lost the love that came to you through her.”

  She felt him push, but reached down within herself and fought, throwing his own words back at him, “You just said it. It was God’s love, not hers. What good is God’s love to me? It was her love I wanted. I only wanted a mother like other children had. She never scolded me or fretted over me. When I did wrong she counselled me to turn away from my lower soul. When I was sick she gave me up to God’s will. She never prayed that I live. Yes, everything perishes but His Face, so it was nothing to her if I died. All I have from my mother is pain and you want me to let that go.”