The Colonial Conquest: The Confines of the Shadow Volume I

by Alessandro Spina

  Sheikh Hassan sat on his mat. He opened the wooden chest and pulled out a tome. The day is a bizarre dream when irrelevant images preoccupy our attentions and force us to take an active part in events, sometimes proving painful. Whenever one’s eyes open on a book, it makes those confused images vanish, and reality comes back under the jurisdiction of the mind.

  Harun al-Rashid, the Caliph of Baghdad and undisputed master of the colourful kingdoms of fables, had a sister he was tenderly devoted to whose name was Abbassa. Jafar, his vizier, was the other being who was close to his heart. Our desires have deep roots: Harun bound his sister and friend in matrimony, but forbade them to consummate it. Having fallen in love, Abbassa broke the rule by copulating with her lawful consort. The story goes that Jafar was drunk at the time.

  What had prompted Sheikh Hassan to seek this grim vignette in the pages of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah? Ibn Khaldun used the tale as an example of historical improbability. Abbassa’s adventure wasn’t in keeping with her religious faith, or her social origins and rank. The princess was the daughter of Muhammad ibn Mansur al-Mahdi, son of Abu Ja’far al-Mansur, son of Muhammad al-Sayyad. Rectitude of faith and a strict adherence to customs were in her heritage. She had no knowledge of the lush pastures of sin! Jafar was a freed slave. How could Abbassa possibly marry a slave’s son? How could Harun al-Rashid, the Leader of the Faithful, allow it, or indeed order his favourite sister to marry a man of such inferior rank? Who could possibly hope to come between those siblings?

  A historian is both a moralist and an apologist. The hero, who is an example, cannot be discouraged by accounts of his weaknesses and mistakes. Ibn Khaldun vents his wrath whenever he encounters asinine storytellers who unhesitatingly depicted Harun al-Rashid as a drunk. A young thug wanders the streets of the capital, making the fateful decision to visit unknown houses, where he squanders both himself and his wealth on love intrigues: was this really the Leader of the Faithful? Ibn Khaldun restores the immaculate purity of he who leads by example to his hero. But what exactly was he defending? The towering figure in the popular imagination – which was excessive and disrespectful – or an unrealistic portrayal of the purity, steadfastness and coherence of a man descended from the noblest lineage who was destined for the highest office? Abbassa may well have loved that vizier, if the latter, as history tells us, was the favourite of her brother, the Caliph. The princess’s favour was by no means less precious than the King’s. Both these blessings rained down on the same head, thus their two weaknesses justified themselves reciprocally. By betraying her brother, Abbassa reaffirmed his decision. By coming together, the Caliph’s darlings had excluded him – and Harun al-Rashid hated it as though he’d been imprisoned!

  ‘And then historians must beware of another risk: that of ignoring the changes in the conditions and customs of nations and races owed to the passing of time … their customs and beliefs do not retain their usual shape, but always metamorphose with the passing of time and change from one state to another.’8

  ‘God will inherit the world and everything it houses,’ Sheikh Hassan said out loud. He’d seen very little of the world outside that Cyrenaican valley where he’d been born and still lived. But what an education he’d had, even in that remote place! On the hilltops one could still see the ruins of Roman fortifications, and children from the area could still find coins bearing the effigies of lords who had been dead for centuries. A marabout – an object of veneration for the tribe led by the Sheikh – could be seen resting between the stones of an old fort. What the Muqaddimah demonstrated in its endless flow, the valley could show just as well in a single image: various civilisations had come and gone, leaving only a few dramatic ruins behind. Ibn Khaldun writes that historians must compare the present and the past, and analyse the similarities and differences between them. Similar cycles repeat themselves, as though impulses, like human beings, followed a trajectory that adhered to set rules. Thus whoever follows this river will be captivated by its course, musing over its variations while ceasing to desire a destination: in the end, the journey becomes an intellectual exercise.

  Hassan had studied at the Sanussi university in Jaghbub, the most celebrated institution in North Africa after Cairo’s al-Azhar. He’d been a restless youth. Employing both severity and compassion, a venerated teacher had taken him under his wing: the university was strictly orthodox, and Hassan’s restlessness had easily led him into the fatal arms of dissident factions. Heresy is a diabolical dream. The young Hassan displayed a natural curiosity nevertheless well disposed to obedience. He was vivacious, but conciliatory, as well as strong, if not overly eager for clashes and disagreements. His master’s severity proved an unbreakable dam; after all, the teacher had spent his entire life in sincere and serene adhesion to orthodoxy. The university’s celebrated library, which housed eight thousand volumes, opened up infinite paths: the restrictions placed on Hassan only closed off a few of them, the most impractical.

  For the following twenty years, Sheikh Hassan’s life had been devoid of any remarkable incidents. After his studies in Jaghbub, he returned to his fields and led a tranquil existence. Occasionally an emissary from Jaghbub – or somewhere further away – would come bearing a book, his only link to the wider world.

  ‘History,’ Ibn Khaldun wrote, ‘is a science: it deals with the principles of politics, the nature of things, and the differences between nations, places and historical epochs, ways of life, customs, sects and schools.’ The ruins of the great ancient monuments, numerous examples of which could be seen even in Cyrenaica, were testament to that diversity as it unfolded over the course of time – a simultaneously fertile and corrupting force.

  Sheikh Hassan travelled little in his life, and usually only from one mountain village to another. He saw the ruins of Cyrene, the celebrated ancient city, as well as Benghazi, the city on the coast which few loved, and where he’d found himself a wife. But he read every adventurer’s account he could get his hands on. His curiosity knew no bounds. He was obsessed by the encounter with the other, which paved the way to knowledge.

  Who were those conquerors who’d washed ashore on his lands in October 1911? What had led them there? Which laws did they obey? What were they looking for? He abhorred those people who sowed death and violence wherever they went, but their presence was a frame of reference. Sheikh Hassan had never seen one of them up close: he hadn’t been to Benghazi since the city had fallen into their hands, but he was hungry for any news about them, asking anyone who crossed his path many insistent questions in order to discover details others considered insignificant.

  Subject to set rules, man’s life is made insecure by the multiplicity of options before him. ‘Man,’ Ibn Khaldun declared, ‘is a creature of habit.’ In other words, he’s subject to contingent forces. Thus, how else could one find any release if not by reading, which was a metaphor for travel and the intellectual knowledge forged by diversity? Without this crucial element, historical contingencies could be mistaken for necessity and metaphysical order. But where diversity is observed so closely that it affirms its legitimacy, what remains of the truth behind the rules that were followed? Doesn’t this diminish laws by codifying them into habit? If people don’t hang on to their conventions over time, it’s equally true that those very conventions have multiple natures. If change is tolerated purely because it would be impossible not to do so, this means that everything different or foreign is also legitimate. Travellers’ accounts challenge the placid certainties that are the foundations of habit and the homogeneous fabric of the societies to which we belong; by being a testament to multiplicity, they reconcile themselves into a metaphor for how relative laws really are.

  The encounter with the other, a man shaped by a different past. Every man’s head lies under the same sky. Is war the only possible encounter? And yet travellers and philosophers have crossed foreign lands without swords in their hands, gripping instead the soft reins of a peaceful beast. They hadn’t destroyed, but merely observed – a
nd their booty wasn’t gold or silver, but words. The other inspired a passionate nostalgia and deep-seated curiosity in these men. How did they bear their own foreignness? What force – what blindness – kept them going? Standing motionless in his room, Sheikh Hassan followed those interminable peregrinations in his books. He wasn’t tormented by duplicity, the protector of laws and travellers. However, it was certainly true that his passion for reading had given rise to rumours in the village that he was guilty of witchcraft. But these were fables that only the poor believed. To read was to open a window onto the world. Bent over his books by a candle that fought against the blindness of the night, Sheikh Hassan could see cities and their inhabitants, empires rising up and then crumbling, as well as tragic individuals who burst onto the scene only to perish in miserable ways. Ibn Khaldun tells us that certain peculiar people believe that Iram of the Pillars is ‘invisible except to soothsayers and magicians.’ A reader is both a magician and a soothsayer. While the poor people living in tents or shanties in the valley slept, Sheikh Hassan was locked in his room like a wizard, conjuring up images of richer cities than Iram of the Pillars, of fabulous civilisations governed by bizarre laws, and of individuals who’d made the world hold its breath, if only for an hour.

  A soothsayer, a magician …

  Being ironic, Sheikh Hassan smiled at these accusations. Ibn Khaldun writes: ‘If prophets are inspired by God’s mercy, which is intrinsically divine, soothsayers’ souls can employ diabolical powers to commune with the invisible world.’ Is reading a diabolical power? Lost in a land where reading was the privilege of few, Sheikh Hassan never stopped pondering its meaning. Suddenly, a multitude of roads appears, and man is subtracted from the homogeneous environment where he’s lived and been educated, and is presented with the infinite roads others throughout history have walked. Literature is a transaction with the outsider, or he who obeys different rules. Were these outsiders really demons? Whom did they obey? Does every traveller’s identity split in two?

  Sheikh Hassan’s nature was conciliatory, and when cornered, he didn’t slip into solitary dialogues with the invisible to avoid being a hypocrite. Even irony – the ability to intentionally de-dramatise a question – is hypocritical. He would often say that the cheerful reports travellers sent from infidel lands were among the gems of Arabic literature and science; he was guided by a sense of innocent curiosity, and curiosity is a benign familiar. Reading, like dreaming, is a vision of remote and absurdly interwoven things. One need only invoke God’s hallowed name to banish such confused images.

  If individuals inevitably drift back to the superfluous – Hassan hadn’t limited his education to the essential, or rather to knowledge of the sacred book, but had read many others besides – the superfluous can sometimes spill into the diabolical. The promise of Salvation is a great doctrine, but impassioned research is an enchanted voyage at the mercy of unknown powers. Ibn Khaldun wrote: ‘The secret of Bedouin society lies in its simplicity and its moderation and reserve.’ Did literature violate these virtues? Ibn Khaldun tells us everything ‘decays, crushed by the superfluous.’

  ‘When sophistication reaches its apex, it enslaves us to our desires. Suffering from a surfeit of beauty, the human soul is blinded by a multiplicity of colours that obscures its vision of this world, or the next.’

  Magic is the attempt to recover worlds shunned by civilisation. Is literature a form of magic? Nature transformed into the divine. What does that mean? Doesn’t that imply a return to polytheism? Apostasy?

  ‘What do you need all those books for?’ a stern and proudly illiterate uncle once asked him after peering disdainfully into the chest where Sheikh Hassan kept his tomes.

  He edged the candle closer and turned the page. Anyone who reads is looking for a non-existent page where he can stop. The superfluous rejects any sense of measure, and therefore grows unabated, independently of the person’s willpower. The nocturnal abandon of the valley below made everything in sight seem both near and distant, both passionately desirable and useless. The nomad who gets lost in the city renounces all his blood ties, loses himself in that crowd and vanishes: to read is to isolate oneself, rejecting all ties so as to plunge into the simple, peaceful knowledge of our ancestors. It is an all-devouring impulse to learn that knows no limits: one page only leads to another. For its loyal inhabitants, the valley is their homeland, a self-sufficient miniature of the world. The yearning for knowledge defies the limits wrought over time immemorial by one’s forefathers: a rejection of the image of the world they preserved. Is one’s well-being confined by one’s horizons?

  The accusations of sorcery weren’t only false, they were also laughable, and Sheikh Hassan didn’t hesitate to refer to them ironically when in public. But where was that yearning for knowledge leading him? Ibn Khaldun writes: ‘ … a man’s intelligence and competence tell us that he thinks too much, just like stupidity is an excess of apathy. As far as human faculties are concerned, any extremes are to be avoided, and one must strike the right balance. And this can only happen through generosity – which is preferable to prodigality – or through courage, instead of temerity or cowardice. And this applies to all other human qualities. Thus, people who are too intelligent are suspected of possessing a democratic soul. These people are then often called demons, or suspected of being possessed. God creates what He wills.’

  ‘God creates what He wills,’ Sheikh Hassan obediently repeated, shutting the book. And he added: ‘God gives the kingship to whom He will.’

  Ibn Khaldun says that ‘serving a master is not a natural way of earning one’s living.’ Anyone who goes to town these days goes to serve a master. The inhabitants of Benghazi weren’t indigenous to the area: they had fled from the island of Crete, or immigrated from Misrata or Djerba, or were descended from Turkish officials or Janissaries. They had simply adapted to the virtues of whichever new master ruled the city while focusing on their individual journeys to wealth, power, or mere survival.

  The Italian Expeditionary Force had believed conquering Benghazi would mean they would control the rest of the country, but Benghazi meant nothing to the tribes, who merely saw it as a useful convenience, or a deadly bridge. The city had always been ruled by foreigners: by Tripoli during the time of the Qaramanli family, by Istanbul, and now by Rome. General Caneva’s Expeditionary Force had replaced the Turkish garrison, but after many years and much bloodshed, most of the mountainous areas and distant oases had retained their freedom. The patterns that Ibn Khaldun thought history followed – the foundation of a city, its flowering, and its subsequent decay – didn’t apply to the natives of Cyrenaica, but to the colonists, regardless of whether they were ancient Greeks or newly-arrived Italians. As per the Italian government’s instructions Benghazi, the capital, was being redesigned and expanded. There would inevitably come a day when the conquerors would reverse that process: the architects of its flowering would become the architects of its decay and decadence.

  Going to Benghazi made Sheikh Hassan feel as though he’d just woken up: an intolerable restriction after a full night of reading, dreams, and rest. Whenever he was in the city, Sheikh Hassan longed for the countryside’s limitless expanse.

  Families in Benghazi wouldn’t willingly marry their daughters into families from the countryside because they respected different customs and were very reluctant to embrace the ‘civilisation’ that made people in the city feel so proud. To them, civilisation meant the imitation of whoever ruled the city. Sheikh Hassan had much respect for his forefathers’ customs and displayed a great intellectual curiosity for anything that was different, but he loathed imitation, which was the antithesis of reading. He had married a woman from the city who’d been promised to him ever since she’d been a girl: an exception made for the good of the family’s prestige.

  Sheikh Hassan didn’t love his wife, who was finicky and always prepared to make unfavourable comparisons between the sophisticated urbanites and the ill-bred mountain people: but in those parts a man
’s authority was unconditional, and his wife’s chatter came and went like a mosquito’s monotone buzz. Ibn Khaldun praised the Bedouin way of life because it safeguarded them from the ‘mediocrity of the cities.’

  Zazia hated Hassan’s books. Since she was illiterate, she had no idea what they contained. Those jinns isolated her husband from the rest of the world. She would vent her wrath on the people who lived in the house and constantly asserted her rights. Nobody paid her much attention because these were simply an unhappy woman’s vain, venomous wailings, and only the master’s wrath was omnipotent.

  Zazia had given Hassan a son who was tough, scornful and ignorant.

  Sheikh Hassan was always shadowed by Anwar, a servant who could either no longer remember why he’d arrived, or else kept his reasons secret. That man didn’t belong to anyone. Sheikh Hassan had taken him on out of compassion, curious about that peculiar creature. Sheikh Hassan had given the man two wives. The first had abandoned him and gone to live in the city, while the second lived in Sheikh Hassan’s house with her son Rafiq and Ghazala, Anwar’s daughter from his first marriage.

  The way that Anwar turned reality on its head when he interpreted it revealed the many defects, strange possibilities and senses of identity inherent in that reality; he had a genius for dissecting habits, and he was a precious lantern that lit the path through the deceptive uniformity of everyday life.

  The abominable sin recalls the beginning of time, the dawn of humanity, or heralds its end, the twilight of the fatal night. Once time comes to a grinding halt brother and sister, a union that history turned into a taboo, will come together again: the divine and the natural, two worlds that were intertwined for centuries, will break asunder.