Words have a way. Life. Perhaps more complete than people's lives. Your destiny. Time gives them meaning. The book in which the words that I will quote are recorded was written from 2001 to 2004. That was not long ago. But when they were written down, they could be read as encouragement for hope. As a sign, that the worst potential of the current reality does not have to happen. As an invitation to the awakening of shame. Today, through no fault of their own and no fault of the author, they are read as a future obituary of hope in a shameless world.
"It's really strange how the fate of the Jews, in the last five hundred years, was so often connected with ours. When we get angry, they get angry too. When we flourish, they flourish. Where there are them and we are not, they fail to defend themselves, so they are slaughtered like sheep. It is the same story here in Sicily, in Al Andalus, in Al Quds, Baghdad, Cairo and Damascus.”
(Sultan in Palermo, a novel from the Islamic Quintet Tariq Ali. The action takes place in Sicily, on the eve of the pogrom of Sicilian Muslims and Jews in the first half of the thirteenth century.)
I don't really know why, the recording of the performance prompted me to publish this detail from the novel Gideon Levy, which falls in the late fall of 2024, sails through cyberspace like the flicker of a candle flame across endless oceans of darkness. The suffering of Gaza is enormous, beyond words and human tears, but the tragedy into which the Israeli government, with the support of the most powerful Western powers, and with the majority's indifference to Palestinian suffering, is leading the Jewish people, and the entire world, is even greater. That's basically what a man named Gideon, a journalist, who happens to be a Jew, a citizen of Israel, is telling a deaf, morally dull world.
My friend Miraš Martinović, feverishly seeking salvation for children from the hell of Gaza, turned to the biggest address. The last one. God, personally. Reprehensible. The poet is Miraš, it can be for him. It is impossible for you not to see/ …To not do/… Show the power /… What are you waiting for/ Why are you silent/…/Show that you are God...
Words absorb time. They are waiting for an opportunity. Meanings shine. Like a stone heat and hay smells. "Three months after the fall of Granada, the king's messengers came to the seat of the city to announce the edict of Ferdinand and Isabella, which ordered 'a complete severance of all relations between Christians and Jews.' From now on they must choose between baptism and exile. If they decide on the second solution, they have four months to sell off their property, furniture and real estate, but they cannot take gold and silver with them."
Leon Afrikanac, novel Amina Malouf. The action takes place from 1448 to 1527. Pogrom of Muslims and Jews after the fall of Granada to the Spanish kings.
That's how it is in the novel. In novels. Reality? She is, they say, more fantastic. In reality, the Jews and Muslims who remained in fallen Andalus, those deceived by hope, those who had neither the wealth nor the strength to leave, were choosing between conversion and death. Not always either. If the victors, the inquisitors, were suspicious of this conversion, they followed, for God's sake, the dagger and the pyre, as a guarantee that no mistake would be made in spreading heresy.
A word, forgotten. That history of Europe - centuries of joint rise and suffering of European Muslims and European Jews. The end of the fifteenth century. End of Al Andalus. "In the middle of the tenth century, the richest country in the known world... Spaniards - Jews, Christians and Mulads... occupied a more important place in society than Muslims by birth." Andre Klot. Muslim Spain. It's not a novel. Earth, Ibn Arebija, Ibn Rushd (Averoesa), Moses Maimonides. Networked with schools. From all over the world, those eager for knowledge arrive at its universities. One of the future popes also studied in Al Andalus. Andre Clot: "The library, located in Cordoba's Alcazar, included - as stated - 400.000 volumes. Containing all religious and profane editions that could be found at that time... Entire delegations were sent abroad with one goal: to buy books without asking the price.” The enormous spiritual treasure of Al Andalus was given over to fury and fire. What has passed has opened the windows to the renaissance.
They say: the Renaissance, the end of the Dark Ages. Do the dark human ages have an end? Or maybe it's all just a pause in the play between two acts of a tragedy, in which human blood flows, really flows, and the actors pierced by the sword do not revive. Intermezzo. A dream within a dream.
Large Rumi and the Great Dante Alighieri are contemporaries. Rumi was born and died in the thirteenth century. Dante born in the second half of the thirteenth, died in the first half of the fourteenth. Dante placed the Prophet of Islam in the eighth circle of hell, the ninth ravine:
...And everything you see, the whole company
Because schism and scandal shine above,
that's why everything is cut like that.
Jelaluddin Rumi Jesus, the Savior, nestle in the ocean of your heart. Whose is it? middle Ages, splashing with muddy waves today? The one where Rumi visited synagogues, churches and mosques, and there he only saw one altar. Or the dark ages in which we are each other's hell. Ninth round.
A river flows through my veins. I measure her water level with a bevel. Staring at the river, I startled like Rumi's elephant, startled by the reflection of its image in the water. Sometimes, just sometimes, the face of a narcissus emerges from the depths of the blue.
There is no greater or more mysterious rainforest than this one trapped in my body. I wander. Winds, rains, storms beat me, sometimes a ray of sunshine illuminates my signposts. I stumble and fall. I can't find a way, I can't give up. I'm traveling. Only Mevlana whispered - it's not the road, it's the passenger. It is one thing to sail the seas, another to sink into the sea.
God doesn't need fans. There is no faith without doubt. There is no hope without fear. Neither words, nor thoughts, which penetrate the secret of the human heart, without pain. I read Tarik's and Amin's novels about ancient pogroms, and Miraš's poem, and listened to Gideon's sermon. I rummage through my meager mind. They say: God is all-merciful, merciful and watches over the fate of the worlds. And what if the all-merciful, compassionate, who watches over the worlds, is not just so all-powerful when it comes to human affairs? If he needs a man to help a man? If the power of human pain hides its strength?
Only in man are Lightness and Darkness intertwined. Only human strength is in vulnerability. His immortality in mortality. Only he can love and hate. In the same day, in the same moment. Only he was given that burden, good and bad. Only he, the man, is tempted. Not God, not an angel, not a devil, not a beast. He has no joy without the bitterness of hellebore.
That's what he said Zarathustra, not that one Nietzsche's, but an Iranian prophet, five/six centuries before the birth of Christ: The existence of evil is a prerequisite for human freedom. Quite possibly, there are more versatile explanations for the impermanence of evil in this world. This is the most challenging. This sets limits. Not submitting to evil is all we can do. All we have to do.
Gideon Levy says: "There have been many brutal occupations in history. There have also been many long-term occupations, although the Israeli one has a pretty good record. But there has never been an occupation in which the occupier presents itself as a victim. Not just as a victim, but by far the only victim.” Hearty, noble. Only, he's not quite right Levy. Model of the Israeli authorities occupier victim it is comprehensive and deadly effective, but it is not unique. The occupier is the victim is more the rule than the exception in the history of the human race. Our nineties are a valuable resource for analysis. Those bare-armed tanks covered in flowers, behind which remains the debris of cities covered with human bodies. On behalf of weaker. Those years of ours could have been a warning to the world, but they weren't. That overwhelming omnipotence occupier of the victim.
Dusk of the West. Nothing new in the East. The dawn is dim. Gaza children are dying. This is what happened yesterday, what will happen tomorrow. What we feel when Gideon's words and Miraš's song echo, may be the echo of the divine voice in us, which wakes us up from a dead sleep. As pain and as defiance. As a warning: whoever kills an innocent man has killed himself. Only, when that flicker of light in the dark night, when human cries and screams do not wake us up, it is a sign that we are the apprentices of the creators of hell. Around us and in us. Left behind. Yourself. Children of a distant god, in the heavens, exiled from the human heart. Children of counterfeit gods.
Words, a sigh of silence. "A fruit tree never grows on a tree. The tree does not tremble, the tips of the branches tremble... It is pain that guides a man in everything he does." Again, for the first time, I am reading Rumi. I breathe in the air with all my strength, I dive, although I know that I will not reach the depths of the ocean. I fall asleep before dawn. In my dream, I feel the sound of the ocean: - Don't give up - he whispers. - Oceans are in a drop of water.
I need a drop of rain or someone's tear so that I don't faint from thirst like a hermit. I'm whispering too. Show the power /… What are you waiting for/ Why are you silent/../Show that you are a Man. I hear Miraš's voice. Before the obituary of hope.
Bonus video:
