"The Young Man Meets the Old Hermit," by an unknown artist, Moraqqa’ 1638, Golestan Palace, from an exhibition of masterpieces of Persian painting at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, spring 2005
After lunch we went back to his room. It hadn’t been a good day so far; his legs ached; he’d pushed the two halves of the ham-and-cheese croissant around on his plate, dismissed the French onion soup as “no good,” and finally eaten a bowl of cottage cheese with picked beets and onions on top. Back in his own chair in his own room, he sighed with relief. I fished around for a subject that would engage him. “Did you ever read Persian poetry when you were a student in Syria?” I asked.
He said no, that they had only read Arabic poetry. “I’ve tried to read Persian, and I can make out a few words but it’s quite different from Arabic,” he said. “They’ve borrowed a lot of Arabic words, and we have some of their words too. All these languages borrowed from each other; it was inevitable because of the trade and travel.”
I told him about an article I’d read recently, someone in Qatar was complaining that the students now all spoke in dialect and none of them were learning classical Arabic because it was never spoken in the home; the journalist asked where the homes were where classical Arabic had been spoken for decades – this was nothing new, he said. My father-in-law brightened. “That’s my next project!” he said. “Of course, after we raise a million dollars for my scholarship fund. I want to endow a department at AUB" (American University at Beirut - he is a graduate and used to teach there) "that will be devoted to the study of classical Arabic language and literature. Imagine! All the focus now is on studying the west. They’re turning out little Americans. Arabs should be studying their own culture and this long wonderful tradition. But maybe no one is interested. And we have a long way to go on the million dollars.”
“How are you coming on your poem?” I asked. For the past year or so, he's been writing a poem in Arabic that he says encapsulates everything he's learned about the heart of religion. I don't think he's written anything down for months, and what he recited to us before wasn't long - but it is epic in his mind and in concept.
“I have most of it written down in Arabic, but not in English,” he said. “I need two weeks of uninterrupted time, but I never get it. People come and bother me. I’ve told you about my project that it came out of, haven’t I? About the twelve people I studied, people who have had ‘epiphanies?’ I wanted to know what they had in common, what they had discovered in common.”
“Tell me again who the twelve were.”
“Let’s see…” He shut his eyes. “Abraham. Moses. Isaiah – the second one, the one who wrote ‘beat your swords..”
“… into ploughshares.”
“Yes. That Isaiah. Let’s see…Mohammad. Al-Hallaj – you know him, he’s the Muslim philosopher who was executed because he ran out into the street crying “I am God!” – they didn’t like that!’ I love him, I've spent a lot of time with Al-Hallaj…St. Francis of Assisi. How many is that?”
“Six. If we're going chronologically I think you forgot Jesus…?”
“Of course. Jesus. Paul. And I think I put the Buddha in there too, for some reason.”
“We’re still missing three.”
“Hmm. Who isn’t there?” he repeated the list, counting them off on his fingers and looking puzzled. “Oh!” he said, brightening up suddenly. “Of course – how stupid! I forgot the Greeks: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.” He looked relieved.
“Great,” I said. “That’s your twelve.”
“So these were what I call ‘the originators of religion’ and most of them went to the desert or some such place to meditate on the core of existence and that’s where they got their epiphanies. In Arabic we call it al-din al-hanif: literally, ‘the religion of the faucet, of the tap.’ My father would say, ‘go fetch a glass of water from the hanif’ – the faucet in the courtyard. The hanifa are a sect of Islam – it means “straight from the stream.” That’s what these men were looking for: the pure thing, straight from the source."*
“So what did you discover they had in common?”
“It all has to do with wrapping yourself in love. And from that, seeking self-esteem, justice, truth, goodness, beauty and excellence. This is all there is. Then, of course, the priests come and make it into a system! I call it ‘churchianity!’ Because I am always looking for mischievous things, I find them!”
He sat back and laughed, shaking his big head at priests and the people who follow them.
"You see,"he continued, "the most important verse in the Bible is 'God is Love.' There are so many words in Arabic to express ‘love.’ Do you know there are over a thousand words for camel? A lot of words for ‘sword.’ But I have no time anymore to pursue these things…
In Arabic we say, “When I love, I am no more.” It means to be lost in love, in the sense of ‘being’-- for one’s self to be annihilated. The verb is waliha – to be non-existent. ‘Ana walhad’ – ‘I’m totally lost.’ That’s what we say when someone is in love. That’s what love is. That’s what they were all getting at."
* My research tells me that hanif, in Arabic scholarship, was used to refer to the "original religion" - the original monotheists, of whom Abraham is the archetype. This pure monotheistic religion is considered by Muslims to have been corrupted in Judaism and Christianity; the Qu'ran states that Islam follows "..the religion of Ibrahim, the hanif, the Muslim.." As a capitalized word, it is a proper name that means "true believer."
--
We left a little while after that. In the evening, after we’d gone to bed, the phone rang. My sister-in-law said that she was with her father at the hospital; he’d been taken there at 10:00 pm after suffering chest pain that his “little white pills” wouldn’t relieve. His blood pressure had also been very high. They were in the emergency department and she expected him to be admitted. Fortunately, we were in Vermont, so we got dressed and went over. We stayed with him until 1:30 am, when he had been moved upstairs to intermediate cardiac care, and was settled in a room. That was Wednesday night. They've had him on a nitrogycerin drip and are changing some of his medications. He seems to be stable now, and has been in excellent spirits throughout. At his insistence, we’ve returned to Montreal; we expect him to be released tomorrow, and I’ll tell you more about the hospital stay in the next post.
He still sounds remarkably lucid! I hope he finishes his project.
Posted by: Dave | March 23, 2007 at 07:04 PM
Beth, what a wonderful conversation. Thank you for recording it. Best wishes for your father-in-law's recovery...
Posted by: Pica | March 24, 2007 at 09:36 AM
Whew -- my heart stopped when I got to that last paragraph in italic. I'm glad it was just a scare. I really like that guy.
By the way, there's a typo in the Arabic: "al-dil" should be "al-din."
Posted by: language hat | March 25, 2007 at 08:39 AM
Thanks for your concern...he's home now and doing OK. (LH - I'll fix the typo, thank you for pointing it out.)
Posted by: beth | March 25, 2007 at 03:34 PM
There's so much that's attractive in this conversation, Beth. A lot of that is in your telling. Wonderful work. I'm happy to see "the Fig and the Orchid" get its own category. It's a lovely project so far.
But, also, I was drawn to the list-making. For me, lists are a way of taking delight in the world. It's the soul saying to itself, "let me count the ways."
And it makes me think now, who are my hanifa in the ancient world? Heraclitus, Diogenes, Epictetus, Qohelet, Marcus Aurelius, Yeshua, Socrates, Gautama, Homer, Rumi. They are such a comfort. They irritate in all the right ways.
But, more than these, the many nameless ones, who contributed to traditions: the writers of the Upanisads, the line of pre-Homeric bards, the originators of the Ifa corpus, the mystical Rabbis...
Posted by: Teju | March 26, 2007 at 12:17 AM