As the first death anniversary of Edward Said dawns,
Hamid Dabashi*, a fellow professor
at Columbia, recounts his last visit to Palestine, where he collected a fistful
of Jerusalemite dust, reclaiming his late friend's birthplace
Ah, make the
most of what we yet may spend,
Before we too into the
Dust descend;
Dust into Dust,
and under Dust to lie
Omar Khayyam
Edward W Said, for
years a cherished friend and for a lifetime a towering comrade, died in New
York at 6:45 am on Thursday 25 September 2003. After a funeral service at
Riverside Church on Monday 29 September 2003, he was cremated and his ashes
taken to Lebanon by his widow, Mariam Said, and buried at the Quaker Friends
cemetery in Brumana village in the Metn region of Mount Lebanon. Edward Said
was born in Jerusalem on Friday 1 November 1935 before the colonial occupation
of his homeland.
ON MONDAY 23 February
2004, I flew to Palestine and landed at Ben Gurion checkpoint. I went to
Palestine as part of a collective to take an expanded version of our
Palestinian film festival, "Dreams of a Nation" which we had
initially organized in New York in January 2003, to four Palestinian cities --
Jerusalem, Ramallah Nazareth, and Gaza City. Our inaugural festival at Columbia
University was a spectacular success. We had screened more than fifty feature,
short, and documentary films, all made by Palestinian filmmakers in or out of
their homeland. Edward Said had delivered the opening address of our festival
at a packed auditorium in the Lerner Hall at Columbia University, to an
audience that had come from all around the city, the state, the country -- some
as far as from Canada. Soon after, the festival assumed a life of its own, and
began to travel around the US, then to Europe and North Africa and other parts
of the Arab world. Our small collective, however, thought it necessary we
should take it to Palestine. A Palestinian cultural organization, Yabous, based
in East Jerusalem, agreed to host our festival. I flew from Copenhagen, where I
was invited by the Danish Cinematheque for a retrospective based on my book on
Iranian cinema, via Zurich, and landed in Ben Gurion checkpoint.
My Palestinian friends
could not pick me up from the checkpoint because I landed at 1:00 am in the
morning and they were all locked up inside occupied Ramallah. (In Tulkaram, now
almost entirely encircled by a formidable wall, the Israeli army locks up
Palestinians at about 6 pm). But they had arranged for a Palestinian cab driver
to come from East Jerusalem to pick me up and take me to my hotel. The
Christmas Hotel, where I was going to stay, is located just off Salah al-Din
Street in East Jerusalem, about an hour drive from Ben Gurion checkpoint.
It took me about two
hours to clear through the Ben Gurion security. When I exited the final
interrogation hall, a young Palestinian cab driver was waiting for me, holding
a piece of paper with my name on it. I approached him. We had a quick eye
contact and he smiled: "Professor Dabashi?" I nodded. "Ahlan
wa sahlan," he said and I smiled -- "shokran habibi."
We got into his cab and passed through yet another set of security stations
patrolled by teenagers in military uniforms, with very long machine guns
hanging from their necks. We finally entered a highway leading east towards
Jerusalem. The highway was completely deserted. The surrounding landscape was
wrapped in a black shawl, marked on its edges by dimly lit lampposts bending forward
and turning their backs to the quiet darkness. On our way, when Ayman
discovered that I am a Muslim, he showed me the spot where the highway had run
through the mausoleum of one of the companions of our Prophet, Muhammad,
bulldozed and flattened for the concrete asphalt. He also showed me an
apartment building that was built on the site of Deir Yassin -- a Palestinian
village whose inhabitants were massacred on Friday, 9 April 1948 by the
commandos of the Irgun, headed by Menachem Begin, who later became the prime
minister of Israel. We were mostly silent. It was dark -- the highway lampposts
now looked lost in a haze, shot like an oddly shaped bamboo shoot, out of
place, bored, boorish, lighting as if nothing other than their own solitary
stands, frightful of their own shadows. But the air was crisp, the night was
cool, and the sound of asphalt under the wheel of Ayman's car was reassuring. "Min
wain anta?" I said I was Iranian.
We entered Jerusalem
about 5:00 am, as the sun was rising on the Dome of the Rock, gracing the blue
sky watching over the old city. I asked Ayman to stop for a few minutes. I
exited his cab. I looked at Qobbbat al-Sakhrah. I had not prayed since I
was eleven years old. The golden dome was marking the azurite cobalt of the
expansive sky. Defiant. The entire universe was silent. There was a blueness in
the sky over the golden dome. There was a humming sound in the air. I saw a few
Hasidic Jews rushing to some unspecified destination. They seemed to be in a
hurry.
I returned to the cab
and Ayman drove me to the front door of the Christmas Hotel, off Salah al-Din
Street. The door to the hotel was locked, but as soon as I stood at its
threshold wondering what to do, a man appeared from inside the hotel, from the
depth of its darkness, opened the door and welcomed me in. I checked in and
asked for permission to sit at a computer in the lobby to check my email. I
sent a few emails to my friends and family, assuring them that I had landed
safely in Palestine and that all was well. "Landed in thy homeland,"
I wrote to Rasha Salti, a Palestinian friend in New York, "its countenance
valanced and yet still beautiful."
I took my backpack up
to the second floor to my room, a modest but impeccably clean cubicle. I washed
my face and brushed my teeth. I was too exited to rest. Insomniac. I came back
down to the lobby, where the same man who had opened the door for me appeared
again from the dark and asked if he could help me. I said I wondered if al-
Harm al-Sharif was near the hotel. He said yes and pointed towards the
direction on Salah Al-Din Street where I had to walk for a few blocks to get
there.
The streets were still
quiet. It was now almost 5 am. The shops were closed. I saw a few more Orthodox
Jews rushing towards a determined destination. Then I saw two teenage Israeli
soldiers with flashy sunglasses and two machineguns hanging from their necks.
Their sunglasses were not necessary. The sun was not yet up. The street lamps
were still lit. They looked tired. They paid no attention to me. They were busy
talking to each other. I do not understand Hebrew.
At a street corner, I
saw a bulletin board for public announcements. I noted a few prominent posters
of our festival hanging on that board -- "Ahlam Ummah: Mahrajan al-Film
al-Falastini." Annemarie Jacir, my principal partner in Dreams of a
Nation project, had been hard at work for months getting the festival moving in
collaboration with our host, Yabous. "Bravo 'aleyki, General
Jacir!" That's what we call her in our collective. She runs a very tight
ship. A couple of our posters were torn down from that bulletin board. I fixed
them.
From Salah al-Din
Street I reached a major thoroughfare encircling the main citadel on which
stood al-Haram al-Sharif. The early morning traffic was now getting
crowded. I crossed the main street and walked towards what I later learned was
called Bab al-Zahra. I did not know exactly where I was going. But I was
drawn through the gate and into the market.
At the mouth of the
market, there were three Israeli soldiers guarding the gate -- one white
soldier in a position of obvious authority and two black soldiers beholden to
him. I asked them, addressing no one in particular, just their constellation,
if that gate led to the Dome of the Rock. No one answered me -- as the gaze of
the two black soldiers gradually diverted from me and my question towards their
white superior. The white officer did not look at me and did not move his
upright and determined neck, holding his steadfast gaze away from my face and
pierced beyond my back towards an unspecified direction. He had no sunglasses
on -- but he looked as if he did. I waited for an answer, as did the two black
soldiers, now circulating my gaze from one face to another -- examining them
under the surface of my un-answered question. These soldiers were slightly
older than the ones I had seen at the airport and then near the hotel. They
were perhaps in their early twenties -- brandishing the same long machineguns
from their necks. They looked tired -- ready to go home and sleep. There was no
answer. I could not move away because I had asked a question, the question was
in the air, and I felt obliged to wait for even a hint, a suggestion, of an
answer so I could just leave. But no answer was coming my way. Nothing. The two
black soldiers threw a nervous look at me, and I at them -- the three of us
were now at the mercy of the white Israeli officer -- determined not to look at
or answer me. We were like three mesmerized pigeons now under the spell of a
cobra -- waiting for his move. He did not move. He would not move. This may
have taken no more than a few seconds, but it lasted an eternity -- time had
stood still, in a frozen frame: three frozen pigeons and one mighty cobra. The
cobra finally moved, or did he, and his lips may have moved, or so I wished. I
was not sure, but I took my chances, watched his lips, heard his voice -- said,
"thank you," to no one in particular, just at the constellation of
the two remaining pigeons and the cobra, and left.
The winding alley was
fully covered with closed shops; very few shopkeepers were around, setting up
their merchandise. The alleys were deserted, except for a few old men, walking
aimlessly. I went down the winding alleys, until I saw a sign of the Dome of
the Rock on an old arch. I followed it. I turned a few winding turns and then a
sharp left and I headed down towards what I later found out was called Bab
al-Usud, the Lions' Gate. At the bottom of the alley I saw a pack of
Israeli soldiers, men and women (boys and girls, really), in riot gear, with
long machineguns hanging from their neck. I did not look at them. They looked
at me. I pretended I knew where I was going. I did not. I was nervous. Scared.
At the bottom of the
hilly alley I saw an Israeli army station to my left, guarded by a teenage
soldier with a very long machinegun hanging from his neck. Immediately to my
right was the entrance to a graveyard. On a white board with blank ink this
graveyard was identified for having the mausoleum of two of the Prophet's
companions -- al-Sahabi al-Jalil Ibadah ibn al-Samit (d. 34 AH) and al-
Sahabi al-Jalil Shidad ibn Aws (d. 58 AH). I had a pen in my pocket and a
piece of paper. I took them out and wrote these names down. On the board they
were written in nasta'liq. On my paper, I wrote them down in naskh.
I entered the graveyard and began to whisper a Fatiha. A few steps into
the graveyard I ran into an old Palestinian. " Sabah al- Kheyr,"
I said; " Sabah al-Kheyr," he replied and smiled and asked me
if I were a Muslim. I said yes. " As-Salamu Aleikum ya Akhi,"
he said, " wa Aleikum Salam ya akhi," I said and he wondered
where I was from. From Iran I said, I am from Iran. He asked if I were a Shi'i.
I said yes. He wondered if this was my first trip to Jerusalem and if I wanted
to visit the sacred site of the two companions of our Prophet. I said yes it
was, and yes I wanted to.
The old Palestinian
Muslim led the way and I followed him. I could see a church down the hill to my
left and a tall wall to my right. Half way through the graveyard, my impromptu
guide started climbing the rise from the narrow walkway up towards the wall. I
followed him. At the foot of the wall we came across a modest gravesite. This
was the grave of al-Sahabi al-Jalil Ibadah ibn al-Samit, as identified
by a modest sign attached to an even more modest barrier constructed with metal
around the grave. I touched the barrier and recited a Fatiha under my
breath. The old Palestinian waited until I finished and then he walked away
further towards the other side of the graveside where the mausoleum of al-Sahabi
al-Jalil Shidad ibn Aws was located. We both stopped, and I said another Fatiha.
The morning weather was cool, calm, and sedentary. The air smelled of freshly
baked bread and dust and Za'atar and olive trees. The light of Jerusalem was
gray and the colour of Jerusalem was light brown--and the soil of Palestine was
ordinary.
The old Palestinian
and I descended the rise and jumped from the last row of graves down on the
narrow path. He asked me if I wanted to go to the al-Aqsa Mosque. I said yes.
He asked me if it was true that we Shi'is did not care for the Sahabah
of our Prophet. I said no. He asked me if I believed in the sanctity of the al-'Asharah
al-Mubashsharah, the ten most noble companions of the prophet to whom
Paradise was promised while they were still in this life. I said no, we Shi'is
did not believe in their sanctity or infallibility because they included the
first three caliphs, whom we believe usurped the right of our Amir
al-Mu'minin Ali, who was the rightful heir to our Prophet. " Shu
Ya'ni ?"-- He stopped abruptly and looked at me with a troubled
hesitation creeping under his serene sense of hospitality to a fellow Muslim.
He asked if I believed in the Khulafa' al-Rashidun, the four Rightly-
Guided caliphs who succeeded our Prophet. I asked if he knew where I could buy
good Palestinian za'atar. He smiled and said most definitely and that he
would take me to the best shop in Jerusalem for za'atar. I said, " shokran
jazilan, ya 'akhi !"
We exited the
graveyard, turned left and walked towards the first entrance into al-Haram
al-Sharif. A few Israeli soldiers were at the mouth of the long corridor
leading to the gate. One of them asked me where I was going. I said to the
al-Aqsa Mosque. He asked was I a Muslim. I said yes. He let me and the
Palestinian go. The Palestinian and I turned left, passed the Israeli soldiers,
and walked towards the end of the alley, where a huge blue gate was guarded by
yet another pack of Israeli soldiers. In front of us was now another older
Palestinian in a dark brown galabiyah, walking with a cane slowly
towards the gate. My Palestinian guide and I slowed down and followed him. He
was whispering something, as he passed through the first group of Israeli
soldiers. I could not quite hear him. I thought he was uttering some prayers.
But when we slowed down, I could hear him better. " Ya akhu ash-
sharmuta! " I heard him say, and I am quite sure I also heard a "
Ya hukkam al-'Arab! "
The three of us slowly
approached the big blue gate and the next pack of Israeli soldiers, who let the
two Palestinians through but stopped me. One of them, an older soldier in a
blue anti-riot gear, asked me where I was going. Before I said anything, my
Palestinian guide turned around and told him in Hebrew what I thought was
something like I was going to the al-Aqsa Mosque. The Israeli soldier
disregarded the Palestinian and continued to look at and talk to me in English.
The other two Palestinians entered through the gate and the gate closed --
leaving me and the Israeli soldiers behind. "Are you a Muslim?" he
asked. "Yes," I said. "Let me see your passport," he said.
I reached for my passport but suddenly realized that I had left it in the
pocket of my coat back in my room at the Christmas Hotel. I said I did not have
my passport with me but that he would not be able to tell from my passport that
I am a Muslim because I traveled with a US passport.
As this conversation
between the Israeli soldier and I was progressing, suddenly the huge blue door
to al-Haram al-Sharif opened and a tall and husky Palestinian came out,
turned to the Israeli solider and told him in English, "Let him in, he is
a Muslim." The Israeli soldier muttered something in Hebrew, to which the
Palestinian answered, again in English, "No, he is a Muslim, let him
in." The Israeli soldier turned away and left, and the Palestinian let me
enter the vestibule leading to the huge courtyard. He closed the door behind me
and said, "Are you a Muslim?" "Yes," I said. "Let me hear
you recite the Qur'an," he said, smiling. I panicked and mumbled. All I
could remember was the opening verses of al-Baqarah. " Alif.
Lam. Mim." I said, nervously, words barely audible even to myself,
" Dhalika al-kitabu la rayba fihi hudan li-'l- muttaqin . "
"That's too long," the Palestinian guard interrupted me. "Can
you recite the Fatiha ?" "Yes," I said, " Bism
Allah al-Rahman al-Rahim," I said less nervously, " al-hamdu
li-'lahi Rabb al-alamin, al-Rahman al-Rahim, Malik yaum al-din." He
listened reverently, whispering the verses with and after me under his breath,
just like a father looking over his son performing in public something
rehearsed before, nervous that he may go wrong, that he may forget a memorized
verse. But I made no mistake, until I finished the Fatiha chapter by
heart, " ghayr al-maghdhubi 'alayhim wa al-dhaliyn," as with
every trembling verse out of my mouth his wise and generous face opening up
with an expansive embrace, a glitter in his eyes confirming his intuition.
" Ahlan wa sahlan ya akhi ", he said as soon as I finished,
"Welcome to Palestine! You are not only a Muslim, you are also an Iranian
because you don't know how to pronounce qaf. It is qaf, habibi,
not ghaf --so it is Mustaqim, not Mustaghim." I
smiled back with embarrassment and tried to say Mustaqim as best as I
knew how. Then I turned around and saw that my old Palestinian guide from the
gravesite was watching over this whole proceeding approvingly, totally bemused
and exonerated by my claim, though a shade Shi'i, to our faith.
The courtyard of al-Haram
al-Sharif is vast, flat, and full of olive trees. Two other Palestinian
guards of the sacred site, with special green uniforms, appeared and asked me
where I was going. My Palestinian guide said that I was a Shi'i going to
al- Aqsa Mosque. These ones did not ask me to recite the Qur'an and let us go.
As I was talking to the guards I noticed that my Palestinian guide sat on the
edge of a border defining the boundaries of the olive groves and wrote down his
name, the name of his son and his cellular phone number for me to call him to
go and buy za'atar. I thanked him for it, and I followed him towards the
Dome of the Rock, which was now visible to our right on a raised platform
overlooking our approach.
It was a Tuesday
morning and the site around the Dome of the Dark was completely deserted. As we
approached it I noticed that its doors were closed. " Cho beyt
al-moqaddas darun por qobab," was the first thing that came to my
mind, a famous line of Sa'di in his Bustan, describing the Sufis,
"Just like the Dome of the Rock, their interiors fully sculpted,"
" Raha kardeh divar birun kharab," he had visited this site in
the Seventh Islamic century (Thirteenth on the Gregorian calendar),
"/While they have left their exterior to ruins." Apparently when
Sa'di had visited this site, the exterior of the Dome of the Rock was in a
state of disrepair. I approached the exterior wall of the Dome and gently
kissed its checkered blue and yellow ceramic tiles. My Palestinian guide looked
at me bewildered and said that what I did was not necessary. I thought it was.
I circumambulated the Dome, where we believe our Prophet ascended to the
Seventh Heaven, and then went down from the steps on the other side and walked
towards the al-Aqsa Mosque. Behind me was now the central site of the Islamic
cosmogonic imagination -- ahead of me the most famous mosque affiliated with it
-- and I felt I was home.
My Palestinian guide
explained to a guard sitting inside a cubicle at the door of the al-Aqsa mosque
that I was a Muslim, that I was a Shi'i, and that I was an Iranian and
wanted to enter the mosque. The guard smiled and welcomed me. My guide at this
point said he had to return to the market to attend to his business. I thanked
him and said goodbye. As he was leaving, I approached the mosque, took off my
shoes, placed them inside a small cubicle at the entrance, very much like those
I remembered from Qom and Mashhad of my childhood, and entered the mosque --
vast, spacious, welcoming, re- assuring, covered, wall to wall, by soothing layers
of carpets, a sudden, almost surreal, silence exuding from its spatial
confidence. I walked slowly towards a pillar at the left side of the mosque.
There were not that many people inside. Both men and women, without any marked
barrier or even distance between them, were either performing their ritual
prayers or reading from the Qur'an. This was markedly different from Iranian
mosques where men and women are not allowed in the same space. I went and sat
at the foot of a pillar, picked up a copy of the Qur'an, and began reading from
the first and the second chapter -- al-Fatiha and al- Baqarah --
trying to pronounce my qaf s properly. Then I just sat there and looked
around. Nobody was paying any attention to me. I had long since forgotten that
silence had a resonance, that peace had a presence, that there is a deliberate
consciousness to motions, that absolute and definitive serenity could fill a
space so voluminously. Whence so much peace? How many Palestinians had been
murdered here, trying to prevent its desecration, destruction -- the
eradication of the center site of a world religion? Wherefore this silence?
After a few minutes I
got up and gently left the mosque, put on my shoes at the door, thanked the
Palestinian guard in his cubicle and headed back towards the Bab al-Faysal
exit of al-Haram al-Sharif. Exiting, I crossed yet another two or three
layers of Israeli soldiers with machineguns hanging from their necks and headed
back towards my hotel.
MY REPEATED TRAFFICS
between Jerusalem and Ramallah, with trips to Bethlehem, Beyt Sahhur, Nazareth,
Nablus, and of course the myriad of Israeli checkpoints in between kept me busy
for the next few days, and I was not able to return back to al-Haram
al-Sharif until Friday, 27 of February, when I had cleared my morning for
that purpose. I had an early breakfast on that Friday in the backyard of
Christmas Hotel and headed towards the Lions Gate at about 8:00 am. There was a
much more heavily armed Israeli presence on that occasion in obvious
anticipation of the Friday noon prayer. I passed through a few congregations of
Israeli soldiers and entered al-Haram al-Sharif fairly easily. It was
still too early for the noon prayer and not that many people were around. I
went straight to the Dome of the Rock and found its doors open, with a
Palestinian older gentleman sitting on a small stool at the main entrance. I
greeted him, took off my shoes and entered the compound. Not more than a
hundred people or so, men and women, were praying in various parts of the
interior. I circumambulated around the rock and finally approached it from an
angle where a group of pilgrims had gathered around a man who was giving a
historical account of the significance of the rock. I stood by the rock and
watched it closely as I listened to the man discussing the Qur'anic verse
pertinent to the Prophet's nocturnal Mi'raj : "Glorified be He who
carried His servant by night from the Masjid al-Haram to the Masjid
al-Aqsa."
After a few minutes, I
turned around and went to a corner and looked up towards the ceiling. There was
a sustained serenity in the air of the building, a miasmatic permanence about
its architectural confidence -- as if the rock that lay bare and exposed at the
heart of it had a knowledge of itself. I noticed a group of women praying,
reading the Qur'an, chatting silently, and I saw a few children, holding the
hand of their fathers -- silent, quietly playful, one of them a bit bewildered.
People looked neither rich nor poor, neither old nor young, neither black nor
white -- men and women were almost indistinguishable in their long galabiyah
or ' abayah. A streak of translucent light entered the arena from the
main gate almost in a rush and its shades and shadows spread around. I could
not hear anything. It was as if I were deaf.
I eventually left the
Dome of the Rock, picked up my shoes from the small cubicle by the door, sat
down and put them on before I descended the plateau on which the Dome is
located. There was a small market inside al-Haram al-Sharif where they
were selling various religious items, but the shopkeepers were also selling
pirated copies of movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise. I bought a
small key chain with a replica of the Dome of the Rock on it. It was much
cheaper than the DVD's of Terminator II and Mission Impossible.
I wondered around in
the space between the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque for a while. It was a
beautiful and sunny day in late February. The light was grayish, the walls
around me luminous. I gradually exited al-Haram al-Sharif through Bab
al- Faysal and turned right towards Bab al-Usud, crossed the Israeli
army station to my left and entered the cemetery. I whispered a Fatiha
as I went straight to the mausoleums of the two companions of the prophet.
First I climbed the rise towards the site of al-Sahabi al-Jalil Ibadah ibn
al-Samit. I stood in front of the grave, held on to the metal barrier, and
recited another Fatiha. Then I took out from my pocket a small plastic
Ziploc bag that I had brought with me from New York, bent over the grave and
started digging a small hole with my fingers, extracting the soil and placing
it inside the bag. About half a fistful of dust into the bag, I got up and
approached the grave of al-Sahabi al-Jalil Shidad ibn Aws. Again, I
whispered a Fatiha, bent over, made a small hole with my fingers, picked
up the soil and added it into the bag. Now I had about a full fist of earth
from both the gravesites of the Prophet's companions buried in Jerusalem.
I got up, placed the
plastic bag and the soil inside it into my pocket and headed back down the
slope over, away from the wall, and towards the last row of graves. As I was
jumping down from the small rise onto the narrow path I saw a small pack of
Israeli soldiers, all except their commanding officers teenagers, boys and
girls, in full riot gear and heavily armed with machineguns hanging from their
necks -- some in greenish and others in bluish uniform. Their commanding
officer looked at me, smiled, and said " assalam 'aleikom." I
said " wa 'aleykom assalam," lowered my head and dusted my
jeans. When I raised my head, my eyes caught the eyes of a very pretty Israeli
girl in military uniform in the company of her fellow soldiers, with a
machinegun hanging from her neck. Her eyes were green. Her hair was light brown.
She was medium height, a bit husky, holding her helmet in one hand, and with
the other caressing her machinegun. She looked at me for a few seconds and I
dropped my eyes and fell behind their march. From behind they looked quite
playful, giggling even.
I slowly followed the
Israeli soldiers out of the cemetery. At the gate of the cemetery I saw the
same group of soldiers sitting at a corner and chatting with each other. Except
for their uniforms, riot gear, helmets, and machineguns (still hanging from their
neck, even while they were sitting), they looked like a group of high school
kids out on a field trip. I got a glimpse of the same pretty young girl
chatting with a fellow soldier as I turned left and headed back to the winding
market. It was Friday and all the shops were closed. I exited the compound from
Bab al-Zahra and went back to Salah Al-Din Street to do some shopping
before the Friday noon prayer. Some of the shops in the main square in front of
the old city were open. I bought a few red and blue scarves, a gold bracelet,
and a kilo of za'atar. The Palestinians do not have their own money.
They have to use Israeli money -- even in Jerusalem and Ramallah. I did not
have Israeli money. I had to exchange US money for Israeli money at a
Palestinian currency exchange outlet on Salah al-Din Street, right in front of Bab
al-Zahra gate to al-Haram al- Sharif.
By about 11:00 am I
had deposited my za'atar and other purchases in my room at the Christmas
Hotel and headed back towards al-Haram al-Sharif because I wanted to
attend the Friday noon prayer. I kept the Palestinian soil I had collected from
the gravesite of the Prophet's companions in the Ziploc bag in my pocket.
Within the two hours or so that I had left the area to do my shopping, it
seemed like the entirety of the Israeli army had moved into the surrounding
streets of al-Haram al-Sharif. I run into literally hundreds of teenage
soldiers in an uncanny combination of military readiness and juvenile
playfulness. They looked like being excited by a kind of picnic outing,
relentlessly talking and laughing with each other, while sporting an assortment
of machineguns hanging from their necks, all in riot gear. There was an influx
of ostensibly Palestinian crowd moving through the alleys of the market towards
al- Haram al-Sharif. I walked in their midst. No Israeli soldier stopped
me or asked me any question and I avoided all eye contacts until I reached the
very last right turn into the alley that led to the Bab al-Faysal
vestibule. The flow of the crowed carried me with it all the way to the main
compound, which was completely covered with worshipers ready for the Friday
prayers. The crowd was ostensibly young -- though many middle-aged and older
men were also among them. There was running water at a corner by an olive tree,
where I joined a group of young men and did the ritual ablutions. I could not
quite remember how to do it. So I followed other people around me. They were
doing it slightly differently than the way I remembered it from my childhood when
my mother used to take us to the Eighth Shi'i Imam shrine in Mashhad, in the
Khurasan province of Iran. I followed the crowd of Palestinians ready for
Friday prayers towards the al-Aqsa mosque. I could not get any closer than a
few steps down from the Dome of the Rock and could not see the end of the
prayer rows extended into the mosque itself. I was now standing between the
Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque -- two of the most sacrosanct sites in the
sacred geography of Islam.
I began my prayers
with others -- remembering when my mother first taught me how to recite the
Qur'an in the Goharshah Mosque in Imam Reza Mausoleum in Mashhad. I must have
been seven or eight years old. I remembered my parents, and I remembered my
children, and I remembered everyone else near and dear to me, on this hallowed
ground -- the sacrosanct site of the faith that claims my conscience, where we
believe our prophet ascended the heavens. I had not prayed since I was eleven
years old. I was now fifty-two, and I had a fistful of Palestinian soil in my
pocket that I wanted to take to Lebanon, go to Brumana, and pour it on the last
resting place of my fallen friend, Edward Said. This soil belongs to him; and
he belongs to this soil; and he will not rest in peace until he was under this
soil. "I testify that God is one," I said in the company of my
Palestinian brothers, "and I testify that Muhammad is the prophet of
God," and then I added in my mind, " wa ashhadu anna Alian wali
Allah."
As the prayer was
nearing its end, I suddenly heard shouts of Allahu Akbar, interspersed
with sounds of explosions and bullets, from various corners of the compound.
They were haphazard and nervous. I eventually noticed a commotion from behind
me. I turned around and I saw crowds of worshipers in disarray. From behind
them, down from behind the Dome of the Rock, I could now see rows of Israeli
troops storming into al-Haram al-Sharif in riot battle formations,
coming, it seemed, from Bab al-Magharibah. They started hurtling
canisters at us without breaking their ranks. Columns of white smoke began to
separate their advancing rows from our confusing formations. Suddenly I heard
explosive sounds that I had no idea what they were and where they were coming
from. My eyes began to burn and I became frightened. A young Palestinian
noticing my fear and bewilderment smiled widely: " la takhaf habibi,"
he said, " qanabil sawtiyah," sound grenades, he said. I had
no clue what he meant. I did not see any sign of people throwing stones at the
Israeli soldiers around me. In fact I saw no pebbles or stones on the compound
anywhere -- except behind me to the left of al-Aqsa Mosque (when facing it with
our back towards the Dome of the Rock) where some sort of construction,
excavation, or restoration (I could not tell) was in progress. I had already
seen a stone-throwing occasion on Wednesday 25 February, early in the
afternoon, when the Israeli army was robbing the Arab Bank in downtown
Ramallah. This was an entirely different situation. There was something calm
and even relaxed about both sides, as if they were two sides of a game they
were playing. There was no physical contact between us and the Israeli
soldiers, but a shuddering rush of people at the front row facing the army.
Suddenly from my back, towards the mosque, I heard an abrupt burst of firing
what I presumed (hoped) was rubber bullets -- " na'am ya akhi--al-
rasas al-matati." I thought there were soldiers coming at us from that
direction too. But I think I was hearing the echoes of rubber bullets being
fired from the front. At one point, the crowd around me became quite jittery
and nervous and I was knocked over and lost my control. There were a few
seconds of panic when I did not know what was exactly happening over my head.
But I got up and walked towards Bab al-Rahma Cemetery and Musalla
Marwan, to the left side of the Dome of the Rock when facing al-Aqsa
Mosque. The space there was a bit wider and safer, I thought.
After catching my
breath and re-assessing where I was in relation to the rest of the compound I moved
back towards al-Aqsa and the Dome and noticed that the crowed was getting more
relaxed and even conversant, as the rows of Israeli soldiers began to retreat
and move out of the compound. The remarkable thing about this whole affair was
that there was a festive spirit about the crowd, at least those around me. The
older people were far more angry and agitated. The younger Palestinians had a
cheerful and jovial disposition -- their ya akhu al- sharmuta! thrown at
the Israeli direction with an almost choral choreography in diction and
disposition. I looked up towards the heavens. There was a certainty about the
cloudless sky, a grayish indifference, and I could hear a faint humming of a
distant traffic encircling the sacred citadel. I reached for my plastic bag in
my pocket, full of soil from the mausoleums of the Prophet's companions. I did
not take the bag out of my pocket. I just felt the earth in between my fingers.
The crowd eventually began to thin out as the Israelis started pulling out and
leave al-Haram al-Sharif. I followed the crowd and entered the winding
streets around the compound, and headed back to my hotel. It was getting late.
I had to go back to my hotel, where Hany Abu Assa'ad was sending his producer
to pick me up and take me to Nablus, where he was getting ready to shoot his
next film.
I HAD NO OTHER
OCCASION to visit al- Haram al-Sharif during that trip and spent most of my
time between Nablus, Nazareth, Ramallah, and Jerusalem. I left Palestine via
Ben Gurion checkpoint on Monday 1 March in order to be back in New York for the
memorial service that Columbia University had organized for Edward Said. Before
I had left for Palestine, Mariam Said and Akeel Bilgrami had asked me to write
a short memorial essay to be included in a small volume they were putting
together to commemorate the occasion. I wrote a short piece, called it
"Siding with Said," and emailed it to Akeel Bilgrami before I flew to
Palestine. I was anxious to attend this memorial.
Exiting the Ben Gurion
checkpoint is far more difficult than entering it. Ihsan, a Palestinian cab
driver friend of Ayman, drove me and Fayçal Hasaïri, a producer with Orbit
satellite television and radio network who had come to Palestine to do a
documentary on our Dreams of a Nation film festival, from the Christmas Hotel
to Ben Gurion. At the very first checkpoint entering the airport, the Israeli
soldiers stopped us and asked us to pull over. They checked our passports and
looked at our bags. They asked me to pick up my green backpack and go and sit
on a bench at the side of their station. I did so. They asked Ihsan to open his
trunk and front hood and the four doors of his car and go and sit next to me.
Fayçal they asked to go inside their station with all his camera equipments.
While Ihsan and I sat on that bench and waited and watched, two Israeli
soldiers brought a couple of German Shepherd dogs and all sorts of equipment
and began checking Ihsan's cab inside out.
After a thorough
examination that took about an hour, we were let go. Ihsan stopped his car at
the entrance to the departure area. We said goodbye, and he left. Fayçal and I
also said goodbye as soon as we entered the departure lounge because he needed
to find a cart to carry his equipment and I was anxious to catch my flight.
Fayçal's flight to Rome was later than mine to New York via Zurich.
Numerous and
interminable serpentine lines await bewildered travelers as soon as they enter
the departure lounge. After waiting for almost two hours to get my small
backpack, passport and ticket checked, the Israeli teenager in charge of
security was visibly troubled when I submitted to his inspection my belongings.
I do not know whether it was the word "Iran" in front of "Place
of Birth" in my passport or the whitish beard I was sporting, or my Arabic
first name, or un-decidable last name, or signs and stamps that showed I had
visited Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, and Morocco that did it,
but he left me standing in front of the huge electronic security belt and
disappeared into a crowd of other security teenagers to ask what level of
security he had to assign to me. The security hazard that people like me posed
to the world at large was properly color-coded, I soon realized. The only
problem was that the teenager could not decide if I were of a yellow or a red
status. After consultation with his companions, he decided that I was security
hazard level yellow, meaning I was assigned only two teenage ninjas and a
German Shepherd to make sure I was not going to cause any trouble.
The two teenagers,
followed by their diligent German Shepherd, grabbed my green backpack (it is
actually my daughter Pardis', which I picked up when she threw it away and
bought a new one), sent it through the belt of electronic checking for
explosives, weapons of mass destruction and such, picked it from the other
side, and asked me to join them at a counter, where they placed my backpack
very carefully, unzipped all its pockets and took every single item of my
belongings, half of which was my collection of various sized packs of za'atar
that I had collected from different Palestinian cities, and the other consisted
mainly of my clothing items and such, a copy of John Steinbeck's East of
Eden that I was reading, and the bag of my toothbrush, toothpaste and the
collection of my medicine, including the precious Lipitor 20MG that I take for
my cholesterol after my open heart surgery.
The teenagers spread
all my belongings widely and generously on the counter for the whole airport to
see and their suspicious German Shepherd to sniff and investigate. One of the
teenagers produced a metal detector, with some sort of sanitary earmuff
attached on the top of it and applied the contraption to all my belongings,
randomly reaching for one of my colorful underwear shorts. A considerate third
teenager, not initially assigned to me, asked me where I was going, and as soon
as I said New York, she realized that given the color-coded level of my
security danger to the world I was about to lose my flight. She grabbed hold of
my passport and ticket while her comrades were sniffing at my underwear and
squeezing my toothpaste and rushed to get me checked in.
I stood there watching
as one of the teenagers, also a girl, reached for the small pocket of my
backpack and took out the Ziploc plastic bag in which I had deposited the earth
of Palestine. She offered it to the German Shepherd who sniffed at it
suspiciously and looked a bit baffled and undetermined. She opened the built-in
zipper and reached for the earth I had collected with her gloved fingers and
asked me what it was. I said it was the soil from the mausoleums of the two
companions of the prophet of Islam. She zipped the bag back and took it away
and disappeared behind a closed door, while her comrade reached for my white
iPod and asked me what it was. iPod, I said. What's in it he asked. Umm
Kulthum, I said, and lots of Bach cantatas if he cared to listen, plenty of Abd
al-Basit I said, then the songs of Mohammad Reza Shajarian and Abd al-Halim
Hafiz, Ella Fitzgerald I had in there with Kiri Takanawa, Billie Holiday and a
few Shahram Nazeri, plus lots of Muddy Waters, Fairuz, Mozart's piano concertos
and a complete Don Giovani, Herbert Von Karajan conducting the Berlin
Philharmonic, with Samuel Ramey in the lead role and Ferruccio Furlanetto as
Leporello; and that I had Jessie Norman in there singing Strauss's Vier letzte
Lieder, and a few John Lee Hooker's songs, John Coltrane was in there, I said,
and Howlin' Wolf, Nosrat Ali Khan and Cecilia Bartoli, Esma'il Kho'i reciting
his poetry, Marziyeh and Banan singing "Bu-ye Ju-ye Mulian Ayad
Hami," Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie, and ...
He thought I had
uttered enough. He took my iPod and went in the direction that his colleague
had disappeared with my bag full of Palestinian soil. I stood there with all my
za'atar collection and clothing items spread all over the counter -- one
teenager running away with my passport and ticket, another with my iPod, and a
third with my fist full of Palestinian earth. I stood there aimlessly, not
knowing what to do. I picked up my copy of East of Eden and started
reading randomly from a page. It was where Cathy Ames had just drugged her
husband Adam Trask on their wedding night and was about to sleep with her
brother-in-law Charles. I have always thought that the sappy obsequiousness of
Adam Trask was a kind of penance he was paying for all those native Americans
he had joined in murdering -- a premonition of the guilty conscience of a
nation that had all but repressed Custer at Wounded Knee. I closed the book and
looked around. I missed Jerusalem.
I sat on the edge of
the counter and awaited my fate. I looked around me. The place had an uncanny
similarity to an airport, but the garrison was a fully fortified barrack, with
its battalion of security forces treating all the transient inmates with equal
banality. It was not just coloured Muslims like me that they treated like
hazardous chemicals. It was everyone. "One," as in our quintessential
humanity, melted in this fearful furnace into a nullity beyond human recognition.
What they call "Israel" is no mere military state. A subsumed
militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to
the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these
people have to call their "soul." What the Israelis are doing to
Palestinians has a mirror reflection on their own soul -- sullied, vacated,
exiled, now occupied by a military machinery no longer plugged to any
electrical outlet. It is not just the Palestinian land that they have occupied;
their own soul is an occupied territory, occupied by a mechanical force geared
on self-destruction. They are on automatic piloting. This is they. No one is
controlling anything. Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of
another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way
they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet
each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication
to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to
the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can perpetrate what these
people and their parents and grandparents have perpetrated on Palestinians and
remain immune to the cruelty of their own deeds.
I sat there frightened
-- frightened not by any specific danger, not by the massive machinery of death
and destruction that surrounded me in that checkpoint and beyond that
checkpoint into every nook and cranny of the occupied Palestine I visited, not
by any specific machinegun hanging from a thin neck, frightened by the
miasmatic mutation of human soul into a subterranean mixture of vile and
violence that preempts a human being from the simplicity of a human touch, of a
human look, of a human voice. Where did humanity end in this colonial
settlement and machinery begin? Is this the reason why Israel as a collectivity
is so indifferent to what the rest of the world thinks of it? Is Ariel Sharon
accidental or integral to these people? They were not subjecting just me to
this sub-human behaviour. They were indiscriminate to names, passports,
identities, nationalities. All humans to them were not just potential but
actual bombs, with different timing devices set to trigger their explosion at
varied, but certain, intervals. How can a people live with such fear without
becoming fear incarnate? Not a single sound of laughter, not a single sight of
a leisurely walk, no one crying for a departing loved one, no one joyous at the
arrival of a friend, no human rush to catch a flight, no two strangers
exchanging flirtatious glances. Before I had left New York I had just watched
Orson Welles' adaptation of Kafka's "Trial" (1962) -- and I felt I
was in the midst of that nightmarish labyrinth of deceased shadows and sinuous
insanity. I lifted my right hand and touched my left elbow, while looking at
myself doing so. I was dead cold.
I was now almost sure
that I will miss my flight to Zurich. The teenager who had taken my iPod came
back empty handed and asked me to step into a cubicle at the corner of that
counter. I left my belongings and my backpack on the counter and followed him
there and he asked me to take off my belt and lower my pants. I did. The boy
reached for my groins. I looked at my shoes. They needed some serious cleaning.
They looked miserable. I had bought them almost a year ago in Carmel,
California, in March 2003, when President Bush attacked Iraq and I interrupted
my Spring break at Big Sur to look for Amy Goodman and Radio Pacifica to follow
the news. The boy -- he looked like my son Kaveh, though a bit younger and yet
his skin thicker than his young age warranted -- bent my belt and kept it close
to his eyes. His eyes looked tired. They were not green like that pretty
Israeli girl soldier I had seen at al-Haram al-Sharif. His eyes had no
colour. They were just tired. His bony cheeks and drawn face showed he had been
at work for a long time. His white shirt was sticking out of his gray pants.
His belt was shiny black. His shoes did not need any shining. He gave me back my
belt and asked me to take off my shoes. I bent, while trying to hold on to my
pants, and untied my shoes and gave them to him. He started examining them. I
was about to put my belt back when the teenage girl who had taken my bag full
of Palestinian earth stuck her neck from behind a curtain and peeped inside the
cubicle and told me to follow her. I followed her, while holding my pants with
one hand and with the other holding on to my belt, my shoes left behind for
further examination with the tired teenager inside the cubicle. The floor of
the airport was chilly, and now I had nasty nausea and a pounding headache.
I went and sat on the
edge of the counter with my belt in my hand, while trying to hold my pants from
falling down, looking at the scattered bags of za'atar, my shirts, tooth
brush, and toothpaste. I had forgotten to take my vitamin E, and I think that
the knafeh I had at Nazareth was too fattening for me. The teenager was
now thumbing through Steinbeck's East of Eden, examining very closely
the page where Cathy Ames sets her parent's house on fire. What troublemaker
was that Cathy Ames -- mayhem and destruction following her wherever she went.
The teenager with tired eyes and bony cheeks came out of the cubicle and
brought me back my shoes and encouraged me to put them back on. I thanked him,
bent and put my shoes on. It took me a few minutes to do so. When I got up my
head began to spin and I had a black out. This usually happens to me when I
have sat down for a while and then I get up. It took me a minute to get back my
sight and stability. I now noticed that all my belongings, za'atar and
all, had been put back inside my bag. "Where is my soil from al-Sahabi
al-Jalil Ibadah ibn al-Samit and al-Sahabi al-Jalil Shidad ibn Aws,"
I asked. "It is in your bag," she said; "and my iPod?" I
continued, "It is in your bag." I had no way of knowing, but she
looked like a trustworthy ninja. I was putting my belt back when the third,
quite considerate, teenager walked fast towards me with my passport and boarding
pass. "Please follow me," she said. I thanked the other two
teenagers, collected my green backpack, looked at the German Shepherd,
attending his comrades faithfully, and followed the conscientious teenager.
There were three or four more security points still ahead of me. But she saw me
through all of them, while I was trying to button up my pants and put my belt
back where it belonged. At the very last checkpoint, the teenager gave me my
passport and boarding pass, and said something like "Have a safe trip!"
(or that's what I thought or hoped, she said). I said thank you and rushed to
get through the last checkpoint. A family of seven people -- a young couple and
their five children, all boys and all with yarmulke on their heads --
was in front of me. The mother was pregnant, the father was murmuring something
under his breath, the children were each eating a Mac Donald's hamburger. I
presume Mac Donald's makes kosher hamburger. I was quite nauseous.
Fortunately, my gate
was very close to the very last security check. As I finally entered the plane,
everybody was giving me dirty looks for having kept them waiting. I wish I knew
how to say I am sorry in Hebrew. But half of the passengers I thought looked
like they were from Brooklyn.
In about an hour we
were all safely flying over the Mediterranean and I panicked. Where was the
Ziploc plastic bag full of soil I had collected from the mausoleums of the two
revered sahabah ? I got up and gently took my daughter's green backpack
down from the overhead compartment. People around me were looking at me
suspiciously. I sat down and opened the main part of the backpack. It was a
mess. I found a bag of za'atar stuck in the middle of chapter twenty of John
Steinbeck's East of Eden, right were the treacherous Cathy Ames was busy
poisoning the goodhearted Miss Faye to inherit her whorehouse. What a
troublemaker was that Cathy Ames? To me Miss Faye is the model of gentility and
unsurpassed moral rectitude -- and yet with what methodic cruelty did Cathy
Ames poison and kill her. I have no patience for those who are trying "to
understand" Cathy Ames. There is nothing to understand. She is just plain
demonic. That's all. What a mess -- and no sign of my bag full of soils from
Palestine. I reached for the smaller side bag of the backpack and unzipped it,
and there, tucked away gently among my bags full of za'atar from
Jerusalem and Ramallah, Nazareth and Nablus, was the bag of Palestinian soil. I
opened it gently and smelled it. It smelled of moist soil and of aromatic za'atar.
I closed it, put it back where it was, closed my eyes, and tried to rest. The
other passengers around me were talking relentlessly, almost all at the same
time, to my tired ears and nauseous headache in an indecipherable combination
of Brooklyn English and relentless Hebrew. I reached for my iPod and turned it
on. There was no sign of any of my recordings. I turned the knob up and down.
Nothing. My iPod was completely cleaned of all its musical memories. I turned
it off and put it back into my bag, closed my eyes and tried to fade out all
the surrounding sounds. "We are now cruising at an altitude of 35,000
feet," said our captain in Brooklyn English.
I ARRIVED IN NEW YORK
in time for Edward Said's memorial at Columbia University on 3 March 2004. A
huge crowed had gathered and many of Edward's friends were there. Nadine
Gordimer was there, as was Danny Glover, Vanessa Redgrave, Salman Rushdie, and
Daniel Barenboim. But all through the service, presided over by our University
Chaplin, Jewelnel Davis, all I could think of, especially when I saw Edward's
face on a huge screen where they were showing a documentary on him, was a bit
of an unfinished business I had with the soil I had collected from Palestine,
now safely tucked away in the smallest pocket of my green backpack.
On Tuesday, 20 July
2004, I flew from New York to Beirut. I had joined a small group of young
Lebanese and Palestinians who were active in Palestinian refugee camps in a
variety of ways but particularly in establishing youth cultural centers. They
had invited me to explore with them the possibilities of taking a portion of
our Palestinian film project, Dreams of a Nation, to the camps. This was
more of a reconnaissance mission, for us to find out what our needs were and
what sort of equipment and infrastructure would be required. Locarno Film
Festival had invited me to be a member of their Jury in August, and they had
generously agreed to finance my trip to Lebanon and Syria to visit Palestinian
refugee camps for this purpose. I left Newark Liberty International airport
early in the evening of Tuesday and landed in Beirut the following Wednesday,
after a short stop in Paris, at about 1:30 pm local time. I traveled with my
usual green backpack, in one of its smallest pockets I had brought with me the
plastic bag that contained the soil of Palestine. Before I left New York I had
sought from Mariam Said, and she had graciously granted me, permission to put
this soil on Edward's grave.
A Palestinian friend,
Rasha Salti, picked me up from the airport and for about two weeks we traveled
around Lebanon and Syria, visiting camps, showing films, and making a
preliminary assessment of what we needed to do. While in Lebanon and in between
our trips to camps around Beirut -- Sabra and Shatila, Mar Elias and Burj al-
Barajnah -- on Sunday, 25 July 2004, at about 3:30 pm, Rasha Salti and I hired
a cab in front of Mayflower Hotel in downtown Beirut and drove to Brumana
village. In the right pocket of my jacket I carried with me the Ziploc plastic
bag that contained the soil I had brought with me from Palestine.
The cab navigated its
way around Ras Beirut in the early afternoon light that was about to lose its
midday alacrity and ease into a gentler version of itself. There is something
suspended in the bared soul of Beirut that has survived the end of the Lebanese
civil war. The day I arrived in Beirut, the Israeli fighter jets had flown over
the city and broken the sound barrier. "It is like raping the sky,"
Rasha told me that day. In my naked eyes, entirely empty of the miasmatic
memories the native Beirutis have of their own history, Beirut is a mille-
feuille pastry of enduring miseries interlaced with creamy layers of sweet
hopes. A bite into Beirut, and you don't know whether to laugh with their joy
or to cry from their pain. Beirut remains pathologically sectarian, but
something in the heart of that sectarianism wishes to flower and fruit into
religious tolerance. From private parties to the staff of a modest hotel, one
sees conversant a cross-section of Lebanese society -- Sunnis, Shi'is,
Christians, and blessed atheists, sharing the same food, defying the same fate,
remembering the same fears, nourishing the same hopes, the making of the same
destiny, and yet speaking of sectarian identities as if they were talking about
some other people in some distant planet.
As a city, Beirut is a
bizarre combination of postmodern banality and a deep sense of irascible
tragedy written all over its face. The archaic memories of the civil war --
rundown buildings, bullet holes zigzagging on the dilapidated facades of
abandoned buildings, portraits and statues of iconic sheikhs and charlatans,
Palestinian refugee camps replete with unconscionable poverty, Lebanese yuppie
intellectuals organizing art festivals in French -- compete with Prime Minister
Hariri's downtown Beirut, made up in vain and vanity to divert lucrative
business and Saudi attention from the Gulf States. Secular Beirutis detest
being asked to what religious denomination they belong. They believe their
secular and progressive politics are beyond the religion of their birth and
breeding -- and by and large they are. There is a universality of learning
about their prominent public intellectuals, people like Fawwaz Traboulsi or
Elias Khoury, that defies all sectarianism and articulates a vision of the Arab
and the Muslim world, and beyond them of world at large, extraordinarily
expansive and embracing in its cultivated cosmopolitanism. And yet
constitutional to the discursive disposition of the Lebanese is an almost instinctive
identitarian politics far beyond the pales and forts of their own reason. The
Druze did this, the Maronite did that, the Greek Orthodox are this way, the
Shi'is, the Sunnis, the Armenians. But if you were to bear with this for a few
minutes until they are let all loose in an Armenian restaurant, then the best
in them (which is their food) overcomes their worst (which is their sectarian
politics). Beirut always reminds me of Shah's Tehran -- rampant poverty
ravaging the soul of the city on one side and obscenely rich shopping quarters,
marked and monitored by a phantasmagoric construction of a huge mosque -- paid
for by Prime Minister Hariri himself -- pretending to hint at Aya Sofia, on the
other -- while claiming the tallest minaret in the world! (Hariri and the late
Shah of Iran seem to share not just their short height but their phallic
propensity for architectural over-compensation). I believe when this mosque is
completed, the pompous absurdity of Hassan II mosque in Casablanca will have
found its match. Beirut is full of exceptionally beautiful mosques, churches,
and a synagogue. This monstrosity, as the rest of Hariri's Saudi money, will
dwarf them in size and cast an unseemly shadow over their exquisite soul.
The sun was much
gentler as we began to exit the city limits of Beirut towards the mountains.
Though exceptionally clean for a major metropolis, Beirut is not a healthy
city. It looks like it is going to explode any minute. But the life that it
does manage to sustain in the midst of that lurking danger and in the minutiae
of its small and modest (not expensive and vulgar) restaurants are the very
definitions of poise and grace. The road out of Beirut to Brumana passes
through some of the oldest and poorest neighborhoods of the city, and Rasha
knows Beirut better than her own kitchen in her apartment in East Village in
New York. We first passed by Suq al-Ahad, a Sunday market where, Rasha
said, the most recent waves of migrant labourers from Syria and Sri Lanka go
shopping. Migrant labourers abound in Lebanon. Shatila, for example, is no
longer limited to Palestinian refugees. The migrant poor from Syria, Egypt,
Iraq, and as far as Bangladesh, have moved to Shatila and share the fate of the
homeless Palestinians (minus their having been massacred by the Phalangists on
behalf of the Israelis, of course). From Suq al- Ahad, we crossed Jisr
el-Basha (over the Beirut river), and then we took the road that separates
an old industrial zone called Sin el-Fil ("The Tooth of the
Elephant," because they had apparently found the remains of a pre-historic
mammoth from antiquity there), and al-Naba'a. For native Beirutis, Naba'a is
reminiscent of yet another industrial zone before the civil war, where poor
working class used to congregate, a mixture of the Lebanese and Palestinian
laborers in particular. Here is where the Leftists did most of their organizing
and here is where there were systematic massacres of poor people at the
beginning of the Lebanese civil war. Immediately after Naba'a, the mille-feuille
began to change colour and taste and we reached Horsh Tabet, an extremely posh
residential area where the Lebanese political and economic elite own villas.
At the Mkalles
roundabout we turned towards Mansourieh, a new industrial zone which is now
home to a new Hotel Management School, and then drove up to the valley where
Tall az-Za'atar, the site of a major massacre of the Palestinians, was once
located. But right before you can completely remember or barely forget the
memory of Tall az- Za'atar, immediately next to it is Beit Mery, yet another
luxurious residential and summer home area. The weather by now had noticeably
changed -- much cooler, fresher, and far less polluted. This is a primarily
Christian neighborhood, Rasha said, recently flooded by the Saudis and the
Khalijis.
Immediately after Beit
Mary we reached Roumieh, home to one of the biggest jails in the country, where
kids and adult felons are incarcerated. Soon after Roumieh is Brumana, a summer
resort area about an hour from downtown Beirut. The physical expansion of
Beirut has gradually reached all the way up there, so that people live in
Brumana or Roumieh all year around and commute to Beirut. Just before we
entered Brumana, a very expensive Mercedes with a Saudi plate was speeding and taking
over a row of cars coming from the opposite direction and by the skin of our
teeth our driver managed to prevent an accident, right in front of the Quaker
Friend's School where Edward, Rasha said, gave its 1998 convocation speech.
I had already called
Sami Cortas, Mariam Said's brother, from Beirut. He had graciously offered to
pick me up from Beirut but I did not wish to impose more than I already had and
said that we will take a cab. We called Sami when we entered Brumana area and
arranged to pick him up from near Grand Hills Hotel, just off the main road,
and he guided us towards the Quakers Friends Burial Ground ( Madafin
Jam'iyyat Ashab al-Quakers ), a modest, almost inconspicuous, burial
ground, just off the main winding road in Brumana. The gate to the cemetery was
locked, and Sami Cortas had the key. He opened the gate, and Rasha and I
followed him down a stairway into a small, enclosed, beautifully kept, garden.
The garden is full of pine trees, native to the Metn Mountain. In between the
pine trees, there was an assortment of various vines, shrubs and flowers. There
were graves scattered all around the garden, in no particular order that was
immediately evident to a pilgrim's eyes. We followed Sami Cortas for a few
steps until he stopped at a grave immediately located to the left of the stairs
as we entered the garden. He motioned with his right hand towards the grave and
said, "here it is." The gravesite is simple, elegant, gracefully
minimalist. It is marked by two black granite stones--one horizontal and one
vertical, with the birth and death dates of Edward Wadie Said carved on it in
both Arabic and English. The first thing that I noted about the grave was that
it faced east. It was properly oriented. To the left of the grave, when facing
it, there is an extraordinarily beautiful and old olive tree, looking almost
like an oversized bonsai, which is sitting in a bed of dense orange and yellow
flowers in full bloom in July when we visited it. Sami Cortas told us that
Mariam Said had planted this singular symbol of Palestine on Edward's
gravesite. The grave is immediately distinguishable from others because of its
vertical and horizontal black granite, separating it from others, which are
mostly in alabaster white and laid horizontally. "With so many dissonances
in my life," I remembered the concluding sentence of Edward's
autobiography, "I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right
and out of place." To the left of the olive tree and fencing the stairs
from which we had descended into the cemetery is an expansive and generous fig
tree that carried unripe fruit in thick bunches when we were there; and at the
foot of the stairs on the other side was a lush vine. I turned around and
looked behind me, from the angle of Edward's grave, and there was an expansive
panorama of Mount Lebanon -- calm, reassuring, permanent.
It must have been five
or six o'clock in the afternoon by now, and the three of us stood there on top
of Edward's grave, under the shade of a constellation of memories and emotions
too precious to disentangle. All I remember now from that moment is Sami's
gentle hand motion and his soft voice, "here it is." And here it was.
I took the Ziploc plastic bag from my pocket, opened it, took some of it out
and gave it to Sami. My hand was shivering. His was stable. We thought it best
to put the soil in the flowerbed under the olive tree over the grave. Sami
poured the soil on the flowerbed. I gave another pinch to Rasha and she did the
same. The rest I emptied into my hand and poured it in between the flowers and
the olive tree, and then shook the plastic back over it so that all of it
landed on earth. I put the plastic bag back into my pocket and looked at
Edward's grave. I asked him to forgive this piece of my Muslim antiquity. I
know he would have laughed at me. "Professor Dabbashi" (he always put
a couple of extra B's in the middle of my last name), "you are a
postmodern muthaqqaf." And as soon as I protested, he would say,
"don't worry, I invented their vocabulary." His gravestone was so
clean. It exuded confidence, a life well-lived. "There is, here, a present
not embraced by the past," I remembered Mahmoud Darwish:
"A silken thread
pours letters of the page of night from the mulberry tree.
Only the butterflies
cast light upon our boldness
In plunging into the
pit of strange words.
Was that
condemned man my father?
Perhaps I can handle
my life here.
Perhaps I can now give
birth to myself
And choose different
letters for my name."
I bent forward and
kissed the tip of his gravestone, and then I sat down and whispered my prayers.
I missed him. I thought something was amiss in the wandering walkabout of my
universe, like having lost a cane, a compass, a guiding star, the Milky Way.
"For me, sleep is death," I remembered his invective in Out of
Place. I got up and followed my friends out of the garden. "Do you
want to take any pictures," asked Rasha. "No," I said, and we
ascended the stairs.
* The writer is
professor of Iranian studies at Columbia University and director of graduate
studies at the university's Center for Comparative Literature and Society.
"Landed in
thy homeland. Its countenance valanced and yet still beautiful"
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