Читать книгу The Greatest Meeting - None - Страница 6

The dance of men of God is exquisitely delicate and weightless.

A weightless leaf floating on the ripples of a stream;

Within, like a mountain, and outwardly, like a fresh leaf,

Separated from a branch of a giant tree,

Floating towards an ocean of wisdom,

With its purity and beauty,

Visible in the entire spectrum of nature’s gifts.

Shams-e Tabrizi

It’s late afternoon, August 16, 1204. There’s no breeze in the air. I look through the opened window of my bedroom and see the leaves of the tall aspen in our backyard. Caressed by the yellow light of the late afternoon, I find them motionless. They look awfully thirsty against the cloudless blue sky as they lazily hang from the branches. The outside air is hot and humid, thick and stagnant, making the inside of our house unbearably stuffy and hot.

Since my teacher informed me that there’s nothing else he can teach me, I no longer attend any of his classes. Instead, I read profusely, a variety of books in the fields of spirituality, philosophy, religious law, history, and mystic power. Also, I spend many hours of my days and sleepless nights in seclusion, contemplating and struggling hard to surrender my earthly needs in order to empower myself to attain unity with the deity and reach truths beyond human understanding. In spite of all the time I need to spend by myself, deep down it makes me sad that I have to live my life mostly in the absence of my father, whose company, despite his abusive personality, I sometimes crave in my lonely hours.

Like today, I go out and sit quietly in the shade on the platform outside our house’s gate, where it’s slightly cooler than inside, and read my book. The boys are not playing in the street, nor do I feel the presence of their ghosts. They have grown up, maybe they have chosen their fathers’ professions, perhaps married, and now have children of their own. But I wonder why their children are not here, chasing a worthless ball?

This interesting book that I hold on my lap is a detailed narrative of another great Sufi’s thoughts, his mystic powers, and a man who lived an enigmatic life. I’m so deeply submerged in the book that I don’t see my father approaching me from the street. He startles me when he looks at me with those eyes that are so intensely full of contempt or worries. I always wonder which. A new emotion overtakes me: a sort of mild panic.

“Did you find a job?” he asks the same question that he has been asking since I stopped going to school.

“Well, I wove ten men’s belts yesterday, took them to the bâzâr and sold them.”

“Do you call that a job?”

“No.”

“I’d like to know why?”

“Because I have a job!”

“Doing what?”

“I study. Can’t you see, father? I’m reading this book.”

“What have you learned so far from these books?” he asks imperiously.

I don’t know how to respond to him, because the things I’ve learned from studying these heaps of books cannot be conveyed in a few sentences. I summarize it this way, “The most important thing I’ve learned so far from reading these books is that every corruption, every evil deed, including murder, theft, lying, deceiving and cheating that goes on in this world is because someone believes in someone else, and mimics him. See father, these books teach me how to disbelieve ideas and thoughts rather than to believe in them. They teach me how to become like a sheet of blank paper, a mirror without the reflection of anybody’s ideas in it.”

I’m certain he doesn’t understand my response. I’m right, for my last remark infuriates him, which is the last thing I want to do. He loses control. Furious, he grabs my wrist firmly with his coarse strong hand and drags me into the house. I’m taller than him now, over six feet four inches, and even though I’m lanky and skinny, I’m stronger too, but I don’t put up any resistance to his action.

We pass through the house on our way onto our large backyard. Once in the backyard, with one hand holding onto my book, I gently release my wrist from his firm grip.

“Why can’t you become serious about your future? Why don’t you study religious laws, become a teacher, so you can earn a decent living, so you can marry someone, settle down and have a family like other people? Or why don’t you become a serious merchant?” he utters the same wishes as always.

I stare at him, and then I look around the yard and see a mother hen surrounded by her chicks. There is a duckling among the chicks. It’s the trick my mother plays, fooling the hens of our house by putting a duck’s egg or two under them for hatching. The mother hens become distressed when the ducklings jump in the water of our large pool and swim away.

“You’re like that mother hen that my mother had fooled by putting a duck’s egg under her, to hatch it among her own,” I address my father to release my frustration. “When the chicks hatch they all go to the edge of the water, but only the duck’s chick can go in the water and float. The other chicks must hopelessly remain near the edge. Now, dear father, I’m that duckling chick who likes and can sail in the sea of wisdom. This is my situation; if you’ve the same soul as I do, come into the water of this sea with me,” I wave the book in my father’s face and continue, “Otherwise stay with the mother hens and remain on the edge of this vast water.”

I see my father is stunned by my impudent comments at first, but suddenly the anger spreads over the old man’s face. I can’t blame him for becoming so tempestuous, because I myself disliked the way, the vindictive way I presented my point to him.

“If you treat your father this way, with those harsh words, I wonder how you treat strangers or your adversaries?” he goes on to voice his long-buried anger.

With that question, I understand my words have offended him, have even hurt him. I begin to regret having said those venomous words. I can’t do anything about it, nor can I herd those words back inside.

“Oh my dear father, I realize that I can speak with no one but myself, or perhaps he whose soul is as clear as a mirror, so I can see myself in him,” I reply with respect.

“Or if you only see yourself in him?”

“Yes father, for I’ve only one purpose in life, that’s to seek the divine truth. See father, I’m young, I can select and change the future if I so desire.”

He stares at me. His eyes are full of annoyance and hostility. I don’t wait for his response but walk away and go back to the platform outside the house to read my book, certain that he’ll be speechless and exasperated.

A few hours later that feels like only a minute, my younger brother walks out and asks me to go in. That’s when I realize it’s getting dark. I join my family in the main room. My mother, in her late fifties, four of my siblings and my father are sitting around the dinner sofreh [a large rectangular white tablecloth] on the floor. As usual our sofreh is full of delicious colorful dishes, and my family is enjoying their meal. The food doesn’t interest me. So I go a short distance away to the other side of the large room and, under the generous beam of an oil lamp, lean against the wall, open my book and become absorbed in its pages.

“Come eat with us, son,” I hear my father saying.

I look up and see my parents’ anxious faces. I can’t control the thought in my mind and say what I truly feel, “As long as the God who created me won’t speak to me directly, so that I can ask Him questions and listen to His answers, eating and sleeping are not important to me.”

“You’ll get weak, son,” my mother warns.

She knows that I’ve no appetite, and I’ve not eaten even a morsel of food for three or four days, not because of the obligatory ritual of religious fasting, but because eating is the least important thing on my mind.

“But I’m not weak, mother. In fact, I’m so strong that I can fly out the window like a bird – like a phoenix from the ashes of earthlings – these burned-out souls. These people around us, who call themselves human beings, but walk among us like effigies.”

“Why is it that you never have an appetite? You haven’t eaten for a long time. What’s the matter with you?” mother asks.

“I don’t know myself, mother,” I try to explain. “I feel I have a trapped soul in my body. Every few days something strange overtakes my senses and holds onto me for a while, during which time no morsel of bread will go down my throat. Strangely enough, I still feel full of energy.”

“What’s wrong with you?” father questions.

“Nothing! And I’m not crazy!”

“But you act like a crazy man,” he dispenses his opinion, telling me indirectly that he doesn’t know his own son.

“Have I ever torn anybody’s clothes? Have I ever thrown myself on you and injured you? Have you, any of you, seen me hurt anyone?”

Except the sounds of banging dishes and eating that come from around the sofreh, there is a long moment of silence that gives me hope that they’re not going to bother me anymore. But I’m wrong again. “Eat with us,” father insists again.

“No, I’m not eating today ... tomorrow ... the day after or the next day,” I reply angrily, hoping they’ll leave me alone.

“If you’re waiting for God to speak to you, then maybe He would do so if He finds you with a stomach full of food.” It amazes me the way he talks to me. It is as if he’s dealing with a child.

“Don’t be absurd, father!” I object to his assertion.

“You’re insane. God Almighty has said all He has to say through His messengers and His prophets. What are there that you want to know?”

I don’t want to argue with my father, but he doesn’t leave me be. So, I respond, “Don’t you think I’ve the right to ask my creator what His purpose was in bringing me into this world? When, why, and where He intends to take me, for what reason, and what end is waiting for me at wherever place He is taking me?”

I look up and find my father reflective. And then in response to my unconventional questions about my relationship with God, he shakes his head in bitter disappointment, and I return to my book. The nagging question of why my father doesn’t understand me goes through my mind again. If I’m a stranger in my own town, that I can understand; but why should my father be a stranger to me, while my heart always aches for a better relationship with him.

“Then, are you going to spend the rest of your life reading books?” I see that my father doesn’t ever intend to leave the subject alone.

“No, father. In fact, I’m leaving tomorrow,” I break the news to my family that has been on my mind for quite a while. I wanted to let them know at a more opportune time, but he pushed me to it.

“To where, my dear son?” my concerned mother asks affectionately.

My mother has a delicate soul, so I try to answer her as tenderly as I can. “I don’t know myself, mother, but I will go around to find and visit as many saints and allâmehs [learned men], and pirs [wise elders] as I can find. I’ll wander from city to city, sit in on the khatâbehs [lectures], learn from them, and perhaps be enlightened by their knowledge and wisdom that I no longer receive from books. Maybe they can enlighten me.”

“There are many men in Tabriz, great jurists, from whose knowledge you can benefit. Why do you have to leave us?” she persists.

“Whatever was there in the minds and the hearts of the learned men in Tabriz, I’ve learned. Look, my own teacher tells me that there’s nothing else he or any other man in Tabriz can teach me.”

“I’ll find you a new teacher, and will bring him from another town if I must,” my father suggests, concerned.

“There’s no one in this city that understands what I say, or knows what I seek. You don’t understand, father. I’m fed up and tired of the people of Tabriz. They’re forged. It’s true that they’re in human forms but their bodies don’t have any souls. In assessing my own life, here and now, I don’t see any significant or valuable thing in it that I will remember many years later and say, ‘It was good.’”

“I still don’t understand you. ... What are you looking for?” father asks.

“I know there must be and there is someone out there who is waiting for me, who is also looking for someone who can understand him. Now, I must travel to the four corners of this Islamic empire, to big learning centers, to various colleges in Baghdâd and Damascus and other great cities. The winds of turbulence are blowing from the East. I must go, see and seek, to find my beloved one, who is unknown to all, but only known to me ... in my dreams.”

“I don’t understand you, son,” my father repeats the same words I’ve heard a thousand times before. I often wonder, whether it is because he doesn’t know how to communicate with me intellectually, or because I frustrate him so much that he doesn’t know how to handle me? Whatever the reasons, I feel this mohebbat [affection] for him in my heart. I respect him and feel sorry that he’s not free from the inconsequential chores of his daily life, to allow himself to question the purpose of his own existence.

“Don’t you know, father ... that the scripture writer of the universe wrote the truth in three scripts:

One he could read and no one else!

One he could read and everyone else!

One he could not read nor could anyone else!

And I am that third Script,” I explain myself as best as I can.

Frustrated, my father turns his face and shakes his head in utter disgust. “You’ve lost your senses. I don’t understand a word you speak.”

“I don’t understand myself either, father. I’m as weary of myself as you are. I’ve only one friend in this whole wide world, one who can understand this turbulent sea of passion I feel in my heart.”

“Who is that friend?” he asks.

“I know him, but I’ve never met him, nor do I know his whereabouts.”

“Then how do you know him?”

“In my solitude, this saint is always in my heart, in my soul. I know he’s out there, like me, waiting.”

Father shows his disgust by rising and coming toward me. Infuriated, he stands near me and, without uttering a word he stares at me with his two fiery eyes. I look up at his face and wonder. I see him so enraged that I’m afraid he might throw himself at me, beat me and throw me out of his house. In all honesty, I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

“You are hallucinating,” he says before leaving the room. I don’t reply.

If for no other reason than my father’s iron need to chart the turbulent waters of my life, I’m certain that I can no longer live in this house.

It is way past midnight. Only the sporadic sound of a lonely owl breaks the silence of the night. Perhaps, in owl language, it is a sad song that expresses the anguish of being separated from his loved ones. Or maybe the bird, with his own ballad, is telling the world how the love of God has disappeared from the hearts of men.

Everybody has gone to bed, and the house is quiet and peaceful. The flame of the lantern is flickering now. The imprinted images on the curtains are blurry. The lantern’s oil is almost burned to the last drop. I get up, refill the lantern with oil in the kitchen, and take it to my bedroom so that I may finish reading my book before dawn arrives.

I open my eyes to the bright beam of early morning sunlight, coming through the window of my small bedroom uninvited to drive away the last vestiges of sleep. Because I had only three hours of sleep, maybe fewer, last night, I blink a few times in confusion and for a fraction of a second wonder where I am. I kept dreaming about strange exotic cities where I’m wandering around aimlessly, totally lost. Every segment of my dreams, though always starting pleasantly, would gradually deteriorate into horrifying nightmares – countless beastly-looking men on their wild horses massacring innocent people with their sabers.

Reality rushes in on the warm aroma of freshly baked bread coming from the kitchen. The flame of the lantern that I had forgotten to turn off last night before falling asleep is faintly flickering.

Through the half-opened door of my bedroom, I see my mother, bent over a counter, busily preparing breakfast for the family. I remain there and watch her fragile and tired body with amazement. I wonder how far I would be away from her house before I will start missing this hard-working, fragile woman, this angel of goodness. I’m certain not far, for the thought of being away from her makes me miss her already; so badly that I have to swallow several times to clear the lump in my throat. I lie awake and let my mind roam the unknown and possibly dangerous trails and landmarks ahead of me on this journey.

As I rise, she notices me. She turns around and acknowledges my presence with a smile that she forces to replace the melancholy expression that normally covers her face. I, too, do a good job of covering up my own sadness. I know that once I’m on my own, out in the wilderness, I’ll have enough time in my solitude to shed enough tears to wash away the pain of my own sorrow.

I get up and wash, put on my long black felt robe, the baggy white pants, my white turban, and a pair of sandals. I join the rest of the family in the big room with a warm greeting. To make my parents happy, I force a few morsels of bread and cheese into my mouth and wash it down with a cup of hot milk sweetened with honey.

Outside the house the early morning August sun is still mellow, rising in the vast clear blue of the eastern sky. Although the sun shines brilliantly, it doesn’t have the intensity to warm up the cool breeze the air has patiently inherited from the night before. The hunchbacked old man, Mostafâ Khan, who works for us, has saddled up a mule. He is patiently waiting for me with a sad smile. He looks at me with more tenderness in his eyes than I’ve ever seen before.

A sudden realization that I’m about to cut the umbilical cord connecting me to my family is about to break loose in my mind with the force of an avalanche. It overwhelms my mind. Am I going to quickly slide down to oblivion on the steep slope of this journey on which I’m about to embark? It is the nagging question I’ve no answer for. I hide the suffocating fear that is holding me in its embrace tightly and gathering momentum as the moment of saying goodbye nears.

Before I mount the mule, I hug Mostafâ Khan, whose forehead is slick with sweat from working hard preparing my mule. Then I embrace all my siblings with their tear-weary eyes. I look into my father’s tear-filled eyes before embracing him and see waves of worries, but it pleases me to notice that there is no more contempt or annoyance in them. I bury myself in the warm embrace of my mother and inhale her sweet smell, struggling to hold back my tears, hoping she can hear my love for her in the silence of my voice. Once in the saddle, I take a long look at my family’s tearful faces, trying to register their images in my mind so I can remember them in the many lonely nights ahead of me.

I look back for the last time and see them all lined up and looking straight at me, but they can’t see my tears. The distance between us is greater now than it was a few minutes ago, I feel so close to them, even though, their images are now blurry through my tears. I’ve a strong intuition that makes my breathing difficult. I feel I shall never see my family again. This intuition is similar to those others that come over me at unpredictable times that I cannot explain to people and, even if I could, I then become the target of their laughter or they tell me I am crazy.

An hour later, leading my mule to the top of a gloriously green cliff, with the vista of Tabriz behind me, the wide green and lush valley carved on the mountainous landscape ahead of me, I fill my lungs with the fresh air. It saddens me more when I realize that this is the same air I have breathed my whole life, and may never breathe again. But as the perched sun in the sky generously shines on my face a strange sense of freedom I have never known before gradually comes over me, chipping away the fragments of my sorrows.

My destination is the exotic city of Baghdâd, the Learning Center of Nezâmieh, which is known as the greatest learning center of the Islamic world. My itinerary will take me through magnificent great cities that are also cultural centers having well known, madresehes [legal colleges], and mosques. I’ll stay a short time in small cities and towns, but spend more time in cities such as Shahr-e Ray, Esfahân, Shirâz, Basreh, and Najaf in order to seek the company of men with knowledge in mystical intuition. I don’t know where I’ll be lodging, in madresehes or in khâneghâhs [dervishes’ and Sufis’ lodges, monasteries]. And in the wilderness, the sky will be my roof, the earth, my bed, and in the company of my own soul, I may have a chance to discover myself.