The Road to Mecca Ch 9 PERSIAN LETTER

The Road to Mecca  Ch 9  PERSIAN LETTER

1

IT is AFTERNOON. I am sitting with a friend in his palm garden just outside the southern gate of Medina. The multitude of palm trunks in the orchard weaves a grey-green twilight into its background, making it appear endless. The trees are still young and low; sunlight dances over their trunks and the pointed arches of their fronds. Their green is somewhat dusty because of the sand-storms which occur almost daily at this time of year. Only the thick carpet of lucerne under the palms is of a brilliant, faultless green.

Not far in front of me rise the city walls, old, grey, built of stone and mud bricks, with bastions jutting forward here and there. From behind the wall tower the luxuriant palms of another garden in the interior of the city, and houses with weather-browned window shutters and enclosed balconies; some of them have been built into the city wall and have become part of it. In the distance I can see the five minarets of the Prophet's Mosque, high and tender like the voices of flutes, the great green dome which vaults over and conceals the little house of the Prophet - his home while he lived and his grave after he died and still farther, beyond the city, the naked, rocky range of Mount Uhud: a brown-red backdrop for the white minarets of the Holy Mosque, the crowns of the palms and the many houses of the town.

The sky, glaringly lighted by the afternoon sun, lies glass-clear over opalescent clouds, and the city is bathed in a blue, gold-and green-streaked light. A high wind plays around the soft clouds, which in Arabia can be so deceptive. Never can you say here,' Now it is cloudy; soon it will rain': for even as the clouds mass heavily, as if pregnant with storm, it often happens that a roar of wind comes suddenly from out of the desert and sweeps them apart; and the faces of the people who have been waiting for rain turn away in silent resignation, and they mutter.

'There is no power and no strength except in God' - while the sky glares anew in a light-blue clearness without mercy.

I bid good-bye to my friend and walk back toward the outer city gate. A man passes by driving a pair of donkeys loaded with lucerne, himself riding on a third donkey. He lifts his staff in greeting and says, 'Peace be with thee,' and I reply with the same words. Then comes a young beduin woman, her black robe trailing behind her and the lower part of her face covered with a veil. Her shining eyes are so black that iris and pupil merge into one; and her step has something of the hesitant, swinging tension of young steppe animals.

I enter the city and cross the huge, open square of Al-Manakha to the inner city wall; beneath the heavy arch of the Egyptian Gate, under which the money-changers sit clinking their gold and silver coins, I step into the main bazaar - a street hardly twelve feet across, tightly packed with shops around which a small but eager life pulsates.

The vendors praise their goods with cheerful songs. Gay head-cloths, silken shawls and robes of figured Kashmir wool attract the eye of the passerby. Silversmiths crouch behind small glass cases containing beduin jewellery arm-rings and ankle-rings, necklaces and earrings. Perfume vendors display basins filled with henna, little red bags with antimony for colouring the eyelashes, multicoloured bottles of oils and essences, and heaps of spices. Traders from Najd are selling beduin garments and camel-saddles and long-tasselled red and blue saddlebags from eastern Arabia. An auctioneer runs through the street, shouting at the top of his voice, with a Persian carpet and a camel-hair abāya over his shoulder and a brass samovar under his arm. Floods of people in both directions, people from Medina and the rest of Arabia and as the time of the pilgrimage has ended only a short while ago - from all the countries between the steppes of Senegal and those of the Kirghiz, between the East Indies and the Atlantic Ocean, between Astrakhan and Zanzibar: but in spite of the multitude of people and the narrowness of the street, there is no hurried frenzy here, no pushing and jostling: for in Medina time does not ride on the wings of pursuit.

But what might appear even more strange is that despite the great variety of human types and costumes that fills them, there is nothing of an 'exotic' medley in the streets of Medina: the variety of appearances reveals itself only to the eye that is determined to analyze. It seems to me that all the people who live in this city, or even sojourn in it temporarily, very soon fall into what one might call a community of mood and thus also of behaviour and, almost, even of facial expression: for all of them have fallen under the spell of the Prophet, whose city it once was and whose guests they now are...

Even after thirteen centuries his spiritual presence is almost as alive here as it was then. It was only because of him that the scattered group of villages once called Yathrib became a city and has been loved by all Muslims down to this day as no city anywhere else in the world has ever been loved. It has not even a name of its own: for more than thirteen hundred years it has been called Madinat an-Nabi, 'the City of the Prophet'. For more than thirteen hundred years, so much love has converged here that all shapes and movements have acquired a kind of family resemblance, and all differences of appearance find a tonal transition into a common harmony.

This is the happiness one always feels here this unifying harmony. Although life in Medina today has only a formal, distant relationship with what the Prophet aimed at; although the spiritual awareness of Islam has been cheapened here, as in many other parts of the Muslim world: an indescribable emotional link with its great spiritual past has remained alive. Never has any city been so loved for the sake of one single personality; never has any man, dead for over thirteen hundred years, been loved so personally, and by so many, as he who lies buried beneath the great green dome.

And yet he never claimed to be anything but a mortal man, and never have Muslims attributed divinity to him, as so many followers of other Prophets have done after the Prophet's death. Indeed, the Koran itself abounds in statements which stress Muhammad's humanness: Muhammad is naught but a Prophet; all prophets have passed away before him; if he dies or is slain, will ye then turn back upon your heels? His utter insignificance before the majesty of God has thus been expressed the Koran: Say [O Muhammad): 'I do not possess any power to grant you evil or good... I do not even possess any power to convey benefit or harm to myself, except as God may please; and had I known the Unknowable, I would have acquired much good, and no evil would ever have befallen me. I am nothing but a warner and the giver of glad tidings to those who have faith in God...

It was precisely because he was only human, because he lived like other men, enjoying the pleasures and suffering the ills of human existence, that those around him could so encompass him with their love.

This love has outlasted his death and lives on in the hearts of his followers like the leitmotif of a melody built up of many tones. It lives on in Medina. It speaks to you out of every stone of the ancient city. You can almost touch it with your hands: but you cannot capture it in words...

-2-

AS I STROLL THROUGH the bazaar in the direction of the Great Mosque, many an old acquaintance hails me in passing. I nod to this and that shopkeeper and finally allow myself to be dragged by my friend Az-Zughaybi down on to the little platform on which he sells cloth to beduins.

'When didst thou return, O Muhammad, and from where? It is months since thou has been here.'

'I am coming from Hail and from the Nufud.'

'And wilt thou not remain at home for a time?'

'No brother, I am leaving for Mecca the day after tomorrow.'

Az-Zughaybi calls out to the boy in the coffee shop opposite, and soon the tiny cups are clinking before us.

'But why, O Muhammad, art thou going to Mecca now? The season of hajj is past.'

=

'It is not a desire for pilgrimage that takes me to Mecca. After all, am I not a hajji five times over? But somehow I have a feeling that I will not long remain in Arabia, and want to see once again the city in which my life in this land began...' And then I add with a laugh: 'Well, brother - to tell thee the truth, I do not understand myself why I am going to Mecca; but I know I have to...'

Az-Zughaybi shakes his head in dismay: 'Thou wouldst leave this land, and thy brethren? How canst thou speak like this?'

A familiar figures passes by with a long, hurried stride: it is Zayd, obviously in search of someone.

'Hey, Zayd, where to?'

He turns abruptly toward me with an eager face:

'It is thee I have been looking for, O my uncle; there was a pack of letters waiting thy return at the post office. Here they are. And peace be upon

thee, Shaykh Az-Zughaybi!'

Sitting cross-legged before Az-Zughaybi's shop, I go through the bundle of envelopes: there are several letters from friends in Mecca; one from the editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung of Switzerland, whose correspondent I have been for the past six years; one from India, urging me to come there and make the acquaintance of the largest single Muslim community in the world; a few letters from various parts of the Near East; and one with a Tehran postmark - from my good friend Ali Agha, from whom I have not heard for more than a year. I open it and glance through the pages covered

with Ali Agha's elegant shiqasta* writing:

To our most beloved friend and brother, the light of our heart, the most respected Asad Agha, may God lengthen his life and protect his steps. Amen.

Peace be upon you and the grace of God, ever and ever. And we pray to God that He may give you health and happiness, knowing that it will please you to hear that we also are in perfect health, God be praised.

We did not write to you for a long time because of the uneven manner in which our life has been progressing in the past months. Our father, may God grant him mercy, has passed away a year ago and we, being the eldest son, had to spend much time and worry on the arrangement of our family affairs. Also, it has been God's will that the affairs of his unworthy servant have prospered beyond expectation, the Government having granted him a promotion to lieutenant colonel. In addition, we hope soon to be joined in matrimony with a gracious and beautiful lady, our second cousin Shirin - and in this way our old, unsettled days are coming to a close. As is well known to your friendly heart, we have not been without sin and error in our past - but did not Hafiz say,

'O God, Thou hast thrown a plank into the midst of a sea -

Couldst Thou have desired that it remain dry?'

So old Ali Agha is at last going to settle down and become respectable! He was not so respectable when I first met him, a little over seven years ago, in the town of Bam, to which he had been 'exiled'. Although he was only twenty-six then, his past had been full of action and excitement; he had taken part in the political upheavals which preceded the assumption of power by Riza Khan, and could have played a considerable role in Tehran had he not lived a bit too gaily. His presence in out-of-the-way Bam in the southeastern corner of Iran had been brought about by his worried and influential father in the hope that the son might be reformed if he were removed from the pleasures of Tehran. But Ali Agha seemed to have found compensations even in Bam - women, arrack and the sweet poison of opium, to which he was greatly devoted.

At that time, in 1925, he was the district gendarmerie commander with the rank of lieutenant. As I was about to cross the great Dasht-i-Lut desert, I looked him up with a letter of introduction from the governor of Kirman province - which in its turn was based on a letter from Riza Khan, the Prime Minister and dictator. I found Ali Agha in a shady garden of orange trees, oleanders and palms through whose pointed vaults the rays of the sun were filtered. He was in his shirt sleeves. A carpet was spread on the lawn, and on it were dishes with the remnants of a meal and half-empty bottles of arrack. Ali Agha apologized,' It is impossible to find wine in this damned hole,' and forced me to drink the local arrack - a terrible brew which went to the brain like a blow. With the swimming eyes of a northern Persian he glanced through the letter from Kirman, tossed it aside and said: 'Even if you had come without introduction, I would have accompanied you myself on your journey through the Dasht-i-Lut. You are my guest. I would never let you ride alone into the Baluchi desert.'

Someone who until then had been sitting half concealed in the shadow of a tree rose slowly: a young woman in a knee-length, light-blue silk tunic and wide, white Baluchi trousers. She had a sensual face that seemed to burn from within, large red lips and beautiful but strangely vague eyes; the lids were painted with antimony.

'She is blind,' Ali Agha whispered to me in French, 'and she is a wonderful singer.'

I admired the great tenderness and respect with which he treated the girl who, as a public singer, belonged to a category in Iran more or less equated with courtesans; he could not have behaved better toward any of the great ladies of Tehran.

We sat down, all three of us, on the carpet, and while Ali Agha busied himself with brazier and opium pipe, I talked with the Baluchi girl. In spite of her blindness she could laugh as only those can laugh who dwell deep in inner gladness; and she made shrewd and witty remarks such as a lady of the great world need not have been ashamed of. When Ali Agha finished his pipe, he took her gently by the hand and said:

"This stranger here, this Austrian, would surely like to hear one of your songs; he has never yet heard the songs of the Baluchis.'

Over the sightless face lay a faraway, dreamy happiness as she took the lute that Ali Agha handed to her and began to strum the strings. She

sang with a deep, husky voice a Baluchi tent song which sounded like an echo of life from her warm lips...

I return to the letter:

I wonder if you still remember, brother and respected friend, how we travelled together in those old days through the Dasht-i-Lut, and how we had to fight for our lives with those Baluchi bandits...?

Do I remember? I smile inwardly at Ali Agha's idle question and see myself and him in the desolate Dasht-i-Lut, the 'Naked Desert' which spreads its huge emptiness from Baluchistan deep into the heart of Iran. I was about to cross it in order to reach Seistan, the easternmost province of Iran, and thence to proceed to Afghanistan; as I had come from Kirman, there was no other way but this.

We stopped, together with our escort of Baluchi gendarmes, at a green oasis on the fringe of the desert in order to hire camels and buy provisions for the long trek ahead. Our temporary headquarters were in the station house of the Indo-European Telegraph. The station-master, a tall, bony, sharp-eyed man, almost never let me out of sight and seemed to appraise me with his glances.

'Beware of this man,' Ali Agha whispered to me, 'he is a bandit. I know him and he knows that I know him. Until a few years ago he was a real robber, but now he has saved up enough money and has become respectable - and makes more money from supplying arms to his former colleagues. I am only waiting for an opportune moment to catch him at it. But the fellow is cunning and it is difficult to prove anything. Since he has heard that you are an Austrian he is very excited. During the World War some Austrian and German agents were trying to arouse the tribes in these parts against the British; they had bags of gold coins with them: and our friend thinks that every German or Austrian is similarly equipped.'

But the cunning of the station-master benefited us, for he was able to find for me two of the best riding-camels of the region. The rest of the day was occupied with haggling about waterskins, camel-hair ropes, rice, clarified butter and many other odds and ends necessary for the desert journey.

=

The afternoon of the following day we started. Ali Agha decided to go ahead with four gendarmes to prepare a camping place for the night, and the drawn-out line of their dromedaries soon disappeared beyond the horizon. We others - Ibrahim, myself and the fifth gendarme - followed at a slower pace.

We swayed (how new it was then to me!) with the strange, swinging amble of the slim-limbed dromedaries, at first through sand dunes, yellow, sparsely dotted with clumps of grass, then deeper and deeper into the plain - into an endless, soundless grey plain, flat and empty - so empty that it seemed not to flow but to fall toward the horizon: for your eye could find nothing there on which to rest, no ridge on the ground, no stone, no bush, not even a blade of grass. No animal sound, no chirping of birds or humming of a beetle broke through that vast silence, and even the wind, deprived of all impediment, swept low without voice over the void - no, fell into it, as a stone falls into an abyss... This was not a silence of death, but rather of the unborn, of that which had never yet come to life: the silence before the First Word.

And then it happened. The silence broke. A human voice struck gently, chirpingly, into the air and remained suspended, as it were: and to you it seemed as if you could not only hear but see it, so lonely and so undisguised by other sounds it floated over the desert plain. It was our Baluchi soldier. He sang a song of his nomad days, a half-sung and half-spoken rhapsody, a quick succession of hot and tender words which I could not understand. His voice rang in a very few tones, at one single level, with a persistence that gradually grew into something like splendour as it enveloped the brittle melody in a byplay of throaty sounds, and, by sheer repetition and variation of the same theme, unfolded an unsuspected wealth in its flat tones - flat and limitless, like the land in which it had been born...

The part of the desert through which we now travelled was called the 'Desert of Ahmad's Bells'. Many years ago, a caravan led by a man named Ahmad lost its way here, and all of them, men and animals, perished from thirst; and to this day, it is said, the bells which Ahmad's camels wore around their necks are sometimes heard by travellers - ghostly, mournful sounds which entice the unwary from their path and lead them to death in the desert.

Shortly after sunset we caught up with Ali Agha and the advance guard and made camp amidst some kahur shrubs - the last we would see for days. A fire was made from dry twigs, and the inevitable tea prepared - while Ali Agha smoked his usual opium pipe. The camels were fed coarse barley meal and made to kneel in a circle around us. Three of the gendarmes were posted as sentries on the outlying dunes, for the region in which we found ourselves was in those days a playground of the dreaded demons of the desert, the Baluchi tribal raiders from the south.

Ali Agha had just finished his pipe and tea and was drinking arrack - alone, for I was not in a mood to keep him company when a rifle shot shattered the silence of the night. A second shot from one of our sentries answered and was followed by an outcry somewhere in the darkness. Ibrahim, with great presence of mind, immediately threw sand on the fire. More rifle shots from all directions. The sentries were now invisible, but one could hear them call out to one another. We did not know how many the attackers were, for they kept uncannily silent. Only off and on a faint stab of light from a rifle muzzle announced their presence; and once or twice I could discern white-clad figures flitting through the blackness. Several low-aimed bullets whizzed over our heads, but none of us were hit. Gradually the commotion died down, a few more shots fell and were sucked in by the night; and the raiders, apparently disconcerted by our watchfulness, vanished as quietly as they had come. Ali Agha called in the sentries and we held a short council.

Originally we had intended to spend the night here; but as we had no idea how strong the attacking party was, and whether they would not return with reinforcements, we decided to break camp immediately and to move on.

The night was as black as pitch; heavy, low clouds had concealed the moon and the stars. In summertime it is better, as a rule, to travel in the desert at night; but under normal circumstances we would not have risked a march in such darkness for fear of losing our way, for the hard gravel of Dasht-i-Lut does not keep any tracks. In the early times the Iranian kings used to mark the caravan routes in such deserts by guideposts of masonry, but like so many other good things of the old days, these marks had long since disappeared. Indeed, they were no longer necessary: the wire of the Indo-European Telegraph, laid by the British at the beginning of the century from the Indian frontier across the Dasht-i-Lut to Kirman, served equally well, or even better, as a guide; but in a night like this, wire and telegraph posts were invisible.

This we discovered to our dismay when after about half an hour the gendarme who had been riding ahead as our guide suddenly reined in his mount and shamefacedly reported to Ali Agha:

'Hazrat, I cannot see the wire any more...'

For a moment we all remained silent. There were wells, we knew, only along the route marked by the telegraph line, and even these were very widely spaced. To lose one's way here would mean to perish like Ahmad's legendary caravan....

Thereupon Ali Agha spoke up in a way which was quite unlike his usual manner; and one could safely presume that arrack and opium were responsible. He drew out his pistol and bellowed:

'Where is the wire? Why did you lose the wire, you sons of dogs? Oh, I know you are in league with those bandits and are trying to lead us astray so that we may perish from thirst and thus be easy plunder!"

This reproach was certainly unjust, for a Baluchi would never betray a man with whom he has eaten bread and salt. Our gendarmes, obviously hurt by their lieutenant's accusation, assured us of their innocence, but Ali Agha broke in:

'Silence! Find the wire immediately or I will shoot down every one of you, you sons of burned fathers!'

I could not see their faces in the darkness but could sense how deeply they, the free Baluchis, were feeling the insult; they no longer even bothered to reply. Then suddenly one of them our guide of a while ago - detached himself from the group, struck his camel with his whip and disappeared at a gallop into the darkness.

'Where to?' shouted Ali Agha and received a few indistinct words in reply. For a few seconds one could hear the soft padding of the camel's feet, then the sounds dived into the night.

In spite of my conviction, a moment before, of the innocence of the Baluchi gendarme, the hesitant thought crossed my mind: Now he has gone to the bandits; Ali Agha was right, after all... I heard Ali Agha draw back the safety-catch of his pistol and I did the same. Ibrahim slowly unslung his carbine. We sat motionless in our saddles. One of the dromedaries grunted softly, a gendarme's rifle butt struck against a saddle. Long minutes passed. You could almost hear the breathing of the men. Then, abruptly, a shout came from a great distance. To me it sounded merely like, 'Ooo,' but the Baluchis seemed to understand it and one of them, cupping his hands to his mouth, excitedly shouted something back in the Brahui tongue. Again that distant shout. One of the gendarmes turned toward Ali Agha and said in Persian:

'The wire, hazrat! He has found the wire!'

The tension broke. Relieved, we followed the voice of the invisible scout directing us from time to time. When we reached him, he rose in his saddle and pointed into the darkness:

'There is the wire.'

And rightly, after a few moments we almost struck against a telegraph post.

=

The first thing Ali Agha did was very characteristic of him. He caught the soldier by his belt, drew him close to himself and, learning over the saddle, kissed him on both cheeks:

'It is I, and not thou, who is a son of a dog, my brother. Forgive me...'

It subsequently transpired that the Baluchi, this child of the wilderness, had been riding in a zigzag until he heard from a distance of half a mile the wind hum in the wire: a humming that was even now, when I passed directly under it, almost imperceptible to my European ears...

We proceeded slowly, cautiously, through the black night, from invisible telegraph pole to invisible telegraph pole, one of the gendarmes always riding ahead and calling out each time his hand struck a pole. We had found our way and were determined not to lose it again.

I AWAKEN FROM MY REVERIE and return to Ali Agha's letter:

With the promotion to lieutenant colonel, this humble individual has been appointed to the General Staff; and this, O beloved friend and brother, appeals to us more than garrison life in a provincial town...

I am sure it does; Ali Agha has always had a flair for life in the capital and its intrigues - especially political intrigues. And, indeed, in his letter he goes on to describe the political atmosphere of Tehran, those endless wranglings under the surface, those intricate manoeuvrings with which foreign powers have for so long managed to keep Iran in a state of restlessness that makes it well-nigh impossible for the strange, gifted nation to come into its own.

Right now we are being harassed by the English oil company; great pressure is being exerted upon our Government to extend the concession and thus to prolong our slavery. The bazaars are buzzing with rumours, and God alone knows where all this will lead to...

The bazaar has always played a most important role in the political life of Eastern countries; and this is particularly true of the Tehran bazaar, in which the hidden heart of Iran pulsates with a persistence that defies all national decay and all passing of time. Between the lines of Ali Agha's letter this huge bazaar, almost a city in itself, reappears before my eyes with the vividness of a sight seen only yesterday: a wide-meshed twilight labyrinth of halls and passageways roofed with vaults of pointed arches. In the main street, next to small, dark booths filled with cheap trifles, there are covered patios with skylights, stores in which the most expensive European and Asiatic silks are being sold; next to ropemakers' workshops, the glass cases of the silversmiths full of delicate filigree work; multicoloured textiles from Bokhara and India mingle with rare Persian carpets - hunting carpets with figures of knights on horseback, lions, leopards, peacocks and antelopes; glass-pearl necklaces and automatic lighters next to sewing machines; black, unhappy umbrellas side by side with yellow-embroidered sheepskin robes from Khorasan: all assembled in this extremely long hall as if in an immense and not too carefully arranged shop window.

In the innumerable side-lanes of this tangled maze of handicrafts and commerce, the shops are grouped according to trades. Here you see the long line of saddlers and leatherworkers, with the red of dyed leather as the dominant colour and the sourish smell of leather permeating the air. There are the tailors: and from every niche for most of the shops consist only of a single raised niche with about three or four square yards of floor space one hears the whirring of industrious sewing machines; long garments are hung out for sale, always the same garments so that when you walk you sometimes think that you are standing still. You have a similar impression in many other parts of the bazaar as well; none the less, the abundance of sameness at every single point has nothing in common with monotony; it intoxicates the stranger and fills him with uneasy satisfaction. Even though you visit the bazaar for the hundredth time, you find the mood around you always the same, seemingly unchanged - but of that inexhaustible, vibrating changelessness of an ocean wave which always alters its forms but keeps its substance unchanged.

The bazaar of the coppersmiths: a chorus of bronze bells are the swinging hammers which beat out of copper, bronze and brass the most varied shapes, transforming formless metal sheets into bowls and basins and goblets. What an acoustic sureness, this hammering in altering tempos across the whole length of the bazaar every man acquiescing to the rhythm of the others so that there should be no dissonance to the ear: a hundred workmen hammering on different objects in different shops but in the whole bazaar street only one melody... In this deep, more than merely musical, almost social desire for harmony appears the hidden grace of the Iranian soul.

The spice bazaar: silent alleys of white sugar cones, rice bags, mounds of almonds and pistachios, hazelnuts and melon kernels, basins full of dried apricots and ginger, brass plates with cinnamon, curry, pepper, saffron and poppy seeds, the many little bowls of aniseed, vanilla, cummin, cloves and countless odd herbs and roots which exude a heavy, overpowering aroma. Over the shining brass scales crouch the lords of these strangenesses, like buddhas, with crossed legs, from time to time calling out in an undertone to a passerby and asking after his wants. All speech is only whisper here: for one cannot be noisy where sugar flows smoothly from bag into balance scale, and one cannot be noisy where thyme or aniseed is being weighed ... It is the same adaptation to the mood of the material which enables the Iranian to knot noble carpets out of innumerable coloured wool threads - thread by thread, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch - until the whole stands there in its playful perfection. It is no accident that Persian carpets have no equal in the world. Where else could one find this deep quiet, this thoughtfulness and absorption in one's own doing? - where else such eyes, dark depths to which time and the passing of time mean so little?

In cavernous niches, somewhat larger than the usual ones, sit silent miniature painters. They are copying old miniatures from hand-written books that have long ago been torn to shreds, depicting in breath-fine lines and colours the great things of life: fights and hunts, love and happiness and sadness. Fine and thin as nerve-threads are their brushes; the colours are not entrusted to lifeless vessels but are mixed on the living palm of the painter and distributed in minute blobs and drops on the fingers of the left hand. On new pages of flawless whiteness the old miniatures experience a rebirth, stroke after stroke, shade after shade. Side by side with the flaking gold backgrounds of the originals emerge the shining ones of the copies. The faded orange trees of a royal park blossom again in a new spring; the tender women in silks and furs repeat once again their loving gestures; anew rises the sun over an old knightly polo game... Stroke after stroke, shade after shade, the silent men follow the creative adventures of a dead artist, and there is as much love in them as there was enchantment in him; and this love makes you almost forget the imperfection of the copies...

Time passes, and the miniature painters sit bent over their work, strangers unto the day. Time passes; in the bazaar streets nearby Western junk penetrates with stubborn gradualness into the shops; the kerosene lamp from Chicago, the printed cotton cloth from Manchester and the teapot from Czechoslovakia advance victoriously: but the miniature painters sit cross-legged on their worn straw mats, burrowing with tender eyes and fingertips into the blissful old joys, and give to their royal hunts and ecstatic lovers a new awakening, day after day...

Numberless are the people in the bazaar: gents with European collar and often trailing Arabian abaya over a European or semi-European suit, conservative burghers in long kaftāns and silken sashes, peasants and artisans in blue or drab jackets. Singing dervishes - Iran's aristocratic beggars - in white, flowing garments, sometimes with a leopard skin over the back, long hair and mostly of fine build. The women of the middle class are, according to their means, dressed in silk or cotton, but always in black, with the traditional short Tehran veil standing stiffly away from their faces; the poorer ones wear a light-coloured flowered cotton wrap. Ancient mullahs ride on magnificently caparisoned asses or mules and turn upon the stranger a fanatical stare that seems to ask: 'What are you doing here? Are you one of those who work for our country's ruin?'

=

Iran's long experience of Western intrigues has made its people suspicious. No Iranian really expects any good to come to his country from the farangis. But Ali Agha does not seem to be unduly pessimistic:

Iran is old - but certainly not yet ready to die. We have often been oppressed. Many nations have swept over us, and all of them have passed away: but we remain alive. In poverty and oppression, in ignorance and darkness: but we remain alive. This is because we Iranians always go our own way. How often has the outside world tried to force on us new ways of life and has always failed. We do not oppose outer forces with violence, and therefore it may sometimes appear as if we had surrendered to them. But we are of the tribe of the muryune - that little, insignificant ant which lives under walls. You, light of my heart, must have seen sometimes in Iran how well-built houses with strong walls suddenly collapse for no apparent reason. What was the reason? Nothing but those tiny ants which for many years, with unceasing industry, have been burrowing passages and cavities in the foundations, always advancing by a hair's breadth, slowly, patiently, in all directions - until at last the wall loses its balance and topples over. We Iranians are such ants. We do not oppose the powers of the world with noisy and useless violence, but allow them to do their worst, and burrow in silence our passageways and cavities, until one day their building will suddenly collapse ...

And have you seen what happens when you throw a stone into water? The stone sinks, a few circles appear on the surface, spread out and gradually fade away, until the water is as placid as before. We Iranians are such water.

The Shah, may God prolong his life, has a heavy burden to bear, with the English on one side and the Russians on the other. But we have no doubt that, by the grace of God, he will find a way to save Iran...

Ali Agha's implicit faith in Riza Shah does not, on the surface, appear to be misplaced. He is undoubtedly one of the most dynamic personalities I have ever met in the Muslim world, and of all the kings I have known, only Ibn Saud can compare with him.

The story of Riza Shah's rise to power is like a fantastic fairy tale, possible only in this Eastern world where personal courage and willpower can sometimes lift a man out of utter obscurity to the pinnacle of leadership. When I came to know him during my first stay in Tehran in the summer of 1924, he was Prime Minister and undisputed dictator of Iran; but the people had not yet quite overcome their shock at seeing him appear so suddenly, so unexpectedly, at the helm of the country's affairs. I still remember the wonderment with which an old Iranian clerk in the German Embassy at Tehran once told me: 'Do you know that but ten years ago this Prime Minister of ours stood guard as an ordinary trooper before the gates of this very embassy? And that I myself occasionally gave him a letter to deliver to the Foreign Ministry and admonished him, "Make haste, you son of a dog, and don't dawdle in the bazaar...!"

Yes, it had not been so many years since Riza the trooper stood sentry before the embassies and public buildings of Tehran. I could picture him as he stood there in the shabby uniform of the Iranian cossack brigade, leaning on his rifle and gazing at the activity in the streets around him. He would watch Persian people stroll along like dreamy shadows or sit in the cool of evening along the water channels, as I watched them. And from the English bank behind his back he would hear the rattling of typewriters, the bustle of busy people, the whole rustling stir which distant Europe had brought into that Tehran building with its blue faience facade. It may have been then, for the first time (nobody told me this, but I somehow think it must have been so), that in the unschooled head of the soldier Riza a wondering, questioning thought arose: 'Must it be like this...? Must it be that people of other nations work and strive, while our life flows past like a dream?'

And it was perhaps at that moment that desire for change - creator of all great deeds, discoveries and revolutions - began to flicker in his brain and mutely call for expression...

At other times he may have stood sentry before the garden gateway of one of the great European embassies. The well-tended trees moved with the wind, and the gravelled pathways crunched under the feet of white-garbed servants. In that house in the midst of the park a mysterious power seemed to dwell; it cowed every Iranian who passed through the gate and caused him to straighten his clothes self-consciously and made his hands embarrassed and awkward. Sometimes elegant carriages drew up and Iranian politicians stepped out of them. The soldier Riza knew many of them by sight: this one was the foreign minister, that one the finance minister. Almost always they had tense, apprehensive faces when they entered that gateway, and it was amusing to observe their expressions when they left the embassy: sometimes they were radiant, as if a great favour had been conferred upon them; sometimes pale and depressed, as if a sentence of doom had just been passed over them. Those mysterious people within had pronounced the sentence. The soldier Riza wondered: 'Must it be thus ...?'

Occasionally it happened that an Iranian clerk came running from the office building Riza was guarding, thrust a letter into his hand and said: 'Carry this quickly to so and so. But make haste, thou son of a dog, otherwise the Ambassador will be angry!' Riza was accustomed to being thus addressed, for his own officers were not in the least fastidious in their choice of epithets. But possibly no, almost certainly - the words 'son of a dog' gave him a stab of humiliation, for he knew: he was not a son of a dog but the son of a great nation that called names like Rustam, Darius, Nushirwan, Kay Khosru, Shah Abbas, Nadir Shah its own. But what did 'those within' know of this? What did they know of the forces which moved like a dark, dumb stream through the breast of the forty-year-old soldier and sometimes threatened to burst his ribs and make him bite his fists in powerless despair, 'Oh, if only I could...'?

And the desire for self-affirmation that weepingly dwells in every Iranian sometimes rose up with painful, unexpected violence in the soldier Riza, and made his mind clear and made him suddenly understand a strange pattern in all he saw...

The Great War was over. After the Bolshevik revolution, the Russian troops which had previously occupied northern Iran were withdrawn; but immediately afterward communist upheavals broke out in the Iranian province of Gilan on the Caspian Sea, led by the influential Kuchuk Khan and supported by regular Russian units on land and sea. The government sent out troops against the rebels, but the badly disciplined and poorly equipped Iranian soldiers suffered defeat after defeat; and the battalion in which Sergeant Riza, then nearly fifty years old, was serving proved no exception. But once, when his unit turned to flight after an unlucky skirmish, Riza could not hold himself any longer. He stepped from the breaking ranks and called out, for everyone to hear: 'Why do you run away, Iranians - you, Iranians!" He must have felt what Charles the Twelfth of Sweden had felt when he lay wounded on the field of Poltava and saw his soldiers race by in headless flight and called out to them with a despairing voice: 'Why do you run away, Swedes - you Swedes!" But the difference was that King Charles was bleeding from many wounds and had nothing at his disposal except his voice, while the soldier Riza was unhurt and had a loaded Mauser pistol in his hand - and his voice was strong and threatening as he warned his comrades: 'Whoever flees, I will shoot him down - even if it is my brother!!

Such an outburst was something new to the Iranian troops. Their confusion gave way to astonishment. They became curious: what could this man have in mind? Some officers protested and pointed out the hopelessness of their position; and one of them scoffed: 'Will you, perhaps, lead us to victory?' In that second, Riza may have relived all the disappointments of his earlier years, and all his dumb hopes were suddenly lighted up. He saw the end of a magic rope before him; and he grasped it. 'Accepted!' he cried, and turned to the soldiers: 'Will you have me as your leader?'

In no nation is the cult of the hero so deeply ingrained as in the Iranian; and this man here seemed to be a hero. The soldiers forgot their terror and their flight and roared with jubilation: 'You shall be our leader!' - 'So be it,' replied Riza, 'I will lead you; and I will kill whosoever attempts to flee!' But no one thought any longer of flight. They threw away the cumbersome knapsacks, attached their bayonets to their rifles: and under Riza's

=

leadership the whole battalion turned round and captured a Russian battery in a surprise assault, drew other Iranian units with it, overran the enemy-and after a few hours the battle was decided in favour of the Iranians.

Some days later a telegram from Tehran promoted Riza to the rank of captain; and he could now affix the title khān to his name.

He had got hold of the end of the rope and climbed up on it. His name had suddenly become famous. In quick succession he became major, colonel, brigadier. In the year 1921 he brought about, in company with the young journalist Zia ad-Din and three other officers, a coup d'etat, arrested the corrupt cabinet and, with the help of his devoted brigade, forced the weak and insignificant young Shah Ahmad to appoint a new cabinet: Zia ad-Din became Prime Minister, Riza Khan Minister of War. He could neither read nor write. But he was like a demon in his drive for power. And he had become the idol of the army and the people, who now, for the first time in ages, saw a man before them: a leader.

In the political history of Iran scenes change quickly. Zia ad-Din disappeared from the stage and reappeared as an exile in Europe. Riza Khan remained - as Prime Minister. It was rumoured in Tehran in those days that Riza Khan, Zia ad-Din and the Shah's younger brother, the Crown Prince, had conspired to remove the Shah from the throne; and it was whispered - nobody knows to this day whether it is true - that at the last moment Riza Khan had betrayed his friends to the Shah in order not to risk his own future in so dubious an undertaking. But whether true or not, soon afterward the Prime Minister - Riza Khan - advised the young Shah Ahmad to undertake a pleasure trip to Europe. He accompanied him with great pomp on the automobile journey to the border of Iraq and is said to have told him: 'If your Majesty ever returns to Iran, you will be able to say that Riza Khan understands nothing of the world.'

He no longer needed to share his power with anyone; he was, in fact if not in name, the sole overlord of Iran. Like a hungry wolf, he threw himself into work. All Iran was to be reformed from top to bottom. The hitherto loose administration was centralized; the old system of farming out entire provinces to the highest bidder was abolished; the governors ceased to be satraps and became officials. The army, the dictator's pet child, was reorganized on Western patterns. Riza Khan started campaigns against unruly tribal chieftains who had previously regarded themselves as little kings and often refused to obey the Tehran government; he dealt harshly with the bandits who for many decades had terrorized the countryside. Some order was brought into the finances of the country with the assistance of an American adviser; taxes and customs began to flow in regularly. Order was brought out of chaos.

As if echoing the Turkish Kemalist movement, the idea of a republic emerged in Iran, first as a rumour, then as a demand of the more progressive elements of the populace and finally as the open aim of the dictator himself. But here Riza Khan seems to have committed an error of judgment: a powerful cry of protest arose from the Iranian masses.

This popular opposition to republican tendencies was not due to any love of the reigning house, for nobody in Iran had much affection for the Qajar dynasty which - because of its Turkoman origin - had always been regarded as 'foreign'; nor was it due to any sentimental predilection for the round, boyish face of Shah Ahmad. It was something quite different: it was prompted by the people's fear of losing their religion as the Turks had lost theirs in the wake of Ataturk's revolution. In their ignorance, the Iranians did not understand all at once that a republican form of government would correspond much more closely to the Islamic scheme of life than a monarchial one; guided by the conservatism of their religious leaders - and perhaps justifiably frightened by Riza Khan's obvious admiration of Kemal Ataturk - the Iranians sensed in his proposal only a threat to Islam as the dominant force in the country.

A great excitement took hold of the urban population, especially in Tehran. A furious mob, armed with sticks and stones, assembled before Riza Khan's office building and uttered curses and threats against the dictator who but yesterday had been a demigod. Riza Khan's aides urgently advised him not to go out before the excitement subsided; but he brushed them aside and, accompanied by only one orderly and entirely unarmed, left the office compound in a closed carriage. As soon as the carriage emerged from the gates, the mob seized the horses' reins and brought them to a standstill. Some people tore the carriage door open - 'Drag him out, drag him out into the street!' But already he was getting out himself, his face livid with rage, and began to beat the heads and shoulders of those about him with his riding crop: 'You sons of dogs, away from me, away! How dare you! I am Riza Khan! Away to your women and your beds!' And the raging crowd, which had been threatening death and destruction but a few minutes ago, became silent under the impact of his personal courage; they drew back, melted away, one by one, and disappeared in the side-alleys. Once again a great leader had spoken to his people; he had spoken in anger, and the people were cowed. It may have been at that moment that a feeling of contempt broke through Riza Khan's love for his people, and clouded it forever.

But in spite of Riza Khan's prestige success, the republic did not materialize. The debacle of this plan made it obvious that military power alone could not bring about a 'reform movement' in the face of the people's resistance. Not that the Iranians were opposed to reform as such: but they instinctively realized that an imported, Western political doctrine would mean the end of all hope of ever attaining to a healthy development within the context of their own culture and religion.

Riza Khan did not understand this, then or ever, and thus became estranged from his people. Their love for him vanished and a fearful hatred gradually took its place. They began to ask themselves: What has the hero really done for his country? They enumerated Riza Khan's achievements: the reorganization of the army - but at the price of tremendous costs which placed crushing tax burdens on the already impoverished people; the suppressed tribal rebellions - but also the suppressed patriots: showy building activity in Tehran - but ever-growing misery among the peasants in the countryside. People began to remember that but a few years ago Riza Khan had been a poor soldier and now he was the richest man in Iran, with innumerable acres of land to his name. Were these the 'reforms' about which so much had been spoken? Did the few glittering office buildings in Tehran and the luxury hotels which had sprung up here and there under the dictator's influence really represent any betterment of the people's lot?

IT WAS AT THIS STAGE of his career that I came to know Riza Khan. Whatever the rumours about his personal ambition and alleged selfishness, I could not fail to recognize the man's greatness from the moment he first received me in his office at the War Ministry. It was probably the simplest office occupied anywhere, at any time, by a prime minister: a desk, a sofa covered with black oilcloth, a couple of chairs, a small bookshelf and a bright but modest carpet on the floor were all that the room contained; and the tall, heavy-set man in his middle fifties who rose from behind the desk was attired in a plain khaki uniform without any medals, ribbons or badges of rank.

I had been introduced by the German Ambassador, Count von der Schulenburg (for although I was Austrian myself, I represented a great German newspaper). Even during that first, formal conversation I became aware of the sombre dynamism of Riza Khan's nature. From under grey, bushy brows a pair of sharp, brown eyes regarded me - Persian eyes that were usually veiled by heavy lids: a strange mixture of melancholy and hardness. There were bitter lines around his nose and mouth, but the heavy-boned features betrayed an uncommon power of will which kept the lips compressed and filled the jaw with tension. When you listened to his low and well-modulated voice - the voice of a man accustomed to speak words of importance and to weigh each of them on his tongue before it was permitted to become sound - you thought you were listening to a man with a thirty-year career of staff officer and high dignitary behind him: and you could hardly believe that it was only six years since Riza Khan had been a sergeant, and only three since he had learned to read and write.

=

He must have sensed my interest in him - and perhaps also my affection for his people - for he insisted that this interview should not be the last, and asked me, as well as Schulenburg, to tea next week at his summer residence at Shemran, the beautiful garden resort some miles out of Tehran.

I arranged with Schulenburg to come first to him (like most of the other foreign representatives, he also was spending the summer in Shemran) and to go together to the Prime Minister's residence. But as it happened, I was unable to arrive in time. A few days earlier I had purchased a small four-wheeled hunting carriage with two spirited horses. How spirited they were became fully obvious a few miles outside Tehran, when, following some wicked impulse, they obstinately refused to go ahead and insisted on returning home. For about twenty minutes I struggled with them; in the end, I let Ibrahim take horses and carriage home and set out on foot in search of some other means of transportation. A tramp of two miles brought me to a village where I fortunately found a droshky, but when I arrived at the German Embassy, it was about an hour and a half after the appointed time. I found Schulenburg pacing up and down his study like an angry tiger, with all his usual suavity gone: for to his Prussian-cum-ambassadorial sense of discipline, such an offence against punctuality seemed no less than blasphemy. At my sight he ex-ploded with indignation:

'You can't - you can't do that to a prime minister! Have you forgotten that Riza Khan is a dictator and, like all dictators, extremely touchy?'

'My horses seem to have overlooked this fine point, Count Schulenburg,' was my only reply. 'Even if it had been the Emperor of China, I would not have been able to arrive any earlier.'

At that the Count recovered his sense of humour and broke out into loud laughter:

'By God, such a thing has never happened to me before! Let's go then - and hope that the footman doesn't slam the door in our faces...'

He did not. When we arrived at Riza Khan's palace the tea party was long over and all the other guests had departed, but the dictator did not appear in the least offended by my breach of protocol. Upon hearing the reasons for our delay, he exclaimed: 'Well, I would like to see these horses of

yours! I think they must belong to the opposition party. I don't know whether it might not be wise to have them placed in police custody!!

If anything, my contretemps rather helped than hindered the establishment of an easy, informal relationship between the all-powerful Prime Minister of Iran and the young journalist, which later made it possible for me to move about the country with a freedom greater than that accorded to most other foreigners.

BUT ALI AGHA'S LETTER does not refer to the Riza Khan of those early days, the man who lived with a simplicity almost unbelievable in display-loving Iran: it refers to Riza Shah Pahlavi, who ascended the Peacock Throne in 1925; it refers to the king who has given up all pretence of humility and now seeks to emulate Kemal Ataturk in building a vainglorious Western facade onto his ancient Eastern land...

I come to the end of the letter:

Although you, beloved friend, are now in the blessed City of the Holy Prophet, we trust you have not forgotten nor ever will forget your unworthy friend and his country..

O Ali Agha, friend of my younger days - 'light of my heart', as you yourself would phrase it - your letter has made me drunk with remembrance: Persia-drunk as I became when I began to know your country, that old, dim jewel set in a setting of ancient gold and cracked marble and dust and shadows - the shadows of all the days and nights of your melancholy country and of the dark, dreaming eyes of your people...

I still remember Kirmanshah, the first Iranian town I saw after I left the mountains of Kurdistan. A strange, faded, opaque atmosphere lay about it, muffled, subdued not to say shabby. No doubt, in every Eastern city poverty lies close to the surface, much more visible than in any European city but to that I was already accustomed. It was not just poverty in an economic sense which thrust itself upon me, for Kirmanshah was said to be a prosperous town. It was rather a kind of depression that lay over the people, something that was directly connected with them and seemed to have hardly anything to do with economic circumstances.

All these people had large, black eyes under thick, black brows that often met over the bridge of the nose, weighted by heavy lids like veils. Most of the men were slim (I hardly remember having seen a fat man in Iran); they never laughed aloud, and in their silent smiles lurked a faint irony which seemed to conceal more than it revealed. No mobility of features, no gesticulations, only quiet, measured movements: as if they wore masks.

As in all Eastern cities, the life of the town was concentrated in the bazaar. It revealed itself to the stranger as a subdued mixture of brown, gold-brown and carpet-red, with shimmering copper plates and basins here and there and perhaps a blue majolica painting over the door of a caravanserai with figures of black-eyed knights and winged dragons. If you looked more carefully, you could discover in this bazaar all the colours of the world -but none of these variegated colours could ever quite assert itself in the unifying shadows of the vaults that covered the bazaar and drew everything together into a sleepy duskiness. The pointed arches of the vaulted roof were pierced at regular intervals by small openings to let in the daylight. Through these openings the rays of the sun fell in; in the aromatic air of the halls they gained the quality of a substance and resembled opaque, slanted pillars of fight; and not the people seemed to go through them but they, the shining pillars, seemed to go through the shadowy people...

For the people in this bazaar were gentle and silent like shadows. If a trader called out to the passerby, he did so in a low voice; none of them praised his wares with calls and songs, as is the custom in Arabian bazaars. On soft soles life threaded its way here. The people did not elbow or shove one another. They were polite - with a politeness which seemed to bend forward to you but in reality held you at arm's length. They were obviously shrewd and did not mind starting a conversation with the stranger - but only their lips were talking. Their souls stood somewhere in the background, waiting, weighing, detached...

In a teahouse some men of the working class sat on straw mats perhaps artisans, labourers, caravan drivers - huddled together around an iron basin filled with glowing coals. Two long-stemmed pipes with round porcelain bowls made the round. The sweetish smell of opium was in the air. They smoked wordlessly; each man took only a few deep draughts at a time, passing the pipe on to his neighbour. And then I saw what I had not observed before: many, very many people were smoking opium, some of them more and others less publicly. The shopkeeper in his niche; the loafer under the arched gateway of a caravanserai; the coppersmith in his workshop during a moment of respite: they all were smoking with the same withdrawn, somewhat tired face, gazing with dull eyes into a spaceless void...

Fresh, green poppies with thick buds were being sold by vendors all over the bazaar and apparently consumed in this way - another, milder form of taking opium. Even children were eating the seeds in doorways and corners. Two, three of them would divide the delicacy among themselves with an old-age tolerance toward each other, without childish egoism but also without childish joy or vivacity. But how could they have been otherwise? In their earliest life they were given a heavy brew of poppy seeds to drink whenever they cried and bothered their parents. When they grew up and began to roam the streets, the borderlines of quietude, lassitude and kindness were already blurred in them.

And then I knew what had moved me so strongly when I first beheld the melancholy eyes of the Iranians: the sign of a tragic destiny in them. I felt that the opium belonged to them in the same way as a suffering smile belongs to the face of a sufferer; it belonged to their gentleness, to their inner lassitude - it belonged even to their great poverty and great frugality. It did not seem to be so much vice as expression - and perhaps also help. Help against what? Strange land of questions...

=

He must have sensed my interest in him - and perhaps also my affection for his people - for he insisted that this interview should not be the last, and asked me, as well as Schulenburg, to tea next week at his summer residence at Shemran, the beautiful garden resort some miles out of Tehran.

I arranged with Schulenburg to come first to him (like most of the other foreign representatives, he also was spending the summer in Shemran) and to go together to the Prime Minister's residence. But as it happened, I was unable to arrive in time. A few days earlier I had purchased a small four-wheeled hunting carriage with two spirited horses. How spirited they were became fully obvious a few miles outside Tehran, when, following some wicked impulse, they obstinately refused to go ahead and insisted on returning home. For about twenty minutes I struggled with them; in the end, I let Ibrahim take horses and carriage home and set out on foot in search of some other means of transportation. A tramp of two miles brought me to a village where I fortunately found a droshky, but when I arrived at the German Embassy, it was about an hour and a half after the appointed time. I found Schulenburg pacing up and down his study like an angry tiger, with all his usual suavity gone: for to his Prussian-cum-ambassadorial sense of discipline, such an offence against punctuality seemed no less than blasphemy. At my sight he ex-ploded with indignation:

'You can't - you can't do that to a prime minister! Have you forgotten that Riza Khan is a dictator and, like all dictators, extremely touchy?'

'My horses seem to have overlooked this fine point, Count Schulenburg,' was my only reply. 'Even if it had been the Emperor of China, I would not have been able to arrive any earlier.'

At that the Count recovered his sense of humour and broke out into loud laughter:

'By God, such a thing has never happened to me before! Let's go then - and hope that the footman doesn't slam the door in our faces...'

He did not. When we arrived at Riza Khan's palace the tea party was long over and all the other guests had departed, but the dictator did not appear in the least offended by my breach of protocol. Upon hearing the reasons for our delay, he exclaimed: 'Well, I would like to see these horses of yours! I think they must belong to the opposition party. I don't know whether it might not be wise to have them placed in police custody!'

If anything, my contretemps rather helped than hindered the establishment of an easy, informal relationship between the all-powerful Prime Minister of Iran and the young journalist, which later made it possible for me to move about the country with a freedom greater than that accorded to most other foreigners.

BUT ALI AGHA'S LETTER does not refer to the Riza Khan of those early days, the man who lived with a simplicity almost unbelievable in display-loving Iran: it refers to Riza Shah Pahlavi, who ascended the Peacock Throne in 1925; it refers to the king who has given up all pretence of humility and now seeks to emulate Kemal Ataturk in building a vainglorious Western facade onto his ancient Eastern land...

I come to the end of the letter:

Although you, beloved friend, are now in the blessed City of the Holy Prophet, we trust you have not forgotten nor ever will forget your unworthy friend and his country

O Ali Agha, friend of my younger days - 'light of my heart', as you yourself would phrase it - your letter has made me drunk with remembrance: Persia-drunk as I became when I began to know your country, that old, dim jewel set in a setting of ancient gold and cracked marble and dust and shadows - the shadows of all the days and nights of your melancholy country and of the dark, dreaming eyes of your people...

I still remember Kirmanshah, the first Iranian town I saw after I left the mountains of Kurdistan. A strange, faded, opaque atmosphere lay about it, muffled, subdued not to say shabby. No doubt, in every Eastern city poverty lies close to the surface, much more visible than in any European city - but to that I was already accustomed. It was not just poverty in an economic sense which thrust itself upon me, for Kirmanshah was said to be a prosperous town. It was rather a kind of depression that lay over the people, something that was directly connected with them and seemed to have hardly anything to do with economic circumstances.

All these people had large, black eyes under thick, black brows that often met over the bridge of the nose, weighted by heavy lids like veils. Most of the men were slim (I hardly remember having seen a fat man in Iran); they never laughed aloud, and in their silent smiles lurked a faint irony which seemed to conceal more than it revealed. No mobility of features, no gesticulations, only quiet, measured movements: as if they wore masks.

As in all Eastern cities, the life of the town was concentrated in the bazaar. It revealed itself to the stranger as a subdued mixture of brown, gold-brown and carpet-red, with shimmering copper plates and basins here and there and perhaps a blue majolica painting over the door of a caravanserai with figures of black-eyed knights and winged dragons. If you looked more carefully, you could discover in this bazaar all the colours of the world -but none of these variegated colours could ever quite assert itself in the unifying shadows of the vaults that covered the bazaar and drew everything together into a sleepy duskiness. The pointed arches of the vaulted roof were pierced at regular intervals by small openings to let in the daylight. Through these openings the rays of the sun fell in; in the aromatic air of the halls they gained the quality of a substance and resembled opaque, slanted pillars of fight; and not the people seemed to go through them but they, the shining pillars, seemed to go through the shadowy people...

For the people in this bazaar were gentle and silent like shadows. If a trader called out to the passerby, he did so in a low voice; none of them praised his wares with calls and songs, as is the custom in Arabian bazaars. On soft soles life threaded its way here. The people did not elbow or shove one another. They were polite with a politeness which seemed to bend forward to you but in reality held you at arm's length. They were obviously shrewd and did not mind starting a conversation with the stranger - but only their lips were talking. Their souls stood somewhere in the background, waiting, weighing, detached...

In a teahouse some men of the working class sat on straw mats - perhaps artisans, labourers, caravan drivers - huddled together around an iron basin filled with glowing coals. Two long-stemmed pipes with round porcelain bowls made the round. The sweetish smell of opium was in the air. They smoked wordlessly; each man took only a few deep draughts at a time, passing the pipe on to his neighbour. And then I saw what I had not observed before: many, very many people were smoking opium, some of them more and others less publicly. The shopkeeper in his niche; the loafer under the arched gateway of a caravanserai; the coppersmith in his workshop during a moment of respite: they all were smoking with the same withdrawn, somewhat tired face, gazing with dull eyes into a spaceless void...

Fresh, green poppies with thick buds were being sold by vendors all over the bazaar and apparently consumed in this way another, milder form of taking opium. Even children were eating the seeds in doorways and corners. Two, three of them would divide the delicacy among themselves with an old-age tolerance toward each other, without childish egoism but also without childish joy or vivacity. But how could they have been otherwise? In their earliest life they were given a heavy brew of poppy seeds to drink whenever they cried and bothered their parents. When they grew up and began to roam the streets, the borderlines of quietude, lassitude and kindness were already blurred in them.

And then I knew what had moved me so strongly when I first beheld the melancholy eyes of the Iranians: the sign of a tragic destiny in them. I felt that the opium belonged to them in the same way as a suffering smile belongs to the face of a sufferer; it belonged to their gentleness, to their inner lassitude - it belonged even to their great poverty and great frugality. It did not seem to be so much vice as expression - and perhaps also help. Help against what? Strange land of questions...

=

MY MIND DWELLS SO LONG on my impressions of Kirman-shah, the first Iranian city I came to know, because those impressions continued, in varying forms but always unchanged in substance, throughout the year and a half that I remained in Iran. A soft, pervasive melancholy was the dominant note everywhere. It was perceptible in villages and towns, in the daily doings of the people and in their many religious festivals. Indeed, their religious feeling itself, so unlike that of the Arabs, bore a strong tinge of sadness and mourning: to weep over the tragic happenings of thirteen centuries ago - to weep over the deaths of Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law, and Ali's two sons, Hasan and Husayn - seemed to them more important than to consider what Islam stood for and what direction it wanted to give to men's lives...

THE GRAND SANSUI

On many evenings, in many towns, you could see groups of men and women assembled in a street around a wandering dervish, a religious mendicant clad in white, with a panther skin on his back, a long-stemmed axe in his right hand and an alms-bowl carved from a coconut in his left. He would recite a half-sung, half-spoken ballad about the struggles for succession to the Caliphate that followed the death of the Prophet in the seventh century - a mournful tale of faith and blood and death - and it would always run somewhat like this:

Listen, O people, to what befell God's chosen ones, and how the blood of the Prophet's seed was spilled over the earth.

There was once a Prophet whom God had likened unto a City of Knowledge; and the Gate to that City was the most trusted and valiant of his followers, his son-in-law Ali, Light of the World, sharer of the Prophet's Message, called the Lion of God.

When the Prophet passed away, the Lion of God was his rightful successor. But wicked men usurped the Lion's God-ordained right and made

another the Prophet's khalifa; and after the first usurper's death, another of his evil ilk succeeded him; and after him, yet another.

And only after the third usurper perished did the Will of God become manifest, and the Lion of God attained to this rightful place as Commander of the Faithful.

But Ali's and God's enemies were many; and one day, when he lay prostrated before his Lord in prayer, an assassin's sword struck him dead. The earth shook in anguish at the blasphemous deed, and the mountains wept and the stones shed tears.

Oh, God's curse be upon the evildoers, and may everlasting punishment consume them!

And again an evil usurper came to the fore and denied the Lion of God's sons, Hasan and Husayn, sons of Fatima the Blessed, their right of succession to the Prophet's Throne. Hasan was foully poisoned; and when Husayn rose in defence of the Faith, his beautiful life was extinguished on the field of Karbala as he knelt down by a pool of water to quench his thirst after the battle.

Oh, God's curse be upon the evildoers, and may the angels' tears forever water the sacred soil of Karbala!

The head of Husayn - the head the Prophet had once kissed - was cruelly cut off and his headless body was brought back to the tent where his weeping children awaited their father's return.

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And ever since, the Faithful have invoked God's curse on the transgressors and wept over the deaths of Ali and Hasan and Husayn; and you, O Faithful, raise your voices in lament for their deaths - for God forgives the sins of those who weep for the Seed of the Prophet...

men... And the chanted ballad would bring forth passionate sobbing from the listening women, while silent tears would roll over the faces of bearded

Such extravagant 'laments' were a far cry indeed from the true, historical picture of those early happenings that had caused a never-healed schism in the world of Islam: the division of the Muslim community into Sunnites, who form the bulk of the Muslim peoples and stand firm on the principle of an elective succession to the Caliphate, and the Shiites, who maintain that the Prophet designated Ali, his son-in-law, as his rightful heir and successor. In reality, however, the Prophet died without nominating any successor, whereupon one of his oldest and most faithful Companions, Abu Bakr, was elected khalifa by the over-whelming majority of the community. Abu Bakr was succeeded by Umar and the latter by Uthman; and only after Uthman's death was Ali elected to the Caliphate. There was, as I knew well even in my Iranian days, nothing evil or wicked about Ali's three predecessors. They were undoubtedly the greatest and noblest figures of Islamic history after the Prophet, and had for many years been among his most intimate Companions; and they were certainly not 'usurpers', having been elected by the people in the free exercise of the right accorded to them by Islam. It was not their assumption of power but rather Ali's and his followers' unwillingness to accept wholeheartedly the results of those popular elections that led to the subsequent struggles for power, to Ali's death, and to the transformation - under the fifth Caliph, Mu'awiyya - of the original, republican form of the Islamic State into a hereditary kingship, and, ultimately, to Husayn's death at Karbala.

Yes, I had known all this before I came to Iran; but here I was struck by the boundless emotion which that old, tragic tale of thirteen centuries ago could still arouse among the Iranian people whenever the names of Ali, Hasan or Husayn were mentioned. I began to wonder: Was it the innate melancholy of the Iranians and their sense of the dramatic that had caused them to embrace the Shia doctrine? - or was it the tragic quality of the latter's origin that had led to this intense Iranian melancholy?

By degrees, over a number of months, a startling answer took shape in my mind.

When, in the middle of the seventh century, the armies of Caliph Umar conquered the ancient Sasanian Empire, bringing Islam with them, Iran's Zoroastrian cult had already long been reduced to rigid formalism and was thus unable to oppose effectively the dynamic new idea that had come from Arabia. But at the time when the Arab conquest burst upon it, Iran was passing through a period of social and intellectual ferment which seemed to promise a national regeneration. This hope of an inner, organic revival was shattered by the Arab invasion; and the Iranians, abandoning their own historic line of development, henceforth accommodated themselves to the cultural and ethical concepts that had been brought in from outside.

The advent of Islam represented in Iran, as in so many other countries, a tremendous social advance; it destroyed the old Iranian caste system and brought into being a new community of free, equal people; it opened new channels for cultural energies that had long lain dormant and inarticulate: but with all this, the proud descendants of Darius and Xerxes could never forget that the historical continuity of their national life, the organic connection between their Yesterday and Today, had suddenly been broken. A people whose innermost character had found its expression in the baroque dualism of the Zand religion and its almost pantheistic worship of the four elements air, water, fire and earth was now faced with Islam's austere, uncompromising monotheism and its passion for the Absolute. The transition was too sharp and painful to allow the Iranians to subordinate their deeply rooted national consciousness to the supranational concept of Islam. In spite of their speedy and apparently voluntary acceptance of the new religion, they subconsciously equated the victory of the Islamic idea with Iran's national defeat; and the feeling of having been defeated and irrevocably torn out of the context of their ancient cultural heritage - a feeling desperately intense for all its vagueness - was destined to corrode their national self-confidence for centuries to come. Unlike so many other nations to whom the acceptance of Islam gave almost immediately a most positive impulse to further cultural development, the Iranians' first - and, in a way, most durable - reaction to it was one of deep humiliation and repressed resentment.

That resentment had to be repressed and smothered in the dark folds of the subconscious, for in the meantime Islam had become Iran's own faith. But in their hatred of the Arabian conquest, the Iranians instinctively resorted to what psychoanalysis describes as 'overcompensation': they began to regard the faith brought to them by their Arabian conquerors as something that was exclusively their own. They did it by subtly transforming the rational, unmystical God-consciousness of the Arabs into its very opposite: mystical fanaticism and sombre emotion. A faith which to the Arab was presence and reality and a source of composure and freedom, evolved, in the Iranian mind, into a dark longing for the supernatural and symbolic. The Islamic principle of God's ungraspable transcendency was transfigured into the mystical doctrine (for which there were many precedents in pre-Islamic Iran) of God's physical manifestation in especially chosen mortals who would transmit this divine essence to their descendants. To such a tendency, an espousal of the Shia doctrine offered a most welcome channel: for there could be no doubt that the Shiite veneration, almost deification, of Ali and his descendants concealed the germ of the idea of God's incarnation and continual reincarnation - an idea entirely alien to Islam but very close to the Iranian heart.

It had been no accident that the Prophet Muhammad died without having nominated a successor and, indeed, refused to nominate one when a suggestion to that effect was made shortly before his death. By his attitude he intended to convey, firstly, that the spiritual quality of Prophethood was not something that could be 'inherited', and, secondly, that the future leadership of the community should be the outcome of free election by the people themselves and not of an 'ordination' by the Prophet (which would naturally have been implied in his designation of a successor): and thus he deliberately ruled out the idea that the community's leadership could ever be anything but secular or could be in the nature of an 'apostolic succession'. But this was precisely what the Shia doctrine aimed at. It not only insisted in clear contradiction to the spirit of Islam on the principle of apostolic succession, but reserved that succession exclusively to 'tie Prophet's seed', that is, to his cousin and son-in-law Ali and his lineal descendants.

This was entirely in tune with the mystical inclinations of the Iranians. But when they enthusiastically joined the camp of those who claimed that Muhammad's spiritual essence lived on in Ali and the latter's descendants, the Iranians did not merely satisfy a mystical desire: there was yet another, subconscious motivation for their choice. If Ali was the rightful heir and successor of the Prophet, the three Caliphs who preceded him must obviously have been usurpers - and among them had been Umar, that same Umar who had conquered Iran! The national hatred of the conqueror of the Sasanian Empire could now be rationalized in terms of religion - the religion that had become Iran's own: Umar had 'deprived' Ali and his sons Hasan and Husayn of their divinely ordained right of succession to the Caliphate of Islam and, thus, had opposed the will of God; consequently, in obedience to the will of God, Ali's party was to be supported. Out of a national antagonism, a religious doctrine was born.

In the Iranian enthronement of the Shia doctrine I discerned a mute protest against the Arabian conquest of Iran. Now I understood why the Iranians cursed Umar with a hatred far more bitter than that reserved for the other two 'usurpers', Abu Bakr and Uthman: from the doctrinal point of view, the first Caliph, Abu Bakr, should have been regarded as the principal transgressor - but it was Umar who had conquered Iran...

This, then, was the reason for the strange intensity with which the House of Ali was venerated in Iran. Its cult represented a symbolic act of Iranian revenge on Arabian Islam (which stood so uncompromisingly against the deification of any human personality including that of

=

Muhammad). True, the Shia doctrine had not originated in Iran; there were Shiite groups in other Muslim lands as well: but nowhere else had it achieved so complete a hold over the people's emotions and imagination. When the Iranians gave passionate vent to their mourning over the deaths of Ali, Hasan and Husayn, they wept not merely over the destruction of the House of Ali but also over themselves and the loss of their ancient glory...

THEY WERE A MELANCHOLY people, those Iranians. Their melancholy was reflected even in the Iranian landscape in the endless stretches of fallow land, the lonely mountain paths and highways, the widely scattered villages of mud houses, the flocks of sheep which were driven in the evening in grey-brown waves to the well. In the cities life dripped in slow, incessant drops, without industry or gaiety; everything seemed to be shrouded in dreamy veils, and each face had a look of indolent waiting. One never heard music in the streets. If in the evening a Tatar stable boy broke into song in a caravanserai, one involuntarily pricked up one's ears in astonishment. Publicly only the many dervishes sang: and they always sang the same ancient, tragic ballads about Ah, Hasan and Husayn. Death and tears wove around those songs and went like heavy wine to the heads of the listeners. A terror of sadness, but of a willingly, almost greedily accepted sadness, seemed to lie over these people.

On summer evenings in Tehran you could see men and women crouching motionless by the watercourses that ran along both sides of the streets under the shadow of the huge elm trees. They sat and stared into the flowing water. They did not talk to one another. They only listened to the gurgling of the water and let the rustling of the tree branches pass over their heads. Whenever I saw them I had to think of David's psalm: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept...

They sat by the side of the watercourses like huge, dumb, dark birds, lost in silent contemplation of the flowing water. Were they thinking a long, long-drawn-out thought which belonged to them, and to them alone? Were they waiting? ... for what?

And David sang: We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof...

-3-

'COME, ZAYD, let us go' - and I put Ali Agha's letter into my pocket and rise to say good-bye to Az-Zughaybi. But he shakes his head: 'No, brother, let Zayd stay here with me for a while. If thou art too niggardly to tell me all that has befallen thee during these past months, let him tell me the story in thy stead. Or dost thou think thy friends no longer care about what happens to thee?'

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세진님, 요청하신 <메카로 가는 길 (The Road to Mecca)> 제9장 <페르시아의 편지 (PERSIAN LETTER)>의 1,000단어 분량 상세 요약입니다. 지침에 따라 본문은 <해라>체로 서술했습니다.<제9장: 페르시아의 편지 (PERSIAN LETTER) 요약><1. 메디나의 오후와 예언자의 영적 유산>

아사드는 메디나 남쪽 성문 밖 야자수 정원에서 친구와 대화를 나눈 뒤, 시장과 모스크를 향해 도시 안으로 발걸음을 옮긴다. 1,300년 전 예언자 무함마드가 묻힌 초록 돔과 다섯 개의 미나렛 아래, 메디나의 거리에는 서아프리카 세네갈부터 중앙아시아 키르기스스탄에 이르는 전 세계 순례자들이 어우러져 있다. 좁은 시장 골목에서 직물과 향료, 은장신구를 파는 상인들의 활기찬 모습 속에서도, 다른 도시와 달리 서두름이나 부딪침 없는 독특한 내적 조화와 평화가 흐른다.  아사드는 메디나에 깃든 이 유대감이 예언자 무함마드를 향한 무슬림들의 깊은 사랑에서 비롯되었다고 통찰한다. 이슬람은 예언자를 결코 신격화하지 않았으며, 코란 역시 그가 기쁨과 고통을 겪는 필멸의 인간이자 '경고자에 불과하다'는 점을 명백히 선언했다. 바로 그 완전한 인간성 때문에 사람들은 그를 자신들의 형제이자 완벽한 본보기로 깊이 사랑할 수 있었다. 시장의 포목상 친구 주가이비의 가게에 앉은 아사드는 곧 메카를 거쳐 아라비아를 영영 떠나게 될 것 같다는 예감을 나누던 중, 동행인 자이드로부터 테헤란 소인이 찍힌 오랜 벗 알리 아가의 편지를 건네받는다.  <2. 다슈트-이-루트 사막의 위험과 헌신적인 길잡이>

알리 아가의 편지는 아사드를 1925년 페르시아(이란) 체류 시절의 생생한 기억 속으로 이끈다. 당시 스물여섯 살의 헌병대 장교였던 알리 아가는 방탕하고 매력적인 인물로, 황량한 밤(Bam)에 머물며 아사드를 맞아주었다. 아사드는 그와 함께 페르시아 동부의 가혹한 불모지 '다슈트-이-루트(Dasht-i-Lut)' 사막을 횡단했던 사건을 회상한다.  사막 한가운데서 야영 중 발루치 반란 부족민들의 기습 총격을 받은 일행은 야영지를 철수하고 칠흑 같은 어둠 속에서 행군을 강행했다. 유일한 길잡이였던 영국령 인도-유럽 전신선(전신주)을 놓쳐 전원이 갈증으로 몰살당할 위기에 처하자, 마약과 술에 취한 알리 아가는 길을 잃은 발루치 병사들을 '도적들과 내통한 개자식들'이라며 권총으로 위협했다. 그러나 깊은 모욕 속에서도 한 발루치 병사가 어둠 속으로 말을 몰아, 사막의 바람이 전신선 전선에 부딪히며 내는 미세한 웅웅거림을 귀로 포착해 전신주를 찾아낸다. 알리 아가는 즉시 병사를 끌어안고 뺨에 입을 맞추며 "개자식은 바로 나였다"라고 진심으로 용서를 구했고, 일행은 전신주를 손으로 짚어가며 무사히 사막을 벗어났다.  <3. 테헤란 바자르의 장인들과 '개미'의 은유>

편지에서 알리 아가는 중령으로 진급하여 총참모부에 배속된 근황과 함께, 영국 석유 회사의 압력으로 술렁이는 테헤란 바자르의 정세를 전한다. 아사드는 이 대목에서 이란 사회의 심장부인 테헤란 바자르의 풍경을 떠올린다. 구리 제품을 두드리는 수백 명의 대장장이들이 자발적으로 빚어내는 리듬의 하모니, 미세한 손가락 끝으로 고대 페르시아 필사본의 세밀화를 정교하게 복원하는 화가들의 침묵, 그리고 손끝의 감각으로 완벽한 조화를 엮어내는 양탄자 장인들의 모습은 이란 영혼이 지닌 깊은 예술성과 내적 질서를 대변한다.  알리 아가는 편지에서 이란 민족을 벽 밑을 파고드는 '작은 개미(muryune)'와 '물'에 비유한다. 숱한 외세의 침략과 억압 앞에서도 이란인들은 헛된 폭력으로 맞서는 대신, 물밑에서 묵묵히 흙을 파내어 결국 침략자의 거대한 벽을 무너뜨리고 맑은 수면을 회복한다는 유구한 생존의 철학이다.  <4. 레자 샤의 집권과 위로부터의 서구화>

이어 아사드는 1924년 테헤란에서 만났던 근대 이란의 독재자 레자 샤 팔레비(당시 총리 겸 육군장관)의 극적인 집권 과정을 회고한다. 외국 대사관 앞의 문지기 사병으로 출발했던 레자 칸은, 1920년 길란 전선에서 퇴각하던 병사들을 권총 한 자루로 통솔해 반격을 성공시키며 영웅으로 급부상했다. 그는 쿠데타를 통해 실권을 장악하고 행정 중앙집권화와 군 현대화를 강력하게 추진했다.  그러나 튀르키예의 아타튀르크를 모방해 공화정을 도입하려던 그의 시도는 대중의 거센 저항에 부딪혔다. 이란 대중은 공화정을 서구화와 이슬람 신앙 파괴의 전조로 받아들였기 때문이다. 흥분한 군중을 채찍으로 진압한 후, 레자 칸의 마음속에는 민중에 대한 경멸이 싹텄고 결국 1925년 황제(샤)의 자리에 올랐다. 소박한 카키색 군복 차림으로 아사드를 친근하게 맞이했던 위대한 지도자는, 점차 외형적이고 과시적인 서구화에 집착하며 민중의 고통을 외면하는 전형적인 독재 군주로 변모해 갔다.  <5. 이란의 시아파 신앙과 무의식적 복수극>

아사드는 이란 전역을 여행하며 목격한 짙은 슬픔과 아편의 냄새, 그리고 거리의 데르비시들이 읊조리는 알리와 후세인의 비극적 순교 설화에 주목한다. 왜 이란인들은 1,300년 전의 역사적 비극에 그토록 광기 어린 눈물을 흘리는가? 아사드는 이를 사산 왕조의 찬란한 페르시아 제국이 7세기 아랍 무슬림 군대에게 정복당하면서 겪은 거대한 문화적 트라우마의 산물로 분석한다.  역사적 연속성을 단절당한 이란인들은 아랍의 종교를 받아들였으나, 정복자에 대한 무의식적 원한을 '시아파 교리'로 승화시켰다. 즉, 예언자의 합리적 유일신 신앙을 신성한 혈통(이맘) 숭배라는 고대 페르시아적 신비주의로 변형시켰으며, 페르시아를 정복했던 2대 칼리파 우마르를 '알리의 자리를 찬탈한 악당'으로 저주함으로써 종교의 외피를 쓴 '역사적 복수'를 완성했다는 것이다. 바빌론 강가에서 울던 유대인들처럼 거리에 웅크려 흐르는 물을 응시하는 이란인들의 멜랑콜리를 회상하며, 아사드는 편지를 접고 아라비아에서의 마지막 여정을 준비한다.  

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아래는 첨부하신 <The Road to Mecca Ch 9: PERSIAN LETTER>의 1,000단어 정도 요약입니다. 이 장은 표면적으로는 메디나에서 받은 한 통의 편지를 읽는 장면이지만, 실제로는 아사드가 과거 이란 여행과 이란인의 정신세계, 레자 샤의 근대화, 시아파 정서, 그리고 이슬람 세계 내부의 다양한 기질을 회상하는 장입니다.

<요약>

이 장은 메디나 남쪽 성문 밖 야자나무 정원에서 시작한다. 아사드는 친구와 함께 오후의 정적 속에 앉아 있다. 배경에는 우후드 산의 회색빛 능선이 있고, 젊은 야자수들이 흔들린다. 메디나는 사막 한가운데 있으면서도 야자수와 정원, 성벽과 미나렛, 예언자의 모스크가 어우러진 성스러운 도시로 묘사된다. 아사드는 이 도시가 단순한 도시가 아니라 예언자 무함마드의 현존이 아직도 살아 있는 공간이라고 느낀다. 예언자의 무덤과 모스크, 그리고 그를 사랑하는 무슬림들의 마음이 메디나 전체를 하나의 영적 중심으로 만든다.

그는 메디나의 거리와 시장을 걸으며, 이 도시가 여러 민족과 지역의 사람들이 모여 사는 곳임을 본다. 카슈미르 상인, 중앙아시아인, 아라비아 베두인, 수단인, 인도인, 페르시아인, 아프리카인 등 다양한 얼굴과 언어가 섞여 있다. 그러나 이 다양성은 단순한 이국적 혼합물이 아니다. 아사드는 메디나에서는 서로 다른 사람들이 예언자에 대한 사랑과 이슬람 공동체 의식 속에서 하나의 정서적 조화를 이룬다고 본다. 이 도시는 민족의 도시가 아니라 신앙의 도시다.

그는 시장에서 옷감 장수 친구인 아즈주가이비를 만난다. 친구는 오랫동안 보지 못했다며 반갑게 맞아주고 커피를 내온다. 아사드는 곧 메카로 떠날 예정이라고 말한다. 하지만 그것은 하지 순례 때문이 아니다. 그는 이미 여러 차례 순례를 했고, 이번에는 아라비아를 떠나야겠다는 막연한 예감을 품고 있다. 그는 자신이 이 땅에서의 삶을 시작했던 도시, 메카를 다시 보고 싶다고 말한다. 여기서 “길”은 다시 한 번 지리적 이동이면서 내면의 전환으로 나타난다.

그때 자이드가 나타나, 우체국에 편지들이 도착해 있다고 알려준다. 그중 하나는 이란 친구 알리 아가가 보낸 페르시아어 편지다. 아사드는 1년 넘게 그에게서 소식을 듣지 못했다. 편지에는 알리 아가의 근황, 그의 아버지의 죽음, 결혼, 그리고 봄이 오면 바그다드나 테헤란으로 오라는 초대가 담겨 있다. 편지의 문체는 우아하고 정서적이다. 알리 아가는 아사드를 “우리 마음의 빛”이라 부르며, 옛 여행의 추억을 불러낸다.

편지를 읽는 순간 아사드는 이란에 대한 기억 속으로 빨려 들어간다. 그는 알리 아가와 함께 다슈트이루트, 곧 “벌거벗은 사막”을 여행했던 때를 회상한다. 그 길은 케르만에서 세이스탄으로, 다시 아프가니스탄으로 이어지는 위험한 여정이었다. 당시 그들은 발루치 헌병들의 호위를 받으며 이동했다. 역장은 그들에게 길에서 만날 수 있는 도적과 약탈자들을 조심하라고 경고했다. 그 사막은 죽음 같은 침묵으로 가득 차 있었고, 바람도 새소리도 동물의 움직임도 없는 곳이었다. 아사드는 그 침묵을 “죽음의 침묵”이 아니라, 세상이 태어나기 전의 침묵처럼 느낀다. 이 묘사는 이 장의 중요한 분위기를 형성한다. 이란은 그에게 아름답지만 무겁고, 깊지만 우울한 땅이다.

여정 중 그들은 밤에 습격을 받는다. 발루치 약탈자들이 갑자기 총을 쏘고, 호위병 몇 명이 죽는다. 일행은 어둠 속에서 방향을 잃고 이동해야 하는데, 사막의 전신주를 따라가야 길을 찾을 수 있다. 그러나 호위병이 전선을 놓치고, 모두가 불안에 빠진다. 알리 아가는 분노하여 그를 모욕하지만, 곧 그 병사는 어둠 속으로 말을 달려 사라지고, 마침내 전신주를 다시 찾아낸다. 돌아온 병사에게 알리 아가는 곧바로 사과하고 입맞춤을 한다. 이 장면은 알리 아가의 성격을 잘 보여준다. 그는 충동적이고 귀족적이며 때로는 잔인할 정도로 거칠지만, 동시에 명예와 용기, 감정을 숨기지 않는 사람이다.

이후 아사드는 이란의 수도 테헤란과 바자르에 대한 기억으로 옮겨간다. 그는 테헤란의 시장을 동양 도시의 심장처럼 묘사한다. 바자르는 단순히 물건을 사고파는 곳이 아니다. 구리 세공, 직물, 향신료, 카펫, 미니어처 그림, 차집, 상인, 장인, 성직자, 거지, 군인, 귀족이 모두 뒤섞인 거대한 사회적 공간이다. 그는 바자르가 이란인의 영혼을 보여준다고 느낀다. 그곳은 오래된 질서와 쇠퇴, 아름다움과 가난, 세련된 예술감각과 침울한 정서가 동시에 흐르는 공간이다.

알리 아가는 이란에 대해 설명한다. 그는 이란이 늙었지만 아직 죽지는 않았다고 말한다. 여러 민족은 한때 번성했다가 사라졌지만, 이란인은 계속 살아남았다. 그 이유는 개미와 같기 때문이라고 한다. 이란인은 강자에게 정면으로 맞서지 않는다. 대신 통로와 구멍을 만들고, 조용히 움직이며, 기다리고, 때가 오면 구조물을 안에서부터 무너뜨린다. 이것은 약자의 생존술이자 오래된 문명의 지혜로 묘사된다. 아사드는 이 말을 통해 이란인의 정치적 본능, 의심, 인내, 우회적 저항을 이해하게 된다.

이어 아사드는 레자 칸, 곧 후일의 레자 샤를 회상한다. 알리 아가의 편지에서는 레자 샤가 터키의 케말 아타튀르크를 흉내 내어 단순함과 겸손을 버렸다고 비판된다. 그러나 아사드는 처음 만났던 레자 칸을 다르게 기억한다. 그는 한때 문맹에 가까운 군인이었지만, 강한 의지와 결단력, 개인적 용기를 가진 인물이었다. 그는 부패한 카자르 왕조와 무기력한 정치 상황 속에서 등장해 군대를 장악하고, 질서를 세우고, 국가를 개혁하려 했다. 아사드는 그에게서 거친 힘과 지도자의 에너지를 보았다.

하지만 레자 칸의 개혁은 점차 문제를 드러낸다. 그는 터키식 공화정을 꿈꾸었지만, 이란 사회와 종교적 정서를 제대로 이해하지 못했다. 터키에서는 아타튀르크의 세속 개혁이 일정한 역사적 조건 속에서 가능했지만, 이란에서는 샤 왕조와 시아파 정서, 전통적 종교질서가 다르게 작동했다. 레자 칸은 공화정 대신 왕정으로 방향을 바꾸었고, 결국 레자 샤 팔라비가 되었다. 아사드는 레자 칸이 처음에는 역사적 가능성을 가진 인물이었지만, 권력을 잡은 뒤에는 자기 민중과 점점 멀어졌다고 본다. 그의 근대화는 철도, 관청, 군대, 복장 개혁, 행정개편 등 외형적 성과를 낳았지만, 사람들의 마음과 문화, 종교적 감각을 깊이 이해하지 못했다.

아사드는 이란인의 우울함을 깊이 관찰한다. 그는 케르만샤를 처음 보았을 때부터 이란인의 눈에 멜랑콜리가 있다고 느꼈다. 가난, 아편, 오래된 피로, 체념, 조용한 슬픔이 거리와 차집, 시장 곳곳에 배어 있었다. 이란 사람들은 잘 웃지 않았고, 몸짓은 느렸고, 말은 낮았다. 그는 이 우울이 단순한 경제적 빈곤만의 결과가 아니라고 본다. 이란의 우울은 역사적 기억과 종교적 정서, 민족적 상처와 연결되어 있다.

이 장 후반은 시아파와 이란인의 집단정서에 대한 아사드의 긴 해석으로 이어진다. 그는 이란에서 떠돌이 더르비시가 카르발라의 비극, 후세인의 죽음, 알리와 하산·후세인의 고난을 노래하는 모습을 본다. 그 노래는 수니파인 아사드에게는 역사적으로 과장되고 신학적으로 동의하기 어려운 것이지만, 이란인들에게는 깊은 감정적 진실을 담고 있다. 그는 처음에는 왜 이 오래된 비극이 이토록 큰 감정을 불러일으키는지 이해하지 못한다. 그러나 점차 그는 이란인의 시아 정서가 단순한 교리 문제가 아니라, 아랍에게 정복당한 고대 페르시아의 상처와 연결되어 있다고 해석한다.

아사드의 해석에 따르면, 이란은 이슬람을 받아들였지만 그 과정은 단순한 기쁨의 개종이 아니었다. 사산조 페르시아는 아랍 무슬림에게 정복되었고, 이란인은 자신의 오래된 문명적 자부심이 무너지는 경험을 했다. 이슬람은 이란에 새로운 정신적 질서를 주었지만, 동시에 옛 문명의 단절과 굴욕도 남겼다. 이란인은 아랍의 종교를 받아들였으나, 그 아랍 정복자의 기억에 대한 반감을 무의식 속에 보존했다. 그래서 그들은 알리와 후세인의 비극을 통해 아랍 이슬람 내부의 반권력적·비극적 전통을 자신들의 정서와 결합시켰다고 아사드는 본다.

그는 시아파의 알리 숭배가 이란인의 민족적 복수감과 연결되었다고 해석한다. 수니파 입장에서 보면, 무함마드가 명시적으로 후계자를 지명하지 않았기 때문에 공동체의 자유로운 선택이 정당했다. 그러나 시아파는 알리와 그의 후손이 부당하게 배제되었다고 본다. 아사드는 이란인들이 이 교리를 통해, 자신들을 정복한 아랍 세계 안에서 다시 상징적 우위를 확보했다고 본다. 즉 알리와 후세인에 대한 사랑은 단순한 종교 감정이 아니라, 정복당한 민족의 깊은 상처와 저항이 종교적 언어로 바뀐 것이라는 해석이다.

이 장은 아사드의 이란관을 잘 보여준다. 그는 이란을 사랑하지만, 그 사랑은 아라비아에 대한 사랑과 다르다. 아라비아는 그에게 단순함, 태양, 사막, 일신교적 명료함의 세계다. 반면 이란은 음영, 슬픔, 기억, 우회, 예술, 오래된 문명의 피로가 있는 세계다. 그는 이란인의 영혼을 “멜랑콜리”로 본다. 이란인은 아름답고 예민하며 인내심이 깊지만, 동시에 상실과 원한의 기억을 품고 있다.

마지막에서 아사드는 다시 현재로 돌아온다. 알리 아가의 편지를 접고 떠나려 하지만, 아즈주가이비는 자이드를 남겨 이야기를 들려달라고 한다. 장은 다음 회상으로 이어질 준비를 하며 끝난다. 이 장은 제목 그대로 한 통의 “페르시아 편지”에서 시작하지만, 그 편지는 아사드의 내면에 저장된 이란 전체를 열어젖히는 열쇠가 된다. 편지는 단순한 소식이 아니라 기억의 문이다.

결국 이 장의 핵심은 이슬람 세계가 하나의 색깔이 아니라는 점이다. 메디나의 조화, 아라비아 사막의 단순성, 이란 바자르의 복잡성, 레자 샤의 근대화, 시아파의 비극적 정서가 한 장 안에 겹쳐 있다. 아사드는 이슬람을 사랑하지만, 그 내부의 역사적 차이와 민족적 감정도 예리하게 본다. <Persian Letter>는 그래서 여행기이면서 문명론이고, 회고이면서 이란 정신사에 대한 아사드식 명상이다.

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The Road to Mecca Ch 8 JINNS

  The Road to Mecca  Ch 8 JINNS

1-

THE SUN IS ABOUT TO SET when a big, black snake suddenly slithers across our path: it is almost as thick as a child's arm and perhaps a yard long. It stops and rears its head in our direction. With almost a reflex movement, I slide down from the saddle, unsling my carbine, kneel and take aim - and at the same moment I hear Mansur's voice behind me:

'Don't shoot - don't...!'- but I have already pressed the trigger; the snake jerks, writhes and is dead.

Mansur's disapproving face appears over me. 'Thou shouldst not have killed it... anyhow, not at the time of sunset: for this is the time when the jinns come out from under ground and often assume the shape of a snake ...'

I laugh and reply: 'O Mansur, thou dost not really believe those old wives' tales about jinns in the shape of snakes?'

'Of course I believe in jinns. Does not the Book of God mention them? As to the shapes in which they sometimes appear to us - I don't know ... I have heard they can assume the strangest and most unexpected of forms...'

You may be right, Mansur, I think to myself, for, indeed, is it so farfetched to assume that, apart from the beings which our senses can perceive, there may be some that elude our perception? Is it not a kind of intellectual arrogance which makes modern man reject the possibility of life-forms other than those which can be observed and measured by him? The existence of jinns, whatever they may be, cannot be proved by scientific means. But neither can science disprove the possible existence of living beings whose biological laws may be so entirely different from our own that our outer senses can establish contact with them only under very exceptional circumstances. Is it not possible that such an occasional crossing of paths between these unknown worlds and ours gives rise to strange manifestations which man's primitive fantasy has interpreted as ghosts, demons and such other 'supernatural' apparitions?

As I remount my dromedary, playing with these questions with the half-smiling disbelief of a man whose upbringing has made him more thick-skinned than are people who have always lived closer to nature, Zayd turns with a serious countenance toward me:

'Mansur is right, O my uncle. Thou shouldst not have killed the snake. Once, many years back when I left Hail after Ibn Saud had taken the town - I shot a snake like that one on my way to Iraq. It was also at the time when the sun was setting. A short while afterward, when we stopped to say our sunset prayer, I suddenly felt a leaden weight in my legs and a burning in my head, and my head began to roar like the roar of falling waters, and my limbs became like fire, and I could not stand upright and fell to the ground like an empty sack, and everything became dark around me. I do not know how long I remained in that darkness, but I remember that in the end I stood up again. An unknown man stood to my right and another to my left, and they led me into a great, dusky hall that was full of men who walked up and down in excitement and talked to each other. After a while I became aware that these were two distinct parties, as before a court of justice. An old man of very small size was sitting on a raised dais in the background; he seemed to be a judge or chieftain, or something like that. And all at once I knew that I was the accused.

'Someone said: "He has killed him just before sunset by a shot from his rifle. He is guilty." One of the opposing party retorted: "But he did not know whom he was killing; and he pronounced the name of God when he pulled the trigger." But those of the accusing party shouted: "He did not pronounce it!" - whereupon the other party repeated, all together, in chorus: "He did, he did praise the name of God!" - and so it continued for a while, back and forth, accusation and defence, until in the end the defending party seemed to gain their point and the judge in the background decided: "He did not know whom he was killing, and he did praise the name of God. Lead him back!"

'And the two men who had brought me to the hall of judgment took me under the arms again, led me back the same way into that great darkness out of which I had come, and laid me on the ground. I opened my eyes - and saw myself lying between a few sacks of grain which had been piled on both sides of me; and over them was stretched a piece of tent cloth to protect me from the rays of the sun. It seemed to be early forenoon, and my companions had evidently made camp. In the distance I could see our camels grazing on the slope of a hill. I wanted to raise my hand, but my limbs were extremely weary. When one of my companions bent his face over me, I said, "Coffee ..." - for from nearby I heard the sound of the coffee mortar. My friend jumped up: "He speaks, he speaks! He has come to!" - and they brought me fresh, hot coffee. I asked them, "Was I unconscious the whole night?" And they answered, "The whole night? Full four days thou didst not budge! We always loaded thee like a sack onto one of the camels, and unloaded thee again at night; and we thought that we would have to bury thee here. But praise be to Him who gives and takes life, the Living who never dies..."

'So thou seest, O my uncle, one should not kill a snake at sunset.'

And although half of my mind continues to smile at Zayd's narrative, the other half seems to sense the weaving of unseen forces in the gathering dusk, an eerie commotion of sounds so fine that the ear can hardly grasp them, and a breath of hostility in the air: and I have a faint feeling of regret at having shot the snake at sunset....

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IN THE AFTERNOON of our third day out of Hail we stop to water our camels at the wells of Arja, in an almost circular valley enclosed between low hills. The two wells, large and full of sweet water, lie in the centre of the valley; each of them is the communal property of the tribe - the western one belongs to the Harb, the eastern to the Mutayr. The ground around them is as bald as the palm of one's hand, for every day around noon hundreds of camels and sheep are driven in from distant pastures to be watered here, and every little blade of grass which grows out of the soil is nibbled away before it can even take breath.

As we arrive, the valley is full of animals, and ever-new flocks and herds appear from between the sun-drenched hills. Around the wells there is a great crowding and commotion, for it is not an easy thing to satisfy the thirst of so many animals. The herdsmen draw up the water in leather buckets on long ropes, accompanying their work with a chant to keep the multiple movements even: for the buckets are very big and, when filled with water, so heavy that many hands are needed to draw them out of the depth. From the well nearest us - the one that belongs to the Mutayr tribe - I can hear the men chant to the camels:

Drink, and spare no water,

The well is full of grace and has no bottom!

Half of the men sing the first verse and the others the second, repeating both several times in quick tempo until the bucket appears over the rim of the well; then the women take over and pour the water into leathern troughs. Scores of camels press forward, bellowing and snorting, quivering with excitement, crowding around the troughs, not visibly pacified by the men's soothing calls, Hu-oih... huu-oih! One and another pushes its long, flexible neck forward, between or over its companions, so as to still its thirst as quickly as possible; there is a rocking and pushing, a swaying and thronging of light-brown and dark-brown, yellow-white and black-brown and honey-coloured bodies, and the sharp, acrid smell of animal sweat and urine fills the air. In the meantime, the bucket has been filled again, and the herdsmen draw it up to the quick accompaniment of another couplet:

Naught can still the camels' thirst But God's grace and the herdsman's toil!

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- and the spectacle of rushing water, of drinking and slurping and calling and chanting starts all over again.

An old man standing on the rim of the well raises his arm in our direction and calls out:

'May God give you life, O wayfarers! Partake of our bounty!'

whereupon several other men disentangle themselves from the crowd around the well and run toward us. One of them takes hold of my dromedary's halter and makes it kneel down, so that I may dismount in comfort. Quickly a way is made for our animals to the trough, and the women pour out water for them: for we are travellers and therefore have a prior claim.

'Is it not wonderful to behold, muses Zayd, 'how well these Harb and Mutayr are keeping their peace now, so soon after they have been warring against each other?' (For it is only three years since the Mutayr were in rebellion against the King, while the Harb were among his most faithful supporters.) 'Dost thou remember, O my uncle, the last time we were here? How we bypassed Arja in a wide circle at night, not daring to approach the wells - not knowing whether friend or foe was here...?'

Zayd is referring to the great beduin rebellion of 1928-1929 the culmination of a political drama which shook Ibn Saud's kingdom to its foundations and, for a time, involved myself in it.

WHEN THE CURTAIN ROSE in 1927, peace was reigning in the vast realm of Saudi Arabia. King Ibn Saud's struggle for power was over. His rule in Najd was no longer contested by any rival dynasty. His was Hail and the Shammar country, and his, too, was the Hijaz after he had ousted the Sharifian dynasty in 1925. Outstanding among the King's warriors was that same re-doutable beduin chieftain, Faysal ad-Dawish, who had caused him so much worry in earlier years. Ad-Dawish had distinguished himself in the King's service and proved his loyalty time and time again: in 1921 he conquered Hail for the King; in 1924 he led a daring raid into Iraq, from where the Sharifian family, protected by the British, intrigued against Ibn Saud; in 1925 he took Medina and played a decisive role in the conquest of Jidda. And now, in the summer of 1927, he was resting on his laurels in his Ikhwān settlement of Artawiyya, not far from the frontier of Iraq.

For many years that frontier had been the scene of almost continuous beduin raids arising from tribal migrations in search of pastures and water; but in a series of agreements between Ibn Saud and the British - who were responsible for Iraq as the Mandatory Power - it had been decided that no obstacles should be placed in the way of such necessary migrations, and that no fortifications of any kind should be erected on either side of the Najd-Iraq frontier. In the summer of 1927, however, the Iraqi government built and garrisoned a fort in the vicinity of the frontier wells of Bisayya, and officially announced its intention to build other forts along the frontier. A ripple of uneasiness ran through the tribes of northern Najd. They saw themselves threatened in their very existence, cut off from the wells on which they were entirely dependent. Ibn Saud protested against this open breach of agreements, only to receive - months later - an evasive answer from the British High Commissioner in Iraq.

Faysal ad-Dawish, always a man of action, told himself: 'It may not be convenient for the King to start a quarrel with the British - but I will dare it.' And in the last days of October, 1927, he set out at the head of his Ikhwan, attacked and destroyed the fort of Bisayya, giving no quarter to its Iraqi garrison. British aeroplanes appeared over the scene, reconnoitred the situation and withdrew - against their habit - without dropping a single bomb. It would have been easy for them to repel the raid (an action to which they were entitled by virtue of their treaties with Ibn Saud) and then to settle the problem of the forts by diplomatic negotiations. But was the British-Iraqi government really interested in a speedy, peaceful settlement of the dispute?

Deputations from the northern Najdi tribes appeared before Ibn Saud and pleaded for a campaign against Iraq. Ibn Saud energetically refused all such demands, declared Ad-Dawish a transgressor, and ordered the amir of Hail to keep close watch over the frontier regions. The financial allowances which the King was giving to most of the Ikhwan were temporarily cut off from the tribes under Ad-Dawish's control; and he himself was bidden to remain at Artawiyya and there await the King's judgment. The Iraqi government was officially informed of all these measures and notified that Ad-Dawish would be punished severely. At the same time, however, Ibn Saud demanded that in the future the frontier treaties be more strictly observed by Iraq.

This new conflict could thus have been easily ironed out. But when matters had reached this point, the British High Commissioner let Ibn Saud know that he was sending out an air squadron to chastise Ad-Dawish's Ikhwān (who had long since returned to their home territory) and to 'force them to obedience toward their King'. Since at the time there was no telegraph at Riyadh, Ibn Saud sent posthaste a courier to Bahrain, from where a telegram was dispatched to Baghdad, protesting against the proposed measure and invoking the treaties which forbade either party to pursue lawbreakers across the frontier. He stressed that he had no need of British 'assistance' in enforcing his authority over Ad-Dawish; and, finally, he warned that a British air action over Najdi territory would have dangerous repercussions among the Ikhwān, who were already sufficiently stirred up.

The warning remained unheeded. Toward the end of January, 1928-three months after the Bisayya incident - a British squadron flew across the frontier and bombed Najdi territory, wreaking havoc among Mutayri beduin encampments and indiscriminately killing men, women, children and cattle. All the northern Ikhwān began to prepare for a campaign of vengeance against Iraq; and it was only thanks to Ibn Saud's great prestige among the tribes that the movement was stopped in time and confined to a few minor frontier skirmishes.

In the meantime, the destroyed fort of Bisayya was quietly rebuilt by the British and two new forts were erected on the Iraqi side of the border.

FAYSAL AD-DAWISH, summoned to Riyadh, refused to come and justify an action which, in his opinion, had been undertaken in the King's own interest. Personal resentment added to his bitterness. He, Faysal ad-Dawish, who had served the King so faithfully and so well, was only amir of Artawiyya which, in spite of the large number of its inhabitants, was no more than an overgrown village. His leadership had been decisive in the conquest of Hail - but the King's cousin, Ibn Mussaad, and not he, had been appointed amir of Hail. During the Hijaz campaign it was he, Ad-Dawish, who besieged Medina for months and finally forced its surrender - but not he had been made its amir. His passionate, frustrated urge for power gave him no rest. He said to himself: 'Ibn Saud belongs to the tribe of Anaza and I to the tribe of Mutayr. We are equal to another in the nobility of our descent. Why should I admit to Ibn Saud's superiority?'

Such reasoning has always been the curse of Arabian history: none will admit that another is better than he.

One by one, other dissatisfied Ikhwān chieftains began to forget how much they owed to Ibn Saud. Among them was Sultan ibn Bujad, shaykh of the powerful Atayba tribe and amir of Ghatghat, one of the largest Ikhwān settlements in Najd: victor of the battle of Taraba in 1918 against the forces of Sharif Husayn; conqueror of Taif and Mecca in 1924. Why had he to be content with being no more than amir of Ghatghat? Why had not he, but one of the King's sons, been made amir of Mecca? Why had he not at least been appointed amir of Taif? He, like Faysal ad-Dawish, saw himself cheated of what he considered his due; and since he was Ad-Dawish's brother-in-law, it appeared only logical for the two to make common cause against Ibn Saud.

In the autumn of 1928, Ibn Saud called a congress of chieftains and ulamā to Riyadh with a view to solving all these disputes. Almost all tribal leaders came except Ibn Bujad and Ad-Dawish. Adamant in their opposition, they declared Ibn Saud a heretic - for had he not made treaties with the infidels and introduced into the lands of the Arabs such instruments of the devil as motorcars, telephones, wireless sets and aeroplanes? The ulamā

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assembled at Riyadh unanimously declared that such technical innovations were not only permissible but most desirable from the religious point of view since they increased the knowledge and strength of the Muslims; and that, on the authority of the Prophet of Islam, treaties with non-Muslim powers were equally desirable if they brought peace and freedom to Muslims.

But the two rebellious chieftains continued their denunciations and found a ready echo among many of the simple Ikhwān, who did not possess sufficient knowledge to see anything but the influence of Satan in Ibn Saud's actions. His earlier failure to impart education to the Ikhwan and turn their religious fervour to positive ends began to bear its tragic fruit...

The steppes of Najd were now humming like a beehive. Mysterious emissaries rode on fast dromedaries from tribe to tribe. Clandestine meetings of chieftains took place at remote wells. And, finally, the agitation against the King burst out in open revolt, drawing in many other tribes besides the Mutayr and Atayba. The King was patient. He tried to be understanding. He sent messengers to the recalcitrant tribal leaders and tried to reason with them: but in vain. Central and northern Arabia became the scene of widespread guerrilla warfare; the almost proverbial public security of the country vanished and complete chaos reigned in Najd; bands of rebel Ikhwān swept across it in all directions, attacking villages and caravans and tribes that had remained loyal to the King.

After innumerable local skirmishes between rebel and loyal tribes, a decisive battle was fought on the plain of Sibila, in central Najd, in the spring of 1929. On one side was the King with a large force; on the other, the Mutayr and the Atayba, supported by factions from other tribes. The King was victorious. Ibn Bujad surrendered unconditionally and was brought in chains to Riyadh. Ad-Dawish was severely wounded and said to be dying. Ibn Saud, mildest of all Arabian kings, sent his personal physician to attend him - and that doctor, a young Syrian, diagnosed a serious injury to the liver, giving Ad-Dawish a week to live; whereupon the King decided: 'We shall let him die in peace; he has received his punishment from God.' He ordered that the wounded enemy be brought back to his family at Artawiyya.

But Ad-Dawish was far from dying. His injury was not nearly as serious as the young doctor had assumed; and within a few weeks he was sufficiently recovered to slip away from Artawiyya, more than ever bent on revenge.

AD-DAWISH'S ESCAPE from Artawiyya gave a new impetus to the rebellion. It was rumoured that he himself was somewhere in the vicinity of the Kuwayt frontier recruiting new tribal allies to his own, still considerable, force of Mutayr. Among the first to join him were the Ajman, a small but valiant tribe living in the province of Al-Hasa near the Persian Gulf; their shaykh, Ibn Hadhlayn, was Faysal ad-Dawish's maternal uncle. Apart from this, there was no love lost between Ibn Saud and the Ajman. Years ago they had slain the King's younger brother Saad and, fearing his revenge, had migrated to Kuwayt. Subsequently Ibn Saud had forgiven them and allowed them to return to their ancestral territory, but the old resentment continued to rankle. It flared up into open enmity when, during negotiations for a settlement, the Ajman chieftain and several of his followers were treacherously murdered in the camp of Ibn Saud's relative, the eldest son of the amir of Al-Hasa.

The alliance of the Ajman with the Mutayr kindled a new spark among the Atayba tribes in central Najd. After the capture of their amir, Ibn Bujad, they had reassembled under a new chieftain; and now they rose once again against the King, forcing him to divert most of his strength from northern to central Najd. The fight was hard, but slowly Ibn Saud got the upper hand. Group after group, he overwhelmed the Atayba until, in the end, they offered to surrender. In a village halfway between Riyadh and Mecca their shaykhs pledged fealty to the King - and the King again forgave them, hoping that at last he would have a free hand against Ad-Dawish and the rest of the rebels in the north. But hardly had he returned to Riyadh when the Atayba broke their pledge for the second time and renewed their warfare. Now it was a fight to the finish. For a third time the Atayba were defeated and almost decimated - and with the complete destruction of the Ikhwan settlement of Ghatghat, a town larger than Riyadh, the King's authority was re-established in central Najd.

Meanwhile, the struggle in the north continued. Faysal ad-Dawish and his allies were now solidly entrenched in the vicinity of the border. Ibn Musaad, the amir of Hail, attacked them time and time again in behalf of the King. Twice it was reported that Ad-Dawish had been killed; and both times the tidings proved false. He lived on, stubbornly and uncompromisingly. His eldest son and seven hundred of his warriors fell in battle; but he fought on. The question cropped up: From where does Ad-Dawish receive the money which even in Arabia is necessary for waging war? From where his arms and ammunition?

Vague reports became current that the rebel, once so bitterly critical of Ibn Saud's treaty relations with the 'infidels', was now himself treating with the British. Rumour had it that he was a frequent visitor in Kuwayt: could he be doing this, people asked themselves, without the knowledge of the British authorities? Was it not possible, rather, that turmoil in the lands of Ibn Saud suited their own purpose only too well?

ONE EVENING IN RIYADH, in the summer of 1929, I had gone to bed early and, before falling asleep, was diverting myself with an old book on the dynasties of Oman, when Zayd abruptly came into my room:

'There is a man here from the Shuyūkh. He wants to see thee at once.'

I hurriedly dressed and went to the castle. Ibn Saud was awaiting me in his private apartments, sitting cross-legged on a divan with heaps of Arabic newspapers around him and one from Cairo in his hands. He answered my greeting briefly and, without interrupting his reading, motioned me to his side on the divan. After a while he looked up, glanced at the slave who was standing by the door and indicated with a movement of his hand that he wished to be left alone with me. As soon as the slave had closed the door behind him, the King laid down the newspaper and looked at me for a while from behind his glittering glasses, as if he had not seen me for a long time (although I had spent some hours with him that very morning). 'Busy with writing?'

Iraq.' 'No, O Long-of-Age, I have not written anything for weeks.' "Those were interesting articles thou hast written about our frontier problems with

He was evidently referring to a series of dispatches I had written for my Continental newspapers about two months earlier; some of them had also appeared in a newspaper in Cairo where, I flatter myself, they helped to clarify a very involved situation. Knowing the King, I was certain that he was not speaking at random but had something definite in mind; and so I remained silent, waiting for him to continue. He did continue:

'Perhaps thou wouldst like to write something more about what is happening in Najd - about this rebellion and what it portends.' There was a trace of passion in his voice as he went on: 'The Sharifian family hates me. Those sons of Husayn who now rule in Iraq and Transjordan will always hate me, for they cannot forget that I have taken the Hijaz from them. They would like my realm to break up, for then they could return to the Hijaz and their friends, who pretend to be my friends as well, might not dislike it either... They did not build those forts for nothing: they wanted to cause me trouble and to push me away from their frontiers...'

From behind Ibn Saud's words I could hear jumbled, ghostly sounds - the rolling and rushing of railroad trains which, though still imaginary, might easily become real tomorrow: the spectre of a British railroad running from Haifa to Basra. Rumours of such a plan had been rampant for years. It was well known that the British were concerned about securing the 'land route to India': and this, indeed, was the meaning of their mandates over Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq. A railroad from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf would not only form a new, valuable link in Britain's

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imperial communications but would also afford greater protection to the oil pipeline that was to be laid from Iraq across the Syrian Desert to Haifa.

On the other hand, a direct rail connection between Haifa and Basra would have to cut across Ibn Saud's northeastern provinces - and the King would never even entertain such a suggestion. Was it not possible that the building of forts along the Iraq-Najd frontier, in flagrant contravention of all the existing agreements, represented the first stage of a carefully devised scheme to bring about enough disturbance within this critical area to 'justify' the establishment of a small, semi-independent buffer state more amenable to the British? Faysal ad-Dawish could serve this purpose as well as, or perhaps even better than, a member of the Sharifian family, for he was a Najdi himself and had a strong following among the Ikhwān. That his alleged religious fanaticism was only a mask was obvious to anyone acquainted with his past; what he really wanted was power alone. There was no doubt that, left to himself, he could not have held out for so long against Ibn Saud. But - had he been left to himself?

After a long pause, the King continued: 'I have been thinking, as everyone has, about the supplies of arms and ammunition that Ad-Dawish seems to have at his disposal. He has plenty of them - and plenty of money, too, it has been reported to me. I wonder whether thou wouldst not like to write about these things -I mean, those mysterious sources of Ad-Dawish's supplies. I have my own suspicions about them; perhaps even more than suspicions - but I would like thee to find out for thyself all thou canst, for I may be wrong.'

So that was it. Although the King spoke almost casually, in a conversational tone, it was obvious that he had weighed every word before he uttered it. I looked hard at him. His face, so grave a moment before, broke into a broad smile. He placed his hand on my knee and shook it:

'I want thee, O my son, to find out for thyself - I repeat: for thyself - from where Ad-Dawish is getting his rifles, his ammunition and the money he is throwing about so lavishly. There is hardly any doubt in my own mind, but I wish that someone like thee, who is not directly involved, would tell the world of the crooked truth behind Ad-Dawish's rebellion... I think thou wilt be able to find out the truth.'

Ibn Saud knew what he was doing. He has always known that I love him. Although I often disagree with his policies, and never make a secret of my disagreement, he has never withheld his confidence from me and often asks my advice. He trusts me all the more, I believe, because he is well aware that I do not expect any personal gain from him and would not even accept a post in his government, for I want to remain free. And so, on that memorable evening in the summer of 1929, he calmly suggested to me that I should go out and explore the web of political intrigue behind the Ikhwān rebellion - a mission which probably entailed personal risk and certainly could be accomplished only at the cost of strenuous efforts.

But the Shuyūkh was not disappointed in my reactions. Apart from my affection for him and his country, the task which he now entrusted to me seemed to promise an exciting adventure, not to speak of a possible journalistic 'scoop'.

'Over my eyes and my head be thy command, O Long-of-Age, I immediately replied. 'I shall certainly do what I can.'

'Of that I have no doubt, O Muhammad; and I expect thee to keep thy mission a secret. There may be danger in it - what about thy wife?'

The wife was a girl from Riyadh whom I had married the previous year; but I was able to assure the King on this point:

'She will not cry, O Imām; it was only today that I was thinking of divorcing her. We do not seem to suit one another.'

Ibn Saud smiled knowingly, for divorcing a wife was a thing not unfamiliar to him. 'But what about other people - thy kinsfolk?'

"There is no one, I believe, who would mourn should anything happen to me - except, of course, Zayd; but he will accompany me in any case, and the things that befall me will befall him as well.'

'That is all to the good,' replied the King. 'And, oh, before I forget: thou wilt require some funds for the undertaking' - and slipping his hand under the cushion behind him, he drew out a purse and thrust it into my hand; from its weight I immediately guessed that it was filled with golden sovereigns. I remember thinking to myself: How certain he must have been, even before he asked me, that I would accept his suggestion...!

BACK IN MY QUARTERS, I called Zayd, who had been awaiting my return.

'If I should ask thee, Zayd, to accompany me on an enterprise that might prove dangerous - wouldst thou go with me?'

Zayd replied: 'Dost thou think, O my uncle, that I would let thee go alone, whatever the danger? But where are we going?'

'We are going to find out from where Ad-Dawish is getting his arms and his money. But the King insists that no one should know what we are doing until it has been done; so thou must be on guard.'

Zayd did not even bother to reassure me, but turned instead to the more practical question:

'We can't very well ask Ad-Dawish or his men; how then do we set about it?'

On my way back from the castle I had been ruminating over this problem. It appeared to me that the best starting point would be one of the cities of central Najd, where there were many merchants who had intimate connections with Iraq and Kuwayt. Finally I settled upon Shaqra, the capital of the province of Washm, about three days' journey from Riyadh, where my friend Abd ar-Rahman as-Siba'i might be able to help me.

The following day was occupied with preparations for our expedition. As I did not want to attract too much attention to my movements, I cautioned Zayd not to draw provisions, as was customary with us, from the King's storehouses, but to purchase everything we needed from the bazaar. By evening Zayd had collected the necessary assortment of foodstuffs: about twenty pounds of rice, the same amount of flour for bread, a small skin containing clarified butter, dates, coffee beans and salt. He had also bought two new waterskins, a leather bucket and a goat-hair rope long enough for very deep wells. We were already well provided with arms and ammunition. Into our saddlebags we stuffed two changes of clothing per man; and each of us wore a heavy abaya which, together with the blankets over our saddles, would serve as covering on cool nights. Our dromedaries, which had spent several weeks at pasture, were in excellent condition; the one I had recently given to Zayd was an extremely fleet Omani racer, while I rode the beautiful old 'northern' thoroughbred which had once belonged to the last Rashidi amir of Hail and had been presented to me by Ibn Saud.

After nightfall we rode out of Riyadh. By dawn we reached Wadi Hanifa, a deep, barren river bed between steep hills - the site of the decisive battle fought over thirteen hundred years ago between the Muslim forces of Abu Bakr, the Prophet's successor and First Caliph of Islam, and those of the 'false prophet', Musaylima, who for many years had opposed the Muslims. The battle signalled the final victory of Islam in Central Arabia. Many of the original Companions of the Prophet fell in it, and their graves are visible to this day on the rocky slopes of the wādi.

During the forenoon we passed the ruined city of Ayayna, once a large, populous settlement, stretching along both banks of Wadi Hanifa. Between rows of tamarisks lay the remnants of the past: broken-down house walls, with the crumbling pillars of a mosque or the ruin of a palatial building rising here and there, all of them speaking of a higher, more gracious style of architecture than that of the simple mud buildings one sees in present-day Najd. It is said that until about one hundred and fifty or two hundred years ago, the entire course of Wadi Hanifa from Dar'iyya (the original capital of the Ibn Saud dynasty) to Ayayna - a distance of over fifteen miles - was one single city; and that when a son was born to the amir of Dar'iyya, the news of his birth, passed along from rooftop to rooftop by the women, travelled within minutes to the utmost end of Ayayna. The story of Ayayna's decay is so clouded by legends that it is difficult to discern the historical facts. Most probably the town was destroyed by the first Saudi ruler when it refused to accept the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab; but Wahhabi legend has it that, as a sign of God's wrath, all the wells of Ayayna dried up in a single night, forcing the inhabitants to abandon the city.

At noon of the third day we sighted the mud walls and bastions of Shaqra and the high palms which towered above its houses. We rode between empty orchards and through empty streets; and only then we remembered that it was Friday and that everyone must be at the mosque. Off and on

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we encountered a woman cloaked from head to toe in a black abāya; she would start at the sight of the strangers and draw her veil across her face with a quick, shy movement. Here and there children played in the shadow of the houses; a solid warmth was brooding over the crowns of the palms.

We went straight to the house of my good friend Abd ar-Rahman as-Siba'i, who at that time was in charge of the bayt al-māl, or treasury, of the province. We dismounted before the open gate and Zayd called into the courtyard, 'Ya walad! 'O boy!' - and as a servant boy came running out of the house, Zayd announced: 'Guests are here!'

While Zayd and the boy busied themselves with unsaddling the dromedaries in the courtyard, I made myself at home in Abd ar-Rahman's qahwa, where another servant immediately lit a fire under the brass pots on the coffee hearth. Hardly had I drunk the first sip when voices became audible from the courtyard questions and answers rang out: the master of the house had returned. Already from the staircase, still invisible, he shouted his greeting of welcome to me, and then appeared in the doorway with open arms: a delicate little man with a short, light- brown beard and a pair of deep-set, humorous eyes in a smiling face. In spite of the heat he wore a long fur coat under his abāya. This fur coat was one of his most treasured possessions. He never tired of telling everyone who was not already aware of its history that it had once belonged to the former King of the Hijaz, Sharif Husayn, and had fallen into his, Abd ar-Rahman's, hands at the conquest of Mecca in 1924. I cannot remember ever having seen him without that coat.

He embraced me warmly and, standing on his toes, kissed me on both cheeks: 'Ahlan wa-sahlan wa-marhaba! Welcome to this lowly house, O my brother. Lucky is the hour that brings thee here!!

And then came the usual questions: Whence, and whereto, and how is the King, and was there rain on the way or didst thou at least hear of rains? - the whole traditional exchange of Arabian news. I told him that Anayza, in central Najd, was my destination - which was not quite true but could well have been.

In earlier years Abd ar-Rahman had been engaged in extensive trade between Najd and Iraq and was thoroughly familiar with both Basra and Kuwayt. It was not difficult to get him to talk of those places and to sound him out about people who might recently have arrived from there (for it seemed to me that with Faysal ad-Dawish being reported so near the border of Kuwayt, either that place or Basra might furnish some indication as to his source of supplies). I learned that a member of the well-known Al-Bassam family of Anayza - an old acquaintance of mine - had recently visited Kuwayt on the way back from Basra, and, not wanting to expose himself to the hazards of a journey through rebel-infested territory, had returned via Bahrain to Najd. He was in Shaqra at present, and if I wanted, Abd ar-Rahman would send for him: for, in accordance with ancient Arabian custom, it is for the new arrival to be visited rather than to pay visits. Soon afterward, Abdullah al-Bassam joined us in Abd ar-Rahman's qahwa.

Abdullah, although belonging to perhaps the most important family of businessmen in all Najd, was not himself a rich man. His life had been full of ups and downs - mostly downs - experienced not only in Najd but also in Cairo, Baghdad, Basra, Kuwayt, Bahrain and Bombay. He knew everybody who was anybody in those places, and carried in his shrewd head a store of information about everything that was going on in Arab countries. I told him that I had been asked by a German business firm to explore the possibilities of importing agricultural machinery into Kuwayt and Basra; and since I had been offered a fat commission by the firm, I was anxious to find out which of the local merchants in those two towns were likely to entertain such a proposition. Al-Bassam mentioned several names, and then added:

'I am sure that some of the Kuwayti people will be interested in thy project. They are always importing things from abroad, and nowadays trade seems to be quite lively - so lively that large consignments of silver riyals are arriving almost every day directly from the mint at Trieste.'

The mention of the silver riyals gave me a jolt. This particular kind of riyal, the Maria Theresa thaler, constituted, side by side with the official Arabian currencies, the chief commercial coinage of the entire Peninsula. It was minted at Trieste and sold at its silver value, plus a small minting charge to the various governments and also to a few outstanding merchants with large trade interests among the beduins; for the beduins were averse to accepting paper money and took only gold or silver - preferably Maria Theresa thalers. Large imports of these coins by Kuwayti traders seemed to indicate that a brisk business was going on between them and the beduins.

'Why,' I asked Al-Bassam, 'should Kuwayti merchants import riyāls just now?'

'I do not know,' he replied, with a trace of perplexity in his voice. "They talk of buying meat-camels from beduins near Kuwayt for sale in Iraq, where the prices are high nowadays; though I do not quite see how they expect to find many camels in the steppes around Kuwayt in these disturbed times... I should rather think,' he added with a laugh, 'that it would be more profitable to buy riding-camels in Iraq and to sell them to Ad-Dawish and his men - but, of course, Ad-Dawish would not have the money to pay for them...'

Would he not, indeed?

That night, before going to bed in the room assigned to us by our host, I drew Zayd into a corner and told him:

'We are going to Kuwayt.'

'It will not be easy, O my uncle,' replied Zayd; but the gleam in his eyes spoke more eloquently than his words of his readiness to embark on something that was not only not easy but extremely dangerous. It would, of course, be child's play to travel across territory controlled by forces and tribes loyal to the King; but for at least one hundred miles or so before reaching the borders of Kuwayt we would be entirely on our own in the midst of hostile territory through which the rebellious Mutayr and Ajman tribesmen were roaming. We could, of course, travel to Kuwayt by sea via Bahrain, but that would require a permit from the British authorities and thus expose all our movements to the closest scrutiny. The same objection would apply to travelling via Al-Jawf and the Syrian Desert into Iraq, and thence to Kuwayt; for it would be too optimistic to suppose that we could slip through the many control points in Iraq. There remained, therefore, nothing but the direct overland route to Kuwayt. How to penetrate undetected into the town itself was a question that could not be easily answered at present; and so we left it to the future, trusting in our luck and hoping for unforeseen opportunities.

Abd ar-Rahman as-Siba'i wanted me to stay with him for some days, but when I pleaded urgent business, he let us go the next morning, after augmenting our food supply by a quantity of dried camel-meat - a delicious addition to the rather monotonous fare ahead of us. He also insisted that I should visit him on my return journey, to which, in truth, I could only answer, Inshā- Allah - 'God willing.'

FROM SHAQRA WE TRAVELLED for four days toward northeast without encountering anything unusual. On one occasion we were stopped by a detachment of loyal Awazim beduins who formed part of Amir Ibn Musaad's forces; but my open letter from the King immediately put them at rest and, after the customary exchange of desert tidings, we continued on our way.

Before dawn of the fifth day we approached a region over which Ibn Saud's arm no longer extended. From now on day travel was out of the

question; our only safety lay in darkness and stealth.

We made camp in a convenient gulley not far from the main course of the great Wadi ar-Rumma, the ancient, dry river bed that runs across northern Arabia toward the head of the Persian Gulf. The gulley was thickly overhung with arfaj bushes, which would afford us some cover as long as we kept close to the almost vertical bank. We hobbled our camels securely, fed them a mixture of coarse barley flour and date kernels - thus obviating the necessity of letting them out to pasture - and settled down to await the nightfall. We did not dare light a fire, for even in daytime its smoke might betray us; and so we had to content ourselves with a meal of dates and water.

=

How sound our precautions were became evident in the late afternoon, when the strains of a beduin riding-chant suddenly struck our ears. We took hold of our camels' muzzles to prevent them from snorting or bellowing, and pressed ourselves, rifle in hand, flat against the protecting wall of the gulley.

The chanting grew louder as the unknown riders approached; we could already discern the words, La ilaha ill'Allah, la ilaha ill'Allah - "There is no God but God, There is no God but God' - the usual Ikhwān substitute for the more worldly travel chants of 'unreformed' beduins. There was no doubt that these were Ikhwān, and in this area they could only be hostile Ikhwān. After a while they appeared over the crest of a hillock, just above the bank of the gulley - a group of eight or ten camel-riders slowly advancing in single file, sharply outlined against the afternoon sky, each of them wearing the white Ikhwān turban over his red-and-white-checked kufiyya, two bandoliers across the chest and a rifle slung on the saddle-peg behind him: a sombre and forbidding cavalcade, swaying forward and backward, forward and backward, in rhythm with the gait of the dromedaries and the great but now so misused words, La ilaha ill'Allah... The sight was impressive and at the same time pathetic. These were men to whom their faith obviously meant more than anything else in life; they thought they were fighting for its purity and for the greater glory of God, not knowing that their fervour and their longing had been harnessed to the ambitions of an unscrupulous leader in quest of personal power...

They were on they 'right' side of the gulley as far as we were concerned: for had they been riding on the opposite side, they would have seen us as plainly as we could now see them from beneath the protective overhang of the bushes. When, with the lilt of the Creed on their lips, they disappeared from view down the hill, we sighed with relief.

'They are like jinns,' whispered Zayd. 'Yes, like the jinns who know neither joy of life nor fear of death ... They are brave and strong in faith, no one can deny that - but all they dream about is blood and death and Paradise...'

And, as if in defiance of the Ikhwān's gloomy puritanism, he began to sing, sotto voce, a very worldly Syrian love song: 'O thou maiden of golden-brown flesh...'

As soon as it was quite dark, we resumed our surreptitious march in the

direction of distant Kuwayt.

'LOOK THERE, O MY UNCLE!' Zayd suddenly exclaimed. 'A fire!'

It was too small a fire for a beduin encampment; a lonely herdsman, perhaps? But what herdsman would dare light a fire here unless he were one of the rebels? Still, it would be better to find out. If it was only one man, we could easily take care of him and also, possibly, gather some precious information about enemy movements in the area.

The soil was sandy and the feet of our camels made almost no noise as we cautiously approached the fire. In its light we could now make out the crouching figure of a solitary beduin. He seemed to be peering into the darkness in our direction, and then as if satisfied with what he had seen, he rose without hurry, crossed his arms over his chest - perhaps to indicate that he was unarmed - and calmly, without the least appearance of fright, awaited our coming.

'Who art thou?' Zayd called out sharply, his rifle pointed at the ragged stranger.

The beduin smiled slowly and answered in a deep, sonorous voice: 'I am a Sulubbi...'

The reason for his calm now became obvious. The strange, gypsy-like tribe (or rather group of tribes) to which he belonged had never taken part in Arabia's almost unceasing beduin warfare; enemies to none, they were attacked by none.

The Sulubba (sing., Sulubbi) have remained to this day an enigma to all explorers. Nobody really knows their origin. That they are not Arabs is certain: their blue eyes and light-brown hair belie their sunburned skins and carry a memory of northern regions. The ancient Arab historians tell us that they are descendants of crusaders who had been taken prisoner by Saladin and brought to Arabia, where they later became Muslims; and, indeed, the name Sulubba has the same root as the word salīb, that is, 'cross', and salībi, which means 'crusader'. Whether this explanation is correct is difficult to say. In any case, the beduins regard the Sulubba as non-Arabs and treat them with something like tolerant contempt. They explain this contempt, which contrasts sharply with the Arab's otherwise so pronounced sense of human equality, by asserting that these people are not really Muslims by conviction and do not live like Muslims. They point out that the Sulubba do not marry, but are 'promiscuous like dogs', without consideration even of close blood relationship, and that they eat carrion, which Muslims consider unclean. But this may be a post factum rationalization. I am rather inclined to think that it was the awareness of the Sulubba's racial strangeness that caused the extremely race-conscious beduin to draw a magic circle of contempt around them - an instinctive defence against blood mixture, which must have been very tempting in the case of the Sulubba: for they are, almost without exception, beautiful people, taller than most of the Arabs and of a great regularity of features; the women, especially, are very lovely, full of an elusive grace of body and movement.

But whatever the cause, the beduin's contempt for the Sulubba has made their life secure: for anyone who attacks or harms them is deemed by his kinsfolk to have forfeited his honour. Apart from this, the Sulubba are highly esteemed by all desert dwellers as veterinarians, saddle-makers, tinkers and smiths.

The beduin, though despising handicraft too much to practise it himself, is nevertheless in need of it, and the Sullubba are there to help him in his need. They are also efficient herdsmen and, above all, unquestioned masters in the art of hunting. Their ability to read tracks is almost legendary, and the only people who can compare with them in this respect are the Al Murra beduins on the northern fringes of the Empty Quarter.

Relieved at finding that our new acquaintance was a Sulubbi, I told him frankly that we were Ibn Saud's men which was quite safe in view of the respect which these people have for authority and requested him to extinguish his fire. This done, we settled on the ground for a lengthy conversation.

He could not tell us much about the disposition of Ad-Dawish's forces, 'for,' he said, 'they are always on the move, like jinns, never resting at one place for long'. It transpired, however, that no large concentration of hostile Ikhwān happened to be in our immediate vicinity just now, although small parties were constantly crossing the desert in all directions.

An idea suddenly struck me: might we not utilize the Sulubbi's instinct for hunting and pathfinding to lead us to Kuwayt?

'Hast thou ever been to Kuwayt?' I asked him.

The Sulubbi laughed. 'Many times. I have sold gazelle skins there and clarified butter and camel wool. Why, it is only ten days since I returned from there.'

'Then thou couldst perhaps guide us to Kuwayt? - I mean, guide us in such a manner as to avoid meeting Ikhwan on the way?'

For a few moments the Sulubbi pondered over this question; then he replied hesitantly: 'I might, but it would be dangerous for me to be caught by the Ikhwān in thy company. I might, though, but... but it would cost thee a lot.'

'How much?'

'Well...- and I could discern the tremor of greed in his voice - 'well, O my master, if thou wouldst give me one hundred riyāls, I might guide thee and thy friend to Kuwayt in such a manner that none but the birds of the sky would set eyes on us.'

=

One hundred riyāls was equivalent to ten sovereigns - a ridiculously small sum considering what it would mean to us; but the Sulubbi had probably never in his life held so much cash in his hands.

'I shall give thee one hundred riyāls - twenty now and the rest after we reach Kuwayt.'

Our prospective guide had obviously not expected his demand to be so readily granted. Perhaps he regretted that he had not set his price higher, for, as an afterthought, he added:

'But what about my dromedary? If I ride with you to Kuwayt and then back, the poor beast will be worn out entirely, and I have only one...'

Not wishing to prolong the negotiations, I promptly replied: 'I shall buy thy dromedary. Thou shalt ride it to Kuwayt, and there I shall hand it to thee as a gift - but thou must lead us back as well.'

That was more than he could have hoped for. With great alacrity he rose, disappeared into the darkness and reappeared after a few minutes, leading an old but beautiful and obviously hardy animal. After some haggling we settled upon one hundred and fifty riyāls as its price, on the understanding that I would pay him fifty now and the rest, together with his reward, in Kuwayt. Zayd fetched a purse filled with riyāls from one of our saddlebags and I started counting the coins into the lap of the Sulubbi. From the depths of his bedraggled tunic he drew out a piece of cloth in which his money was tied; and as he started to add my riyāls to his hoard, the glitter of a new coin caught my eye.

'Stop!' I exclaimed, placing my hand over his. 'Let me see that shining riyal of thine.'

With a hesitant gesture, as if afraid of being robbed, the Sulubbi laid the coin gingerly on the palm of my hand. It felt sharp-edged, like a new coin, but to make sure I lit a match and looked at it closely. It was indeed a new Maria Theresa thaler - as new as if it had just left the mint. And when I held the match over the rest of the Sulubbi's money, I discovered five or six more coins of the same startling newness.

'Where didst thou get these riyāls?'

'I came by them honestly, O my master, I swear ... I did not steal them. A Mutayri gave them to me some weeks ago near Kuwayt. He bought a new camel-saddle from me because his was broken...

'A Mutayri? Art thou certain?'

'I am certain, O my master, and may God kill me if I speak a lie... He was of Ad-Dawish's men, one of a party that had recently been fighting against the amir of Hail. It surely was not wrong to take money from him for a saddle...? I could not well refuse, and I am sure that the Shuyūkh, may God lengthen his life, will understand this...'

I reassured him that the King would not bear any malice toward him, and his anxiety subsided. On questioning him further, I found that many other Sulubba had received such new riyāls from various partisans of Ad-Dawish in exchange for goods or small services.

OUR SULUBBI INDEED PROVED himself an outstanding guide. For three nights he led us a meandering course across rebel territory, over pathless stretches which even Zayd, who knew this country well, had never seen before. The days were spent in hiding; the Sulubbi was a past-master at finding unsuspected places of concealment. On one occasion he led us to a water hole which, he told us, was unknown even to the beduins of the region; its brackish, brown water assuaged the thirst of our camels and enabled us to refill our waterskins. Only twice did we see groups of Ikhwāns in the distance, but on neither occasion were they allowed to see us.

In the forenoon of the fourth morning after our meeting with the Sulubbi, we came within sight of the town of Kuwayt. We did not approach it from the southwest, as travellers from Najd would have done, but from the west, along the road from Basra, so that anyone who met us would think we were Iraqi traders.

Once in Kuwayt, we made ourselves at home in the compound of a merchant with whom Zayd was acquainted from his days in the Iraqi Constabulary.

A damp, oppressive heat lay over the sandy streets and the houses built of sunbaked mud bricks; and, accustomed to the open steppes of Najd, I was soon drenched with perspiration. But there was no time for rest. Leaving the Sulubbi in charge of the camels - with the strict injunction not to mention to anyone from where we had come - Zayd and I proceeded to the bazaar to make our preliminary investigations.

Not being familiar with Kuwayt myself, and not wishing to make Zayd more conspicuous by my presence, I remained for about an hour alone in a coffee shop, drinking coffee and smoking a nargile. When Zayd at last re-appeared, it was obvious from his triumphant expression that he had found out something of importance.

'Let us go outside, O my uncle. It is easier to talk in the market place without being overheard. And here I have brought something for thee - and for me as well' - and from under his abāya he produced two Iraqi igāls of thick, loosely plaited brown wool. 'These will make Iraqis of us.'

Through discreet enquiries Zayd ascertained that a former partner of his - a companion of his old smuggling days in the Persian Gulf - was now

living in Kuwayt, apparently still engaged in his accustomed trade.

'If there is anyone who can tell us something about gun-running in this town, it is Bandar. He is a Shammar like myself - one of those stubborn fools who could never fully reconcile themselves to Ibn Saud's rule. We must not let him know that we are working for the Shuyūkh - and, I think, not even from where we have come; for Bandar is not really a fool. He is a very cunning man - indeed, he has tricked me too often in the past that I should trust him now.'

We finally traced the man to a house in a narrow lane close to the main bazaar. He was tall and thin, perhaps forty years of age, with close-set eyes and a sour, dyspeptic expression; but his features lit up in genuine pleasure when he beheld Zayd. Because of my light skin, I was introduced as a Turk who had settled in Baghdad and had been engaged in exporting Arab horses from Basra to Bombay. 'But it does not pay nowadays to bring horses to Bombay,' added Zayd. 'Those merchants from Anayza and Burayda have completely cornered the market there.'

'I know,' replied Bandar, 'those dirty Southerners of Ibn Saud are not content with having taken away our country; they are bent on taking away our livelihood as well...'

'But what about gun-running, Bandar?' asked Zayd. 'There should be a lot of business here, with all these Mutayr and Ajman desirous of twisting Ibn Saud's neck - heh?'

'There was a lot of business,' replied Bandar, with a shrug of his shoulders. 'Until a few months ago I was making quite good money buying up rifles in Transjordan and selling them to the people of Ad-Dawish. But now all that is finished, entirely finished. You couldn't sell a single rifle now.'

=

'How is that? I should think Ad-Dawish would need them more than ever before.'

'Yes,' retorted Bandar, 'so he does. But he gets them at a price for which one like thee or me could never afford to sell... He gets them in cases, from overseas - English rifles, almost new - and he pays ten riyāls for a rifle with two hundred rounds of ammunition.'

'Praise be unto God!' exclaimed Zayd in genuine astonishment. 'Ten riyāls for an almost new rifle with two hundred rounds: but that is impossible...!'

It really did seem impossible, for at that time used Lee-Enfield rifles cost in Najd about thirty to thirty-five riyāls apiece, without ammunition; and even if one took into consideration that the prices at Kuwayt might be lower than in Najd, the tremendous difference was still unaccountable.

Bandar smiled wryly. 'Well, it seems that Ad-Dawish has powerful friends. Very powerful friends... Some say that one day he will become an independent amir in northern Najd.'

'What thou sayest, O Bandar,' I interposed, 'is all well and good. Perhaps Ad-Dawish will really make himself independent of Ibn Saud. But he has no money, and without money even the great Alexander could not have built a kingdom.'

Bandar broke out into a loud guffaw: 'Money? Ad-Dawish has plenty of that - plenty of new riyāls, which come to him in cases, like the rifles, from beyond the sea.'

'Cases of riyāls? But that is very strange. From where could a beduin obtain cases of new riyāls?'

'That I do not know,' replied Bandar. 'But I do know that almost daily some of his men are taking delivery of new riyāls that are reaching them through various merchants in the city. Why, only yesterday I saw Farhan ibn Mashhur at the port supervising the unloading of such cases.'

This was indeed news. I knew Farhan well. He was a grand-nephew of that famous Syrian beduin prince, Nuri ash-Shaalan, who had once fought together with Lawrence against the Turks. I had first met young Farhan in 1924 in Damascus, where he was notorious for his revels in all the doubtful places of entertainment. Some time afterward he fell out with his great-uncle, migrated with a sub-section of his tribe, the Ruwala, to Najd, where he suddenly became 'pious' and joined the Ikhwan movement. I met him again in 1927 in Ibn Musaad's castle at Hail. By then he had donned the huge, white turban of the Ikhwān as a symbol of his new-found faith, and was enjoying the bounty of the King; when I reminded him of our previous meetings in Damascus, he quickly changed the subject. Stupid and ambitious as he was, he had seen in Ad-Dawish's revolt an opportunity to achieve

==

an independent amirate for himself in Al-Jawf, an oasis north of the Great Nufud for in Arabia, as elsewhere, rebels follow the time-honoured practice of dividing the lion's skin before the lion has been killed.

'So Farhan is here in Kuwayt?' I asked Bandar.

him.' 'Of course. He comes here as often as Ad-Dawish, and goes freely in and out of the shaykh's palace. The shaykh, they say, has a great liking for

'But do not the British object to Ad-Dawish's and Farhan's coming to Kuwayt? I seem to remember that some months ago they announced that they would not allow Ad-Dawish or his people to enter this territory...?'

Bandar guffawed again. 'So they did, so they did. But, I have told thee: Ad-Dawish has very powerful friends... I am not sure whether he is in town just now; but Farhan is. He goes every evening to the Great Mosque for the maghrib prayer - thou canst see him there with thine own eyes if thou dost not believe me...'

And see him we did. When, taking Bandar's hint, Zayd and I strolled in the early evening in the vicinity of the Great Mosque, we almost collided with a group of beduins, unmistakably Najdi in bearing, who emerged from around a street corner. At their head was a man in his middle thirties, somewhat shorter than the tall beduins who surrounded and followed him, his handsome face adorned by a short, black beard. I recognized him at once. I do not know to this day whether he recognized me; his eyes met mine for a moment, swept over me with a puzzled ex-pression, as if he were trying to recall a dim memory, and then turned away; and an instant later he and his retinue were lost in the throng of people moving toward the mosque.

We decided not to extend our clandestine sojourn in Kuwayt unduly by waiting for an opportunity to see Ad-Dawish as well. Bandar's revelations were confirmed by Zayd's adroit enquiries from other acquaintances in the town. Ad-Dawish's mysterious supplies of Lee-Enfield rifles -only superficially disguised as 'purchases' - clearly pointed to a Kuwayti merchant who had always been prominent as an importer of arms; and the large amounts of mint - new Maria Theresa riyāls that circulated in the bazaars of Kuwayt were in almost every case traceable to Ad-Dawish and the men around him. Short of seeing his actual depots and examining the consignment papers - which was scarcely within the realm of likelihood - we had enough evidence to confirm the suspicions the King had voiced during his talk with me.

My mission was completed; and in the following night we made our way out of Kuwayt as stealthily as we had come. During Zayd's and my investigations in the bazaars, our Sulubbi had found out that there were no rebel groups at the moment to the south of Kuwayt. And so to the south we went - in the direction of Al-Hasa province, which was firmly under the control of the King. After two strenuous night marches, we encountered, not far from the coast, a detachment of Banu Hajar beduins who had been sent out by the amir of Al-Hasa to reconnoitre the latest positions of the rebels; and in their company we re-entered loyal territory. Once safely within Ibn Saud's realm, we parted from our Sulubbi guide who, contentedly pocketing his well-earned reward, rode away toward the west on the camel I had 'presented' to him, while we continued southward in the direction of Riyadh.

THE SERIES OF ARTICLES which I subsequently wrote made it clear for the first time that the rebels were being supported by a great European power. They pointed out that the basic aim of these intrigues was to push Ibn Saud's frontiers southward and, ultimately, to convert his northernmost province into an 'independent' principality between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, which would allow the British to build a railway line across its territory. Apart from this, Ad-Dawish's rebellion offered a welcome means to bring about so much confusion in Ibn Saud's kingdom that he would be in no position to resist, as he had hitherto done, Britain's demands for two important concessions: one of them being the lease of the Red Sea port of Rabigh, north of Jidda, where the British had long wanted to establish a naval base, and the other, control of that sector of the Damascus-Medina railway which runs through Saudi territory. A defeat of Ibn Saud at the hands of Ad-Dawish would have brought these schemes well within the realm of practical possibility.

A flash of sensation followed the publication of my articles in the European and Arabic (mainly Egyptian) press; and it may well be that the premature disclosure of all that secret planning contributed something to its subsequent frustration. At any rate, the plan of a British railway from Haifa to Basra was allowed to lapse into oblivion in spite of the large sums which appeared to have been spent for preliminary surveys, and was never heard of again.

What happened afterward is a matter of history: that same summer of 1929, Ibn Saud protested to the British against the freedom accorded Ad-Dawish to purchase arms and ammunition at Kuwayt. Since he had no tangible 'proof' that these arms were being supplied by a foreign power, the King could protest only against the sales as such. The British authorities replied that it was the traders in Kuwayt who were supplying arms to the rebels - and that Britain could do nothing to stop this, since in the treaty of Jidda of 1927 they had lifted their embargo on the import of arms to Arabia. If Ibn Saud wanted, they said, he too could import arms via Kuwayt... When Ibn Saud objected that the very same treaty obliged both Britain and Saudi Arabia to prevent in their territories all activities directed against the security of the other party, he received the answer that Kuwayt could not be termed 'British territory' since it was an independent shaykhdom with which Britain had no more than treaty relations...

And so the civil war continued. In the late autumn of 1929, Ibn Saud personally took the field, this time determined to pursue Ad-Dawish even into Kuwayt if - as had always been the case in the past - that territory remained open to the rebels as a refuge and base for further operations. In the face of this determined attitude, which Ibn Saud took care to communicate to the British authorities, they apparently realized that it would be too risky to pursue their game further. British aeroplanes and armoured cars were sent out to prevent Ad-Dawish from retreating again into Kuwayti territory. The rebel realized that his cause was lost; never would he be able to withstand the King in open battle; and so he started to negotiate. The King's terms were crisp and clear: the rebel tribes must surrender; their arms, horses and dromedaries would be taken away from them; Ad-Dawish's life would be spared, but he would have to spend the rest of his days in Riyadh.

Ad-Dawish, always so active and full of movement, could not resign himself to inaction and immobility: he refused the offer. Fighting a last-ditch battle against the overwhelming forces of the King, the rebels were completely routed; Ad-Dawish and a few other leaders - among them Farhan ibn Mashhur and Naif abu Kilab, chieftain of the Ajman - fled to Iraq.

Ibn Saud demanded Ad-Dawish's extradition. For a time it seemed that King Faysal of Iraq would refuse his demand by invoking the ancient Arabian law of hospitality and sanctuary; but finally he gave in. Early in 1930, Ad-Dawish, seriously ill, was handed over to the King and brought to Riyadh. When after a few weeks it became obvious that this time he was really dying, Ibn Saud, with his customary generosity, had him brought back to his family at Artawiyya, where his stormy life came to an end.

And once again peace reigned in the realm of Ibn Saud...

AND ONCE AGAIN PEACE reigns around the wells of Arja.

'May God give you life, O wayfarers! Partake of our bounty!' calls out the old Mutayri beduin, and his men help us to water our camels. All

grudges and enmities of the so recent past seem to be forgotten, as if they had never been.

==

For the beduins are a strange race: quick to flare up in uncontrollable passion at even imaginary provocations, and just as quick to swing back to the steady rhythm of a life in which modesty and kindness prevail: always heaven and hell in close proximity.

And as they draw water for our camels in their huge leather buckets, the Mutayri herdsmen chant in chorus:

Drink, and spare no water,

The well is full of grace and has no bottom...

-3-

ON THE FIFTH NIGHT after our departure from Hail, we reach the plain of Medina and see the dark outline of Mount Uhud.

The dromedaries move with tired step; we have a long march behind us, from early morning deep into this night. Zayd and Mansur are silent, and I am silent. In the moonlight the city appears before us with its crenellated walls and the slim, straight minarets of the Prophet's Mosque.

We arrive before the gate which, because it faces north, is called the Syrian. The dromedaries shy before the shadows of its heavy bastions, and we have to use our canes to make them enter the gateway.

Now I am again in the City of the Prophet, home after a long wandering: for this city has been my home for several years. A deep, familiar quiet lies over its sleeping, empty streets. Here and there a dog rises lazily before the feet of the camels. A young man walks by singing; his voice sways in a soft rhythm and fades away in a side-lane. The carved balconies and oriel windows of the houses hang black and silent over us. The moonlit air is lukewarm like fresh milk.

And here is my house.

Mansur takes leave to go to some friends, while we two make the camels kneel down before the door. Zayd hobbles them without a word and begins to unload the saddlebags. I knock at the door. After a while I hear voices and footsteps from within. The shine of a lantern appears through the fanlight, the bolts are drawn and my old Sudanese maid servant, Amina, exclaims joyfully:

'Oh, my master has come home!'

====

세진님, 요청하신 <메카로 가는 길 (The Road to Mecca)> 제8장 <진들 (Jinns)>의 1,000단어 분량 상세 요약입니다. 지침에 따라 본문은 <해라>체로 서술했습니다.

<제8장: 진들 (Jinns) 요약>

<1. 황혼의 뱀과 사막의 영적 실재> 해질 무렵 아사드는 길을 가로지르는 굵은 검은 뱀을 발견하고 반사적으로 총을 쏘아 죽인다. 이를 본 길동무 만수르는 해질녘에 지하에서 올라와 뱀의 형상을 취하는 '진(Jinn, 영적 존재)'을 죽였다며 강하게 나무란다. 아사드는 처음에는 미신이라며 웃어넘기려 하지만, 인간의 오감과 과학적 도구로 측정할 수 없다고 해서 미지의 생명 형태를 배제하는 것은 근대인의 지적 오만일 수 있음을 자성한다.

이어 또 다른 동행자인 자이드 역시 과거 해질녘에 뱀을 죽인 뒤 원인 모를 중병에 걸려 나흘 동안 의식을 잃었던 섬뜩한 체험담을 털어놓는다. 자이드는 깊은 혼수상태 속에서 자신이 영적 법정에 서서 심판을 받는 꿈을 꾸었으며, 총을 쏠 때 신의 이름을 불렀다는 변호 덕분에 간신히 풀려나 살아났다고 증언한다. 이 신비로운 대화는 자연의 심연과 보이지 않는 세계에 대한 사막인들의 경외감을 드러내며, 아사드로 하여금 사막의 황혼에 감도는 보이지 않는 힘의 존재를 깊이 숙고하게 만든다.

<2. 아르자의 우물과 이크완 반란의 기억> 하일에서 출발한 지 사흘째 되던 날, 일행은 낮은 언덕으로 둘러싸인 아르자의 우물에 도착해 낙타에게 물을 먹인다. 이곳은 평화롭게 양 떼와 낙타를 몰고 온 하르브 부족과 무타이르 부족이 함께 어우러져 전통 노동요를 부르며 물을 긷는 활기찬 공간이다. 불과 3년 전까지만 해도 사우디 왕정에 충성하던 하르브 부족과 반란을 일으켰던 무타이르 부족이 피비린내 나는 내전을 치렀음에도, 언제 그랬냐는 듯 우물가에서 나그네를 환대하며 평화를 누리는 모습은 베두인들의 독특한 삶의 탄력성을 보여준다.

이 광경은 1928년부터 1929년까지 이븐 사우드 국왕의 왕국을 뿌리부터 뒤흔들었던 거대한 '이크완(Ikhwan) 반란'의 기억을 소환한다. 이븐 사우드의 통일 전쟁에서 핵심 무력 집단이었던 종교적 광신 무장 전사 이크완 세력은, 무타이르 부족의 맹주 파이살 앗-다위시와 오타이바 부족의 술탄 이븐 부자드를 중심으로 국왕에게 등을 돌렸다. 이들은 자동차, 전화기, 무전기 같은 근대 기술의 도입과 이교도(영국)와의 국경 조약 체결을 '배교'로 규정하며 반란을 일으켰고, 왕국 전역을 극심한 혼란에 빠뜨렸다.

<3. 국왕의 은밀한 밀명> 1929년 여름, 리야드의 궁정에서 이븐 사우드 국왕은 아사드를 은밀히 자신의 개인 처소로 불러들인다. 국왕은 아사드가 유럽과 이집트 언론에 기고한 국경 정세 분석 기사들을 높이 평가하며 특별한 비밀 임무를 맡긴다. 이크완 반란군을 이끄는 파이살 앗-다위시가 막대한 자금과 최신식 무기, 탄약을 끊임없이 조달받고 있는데, 그 배후에 숨은 외세의 음모를 객관적인 유럽인 기자의 신분으로 현장에 침투해 직접 파헤쳐 달라는 요청이었다.

영국은 팔레스타인, 트랜스요르단, 이라크에 걸친 위임통치령을 바탕으로 지중해 하이파에서 페르시아만 바스라까지 이어지는 철도와 송유관 경로를 확보하고자 했다. 사우디 영토를 관통해야 하는 이 계획을 이븐 사우드가 거부하자, 영국이 앗-다위시의 반란을 배후에서 부추겨 북부 완충 지대를 장악하려 한다는 것이 국왕의 강력한 의심이었다. 국왕은 아사드에게 금화가 든 주머니를 건네며 절대적 신뢰를 표했고, 아사드는 이 위험천만한 첩보 임무를 기꺼이 수락한다.

<4. 쿠웨이트로의 잠입과 비밀 정보 수집> 아사드와 자이드는 은밀히 리야드를 빠져나와 나지드 중부의 샤크라로 향한다. 그곳에서 바스라와 쿠웨이트를 오가던 상인 압둘라 알-바삼을 통해, 최근 쿠웨이트 시장에 오스트리아 트리에스테 조폐국에서 갓 찍어낸 신권 '마리아 테레사 은화(리얄)'가 대량으로 유입되고 있다는 결정적인 단서를 포착한다.

반란군 부족들이 들끓는 험난한 사막을 돌파하기 위해, 아사드는 사막의 방랑자이자 탁월한 추적 기술을 지닌 비(非)아랍계 수룹바(Sulubba) 부족의 한 남자를 길잡이로 고용한다. 수룹바 길잡이의 주머니에서도 갓 주조된 반짝이는 신권 은화가 발견되었고, 이는 반란군 전사들이 물품 대금으로 지불한 것이었다. 수룹바의 안내로 반란군 정찰대를 기적적으로 피하며 사흘 밤을 이동한 끝에 일행은 이라크 상인으로 위장하여 무사히 쿠웨이트 시내로 잠입한다.

쿠웨이트의 무기 밀수업자 반다르와의 접촉을 통해 충격적인 사실이 드러난다. 반란군 지도자 앗-다위시는 해외에서 상자에 담겨 반입되는 영국제 최신 리-엔필드 소총과 200발의 탄약을 정가의 3분의 1도 안 되는 10리얄이라는 헐값에 공급받고 있었다. 또한 반란군에 합류한 파르한 이븐 마슈후르가 항구에서 상자에 든 신권 은화를 직접 인수하고, 영국 당국의 묵인 아래 쿠웨이트 통치자의 궁정을 자유롭게 드나들고 있는 현장을 직접 확인한다.

<5. 폭로와 반란의 종식, 그리고 메디나 귀환> 조사를 마친 아사드는 남쪽의 하사 주로 탈출한 뒤, 이크완 반란의 배후에 영국 제국주의의 음모가 도사리고 있음을 폭로하는 기사들을 유럽과 이집트 유력지에 연속 게재한다. 이 기사들은 큰 파장을 일으켰고, 음모가 백일하에 드러나자 영국은 하이파-바스라 철도 계획을 조용히 백지화하며 발을 뺀다.

외세의 은밀한 지원이 차단되자 고립된 앗-다위시와 반란군은 1929년 늦가을 이븐 사우드 국왕의 총공세 앞에 완전히 궤멸된다. 이라크로 도주했던 앗-다위시는 결국 송환되어 리야드로 압송되었고, 이븐 사우드의 너그러운 처분으로 고향 아르타위야에서 최후를 맞이함으로써 아라비아반도에는 다시 평화가 찾아온다.

사막의 위험과 정치적 음모를 모두 뚫고 지나온 아사드는 마침내 제2의 고향이자 영적 안식처인 '예언자의 도시' 메디나에 도착한다. 달빛 아래 고요히 잠든 모스크의 미나렛을 바라보며 자신의 집 문을 두드리는 그의 모습과 함께, 사막의 신비와 정치적 첩보전이 교차했던 격정의 장은 평온한 귀가로 마무리된다.

===

아래는 첨부하신 <The Road to Mecca Ch 8: JINNS>의 1,000단어 정도 요약입니다. 이 장은 제목은 <Jinns>이지만, 실제 중심은 “진” 자체보다도, 사막적 상상력, 베두인 세계, 이븐 사우드의 정치, 아드다위시 반란, 그리고 아사드의 비밀 정찰 임무에 있습니다.

<요약>

이 장은 해질 무렵 아사드 일행 앞에 큰 검은 뱀이 나타나는 장면으로 시작한다. 아사드는 거의 반사적으로 총을 쏘아 뱀을 죽인다. 그러나 동행자 만수르는 못마땅해한다. 해가 질 무렵에는 뱀을 죽이면 안 된다는 것이다. 그 시간은 “진”들이 나오는 시간이기 때문이다. 아사드는 만수르에게 그런 이야기를 정말 믿느냐고 묻는다. 만수르는 당연히 믿는다고 답한다. 꾸란에도 진이 언급되어 있지 않느냐는 것이다.

아사드는 여기서 진에 대해 흥미로운 사색을 펼친다. 그는 서구 근대인의 태도처럼 진을 단순한 미신으로 치부하지 않는다. 인간의 감각과 과학적 측정이 포착할 수 없는 존재 양식이 있을 수 있지 않느냐고 생각한다. 꾸란이 말하는 진은 인간과는 다른 생명체일 수 있고, 인간의 감각이 제한되어 있기 때문에 우리가 그들을 직접 인식하지 못할 수도 있다는 것이다. 다만 그는 그것을 과학적으로 증명할 수는 없다고 말한다. 중요한 것은 사막의 어둠과 고독 속에서 인간이 보이지 않는 힘의 존재를 느끼게 된다는 점이다.

만수르는 예전에 해질 무렵 뱀을 죽인 뒤 병이 나고 이상한 환상을 본 경험을 이야기한다. 그는 무덤 속처럼 어두운 곳에 끌려가 재판을 받았고, 자신이 하나님의 이름을 부르며 방어하지 못했다는 이유로 유죄가 되었다고 느꼈다. 아사드는 만수르의 이야기를 들으면서도 절반은 웃고 절반은 불안해한다. 그는 방금 죽인 뱀 때문에 이상한 후회와 불길함을 느낀다. 이렇게 이 장의 첫 부분은 진에 대한 민간신앙과 이슬람적 상상력, 그리고 합리적 회의 사이의 긴장을 보여준다.

다음 장면은 하일에서 출발한 지 사흘째 되는 날, 아사드 일행이 아르자 우물에 도착하는 대목이다. 아르자는 하르브와 무타이르 두 부족의 공동 우물이다. 우물 주변은 낙타와 양, 사람들로 가득 차 있다. 깊은 우물에서 물을 길어 올리는 일은 힘들고, 여러 사람이 가죽 물통을 끌어올리며 노래를 부른다. 그 노래는 “마셔라, 물을 아끼지 마라. 우물은 은총으로 가득하고 바닥이 없다”는 식의 구절로 반복된다. 이 장면은 사막에서 물이 단순한 자원이 아니라 하나님의 은총이자 공동체의 생명이라는 사실을 잘 보여준다.

아르자 우물 주변에서 사람들은 서로에게 관대하게 물을 나누어준다. 얼마 전까지 서로 싸우던 부족들도, 지금은 여행자들에게 “우리의 풍요를 나누라”고 외친다. 그러나 이 평화로운 장면은 곧 정치적 회상으로 이어진다. 자이드는 하르브와 무타이르가 지금은 평화롭게 물을 나누지만, 얼마 전에는 이븐 사우드의 적이었던 파이살 아드다위시를 지지하며 반란에 가담했다고 말한다. 이를 계기로 아사드는 1928~29년의 거대한 베두인 반란과 이븐 사우드의 정치적 위기를 설명한다.

그 배경에는 이라크 국경 문제가 있다. 이븐 사우드는 영국과 조약을 맺고 나지드-이라크 국경 지대에 요새를 세우지 않기로 합의했으나, 이라크 쪽은 국경 근처에 요새를 세우려 했다. 이븐 사우드는 항의했지만 영국은 회피했다. 이때 파이살 아드다위시가 이끄는 이크완 세력이 문제를 무력으로 해결하려 했다. 그는 이라크 국경 초소를 공격했고, 이에 영국 공군이 나지드 지역을 폭격했다. 베두인 부락들이 피해를 입고, 여성과 아이들까지 죽었다. 이븐 사우드는 대규모 부족 회의를 열어 사태를 수습하려 했지만, 아드다위시와 다른 반항적 추장들은 오지 않았다.

이 반란은 단순한 종교적 광신이나 국경분쟁이 아니었다. 아사드는 여러 원인이 뒤섞여 있었다고 본다. 하나는 이크완의 종교적 엄격주의였다. 그들은 자동차, 전화, 무선, 비행기를 악마의 도구로 보았고, 이븐 사우드가 그런 현대적 장치를 받아들이는 것을 못마땅하게 여겼다. 그러나 울라마들은 그런 기술이 종교적으로 금지된 것이 아니며, 오히려 무슬림의 힘과 지식을 증가시킬 수 있다고 판정했다. 또 다른 원인은 부족 지도자들의 권력욕과 질투였다. 아드다위시와 이븐 부자드 같은 인물들은 이븐 사우드 아래에 복종하는 것을 견디지 못했다. 특히 아드다위시는 하일 정복에서 자신의 공을 인정받지 못했다고 느꼈고, 아즈만과 무타이르 부족을 이끌며 반란을 키워갔다.

전투는 시빌라에서 결정적으로 벌어졌다. 이븐 사우드는 충성 부족들을 모아 반란군과 맞섰고, 반란군은 패배했다. 이븐 부자드는 항복했고, 아드다위시는 부상당했지만 살아남았다. 그러나 그는 멈추지 않고 쿠웨이트 방면으로 도망쳐 다시 세력을 모으려 했다. 이때부터 의문이 생긴다. 아드다위시는 어디서 무기와 돈을 얻는가? 어떻게 계속 반란을 유지할 수 있는가? 아사드는 이 질문이 이 장의 실제 서사적 중심으로 이어진다고 보여준다.

1929년 여름 어느 날 밤, 이븐 사우드는 아사드를 은밀히 부른다. 그는 아사드에게 아드다위시의 무기와 자금 출처를 조사해 달라고 부탁한다. 이븐 사우드는 영국이 배후에 있을 가능성을 의심한다. 영국은 겉으로는 사우디와 조약관계를 유지하지만, 실제로는 쿠웨이트를 통해 아드다위시를 지원해 나지드 북동부를 불안정하게 만들고, 장차 하이파와 바스라를 잇는 철도나 송유관 같은 전략적 이익을 노릴 수 있다는 것이다. 이븐 사우드는 아사드가 외국인이면서도 자신을 사랑하고, 정치적 감각과 언론 경험을 가진 인물이라고 보고, 이 위험한 임무를 맡긴다.

아사드는 이를 받아들인다. 그는 자이드를 동행자로 삼아 쿠웨이트로 향한다. 임무는 위험하다. 아드다위시 세력에게 잡히면 목숨을 잃을 수 있고, 영국 측의 감시를 받을 수도 있다. 이들은 공개적으로 움직이지 않고, 몰래 사막길을 돌아간다. 준비 과정에서 낙타, 식량, 물통, 커피, 밀가루, 대추야자, 소금, 총알 등을 챙긴다. 여정 중 샤크라와 와디 하니파, 폐허가 된 옛 도시 아야나를 지나며, 아사드는 와하비 운동의 역사와 초기 이슬람 정복의 기억을 떠올린다.

샤크라에서는 아사드의 옛 친구 압드 아르라흐만 아스시바이를 만난다. 그는 나지드와 이라크, 쿠웨이트 사이의 상업과 인맥을 잘 아는 사람이다. 아사드는 그를 통해 쿠웨이트 쪽에 새로운 은화, 특히 마리아 테레지아 탈러가 대량으로 들어오고 있다는 단서를 듣는다. 이 은화는 베두인들이 신뢰하는 화폐였고, 대량 유입은 누군가 반란군에게 자금을 대고 있다는 의심을 강화한다.

이후 아사드와 자이드는 쿠웨이트로 가기 위해 더 은밀한 길을 택한다. 도중에 그들은 이크완 무리와 맞닥뜨릴 뻔하지만, 어둠 속에 숨어 위기를 피한다. 아사드는 그들을 보며 묘한 감정을 느낀다. 그들은 신앙심이 강하고 죽음을 두려워하지 않는 용감한 사람들이지만, 동시에 삶의 기쁨과 아름다움을 모르는 사람들처럼 보인다. 자이드는 그들을 “진”과 같다고 말한다. 그들은 생명도 죽음도 모르고, 피와 낙원만 꿈꾼다는 것이다. 이 장 제목 <Jinns>는 여기서 다시 의미를 얻는다. 진은 단순한 초자연적 존재가 아니라, 사막 속에서 인간성을 잃고 광신과 폭력의 도구가 된 사람들의 이미지와도 연결된다.

아사드 일행은 한 불빛을 발견하고 접근하다가 술루비족 사람을 만난다. 술루비는 아랍인도, 정통 베두인도 아닌 독특한 집단으로 묘사된다. 그들은 사냥, 길 찾기, 수리, 금속 세공, 수의술 등에 능하지만, 다른 베두인들에게 멸시받는다. 아사드는 이들을 통해 사막 사회 내부의 위계와 배제도 보여준다. 이 술루비 남자는 돈을 받고 아사드 일행을 쿠웨이트까지 안내한다. 그는 뛰어난 안내자였고, 험한 사막길을 안전하게 통과시킨다. 그 과정에서 그가 가진 새 은화를 통해, 아드다위시 쪽 사람들이 쿠웨이트에서 은화를 받고 있다는 추가 단서도 얻는다.

쿠웨이트에 도착한 아사드와 자이드는 이라크 영사관에 아는 상인의 집에 머문다. 그들은 시장에서 정보를 수집하고, 자이드의 과거 밀수 인맥을 활용해 반다르 아스샴마리라는 인물을 찾아낸다. 반다르는 무기 밀매에 관여한 사람이다. 그는 아드다위시가 더 이상 평범한 상인들에게서 무기를 사지 않는다고 말한다. 값싼 신형 소총과 탄약이 대량으로 들어오고 있으며, 그것은 쿠웨이트의 영향력 있는 상인들을 통해 공급된다는 것이다. 더구나 아드다위시의 친족 파르한이 쿠웨이트에 자주 드나들며, 영국 사람들이 그 움직임을 알고도 막지 않는다는 정황이 드러난다.

아사드와 자이드는 모스크에서 파르한을 직접 본다. 자이드는 그가 누구인지 확인한다. 이로써 아사드는 임무의 핵심을 파악한다. 아드다위시의 반란은 단순한 부족 반란이 아니라, 쿠웨이트 상인, 무기 자금, 영국의 묵인 또는 지원과 연결되어 있었다. 그는 더 오래 머물지 않고 정보를 가지고 돌아간다. 이후 그는 유럽과 아랍 언론에 글을 써서 반란군이 강력한 외부 세력의 지원을 받고 있다고 폭로한다.

그 결과 영국 쪽의 은밀한 계획은 일정 부분 좌절된다. 아사드는 영국이 사우디 영토를 남쪽으로 밀어붙여, 사우디와 이라크 사이에 독립적 완충국을 만들고, 철도·송유관·홍해 항구 라비그 양허권 등을 확보하려 했다고 해석한다. 그의 글이 이런 계획을 드러내자, 영국 언론은 문제를 회피하려 했고, 이븐 사우드는 쿠웨이트의 무기 구매를 막아 달라고 공식 항의한다. 결국 아드다위시 반란은 힘을 잃고, 반란군은 패배한다. 아드다위시는 이라크로 도망가지만, 나중에 이븐 사우드에게 넘겨지고 병든 상태에서 가족에게 돌아가 죽는다.

이 장의 마지막은 다시 아르자 우물과 평화의 장면으로 돌아온다. 얼마 전의 원한과 전쟁은 잊힌 듯, 무타이르 베두인들은 여행자들에게 물을 나누며 노래한다. 이어 아사드는 메디나에 가까워진다. 다섯 번째 밤, 멀리 우후드 산의 어두운 윤곽이 보이고, 예언자의 도시 메디나의 성벽과 미나렛이 달빛 속에 나타난다. 긴 여정 끝에 그는 자신의 집 앞에 도착한다. 만수르는 친구들을 찾아 떠나고, 자이드가 낙타를 무릎 꿇린다. 아사드가 문을 두드리자, 오래된 수단 출신 하녀 아미나가 기뻐 외친다. “오, 주인님이 집에 오셨다!”

이 장은 그래서 여러 층으로 읽힌다. 

• 표면적으로는 아사드의 사막 모험과 첩보 임무 이야기다. 
• 역사적으로는 이븐 사우드가 사우디 국가를 통합하는 과정에서 겪은 이크완 반란과 영국의 국경정치 이야기다. 
• 종교적으로는 진, 운명, 보이지 않는 힘, 신앙과 광신의 차이를 묻는 장이다. 
• 문학적으로는 뱀, 우물, 밤길, 노래, 사막의 불빛, 메디나의 달빛이 이어지는 아름다운 여행 산문이다.
•  가장 깊은 주제는 이것이다. 사막에는 보이지 않는 존재만 있는 것이 아니라, 보이지 않는 정치, 보이지 않는 욕망, 보이지 않는 신앙의 힘도 있다. 
• 아사드는 그 모든 것을 통과해, 마침내 다시 “집”에 도착한다.

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