==
<메카로 가는 길> 제12장 <길의 끝(END OF THE ROAD)> 요약
<메카로 향하는 밤길과 배 위에서의 형제애 회상>
무함마드 아사드는 자이드(Zayd)와 함께 예언자가 생애 마지막 순례 때 지나갔던 '동쪽 길'을 따라 메디나를 떠나 메카로 향한다
아사드는 1927년 1월 개종 직후 아내 엘사(Elsa)와 함께 중동행 증기선 3등 칸을 탔던 기억을 반추한다
<야영지의 밤: 아부 사이드의 실연과 은하수의 위로>
마지막 야영의 밤, 아사드는 자이드에게 아라비아의 근대화(석유 탐사와 세속적 부의 유입)로 인해 옛 베두인의 순수성이 사라질 것을 우려하며, 인도·중국·자와 등 더 넓은 이슬람 세계를 탐방하기 위해 곧 아라비아를 떠날 뜻을 밝힌다
그때 이븐 사우드 왕의 경호대원인 아부 사이드(Abu Said)가 질주해와 실연의 고통으로 미친 듯 울부짖으며 야영지를 맴돈다
<메카의 기원과 첫 순례, 엘사의 죽음>
아사드는 아브라함과 하갈, 이스마엘의 전승과 자무잠 우물의 기원, 그리고 카바 신전의 건립 과정을 되짚는다
<아라파트 평원의 질주와 영적 합일>
새벽녘 언덕에 오른 아사드는 아라파트 평원을 내려다보며 과거 1,300여 년 동안 이곳을 거쳐 간 수억 명 순례자들의 영적 파동과 다시 연결된다
평론: 귀향(歸鄕)의 완성과 이방인성의 극복
제12장 <길의 끝>은 레오폴트 바이스라는 오스트리아 지식인이 무함마드 아사드라는 무슬림으로 거듭나는 기나긴 영적 탐색의 대단원이자 완결점이다. 이 장은 지리적 여행기, 사막의 서정시, 문명사적 성찰, 그리고 실존적 고백이 완벽하게 융합된 문학적 절정을 보여준다.
<1. 은하수와 카바: 절대자 앞에서 비워지는 자아>
아사드는 사막의 은하수를 아브라함의 희생과 연결 짓고, 카바의 건축미를 '인간적 기교와 교만의 완전한 포기'로 읽어낸다
<2. 죽음의 상흔과 영적 성숙>
첫 순례 직후 찾아온 아내 엘사의 죽음은 아사드의 여정에 짙은 비극적 무게를 더한다
<3. '다리'를 건넌 자의 자유와 새로운 지평>
책의 종막을 장식하는 아라파트 평원의 질주는 이 책 전체를 통틀어 가장 압도적인 장면이다
그러나 이 '길의 끝'은 폐쇄적 안주가 아니다. 그는 다가올 물질문명의 오염을 예견하며, 더 넓은 세계(인도와 동남아시아)를 향해 흐르는 물처럼 나아갈 준비를 한다
==
==
==
END OF THE ROAD
-1-
WE LEAVE MEDINA late at night, following the 'eastern' route - the one the Prophet followed on his last pilgrimage to Mecca, a few months before his death.
We ride through the rest of the night and through the approaching dawn. After a short stop for our morning prayer we proceed into the day, which is grey and cloudy. In the forenoon it begins to rain, and soon we are wet to our skins. Finally we espy a small beduin encampment far to our left and decide to take shelter in one of the black tents.
The camp is small and belongs to a group of Harb beduins, who receive us with a loud, 'May God give you life, O strangers, and be you welcome.' I spread my blanket over the mats of goat hair in the tent of the shaykh, whose wife - unveiled like most of the beduin women in this region - repeats her husband's gracious welcome. After my sleepless night, sleep overcomes me speedily under the drumming of the rain on the tent roof.
The rain drums into my awakening several hours later. Nightly darkness lies over me - oh, no, it is not the night, only the dark canopy of the tent; and it smells of wet wool. I stretch my arms and my hand strikes against a camel-saddle standing on the ground behind me. The smoothness of the old wood is good to the touch; it is pleasant to play on it with one's fingers, up the pommel, until they meet the iron-hard, sharp-edged camel-gut with which it is laced together. There is nobody in the tent but me.
After a while I rise and step into the tent opening. The rain is hammering holes into the sand - myriads of tiny holes which suddenly appear and as suddenly disappear to make room for new holes - and turns to spray over the blue-grey granite boulders to my right. There is nobody in sight, for at this time of day the men must have gone out to look after their camels; the many black tents near the acacia tree down below in the valley are silent in the silence of the rainy afternoon. From one of them a grey wisp of smoke winds upward - herald of the evening meal; it is too thin and too humble to assert itself against the rain, and creeps sidewise, fluttering helplessly, like a woman's hair in the wind. Behind the moving veil of silver-grey water-ribbons the hillocks seem to sway; the air is full of the scent of water and wild acacia trees and damp tent-wool.
Gradually the splashing and dripping ceases and the clouds begin to break up under the rays of the evening sun. I walk toward one of the low granite boulders. In it is a depression as large as one of the platters on which a whole roasted sheep and rice are offered to guests on festive occasions; now it is filled with rain water. When I put my arms into it, it reaches up to the elbows, lukewarm, strangely caressing; and as I move my arms about in it, it feels as if my skin were drinking. From one of the tents emerges a woman with a big copper vessel on her head, evidently intending to fill it from one of the many pools in the rocks; she holds her arms stretched outward, sideward and upward, gripping with her hands the hems of her wide red garment like wings, and sways softly as she approaches. She sways like water when it slowly flows down from the rocks, I think to myself; she is beautiful like water From the distance I can hear the bellowing of the returning camels: and here they are, appearing in a spread-out group from behind the rocks, solemnly shuffling with loose legs. The herdsmen drive them on with sharp, short calls into the middle of the valley, then they call 'Ghrr... ghrr...,' to make the animals kneel down; and the many brown backs swing down in wavy movements toward the ground. In the growing dusk the men hobble the camels' forelegs and then disperse to the tents, each to his own.
And here is the night with its soft darkness and coolness. Before most of the tents glow fires; the clattering of cooking-pots and pans and the laughter of the women mingle with the occasional calls of the men and the fragments of their talk which the wind carries to me. The sheep and goats that have come after the camels continue to bleat for a while, and sometimes a dog barks - just as he barks in all the nights in all the tent-camps of Arabia.
Zayd is nowhere to be seen; he is probably still asleep in one of the tents. I walk slowly down to the resting camels. With their great bodies they have burrowed for themselves hollows in the sand and now lie comfortably, some of them chewing their cud and others stretching their necks long on the ground. One or another lifts its head and grunts as I pass by and playfully grasp its fat hump. A very young foal is tightly pressed against its mother's side; frightened by my hands, it jumps up, while the mother turns her head toward me and softly bellows with wide-open mouth. I take hold of the foal's neck with my arms and hold it fast and press my face into the warm wool of its back: and all at once it stands quite still and seems to have lost all fear. The warmth of the young animal body penetrates my face and my chest; under the palm of my hand I sense the blood pounding in its neck-vein; it merges with the beat of my own blood and awakens in me an overwhelming sense of closeness to life itself, and a longing to lose myself in it entirely.
-2-
WE RIDE, AND EVERY STEP of the dromedaries brings us nearer to the end of our road. We ride for days through the sunlit steppe; we sleep at night under the stars and awake in the coolness of dawn; and slowly I approach the end of my road.
There has never been any other road for me; although I did not know it for many years, Mecca has always been my goal. It called to me, long before my mind became aware of it, with a powerful voice: 'My Kingdom is in this world as well as in the world to come: My Kingdom waits for man's body as well as for his soul and extends over all that he thinks and feels and does - his commerce as well as his prayer, his bedchamber as well as his politics; My Kingdom knows neither end nor limits.' And when, over a number of years, all this became clear to me, I knew where I belonged: I knew that the brotherhood of Islam had been waiting for me ever since I was born; and I embraced Islam. The desire of my early youth, to belong to a definite orbit of ideas, to be part of a community of brethren, had at last been fulfilled.
Strangely enough - but perhaps not so strange if one considers what Islam stands for my very first experience as a Muslim among Muslims was one of brotherhood...
In the first days of January 1927, I set out again, this time accompanied by Elsa and her little son, for the Middle East; and this time, I sensed, it would be for good.
For days we voyaged through the Mediterranean, through a shimmering circle of sea and sky, sometimes greeted by distant coasts and by the smoke of ships that glided past. Europe had disappeared far behind us and was almost forgotten.
I often went down from the comfort of our cabin deck into the stale steerage with its tiered rows of iron bunks. Since the boat was going to the Far East, the majority of the steerage passengers were Chinese, small craftsmen and traders returning to the Middle Kingdom after years of hard labour in Europe. Besides these, there was a small group of Arabs from Yemen who had come on board at Marseilles. They also were returning home. The noises and smells of Western ports were still about them; they were still living in the afterglow of the days when their brown hands had shovelled coal in the stokeholds of English, American or Dutch steamers; they were still speaking of strange foreign cities: New York, Buenos Aires, Hamburg. Once, caught by a sudden longing for the shining unknown, they had let themselves be hired in the port of Aden as stokers and coal trimmers; they had gone out of their familiar world and thought that they were growing beyond themselves in the embrace of the world's incomprehensible strangeness: but soon the boat would reach Aden and those times would recede into the past. They would exchange the Western hat for a turban or a kufiyya, retain the yesterday only as a memory and, each man for himself, return to their village homes in Yemen. Would they return the same men as they had set out - or as changed men? Had the West caught their souls - or only brushed their senses?
The problem of these men deepened in my mind into a problem of wider import.
Never before, I reflected, have the worlds of Islam and the West come so close to one another as today. This closeness is a struggle, visible and invisible. Under the impact of Western cultural influences, the souls of many Muslim men and women are slowly shrivelling. They are letting themselves be led away from their erstwhile belief that an improvement of living standards should be but a means to improving man's spiritual perceptions; they are falling into the same idolatry of 'progress' into which the Western world fell after it reduced religion to a mere melodious tinkling somewhere in the background of happening; and are thereby growing smaller in stature, not greater: for all cultural imitation, opposed as it is to creativeness, is bound to make a people small...
Not that the Muslims could not learn much from the West, especially in the fields of science and technology. But, then, acquisition of scientific notions and methods is not really 'imitation': and certainly not in the case of a people whose faith commands them to search for knowledge wherever it is to be found. Science is neither Western nor Eastern, for all scientific discoveries are only links in an unending chain of intellectual endeavour which embraces mankind as a whole. Every scientist builds on the foundations supplied by his predecessors, be they of his own nation or of another; and this process of building, correcting and improving goes on and on, from man to man, from age to age, from civilization to civilization: so that the scientific achievements of a particular age or civilization can never be said to 'belong' to that age or civilization. At various times one nation, more vigorous than others, is able to contribute more to the general fund of knowledge; but in the long run the process is shared, and legitimately so, by all. There was a time when the civilization of the Muslims was more vigorous than the civilization of Europe. It transmitted to Europe many technological inventions of a revolutionary nature, and more than that: the very principles of that 'scientific method' on which modern science and civilization are built. Nevertheless, Jabir ibn Hayyan's fundamental discoveries in chemistry did not make chemistry an 'Arabian' science; nor can algebra and trigonometry be described as 'Muslim' sciences, although the one was evolved by Al-Khwarizmi and the other by Al-Battani, both of whom were Muslims: just as one cannot speak of an 'English' Theory of Gravity, although the man who formulated it was an Englishman. All such achievements are the common property of the human race. If, therefore, the Muslims adopt, as adopt they must, modern methods in science and technology, they will do not more than follow the evolutionary instinct which causes men to avail themselves of other men's experiences. But if they adopt - as there is no need for them to do - Western forms of life, Western manners and customs and social concepts, they will not gain thereby: for what the West can give them in this respect will not be superior to what their own culture has given them and to what their own faith points the way.
If the Muslims keep their heads cool and accept progress as a means and not as an end in itself, they may not only retain their own inner freedom but also, perhaps, pass on to Western man the lost secret of life's sweetness...
AMONG THE YEMENIS on the boat was a thin, short man with an eagle's nose and so intense a face that it seemed to be on fire; but his gestures were quiet and measured. When he learned that I was a newcomer to Islam, he showed a special affection for me; for hours we would sit together on deck while he spoke to me of his mountain village in Yemen. His name was Muhammad Salih.
One evening I visited him below deck. One of his friends lay ill with fever on his iron bunk, and I was told that the ship's doctor would not bother to come down to the steerage. As he appeared to be suffering from malaria, I gave him some quinine. While I was thus busy with him, the other Yemenis gathered in a corner around little Muhammad Salih and, with sideglances at me, took whispered counsel. In the end one of them advanced -a tall man with an olive-brown face and hot black eyes - and offered me a bundle of crumpled franc notes:
'We have collected this among ourselves. Unfortunately it is not much; grant us the favour and accept it.'
I stepped back, startled, and explained that it was not for money that I had given medicine to their friend.
'No, no, we know it; but do nevertheless accept this money. It is not a payment but a gift - a gift from thy brethren. We are happy about thee, and therefore we give thee money. Thou art a Muslim and our brother. Thou art even better than we others: for we have been born as Muslims, our fathers were Muslims and our grandfathers; but thou hast recognized Islam with thine own heart... Accept the money, brother, for the sake of the Prophet of God.'
But I, still bound by my European conventions, defended myself. 'I could not possibly accept a gift in return for a service to a sick friend Besides, I have money enough; you surely need it more than I. However, if you insist on giving it away, give it to the poor at Port Said.'
'No,' repeated the Yemeni, 'thou accept it from us - and if thou dost not wish to keep it, give it in thine own name to the poor.' And as they pressed me, and, shaken by my refusal, became sad and silent, as if I had refused not their money but their hearts, I suddenly comprehended: where I had come from people were accustomed to build walls between I and You: this, however, was a community without walls... 'Give me the money, brothers. I accept it and I thank you.'
-3-
'TOMORROW, inshä-Allāh, we will be in Mecca. The fire thou art lighting, Zayd, will be the last; our journey is coming to an end.' 'But surely, my uncle, there will be other fires to light, and there will always be another journey ahead of thee and me?'
"That may be so, Zayd, my brother: but somehow I feel those other journeys will not be in this land. I have been wandering in Arabia so long that it has grown into my blood; and I fear if I do not leave now, I never shall... But I have to go away, Zayd: dost thou not remember the saying that water must move and flow if it is to remain clear? I want, while I am still young, to see how our Muslim brethren live in other parts of the world - in India, in China, in Java...'
'But, O my uncle,' replies Zayd with consternation, 'surely thou hast not ceased to love the land of the Arabs?'
'No, Zayd, I love it as much as ever; perhaps even a little too much - so much that it hurts me to think of what the future might bring to it. I am told that the King is planning to open up his country to faranjis, so that he may gain money from them: he will allow them to dig for oil in Al-Hasa, and for gold in the Hijaz - and God alone knows what all this will do to the beduins. This country will never be the same again...'
Out of the hush of the desert night sounds the beat of a galloping camel. A lonely rider rushes with flying saddle-tassels and flowing abāya out of the darkness into the light of our campfire, brings his dromedary to an abrupt standstill and, without waiting for it to kneel, jumps down from the saddle. After a short 'Peace be with you' he starts, without uttering another word, to unsaddle the beast, tosses his saddlebags near the camp-fire and sits down on the ground, still silent, with face averted.
'May God give thee life, O Abu Said,' says Zayd, who evidently knows the stranger. But the stranger remains silent, whereupon Zayd turns to me: 'He is one of Ibn Saud's rajajil, the devil.'
The morose Abu Said is very dark; his thick lips and crinkly hair, worn carefully plaited in two long tresses, betray African ancestry. He is extremely well dressed; the dagger in his belt probably a gift from the King is sheathed in gold; and his mount is an excellent, honey-coloured dromedary of the 'northern' race, slim-limbed, narrow of head, with powerful shoulders and hind-quarters.
'What is the matter with thee, O Abu Said? Why dost thou not speak to thy friends? Art thou possessed by a jinn?'
'It is Nura...' whispers Abu Said - and after a while, when the hot coffee has loosened his tongue, he tells us about Nura, a girl from the Najdi town of Ar-Rass (he mentions her father's name and it happens that I know him well). He had observed her secretly over the garden wall when she was drawing water in the company of other women 'and I felt as if a glowing coal had fallen into my heart. I love her, but her father, that dog,
wouldn't give me his daughter in marriage, the beggar - and said that she was afraid of me! I offered a lot of money as her dower, also a piece of my land; but he always refused and in the end married her off to her cousin, God's curse be upon him and her!'
His strong, dark face is illuminated from one side by the camp-fire, and the shadows which flicker across it are like the shadows of a hell of
torment. He cannot bear to remain sitting for long; driven by his restlessness, he jumps up, busies his hands for a moment with his saddle, returns to the fire and, suddenly, dashes off into the empty night. We can hear him as he runs in wide circles around our camping place and shouts, shouts:
'Nura's fire burns me! Nura's fire burns in my breast!' - and again, with a sob: 'Nura, Nura!'
He approaches the campfire again and runs in circles around it, with his kaftan fluttering like a ghostly night bird in the light and darkness of the flickering fire.
Is he mad? I do not think so. But it may be that out of the dark recesses of his soul rise up some primeval, atavistic emotions - ancestral memories of the African bush, the memories of people who lived in the midst of demons and weird mysteries, still very close to the time when the divine spark of consciousness changed the animal into man; and the spark is not yet strong enough to bind the unchained urges together and to weld them into a higher emotion... For a second it seems to me that I can really see Abu Said's heart before me, a lump of flesh and blood smoking in the fire of passion as if in real fire - and somehow it appears quite natural to me that he should cry so terribly, cry and run in circles like a madman until the hobbled camels raise themselves, frightened, on three legs...
Then he returns to us, and throws himself on the ground. I can discern the repugnance in Zayd's face at the sight of such an unrestrained outburst - for to the aristocratic disposition of a true Arab there is nothing more contemptible than such an unleashing of the emotions. But Zayd's good heart soon gets the better of him. He tugs Abu Said by the sleeve, and while the other lifts his head and stares at him with blank eyes, Zayd gently pulls him closer to himself:
'O Abu Said, how canst thou forget thyself like this? Thou art a warrior, Abu Said ... Thou has killed men and often have men nearly killed thee -and now a woman strikes thee down? There are other women in the world besides Nura... O Abu Said, thou warrior, thou fool...'
And as the African groans softly and covers his face with his hands, Zayd continues:
'Be silent, O Abu Said... Look up: dost thou see that lighted path in the heavens?'
Abu Said looks up in astonishment, and I involuntarily follow Zayd's pointing finger and turn my eyes to the pale, uneven path that runs across the sky from one horizon to the other horizon. You would call it the Milky Way: but the beduins in their desert wisdom know that it is nothing but the track of that heavenly ram which was sent to Abraham when, in obedience to his God and in his heart's despair, he raised the knife to sacrifice his firstborn son. The path of the ram remained visible in the heavens for time eternal, a symbol of mercy and grace, remembrance of the rescue sent to heal the pain of one human heart - and thus a solace to those who were to come after: to those who are lonely or lost in the desert, and to those others who stumble, weeping and desolate, through the wilderness of their own lives.
And Zayd goes on, his hand raised toward the sky, speaking solemnly and at the same time unassumingly, as only an Arab can speak:
'This is the path of the ram which God sent to our Master Abraham when he was about to kill his first-born; thus God showed mercy to His
servant... Dost thou think He will forget thee?'
Under Zayd's soothing words Abu Said's dark face softens in childlike wonderment and becomes visibly quieter; and he looks attentively, like a pupil following his teacher, toward the sky, trying to find in it an answer to his despair.
-4
ABRAHAM AND HIS heavenly ram: such images come easily to one's mind in this country. It is remarkable how vivid the memory of that ancient patriarch is among the Arabs - far more vivid than among the Christians in the West who, after all, base their religious imagery in the first instance on the Old Testament; or even among the Jews, to whom the Old Testament is the beginning and the end of God's word to man. The spiritual presence of Abraham is always felt in Arabia, as in the whole Muslim world, not only in the frequency with which his name (in its Arabic form Ibrahim) is given to Muslim children, but also in the ever-recurring remembrance, both in the Koran and in the Muslims' daily prayers, of the patriarch's role as the first conscious preacher of God's Oneness: which also explains the great importance given by Islam to the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, which since earliest times has been intimately connected with the story of Abraham. He was not as so many Westerners mistakenly assume - brought into the orbit of Arab thought by Muhammad in an attempt, as it were, to 'borrow' elements of religious lore from Judaism: for it is historically established that Abraham's personality was well known to the Arabs long before the birth of Islam. All references to the patriarch in the Koran itself are so worded as to leave no doubt that he had been living in the foreground of the Arabian mind ages before Muhammad's time: his name and the outline of his life are always mentioned without any preliminaries or explanations - as something, that is, with which even the earliest listeners to the Koran must have been thoroughly familiar. Indeed, already in pre-Islamic times Abraham had an outstanding place in the genealogies of the Arabs as the progenitor, through Ishmael (Ismail), Hagar's son, of the 'northern' Arab group which today comprises more than half of the entire Arabian nation, and to which Muhammad's own tribe, the Quraysh, belonged.
Only the beginning of the story of Ishmael and his mother is mentioned in the Old Testament, for its later development does not bear directly on the destinies of the Hebrew nation, to which the Old Testament is mainly devoted; but pre-Islamic Arab tradition has much more to say on the subject.
According to this tradition, Hagar and Ishmael were abandoned by Abraham at the place where Mecca stands today - which, on the face of it, is by no means improbable if one remembers that to a camel-riding nomad a journey of thirty days or more was and is nothing out of the ordinary. At any rate, Arab tradition says that it was to this valley that Abraham brought Hagar and their child - to this gorge between rocky hills, naked and barren under the Arabian sun, swept by flaming desert winds and avoided even by birds of prey. Even today, when the valley of Mecca is filled with houses and streets and people of many tongues and races, the desert solitude cries out from the dead slopes around it, and over the crowds of pilgrims who prostrate themselves before the Kaaba hover the ghosts of those long-past millenniums in which silence, unbroken and devoid of all life, hung over the empty valley.
It was a proper setting for the despair of that Egyptian bondwoman who had borne a son to her master and thus had become the object of so much hatred on the part of her master's wife that she and her son Ishmael had to be cast away. The patriarch must have been grieved indeed when he did this to placate his implacable wife; but one should remember that he, who was so close to God, was convinced that His mercy was without limit. We are told in the Book of Genesis that God had thus comforted him: 'Let it not be grievous in thy sight because of the child and because of thy bondwoman ... Of her son will I make a nation because he is of thy seed.' And so Abraham forsook the weeping woman and the child in the valley, leaving with them a waterskin and a skin filled with dates; and went away northward through Midian to the land of Canaan.
A solitary wild sarha tree stood in the valley. In its shadow sat Hagar with the child on her lap. Around her there was nothing but swimming, waving heat, glaring light on sand and rocky slopes. How good was the shadow of the tree... But the silence, this horrible silence without the breath of any living thing! As the day was slowly passing Hagar thought: If only something living would come here, a bird, an animal, yes - even a beast of
prey: what a joy it would be! But nothing came except the night, comforting like all desert nights, a cooling vault of darkness and stars that softened the bitterness of her despair. Hagar felt new courage. She fed her child some dates and both drank from the waterskin.
The night passed, and another day, and another night. But when the third day came with fiery breath, there was no more water in the skin, and despair outgrew all strength, and hope became like a broken vessel. And when the child cried in vain, with an ever weaker voice, for water, Hagar cried out to the Lord; but He did not show Himself. And Hagar, distraught by the suffering of her dying child, ran to and fro with uplifted hands through the valley, always over the same stretch between two low hills: and it is in remembrance of her despair that the pilgrims who now come to Mecca run seven times between these two hillocks, crying out, as she once cried: 'O Thou Bountiful, Thou Full of Grace! Who shall have mercy on us unless Thou hast mercy!'
And then came the answer: behold, a stream of water gushed forth and began to flow over the sand. Hagar shouted with joy and pressed the child's face into the precious liquid so that he might drink; and she drank with him, calling out imploringly between her gasps, 'Zummi, zummi!' -which is a word without meaning, merely imitating the sound of the water as it welled up from the earth, as if to say, 'Gush forth, gush forth!' Lest it run out and lose itself in the ground, Hagar heaped a little wall of sand around the spring: whereupon it ceased to flow and became a well, which henceforth came to be known as the Well of Zemzem and exists to this day.
The two were now saved from thirst, and the dates lasted them a little longer. After a few days a group of beduins, who with their families and chattels had abandoned their homelands in South Arabia and were seeking new pastures, happened to pass by the mouth of the valley. When they saw flocks of bird circling into the valley to explore it and found a lonely woman with a child sitting by the rim of an abundant well. Peacefully disposed as they were, the tribesmen asked Hagar's permission to settle in her valley. This she granted, with the condition that the well of Zemzem forever remain the property of Ishmael and his descendants.
As for Abraham, tradition says he returned to the valley after some time and found Hagar and their son alive, as he had been promised by God. From then on he visited them often, and saw Ishmael grow to manhood and marry a girl from the South Arabian tribe. Years later the patriarch was commanded in a dream to build next to the Well of Zemzem a temple to his Lord; and thereupon, helped by his son, he built the prototype of the sanctuary which stands in Mecca to this day and is known as the Kaaba. As they were cutting the stones for what was to become the first temple ever raised to the worship of the One God, Abraham turned his face toward heaven and exclaimed, 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk!" - 'For Thee am I ready, O God, for Thee am I ready!": and that is why on their pilgrimage to Mecca - the pilgrimage to the first temple of the One God - Muslims raise the cry, 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk! when they approach the Holy City.
'LABBAYK, ALLAHUMMA, LABBAYK...'
-5-
How many times have I heard this cry during my five pilgrimages to Mecca. I seem to hear it now, as I lie near Zayd and Abu Said by the fire.
I close my eyes and the moon and the stars vanish. I lay my arm over my face, and not even the light of the fire can now penetrate my eyelids; all sounds of the desert go under, I hear nothing but the sound of labbayk in my mind and the humming and throbbing of blood in my ears: it hums and throbs and pounds like the pounding of sea waves against the hull of a ship and like the throbbing of engines: I can hear the engines throb and feel the quiver of the ship's planks under me and smell its smoke and oil and hear the cry 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk' as it sounded from hundreds of throats on the ship which bore me on my first pilgrimage, nearly six years ago, from Egypt to Arabia over the sea that is called the Red, and nobody knows why. For the water was grey as long as we sailed through the Gulf of Suez, enclosed on the right side by the mountains of the African continent and on the left by those of the Sinai Peninsula - both of them naked, rocky ranges without vegetation, moving with the progress of our voyage farther and farther apart into a hazy distance of misty grey which let the land be sensed rather than seen. And when, in the later afternoon, we glided into the open width of the Red Sea, it was blue like the Mediterranean under the strokes of a caressing wind.
There were only pilgrims on board, so many that the ship could hardly contain them. The shipping company, greedy for the profits of the short hajj season, had literally filled it to the brim without caring for the comfort of the passengers. On the decks, in the cabins, in all passageways, on every staircase, in the dining rooms of the first and second class, in the holds which had been emptied for the purpose and equipped with temporary ladders: in every available space and corner human beings were painfully herded together. They were mostly pilgrims from Egypt and North Africa. In great humility, with only the goal of the voyage before their eyes, they bore uncomplainingly all that unnecessary hardship. How they crouched on the deck planks, in tight groups, men, women and children, and with difficulty managed their household chores (for no food was provided by the company); how they always struggled to and fro for water with tin cans and canvas canteens, every movement a torture in this press of humanity; how they assembled five times a day around the water taps of which there were too few for so many people in order to perform their ablutions before prayer; how they suffered in the stifling air of the deep holds, two stories below the deck, where at other times only bales and cases of goods travelled: whoever saw this had to recognize the power of faith which was in these pilgrims. For they did not really seem to feel their suffering, so consumed were they with the thought of Mecca. They spoke only of their hajj, and the emotion with which they looked toward the near future made their faces shine. The women often sang in chorus songs about the Holy City, and again and again came the refrain: 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk!"
At about noon of the second day the ship siren sounded: this was a sign that we had reached the latitude of Rabigh, a small port north of Jidda, where, in accordance with an old tradition, the male pilgrims coming from the north are supposed to put away their everyday clothes and don the ihram, or pilgrim's garment. This consists of two unsewn pieces of white woollen or cotton cloth, of which one is wound around the waist and reaches below the knees, while the other is slung loosely around one shoulder, with the head remaining uncovered. The reason for this attire, which goes back to an injunction of the Prophet, is that during the hajj there should be no feeling of strangeness between the Faithful who flock together from all the corners of the world to visit the House of God, no difference between races and nations, or between rich and poor or high and low, so that all may know that they are brethren, equal before God and man. And very soon there disappeared from our ship all the colourful clothing of the men. You could no longer see the red Tunisian tarbūshes, the sumptuous burnuses of the Moroccans, or the gaudy gallabiyyas of the Egyptian fellāhīn: everywhere around you there was only this humble white cloth, devoid of any adornment, draped over bodies which were now moving with greater dignity, visibly affected by this change to the state of pilgrimage. Because the ihram would expose too much of their bodies, women pilgrims keep to their usual garments; but as on our ship these were only black or white - the black gowns of the Egyptian and the white ones of the North African women - they did not bring any touch of colour into the picture.
At dawn of the third day the ship dropped anchor before the coast of Arabia. Most of us stood at the railing and gazed toward the land that was slowly rising out of the mists of the morning.
On all sides one could see silhouettes of other pilgrim ships, and between them and the land pale-yellow and emerald-green streaks in the water: submarine coral reefs, part of that long, inhospitable chain which lies before the eastern shore of the Red Sea. Beyond them, toward the east, there was something like a hill, low and dusky; but when the sun rose behind it, it suddenly ceased to be a hill and became a town by the sea, climbing from its rim toward the centre with higher and higher houses, a small delicate structure of rose and yellow-grey coral stone: the port-town of Jidda.
By and by you could discern the carved, latticed windows and the wooden screens of balconies, to which the humid air had in the course of years imparted a uniform grey-green colour. A minaret jutted up in the middle, white and straight like an uplifted finger.
Again the cry, 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk!' was raised a joyful cry of self-surrender and enthusiasm that swept from the tense, white-garbed pilgrims on board over the water toward the land of their supreme hopes.
Their hopes, and mine: for to me the sight of the coast of Arabia was the climax of years of search. I looked at Elsa, my wife, who was my companion on that pilgrimage, and read the same feeling in her eyes...
And then we saw a host of white wings darting toward us from the mainland: Arabian coastal boats. With Latin sails they skimmed over the flat sea, softly and soundlessly winding their way through fords between invisible coral reefs - the first emissaries of Arabia, ready to receive us. As they glided closer and closer and, in the end, flocked together with swaying masts at the side of the ship, their sails folded one after another with a rush and a swishing and flapping as if a flight of giant herons had alighted for feeding, and out of the silence of a moment ago there arose a screeching and shouting from their midst: it was the shouting of the boatmen who now jumped from boat to boat and stormed the ship's ladder to get hold of the pilgrims' baggage; and the pilgrims were so filled with excitement at the sight of the Holy Land that they allowed things to happen to them without defending themselves.
The boats were heavy and broad; the clumsiness of their hulls contrasted strangely with the beauty and slimness of their high masts and sails. It must have been in such a boat, or perhaps in a somewhat larger one of the same kind, that the bold seafarer Sindbad set out to run into unasked-for adventures and to land on an island which in truth - oh horror! - was the back of a whale... And in similar ships there sailed, long before Sindbad, the Phoenicians southward through this same Red Sea and on through the Arabian Sea, seeking spices and incense and the treasures of Ophir ...
And now we, puny successors of those heroic voyages, sailed across the coral sea, skirting the undersea reefs in wide curves: pilgrims in white garments, stowed between cases and boxes and trunks and bundles, a dumb host trembling with expectation. I, too, was full of expectation. But how could I foresee, as I sat in the bow of the boat, the hand of my wife in my hand, that the simple
enterprise of a pilgrimage would so deeply, and so completely, change our lives? Again I am compelled to think of Sindbad. When he left the shores of his homeland, he - like myself - had no inkling of what the future would bring. He did not foresee, nor desire, all those strange adventures that were to befall him, but wanted only to trade and to gain money; while I wanted no more than to perform a pilgrimage: but when the things that were to happen to him and to me really happened, neither of us was ever again able to look upon the world with his old eyes.
True, nothing so fantastic ever came my way as the jinns and the enchanted maidens and the giant bird Roc that the sailor from Basra had to contend with: but, none the less, that first pilgrimage of mine was destined to cut deeper into my life than all his voyages together had done to him. For Elsa, death waited ahead; and neither of us had any premonition how near it was. And as to myself, I knew that I had left the West to live among the Muslims; but I did not know that I was leaving my entire past behind. Without any warning, my old world was coming to an end: the world of Western ideas and feelings, endeavours and imageries. A door was silently closing behind me, so silently that I was not aware of it; I thought it would be a journey like all the earlier journeys, when one wandered through foreign lands, always to return to one's past: but the days were to be changed entirely, and with them the direction of all desire.
BY THAT TIME I HAD already seen many countries of the East. I knew Iran and Egypt better than any country of Europe; Kabul had long since ceased to be strange; the bazaars of Damascus and Isfahan were familiar to me. And so I could not but feel, 'How trivial,' when I walked for the first time through a bazaar in Jidda and saw only a loose mixture and formless repetition of what elsewhere in the East one could observe in far greater perfection. The bazaar was covered with planks and sackcloth as protection against the steaming heat; out of holes and cracks thin, tamed sun rays shone through and gilded the twilight. Open kitchens before which Negro boys were roasting small pieces of meat on spits over glowing charcoal; coffee shops with burnished brass utensils and settees made of palm fronds; meaningless shops full of European and Eastern junk. Everywhere sultriness and smell of fish and coral dust. Everywhere crowds of people - innumerable pilgrims in white and the colourful, worldly citizens of Jidda, in whose faces, clothes and manners met all the countries of the Muslim world: perhaps a father from India, while the mother's father - himself probably a mixture of Malay and Arab - may have married a grandmother who on her father's side descended from Uzbegs and on her mother's side possibly from Somalis: living traces of the centuries of pilgrimage and of the Islamic environment which knows no colour bar and no distinction between races. In addition to this indigenous and pilgrim-borne confusion, Jidda was in those days (1927) the only place in the Hijaz in which non-Muslims were allowed to reside. You could occasionally see shop signs in European writing and people in white tropical dress with sun helmets or hats on their heads; over the consulates fluttered foreign flags.
All this belonged, as it were, not yet so much to the mainland as to the sea: to the sounds and smells of the port, to the ships riding at anchor beyond the pale coral streaks, to the fishing boats with white triangular sails to a world not much unlike that of the Mediterranean. The houses, though, were already a little different, open to the breeze with richly moulded facades, carved wooden window frames and covered balconies, thinnest screens of wood that permitted the inmates to look out without hindrance into the open but prevented the passerby from seeing the interior; all this woodwork sat like grey-green lace on the walls of rose coral stone, delicate and extremely harmonious. This was no longer the Mediterranean and not yet quite Arabia; it was the coastal world of the Red Sea, which produces similar architecture on both its sides.
Arabia, however, announced itself already in the steely sky, the naked, rocky hills and sand dunes toward the east, and in that breath of greatness and that bare scarcity which are always so strangely intermingled in an Arabian landscape.
IN THE AFTERNOON OF the next day our caravan started on the road to Mecca, winding its way through crowds of pilgrims, beduins, camels with and without litters, riding-camels, gaily caparisoned donkeys, toward the eastern gate of the town. Off and on motorcars passed us - Saudi Arabia's earliest motorcars - loaded with pilgrims and noisy with their claxon horns. The camels seemed to sense that the new monsters were their enemies, for they shied every time one approached, frantically veering toward house walls and moving their long necks hither and thither, confused and helpless. A new time was threateningly dawning for these tall, patient animals, filling them with fear and apocalyptic forebodings.
After a while we left the white city walls behind and found ourselves all at once in the desert - in a wide plain, greyish-brown, desolate, dotted with thorny bushes and patches of steppe grass, with low, isolated hills growing out of it like islands in a sea, and hedged in to the east by somewhat higher, rocky ranges, bluish-grey, jagged of outline, barren of all life. All over that forbidding plain there plodded caravans, many of them, in long processions - hundreds and thousands of camels - animal behind animal in single file, loaded with litters and pilgrims and baggage, sometimes disappearing behind hills and then reappearing. Gradually all their paths converged onto a single, sandy road, created by the tracks of similar caravans over long centuries.
In the silence of the desert, which was underlined rather than broken by the plopping of the camels' feet, the occasional calls of the beduin drivers and the low-toned singing of a pilgrim here and there, I was suddenly overcome by an eerie sensation - so overwhelming a sensation that one might almost call it a vision: I saw myself on a bridge that spanned an invisible abyss: a bridge so long that the end from which I had come was already
lost in a misty distance, while the other end had hardly begun to unveil itself to the eye. I stood in the middle; and my heart contracted with dread as I saw myself thus halfway between the two ends of the bridge - already too far from the one and not yet close enough to the other - and it seemed to me, for long seconds, that I would always have to remain thus between the two ends, always above the roaring abyss -
when an Egyptian woman on the camel before mine suddenly sounded the ancient pilgrim's cry, 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk!- and my dream broke asunder.
From all sides you could hear people speaking and murmuring in many tongues. Sometimes a few pilgrims called out in chorus, 'Labbayk, Allahumma, labbayk!' - or an Egyptian fellāh woman sang a song in honour of the Prophet, whereupon another uttered a ghatrafa, that joyful cry of Arab women (which in Egypt is called zaghrūta): a shrill, very high-pitched trill which women raise on all festive occasions - like marriage, childbirth, circumcision, religious processions of all kinds and, of course, pilgrimages. In the knightly Arabia of earlier times, when the daughters of chieftains used to ride to war with the men of their tribe in order to spur them on to greater bravery (for it was regarded as extreme dishonour to allow one of these maidens to be killed, or, still worse, to be captured by the enemy), the ghatrafa was often heard on a field of battle.
Most of the pilgrims rode in litters - two on each camel - and the rolling motion of these contraptions gradually made one dizzy and tortured the nerves, so unceasing was the pitching and rocking. One dozed exhausted for a few moments, was awakened by a sudden jolt, slept again, and awoke again. From time to time the camel drivers, who accompanied the caravan on foot, called to their animals. One or another of them occasionally chanted in rhythm with the long-drawn-out step of the camels.
Toward morning we reached Bahra, were the caravan stopped for the day; for the heat permitted travel only during the night.
This village - in reality nothing but a double line of shacks, coffee shops, a few huts of palm fronds and a very small mosque - was the traditional halting-place for caravans halfway between Jidda and Mecca. The landscape was the same as it had been all the way since we left the coast: a desert with isolated hills here and there and higher, blue mountains in the east which separated the coastal lowlands from the plateau of Central Arabia. But now all this desert around us resembled a huge army camp with innumerable tents, camels, litters, bundles, a confusion of many tongues - Arabic, Hindustani, Malay, Persian, Somali, Turkish, Pashtu, Amhara, and God knows how many more. This was a real gathering of nations; but as everyone was wearing the all-leveling ihram, the differences of origin were hardly noticeable and all the many races appeared almost like one.
The pilgrims were tired after the night march, but only very few among them knew how to utilize this time of rest; to most of them travelling must have been a very unusual enterprise, and to many it was the first journey of their lives and such a journey, toward such a goal! They had to be restless; they had to move about; their hands had to search for something to do, even if it was no more than opening and retying their bags and bundles: otherwise one would have become lost to the world, would have entirely lost oneself in unearthly happiness as in a sea...
This seemed to have happened to the family in the tent next to mine, apparently pilgrims from a Bengal village. They hardly exchanged a word, sat cross-legged on the ground and stared fixedly toward the east, in the direction of Mecca, into the desert that was filled with shimmering heat. There was such a faraway peace in their faces that you felt: they were already before the House of God, and almost in His Presence. The men were of a remarkable beauty, lean, with shoulder-long hair and glossy black beards. One of them lay ill on a rug: by his side crouched two young women, like colourful little birds in their voluminous red-and-blue trousers and silver-embroidered tunics, their thick black tresses hanging down their backs; the younger of the two had a thin gold ring in one nostril.
In the afternoon the sick man died. The women did not raise a lament as they so often do in Eastern countries: for this man had died on the pilgrimage, on sacred soil, and was thus blest. The men washed the corpse and wrapped it in the same white cloth which he had worn as his last garment. Thereafter one of them stood before the tent, cupped his hands to his mouth and called out loudly the call to prayer: 'God is the Greatest, God is the Greatest! There is no God but God, and Muhammad is God's Messenger!... Prayer for the dead! May God have mercy upon you all! And from all sides the ihrām-clad men flocked together and fined up in rows behind an imām like soldiers of a great army. When the prayer was over, they dug a grave, an old man read a few passages from the Koran, and then they threw sand over the dead pilgrim, who lay on his side, his faced turned toward Месса.
BEFORE SUNRISE ON THE SECOND morning the sandy plain narrowed, the hills grew closer together; we passed through a gorge and saw in the pale light of dawn the first buildings of Mecca; then we entered the streets of the Holy City with the rising sun.
The houses resembled those in Jidda with their carved oriel windows and enclosed balconies; but the stone of which they were built seemed to be heavier, more massive than the light-coloured coral stone of Jidda. It was still very early in the mornin, but already a thick, brooding heat was growing. Before many of the houses stood benches on which exhausted men were sleeping. Narrower and narrower became the unpaved streets through which our rocking caravan moved toward the centre of the city. As only a few days remained before the festival of the hajj, the crowds in the streets were very large. Innumerable pilgrims in the white ihrām, and others who had temporarily changed again into their everyday clothes -clothes from all countries of the Muslim world; water carriers bent under heavy waterskins or under a yoke weighted by two old petroleum cans used as buckets; donkey drivers and riding-donkeys with tinkling bells and gay trappings; and, to make the confusion complete, camels coming from the opposite direction, loaded with empty litters and bellowing in various tones. There was such a hubbub in the narrow streets that you might have thought the hajj was not a thing that had taken place annually for centuries but a surprise for which the people had not been prepared. In the end our caravan ceased to be a caravan and became a disorderly tangle of camels, litters, baggage, pilgrims, camel drivers and noise.
I had arranged from Jidda to stay in the house of a well-known mutawwif, or pilgrim's guide, by name of Hasan Abid, but there seemed to be little chance of finding him or his house in this chaos. But suddenly someone shouted, 'Hasan Abid! Where are you pilgrims for Hasan Abid?' - and, like a jinn from out of a bottle, a young man appeared before us and, with a deep bow, requested that we follow him; he had been sent by Hasan Abid to lead us to his house.
After an opulent breakfast served by the mutawwif, I went out, led by the same young man who had received us earlier, to the Holy Mosque. We walked through the teeming, buzzing streets, past butcher shops with rows of skinned sheep hanging before them; past vegetable vendors with their goods spread on straw mats on the ground; amidst swarms of flies and the smell of vegetables, dust and perspiration; then through a narrow, covered bazaar in which only clothiers had their shops: a festival of colour. As elsewhere in the bazaars of Western Asia and North Africa, the shops were only niches about one yard above ground level, with the shopkeeper sitting cross-legged, surrounded by his bolts of cloth of all materials and colours, while above him there hung in rows all manner of dress articles for all the nations of the Muslim world.
And, again, there were people of all races and garbs and expressions, some with turbans and others bareheaded; some who walked silently with lowered heads, perhaps with a rosary in their hands, and others who were running on light feet through the crowds; supple, brown bodies of Somalis, shining like copper from between the folds of their toga-like garments; Arabs from the highlands of the interior, lean figures, narrow of face, proud of bearing; heavy-limbed, thickset Uzbegs from Bokhara, who even in this Meccan heat had kept to their quilted kaftāns and knee-high leather boots; sarong-clad Javanese girls with open faces and almond-shaped eyes; Moroccans, slow of stride and dignified in their white burnuses; Meccans in white tunics, their heads covered with ridiculously small white skullcaps; Egyptian fellāhīn with excited faces; white-clad Indians with black eyes peering
from under voluminous, snow-white turbans, and Indian women so impenetrably shrouded in their white burqas that they looked like walking tents; huge Fullata Negroes from Timbuktu or Dahomey in indigo-blue robes and red skullcaps; and petite Chinese ladies, like embroidered butterflies, tripping along on minute, bound feet that resembled the hooves of gazelles. A shouting, thronging commotion in all directions, so that you felt you were in the midst of breaking waves of which you could grasp some details but never an integrated picture. Everything floated amid a buzz of innumerable languages, hot gestures and excitement - until we found ourselves, suddenly, before one of the gates of the Haram, the Holy Mosque.
It was a triple-arched gate with stone steps climbing up to it; on the threshold sat a half-naked Indian beggar, stretching his emaciated hand toward us. And then I saw for the first time the inner square of the sanctuary, which lay below the level of the street - much lower than the threshold -and thus opened itself to the eye like a bowl: a huge quadrangle surrounded on all sides by many-pillared cloisters with semicircular arches, and in its centre a cube about forty feet high, draped in black, with a broad band of gold-embroidered verses from the Koran running around the upper portion of the covering: the Kaaba...
This, then, was the Kaaba, the goal of longing for so many millions of people for so many centuries. To reach this goal, countless pilgrims had made heavy sacrifices throughout the ages; many had died on the way; many had reached it only after great privations; and to all of them this small, square building was the apex of their desires, and to reach it meant fulfilment.
There it stood, almost a perfect cube (as its Arabic name connotes) entirely covered with black brocade, a quiet island in the middle of the vast quadrangle of the mosque: much quieter than any other work of architecture anywhere in the world. It would almost appear that he who first built the Kaaba - for since the time of Abraham the original structure has been rebuilt several times in the same shape - wanted to create a parable of man's humility before God. The builder knew that no beauty of architectural rhythm and no perfection of line, however great, could ever do justice to the idea of God: and so he confined himself to the simplest three-dimensional form imaginable - a cube of stone.
I had seen in various Muslim countries mosques in which the hands of great artists had created inspired works of art. I had seen mosques in North Africa, shimmering prayer-palaces of marble and white alabaster; the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, a powerfully perfect cupola over a delicate understructure, a dream of lightness and heaviness united without contradiction; and the majestic buildings of Istanbul, the Sulaymaniyya, the Yeni-Valide, the Bayazid Mosque; and those of Brussa, in Asia Minor; and the Safavid mosques in Iran - royal harmonies of stone, multicoloured majolica tiles, mosaics, huge stalacite portals over silver-embossed doors, slender minarets with alabaster and turquoise-blue galleries, marble-covered quandrangles with fountains and age-old plantain trees; and the mighty ruins of Tamerlane's mosques in Samarkand, splendid even in their decay.
All these had I seen - but never had I felt so strongly as now, before the Kaaba, that the hand of the builder had come so close to his religious conception. In the utter simplicity of a cube, in the complete renunciation of all beauty of line and form, spoke this thought: 'Whatever beauty man may be able to create with his hands, it will be only conceit to deem it worthy of God; therefore, the simplest that man can conceive is the greatest that he can do to express the glory of God.' A similar feeling may have been responsible for the mathematical simplicity of the Egyptian pyramids -although there man's conceit had at least found a vent in the tremendous dimensions he gave to his buildings. But here, in the Kaaba, even the size spoke of human renunciation and self-surrender; and the proud modesty of this little structure had no compare on earth.
THERE IS ONLY ONE entrance into the Kaaba - a silver-sheathed door on the northeast side, about seven feet above ground level, so that it can only be reached by means of a movable wooden staircase which is placed before the door on a few days of the year. The interior, usually closed (I saw it only on later occasions), is very simple: a marble floor with a few carpets and lamps of bronze and silver hanging from a roof that is supported by heavy wooden beams. Actually, this interior has no special significance of its own, for the sanctity of the Kaaba applies to the whole building, which is the qibla - that is, the direction of prayer - for the entire Islamic world. It is toward this symbol of God's Oneness that hundreds of millions of Muslims the world over turn their faces in prayer five times a day.
Embedded in the eastern corner of the building and left uncovered is a dark-coloured stone surrounded by a broad silver frame. This Black Stone, which has been kissed hollow by many generations of pilgrims, has been the cause of much misunderstanding among non-Muslims, who believe it to be a fetish taken over by Muhammad as a concession to the pagan Meccans. Nothing could be farther from truth. Just as the Kaaba is an object of reverence but not of worship, so too is the Black Stone. It is revered as the only remnant of Abraham's original building; and because the lips of Muhammad touched it on his Farewell Pilgrimage, all pilgrims have done the same ever since. The Prophet was well aware that all the later generations of the Faithful would always follow his example: and when he kissed the stone he knew that on it the lips of future pilgrims would forever meet the memory of his lips in the symbolic embrace he thus offered, beyond time and beyond death, to his entire community. And the pilgrims, when they kiss the Black Stone, feel that they are embracing the Prophet and all the other Muslims who have been here before them and those who will come after them.
No Muslim would deny that the Kaaba had existed long before the Prophet Muhammad; indeed, its significance lies precisely in this fact. The Prophet did not claim to be the founder of a new religion. On the contrary: self-surrender to God - Islām - has been, according to the Koran, 'man's natural inclination' since the dawn of human consciousness; it was this that Abraham and Moses and Jesus and all the other Prophets of God had been teaching - the message of the Koran being but the last of the Divine Revelations. Nor would a Muslim deny that the sanctuary had been full of idols and fetishes before Muhammad broke them, just as Moses had broken the golden calf at Sinai: for, long before the idols were brought into the Kaaba, the True God had been worshipped there, and thus Muhammad did no more than restore Abraham's temple to its original purpose.
AND THERE I STOOD before the temple of Abraham and gazed at the marvel without thinking (for thoughts and reflections came only much later), and out of some hidden, smiling kernel within me there slowly grew an elation like a song.
Smooth marble slabs, with sunlight reflections dancing upon them, covered the ground in a wide circle around the Kaaba, and over these marble slabs walked many people, men and women, round and round the black-draped House of God. Among them were some who wept, some who loudly called to God in prayer, and many who had no words and no tears but could only walk with lowered heads...
It is part of the hajj to walk seven times around the Kaaba: not just to show respect to the central sanctuary of Islam but to recall to oneself the basic demand of Islamic life. The Kaaba is a symbol of God's Oneness; and the pilgrim's bodily movement around it is a symbolic expression of human activity, implying that not only our thoughts and feelings - all that is comprised in the term 'inner life' - but also our outward, active life, our doings and practical endeavours must have God as their centre.
And I, too, moved slowly forward and became part of the circular flow around the Kaaba. Off and on I became conscious of a man or woman near me; isolated pictures appeared fleetingly before my eyes and vanished. There was a huge Negro in a white ihrām, with a wooden rosary slung like a chain around a powerful, black wrist. An old Malay tripped along by my side for a while, his arms dangling, as if in helpless confusion, against his batik sarong. A grey eye under bushy brows - to whom did it belong? - and now lost in the crowd. Among the many people in front of the Black Stone, a young Indian woman: she was obviously ill; in her narrow, delicate face lay a strangely open yearning, visible to the onlooker's eye like the life of
fishes and algae in the depths of a crystal-clear pond. Her hands with their pale, upturned palms were stretched out toward the Kaaba, and her fingers trembled as if in accompaniment to a wordless prayer...
I walked on and on, the minutes passed, all that had been small and bitter in my heart began to leave my heart, I became part of a circular stream oh, was this the meaning of what we were doing: to become aware that one is a part of a movement in an orbit? Was this, perhaps, all confusion's end? And the minutes dissolved, and time itself stood still, and this was the centre of the universe...
NINE DAYS LATER ELSA DIED.
She died suddenly, after less than a week's illness which at first had seemed to be no more than an indisposition due to heat and the unusual diet, but later turned out to be an obscure tropical ailment before which the Syrian doctors at the hospital of Mecca stood helpless. Darkness and utter
despair closed around me. She was buried in the sandy graveyard of Mecca. A stone was placed over her grave. I did not want any inscription on it; thinking of an inscription was like thinking of the future: and I could not conceive of any future now.
Elsa's little son, Ahmad, remained with me for over a year and accompanied me on my first journey into the interior of Arabia a valiant, ten-year-old companion. But after a time I had to say good-bye to him as well, for his mother's family finally persuaded me that he must be sent to school in Europe; then nothing remained of Elsa except her memory and a stone in a Meccan graveyard and a darkness that was not lifted until long afterward, long after I had given myself up to the timeless embrace of Arabia.
-6-
THE NIGHT IS FAR ADVANCED, but we continue to sit around the glimmering campfire. Abu Said has now emerged from the raging tempest of his passion; his eyes are sad and somewhat tired; he speaks to us of Nura as one might speak of a dear person that has died long ago.
'She was not beautiful, you know, but I loved her ...'
The moon above us is full with the fullness of a living being. No wonder the pre-Islamic Arabs thought it to be one of the 'daughters of God' -the long-haired Al-Lat, goddess of fertility, who was said to communicate her mysterious powers of procreation to the earth and thus to beget new life in humans and animals. In her honour, the young men and women of ancient Mecca and Taïf used to celebrate the nights of the full moon in open-air revels and unrestrained love-making and poetic contests. Out of earthenware pitchers and leathern bottles flowed the red wine; and because it was so red and so full of excitement, the poets likened it in their wild dithyrambs to the blood of women. This proud and passionate youth poured its exuberance into the lap of Al-Lat, 'whose loveliness is like the shine of the moon when it is full, and whose loftiness is like the flight of black herons' -the ancient, youthfully mighty goddess who had spread her wings from South Arabia to the north and had reached even distant Hellas in the shape of Leto, the mother of Apollo.
From the diffuse, vague nature worship of Al-Lat and a host of other deities to the sublime concept of the One God of the Koran: it was a long road that the Arabs had to travel. But, after all, man has always loved to travel far on the roads of his spirit, here in Arabia no less than in the rest of the world: he has loved it so much that all his history may indeed be described as the history of a quest for faith.
With the Arabs, this quest has always aimed at the Absolute. Even in their earliest times, when their imagination filled the world around them with a multitude of gods and demons, they were ever conscious of the One who dwelt in majesty over all the deities an invisible, ungraspable Omnipotence far above the humanly conceivable - the Eternal Cause above all effects. The goddess Al-Lat and her divine sisters, Manat and Uzza, were no more than 'God's daughters', mediators between the Unknowable One and the visible world, symbols of the incomprehensible forces that surrounded the childhood of man: but deep in the background of Arabian thought, knowledge of the One was always present, always ready to flare up into conscious faith. How else could it have been? They were a people that had grown up in silence and solitude between a hard sky and a hard earth; hard was their life in the midst of these austere, endless spaces; and so they could not escape the longing after a Power that would encompass all existence with unerring justice and kindness, severity and wisdom: God the Absolute. He dwells in infinity and radiates into infinity - but because you are within His working, He is closer to you than the vein in your neck...
THE CAMPFIRE HAS DIED down. Zayd and Abu Said are asleep, and nearby our three dromedaries lie on the moon-blanched sand and chew their cud with soft, crunching sounds, pausing from time to time. Good animals... Sometimes one of them shifts its position and rubs with the horny surface of its chest against the ground and occasionally blows snortingly, as if sighing. Good animals. They are without a definite expression, quite different from horses, which are always so clearly outlined in their characters; yes, different from all the other animals which man uses - just as the desert steppe to which they belong is different from all other landscapes: without a definite expression, swinging between contradictions, moody, and nevertheless infinitely modest.
I cannot sleep, and so I wander away from the camp and climb one of the hillocks close by. The moon hangs low over the western horizon and lights up the low, rocky hills which rise like phantoms out of the dead plain. From here onward, the coastal lowlands of the Hijaz flow toward the west in a soft incline: a series of valleys torn up by many winding, dry stream beds, barren of all life, without villages, without houses, without trees - rigid in their nakedness under the moonlight. And yet it was from this desolate, lifeless land, from amidst these sandy valleys and naked hills, that the most life-affirming faith of man's history sprang forth...
Warm and still is the night. Half-light and distance make the hills waver and sway. Under the shine of the moon a pale, blue shimmer vibrates, and through this pale blueness glides an opalescent hint, a ghostly remembrance, of all the colours on earth; but the unearthly blueness subdues them all, melting without transition into what should be the horizon, and is like a summons to unfathomable, unknowable things.
Not far from here, hidden from my eyes in the midst of this lifeless wilderness of valleys and hills, lies the plain of Arafat, on which all the pilgrims who come to Mecca assemble on one day of the year as a reminder of that Last Assembly, when man will have to answer to his Creator for all he has done in life. How often have I stood there myself, bareheaded, in the white pilgrim garb, among a multitude of white-garbed, bareheaded pilgrims from three continents, our faces turned toward the Jabal ar-Rahma - the 'Mount of Mercy' - which rises out of the vast plain: standing and waiting through the noon, through the afternoon, reflecting upon that inescapable Day, 'when you will be exposed to view, and no secret of yours will remain concealed'...
And as I stand on the hillcrest and gaze down toward the invisible Plain of Arafat, the moonlit blueness of the landscape before me, so dead a moment ago, suddenly comes to life with the currents of all the human lives that have passed through it and is filled with the eerie voices of the millions of men and women who have walked or ridden between Mecca and Arafat in over thirteen hundred pilgrimages for over thirteen hundred years. Their voices and their steps and the voices and the steps of their animals reawaken and resound anew; I see them walking and riding and assembling - all those myriads of white-garbed pilgrims of thirteen hundred years; I hear the sounds of their passed-away days; the wings of the faith which has drawn them together to this land of rocks and sand and seeming deadness beat again with the warmth of life over the arc of centuries, and the mighty wingbeat draws me into its orbit and draws my own passed-away days into the present, and once again I am riding over the plain-
fishes and algae in the depths of a crystal-clear pond. Her hands with their pale, upturned palms were stretched out toward the Kaaba, and her fingers trembled as if in accompaniment to a wordless prayer...
I walked on and on, the minutes passed, all that had been small and bitter in my heart began to leave my heart, I became part of a circular stream oh, was this the meaning of what we were doing: to become aware that one is a part of a movement in an orbit? Was this, perhaps, all
confusion's end? And the minutes dissolved, and time itself stood still, and this was the centre of the universe...
NINE DAYS LATER ELSA DIED.
She died suddenly, after less than a week's illness which at first had seemed to be no more than an indisposition due to heat and the unusual diet, but later turned out to be an obscure tropical ailment before which the Syrian doctors at the hospital of Mecca stood helpless. Darkness and utter despair closed around me.
She was buried in the sandy graveyard of Mecca. A stone was placed over her grave. I did not want any inscription on it; thinking of an inscription was like thinking of the future: and I could not conceive of any future now.
Elsa's little son, Ahmad, remained with me for over a year and accompanied me on my first journey into the interior of Arabia a valiant, ten-year-old companion. But after a time I had to say good-bye to him as well, for his mother's family finally persuaded me that he must be sent to school in Europe; then nothing remained of Elsa except her memory and a stone in a Meccan graveyard and a darkness that was not lifted until long afterward, long after I had given myself up to the timeless embrace of Arabia.
-6-
THE NIGHT IS FAR ADVANCED, but we continue to sit around the glimmering campfire. Abu Said has now emerged from the raging tempest of his passion; his eyes are sad and somewhat tired; he speaks to us of Nura as one might speak of a dear person that has died long ago.
'She was not beautiful, you know, but I loved her ...'
The moon above us is full with the fullness of a living being. No wonder the pre-Islamic Arabs thought it to be one of the 'daughters of God' -the long-haired Al-Lat, goddess of fertility, who was said to communicate her mysterious powers of procreation to the earth and thus to beget new life in humans and animals. In her honour, the young men and women of ancient Mecca and Taïf used to celebrate the nights of the full moon in open-air revels and unrestrained love-making and poetic contests. Out of earthenware pitchers and leathern bottles flowed the red wine; and because it was so red and so full of excitement, the poets likened it in their wild dithyrambs to the blood of women. This proud and passionate youth poured its exuberance into the lap of Al-Lat, 'whose loveliness is like the shine of the moon when it is full, and whose loftiness is like the flight of black herons' -the ancient, youthfully mighty goddess who had spread her wings from South Arabia to the north and had reached even distant Hellas in the shape of Leto, the mother of Apollo.
From the diffuse, vague nature worship of Al-Lat and a host of other deities to the sublime concept of the One God of the Koran: it was a long road that the Arabs had to travel. But, after all, man has always loved to travel far on the roads of his spirit, here in Arabia no less than in the rest of the world: he has loved it so much that all his history may indeed be described as the history of a quest for faith.
With the Arabs, this quest has always aimed at the Absolute. Even in their earliest times, when their imagination filled the world around them with a multitude of gods and demons, they were ever conscious of the One who dwelt in majesty over all the deities an invisible, ungraspable Omnipotence far above the humanly conceivable the Eternal Cause above all effects. The goddess Al-Lat and her divine sisters, Manat and Uzza, were no more than 'God's daughters', mediators between the Unknowable One and the visible world, symbols of the incomprehensible forces that surrounded the childhood of man: but deep in the background of Arabian thought, knowledge of the One was always present, always ready to flare up into conscious faith. How else could it have been? They were a people that had grown up in silence and solitude between a hard sky and a hard earth; hard was their life in the midst of these austere, endless spaces; and so they could not escape the longing after a Power that would encompass all existence with unerring justice and kindness, severity and wisdom: God the Absolute. He dwells in infinity and radiates into infinity - but because you are within His working, He is closer to you than the vein in your neck.
THE CAMPFIRE HAS DIED down. Zayd and Abu Said are asleep, and nearby our three dromedaries lie on the moon-blanched sand and chew their cud with soft, crunching sounds, pausing from time to time. Good animals Sometimes one of them shifts its position and rubs with the horny surface of its chest against the ground and occasionally blows snortingly, as if sighing. Good animals. They are without a definite expression, quite different from horses, which are always so clearly outlined in their characters; yes, different from all the other animals which man uses - just as the desert steppe to which they belong is different from all other landscapes: without a definite expression, swinging between contradictions, moody, and nevertheless infinitely modest.
I cannot sleep, and so I wander away from the camp and climb one of the hillocks close by. The moon hangs low over the western horizon and lights up the low, rocky hills which rise like phantoms out of the dead plain. From here onward, the coastal lowlands of the Hijaz flow toward the west in a soft incline: a series of valleys torn up by many winding, dry stream beds, barren of all life, without villages, without houses, without trees - rigid in their nakedness under the moonlight. And yet it was from this desolate, lifeless land, from amidst these sandy valleys and naked hills, that the most life-affirming faith of man's history sprang forth...
Warm and still is the night. Half-light and distance make the hills waver and sway. Under the shine of the moon a pale, blue shimmer vibrates, and through this pale blueness glides an opalescent hint, a ghostly remembrance, of all the colours on earth; but the unearthly blueness subdues them all, melting without transition into what should be the horizon, and is like a summons to unfathomable, unknowable things.
Not far from here, hidden from my eyes in the midst of this lifeless wilderness of valleys and hills, lies the plain of Arafat, on which all the pilgrims who come to Mecca assemble on one day of the year as a reminder of that Last Assembly, when man will have to answer to his Creator for all he has done in life. How often have I stood there myself, bareheaded, in the white pilgrim garb, among a multitude of white-garbed, bareheaded pilgrims from three continents, our faces turned toward the Jabal ar-Rahma - the 'Mount of Mercy' - which rises out of the vast plain: standing and waiting through the noon, through the afternoon, reflecting upon that inescapable Day, 'when you will be exposed to view, and no secret of yours will remain concealed'...
And as I stand on the hillcrest and gaze down toward the invisible Plain of Arafat, the moonlit blueness of the landscape before me, so dead a moment ago, suddenly comes to life with the currents of all the human lives that have passed through it and is filled with the eerie voices of the millions of men and women who have walked or ridden between Mecca and Arafat in over thirteen hundred pilgrimages for over thirteen hundred years. Their voices and their steps and the voices and the steps of their animals reawaken and resound anew; I see them walking and riding and assembling - all those myriads of white-garbed pilgrims of thirteen hundred years; I hear the sounds of their passed-away days; the wings of the faith which has drawn them together to this land of rocks and sand and seeming deadness beat again with the warmth of life over the arc of centuries, and the mighty wingbeat draws me into its orbit and draws my own passed-away days into the present, and once again I am riding over the plain-
- riding in a thundering gallop over the plain, amidst thousands and thousands of ihrām-clad beduins, returning from Arafat to Mecca - a tiny particle of that roaring, earth-shaking, irresistible wave of countless galloping dromedaries and men, with the tribal banners on their high poles beating like drums in the wind and their tribal war cries tearing through the air: 'Ya Rawga, ya Rawga!' by which the Atayba tribesmen evoke their ancestor's name, answered by the 'Ya Awf, ya Awf!' of the Harb and echoed by the almost defiant, 'Shammar, ya Shammar!' from the farthest right wing of the column.
We ride on, rushing, flying over the plain, and to me it seems that we are flying with the wind, abandoned to a happiness that knows neither end nor limit... and the wind shouts a wild paean of joy into my ears: 'Never again, never again, never again will you be a stranger!'
My brethren on the right and my brethren on the left, all of them unknown to me but none a stranger: in the tumultuous joy of our chase, we are one body in pursuit of one goal. Wide is the world before us, and in our hearts glimmers a spark of the flame that burned in the hearts of the Prophet's Companions. They know, my brethren on the right and my brethren on the left, that they have fallen short of what was expected of them, and that in the flight of centuries their hearts have grown small: and yet, the promise of fulfilment has not been taken from them ... from us...
Someone in the surging host abandons his tribal cry for a cry of faith: 'We are the brethren of him who gives himself up to God!' - and another joins in: 'Allahu akbar' God is the Greatest! - God alone is Great!'
And all the tribal detachments take up this one cry. They are no longer Najdi beduins revelling in their tribal pride: they are men who know that the secrets of God are but waiting for them... for us... Amidst the din of the thousands of rushing camels' feet and the flapping of a hundred banners, their cry grows up into a roar of triumph: 'Allahu akbar!'
It flows in mighty waves over the heads of the thousands of galloping men, over the wide plain, to all the ends of the earth: 'Allahu akbar!' These men have grown beyond their own little lives, and now their faith sweeps them forward, in oneness, toward some uncharted horizons... Longing need no longer remain small and hidden; it has found its awakening, a blinding sunrise of fulfilment. In this fulfilment, man strides along in all his God-given spendour; his stride is joy, and his knowledge is freedom, and his world a sphere without bounds...
The smell of the dromedaries' bodies, their panting and snorting, the thundering of their innumerable feet; the shouting of the men, the clanking of the rifles slung on saddle-pegs, the dust and the sweat and the wildly excited faces around me; and a sudden, glad stillness within me.
I turn around in my saddle and see behind me the waving, weaving mass of thousands of white-clad riders and, beyond them, the bridge over which I have come: its end is just behind me while its beginning is already lost in the mists of distance.
