--paraphrasing Gabriel Hadd*d quoting Habib 'Ali last night
The Road Home.
Basit Kareem Iqbal
Grappling with the identities of the unconscious. The fitrah, the innate primordial nature inherent and internal to all humanity, but then too the collective memories that make up the histories which run in our bloodlines, mixing and merging and sifting, specific and individualized, relating to the many sources of physical and transcendental makeup. The fitrah can be mutilated, our foci wrenched from the Creator to the created, but never totally obliterated—the lasting caveat, the avenue for eternal hope. Just so, what we call our human heritage can too be muted, but even the last gaspings of a drowning man bring him air—this heritage may become a sluggish current indefinable and unrenderable, but will remain through the days of one's life, surfacing awkwardly even if never acknowledged or honoured.
There are different perspectives on "heritage", genetic and gastronomical, intellectual and iridescent, but as human beings the most comprehensive take would be that of what defines us in the first place—the spirit. Each and every one of us is heir to enormous traditions we have only a surface understanding of, if that—and this applies most closely to Muslims, because we can still realistically speak of a living spiritual tradition that transforms all aspects of life. Such traditions are not static but organic, integrating all forms that abide by their fixed internal principles. From this perspective, living in and of Western society could be a tremendous opportunity to examine Western tradition, but on the whole we as individual Muslims have failed to even hold to our own in its own right, we have forgotten. This is not specific to Muslims but is common to people the world over.
--
I was not thinking of these things when I walked off the plane into the intense Syrian heat six months ago. I was off to a grand adventure, "I'm here to learn Arabic", and when people would ask why, I would throw out some stumbling words about "tradition" and "Qur'an" and "understanding", but I did not know what I was trying to say. I had friends who had gone to study in Cairo, and Damascus and Tarim were both buzzwords, but I did not know what there was to study, let alone evaluate the benefits of studying in this or that place. I knew there was a tradition but the word was not much beyond three syllables long. A Muslim from the West who somehow ended up in a city that has witnessed thousands of years of history and myth. This is when heritage will no longer self-efface—it becomes an ocean that will roar in anger and might.
An afternoon sun catching dust-motes and throwing shadows. Bright sky behind a tangled mass of concrete and cobblestones spreading down from a red mountain to fill the horizon with the flickering lights of cigarette exhaust and green minaret, the city in transition we call Damascus—it is not the city or the land itself that speaks; society rushes only to satiate itself with what it can import from the great globalizer. It might be the isolated unconscious of history, adjusting worldliness to millennia, but I think it far simpler: basic individual communication with living proofs that catalyze and call out a consciousness of heritage, a forgotten orthodoxy.
Frankincense and myrrh, Paul journeyed to these gates, and Syrian youths in perfectly coiffed hair, the image of five television stations, experimenting with polyphonic ring tones outside an old church. An older man who lives in my apartment building tells me he is descended from Salahuddin al-Ayyubi, a statue of whom whirls on a battlehorse outside the Old City, and the commonplace bureaucracy puts Kafka to shame. The scholars of older traditions, stiletto heels, the laughter of children, the workings of factory machinery. Advertisements playing off inferiority complexes, lies to the world, soldiers with guns shooting blank ammunition, fruit juices and bean paste, buildings hewn out of raw grey dust, the ubiquitous spine of society, the satellite receiver, inching up toward the sky, constructing little myths. Generosity and abrasive self-interest, corn-fields in the middle of a city.
Constantly utililitarian and justifiably so, I have been asked what it is I have taken from "these months away". It would take too long to explain a greater 'consciousness of heritage'. I generally say "oh, some little Arabic and months of chilling", the same way I would reply about the weather. All's quiet on the world front—lead me to my next gratifate.
...dukhis and dukhettes: i could do a real travelogue? It wouldn't be long, because I've wasted so much time here there's less to say than you'd think, but hey. Hah. And then I'll wonder who I'm plagiarizing. But it could be "if stones could speak", images from Damascus through the ages put into words with pictures and thoughts and other. I will distribute it quietly, a clandestine communiqué, to those close to me, and then slowly the revolution will come.
you say you want a revolution / well, you know / we all want to change the world. --the Beatles.
Speaking of revolution, go read [James's last post], and then go [here].
--
Moving in a few days, the end of an era.
