Starry Temptation
Fawwaz Traboulsi
“His Veil is Light”
The Holy Quran
This tale speaks of the stars. It ought to be told on a starry midsummer night, under the scintillating skies of Lebanon’s mountains. This tale speaks of three characters too, born out of books, at times apart, yet unexpectedly brought closer together. Connections developed and dialogues emerged, swiftly building ties and bridging bonds, between a colonialist striving to conquer and occupy the stars and a devout worshiper amorously set out to wed them. A little prince is also caught amidst them both; his presence ostensibly irrelevant and mismatched. Or is it?
On occupying the stars
“The world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonised. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
Those words are Cecil Rhodes’, one of europe’s leading colonialists and the man who saw an entire country -Rhodesia- named after him; a country that managed only to recover its African appellation – Zimbabwe – after eagerly seizing independence.
Cecil Rhodes stands apart from other colonial pioneers. Unlike them, Rhodes seeks neither to disguise nor hide colonial goals. He is on the contrary, candidly vocal and loud in proclaiming them. Similarly, Rhodes is never to be found failing under the heavy weight of “The White Man’s Burden”, neither flaunting the illusion of carrying out the “civilizing mission” he would also want colonizing countries to adopt towards peoples across the globe. Truth be told, Rhodes is not looking to civilize anyone. In his views, Colonialism is a comprehensively selfish process essentially meant to reap and render benefits to Great Britain. As a matter of fact, Rhodes did not only strive to provide the United Kingdom with new markets to liquidate merchandises and goods produced in the kingdom’s factories, its workshops, farms and mines, but he also regarded colonialism as savior from the country’s own internal crisis. Rhodes was thus foreseeing the imminent danger of bloodstained civil wars, by their very nature, invariably inherent to capitalism itself and whereby poor fight rich and workers capitalists. In facing such danger, that would put at risk Britain’s 40 million inhabitants, Cecil Rhodes called upon the politicians to invade and occupy more territories across the globe and to exploit even more people. In doing so, Rhodes sought to incite the transferring of riches and wealth to Britain to reduce class disparities or the exporting of the demographic abundance of Britain’s workers and poor to the colonies.
While colonialism is peaking and at its utmost state of expansion, with industrially developed countries controlling most corners of our planet, Cecil Rhodes professes capitalism’s gluttony and its limitless desire to expand indefinitely. After having colonised almost every recess of planet Earth, Rhodes’ ambitions turn celestial as he now aims to invade and colonise corners of the observable universe. Such is the geographical greed of colonialism and colonialism in essence is mostly geography. In a text on Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Edward Said writes: “Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control.”
Starry Temptation
“We also have a couple of words to put into.. the stars” says one of the poets to protest the exaggeration of colonial geopolitics. Who has actually not dreamed, even once, to travel to the stars and to own a “home in the sky”, to quote Abu Tammam? Poet Muhammad Al Maghut hasn’t and he doesn’t even want to; not in the stars and not anywhere else in the entire universe for that matter. He all the more declares that joy is not his profession yet solemnly promises: “I will never hurt a star” (Joy is not my profession).
Stars belong to the realm of beauty, not that of colonialism; even if theirs is farfetched, beneath the moon’s incommensurable beauty. “All girls are stars and you are their moon” goes the popular Iraqi folk song, reminiscent of that contrast. Jamil Buthayna on the other hand sings: “Moon is beauty, Women are planets/And the moon and the planets stand worlds apart”. Who copied the other? Did the popular folk song inspire Jamil or was it the other way around?
Stars belong to the realm of love. Stars are messengers of love. Who hasn’t wished to scatter thousands of stars on the path of their beloved, as Nizar Qabbani did to tell his beloved he loved her an everlasting love?
Stars belong to the realm of lovers. A star is the lover’s namesake. It is his shirt, the clothes on his back. A star is the lover’s identity, as in the painful frailty of popular Iraqi folk poetry:
“Morning Star, oh my love/I fall on your cover
And on semblance of shivers/we embrace each other.”
Stars belong to the realm of giving. Stars are gifts. “The star guided me to the gate of the brightest light” writes Abdel Wahab Al Bayati in one of his poems, copying Pablo Neruda. While Neruda’s poem imagery is densely suggestive, evoking the story of the Star of Bethlehem leading the Three Kings to Christ’s cradle, Al Bayati’s copied version, on the other hand, is rather flat.
Stars belong to the realm of the night’s secrets and when, as in Gibran’s poem sung by Fairuz, the “night stands still”, they are its secrets’ keepers all at once. There is no secret though in this quote of Paul Eluard, France’s great poet, who was even nicknamed “The Wet Nurse of the Stars”.
Stars belong to the realm of hope and promises. Under siege and under fire, Mahmoud Darwish poetically asserts: “Beirut is our star” and Beirut might very well be our only star, even become our last. Stars are wavering here too and from promise to demise, the popular threat resonates: I will show you the “stars in broad daylight!” In the creative namesake film, director Oussama Mohammad actually does just that.
In the “country of the stars”, Stars also belong to the realm of books even when “the star” there is the name of a football club. On the night and the beloved, Fairuz sings: “I turned the night’s stars into books/and made you the star of those books” and on this recurrent theme of elusive country, Said Akl’s poem imagery similarly reiterates: “I live in a rock of mine hung on a star/flown by the books that told me this is Lebanon.” Greatness is undoubtedly immanent to the stars too and the proverb goes: “every tall man is a star in the sky, every small one a clutter on earth.”
Stars belong to the realm of sheer ambition. The arabic poet recites: “if you risk the honor of your desire/aim for nothing less than the stars” and while one might exert all that is in his or her power to aim for nothing less, it is ultimately the star’s decision. The final say will thus be that of the star and in one of his quatrain, Chahine Maalouf illustrates that exact notion:
“Oh Poplar tree standing so tall/Oh Poplar tree be wary
Even if you reach the stars/You will still be vulnerable
My beloved leaned on you/resting peacefully in your shelter
You uncovered intentionally/bereaving him of shades.”
Stars’ relation to ambition is even more so epitomized in the dream of Joseph, son of Jacob, in which he sees his mother as the moon, his father as the sun and his brothers as the stars all bowing down to him. “Behold, I have dreamed yet a dream: and, behold, the sun and the moon and eleven stars bowed down to me” (Genesis 37:9) says Joseph to his father who advises him not to share his dream with his brothers so they don’t go on plotting against him. Joseph’s father turns out to be right: consumed with jealousy, his brothers come to despise him, throwing him into a well. The plot eventually turns on them and they do bow down to him; his dream’s come true.
What did not come true however was yet another dream; that of the Lebanese sergeant, looking to prosecute Marcel Khalife for when he composed music for Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “I am Yusuf Oh Father”, on grounds that he had committed the horrendous sin of writing music for a Quranic verse.
Despite all of that, no dream, no vision is stranger, more unusual than that of French utopian socialist Charles Fourier. Fourier indeed envisioned that human beings would, in the future, grow novel tail-like organs they would use to communicate with extraterrestrial inhabitants, while the stars copulate.
At the end and after all, while the star may end up having the final say and while Joseph’s parents may come to resemble celestial objects, nothing from this earth nor beyond could possibly transcend that which believers invoke and chant to in Fairuz’ heartrending voice. “Oh Mary the Maiden, you outshone sun and moon/and every star in the sky has abdicated,” she sings.
It all begins and ends with stars and our world, as we know it, will come to its definite downfall when the stars fade out.
The Little Prince: the heart knows best
The Little Prince lives on Asteroid B-612 that is not much larger than a house. There are three volcanoes on the Little Prince’s planet. Two of them are active, the third is dormant and all three of their chimneys require constant sweeping. A rose also grows on the Little Prince’s planet and she fears winds. The Little Prince is looking for a friend. He also seems to want a sheep but he is afraid this sheep would come to eat his rose. He would have to find him some pasture and to do that he would have to come down to planet earth and so he does.
On his way to planet earth, the seventh planet, the Little Prince visits six other asteroids and meets a handful of interesting characters; the king with no subjects is one of them. The king believes he can control the stars because he is commanding them to do what they are already doing. The conceited man is another. He wants nothing more than become the most admirable man and cannot stand to listen to anything other than compliments and praise. The conceited man thus lives alone on his planet, he couldn’t possibly be there with anyone else. The Little Prince further encounters a drunkard that drinks to forget the shame he feels out of being a drunkard and a lamplighter who has gone jobless because his planet is incessantly lit. On another planet, the Little Prince gets to know a geographer who is not much of an explorer; he doesn’t even know the surroundings of his asteroid. There is finally a businessman that the Little Prince meets. He owns 500 hundred million stars that he deposited in the bank in return for chequebooks. When the Little Prince visited his planet, the businessman was so preoccupied counting his stars that he didn’t even have time to relight the cigarette hanging on his lips.
“ – What good does it do to you to own the stars? asks the Little Prince
– It does me the good of making me rich..
– And what good does it do to you to be rich?
– It does me the good of being able to buy more stars.”
When the Little Prince read Rhodes’ text on invading the stars, he secretly thought Cecil Rhodes reminded him of the drunkard who drinks to forget his shame of being a drunkard.
Truth be told, the Little Prince didn’t like any of the images and comparisons Men made of the stars. He found all of them colourless and bland. The Little Prince is loyal to his Rose, on his planet. At night, he yearns for the sky and because of his love for a flower that lives on a star, he sees all stars abloom with flowers. Men’s imagery of the stars are silent. The stars are loud warns the Little Prince and he loves to listen to them. The stars for the Little Prince, are like five hundred million little bells ringing and five hundred million springs of fresh water sprinkling and more than anything else, the stars will fill the sky with laughter.
Such is the gift the Little Prince brings to his friend on earth, stars that can laugh and he says: “In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing.” The Little Prince continues: “You will always be my friend (..) and your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, ‘Yes, the stars always make me laugh!” And thus the Little Prince disappears from the mortal, transient life we live.
He leaves us with his secret: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
The stars’ lover
When the esteemed sufi sheikh finished reading Antoine de St Exupery’s “The Little Prince”, he composedly closed the book down and thought: how odd is this story and this Little Prince, it is as if he were one of our own. Seeing with the heart, the essence left invisible for the eye, revealing itself only to inner contemplation is what we have been aspiring to ever since the Adored came into our world. How would this sufi sheikh, Ibn Arabi, relate to all of that? He wouldn’t have been pushed through this hadn’t he deliberately made his own way in to begin with. His peculiar story with the stars remains one of the strangest.
“When he came into Bejaia on the mentioned date, he said: ‘One night I saw that I espoused all the stars in the sky and there was not one star that I did not make love to. I then shared my dream with a man who later recited it, a dream interpreter with an insight, and I told him: do not recall me; and when he recounted my dream, my vision, he lauded and glorified it and said: ‘that is the bottomless ocean, for God almighty has sent he who had this dream knowledge of the supreme sciences and the sciences of secrets and the uniqueness of the planets more than anyone of his time has ever received’. The man then kept quiet for an hour and said: ‘if he who had this dream is in this city then it is that young andalusian man who has just gotten here.’
The young andalusian man who had this dream is none other than our preeminent Sheikh Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi.
Oh Poets where art thou? You have drawn your images and you have imagined everything there ever was to imagine about the stars and yet you missed on that. You missed depicting this solemn sufi sheikh, ceremonial in his graceless infringe, swimming across the skies, wedding their infinite stars, savouring their nectar, one after another.
The unordinary scene lends itself to all sorts of interpretations yet one should beware of the temptation to interpret and explain the turn of phrase Nikah “espousing” or “making love” in its most textual, most literal meaning. One should beware, here too, of getting lost in psychoanalysis decoy and of succumbing to Dr Freud’s teachings by interpreting the act of flying in itself as a dream expression of erection. Sufis stand out from the rest of Humanity in almost everything, even in their appropriation of lexical fields and verbal disciplines. For our Sheikh Ibn Arabi, the sky, the stars and the act of “making love” take on entirely original meanings and don connotations utterly different from those given by the British colonialist and from those that might spontaneously first come to mind.
The first distinction lies in the significance attributed to the sky. Ibn Arabi’s sky is in reality wondrous layers of skies miraculously weaved and overlaid. In quest of simplicity, one might acknowledge the superposed existence of higher skies, lower skies and the world, with the seventh sky laying at the crossing where the higher skies rejoin the lower ones. In lay language and at the term of a torture session in one of the convivial prisons of our great Arab Nation one might be found saying: “i screamed at the top of my lungs and my screams got to the seventh sky.” Regardless of how far out of reach that sky is and regardless of its beauty, it would never compare nor go beyond that of the sufi seventh sky:
“It is the sky from which God Almighty created the skies and it holds two faces and it is adorned with incandescent lanterns, reflections of the faces of angels whereas the earth’s sky is adorned with stars, reflections of the hearts of humans. One of the faces of the germinal sky is adorned with lanterns, reflections of the faces of angels and the other is adorned with the ornaments of the planets, reflections of godly attributes.”
The distinction thus lies not only between the skies but also between the blazing bodies, the makers of light. Lanterns and stars thereby revolve around the course of the heart without which, none of what should be seen is seen, as the Little Prince has taught us. And while the planets remain the reflection of godly attributes, one wonders how the Muse inspired Mahmoud Darwish to virilize the planets and make them salty in his libertine, almost blasphemous definition of femininity: “Femininity: Lips when they call on the salty planet”.
The mere distinction between Ibn Arabi’s skies and Cecil Rhodes’ skies is far from being sufficient. An essential difference lies in the action undertaken by both: the action of invading the stars and that of espousing them.
Colonialism has long been compared to rape. I have never appreciated nor even liked the comparison at all, referenced and rooted in bewildering and identifying primogeniture with purity and honor. Above all, such comparison suggests that rape is truly unrecoverable, irremediable and it will always remind me of Naji Al Ali’s brilliant caricature in which he depicts Palestine as a timid virgin, lowering her gaze with a bourgeois Arab governor standing next to her. They are both facing a character meant to represent an Israeli; the bourgeois governor addressing him and saying: you raped her and you ought to marry her.
Naji’s satire not only ridicules the political paradox at stake but also profoundly criticizes the notion of shame and the covering of shame.
There used to be two traditional means to deal with rape. For one, the girl would be married to her rapist or for two, the now-tainted honor would be avenged by killing the man who committed the “odious act.” The latter was widely common during tribal times, when tribal values prevailed. Nowadays, such values have changed, globalized and blighted with capitalism. Punishment for rape is no longer about covering shame by marrying the woman to her rapist nor is it washing shame away with the rapist blood. Punishment for rape has now sadly become washing shame away with the blood of the victim herself; in the same way that in present Iraq, revivals of Saddam Hussein’s tribalism harmoniously interlace with revivals of American tribalism. Have you not heard of these women imprisoned in Abu Ghraib Prison imploring their families to kill them because women admitted to this Saddami-American camp of shame are doomed and ill-fated? They will be inevitably raped and they will be inevitably sentenced to death by virtue of that old-new tribal law.
Is there anyone left in Iraq that sings “Morning Star, oh my love/I fall on your cover?” Is there anyone left in Iraq that even remembers “Morning Star, oh my love/I fall on your cover?” Stars are howling in Iraq. Stars are dying in Iraq. Their covers are shrouds on the remains of befallen loved ones, perishing by the dozens every day…..
Rape is an act of sexual intercourse. Ibn Arabi’s wedding, his lovemaking, however, is far from from being reduced to mere sexual intercourse. Nikah for Ibn Arabi is inherent to the concept of “Tawhid”, or Oneness. The concept of Trinity has a considerable role in Islamic Sufism and an influence on Ibn Arabi’s thought in particular. Ibn Arabi is in fact one of the first scholars to negate the concept of Monism or Monotheism. Ibn Arabi declares: “the first of numbers is two” then further asserts: “two are nothing if it weren’t for a third coupling them and tying them closer to one another. This third is the one joining them together…” (Letters of Ibn Arabi, p.23-25). In Ibn Arabi’s work, that is how the concept of Trinity came to be associated with notions of creation and production. Whenever two things are set to produce and create, coupling thus become indispensable and it is that impulse of dual assembly that Ibn Arabi refers to as Nikah, or “lovemaking”.
In a sufi-esque manner, one can almost infer, and with sound conviction, that Ibn Arabi’s Trinity is none other than a precursor of Hegel then Marx’s controversial concept. Finally, it seems futile here to resort to philosophy. Paul Eluard, France’s greatest poet, has delectably expressed the Marxist Trinity Formula, in these verses from his poem on bodily sufism:
“I am the spectator and the actor and the author
I am the woman and her husband and their child
And I am the first love and the last love
And I am the furtive stand and the infinite one
And once more the woman and her bed and her dress
And her shared embrace and the man’s sweat
And his pointy pleasure and the female swell
Simple and double, my flesh is never in exile
For where body begins, I take conscience and form
And for even when body defeats
I lie in its hearth, I marry its torment
And its infamy honors my heart and life”
I see light through this wedding! A woman and a man and a Third marrying them… It is Light! The lovers are now splendidly translucent, the lovers are now light, just light.
Light on Light…