The Road from Damascus (46 page)

Imam Ali said:
There is enough light for one who wants to see.

In another long dusk they washed with dust, prayed, nibbled sandwiches, held hands.

Stars became distinct in stages, as suggestions first, then as fixed ideas. Bright Venus, once called Ishtar. And the Pole star. The Plough. And Orion and Taurus, the constellations of Sami’s childhood, oscillating in a stretch of time which has no economic meaning. Mustafa said he’d be up there, among the stars, but didn’t specify which. Which constellation? Orion-Gilgamesh? Gilgamesh who’d rejected Ishtar’s advances, Gilgamesh the king who didn’t need gods. Or Taurus, the Bull of Heaven who ravaged the earth with drought? Bull in a china shop, Nur said.

Sami gazed on them. Fire and rock, the distance of time. Constellations to our eyes, telling the stories of culture. A little bit of science tells you how arbitrary the patterns are. Of course his father wasn’t up there. His father was far too small, like any of us. Sami felt fear and trembling. Felt the emptiness of a burning heart.

Truth and beauty are in the details. The details on the mountain were bacteria, heather, a fox, some starlings, tribes of rabbits. The rumour of a golden eagle, and a cloud of late midges descending to gobble on the human couple. Everything gobbling everything else, relentlessly teaching a very simple lesson: of the power of change. Nature’s plans don’t include us.

Or perhaps they do. Sami had developed a trembling, contingent faith, not necessarily expansive enough to house an eternal heaven, certainly not for Sami as he is. For what is he, now? Not much any more. Not Mustafa’s son, nor Marwan’s son-in-law. Not the child of corpse dust. Not an academic. Not a member of the eternal Arab nation.

So what, then? He’s Nur’s son. Muntaha’s husband. These are facts. But to define himself as other people’s attributes – it isn’t much. Even his name was given to him by other people. In the dead past. So what else?

He’s a bit more of a man now. Meaning, a moment of consciousness. Awe and dread.

For now, that’s all he can manage. Perhaps it’s enough.

All praise is due to the Maker Who transfers books from non-existence to existence.

Thanks to my wife for putting up with a writer in the house. Apologies to Ibrahim and Ayaat for all the times I snarled when they opened the door. Thanks to Bashaar for answering questions and to Hadya for telling me her dream. Thanks to my friends Adrian Barnes, Giles Coren, John Liechty and Tariq Yusuf for patient reading and suggestions. Thanks to Simon Prosser, Juliette Mitchell, and especially my agent, Camilla Hornby, for their expert advice. Thanks to Francesca Main for helping with practicalities.

The Qur’anic ‘We shall show them Our signs…’ in
chapter 6
was translated by the author. Otherwise, all Qur’an quotations come from Muhammad Asad’s
The Message of the Qur’an
, which is in my opinion by far the best translation in English, and the only one I would recommend to English speakers. My thanks to The Book Foundation for permission to quote.

Thanks to Hadba, Zeinab and Omar Qabbani for permission to quote the poetry of their father, the great Nizar Qabbani.

The line ‘wordlessly sensed by the mind’ comes from the Nizar Qabbani poem ‘I Declare: There Is No Woman Like You’, translated by Lena Jayyusi and Naomi Shihab Nye, from
On Entenngthe Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani
, published by Interlink Books.

Khalid Abdul Muhammad sampled by Public Enemy is quoted in
chapter 21
.

The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is quoted in
chapter 2
.

Thanks to Linton Kwesi Johnson for permission to quote from his poem ‘Time Come’, from
Selected Poems
, published by Penguin.