Requiem (18 page)

There was
nothing for me to do here. I thought of going back to England. Then I
remembered the scrap of paper, and I took myself off to Baghdad.

It was 1976,
just a couple of years before the Islamic revolution in neighbouring Iran, and
three years before Saddam Hussein became Iraqi president. I made a terrible
journey across Iraq by bus, and arrived in Baghdad feeling depressed and ill.
When I stepped off the bus into a cloud of flies I felt like going home immediately.

But
I didn't. I went directly to the address I'd been given in England. I was told
the man I wanted to see had gone away. I would find him in a small village near
the oil town of
Kirkuk
. After two days of weeping and
cursing my stupidity I got on a bus and went back across the desert. I had no
intention of getting off the bus until it was back in Palestine. Imagine how I
felt when the bus broke down in a village fifteen miles from
Kirkuk
.

I asked
around for information about this man. No one knew him. Then a passing
goat-herd pointed to a house. I went there. It was quite a wealthy residence.
An oily servant told me I should wait on the porch, and there I met another
young man, an Iraqi called
Mehemet
.

'Are you
waiting for
Abd
Al-Qadir Al-
Karim
?'
I asked the young man.

'The Tongue of the Unseen?'

'Yes, yes.
Whatever you say.' I was at the end of my patience.

'Yes, I am.'

'And is he a Master? One of the Near
Ones?'

'If he is, it's not for us to say.'

'To hell with that. Is he or isn't he?'

The young man shrugged.

Well,
I'd had enough. I trudged back through the sleepy village to the bus. Only to
find that it was gone.

. I returned to the
house. The servant was busy packing two heavy bags with blankets and supplies.
He gave one bag to
Mehemet
and one to me and told us
to follow him out into the desert, where we would meet
Abd
Al-Qadir Al-
Karim
. He marched us for seven miles.
Mehemet
had turned very quiet and sullen. As for me, I was
cursing this man's foreskin for the games he seemed to be playing.

His servant would answer no
question whatsoever. Finally, worn down by my persistence, the servant (who
always marched three steps ahead) turned and said, 'If he is your teacher, he
will make you benefit from his luminescence, whether you know it at the time or
not. He may discomfit you. That will be intended and necessary. He is modest
and allows you to find out what you have to find out slowly. When you meet him,
he will act upon you whether you know it or not.'

Riddles.
That was all we could get out of the obdurate servant. I abused him for his
dullness. I called him all the names I could think of, and, believe me, I know
a few.

Before
nightfall we reached a cave in the desert. No one was there. We were instructed
to spread our blankets and prepare to spend the night. Perhaps you already
suspect, but for
Mehemet
and me it was almost three
days before we realized the grubby servant was, of course,
Abd
Al-Qadir Al-
Karim
.

Mehemet
and I spent three
years with him, much of the time, but not all, in that very place. There was
water nearby, and for food
Mehemet
or I would walk
back to the village to collect provisions. Our needs were minimal.

And we learned things.
Wondrous things. We meditated, and we prayed. Through discipline the mind can
be purified of the sins and weaknesses of the soul, leading onwards and upwards
to the divine. I learned the art of poetry. Our teacher taught us that Allah
placed the moon in the sky to inspire love poetry.
Mehemet
learned the arts of forging sound and rhyme to manipulate the emotions of men.
I mastered the skills of hypnotism. We learned how to raise the
djinn
and how to control them. We also
learned that angels are powers hidden in the faculties of man and how we should
awaken them.

Then after three years,
in the middle of these teachings, our teacher disappeared quite suddenly. We
awoke one morning, with the sun breaking over the lilac mountains and the moon
still in the morning sky, and
Abd
Al-Qadir Al-
Karim
was gone. We waited for two weeks for him to return,
but he never came. Finally
Mehemet
and I went back to
the house in the village to look for him.

When we
reached the house, we found a family living there. They denied all knowledge of
Abd
Al-Qadir Al-
Karim
. They
claimed their own family had lived in that house for three generations. They
looked at our rags and told us we'd spent too long in the desert.

We
were stunned. Without our teacher we were directionless. What's more, we were
reduced to begging for food; before now all our modest needs had been met by
him. We hung around for a month or two, waiting for him to return. We were
thoroughly miserable. We drifted back towards Baghdad, eking out a living by performing
conjuring tricks and reciting poetry along the way.

But
the political mood had changed. There was revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein,
the new president of Iraq, was afraid that his own country might go the same
way, so he deliberately provoked the Iran-Iraq conflict. There was little
tolerance for two vagabonds from the desert. I knew if we didn't get out soon,
we would be drafted into the war.

'Our
Master,'
Mehemet
said to me one day, 'he wasn't a
man. He was a spirit, wasn't he? Was he a
djinn
?
An angel? Or a demon?'

I grabbed
him roughly by the collar. 'Don't ever talk that way again!' I snarled in his
face. 'Don't ever!'

We begged a
ride in a truck to Syria, where there were plenty of dispossessed Palestinians.
We scratched a living. One day I found
Mehemet
weeping. After all this time he'd become like a little brother to me, so much
did I love him. He wept for the days when we lived with our teacher, when
everything was as clear as the course of the sun and the moon over the desert,
and when scholarship was our all.

'We've lost our way,' he said. 'We are
lost.'

'No,'
I said to him. 'Our teacher is still with us. The Near Ones haven't deserted
us. This is a test. Do you remember how frequently the Master would discomfit
us, and the meaning of his actions was never clear until later? So with this,
little
Mehemet
. And until today we have been failing
the test, living like dogs, forgetting everything we learned. We must go back
to our old ways.'

'But we can't go back to Iraq!' he cried.

'Not to Iraq. To Palestine.'

By
God's will, I successfully smuggled
Mehemet
into my
homeland.
Mehemet
was amazed at what he saw here in
Jerusalem, and across the West Bank we had the support and comfort of my family
and friends. Then we found a place between Qumran and Jericho which suited our
needs: a small cave with a spring nearby, so that we could live as before.

The
living was frugal. My family brought us things. Other people were kind. We set
ourselves to a life of meditation and prayer under the sun and stars. How far
away this was from my dissolute years at Leicester University, Tom! The
students of the Islamic Society would not have believed it.

After a
while we began to get a reputation as holy men, and one day a peasant woman
brought us her son, who was a cretin, and asked us to pray for him. What could
we do? We prayed for him. We asked Allah for compassion. I tried to place some
suggestions in the boy's mind. What do you know? The woman brought him back
every week for three months. She said he was much improved. I don't say it was
true or not true, only that she believed it. Occasionally others would come,
and sometimes we helped them. If they were possessed or demonic, we did our
best for them. We said to the people, we can only knock on Allah's door, and he
must decide if he opens it. They accepted this, and, whatever the result, they
always left gifts of food.

But this new
contact with people and the new admiration of women - it started to make things
difficult for us. A beautiful young mother came to us. Her child had dreadful
asthma. She had nothing to offer us but herself, she said, and she laid the
baby on the floor and, unbidden, went into the cave and undressed. Shall I
lie, when I have sworn to Allah? First I went in, and then
Mehemet
.
Afterwards we did what we could for the child. She never came back.
Mehemet
and I were ashamed.

You must
understand, there is no
monkery
in Islam. There is no
order for celibacy. I could see, after that experience, that
Mehemet's
mind, like mine, was turning towards thoughts of
a legitimate marriage. To live without a woman is a curse greater than the
trials of living with a woman, forgive me.

There
was one nubile daughter of a goat-herd, living across the valley. She would
come with her family to bring her brother, a boy with a withered hand. She was
not yet fifteen years old and utterly radiant. In my eyes, the Evening Star. I
put it to the father outright. If we'd been rich, he would have given us his wife
too; but, as it was, he was appalled and bundled his family away. They never
came again.

Then
I made the greatest mistake of my life, Tom. I summoned the
djinn
,
so that I might have this girl.

I never told
Mehemet
what I was about to do. I sent him on a
journey to my cousin's house, knowing that he would be gone for at least three
days. Then I set about the invocation.

It was a fine,
clear morning when I awoke. The moon was still in the sky. The sun had spilled
itself across the ochre rocks.

For
two hours I performed the ritual purification. Then I spread out my red prayer
mat, faced the direction of Mecca and prayed two
rak'as
,
before smearing my face with red ochre. At this point I began to repeat the
mighty names of God. For this
djinn
it
must be the
jalali
,
the terrible names
of Allah, as opposed to the
jamali
or
amiable names. When I had finished, I began to pronounce the name of the
djinn
,
which I may not even now repeat to
you. The name must be repeated 137,613 times. Normally this is done over the
course of forty days, but I did not have the time, so I needed to accelerate
the ritual, omitting some special incantations and rituals of purification, for
which I was later to pay dearly.

At noon,
with the sun glaring directly on to my bare head, I paused. I had been at it
for seven hours. I drank some water and ate some seeds according to a strictly
controlled diet. Then I began again, repeating the name.

I broke off
only to drink some water at sundown and to perform the grave exercise. In this
it is necessary to imagine that you are dead, that you have been washed and
wrapped in a winding-sheet and laid in a tomb and that all the mourners have
departed. Then I repeated the name of the
djinn
until the early hours of the morning, when sleep overtook me.

In my
dreams the
djinn
came to me as a
shadow. When I awoke it was to the sound of soft dust falling across the desert
floor. The moon was almost full, hatching rich shadows from behind every rock.
The soft ticking, as of dust falling, was of the desert coming alive. But
there was no dust: I swept my hand across my sleeping bag, and it was clean.
Yet still the white dust came down like snow, being transmuted to invisibility
the moment it touched the desert floor.

In
the morning I repeated the purifications and began again to invoke the name of
the
djinn
.
I could feel its closeness.

At
noon the heat of the sun made me afraid, and I invoked the particular titles of
Allah from among his ninety-nine names. First, Al-
Hefiz
,
the Guardian, to ward off fear; then Al-
Muhyi
, the
Quickener
, to ward off all spirits and demons other than
that which I was busy summoning; then Al-
Qadri
, Lord
of Power, to take away my anxieties.

I
etched in the sand the binary, tertiary and quaternary mystical squares and
wrote the numerical values of the appropriate names of Allah, linking them with
the twenty-eight letters of the Arabic alphabet and the twelve
zodiacals
. Around this I drew the square of Eve and resumed
the incantation.

At
sundown I wrote the name of the
djinn
on
a withered leaf, scorched the leaf and dissolved it in water before drinking
it. After this I fell into a swoon.

Again
I was awoken in the night. This time I was roused by the sound of the desert
singing. Have you ever heard the desert sing? It turns your skin inside out. It
sings with one sweet, unbroken note, a note made by all the rocks and plants
and the desert floor in unison. It sings to the moon (which had now reached its
fullness). This sound will drive men mad, unless they are protected by the
controlling rituals.