'I accept, sir,' I answered with a sigh and a laugh.
The following week I started my new job. It was a boring job and a far cry from the journalistic 'career' I had been dreaming of. I had nothing to do but transmit by telephone; but I was a good telephonist and the pay was good, too.
This went on for about a month. At the end of the month an unforeseen opportunity offered itself to me.
In that year of 1921 Soviet Russia was stricken by a famine of unprecedented dimensions. Millions of people were starving and hundreds of thousands dying. The entire European press was buzzing with gruesome descriptions of the situation; several foreign relief operations were being planned, among them one by Herbert Hoover, who had done so much for Central Europe after the Great War. A large-scale action within Russia was headed by Maxim -Gorky; his dramatic appeals for aid were stirring the entire world; and it was rumored that his wife would shortly visit the capitals of Central and Western Europe in an attempt to mobilize public opinion for more effective help.
Being only a telephonist, I did not participate directly in the coverage of this sensational episode until a chance remark from one of my chance acquaintances (I had many of them in the strangest places) suddenly drew me into its midst. The acquaintance was the night doorman at the Hotel Esplanade, one of Berlin's swankiest, and the remark had been: 'This Madame Gorky is a very pleasant lady; one would never guess that she is a Bolshie...'
'Madame Gorky? Where the hell did you see her?'
My informant lowered his voice to a whisper: 'She is staying at our hotel. Came yesterday, but is registered under an assumed name. Only the manager knows who she really is. She doesn't want to be pestered by reporters.'
'Do you think we could keep our jobs for long if we didn't?'
What a story it would make to get an exclusive interview with Madame Gorky -the more so as not a word of her presence in Berlin had so far penetrated to the press.
'Could you,' I asked my friend, 'somehow make it possible for me to see her?'
'Well, I don't know. She is obviously dead-set on keeping herself to herself... But I could do one thing: if you sit in the lobby in the evening. I might be able to point her out to you.'
That was a deal. I rushed back to my office at the United Telegraph; almost everyone had gone home by that time, but fortunately the news editor was still at his desk. I buttonholed him.
'Will you give me a press card if I promise to bring back a sensational story?'
'What kind of story?' he enquired suspiciously.
'You give me the press card and I'll give you the story. If I don't, you can always have the card back.'
Finally the old news-hound agreed, and I emerged from the office the proud possessor of a card which designated me as a representative of the United Telegraph.
The next few hours were spent in the lobby of the Esplanade. At nine o'clock my friend arrived on duty. From the doorway he winked at me, disappeared behind the reception desk and reappeared a few minutes later with the information that Madame Gorky was out.
'If you sit here long enough, you're sure to see her when she returns.'
At about eleven o'clock I caught my friend's signal. He was pointing surreptitiously to a lady who had just entered the revolving door: a small, delicate woman in her middle forties, dressed in an extremely well-cut black gown, with a long black silk cape trailing on the ground behind her. She was so genuinely aristocratic in her bearing that it was indeed difficult to imagine her as the wife of the 'working-man's poet,' and still more difficult as a citizen of the Soviet Union. Blocking her way, I bowed and proceeded to address her in my most engaging tones: 'Madame Gorky...?'
For an instant she appeared startled, but then a soft smile lighted her beautiful, black eyes and she answered in a German that bore only a faint trace of Slav accent: 'I am not Madame Gorky, .. You are mistaken -my name is so-and-so' (giving a Russian-sounding name which I have forgotten).
'No, Madame Gorky,' I persisted, 'I know that I am not mistaken. I also know that you do not want to be bothered by us reporters -but it would mean a great deal, a very great deal to me to be allowed to speak to you for a few minutes. This is my first chance to establish myself. I am sure you would not like to destroy that chance...?
I showed her my press card. 'I got it only today, and I will have to return it unless I produce the story of my interview with Madame Gorky.'
The aristocratic lady continued to smile. 'And if I were to tell you on my word of honor that I am not Madame Gorky, would you believe me then?'
If you were to tell me anything on your word of honor, I would believe it.'
She burst out laughing. 'You seem to be a nice little boy.' (Her graceful head reached hardly to my shoulder.) 'I am not going to tell you any more lies. You win. But we can't spend the rest of the evening here in the lobby. Would you give me the pleasure of having tea with me in my rooms?'
And so I had the pleasure of having tea with Madame Gorky in her rooms. For nearly an hour she vividly described the horrors of the famine; and when I left her after midnight, I had a thick sheaf of notes with me.
The sub-editors on night duty at the United Telegraph opened their eyes wide on seeing me at that unusual hour. But I did not bother to explain, for I had urgent work to do. Writing down my interview as quickly as I could, I booked, without waiting for editorial clearance, urgent press calls to all the newspapers we served.
Next morning the bomb burst. While none of the great Berlin dailies had a single word about Madame Gorky's presence in town, all the provincial papers served by our agency carried on their front pages the United Telegraph Special Representative's exclusive interview with Madame Gorky. The telephonist had made a first-class scoop.
In the afternoon a conference of editors took place in Dr. Dammert's office. I was called in and, after a preliminary lecture in which it was explained to me that no news item of importance ought ever to go out without first being cleared by the news editor, I was informed that I had been promoted to reporter. At last I was a journalist.
SOFT STEPS in the sand: it is Zayd, returning from the well with a filled water skin. He turns to me:
'Wilt thou eat now, O my uncle?' -and without waiting for my reply, which, he knows, cannot be anything but Yes, he heaps the contents of the pot on to a large platter, sets it before me, and lifts one of our brass cans, filled with water, for me to wash my hands:
'Bismillah, and May God grant us life.'
And we fall to, sitting cross-legged opposite each other and eating with the fingers of the right hand.
We eat in silence. Neither of us has ever been a great talker. Besides, I have somehow been thrown into a mood of remembrance, thinking of the times that passed before I came to Arabia, before I even met Zayd; and so I cannot speak aloud, and speak only silently within myself and to myself, savoring the mood of my present through the many moods of my past.
After our meal, as I gaze at the silent Arabian stars, I think how good it would be to have by my side someone to whom I could speak of all that has happened to me in those distant years. But there is nobody with me except Zayd. He is a good and faithful man and was my companion in many a day of loneliness; he is shrewd, delicate in perception and well versed in the ways of man. But as I look sidewise at his face -this clear-cut face framed in long tresses, now bent with serious absorption over the coffeepot, now turning toward the dromedaries which rest on the ground nearby and placidly chew their cud -I know that I need quite another listener: one who not only has had no part in that early past of mine but would also be far away from the sight and smell and sound of the present days and nights: one before whom I could unwrap the pinpoints of my remembrance one by one, so that his eyes might see them and my eyes might see them again, and who would thus help me to catch my own life within the net of my words.
But there is nobody here but Zayd. And Zayd is the present.
WINDS
WE RIDE, RIDE, two men on two dromedaries, and the morning glides past us. 'It is strange, very strange,' Zayd's voice breaks through the silence.
'What is strange, Zayd?'
'Is it not strange, O my uncle, that only a few days ago we were going to Tayma and now our camels' heads point toward Mecca? I am sure thou didst not know it thyself before that night. Thou art wayward like a badawi ... like myself. Was it a jinn, O my uncle, who gave me that sudden decision, four years ago, to go to thee at Mecca -and gave thee now thy decision to go to Mecca? Are we letting ourselves be thus blown around by the winds because we do not know what we want?'
'No, Zayd -thou and I, we allow ourselves to be blown by the winds because we do know what we want: our hearts know it, even if our thoughts are sometimes slow to follow -but in the end they do catch up with our hearts and then we think we have made a decision...'
PERHAPS MY HEART knew it even on that day ten years ago, when I stood on the planks of the ship that was bearing me on my first journey to the Near East, southward through the Black Sea, through the opaqueness of a white, rimless, foggy night, through a foggy morning, toward the Bosporus.
I regarded this journey as something accidental and took it, as it were, in my stride, as a pleasing but nevertheless not too important interlude. At that moment my thoughts were perturbed and distracted by what I took to be a preoccupation with my past.
How should community be shaped so that men could live rightly and in fullness? How should their relationships be arranged so that they might break through the loneliness which surrounded every man, and truly live in communion? What is good -and what evil? What is destiny? Or, to put it differently: what should one do to become really, and not merely in pretensions, identical with one's own life so that one could say, 'I and my destiny are one'? Discussions which never came to an end...
The literary cafes of Vienna and Berlin, with their interminable arguments about 'form,' 'style' and 'expression,' about the meaning of political freedom, about the meeting of man and woman Hunger for understanding, and sometimes for food as well And the nights spent in passions without restraint: but when the morning came one had forgotten the ashes of the dawn and walked again with swinging steps and felt the earth tremble joyfully under one's feet ... The excitement of a new book or a new face; searching, and finding half-replies; and those very rare moments when the world seemed suddenly, for seconds, to stand still, illumined by the flash of an understanding that promised to reveal something that had never been touched before: an answer to all the questions...
In spite of my youth, it had not remained hidden from me that after the catastrophe of the Great War things were no longer right in the broken-up, discontented, emotionally tense and high-pitched European world. Its real deity, I saw, was no longer of a spiritual kind: it was Comfort. No doubt there were still many individuals who felt and thought in religious terms and made the most desperate efforts to reconcile their moral beliefs with the spirit of their civilization, but they were only exceptions. The average European -whether democrat or communist, manual worker or intellectual-seemed to know only one positive faith: the worship of material progress, the belief that there could be no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression went, 'independent of nature'. The temples of that faith were the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dance-halls, hydroelectric works; and its priests were the bankers, engineers, politicians, film stars, statisticians, captains of industry, record airmen, and commissars. Ethical frustration was evident in the all-round lack of agreement about the meaning of Good and Evil and in the submission of all social and economic issues to the rule of 'expediency' -that painted lady of the streets, willing to give herself to anybody, at any time, whenever she is invoked ... The insatiable craving after power and pleasure had, of necessity, led to the break-up of Western society into hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever and wherever their respective interests clashed. And on the cultural side, the outcome was the creation of a human type whose morality appeared to be confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of right and wrong was material success.
I saw how confused and unhappy our life had become; how little there was of real communion between man and man despite all the strident, almost hysterical, insistence on 'community' and 'nation' how far we had strayed from our instincts; and how narrow, how musty our souls had become. I saw all this: but somehow it never seriously occurred to me -as it never seems to have occurred to any of the people around me -that an answer, or at least partial answers, to these perplexities might perhaps be gained from other than Europe's own cultural experiences. Europe was the beginning and the end of all our thinking: and even my discovery of Lao-tse -at the age of seventeen or so -had not altered my outlook in this respect.
From that time onward, for several years, Lao-tse was to me a window through which I could look out into the glass-clear regions of a life that was far away from all narrowness and all self-created fears, free of the childish obsession which was forcing us, from moment to moment, always to secure our existence anew by means of 'material improvement' at any price. Not that material improvement seemed to be wrong or even unnecessary to me: on the contrary, I continued to regard it as good and necessary: but at the same time I was convinced that it could never achieve its end -to increase the sum total of human happiness-unless it were accompanied by our orientation of our spiritual attitude and a new faith in absolute values. But how such a reorientation could be brought about and of what kind the new valuations were to be was not quite clear to me. It would certainly have been idle to expect that men would change their aims and thus the 'direction of their endeavors -as soon as someone started preaching to them, as Lao-tse did, that one should open oneself up to life instead of trying to grab it to himself and thus to do violence to it. Preaching alone, intellectual realization alone could obviously not produce a change in the spiritual attitude of European society; a new faith of the heart was needed, a burning surrender to values which tolerated no Ifs and Buts: but whence to gain such a faith...?
It somehow did not enter my mind that Lao-tse's mighty challenge was aimed not merely at a passing and therefore changeable intellectual attitude, but at some of the most fundamental concepts out of which that attitude springs. Had I known this, I would have been forced to conclude that Europe could not possibly attain to that weightless serenity of soul of which Lao-tse spoke, unless it summoned the courage to question its own spiritual and ethical roots. I was, of course, too young to arrive consciously at such a conclusion. True, his message shook me to my innermost; it revealed to me the vista of a life in which man could become one with his destiny and so with himself: but as I did not clearly see how such a philosophy could transcend mere contemplation and be translated into reality in the context of the European way of life, I gradually began to doubt whether it was realizable at all. I had not yet reached the point where I would even ask myself whether the European way of life was, in its fundamentals, the only possible way. In other words, like all the other people around me, I was entirely wrapped up in Europe's egocentric cultural outlook.
AND THEN ONE DAY, in the spring of 1922, I received a letter from my uncle Dorian. Dorian was my mother's youngest brother. Our relationship had always been rather that of friends than of uncle and nephew. He was a psychiatrist -one of the early pupils of Freud -and at that time headed a mental hospital in Jerusalem. As he was not a Zionist himself and did not particularly 'sympathize with the aims of Zionism -nor, for that matter, was attracted to the Arabs -he felt lonely and isolated in a world which had nothing to offer him but work and income. Being unmarried, he thought of his nephew as a likely companion in his solitude. In his letter he referred to those exciting days in Vienna when he had guided me into the new world of psychoanalysis; and he concluded: 'Why don't you come and stay some months with me here? I will pay for your journey coming and going; you will be free to return to Berlin whenever you like. And while you are here, you will be living in a delightful old Arab stone house which is cool in summer (and damned cold in winter). We shall spend our time well together. I have plenty of books here, and when you get tired of observing the quaint scenery around you, you can read as much as you want ...'
I made up my mind with the promptness that has always characterized my major decisions. Next morning I informed Dr. Dammert at the United Telegraph that 'important business considerations' forced me to go to the Near East, and that I would therefore have to quit the agency within a week...
If anyone had told me at that time-that my first acquaintance with the world of Islam would go far beyond a holiday experience and indeed become a turning point in my life, I would have laughed off the idea as utterly preposterous. Not that I was impervious to the allure of countries associated in my mind -as in the minds of most Europeans -with the romantic atmosphere of the Arabian Nights: I did anticipate color, exotic customs, picturesque encounters; but it never occurred to me to anticipate adventures in the realm of the spirit as well, and the new journey did not seem to hold out any special promise of a personal nature. All the ideas and impressions that had previously come my way I had instinctively related to the Western world-view, hoping to attain to a broader reach of feeling and perception within the only cultural environment known to me. And, if you come to think of it, how could I have felt differently? I was only a very, very young European, brought up in the belief that Islam and all it stood for was no more than a romantic by-path of man's history, not even quite 'respectable' from the spiritual and ethical points of view, and therefore not to be mentioned in the same breath, still less to be compared, with the only two faiths which the West considers fit to be taken seriously: Christianity and Judaism.
It was with this hazy, European bias against things Islamic (though not, of course, against the romanticized outward appearances of Muslim life) that I set out in the summer of 1922on my journey. If, in fairness to myself, I cannot say that I was self-absorbed in an individual sense, I was none the less, without knowing it, deeply enmeshed in that self-absorbed, culturally egocentric mentality so characteristic of the West at all times.
AND NOW I STOOD on the planks of a ship on my way to the East. A leisurely journey had brought me to Constanza and thence into this foggy morning.
Daylight and color had come up with the sun. I heard the voice of Father Felix continue:
'You see, the deepest symbol of longing -all people's longing -is the symbol of Paradise; you find it in all religions, always in different imageries, but the meaning is always the same -namely the desire to be free from destiny. The people of Paradise had no destiny; they acquired it only after they succumbed to the temptation of the flesh and thus fell into what we call Original Sin: the stumbling of the spirit over the hindering urges of the body, which are indeed only the animal remnants within man's nature. The essential, the human, the humanly-divine part of man is his soul alone. The soul strives toward light, which -is spirit: but because of the Original Sin its way is hampered by obstacles arising from the material, non-divine composition of the body and its urges. What the Christian teaching aims at is, therefore, man's freeing himself from the non-essential, ephemeral, carnal aspects of his life and returning to his spiritual heritage.'
'It may be so, Father Felix. But I feel-and this is the feeling of many people of my generation -1 feel that there is something wrong in making a distinction between the "essential" and the "non-essential" in the structure of man, and in separating spirit and flesh ... in short, I cannot agree with your denying all righteousness to physical urges, to the flesh, to earthbound destiny. My desire goes elsewhere: I dream of a form of life -though I must confess I do not see it clearly as yet -in which the entire man, spirit and flesh, would strive after a deeper and deeper fulfilment of his Self -in which the spirit and tile senses would not be enemies to one another, and in which man could achieve unity within himself and with the meaning of his destiny, so that on the summit of his days he could say, "I am my destiny."
'That was the Hellenic dream,' replied Father Felix, 'and where did it lead? First to the Orphic and Dionysian mysteries, then to Plato and Plotinus, and so, again, to the inevitable realization that spirit and flesh are opposed to one another ... To make the spirit free from the domination of the flesh: this is the meaning of Christian salvation, the meaning of our belief in the Lord's self-sacrifice on the Cross...' Here he interrupted himself and turned to me with a twinkle: 'Oh, I am not always a missionary pardon me if I speak to you of my faith, which is not yours'
'But I have none,' I assured him. 'Yes,' said Father Felix, 'I know; the lack of faith, or rather the inability to believe, is the central illness of our time. You, like so many others, are living in an illusion which is thousands of years old: the illusion that intellect alone can give a direction to man's striving. But the intellect cannot reach spiritual knowledge by itself because it is too much absorbed in the achievement of material goals; it is faith, and faith alone, that can release us from such an absorption.'
'Faith...' I asked. 'You again bring in this word. There is one thing I can't understand: you say it is impossible to attain through intellect alone to knowledge and to a righteous life; faith is needed, you say. I agree with you entirely. But how does one achieve faith if one has none? Is there a way to it -I mean, a way open to our will?'
'My dear friend -will alone is not enough. The way is only opened by God's grace. But it is always opened to him who prays from the innermost of his heart for enlightenment.'
'To pray! But when one is able to do this, Father Felix, one already has faith. You choose to lead me around in a circle -for if a man prays, he must already be convinced of the existence of Him to whom he prays. How did he come to this conviction? Through his intellect? Would not this amount to admitting that faith can be found through the intellect? And apart from that, can "grace" mean anything to somebody who has never had an experience of this kind?
The priest shrugged his shoulders, regretfully, it seemed to me: 'If one has not been able to experience God by himself, one should allow himself to be guided by the experiences of others who have experienced Him...'
A few days later we landed at Alexandria and the same afternoon I went on to Palestine.
The train swept straight as an arrow through the afternoon and the soft, humid Delta landscape. Nile canals, shaded by the sails of many barges, crossed our path. Small towns, dust-grey clusters of houses and lighter minarets, came and went. Villages consisting of box-shaped mud huts swept past. Harvested cotton fields; sprouting sugar-cane fields; abundantly overgrown palms over a village mosque; water buffaloes, black, heavy-limbed, now going home without guide from the muddy pools in which they had been wallowing during the day. In the distance, men in long garments: they seemed to float, so light and clear was the air under the high, blue sky of glass. On the banks of the canals reeds swayed in the wind; women in black tulle cloaks were scooping water into earthenware jars: wonderful women, slender, long-limbed; in their walk they reminded me of long-stemmed plants that sway tenderly and yet full of strength in the wind Young girls and matrons had the same floating walk.
The dusk grew and flowed like the breath of some great, resting, living being. As the slim men were walking homeward from the fields, their movements appeared lengthened and at the same time lifted out of the slowly disappearing day: each step seemed to have an existence of its own, rounded in itself: between eternity and eternity always that one step. This appearance of lightness and smoothness was perhaps due to the exhilarating evening light of the Nile Delta -perhaps also to my own restlessness at seeing so many new things -but whatever the cause, I suddenly felt in myself all the weight of Europe: the weight of deliberate purpose in all our actions. I thought to myself, 'How difficult it is for us to attain to reality... We always try to grab it: but it does not like to be grabbed. Only where it overwhelms man does it surrender itself to him.'
The step of the Egyptian field laborers, already lost in distance and darkness, continued to swing in my mind like a hymn of all high things.
We reached the Suez Canal, made a turn at a right angle, and glided for a while toward the north along the grey-black bank. It was like a drawn-out melody, this long line of the canal at night. The moonlight turned the waterway into something like a real but dream-broad way, a dark band of shining metal. The satiated earth of the Nile valley had with astonishing rapidity made room for chains of sand dunes which enclosed the canal on both sides with a paleness and sharpness rarely to be seen in any other night landscape. In the listening silence stood, here and there, the skeleton of a dredge. Beyond, on the other bank, a camel rider rushed by, rushed by -hardly seen and already swallowed by the night. .. What a great, simple stream: from the Red Sea, through the Bitter Lakes, to the Mediterranean Sea -right across a desert -so that the Indian Ocean might beat on the quays of Europe...
At Kantara the train journey was interrupted for a while and a lazy ferry carried the travelers across the silent water. There was almost an hour before the departure of the Palestinian train. I sat down before the station building. The air was warm and dry. There was the desert: to the right and to the left. Shimmering grey, smudged over, broken through by isolated barking -perhaps it was jackals, perhaps dogs. A beduin, heavily loaded with saddlebags made of bright carpet cloth, came from the ferry and walked toward a group in the distance, which only now I recognized as motionless men and crouching camels, ready saddled for the march. It seemed that the new arrival had been expected. He threw his saddlebags over one of the animals, a few words were exchanged, all the men mounted and, at the same moment, the camels rose, first on their hind legs, then on their forelegs -the riders rocked forward and backward -then they rode away with soft, swishing sounds, and for a while you could follow the light-colored, swaying bodies of the animals and the wide, brown-and-white-striped beduin cloaks.
The train carried me through the Sinai Desert. I was exhausted, sleepless from the cold of the desert night and the rocking of the train over rails resting on loose sand.
After a short while came old Gaza, like a castle of mud, living its forgotten life on a sand hill between cactus walls.
Beyond the station building a caravan was encamped; they were, my companion informed me, beduins from northern Hijaz. They had brown, dusty, wild-warm faces. Our friend was among them. He appeared to be a person of some account, for they stood in a loose semicircle around him and answered his questions. The trader spoke to them and they turned toward us, friendly -and, I thought, somewhat superciliously -considering our urban existence. An atmosphere of freedom surrounded them, and I felt a strong desire to understand their lives. The air was dry, vibrating, and seemed to penetrate the body. It loosened all stiffness, disentangled all thoughts and made them lazy and still.
Perhaps it was a presentiment of coming upheavals in my own life that gripped me on that first day in an Arab country at the sight of the beduins: the presentiment of a world which lacks all defining limits but is, none the less, never formless: which is fully rounded in itself -and nevertheless open on all sides: a world that was soon to become my own. Not that I was then conscious of what the future held in store for me; of course not. It was, rather, as when you enter a strange house for the first time and an indefinable smell in the hallway gives you dimly a hint of things which will happen in this house, and will happen to you: and if they are to be joyful things, you feel a stab of rapture in your heart -and you will remember it much later, when all those happenings have long since taken place, and you will tell yourself: 'All this I have sensed long ago, thus and in no other way, in that first moment in the hall.'
A strong wind blows through the desert, and for a while Zayd thinks we are going to have another sandstorm. But although no sandstorm comes, the wind does not leave us. It follows us in steady gusts, and the gusts flow together into a single, unbroken sough as we descend into a sandy valley. The palm village in its center, consisting of several separate settlements each surrounded by a mud wall -is veiled in a mist of whirling sand dust.
This area is a kind of wind hole: every day from dawn to sunset the wind beats here with strong wings, settling down during the night, only to rise again the next morning with renewed force; and the palm trees, eternally pressed down by its blows cannot grow to their full height but remain stunted, close to the ground, with broad-spread fronds, always in danger from the encroaching dunes. The village would have long ago been buried in the sands had not the inhabitants planted rows of tamarisks around every orchard. These tall trees, more resistant than palms, form with their strong trunks and ever-green, rustling branches a living wall around the plantations, offering them a doubtful security.
We alight before the mud house of the village amir, intending to rest here during the noon heat. The qahwa set aside for the reception of guests is bare and poverty-stricken add displays only one small straw mat-before the stone coffee hearth. But, as usual, Arabian hospitality overcomes all poverty: for hardly have we taken our places on the mat when a friendly fire of twigs crackles on the hearth; the ringing sound of the brass mortar in which freshly-roasted coffee beans' are being pounded gives a livable character to the room; and a mighty platter piled with light brown dates meets the hunger of the travelers.
Our host -a small, lean old man with rheumy, squinting eyes, clad only in a cotton tunic and a head cloth -invites us to partake of this fare:
'May God give you life; this house is your house, eat in the name of God. This is all we have' -and he makes an apologetic gesture with his hand, a single movement in which the whole weight of his fate is expressed with that artless power of evocation so peculiar to people who live close to their instincts -'but the dates are not bad. Eat, O wayfarers, of what we can offer you...'
The dates are really among the best I have ever eaten; and the host is obviously pleased by our hunger which he can satisfy. And he goes on:
'The wind, the wind, it makes our life hard; but that is God's will. The wind destroys our plantations. We must always struggle to keep them from being, covered by sand. It has not always been thus. In earlier times there was not so much wind here, and the village was big and rich. Now it has grown small; many of our young men are going away, for not everyone can bear such a life. The sands are closing in on us day by day. Soon there will be no room left for the palms. This wind ... But we do not complain... As you know, the Prophet -may God bless him -told us: "God says, Revile not destiny, for, behold -I am destiny..."
I must have started, for the old man stops speaking and looks at me attentively; and, as if comprehending why I started, he smiles with almost a woman's smile, strange to see in that tired, worn-out face, and repeats softly, as if to himself:
'. . . behold, I am destiny' -and in the nod with which he accompanies his words lies a proud, silent acceptance of his own place in life; and never have I seen, even in happy people, a Yes to reality expressed with so much quiet and sureness.
I am carried back to a time long past, to that autumn day in Jerusalem ten years ago, when another poor old man spoke to me of surrender to God, which alone can cause one to De at peace with Him and so with one's own destiny.
During that autumn I was living in my uncle Dorian's house just inside the Old City of Jerusalem. It rained almost every day and, not being able to go out much, I often sat at the window which overlooked a large yard behind the house. This yard belonged to an old Arab who was called hajji because he had performed the pilgrimage to Mecca; he rented out donkeys for riding and carrying and thus made the yard a kind of caravanserai.
Every morning, shortly before dawn, loads of vegetables and fruits were brought there on camels from the surrounding villages and sent out on donkeys into the narrow bazaar streets of the town. In daytime the heavy bodies of the camels could be seen resting on the ground; men were always noisily attending to them and to the donkeys, unless they were forced to take refuge in the stables from the streaming rain. They were poor, ragged men, those camel and donkey drivers, but they behaved like great lords. When they sat together at meals on the ground and ate flat loaves of wheat bread with a little bit of cheese or a few olives, I could not but admire the nobility and ease of their bearing and their inner quiet: you could see that they had respect for themselves and the everyday things of their lives. The hajji, hobbling around on a stick -for he suffered from arthritis and had swollen knees -was a kind of chieftain among them; they appeared to obey him without question. Several times a day he assembled them for prayer and, if it was not raining too hard, they prayed in the open: all the men in a single, long row and he as their imam in front of them. They were like soldiers in the precision of their movements -they would bow together in the direction of Mecca, rise again, and then kneel down and touch the ground with their foreheads; they seemed to follow the inaudible words of their leader, who between the prostrations stood barefoot on his prayer carpet, eyes closed, arms folded over his chest, soundlessly moving his lips and obviously lost in deep absorption: you could see that he was praying with his whole soul.
It somehow disturbed me to see so real a prayer combined with almost mechanical body movements, and one day I asked the hajji, who understood a little English:
'Do you really believe that God expects you to show Him your respect by repeated bowing and kneeling and prostration? Might it not be better only to look into oneself and to pray to Him in the stillness of one's heart? Why all these movements of your body?'
As soon as I had uttered these words I felt remorse, for I had not intended to injure the old man's religious feelings. But the hajji did not appear in the least offended. He smiled with his toothless mouth and replied:
'How else then should we worship God? Did He not create both, soul and body, together? And this being so, should man not pray with his body as well as with his soul? Listen, I will tell you why we Muslims pray as we pray. We turn toward the Kaaba, God's holy temple in Mecca, knowing that the faces of all Muslims, wherever they may be, are turned to it in prayer, and that we are like one body, with Him as the center of our thoughts. First we stand upright and recite from the Holy Koran, remembering that it is His Word, given to man that he may be upright and steadfast in life. Then we say, "God is the Greatest," reminding ourselves that no one deserves to be worshipped but Him; and bow down deep because we honor Him above all, and praise His power and glory. Thereafter we prostrate ourselves on our foreheads because we feel that we are but dust and nothingness before Him, and that He is our Creator and Sustainer on high. Then we lift our faces from the ground and remain sitting, praying that He forgive us our sins and bestow His grace upon us, and guide us aright, and give us health and sustenance. Then we again prostrate ourselves on the ground and touch the dust with our foreheads before the might and the glory of the One. After that, we remain sitting and pray that He bless the Prophet Muhammad who brought His message to us, just as He blessed the earlier Prophets; and that He bless us as well, and all those who follow the right guidance; and we ask Him to give us of the good of this world and of the good of the world to come. In the end we turn our heads to the right and to the left, saying, and "Peace and the grace of God be upon you" -and thus greet all who are righteous, wherever they may be.
'It was thus that our Prophet used to pray and taught his followers to pray for all times, so that they might willingly surrender themselves to God -which is what Islam means -and so be at peace with Him and with their own destiny.'
The old man did not, of course, use exactly these words, but this was their meaning, and this is how I remember them. Years later I realized that with his simple explanation the hajji had opened to me the first door to Islam; but even then, long before any thought that Islam might become my own faith entered my mind, I began to feel an unwonted humility whenever I saw, as I often did, a man standing barefoot on his prayer rug, or on a straw mat, or on the bare earth, with his arms folded over his chest and his head lowered, entirely submerged within himself, oblivious of what was going on around him, whether it was in a mosque or on the sidewalk of a busy street: a man at peace with himself.
The 'Arab stone house' of which Dorian had written was really delightful. It stood on the fringe of the Old City near the Jaffa Gate. Its wide, high-ceilinged rooms seemed to be saturated with memories of the patrician life that had passed through them in earlier generations and the walls reverberated with the living present surging into them from the bazaar nearby -sights and sounds and smells that were unlike anything I had experienced before.
From the roof terrace I could see the sharply outlined area of the Old City with its network of irregular streets and alleys carved in stone. At the other end, seemingly near in its mighty expanse, was the site of Solomon's Temple; the AI-Aqsa Mosque the most sacred after those of Mecca and Medina -stood on its farthest rim, and the Dome of the Rock in the center. Beyond it, the Old City walls fell off toward the Valley of Kidron; and beyond the valley grew softly rounded, barren hills, their slopes thinly spotted with olive trees. Toward the east there was a little more fertility, and you could see there a garden sloping down toward the road, dark-green, hedged in by walls: the Garden of Gethsemane, From its midst shone between olive trees and cypresses the golden, onion-shaped domes of the Russian Church.
Jerusalem was an entirely new world to me. There were historic memories seeping from every corner of the ancient city: streets that had heard Isaiah preach, cobblestones over which Christ had walked, walls that had been old when the heavy step of Roman legionaries echoed from them, arches over doorways that bore inscriptions of Saladin's time. There was the deep blue of the skies, which might not have been unfamiliar to someone who knew other Mediterranean countries: but to me, who had grown up in a far less friendly climate, this blueness was like a call and a promise. The houses and streets seemed to be covered with a tender, oscillating glaze; the people were full of spontaneous movement and grand of gesture. The people -that is, the Arabs: for it was they who from the very beginning impressed themselves on my consciousness as the people of the land, people who had grown out of its soil and its history and were one with the surrounding air. Their garments were colorful and of a Biblical sweep of drapery, and each of them, fellah or beduin (for you could often see beduins who came to town to buy or sell their goods), wore them in a manner quite his own, ever so slightly different from the others, as if he had invented a personal fashion on the spur of the moment.
In front of Dorian's house, at a distance of perhaps forty yards, rose the steep, time-worn walls of David's Castle, which was part of the ramparts of the Old City -a typical medieval Arab citadel, probably erected on Herodian foundations, with a slim watchtower like a minaret. (Although it has no direct connection with King David, the Jews have always called it after him because here, on Mount Zion, the old royal palace is said to have stood.) On the Old City side there was a low, broad tower, through which the gateway went, and a bridge of stone arched across the old moat to the gate. That arched bridge was apparently a customary place of rendezvous for beduins when they had occasion to come into the city.
I often sat on the stone balustrade below the Jaffa Gate and watched the throng of people going into or coming out of the Old City. Here they rubbed against each other, jostled one another, Arab and Jew, all possible variations of both.
What did the average European know of the Arabs in those days? Practically nothing. When he came to the Near East he brought with him some romantic and erroneous notions; and if he was well-intentioned and intellectually honest, he had to admit that he had no idea at all about the Arabs. I, too, before I came to Palestine, had never thought of it as an Arab land. I had, of course, vaguely known that 'some' Arabs lived there, but I imagined them to be only nomads in desert tents and idyllic oasis dwellers. Because most of what I had read about Palestine in earlier days had been written by Zionists -who naturally had only their own problems in view -I had not realized that the towns also were full of Arabs -that, in fact, in 1922 there lived in Palestine nearly five Arabs to every Jew, and that, therefore, it was an Arab country to a far higher degree than a country of Jews.
When I remarked on this to Mr. Ussyshkin, chairman of the Zionist Committee of Action, whom I met during that time, I had the impression that the Zionists were not inclined to give much consideration to the fact of Arab majority; nor did they seem to attribute any real importance to the Arabs' opposition to Zionism. Mr. Ussyshkin's response showed nothing but contempt for the Arabs:
'There is no real Arab movement here against us; that is, no movement with roots in the people. All that you regard as opposition is in reality nothing but the shouting of a few disgruntled agitators. It will collapse of itself within a few months or at most a few years.'
This argument was far from satisfactory to me. From the very beginning I had a feeling that the whole idea of Jewish settlement in Palestine was artificial, and, what was worse, that it threatened to transfer all the complications and insoluble problems of European life into a country which might have remained happier without them. The Jews were not really coming to it as one returns to one's homeland; they were rather bent on making it into a homeland conceived on European patterns and with European aims. In short, they were strangers within the gates. And so I did not find anything wrong in the Arabs' determined resistance to the idea of a Jewish homeland in their midst; on the contrary, I immediately realized that it was the Arabs who were being imposed upon and were rightly defending themselves against such an imposition.
In the Balfour Declaration of 1917,which promised the Jews a 'national home' in Palestine, I saw a cruel political maneuver designed to foster the old principle, common to all colonial powers, of 'divide and rule'. In the case of Palestine, this principle was the more flagrant as in 1916 the British had promised the then ruler of Mecca, Sharif Husain, as a price for his help against the Turks, an independent Arab state which was to comprise all countries between the Mediterranean Sea and the Persian Gulf. They not only broke their promise a year later by concluding with France the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement (which established French Dominion over Syria and the Lebanon), but also, by implication, excluded Palestine from the obligations they had assumed with regard to the Arabs.
Although of Jewish origin myself, I conceived from the outset a strong objection to Zionism. Apart from my personal sympathy for the Arabs, I considered it immoral that immigrants, assisted by a foreign Great Power, should come from abroad with the avowed intention of attaining to majority in the country and thus to dispossess the people whose country it had been since time immemorial. Consequently, I was inclined to take the side of the Arabs whenever the Jewish-Arab question was brought up -which, of course, happened very often. This attitude of mine was beyond the comprehension of practically all the Jews with whom I came in contact during those months. They could not understand what I saw in the Arabs who, according to them, were no more than a mass of backward people whom they looked upon with a feeling not much different from that of the European settlers in Central Africa. They were not in the least interested in what the Arabs thought; almost none of them took pains to learn Arabic; and everyone accepted without question the dictum that Palestine was the rightful heritage of the Jews.
I still remember a brief discussion I had on this score with Dr. Chaim Weizmann, the undisputed leader of the Zionist movement. He had come on one of his periodic visits to Palestine (his permanent residence was, I believe, in London), and 1 met him in the house of a Jewish friend.
He was talking of the financial difficulties which were besetting the dream of a Jewish National Home, and the insufficient response to this dream among people abroad; and I had the disturbing impression that even he, like most of the other Zionists, was inclined to transfer the moral responsibility for all that was happening in Palestine to the 'outside world'. This impelled me to break through the deferential hush with which all the other people present were listening to him, and to ask:
'And what about the Arabs?' I must have committed a faux pas by thus bringing a jarring note into the conversation, for Dr. Weizmann turned his face slowly toward me, put down the cup he had been holding in his hand, and repeated my question:
'What about the Arabs...? 'Well-how can you ever hope to make Palestine your homeland in the face of the vehement opposition of the Arabs who, after all, are in the majority in this country?'
The Zionist leader shrugged his shoulders and answered drily: 'We expect they won't be in a majority after a few years.' 'Perhaps so. You have been dealing with this problem for years and must know the situation better than I do. But quite apart from the political difficulties which Arab opposition mayor may not put in your way -does not the moral aspect of the question ever bother you? Don't you think that it is wrong on your part to displace the people who have always lived in this country?'
'But it is our country,' replied Dr. Weizmann, raising his eyebrows. 'We are doing no more than taking back what we have been wrongly deprived of.'
'But you have been away from Palestine for nearly two thousand years! Before that you had ruled this country, and hardly ever the whole of it, for less than five hundred years. Don't you think that the Arabs could, with equal justification, demand Spain for themselves -for, after all, they held sway in Spain for nearly seven hundred years and lost it entirely only five hundred years ago?'
Dr. Weizmann had become visibly impatient: 'Nonsense. The Arabs had only conquered Spain; it had never been their original homeland, and so it was only right that in the end they were driven out by the Spaniards.'
'Forgive me,' I retorted, 'but it seems to me that there is some historical oversight here. After all, the Hebrews also came as conquerors to Palestine. Long before them were many other Semitic and non-Semitic tribes settled here -the Amorites, the Edomites, the Philistines, the Moabites, and the Hittites. Those tribes continued living here even in the days of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. They continued living here after the Romans drove our ancestors away. They are living here today. The Arabs who settled in Syria and Palestine after their conquest in the seventh century were always only a small minority of the population; the rest of what we describe today as Palestinian or Syrian "Arabs" are in reality only the Arabianized, original inhabitants of the country. Some of them became Muslims in the course of centuries, others remained Christians; the Muslims naturally inter-married with their co-religionists from Arabia. But can you deny that the bulk of those people in Palestine, who speak Arabic, whether Muslims or Christians, are direct-line descendants of the original inhabitants: original in the sense of having lived in this country centuries before the Hebrews came to it?'
Dr. Weizrnann smiled politely at my outburst and turned the conversation to other topics. I did not feel happy about the outcome of my intervention. I had of course not expected any of those present -least of all Dr. Weizmann himself-to subscribe to my conviction that the Zionist idea was highly vulnerable on the moral plane: but I had hoped that my defense of the Arab cause would at least give rise to some sort of uneasiness on the part of the Zionist leadership an uneasiness which might bring about more introspection and thus, perhaps, a greater readiness to admit the existence of a possible moral right in the opposition of the Arabs... None of this had come about. Instead, I found myself facing a blank wall of staring eyes: a censorious disapproval of my temerity, which dared question the unquestionable right of the Jews to the land of their fore fathers...
How was it possible, I wondered, for people endowed with so much creative intelligence as the Jews to think of the Zionist Arab conflict in Jewish terms alone? Did they not realize that the problem of the Jews in Palestine could, in the long run, be solved only through friendly co-operation with the Arabs? Were they so hopelessly blind to the painful future which their policy must bring? -to the struggles, the bitterness and the hatred to which the Jewish island, even if temporarily successful, would forever remain exposed in the midst of a hostile Arab sea?
And how strange, I thought, that a nation which had suffered so many wrongs in the course of its long and sorrowful diaspora was now, in single-minded pursuit of its own goal, ready to inflict a grievous wrong on another nation -and a nation, too that was innocent of all that past Jewish suffering. Such a phenomenon, I knew, was not unknown to history; but it made me, none the less, very sad to see it enacted before my eyes.
By that time my absorption in the political scene in Palestine was grounded not merely in my sympathy for the Arabs and my worry about the Zionist experiment, but also in a revival of my journalistic interests: for I had become a special correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung; then one of the most outstanding newspapers in Europe. This connection had come about almost by accident.
One evening, I found the press card issued to me a year before in Berlin as a representative of the United Telegraph"
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