The Descent

[10]

Well, if you can’t take the cat out of the bag…

you might as well stick your head into the bag.

 
“And why not your entire body while you’re at it.”

Well, well, well now, that voice, for some odd reason, sounded familiar to me, quite familiar; I had heard it in my head before. I swear I did. Still…

“And who the hell is this, if I may ask?” But then I could see very well who this was. And I recognized him, instantly, even though he should have been quite unrecognizable in that casual attire of his. The voice that so rudely interrupted the idiotic remarks of Jibrîl and Iblîs belonged to a middle-aged looking man wearing a simple sweat shirt and an ordinary looking blue jeans; he was sitting on a simple yet comfortable-looking plastic white chair in a faintly lit corner in Eve’s very womb. Dressed like that, looking like that, he could have been anybody, I mean anybody, but he wasn’t of course. I knew that he wasn’t. And I knew, I most definitely knew, who he actually was.

“Muhammad you son of a bitch, what the hell are you doing in here?” I asked as I wiggled my body through into Eve’s womb; her warm juices eased the process, for me at least, and so did my tears and the fact that I was naked.

Still, the wiggling went on for years, years during which many things must have happened in the real Sûq, many things did happen. I became much calmer for once, and did manage to regain a good deal of my former sanity. But in this Sûq, in this extension of it that just happened to lie in Eve’s very womb, the only thing that really mattered, as far as I was concerned, was the seemingly endless act of wiggling that, one day, and quite unexpectedly, did finally come to an end. Ah. I wonder…

Does the process of anti-birth inflict the same amount of pain upon Eve as the normal process of birth? Does it inflict more? Does it inflict less? Well, at least I know, I know without any doubt that there must have been some suffering involved; and this time, I was old enough, rather, mature enough to share it, to remember it, and to cherish it. It created a bond between me and Eve, a long needed bond, a most necessary bond. A love bond, I guess. Yes, a love bond.

“May I join you?” I said as I lay my tired body on the empty plastic chair opposite Muhammad’s own; and since both chairs looked exactly the same, I knew that, this time around, no unnecessary symbols were going to be employed, that this was going to be as plain and direct a face-off as one can get, in any world, in any Sûq.

“Would you like some fresh orange juice before we start?” Asked Muhammad.

Orange juice? Orange juice? Imagine this if you will: a young idealist debating with Muhammad, the almighty Prophet of Islam himself,  about certain ethical issues, in a dark corner in Eve’s very womb, in a parallel dimension, all this while sipping freshly squeezed orange juice. Did I just say that this was going to be a plain face-off? Yes I did. And I meant it too. The anticlimactic nature of it notwithstanding.

“No thanks. I’ve just had enough of orange juice to last me a long while. But it was kind of you to ask.” Note the sarcasm in my reply. I was still capable of being sarcastic after all these years of being frozen in a situation like this. A point in my favor, wouldn’t you say?

“Well then, let’s get to business. You are a spoiled brat, a hypocrite and a coward,” well, well, well, he doesn’t mince words, does he? Mind you, he was speaking very calmly as if the whole matter did not concern him in any way, which, of course, it did, otherwise he wouldn’t have been here, would he?

“…A weakling who thought he had the right to turn his back upon his long cherished beliefs, his supposedly long cherished beliefs, in a moment when things got a little bit rough and didn’t go his way. ‘There is no God,’ he said, ‘and Muhammad was nothing but a scoundrel, all prophets were, in fact, nothing but scoundrels, because they did not give me what I want, because their teachings did not make life easier for me, and I still have to live and suffer like everyone else.’

But you didn’t think of yourself as being like everyone else, did you? You thought of yourself as being a cut above the rest, didn’t you? You thought of yourself as a would-be prophet perhaps, a modern-day savior of sorts, a messiah, a Mahdî, perhaps even the Mahdî. And it killed you to know that you weren’t. The lack of miracles in your life made you realize at one point that you weren’t, and that you are not destined to be. So you rebelled. You wiped out all of your faith with one single rebellious stroke, and decided to start a new page as an atheistic humanist.

Isn’t that precious? Now you can be a prophet without any need for divine inspiration or miracles. Now you can be a secular prophet, a whimsical prophet, a cry-baby prophet for all the cry-babies of the world, your world, and, gracious heavens, how many of them there are in your world. Your world is virtually bursting with potential followers, and they are waiting for you. So go get them boy. Go get them. There are all yours. I don’t need the likes of them. I don’t need the likes of you. In fact, I never needed the likes of you.”

A calm attack warrants an even calmer counter-attack. Wouldn’t you agree.

“My conversion to ‘atheistic humanism’, and that’s not a bad term by the way, can be better explained by the fact that, at one point in my life, I simply found out that I can live without God, that I did not need Him to tell right from wrong, and that I never really did. Moreover, having Him in my life did not in any way make me feel less lonely. So, at one point in my life, I discovered that God had become irrelevant to me; and when I dealt with the issue of God on a more philosophical level, I ended up realizing that the Abrahamic concept of God itself is, in fact, not very satisfactory, especially in relation to such issues as free will, good and evil and divine love and justice. The whole notion then fell apart and ideas which, I think can be described as humanist in nature, began to take its place.

As for your reference to my quite obvious messiah complex, well, I dare say it’s something very human, and we all seem to have it, albeit in different proportions. You most definitely had it, and you seem to have it still, don’t you? Death doesn’t stop the likes of you, does it? Well, as for me, I am struggling with it now more than ever, and I think it’s under control, at least under much more control than it used to be when I was a Believer. And I am speaking of it openly now, because I really believe that these particular human tendencies are best dealt with in the open, they become more manageable somehow when they are not left buried under a ton of fear, shame and apprehension.

Let me also say that I have the right to be a cry-baby, and that I enjoy being a cry-baby; being a cry-baby keeps me going, somehow, much more than anything you have to say.”

“And how about being a hypocrite? Do you have the right to be a hypocrite?”

“I don’t understand how I can be described as a hypocrite just because, at one point in my life, and after much thought and deliberation, I changed some of my concepts of life. I have always tried to live in accordance with my beliefs. Oh yes, I haven’t always been so successful, but I have never lied to myself either, and I have never tried to hide my beliefs. So how can I be described as a hypocrite.”

“Because you are a hypocrite.”

“How? Do explain this to me, please.”

“Before I do, let me ask you something.”

“Go ahead.”

“What made you turn against me in particular? What made you think I was a scoundrel?”

“I broke away from the ranks of your followers, I wouldn’t say that this is the same as turning against you, or thinking of you as a scoundrel.

In fact, I really think you yourself did actually believe in your prophethood; you did believe that the voices inside your head represented an inspiration from God. You gave a divine foundation to your own ideals and you thought it right, after all, you were certain that these ideals would prove beneficial to your people, and you were certain that the path to glory for you and your people lay in building a strong monotheistic religious foundation that would allow you to benefit from the cultural and intellectual heritage of monotheism, a heritage that lay all around you. And on the basis of this religious foundation, an Arab kingdom could be built; the Arabs had been trying to achieve something along these lines for centuries, benefiting from the struggle between the Persian and Byzantine empires, but they had continued to fail because they hadn’t had a strong sense of unity. That was your gift to them. That was the essence of your success.

Now, I followed you because you were successful, a successful idealist in a world where almost everyone expects idealists to fail. Then, and after a long time, unfortunately, I found out that the only reason you had been successful lay in your willingness to compromise your ideals. For as time went by, and as you gained more and more converts and more and more power, and after you had successfully created a strong Islamic presence in Madinah, you began to change. You were gradually becoming a king, a strong and smart king, but a king nonetheless, just another ambitious king. The ethical side of your activities became secondary and was often compromised in your struggle to expand the boundaries of your kingdom.

You ordered assassinations, you chased people away from their homes, you massacred people, and you enslaved people; in short, you got your prophetic hands dirty, too dirty. You, who, at one point in his career, had been fighting for religious freedom, ordered at one occasion the destruction of a mosque, simply because it had been constructed by people who disagreed with some of your policies. You thus became the first Muslim ruler in history to put down the first attempt at establishing some sort of democratic opposition. And you, and no one else, were the first Muslim ruler in history to advocate the concept of hereditary kingship, when you began to smooth the way for your cousin ‘Alî, whom you had raise as a son, to become your successor. You were the first Muslim to betray the Islamic ideals, because you were too greedy for power. And as a result of your betrayal, the struggle for power in the Muslim world has not ended, ever since the moment of your death.

So. Muhammad, who is the real hypocrite among us? Pray tell me.”

“You, of course, you, and it will always be you, no matter how hard you try to turn the tables around, no matter how hard you try to turn things against me. You and Jesus and the likes of you two. You would let other people get their hands dirty to carry out your dreams towards fulfillment, you would let other people shed blood and do whatever it takes to transform your vision into a living reality. You are the hypocrites.

But as for me, I did it myself, I did not run away from the responsibilities born out of my dreams, of the ideals I was advocating. No. I did it all myself, and I did not fake any so-called moral indignation when faced with difficult situations and hard choices. For I came to know at one point in my life that to do good, to protect all that you believe to be good, in such an imperfect world, will always require of you to get your hands dirty. If you are not willing to do that, then you are a hypocrite.

So my dear, dear hypocrite, what do you think? Don’t you remember the days when you believed in these things, when you were willing to follow in my footsteps and do whatever it takes to make your dreams come true? Don’t you remember the time when you were willing, itching, to get your hands dirty in your selfish desire to change the world, simply because you couldn’t fit in it, simply because you felt like a stranger in it? It was right then what I had to say, what I did, wasn’t it? You justified my massacres for me, and all of my ethical compromises, and were willing to do the same, but never had the chance to. You never had the chance to. That’s why you are what you are today, because you never had the chance to become like me. And that’s why you are a hypocrite, pure and simple.”

Believe me when I say that I stared Muhammad in the face for a long, long time waiting for a response to form in my head, I stared at him, I stared at myself, I stared at everything and everyone, until I finally knew what I had to say, it was the only thing that could be said in the circumstances really, I had to condemn myself again, I had to admit defeat, my total defeat, for the final time in my life I hope, I had to admit my total defeat.

“I am eternally a pupil of my conscience. I will forever have new things to learn from it. Always aided, and sometimes impeded, by my sense of intuition and my imagination. I don’t know what it was that made me unable to follow in your footsteps when I longed and burned in my longing just to do so. I really don’t know. But I don’t think it relevant now.

I mean, ponder this question for a spell: what if I had been born an American, or an Englishman or a Frenchman, or a Japanese, or a Chinese, etc., would I have developed the same identity crisis I am currently experiencing? Certainly not, and you know it. For the crisis of identity I am experiencing today, and that I have always been experiencing, stems from the very fact that I was born an Arab and a Muslim, at a time when these adjectives do actually signify backwardness, weakness, and to an extant even shame, and none of them are of my own making. I was simply born into them.

Anyway, what I am trying to say is that such hypothetical questions are in fact quite irrelevant. For I have to deal with the reality of what I am, of what I have been. I have the right to live and grow and learn from my experiences. There is nothing hypocritical in discovering, one day, that some of my erstwhile choices and concepts were indeed wrong or unsuitable, and there is nothing hypocritical about making different choices and adopting new concepts. I have been true to myself all through my life, I have never pretended to believe in things that I did not in actuality believe in, or acted, intentionally, contrary to my own declared beliefs. Being quite certain of this, I can look you, and the whole world if you like, straight  in the face, and declare with the all the confidence in the world that I am not a hypocrite. I am not a hypocrite. I am not a hypocrite.”

And with this assertion, this admission of defeat, for how else can such an affair be described when there was no reason whatsoever for me to accept being put on trial by a man, and forced to defend myself and justify my actions and my beliefs to a man, to a symbol, who had much more to answer for than I have ever had in my entire life, or even could ever have. Still, what has happened cannot be undone, but I shall never allow it to happen again, I shall never allow for any doubts to be cast regarding my own integrity in my own mind. For this is more in nature folly than righteousness. A man who doubts his own integrity cannot undo the wrong he caused, cannot change. That is simply not the kind of man that I am.

And with this assertion, no matter how one interprets it, my face-off with Muhammad, and my entire descent, came naturally to an end.

And as for you Eve, as for me and you, I am sorry it has taking me so long, so much a time to be able to gather enough courage to admit to myself, and to you that I love you. But I do love you Eve. I love you. I love you.

And now everybody all together: que serà serà…

…whatever will be will be…

…the future is ours you see, que serà serà…

Ooh, I just looove happy endings…?