Authors: Elias Khoury
Karim continued, saying he thought that the death of nostalgia for one’s homeland and the feeling that return was impossible lay behind all the identity-based turmoil. It was further fed by European racism, which had begun to target Muslims more and more. “The Muslims and Arabs seem to have become the Jews of Europe now. Strange, how people are put together. Capitalist societies seem to need anti-Semitism to release their inner complexes. The Arabs and Muslims are becoming the Jews of Europe and the Palestinians have become the Jews of the Jews. It’s bewildering.”
Sheikh Radwan said he wasn’t surprised by these developments. “Verily, the Europeans have not ceased to be crusaders in their heart of hearts and
their hatred of Muslims will continue to grow as they weaken and collapse, God willing.”
“What are you talking about, Mawlana? First of all, the Arabs called them Franks, not crusaders, and besides, what crusaders are you talking about? The crusaders were over long ago and modern colonialism has nothing to do with crusader times. Have you forgotten Lenin’s maxim that ‘imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism’?”
“Lenin too was a crusader.”
“What? It looks like we have nothing left to talk about, Sheikh Radwan.”
“Talk? We can talk as much as you want! The hegemony of this imported culture is, however, no longer viable. The age of ‘sinalcolized’ culture is at an end, my dear Brother Sinalcol.”
Karim swallowed the slight and there was silence.
“Why do you not eat? In a minute they will bring the kenafeh with clotted cream and other comestibles,” said the sheikh.
Karim looked at his watch and saw the hands were pointing to a quarter to two. He told Radwan he was in a hurry because he had an appointment with some friends at the port and thanked him for the meeting.
The plates of pastries arrived. Karim ate kenafeh with clotted cream, which had been his favorite when he’d been in Tripoli with Danny. Then he drank from the glass of water in front of him, and said he had to leave.
“When willst thou send me the papers?” asked Radwan.
Karim said he was sorry, they’d been placed in his safekeeping. “You’re the one who brought the papers to my apartment in Beirut and I’m sure you remember Khaled’s message that they were only ever to be given to one person – Hayat.”
The sheikh said Hayat was now in the keeping of God, Great and Glorious, and that he himself had issued a ruling that Karim was released from his promise to Khaled. So, as the promise was no longer valid, Karim
could give him the papers because he, Radwan, was now the person closest to the martyr.
Karim was at a loss as to how to reply. He felt he ought to hand over the papers to no one, especially not to Radwan. He was sure Radwan would omit sections and insert words, which was what Khaled and Radwan had done previously with the text that they’d turned into their blue book.
“Do you still use the blue book?” Karim asked.
The sheikh replied in decisive tones: the book was no longer of any value since its secularist ideas were no longer valid and their Islamic approach could not be grafted onto it. “We derive our culture now from the works of the religious jurists, and above all those of Ibn Taimiya.”
Karim got up to leave but the sheikh grasped him by the arm, forcing him to sit again. The sheikh said his request for the papers reflected the wishes of Khaled’s grandmother. “Imm Yahya has expressed a desire for the papers and I am of the view that that is her right as the sole legal heir to both martyrs. She wishes me to publish them so that the memory of the two men be not consigned to oblivion.”
Karim stood up, twisting his lower lip, as though not accepting what had been said.
“Where are you rushing off to? What, you don’t want to see Sinalcol?” said the sheikh.
“As far as I am aware Sinalcol is dead,” said Karim.
“True, but who says we can’t see the dead?” responded Radwan. “Nothing could be easier, dear, than to arrange for you to meet your namesake there in Hell. Do not imagine you can refuse me the papers. If I want them, I’ll damn well get them, whether thou likest it or not.”
Sheikh Radwan raised his finger threateningly, but Karim, who sensed danger, began to prevaricate. He sat down again and told Radwan that he ought not to use threatening language with him. “You threaten to kill me
when you know that ‘who so slays a soul … shall be as though he had slain mankind altogether’?”
“God be praised, you have committed the Noble Koran to memory!” said Sheikh Radwan.
“If it’s Imm Yahya who’s asking for them, I’m willing to give her the papers but I have to hear the words from her, not because I don’t believe you, God forbid, but because they are a sacred trust and I care about these things, if you understand what I mean.”
The meeting ended with Karim in a fix. Sheikh Radwan said that that was Karim’s right and he’d send a car at five thirty to the Silver Shore so they could visit Imm Yahya together at her house in Qubbeh, and there Karim could hear her request with his own ears.
Karim arrived at the restaurant at three to find a fish banquet spread out and waiting for him, at its center a sea bream grilled in the Tripoli style, which they call “hot fish.” Ahmad got up to welcome him saying they’d forgotten all about him because he was late and he should excuse them for having started eating.
And at the restaurant Karim heard the strangest of stories. At the start he was sullen and incapable of responding to the jolly atmosphere imposed by Ahmad’s father, with his overbearing presence, his way of drinking arak straight without water, and his theory of how water spoiled the arak’s purity. Abd el-Malek Dakiz reminded him of his own father in his movements, his domination of the table, and his theories about food. He was a man of seventy-five with snow-white hair unblemished by a single strand of black. His bearing was erect with no sign of a stoop, he had a smile that never left his thin lips, a lean brown face, and a long nose. Abu Ahmad’s hands and the black liver spots that dotted them were everywhere at the table, whether pouring arak or distributing morsels to those seated around. The dilemma of having to meet Yahya’s mother at five thirty prevented Karim from
joining in, but Muna deftly seized the thread of the elderly man’s conversation to tell him Dr. Karim had written a study on the crusaders and was interested in tracing the destinies of their descendants in Lebanon. “Tell us, uncle, about your family’s crusader roots.”
“Our family, Muna? It’s your family too!” he responded.
“How come? Are you a Christian, Abu Ahmad?” asked Karim.
“I’m a Muslim, and praise be to God,” he replied. Then he pointed to the minaret of the mosque that could be seen through the restaurant’s rain-spotted window. “That’s the Dakiz Mosque. When my father returned from the pilgrimage, he sold a lot of the family’s property to build this mosque, and you ask me if we’re Christians!”
“Tell us the story of the French passport,” said Muna.
The man sat up straight, took a sip from his glass, and said he hated the French colonialist mentality. “Can you imagine, the French consul’s only concern was whether I was Francophone? I told him, ‘I know French but
je suis arabophone
,’ and I pronounced the
a
with a guttural consonant before it the way we say it. He didn’t like that, though. Maybe he believed in the myth of bilingualism that some Jesuit came up with but it doesn’t matter. What matters, Dr. Karim, is that we are originally from the house of De Guise – we say Dakiz in Arabic to make things easier – and I have correspondence with members of our family in France, particularly Count Bernard de Guise, who wrote to me that it would be an honor for them to become acquainted with their cousins of the line of the knights who had occupied the East and liberated Jerusalem, but what can one say?”
Abd el-Malek Dakiz spoke of how, at the beginning of the war and at the insistence of Muna, whose only dream was to emigrate, he’d gone to the French consulate in Tripoli, where he’d met the consul, Monsieur Gérard, told him about his family origins, and sought to reclaim his French nationality. The French consul had looked at him as though he didn’t believe
him, so Abd el-Malek Dakiz had shown him his correspondence with the French side of the family, stressing the fact that his was the sole family with scientifically proven Crusader-Frankish roots, though the Bardawil family might perhaps share that status since the Arabic historical sources did refer to King Baudouin as Bardawil.
The French consul had thought he was in the presence of a madman. However, faced with Abd el-Malek’s insistence on his right to French nationality, he said the matter was not in his hands and the decision had to come from the French foreign ministry; he gave the crusader a nationality claim form to fill out.
“It was murder. Endless forms to fill out,” said Abd el-Malek, “and documents and financial instruments and birth certificates for me and my father and my mother and my grandfather and my grandmother. The important thing, my dear sir, and so as not to bore you is we went back to the consulate and submitted them all to the consul. This time, though, I didn’t like the way he behaved. He treated me as though I were a madman who’d escaped from the lunatic asylum. It made no difference to me. The truth was clear as daylight and I felt sure that French citizenship was in my pocket.”
He said he’d waited three long months before getting back in touch and they’d given him an appointment for three weeks from that day.
“He asked me why I wanted French citizenship. I answered ‘because of the war.’ He said he sympathized with my motives but was sorry to inform me that my application had been rejected.”
“Why?”
“At that point, gentlemen, the man said something no mind can fathom or logic accept. He said my family might have had Frankish origins but that the Franks weren’t French: they were
des francs, pas des français
. Heavens above, what kind of rubbish is that? He said that the French state had not existed at the time of the crusades, which meant that the crusaders were
Franks and not French. I roared with laughter and asked him if he could fix me up with a crusader passport.”
When Abd el-Malek heard the justification offered by the French consul, first he laughed as though listening to a joke, then he grew furious. He said if that was how things were, why had the French General Gouraud stood in front of the tomb of Saladin in the Umayad Mosque in Damascus and told the Arab leader, “Saladin, we’re back!”
“No, no,” said the consul, “that is a widespread historical misconception. General Gouraud had nothing to do with the matter. The founder of the State of Greater Lebanon had no interest in the past. Those were the words of General Goybet, commander of the Syrian campaign and Gouraud’s deputy. You’re right, there was no call for such words, but you know the warrior mentality and the
folie de grandeur
to which they’re prone.”
“And why did General Allenby say, ‘Today the crusades have ended,’ when the British occupied Jerusalem on December 9, 1918?”
“It seems you know your history well, Monsieur De Guise,” said the consul.
Dakiz had left the French consulate cursing the hour that Muna had got him involved in the absurd project. “Damnation! The French and the English can claim they’re crusaders whenever it suits them but the original crusaders have to shut up and die in the civil war.”
Abd el-Malek said he’d been so angry he’d phoned his only son, Ahmad, and asked him to divorce his wife because she was “a discord in the land.”
“Me, a discord in the land, uncle?” asked Muna, laughing.
“God damn passports and the day they were invented! Now you, your husband, and your children are going to get Canadian passports even though Canada wasn’t even on the map at the time of the crusades.”
Karim felt as though he had been transported to an unreal world. The
man truly believed he was descended from the crusaders even though all his forefathers were Tripolitanians, he was a Sunni Muslim, and his family had built a mosque in the city! What caught his attention was the pleasure Ahmad took in what his father was saying. The whole family was either telling the truth or believed it was. Abu Ahmad claimed he still spoke the language of his crusader ancestors and was sorry his son had refused to learn it and that the only person who could speak it now was his father’s uncle’s daughter, who was eighty-seven years old and lived alone in her house opposite the mosque.
When Karim heard the story of the crusader language, he too was sucked in and found himself inside the imaginary world fashioned by Abu Ahmad’s words, for it had never before entered his mind that the crusaders spoke a language all their own, different from those of the countries from which they came.
He asked about the language and got an answer from Muna that obviated the question. “It’s called lingua franca, uncle, not ‘the language of the crusaders,’ and it wasn’t a language, it was a mixture of numerous dialects, including Arabic.”
“All languages are mixtures,” said Ahmad.
“Fine, so why did you become Muslims?” asked Karim.
“The story of our forefathers is a truly strange one,” said Abd el-Malek.
“Everyone around them were Muslims. You’ve heard of the terrible massacre committed by the Mamluke Baybars when he occupied the Fragrant City?”
“I have,” said Karim, “but I know too about the savage massacre committed by the crusaders when they occupied the city.”
“History is nothing but massacres,” said Abu Ahmad, “but that’s not the point. Our forefathers became Muslims because they had no other option.
If you come to the house with me I’ll show you the family tree and how we started mixing with Muslims a long time ago and intermarried with them long before the Mamluke conquest of the city. I deduce that our forefathers became Muslims in order to fit in with their environment. Not me, though. I’m a Muslim by conviction. I studied philosophy at the university and worked as a philosophy teacher at the Mar Elias School and I’ve studied the matter in depth and thought about becoming a Christian again like my forefathers, especially as I love the Byzantine hymns. When you listen to Dimitri Coutya chanting you’d think it was a voice to open the Gates of Heaven. But I discovered that Muhammad was the true prophet.”