0.4.3
As we proceeded on our way, the tram ground to a halt with a whistle. There were two men alongside each other, one riding a bicycle and the other quite out of breath from keeping up with him. They had barely reached the tram before the man next to me stood up respectfully and accepted their greetings. The man who had been walking took a seat, looking as though he were mounting a splendid steed like some horseman on the battlefield. The man who was riding the bicycle stayed on his machine and pedaled alongside the tram. I was sitting between them. I had no idea who they might be until they greeted each other with an air of authority, from which I gathered that they were ministers. From their conversation, it emerged that the passenger sitting beside me was the Permanent Undersecretary of Justice, the person who had been walking was the Minister of War, and the man on the bicycle was the Minister of Finance. I will now give you a version of the conversation I heard; they were speaking sometimes in Arabic and at others in French:
0.4.4
PERMANENT UNDERSECRETARY (to the Ministers of War and Finance) Why are you both walking and riding like this? What’s happened to your horses and carriages?
MINISTER OF WAR (chuckling) They’ve been sequestered by the Ministry of Finance!
UNDERSECRETARY (almost skipping a heartbeat from shock) How can they sequester the Minister of Finance’s carriage? He’s the guardian of the country’s treasury after all. They can’t do that to the Minister of War. After all it was his horse and foot which helped conquer the Sudan.
MINISTER OF WAR We’ve overlooked sharing the revenues accrued from both of them, so the occupying powers were eager to show how just they were by applying the principle of equality and by treating us in exactly the same way as they do ordinary people. They confiscated the carriages on the spot, and we’ve rushed to oblige them by walking in the streets and riding on trams. By so doing, we can show how compliant we are to their wishes and thus ingratiate ourselves to them.
UNDERSECRETARY We should be delighted by the present situation. The occupying powers have restored the principle of equality from the very first days of Islam that we’ve all been hearing about. In those days of old, amirs used to descend to the same level as the people. The way you’re riding on a tram is no different from the way Marwān came into Damascus riding a donkey during the caliphate of Abū Sufyān ibn Hishām; he had objected to his procession and the way it contravened a sense of equality.17
MINISTER OF WAR In which book did you find that story?
UNDERSECRETARY I didn’t get it from a book; I don’t have any time to read such things. I heard it from the Minister, and he in turn heard it from his teacher, Shaykh Ḥaddād.
MINISTER OF FINANCE (looking right and left over his bicycle)
“For all the things you’ve mentioned,
there are several you’ve overlooked.”18
There is something else which goes far beyond the benefits we get from merely complying with this idea of equality. If we ride on trams, the price of shares in the tramway company is bound to go up. People will start crowding each other out so that they can all ride on trams and have an opportunity to see us and copy everything we do. The price of shares will rise; people who are lucky enough to own shares in them will make a large profit.
0.4.5
MINISTER OF WAR If the tramway company did what it has promised to do and introduced first-class carriages, that would be fine. Then we wouldn’t have to mix with common people and run the risk of their hearing our conversations about secret government matters while we’re riding with them.
UNDERSECRETARY The first-class compartments would be bound to get overcrowded as well.
MINISTER OF WAR People who ride in first-class carriages are from the upper class. It doesn’t matter if they hear some of the secret business we’re discussing. The people to worry about are the common folk who don’t read newspapers.
MINISTER OF FINANCE Every time you come up with a way of making a profit, you miss another one. Don’t you realize that it costs more to ride in first class than it does in second? Sound economics won’t allow such extravagance.
MINISTER OF WAR Don’t you think we should forget this whole idea? After all, we already have an example of a way to remedy it. When His Excellency Fakhrī Pāshā, the Minister of Public Works and Public Education, used to travel by rail from Ramla to Alexandria, he would cut his ticket in half. If the inspector asked him, he completely nonplussed him by replying that he was a minister. As such, he was entitled to travel at half fare and to be exempted from the return half. I’m sure the tramway company here will be more amenable on this point than the Ramla Railway Company.
0.4.6
Our narrator told us: When the time came for us to part company, I got off and so did they. We all went our own ways. I left them to their dreams of profit, economy, and flattery. They meanwhile left me with their conversation, achieving thereby the cherished goal of distinction between the curser and the cursed and of equality between ruler and ruled.
Miṣbāḥ al-sharq 31, November 17, 1898
1.1
ʿĪsā ibn Hishām told us: In a dream, I saw myself walking among the tombs and gravestones in the Imam Shāfiʿī cemetery. It was a brilliant moonlit night, bright enough to blot out the stars in the sky; in fact, so gleaming was the light, one could have threaded a pearl and watched a speck of dust. As I stood there amid the graves atop the tombstones, I contemplated man’s arrogance and conceit, his sense of his own glory, his pride, his total obsession with his own pretensions, his excessive desires, his sense of self-aggrandizement, and the way he chooses to forget about the grave. In his deluded arrogance he hoists his nose into the air and endeavors to pierce the very heavens with it. Then he can boast about the things he has collected and use what he owns to claim some kind of superiority. But then Death always coerces him. Once it has enshrouded his artificial splendor and glory beneath its slabs of stone, it uses that very same nose to block up a crack in his tomb.
1.2
Deep in thought I continued my walk. I recalled the words of the sage poet, Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī:
Tread lightly, for methinks the surface of the earth
is made only from these bodies.
It would be wrong of us to treat our forefathers
and ancestors lightly even if they lived long ago.
Walk slowly abroad, if you are able,
and do not strut over the remains of God’s people.19
1.3
So I repented and trod lightly. Among these numerous corpses and remains of the dead there would be mouths. For a single kiss from them, lovers in the past would often have changed course and bartered the very sweetness of Kawthar for their sweet taste. But now they are blended with the dust of the earth, and their teeth mingle with pebbles and small stones.
I also remembered those cheeks the rose so envied that it wept dewy tears, which would arouse people’s hearts to a fiery passion. The beauty spot on their surface looked exactly like the faithful companion Abraham in the fire, or the black-skinned Nuʿmān of al-Ḥīrah in the midst of red anemones. Through them flowed the glow of modesty and youth’s gushing spring, but now fate has folded away their beauty just as one shuts a book; by