Free The Theocrat: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature) by Bensalem Himmich Page A

enjoying. As a result his demeanor improved greatly, and his mental and physical condition stabilized. When Abu Ya’qub died and he again banned wine-drinking and listening to songs, his health reverted to its former state.
    Yahya ibn Sa‘id al-Antaki,
    Appendix to the History of Eutychius
    One evening in the summer of A.H , 399 al-Hakim was in his wine salon, following the instructions of his Christian physician, Ibn Nastas. He was sitting in violet oil and drinking wine, all in the hope of ridding his mind of its fluid imbalance and curing himself of his spasms and melancholia. No sooner did he feel a sense of relief and relaxation—naked though he-was except for a loincloth—than he yelled for his devotees. They came running, kissed the ground, and took their normal places. He gave orders for singers to be brought in, whereupon male and female youths arrived and regaled him with the sweetest and most delicate of melodies. Once he felt at ease and completely comfortable, he allowed the singers to leave and summoned a young male secretary. The young man arrived with paper and pens. Al-Hakim gave two orders; one for the guards to leave; the other for the secretary to take off his clothes, sit down alongside him. and get ready to write.
    This summer night was like all the others during that particular season. The sky was studded with stars; the moon rose and shone, and the silence was as deep and expansive as ever. Yet deep within, this night was of akind rarely encountered, one in which passion ferments and birth-pangs intensify. This night and its attributes were to glow only by virtue of al-Hakim’s state, through the lexicon of his perception and the way insistent thoughts kept flooding over him. Such a night was only so remarkable and noteworthy because al-Hakim was determined to control his internal vertigo and hold forth about his symptoms and misgivings, all in the hope of being cured and saved and in quest of a text for recovery.
    As al-Hakim started dictating his thoughts to the scribe, he was still wavering between twin delights, the violet oil and the wine that kept impinging upon his visions.
    “The head,” he said, “the child and its tragedy; the head split apart and its history. Two charts for compiling the trial, one of scrutiny and embarking on the caravan of travail….
    “Regarding the most miserable of heads, speech may often be useless and ineffectual.
    “The most miserable of beads, the most outstanding, is the mournful one with a wailing-woman within; the feverish head that has broken oars and rudder, plows through the waves, and appears before God wearing hempcloth as it waits for trousers to dry in the sun, trousers that have cleft both waves and virgins and that one day were the focus of women both pregnant and bereft.…
    “The trial of the head is in vanishing behind its own bulk, to the measure of its own shivering and gloomy mien.
    “Its sign is the desert where there is neither ruler nor ruled, where it is to be seen alone plunging its torments into the sand and using negligence and delay to resist its own tumble.
    “The head must inevitably disappear behind its own shadow, like an egg that abandons its own color and vanishes. Egg and head share color, the whiteness of repetition and beginning, the whiteness of concealment and discretion.”
    For a moment al-Hakim said nothing, then he continued, “If I were a child, I would ask for a father who would teach me to shoot at women and mirrors, and how to ride and disappear; he would bequeath me botha desert within me as expansive as fate itself and a love for refreshment through silence, biers, absence.
    “Were I a child, I would ask for a father with the rest of pre-lslamic culture in his bosom, a father who would teach me, through sense, knowledge, and poetics, how to burn down walls, though they be of silk, how to worship the sea and urinate in it….
    “Were I a youngster, I would dream of a father who would say to me, ‘In