Tracking the Spirit of the One You Love

AFTER RETURNING FROM MALTA and learning of the baby’s death, Muhammad avoided seeing his father. In fact, he didn’t want to talk to anybody in his family. So he left the house and went to live in Tawida’s shack, which came as a cruel blow to his parents and his wife. Fatima would bring him food and drink, and she and her son Ali would sit with him for hours as he cried and poured out his heart to her. All she could do was try to ease his pain with calming words.

Muhammad’s refusal to have anything to do with his family frightened his mother, hurt his father, and broke his wife’s heart. One day his father finally decided to go have a talk with him. Muhammad was lying on the bed when his father came in. He had expected the visitor to be Ali or Fatima, but who should walk in but the blustering old man, who jabbed him several times in the waist with his cane.

“Get up now, and stop being such a sissy. What’s all this fuss over a slave woman with a split upper lip and hooves for feet? You’ve made us a laughingstock! It’ll be a scandal to beat all scandals if your in-laws get wind of what you’ve been doing. You abandon your wife and your daughters to go grieve over a servant woman. Unbelievable! So which one’s the slave—she, or you? Get up, damn you!”

“What pains me is the thought that my baby boy died of hunger and thirst under my own roof. Did it pain any of you?”

The old man was slightly rattled by his son’s retort. But then, as if he hadn’t heard a thing, he tapped the ground with his cane and bellowed, “Oh, so now he’s your son whose death grieves you so! After he was born, you acted as if he didn’t belong to you, and you were fine with letting him live in a cardboard box. You begrudged him even a cradle or clothes to wear. And now it occurs to you to weep and wail, ‘My son, my son!’”

“So bring him back to me and let me acknowledge him as mine, circumcise him, and buy things for him the way fathers do for their sons without any interference from you all. Would you really have let me do that? I didn’t get to choose my own wife, or even my daughters’ names. So how much freedom would I have had to decide how to relate to a slave woman that you’ve assaulted along with me? But I’m to blame. All my life I’ve been a coward, scared of you and your anger. In relation to you, I’m not a man, and I’ve got no authority over anything.”

“So you’ve found your tongue, have you?”

Lalla Uwayshina was nearby, listening in on the conversation and waiting for the right moment to come in and say something.

“God guide you, son,” she said. “Your daughters ask about you. They say, ‘What’s wrong with our father?’ And I don’t know what to tell them. What fault is this of theirs, or your wife’s? She hasn’t done anything wrong, and she’s been putting up patiently with your cold neglect. Do you think God’s pleased with what you’re doing to her? Curse Satan and get on with your life. If it’s a matter of having a slave woman, you can go to the market and buy yourself a new one every day if you want to. All the men do it, son. But nobody would abandon his family for a slave girl.”

Muhammad held his peace until they had both said all they had to say and left. Once they were gone, he bit his hand to keep himself from screaming. Then he burst into tears.

Nobody’s willing to understand that I’m a human being and that you, my beloved, are my beloved!

Al-Figgi and his son left the zawiya after a tempestuous hadra in which the aromas of benzoin, gum ammoniac, and asafetida rent the heavens, hands burned from the beating of tambourines, and tongues waxed eloquent in praise of the Prophet and hymns to the Almighty. Singers, adepts, and seekers alike danced with their sheikhs until they fell to the floor in exhaustion, vying to reach the heights of ecstasy and rapture in which, divorced from the external world, they were filled with inner tranquility. When an adept had achieved this state, he was like a pure spirit soaring through heavenly realms with God and the noble members of the Prophet’s family. The person wandering in the ecstasy of love, absent from this earthly realm, would be ushered into a higher world only accessible to a chosen elite: a supernatural world where hearing isn’t mere hearing, nor seeing mere seeing, where the senses are vivid beyond description and vision is clear to perfection, where you can see the invisible, hear the inaudible, and touch the untouchable. It’s a world merited only by those with the purest of souls and the sublimest of aspirations, by the reciters of the Qur’an and the knowers of its secrets who chant it day and night and believe unquestioningly in what it says about the outer appearances of things and their inner essences, by those whose spirits cling in love to God and His Prophet, who perceive the true causes underlying things and for whom the veil has been drawn back, who, step by step, ascend the ladder of spiritual illumination. These are the men of God, the praiseworthy helpers. Of these, the highest in rank is the sheikh of the hadra, who leads processions down the streets toward paths of light, knowledge, and the divine love.

Sustenance, sustenance, succor, succor.

After the religious gathering had dispersed, Muhammad waited on a side street that al-Figgi usually took on his way home. When al-Figgi and his son approached, Muhammad stepped out of the shadows and blocked their path. In his capacity as patriarch and sheikh of the hadra, al-Figgi was walking two steps ahead of his son, who trailed behind like a shadow, his collarbones visible through the neck opening in his mantle. With a downy-soft beard that lay flat over his cheeks and black circles around his wide eyes, he looked like a true dervish. At the same time, being a novice, he’d gotten dizzy from so much spinning and twirling, he had vomited repeatedly in the course of the hadra, and his spirit had nearly been wrested away in a state of spiritual ecstasy.

“Where have you taken Tawida?” Muhammad demanded.

“Bismillah ar-rahman ar-rahim, a‘udhu billahi min sharr ash-shaytan ar-rajim!” al-Figgi muttered in alarm, calling on the Merciful to protect him from Satan and his evil forces.

“Where have you taken the poor woman?!”

“I have no idea where she is. What have I got to do with her and all your family problems?”

“So you’re playing dumb, are you? You snake in the grass, you masterminded all the problems we’ve having in our household!”

Pushing Muhammad roughly out of his path, the sheikh retorted, “Get out of my way. It’s enough what you did to me before.”

Taking a few steps away, al-Figgi shouted at his son, who stood gawking into the other men’s faces, “Come on, we’re late!”

As the young man hurried to catch up with his father, Muhammad added, “We’ve still got plenty of scores to settle, Sheikh.”

Brushing off the threat, al-Figgi retorted, “Do your worst. See if I care!”