Bensalem Himmich - A Muslim Suicide

The purest water of sincerity courses over your truth. You are someone who lived with no family or friends save those righteous and reverent souls who were already dead. So I beg you, dear friend, to accept me as a loyal successor, separated by neither time nor space, as is the case in the gardens of Eden where I will be searching for you next after the Lord of the Prophets himself. Accept me as a true and loyal devotee. From the pages of your works that have survived you pour out your own spirit, which hovers on the air. Thus you are able to provide me with words that are the best and most effective, duly released from the trammels of tradition and attribution, and allow me to compose my own sentences and associations that are profound and rich. They are all illuminated by your always dynamic fragments of thought and your brilliant rhetorical flair, far removed, oh how far removed, from the obscurities and barbarisms committed by Arab pseudo-Aristotelians.

Your greatest weapon is your courageous, forthright pen, which you use to probe the inner workings of the soul and the loftiest reaches of the truth. With it you scoff at the foibles of ministers and notables, resist poverty, screen your purpose, and brazenly, almost flippantly, flirt with death. The fact of the matter is that you made use of your pen to compile a mass of pleas and complaints, pouring out the flaming oil of your own story with God, to such a degree that at one point you went right over the top and blasphemed by saying, "0 God, to You I complain about what You have brought down upon me; by Your truth, you have strengthened the bonds, tightened the noose, and waged war…"

How can I possibly not take pity on you and ask the Creator to grant you forgiveness?

After all this how can I not call upon you to give me your help?

I am in need of something to relieve me of your never-ending tensions and your permanent state of anxiety as you function amid the gaze of other people and the illusions of adjuncts. So protect my back!

Now I aspire to surpass you in ridding myself of yearnings, struggles, rancor, and enmity, anything in fact that would impair my exposure to wafts that emanate from the surging flood of truth. So protect my back!

I am now on my path toward the single totality, investigating both essence and meaning, aspiring to rise to other heights of perfection among the gradations of profundity and comprehension. So protect my back!

I have immersed myself in some of your writing: in Divine Signs, that lofty text; in Treasures in Insights; and in whatever Epistles I have managed to acquire. I have then proceeded to look at Al-Niffari's Book of Stations, the Lamiyya of Ibn Sina, and the Nazm al-Suluk by Ibn al-Farid* as well as his famous Khamriyya poem. In addition I've looked at the collection Litanies by al-Shadhili al-Ghumari* and similar works, all of which quenched my thirst for more knowledge and sharpened my mind with a rush of inspiration. After all that, I perused some literary works in both prose and verse. They all managed to bolster my initiative by using styles that adhered to both sense and fingers and have become an essential part of my inner self. After all, refined and lofty literature is the conduit that provides life with its value and purpose. How else could we appreciate the contents of sacred texts and establish the bases of the Qur'an's miraculous nature and the divine oath: "Nun, and the pen, and what they write" [Sura 68, v. 1].

In the same way I have spent days and nights exploring the insides of books and the contents of their pages, only stopping in order to keep body and soul together with a little breakfast, taking short naps and performing prayers. When the holy month was two-thirds gone, I started to get sick, easily recognizing the annoying symptoms; that forced me to stop writing and adjust my work pattern.

No, no, I'm not one of those authors who can just make up their minds to sit down and write, showing certain symptoms of arrogance and a far from simple ability to fabricate in both vision and gesture. By God, that kind of posture disgusts me and occasionally makes me laugh.

No, no, for me writing is an unexpected jarring sensation, a sudden flare of inspiration; it can also be a tense and tricky process of fermentation, a painfully slow internal course of fruition.

I started having dreams about my wife. I would call for her because I urgently wanted her to come; and she would respond, "Here I am!" I would show her how things were going and what a flood of divine inspiration had reached me. I would tell her to untie my belt, open up my gates, and respond to my expectations. Then I would summon her again and ask her to bare her breasts. She would hear me and reply, "My bosom is your own possession, and all my senses cry out for you!" I then imagine myself telling her, "So here I am today, Fayha', conveying to you some awesome words, so remember them…. No, instead I'm going to tell you some things that, if I compose them all in succession, will bring me contentment and ascendancy." And thus did I set down "The Ascetic's Epistle," "A Book Containing Aphorisms and Homilies," "The Epistle of God's Discourse through the Medium of His Own Light," and "The Epistle of the Blessed Tablets." And all praise be to the True One for the signs of His generosity and beneficence.

Those were all epistles in which my ideas and inspiration were fully formed. There were others from the same period where, because of a lack of time, I merely planned the basic format. They were all either additions to or modifications of the text of Escape of the Gnostic, or else refinements and epigraphs, all of them lightly footnoted and easily comprehensible. I think that they enabled me to come closer to the definition of the essence of the unity of existence and complete perfection, all part of the ongoing struggle to link the potential existent with the Necessary Existent; in other words, to be transformed by the beautiful names of God that are its very essence and to be found worthy of the divine succession.

On the twenty-seventh day of the noble month of Ramadan, Hamada and Bilal came to visit me, escorted by `Abd al-Barr, the warden. The young man reassured me that everything was fine at home and that his mistress was longing to see me. Then `Abd al-Barr informed me with due gratitude that he had received some sacks of food that Bilal had brought with him, which were to be distributed to the poor on the day after the festival. I invited them all to take a stroll on the hillside, and they willingly joined me. We left the zawiya behind us and headed for the forest where the hermits lived. I noticed how amazed and scared Hamada looked as he observed the weird appearance of the figures that kept appearing and disappearing before his very eyes. While 'Abd al-Barr and I were chatting, we heard the young man behind us yelling and asking for help. Looking behind me, I could see an arm stretching out from the limb of a tree and grabbing him by the hand. With my companions I rushed to help him, but we could not wrestle him free of the person in the tree who had grabbed him-and he looked just like the wild and uncontrollable hermit I had met before. I used soothing words to get the hermit to let him go, and he promised to do so just as soon as he had had his fill of the handsome, beardless young man's face. At this point I recalled that looking at beardless youths, just like losing one's senses, public exposure, fantasizing, dancing, and tearing one's clothes are all reckoned among the faults characteristic of hermits. God alone knows whether that is true or not and what mankind conceals inside his breast. In any case it was only moments later that the hermit fulfilled his promise by releasing the youth. I was thus able to rescue him and calm him down somewhat. Sobbing loudly, he begged me to let him go back to his home.