Bensalem Himmich - A Muslim Suicide

Bensalem Himmich has taught philosophy at Muhammad V University in Rabat, Morocco, and is currently the Moroccan minister of culture. He has published six novels, four collections of poetry, and books of essays and literary criticism. He was awarded the Riad El-Rayyes Prize for the Novel in 1989 for Majnun alHukm (The Theocrat) and the Great Atlas Prize in 2003 for his novel Al-Allama (The Polymath). More recently, Himmich received the 2009 Naguib Mahfouz Award from the Egyptian Writers Union.

Roger Allen is the Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor Emeritus of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature Emeritus in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. In addition to numerous studies on the Arabic literary tradition, he has translated fictional works by, among others, Naguib Mahfouz (God's World; Mirrors; Karnak Cafe; The Final Hour), Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (In Search of Walid Masoud), Yusuf Idris (In the Eye of the Beholder), 'Abd al-rahman Munif (Endings), and Mayy Telmissany (Dunyazad).

Woe is me!

Woe is me for what I have lost, leaving a huge void inside me.

I have been asked to explain the nature of this loss by a voice that I've grown used to hearing in my dreams.

"You herald of the unseen," I have shouted back at the top of my voice, "you ask me about it, and yet you know more about it than anyone else!"

My shouts rose and echoed through the darkness of night, so much so that they shook me awake. The weather was cold and rainy, and yet springtime was to bring with it a magic of its own.

I got up at once and went outside, wandering through the alleys of my own quarter and neighboring quarters too. As I crisscrossed them, I was sometimes lost in my own thoughts, while at others I concentrated my entire attention on the dawn of the day to come and the stirrings of plants and creatures all around me.

Yet again, maybe for the thousand and first time, I performed my prayers, with no other plea than that the All-Knowing One would direct me to my manuscript, my missing essence and lost pillar of support.

Fragments, snippets of sentences, isolated words, that's all that remains of my manuscript. I have tried to follow its traces by jotting down various bits during hours of intermittent wakefulness, on the crest of an all-too-fleeting bout of clear thinking, or whenever scattered glimpses and fragments have flashed across my mind. Here now are just a few of them:

"You should espouse plenitude in existence, for that displays more purity and intelligence… and is…

"Knowledge is a token of sublimity…

"Love constitutes within its confines the fertilizer of the living and the means of well-being…

"As you proceed ever upward, may your progress be spiral… so faulty circles are broken; so you can implant your branch on the heights you have reached, not the place where you started; so you can await the onset of drowsiness and everturning habits…

"Many's the intellect if it is pure, your own portion will not elude you or disappear…

"The very obscurity of my discourse is my means of concealment. Whoever seeks to interpret me without understanding, that person is ignorant of my secrets and has become my foe…

". I belong to You, 0 God. To You I will return and be gathered…

"In Your splendor and glory implant me in Your firmament now, now. Set me down so that I may scatter the clouds of plurality, so I may establish an element of certainty in true existence and unity.

". My routine involves isolation and seclusion…

"Concerning the reason why I persist in this direction…. just watch me and do not ask.

"Reconciliation with your whole self is the correct path…. Traveler on the way, remove from your self all attachments and attributes. They are all blemishes and illusions.

"L0VE. By all women with their beautiful eyes, I am not a worshipper of the PNS nor am I a crazy presence in your midst."

My manuscript is my foundational location, my untouched flame. If I ever find it, I will rejoice and will find my endeavors invigorated. But if I am deprived of it and the loss lingers for some time, I will feel the fire of anguish and turn in on myself…

People may well be surprised that I am so intensely sad at the loss and that the mere memory of it brings a lump to my throat, as though I'd been robbed of someone very dear to me, or had lost a precious possession, something irreplaceable. Ah me! The comparison is exactly right and captures my feelings so well! The text of my manuscript is a unique example of its kind. In it discourse adopts an elevated plane, carefully and finely interwoven. I would not wish to claim that it constitutes the ultimate of revelations to me-heaven forfend, heaven forfend! If some form of imagery makes things easier, then let's say that it's like a set of blessed, luminescent tablets, tablets whose consonants are the purest flowing blood, while its vowel sounds are the result of the subtlest flashes of lightning; tablets of the kind that time never proffers twice, as evidence of which I can cite the fact that the majority of its ideas and contents have been completely erased from my memory, leaving behind nothing but a few notable traces and an alluring waft of scent.

If only you realized, the pages in my manuscript are just like vessels that I replenish during my hours of sleep and quests of the beyond, fueled by a desire for pearls concealed within my internal sun or else in my imagined rains. When I receive a God-granted state of harmony, I feel pure enough to compose my ideas. With that I rush to embrace the wind or to send kisses to the stars in the zenith of the firmament. At that very moment my sense of delight knows no peer, a yardstick for the sheer health and fertility of life that I feel, the guiding compass, the holy lamp guiding my path to the abodes of sublime felicity.

Were my delight to be measured in terms of its connections to people, then foes of my flashes of intoxication would deny it; every savant connoisseur would get his share of it, each in accordance with his rank and ability.

In the wake of this loss, I have started-if only you might realize! — undertaking the task of writing as though it were the twin brother of prayer itself. For that purpose I am equipping myself with every kind of spiritual and cognitive material that may be needed, all out of a strong desire to entice into its trap every kind of idea and proximate entity. My manuscript was replete with such things; its very odor perfumed both heart and mind in gleaming moments of illumination.

In order to lighten the heavy load of my loss, I have developed certain strategies. I make a point of performing preparatory rituals and concocting liquids of such a kind that, when they are drunk, the memory is sharpened and stimulated. Long periods of waiting, either continuous or intermittent, in the day's early hours, all in front of blank sheets of paper; at times this involved bouts of sleeping, at others staying awake, so much so that you might imagine I were drunk even though I was not. All these measures and others like them have had as a goal a quest for vision and inspirational thoughts, for a means of recreating my missing manuscript-if only bit by bit or segments in place of the whole thing. These strategies of mine may not have borne fruit as yet, but they have become a kind of drug that I can take in order to bring some relief, albeit a little, to my wounded heart, to let me utter some sighs of regret with the hope perhaps of taking a deep breath once in a while and feeling some sense of release.