Tahar Ben Jelloun - Leaving Tangier

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A Turkish singer of Kurdish and Arab descent, Ibrahim Tatlises (1952–) is one of Turkey’s most prolific recording artists. He has his own television show, has appeared in numerous movies, and has recently enjoyed increasing international success.

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Farid al-Atrash (1915–1974) was one of the idols of twentieth-century Arab popular music. A Syrian composer, singer, and musician, he specialized in romantic love songs and composed the songs and instrumental music for more than thirty Egyptian musical films in which he starred.

More than thirty years after the death of Oum Kalsoum (1904–1975), the ‘Star of the East,’ there is still no one to rival the phenomenal impact and artistry of this Egyptian singer. She began singing at an early age, and through her artistic dedication and the canny management of her career, she turned her truly extraordinary voice into one of the wonders of the Arab world. She sang of the joys and sorrows of love and loss in bravura performances that might last for as long as six hours. During these performances two or three songs would become the means through which, improvising in response to her public’s ecstatic energy, she would create an intense bond with her audience, who repaid her tremendous outpouring of emotion with their undying love.

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In the West, a jinn is usually thought of as a ‘genie in a bottle,’ but in pre-Islamic Arabian mythology and in Islamic culture, the Jinn are a race of supernatural creatures, lower than angels, capable of assuming human or animal form and influencing mankind for good or evil. The Koran says that the Jinn were created by Allah, ‘from the fire of a scorching wind,’ from ‘fire free of smoke’; one connotation of the word jinn is invisibility, and jinns are invisible to humans unless they choose to be seen by them. The Jinn live in their own societies like humans (they eat, marry, and while they may live for hundreds of years, they do die), but, like angels, they have no substance: whole communities can live comfortably on the head of a pin or cozily in a vast desert waste. In the sura devoted to them, ‘El-Jinn,’ a company of jinns listens to the Koran and pledges allegiance to Allah, but some dark jinns, called Ifrit, will work black magic upon people when summoned by a magician or human evildoer.

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Sufism is a wide-ranging tradition of Islamic mysticism practised by many different Sufi orders, all dedicated, through differing practices and beliefs, to the individual experience of divine love through religious ecstasy: by seeking truth and self-knowledge, the human heart strives to heal itself and turn only towards God. Sufism is perhaps most familiar in the West in the person of Jalal ad-Din Mohammed Rumi, the great thirteenth-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, and theologian, whose poetry speaks of the universal longing to reunite with the lost beloved. After his death, Rumi’s followers founded the Mevlevi Order, long known for worshipping through dance and music as the Whirling Dervishes.

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An estimated two million people now converge on Mecca from around the world to perform the rituals of the hajj, which have become closely scripted to safely shepherd massive crowds through these rites. Each pilgrim must circle the Kaaba counterclockwise seven times; ‘kiss’ (point at) the Black Stone; run between the hills of Safa and Marwah; drink from the Zamzam well; stand vigil on the plains of Mount Arafat; gather pebbles at Muzdalifah; and throw them at walls (‘the devil’) in Mina. Manuals go into minute detail about every aspect of the hajj, noting even the prescribed size of the pebbles for the ‘stoning of the devil’ (1–1½ cm). This lapidation reenacts Abraham’s pilgrimage to Mecca, during which the devil appeared to him at three different heaps of stones; each time, at the Archangel Gabriel’s urging, the patriarch pelted the devil with seven stones until he vanished. The defeat of the devil’s attempts to stop the sacrifice of Ishmael also represents the humbling of each pilgrim’s ‘internal despot,’ or selfhood, which allows the worshipper to draw closer to Allah.

TAHAR BEN JELLOUNwas born in 1944 in Fez, Morocco, and emigrated to France in 1961. A novelist, essayist, critic, and poet, he is a regular contributor to Le Monde, La Repubblica, El País , and Panorama . His novels include The Sacred Night (winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt), Corruption , and The Last Friend . Ben Jelloun won the 1994 Prix Maghreb, and in 2004 he won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for This Blinding Absence of Light.

LINDA COVERDALEhas translated more than fifty books, including Tahar Ben Jelloun’s award-winning novel This Blinding Absence of Light . A Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, she won the 2006 Scott Moncrieff Prize and the 1997 and 2008 French-American Foundation Translation Prize. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.