1.19.10
Then God decreed that the sea grow calm and the weather turn fair, and after some hours the Alexandrine shore appeared, and the same man came and gave him the good news that land was in sight, so he arose stoically, washed his face, and changed his clothes. When they left the ship, the Fāriyāq was ahead of them all, and no sooner had he set foot on the ground than he picked up some pebbles from its surface and swallowed them, declaring, “This is my mother and to it I return. On it I was born and on it I shall die.” Then he made his way to a Bag-man who was in the city and presented him with his letter of recommendation from the other Bag-man, and he stayed with him while waiting for a ship leaving for the island. Let us then congratulate him for arriving safe and sound, and let us present a memorandum to the Princely See and Royal Presence, His Excellency the Patriarch of the Maronite Sect, whoever he may be, after which we shall turn our attention for a short while to the Market-men and the Bag-men and set out the differences between them.
A M
EMORANDUM FROM THE
W
RITER OF
T
HESE
C
HARACTERS
1.19.11
The Fāriyāq now has escaped your lands and slipped through your hands. He’s blown a raspberry in all your faces, and at your threats his pulse no longer races. All that remains is for me to remind you of the injustice, tyranny, oppression, and aggression that you carried to such great lengths against my brother, the late Asʿad,314 to wit, that you held him in your prison at your official abode at Qannūbīn315 for around six years and that, after you had forced him to taste every form of humiliation, degradation, misery, and distress in the small cell that was his sole abode — for he never left it for a place where he could see the light or breathe the air that the Creator has bestowed on the innocent and guilty alike among his creatures, — he gave up the ghost. Your only reason for imprisoning him was that he was at odds with you over matters that call for neither punishment nor reproach. You had no authority over him, either religious or civil. As for the religious aspect, Christ and his apostles never ordered the imprisonment of those who disagreed with what they had to say; they merely held themselves aloof from them. If the Christian religion had adopted from its beginnings the same vicious cruelty that characterizes you now — you, the shepherds of the lost and guides of the erring — no one would have believed in it, for no one converts unless he believes that the religion he is adopting is better than the one he is abandoning. Everyone in the world knows that there is nothing good to be said for imprisoning, starving, humiliating, threatening, discomforting, and reviling people, not to mention that Christ and his apostles acknowledged the authority and government of the sovereign and never themselves did more than urge on people the noble virtues and command them to piety, modesty, peace, endurance of suffering, and mildness of behavior, which are the goals of every religion known to man.
1.19.12
And as for the civil aspect, given that my brother Asʿad did nothing reprehensible and committed no crime against his neighbor or his emir, or against the state — which, if he had done so, would have required that he be tried before the legal authorities — the patriarch’s maltreatment of him is no less than maltreatment of the person of Our Lord the Sultan, whose slaves we all are and to whose safekeeping and rule we all appeal. All of us are equal in rights, for the patriarch has no right to take a single silver coin from my house by force; how much less then is his right to take a life by force! Even if we concede that my brother debated and argued over religion and said that you were misguided, it was not yours to kill him for that reason. If you acknowledged his status as a scholar and feared the consequences of his activities, you ought to have pulled apart his evidence and refuted his arguments orally or in writing; if not, you should have banished him from the country, as he asked you to do. Instead, though, you persisted in your ferocious punishment in order to make an example of him and claimed that the fact that he once escaped from your abode in an attempt to save himself exacerbated his crime and increased his guilt, meaning that your own tyranny and injustice toward him should also be increased.
1.19.13
Do I hear you, you confederacy of cretins, claiming that to destroy one soul for the salvation of many is a praiseworthy act that should be encouraged? If you had any insight or good sense you would know that persecution and compulsion only increase the persecuted in his love of that for which he is persecuted, especially if he is convinced in his heart that he is right and his tormentor wrong, or that he is blessed with knowledge and virtue while the other is innocent of them. The fact is, you are without either religious or political understanding and have exposed your honor to defamation and blackening and your reputation to revulsion and condemnation for as long as sky is sky and earth earth, and that my brother’s reputation, God have mercy upon him, though he be dead, will never die. Whenever anyone of good sense and insight mentions him, he will mention along with him your misdeeds, your atrocities, your excesses, your ignorance, and your ugliness. I swear, he drove more of your blood-thirsty community out of their allegiance to you by his death than he would have done if he had remained alive — suffice it to mention the Most Honorable Khawājā Mikhāʾīl Mishāqah316 and other persons of wealth and capability.
1.19.14
Did you feel no compassion, you bull-necked thugs, for his youth and beauty? Were your hard hearts not affected by the pallor of his face when you kept him from the light and air, when his firm and tender body withered and nothing was left of his well-turned physique but skin and bones (and even then you were too stingy to release him with just those)? Did you take no pity on him when you saw that his fingertips had been worn away for want of those very things to which the al-Aṣmaʿī in your monastery had unfettered access? How many a time, by God, did they take up the pen only to use it to write out what kings wished to hear and how many a time, by God, did he ascend the pulpit and preach to you extemporaneously, the sweat pouring from that shining brow, and how hard did his listeners weep as they remembered their sins and determined to renounce them! How many a time did he write and translate insipid books for you and instruct your stupid monks and bring them out from the shadows of their ignorance! Did not the modest decency that shone from his face put your own impudent countenances to shame — he who was more bashful than the most demure of women? Or his dearness to his family, the honor paid him by emirs, the love shown him by lords and commoners? His unblemished purity and honorable morals? The elegance of his language, the good cheer he brought to those he was with? Is one such as him to be imprisoned for six years, humiliated, punished, and to die (and God alone knows of what he died)?
1.19.15
How do you explain that neither the French churches nor the Austrian nor the English nor the Muscovite nor the Greek Orthodox nor the Greek Catholic nor the Coptic nor the Jacobite nor the Nestorian nor the Druze nor the Mutawālīs317 nor the Anṣārīs318 nor the Jews perform such abominable and vile acts as are performed by the Maronite church? Or is it alone possessed of the truth, while all others are in error? Do you not claim that the King of France is the protector and defender of religion? Yet at the same time, the Catholic citizens of his kingdom continue to print books condemning the vices, shameful deeds, stupidity, obscenity, lustfulness, and atheism of the leaders of their church. Some of them, indeed, have written histories devoted to the immorality, depravity, and bad conduct of the popes, as of their denial of the truth of the immortality of the soul, of divine inspiration, and of the divinity of Christ.319