‘8. When the female (infant)
Buried alive, is questioned—
9. For what crime
she was killed;
(‘There have been,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘Arabs who buried their baby daughters alive; they didn’t want to have to provide for them or be burdened with protecting their honour. These are only words and one can speak them but if one thinks of the actuality then one must look at what is intolerable to look at. I am thinking now of your Abraham and Isaac who are Ibrahim and Isma’il in Muslim tradition. Never before have I dared to say aloud these words that I am going to say now: the fundamental flaw in God is that He will say that He requires the sacrifice of Isaac/Isma’il; the fundamental flaw in man is that he takes his knife in hand to do God’s bidding. This story of God’s testing of Abraham has become an easy thing to read, an easy thing to say in words, an easy point of reference; but if you let it become real in your mind then you have to look at a boy tied hand and foot by his father whose knife is at his throat. Think of it! There lies the boy trussed like an animal, he lies on the firewood that he has borne on his own back to the place where the fire will consume him when he has been murdered by his father whom he has trusted all his life. Murder in the name of God! And Abraham has no hesitation! He is completely willing to murder his son because a voice in his head has made him mad. If I had ever in my life come upon such a scene, if I had ever come upon such a madman with his knife upraised over a child I should have killed that man before God had a chance to speak again. Wouldn’t you? See it in your mind! Be that father and look down into the eyes of your son while you raise the knife. What are you at this moment that is one moment away from murder, from human sacrifice? Will you call yourself the hand of God? Why should Yaghi-Siyan not call himself the hand of God a hundred times over? Word of God! If God is everywhere then every word is the Word of God, Yaghi-Siyan’s word as well as Muhammad’s. Wait, listen to more of this Sura of the folding-up:)
‘10. When the Scrolls
Are laid open;
11. When the World on High
Is unveiled:
12. When the Blazing Fire
Is kindled to fierce heat;
13. And when the Garden
Is brought near;—
14. (Then) shall each soul know
What it has put forward.
‘Here I have been quoting verses of the Holy Quran and I cannot even properly call myself a Muslim,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘I don’t believe in a Last Day that will be different from any other day; I believe that the Last Day is every day; I believe that the Garden and the Fire are in each of us every day of our lives and we are in one or the other or somewhere between the two depending on our actions. I believe that every soul knows very well from one moment to another what it has put forward — do I not know what I have put forward with this Hidden Lion that I have called up? Do I not know how far I have overstepped the bounds of what is permitted in one’s approach to the Unseen?’
‘Why do you keep saying “I”?’ I said. ‘Whatever has been done with Hidden Lion has been done by the two of us; was it not I who drew the first unit of the pattern on the stone?’
‘Ah!’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘You see! You are trying to share the burden of blame because you know that there is a burden of blame!’
I thought of Hidden Lion, of its tawny triangles, its red and its black but as soon as the triangles came into my mind they were covered first by blood then by the terrified feet of the hundred chosen for death by Firouz. What should I have done in his place? Useless to ask such a question — he did what he did that day, I did what I did, each of us in our own place. It is so very, very easy to live one day longer than one ought.
‘You don’t deny what I have just said,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘you don’t deny that we have overstepped the bounds.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t deny it. Everywhere there are patterns of tiles to be seen, most of them far more ambitious in their complexity and finish than Hidden Lion, but I think one may say that they were done in innocence.’
‘They were done without presumption,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘they were done modestly and with no other purpose than that of ornamentation. They were done without intent to observe the Unseen, without intent to violate its privacy; they harmlessly adorn buildings, walls, floors; they were not made for the sole purpose of seeing the Unseeable. We have done that which ought not to be done although you are not to blame; it was I who asked you to make the design, I with my stupid ideas of sulphur and mercury and triangles, I with my greed for the Unseen. And yesterday the Unseen said, “Do you still pursue me with your tiles? I have shown you, have I net, twisting serpents, moving pyramids, disappearing lions; I have shown you the surge of Me that is like a river of power, and still you crave more; very well then, I will show you more.”’
‘Can you really believe that?’ I said. ‘Can you really believe that Hidden Lion has called down this terrible thing upon itself?’ Think,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘what we have done. We have made a provocation and an insult. We have used the names of God and the habitation of the Unseen and we have made a good-luck charm with our tiles. We have made an idolatry for ignorant people to whom prayer is only a kind of begging, we have put the rubbish of the seeable and the touchable between them and Allah, we have sped them on their way from any hope of the Garden, we have pointed them towards the Fire.’
‘Have we truly done so much evil?’ I said.
‘Only consider,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘if the pattern of Hidden Lion is contiguous with infinity (and there can be no doubt of this, in our very souls we know it to be so) then everything about it is contiguous with infinity. If our action in making it was wrong (and we both know now that it was) then that wrong action is contiguous with infinity; its connexions extend to things and places we know not of, we cannot imagine the vastness of the web to which Hidden Lion is an entrance and a passageway.’
‘All things being contiguous,’ I said, ‘Hidden Lion can as well be an effect as a cause; it cannot be proved to be the beginning of a chain of evil.’
‘Sophistry cannot help us,’ said Bembel Rudzuk; ‘every action has its consequences and the consequences of the action of making Hidden Lion cannot be without evil.’
At that moment from the minaret there came the call of the mu’addhin. Bembel Rudzuk began his prayers and I drew a little apart from him and stood looking out over the city that I seemed to be approaching by sea in the grey dawn. Again I saw in my mind the terrified feet of the Syrian and Armenian Christians on the tawny, the red, and the black triangles and I wondered in what way any of what was happening could possibly have been willed by God in any of His or Its aspects. How far back would one have to go to find the cause from which this effect had arisen? All things being contiguous, one was driven back to the original bursting into being of the universe: immediately from that moment existed the possibility of everything that could possibly happen on this earth. From that moment two and two made four, and all else that could be until the end of time already was; on one or another, on a few or on many of the planes of virtuality and actuality that might at some time intersect, everything that could be already was. The choices that would have to be made by people who would not be born for thousands of millions of years were already forming with the galaxies and the nebulae, with the Virgin and the Lion. As far as I could see, the will of God was simply that everything possible would indeed be possible. Within that limitation the choice was ours, the reckoning His. And He was in us, one couldn’t get away from Him, that was the Fire of it, that was the Garden of it, at the centre of every soul and contiguous with infinity. The possibilities of choice were beyond all calculation and the probability of wrong choice so high as to be almost a certainty. Only God could think of such a game, and only humans would bother to play it.