"Muslim". Zahia Rahmani
Perhaps they omitted some stories as well. What exactly constitutes the divine word will be argued over forever, it is said, beneath the watchful eye of God and his Prophet. They made the Quran, the holy book of “Muslims.” And Arabic, as a language, was reborn. It would be the language of this adventure. The language of Islam.
Reading the Quran, reading this book that defies comprehension, you will understand that it came to us through foreign languages, those of the Old and New Testament. By taking up the spoken word of others, by taking up its stories, replacing certain versions with others, and in passing them on to people who were ignorant of them, to people who didn’t speak Arabic, to people who had never learned to read, Islam opened up the world for them for a while. An endless story. Those who didn’t speak Arabic, and those Arabs unfamiliar with the history of monotheism, should they have refused this story? Those who told the stories of the Quran to the illiterate were intermediaries, translators. And, since then, it was not in Arabic at all that millions of men and women heard the message of the Prophet. Islam wasn’t limited to just one language. And so long as time remains, mothers indoctrinated by the one true word will continue to raise their children through the grace of words. The book of history has been opened wider.
The stories from Arabic enriched my language as well as many others. And it was for this gift, this gift of history, and its connection to languages, that Arabic was for a long time revered. To reprise a book, to speak of its origins, to speak of what it contains, to speak of its language and its varieties, that is to define that book. And not to read the Quran in that way is to admit that it has won. The ignorance of our times is unbridled, but languages had known how to find instruction in Islam. In its linguistic tradition, they had a treasure.
I couldn’t tell this to anyone in France, I was a child. I lived inside a language that I couldn’t pass on. It was like in the story of Miriam where the storyteller can’t stop until all of the listeners have fallen asleep. I didn’t know how to control it. If I approached it a thousand times, it would unravel each time. On the Night of the Elephant I didn’t run away, I entered into them. Into their stomachs. What could I have believed in? That I could defeat them by myself? Defeat whom? Could I make them retreat? Change the course of history? I left everything behind—Muhammad, the elephants, and my family. The elephants were still there, approaching the city, tramping toward a battle that would kill them all. The Night of the Elephants was the birth of Muslims. I didn’t want to be one. And in France, I was taken to be an Arab, even though I wasn’t, even though their language and ways were foreign to me. I left them, left them behind in my cube-like room. I separated myself from them.
I REMEMBER HOW ONE TIME when I was a teenager I looked at a poster advertising a circus and its special elephant act. And when they came into the ring, I wasn’t disappointed. Their imposing size impressed me. There were quite a few of them, one following closely upon the next, with their children behind them. But as soon as the trainer had arranged them in a circle and made them sit on their haunches, I grew overwhelmed by anger and disgust. Seeing them sitting on their rear ends with their front feet raised to greet the audience made me sad. I was ashamed. I became emotional. I know this confession is ridiculous. I left the elephants, and I left the circus. It was humiliating what they were doing to them. For these marvelous beasts that had brought so much to the world, that had worn the world on their shoulders, was there nothing left other than this as a means to live?
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I was told I was a child of Adam and Eve. That I was sister to Cain and Abel. That I was the daughter of the son of Abraham. But as for the sons of Abraham, both of them circumcised, I didn’t know which he had taken to Mount Moriah—his son born of Hagar, the slave, or his son Isaac, born of Sarah. I didn’t know which son had been elected. The first text said Isaac. But the Quran, meant to overturn everything that preceded it, corrected this history by omitting the name of the sacrificed. So which lineage was mine? I guarded this enigma as though it were a treasure. So they had erased a name. Perhaps they didn’t dare to put another in its place. Was it from the one, or the other, or perhaps from both, that a great nation came into being?
Sarah told Abraham to get rid of Hagar and her son. Abraham was upset, but he did what she said. He gave Hagar some bread and water. She put her son on her shoulders and set out for the desert. Just as she was about to collapse, she happened upon a spring. She put her son down. And then history tells us nothing about her. Nothing. Her life stops. The boy finds himself without a father, and Hagar disappears into the shadows of legend. So perhaps I was a child of Ishmael, the abandoned child, the child born of a cast-off slave. Of a mother expunged from the record. Forgotten. Of a mother cut off from her progeny. I take this to be my lineage. And even if they want to pen me in by calling me what they do, it’s only through the life of Ishmael, the abandoned child, that I escaped the harsh hand of the father. “Abraham, Abraham,” the Angel of the Lord could have said, “Why did you abandon him?” The record never mentions him again. I come from a fatherless family. Where should I go?
I come from a line of wounded innocence. Like so many others, it was war that chased me from my country. The generals know that hope that inspires soldiers. Knowing that, they set fear against hope. And it’s enough to pretend to be an executioner to actually become one. So they live on. Since then, men have ruled through contempt, lies, and terror in the land where I was born. I would have to have lived there. There was no hope there. When there’s no more hope, you have to flee. And France, which was the partial cause of this horror, couldn’t turn me away.
Coming to France was my father’s fault. He’d been banished from Algeria. Banished like so many others had been, and like so many more would be. Banished, stripped of a name, a soldier of the colonial army, a traitor to his country. They were the banished, the silent participants of the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria, Iraq, and elsewhere, the comrades of the losers of these wars, waiting to drag their shame home. That was my father. He was one. Otherwise, he wasn’t my father. He was only the man who had impregnated my mother. I never knew what to call him. I never had a father. The war had stolen mine. I know I’m alive. Not him. He never seemed alive. You could say that he was the living dead. He had never had his own life. He was born dead. A man whose human dignity had been stolen from him when just a child. It was never given back. But like all those who are dead but live on, he never became anything. He couldn’t. Stricken by the memory of the crimes that had been forced upon him, he became nothing. He didn’t want to be anything. He was nothing. Nothing. He committed suicide. It was in this act that he’d expressed his protest. I didn’t have a father, or a country, or a religion. I thought that these struggles, made newly mine upon his death, would have been enough to justify, and serve as bond for, my life on this new continent—Europe—that was now my own. But, no. The very smallest thing drew their suspicions. They remade me as they wished. They gave me a father, a religion, and a way of life. And a Name. “Muslim”—a name without end. I had a way out. I was given the Name. Ever watchful, confused, I fled in front of them.
I KNEW ABOUT THE NAME from the age of ten. It was late, and, as usual, I wanted to watch television. But it was forbidden for many reasons, and so it was in secret, at night, that I gave myself over to it, to its images and its voices. The film Night and Fog said, “There were nine million men and women killed. Killed because they were …” Here, in this country. For the first time I realized the extent of the horror. For me, it wasn’t just Germany but France, where I was living, as well. I thought about what this place was, and I listened, and I understood that in the vast expanse of Europe, some people took others and led them to the slaughterhouse and, here, where I was living, they took others and led them to their deaths, and behind this I heard one phrase, “We don’t want them, we don’t want others, not them …”
They had just one Name. One Name. And no one suspected the evil inside them, no one bore witness to this evil, the thing that they were referring to when they said, “We don’t want them, we don’t want others, not him, not her, not them.” And this always brought to mind the scenes of trains leaving for Poland.
“The most wretched of the excuses that intellectuals have come up with for executioners—and in the last decade they have not been idle in finding them—is that it was an error in the victim’s thinking that led them to being murdered.”1
In that, there was one phrase that struck me. One phrase