Ajil-e Moshkel Gosha

Once a month for as long as I can remember, my mother did her ritual “Ajil Moshkel Gosha.” Now: what in the world is that? Ajil means “mixed nuts.” Moshkel Gosha means “resolving problems.” So what does that mean: the Mixed Nuts of Resolving Problems? The practice that was exceedingly dear to my mother involves purchasing a mixture of nuts and dried fruits we call Ajil, then ritually cleaning them and distributing them among the poor in fulfillment of a vow, a Nazr, a wish. The practice has to be done regularly – once a month – and as the cleaning is done, my mother had to tell us the story of the “Pir Mard-e Khar-kan/the thorn-gathering old man,” in which the significance of this practice is highlighted. The story was about an old man who collected thorns from deserts and sold them for a living, as he and his wife and daughters lived in despair and poverty. There are varied and detailed versions of the story, but the short version of what my mother used to tell us involves “Yek Mard-e Ruhani/an enlightened man” appearing to the old man one day and giving him some pebbles, which he brings home, and his wife telling him to put them under the downspout in their courtyard. They go to sleep and suddenly in the middle of the night their house becomes full of light – they think there is a fire, but they soon discover all those pebbles have turned into precious shining jewels – the legendary Gohar-e Shab-cheraq/jewel that shines at night. The following day the old man sells one of those jewels and becomes a successful and rich merchant, at which point the same Mard-e Nurani appears to him in dream and tells him in gratitude that he must regularly prepare Ajil and distribute it among the poor; they happily oblige. Finally, the old man is so rich and successful that he decides to go to perform his Hajj pilgrimage, and while he is away his family forgets their ritual and regular Ajil obligations. Suddenly their fortune changes, and the daughter of the governor who was a friend of one of the old man’s daughters suspects her of stealing her jewelry and they are all put in jail. The man comes back from Hajj and sees no one is there to welcome him. He ultimately finds out his family had forgotten to do the Ajil, so he does the Ajil and their fortune goes back to where it was. It turns out a crow had stolen the piece of jewelry that belonged to the governor’s daughter. The moral of the story is to do the Ajil and attend to the poor regularly and be thankful for what you have so that all your wishes come true.

What was extraordinary about this story is not its simple outline but the conflation of its simplicity and the ritual repetition with which my mother told us the story of the thorn-gathering old man every single month for as long as I remember. She would ritually spread a cloth specific for this purpose over the carpet in our living room and place the nuts and dried fruit she had purchased on it, and gently begin to clean and make them easily edible. As she was slowly, gently, and caringly doing so she began to tell us, my brother Aziz and me, this story from beginning to end. Depending on her mood or how busy she was she would either rush through the story or elaborate in more detail. In either case she would not miss any crucial twist of the story. As I grew older I used to watch my mother’s face closely to see whether she told this story hurriedly or with patience. She would always tell it feelingly – she felt for the old man and his predicament; she felt for his wife and her troubles; she cared for their children. When they had the turn in their fortune and became successful my mother was visibly happy and delighted. When their fortune turned and they were in trouble, so were my mother’s facial expressions. She was ultimately delighted visibly that they returned to their ritual chores and thus their fortunes were back to where they had been. Ever since, I have read every story and every novel, in Persian or any other language, with the voice of my mother in my ears, reading me that book feelingly.

Scholars of folklore believe the origin of this story and practice of Nazr/vow is quite ancient and goes back all the way to the Zoroastrian sources of Iranian culture. The archaic disposition and nature of this story I could see evident in the ritual simplicity with which my mother told us the story of the thorn-gathering old man. My younger brother Aziz and I had to sit by her side no matter what we were doing, to watch her clean the Ajil and tell us this story. We were part of the scene – her audience, her congregation, as it were. As soon as we sat in front of her, she began to tell the story like a soothsayer, a priestess, like an ancient magus sharing with her congregation the verses of an aural antiquity. I was as much attached, committed, and mesmerized by this small ritual as I have been with the grandest of all religious rituals of all religions. The Ajil from which we ate and the rest we distributed to the poor was akin to the Eucharist – the body of an evidence otherwise hidden to the naked eye. There was something ancient, archaic, iconic about the event – something compelling, something cosmic about the simplicity of this story that my mother told us. She had another such ritual that consisted of a morsel of bread, herbs, and feta cheese (Loqmeh-ye Nun-o-Panir-o-Sabzi), of which we made some 100 or more pieces and put them in a basket. I would be dispatched around town to distribute them to people. On certain sacred nights for Shi’is, such as Sham-e Ghariban, I would be told to go wearing a black shirt and barefoot, in honor and commemoration of the barefoot in Imam Hossein’s family in the aftermath of the Karbala massacre. Central to the narrative discovery of myself as myself through the hermeneutic act of positing myself as another is embedded in the formal pathways of my childhood recollections of the inner sanctum of my mother’s devotional universe. I am the product of those rituals, practices that have an imperceptive presence in the sinews of my mind, as they do in the annals of a Muslim person, where the contours of being born in a certain geography troubles and ennobles you at one and the same time.

The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing

Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi’s philosophical allegories, or visionary recitals as the eminent French scholar Henry Corbin called them, have been a constant refrain and beloved companion to me throughout the writing of this book. The centrality of his bold and beautiful “I” at the epicenter of these allegories is what has always delighted and mesmerized me. Equally crucial in recollecting my childhood memories has been Suhrawardi’s repeated uses of the state of childhood as an occasion of awakened consciousness. One of the most formidable allegories of Suhrawardi is his Avaz-e Par-e Jibril/The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing. In the guise of late childhood and early adolescent recollections, Suhrawardi’s visionary recital is an allegory of leaving childhood behind and entering the domain of childhood with a renewed understanding. He begins his treatise as an adult philosopher-mystic having a cantankerous argument with an interlocutor before plunging into this allegorical recollection and then quite imperceptivity eases back into answering the philosophical questions with which he started the treatise. He begins the allegory combatively, denouncing a person who had not understood what “the Sound of Gabriel’s Wing” means, and he now wishes to tell that person and the rest of the world the correct answer to that question. Then there is a sudden shift in the prose, away from the critical voice of the philosopher-mystic, fast cut into an allegorical recollection that commands and exacts its own attention. The structure of the narrative is therefore very simple: it begins by raising a crucial mystical question, quickly cuts into a childhood memory, and then eases into answering those questions raised at the beginning of the treatise. If one is philosophically minded, obviously one is drawn into the theoretical issues that Suhrawardi raises – but still paramount in the treatise is the miraculous opening of the allegory when he recalls how at a certain moment in his childhood he departs from the woman’s quarters of his household and enters his father’s quarters, and from there he goes into his father’s khanqah/convent, where he tells us there are two doors. One opens to the rambunctious city and the other to a peaceful prairie full of mystical delights. Let me translate this passage from his original Persian here:

Much of this encounter happens in the course of that visitation with ten wise men, one of whom starts answering his questions and teaching him secrets of the world. For the entirety of the treatise, he now asks the master questions and the master responds. At the end of the treatise, he reenters his father’s convent, closes the door to the idyllic prairie where the ten wise men were gathered, and opens the door to the crowded city and awakens to his state of sobriety. So the whole story can be read (or watched, to be more exact) as a dream or a dreamlike allegory in which one sees him exiting the world of critical consciousness and entering the world of creative imagination, but in the context of those visionary episodes he raises precisely the same philosophical and mystical questions that he had raised in a state of awakened sobriety to which he now offers answers in a prose that is half conscious and half subconscious, half sober and half intoxicated, half virtual and half verbal. Suhrawardi, in other words, alters the state of consciousness in which we are to grasp the meaning of the questions we raise and responses we solicit.

What the colleague who read the initial idea of this book wisely detected in my prose and saw in the interface between the visual and the verbal textures of the project most probably has its roots in precisely Suhrawardi’s philosophical allegories, or visionary recitals, which have both consciously and subconsciously informed the prose of these recollections of my childhood memories. This is also the way the story of my childhood in this book unfolded – with certain theoretical and philosophical questions regarding identity and alterity. The very act of the recollection of my childhood memories began to alter the state of the ensuing prose and recast those questions as I sought to find answers to them. I began this book by raising a certain range of philosophical questions and then plunging into my adult encounters with my childhood memories, and in the course of which visitations, the self same philosophical questions I had raised began to resurface. When I began to think about this book I did not imagine any particular turn to Suhrawardi, nor did I intend for his allegorical treatises to be the model for my thinking. My fascination and engagement with him has been prolonged over the last forty years or so that I have been regularly reading him. So he must have been subconscious to my thinking and as I said earlier, his preoccupation with the knowing subject, the I of his allegorical narratives, was always fascinating to me – but little did I know that, far more than any European philosopher or American critical thinker or any Asian, African, or Latin American philosopher, it was in fact philosophers and mystics like Rumi, Najm al-Din Razi, and Suhrawardi who were keeping me conscious or unconscious company as I began to tell you these stories. This recognition, as my old teacher Philip Rieff used to say, is neither here nor there. It is just a revelation to me – neither surprising nor reassuring. It is what is.

Let me now dwell a bit more closely on the substance of this allegory, in which Suhrawardi’s adolescent persona while in a state of subconscious awakening encounters ten wise men, but only one of them welcomes and talks to him warmly. The young Suhrawardi asks the old wise men who they are and where they come from – they are pure abstract beings and they come from Nakoja-abad/“Nowhereville.” They are tailors, travelers, and they know the Words of God. What follows is a tutorial session between the young Suhrawardi and the one and only old man who speaks to and instructs him, revealing the meaning of what he sees. The key moment in the encounter is when the wise man teaches the narrator the alphabet of God’s Words. Here is a precise translation of what Suhrawardi writes:

There is an obvious allusion here between the old wise man teaching Suhrawardi’s adolescent persona the divine alphabet and the Qur’anic passages in which God teaches Adam the names of things. But the passage, in a mundane and childish way, is also reminiscent of the moment when my older brother Majid sat me down and taught me the English alphabet. There is nothing divine about the English alphabet, nor was my poor late brother Majid anything resembling an old wise man. He died young at the age of fifty-six, his life full of innocent debaucheries. But still the archetypal image suggests itself. The key question at this point, and the whole point of the treatise on “the Sounds of Gabriel’s Wing,” is what exactly is “the Sound of Gabriel’s Wing”? Here is where the framing of my minding my memorial prose on that archetypal model becomes emblematic. Finally in the guise of an inquisitive adolescent, Suhrawardi turns to the wise man and asks him the crucial question. Here is a precise translation of what happens here, for the existing translations from the original Persian are not quite accurate:

Figure E.1 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus/New Angel, (1920)

(Found in the collection of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Now remember the timing of Suhrawardi (1097–1168) when he wrote this treatise. Let’s jump a few hundred years to the Berlin of Walter Benjamin’s time (1892–1940) when he wrote one of his major works, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in which he reflects on the meaning of Angelus Novus/New Angel, the 1920 monoprint by Paul Klee. This is what Walter Benjamin writes:

Let’s now read Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s respective angels together. What do we get? A transhistorical theology of their respective Islam and Judaism where history is seen as the interface either between the left and the right wing of Gabriel or between the front and back of Angelus Novus. Suhrawardi’s Gabriel has one wing turned toward divine truth as its necessary being and one wing tilted toward the shaded history of humanity as his contingent being, while Benjamin’s Angelus Novus has his face facing the troubled past as the storm from paradise is propelling him toward a frightful future. Benjamin’s angel goes backward, Suhrawardi’s sideways. One is teleological, the other contemporaneous. There is no teleology in Suhrawardi and there is no spontaneity in Benjamin’s respective historical theologies. But read together, Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s respective prose become a prophetic vision of history in which reality becomes unreal in the face of a divinity neither of them could ignore. Like the rest of you, I stand in between Suhrawardi’s and Benjamin’s angelology, with all our history and all our humanity fragmented, just like these stories I have shared, between a necessary past we cannot ignore and a contingent future we cannot see.

At the end, after a long tutorial that may have lasted a dream, a lifetime, or an eternity, or just the span of a fleeting thought, Suhrawardi’s young narrator finally awakens as the sun rises in his father’s convent, and the door that had opened to the paradisical abode closes, while the opposite door to the crowded city reopens. As the passersby and merchants begin their traffic in the city, the ten wise men disappear into the prairies. Suhrawardi’s dramatis persona as the narrator regrets the awakening moment, but there is nothing he or Suhrawardi or we could do. The same is with the story of my childhood, a mythic moment, a dream, a lifetime; just a passing thought I thought I could share, an eternity in the making and now forever lost.

The formal structure of this prose you have been kindly reading and its affinity with Walter Benjamin’s iconic reading of Angelus Novus I must now conclude had come to me from Suhrawardi’s visionary recitals – with which I began and with which I now bring my stories to a close. Is it at all surprising that I go back to the voice of my mother’s storytelling, about that thorn-gathering old man, to remember and recite the towering figure of Shahab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi as the foregrounding of my own prose here in this book? Have I not been telling you my own allegories, the songs my mother sang me, the pigeons my father flew, the savings she sewed into my pants to protect me against evil as she sent me off into the world, the toys, the plays, the love, the care, the silent prayers, and the loud poems? Who was Suhrawardi’s mother – or father for that matter? Why do we know so little about the most formative powers and sentiments of our philosophers and mystics? What lullabies did Rumi’s mother sing for him; what toys did his father make for him; what games did he play in the streets of Balkh or even Kunya? Why does Suhrawardi say he left women’s quarters and went into men’s quarters as a prelude to his adulthood; why visit his father’s khanqah/convent and not his mother’s convent? Why do all those ten wise men he meets have no wives but each a son; why not any daughters; and how about ten or twenty wise women? We know nothing or very little about these questions. But still, we have the repeated allegory of childhood in Suhrawardi’s stories. Even though he tells us nothing of his own mother, still there must be a reason he is drawn to his childhood so much as a metaphor. For me, Suhrawardi’s childhood allegories more than anything else remind me of my mother and my two maternal grandmothers – one biological and the other my step-grandmother, Bibi Mar Shekar/Grandma, Mother of Sugar.

Bibi Mar Shekar lived to be more than 100 years we were told. She was so old she had grown new baby teeth, the legend had it. “When I die do not mourn for me,” she told my aunt Batul. The day she died a band of vagabond musicians appeared on our street, walked and sang and played their music toward Kucheh Barikeh, where my Dai Vali’s house was and where Bibi Mar Shekar died. I had no clue where and how and to what parents she was born; what was her story? Whenever I ran into her sitting at the entrance of Kucheh Barikeh she would say “Da Hamid Fetermah/My child, Hamid, get me some peppermint candies!” She was always craving peppermint candies. I would run to Baba Houshang and get her some peppermint candies. “Khoda bi qazat konah/May God protect you from misfortune!” Had she really grown new baby teeth?