A Bus, a Ship and Ghassan Kanafani

I harbor two secret jealousies of America and have been careful not to reveal them, but maybe the time has come to uncover them once I’ve written a bit about their negative drawbacks.

These jealousies began in my early days in America. I closed in on the irrational feeling: “I should have this … for us … and not just for them.” I felt as if I were a father being robbed of his own child, finally getting to see him only after he had grown up to be a young man at the center of attention.

I was, to be exact, like the stunning hero of Ghassan Kanafani’s “Return to Haifa,” wherein a man and his wife inadvertently leave their young child, Khaled, in their house, but then cannot return to him when life forces them suddenly far from all of Haifa. They return after two decades to find that their young son is no longer their child. He has become the son of a Jewish woman from Poland who took over the house along with the baby. The parents return to Haifa after 20 years only to find that Khaled is no longer Khaled and that he has been renamed Dave.

I felt just like them. My feelings were choking me — this had to be mine. Yes, it could be theirs, but it also needs to be ours, should have been ours.

I am not talking about the height of a building; that is something easy to import. I am not talking about luxury cars or other modern products, for in some Islamic countries of ours the numbers of these exceed those found even in Western countries (imported from them, of course)! All of these things make up a purely ephemeral skin and their essences will not be altered with time.

I am talking about what made these buildings possible, what made these products a reality, irrespective of the fact that this architecture was built on false premises and the fact that most of these products do not meet actual needs to the same extent that they fill the pockets of the upper class that controls them.

In my first days in the capital, Washington, D.C., I sought out places, behaving as if I were a child on the first day of school — with the difference that my mother was not waiting at the door in case of an emergency! I didn’t know anyone in Washington and I memorized the colors of the metro lines that I needed to catch by heart as well as the stop where I needed to get off and the number of the bus that I needed to wait for.

There in West Falls Church under the drops of rain, while I ran to catch the five o’clock train so that I didn’t have to wait another whole hour, I found for the first time the outlook that provoked my jealousy, ignominy and distress. I found that the people had stood in line one after the other just as if they were boarding the bus, even though the bus had not arrived yet. When someone new arrived, they stood beside the others who had arrived beforehand in amazingly simultaneous regularity.

Believe me, I became depressed on that sight. I stood behind them carrying unreasonably great jealousy on my back, on behalf of my whole nation and myself. I wanted to shout to them and us: There is a big mistake here! This line should have been ours! We should have taught it to them! We should not be standing in front of it stunned and humiliated! Why? Because our religion is the only religion in the world whose book, descended from above, contains a Surah called “The Row.” Can anything lay the foundations for a system in its clearest and simplest manifestations more than a Surah that talks about the Row? Do I hear the grumblers say, “This is reserved for fighting only?” In reality, if this idea has become manifest duty in reference to fighting, where general chaos reigns, then it should be the first recourse at other times. If God loves those who stand in line to kill in his name as if they were cement buildings, then does he not, likewise, love those who build columns in his righteous path also? And to those that live according to his path, and teach and learn according to his path: Shouldn’t everything we do in life be according to his path? Shouldn’t our lives be an ongoing effort to stay on his righteous path? Isn’t the line the ideal form of this as Almighty God decreed it?

The Row was not only a military plan. It would not originally have been possible for a plan like this to succeed if it had been restricted to the battlefields alone. It wouldn’t even succeed on the battlefield at all unless a society already trained to form lines in daily life had come first. Our societies have fought for all-encompassing training in the formation of lines and rows and the process of lining up ever since prayer became one of the duties and pillars that uphold society. Can we imagine training for order through a more appropriate way than prayer, which involves masses of people organizing themselves automatically in rows without any shoving or disturbance? It comes as naturally as breathing, without any planning or premeditation.

But when we look at what we have now, we come to realize a difference between us and them that is painful and humiliating — and these were precisely my feelings the day I found the line forming automatically, one by one, even though the bus had not come yet.

I stopped, burdened by my nakedness, completely confident that no one had noticed what was going on in my mind. I was just another melancholy individual in the herd of people returning from work at the peak of the economic recession, the mask of depression rather commonplace.

In the few minutes before the bus arrived, I reminded myself of the state of the lines for waiting in most of our countries. The vast gap between their line and our line did not sadden me as much as I was saddened by the vast gap dividing us from what we should now have, regardless of the conditions of others.

I reminded myself of the employee, for example, that comes vapidly to his vague appointments without understanding or expectation, shoving the other passengers over a spot as he is followed by the doom and gloom around him. I reminded myself of the tea merchant, the sandwich seller, the officer next to the door of the government institution where there is always someone who knows someone else who is ready to perform a service for you against the Almighty.

I reminded myself of the large numbers coming in to cut through the line, some coming hours after you and leaving victoriously and safely, cloudlike, hours before you. I reminded myself of the employee knocking down people waiting in line and the continuous trickery on the part of some to skip in front of someone else. I remember the sad ones coming to wait, wearing something fit for a wedding reception. I remind myself of the employee who decided to be surprisingly chivalrous at a critical moment and of the one saying that he arrived before that person. And another having sympathy for those with children and a husband waiting at the house who could not endure waiting for nourishment.

It started to drizzle, as if taking part in my sadness and depression. Indeed, it seemed as if the rain were a cover on top of it.

I remembered the words of Sayyab: “When came the night for leaving, how many tears we shed, / We made the rain the pretext, not wishing to be blamed.” Yes, the rain is useful at night. It helps one face the facts for a moment, discover the painful differences between what should be and what really is.

Every time that I came across people waiting in line for the bus, I recalled the bitterness of that first meeting and the contradictions between reality and the way things should be as well as the heartbreak of what was innately ours and nevertheless became foreign to us.

I do not deny that this row is a great seduction, like others that can capture the heart of a foreigner going to America to study, for example, who quickly enough comes to adopt its ways, but it is the most dangerous seduction, in my opinion. Other temptations that we are warned of are real, no doubt, but these trifling things and their drawbacks have already invaded our own homes — the quantity being less, maybe, but they are there. As for the seduction of the line and the system, one cannot say it was imported because the treaties and contracts guaranteeing it are unwritten and globalization only permits the export of what is consumable and transient.

This phenomenon — and its sister, which I shall discuss at another time — is a temptation born in America.

Why am I not seduced, then? How do I survive the temptations of the line and the system?

The keenness for order in America — embodied in the automatic line that I am speaking about — is very clear up close. But for the eye that watches events directly, that is part of these events, that steps back from the abstract and tries to consider America as a whole with a comprehensive view that does not stumble around in the details but encompasses everything, that eye perceives that it is no longer really a system, but perhaps the opposite of that.

How could the opposite of order reign in America? The system of organization and automatically stopping in lines only happens in America in matters that would otherwise seem offensive without direct orderliness. I mean “direct” in the literal sense. That is, when the lack of orderliness leads to pushing and injury to those struggling against one another. It is the social contract that Western society was built on, the contract that sanctifies personal freedom and the concept of individualism and yet at the same time regulates individual freedoms for those brought up in this society.

Some of you will say, “What is the problem with that?” Is it not the same concept as “no harm, no foul”? In the Islamic sense, this familiar idea is first focused on final results: “Nay but the works of the final seals.” Second of all, the Western worldview regards individualism as one of the most important developments of their civilization (truly in certain aspects only), whereas the Islamic understanding of this focuses on the people: “What emanates from the people stays on the earth” (Thunder 17). The people, not the individual or a group of people. Gain and loss are tied to the group in Islam, not to the individual, whose age may not allow him to distinguish between personal gains and losses, causing him to lose sight of the effects of his actions on society as a whole.

An example of this — and it may seem a repetitive example, but it is repeated so often due to its widespread occurrence — is the affair. Free sexual relationships may not seem damaging from the western point of view. What harm is there as long as the two individuals consent to the relations willingly and not forcibly? Or as the famous Arab writer wrote through the tongue of one of her heroines: What harm does it cause the man if I have been with 100 men before him, as long as I have washed myself afterwards? Such healthy protection is what makes the matter innocuous. But behold the immediate danger that, in fact, sexual freedom involves far more danger than STDs. The other effects of sexual liberation do not appear suddenly like a skin rash or blisters or infections, but slowly and gradually through ways that people are not conscious of: the high rates of divorce, illegitimate childbearing, families without a father, the collapse of marriage as an institution and gradually, the collapse of the family as an institution, with bastard children, the raising of impure children and custody deals that take the children all over the place.

This effect is long-term and cumulative and does not pertain to a particular individual, but concerns the people as a unit. It concerns each one of them even if they do not participate in the matter personally. Everyone is a partner in the crime of social dissolution because society, as the messenger Mohammed peace be upon him told us, “is the ship that either keeps everyone afloat, or the ship that everyone drowns in … and no one can be neutral while in it.” Really, it is like the tribe that is held by a ship, some up above and others cooped up below. As for those who are in the hold, if they are not allowed to pass by those above them for fresh air, then they will be in danger of perishing. Indeed, their share has been violated; their safety has been breached, but if they take each other by the hand, then they will survive.

It is possible for anyone on the ship, according to the Western way of thinking, to nail screws into the ship in order to hang pictures in his corner of the ship — this is his personal freedom in his private corner and there is no clear harm in what he is doing. But the damage, in the Islamic frame of mind, is what this action brings on in the long-term as a result of the small nails that seem harmless at first glance. Their effect on the group can be like an axe, damaging the ship and letting water leak inside. There is no neutrality here. You cannot be neutral toward the small screws, even if you do not see their immediate damage.

Americans see the big pickaxe and clearly and skillfully avoid it, yet lack interest in the effects of the small screws. Therefore, you see them conscientiously careful to avoid the pushing and shoving while waiting for the bus and perfectly keen on stopping in an orderly line before its arrival because the pushing and shoving will harm them and may delay them, but they are not regular and committed in the same way in their personal relationships. They do not stop in a line there because the damage there does not appear direct and close at hand. Rather, it accumulates extraordinarily slowly.

I am not talking about Americans’ flaws here in order to praise our virtues, which are on the edge of extinction for what happened to us was ironic and contradictory. We completely lost the tenet of “the line” that the Quran embedded in us during the first generation. We lost it completely when it comes to waiting for a bus or other kinds of waiting. We have almost lost it to history even in our personal relationships in the midst of this fever of Westernization that seeps under our skins.

Despite this, we possess a better opportunity than Said, the hero of Kanafani’s novel, who did not have the ability to turn back the hands of time when his son had grown up and his name become “Dave.”

As for us, we still have to swim against the current and return to our religious texts. We have become Dave, obliterated in one way or other; Dave, who was brought up contrary to his values and his fixed star and became Dave instead of remaining Khaled.

But there, in view of these texts, it is possible to rediscover our identities and breathe new life again.

Marching against the current to reach the texts will not be easy, for within the current there are currently misunderstandings piled one on top of the other, boding ill for their preservation. And within the current there are weak interpretations that have become a negative part of the collective conscience. And there is also a stormy current of Westernization sweeping everything away.

But the other option is more difficult. That is, for the coming bus to run us over, that Polish bus that turned Khaled into Dave.