A Muslim Suicide

10

171 10 So now here I am living with my bride under a single roof, like butter and honey. We have been spending many wonderful hours in each other’s company, chatting and sharing the sweet delights of married life. As a way of adjusting to life in my new home with all its facilities, I take the trouble to talk to the house staff. I often go up to a room on the roof where on one side I can look out at the sea and on the other at the mountain with its meadows and forests. I have also been taking a look at the archive of my late father-in-law, its shelves loaded with works on accounting, commentary, and law. The roof room and the archive are connected by a staircase that leads to the prayer-cell that my beloved promised to provide for me. The whole thing was built in short order, and, in spite of its small size (as I had requested), it nevertheless provides its occupant with an ideal space for seclusion and profound cogitation, the very acme of serenity and peace: no more furniture than necessary, windows open to the sky, and luxuriant gardens from which, night and day, it receives just enough light. In leisure moments I took to searching the archive’s library for useful works that I had not read before and organizing in my mind sections of a new book whose purposes and contents I had been carrying around in my head ever since my period in Spain had come to an end. I decided to put it into written form and polish it, all under a title that meant a great deal to me: Escape of the Gnostic. For me the word escape [budd] implies a number of notions: a line of poetry, the fulcrum of a millstone, a firm principle, or you might even say that it and its synonyms all blend together to produce a single meaning, namely the loftiest ideal, with no equal, the first and last, the perceived and hidden; the only path toward it involves uncovering its signs and secrets in the persona of an ever-striving humanity. Whoever knows himself knows his Lord, as the prophetic hadith puts 172 | Bensalem Himmich it. The “gnostic” of my title is one who realizes that adjuncts and additions are mere coincidentals, or rather fantasies. Time consists of periods and moments; place mere sectors and partialities; and all of them collapse into something inferior to both unity and genuine cognizance. The gnostic person is someone who realizes all this and has experienced it, as a consequence of which he has demolished the normal icons of habit and instead adopted a posture whereby he strives for the essence of essences, the quality of qualities, and the perfection of perfections . That is all made possible by virtue of a lofty and cogent motivational force that such a gnostic can foster and strengthen by dint of his own efforts and abilities . By my own life, here resides the true significance of the struggle, one aimed at achieving a conception of divine abundance, an experience of the ever-present opaque eternity, a conjunction of the possible and Necessary Existent, one that results in a transcendent state through a permanent residence beneath its glory and beauty. Is it not God Himself who has said, “To Him shall you be gathered”; “Verily to your Lord is the return”; “Verily with your Lord is the final resort.” If you are able to comprehend this clear divine discourse, then my commentary will be of help to you; if I become too complex, then it will make things easier. O God, within the welcoming folds of my beloved’s house, let me focus my mind on You, and with all willingness and delight! O God, aid me and my beloved so that I can turn my self, my nature, and my situation entirely toward You! O God, give me a glimpse of the heavenly light of Your face in the beauty of my wife, she who is the means of my elevation and proximity to Your presence and Your kingdom. Amen! As the second month of my marriage began, I asked my wife’s permission to go up the mountain to the zawiya to collect my books and bring them back to my new prayer-cell. Thus it was that Bilal al-Sikkit accompanied me on the trip along with two mules. Putting the...