The Theocrat: A Modern Arabic Novel (Modern Arabic Literature)

by Bensalem Himmich

  In the twenty-first—some people say, the twenty-second—year of al-Hakim’s quarter century, the caliph was afflicted with bouts of melancholia that were sometimes severe. He secluded himself and wandered around a great deal. He started wearing sackcloth and stopped bathing. He used to spend the night observing the stars and searching in them for divine inspiration. These habits of his were accentuated by a group of devotees who made their appearance at this time. They called him “the buttress of time and most eloquent of speakers,” and used books and epistles to record behavior traits and segments from his extraordinary and incredible decrees as proofs and signs of his infallibility and divinity. They demanded that he be sanctified and worshiped and secretly won his affection and his support. They started touring Egypt and Syria attracting followers to his cadre of “sages” and establishing pacts, agreements, and obligations of confidentiality and pledge. A series of intrigues and bloody conflicts broke out between this group of Sunnis. As a consequence, the devotee named Akhram was killed. Thereafter Hamzah al-Druzi took their cause with him and fled to the mountains of Syria, shortly before or after the murder of al-Hakim himself. His own followers spoke in terms of his disappearance three nights before the end of the month of Shawal in the year A.H. 411, an event to which we will refer later on.

  2. The slave Mas‘ud, or the Agent for Sodomite Punishment

  He used to take charge of the public order for himself, riding around the markets on a donkey (he never rode anything else). When he found anyone cheating, he ordered a slave whom he always took with him, named Mas‘ud, to sodomise the offender. This is a dire, indeed unprecedented, circumstance.

  Ibn Kathir,

  The Beginning and the Ending

  Al-Hakim used to put on a white woolen garment and ride a tall, blond-colored donkey named Moon. He would make circuits of the markets in Cairo and the old city and take care of matters of public order himself. He always took along with him a tall, bulky slave named Mas‘ud. Whenever he came across anyone cheating people, he ordered Mas‘ud to sodomize the merchant on the spot in his shop, with al-Hakim standing close by and everyone watching till the slave had finished. For this reason Mas‘ud became the butt of jokes in Cairo. People would say: Mas‘ud, go and get him! A poet of the time composed these lines:

  Mas‘ud has a tool that is mighty.

  Long as a papyrus scroll.

  One that cleaves the arses of sinners

  Harder than a pearl on a nail.

  Ibn lyas, Bright Flowers Concerning the Events of the Ages

  This Mas‘ud had been one of the vast number of slaves that made the slave market on the outskirts of Cairo resound with noise. His most recent slave master, Abu Sulayman al-Za‘farani, had categorized him as a tough sell, someone that needed oils and creams to make him attractive to gullible buyers. Mas‘ud’s face was as black as could be and incredibly ugly, so much so that, if we are to believe rumors of the time, it was impossible to entertain any positive thoughts about him even with his white teeth. In all three dimensions his body was as powerful and tall as any ghoul: if he made up his mind to kill his slave master by kicking and punching him, it would have been no harder than banging a nail.

  Like everyone so endowed, Mas‘ud wore his inner soul through the color of his skin and eyes, People saw his temperament as molded by sheer evil and darkness; the very purchase of him was regarded as a loss, since, like many other slaves, he was always running away. “If he’s hungry, he sleeps; if he’s sated, he fucks.” went the popular saying, but actually it did not apply to Mas‘ud. When he was hungry, he waited; if he was sated, he belched and started work again. As regards running away, he did indeed do it a lot; for that very reason, he never stayed with a single owner or slave master any longer than demanded by the limits of surveillance and daylight. He would wait instinctively for those moments of distraction at dead of night when he could speed away like an arrow in pursuit of careening specters.

  The root cause of such behavior was not poor training or corrupt character, but rather a terrible fear of his own image as others saw him and of his smell that others termed foul. He had managed to run away more times than any other slave, so at one point he was declared legally killable inside Egypt. That particular episode forced him to spend a frantic period on the run, and he was forced to look for a hiding place. For a while he lived a life that swung between total panic and sorrow, anticipating his own downfall and the oblivion that would follow; if not that, then a mountain where he could stay clear of hunters and the blind. The last place Mas‘ud stayed during this period was a deserted cemetery shrouded in silence and full of wild herbs. There he eked out a living among the rocks and tree roots. Each night he envisioned legions of the dead rising up and handing him cold and poison to drink; the angel of the dead would arrive in a black cloak of infinite length and depart with the elements. In spite of the difficulties of living in such a place and the terrifying company at night, Mas‘ud came to appreciate that life among the dead was much preferable to falling once more into the clutches of the living. The eyes of the latter were hellfire, their expressions were deadly arrows, whereas the former had no eyes but merely sockets that were forever empty, neither pursuing anyone nor loading someone down with investigations and matters of conscience.

  Mas‘ud spent several days with no alternative but living amid the cold and mud, nourished only by the thought of his own coffin or else by looking at the women’s underwear hung up to dry far away on the roofs of the houses that overlooked the cemetery. Then came the day when Mas‘ud felt his guts being torn apart by an incredible hunger. He got up and walked around the city perimeter searching for food amid the garbage. He had not gone very far before he noticed that everyone around him was running away in sheer fright, making even domestic animals and fowl do likewise. When he reached a square, he realized that his body was uncovered and exposed to the army elite, so he pulled himself together and rushed back to his ditch in the cemetery. Once there he stretched out, feeling defeated and overwhelmed, someone for whom nature’s only succor would be in the form of whatever herbs and grasses might feed his body and keep him concealed from the rest of humanity. He spent a few more days in this state, hovering between imminent death and labored breathing, but then all of a sudden he became aware of increased movement and the sound of human voices all around him, as though a whole group of tribes had arrived all at once to bury their dead en masse. Mas‘ud was shocked and frightened. When he raised his head to take a look, he was amazed to see a peculiar, indeed bewildering, scene right in front of him: people setting up tents and lighting fires on the cemetery grounds. Only a few days passed till the entire cemetery was crammed with people and animals. These people, he discovered, were not migrant bedouin but people who no longer had homes in the city or its suburbs. The cost of living inside the city was now so high that its quarters and districts had vomited them out to the city perimeter.

  Mas‘ud did not bother to seek explanations for what was going on all around him. Instead he focused his entire mental capacities on a single issue: since his reliance on the dead for protection was no longer working, how could he get away from these live human beings who had invaded the cemetery? Where could he go? Mas‘ud poured himself heart and soul into solving this knotty problem and explored every conceivable avenue; he thought of advantages and disadvantages and converted them into a kind of sustenance through which he could stave off his hunger and misery. On the third day of this grim period, he surrendered to a deep midday sleep, only to wake up to the sounds of a group of boys screaming because they had moved away all the branches and leaves he was using to cover himself and then discovered a living being underneath them. Elder folk arrived in droves to rescue the young children and surrounded Mas‘ud’s ditch in successive circles. “Look at this disgusting slave,” they were saying, “who’s pretending to be dead so he can run away from his master. We must tie him in chains and hand him over to the police chief!” This and other similarly brutal statements f
ell on Mas‘ud like a fatal lightning-strike. He could stand it no longer, stood up with a huge roar, and took off through the crowd, yelling for all he was worth. Anyone who tried to stand in his way found himself confronting a terrifying display of yelling and threats. As his voice became hoarse, people still only managed to grab hold of the rags and tatters he was wearing. No sooner had he managed to get clear of this mob of people than he found himself, naked and exhausted, on the city’s outskirts, confronting a platoon of armed guards. There are many reports about what happened next to Mas‘ud in this tricky situation. The most plausible is what was contained in the police chief’s report quoted below:

  The slave named Mas‘ud was surprised by our patrol outside the city. He was running away from his master and was as naked as the day he was born. I gave our guards orders to surround him and use whatever weapons were needed to make him give up or leave him dead. How terrifying this ill-starred wretch looked in the open space, using all possible means to avoid being hit—leaping, crawling, and hiding behind rocky outcrops and trees. At one point he hid himself to take a breather and huddled up close to the ground, obviously planning a getaway. Just then our men managed to surprise him; they pounced on him from all sides like thunderbolts, at which point it was all over. He found himself attacked and beaten everywhere and clubbed almost to death. When the slave showed no further signs of movement, our men approached him. What they saw astonished them, so much so that some of them almost fainted at the sight. The slave was awash in his own blood, like a slaughtered bull breathing his last. There he was, extracting the arrows that had hit him and still hurling curses and threats at them, spitting in the face of anyone who dared touch him. The major thing they discovered and which totally annulled any astonishment they had previously felt was the sheer size and shape of the man’s penis; the soldiers were unanimous that they had never seen or heard of its like anywhere. They were so amazed that they even had a competition to see what was the best description for it; for—that purpose they resorted to comparisons with species of wild animals, and then to confining his particulars to the colossal size of his penis. Hardly had they finished with their unique discovery than their commander ordered them to carry the slave to the closest warehouse so that they could check his file, find out his identity, then return him to his owner.

  Mas‘ud was tossed into a large warehouse used for sick riding animals and people down on their luck. To get him there they used all kinds of violence, restraint, and intimidation. He had not been there for very long before his fame had spread throughout old and new Cairo and into every quarter. News of his penis made its ways through all the popular clubs till it reached as far as the soirees of the Fatimids; echoes even came to the ears of al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah.

  Those who brought the story to the Fatimid caliph suggested that the slave be either killed or castrated so as to put an end to all these tales. The more sympathetic counselors advised the caliph to leave him in the warehouse or in a charitable hostel until he died. Al-Hakim took all these opinions and suggestions under advisement, but then rejected them out of hand. Instead he decided—a decision he reached at dead of night—to make Mas‘ud a member of his retinue and to assign him a particular function. When the true nature of his function was revealed to al-Hakim’s most adept devotees and philosophers, they outdid each other in welcoming the idea and in extolling the mind of the ruler who had come up with the idea and “created it from nothing.”

  Not long after the idea of this special function came into being, its inventor, al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah, moved to implement it in detail. He ordered Mas‘ud’s immediate transfer from the warehouse to the palace clinic where he was consigned to the very best doctors and gentlest of nurses. They gave him all necessary first aid and then went on to provide all necessary treatment. He also gave Mas‘ud’s former owner, Sulayman al-Za’farani, double payment as well as some decorations of honor.

  So Mas‘ud spent several days in the clinic receiving various kinds of intensive care and special treatment from the nurses who, following special instructions from on high, rivaled each other in giving Mas‘ud massages and in teasing and arousing him. Once he was on the road to recovery, he proceeded to eat everything he was offered, and then asked for more. Everyone was amazed, and the clinic accountant was appalled. No sooner had he got out of bed and started walking and using his limbs again than al-Hakim’s devotees instructed the town criers to announce in the all public markets of Cairo that al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah had given Mas‘ud this special function. So they went their way and made the following announcement as they did their rounds:

  Servants of God, our Lord and yours hereby warns you all that there is no place in his lands for commodity speculators or merchants who cheat customers. Anyone who cheats in markets and food shops will discover that our Lord has authorized Mas‘ud the slave to commit sodomy on him. You crooks, our Lord is riding his blond donkey among you, ever watchful. His dire punishment is yet closer to your asses than the unlawful food in your bellies. So beware! Whoever issues a warning is thereby excused!

  This dire warning fell on the merchants of old and new Cairo like a thunderbolt. The general populace and people in need on the other hand greeted the news with unrestrained joy. Those who had grudges kept an eagle eye out for speculators and cheats and exposed the major violators who refused to mend their ways. The majority of merchants decided to resort to more covert types of swindling and fraud.

  In the early months of the implementation of al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah’s decision, the slave Mas‘ud—now converted into the agent of sodomite punishment—saw continuous activity in dealing with speculators and crooked merchants. He managed to cope with the exhaustion that he felt at the end of each day by taking into account his own important status and the way he could now terrify people who just the day before had been able to frighten and despise him. He was also delighted at the special food he was given with the intention of renewing his energy and arousing his sexual appetite, things like almonds, harisa, and meat and fat from the Nile salamander.

  During these early months of Mas‘ud’s new career, he looked happy and content, always smiling. He realized that al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah held him in high esteem and that, thanks to his own ramrod-straight scales of justice, he himself was playing a major role in correcting merchant behavior. AH this gave him the clear impression that the heavens had given him a truly unique opportunity to take revenge on society as a whole, which had subjected him to all manner of contempt and suffering. He would walk around the city and through the markets of the kasba wrapped in an aura of supercilious arrogance, belching at anyone he wished, cuffing anyone he did not like on the neck, and squeezing the nose of people who made gestures at his expense under his armpit. How was he supposed to behave otherwise when he could see for himself how many merchants he had managed to injure or kill and how many had committed suicide, all because of his surprise forays into the markets accompanied by al-Hakim’s demons and sergeants, or by al-Hakim in person riding his blond donkey!

  Mas‘ud’s daily excursions into the kasba markets took in every market where foodstuffs were on sale. One of the earliest consequences of his forays was that the bar in Khan al-Ruwasin which served wine to people with problems vanished, as did all the blondes from the grain market, prostitutes who used to stand on the pavement wearing men’s clothing in red, chewing gum, and making eyes at the people who came to market. These two markets, just like those in the Burjuwan quarter and on Bayn al-Qasrayn Street, were full of merchants of every kind: butchers, bakers, fruit vendors, vegetable sellers, milk and cheese merchants, sellers of frozen products, cooks, grilled meat sellers, perfumers, and others.

  The only exception to this pattern was the chicken market where chicken and rice were the basic products on sale along with various types of dove, blackbird, nightingale, and other songbirds. In all these markets Mas‘ud had no trouble in training merchants who owned shops how to behave and putting a stop to their policies of overpricing and infringeme
nts of proper trading practice. Barely three months went by before market inspectors were able to report a new trend among shop owners toward upright conduct, although they did whisper that there was a noticeable decrease in the number of merchants still in business and entering the trade.

  Throughout this period there remained just one black mark on Mas‘ud’s record, namely itinerant peddlers. How was he supposed to keep track of them and impose his unique punishment for any fraudulent practices when they acted just like Bedouin, touring the markets and operating on a ‘take the money and run’ policy? How could he have any impact on their control when they had organized themselves to the extent of employing young men on the make who would act as informants and sentinels? Even suppose that he did go after them, how could he arrest them all when they scattered to the four winds and took refuge in the maze of alleyways and culs-de-sac? Faced with this dilemma, Mas‘ud thought long and hard. The solution he adopted involved making use of shop owners who were aggravated enough to be glad to take revenge on these roving peddlers. The way it worked was that Mas‘ud allowed these merchants to chase the peddlers every time they set up stalls to ply their trade, and then block their escape routes till Mas‘ud and his guards could get there and arrest them.

  One day at about noon a huge din could be heard in the Ruwasin market; a fierce row had broken out between these two factions. Mas‘ud soon arrived with his entourage to see what had happened and assess the consequences. There had been a serious fight involving clubs, truncheons, and slingshots, but neither side had come out on top. The brawl continued, and, when some of the combatants started unsheathing swords, Mas‘ud ordered his guards to put an end to the brawl and to the shop owners’ advantage, to confiscate the peddlers’ goods, and force them to run away. No sooner had the order been executed than the peddlers were seen running for their lives in total panic. A group of them found themselves being chased by the hulking frame of Mas‘ud, emitting hideous grunts as he ran. After a considerable time and great expenditure of energy, he only managed to grab hold of one peddler who had run out of breath and was very scrawny in any case. Mas‘ud seized this poor wretch by the feet, dragged him to the closest dark alley, and started to strip off his clothes and tackle his backside. He had hardly started the operation before he sprang back in amazement.