The Black Book

by Orhan Pamuk

  The Koran is quite explicit on the subject only for those who can make out the “meaning” of the Arabic alphabet (as in the 97th verse of the sura called Al-Isra, or The Israelites, or the 23rd verse of Al-Zumar, or The Companies, where it is explained that the Koran is revealed mutashabih and mathani: “consistent in its various parts” and “repeated,” etc., etc.). According to Mutahhar Ibn Tahir from Jerusalem, who wrote three hundred years after the revelation of the Koran, in his book Origins and History, the only evidence on this subject is what he says concerning Muhammad’s “name, appearance, or else the guidance of someone whose work is consistent with mine,” or else, the depositions of the other witnesses who supplied the information for this particular hadith and others like it. And we also know that it is briefly noted in Ibn Batuta’s Journeys that the Shiites await His manifestation ceremonially in the underground passages below the shrine of Hakim-al Wakt (Sage of the Time) at Samarra. According to what Firuz Shah dictated to his scribe thirty years after that, there were thousands of unfortunates in the dusty yellow streets in Delhi who awaited Him and the mystery of the letters that He would reveal. We also know that yet another point is stressed once again during the same time period, in Ibn Khaldun’s Introduction where he considers each hadith concerning His appearance, which he selected by sifting through extreme Shiite sources: that He would slay Dadjdjal, or Satan, or, in keeping with the Christian concept and language, the Antichrist, who would appear together with Him on the Day of Judgment and Salvation.

  The surprising thing was that none among those who awaited and dreamed of the Messiah found it possible to imagine His face: not my worthy reader Mehmet Yılmaz who has written to me concerning the vision he experienced in his house at a remote town in the Anatolian hinterland, not even Ibn Arabi who dreamed up the same vision seven hundred years before him and wrote about it in his Phoenix, not the philosopher al-Kindi who had a dream that He, along with all those He had saved, would conquer Constantinople from the Christians, and not the salesgirl who daydreamed about Him as she sat surrounded by bobbins, buttons, and nylon stockings in a dry-goods store on a backstreet of the Beyoğlu district in Istanbul where al-Kindi’s dream had eventually come true.

  On the other hand, we are able to imagine Dadjdjal all too well: according to al-Bukhari’s Prophets, Dadjdjal is single-eyed and red-haired, according to Pilgrimage his identity is written on his face; Dadjdjal, who is supposed to be thick-necked according to Tayalisi, has red eyes and a heavy frame according to Tawhid by Reverend Nizamettin Bey who did his daydreaming in Istanbul. In the humor rag called Karagöz, which was read extensively in the hinterland during the years I was a cub reporter, there was a cartoon-strip romance concerning the derring-do of a Turkish warrior, in which Dadjdjal was represented as deformed and crooked-mouthed. Dadjdjal, who came up with incredible ruses in his battles against our warriors, who were known to make love to the beauties of Constantinople, which was as yet unconquered, had a broad forehead, a large nose, but no mustache (in keeping with the suggestions I sometimes gave the illustrators). In opposition to Dadjdjal, who stirs our powers of imagination so vividly, our only writer who was able to personify our long-awaited Messiah in all His glory was Dr. Ferit Kemal who wrote his Le Grand Pacha in French, and the fact that it could only be published in Paris in 1870 is considered, by some, a loss for our national literature.

  Placing this unique work which portrays Him in all his aspects outside of our literature, just because it has been penned in French, is as wrong as it is pitiful to claim that “The Grand Inquisitor” in the Russian author Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov has been lifted out of this slim treatise, as some have done, although with some embarrassment, in East-oriented publications such as The Ritual Fountain or The Grand East. On the subject of the litany concerning what the West has stolen from the East, or the East from the West, I am always reminded of a notion I had: If this realm of dreams that we call the world is a house into which we enter disoriented as a somnambulist, then the various literatures are like clocks hung up on the walls of the rooms in this house to which we wish to orient ourselves. Now:

  1. It’s stupid to say that one of the clocks ticking away in one of the rooms in the house of dreams is right while another one is wrong.

  2. It’s also stupid to say that one of the clocks in the rooms is five hours ahead of another since, by virtue of the same logic, it can be said that the same clock is seven hours behind.

  3. It’s even more stupid to conclude that one clock is imitating another if one clock says nine thirty-five and then, after some period of time has elapsed, another one now says nine thirty-five.

  Ibn Arabi, who wrote more than two hundred mystical books, was in Morocco, a year before he attended Averroës’ funeral in Cordova, where he had written a book inspired by the story (dream) of how Muhammad had been taken to Jerusalem and ascended to the sky on a ladder (mirach in Arabic) where he took a good look at both Heaven and Hell as it is related in the Israelites sura mentioned above (note to the typesetter: if we are on top of the column now, then substitute “below” for “above”). Now, after taking into account what Ibn Arabi says about perambulating the seven heavens with his guide, what he saw there, and what he and the prophets confabulated about, and also taking into account that he wrote this book when he was thirty-three years of age (in 1198), coming to the conclusion that the dream girl called Nizam in his book is “true” while Beatrice is “false,” or that Ibn Arabi is “right” while Dante is “wrong,” or that “The Book of the Israelites” and Makan al-Asra are “correct” while The Divine Comedy is “incorrect,” is an example of the first kind of stupidity that I mentioned.

  Since the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Tufeyl penned in the eleventh century a book about a child abandoned on a desert island where he lived for years and came to appreciate nature, the sustenance he nursed from a doe, the ocean, death, the heavens above, and “the divine truths,” claiming that Hayy Ibn Yakzan (The Self-Taught Philosopher) is six hundred years “ahead” of Robinson Crusoe, or, since the second book gives much more information about tools and things, claiming that Ibn Tufeyl is six hundred years “behind” Daniel Defoe is an example of the second kind of stupidity.

  The Reverend Veliyyudin Bey, who was one of the Sheikhs of Islam during the reign of Mustapha the Third, suddenly inspired by the disrespectful and inopportune remark made by a loose-tongued friend (who was visiting on a Friday evening and, upon seeing a magnificent escritoire in the Sheikh’s study, said, “Reverend Teacher, seems like your cupboard is as messy as your mind”), began writing a lengthy poem in couplets, in March of 1761, in order to prove that everything was in its place both in his mind and in his walnut escritoire, making much of the similarities between the two. Since he propounded in his work the view that our minds also had twelve compartments—just like the splendid Armenian-make escritoire which had two cabinets, four shelves, and twelve drawers—where we stored time, places, numbers, papers, all the odds and ends we call today “cause-and-effect,” “existence,” and “necessity,” and since he beat by twenty years Kant’s categorization of Pure Reason into twelve compartments, deducing that the German appropriated the idea from the Turk is an example of stupidity of the third kind.

  When Dr. Ferit Kemal was at work portraying the long-awaited Messiah in all His glory, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his compatriots would approach his book a hundred years later displaying such stupidities: his whole life was already surrounded by a nimbus of neglect and disinterest which had exiled him to the silence of a dream. Today, I can only imagine his face, which was never photographed, as the face of a somnambulist: he was an addict. He turned many of his patients into addicts like himself, as we are told in Abdurrahman Şeref’s derogatory study called The New Ottomans and Liberty. He went to Paris in 1866, heeding some vague sense of rebellion—that’s right, a year before Dostoevsky’s second trip to Europe!—and had a couple of articles in the newspapers called Liberty and Reporter, both
of which were published in Europe, but he remained in Paris after the Young Turks reconciled their differences with the Palace and returned one by one to Istanbul. There’s no other trace of him. Since he refers to Baudelaire’s Les Paradis artificiels in his foreword, perhaps he also knew about De Quincey, who is a favorite of mine; perhaps he was experimenting with opium, but in the pages where he talks about Him there are few hints of any such experiments; quite to the contrary, there are signs of a powerful logic that we are in desperate need of today. I am writing this column in order to promulgate this logic and to introduce the irresistible ideas put forth in Le Grand Pacha to the patriotic officers serving in our armed forces.

  But in order to get the logic, one must first get the book’s ambience. Imagine a book bound in blue, printed on paper made of straw, and published by Poulet-Malassis in the year of 1861, in Paris. It has only ninety-six pages. Imagine the illustrations by a French artist (De Tennielle) which, rather than showing old Istanbul, look like today’s Istanbul with its stone buildings, sidewalks, and parquet-stone paved streets; imagine the pictures of today’s concrete rat holes, and of shadows, furniture, and surroundings that suggest suspended and electrified instruments of torture rather than the stone cells and primitive torture devices that were the order of the day back then.

  The book begins with the description of one of the backstreets in Istanbul. There is no sound besides the night watchmen’s nightsticks beating on the sidewalks and the ululations of dog packs fighting each other in distant neighborhoods. No light seeps through the latticework windows of the wood-frame houses. The wisp of smoke that comes out of a stovepipe diffuses into the gossamer fog that has descended on the domes and rooftops. In this profound silence, one can hear the sound of footsteps on the deserted sidewalks. Everyone interprets this strange, novel, unexpected sound of footsteps as joyful tidings, even those who have put on several layers of sweaters in preparation for diving into their chilly beds, also those who are already dreaming deep under a pile of quilts.

  The next day, far from the gloom of the night before, is festive. Everyone has recognized Him, realized that He is Him, and knows that the hour of eternity loaded with sorrows that all thought would never end is finally over. He is present among the festive merry-go-rounds, the old enemies who have made up, children eating apple candy and taffy on a stick, men and women joking together, people dancing and playing. He is more like an older brother among his siblings than the supreme Messiah walking among the unfortunates that He will lead to better days and to victory upon victory. But there is the shadow of a doubt in His face, a misgiving, a premonition. Then, as He walks in the streets lost in thought, the Grand Pasha’s men arrest him and stick him into one of those stone-vaulted dungeons. At midnight, the Grand Pasha himself arrives with a candle in his hand to visit Him in his cell and converse with him throughout the night.

  Who was this Grand Pasha? I too, like the author, want the reader to come to a conclusion without any interference, so I cannot even translate his proper name into Turkish outright. Seeing that he is a pasha, we might think of him as a great statesman, or a great soldier, or else simply as someone who has achieved high rank. From the logical nature of his discourse, we might assume that he is a philosopher or a lofty personage who has achieved a certain kind of wisdom that we sense in certain people who place the interests of the nation and the country above themselves, which is a recurrent phenomenon among us Turks. All night long, the Grand Pasha holds forth, and He listens. Here is the Grand Pasha’s logic and the words which strike Him speechless:

  1. Like everyone else, I too knew at once that you are Him (the Grand Pasha begins to speak). Knowing this didn’t depend on my consulting oracles concerning you, or signs in the heavens and in the Koran, or the secrets in letters and numbers—as has been the custom for hundreds and thousands of years. I knew you were Him the moment I saw the joy and the thrill of victory in the faces of the multitude. Now they expect you to obliterate their pains and sorrows, restore their lost hopes, and lead them on to victory. But can you do it? Hundreds of years ago, Muhammad was able to provide happiness for the unfortunate because his sword opened the way for them to rush from victory to victory. Today, on the other hand, no matter what strength our faith has, the enemies of Islam possess more powerful weapons. No chance of a military victory! Can this fact be better illustrated than in the case of some false Messiahs who have claimed to be Him and managed to make things very difficult for the English and the French in India and Africa for a brief period, only to be completely crushed and annihilated themselves, thereby leading the people to greater catastrophe? (These pages abound with military and economic comparisons that demonstrate why a massive victory over the West has to be dismissed as a mere fantasy, not only for Islam, but for the East as a whole. The Grand Pasha compares the levels of wealth in the West to the poverty of the East with the honesty of a realistic statesman. And He, because He is He and not a fake, quietly and sadly confirms the depressing prospects as they are delineated.)

  2. And yet (the Grand Pasha continues in the wee hours of the morning), it does not mean that no hope of victory can be provided for the unfortunate. We cannot fight only against “external” enemies. What about foes that are internal? Might it not be that the authors of all our poverty and suffering are the sinners, the usurers, the vampires, and the sadists amongst us who palm themselves off as ordinary citizens? You do see, don’t you, that you can give the hope of victory and happiness to your unfortunate brethren only by waging war against the enemy inside? Then you must have also realized that yours is not a war that can be fought through the agency of gallant warriors, the champions of Islam; it must be fought under the auspices of informers, torturers, executioners, and the police. The hopeless have to be presented with the criminal responsible for their misery so that they can believe that his defeat will render heaven on earth possible. That is all we have been able to do for the last three hundred years. In order to give them hope, we reveal to our brothers the criminals among them. And they believe us, for they are as hungry for hope as they are for bread. Before these criminals are sentenced, the smartest and the straightest among them, those who understand why they are being condemned, admit to more crimes, exaggerating even the smallest, so that hope can be stirred all the more in their unfortunate brothers’ hearts. We even pardon some who join us in hunting down the criminal element. Like the Koran, hope supports not so much our spiritual lives as our material existence: we expect to receive hope and freedom from the same source that provides us with our daily bread.

  3. I know that you have the resolve to accomplish all the difficult tasks that are put before you, the sense of justice to pluck the criminals out of the crowd without batting an eyelash, and the strength to put them through torture, even though unwillingly, and rise above it all: after all, you are Him. But for how long can you expect hope to distract the multitudes? They are bound to catch on all too soon that things are not getting any better. When they see that their slice of bread is getting no larger, the hope they have been offered will begin to diminish. Once more they will lose their trust in the Book and their faith in both worlds; they will surrender themselves to the depression, immorality, and spiritual poverty of the life they led yesterday. Worst of all, they will begin to suspect you, even to hate you. The informers will begin to feel guilty about the criminals they’ve willingly handed over to your executioners and your diligent torturers; the police and the guards will become so sick of the vapidity of the torture they have perpetrated that neither the latest methods nor the hope you have offered will keep them distracted; they will end up by becoming convinced that the unfortunates who were hung from the gallows like bunches of grapes have been sacrificed in vain. You must have already realized that on Judgment Day they will believe neither you nor the stories you tell them; and when there remains no single story that they can all believe in collectively, then they will begin believing their own private fictions; everyone will have his own story which he
will want to tell. Millions of wretches, wearing their tales like haloes of woe around their heads, will stumble dolorously like somnambulists on dirty city streets and on muddy squares that never seem to get tidied up. Then, in their eyes, you will be the Dadjdjal, and the Dadjdjal, you! Now they will want to put their faith in Dadjdjal’s tales, and not in yours anymore. Returning in glory, Dadjdjal will either be me, or else someone like me. And he will tell them that you have been fooling them for all these years, that it was not hope that you infected them with but lies, that you had been Dadjdjal all along and not Him. Perhaps there will be no need for all this. At midnight some night, in a dark alley, either Dadjdjal himself or some unfortunate who has come to the conclusion that you had deceived him for too long will empty his gun into your mortal body which was once supposed to be bulletproof. That is how, because you offered them hope and deceived them all these years, they will find your body some night on a dirty sidewalk, in one of those muddy streets that you had come to know and cherish.