Year 1961 - Part 7: Badawi al-Jabal's Poetry and the Assault That Led to His Death

Thursday, 25 May

The days of Eid al-Adha fell between the 24th and the 28th of May. My own circumstances were ordinary enough, carrying out the ministry's own work, reading books of law or literature whenever I found the chance to retreat into myself.

I took up the collected poems of Badawi al-Jabal, our own colleague in government before the Union and in the Chamber of Deputies, and read his own towering poem on "the Radiant Kaaba," from which I chose these moving lines:

"With a light shed upon the Mother of Cities, and its own sweetness,

I washed my heart clean of sorrow and burning grief.

I kissed its soil seven times, and darkened my own eyes

with a beauty as awesome as the secrets of the sky.

I held my own heart back, lest it fly to Mina,

heavy as it was with longing and a pounding heart.

O my own soul: the valley of the trusted Muhammad,

rich in guidance, though its own soil bears no crop.

O my own soul: between al-Hijr and Zamzam

I left my own tears to plead for my sins.

Processions like waves, their own supplication rising loud,

and the fire of the forenoon sun, red and blazing.

They gathered there, the rich and the destitute alike,

the downy-winged young and the gray-haired old.

They laid down their own heavy burden of sins, weary,

within a vast, forgiving space, from God's own mercy.

Had I still some remnant of my own youth left in me,

I would have hastened to it, mounted on a swift, noble steed.

I tore away the veil of silence between us,

with a reed pipe, drunk with a captivating longing."

When I once asked him whether he had ever made the pilgrimage himself, to describe the pilgrims' own scene with such precision, he expressed his own regret that time had never allowed him this act of devotion, but that he had heard of it from pilgrims, and pictured them circling in his own mind's eye.

When I made the pilgrimage myself, years later, I recalled these magnificent lines of his, standing in the very embrace of Mina, the place his own heart had once feared to fly to.

Al-Jabal wrote splendid patriotic verse as well, and among the finest of his poems is his own gloating over the fall of the French "tyrant," which had occupied our own country, and which fell in 1940 beneath the blows of the German hordes. Of this defeated empire he wrote:

"O reveler of the tribe, does our own complaint concern you at all?

Iron has softened, yet none softened toward our own suffering.

Set aside reproach, for tears alone will not suffice,

and reproach instead a people now mere ashes and fire.

I have come to believe that hatred alone stokes our own resolve,

and that God has banished pity and tenderness far from us.

The old blood feuds of Yarab lie thirsting in their own graves,

passed over, by the tribe's own cupbearers, in forgetfulness.

No Khalid conquers Rome in triumph now,

nor does al-Muthanna ride beneath Shayban's own banners.

Tell those who once enslaved the world to their own sword,

who was it that divided people into the free and the enslaved?

I take real delight in the tyrant's own downfall,

felled by another tyrant, who now grinds him down in turn with injustice and oppression.

I have heard Paris herself complain of her conqueror's own arrogance.

Did you never recall, O Paris, our own complaint?

While horses roamed the grieving mosque itself,

trampling the worshippers, both old men and youths alike.

For twenty years we drank from a cup filled to the brim

with sorrow, and now, at last, taste its own dregs in full."

I was in Paris myself at the time, and witnessed the French people's own devastation at their humiliating defeat, living under the hooves of Hitler's horses for nearly five years.

We shared in al-Jabal's own gloating over those who had once trampled our own country's dignity.

Al-Jabal also composed a few lines about me, improvised as we sat together on the government's own benches during a session of the Chamber of Deputies in 1955, after I had read him some of "my own poetry."

May God have mercy on him, he said:

"This verse of mine, were it recited at the season of pilgrimage,

would set the pilgrims dancing, and Arafat itself would ring with joy.

'Ibn Homad' offers his own prayer through it, a true believer,

for his own verse is, to the unbelievers themselves, a form of prayer.

It carries poetry of radiant brilliance,

and the very hallmark of inspired eloquence,

jurisprudence and the finest, most refined literature,

along with proud manners and fine qualities besides.

It carries a character formed of the sweetness of fine wine,

and of beauty, both grace and life itself."

We did not always see eye to eye on matters of politics, but we became close, devoted friends all the same.

I visited him once, after a criminal had set upon him with an iron chain, as he walked, frail with age, along the street.

This wicked assault was itself a kind of blasphemy against genius, and it was the very thing that finally brought him to his own final resting place.

The cause of this assault was a poem of his, in which he wrote:

"Is arrogance still arrogant, when arrogance itself has melted away in shame before mere arrogance?

Neither a 'banner,' a 'division,' nor a 'field marshal' ever endured the horrors of battle.

We are the dead, and the worst thing tyranny has ever devised is the dead, walking still upon the roads.

Socialism? A treasure of pearls,

and pomp, and a pulpit, and a throne.

Socialism? Its own teachings are enrichment,

and injustice, and obscenity, and vice.

Every scoundrel, cheeks puffed with pride, though he be no Sabur in his own splendor, nor Azd Shanu'a either.

A lesson for tyrants, in the fall of one tyrant,

and vengeance exacted by one who is just, and does no wrong."

He gave me a gift of his own collected poems, gripping the pen with real difficulty, his own hand trembling as he did. May God have mercy on him, and grant him a rich reward.

Thursday, 1 June

India's consul general, Mr. Safrani, invited us to a dinner reception held in honor of Mr. Humayun Kabir, Minister of Cultural Relations in the Indian federal government, and Mr. Azim Hussain, its ambassador to the new capital, Cairo.

We ate an Indian meal, heavy with spices, one we had never grown accustomed to before.

The heat of the day worked, along with this food, to "close" the appetite.

But our own appetite for political conversation remained wide "open."

The talk turned to non-alignment, a subject we had already chewed over so many times that we had grown quite sick of it.

But the conversation on Kashmir proved far more gripping, and far more heated.

The province of Kashmir has an absolute Muslim majority, yet its own ruler was Hindu, and it is, besides, the birthplace of India's leader, the Hindu Jawaharlal Nehru.

When Britain decided to grant India its own independence, it left the choice to the rulers of the individual states (not to the people themselves) of joining either India or Pakistan, and the Maharaja of Kashmir chose to join India, brushing aside the will of its own Muslim population entirely.

Ever since that day, the unrest there has never once settled.

I myself had once cabled, along with some fellow deputies, the government of Pakistan, expressing our own support for its recovering the usurped part of its own country.

The government of India, for its own part, generally chose its own representatives to Islamic countries from among its own Muslim citizens.

Minister Humayun confided to us that India held forty-five million Muslims, four million of them in Kashmir, noting that Kashmir's own total population stood at five million, with the fifth million living under Pakistani rule, as he put it.

He believed the Kashmir question was an extremely difficult one to solve, one reason for this difficulty being the absence of a strong Pakistani government capable of negotiating any real, lasting solution.

He believed that the absence of a sound parliamentary system in Pakistan greatly weakened its own government's own strength.

In his own view, were the border between the two parts of Kashmir ever opened, more than half of Pakistan's own Muslims would move into the Indian sector.

While no more than fifty thousand Indian Muslims would move the other way, into Pakistan.

Mr. Nihad al-Qasim immediately recognized that His Excellency the Indian minister belonged to Abul Kalam Azad's own circle.

We had already heard such views from him before, on an earlier visit to Damascus. These are men who favor the unity of the Indian subcontinent, and oppose the very existence of a Muslim state of Pakistan.

Strangely enough, His Excellency the minister seemed to proceed entirely from his own love for his country and his own faith.

Monday the 5th: At Rushdi al-Kikhya's Table in Aleppo

A senior Ministry of Finance official met with Aleppo's own merchants, and told them they were not paying the state what they honestly owed it, that they were manipulating their own commercial ledgers, and smuggling money abroad.

And that they were operating on loans borrowed from the banks.

For this reason, he said, they had to be held to a strict accounting.

This stirred a real panic among them, whose echoes reached me directly.

What this official said was entirely true, and no distortion of the facts at all.

But the sensitive economic circumstances weighing so heavily on the country did not allow for a statement of this kind, one that was, besides, exaggerated and embellished beyond anything the official had actually said.

Since Aleppo is the country's own center of commercial and industrial weight, contributing a large share of the state's own budget, so much so that some financial experts once estimated this share at sixty percent (before the Union), and since any economic disturbance there would have a damaging effect on the country's own financial situation, I decided to meet with its own merchants myself, at my own invitation, at the office of the regional finance director, and made my way to Aleppo at once.

When I sat down to speak with them, they were extremely wary and suspicious. But once I assured them I would never depart from the laws already in force, laws they knew perfectly well, nor from the dealings we had long grown accustomed to, a good measure of calm returned to them.

I say "a good measure," for I know they generally take me for a leftist, one they hold no real affection for, and do not entirely trust.

This trip was also a routine occasion for me to inspect the finance departments of the provinces lying along my route to Aleppo, Homs and Hama, and I made my own way back by way of Idlib and Latakia.

In Aleppo, Rushdi al-Kikhya invited me to a dinner he held at a new club I had never heard of before, called "Club Mogambo." The leading figures of the "former" People's Party attended.

We discussed the general state of affairs.

I sensed they were living under a dark cloud of rumors spread by ill-wishers against the Union.

Among them were outright lies with no basis in truth at all.

And among them were real facts, whose meaning had been badly distorted, out of ill intent.

This was my own occasion to dispel a great many of the falsehoods troubling people.

Rushdi al-Kikhya asked me: why do you not simply refute these fabricated rumors? I told him: it is human nature to spread news of corruption, however fabricated, and rare indeed for people to pass on news of good deeds, as a general rule.

Besides, news of these rumors does not always reach us in time, or we never hear of it at all.

It is the habit of petitioners to concern themselves only with getting their own business done, and they are wary of straying beyond it, for fear of angering the man with the power to decide it, and bringing harm upon themselves.

This is a habit we have grown well accustomed to.

I always used to hear nothing but praise and effusive tribute, professions of devotion to the Union, and readiness to "die for its sake" and "for the cause." But few indeed ever open their own hearts to us in complete honesty.

We do our best to clarify whatever falls within our own remit, through an official statement or press announcement. They all made me feel, that evening, that the Union was our nation's own destiny, one it could not survive without, and that if some mistakes had occurred in its own implementation, they had to be corrected, but corrected within the framework of the Union itself.

I came away truly reassured by what I heard.

And reassured, even more, by my old friends' own genuine convictions, and their own sincere devotion to their country and its president. How vast the gulf between the Baathists' own stance, the very men who led the country toward federation and then Union, only to turn against it soon after, and the stance of the "People's Party men," who raised the banner of federation, and voted for it, yet, once the banner of Union was raised instead, rallied around it and voted for it unanimously, gaining nothing at all from its own "fruits."

They remained loyal to it, despite every ill-intentioned report submitted to the President about them, and about me too, as I later learned.

For we, in Aleppo, never sell out our own nation for the sake of a mere capital city.

Monday the 12th

A cable reached me from the Presidency, summoning me to Cairo to discuss certain financial matters, among them the vote on the Northern Region's own budget in the National Assembly.

We boarded the Syrian plane, which went rattling down the runway all the way to its own end, and stopped there. Why, good people, why? The kindly announcer came to us, with his own gentle smile, asking us to step off the plane and help push it, so that it might, perhaps, manage to take off after all.

We did indeed step off, and pushed it a few hundred meters, but it refused to answer our own pleading.

We were told to go back to the departure hall, and we did.

We remained there, pacing back and forth.

Every half hour, we were given the good news that we were about to take off at any moment.

We did finally take off, and this "aging traveler" of a plane made a long stop in Beirut, but it did, in the end, deliver us to Cairo, some six hours late.

El-Kaissouni teased me, saying: Gagarin is faster than you, circling the entire globe in just an hour and a half.

I reached the Hilton, where a room had been reserved for me, at two in the morning, utterly exhausted:

"Where has youth gone, and on what road did it wander,

or where might it be sought, lost, or perished entirely?

Do not be astonished, Salma, at a man

whose own gray hair mocked his head, until it wept."

Even so, we were fortunate, for we reached our destination safely.

By a strange coincidence, a Dutch plane, belonging to the well-known KLM airline, struck a hill near the airport that very morning, catching fire, so that every one of its passengers burned to death.

Likewise, a Russian plane got its own wheels stuck in the sand that same afternoon, blocking the runway and halting all flights.

I later learned that our own plane's pilot had witnessed the flames consuming the entire Dutch plane and its passengers, and suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, deciding to give up flying as a "profession" altogether.

In the morning, I made my way to the National Assembly, to discuss our own Northern Region's budgets before the finance committee, before their own approval by the National Assembly.

At the finance committee, the budget was received with praise and appreciation.

I had not expected any real resistance to it at all, and I do not know why a single deputy would ever resist a budget so precisely coherent, so sound in its own figures, and so correct in its own direction.

When figures speak eloquently for themselves, the proof they offer is decisive.

And if the premises are sound, the conclusions drawn from them are sound as well.

Likewise, I met with no obstacles at all in the finance committee, two-thirds Egyptian and one-third Syrian, when I explained to its members the reasoning behind two laws I proposed, in agreement with the President and El-Kaissouni:

The first provided for lending the Syrian Tobacco Authority a sum of 30 million Syrian lira, so that it would have permanent capital of its own to buy and sell with.

This department, it is well known, is a legacy of the French Mandate era, one that continued on after it ended.

The Ministry of Finance used to lend it seasonal loans, to pay tobacco farmers for the leaves it bought from them, which it then manufactured into ready cigarettes, offered for sale to the public, and from the proceeds of these sales, it would pay the department's own operating costs and staff salaries, and repay the state the loans it had borrowed.

It sometimes happened that the "Treasury Directorate" found no liquid funds in its own coffers to lend the Tobacco Authority at the right time, leaving it with no choice but delay and procrastination in paying the farmers what they were rightfully owed.

Once it had permanent capital of its own, this whole cycle of borrowing and repayment would come to an end.

For this reason, a law had to be secured, allowing the Ministry of Finance to put paper currency into circulation without gold backing, its denominations and notes to be set by a decision of the Minister of Finance.

This operation was, in essence, an inflationary one, without any doubt, but the state needed it, to ease the operations of a department of enormous importance to the state's own economy, and to allow the Ministry of Finance to expand its coverage of the ministries' own budget shortfalls, so that they could function on solid ground, given our own difficult circumstances.

The second law provided for allocating permanent capital of 15 million lira to the Customs Department, for these same reasons.

None of the deputies found anything to say against either of these two laws, when Assembly Speaker Anwar Sadat put them forward for discussion, and then for a vote.

But some of the nation's own representatives put questions to me on the general financial situation.

I answered them, drawing on my own earlier parliamentary experience, and my complete knowledge of the financial situation, its own revenues and expenditures alike.

Even so, I avoided going too deeply into the budget of the armed forces (the First Army), since I would simply set aside a lump sum for it, and never learn anything more about it afterward.

Except on one occasion, when I attended a discussion of the Defense Ministry's own budget, or, more precisely, a discussion of certain of its own sections, when Field Marshal Amer took me by the hand, and we walked together into the meeting hall at the Joint Command building.

This was, for me, a truly astonishing precedent.

For he had "allowed the Minister of Finance to see budget items that were otherwise 'forbidden' to view."

Cooperation between the executive authority (which I represented in this discussion) and the legislative authority was excellent, and some newspapers praised me for my own explanations. Among what the newspaper al-Wihda wrote, on 13 June 1961:

"Yesterday's budget discussion session was one of the important and successful sessions.

Great credit for raising it to this standard belongs to Dr. AbdulWahab Homad."

Some friends told me that certain Syrian deputies forge their own signatures to collect session allowances, offering bribes and gifts to some of the Assembly's own administrative staff, to have them mark them present at a session, when in fact they are absent from it entirely, relaxing back home instead.

And what, exactly, can the Assembly's own speaker do about it? Could he possibly have a hundred eyes, to track every single deputy's own conduct, both at the Assembly and at the furnished lodgings he has rented?

Did the wise poet not once tell us?

"Souls will never turn away from their own wrongdoing,

so long as nothing within them holds them back."