thesultansjester

Like this writer, I too was born in Sarajevo. As a youth I had loved books and poetry and longed to be man of letters. However, my fate was to be a clown for the Sultans court. Yet my pain made me all the more amusing to them…

I learned of the unspeakable tragedy that befell my beloved city and it’s people when I awake and I could scarcely believe it: it was as if the calamity from the fall of The Ottoman Empire had reverberated through time to kill so many innocents in that disgraceful genocide.

This man survived, and he is a man of letters. He tells a disturbing story that Bosniak mothers would tell their children: would that mothers would tell their children tales such as these still!

Once upon a time, there was an emperor in Mesopotamia who built a huge labyrinth and called upon a Bedouin emperor from Arabia to visit him. When the Bedouin emperor arrived, he showed him the labyrinth and locked him there to wander. The Bedouin wandered and wandered and finally came out. Asked by the Mesopotamian emperor if he has been delighted by this edifice of his, and whether there was anything in his own empire grander than the labyrinth, the Bedouin replied that there was, promising to show it to him when he came for a visit. after a short while the emperor of Mesopotamia visited Arabia. As is becoming to emperors, he was received by the emperor of Arabia and then taken to the desert. ‘Here is my labyrinth,’ the Bedouin said, leaving him in the middle of the sea of sand. ‘Find the way out and then come and tell me whether there is, besides the miracle of God, any miracle greater than this?’

The miracle of the eternity of the desert has become a metaphor in the Arabic language. No path can be made there, because the wind would soon erase it as if it had not been there. The powerful feeling that overwhelms man there is one of a circle. Wherever he goes, he remains in that circle. The sky is everywhere, powerfully bent on Earth. It is only then that man realises that eternity is the grandest edifice an edifice not made by human hands.

– Enis Karic, ‘Essays On Behalf Of Bosnia’.

It warms my heart that the Bosniaks are still the voice of Islam and Sufism, just as they were in my days during the twilight of the Caliphate. I read this scholars book, ‘Essay on Behalf Of Bosnia’ and lamented that such erudite scholarship, such beautiful prose, is ignored by the Muslims of today.

His pain gives him his voice just as the Jesters misery is his mirth. And to the one-eyed, whose inner eye is blind, this will always be a mystery.

‘When God wanted to create man he sent to Earth and angel Gabriel to bring back some earthly dust. Earth, however, prevented Gabriel from taking the dust, for fear that this newly created being would spill blood and cause disorder. When Gabriel returned without having done the job, God sent successively the angel Michael and angel Israfil to get some soil from Earth. But Earth refused them as well, explaining that it was because of her fear of that new being. Finally, God Almighty sent the angel of death, the malak who takes the soul in the moment of death, Azrail. He took from the Earth several measures of earthly dust and mud telling the Earth: Divine order is older than your fear.

And what I take from you  Earth, I shall give back to you at the moment of man’s death. Is there a death that does not give back to the Earth what belongs to her?’

– Enis Karic, Dijalog, Sarajevo, 1997.

Here are some pictures of my new home Zimbabwe, where I inexplicably awoke after having fallen asleep in 1870. This is a mosque and Darul-Uloom in Harare run by a group from India called ‘Deobandis’. I don’t think they existed in my time…

Despite Zimbabwe being something of an international pariah state, victim to sanctions and great poverty, there are hardly any beggars here and the people, Muslim and Christian alike are incredibly forthcoming and humble. The Sultan would have been proud to serve such humane subjects

I believe Her Majesty, The Queen of England, knighted the President, Robert Mugabe. Though she does not seem to like to talk about that nowadays.

I came about this disturbing story on the ‘net’. It’s amazing what you can find there! Perhaps if the Sultan had something as powerful as this…it would have certainly kept the harem amused. In my day abacuses were the big thing and those new fangled mechanical adding machines. This guy seems to have a surgical fetish for…calculators. And bad language.

While in a stationary shop recently I recalled our situation in Secondary School. Not the Self discovery or pubescent shit that you see in the movies and books, but rather how universally attached the boys in my class were to our scientific calculators. I was reminded of this by the lack of scientific calculators in the stationary shop itself. Oh, they had lots of calculators no doubt, but of the ordinary variety, the kind you might find in any shop to add shit up, not the scientific variety, with functions such as inverse Tan and even ‘Cosh’. Some of them could even draw graphs or solve equations. In fact, some were so good that they were banned from exams. In my mind they were a completely different genus to mere ‘calculators’.

I could not believe that a shop would peddle stationary to children without at least a rudimentary selection of scientific calculators, preferably looking suitably ornate behind a glass display cabinet, all arranged in competition with each other; Casio (the best) verses Sharp (a close second and the choice of the child wishing to assert his individuality or willing to grapple its’ more challenging interface). What the fuck was the world coming to? Sure they had one or two scientific calculators but that was hardly adequate! And come to think of it, they seemed hardly to have improved at all. In fact they were LESS ostentatious in their functions and LCD display than I considered necessary.

My classmates would have agreed. Even the ones who took no interest in academia considered it mandatory to maintain at least a respectable scientific calculator. To those that did higher Maths or Science, the device was like a dick; simply indispensable. In fact the closest thing I could think of to the scientific calculator would be like a horse to a cowboy. People would get one for their birthday (like me) or save up for months for one and treasure it. Keys would be wiped at night with a damp cloth and solar cells meticulously purged of fingerprints. The lucky few who could afford the newly released GRAPHICAL scientific calculators were the subject of envy, and we would swarm around them to catch a glimpse of how the calculator could graph functions and solve complicated quadratic equations. It seemed almost miraculous. Those who dared to bring an ordinary calculator to class were rightly made to feel inadequate and mocked.

The calculator was a constant companion, an aid in difficulty and a witness in times of intellectual suffering. It was a friend. You could feel happy with it. I don’t care if that sounds dumb, or weird. Sometimes it almost felt like it was all you needed, and happiness could be derived directly from it. To grown ups, who feel that their purpose in life is to make money for some faceless company or government, or who feel that a house in a particular postcode or car is of value and will enhance their life, well, they should understand. After all the calculator was just an object as well and if happiness can be derived from one why not another? If from a big and expensive one, why not a small and cheap one? An object is an object right? A house doesn’t follow you around, you can’t hold it in your hands and play with it for hours on end purposely. It doesn’t silently bear witness to all the minor atrocities of school life.

Yes, the closest analogy for my calculator was a horse. Like in a Western. The horse in Shane maybe.

Various preferences existed when it came to scientific calculators. Strangely, they mainly focused around aesthetics as opposed to functionality. For example, should it be carried in a wallet (the standard) or a hard case from which it was slid out (the new upstart)? Rubber keys or hard plastic? Colour schemes were all pretty similar, but variations were prized. I myself insisted on a wallet and rubber keys. Nothing could beat the feel of them under your fingers as you laboured for a difficult answer, all made worthwhile by the right result. Actually, most of us preferred rubber keys. The hard keys were a perversion.

I noted with disgust that both of the calculators in the stationary shop had hard plastic keys. They were being eyed by two suitably ugly and perverse looking  boys.

It was widely recognised that Casio made the most affordable and aesthetically superior calculators, and their standard format of metallic silver with multicoloured rubber keys attractively displayed in a black (perhaps faux) leather wallet was unbeatable. The fact that you could have a calculator AND a watch by the same brand seemed to introduce an incredible serendipity into the lives of those blessed thus. Of course, their were other brands. Sharp was the foremost of these and the various excellences and shortcomings of Sharp vis – a – vis Casio was the topic of fierce debate and research. The third brand, Texas Instruments, was widely regarded as shit. Not because it was cheap (it wasn’t) but because it actually was shit. It looked, felt and worked shit. Any fool in possession of one could expect to get cussed with no intervention from anyone. The Geneva Convention did not apply to you if you were dumb enough to sport a Texas Instruments calculator. Our prejudices were challenged, when, near the end of our time in school, Texas Instruments were the first (and at that time only) company to release Graphical Scientific Calculators. Gutted.

As I stood in the shop, I felt overcome by anger. How could the (expletive) running this shop not have a well stocked selection of scientific calculators? Who the fuck did he think he was? Then a frightening thought seized me. Maybe it was like this in all shops. Maybe kids did not need or want them any more. The thought seemed horrible. I felt entirely alienated from such an inscrutable society, one that could do away with scientific calculators. How could they not understand the disproportionate pleasure to be derived from a scientific calculator? Especially one with multicoloured rubber keys in a black wallet? Were they insane?

But I soon realised that I wasn’t really angry at them, they were all a bunch of ****wits anyway, calculators or not: I was frightened of myself. For I knew that we each secretly promised ourselves in school, in envy of seeing those who had better and newer calculators than us (especially the unaffordable graphical variety), that when we had jobs and money, we would buy the best and nicest calculator on the market. And not just one. Many. We would collect them, perhaps displaying them in a glass case, like the one from whence they came. Since then, I had had plenty of money. But not only had I not bought a SINGLE calculator, so much had changed that I did not even know that they were now a dying breed, and endangered species. And yet as I contemplated this I still felt for my calculator, as sharply as I had long ago. More in fact. I remembered its keys like the faces of my teachers in school and still loved it. How could I have forgotten? Where had it gone? Why had I not looked after it?! It must be in a rubbish pile somewhere or recycled into a child’s toy or something. A Barbie perhaps, so some young girl could practice dressing up for the day she gets turned out for the price of a cheap drink.

Why had I not replaced it? Had I lost the ability to love scientific calculators or all of the simple pleasures of adolescence? I was sure then, standing in that shop that if I could not love calculators any more then there was no pleasure whatsoever in this world.

I must say, this is a strange new world with strange new angsts. This poor fellow seems to regret his lot in life though he does seem to fancy himself something of a poet. I wish I knew who he was, I would soon cheer him up as I would do the Sultan and ladies of the court. Oh to hear their musical laughter again! The women speak so harshly nowadays. Would that I had slept on…

I was standing in the corridor of the A&E department of the hospital where I worked as a porter. As usual I and my friend were on work – avoidance. Disillusioned and fed up, this was our favourite pastime. The two of us had gone after the morning ward round at eight to give an x-ray request. Obviously, it does not take two men to hand in a piece of paper. It was not a two – man job. In fact it was a no – man job, as in what the **** was the point of making a guy walk half a mile to the x – ray department to hand in a piece of paper? Had these dickless idiots not heard of faxes? Or e-mails? Or perhaps phones? No one minds doing a bit of unworthy dog – work now and again, but it seemed to me that my entire professional life consisted exclusively of this kind of crap. Hence I suppose the work avoidance.

As I stood enthusiastically watching my Italian colleague handing in a piece of paper to a disinterested radiographer with an unnecessary explanation (no doubt designed to magnify our work avoidance), I saw an old Muslim man on a hospital trolley outside the x – ray room where we stood. He was wearing a long shirt with white cotton pants and had a long white beard to match his white hair. He looked like he was dying. Next to him stood a sturdy young Asian. The man reached out his hand imploringly and the man, who I somehow knew had to be his son, took it. He said nothing, the imploring was done by the cast of his face and the way he moved his hand. I could not fathom to what he implored his son but the young man seemed to understand. I imagined that it was some kind of apology by the old man to his son for injustices which now seemed insignificant. What struck me however was that I thought ‘This will be my father soon’, in the place of the old man, frail weak and helpless, raising his hand to somehow borrow my strength. But then I thought, more accurately, ‘Soon it will be me in the place of the old man’, and this gave me pause for thought. Then I went back to avoiding work. We were extremely good at it, and I believe that my friend and I avoided work successfully for the rest of the day.

However, the avoidance of work did not give me the pleasure that it should, for I was profoundly miserable. Having had plenty of time to reflect on my misery during such taxing activities as taking pieces of paper from one part of the hospital to another (if anything requires three years in university, surely it’s this), I put it down to the fact that I  didn’t have a family of my own, although it would be false to say that I retained such lofty thoughts; in fact I was probably now willing to say that I was miserable because I had no girlfriend or simply had not been laid. But what troubled me was that why should this be such an all encompassing catastrophe for me? After all, there were others who functioned reasonably well as thirty year old pseudo –  eunuchs.

I realised that probably to destroy a man you have to make him believe he is the opposite of what he aspires to. Unlike most dickless wasters, I never took any interest in cars or boasting about jobs and money. I always considered them to be amongst the most pathetic of men, because they were try to fill with fame, status and above all materialism a gap in their soul. They substituted these for what a man really should be doing; the two Fs; Fighting and F***ing.

That probably makes me sound like a violent and licentious individual. In fact, I was a thirty years old, deliberately abstinent and had not thrashed anyone for quite some time.

Yet, from a very early age I had been fascinated with the excellent design of women. How they had been created in myriad different forms, where the slightest variation in the shape of the eye or the line of the brow produced an entirely different yet attractive outcome. This was endlessly fascinating. There was no obvious upper limit to how beautiful they could be; no one of them could overwhelm the others. To me they were doubtless the ultimate proof of the divine design of the universe, otherwise how could something so sublime and perfect exist? Chance alone was a poor craftsman for such as they.

So to me, the only thing in life really worth hankering after and chasing was women. Nothing in nature was as attractive as this slight variation on my very own design. Yet strangely, throughout my life, this love and single-minded adoration did not lead me to perversion. I was able to contemplate and believe in monogamy and romantic love. It also did not seem to handicap me when I was around women; I was able to talk with them and mock them with ease, sometimes toying mercilessly with the very objects of my obsession.

Oddly, it never occurred to me until much later in my youth that they might regard me with the same hunger and obsession, and I regarded their motives as inscrutable.