The Book of Khalid by Ameen Fares Rihani (best contemporary novels .txt) 📖

If we remember that the name of Khalid’s cousin is Najma (Star), the significance to himself of the sign spoken of in the last Chapter, is quite evident. But what it means to others remains to be seen. His one star, however, judging from his month’s experience in Baalbek, is not promising of Jannat. For many things, including parental tyranny and priestcraft and Jesuitism, will here conspire against the single blessedness of him, which is now seeking to double itself.

“Where one has so many Fathers,” he writes, “and all are pretending to be the guardians of his spiritual and material well-being, one ought to renounce them all at once. It was not with a purpose to rejoin my folk that I first determined to return to my native country. For, while I believe in the Family, I hate Familism, which is the curse of the human race. And I hate this spiritual Fatherhood when it puts on the garb of a priest, the three-cornered hat of a Jesuit, the hood of a monk, the gaberdine of a rabbi, or the jubbah of a sheikh. The sacredness of the Individual, not of the Family or the Church, do I proclaim. For Familism, or the propensity to keep under the same roof, as a social principle, out of fear, 144 ignorance, cowardice, or dependence, is, I repeat, the curse of the world. Your father is he who is friendly and reverential to the higher being in you; your brothers are those who can appreciate the height and depth of your spirit, who hearken to you, and believe in you, if you have any truth to announce to them. Surely, one’s value is not in his skin that you should touch him. Are there any two individuals more closely related than mother and son? And yet, when I Khalid embrace my mother, mingling my tears with hers, I feel that my soul is as distant from her own as is Baalbek from the Dog-star. And so I say, this attempt to bind together under the principle of Familism conflicting spirits, and be it in the name of love or religion or anything else more or less sacred, is in itself a very curse, and should straightway end. It will end, as far as I am concerned. And thou my Brother, whether thou be a son of the Morning or of the Noontide or of the Dusk,––whether thou be a Japanese or a Syrian or a British man––if thou art likewise circumstanced, thou shouldst do the same, not only for thine own sake, but for the sake of thy family as well.”

No; Khalid did not find that wholesome plant of domestic peace in his mother’s Nursery. He found noxious weeds, rather, and brambles galore. And they were planted there, not by his father or mother, but by those who have a lien upon the souls of these poor people. For the priest here is no peeled, polished affair, but shaggy, scrubby, terrible, forbidding. And with a word he can open yet, for 145 such as Khalid’s folk, the gate which Peter keeps or the other on the opposite side of the Universe. Khalid must beware, therefore, how he conducts himself at home and abroad, and how, in his native town, he delivers his mind on sacred things, and profane. In New York, for instance, or in Turabu for that matter, he could say in plain forthright speech what he thought of Family, Church or State, and no one would mind him. But where these Institutions are the rottenest existing he will be minded too well, and reminded, too, of the fate of those who preceded him.

The case of Habib Ish-Shidiak at Kannubin is not yet forgotten. And Habib, be it known, was only a poor Protestant neophite who took pleasure in carrying a small copy of the Bible in his hip pocket, and was just learning to roll his eyes in the pulpit and invoke the “laud.” But Khalid, everybody out-protesting, is such an intractable protestant, with, neither Bible in his pocket nor pulpit at his service. And yet, with a flint on his tongue and a spark in his eyes, he will make the neophite Habib smile beside him. For the priesthood in Syria is not, as we have said, a peeled, polished, pulpy affair. And Khalid’s father has been long enough in their employ to learn somewhat of their methods. Bigotry, cruelty, and tyranny at home, priestcraft and Jesuitism abroad,––these, O Khalid, you will know better by force of contact before you end. And you will begin to pine again for your iron-loined spiritual Mother. Ay, and the scelerate Jesuit will even make capital of your 146 mass of flowing hair. For in this country, only the native priests are privileged to be shaggy and scrubby and still be without suspicion. But we will let Shakib give us a few not uninteresting details of the matter.

“Not long after we had rejoined our people,” he writes, “Khalid comes to me with a sorry tale. In truth, a fortnight after our arrival in Baalbek––our civility towards new comers seldom enjoys a longer lease––the town was alive with rumours and whim-whams about my friend. And whereso I went, I was not a little annoyed with the tehees and grunts which his name seemed to invoke. The women often came to his mother to inquire in particular why he grows his hair and shaves his mustaches; the men would speak to his father about the change in his accent and manners; the children teheed and tittered whenever he passed through the town-square; and all were of one mind that Khalid was a worthless fellow, who had brought nothing with him from the Paradise of the New World but his cough and his fleece. Such tattle and curiosity, however, no matter what degree of savage vulgarity they reach, are quite harmless. But I felt somewhat uneasy about him, when I heard the people asking each other, “Why does