New Beginning

Almost exactly one year to the day after I started this blog something quite unusual happened. It crashed. Well, to put it more honestly, my website, of which this sometimes rambling, sometimes raving, occasionally poetic but more often cryptic record of my life is a part, crashed. It went belly-up, suddenly, without warning, without even a hint of a future history which would, as I’ve now realized in that cliché way we’ve all come to know as hindsight, prove to be a defining moment in my self-created blogging universe.

That may not sound very unusual: this precarious universe built on infinitesimally small packets of information, tiny little bricks piled haphazardly one on top of the other; this shanty supercity where we flaunt the fundamental rules of structural design, this Gaudi Park packed with protruding ideas, acute angles of perception and otherworldly creatures borne of a limitless imagination. This surreal place will, every-so-often, come tumbling down on our heads.

Or so I thought. So I imagined. So I feared. So I despaired.

But, in the end, the catastrophe that drove me to 2 weeks of raki-induced oblivion was itself a mirage. My digital self hadn’t, in fact, shattered into a billion bits and bytes. It still existed, cryogenically frozen somewhere in the infinite chill of deep cyberspace. Nonetheless, for those 14 days, I was lost. During that time, I hunted, like Gilgamesh hunting Enkidu, like Rumi roaming the warren of streets in Damascus searching for his beloved Shams, only to find that my other self had never left home. Returning to that place, tired and forlorn, I found myself again, or if not my true self, not the self that I had left behind, then a newer version – ARK v2 or v3 or v3.2.4.6. The self I found, when in a vaporous haze I punched in the familiar cipher signifying my cyber-existence, had changed in some inexplicable way, and what I discovered in that moment, that instant of rediscovery, for the umpteenth time, was that it wasn’t the hunt that had mattered but, in another tired cliché, the journey itself.

What did I discover? you must be asking. Let me tell you a story.

The day before Saladin entered triumphant into Jerusalem on 27 Rajab 583, many of his advisors and captains begged him to let them plunder the defeated city, as it had been plundered by the Franj a century before. “Let us destroy the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,” demanded one of his more virulent advisors, “as a lesson to the infidels and a reminder that they should fear the Army of the True God.” Saladin, whose life had been exceptionally marked by compassion, was unmoved, though he understood the wrath of his people, many of whom had been weaned on stories, some more true than others, about what the Frankish armies had done to the poor and innocent after they had breached the walls of this holiest of cities. He saw in their faces the faces of great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, of distant aunts and long-lost uncles, of cousins decades removed, even of complete strangers who would have been kin had history followed another path. In these faces, these ghosts of the past that still haunted the contours of living faces, he also saw, to his horror, himself.

That image stalked Saladin, even as he negotiated the terms of surrender with the envoys of Balian of Ibelin, the defeated Frankish ruler of Jerusalem. Like a shadow hovering in every corner of his tent, this reflection of his own face, a likeness which was not himself but more self than his own image reflected in a mirror, overtook the great Muslim conqueror as a lion might overtake its prey. The hunter became the hunted, servant supplanted master and in that infinitely brief moment, Saladin, the lord of destiny, conqueror of fate, architect of history, understood the meaning behind the veil.

The next morning, at the moment when the gates of Jerusalem were to be opened, Saladin insisted, despite the protests of his advisors, that he should lead the procession into the capital of the Holy Land. “There will be many assassins, my lord,” they warned. “You must wait until your captains have cleared a safe path to the citadel.” But Saladin would not heed their warnings and the most perceptive of his advisors could see that their lord and master would not be swayed; for his face had changed and they recognized that the man entering Jerusalem was not the same man who had led his army to the gates of Damascus and Aleppo, nor was he the commander who had united the disparate armies of Islam and led a campaign that had accomplished in a few short years what others had failed to do in a century.

Saladin, this Saladin, the Saladin who mounted his milk-white mare on the morning of the 27^th Rajab 583, was in fact no conqueror at all. This man, who rode at the forefront of the most feared army in the whole of the Levant, was a mere child. It was as if a new identity had come into being in the course of a single night, emerging from the womb of history like a long-forgotten memory. So when this child marched through the gates of Jerusalem and saw the streets lined with the faces of his ancestors, he knew he had come home, though he had never set foot in this city before. And when the people of Jerusalem looked into the face of their new King, they saw not another subjugator, nor did they see a stranger who had come to rule over them. Instead, they saw themselves, each and every one of them as he gazed into the eyes of this legendary man, saw the reflection of his own face.

In the first entry I ever posted on this blog, I wrote:

This…is my journey through war...and peace...and all of the myriad details that make life so dizzyingly spectacular. But it's not a journal. I don't know what it is yet but I'm interested in seeing what it will become.

That interest has turned to fascination which in turn has inspired enquiry. Losing the blog forced me to reconsider the question I asked when I started: What is a blog? What had I lost and could it ever be regained?

That line of thinking led me to reconsider my ideas about identity, a theme I’ve been exploring for years (something all immigrants must face at some point in their lives). For many years, I’d tied identity to history, not simply my own history in the concrete sense of a life led, but in the more abstract sense of history existing as an ontological entity where a collection of pasts inform and shape the present. In that sense, I’d toyed for some time with the idea of borrowed histories, a theme Hermann Hesse explored so beautifully in Demian. My identity, my logic went, is not simply the sum total of my life but the calculus of the lives that have come before me; my parents for example: their history has shaped my identity, just as the histories of their parents shaped theirs; my friends, whose histories have become an integral part of my own self-awareness; the collective history of Canada; of Pakistan; and now of Turkey. All of these histories are linked in me, like a matrix, like the dendrites of a neuron, which naturally leads to the next question: What is the soma? What is the central body of this self? Searching for that centre created a conflict in me that I found difficult to resolve, as the following excerpt from another previous entry shows:

I am Pakistani-Canadian, and there is the crux of the problem. I am a Muslim-atheist-apostate, an extension of the problem. I am also a secular-spiritualist, a writer-photographer, a friend-lover, a pacifist-war junkie. We are not unique, people like us, folks caught in the hyphen. In fact, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that the whole of humanity is a vast collection of conflicted individuals, fragmented personalities stitched together by well-placed punctuation, an army of grammatical Frankensteins searching for continuity.

It haunted me, this conflict, this elusive continuity that seemed to exist always somewhere in the penumbra, never fully exposing itself to the light. And the more I searched for it, the more distant and abstract it became.

Until I lost my blog.

That seemingly catastrophic event was, I now know, a blessing in disguise. It forced me to accept that my identity is not singular, that losing one history – the history I’d constructed in cyberspace, for example – was to lose one self in the myriad of selves that exist in us. The single neuron then becomes a network of neurons, a network of selves linked by multiple histories.

Then it dawned on me, the answer I’d been dancing around for months:

If histories are the source of identity, then the more histories in which we implicate ourselves, the more selves we create.

Rather than a cause of imprisonment, the hyphen is in fact a liberator. It frees us from the illusion of singularity, a point I made in another blog entry:

So maybe in some ways being multiple is better than the certainty of any single identity. That certainty is too easily corrupted into a form of racist nationalism. Multiple identities may be confusing but they provide us with the empathy and necessary displacement required to appreciate the value of other cultures.

Not only other cultures, but the value of our own other selves. To take that thought a step further, single identities don’t exist, they are a false construct, like God, the product of fear, a fear of the unknown, a fear of the Other. Single identities, like God, become an object of worship, a source of dogma, and inevitably a source of conflict. Applied to current events, the wars we see around the world today are not a Clash of Civilizations but rather a Clash of Identities. As the world shrinks, as histories mix and new identities challenge the old, established ones, societies in general and the people who specifically make up those societies will naturally struggle against what they perceive as a loss of identity.

So the challenge in the world today is to find a way to overcome the dogma of singularity, in a sense to create a space where multiple identities are accepted as the natural state of being. It will be a long and difficult road: to challenge the religion of the singular self is to challenge the power structures that derive legitimacy from that religion, those who reinforce the illusion of dominant cultures and superior modes of thought. That will be a challenge I’m now willing to take up on this blog, now that I finally realize, after losing it, what it means to me.

This then, is the new beginning…