23. Faith in Humanity

In 1890 a thirty-year-old man named Muṣṭafā al-Shāhīn arrived in the United States. He had great commercial ambitions but none of the means that would carry him to his goals. He was therefore compelled to trade, though on a simple scale. He wandered through villages and farms carrying his wooden box, selling farmers pins, combs, and small goods. For five years he worked and strove until he had saved nearly two thousand dollars in the money belt he had brought from home.[83] At first he wore it beneath his shirt out of fear for the money inside. Once he grew accustomed to the country and no longer feared thieves, he could not alter the habit. One day he tried taking off the belt, but he returned to it the next, for a chest cold had reached out its hand to greet him and he had declined the handshake. Necessity thus returned him to his former practice.

A man like Muṣṭafā al-Shāhīn had no concern of mind or feeling but to grow great in the financial world and establish, on his own account, a large store visited by peddlers. Seated in his chair, commanding and forbidding, he would reap profits from them. He had gained some experience in importing merchandise and distinguishing the fat from the lean, and he saw the two thousand dollars he had saved as an excellent commercial capital.

But where were the customers?

He put this question to himself and set his thought to answering it.

The establishment he aspired to create could not be in New York: he knew himself unequal to commerce in a great city among great merchants. Nor would he prosper if he opened it in any one of the villages through which he had wandered during his years abroad, for no single village had enough inhabitants to ensure the store’s success. Yet he could not carry the establishment upon his back as he had done with his peddler’s pack and try his fortune in this village and that.

Ambition opens people’s inner eyes, whatever the quantity of their brains. After long thought, Muṣṭafā arrived at an original opinion. He immediately liquidated his business and sold everything in his pack. Of its trinkets he retained things useful back home—combs, perfume bottles, rings, false jewelry, and the like—as presents for his people in the village. A few days later he took ship and returned to his family with the money that remained, putting his trust in God.

Muṣṭafā reached his village. Every inhabitant hurried to greet the rich returnee, from old women and old men down to children wearing amulets. Do not ask how great the people’s amazement was at the wealth he had brought home. His ten fingers covered with rings, the great pin in his tie, the yellow studs in his shirt cuffs, the gifts of “jewels” for his wife and sisters, and the woolens and small goods he gave relatives and neighbors—all these proclaimed to them in a mighty voice that Muṣṭafā al-Shāhīn had become a man without equal.

The old men lamented their bad fortune because their youth had passed before they learned of America. Young men drew near to him to study the conditions in America, how to travel there, what the journey cost, and everything else. But Muṣṭafā had come to his village on a commercial mission. In the people’s infatuation with him he saw a road to his purpose. Not a week had passed after the village son’s arrival from America before the village, down to its very soil, longed to go to America with him.

Thus, at the end of a month, Muṣṭafā returned to America at his own expense, leading an army of ten young men. With them he would conquer the commerce of America and reach the goal he had so long imagined and desired.

On the long road, Muṣṭafā suffered some hardship from his commercial expedition. Despite all the trouble, however, he rejoiced within. Around him he saw the men on whom he would build his glorious future; in him they saw the heroic commander who would bring them into a world of glory and honor.

His trouble did not end with bringing them. When he reached the village in which he had decided to build his establishment, he nearly tore himself apart training them to carry peddlers’ packs and teaching them certain necessary phrases of English—only as much of the language as he himself knew, a pronunciation he had snatched up and used, as he said, to untie his own knots.

God made the task light for Muṣṭafā. The establishment he had imagined was created and divided into two parts: an inner section in which he slept, cooked, ate, and received guests, and an outer section with merchandise and boxes on shelves and wooden stands on the floor supporting trays of goods.

The first year passed in founding the establishment and training the army for conquest. In the second, Muṣṭafā harvested a noteworthy amount of profit and sent part of it to his village to bring his wife to America. In the third, he began quarreling with his army. Its ten members had acquired some experience in the marketplace and broadened their understanding by moving from town to town; now they argued with him over prices. They inclined toward rebellion and conspired among themselves to boycott him. Only by clever devices could he persuade them otherwise. He became gentle with them, invited them to his table on Sundays, and won their hearts through courtesy and family alliances.

The years passed. The establishment’s business increased and its profits multiplied, but its owner cursed his luck because events had not followed his calculations. Command and prohibition over the imported class of customers were no longer among his functions.

I knew him during those years. I sometimes visited that village and would turn into his establishment to ask how he was and converse a little while waiting for the train.

Commercial changes followed: I left the firm I had represented and attached myself to another in a different region of the country. I no longer heard anything of Muṣṭafā al-Shāhīn. But I pictured him in my mind and said, “Five years have passed since I saw him. Today he must be the town’s leading notable, for his business is moving, his customers are solid men, and his expenses for a year amount to the profit of a month.”

In 1906, travel threw me by chance into that village. As soon as I arrived, I went to see the man I had come to know solely because he spoke the language I spoke, the language belonging to us both.

How great was my astonishment when I saw my friend somewhere other than his former establishment. I found him at the door of a wretched house near his old store, surrounded by schoolchildren, boys and girls, to whom he was selling ice cream in cones for a cent each. When the school bell rang, the children left Muṣṭafā’s circle and ran back to school. I approached and greeted him. He was very happy to see me after a long absence during which many events had befallen the poor man.

I watched him lift the pot from which he had been selling and invite me into the house, since business time had passed. I entered with him to learn something of what had been hidden from me.

“How are your affairs, Muṣṭafā?” I asked. “It seems things have changed for you.”

He answered with a deep sigh and did not wish to speak. Instead, he led me to a small room opposite the one in which we had been sitting and said, “Look. Consider.”

On the walls I saw ten portraits of ten people, each with a name written beneath it. I drew close to read them. They were: “Father of the Thousand,” “Father of the Five Hundred,” “Father of the Six Hundred,” and so on. Beneath nine portraits I read numbers in place of names. Under the tenth was written “Father of Eve.”[84]

“What do you mean by these numbers?” I asked, laughter nearly overcoming me.

“I named each portrait by the amount its subject swindled from me before fleeing to a place I do not know.”

“And who is this Father of Eve?”

“He is the one who made off with the woman at the end, after conspiring with her to rob the establishment, which the government closed when it declared me bankrupt.”

“Then you lost everything, Muṣṭafā?”

“Yes, I lost everything. More than that, I lost something you cannot see.”

I nearly wept for his condition. “What was it?”

“My faith in the human constitution.”

NOTES

[83] The kamar was a broad cloth money belt worn beneath the clothes. Haddad makes its warmth and security literal when Muṣṭafā imagines that removing it invites a cold.
[84] The Arabic teknonym Abū, ‘father of,’ normally identifies a man by a child. Muṣṭafā replaces the child’s name with each swindler’s debt. ‘Father of Eve’ is a dark joke for the man who carried away his wife, the archetypal woman.
