30. The School of Exile

“The people of our country are poor creatures, backward in everything. If not for exile, they would be no different from the people of Africa. Exile has taught most of them and opened their inner eyes, so that they have come to know what the world is.”

These sentences formed part of a long statement Ilyās Shadrāwī made before a crowd of countrymen in a Syrian café. The conversation concerned memories of the homeland that had occurred to several of them. One man wished to answer that, in the past, Syrians in Syria may have been as he described, but for twenty years—that is, since Ilyās Shadrāwī had emigrated—Syria had filled with schools. Its inhabitants now knew everything and, thanks to their native intelligence, had become more skillful than Europeans and Americans in every field.

Ilyās Shadrāwī was not persuaded by this reply. He pulled the hookah hose from his mouth so sharply that those present imagined he had drawn out his teeth.

“In our country,” he said, “they still believe that America’s streets are paved with glass and that a person can dig anywhere and find gold in abundance. We often hear that they believe the strangest things about America, although we have spent tens of years here without seeing any trace of them.”

The man who had opened the door of objection closed it by rising and leaving the group. “All that passed away long ago,” he said. “Now the hour of prayer at Sunday Mass has come. A happy day to all of you.”

The objector departed, leaving among the people a conversation about Syria and Syrians that could not be joined together. Whenever one man tried to gather it at a single point, another appeared and branched it in several directions until the cup was lost among them.[105] Exactly two hours later, near noon, their conversation had moved from comparing Syrians’ knowledge with that of emigrants to Egypt, Egyptians, the British government, the ʿUrābī incident, and many other affairs—for conversation, as people say, has branches.[106]

I still remember that patriotic gathering, although it took place more than ten years ago in a city far from New York. My travels had cast me into that café one Sunday morning. I sat at a table sipping coffee and listened to the company’s conversation from a distance to kill the empty time. Since I knew none of them, I did not join the discussion but amused myself with what I heard.

The branching roads their talk followed, however, led my eyes toward sleep. I nodded for a minute, awoke when my head struck the wall, and then their conversation carried me down another road. Many times I intended to depart but found insufficient strength to rise. Besides, I was a stranger in that city and had nowhere to go except the café and the hotel in which I lodged. My will therefore fell beneath the nightmare of drowsiness. I remained like someone in a disturbing dream, watching strange scenes and telling himself, “I may be dreaming,” while straining his wits to determine whether he dreams or wakes.

While I was in this condition, a hand shook my shoulder. I awoke in alarm and found a friend I had met on an earlier journey.

“Sleeping in the morning?” he said. “Wake up, my friend. Mix yourself among the brothers and be entertained; you will drive sleep away.”

He came close, placed his mouth beside my ear, and said, “There is a man here of very strange habits. He claims to know everything, though he can neither read nor write. His talk and intervention in every subject are comedy to anyone who listens. Pay attention. I shall stir up his disposition and draw him into a strange subject. I promise you will split with laughter.”

My friend, whose presence greatly cheered me, called to the server and ordered two cups of coffee. By then I was truly awake, and every trace of sleep had flown from my eyes. My friend entered the company’s conversation.

“What are you discussing?”

Ilyās Shadrāwī answered, “When you came in, the talk was about the British government in Egypt, and yours truly was telling them what I myself experienced in that country after the ʿUrābī incident. The English used tremendous severity there until they were able to make it the Garden of Eden.”

One of the wonders was that this man had spoken in a Syrian dialect when he began, before I dozed, because the conversation was about Syria. Now that it had turned to Egypt, he spoke the language and dialect of Egyptians. I listened with the greatest attention to discover how—and in which language—his discourse would end, especially after my friend had told me that he was a prodigy of the age in thrusting himself into every affair and subject.

His speech was exceedingly long, and I enjoyed its winding course. At one moment he touched upon Egyptian politics and ended with the ancient pharaohs. At another he turned toward the British occupation and appended the story of the Library of Alexandria in the age of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb.[107] All this came in the language and dialect of Egyptians, as though he had been born in Egypt and arrived from it that very day.

I shall not burden the reader by recounting everything amusing I heard. I limit myself to the final tale he offered.

“In Egypt,” he said, “everyone sentenced to hang pays one Egyptian pound for the price of the rope. No power beneath the sun can release him from the tax.”

A tax for which God had sent down no authority! But Ilyās Shadrāwī was describing to the company his experiences in that country. Like everyone present, I had breathed Egypt’s air from a steamship when it stopped in Alexandrian waters on my way to this country. Thus I remained silent in amazement.

One member of the group, however, could not digest the tale. Full of wonder, he asked the speaker, “But if the condemned man does not possess the price of the rope, what do they do with him?”

Ilyās Shadrāwī answered at once in the language of the Egyptians: “They don’t hang ’im.”[108]

Reader, do not ask how the gathering ended. Laughter nearly paralyzed every listener’s jaws, including mine and my friend’s. When I recovered and they recovered, I placed my hand upon my head like someone emerging from unconsciousness and asked my friend’s permission to return to the hotel.

He accompanied me. On the way, I told him that the first thing I had heard Ilyās Shadrāwī say, at the gathering’s beginning, concerned Syrians’ scandalous ignorance in believing such things existed in America. He had been proving to his listeners that exile alone illuminated the inner eyes of some of them. I then observed how he ended with his final story, claiming it came from personal experience.

I said this, bade my friend farewell, and began climbing the hotel stairs.

He answered, “Let us thank God that his tale came from personal experience. If it had come by hearsay—as Syrians in Syria hear of America’s glories and exaggerate them—the condemned man in Egypt would hang the khedive in his place if he refused to pay for the rope.”[109]

NOTES

[105] Arabic ḍāʿat al-ṭāsa baynahum, ‘the cup was lost among them,’ describes a confused affair in which responsibility and direction disappear.
[106] Aḥmad ʿUrābī led the Egyptian nationalist revolt of 1881–82. British forces defeated it and occupied Egypt in 1882; British political control continued under varying legal forms for decades.
[107] A persistent but historically disputed tradition alleges that the Library of Alexandria was destroyed on the order of Caliph ʿUmar after the Muslim conquest. Haddad cites it as one more sign of Ilyās’s indiscriminate pseudo-history.
[108] Arabic lā yishnaqūhūsh renders an Egyptian negative construction with the suffix -sh. The marked dialect is part of the joke: Ilyās adopts an Egyptian voice as proof of an experience he never had.
[109] The ‘school of exile’ is ironic. Ilyās claims that emigration cures homeland ignorance, but the gathering reveals how confidently misinformation can be manufactured abroad.
