(On the Hermeneutics of Leadership and Exegeses of the Group: Shahāda)

For the woman who refuses adjustment, who insists on the specificity of her desire, the hysteric is her sister.

-Julia Kristeva

A disobedience that bequeaths humiliation and extreme need is better than an obedience that bequeaths self-infatuation and pride.

-Ibn ‘Atā’ ’Allāh

If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.

-Emma Goldman

Genesis: Abjadiyya

In the beginning, there was the self. And the self was made word. Lonesome, ontologically weary and fearful of extinction, word yearned for company. Not foreign or distant, but intimate and personal. Since the universe as an idea was born out of the primeval desire for knowledge, as the Divine Presence was a hidden treasure longing to be known and the formation of the universe was the purposeful means to that recognition; and given that all desire is libidinous in nature and that all creation starts with a word, kunn fayakūnu kawnan kā’inan mann kāna maknūnan maftūnan bidhatihī fātinan lahā, be to become betrothed to gnosis and bearing with me, word lured a libidinosity-paved context. And, thus, context signified everything: existence and annihilation, opposites and their antonyms, synonyms and their metonyms, nebulosity and referentiality, the spoken and the closeted, penetrators and penetratees, the sacred and the profane, the nouns and the verbs, the symbolic and the ambiguous, epistemology and oblivion, the fragmented and the wholesome, the Self and the Other. Context is everything. Or so we were taught and so we chose to believe.

Treading out of one’s immediate context can be both a condolement and a curse. The former takes the shape of the freedom of freshly adopted contexts, which enrich one’s being, enhancing our palimpsestic propensities, and the beautifully wondrous possibilities (’alf ’alf ’ihtimāl to invoke the Jahinian muse) that emerge from intersecting with other individuals’ contexts, dialoguing and conflicting, affirming and shattering stereotypes, idolizing and blaspheming, bickering and having the most ecstatic make-up sex.

As for the latter, the misfortune, it arises with the vulnerability of being completely decontextualised, of yearning for acceptance from the unfamiliar hearts while preserving one’s authenticity, of allowing others a step into one’s shoes while shunning being polluted by compromise. It is a moment of utter nudity, when one gets deprived of one’s context and immediacy and stands at the threshold, on the perpetual verge of the trauma of understanding (to cite Freud) absolutely bereft and lost in translation. And as only nudity permits, the rawness of thoughts and emotions is put on permanent display, attracting either compassion, which only the act of true “seeing” as Mary Daly advises, can grant, or cruelty that often starts with self-laceration and ends with otherisation and exile, all while bearing the marks of lashes and signs to the routes that ostracization takes, scarlet-lettering the contextless self and cartographing its desolate vicinities. The contextually divested self is, henceforth, declared a hazardous zone where intolerance is tolerated, disarmament dictated and sovereignty-defiling intrusion necessitated. It is pronounced a persona non grata.

But because the self was born out of desire, undesirable it will not be. And betwixt the blessing and the blight is a realm of grayness, suspended in the erotics of hermeneutics and the wilderness of revisionism. Immersed in that very nakedness, we commenced our trip to Copenhagen. As we voyaged through the summer school, and at the risk of familiarity turning banal, schooled we were to become in the grayness that expanded and begged for intervention, yet with unrelenting labour in shedding contexts, embracing others, or harmonising them in togetherness; all while breaking the bread of acquaintance and sipping the wine of association.

Exodus: Dhahāb

i used to be an enthused fan of even numbers. They looked neat and provided a false sense of security and accord. After being endowed with a morsel of cognisance, a crumb of discernment and a smidgen of humour, i decided that evenness was nothing but a fallacy. And in one fell swoop, the mathematics of the heart dictated that 1+1=1 and that is that. Notwithstanding my romantic whimsicality, two of the three days that stand out in the summer school, bearing great personal and communal signification, carry even numbers. But three days they were. Three days they are. Three reinstates my belief in oddity. Three consecrates the trilogy of recurrence, resonance and reflection. Three is my (un)holy trinity of self, selfish and selfless. Three is an open love triangle, where one cannot help but be a primary and utterly partial side, a self-born, uncrooked rib and ethically right angle; an open love affair where one lusts after a hermeneutical exit, but gets wondrously exerted in the richness of associations, intersections, desire-driven and desire-based intricacies, where the only expected faithfulness is to be shed at the altar of desire.

And on the eighth day, when most was said and done, god never reclined, as more work demanded accomplishment. There he was, Bjørn Nørgaard, the god of healing slaughter, ruthless art and uncompromising rhetoric. He became known to us. He rose to recreate the world in his own truth, fully knowing that there was no time for image-worship. He displayed how he so selfishly and selflessly employed his personal history, body and the bodies of those he loved as a platform for his political commitment and art. i found myself absorbed in the slide he showed of the performance-art piece, “The Female Christ”, where his wife, naked and carrying a cross, walked through Copenhagen Stock Exchange. Lene Adler Peterson sacrificed her body as installation artwork to protest and lament the ills of capitalism, symbolised by its ‘temple’, the stock exchange market where the woman Christ-figure, daughter of her own mother, visited in her stark humanity, bearing her personal truth to disturb and discomfort the idol worshippers. Watching this slide in class completely captivated me. Then again at the museum where Nørgaard’s work was exhibited, i allowed myself to be engrossed more and sink deeper in semiotics where glowed the eternal sunshine of the hermeneutical endeavor. With tenderly wise features and a great deal of affinity, Nørgaard rejuvenated in me the ontological eroticism that had been subdued due to the first sabbatical happenings.

Fast backward. On the fourth day, when the morning and evening were marked in place, the time was properly kept and we each knew our standing, they said “Let’s take you on an excursion to one of our finest creations and expose you to the manufacture of democracy”. So, on the fourth day there was the parliament where those on the road to Ithaca met the good, the bad and the ugly. Three, always three. The word “excursion” had such benign connotations that did not prepare us for what to come. The bad and the ugly proposed an uncomplex intellectual stance, albeit i took on the latter for extra-curricular comic relief, resulting from the ugly completely oblivious to how ugly ugly was and continuing to be all the uglier. i scored. We laughed. But unhidden whips in the eyes and tones of voices seemed not to care. i thought the good was good to reason with. There was a sophistication and, beneath the rhetoric that wreaked with both patronisation and Euro-centric aspirations for a new world order that would neutralise the unilateralism borne out of the single-super-power system, beneath all of that, i detected that, with some intellectual finessing, the good was going to show how good good was. Up to that moment, i was viewed as the veiled woman, who carried a thick British accent and articulated intelligent ideas. Then, i opened my mouth and uttered the words “neo-colonial discourse”. And all hell broke loose. i became the veiled woman who veiled nothing. No British accent could come to my rescue then, to prove that i myself am a post-colonial product. i tried to entice the works of dangerous authors like Said, Spivak, Foucault and Derrida to shoulder the blame for me, since after all they were responsible for my monstrosity and exclusionary language. But of no avail. i fell into the pit of incessant proving and translation of the self. A dark pit that was to become my purgatorial abyss. With just a few words, pronounced correctly, i forfeited the context with which i had barely become kin. i metamorphosed into The Medusa who laughed and cried unabashedly, wore on her head a sea of floating snakes for ideas that even the tightly fitted veil could not contain and turned the parliament into pandemonium. And i proudly became the enemy of the process.

Fast forward. On the eleventh date, came the day of reckoning. The writing had been posted on the wall, instructing us not to ask and not to tell, not to question the establishment or expose it. i was not about to acquiesce to a closeted present after all the confessional coming out i had invested myself in. Having had ten days with ten commandments, regulating our disorderliness and stipulating discipline, we were deemed ready for the ministerial blessings. The Minister strutted in with his entourage and secret service, which was no secret at all. He started ministering and preaching us in the ways of development and the developed, as if we were a congregation of premature fetuses whose carrying wombs suffered brutal kicks and spat us out in the most unmotherly of manners. We were expected not to desecrate his presence in the name of an unholy land and its unchosen people, the sons and daughters of the Arabo-Islamic Other whose demonisation he furthered in his speech, personifying xenophobia in its most elegant of shapes: tall, white, sharply dressed. But we did anyway. We blasphemed and sinned like no lascivious law-breaker could ever do. Some of us spoke up, throwing one verbal punch at the ungodly official after another, all while maintaining decorous titles, addressing him as Your Excellency and Your Excellency that (note i am being accordingly courteous with capitalisation here). But i, the threat to dialogue and demolisher of process, remained silent, yet louder than all. i channelled Lene Adler Peterson, Nørgaard’s partner in crime. i put myself out there, becoming entirely naked while clad in fully covering Egyptian galabiyya and headscarf. i donned my cross of “Free Gaza” shirt, gagged my sacrilegious mouth and strapped my sinning hands with the Palestinian kufiyya. Presenting myself red-handed with terrorism and silence, i took my place directly opposite the Minister’s pulpit. Wherever he looked, he could not avoid my eyes. No matter how tall he stood, my silence echoed louder. Despite his white complexion and ministerial demeanor, the woman of colour proudly exhibited her blemished skin and her scarred and humbled goddess. i took away the divine right of kings and robinhooded it eastward.

Following that, unfolded an undivulged herstory of insecurity, vulnerability, self-doubt, guilt-ridden revisionism, self-loathing, futile self-explanation, character assassination, vindictiveness and name-tarnishing. Incalculable was the time, energy, heart and self invested in and consumed by the process, an adversary of which i was branded. But a simple adding up of the digits of the aforementioned days is indeed possible. 4 + 8 + (1+1) = 14. Almost a fortnight in the midst of a quasi-suhba. Twice the number of heavens. Double the deadly sins. Two times the benefits of travel. The suffering and wrong-doing was manifold. A story better remain untold.

Revelations and The Song of Songs: Tajallī-Ta’wīl

With all things contextual i commenced and with contexts i resume. Wholly conscious of the new milieus acquired in the course of writing this testimony, i refer myself and the reader to the beautiful moment in the very first day of the summer school when we were all schooled in the ways of one another. We convened in a large, yet intimate circle. Summoned to the call of knowledge, we congregated to celebrate a sacred union and inaugurate the cycle of introductions. We made room for each other. That was when the spirits were still alerted by the freshness of exposition. The hearts hid not their compassion, even if the eyes veered away in shyness or prejudice. A discerning voice asked us to each select a significant incident, a turning point, or a meaningful period in our lives to use as an entry to oneself, as if opening but one of many doors to the realm within. What i came to realise was that the discerning voice was offering us a shelter from the homesickness decontextualisation can stir. By avoiding chronological linearity, we recreated our personal histories and chose the stories we were so desirous of telling. We watched each other build our individual contextual havens. We allowed one another a view from within, a point of reference that was to prove extremely helpful at times of dire contention. Collectively we spoke of the most intimate of matters; loved ones back home, profound losses, new arrivals, familial dramas, mutilated bodies, shattered dreams, religiosity and lack thereof, inner demons and divinities. The circle of learning initiated us into one another’s sense of humour and mannerisms, odours and flavours, textures and complexions, attire and substance. Together we witnessed our contexts comfortably intersect and we chimed along in unison.

Another brilliant accomplishment of the summer school was how it did not provide rigid definitions to its two most prominent concepts: reform and leadership. Both notions are not only context-determined, but also highly dependent on personal hermeneutics. The fluid discussion around reform and leadership in itself birthed myriad self-fashioned definitions. The experience of the summer school, the dialogues we had and observations we made strengthened my belief in diversity, which guarantees the acceptance that one did or did not enjoy. It confirmed that the most genuine shapes of reform was that of the self. It is the certified copy after which all reforms should be modeled.

Similarly, it is an imperative for leadership to be authentically founded. Any leader, and every individual at the summer school was one indeed, has to know their selves and be faithful to who they really are. Come hell or high water, Cyclopes or Sirens, they have to exist authentically, be fully awake to their essence and become their own prophets and prophetesses if they are to lead followers onto the path to a more meaningful reality. This faith does not, however, excuse rigidity and cruelty, but rather demand of the self continuous revisitation of principles and opinions, which in its turn should prevent intellectual stagnancy.

Reflecting on my, with emphasis on “my” since reflection is by default an individualised activity, experience at the summer school, i conclude that there are two types of leaders and two types of entities to which they belong. There are the efficient and professional obedient sons and daughters of the institution. They build institutions, run institutions and renovate institutions. They have absolute veneration for processes and are institutionalised in their ways of thinking and modi operandi. They revere establishments and are integral parts of them. The second type is that of activists who belong to the revolution. They are those who disobey and blaspheme. They write their stories outside the comfortable social script, constantly decentralising the centre, wildly running away with the margin, which becomes their vast and emancipatory context where they find company in other decontextualised and ostracised selves. The activists are the ones who always raise their voices and stamp their feet, never allowing the institution to contain their resistance or stifle their voices.

i am indebted to DEDI for allowing all the pieces to fall in place, hence crystallising my self-definition and position. One of the endearing criticisms made of me, and goddess knows there were many, was how i personalised matters and made things about myself. The feminist in me viewed this as the most possible of compliments, to be the living example of the-personal-is-public, the-private-is-political, the-daily-is-historical mottos. The Sufi in me rejoiced at the idea of being a humble disciple of Mawlānā ‘Ibn ‘Arabī’s Ontological Monism, where one is in all and all is in one. The self-doubting, guilt-ridden me, however, understood that that was a problem. What no one knew was that i earnestly tried to sanitise my rhetoric and disposition. In the midst of that keen effort, something beautiful happened: a sign was revealed. And i had to employ all my interpretive labour if i were to decipher it.

On the very day of our “excursion” to the parliament, and after i committed the right mistake of opening my mouth and made a scene that cost me reproach and disapproval, to say the least, we were guided through an artistic promenade in the city. When i least expected it, i was granted a sign of recognition. Writing this now, i am entirely grateful and happy that the sign found in me a ready and fertile receptacle, for it to copulate with sincere hermeneutical desire and produce meaning and purpose. The nocturnal tour of the city was like an alleyway to the self; meandering and painstaking, but gratifying and meaningful.

The sign was as follows. One of the stops we made was to a shop window. We stood there mesmerized, at the threshold of fantasy and the intersection between perception and reality. In the window images took the stage and then departed. But one Mediterranean-looking man appeared more than once. At times, he was uttering unintelligible syllables. At others, he let out long cries of agony and yearning. The sign emerged when he dexterously handled a string, entering into one nostril and out of the other. Dangling from the string was a pendant that bore a letter, more like a scrabble piece. The letter was R. My very own scarlet letter. i read the sign and lost myself in it. i dwelled with it like Heidegger counsels. i carried it within me all the way back home, took it to bed, interpreted and reinterpreted it, exhausted it and was consumed by it. i am sharing with you now. R, riham, relentless, recalcitrant, resistant, (ir)reverent, ravenous, ruthful, redemptive, righteous, rigorous, rebellious, revolutionary. And if that was not personal, i do not know what is!

i am writing this shahāda (pillar of my belief, martyrdom, testimony, witnessing by being fully present and aware) at the backdrop of fraudulent elections, persistent settlement-building and the commemoration of the holocaust on Gaza, which are themselves diverse contexts interconnecting and conversing. i confess that i was avaricious and unreasonable. i wanted to have it all: be myself and stay true to my principles, while expecting from people to read me compassionately. i wallowed in my yearning for acceptance and failed to understand why some disliked me or disapproved of my ways. But i reflected on what a wise and gentle Elisabeth Flensted-Jensen told me at the farewell dinner on the last day of creation and deconstruction. She held my hand and said, in her soothing voice and calm demeanor, that those of us who committed the public act of putting oneself out there, for the sake of something grander, had to accept public laceration and disdain, because when projecting all of our inner power outwards, we became dehumanised in the eyes of others, who would see us as the cause that we stood for. We would be left in a moment of emotional nudity, where our vulnerability would be sensed by no one but ourselves. “But that is Ok”, Elisabeth said. “Not everyone needs to see your soft side. And it is unfair of you to burden them with that expectation if you are to continue being who you are meant to be.” Those bezels of wisdom carved for themselves an eternal place in my memory and conscience.

Too long a sacrifice makes a stone of the heart, Yeats chants. i cannot sacrifice my authenticity in return for acceptance and approval. It is part of my personal growth and reform to make the choice and pay the price. i, hereby, apologise to whom i wrongfully asked for everything: to The Laurel Crowned, New Victory, Living Happily, With Own Ideas, Be Thanked and Praised, Generous, Famous Warrior, The Achiever, Praiseworthy, Extraordinary Gift, One Who Contributes, The Proud, Effort, Shining, Walk Proudly, The Revered, Has A Rich Home, Happiness, Loving Man, Symbol of Victory, Beautiful and Courageous, Lilly Flowers, Attractiveness, Celebration, The Beloved, God is Gracious.

In gratitude to the institution, i conclude that i bore witness to my belief reinforced in the revolution. i was fully present in that moment as the parliament turned pandemonium. i am born-again believer that kullun muyassar limā khuliqa lah. And i am among those who embrace their weaknesses and proudly put their vulnerability on a pedestal. We continue to attempt to see the world from other peoples’ vantage points, even as they refuse to accept our invitation and step into our shoes while we make room for them. We are the Eves who preferred knowledge over ontological loiter; the Zulaikhas who are eternally infatuated with the majestic beauty of the beyond; the Jobs who patiently endure the absurdity of their situation with great certainty that esoterically it all makes sense; the anti-Noahs who turn down a seemingly free ticket on the Arch, favouring the struggle with the waves of experience and ordeal that hone our humanity, realising that the ride is never free as it entails acquiescence to the established; the Jonahs who are not afraid of whales and make their dark pits home where they take shelter from the safe shore, in order to revise and reclaim their selves; the Moseses who are in an endless and uncensored dialogue with their inner divinities; the Christs who bear their crosses, unsparing of flesh and blood in the resistance against the corporal entities; the Muhammads who journey on their own wings towards spiritual ascension; the Hathurs that heal and Sekhmets that deconstruct; the Isises that exert their existence in unifying the fragments of the self; the Medusas that turn men into stone, structures into anarchies and parliaments into pandemonium, but who are so utterly vulnerable, so utterly human that can be turned into running water, while our serpentine heads still yearn for knowledge, and thus we again begin.

i, hereby, confirm and fully embrace the criticism that i make it all about riham. Indeed, i do, because i use myself in the cause until i am used up. This is the kind of leader, i aspire to be. The one, who despite rebellion being her very raison d’être, and although she ardently advocates for reform, she compromises not her authenticity. i, hereby, declare that if i can’t dance, i don’t want to be part of your revolution. And i shall continue to dance to my very own music.

May he who is without complexity cast the first stone.

Afterthought: Dirāya

Perish the thought, may it never happen!

OR

All allusions appearing in this testament are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.