a fragment on Al Quds from Haifa Fragments - novel by khulud khamis: Al Quds. So many arguments over this one word. Al Quds. Almost everybody has this conflict figured out all wrong. I’m sick of reading almost every foreign news reporter or commentator reducing this conflict into a small, neat slot. For them, it is all so clear – Muslims and Jews fighting over the Holy Land. It suits them well, because they need to type clean articles, with word count; can’t spill over to the next column. It would be too messy to start moving articles around, aligning them, shifting the pictures around, cramming the advertisements into even thinner spaces. No, there is no room for any incongruence – not in the newspapers, not in people’s minds. They want to drink their morning coffee over neatly arranged conflicts they can then file away in a neat compartment of their brain. They need to know the basics – who’s against who and over what so that they can look smart in their evening suits at the cocktail party after work. Al Quds. Don’t I just love the way the word sounds – with a finality to it. Asmahan – you loved the old city, with its amalgamation of colours, smells and sounds. Always on the move, the same corner infinitely changing over the course of a single day. But you could never experience Al Quds from within, only from with-out. That was the one difference between you and me, Asmahan, with the result being two extremes of the same experience, each pulling towards a different direction. Al Quds. For me, it was always physical electricity as soon as I got off the bus at the central station. The air was thicker, denser, as if there was not enough to go around for everybody. I was always able to physically see the tension closing in on me. Everything was more intense. More soldiers to one square space, more guns to that same space. And of course, this was in inverted relation to the feeling of security. The more soldiers and guns I saw, the less secure I would become. The image of an eighteen or nineteen year old soldier – a child himself – harassing a young boy of no more than twelve or thirteen, bullying him with the butt of his gun in a dark corner of the souk still haunts me in my waking hours. When I tried to describe this suffocation, you could never even begin to understand how one could feel so in the Holy City. But then you never even made the attempt. It was convenient for you to close off, to pull that veil down over. We have become prisoners of the propaganda we’re being fed. The success of this great lie is its result that we have become bound to it – we believe religion is the cause for all our sorrows and we are enacting the rage accordingly. We have taken up the sword of religion that was handed to us falsely and we are fighting the great war of religion. We have forgotten history. And there will be no justice until we realise this big lie and go back in time to unravel the real injustice done to us. Only then we can slowly progress towards something new. But until we are bound to Al Quds with chains of iron, there can be no movement in any direction. We are not the keepers of Islam. We are a people who have lived here for hundreds of years. This is a struggle over home. This is our land. Religion has nothing to do with it. - khulud خلود
Posted on: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:02:58 +0000
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