In one of the Saudi villages near the city of Jizan, an old man lives. He is sitting on a chain. Relatives chained him by the leg to the front door of a lonely building, so that he saw his will and was not deprived of shelter.
The old man is gray-haired, like a moon. From under the shaggy white hair, he smiles at the journalist who visited him. Muhammad al-Khlioui is known in Jizan as a prisoner of love passion. Relatives call him "madman" and "blessed."
60 years ago, black-haired and slender Muhammad fell in love with a neighbor's girl and embraced her. Due to the poverty of the parental family, he collected the required kalym for too long, and the neighbors gave his chosen one for another.
Since then, Muhammad has lost his peace and lives only with the sweet suffering of passion. He wandered around the country for a long time, lived as a hermit in the desert, but returned to the village to be close to his dream, so that only the song that once resounded in his heart would not die in his memory.
Years have not erased love. In the old body, she lives with the same young strength. Muhammad does not need anything from life, except for dreams of his first love, which became a parable spread throughout the province. Protecting themselves from the shame that the old romantic could bring to the family with his unpredictable actions, the relatives decided to isolate the lover and, desperate in trying to heal the passionate nature from the love affliction that had swallowed him, eventually put him on a chain. and so the old man lives. The soul is in a vise, and the body is on a chain.
Love deeply touches the Arabs. They are romantics in the soul. And they are all poets. One of my acquaintances, an oriental scholar, fascinated by the Arabic language, told his Emirate friend that if he were an Arab, he had become a poet, the speech of people living in the midst of scarce, dreamy nature, and their spirit was so beautiful. In response, he heard a complaint: "We are all poets, unfortunately." Unfortunately, because the proportion of a beautiful romantic soul is heavy. Carry high feelings intoxicatingly and gloriously, but not easy.
In the days of the emergence of Islam, poets were the most respected people in Bedouin society, and the Prophet Muhammad saw them as his main rivals. It depended on them whether society would accept the call for a new faith. This is probably why the Qur'an is fixed in the form of rhymed prose in order to address the people in their usual language.
In the early period of the formation of Islam, the prophet, striving to unite the nomads, to avert pagan fellow tribesmen from divine polytheism, tried to rally them with the name of the only God and placed love for him in the first place among the spiritual affection of a true Muslim. Islamic ulema (theologians) derive the formula of love from the Koranic surah “Repentance,” which sees lust for profligacy and contains a warning in this regard. "If your fathers, and your sons, and your brothers, and your spouses, and your family, and the property that you have acquired, and the trade you are afraid of stagnation in, and the dwellings that you have approved, are nicer to you than Allah and his message, and the struggle on his way, then wait until Allah comes with his command. And Allah does not lead the dissolute people. "(Quoted from the translation of academician Krachkovsky)
Analyzing this verse, the ulama make a conclusion about the existence of three types of love: higher, earthly, and material. In the first place they put love for Allah and his prophet, followed by love for children, spouses, parents and relatives, and in the last place is a passion for money and the satisfaction of sexual instincts. Moreover, the Qur'an warns against strong feelings. “And those who follow the passions want to reject you with a great rejection,” the Sura woman says.
What are the Russian jokes about smoking rooms, at workplaces, at bachelor parties? When everything has already been told about the Chukchi, which has become the new Russian, if "Vasily Ivanitch" drank his "much" out of the bucket and sleeps, and the answers of the Armenian radio have been heard, they are talking about women. The plots of jokes are also often combined with realities and fantasies on women's themes.
Among Arabs, jokes are not very common: Islam does not encourage idle talk, distracting from faith. It is about her that they talk, most often. They quote the Qur'an, discuss legends about the life of the Prophet Muhammad, and tell religious parables.
It is not customary to talk about women among Arabs in vain, to talk about their family life, especially. The family and personal life of the veil of the ban are closed from prying eyes, like a harem (female) half of the house from a guest and even a friend. The intimate side of being is closed even more. Strange as it may seem, the press is freer in discussing issues of love and sex than men's gatherings - “divan”. Moreover, the second is given more attention. On the pages of the daily press such physiological problems are sometimes discussed, about which a personal doctor would be too shy to say. The printed word is depersonalized, soulless and therefore dispassionate. The relationship of the sexes is considered as if it is a mechanical interaction of the gears, the institution of marriage looks like a means of liberating sexual energy. Love - in the sense of "multiply" - in the Quranic word.
Poetry is another matter. In poetic creations, the romantic Arab soul flies on the wings of tradition. Poetry is the language of love. Turning to her, you can find many stories of beautiful love and love frenzy. There are many examples known around the world. After all, Othello, the Moor of Venice, who has become a symbol of temperament, passion and jealousy in European classics, is not accidentally the Arabic name Atalla (a gift of God), distorted to please the Latin sound that adorns O, which is absent in Arabic phonetics.
There are other examples. In the Hijaz tribe of Uzra, there was a direction of love poetry, praising the unfortunate lovers whom fate had divorced. The poets of the Uzrita school of the early Middle Ages sang a mystical love for the ideal woman, a love that brings the poet some suffering. Their heroes, once in love, die from their passion.
European literature noted with its attention this feature of Arab love and the poetic lines born by it. Heinrich Heine wrote the poem Azra in the mid-19th century. After 50 years, it found admirers in Russia, was translated into Russian and still captivates with the power of an all-encompassing, destructive feeling.
"Every evening in that alley
Where the silver fountain splashes
Beautiful sultan's daughter
I went for a walk
Every evening waiting in the alley
Where the silver fountain splashes
Young slave and became
Every day is paler, paler.
Since the princess approaches him
With an imperative speech:
"I want to know your nickname
And your kind, your homeland "
And the slave answered:
Magomed, the homeland is Yemen,
My kind is Azra, the one in which
Whoever loves dies. "
Just as the whole world knows the Verona lovers Romeo and Juliet, all Arabs know the legendary love couples of their ancestors. These are Kais and Leila, Jamil and Buseyn, Kuteir and Azza, Antar and Iblya and many others, glorified in lyric poems, in which the poet in love is the main sufferer.
The love tragedy of Muhammad al-Khlioui shows that the spiritual soul of the Arabs has remained unchanged for centuries. Passion is inexhaustible in her. She is so strong that the lover behaves antisocially, violates established traditions, threatens family foundations and threatens her own life.
“If it’s true that love is dying, then why live,” says an Arab proverb. Wise people drew attention to the perniciousness of love passion. The Prophet Muhammad saw in love a danger threatening society, and led the people on a religious sidelines in order to achieve their goal - to nourish faith with the power of love, to turn people away from passion, from the desire to live with love, which, according to the nomads, "is like death because it changes everything".
It is strictly forbidden to celebrate Valentine's Day in the fettered religious framework of Saudi Arabia. Stores are not allowed to sell red roses, and couples in love are not allowed to show their feelings in public. Hotels, shops, restaurants, parks are not allowed to host any events on February 14th. Teachers are instructed to advise schoolchildren and students to refrain from wearing red clothes, as well as any symbols of the day of all lovers.
“The most intelligent thing about love is insanity,” say the Arab sages. In this, they are close to the arguments of the beautiful Russian writer Tatyana Tolstoy, who believes that a lover from the outside “looks strange, stupid and even sometimes unpleasant. Only someone who knows this feeling from the inside can put himself in his place, and even that is a sympathy of healthy The feelings of the lover are sharply individual, he sees and hears differently than others, he really seems to be sick, "she writes in one of her essays.
Here is our Emirate contemporary Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum - a brave, energetic, strong man, vice president and prime minister, ruler of Dubai compares love with witchcraft. Exhausted by the proximity and inaccessibility of the object of his feelings, the secret of her eyes, he seeks a measure of beauty, asks about it and answers himself:
"Is love only giving birth to dreams?
To what we see, we feel completely
There is no equivalent in words.
Love is insanity, a witchcraft affair. "
In another poem, he calls his beloved “Sing, say, conjure witchcraft over me”, asks: “Love, what are you? Delight or groan? And how to be treated if you are an ailment”? Sheikh Mohammed does not agree with the strict attitude of the fat to the lovers. He admires them and does not consider it possible to condemn those who were captured by passions.
According to the Arab tradition, the high-ranking poet compares his beloved with the “most pure moon”, “the bright moon”, claims that her appearance “the moon is only akin to”. He admires the beautiful and antimony-free eyes of his beloved, whom the gazelle could envy, calls her "rose", "left-handed", "jasmine", "light of eyes", bending from harmony, "stem of the rose of beauty", admits that he burns with passion that “melts his bones”, and he only needs it, because (Here it is, the threat from which the prophet sought to protect the first, not yet strengthened Muslim community!) “faceless all the people who come, who leave. All people - she. The rest doesn't count. "
The images of the poet echo the delightful descriptions of the beauties from the "One Thousand and One Nights," whose faces "are like the circle of the moon on the day of its fullness." They have “overcast eyes, heavy hips and a thin camp,” and their hair is blacker than the night of separation for a distressed and in love, and their forehead is like a new moon on Ramadan, and their eyes are like gazelle’s eyes, and their cheeks are like anemone’s flowers, and their lips are like corals, and teeth - pearls strung in necklaces of native gold. "
So beautiful are these descriptions of oriental beauties by their medieval admirers, which is a pity to deprive the reader of the opportunity to re-read them.
"She is more beautiful than the moon on the night of the full moon, and her face shines brighter than the sun; her saliva is sweeter than honey, her mill is thinner than branches, she has black eyes and a bright face, and a brilliant forehead, and a breast like a gem, and nipples like two grenades, and cheeks, like two apples, and a belly with folded folds, and a belly button, like an ivory box full of musk, and a pair of legs, like marble pillars. It captures the heart with a beefy eye and the thinness of a thin camp. "
"Her neck, like an ingot of silver, towered above the camp, which looked like a willow branch, and her belly with folds and corners, at the sight of which a lover, excited, and a belly button holding an ounce of musk of the best quality fools ... This girl surpassed the willow branch and reed cane. "
And here is the apogee of love. "And they hugged, gripped by extreme languor, and overpowered their love and passion, and both of them became like drunk without wine, and covered out of unconsciousness, and they fell to the ground, and remained without feelings for a long time."
And then, almost like the great Russian romantic Alexander Green. "And they lived the most enjoyable, pleasant, joyful and sweet life, until the Destroyer of pleasures and the Destroyer of meetings came to them."
She is such an Arab love. And Muhammad al-Khlioui is not alone - a gray-haired, bright child of Arab romantics, connected with the great past with a glorious and heavy chain of suffering heritage.
Victor Lebedev
