the book) and the other was that of Saint Menas. There was also a mirror that multiplied the gloominess of the scene and harbored a dark shadow in its left extremity, a shadow that couldn’t escape the eyes of the locals who immediately asserted it to be demoniacal.
There is universal consensus among his one-time neighbors that Wahid experienced a strange metamorphosis about a month and a half (I will not be surprised if it was precisely forty days) before his death. They could hear him cheerfully sing with other voices. An old man who now lives near Saint George’s Church of Sporting told me that he once overheard Wahid and a mysterious feminine voice cry as if in orgasm. Earlier that morning he had heard Wahid talk loudly and laugh with other people, though he didn’t see anybody enter or leave his apartment. “I could hear footsteps, some of which seemed to be made by high heels. There were laughs, cheers that implied games, lengthy discussions, and knocking of glasses.”
Some examine dams to learn about beavers, others study cocoons to explore the world of silkworms. In a similar fashion did I approach Wahid’s book, this extravagant, monstrous elaboration, closely observing the fine threads that intermingled to form that distorted fabric of logic, agony and madness. I felt that there was something personal in the copy that I read. After all, I thought, the sold copies were few, and it is not foolish to assume that Wahid distributed some of them personally to book dealers. There was something translucent about the pages. They seemed as portals or mirrors. I could see Wahid from the other side of the portal, and I could see my reflection in the mirror, and the two images superimposed with disturbing harmony. I felt Wahid inseminating me with every letter that I read from the book. He was impregnating me with these spiny fragments of his soul that he had carefully concealed between the pages of the old volume. The more that I studied him the more he studied me and the deeper my dissecting tools delved into his soul the deeper his delved into mine. I felt violated, invaded and I found it disturbing that this deflowering was met in my soul with secret pleasure.
Now that my recount is nearing a close my hand starts to fail me, for I risk spoiling this sincere tribute to Wahid because of my weak, superstitious nature. Neither do I want to be considered a lunatic nor can I hold myself from penning down those last lines which have nothing to do with Wahid but concern me and my troubled head. Yet considering that my humble narrative turned out to be as complex and bizarre as the life that it was supposed to cover, and convinced that this paper will follow Wahid’s own book all the way down to the cold hell of oblivion, I feel relieved from treating it with exaggerated seriousness and find it harmless to add my own spoonful of folly.
In effect, my life hasn’t been the same since I first learned of Wahid. My taste in art, literature, and women is growing darker and my old interest in the occult is experiencing an unholy revival. My eyes, which once delighted in the innocence of daylight, have now divorced the sun and I have started to wear sunglasses. I have started to be chased by a beautiful, evil, half-aristocratic melancholy that was never of me, but now had a natural affinity to me, as if we were bound together by invisible threads. Hordes of demons are hovering above the folded mountains of Arabian sand. They are preparing themselves to encounter me, to worship me as the legitimate heir to their throne, to serve me willingly for many a year and to celebrate a ritual sacrifice where I will be the priest and the victim.
This morning, while accompanying a friend to the mall, I was caught gripping a mannequin. I have no idea what was going in my head at the time. I can remember myself apologizing to the assistant as he rebuked me and took my hands off the voluptuous breasts of a white mannequin. My friend thought that I was tired and bought me a pack of cigarettes. My lips shivered when they distinguished the taste of clove. I hurried back home to find that a packet of black candles that I bought a decade ago had mysteriously appeared on my dinning table - the only packet of candles that I ever bought in my life! I felt surrealist dimensions converging upon my head and squashing it in between. I sought refuge in an old pile of papers that was forgotten for a year or two when my eyes fell on these lines of Arabic poetry.
But when you knew not nature’s ways
And thought yourself a man worthy of praise
A problem-solver you invented
And he your problems has augmented
I quickly skimmed upwards to the title; It was Ismail Adham’s paper “Why I am an atheist.” Ismail Adham was another Alexandrian writer whose legacy was dramatically toned down for having been an atheist. He committed suicide at the tender age of twenty-nine and his body was found floating in the Mediterranean Sea at Gleim’s beach in 1940. It seems that he and Wahid took the same way and reached the same end. I know that my feet are already on the beginning of the same road. Am I to follow their trail? Am I to become another lonely slave of Christ or Muhammad? No. I don't have the least desire to become a martyr. I want to be free. I will live and breathe. I will fight against Wahid, will squeeze him out of my soul and think him out of my head. I will reach for my pen and write down about his tragic life. I will confine him to paper. I know this is the only way to exorcise him out of my soul.
The name Wahid Abdul Masseih can be literally translated into English as 'the lonely slave of Christ.' Lonely Wahid doubtlessly was, but was he really a slave of Christ? There is a certain satisfaction in slavery, a certain peace of mind. Slavery relieves the slave of the hell of making choices and shaping one’s own way. I don't think that Wahid has ever intended to enslave himself. He wasn't born a slave and never desired to be one. Yet I must admit that Wahid was really a slave of Christ. His slavery has been imposed upon him by the real slaves, those who were slaves of their own will.
Abdul Masseih died in May 1982. His cadaver was discovered at a considerable level of decomposition in his apartment upon the neighbors’ complaint of obnoxious air. He was buried at a deserted Jewish cemetery after the Coptic clergy not unexpectedly refused to give him a blessing or offer him shelter in his own grave. His headstone mentions his death-year to be 1981. Perhaps someone tried to obfuscate his real age at the time of his death.
Endnotes
(1) The documentary hypothesis is a theory proposed by Julius Wellhausen. It holds that the Torah was derived from originally independent, parallel and complete narratives, which were subsequently combined into the current form by a series of redactors. According to this theory, the first chapter of Genesis recounts the story of creation as mentioned by the so-called ‘priestly’ source while the second chapter recounts the ‘Jehovic’ story of creation.
(2) The Book of Tobit is considered canonical by the Coptic Orthodox Church.
(3) Pope Dionysius regarded the Book of Revelation as an apocryphal work.
(4) Pope Yusab II of Alexandria was the Coptic Pope from 1946 till 1956. In an unprecedented event in the history of the Coptic Church, he was removed from his office in 1954 after being charged with supporting his corrupt secretary. Yusab II is highly praised in the Ethiopian Church for granting it autocephaly.
(5) I may disagree with Wahid on this issue. I think the apparitions were staged, primarily, to boost the morale of the Egyptians after the 1967 defeat.
(6) The sun is classically employed as an allegory of the trinity in the Coptic Church. Sabellius used this same allegory to promote his heresy. “For he, and the Sabellians who derive from him, hold that the father is the same, the son is the same, and the Holy Spirit is the same, so that there are three names in one entity. Or, as there are a body, a soul and a spirit in a man, so the father, in a way, is the body; the son, in a way, is the soul; and as a man’s spirit is in man, so is the holy spirit in the Godhead. Or it is as in the sun, which consists of one entity but has three operations, the illuminating, the warming and the actually shape of the orb. The warming, or hot and seething operation is the spirit; the illuminating operation is the son; and the father is the actual form of the whole entity.” The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis. Books II and III translated by Frank Williams page 121. Against
Sabellians.
(7) See The Zahir by Jorge Luis Borges.
(8) The Gnostics believed in the reincarnation of the souls. In order to descend to earth, the soul had to pass through the planetary spheres, there the archons (rulers of the planets) could imprint its fate upon it.
(9) Crowley thought he was the reincarnation of Alexander VI.
(10) There were three kinds of humans according to the Gnostics. The hylics were materialistic and perishable, the psychics were moral and followed conventional religion, and finally the pneumatics were the spiritual elect who didn’t need conventional religion and its limitations.
(11) Regine Olsen was the fiancée of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. She eventually broke up with him and married another man. This failed relationship deeply troubled Kierkegaard and had a profound impact on his philosophy.
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