PALESTINE Memories of 1948 - Photographs of Jerusalem | Page 199

solitude: one night, my younger brother Mustafa, two
years my junior, had woken up screaming, but all our
efforts to calm him down were in vain. A few hours
later, his little hand in mine, he lay lifeless by my side.
Four years later, in 1936, my mother declared that it
was time for the family to move to Jerusalem, where I
would get a better education, as would my other brother
and my three sisters. My father agreed. The Rawdat Al
Maaref school, inside the old city walls, had the reputa-
tion of being one of the best in all Palestine: the teach-
ers came from renowned universities in Cairo, and the
pupils came from across Palestine as well as from Egypt,
Iraq, Syria, Transjordan and Lebanon. It would only
possible for me to enrol there if my level of English was
good enough, but I had never even heard the sound of
that language whereas the pupils there had already been
speaking it fluently for four years. So, I spent the summer
with a teacher who inflicted high doses of private lessons
on me. Initially, he would read the lesson and ask me to
repeat after him, but I could only read Arabic, which is
written in the opposite direction from languages using
the Latin alphabet. Thanks to my excellent memory I
was able to manage in spite of everything: I would repeat
word for word what I had heard whilst pretending to
read. Unfortunately, it was more complicated when it
came to writing, memory was not enough: I had to use
tracing paper to copy the letters, which I did not under-
stand. In other words: instead of reading and writing, I
memorized and copied. When the teacher realized this,
he was livid: not only had I lied, but I had made fun of
him! His “immense admiration” for my father saved me,
luckily, and the lessons resumed.
That was because my father was a well-respected
person in Jerusalem, even if he was not one of the nota-
bles of the holy city. As a young student in Fez, he had
joined a Sufi brotherhood, the tariqa 22 of Al Tijaniya, 23
and went every Friday to the zawiya, the place where
all the members gathered. Once my father had settled
in Jerusalem in the early 1920s, it was quite natural
that, given his experience, the tariqa should offer him
responsibility for the whole region, and he accepted.
Was not Jerusalem an appropriate centre for spreading
a message of peace, justice and mutual understanding
between people? When he went to put his name on
the Jerusalem register, my father, Ahmad Moham-
mad Abdullah Abdulsadeq Al Dadsi Tissili became,
with the agreement of the Sufi brotherhood, Ahmad
Al Tijani, because he was the sheikh of the Tijaniya
brotherhood and at that time, a person’s name des-
ignated his identity within the society for which he
worked and was recognized.
Over the years, Jerusalem became a major meet-
ing place for the Tijaniya: after Ramadan, all the Sufi
sheikhs, the spiritual guides of the brotherhood – from
Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Sudan – gathered there to
attract divine benediction, baraka, on themselves. On
those occasions my mother prepared a gigantic cous-
cous, which one of the brotherhood would distribute
to the poor as well as to all those who wanted to receive
the benediction. I remember stretching up to my full
height next to a thin man with long, slender hands to
watch the procession of hundreds of people, men and
women, with a bowl in their hands receiving the blessed
food and then returning homewards, a big smile light-
ing up their faces. A strange thing was that though the
ladle kept filling up the proffered bowls, the level never
went down. That is how, over the years, the child that I
was saw the manifestation of baraka as a magic gesture,
born of sharing.
Every Friday my father and the members of the
tariqa gathered in the hall 24 dedicated to the hailala
ritual. 25 The men and women gathered separately. The
participants recited some verses from the Koran over
and over, 26 imbuing themselves with their meaning,
which would plunge them into another state, half way
between wakefulness and sleep, close to a being in a
trance. I myself took part in the hailalas from the age
of eight. I was transfixed by the reading of the texts
which, by the infinite beauty that they emanated in my
eyes, created in the deepest part of me the same serenity
as does wonderful music that transports one into the
upper spheres because it speaks without an intermedi-
ary to what is most secret in the soul.
My father was not only assuming a spiritual role,
he also became a politician in Palestine. He was a
nationalist, a revolutionary who took part in the revolt
of 1936‒1939. He denounced the British and fought
against them because they were protecting Zionist
groups who had come to take our land. But he did not
put all the British in the same bag: when our neigh-
bour, an old retired English lady by the name of Miss
Dickson, had to leave Jericho because the British
authorities had called on all the British to gather in the
larger Palestinian towns, my father made sure that her
house was not ransacked. His explanation was simple
and thoughtful: the important thing was to remind
Mohammad
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