Don't Panic, I'm Islamic by Gaspard Lynn; Duffy Carol Ann; Riddell Chris

Author:Gaspard, Lynn; Duffy, Carol Ann; Riddell, Chris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saqi
Published: 2017-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

FROM THE OBSERVATION TERRACE of Galata Tower, the Genovese citadel that dates back to 1348, Istanbul stretches out before me.

Yesterday, down in the square, I fled from the Saviours.

Today I’ve come for my valediction.

I’m resolute.

But in case I falter, I think back.

Childhood is seldom idyllic. Childhood spent in children’s homes is desolation.

Yet desolation can be a blessing. It drives the child to seek answers.

At first, it raises elementary questions: why did my parents abandon me? Did they hate me? Were they destitute and unable to feed me? Did they just die? Were they killed because they believed in goodness? Were they killed trying to protect me?

Then other questions stream – questions that demand meanings to existence. Often the process awakens that faculty which the Leviathans call apple after the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

I watch as the Saviours’ paramilitaries comb the area around the Tower. Still salivating from yesterday’s spoil, they’re ravenous for the one they anticipate today.

They’ll have it.

The apple is our guiding soul. It reveals to us all that is good, all that affirms life; and it warns us about all that is evil, all that unleashes death before life can be completed.

That’s why the Saviours, false prophets and megalomaniac leaders, denature everything that is beatific. That’s why they feed us the fiction that God singled out the apple as the forbidden fruit and banished Adam and Eve from Eden for eating it.

I shout at the Saviours’ paramilitaries: ‘I’m back!’

They spot me and regroup.

It’s the Saviours who keep brainwashing us with the lie that God ordained them to redeem our wickedness by making us spit out even those bites taken by our primogenitors. For they know that when we finally eat every morsel of the apple we shall transmute into love the inhumanity they have imposed on us as the ultimate morality.

And one day we shall have eaten every morsel of the apple. The Leviathans will see to that. Much as the Saviours scorn the Leviathans or depict them as ‘false messiahs’, they can’t stop them. The Leviathans are Eternal.

I imbibe Istanbul.

Conjoining Europe and Asia with seven hills, two seas and the princely Bosporus, it inspires earth, water, sky and fire to unfurl radiances unseen anywhere in the world.

Sofi used to say: ‘Life is everlasting. Death is not. That’s what Istanbul tells us.’

Sofi nurtured in her marrow the ration of the apple she inherited from Eve.

We were thirteen. Vegetating in dingy institutions. We might never have met but for a charity function organised by some Istanbul worthies offering a circumcision kermis to my orphanage and a girls’ picnic to Sofi’s. To save money both events were held at the same venue, a humble open-air café on the heights of Büyük Ada, Istanbul’s largest island.

Eventually, bored with the vanilla merrymaking, we both slipped away from our groups and made for the cliffs. Scurrying between boulders, we didn’t see each other.

Sighting an isolated beach below, we picked our separate ways down the scar and reached it almost at the same time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.