205 292
I stared at thenightof the city
205
as even the heroes of
Greek tragedies and the
god of Olympus had not
witnessed.
A large part of these
fantasies seem to have
come together in Mullah
Hajar’s
dark
psyche,
heaped in the bottomless,
locked-up cellar of his
heart, the heart of a man
who combined extreme
shyness with extreme
desire, extreme religiosity
with
extreme
poetry,
extreme submission to the
conditionsoftheworldwith
extreme fantasies. This
deep contradiction, this
endless division, appears
to have riven Mullah Hajar
so badly that his soul, like
that of the age, was split
between two creatures:
one severe and inhibited,
the other free, unashamed
and full of poetry. One
of them was grounded
in this world, obedient
to its terms and dictates,
the other emerged from
an imaginary world that
heeds no orders.
In his classical style,Mullah
Hajar wrote:
Man is a strange mix of
different creatures. Inside,
he is both beast and angel.
I was neither beast nor
angel, neither one nor
the other, and yet I have
spent thousands of nights
in fantasies, for which
God has apportioned
no sentence, and which
cannotbeseenbymyfellow
men. Since my youth, I
have presented myself as
an ascetic and a mystic.
From early morning until I
slipped into bed there was
nothing in my heart but
the dhikr 6
‘Ya Allah, Ya
Allah’
, but as soon as my
head touched the pillow
and I knew that the world
was asleep, that none of
my relatives, my friends or