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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