Trafika Europe 9/10 - UK in Europe

I stared at thenightof the city

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

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