GHURBA, THE EPISTEME OF ESTRANGEMENT (ON SPEAKING WHILE THE SAND KEEPS SLIPPING OUT FROM UNDER YOUR FEET) By Wendy M. K. Shaw *** The Montréal Review, October 2026 |
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We chug on forward on the same track: provide more facts. More facts, clearer facts, more facts in more places, more flashy decoration on facts, more attractive speakers of facts. Shorter sentences, more charts. More colors on more charts. More statistics, easy to read. More discussions of facts. More essays. More explanations of history. More documentation. More more documents show that more more is true true. More photographs. More film. More (potential) deep fakes. More truth. More detailed articles in more academic journals where fact facts compete with other fact facts and more arguments argue to give academics who teach and research their proper due. More clarity. More clarity in accordance with strict paradigms. So much clarity that Artificial Intelligence does it better than you. More desperate desperation when people will die before one damned fact gets through their thick skulls. We become strange when evidence-based argumentation gets us not the fast-track to civilization, but off-track until there is no track at all. What gives? Out of breath from running the endless marathon to nowhere, we become strange. We become strangers where we tread water, stand still. The familiar transforms. Aliens full of conviction but void of compassion surge. They suck all poetry and kindness into the vacuum of base metals promising that what remains will be funnels of pure gold insistently spell happiness with a spectral neon glow that blots out both the Gods of yore and the Enlightenment that (prematurely) danced upon their graves. How do we speak when that vacuum voids all voices? How do we hear while steering clear of ears? Where do we stand on gaping ground? Plato said that Socrates said that an argument is a being with a head, a middle, and a tail. Still, his dialogues meander as their speakers drink and eat, walk and belch, flattering and teasing one another in good measure. We listen to what he said, forgetting to pay attention to what he did: we offer up plain speech as the manna of truth, then take offence when nobody listens. Mastery appears as a style: a set of rhetorical conventions ensuring argument leads from evidence to certainty, promising the redemption of knowledge from the Original Fall. Reasoned argument becomes alien as the earth gently slips from its axis. Estranged, that’s us. What next? Student of Plato, Aristotle stuck to the program: his notion of science was all about an axiomatized deductive system of demonstrations. Syllogisms aplenty! But in actuality: not so much. He too rarely did what he said.[1] “Speak no poetry,” he said, supposedly, in the middle of beautiful, theatrical prose. See content; hear form. When we do what he said without watching what he did, we get the message all wrong. Science, as Plato points out, is not about curing the illness. It’s about providing medicine matching the patient’s capacity to receive.[2] In our drive to cut back the frills and the flack, in our drive to scientific efficiency and efficacy, his advice slipped through the cracks. It became the voice of the smack-peddler, two-time preacher, yesterday’s teacher. We ignore this pyrite, zirconium voice at our peril: it works. We are just waiting for that con man to knock on our doors, or pop up on our screens. Estranged, we seek truth in the strange, because the normal doesn’t feel so true without the frills. It’s the telling that sells, not the speech. Let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, long ago, the Roman Emperor Decius traveled to the city of Ephesus to sacrifice to the pagan Gods. He demanded that the entire city show up for the ceremonies. Some local Christian boys refused. The Emperor denounced them. Soldiers set out to drag them to their flogging. They hid in a nearby cave. Decius walled them in: no hope. They prayed. One by one, they slept. When they woke up, they were ravenous! Still, they scarcely dared go back lest they face arrest. One of them found a coin in his pocket and bravely set forth to buy bread to share with his friends when he returned. The shopkeeper looked at the boy, and then at the coin, and then at the boy. He gulped. The coin was hundreds of years old and so, it turns out, was the boy. Decius was long dead. Ephesus was now a Christian town. Amazed, upon hearing the news and meeting the ancient but young celebrities, Emperor Theodosius offered to build a shrine over the cave. The boys prefer not. They totally dis him! They don’t need a shrine, they say. Truth is none other than the resurrection, they say. The emperor covers the boys with his mantle as they fall back asleep, eternally.[3] Nice Christian parable, wouldn’t you say? Right on the money! The Bishop Jacob of Sarug wrote it down in the sixth century, in Syriac. It later became the second-longest continuous narrative (after an expanded rendition of the adventures of the Prophet Joseph) in the Qur’an. To this day Muslims recite it on Fridays, during the congregational prayer. In the early twentieth century, Catholic scholar of Islam Louis Massignon recognized the story associated with the shrine to the seven sleepers near where he had grown up in Brittany, cousin of the fragmentary sarcophagus acquired during the Crusades held in the crypt of the Abbey St. Victoire in Marseille believed to have held the sleepers’ bones. Despite such European pretenders, Massignon led an archaeological dig in Ephesus, where he discovered several contemporaneous Roman-era tombs. Was this the cave? Or is the true tomb of the seven sleepers in a cave associated with the sleepers in the ninth and tenth centuries by Islamic scholars at ar-Rajib, just east of Amman, Jordan?[4] Is the story the one I told you, or the story of its retelling, including this one? Stories get around. They leave traces, all of which may be true, and all of which cannot be true. And nonetheless, they survive. But why this story? It’s the story of survival despite the odds, the story of knowing how to survive even when the tongue must wear a different skin. Following the same rhetorical move implied by Plato, the Qur’an too offers its wisdom in the interstices of this emotional tale about rich young men rebelling for a just cause despite their entitlement – not, perhaps not coincidentally, unlike the sons of rich young Arabs attracted by the egalitarianism of the new monotheism led by the man Muhammad, increasingly recognized as a prophet. 17. You could have seen the [light of the] sun as it rose, moving away to the right of their cave, and when it set, moving away to the left of them, while they lay in the wide space inside the cave. (This is one of God’s signs: those people God guides are the rightly guided, but you will find no protector to lead to the right path those he leaves to stray) 18. You would have thought they were awake, though they lay asleep. We turned them over, to the right and the left, with their dog stretching out its forelegs at the entrance. (Q. 18:17-18)[5] Interpreting these signs, the tenth-century mystic al-Hallaj recognized a parable about refusing any form of worship falling short of direct union with God. Through the streets of Baghdad, he invited the public to share his awakening by shouting the phrase, “Destroy your Ka’aba!” The more obtuse, the more inspiring! Executed as a heretic and revered as a saint, his advice percolates to us in the familiar injunction “Kill your darlings,” often misattributed to William Faulkner who borrowed it from Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1916 On the Art of Writing, where he flat out described the sacrifice of undeserving treasures as “murder.” Why are we supposed to kill our darlings anyway? To produce more predictably publishable precision-crafted monographs? Advocating neither self- nor darling- immolation for the contemporary cynical intellectual, the story of the cave might still offer some ecumenical tea leaves for those mired in a world that reduces all values to cash. It suggests that salvation may sometimes lie not in direct action, but also in pulling away. As the youths preserved their Truth in stillness — in the cryogenic chamber of the cave or museum case — the world revolved. In its revolution came revolution. By dint of travel across time instead of space, the alien world transformed into home. Such is the conundrum presented by the saying of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith) from which all this concern about gharibat (strangeness/ alienation) emerges. “Islam started as something strange and it will again become strange, receding between the two mosques just as the serpent crawls back into its hole!”[6] Gharib. In the strange world, faith itself becomes strange; it retreats, replacing itself with the visible, normative signs of worldly corruption. Here, the snake has no Biblical allegorical overtones of sin; he is simply a creature, seeking safety. Seeking the right to forge a path, as a snake does, across the dry sand of the desert, with the most unlikely and fluid of motions. Like water joining as rivulets to a river; like believers whose feet cut the path, the “shar’ia” to the watering hole of salvation; the snake follows his righteous path – one on which most of us, possessors of limbs, would likely fail. Yet it is hindered by the physical reality that impedes it. This retreat may be the practice of scholarship itself, as we retreat into the caves of archives and libraries, and into our own heads and computers to engage in the solitary plenitude of writing. It may be the practice of art: of hours spent in studios, or at computers, taking the freedom to discover what we create. This may also be the challenge of recognizing ourselves, as intellectuals, in a world of economies in which our work, along with art, comes to be evaluated more through its immediate fungibility on a market than through its internal coherence and longevity. In this world, we enter into the exile of the literary, perhaps even of the literate. Unable to retreat into a cave, we must learn to function in this state of being a refugee, in which all places are equally home because all places are equally in exile. It is precisely this estrangement which can give us the power to persist and to resist. This power comes by letting go of the idol, of the image, of the method, of the discipline, of the object itself, not in order to destroy it but to treat it with equanimity: a subtle distance which may be the greatest protection of all. Citing the theorization of their complete abandon to Divine will (tawakkil) by early mystics like al-Hallaj and as-Shushtari, Louis Massignon identifies their sleep with a state called ghurba, in which the exiled individual seeks refuge from the world to preserve what little integrity remains in unjust times and an ardent desire for justice.[7] For the world is full of injustices, large and small. Perhaps our most innate, authentic sense is that of recognizing fairness and feeling injury when its logic is ignored in favor of power or expedience. So much of education, of growing up, of growing into a community involves a normalized process of letting go of what we actually know and desire in favor of what we should know and desire, and resenting every minute of it. Unjust power bullies those caught in its snare by enforcing its irrationality, forcing the individual to replace their thinking with the thinking of others rather than engaging, questioning, and choosing to digest it in mutual conversation. Ghurba is the estrangement that enables us to grapple with this submission to power that is part of the social order, yet also to gain the distance necessary to let go of its painful imposition. For those who can manage its immaterial austerity, it replaces resentment with openness and wonder. Estrangement emerges as an episteme by unfolding the contradictions that surface through the pairing of unlikely companions. Think, Oliviero Toscani’s Benetton ads from the 1990s, where supposed ethnic contrasts looked so much like me and my friends that we got tired of becoming the poster children for our native multiplicity. Think, ads for the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG) that celebrate a city as multicultural as the subway upholstery, where an old lady knitting and young skate punk and leather clubber travel side by side. Life on the edge is provisional. The strange becomes normal; the normal becomes strange. The hinge is not, it seems, mutual adaptation so much as mutual acceptance. “You do you.” The threat is, “what if you is better than me?” The challenge is, “you better do me!” The aggression is, “you fail to do me!” Estrangement emerges like that toroid or doughnut built out of a sheet of paper, sliced and folded with such precision that when flat, it appears smooth, but when curved and glued it moves to reveal everlastingly new holes in a surface that never ends. In contrast to positivist approaches to knowledge that claim direct paths to and expressions of Truth, the method of estrangement recalls the Greek etymology of the word method (μέθοδος): it transcends (met-) and path (hodos). It pursues. It inquires. Strategy doubles as a ruse. Much as an excited electron jumps into a higher shell, method becomes a metaphor not only for the bounding but also for the excitement of thought. It compels a crisis of movement in which the exit from one framework becomes the entrance to another.[8] Such method follows allusion with the acumen of a dog on a trail who doesn’t know what she will find but knows all too well how fun it is to sniff, doggedly. What happens if the method is the goal? What happens when instead of finding comfort in belonging we settle in to the recognition that we are better off strange? Estrangement disavows the steady state of belonging, understood as the nexus of truth enabled through a catechism’s adherence to any given rule: religio- in Latin. To belong to an institution, a discipline, or an identity – to be owned by it – means not only to follow the rules, but in doing so, to discard that which refuses to fit, that which must be forgotten, and that which must not be asked. It is a contract to shed off excess limbs, however useful or natural or exciting they might be. It means riding on tracks through a tunnel rather than running, or perhaps slithering, through an open field. The gift of belonging sounds more inclusive than the demand for assimilation, but the cost – that of difference – is the same. Belonging, like assimilating, requires abandoning that which fails to fit. It requires a trim of the hair or a cut of the beard or slicing off limbs. Headscarf off, skinny jeans on. It's the suit, and not the smarts, that gets you into the room. Belonging discards the fruits damaged in transport: the ones that threaten rot but also specialize in sweetness. What is true of nations is also true of academic disciplines. Like a pharmaceutical corporation that panders cure in the name of poison and poison in the name of cure, disciplinarity includes scholars holding rubber stamps at the ready to assure trans-generational approval of “rigor” at the cost of randomness, substrate of creativity, rendering curiosity, driver of exploration, as spare change. How are we to see the truth that might have been discovered in the experiment preemptively disallowed because it would have arisen beyond the horizon of the setting sun? We are not. It is forbidden. And yet as much anywhere, truth may lie on the other side of the line that separates the darkness from the light. Helios Hyperion may drive his chariot in one direction, but its path appears different from every side. Eager to collect all the fruits of Spirit’s perennial exile, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel summarizes an entire philosophy of history with the incantation: ex oriente lux – the rest of the book is but a working out of this magic.[9] He thereby flatters the West as the ultimate inheritor, recipient of all wealth funneled as unidirectionally into The Inheritance. Not for him those two-way streets! Intersections? Fogeddaboudit! By then Hegel had slipped from pastor to bureaucrat, but by cutting the word Christianity from the map of his history he failed to excise its shadow: the direction of inheritance from East to West followed the bloom of his religion credited with the flowering of Civilization despite the unstanched blood gushing in its wake. Worth it, right, if sacrifice promises redemption? Or was that only for the man who was God, and not for every man woman and child sacrificed on the altar of progress? Oh well, posthumous conversion with an eternity in heaven beats a good life in the here and now paid for by hell in the everafter! Right? … right? Looking at the same sun moving in the same direction across the same sky, early Islamic authors considered the West less as a space of gain than one of estrangement. This idea is embedded in its name. In Arabic, “west” is indicated by the word gharb, where the radical triad of the sounds gh-r-b signals the strange, the uncanny, and exile. When the Umayyad Prince Abd al-Rahman (r. 756-788) survived his escape from Damascus to rebuild his dynasty in Cordoba, he dedicated a poem to the palm tree that shared both his palace and his exile.
Gh-r-ba refers to the West as the space of the setting sun, as opposed to the East (sh-r-k), the land where it rises. Identified with mystical illumination in the Eastern/Enlightenment (ishraqi) philosophy of the Eflatun-fan Shahab al-din Suhrawardi (1154-1191), the notion of the orient comes to signify proximity to the divine.[11] Ghurba thereby becomes associated with notions of estrangement, exile, or homesickness, particularly in Suhrawardi’s Tale of the Occidental Exile (Qissas al-Ghurba al-Gharbiyya). For him, the West articulates the world of matter and darkness in which humanity is trapped – just as Suhrawardi was imprisoned in Qayrawan, the Westernmost city of Islam at the time. Suhrawardi describes his imprisonment as a sensory well. Nonetheless, by night he manages to ascend to a heavenly sphere, naked as an FKK (Freikörperkultur) aficionado trying to break free from the workaday world of textile uniforms through the uniformities of flesh. “Evenings,” Suhrawardi explains, “we climbed up to the palace and looked out from a window. Often, doves came to us from the thickets of Yemen to tell us about the state of the holy meadow. At other times, we were visited by Yemeni lightning which flashed on the right, eastern side and told us about the nocturnal events of Najd. The fragrance of arák [fermented grape infused with anise seeds] added emotion to our emotion. We became filled with emotion and yearned for our homeland.” God sends them a note which explains, “We aroused longing in you but you failed to long. We summoned you but you failed to set forth. We signaled to you but you failed to understand… you two must not tire of traveling.”[12] Similarly, the Central Asian mystic Najm al-Din Kubra (1145-1221) described that the wayfarer of intense meditative states “observes his own transformation as he is separating from his body. He sees that he is at the bottom of a well and that the well is descending fast below him, or that he is ascending the well toward its opening. The soul is set free and yet has its old habitat, the body and the security of forms, in its periphery as he is afloat in a collapsing vortex.”[13] To be alienated requires no migration. Still, transportation can’t hurt transformation. Estrangement is the condition of awakening. How do we discover paths that enable our strangeness and celebrate our estrangement? Perhaps in the roads not taken, the roads disavowed. Europeans often call shariah Islamic “law.” Since the earliest translations of the Qur’an in the thirteenth century, it has often been vilified as inflexible, despotic, and absolutely inimical to “Western law,” presumed as righteous, even after secularization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries redefined Christian ethics under a guise of universalized “humanism.”[14] Etymologically shariah refers to the clearest path to water. Allegorically, the water is of course salvation – whatever that is in a particular faith context – and the path is din, often mistranslated as “religion” -- a concept far more tied to rules (religio- in Latin) than the contingent path to the oasis of Truth in the desert where Islam originated. Indeed, the Divine Recitation (Qur’an), dictated to the Prophet Muhammad through the visitation of the Angel Gabriel, underscores the potential distinction between these paths: “to you your path, and to me my path” (Q 109:6). And if this separation isn’t enough to allay worries of forceful conversion, consider its corollary, “Let there be no compulsion in the path” (Q 2:56). Why bring this up? Because to think about ghurba through another path puts estrangement not as the road to loss, but as the road to gain; an opening, a wealth, a revelation rather than a closing, impoverishment, or blinding. It doesn’t require the disavowal of one religio- for another, so much as the recognition that being at home in the multiplicity of paths is not a locative matter. It’s about the clearest way of movement, with the least friction, for the benefit of all. Is shariah unique in this desire? Hardly! Shar’ia is a hodos, and as humans we seek the -met of the path that has been laid down, acquired in English from the Old Norse “lag,” the origin of the word “law”. Funny how many paths might unpredictably converge or diverge in the process of estrangement! Or rather, how all of these seemingly diverse meanings come from shared sources, because what is normal is not stillness, but movement… that create, and follow, and destroy, and create new paths. Who is doing the movement, and how do they encounter the world along the way? Separated by centuries and languages and distances, both Suhrawardi and Hegel assumed that the sun resembles a tourist gullible to souvenir hawkers: it acquires the knick-knacks while burning full speed across the sky. Where for Hegel this weight indicates the gain of Spirit as a wealth (of experience, perhaps, or of offshore properties in our post-capitalist hellscape), for Suhrawardi it entails the diminution of Spirit entailed in material embodiment. The sun is hot and scorches everything it collects; our journey to it is always one augmenting blindness, the very spot where renunciation enables access to truth. Such is the nature of ghurba: it resists the normalization through which the strange, having transformed into fashion, becomes normative, and loses its edge. The mystic Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), who migrated from his native Andalusia to Damascus via transcendent pilgrimage in Mecca, explained, “Know that ghurba is used in this community to mean many things. By this they mean the separation from the place of residence in order to obtain what is desired. They use it [also] for turning away from a state (ḥāl). They say that to enter strangeness means to turn away from a state before immersing yourself in it. Finally, being alien to the real means: becoming alien to knowledge because of astonishment.”[15] Thanks to the modern European tipping of the global scales, recent exile has often suggested a sliding westward, which might be considered less as a place – West of where, anyway? – than a gullible orientation of the mind towards that which toots its own horn as the best, the most advanced, the place to be emulated. It has become the place towards which to strive, even if, and sometimes because, immigration restrictions – border walls, passports, visas, cameras, fingerprints, officers, deserts, oceans, and men with guns — hinder the path. Even when, for the most mundane of reasons – picking the fields and tending the sick and collecting the trash – they desperately yearn for helping hands. Maybe the presence of the exiled, the gharib, serves as a parable that enforces belonging: not just “there but for God go I,” but a “I had better put up with this shit because there is nowhere else to go.” Maybe there’s another parable, often unseen and unsaid, but sometimes discovered, particularly by the young: it’s fun when not everybody does the same thing, thinks the same way, believes the same thing. Variety is the spice of life. And ok, you don’t like spice, you like it bland, but would respect be too much? Maybe the young are always gharib, and this is why we treasure youth so dearly. And what about when the not-yet-estranged immigrants from the other-than-gharb arrive? Is the land of milk and honey all it’s cracked up to be, anyway? The immigrant laborer lives in ghurba, describing his or her suffering in the Western land of exile -- which promised to serve as the land of salvation and plenty. Isn’t it ironic, then, that the English language homonym, garb, should mean what we wear, a cloak that serves as an identity that always must also be a disguise? Such homonyms are no more arbitrary than seeking meaning in the physics of the spinning earth that gives rise to the illusion of the rising and setting sun which garbs the earth with the immutable cardinal directions of East and West, unequal although it is difficult to say exactly how. The weightiness associated with the West, a place where Spirit and Matter collects as though there were a Westward pull of gravity – or maybe a receptacle or trash can or magnet that collects the refuse of the world to itself, indiscriminately and rapaciously – repeats itself as a trope. Uncanny. A poet is gharib when he is alienated from the world, echoing the alienation of the Sufi dervish who, in forgoing the worldly comes closer to home.[16] Under conditions of enforced secularity, to which freely alcohol-imbibing poets of the early Turkish Republic readily adhered, the movement of estrangement -- “garip” – echoed a tradition of alienated Sufi poets. What can be more alienating than to no longer be allowed to articulate alienation or to alleviate it through sublimation within the joyous self-erasure of union with the Divine? As Turkey lost its alphabet, they argued in favor of the loss of language itself:
If history is an exercise in re-membering, placing the members willy-nilly upon the body of the present, then perhaps poetry is an exercise in forgetting, or rather in mis-remembering. Maybe both participate in the excision and suturing of memory onto the body, in different places, where organs have functions the past would never have imagined. Would the only way of realizing knowledge be to leave home? This, ibn Arabi suggests, vests too much meaning in the physical home, which is no more or less the place of estrangement or belonging when seen from the vantage point of truth. “Those who leave home have not yet recognized the face of Truth in ordinary, familiar things.” What is more important for him is the decision to seek, which necessitates relinquishing the states of mind that have been familiar. That which the seeker of knowledge gives up is not home as a location, but home as a sense that has not yet been questioned. In our world the notion of home has become closely tied to “nation.” Yet before modernity, the home called watan in Arabic was not the same as the home called patrie was not the same as the home simply where you happened to be. There was a time when you made the home on the land where you found yourself; you may belong to it, but it did not belong to you. As in the slogan of the Jewish Bund of the early twentieth century, “Here where we live is our country.”[18] If you were lucky enough to not be chained down, you had the right to pull up your roots and replant them, again and again. There were no passports, no borders, and the entire world was wild in that best of senses, like Eden. We had homes, of course, but these homes came more from where we were than from where we imagined we had been. “Wherever one finds one’s heart, there one dwells,” says ibn Arabi, indicating that the estranged, in finding heart, find a home dissociated from place. When everything is exile, then we are all equally at home.[19] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe seems to agree: in a 1799 letter to the Swiss historian Johann Jakob Hottinger, he suggested that, “At a time when people everywhere busy themselves with creating new Fatherlands, for the impartial thinker – for the one who rises above his own era -- the Fatherland is nowhere and everywhere.”[20] At the birth of collective political identities, he recognized that the national family must serve less as the goal than as the path: a construct to transcend through the non-directional, undirected power of thought: the -met finding its -hodos. Whether in East or in West (places always locatively and connotatively relative, and thus illusory), the seeker of knowledge can never arrive home. Water gives life through circulation. To be home -- to Know absolutely -- is to be dead. To live in the material world means to be estranged from the Divine. Yet we can acquire glimpses, proximity, through acts of estrangement. Ibn Arabi considers the seeker of knowledge in a perpetually liminal state: relinquishing the fiction of an authentic home, the seeker recognizes that all places are to the same extent both home and not home. In this recognition, all places become potentially home; it is the job of the seeker to articulate them as home within the truth of estrangement. “The striving towards becoming so that one persists only through the Real is to return to the state of nonexistence in which one was before.” Yup, ibn Arabi again. So here we are, seekers of knowledge among the ruins of a secular modern age emerging from a deeply Christian-inspired humanism that emphasizes goal-oriented transcendence into a heavenly steady-state. Entry into ghurba instead involves a thought experiment: what might we learn from an alternative path? Instead of controlling Islam by disparaging it; instead of considering it as alien to the main (Christian) story; instead of reminding alterity to stay put, outside of the structuring epistemes of our world… what if we consider what might be learned from that which is presumed alien? What would it mean to embrace estrangement, to prioritize it over belonging to the familiarity of permanence? The embrace of estrangement requires a twofold engagement with an episteme of ghurba, both individual and epistemic, recognizing as strange who we are as well as how we work. It allows for learning from a way of believing, just as we have learned subconsciously from the traces of Christian believing embedded in modernity, without necessarily allowing for faith. We can walk along with the faithful and see what they see; and maybe we might absorb faith, and/or maybe we might absorb wisdom. Nothing lost, much to gain. Gurbet, as I first learned it in Turkish, was to live as a stranger in a strange land, longing for a homeland that held the promise of being unstrange. I heard it as a child, in my second mother tongue that I had just learned under the pretense that it had always been my own: the transgenerational return.[21] I encountered it through the migrant Turks who had moved to Germany full of hope and fear, building lives by the sweat of their brow about which they might brag when bringing home a good Turk-made BMW or Mercedes Benz. Nine years old, I encountered it traveling on the bunk-bedded kuşetli tren across Eastern Europe with these chain-smoking homesick men who offered my family poppy-seed bread sweetened with stories of home peppered with longing. Gurbet as they used it would not apply to me, because I was blessed by the turn of my tongue, trained by the sweat of my thought, to belong. To live in gurbet did not belong to me, since to acknowledge my own gurbet would be first to acknowledge that I did not fit in. Not in my father tongue, not in my mother tongue; not in the West, not in the East. How silly of me. How classist of me. Of course gurbet belongs to me, I have learned finally now that I too live in Germany: stranger born and still stranger will I die. People ask, after all these years, if I will go home. Which place was home, I ask, when in time there is only forwards? Ibn Arabi reaches out to comfort us on such journeys:
Camels don’t have pastures. There is no going back. Truly, it has never been easy to have a sense for the uncanny, the unheimlich reality that home is less solid than sense. Existence reveals itself as alienation. A camel weighted with the water of experience, I have no idea where my pasture might be. Chip on my shoulder? No, not really. Not in the least (I tellingly insist). Quite the opposite: pen in my hand, peace in my heart. Not simply nostalgic, ghurba offers relief. When home is revealed as never having been, wherever one goes must be made home. It is a permanent friction with location – every location -- scraping against the edges of the expected world like a lathe carving out a bowl. Ghurba is not simply a state of being estranged, of being a refugee seeking the grace of others, but a verb, an action that remodels the home of others in which we have arrived uninvited, inviting – even requiring – the unwilling to shape it anew. No wonder they dislike our poison, but it may also be that they need us as their cure. For in remaking our new home, we press against its limits, both physically and mentally. We tell those around us that the boundaries and limits they take as normal are ontologically provisional. That world may take comfort in its apparent permanence. But the presence of me, or the immigrant, or the refugee, the discomfort of our mobility and the concomitant necessity of remaking the home of others, brings up the fact that we are present where we were not. We are temporal. Ibn Arabi explains that “the home of the contingent is contingency.” And, after all, who isn’t contingent? One arbitrary sperm and one arbitrary egg, born in one arbitrary place, destined to live for some arbitrary time and then… not to. You may not like it, but our placement here on earth is a temporary matter. It always has been, and for as long as we keep on appearing, so it will be. We are temporary, too. You are free to agree or disagree: for ibn Arabi, only the Divine is necessary. Absolute. Everything else is possible or impossible: possible if it becomes manifest, impossible if it never leaves the divine knowledge. Secularly conceived, what does this mean? The secular version of the Divine seems to be vested in the illusion of solidity provided by institutions; the mandatory forgetfulness that this giant dance we all participate in, however buttressed by regulations and bureaucracies; however painted with boundaries and conventions, is not mandatory. Norms and traditions remain forever optional, contingent on our human participation. Ghurba offers the alienation required to ask why an elephant is pooping in the middle of the room, and why we are sitting in the stink and doing nothing about it. Our temporality serves as a mirror for those who celebrate their homeliness, belonging by dint of birth or by embroidering themselves into the pattern determined by nationality, discipline, or identity. No less temporary than I am, those who live in the comfort of apparent permanence live in fear of what we in ghurba can never forget: any home – any moment – might just as well be otherwise. For them, the idea of decamping remains tied to reconstructing elsewhere the same home they already had, replicated. They can only imagine the camp as a colony, a repetition of that which they left behind. Through this mirror, they might imagine me or the refugee as the colonizer of their home. It would be a mistake to equate the act of living in ghurba simplistically with the individuals who live abroad, trying to recreate a lost home by holding on to their habits no less than those who hold on to their apparently stable homes by insisting on their immutable perpetuity. The expat, like the refugee, may or may not experience ghurba, as may the person who has never left home. It would be erroneous to equate ghurba with the happenstance of personal histories without recognizing the epistemic shift required in negotiating the space between where we have been and where we are going. Although academic rigor often prides itself on skepticism, all too often this brand of skepticism resides in a critique of the findings rather than considering the utility of multiple paths. It trusts in established method and institutions. It trusts the neutrality of its own discernment. Ensconced in its dominance, its skepticism weakens. In contrast, the skepticism born of ghurba is born of loss, risk, and the impossible feat of renewing order out of chaos, moment by moment. Ghurba crosses the border between the strange and the homely so many times that it slices that frontier to smithereens. The restrictions between disciplines, once deemed necessary, enter the fray, lose the privilege of setting the rules. The forms that functioned as retaining walls for the ivory tower appear instead like candied clouds, poems that speak sense where statistics slither and slander. Ghurba listens for the speech of each new home to teach it new questions that might be asked; it speaks in a tongue renewed in the polyphony of languages newly learned and rhetorics recently revived. Like Don Quixote’s niece, those who inhabit towers beg that the books of poetry be burnt with the rest; for should her uncle be cured of the illness of chivalry, the next lot of books may transform him into a shepherd, and he would then wander through the woods and fields singing and playing on a pipe. What kind of progress is that?[22] Those of us who escape the gh-r-b well where our intellect lies
estranged in the issue of home, and who become able, even momentarily, to
ascend to our freedoms may be no different than Don Quixote, pursuing the
apparently absurd dream of chivalry. But I ask you: is it the preachers and
soldiers who would burn his books and confiscate his lance and cardboard armor
whom we fold into our hearts, or is it Don Quixote, spear in hand, poetry in
mind, peace in his heart?
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Art Note: The Sleepers, Bill Viola, 1992. Seven barrels of water glow in a darkened room. At the bottom of each, a monitor plays a thirty-minute loop of a different person asleep, filmed in real time. The cave becomes a chamber of light, and the sleepers, strangers to one another and to us, rest in stillness while the world revolves above them. Video installation: seven metal barrels, seven videos, seven black-and-white monitors, and 385 gallons of water; 524 × 584 cm (variable); edition 1/2. Collection Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, A 92 1333 I 21. Photo: Louis Lussier. © Bill Viola.
