The pearl

The pearl

I admire this customer and really enjoy cutting his hair, he is not the kind of person who participates in idle chatter, he has deep issues to discuss. His character is profoundly admirable and his ideas flow fluidly from his tongue. His soul is peaceful and genuine, pious without showing off or loud. He is fair and his way of dealing with life is simple, true and neutral. His soul is deep and his opinions take more than one haircut to discuss.

I often wished that the haircut could last all day or that there would never be awaiting customers when he was in my salon. We seemed to isolate ourselves in my simple haven and his only request was that I complete his cut before the midday prayer call.

He is an ordinary customer but possess the arrest qualities I have ever encountered.

His eyes are a unique secret full of kindness and foresight that embraces you. He delighted me when he admitted that is was happy that I am his barber.

My words were always meager ones which initiated the conversation, like a seeping hole in a honey bottle. If I did not begin a conversation he would remain silent. This reminded me of the philosopher, Baydaba, who always started his deep lecture only after the king has asked him about a subject and the words written by a critic “his words flow drop after drop from a pure stream” are also so appropriate in describing my customer.

Recently, he has a deep feeling of bitterness that seems blunt in most people’s eyes because of his directness. The fact that people have adopted the wrong lifestyles disappoints him. The only way of perfection is the divine way, he says. Thousands of years of human failure has proven that. No one is perfect but we are as good as we make u p our minds to be.

I feel closer to him when he shares details of his life with me. He told me about his love for his wife. The one who helps him bear life and find peace. She is his refuge, I wonder if refuge can be a wife. He takes her as a blessing except at the times when she loses her temper and her anger boils over, she complains that he is not in touch with the real. What she does not realize is that she is the great soul who gives him the reason to think and breathe and they would be the happiest couple if she stopped measuring happiness with material possision.   I tried to warn him that he should be more compassionate with her but his answer was, “nothing can destroy a true love as we have the talent of tolerance and understanding,”

At times we disagree but I intentionally debate him as this encourages words and ideas to flow from his mind and I listen in amazement to his interpretations.

He says that the brotherhood, which the prophet Mohamed,peace be upon Him, made in Almadina between the immigrant and the Ansar,  was the perfect ideal for the Utopia which philosophers have been searching for. This period was the perfect human creation and also that the arrangement of the four Khalifs after the prophet Mohamed was completely divine, so that no of them can be replaced or preceded. He also argues that the discrimination between people and their beliefs is that they are not aware of God’s miracles.

He says that not praying actually means denying Allah. We are so ungrateful and yet we expect blessings from Him; children, health and even money, while we refuse to give thanks and have little faith. We want a modern religion with all blessings and no obligations or dedication.

He says the biggest defeat of our nation is the false feeling of perfection that we have, thus stopping us historically in the past ages while the rest of the world is moving forwards. Although we are the unimportant part of civilization now, we still affect the majority. While we stand dogmatically in our history, the western mind has invented its own set of moral values that are less spiritual than our own but which they all follow. With their lower values they are greater and yet us with the higher values are the lesser.

He says that most of those who speak of moral values do so to achieve their own goal but if one looks deeper into their souls you will find corruption.

He believes that Anthon Chikov, the Russian writer, was the greatest author of short stories.

He wrote deeply and yet simply about ordinary people in a way that made them cry and laugh at themselves. He wrote that ugliness is not only in hated things far away but also close inside ourselves making even love which is the greatest gift turn into malice.

He says that you could read thousands of old Arabian poetry even Motanabi, the greatest poet, but yet rarely find their souls expressed openly.

He says that we shall never reach the world cup championship because civilization is still in parts, not a whole form and a country in which there is a bribery judge can never go there. 

 the judges are bribed.

One day he came to have his hair cut and I noticed that he was silent and sorrowful. His eyes were sad and he was silent. His thoughts were drifting far away. I tried to find a subject to persuade him into conversation but in vain. When his haircut was almost complete, he looked into the distance and said, "He who opposes life never expects his own life to become conflicting.”

He had had a severe disagreement with his wife but never imagined that it would end up in court.

His weapon to punish her was always silence or being away from home. He always believed that being away from the one who loves you is the greatest punishment when you have been offended. He thought that time alone would cure and that she would come to the realization that she was in the wrong.

He had entered their home to find it completely bare. The police had sent him a letter demanding divorce by law. He did nothing, had not even contacted his lawyer, he pondered and tried to find answers to how this had got so out of hand.

“She will regret everything and return”, he thought.

“She will say to herself, ‘I lost a great true love for some wood.”

When he came to me the last time, he was terribly disappointed and downcast, as he said, “Her moment of regret ahs not yet come.”

A long time of silence passed between us and then he asked me mournfully, “What on earth can turn a true love to this? Have we never had a respected moment or memory together?”

His morose was thick, deep and dark. I wished to tell him that one needs to come into touch with reality, to know it, but I kept silent, thinking it better than to judge him.

He is a pearl on a black man’s chest on a very dark night.

Then I told him, “The greatest punishment for her is to live without a man such as you.”