Al->aklm’s Bird of the East
Although specifically concerned with poetry, the following introductory
references to al->aklm’s veiled autobiography are meant to account for its
negotiatory stance among the increasingly influential channels of Sufi poetry,
classical music, and conflicting ideologies in a text that carves out its affilia-
tion while holding hard to its roots. Al->aklm’s Bird of the Eastis dedicated
as follows: “To my Patron Saint Saiyidah Zainab,” the daughter of Immm cAll,
and hence the granddaughter of the Prophet Mu.ammad. The quarter in
Cairo where her shrine stands is also named after her. The protagonist
Mu.sin, who relives al->aklm’s days in Paris throughout the mid-1920s,
specifies his love and attachment to the saint who “had granted him her grace
when he had been in trouble,” as a kind of both filiation and homage, for
“Her existence was very real in his life,” and “every success he had ever had
in life resulted from an encouraging wave of her hand” (Ibid. 87). “It was she
who instilled forbearance in him or strengthened his will as the case might
be” (Ibid. 88), he explains. He further intimates, “Whenever he placed his
hopes in something, he always turned humbly to her so that she might stand
at his side and combine her profoundly reverent voice with his in supplica-
tion to God” (Ibid.). Overwhelmed by Parisian life, the protagonist is driven
away from the filial, with its “natural bonds and natural forms of authority,”^21
toward a “new affiliative relationship,” which, in Edward Said’s formulation,
“changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms” (Ibid. 20)
under the impact of the hegemonic culture.
The protagonist, a prototype for a large number of Arab intellectuals since
the first decades of the twentieth century, suffers no illusions regarding his
state, for displacement and relocation are too real to be minimized or ignored.
Their immediate threat is to uproot faith, for “once one has lost it, it is diffi-
cult to recapture it” (Ibid. 86). Drawn to Parisian culture through negotia-
tion and acceptance, the protagonist gradually undergoes the “breaking of
ties with family, home, class, country, and traditional beliefs,” which, in
Edward Said’s reading of the process, takes place “as necessary stages in the
achievement of spiritual and traditional freedom” (Ibid. 19). Displaced as
such and alternatively hosted in a specific terrain of culture and its rational-
ist segments, the protagonist leaves behind “the originating but now unre-
coverable father” (Ibid. 18). Standing instead in limbo, Mu.sin confesses,
“I am worried myself,” for “Under the hot breath of modern culture my faith
is trembling like a fragile flower petal” (Bird, 86).
As this meeting with Parisian culture never passes without some losses on
his part, the protagonist goes back to the dedicatee in supplication for
support, for there “were...times when life frowned on him and seemed very
hard. At those moments it seemed as though the saintly Lady had forgotten
him, but when he stopped to think, he realized that in those difficult times
and situations it was he who had forgotten her, rather than the other way
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS