Street of Thieves

The helicopter wasn’t there for nothing, everything must have seemed more beautiful seen from the sky, which was clear that day. In the street it was quite otherwise. I hadn’t cancelled my class for the day: I was a strike-breaker. I had to go there on foot, since there was no subway. It was ten in the morning, and there were already gatherings, groups of guys with caps, flags, megaphones, and cops everywhere. Half the streets in the city were blocked off. The big brand names were closed, just a few small businesses braved the picket lines — to their detriment: I saw a baker forced to close by a dozen unhappy union members shouting “Strike, strike!” and threatening to smash in his window with axe handles, he took less than ten minutes to abdicate and give his employees the day off. On the other hand, explaining to the Chinese in the Ronda shops the concept of picketing was more complicated:

“No work today.”

“No work?”

“No, it’s a general strike.”

“We not on strike.”

“Yes, it’s a general strike.”

“We not on strike.”

“Exactly, you have to close.”

“We have to go strike?”

But in the end, used to the proletarian struggles of the Single Party, the Chinese could also recognize a big stick when they saw one, and ended up lowering their shutters, for a few hours at least.

Their job became even more clandestine than usual.

In Gràcia, everything seemed calm. The streets were bathed in the blue-tinged coolness of a spring morning; Judit was waiting for the class, I arrived a little out of breath. Elena and Francesc couldn’t make it, they lived too far away to come by foot. Judit’s mother was there, it was the first time I met her; I was introduced as “Lakhdar, my Arabic professor.” She seemed much younger than I’d have thought; she wore skinny jeans, a blue T-shirt on which was written I would prefer not to; her name was Núria. I thought of my own mother, they must have been about the same age — but they didn’t have the same life, you just had to look at them to see that.

The one-on-one class went well, even though Judit was a little absent. We had read a passage by Ibn Battuta that seemed to suit current events. Ibn Battuta is in India, with the Sultan Muhammed Shah, and he relates how a Sheikh named Shihab-ud-dun, very powerful and well-respected, refused to appear before the Sultan when he had been summoned; the Sheikh explains to the court messenger that “he would never serve a tyrant.” So the Sultan sent for him to be taken by force:

“You say I’m a tyrant?”

“Yes,” replied the Sheikh, “you are a tyrant, and among your tyrannies, there is this and that,” and he began to enumerate on a number of them, like the destruction of the city of Delhi and the expulsion of its inhabitants.

The Sultan held his sword out to his vizier, saying:

“If I am a tyrant, cut off my head!”

“The man who calls you a tyrant is a dead man, but you yourself know perfectly well that you are one,” interrupted the Sheikh.

The Sultan had him arrested and locked up for fourteen days with nothing to eat or drink; every day he was brought to the courtroom, where the judges asked him to withdraw what he had said.

“I will not retract my words. I am made of the same cloth as the martyrs.”

On the fourteenth day, the Sultan had a meal sent to him, but the Sheikh refused:

“My belongings are already no longer of this world, take away this food.”

When the Sultan heard this, he ordered that they make the Sheikh ingest four pounds of fecal matter; some idolatrous Hindus were in charge of executing the order: they spread open the Sheikh’s jaw with pincers, mixed the excrement with water, and made him swallow it.

The next day, they brought him before a gathering of higher-ups and foreign ambassadors, so he would repent and withdraw what he had said — he refused once again, and was decapitated.

May God have mercy on his soul.

Once the text was translated, as an exercise, we discussed, in literary Arabic, the Sheikh’s determination and this question: Should one give in to the powerful? I said I didn’t think the Sheikh’s sacrifice served much purpose. He would certainly have been more useful had he stayed alive and continued the struggle, even if it meant going back on his statement. Judit was wiser than me, and more courageous too, perhaps:

“I think his sacrifice was useful — tyrants have to know what they are. The Sheikh’s determination even to the point of death showed the Sultan that there are ideas and people who cannot be conquered. What’s more, if the Sheikh had retracted, Ibn Battuta would not have told this story, and his struggle would have remained unknown to all, whereas his example is of great benefit.”

She expressed herself well, her Arabic was fluid, with fine expressions and no grammatical errors.

We began talking politics; I thought of the Syrians, tortured and bombed every day, and of the courage they needed to continue fighting, in the long war against their Sultan who must also have known perfectly well that he was a tyrant.