It was a long haul across sand-sheets to Rabia’s place – a ragged tent pitched on the opposite side of a dune from the tents of the rest of her clan. Rafig told me that, as a young girl, Rabia had been struck by lightning while herding goats in the desert. She had been ill for a long time, but had recovered, and and ever since then had been capable, as he put it, of ‘seeing through the veil’. Now she was one of the most famous kahinas among the nomads. He said she made his skill with the Sandlines look like child’s play.
He took me to her tent and and left me to visit her alone. She was a younger woman than I had been expecting, but her eyes were deep, and she gave me the impression that she was looking right through me to something else beyond. We sat in the shade of a thorn tree, drank water and tea, and I explained who I was and why I was there.
After a while, she asked if I had any special question to ask.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose … the same as most people … I’d like to know what happens when we die.’
She laughed. ‘What happens is that the Great Spirit takes us unto the Great Spirit.’
‘I have heard nomads say that, but I never really understood it.
‘I will give you a mithil *– a like-thing.’
‘All right.’
‘You have come here on camels from the tents of Rafig, no? Imagine, though, that you have not come here at all. Imagine you never left those tents. You are sound asleep in Rafig’s camp, and you are only dreaming this.’
‘You mean that you, and all this around me now, is a dream?’
‘Let us imagine it is so. Now, if this is a dream, where is your soul? If you search for your soul here, or up in the sky beyond the clouds, or behind those dunes over there, you will not find it. So where is it?’
‘Perhaps I don’t have a soul.’
Her laughter was merry. ‘The soul is not really something you ‘have’ – like a shirt or a camel. The soul is the True Self, and the True Self is the Great Spirit. So where is it?’
‘All right, so if this is a dream, my soul – my True Self – is in Rafig’s camp, dreaming?’
‘Yes, and the person you believe you are, the one that seems to be sitting here, is what is being dreamed.’
I nodded. She smiled. Suddenly she picked up a sharp stone, and in a swift movement brought it down to within an inch of my temple. I flinched slightly.
‘If, God Forbid, I hit you with this stone and killed you, where would you be?’ she demanded.
‘Still in the dream?’
‘Of course.’
‘I would be waking up in Rafig’s camp, thinking that a dream had come to me – a dream of a woman who hit me on the head with a stone.’
‘If you remembered it, yes,’ she chuckled, throwing the stone down. ‘Perhaps you would remember, perhaps not, but you would still wake up, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, that is what it is like when the Great Spirit takes you unto the Great Spirit. It is like waking from a dream and returning to what you have always been – what we all are – part of the Great Spirit and the Great Spirit’s Dreaming.’
‘You mean this really IS a dream?’ I slapped the ground with my palm. ‘I can feel the earth.’
She shook her head. ‘I said it was a mithil – a like thing. This is a dream of a kind, perhaps, but different from a ‘sleeping dream’ – it is a dream we all share. The world we see and feel is as we agree it is in our sharing of it. It is real in its way, but is not al-Haqq – The Real. Al-Haqq is the true name of the Great Spirit.’
She made a fist, held it up in front of my eyes, then suddenly released her fingers.
‘See,’ she said. ‘When I open my hand there is nothing that was not there when it was closed. That is what happens when we die – we merge with the Real – our soul opens up like a fist unclenching.
(Photos – thanks Mariantonietta Peru)