OUTCASTS AT THE FEAST: by Golan Haji

The Believers of the Black Book, Yazidis of the villages in Jazira and Afrin, worshipped a deity called Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel. The Peacock Angel is the progenitor of all things, its egg cracking open to reveal a cosmos that had lain there asleep in silence and darkness. As the shell broke away, as creation was born, two giants were born with it: Time and Death. 

Sheikh Jawdat Said believed that humans have a second birth—“when they emerge from the womb of their forefathers’ thinking”—an idea possibly inspired by those ancient Greeks who chose the Caucuses as a site of punishment for their mythic heroes, the very mountains from which the sheikh’s ancestors had been displaced into Syria. A Circassian skullcap on his head, the white glow of his beard illuminating the radiant young faces that would attend those non-violent demonstrations from the start of the Syrian uprising in March 2011, he would turn his attention to the fate of the Syrian people, those tattered lives in which everything had been put on hold except violence and grief and military service. The sheikh was himself one of those the war had pushed into exile after first ensuring that half the population was internally displaced; one of those who fled in a rush, leaving everything behind them and vanishing into thin air. They left their clothes and their books and their friends’ paintings, abandoned homes and cities and lovers, crossing borders and entire countries until they found themselves in camps with new trials and languages to test them. On the way, some would change their deepest convictions and ideas, sometimes even their religion or gender, as though changing one mask for another as they moved from one costumed ball to another; as though consigning their past to oblivion.  

Liberated from the trap of that blind binary, Love and Hate, Jawdat Said rejected the idea that our world revolves around the sun of violence. He knew that it was only through violence that Syria could be reduced to the categories of Arabism and Islam; since the late 1960s his mantra had been, “First make peace among yourselves before you talk about peace with Israel.” From his very first sermons he had sought to jolt Syrians awake to the possibility of non-violence; “jolt” because, still in thrall to their forefathers, “the lowest of the earth, both from among them and elsewhere, have been set loose against them.” In 1965, he was imprisoned following a Friday sermon at the Murabit Mosque in Damascus in which he openly rejected tyranny, stating, “Let the scholars declare that they have disowned me, the way the people of the Jahiliyyah spurned their outcasts.” He also said that if forced to choose between nationalism and Christianity he would choose to become a Christian. His analysis then turned to the doctrine of Adam’s first son and the event of the first murder as described in Surah al-Ma’idah, the Chapter of the Feast, from which he quoted the following verse, the words of that first son: “Though you reach out your hand to kill me, I shall not reach out mine to kill you.” His approach might be said to intersect with Martin Buber’s in its fusing of the first and second person pronouns; how absurd it is to worry about who killed whom, if we remain imprisoned within the cycle of crime. What sets man apart from the beasts is our awareness of this You—though it is easily forgotten: as though self-centredness is the essence of existence and anything that contradicts it deserves to be dismissed, must meet with active disgust and rage and contempt: an enemy that needs to be wiped out. Time and again over the years they would mock him and Jawdat Said would remain patient, adjuring his students to abide by a literal interpretation of Christ’s words: “Do good unto those who do you ill.” 

Over the course of their long war, Syrians sent countless appeals out into the world, but rarely did they address one another. On their phones there was an endless stream of tearful messages from prisons, from underwater, from beneath the rubble. There was the many, many Syrians who competed on the fields of violence, materially and morally, in real life and online—as children might fight who are yet to be weaned off the thrill of abuse and threats. Were it not for the sheer impossibility of the task, the strongest would have taken the country for himself and kicked everyone else off the pitch.  

Syrians did not become what they wanted for themselves, they turned into what was wanted for them. In Jawdat Said’s phrase: “The great men of the world: we are sacrifices to their gods. By our own will, it is their will that we have carried out…” The country was razed to the ground, but no phoenix soared up out of the flames that burned from the forests of the coast to Tadmur’s deserts, from the sea to the river. The literature they wrote was nothing like German Trümmerliteratur, the “rubble literature” that developed out of Nazism’s defeat. So I told myself as I read the work of several young writers showcased by the Ettijahat Foundation for Independent Culture. In my estimation, these new voices place the freedom to write above every other consideration; they believe in the minoritization of literature, not a literature of minorities. If Syrians were ever to embrace the linguistic accident bequeathed them by fate, they would be reading Kurdish books printed in Qamishli instead of imported from Erevan and Irbil; if they translated one another’s work they would see how much more estranged they were from one another than from any stranger from outside.  

Syria’s fear continues and the din is yet to die down in which all shout to make themselves heard except the dead. It is in the name of the dead that vengeance is being enacted everywhere you look; in their name that the survivors fight to claim the precedence of their suffering. Jawdat Said refused to counter the arrogance of one violence with another, for all that the ancient laws of revenge have yet to fall into obsolescence, from Hammurabi’s Babylon through to Gaza and Beirut, from the blindness of an eye for an eye to the snarled cry, “one drop of our blood will bring torrents of yours.” 

We are the heirs of our dead. Let this commonplace serve as a prompt for humility and silence. We are the heirs of an endless waiting and patience whose only compensation was scarcity. In this moral ruin, surrounded by murderers and thieves, slaves to power who enslave us by force, how are we to recover our faith in others if we have not restored our faith in ourselves? From where will we find the strength of thought to look into those dark corners of our souls, where pain shines like the eyes of the lost? What pleasure is there in winning? What winning, and winning what, when you lose your mother or father and are prevented from attending the funeral by the bloody crimes committed on the land of your birth, when the white-collar crimes of the hellish bureaucracy in the countries where you’ve taken refuge forbid you from travelling, when the courts make you bear the burden of your impotence and you almost find yourself pleading with them to forgive you, because we are human and we will die.  

“The state is the pinnacle of egoism,” said Schopenhauer. The rational mind hides that terrible, all encompassing, limitless selfishness the way we might seek to conceal something shameful or disfiguring (in classical Greek, one of the official languages of ancient Syria, “mind” is phren, which is a diaphram, a veil). The state raises its citizens to be mindful of their own interests: you must be aware of yourself in all things: first and foremost yourself; yourself, then the power, pleasure and benefits that might be yours. Beware lest your family and neighbours take advantage of you: sometimes the way to lies runs straight as the path of truth. We are accustomed to judge the thoughts of others, not our own. We cannot bear to see selfishness in others, we call it immoral, yet at the same time we live with it occupying our minds and everything around us; we swing back and forth between ecstasy and disgust to witness the battles between this ego and that, the looping reel of crimes and errors and madnesses—and even so we applaud altruism, heap praise on those who want for their neighbour what they’d want for themselves.  

Those in pain are shaken and uncertain, perhaps; weighed down by sadness, nauseous. If only we could believe the words of the Moroccan poet Abderrahim Sail— 

Let us return 

my friends 

to the demolished mountain,

and let us search 

for hope 

beneath the ruins. 

If we find it alive 

we bring it back to the people; 

if it be dead 

we’ll keep it for ourselves.

—so that the pain doesn’t bring us back once more to that loneliness in which the deceived and disappointed start to believe they have been abandoned even by their dearest friends; so that rampant egoism does not lead us to hatred of that to which we should show love and compassion: our country, Syria.

December 2025 

Golan Haji is a Syrian-Kurdish poet, essayist and translator with a postgraduate degree in pathology. He lives in Saint Denis, France. He has published five books of poems in Arabic: He Called Out Within The Darknesses (2004), Someone Sees You as a Monster (2008), Autumn, Here, is Magical and Vast (2013), Scale of Injury (2016), The Word Rejected (2023). His translations include (among others) books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Alberto Manguel. He also published Until The War (2016), a book of prose based on interviews with Syrian women. Last spring, his French-Arabic volume Avant Ce Silence, with French translations by Marilyn Hacker and Nathalie Bontemps, was published by APIC editions in Algeria.

(Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger)

To download and read the Kurish text please click on the attachement below. 

   Sêwlekên Sofreyê - Colan Hacî 2025