Illusions

Optimism and pessimism are two phenomena observable among all nations, whatever their race: from the Englishman who takes the black cat as a good omen — to the point of letting it roam free through the corridors of Parliament — and who rejoices, like the bride who is happy at the sight of that cat if it greets her on the morning of her wedding day... to the African who wraps himself in a lion's skin, claiming it endows him with courage and strength; from the village woman who lights the oil lamp with its three wicks and sets it at a crossing of three roads so that her ailing child may be cured of the tertian fever, to the cinema star in Hollywood who hangs a statuette of Buddha on her breast for luck. And so on.

The Arabs of old drew good omens and bad, and no wonder: they were a nation living in the bosom of nature, so its imagination widened and its senses grew keen, and it took to divining the unseen and its secrets, watching every movement made by bird or beast or plant and reading a purpose into it. They were, moreover, a nation of language and eloquence, enamored of words, which it set in order and sang as verse, and arranged and made the stuff of its evening talk as prose. No wonder, then, that it should take from a thing its name and the words derived from it — words that might mean good or ill — and join them to the color of a bird, say, or to its movement, and come out with a conclusion inviting optimism or pessimism... The crow, for example, is black with a blackness that reminds the Bedouin of the pitch-dark night in which no star gives guidance; then, too, it circles over the traces of the tribe after its departure or its perishing, singing its unmelodious songs as though calling out with its fellows, rejoicing at that departure — or at that singing. As for its name, ghurab, from it are derived taghrib and ghurba — banishment and exile — and other such words. It is therefore the herald of ill omen, and when it croaked the poet would hasten to cry:

The crow croaked, and I said: a parting, soon —
whatever you will, now they have gone away — a parting; croak on.

And from the ban tree and the gharab tree are derived bayn, separation, and ghurba, exile; so when the two birds sang upon them the poet cried:

The two birds sang of Layla's parting
upon two boughs, of gharab and of ban;
the ban foretold Sulayma's night afar,
and in the gharab, an exile far from near.

As for the eagle, 'uqab, from it is derived the word 'uqba, the happy outcome; and from the doves, hamamat, are derived himam, doom, and humma, fever, and other such — but their whiteness, and their being the messenger of peace, tip the balance of good omen in their favor. And the hoopoe is the herald of good in their tradition: he was Solomon's guide to the places of water in the depths of the earth, and the crest on his head is a reward from God for his devotion to his mother when she died, for he made her grave in his head. And so we see the poet exclaim:

They said: an eagle. I said: a happy issue of love,
drawn near after their long absence and remove.
They said: doves. Then their meeting was decreed,
and the dream of youth came back to us, a spring.
They said: a hoopoe sang upon a ban tree.
I said: guidance, by which we set out and return.

And we today, like all people ancient and modern, take bad omens and good from any number of things; we may do so without knowing any reason for it, and we do it because the people around us do it, and we imitate them. If one of us stumbles in the road upon a horseshoe, she bends down and picks it up quickly, joy spreading over her face; then she carries it off as though she had found a treasure, and hangs it in a prominent place in the house so that it may bring her happiness — indeed she may hang it in her own room, above her very bed, for extra good luck... One might suppose this belief to be purely Arab, since the horse was for the Arab the source of good, so that one of them said: "Goodness is knotted in the forelocks of horses." But two things make one doubt the soundness of this view: first, because this good-luck belief prevailed in the West before it prevailed here, so the likelier case is that we took it from them and not they from us; second, why did the Arabs not draw their omen from something nearer to the horse's forelock than its shoe? Why did they not take it from a piece of the straps about its head, or the ornaments about its neck? There is an opinion nearer the truth: that the horseshoe holds seven nails, and the number seven has always been blessed in people's eyes. The Creator, glorious and exalted, made the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and the holy books tell of that number's standing — the seven heavens and the seven angels, the seven layers of the earth, and so on. And perhaps the horseshoe, which resembles the figure seven to a great degree, became in their eyes seven twice over...

And since we are speaking of numbers, we cannot fail to notice that they play an important part in our beliefs. The number five, for instance, wards off ill fortune and shames the evil eye: if a lady fears another's envy, or hears that she envies her, she hastens to say "five in her eye," or "five and a little five in the eye of whoever does not bless the Prophet." Is this because the figure five is written as a closed ring which the envier's eye cannot pierce? A woman may be asked her child's age, and if it is five months or five years she answers: "His age is the number of the fingers of your hand." Indeed, how many children have we seen with a piece of silver or gold wrought in the shape of the hand and its fingers hung upon their heads — either stuck with a bit of wax to the child's front locks, or sewn onto his cap! Does this mean that the open palm drives off the envier's eye and blocks the evil from issuing out of it, just as touching wood, among the Franks, prevents the electricity of the envier's eye from reaching the envied?

And the number 13 has its well-known ill repute — a belief that came to us from the West, and its origin is most probably religious: Christ and his disciples were thirteen persons, and the whole company was good and righteous except the thirteenth person, who betrayed and brought ill fortune upon the whole company... Hence every thirteenth person in any company may become an ill omen upon it; hence let people shun the number 13 and the figure 13, and let them tell their tales, truthful or exaggerated, of an evil power lurking in the number, and let them fit every coincidence that has happened to it and ascribe it to it. But perhaps we should not forget that many have defied the unlucky number, insisting that the rooms of their mansions be 13, and the number of their servants 13, and the number of a man's office room 13 — and no harm befell them. And over how many people's houses has a crow croaked, or an owl hooted at evening, without being able to bring them any harm; indeed, how many people have hung up a horseshoe, and horseshoes, without gaining any happiness.

Optimism and pessimism are two beliefs whose truth has never been established. The world of the unseen and what it hides has not yet been disclosed to us, nor has it been confirmed to us that birds or animals or plants have any connection with the Director of the Universe — knowing what good or ill He intends for us, and signaling those intentions to us out of the corner of an eye. It is no good, then, to cling to illusions; but if there is no help for it, then let the ban be a ban and not a parting, and the crow a return from exile, just as the doves were "our meeting decreed."

Yes — it is not good for a person to look at the world with an anxious, pessimistic eye. Pessimism, and the awaiting of calamities that may never happen, is a misery one creates for oneself, by oneself. Three-quarters of our misfortunes are imaginary misfortunes: we dream, asleep or awake, and take alarm; then we form for ourselves the notion that the calamity is coming beyond all doubt; then we set ourselves to await its coming, between dread and trembling — and most often it does not happen, and we shall have reaped nothing except to have been distressed in advance, to have made ourselves wretched without cause, and to have spent a few days of our lives in a misery that wore out our strength and shattered our nerves. Had we taken the hopeful view instead of the gloomy one, we should have been happy — or at least have gained a stretch of time in which we did not grieve beforehand, and did not suffer before suffering came.

Why, one wonders, do some of us always wear the dark spectacles? And why do some of us see faint breaths misting the mirror of the self, yet do not hasten to wipe it with a white cloth — rather it seems to them a thick fog, and they fall to sighing and moaning before it until the breaths thicken, and it becomes a fog in earnest.