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IV- Amman

I hope tomorrow to find an oud. A real one, not a souvenir piece of shit. Qasim is hosting me, he said he’d go with me. Qasim has sadness in his eyes. He’s separated from his wife recently, and the 15-year old daughter has gone too. But 20-year old Mahmud is with Qasim - they stick together. You can see Mahmud loves and respects his father immensely, it is a beautiful thing to witness.

Drinking tea after downing a Ukrainian omelette another guest taught him how to make, Qasim and I talk about the cancer of religion. He reads and reads and he knows so much. He tells me the historical facts of Mohammed, the baselessness of Wahhabi claims to Quranic truth which they use to control simple-minded people. Sounds like Catholics 500 years ago. He tells me how this sect has infiltrated places like Egypt and Jordan in the last 25 years, how before them Muslims were spiritual but free to have choice and live their daily lives as they saw fit. Qasim tells me how when he worked in Saudi Arabia for 2 months a while back, if you were caught walking down the street during prayer time the religious police would give you a beating. These are the Wahhabis. They began giving free lectures in Egypt and Jordan in the eighties, handing out free hijabs to the women, and by the mid-80s suddenly the women are all covering their heads. It’s like this, yanni, says Qasim, like this. And his wife held out, kept her head bare till she started to feel naked amongst all her covered friends. She began wearing the hijab. And husband and wife began to grow apart. While Qasim learns more and more about the origins of monotheism, the links to Sumerians, the truth behind Quranic tales, he begins picking his way toward God- peeling back layers, searching for the truth. God gives us a brain, yanni, he says, so that we may use it to think and to find our way to him. But this talk scares Qasim’s wife, and it scares his friends, the fear of wrath and fire is embedded in them from childhood, from society- husband and wife grow still further apart.

It’s a quiet house, here. Qasim reads for hours everyday, picking his way toward God, making his own path- it’s a search for truth I can relate to. I guess God gave me a brain too…