It appeared to my mind impossible and contrary to all sound custom that so good a knight should have lacked a sage to undertake the writing of his unparalleled achievements, since there never was one of those knights errant who go out on their adventures that ever lacked one. For every one of them had one or two sages ready at hand not only to record their deeds but to describe their minutest thoughts and most trivial actions.
-Don Quixote, Part I Chapter 9
In Arabic, a faaris is a knight, a horseman, from the Arabic word faras, mare. KhairAllah was a camelman but nonetheless I thought he needed a sage. I wrote about him in 1984 and made a film about him in 1988. I always called him batal al-shaasha, hero of the screen, and wanted more than anything to show the film Sawt al-Sawt, Voice of the Whip, at el Obeid’s outdoor cinema Arous al-Rimal, Bride of the Sands. It was not to be because when the film was finally finished, VHS had killed commercial cinema even in rural Sudan.
I thought that the film review in American Anthropologist was a snarky hit job. The reviewer must have attended a screening at the Margaret Mead Festival when from the stage I tossed out a throw away line about “the romance of the road” and my childhood desire to ride the Chisholm Trail, because he called me a starry eyed dilettante with no business making self-styled ethnographic films. This was the same guy who lied about his religion to his informants when writing his own ethnography of Arab nomads, in order as he said to fit in better.
At least he correctly picked up on the title’s wordplay, which reverses its Arabic consonants’ near homophones t and s- in Arabic, t and s both have emphatic and plain versions and create totally different words. Arabs like clever manipulations of their language, even illiterate Arabs.
I never once told KhairAllah that I was a Muslim and I never dressed as an Arab, much to my regret when before the forty day mark my blue jeans became so oppressively dirty that I wished I had worn a pair of sirwal, light breathable cotton riding pants, like my college friend Steve wore. Steve is Jewish and gave himself the Arabic name Mustafa, meaning the Chosen One, as the Prophet Muhammad was called, in order for the drovers to always remember his name. To fit in better, he thought. It gave us both great pleasure around the campfire to tell the men, No, Mustafa is not Muslim, he is Jewish. He just chose the name, the Chosen One, because he likes how it sounds.
It reminded me of the anecdote told by my graduate school teacher, a State Department adjunct originally from a small town in Oklahoma, who said by way of trying to open our eyes to cultural difference, Back when I was in high school, we had a Djew, an A-Rab, and a Terk, and we all got along OK. All I could later say was, You should have been around our campfire on the darb al-arba’in.