Brüder, über’m Sternenzelt
Richtet Gott wie wir gerichtet
Schiller
I
IN THAT CITY the art of music attained to such a perfection that, after the bio-state wars, in a square reminiscent of both Times Square and Palace Square, portraits of Beethoven and Schiller were projected as iconography. They were put up as silent symbols of the new freedom, the true view of human freedom at war with the forces of willed destruction.
Freedom had been cast off so that it could be donned again anew, in a wholly new expression, a triumphant robe of honour. Since it had been seen in the dark decades of the great wars, and borne witness to by the survivors of the, now thankfully defunct, reservations, that last century’s greatest espousers of freedom had been, simultaneously, last century’s biggest killers—the trappings of freedom, the party machine in parliament, and not only the rigged voting system but the electoral franchise itself and the mass media machine that espoused ‘freedom of the press’ was consigned to the dustbin of the past: numerical selection and abstract number currencies were abandoned, and departed like wisps of smoke. They were merely the gigantic shadows that perpetuated the world’s deep night.
V, the initial of victory, at points in the struggle we relayed it in code …— and the Roman numeral for fifth; anonymous allies from the populace graffitied it with slogans across the infrastructure networks. When we unfurled it on flags raised high at all points of that city, it was as though the fourth movement of that familiar symphony, known as Fate and also Victory, resounded for the first time in its unbelievably long, pure C major cadence. In the days of victory a handsome, dynamic, birdlike conductor performed it to seas of people in the great squares. They then all sang Schiller’s An die Freude to rapturous applause and calls for it to be sung again and again. In the previous century a critic once reported that the master had said of the symphony’s four note opening motif: “thus fate knocks at the door”, and whether he had said it or not all it amounted to was party trick chat, the noise of those who could hear the music but could not live by it. In that city, the music went into action, and those who knew in that city would note privately to one another that in Qur’an the word for victory and spiritual opening was the same word.
Now the music resounded. Joy follows sorrow, sunshine-rain. A climax, that once it began, climbed on and on, irrepressible, unstoppable. It led the people of that city imperiously forward. Or, to be exact, it led the souls of the small circle of leaders—from the old families—to step forward in the final stages of the struggle.
In the second war on the reservation zone—a zone where two million people lived under blockade trapped behind fences, monitored by spy planes— the encircled population had to suffer the military-technological experiments of a new kind of aerial war; unmanned aerial war on a captive civilian population. Behind the fences of this zone, agents of the financial state’s safe haven fostered infighting among the beleaguered population by setting up the green headbanded terror faction whose violent resistance, they had hoped, would unite the world in such condemnation that they could enjoy the most convenient distraction from, perhaps even a blank cheque for, the planned genocide that they were eager to get underway. At a crucial moment in the struggle, a leading tribune of the world state had visited the administrative district of our city. He had, fired up and fueled by his hateful belief in his own propaganda, assumed our people would accept his explanation for a coordinated bombing campaign on schools and hospitals in the reservation zone.
Although the reservation zone was 2,229 miles from us by plane, and on the far eastern shore of the middle sea, the people of our city could not contain their outrage any longer. Our enemies had, because they are not loved, dangerously underestimated the human heart and its capacity to suffer with its fellow brothers. One bright morning, the familiar tribune was arrested by a cadre of Guards officers as he passed from the administrative district and, unwittingly, crossed the property of the Guards military headquarters and stables. In understanding that their oath to the Regent, though the king himself was politically trapped, made them immune to the threats of the prime minister—who had shown himself to be the collaborator of a foreign power—a group of the finest officers of the Guards detained the tribune as his long black car crossed the gravel parade ground of their Palladian headquarters.
It was all too much, to hear that tribune address us again. No matter how fiercely the mass media machine sought to sell mass indoctrination as privately formed opinion, their lies, like a house of cards, had to cave in on themselves, inevitably unable to support their own weight. After his seventh visit to the Americas, the tribune tried his luck in our city too. But his argument, that children killed by the zionist conscripts would have grown up to be terrorists anyway, only served to wake the people up. The same tribune had celebrated the founders of his country who, in the 1940s, had run a terrorist campaign to kill British officers. One of the murdered officers, Lord Moyne, was the great grandfather of the Guardsman that stepped out to stop the long black car on the parade ground.
II
What did this all have to do with music? It was not due to the failed socialist protests that the decisive stroke was made. Neither did the officers act on the pathetic arrest warrants issued by the international criminal courts, though these had served to show many people how much the zionists had lost control in the diplomatic world.
An entire city cannot change a man, but a man can change an entire city. In the New World Order, ‘the people’ had been raised to the status of divinity—yet those who still kept a relationship to language knew ‘the people’ was an abstraction, one that could not be found anywhere. Though in those years the light of language dimmed, some tended to it like a handmaiden with cupped hands to a candle.
So it was that the people of our city, like the Basque, the Irish, the Scots, the Tibetans, the Balts, the Zulu, the Afrikaaners, realized that the natural society bounded by geographical location, united by language and culture, could never gain freedom in a usury-based world of tyranny, however much that world spouted the dead rhetoric of its founding fathers from America, emptily invoking freedom, happiness and the rights of man.
Horrified by the planned genocide of the Palestinian people, they saw that their own struggle was not different from the struggle of the Sikhs, the Kashmiris, the Bretons, nor of any natural group who wished to run their own affairs.
In one of the ironies of history, it was the actions of the penultimate president of the Galba to dismantle the UN, and his administrations’ energetic interest—though illiterate and superficial—in Carl Schmitt’s philosophy of history, law and politics, that opened many of the intelligent people up to the sophisticated political action required to seize their own freedom.
What differentiated the freedom struggle of our city from others, and which enabled the old families and officers of the guards to step forward, was their recognition that they could not achieve their freedom by political terrorism against ‘democracy and law’.
An even smaller circle of people discovered the private essays left behind by an eminent Highlander—the first highlander to become a Shaykh of the Darqawi order, an order so renowned across its historical homeland of north-west Africa for its uncompromising refusal to be in the employ of state power—in one of which he wrote:
‘the whole fabric of the New World Order, so-called, is enmeshed and enslaved by the total corrupt and deceptive method of worthless number-money backed up by no genuine wealth. Between the valuable commodities and properties owned by the banking system and its elite and the enslaved masses lies the great mythic unpayable debt in ‘money’, which assures the world’s continued en-debtedness to the elite. This web of the spider has to be swept away.’
Freed from the curse of ethnic minority status and identity politics, people in our city finally began to enter Islam in large numbers. A religion that places primary emphasis on the word, on the oath, and on the verb, that is on action and doing—not ‘works’ which belong to the idolatrous worship of nouns—is naturally a religion that appeals to honest, sincere people in every element of society, and in particular to the soldier. Islam replaced for us golden calves, covenants, crucifixes and chosen people status. The covenant broken by the Jews was replaced by the crucifixion-redemption myth of meta-historical Christianity. Essentially the same thing, but taken from a hybrid race and applied to a universal humanity. The uncomfortable fact is, given the revolutionary form that the music of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis achieves, Beethoven would have preferred Nietzsche to the ritual tale of the crucifixion myth. A covenant is not a thing to be worshipped at an altar, that grants unconditional chosen status, but like a promise or an oath, it requires active submission to the Divine, and love for His Messengers. This was the religion of Islam, the only religion in the world not named after a personality, or a place, or a people—but instead named after a verb, an action and doing word.
Able to see the racial politics that had been foisted on them too, with the absurd promise of deportations, Islam enabled us to recognise our brotherhood with other men. To stand with them. And we found that they came out to us and said “I am with you.” The rich language of Urdu, along with the vivacious line of classical Islamic works that came into our hands, gave our people for the first time since the Essex Circle in the twilight years of the sixteenth century, a rich self expression.
When the tribune spoke in our ancient Parliament, and the Prime Minister seconded his murderous threat—live streamed to the whole world—that he would pursue those who, like the bombed and murdered children, may not be terrorists but might become one, the officers of the Guards had had enough.
III
In an amazingly short time, the people of that city were able to bring the world 'order' to the brink of chaos. Creative chaos.
Soon after the arrest of the tribune and Prime Minister we had declared a global uprising (Intifada) against the world system. The process had begun well before the guards stepped forward. It had all begun with the recovery of real human company, gatherings of invocation of the Divine Name, (singing-dancing), group recitation of Qur’an, study of Qur’an and the A’mal of the Ahl al Madina, the establishment of local social nexuses for education and medicine, and trading without usury, speculation or the majority-share lie. When the true Islamic teaching took hold, it did so with such strength and success that the Arabs themselves turned to our city to recapture the living teaching that they had abandoned for over one hundred years.
Decisive chords imply a further sound.
‘With all the European heritage already at the gates of Islam—Goethe’s undoubted Islam, Wagner’s mythic indication of it at the end of Parsifal and thus his whole life’s quest unveiled, Rilke’s yearning for its prayer and love of its message—it was but a step to go from the failed christianity to the final manifestation of prophetic teaching, a teaching that was already embedded in the European inheritance.’
We had read these words before, before the moment had been achieved emphatically. What can only be described as a series of Beethoven-like crashing chords had happened, and we enjoyed the strings, as it were, turn icy dissonances into a music of burning intensity—controlled triumph bringing the crashing chords home with classical harmonies.
IV
There is a lot more to be said that I cannot write here. What came to pass was stated more clearly in the writing of my own teacher, even though his books long preceded the events. So it seems writing takes a life of its own, independent of its author. I began by telling you about our city, where the art of music attained such heights that the music Beethoven promised for a war-torn age accompanied, point for point, our own momentous events. The melodic process started, as the transition to the finale starts with the scherzo’s mysterious birth, in a spectral, twilit world from which there seemed to be no escape.
If you were to find in the archives the 18th century periodical Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung you would see in volume 12, issue no. 40 that, a year and a half after its premiere in Vienna, on the 11th July 1810, an anonymous account was submitted by someone who had attended an early performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This unsigned record leaves us with the atmosphere of the occasion:
Radiant beams shoot through this region's deep night, and we become aware of gigantic shadows which, rocking back and forth, close in on us and destroy everything within us except the pain of endless longing—a longing in which every pleasure that rose up in jubilant tones sinks and succumbs, and only through this pain, which, while consuming but not destroying love, hope, and joy, tries to burst our breasts with full-voiced harmonies of all the passions. We live on and are captivated beholders of the spirits.
In that city, after a simple short crescendo, a proud march was launched. There were moments when everything slowed down, but one voice like the lone woodwind was enough to sing us through until we were joined by the stentorian trumpets’ call.