On Monday night, members of the Scream theater group treated Sawy Culture Wheel’s audience to a new production of great Egyptian playwright and poet Salah Abdel-Saboor’s famed text “Ma’sat Al-Hallaj (Al-Hallaj Tragedy).
While the group chose to not infuse a modern spirit into the play, whose events take place in the year 922 AD (309 in the Hijri calendar), the themes and the conflicts it explores are as relevant today as they were a thousand years ago.
Mansur Al-Hallaj was a Persian mystic, revolutionary writer and teacher of the Sufi order. His name continues to live on till this day owing to his widely disputed self-proclaimed divinity. As the play illustrates, Al-Hallaj was put to his death on a cross for such heresy. The heresy accusations were a pretext to allow those in power to dispose of him as they suspected him of planning a mass rebellion against their ruling regime.
The social injustices Al-Hallaj fought against are no different to the ones we face today: prevailing ignorance, widespread poverty, and religion-tainted politics that rarely rise up to its purist objectives.
Except for a few glitches, the Scream theater group was successful in perfecting Al-Saboor’s dialogue. Yet while Al-Saboor in his text’s epilogue described his work as one of the “poetic theater genre (not to be confused with musical theater), this implication wasn’t evident in the performance. Did this shortcoming arise from the performers’ reluctance to fully embrace the text, or was it inherent in the basic text itself? It’s difficult to say; however the play’s lack of poeticism didn’t take anything away from the commanding script nor the persuasive acting and dedicated direction.
Although the decor and costumes felt somewhat artificial while the sound design was not appropriately managed, the play’s imposing philosophical themes overshadowed such drawbacks.
In perhaps one of the best written dialogues in modern Arabic plays, Al-Hallaj discourses with his friend Al-Shebly, another prominent Sufi figure of the time, on weighty dilemmas such as how should man set out to battle corruption and man-made evil and how man, in a world created by God, should understand that natural evil is a fact of life, no different than natural disasters and birth defects.
Al-Saboor weaves these theoretical conundrums seamlessly with the historical events that led to Al-Hallaj’s trial and subsequent crucifixion. The intrinsic richness of the original text saved the new production from the occasional lapses to kitsch. Actors portrayed those philosophical discussions with more heartiness and boiling vigor than would be appropriate to these rather thoughtful moments, which at times robbed the dialogue of its philosophical abstractness and felt exaggerated.
Talking to Ahmed Samy, the play’s young director, it seemed that he himself was focused more on the message Al-Hallaj carried in his philosophy than with the philosophical quandaries that raged inside the philosopher’s head.
Al-Hallaj was against superficial religiosity and, as Samy put it, against “ignorance in religion, against the ritualistic side of religion people primarily focused on without establishing a meaningful connection with God. Samy recalled Al-Hallaj’s words in the play which compared these practices to a person kneeling in front of his/her own fear, not God.
Al-Hallaj’s exit strategy out of this trap and unto the greater light has been summarized by Al-Saboor in the following line: “Love is the secret of our salvage; Love and you win. Al-Hallaj goes on to speak of what was considered heresy and blasphemy back then and probably would be considered so now too. “Then you lose yourself in your beloved, and you become both the praying and the prayer, you become the religion, the Lord, and the mosque, he utters in the face of his judges.
It’s difficult to avoid the comparison between Al-Hallaj and Jesus. Both were crucified and both faced their death with an open heart. Both believed in the power of love and aspired, through their words, to reach the hearts of people. Yet while Jesus appealed to man’s goodness to criticize the religious institutions of his time, Al-Hallaj appealed to man’s established religion as a way to fight the corrupt politics of his time.
Al-Hallaj’s calculated blunders were acted out to assist people to reach some worldly justice and even the same spiritual heights he touched. Jesus, on the other hand, didn’t care to eradicate political evil; he simply pronounced that his kingdom was not of this world.
No doubt, “Al-Hallaj’s Tragedy poses serious questions in face of the current and (erringly similar) past social injustices carried out on the hand of corrupt politics. The play is also stimulating in the philosophical depths it touches, at times even forcing the audience to tackle difficult general questions that are not the least dead and buried. Its greatness however is in the way it connects these two poles naturally and realistically.
