A Christmas In Arabia

Once upon a time in the hot country of the east there was a tiny village. Its name has been forgotten through the ages between then and now, as the sands of the desert surrounding it have passed over the people who lived there. It passed over even the people who remembered them, with the curious indifference of desert to the human beings who choose to live on it. No one ever tames the desert. A house there is always that of a nomad, because the desert will always take back everything in the fullness of time, whether land, or shelter, or life.

But in this time of which I speak, there was a great war between the people of the east and the people of the north. Once, these peoples had each lived without knowledge of the other. Each was a warlike people, with philosophy and religion and sense of mission. Separately, each was a society and a world unto itself, tolerating no outsiders or opposition. In their years of growth and conquest, each had thought itself invincible. All might have been well if the earth had only contained an infinite breadth of land and infinite selection of conquerable peoples. But eventually, given the finite nature of the world, it was destined that these two powers should one day come into direct conflict. Separately, each had been an elemental force capable of overrunning any challenge. But in meeting, it was fire and ice, oil and water. They could never touch, the one empire on the other, without obliterating one side, or moving into uneasy truce, always touching and never mixing.

And so things had been for hundreds of years. It was an awkward way to live, always with the enemy in the midst with no defining borders drawn or a final battle ready to erupt. For two such warlike nations, it was a difficult and perhaps impossible situation. That it lasted so long paid tribute not to tolerance or any change in behaviour. Instead, it evinced a going-underground of tensions and violences. Instead of skirmishes with armed soldiers and plans and charges, there were little wars, little lines of advance, small victories, and covert defeats. The new war was fought between merchants, between farmers, between officials. If casualties seemed fewer, it was only because the killing was cleaner and often done in the name of law, or in the name of tradition. Gone was the immediacy of armed conflict, or the assurance that their God had favoured a force if the day went well—or had been conversely displeased if it did not. This new war was fought by people who remembered, by those who knew how it had been in the past, for the sake of history.

When history is played out again and again, even on minor scales between neighbours, old hatred never dies but finds reinforcement in each generation which cuts its teeth on the stories of its elders, and listens to the tales of long travail in the long nights of winter.

 Such a precarious balance of false peace needs very little to send it careening out of control. Thus it was that in a certain year, a great religious leader of the peoples of the north made a decree. It was a small thing in itself, but it struck deep. The peoples of the east would, in a certain place, no longer be able to carry openly the symbols of their religion. It was one decree, in one place, but it started a conflagration which had been smouldering just out of sight below the surface of the world.

 Peace was ruptured then, openly, and war began again in earnest.

 War was far from the tiny village on the edge of the eastern desert, far from its market, from its well, from its small houses. I don't mean to build a picture of idyllic rurality, a haven from cruelty. This village was no paradise. People lived and died within its borders, and between those times, they fought and reconciled, they had loves and refused love, they waited, they dreamed, they lost everything or gained a new chance. There was no one word that could represent all the variety of it, except perhaps to say it was life, or it was alive, or it was human.

 The children of this village were like children everywhere. They often argued, often disagreed, often made up in a day and played as if there had never been a break in their friendships. But like children, they were precious, with all their faults and because they represented in a concrete way all the hopes of their elders.