Al-Nasser Khameer .. Cinema of wandering, mysticism, and the journey to God

Abd al-Salam, the newly appointed teacher arrives at the wreckage of a village, rubble and destruction, stray spirits wandering in the desert, struck by curse and ravaged by them, after they were green orchards and running rivers, whose adults spend their days searching among the orchards buried under the sand for a treasure stored between them. So they leave for the desert, and wander in its paths, and so is what they all do.

The truth is that village life is indeed linked to treasure, for they are descended from the Moriscos who were expelled from Andalusia and settled in Ifriqiya, and among them was the grandfather of these wanderers, the calligrapher who was given by one of the defenders of the fortresses of Cordoba the deeds of its possession and the keys to its palaces, its role and its shops, and God swore to return one day to the city , He or his children, grandchildren, or one of his descendants.

Luck did not help the calligrapher to return, so he buried the box at the root of a fig tree, and determination did not help his children, and memory did not help his descendants, then pessimism struck them and the curse of wandering befell them, and he sees one of them in his bright sleep at night, and in the morning he leaves and joins the caravan of wandering in the desert, and in Every year – when the visiting season arrives – the people of the village are absent, and during these days the wandering men return, and no one but this stranger can approach them.

In order to save those stray souls, their sheikh, the teacher Abd al-Salam, hands over an old book that is sufficient to read to expel the curse, and Hussain teaches the rebellious child against reality of the secret of the curse and decides to leave for Cordoba, and in the meantime the teacher falls in love with the mayor’s daughter and is fascinated by her sweet voice, her attractive features and her charming looks, and it is astonishing Juveniles he finds her image in that magic book.

With the end of his mission and the help of the lost, this savior teacher disappears, and the narrator’s voice informs us that an old woman comes three days after opening the book to take him, and he breaks the sand with him until he reaches the gardens of his beloved, which only the loving ones enter.

A ruinous role where naughty spirits reside

The “lost dove’s collar” … the curse of the princess of Samarkand, wailing in the desert

Lovers roam the corridors of the city of Cordoba, and Hassan the student – who lives in the custody of his calligrapher teacher – finds a tear from a book at the beginning of which reads “Love, may God bless you, the beginning of it is joking and the end of it is very.” And in it he narrates the news of the princess of Samarkand. Then the film turns into a journey in search of a copy of this book, the meaning of love and its names, so the perfume seller introduces him to the great prayer of the universe, and another compares it to the disease that we suddenly get without knowing.

Before the master calligrapher travels to Mecca carrying a copy of the Qur’an that he wrote himself, permitting a good and giving him his sweetness, then he must face his destiny himself, but the vision becomes overwhelming, and he sees the knight as a dear riding his miraculous horse or hears the echo of the mourning of the princess of Samarkand.

And when he tries to catch up with his teacher to escape from this troubled world, the path to it is lost, and it falls into deserts from which the princess’s mourning ends, who withers the orchards or looks at a scene of her. A red pomegranate, so the scene appears identical to the description in the rip in his hands.

Someone gives it a book, and it is the “dove ring” that contains the origin of that rip, and reads: “Love, may God bless you, the beginning of it was joking and the end of it very much. One night a vision came to me, two elderly maidens in the middle of an empty basin spraying drops of water so that it might drain and on the edge of the basin the princess of Samarkand stared with her wide eyes at a red pomegranate Her sad singing took me out of my sleep, and I woke up. “

As for his writer, he is a lover prince who was killed by his love for the princess of Samarkand who visited him in his dream. Is the writer prince the son of Hazm himself? This question does not matter much, because the story has its own logic that turns dear to the girl drawn in the book’s miniature, that is, the wailing princess of Samarkand, and as soon as Hassan discovers the truth of his beloved, the vulnerable and impoverished attacks on Cordoba, and they burn the country and turn the dream into a nightmare, so the beloved disappears, the book is destroyed, the castle is destroyed, and it is resolved. The ruin in Riyadh, in which Hassan used to frolic among the roses and the pools of water, and the curse descended upon the city.

Baba Aziz led by his granddaughter, his stick and his reassuring heart

“Baba Aziz” … a final journey led by Ishtar, the stick and the seeing heart

It came at the beginning of the film: “Roads to God according to the number of creatures’s souls.” Indeed, the story of “Baba Aziz” works to embody this hadith that the Sufis attribute to the Messenger. He who sees through him what the sighted do not see, so the reassuring one who follows his heart is never lost.

And because the journey is long and arduous, he resists Baba Aziz, who has turned away from the road by storytelling. He tells his granddaughter Ishtar the story of the prince who ends at a stream of water and contemplates his image in it, and finds in it the divine glory that astonishes him about others, and unlike the Greek myth that causes Narcissa to perish from his excessive love for his image, our prince Out of the intensity of his temptation with this splendor, he becomes transparent and unseen by the beholder, then he strikes on the ground in search of this splendor, so he takes the path to God.

On his way, Baba Aziz encounters travelers like him, people, Jana, Persians and Arabs coming from all corners of the world, each of whom has his own story and his own path to God. One of these is Osman, the calligrapher and his student Hasan were supplied with ink, and he was searching for his palace in the well of the well, so that whenever he sank into the well of the well, secret worlds opened for him among vast cities.

Among them is Zaid, the searcher for Nour, the seductress who runs the boards of fresh poetry, and when he feels that he has finished his career, he asks Ishtar to continue her journey with Moroccan Zaid, towards the season, then he lies ready to receive death, and someone finds him who walks the way to God, so he buries him, wears his clothes, takes his stick and strikes in The earth as he did, and the dervishes walked on that stick.Baba Aziz’s journey ends at his grave as Ishtar and Zaid continue their journey toward spiritual peace

The language of metaphor .. the features of mystical mysteries in cinema

The events take place in the course of the Sufi symbol, and what is seen in these films are signs that are based on sign and suggestion. For the Sufis, the experience of faith is difficult to encompass and describe, so it is only presented through metaphor and metaphor. Our paper works to decipher its most important codes, which are women, nature, journey, and calligraphy.

In these films, we refer to many women, and we refer to Hassan, the lover, among them the daughter of the mayor in “The Wandering in the Desert” and “Baba Aziz,” the princess of Samarkand in “The Lost Pigeon Ring”, and Noor in “Baba Aziz”, and many others, despite their multiplicity and differences, They carry the same features, the same clothes and the same adornment, and they face the same fate, so the lover becomes attached to the woman, then another appears that he does not expect, so love is absolute, and it is not strange, because beauty for the Sufis is a requirement for love. And love is multiple in its manifestations, one in its essence, indicating the beloved who is the beautiful God who loves beauty, to the words of Ibn Arabi.

For them, this act is intended for the sake of God, so it is not greed for his reward and his innocence or fear of his punishment and his fire, and since the journey was arduous, the trainee lover needed a knowledgeable old man to follow his tracks. Likewise, Abd al-Salam was in “Wandering in the Desert,” so the sheikh helped him with the book that takes whoever opens it to Jinan the two lovers, as well as the affair of Hassan, who strayed from the path of his sheikh, the calligrapher, or the affair of Zaid, who followed the traces of “Baba Aziz” until he caught his lover, Nour.Adored in the three films … similarity, features, and unity in essence and symbol

“And within you has the greater world folded.”

Sufis also have that the body and nature are estranged in this world, Adam was expelled from Heaven after he committed sin, and the earth was made an alternative world for this sinful being, and both of them go back to the same origin which is God, the origin of all appearances of existence.

In this context, the verse attributed to Imam Ali is understood:

You claim that you are a small offense and in you has
the larger world

Nature is linked in the mind of the Sufi with another symbol, which is the journey and movement in the universe and the changes that accompany it, conditions, events, facts and rifts.

In the films of Nasser Khamir, the journey is linked to the desert, so it takes on the meaning of wandering, desertification and thirst.

In “The Lost Ring of the Pigeon”, the lover lives in Cordoba the euphoria of love and overwhelming happiness, and when he leaves it, a disaster occurs, the rebels attack, and the dream turns into a nightmare that destroys the world around him, and nothing remains but the voice of the princess of Samarkand mourns, and good misery lives because of this expulsion from heaven, and the meaning The desert in “Baba Aziz” takes the meaning of breadth, extension, openness, vision and widening of the horizon, and the journey in it is in search of the perfection that is God, as in Sufi usage in general.

The link between the apparent world and the subconscious world … the indications of the Sufi letters

The three films of Al-Nasser Khameer celebrate a special celebration of calligraphers and calligraphers. The grandfather of those wandering in the desert is a calligrapher, and their sheikh guides the people on the path of salvation by uncovering the manuscript’s mysteries. “He lives by selling writing materials to the calligrapher and his student Hassan.

In “The Missing Ring of the Dove,” the calligrapher teacher says to his student Hassan: “The line is the rhythm of the Absolute, the connection between the visible world and the inner world. And he says, “Waw Ya Hassan is the only letter that contains its meaning, unique and multiple in the image of the photographer, a traveler character.”

The Nazar Khamir wants the filmmaker to be a witness, in turn, of this divine splendor, so he makes Arabic calligraphy an affair in establishing the aesthetics of the three films, and let us give an example with the letter waw, which for the Sufis symbolizes perfection, combining the contradictions between night and day, East and West, and women and men.

This letter represents the embodiment of the movement form in the movie “The Desired Pigeon Ring”, making it in the form of a circle when the characters roam the streets of Cordoba again at the start, and as soon as Hassan exits that circle and his movement takes the form of a tide, the circle breaks down and the city loses its stability and splendor and engulfs it, and the result of the two movements is the formation of a letter Waw. This is how Al-Nasir Khamir guarantees it the meaning of travel, wandering and alienation that a person has been suffering since he was pushed from Paradise. The letter for the Sufis is the knowledge by which the notables of words appear and relates to the divine word “Be”, which is a symbol of the divine will.Waw is the only letter that contains a unique and multiple meaning on a photographer’s photo

Melting time and space … the journey of the swimming filmmaker in his soul

In the films of Nasser Khameer, the time appears to be circular and indeterminate, so we do not know the beginning of the end, nor the place of the day of the month or year, and some events may take place in southern Tunisia, Cordoba or Iran, but space quickly loses its usual geographical dimensions, so Morocco seeks the East. And on the adimah, people meet the jinn. In general, we are between two spaces:

– An absolute, extended space called the link between lovers and overwhelming happiness, but it is a lost paradise and lost bliss, a dream that has passed and passed away, or it is a dream desired by characters who strike in their path the wandering desert, and they perceive it through mystical radiance after striving and remembrance, and see it with insight, not with sight.

– The space of the present, which is associated with drought, ruin, dust and thirst, as its characters suffer after being defeated from their happy, paradise past, so misery and abandonment of loved ones met for them, as they plunge into their inner souls, and their actions reveal their emotional and psychological dimension more than they express adventures in the outside world.

Perhaps this tendency is what made some critics describe the champion Khmer as a cinematographer swimming in his soul, and immersed in his obsessions, who lives his nostalgia for his lost paradise, and his nostalgia for his ancestors’ lost past in Córdoba, in order to present the issues of the present, but this criticism is not without arbitrariness, in this cinema a position From the modernity that embraced the material as a doctrine, destroying the human self and going with its reassurance, but it remains a virgin cinema that has not yet been invaded by serious criticism of its immunity.