Qareen

Author: Monther Al-Qabbani

"Time has intertwined for me; my time and the time of the other Murad... my Qareen (companion/double) who became my enemy and deceived me more than once! I was like someone riding in a driverless horse-drawn carriage, taken to an unknown destination; but nothing lasts forever, and I realized after my embodiment what I hadn't realized then. Knowledge! Awareness! Power! Ability! Over the years, I have become what you see me as now; what you and others consider miracles are, to me, mere possibilities! I can turn coal into diamonds! Walk on water! Penetrate fortresses and walls! Know the algorithm of events through their branches of life paths! Impossible has become a word with no place in my dictionary! But... but despite all this, I still don't know how I manifested here, leaving my body there in the time from which I came? My Qareen deceived me when he made me sever ties with my old body. Most likely, he didn't expect me to manifest here, perhaps thinking I would vanish and he would remain; but I didn't vanish, I manifested without knowing how?! There is no way to know except by separating the soul from the body again so I can go to his world and see what happened to him and to me, for in knowledge lies salvation! And here, my friend, your role comes in... You are the only one capable of helping me now, you and your promise to me until I find a way to separate without needing sleep." Through this window, one can read "Qareen," the third and final part of Monther Al-Qabbani's (Knights and Priests) trilogy, representing his artistic presence within a creative achievement where he was the player par excellence. We say player because he was the one who began to select, modify, illuminate, and obscure the signs, masks, and images that point to the ambiguity the reader inevitably encounters in the text. However, after a careful reading, the reader soon realizes that this ambiguity is not from the author, but from the character – the narrator whom Al-Qabbani chose to keep an ambiguous identity – his hero "Murad Qutuz," whom we encountered in the first two parts of this trilogy. He deliberately kept him, here too, oscillating between manifestation and concealment, based on a fictional strategy that blends the real with the imagined and the dreamed; within a psychological concept based on the image of the Qareen who embodies within a specific textual structure that moves as the other physical, visible presence of Murad's inner self; to also be a heroic character who plays its role as a Qareen and moves in parallel with the other central human structure in the text, i.e., Murad Qutuz, as he appeared in confrontation with his other self, moving freely between places and times and by undertaking action and movement. Here, the narrator focuses more on monitoring the movement of this Qareen, who becomes the main and essential actor in tracking events, monitoring other characters, and upon whom falls the responsibility of narrating news and conveying information and facts to the recipient, and even involving him in the game of reading at times. The relationship with him implicitly represents the area of meaning production, which we will discover the more we delve into the reading... Therefore, "Qareen" is a story Monther Al-Qabbani intended not to conform to the known laws of narrative literature in general, and novels in particular. It is a novel of the (moment) that humans experience outside the boundaries of space-time, and he still repeats his favorite phrase, "Nothing will be that has not already been."