Master ordered Rabia to leave California tonight. She is to return to Egypt at once.
During the flight, she closes her eyes. She does not sleep. She prays, chants, and dreams of the
Rose Garden of the Beloved.
For over a year now, Rabia has devoted every prayer to
Egypt.
Whenever she dances, she dedicates every motion of her
body—every rotation of her hips, every roll or ripple of her flesh, every bat
of every eyelash, every quiver of every muscle down to her deep, inner
musculature; she dedicates it all to the divine strength of humanity.
Rabia has faith.
She has faith in human potential, collective human consciousness, and
the inner workings of the silence within the Mind of Mankind.
For the past ten years, Rabia has lived alone in a villa on Cabrillo
Beach. She ate rice and lentils
and contemplated her faith. She
belongs to a secret order of devotees to the Mysteries of the Sacred Dance. Her story is one of cultural fusion and
great daring.
Rabia was born in Palestine in 1964. Her father was a cleric; her mother
made delicious taboon bread. The
family fled to Egypt before the Six-days War. Rabia was three-years-old when her mother died. Rabia's father sent her to an all-girls boarding school in Cairo. Every week her father would take her on excursions, usually
to visit their favorite orchard near the pyramids. When Rabia was twelve-years-old, her father died and she was
sent to live with an Aunt Rima who had immigrated to the United States years
before. Rabia lived in Southern California
with her father’s sister throughout her adolescence. In the U.S. Rabia discovered she had talent as a dancer. She studied all kinds of dance: ballet,
tap, Classical Indian, Belly, Salsa, Ardha Arab tribal war dance, Snake Dance,
Disco Dance, the Charleston. You
name it. Rabia could dance it.
During this time, her doumbec-player boyfriend at the time (his name was Ibrahim) inspired Rabia to get a tattoo
on her back—a phoenix with red and gold plumage; its wings stretched between
Rabia’s shoulders.
When she was ready to go to college, she yearned to leave
The States. She went to study in
London. There she enrolled in a course
about Religions and History, and her studies transformed her. She sent word to Aunt Rima that she was
leaving school to travel to holy places all around the world. Eventually, she felt drawn to the Sufi Fakirs
of Bengal and took up the road with these ascetics for three years.
When she felt restless, Rabia left the Fakirs to roam other parts of the Earth. On her own, Rabia visited as many sacred
shrines throughout the world as she could. During her sojourn, Rabia bathed in the Ganges, kissed the
Black Stone, meditated before the Buddha at Wat Phnom, burned candles at the
feet of Guadalupe, celebrated Spring at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, squatted
before Sheela Na Gig at the Round Tower, laughed with monks in the temples at the
top of the Mountain of Eternal Clouds and Mist, climbed the terraced gardens in
Haifa to the Shrine of the Báb, and whirled before the shrine of Jalal-ud-Din
Rumi.
She made her living dancing on the streets, in taverns and
community halls. Crowds of men,
women, and children loved her and threw coins to her. She sewed the coins to her belt. They cheered her on because Rabia's dancing transmitted a feeling of well-being to those who watched her.
Rabia had disciplined her flesh, her bones, her breath, and her blood until she had become an embodiment of
holiness. Her human body—with all
its potential—knows its place, its size, and its purpose in the cosmos. Rabia, like Mother Earth, obeys laws of
gravity, rhythm, motion, and silence.
Master and Rabia met during these sojourn years. That day, Rabia was not dancing. She was completely covered and
performing the Hajj. Master and Rabia merely made eye contact, but that eye contact was all they needed. The two knew each other in other lifetimes; in that eye contact, they exchanged a silent, ancient promise. But years would pass, and
Rabia would need to return to California to care for her dying aunt, before she
would ever meet up again with Master.
Master is a black pilgrim, a survivor of genocide, a witchy
wealth doctor, a scholar of the ancient religion of love, and the only human
being Rabia knows of who has kissed every holy shrine on this planet. Still, there is something about Cairo,
or—to be more precise—the desert outside of Cairo, where the sky boasts a
clear human view of celestial bodies in action. Of all the places in the world, Master chose the Mother of
the World for their honeymoon night.
While on her flight to Cairo, Rabia concentrates. She imagines the leaders in Cairo and
all over the world working hard to see to it that every person shall have
bread, individual freedom, and social justice.
Rabia knows that today’s Cairo is soiled by the politics of
power, but she doesn’t believe in modern politics. She believes in people. She believes in the seasonal rise and fall of the Nile. She believes in fellaheen farmers and
their local saints. Nor is she too
concerned about Cairo’s current transition of power, whatever happens there, the
coral reefs will continue forming in the Red Sea.
What concerns Rabia and Master most is what is taking place
in the sky. The sun is
entering Gemini. Election eve, there will be an annular solar eclipse with a magnitude of .94. The moon will obscure 85 percent of the sun's surface.
Master orders Rabia to meet him at a private, desert observatory
where they will survey the sky.
While elections take place in Egypt, Master and Rabia sit and watch the
sky. Master plays the drum. Rabia dances. The stars burn through motion. The Earth moves around the sun in its perfect devotion. When Master rests, Rabia rests. There is silence in the desert. There is silence in the cosmos. There is silence at the center of
collective human consciousness.
At around 5:30 pm, the Moon crosses the Sun's path and creates a ring of fire in the sky for viewers on Earth. Master and Rabia witness the beauty of the alignment of Sun, Moon, and Earth. When it is over, they ignite the funeral pyre.
Finally, Rabia receives kisses--for the first and last time--from Master's lips, lips that have kissed a million shrines. Their lovemaking, sacred and playful, fuels the blaze.
In a tight embrace, the lovers throw themselves into the fire. The fire consumes the lovers and dies out.
There is dust and silence.
Some time later, a dust storm.
One beautiful bird rises from the ashes.
Phoenix spreads great wings to cruise
the night sky above the Red Sea.
All along, coral reefs continue forming within the silence in the
sea. Reefs formed by Earth's plate tectonics. The lithosphere moves; the African and Arabian continents slowly rift apart.
