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it hollow and self-loving? I don’t even know if the Grandee is sincere. Does he know? Perhaps not even he. I am weak and he’s strong, the offer gives him many ways of ruining me. But I, too, have much to gain. The souls of the city, of the world, surely they are worth three angels? Is Allah so unbending that he will not embrace three more to save the human race? -- I don’t know anything.—Should God be proud or humble, majestic or simple, yielding or un-? What kind of idea is he? What kind am I?

Halfway into sleep, or halfway back to wakefulness, Gibreel Farishta is often filled with resentment by the non—appearance, in his persecuting visions, of the One who is supposed to have the answers, He never turns up, the one who kept away when I was dying, when I needed needed him. The one it’s all about, Allah lshvar God. Absent as ever while we writhe and suffer in his name.

The Supreme Being keeps away; what keeps returning is this scene, the entranced Prophet, the extrusion, the cord of light, and then Gibreel in his dual role is both above-looking-down and below-staring-up. And both of them scared out of their minds by the transcendence of it. Gibreel feels paralysed by the presence of the Prophet, by his greatness, thinks I can’t make a sound I’d seem such a goddamn fool. Hamza’s advice: never show your fear: archangels need such advice as well as water-carriers. An archangel must look composed, what would the Prophet think if God’s Exalted began to gibber with stage fright?

It happens: revelation. Like this: Mahound, still in his notsicep, becomes rigid, veins bulge in his neck, he clutches at his centre. No, no, nothing like an epileptic fit, it can’t be explained away that easily; what epileptic fit ever caused day to turn to night, caused clouds to mass overhead, caused the air to thicken into soup while an angel hung, scared silly, in the sky above the sufferer, held up like a kite on a golden thread? The dragging again the dragging and now the miracle starts in his my our guts, he is straining with all his might at something, forcing something, and Gibreel begins to feel that strength that force, here it is at my own jaw working it, opening shutting; and the power, starting within Mahound, reaching up to my vocal cords and the voice comes.

Not my voice I’d never know such words I’m no classy speaker never was never will be but this isn’t my voice it’s a Voice.

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