[The 80-year-old — tall, with broad shoulders and a long white beard — receives all of them the same, minister or beggar. He insists on walking each visitor to the door when they leave, despite their insistence that the ustad — “master” in Persian, as he is often called — not embarrass them by paying them such an honor.]
By Mujib Mashal
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Haidari
Wujodi’s library desk is a place of pilgrimage for musicians, poets and
students,
among others.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times
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KABUL,
Afghanistan — For more than
50 years now, a mystic poet has kept a quiet window desk at the Kabul Public
Library. His seat overlooks the hustle and bustle of the Afghan capital city,
all but unrecognizable from the day he arrived as a young library clerk — one
with a dreamy mind and stammering speech, but fine calligraphic handwriting
that helped land him his day job.
As governments toppled around him,
Afghanistan sank deeper into flames of war that still burn. But Haidari Wujodi,
80, maintained his daily routine, switching his shoes for comfortable sandals
that he wears with socks as he arrives at his desk behind stacks of fraying
periodicals. His flask of tea fills and empties.
Until his official retirement a few years
ago, Mr. Wujodi was in charge of the periodicals section. But his life is so
intertwined with the third floor corner of the library that the Afghan government
continues to pay him a small stipend and Mr. Wujodi continues to show up every
day, often the last to leave as the sound of evening prayer echoes in the dusk.
He no longer shelves magazines and
newspapers; his assistants take care of that. Over the years, his desk has
become an address for all kinds of visitors — musicians who need lyrics for a
new composition, young poets who bring their latest publication for encouragement
and feedback, university students who need references for a paper or a
dissertation, and street vendors who just want some wise words to get them
through troubled times.
The 80-year-old — tall, with broad shoulders
and a long white beard — receives all of them the same, minister or beggar. He
insists on walking each visitor to the door when they leave, despite their
insistence that the ustad — “master” in Persian, as he is often called — not
embarrass them by paying them such an honor.
“There’s a saying of the Prophet,” Mr. Wujodi
told a young poet one recent morning as he was leaving, having dropped off
several collections of his recently published work. “If your friends are
visiting you, try to go out seven steps to receive them. And when they are
leaving, go out with them at least seven steps.”
Mondays and Wednesdays have been special in
Mr. Wujodi’s routine. Twice a week for 30 years now, he has hosted a two-hour
reading of the works of the Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi — the 13th-century
Persian poet, philosopher and Sufi mystic known in the West as Rumi. The
lessons typically end up being less about poetry and more about spirituality
and philosophy. He calls Rumi’s body of work “a factory of human making.”
About 15 men and women, members of a group
called “The Society of Lovers of Mawlana,” arrive and quietly take their seats.
Mr. Wujodi looks out of the window as the room fills with the warm afternoon
sun and a peaceful silence. One of the members, a middle-aged man with a narrow
beard and a beautiful melodic voice, sings several verses as the rest follow
along in their copies of the book. Then, in a soft but shaky voice, his head
trembling, Mr. Wujodi begins explaining the verses.
On a recent Monday, lesson 405, on page 333
of one of Mawlana’s collections, focused on a conversation between a mystic and
an interlocutor, with the mystic trying to explain to the man that the beauties
in the outside world are simply reflections of what is inside.
The
fruits and the gardens are inside the heart
What’s
in this mud and water is the reflection of their grace.
Mr. Wujodi, spending an hour on these two
lines, spoke of the heart as the physical “plasma on the left side of the chest,”
and of the divine and spiritual capacity that he said could not be exactly
defined. The way of reaching the divine is by focusing inward, he said.
“The heart is like a mirror,” Mr. Wujodi
said. “If it is cleansed of the dust and fog, whichever way or object you aim
it at the reflection of it would be reflected in the mirror.”
Haidari Wujodi was born in 1939, in a small
village in Panjshir Province in northern Afghanistan, one of five children of a
cleric. In those days the Islam practiced in Afghanistan was deeply tied into
Sufi traditions of poetry. His father kept about 200 books at home, many of
poetry and handwritten. It was there that the young Haidari learned to read.
Mr. Wujodi has only a sixth-grade formal
education. When he was completing his fifth-grade exams, he had a dream one
night that he says sent him “tumbling between sanity and insanity.” Mr. Wujodi
says he is unable to describe the state, but for several years he could not
regain his balance. When he did, he was transformed.
At 15, Mr. Wujodi moved to Kabul, and found
his way to the bookbinding shop of one of the most renowned mystic poets of the
time, Sufi Ashqari. While he was just a teenager and Mr. Ashqari in his 60s,
their relationship shaped his life. The teenager was admitted to the small
group of poets who gathered at Mr. Ashqari’s shop in old Kabul, exchanging
verses as Mr. Ashqari continued to bind books.
Years later, when Mr. Ashqari was 90 and on
his deathbed, he entrusted his unfinished work — the last chapters barely
legible, because his hand had started trembling — to Mr. Wujodi, who spent
eight months working after hours at the public library to prepare it for
publication.
As his own poetry drew attention, Mr. Wujodi
made sure he stuck to his quiet corner at the library — a dream job that
allowed him space for his poetic endeavors and an income to support his wife, a
son who is now an artist and two daughters who are both teachers.
He repeatedly rejected offers of higher
positions. In the early 1990s, when the Islamic government that followed the
Soviet withdrawal insisted that Mr. Haidari lead an educational foundation, he
agreed to a compromise: He would continue his day job at the library, and for
one hour at the end of every day he would go to the foundation’s office.
Mr. Wujodi still does not own his own home,
living in a house owned by his wife’s family. One time, in the waning days of
the monarchy, he refused even to meet with a member of the royal family who
wanted to set him up with his own place.
“I apologized,” Mr. Wujodi recalled. “I said
‘I know, my decision is beyond logic.’”
Every morning on his way to work, Mr. Wujodi
would circle the park at the heart of the city. At 80 he is still fit — “these
mystics eat very little,” one member of the society said — climbing the three
stories to his desk without holding the railing. But in recent years, age has
cut his walk in the park in half.
Most days, Mr. Wujodi’s desk feels like an
oasis at the center of chaos. One Monday last November, a suicide bomber killed
a traffic cop at the roundabout just outside. From a library window, the scene
was framed in a picture that went viral. The officer’s body, separated from his
white cap, was sprawled under a billboard that read: “The nation that doesn’t
read books will have to experience the whole of history.”
The shrapnel from the explosion flew through
Mr. Wujodi’s window, where he had just finished his afternoon prayer. Had he
still been standing, he might have been killed.
“What is happening in our world — is this
really humane?” Mr. Wujodi asked during a recent lesson, lamenting how far the
world stands from the humanist teachings of mystics like Rumi. “We don’t need
philosophy for this — even a kid knows that we haven’t reached that common
sense worthy of humanity.”
“The world is still blacked out on the wine
of the grape — all this human killing, all this destruction, this ruin” he
added. “What is worthy of the dignity of a human, we haven’t reached that yet.”
