Haqiqat

Haqiqat begins with a mirror. Usually a mirror confirms my presence: I approach it to see myself. Here the opposite happens - “I looked in the mirror, I was not there; only Your reflection remained.” For me this is one of the strongest images of the album, because it continues everything that came before, but does so without gentleness. In Sukunat words died. In Haqiqat the familiar face disappears.

The word Haq in the Islamic language is multilayered. It means truth, reality, right; al-Haqq is one of the Divine names, “the True,” “the Real.” The Quran says: “this is because God is al-Haqq.” So in my text “Truth” never remains simply a correct opinion. It is personally addressed. It is not a set of right formulations that can be mastered, but a Reality before which my own construction of myself begins to become transparent.

I call Truth an “open secret.” This phrase is especially dear to me. A secret is usually hidden, and what is open is accessible. But a spiritual secret can be before one’s eyes and remain unread. Not because someone deliberately hides it, but because seeing and recognizing are not the same. In this sense kashf, “unveiling,” does not necessarily bring new information. Sometimes what is lifted is not the veil from a thing, but the veil from my way of seeing.

The image of the mirror has an enormous history in Sufi poetry. In Rumi the heart becomes a mirror that love cleans of rust; the Quran in 83:14 speaks of “rust” on hearts as a trace of deeds. This line is close to me, but in Haqiqat the mirror is stricter still. Here I am not simply polishing the surface to see myself better. My reflection ceases to be the main content of the mirror.

“The faces fell away, there are no masks” is for me not only a psychological phrase about social roles. A mask can be spiritual too. One can grow used to the image of a person who “understands,” “feels more deeply,” “walks the path.” Such masks are especially dangerous because they look noble. Haqiqat takes these away too. Truth is not interested in how beautiful I look next to it.

Here it is impossible not to recall Hallaj and his famous ana al-Haqq - “I am the Truth.” I deliberately do not draw a direct identity between my song and his experience. But the very history of this paradoxical utterance reminds me how dangerous and ambiguous the language of ultimate closeness can be. Annemarie Schimmel in Iranica stresses that it was not necessarily a simple statement that “a human being is God”; in Sufi interpretations the phrase was linked with the radical self-disappearance of the speaker. This is an important caveat for my text too: when “I am not there,” this is not an exaltation of my “I” but, on the contrary, its deconstruction.

“The words burned and turned to ash; only silence remained” brings back Sukunat, but now after the fire. Before, words simply died; here they burn. For me this difference is tangible. The silence of Sukunat was peace; the silence of Haqiqat is a trace of purification. In it one can no longer hide behind one’s own story.

And yet the ending is not hopeless: “this is the end and this is the beginning.” I would very much not want Haqiqat to sound like the destruction of a person. For me true unmasking must set something free. The end of the mask is the beginning of the face. The end of the need to possess Truth is the beginning of the possibility of living before it. That is why with the next track I return to people. Truth must withstand not only the mirror and the silence, but also the street.

It is precisely here that the difference between Truth and my certainty about truth is especially important to me. Certainty easily becomes rigid: it wants to speak louder, to divide people, to prove its right. Haqiqat moves in the opposite direction. The closer Truth is, the less remains of the one who could boast of it. This is a very important inner criterion for my reading of the song: if the experience of “truth” only makes the ego larger, then the mirror has probably not yet become transparent.

It also matters to me that the word al-Haqq joins together what in English has to be separated by the words “truth,” “reality,” “authenticity.” So Haqiqat is for me not a dispute about the correct formulation. It is a question: what remains real when invented roles fall away? In the song I do not answer it with a long definition. I leave “naked light,” silence and the paradox “is not, and is.” It seems honest to me that at the ultimate point language becomes shorter, not more confident.

And perhaps that is why this track should not be comfortable. I can love the images of light and the heart, but Truth does not have to be only beautiful. Sometimes it deprives me of my favorite explanation of myself. Sometimes it shows that what I took for spirituality was fear; what I took for principle, pride; what I took for humility, a way of changing nothing. For me Haqiqat remains exactly such a point: not an accusation, but the impossibility of living any longer behind the former mask.