ESAD DURAKOVIĆ / AJLAN AL-KURDI, IN MEMORIAM

By Esad Duraković

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The symbolism of our world is horrifying. Syria – in the broader and historical sense of Sham – is a space in which humanity experienced its civilizational dawn: everything we consider civilizational, mostly originated here, in the full positive sense of dawn. Today, Sham is a symbol of civilizational extinction in all domains.

I feel unfortunate to be living in a time – and God has destined it so for me – in which I helplessly witness this cataclysmic destruction of all values precisely in Sham. In it, people are mercilessly killed with Mephistophelian passion and fury, material goods are destroyed, monuments of ancient and successful cultures as testaments to the rise of humankind; in Sham, humanity is being destroyed by the combined forces of East and West, Muslims and Christians, involved Jews, Shiites and Sunnis; in it, the meaning of every creation is being destroyed to culminate in the Mephistophelian meaning of destruction.

Today, an organized mass of some people, who are deadly serious and at the same time lethally powerful, are preparing Armageddon precisely on the soil of historical Sham, yearning for it as for their own salvation. In Sham, these years, the very idea of Ummah – as the fundamental idea of the Quran – is being thoroughly destroyed. Do you not see, O Muslims of every faction and all disorientations, that with your conflicts you serve incomprehensible and unrestrained satanic forces, because you are attacking the very heart of Islam – the sublime Quranic idea of Ummah as the highest institution of mutual solidarity and mercy?! How can you so brazenly ignore, or rather, enter into a dramatic conflict with the verse that states that Allah created us different so that we may know each other, not so that we may destroy each other?! Can you not grasp this even when looking at all the kinds of devastation you inflict, and by looking at the lifeless body-symbol of the boy Aylan?!

My dear Aylan,

Despite all the devastation that your and my poor "Muslims" so passionately inflict, they have done everything to tear you, as a child, away from your homeland. Because, what is a child, what is a human being at all, without a homeland in which we become aware of ourselves and our world, in which we gain the precious ability to look at the first joys of life with childlike innocence. And they have taken that away from you, dear Aylan, these satanically darkened minds who, truly satanically misled, believe that the Different must be destroyed by a falsified command from God himself.
I am fully aware of what they have taken from you, so in this address to you, I bring all my emotions, immensely ashamed that I belong to the human race to which you, superiorly, with contempt, turned your back at the moment of death that immortalized you.

You set off for a world that destroyed your homeland, your country, that devastated the emotional empire of your childhood, because – every child has an ineffable emotional empire; you were banished from it by those whose hearts were powerfully possessed by the devil himself, and so you – oh, what symbolism and message! – forever turned your back on this unfortunate world that wrongly believes it is fighting for Islam, and on a world devoid of humanity.

I do not see your face – and it would be so important for us to see it, our dear Aylan! – because for a reason it is turned away from the desolate land where all values are being destroyed – you turned it towards the open sea, towards the infinite, towards the boundless and unattainable freedom near which you arrived.

I do not see your face – and it would be so important for us to see it, our dear Aylan! – but I feel, I even know that your mouth is full of wet sand from the seashore, instead of the floral pollen of your homeland. And instead of your childlike squeals and a face radiant with childlike joy, only the mournful sound of the eternal sea is heard, and the cries of astonished seagulls are heard.

Our dear Aylan!
 
Neither Notre-Dame, nor anything else that is a value, is as sublime as your death is a sublime edifice.

With your death, you ceased to be the person Aylan and became a myth of our unfortunate world.

I refer to the Quran in whose name these warriors there devastate, and I say: With your death, dear Aylan, these villains have killed all of humanity!

I would greatly like to see you in the Hereafter, but I do not know how I would, even then, look into your childlike face that you turned away from all of us here towards the infinite and the water – as a life in peace and as freedom.

After all, even if we are both in the better part of the Hereafter, it is unlikely we will meet, although I would like to, because due to your fate, Aylan, the most beautiful gardens there belong to you and not to us...