El-Wakil’s Manuscript

I have flâneured the lonely, serpentine streets of Tunis eight-odd times, and yet I recall them not. The Medina is like a dream I cannot fully awaken from—a labyrinth that folds back on itself, with every corner both familiar and elusive. There is something in its narrow, cobbled alleyways, its horseshoe-arched entrances, its minarets, that seems to defy time, as though the city itself were suspended between what was and what might be. It was in this place that the useless dusk brought El-Wakil.

On the twelfth day of Jumada al-Awwal, as the low sun cast its soft amber light over the blue, lime-washed doors and worn cobblestones, he stood at the edge of a small courtyard, his lean back to an arch whose soffit appeared adorned with decaying arabesques. The contrast of his presence with the crumbling walls was unsettling—he seemed both too foreign and too familiar, as though he belonged neither to the city nor to the world I knew. His clothes, a blend of intricately-ornamented Tunisian garb and something unplaceably other, shifted in the light like the shadows themselves.

El-Wakil, a man whose name seemed to hover just beyond grasp like an idea half-formed, and yet it held a quiet certainty. His name, which means “the Agent” in Arabic, was, as I later understood, both his role and his essence. He was the bridge, the intermediary, the one who exists on the liminality of the world of beings and that of non-being.

"Do you seek what was lost?" he queried, his voice soft and thick with the weight of something ancient.

I did not know what he meant. How could I? But something in the question resonated deep within me, like an echo I had heard many times before, only now it reached me clearly. I nodded without fully understanding why.

He led me through the winding streets, past souks, gates, and mosques, whose contours seemed to shift and blur in the setting sun. We arrived at a small courtyard where the air seemed heavier, as though the very space held memories too old for words. There, El-Wakil began to speak of a manuscript, one that had been written centuries ago, but was now lost—destroyed, he whispered, in a fire. The words he spoke were strange, yet they stirred something deep within me, like a secret I had always known.

The manuscript, he conjectured, was not an ordinary tome. It was a text that bridged many worlds—philosophical, linguistic, spiritual. It contained a synthesis of ideas, the kind of synthesis that transcends human borders. There was, El-Wakil explained, an amalgamation of the thought of Martin Heidegger, John Mbiti, and an ancient, forgotten language that, it’s believed, had once been spoken by the gods themselves.

"It was a manuscript of Being," El-Wakil conjectured, the phrase hanging in the air between us. "Not Being as we understand it, but as it is experienced in its purest form—an unfolding of presence and absence, a manifestation of truth itself."

He spoke of “Aletheia", Heidegger’s term for the revealing of truth. But, unlike Heidegger’s philosophy, which views this revealing as something hidden, something to be uncovered, El-Wakil’s interpretation suggested that “Aletheia" was not merely about revealing what was hidden. It was, instead, about an ongoing and dynamic unfolding—a becoming that is inseparable from the world itself. For Heidegger, to be was to be aware of one’s own being in relation to the world; for El-Wakil, being was never separate from the world. It was a continuous dance of presence, in which all things share in the revelation of their essence.

But the manuscript, if memory serves me well, was not just about “Being”. El-Wakil also spoke of John Mbiti’s notion of “Ubuntu", the idea that "I am because we are." This concept, so central to Mbiti’s philosophy, suggests that one’s existence cannot be understood apart from others; it suggests that we are who we are through our relationships with others, both human and non-human. El-Wakil noted that in the manuscript, “Ubuntu” was not merely an ethical principle; it was an ontological reality. The manuscript’s language, its very structure, reflected this interconnectedness—the way in which each being, as Mbiti conjectured, exists not in isolation, but as part of a greater whole, where all things are simultaneously individual and collective.

There, in that quiet, moon-lit courtyard, El-Wakil explained that the manuscript was not written in any earthly tongue but in a language that transcended all human limitations. Although it was written in a form that could be called "Volapük," it was not the constructed language of Johann Martin Schleyer, but a far older, more elemental language—a language that embodied both being and becoming, a language that could be "seen" in the same way that one might sense the unfolding of a flower or the movement of the stars.

The following part, I remember only fragmentally. This language, El-Wakil conjectured, was more than a tool for communication; it was a direct expression of the divine. It was a language not only of humans, but of angels and divinities—beings whose understanding of the world is not bound by temporal limitations.

The script itself, he noted, was a series of symbols, each one representing a whole number, but not in the way we understand numbers. These symbols were not mere signs of quantity; they were keys to understanding the very structure of existence, a numeration system that reflected the infinite and interconnected nature of all things.

"There is no end to the sequence," El-Wakil said, his voice soft with wonder. "Each symbol leads to another, infinitely. And each symbol reveals a different facet of Being, a different layer of existence. The symbols, he conjectured, are not for us to “understand” in the way we think of understanding. They are for us to “feel”—to experience in the same way we experience the world itself, as a web of interrelated moments and beings, stretching out infinitely in all directions."

The fire that destroyed the manuscript, he later noted, was not a loss, but a transformation. Perhaps it was never meant to be understood by mortals, he suggested, only to be a symbol of the constant unfolding of truth. What had been written, he explained, and what had been lost, was not truly gone. It had simply returned to the great web of “Being", where all things—written and unwritten, seen and unseen—are part of the same eternal flow.

I could not help but feel both awe and sorrow at his words. The manuscript, I assumed, had contained a knowledge too vast for any single mind to grasp. But that knowledge , as I gradually convinced myself, was not lost, nor was it meant to be understood in the way we seek to understand things. It was a knowledge to be “lived”, a truth to be “experienced" in the world, through the way we relate to each other and to the world around us.

Days passed, and I searched the Medina for traces of the manuscript, but I found nothing. The manuscript had become like the air—the more I sought it, the less it seemed to exist in any fixed form. And yet, I could not shake the sense that it was with me still, woven into the very fabric of the city, into the relationships I formed, into the moments of silence and presence that punctuated my days.

Perhaps, as El-Wakil suggested, the manuscript was never meant to be understood in the way we understand books or theories; it was something that existed in the folds of reality itself, in the spaces between the things we see and the things we feel. Perhaps it was a reminder that the world is not simply a collection of objects or events, but a dynamic, interwoven whole, where “Being" and “Ubuntu” are not separate, but mutually constitutive. Perhaps the manuscript, in its destruction, had become part of the great unfolding of truth, a truth that is always there, waiting to be experienced, waiting to be lived.

In the end, I do not know if I ever truly encountered El-Wakil, or if I have simply been swept into the same timeless current that flows through the streets of the Medina. Perhaps he, too, is simply part of that flow—a momentary convergence of being and becoming. But in his presence, I was reminded of something deeper, something beyond understanding: that there is no loss without return, no absence without presence, and no separation between the world and the truth we seek. All things are interconnected. All things are, in their own way, part of the same eternal manuscript, written and re-written in infinite ways.

And perhaps that is enough.