The Last Barrier

In an interview on Israel and Palestine in Art

Your final book is Reshad Feild’s The Last Barrier: A Journey into the Essence of Sufi Teachings. Where does this fit in with the research for your book?

This book is a mixture of the two things I have been talking to you about. On the one hand, Muslim and Palestinian themes, and on the other hand, the mystical aspects of my book. I was very much attracted to the mystical movement in Islam – Sufism. Lots of people in the UK and the States think that Islam is all about fundamentalism so I wanted to show this more mystical side of Islam as well. I read many books about Sufism, and this one is a personal journey of a student with his mentor who guides him into the world of Sufism. The main insight is that to live you have to die, and by dying they mean that you should abandon your ambitions and everything that you want to achieve. This enables you to totally give yourself to the world. And this book is all about the mentor guiding the student to help him to become a Sufi. Although Sufism isn’t that popular in Palestine, I wanted it to be part of my book, because my book is a mystical book with people dying and ghosts and so on. In my book the estate of the Rajani family was blessed by a Sufi teacher, who also gave a prophecy that if the family abandon it then the family itself will disappear, and that is what happens in the book. The land is sold to a Jewish settler and it destroys the family.