Islamist Hate and Christian Hope

A review of a recent novella set in Kurdistan in 2014. 'Hope overthrows pride with humility. Where hope prevails, pride fails.'

From The Imaginative Conservative

By Joseph Pearce

Paul T. Mascia’s novella, “Nazar’s Journey,” is full of hope, and yet it is set in the midst of one of the grimmest and deadliest episodes in recent history, in which it would have been very easy for people to lose all hope.

Nazar’s Journey, by Paul T. Mascia (Austin Macauley Publishers, 2024, 141 pages)

Nazar’s Journey, a newly published novella by Paul T. Mascia, is hopeful in the fullest and most literal sense of the word. It is full of hope. And yet, paradoxically, it is set in the midst of one of the grimmest and deadliest episodes in recent history, in which it would have been very easy for people to lose all hope.

The story takes place on the plains of Nineveh in Iraq. It is August 2014. Islamic militants have captured the Christian town of Qaraqosh. The Kurdish troops who were the Christians’ only defence have retreated. Those Christians who are not killed, flee in terror from their homes, headed for the town of Erbil, forty miles to the east in Kurdistan. Most are on foot. It is the hottest time of the year. Many are old or sick. There are many infants and children. Food and water are scarce. Many die by the side of the road and are buried in the shallowest of graves by their grieving family members. There are no tools for the digging of adequate graves. There is no time. Within days, the bodies are decaying. The stench of death fills the hot, stifling air as the tens of thousands of refugees trudge eastwards towards relative safety. Perhaps, in such extreme and horrific conditions, it would be understandable were people to lose hope.

Nazar, the thirteen-year-old eponymous hero of this story, is on a journey which is much more than a flight to safety. His journey is a quest to find his father. It is a journey in faith, animated by love, but it is full of hope.

Hope, as the humblest of virtues, is the antidote to the poison of pride, the greatest of sins. Hope overthrows pride with humility. Where hope prevails, pride fails. Conversely, where hope is absent, pride prevails. Hopelessness is despair, and despair is the triumph of pride. Hope, the humble David of the virtues, slays the mighty Goliath of the sins.

Hope also has a special place in ancient mythology, a place reserved for it in Pandora’s Box, which, ironically, was not really Pandora’s at all. It belonged to the gods and she had no right to open it. As with Eve’s plucking of the forbidden fruit, Pandora, the pagan Eve, opens the forbidden box. The curse of this original sin plagues humanity as, like a cloud of licentious locusts, vice and disease pour forth from the opened casket, along with wars, terrorism and hatred of Christ and His Church. Only hope remains in the box, the silver lining in the cloud that overshadows fallen humanity.

Hope is also the silver lining in the cloud that overshadows Nazar and the other characters whom he meets. It is ever present, like the God whom Nazar trusts. At times, Nazar is a figure of the true disciple who takes up his cross on his very own via dolorosa in imitation of Christ. His separation from his beloved father reflects the agony of the Son’s separation from the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. Even his name is an abbreviated form of “Nazarene”. Perhaps we might even see Nazar as a Christ figure in the sense that he is joined on the journey by an old man called Yousif, i.e. Joseph, and a woman called Amira, the grouping of an old man, younger woman and a child serving as an emblematic representation of the Holy Family on the flight to Egypt. This is surely intentional on the author’s part considering that Amira first introduces Yousif to Nazar in words which connect him to St. Joseph: “He is a builder. Just like St. Joseph. That’s his name, you know—Yousif.”

It says something for the poetic quality of Paul T. Mascia’s storytelling that the presence of hope is signified metaphorically at key moments in the story by the appearance of the skylark, which ascends in song in the very midst of the evil and descends dovelike as the suggestive presence of the Holy Spirit. The song of the skylark raises the curtain epigraphically on the story, or rather, and to be precise, it is Shelley’s song “To a Skylark” which raises the curtain and sets the scene. In this wonderful poem, one of the most beautiful ever written, we hear the poet’s own worded song of praise to the skylark’s wordless song. Although seeming to have little to do with the ugliness of the situation in which Nazar finds himself, the recurrence of the metaphorical presence of the skylark as a musical motif signifies a bird’s-eye view of the events unfolding on the ground, suggestive of the presence of a beauty which transcends the ugliness of sin, death and war, and which transfigures the darkest moments with the light and love of God’s presence. At one such moment, Nazar asks Amira the deepest of questions, receiving in response the wisest of replies:

Amira went out with Nazar into the wheat fields. There was a soothing summer evening breeze passing through the fields and stirring the harvest. The crickets and other night creatures were making pleasant melodies. They looked up at the sky. Amira was stunned by the glittering lights. Nazar almost felt like he could reach up and touch them and bring them to earth. When they began to talk, the Skylark woke up from his deep sleep and listened to their conversation.

“Amira?”

“Yes, Nazar.”

“You talk about the good Lord. Le bon Dieu.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“But, Amira, do you really believe that God is good? Now that we see all the terrible things that have happened to us….”

Amira’s eyes remained fixed on the heavens.

“Nazar, would a Tashya Alousa create such beauty?”

Amira was using the Chaldean words for cruel tyrant.

Nazar paused. He could not answer.

Then Amira put her arm on his shoulder. “Yes, Nazar, the suffering is real. But the goodness is inescapable. It is surrounding us.”

Apart from the beauty of creation, resplendent in the night sky and in the song of the skylark, there is also the deep beauty to be found in the dignity of the human person and the holiness of souls. Nazar sees such beauty when he first meets Amira. He recognizes “a beauty in her countenance, a beauty which any artist would be challenged to depict”. Nor is such beauty something merely physical: “It was an inner beauty, perhaps emanating from the depths of her soul, a beauty which endures and even flourishes with the passage of time.”

There is one other connection to the skylark, presumably unintended by the author, which warrants our attention. A few years ago, back in 2007 to be precise, a novel was published by Antonia Arslan, entitled Skylark Farm, which is very similar in terms of genre and subject matter to Nazar’s Journey. This earlier novel is set amidst the Armenian Genocide of the early twentieth century, a hundred years before the “ethnic cleansing” of the Christians of Iraq by Islamist extremists. Skylark Farm, along with Arslan’s follow-up novel, Silent Angel, dovetail very well with Nazar’s Journey as works of historical fiction which highlight the anti-Christian pogroms of modern times.

We will end this brief appraisal of this brief but powerful story with a discussion of how the story ends. We will do so, however, without giving away the plot or without any “spoilers”.

The story ends with a eucatastrophe, a word invented by J. R. R. Tolkien to indicate the sudden joyous turn in a story which leads to the consolation of the happy ending. Eucatastrophe is the antithesis of catastrophe, which is the sudden devastating turn which leads to tragedy. It offers what Tolkien called the “sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth… a brief vision… a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium”. Evangelium. Good news!

Without saying exactly what happens, which is for the reader to discover, we can reveal that Nazar’s journey ends with a sudden joyous turn and the consolation of a happy ending. How can a story filled with the suggestive presence of the Fatherhood of God end in any other way?