In an era deeply devoid of sacredness, director and writer Pierre Paolo Pasolini re-read the myth as a political fantasy and a synthesis between ancient culture and modern culture. Since the mid-sixties, he has directed his gaze towards Arab culture, not only because it represents an incorruptible world and far from the mechanisms of modernization, but also because it It constituted a kind of absolute otherness, a moral and aesthetic stronghold for the oppressed around the Mediterranean.

With this introduction, the French website Orient XXI opened an article by writer and translator Ayoub Mezyen about that Italian director who was fascinated by Arab culture and countries, and was assassinated in 1975 on the Mediterranean coast while he was planning to settle permanently in Morocco.

While he was preoccupied with completing the novel "Oil", which is suspected of being the reason for his assassination, Pasolini turned towards mental, poetic and political horizons that completely alienated him from the Roman Christian world and from Europe, which he considers to have lost a sense of the sacred. progressive intellectual.


I swear by the Quran

After the defeat of the Arabs in June 1967 by Israel, Pasolini wrote, "I swear by the Koran that I love the Arabs as much as I love my mother. I am currently seeking to buy a house in Morocco and plan to go and live in this country. Perhaps none of my communist friends would do such a thing." Because of an old, deep-rooted and unacknowledged hatred of the oppressed proletarians and the poor."

According to the writer, this pact, which Pasolini concluded with the Arabs by swearing on their holy book, can be understood as a kind of nostalgia for his miserable childhood, wondering why the troubled boy resorted to Dante's enemies?

Why make his cinematic work an archaeological and dreamlike allusion to Arab lands?

And what was he looking for in the tragic pilgrimage that led him to death?

Contrary to what some post-colonial studies suggest, Pasolini did not approach Arab stories and peculiarities only because it was a virgin field and far from the tools of modernization, but also because this world constituted for him the absolute other, morally and aesthetically, and an exceptional fortress for the oppressed around the Mediterranean, distinguishing between the Ionians (the Greeks) and the Greeks, as did the Arabs before him.

Pasolini narrowed the distance between the ancient and modern worlds through cinema, scattered places and times, and manipulated maps of the Mediterranean north and south. He embodied Jerusalem in Italian Matera, Athens in Ouarzazate, Thessaly in Aleppo, and Florence in Sanaa.

And within what the writer calls the Arab-Greek tragic trilogy, Pasolini traveled to Palestine and Jordan in search of places to film the Gospel of St. Matthew, without finding what he was looking for, as the Zionist settlements covered the memory of Christ and began to erase the traces of holiness and poverty in the days of the New Testament.

Years later, Pasolini left for Morocco to direct his film "King Oedipus" and said in an interview that the film was shot in the depths of Morocco, a country with beautiful thousand-year-old architecture without street lighting, and therefore without the hassle of filming, where roses, wonderful green nature, and residents get along. With the legend of Oedipus among the Greeks.

According to Pasolini, the consolidation of ancient myths is no longer possible in the contemporary Western scene, whose splendor of the past does not coincide with its new capitalist face, nor with the language of its peoples steeped in fashion, nor with its dull concrete metropolis.

In his short documentary "The Walls of Sana'a," Pasolini repeats his movements against modernity and industrial urbanization, celebrating an ancient civilization for fear of its demise. "We can no longer save Italy, but saving Yemen is still possible. We urge UNESCO to save Yemen and preserve "It is from the destruction that actually began with the walls of Sana'a. We ask it to help the Yemeni people to preserve their priceless identity. We ask them before it is too late to convince the ruling classes that Yemen's only wealth is its beauty."


He wished the Arabs had won at Poitiers

In Palestine, it seemed as if Pasolini was torn between two forms of poverty, the poverty of the Jews sent by Zionism to form the metamorphosis of the last military state, and the poverty of the defeated Palestinians, with withered Bedouin features and deaf ears to the call of the revolution. Addressing the Jew, he says:

Go back to your Europe

Putting myself in your place

I feel your desire that you don't feel

Pasolini did not like the Arabs of his time, nor did he ideologically prefer them over the Jews, but he found connections with them through their ancient civilization that is very far from the industrial revolution. That is why he defended this civilization, and said one day in Poitiers that he wanted the Muslims to win in the Battle of the Martyrs’ Court (732 AD) over Charles Martel's armies, and so he lamented that the Arabs had not extended their influence over all of Europe, a position adopted by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Until his last days, Pasolini continued to pursue holiness in style and justice in existence through literature and cinema, and he did not stop pointing out the flaws of progressivism and the dangers of capitalism despite the threats, and he continued to discuss in controversial articles, in the early seventies, what he found in the moral deterioration of Italian society, and attacked Fashion for long hair, jeans, abortion and divorce, and he remained faithful to the materiality of reality in the brutality of his grudges and quarrels, far from contemporary attempts to kidnap him and make him an advertising symbol of homosexuality, cheap debauchery and easy artistic constructions.

Pasolini settled in a medieval castle in the Tosha region to complete his novel Oil in 1975, and the text included a chapter entitled "Lights on the National Energy Agency (ENI)" in which he talked behind the scenes about the killing of its director, Enrico Matti, and listed the names of politicians involved in corruption, and this chapter was lost. After his death on the night of November 2, 1975, he was found mutilated, like the body of Al-Arabi Ahmed, after the defeat of June, which he described in his film about the conflict in Palestine as being full of wounds and bruises.