The Men Who Cannot Dance
On wells, weddings, clerics, grievance, and the old false god that still asks for children.
There is a time for everything, Ecclesiastes tells us, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to mourn and a time to dance. Even in the Gospels, when the End Times are imagined, people are still getting married, still entering houses, still preparing food, still making vows, still carrying flowers, still becoming foolish with hope, because human life does not stop asking for music simply because history has become frightening. A wedding is one of humanity’s oldest acts of defiance. It says that death is not the only organiser of the world. It says that two people may still stand in front of everyone and promise a future, even while empires fall, markets tremble, prophets shout, and old men in dark corners declare that everything is forbidden. A wedding is not only a private celebration. It is a small republic of movement. The young rush onto the floor because their bodies still trust joy. The older ones divide themselves into many secret categories: those who want to dance and do, those who want to dance and do not, those who say they do not want to dance while tapping one foot beneath the table, and those who have forgotten that once, before dignity stiffened their knees, they too were carried by music. Then, always, somewhere near the edge of the room, there is the dark corner. In that corner sit the men who have made a theology out of not dancing.
They watch the floor with grave faces. They mutter that the young are too loud, that the women are too visible, that the rhythm is too chaotic, that someone must take responsibility for this disorder. Perhaps when they were young no one asked them to dance. Perhaps no door opened for them. Perhaps their self-image became involved too early, and they decided that because they could not enter joy gracefully, joy itself must be vulgar. Perhaps they were too important to risk looking foolish. Now they are older, and religion has given them a magnificent costume for their resentment. They are no longer merely men who sat out the dance. They are guardians. They are interpreters. They are necessary. On their shoulders, they tell us, lies the waiting for the Hidden Imam, or the defence of God, or the protection of tradition, or the purity of the nation, or the security of the community. They do not bring bread. They do not dig wells. They do not plant orchards. They do not compose music. They have acquired a different skill: how to build a toll booth at the threshold of life and charge every living thing for passage.
This is the clerical pattern in its most naked form. It arrives wherever life becomes fertile. It does not create the well, but it appears beside the well with a bucket and a rulebook. It does not plant the garden, but it arrives at harvest with a ledger. It does not write the song, but it stands near the musicians asking whether music has been properly licensed by heaven. It is not even the necessary evil of tax, because tax, at least in its honest form, is supposed to return to the community as roads, schools, hospitals, libraries, pipes, lights, safety, shelter. The clerical toll is different. It does not return as life. It returns as authority. It returns as surveillance. It returns as the right to sit at the gate and decide who is pure enough to pass. It is the shadow of the room pretending to be the architecture of the room.
The human brain under joy is one of the great miracles of creation. When fired by wonder, movement, play, risk, beauty, love and necessity, it becomes inventive. It finds patterns. It builds bridges. It hears harmonies before they exist in matter. It takes stone and makes a mosque, a cathedral, a synagogue, a palace, a garden, a courtyard, a bridge, a poem. The greatest architectural and artistic creations of civilisation are embodied music. They are not dead objects. They are rhythm slowed into matter. A dome is a note held in the sky. A garden is a melody written in water and shade. A bridge is trust made visible. Joy is not childish. Joy is one of the doors through which intelligence enters the lower world. No one owns this door. No cleric created it. No state can copyright it. No militia can martyr it into existence. It arrives when life is permitted to move.
The Bible gives us an old image for this. Abraham digs wells. The locals fill them in. Isaac digs them again. Later, Jesus turns water into wine and speaks of living water. The pattern is ancient and exact. One kind of human being digs. Another fills in. One kind of human being finds water beneath the earth. Another cannot bear the sight of shared abundance and throws stones into the opening. One kind of human being says, “Drink.” Another says, “Who authorised this well?” The question of civilisation may finally be as simple as this: are you digging wells, or are you filling them in?
But Abraham’s wells were never only about water. They were about covenant. They were about whether land becomes more alive under human presence or more barren, more violent, more hungry for children. The older biblical geography is larger than the modern argument wants to admit. Abraham moves through a world of tents, wells, kinship, rescue, quarrel, famine, hospitality and departure before later histories narrow the sacred into borders, kingdoms, flags and wars. He does not only receive promise. He digs. He negotiates. He protects. He tries to rescue Lot. And Lot’s story is one of the great warnings: it is possible to settle somewhere and still fail to make it flourish. Sodom is not merely a place of sin in the childish sense. It is a place where life has become morally sterile, where appetite has replaced hospitality, where the stranger is not protected, where the city has forgotten the sacred duty of welcome. Lot has to be extracted because the city has become a machine of devouring.
Yet the biblical imagination does not leave Moab only as scandal, exile or foreignness. From Moab comes Ruth, the outsider woman whose loyalty becomes more fruitful than the bloodline purity of those who think they alone own the story. Ruth does not arrive as conqueror, cleric, soldier or claimant. She arrives as fidelity. She follows Naomi. She gleans. She enters the field humbly, and through her the future returns. From Ruth comes Obed, from Obed Jesse, from Jesse David. The foreign woman becomes grandmother to right sovereignty. This is the hidden rebuke inside the tradition itself: covenant is not tribal vanity. Covenant is fruitfulness under God. It is the capacity to receive rescued life and allow it to become future.
And here the Abrahamic traditions carry a strange and perfect symmetry. In the Bible, Isaac is bound and Isaac is spared. In Islamic tradition, Ishmael is remembered as the son brought near to sacrifice, and Ishmael too is spared. The brothers over whom history later quarrels are both, in their own sacred memories, released from the knife. The child is not eaten by God. The son is not consumed by the father’s obedience. The ram appears. The hand is stopped. Heaven interrupts the logic of blood. This should have been the shared foundation of the Abrahamic world: not that one child is chosen for death and the other for life, but that the God of Abraham rejects the final offering of the child. The God of Abraham asks for the end of child sacrifice, not its political rebranding.
So the sacred question is not who can claim the land most loudly, but who can make the land less hungry for children. This is where every death-cult politics stands condemned, whether it speaks Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, English, or the language of international law. A true Abrahamic tradition should recoil from the offering of children to history, revenge, martyrdom, nation, purity or grievance. It should recognise the smell of Moloch whenever adults make a theology out of a child’s death. It should recognise the false god whenever mothers are told that the body of a son can open heaven, whenever fathers are told that the grave of a child can become income, whenever leaders turn the nursery into a recruiting ground and call it resistance. Who turns water into wine, and who turns living water into a toll booth? The land itself becomes witness. It does not finally testify for slogans. It testifies for fruit.
This question can be asked of nations as much as of men. When the Jews returned in the twentieth century to the land that lived inside their scriptures, memory, exile songs and prayers, they did not return only with slogans. They returned with a civilisational task. Whatever one thinks of the politics, the conflict, the tragedy, the competing claims and the wounds of 1948, one fact remains impossible to ignore: they undertook the long, difficult, unromantic labour of making life possible. They planted. They irrigated. They researched. They built water systems. They learned the grammar of arid land. They restored old agricultural imagination with modern science. They did not merely say, “This land is ours.” They asked, “How does this land live?” That question is fundamentally different from ownership. It is relationship. It is covenant in practical form. It is the opposite of the clerical toll booth.
The scale of such projects does not always announce itself with the pomp of empire. A great wall is easier to photograph than a pipe. A military parade is easier to understand than soil rehabilitation. A speech can be translated in one evening; a water system takes decades. Yet the quiet projects are often the true civilisational projects. They are what people do when they believe the future deserves infrastructure. They are what exiles do when memory becomes responsibility. A land is not restored by flags alone. It is restored by boring work, by engineers, farmers, scientists, teachers, mothers, children, migrants, donors, failures, revisions, seasons. It is restored by people who understand that life is not a metaphor if there is no water.
And here the political and spiritual panic begins. Fertility is not neutral. Fertility is evidence. A tree can become an argument. A green field can become a theological embarrassment. If a people you have been taught to see as illegitimate make the desert bloom, then nature itself appears to have refused your story. If they build hospitals, laboratories, farms, orchestras and universities, then the world begins to see not merely a military state, not merely a grievance in reverse, but a people making life. That is dangerous to any movement whose emotional economy depends on permanent wound. The wound must remain open because the leadership feeds from it. The child must remain angry because the elder has no other inheritance to give him. The camp must remain temporary even after generations because permanence would weaken the priesthood of grievance. The tunnel must be built instead of the school, the martyr poster instead of the playground, the afterlife promise instead of the living child’s future.
This is not an accusation against Palestinian humanity. It is the opposite. It is a defence of Palestinian humanity against those who have repeatedly converted it into theatre, bargaining power, ideological fuel and sacrificial material. Palestinian children deserve orchards more than slogans. They deserve mathematics without martyrdom. They deserve roads not tunnels, libraries not weapon stores, honest leadership not death poetry written by men whose own children are usually safer than the children they recruit. The great scandal is not that Palestinians love life less. The great scandal is that so many political and clerical structures around them have learned how to profit from their prevented life.
Here the irony becomes almost unbearable. The accusation thrown at Israel is often that its existence must mean Palestinian disappearance. Yet demography itself complicates that story. Palestinian populations have grown dramatically over the decades. Arab citizens of Israel exist, study, work, vote, practise medicine, teach, argue, protest, build families and participate in the life of the state, even amid inequality, conflict and unresolved national questions. This does not erase Palestinian suffering, displacement or occupation. It does not solve the moral and political questions. But it does puncture the totalising fantasy that Jewish sovereignty automatically means the biological erasure of the other. In reality, the more frightening fact for the clerical-political imagination may be this: Jewish life, when allowed to build, tends to produce systems in which other life also becomes harder to erase. That is precisely why the story must be captured. That is why the green field must be renamed oppression, the hospital must be renamed propaganda, the survival of the neighbour must be hidden behind the mythology of annihilation. If the enemy is shown to be capable of cultivating life, then hatred must work much harder.
Now move the camera eastward to Pakistan, born almost the same historical age as Israel, born out of trauma, partition, fear, religious identity and the shadow of caste. Pakistan’s founding wound is different, but its dependency on Islam as a total political saviour is also existential. For many, Islam promised dignity against the old pollution codes of the subcontinent. It promised that no human being could be permanently untouchable before God. That spiritual promise was powerful. It still is. But when a spiritual promise becomes a military-clerical state project, it begins to harden into something else. Instead of freeing people from inherited humiliation, it may create new hierarchies of purity. Instead of building a republic of dignity, it may build a competition over who can sound most offended, most pious, most injured, most willing to punish. The old caste shadow does not disappear. It simply changes costume.
Pakistan has intellect. No honest observer can deny this. It has poets, doctors, engineers, workers, entrepreneurs, farmers, musicians, scholars, an immense diaspora, and a young brain trust scattered across the world sending money home. The will is there too, in millions of ordinary people who want education, stability, dignity, safety, beauty, and a country their children do not have to leave in order to breathe. Yet something in the national structure keeps failing to convert this human wealth into a flourishing civic landscape. Military dominance, corruption, clerical intimidation, water stress, land degradation, elite capture and ideological theatre have again and again interrupted the work of life. Mosques rise, but fertility does not necessarily follow. Loudspeakers multiply, but clean water does not. The vocabulary of honour expands, but public trust shrinks. The toll booths become sophisticated while the wells remain broken.
This is the absurdity that must be named. Religion at its deepest should make human beings more capable of life. It should make them more truthful, more humble, more generous, more courageous in protecting the vulnerable, more reverent before creation. But clerical power often does the reverse. It takes the symbols of heaven and uses them to avoid the obligations of earth. It speaks of paradise while sewage runs through neighbourhoods. It speaks of purity while children cannot read. It speaks of honour while women are afraid. It speaks of martyrdom because martyrdom is cheaper than infrastructure. It speaks of divine law because divine law, when monopolised by men in the corner, can be made to say anything that keeps them seated above everyone else.
The figure of the bored cleric at the wedding is therefore not merely comic. He is archetypal. He is the man who cannot bear the dance because the dance proves that life does not require his permission. He is unwanted not because faith is unwanted, not because reverence is unwanted, not because sacredness is unwanted, but because he has confused himself with the sacred. He has placed his own wounded ego at the doorway of the divine and demanded an entrance fee. He has made himself heavy and called it depth. He has made himself joyless and called it seriousness. He has made himself afraid of women, music, colour, laughter, youth and fertility, and called it morality. But morality without life is only control wearing a clean shirt.
The world is full of such men now. Some wear turbans, some wear uniforms, some wear suits, some wear revolutionary scarves, some wear academic language, some wear anti-imperial slogans, some wear nationalist flags. The costume changes. The pattern remains. They arrive where life is moving and ask how to own the movement. They arrive where people are healing and ask how to manage the wound. They arrive where young people are dancing and ask how to regulate rhythm. They arrive where exiles are planting and ask who authorised memory. They arrive where women are laughing and ask whether laughter has been modestly distributed. They arrive where children are learning and ask whether the curriculum serves the ideology. They arrive where water is flowing and ask whether the well has paid its dues.
Against them, the answer must not only be argument. It must be construction. Dig the well. Redig the well when they fill it in. Plant the garden. Teach the child. Build the school. Fund the library. Translate the poem. Protect the dancefloor. Rescue religion from the men who use it as a toll booth. Rescue politics from those who turn grievance into inheritance. Rescue the nation from those who prefer a martyr’s poster to a living teenager with a future. Rescue the wedding from the corner.
There is a time to mourn, yes. There is a time to rage. There is a time to name cruelty, and a time to confront the men who have made cruelty respectable. But there is also a time to dance. Not because the world is innocent. Not because history is healed. Not because the dead are forgotten. We dance because the dead are not forgotten. We dance because someone’s parents met at a wedding and somehow figured it out. We dance because Abraham’s wells were filled in and Isaac dug them again. We dance because living water must keep moving. We dance because the men in the corner are not God. We dance because the floor was never theirs.
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