I stood in the 'prep room' of the Grassi Museum in Leipzig in the spring of 2023. What I saw there, what I experienced and what followed me was unexpected. Inconspicuous at first glance. A cloth woven from sand-coloured threads, a few light stripes, and letters and drawings in brown. Or was I mistaken? None of this meant anything to me. But it wasn't meaningless. I wanted to touch the fabric. Something kept me. What was it?  

Sometimes, when we stand on high mountains or look down from a tower, what we see appears symbolic. The world in front of us turns into shapes. We believe we recognize geometric figures and are tempted to decipher them, as if what we see can be read. What was just a house, a field, a tree, is suddenly signs, suddenly it is writing, undoubtedly. But we can't read them. We no longer understand what we just took for granted, it has become a riddle. The meaning, familiar and firmly grasped by a term, slips away from us. The desire for a new interpretation is awakened, but we remain perplexed by the strangeness of this hatching. A book title comes to mind: Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (The Readability of the World). Hans Blumenberg wrote it. The title is beautiful, and the idea is beautiful. 

Title and thought returned before the cloth. They promised help in recognizing the blanket's own character in the symbolism that was - or seemed to be - inscribed in it. A direction was shown, seductive to follow. The temptation to touch the fabric grew with every glance. It almost seemed that if my fingers only stroked it first, the cloth would gain a voice and make itself known. From this voice, the story, reaching far back into time, would resound as a narrative, the distant past would return to the present, to my present. It was about people whose powerlessness was as great as the powers from which nothing and no one protected them - only this cloth. Where it came from, North Africa, it was called haik. Its power was hidden, there was no doubt about that. But where?  

He identifies the voice as that of a prophet and does as he is told. He finds that Hakim in the Egyptian embassy as a janitor, who tells him his adventurous life story in a somewhat grumpy, almost unfriendly manner, triggered by that same prophetic voice. It seems to be playing hilarious jokes on him and, with the most bizarre instructions, mixes luck and misfortune so ludicrously that they can hardly be distinguished: Death and life shoulder to shoulder, ascent and descent in one stroke of the pen. For a long time, there is no mention of Allah's most holy name, instead of sacred souls there are unholy everyday occurrences. Even more, the voice of the Prophet also rang out to Hakim's wife Fatima, and when things finally got too crazy for him - a fish trading business in Damascus - he changed his life. He began to read obsessively, and the prophet remained silent. But then: 

It always starts with hearing voices, I think. No one is behind me, I don't check, why should I? The ghostly thing has no form, its reality is inconspicuous, as inconspicuous as the sand-coloured cloth in front of me. The signs in it are real, they have created a reality, the reality of the protective, the protecting. Their work alone testifies to the spirit in which those who have woven Allah's ninety-nine names into this Haik have trusted. Ninety-nine times hope for the last, the only, the signless. To be experienced as protection alone, nameless.