“Madness is an inability to know dream from reality “-Ibn Sina
Aleppo, Syria, December 1984: “Unexpectedly Nabil stepped out into an octagonal courtyard. In the centre sat a beautiful star shaped sandstone basin. Two overlaid squares turned around a shared centre. Eight-pointed. Around him there were twelve dark door openings. Above them were twelve black portholes. He had never seen anything like it. Everything was built in stone. Again, the reliable and solid aesthetics of the Mamelukes. He could have stumbled into a Sufi monastery, a zawiya. But it did not look like the ones in Cairo and he thought of himself as an expert of everything that caught his interest. Through a circular aperture in the top of the tall dome, he saw above him the distant paleness of the Aleppo sky.
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