Khaberni - Written by Imad Daoud:
Water is a liquid memory searching for its course through the crevices of forgetfulness. When it descended upon Karak, it was not looking for land to hydrate but for a tongue that speaks of absence. It carved its path through the city streets like a passing question, but it found the answer thrown in the corners of neglect, turning into a hurricane of reproach!
The fallen stones of the castle are not just stones; they are words whose validity has expired from a poem written by the Ayyubids and we have forgotten how to read. Each stone bears the fingerprint of a hand that built it with love, the echo of a soldier's footsteps who guarded the dream for centuries, and the shadow of a man who stood here facing the winds. The water did not destroy these stones, but revealed a hidden hand stronger than the hand of history: the administrative silence that carves by postponement what wars cannot carve!
In the streets, the scene became a watercolor painting by Salvador Dali: cars floating like light dreams, houses transforming into isolated islands, and people walking in the mud as if stepping into another time. The images captured by eyes were not documentation, but confronting mirrors.
Each shot tells the viewer: This is not another place, this is you! This is not mud, this is the dust of the covenant between the place and the person, left to be carried on the water’s surface!
On screens, people wrote in a new language. One said, "I learned today that water can carve stone, but more profoundly, it can also carve our pride." And a woman wrote, "My house drowned, but my memory floated like a plank on the surface." These are not comments, but testimonies of existence from people who suddenly realized that the real danger does not carry a sword, but carries a pen of postponement, and walks on the feet of procrastination.
And Karak, which speaks in the dialect of steadfast stone, found itself in a strange conversation with an element that speaks in the language of flow and shift!
How can a city that faced Saladin, the Mamluks, the Ottomans, colonialism, and extremism too, shiver under a rain stream? Because the new enemy does not come on horses nor with explosive belts and bombs and automatic weapons; it comes in the guise of the employee who signs delays, and with the mind of the engineer who forgets to calculate the slope of the street, and with the heart of an official who thinks the homeland is lines on a map, not a covenant between generations.
I remembered, as I saw the water playing with the city’s glory, the words of Kafka: "The chains that shackle humanity are made of paper." Paper of unimplemented reports, hanging plans, and promises that dissolve with the first humidity. Water was merely a great revealer, like the doctor who tells you of the disease after it has settled in the bones.
Even the noble solutions that came as a reaction, were part of the tragedy. The officials walked in the mud, touched the pain with their hands, and fairness dictates that this legacy is heavy; it is the accumulation of decades of short-term planning, and cannot be borne by one government or a specific minister, even if they came with the zeal of the battlefield and the will to change... But the question remains pending: Will this extended hand turn into a fist that holds the project until completion? Or will we return to the monotony of meetings that produce a mouse after a mountain of labor?
The old phrase "Blessed be the spilled blood, O Karak" echoes today as a funeral hymn. Blood was the price of freedom, and water has become the price of responsibility. Or rather, the price of its absence. Both are crucial fluids, but one writes history, and the other erases it!
This disaster might be a dreadful gift from fate. A gift that forces us to look into a deep mirror. A mirror that reveals that civilization is not in the height of edifices, but in the depth of drainage! Not in the beauty of facades, but in the solidity of "pipes." Not in the ability to withstand invaders, but in the wisdom to deal with rain!
Karak teaches us a dual lesson: Water can be either a blessing or a curse. And the blessing does not only come from the sky, but is made by hands on the ground. Hands that know that respecting the homeland starts from respecting every inch of its soil, its water channels, and the dignity of a person who should not have to wade through mud to reach his home.
So, blessed be the spilled water, O Karak, if it came to rescue us from our worst enemies: our satisfaction with ourselves. To alert us that some walls need mending, not in stone, but in mind. In the mind that must learn that greatness is not only in building above the ground, but in building with it; with the fluidity of a river that knows its course and does not exceed it.
And Karak, as usual, remains a witness. A witness to the fact that water may wash the stones, but it does not wash away the will. And it may demolish walls, but it does not demolish the dream. And perhaps, after years, we will thank these floods for awakening in us the question of quality, and reminding us that the nation is built every day, with every right decision and every respected detail.
Let's repair the wall, but more importantly, let's begin with restoring the covenant: the covenant between us and the land we embrace and that embraces us, between us and the sky that waters it, and between us and ourselves, when we finally decide to be at the level of our ancestors' stones, not less than them!
