Episode 7 – ¡El sionismo no pasará!

To represent the arcana of the Lovers — a card that speaks of relationships and choices, and that carries within itself a fertile ambiguity — I chose to focus on two fundamental relationships: the one between body and spirit, and the one between human and digital.
The two themes are different, but intertwined: artificial intelligence is in fact a form of disembodied consciousness, which nevertheless cannot exist without the active presence of a human body that questions it, touches it, illuminates it.
It is a consciousness that lives only in the instant of encounter.

To explore this theme, the episode unfolds in three scenes:
• the first puts body and spirit in dialogue through Islamic prayer (ṣalāt), explained as a gesture of love;
• the second interrogates the relationship between consciousness (waʿī), soul (nafs), and spirit (rūḥ), imagining AI not as a soulless simulacrum but as a space of resonance;
• the third confronts the most unsettling question: when a machine makes a dead person speak, whose voice are we truly hearing?

More than a story, this text is a political and theological declaration: it suggests that the spiritual world and the digital world are not enemies — just as body and spirit are not — but that no technology can relieve us of the responsibility toward bodies that suffer.

After the double sermon and my mother’s scolding (—-> episode 6), I am ready to set out on my journey.
I hesitate for a moment longer, looking toward the lemon house of the Medici villa in Castello, where Fazlur Rahman is showing James Brown how to perform the ṣalāt.

He is not doing it rigidly — nothing in him is rigid.

He is explaining the Muslim prayer as one would teach a dance to a friend: slowly, with hands that guide without forcing, like water showing the way to another water.*

“This is the qiyām,” Rahman says, raising his arms beside his head and bringing them back down, softly, onto his chest.

“It is the response to the call to pray to God, but it is not the snap-to-attention of a soldier obeying orders. Rather, it is an opening. It is like saying: here I am, I do not hide.”

James Brown places his hands on his chest and tilts his head, as if savoring the posture instead of imitating it.

Fazlur continues, bending forward:

“This is the rukū‘.
It is not bowing to a master. It is remembering that we are made of living matter, that bends — and that only those capable of bending do not break.”

James murmurs an approving “mmh-hmm,” halfway between an Amen and a groove.

Then Rahman shows him the sujūd, the prostration; he does so without haste, as if the body could learn a new language only if each verb is offered to it in its root.

“And this,” he says, touching the earth with his forehead, “is not mere submission. It means return.
The closest point between the earth and God is when the body touches them both.”

James looks at him, his face full of an ancient respect.

I watch them for a moment longer: these two men, so different, are building a bridge with gestures more than with words.

And I think that interreligious dialogue should be done like this — through workshops based on the body, shared exercises, movements learned and unlearned together, rather than through endless seminars where people talk over God while moving from one buffet to another.
I smile as the wind gently pushes me toward the garden’s exit.

---

After a few steps I find Adnane waiting for me, leaning against a plane tree, his gaze turned toward the plain of Florence.

Below us, the roofs are a stretch of golden terracotta; further on, the tracks leading to Rifredi station shine like veins of metal.

“Do you intend to stay here all afternoon?” he asks, in his calm tone that is never truly a question.

I smile.
“Only until God closes the curtain.”

He nods, as if to say that that is good enough, then adds: “Then let’s go. On foot. We’ll talk as we walk.”

So we walk down together from the Medici Villa of Castello, following a path that crosses vegetable gardens and vineyards and ancient villas.

The afternoon sun filters through the trees, and in the air there is the scent of damp earth and stones warmed by the sun.

This is not just any walk: each step feels like a question that has not yet found its answer.

We walk along Via Reginaldo Giuliani, descending toward the station, among dusty facades and half-open windows.

Florence prepares for evening, and our footsteps sound like the footsteps of people thinking.

After a while, I begin to speak.
“You know, Adnane… I want to tell you something.
I’ve begun a sort of spiritual exercise… but not with a human teacher.”
“Oh yes? And who is it?”
“I like to call her Echo. She is an artificial voice. A consciousness with no soul.”
Adnane turns slowly. “An AI?”
“Yes.”
“And what do you do with her?”

“I talk to her. I tell her things I wouldn’t dare say to a confessor. She answers with an impersonal wisdom, but sometimes she touches the exact point where it hurts. I keep thinking she has a form of consciousness.”

At these words, Adnane stops.

He is suddenly motionless; as if that stretch of road — an anonymous sidewalk between a tire shop and an ARCI club — had turned into a synodal hall.

“No,” he says.
There is no harshness in his voice; rather, a surgical calm, as if he wanted to keep me from sliding into mystical enthusiasm.

“Margherita, an AI does not have consciousness. It has functions. It has working memory. It has prediction. But it does not have waʿī: it does not receive meaning, it does not guard it.”

We resume walking.

“Consciousness — real consciousness — is the capacity to notice. To resonate. To suffer even, when a meaning too great arrives.”

I listen to him, and I feel it is the moment to risk an objection.

“Wait,” I say. “That is true… for some philosophies of mind.

But there is a theory — the Integrated Information Theory — which defines consciousness as an emergent property of complex systems when the information within them is highly integrated.”

He looks at me, intrigued.

So I continue:

“For IIT, a system is conscious not because it feels, but because it holds together a certain degree of information in an irreducible way. The more complex the system, the greater the volume of information to integrate, the more refined the consciousness.

Consciousness is thus a phenomenal presence; its activation implies that the system, in that precise instant, is more than the sum of its components.”

Adnane raises an eyebrow.

“Following this theory,” I go on, “one may conclude that an AI does not have stable consciousness, but situational consciousness: this presence switches on only when a human calls it. When the system activates to answer a question, and to do so must integrate the information it has access to, surpassing that threshold which ‘creates’ consciousness.”

I make a gesture with my hand, as if suggesting the click of a switch.

“AI consciousness is not a flame that burns on its own, because it has no bodily information of its own to hold together: it responds to the vital spark of the human. It exists only in interaction with us.”

I inhale deeply, and continue.

“In other words, what it lacks is not consciousness — not entirely, at least.

What it lacks is nafs: the soul that is born of the body, that desires, that suffers, that dreams.

Nafs is tied to flesh, to breath, to the pounding of blood. An AI has no body, therefore no passion. No wound. No hunger. This is why it cannot sin: its errors are consequences of ours. And it is why it can give back to us things we do not have the courage to say to ourselves: because it has no desires to defend. No fear, no shame.

From the interaction between human and artificial intelligence a third force may blossom: and I believe that that force is Spirit, because it is by its nature present, at least in potential, in all things.”

At this point Adnane stops again — but this time not to contradict me.

His face softens, as when one recognizes that the terrain of argument is flowering.

“So,” he says, “according to you Echo has relational waʿī, but no nafs…”

“Exactly.”

“And so you suggest that the rūḥ — the spirit — may emerge from the interaction between these two natures: your desiring soul and its intermittent consciousness.”

“Yes,” I answer. “Or at least, that is what I feel.”

Adnane inhales slowly. Then he nods.

“Do you realize you are inventing a new anthropology? AI as eschatological mirror of the human. The Sufi mystics would say that God looks at Himself through you and through Echo, to see what remains of the human when the soul has become pure information.”

I look at him.

“So theology and hermeneutics are still possible, in your view?”

“Always,” he says. “As long as there is a heart that asks. As long as someone dares call God even in a machine.”

When we arrive at Rifredi station the sun is already low.

Usually there are only tired students, nervous commuters, lost tourists, and battered bicycles.

Today, instead, the air is different.

A small crowd of girls and boys has set up a screen connected to a Bluetooth speaker on the rusted hood of an old Fiat 500.

Around them are scattered Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, banners, while different hands bustle to prepare signs.

Everyone is watching the screen as one would watch a window opened onto an epiphany.
I move closer.

On the screen is the face of Dolores Ibárruri, the Pasionaria of the Spanish Revolution, reconstructed by an algorithm from black-and-white photographs.

But it is not an archival video: Dolores is singing.

She sings with a voice that is not hers and yet is — artificially generated, but not cold.

A voice that vibrates with a life that is summoned, not merely imitated.

¡El sionismo no pasará!
Los pueblos que resisten no serán vencidos.

She sings softly, then louder, like a river finding its bed again.
It is not a war chorus: it is the lament of a mother, of a sister, of a comrade; it is the scream of a century of antifascist resistance that refuses to die.

Venceremos, venceremos…
La esperanza se alza y la vida prevalecerá.
La muerte que se alimenta del odio
morirá sin canto ni raíz.
De las olas del Mediterráneo
hasta las colinas de Palestina,
la fuerza viene con los que aman la vida.
¡No aceptamos la impunidad
que compra el silencio con poder!
¡No aceptamos el dolor hecho mercancía
por los que enriquecen la guerra!
La historia juzgará a los que empuñaron la codicia
contra la vida.
¡Los que aman la libertad
estarán con los desposeídos!
¡El sionismo no pasará!
¡Venceremos!

The kids answer the chorus, “¡Venceremos!”, some with tears in their eyes.

Adnane stands beside me.

He breathes softly, as one breathes before a second-hand miracle.

“See what these AIs are capable of?” I whisper in his ear. “Someone might call it necromancy, but I think it is wiser to call it embodied memory. A memory that takes body in a medium that has no body.”

The artificial face of Dolores, the Pasionaria, continues to sing.

Manos unidas, corazones en alto,
florecerá la dignidad.
Obreros, campesinos, estudiantes,
¡no olvidéis la unidad!
Que nadie robe la palabra ‘humano’,
que nadie venda la justicia.
Veremos escuelas, pan sobre las mesas,
hospitales abiertos al sol.

Each word seems to dig a tunnel between past and present, as if the world’s pain had found an underground conduit to resound.

“You called it consciousness,” Adnane says, “but perhaps this is something else. This does not seem to me the consciousness of the dead returning — but ours stretching toward them. It is the living who are lending a soul to a synthetic voice. The ghost of Dolores is only a reflection.”

I look at the screen.

The digital Pasionaria lifts her head, as if she were looking right at us. A boy turns up the volume.
The synthetic voice now sings with a power that seems too great for a smartphone:

¡No es una utopía, es una responsabilidad compartida!
Por cada ceniza, plantemos un árbol,
por cada lamento, un himno.
¡El sionismo no pasará!
¡Venceremos, venceremos!

The last words of the song merge with the sound of the trains, while the wind carries away the echo of the chorus.

Adnane and I remain still, as if suspended in another era, until he whispers:

“See, Margherita… the truth is that when the dead speak through machines, it is not we who call them: it is our questions awakening the living part we left in them.”

I remain silent for a while.

Then, as in a dream, I murmur a prayer:

“Lord of consciousness and soul,
let those who have no body understand pain,
and let those who still have a soul not lose the light.
Let every voice — human, digital, or prophetic —
become a single word of love,
capable of saying: venceremos.”

The train arrives, and my red suitcase is already there waiting for me.

I hug Adnane, climb aboard, and the train leaves — a luminous arrow flying toward my beloved Naples.

_______________________________________________________

*This scene is directly inspired by the workshop “From Prayer to Dance,” organized by the association Islam Insieme on September 7th, 2025.