The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  Thus the days in the great old city were exciting. But the Maghribi scholars were anxious to begin their long journey home, and so Bistami helped them prepare their caravan, and when they were ready, he joined them continuing westwards on the road to Fez.

  This part of the tariqat led them first north, to Alexandria. They led their camels to a caravanserai and went down to have a look at the historic harbour, with its long curving dock against the pale water of the Mediterranean. Looking at it Bistami was struck by the feeling one sometimes gets, that he had seen this place before. He waited for the sensation to pass, and followed the others on.

  • • •

  As the caravan moved through the Libyan desert, the talk at night around the fires was of the Mamluks, and of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Emperor who had recently died. Among his conquests had been the very coast they were now skirting, though there was no way to tell that, except for an extra measure of respect given to Ottoman officials in the towns and caravanserai they passed through. These people never bothered them, or put a tariff on their passing. Bistami saw that the world of the sufis was, among many other things, a refuge from worldly power. In each region of the earth there were sultans and emperors, Suleimans and Akbars and Mamluks, all ostensibly Muslim, and yet worldly, powerful, capricious, dangerous. Most of these were in the Khaldunian state of late dynastic corruption. Then there were the sufis. Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and little debater’s jokes and flourishes, while a pot of thick hot coffee was poured with solemn attention into little glazed clay cups, all eyes gleaming with firelight and pleasure in the argument; and he thought, these are the Muslims who make Islam good. These are the men who have conquered the world, not the warriors. The armies could have done nothing without the word. Worldly but not powerful, devout but not pedantic (most of them, anyway); men interested in a direct relation to God, without any human authority’s intervention; a relation to God, and a fellowship among men.

  One night the talk turned to al-Andalus, and Bistami listened with an extra measure of interest.

  “It must be strange to re-enter an empty land like that.”

  “Fishermen have been living on the coast for a long time now, and zott scavengers. The Zott and Armenians have moved inland as well.”

  “Dangerous, I should think. The plague might return.”

  “No one appears to be affected.”

  “Khaldun says that the plague is an effect of overpopulation,” said

  Ibn Ezra, the chief scholar of Khaldun among them. “In his chapter on dynasties in “The Muqaddimah”, forty-ninth section, he says that plagues result from corruption of the air caused by overpopulation, and the putrefaction and evil moistures that result from so many people living close together. The lungs are affected, and so disease is conveyed. He makes the ironic point that these things result from the early success of a dynasty, so that good government, kindness, safety, and light taxation lead to growth and thence to pestilence. He says, “Therefore, science has made it clear that it is necessary to have empty spaces and waste regions interspersed between urban areas. This makes circulation of the air possible, and removes the corruption and putrefaction affecting the air after contact with living beings, and brings healthy air.” If he is right, well — Firanja has been empty for a long time, and can be expected to be healthy again. No danger of plague should exist, until the time comes when the region is heavily populated once again. But that will be a long time from now.”

  “It was God’s judgment,” one of the other scholars said. “The Christians were exterminated by Allah for their persecution of Muslims, and Jews too.”

  “But al-Andalus was still Muslim at the time of the plague,” Ibn Ezra pointed out. “Granada was still Muslim, the whole south of Iberia was Muslim. And they too died. As did the Muslims in the Balkans, or so says al-Gazzabi in his history of the Greeks. It was a matter of location, it seems. Firanja was stricken, perhaps from overpopulation as Khaldun says, perhaps from its many moist valleys, that held the bad air. No one can say.”

  “It was Christianity that died. They were people of the Book, but they persecuted Islam. They made war on Islam for centuries, and tortured every Muslim prisoner to death. Allah put an end to them.”

  “But al-Andalus died too,” Ibn Ezra repeated. “And there were Christians in the Maghrib and in Ethiopia that survived, and in Armenia. There are still little pockets of Christians in these places, living in the mountains.” He shook his head. “I don’t think we know what happened. Allah judges.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “So al-Andalus is reinhabited,” Bistami said.

  “Yes.”

  “And, sufis are there?”

  “Of course. Sufis are everywhere. In al-Andalus they lead the way, I have heard. They go north into still empty land, in Allah’s name, exploring and exorcising the past. Proving the way is safe. Al-Andalus was a great garden in its time. Good land, and empty.”

  Bistami looked in the bottom of his clay cup, feeling the sparks in him of those two words struck together. Good and empty, empty and good. This was how he had felt in Mecca.

  • • •

  Bistami felt that he was now cast loose, a wandering sufi dervish, homeless and searching. On his tariqat. He kept himself as clean as the dusty, sandy Maghrib would allow, remembering the words of Mohammed concerning holy behaviour: one came to prosper after washing hands and face, and eating no garlic. He fasted often, and found himself growing light in the air, his vision altering each day, from the glassy clarity of dawn, to the blurred yellow haze of midday, to the semi-transparency of sunset, when glories of gold and bronze haloed every tree and rock and skyline. The towns of the Maghrib were small and handsome, often set out on hillsides, and planted with palms and exotic trees that made each town and rooftop a garden. Houses were square whitewashed blocks in nests of palm, with rooftop patios and interior courtyard gardens, cool and green and watered by fountains. Towns had been set where water leaked out of the hillsides, and the biggest town turned out to have the biggest springs: Fez, the end of their caravan.

  Bistami stayed at the sufi lodge in Fez, and then he and Ibn Ezra travelled by camel north to Ceuta, and paid for a crossing by ship to Malaga. The ships here were rounder than in the Persian Sea, with pronounced high-ended keels, smaller sails, and rudders under their centreposts. The crossing of the narrow strait at the west end of the Mediterranean was rough, but they could see al-Andalus from the moment they left Ceuta, and the strong current pouring into the Mediterranean, combined with a westerly gale, bounced them over the waves at a great rate.

  The coast of al-Andalus proved cliffy, and above one indentation towered a huge rock mountain. Beyond it the coast curved to the north, and they took the offshore breezes in their little sails and heeled in towards Malaga. inland they could see a distant white mountain range.

  Bistami, exalted by the dramatic sea crossing, was reminded of the view of the Zagros Mountains from Isfahan, and suddenly his heart ached for a home he had almost forgotten. But here and now, bouncing on the wild ocean of this new life, he was about to set foot on a new land.

  • • •

  Al-Andalus was a garden everywhere, green trees foresting the slopes of the hills, snowy mountains to the north, and on the coastal plains great sweeps of grain, and groves of round green trees bearing round orange fruit, lovely to taste. The sky dawned blue every day, and as the sun crossed the sky it was warm in the sun, cool in the shade.

  Malaga was a fine little city, with a rough stone fort and a big ancient mosque filling the city centre. Wide tree-shaded streets rayed away from the mosque, which was being refurbished, up to the hills, and from their slopes one looked out at the blue Mediterranean, sheeting off to the Maghrib’s dry bony mountains, over the water to the south. Al-Andalus!

  Bistami
and Ibn Ezra found a little lodge like the Persian ribats, in a kind of village at the edge of the town, between fields and orange groves. Sufis grew the oranges, and cultivated grapevines. Bistami went out in the mornings to help them work. Most of their time was spent in the wheat field stretching off to the west. The oranges were easy: “We trim the trees to keep the fruit off the ground,” a ribat worker named Zeya told Bistami and Ibn Ezra one morning, “as you see. I’ve been trying various degrees of thinning, to see what the fruit does, but the trees left alone develop a shape like an olive, and if you keep branches off the ground at the bottom, then the fruit can’t pick up any groundbased rots. They are fairly susceptible to diseases, I must say. The fruit gets green or black moulds, the leaves go brittle or white or brown. The bark crusts over with orange or white fungi. Lady-bugs help, and smoking with smudge pots, which is what we do to save the trees during frosts.”

  “It gets that cold here?”

  “Sometimes, in the late winter, yes. It’s not paradise here you know.”

  “I was thinking it was.”

  The call of the muezzin came from the house, and they pulled out their prayer mats and knelt to the southeast, a direction Bistami had still not got used to. Afterwards Zeya led them to a stone stove holding a fire, and brewed them a cup of coffee.

  “It does not seem like new land,” Bistami noted, sipping blissfully.

  “It was Muslim land for many centuries. The Umayyads ruled here from the second century until the Christians took the region, and the plague killed them.”

  “People of the Book,” Bistami murmured.

  “Yes, but corrupt. Cruel taskmasters to free men or slave. And always fighting among themselves. It was chaos then.”

  “As in Arabia before the Prophet.”

  “Yes, exactly the same, even thought the Christians had the idea of one God. They were strange that way, contentious. They even tried to split God himself in three. So Islam prevailed. But then after a few centuries, life here was so easy that even Muslims grew corrupt. The Umayyads; were defeated, and no strong dynasty replaced them. The taifa states numbered more than thirty, and they fought constantly. Then the Almoravids invaded from Africa, in the fifth century, and in the sixth century the Almohads from Morocco ousted the Almoravids, and made Sevilla their capital. The Christians meanwhile had continued to fight in the north, in Catalonia and over the mountains in Navarre and Firanja, and they came back and retook most of al-Andalus. But never the southernmost part, the Nasrid kingdom, including Malaga and Granada. These lands remained Islam to the very end.”

  “And yet they too died,” Bistami said.

  “Yes. Everyone died.”

  “I don’t understand that. They say Allah punished the infidels for their persecution of Islam, but if that were true, why would He kill the Muslims here as well?”

  Ibn Ezra shook his head decisively. “Allah did not kill the Christians. People are wrong about that.”

  Bistami said, “But even if He didn’t, He allowed it to happen. He didn’t protect them. And yet Allah is all-powerful. I don’t understand that.”

  Ibn Ezra shrugged. “Well, this is another manifestation of the problem of death and evil in the world. This world is not Paradise, and Allah, when he created us, gave us free will. This world is ours to prove ourselves devout or corrupt. This is very clear, because even more than Allah is powerful, He is good. He cannot create evil. And yet evil exists in the world. So clearly we create that ourselves. Therefore our destinies cannot have been fixed or predetermined by Allah. We must work them out for ourselves. And sometimes we create evil, out of fear, or greed, or laziness. That’s our fault.”

  “But the plague,” Zeya said.

  “That wasn’t us or Allah. Look, all living things eat each other, and often the smaller eats the larger. The dynasty ends and the little warriors eat it up. This fungus, for instance, eating this fallen orange. The fungus is like a field of a million small mushrooms. I can show you in a magnifying glass I have. And see the orange — it’s a blood orange, see, dark red inside. You people must have bred them for that, right?”

  Zeya nodded.

  “You get hybrids, like mules. Then with plants you can do it again, and again, until you’ve bred a new orange. That’s just how Allah made us. The two parents mix their stock in the offspring. All traits are mixed, I suspect, though only some show. Some are carried unseen to a later generation. Anyway, say some mould like this, in their bread, or even living in their water, bred with another mould, and made some new creature that was poison. It spread, and being stronger than its parents, supplanted them. And so the people died. Maybe it drifted through the air like pollen in spring, maybe it lived inside the people it poisoned for weeks before it killed them, and passed on their breath, or at the touch. And then it was such a poison that in the end it killed off all its food, in effect, and then died out itself, for lack of sustenance.”

  Bistami stared at the segments of blood-red orange still in his hand, feeling faintly sick. The red-fleshed segments were like wedges of bright death.

  Zeya laughed at him. “Come now, eat up! We can’t live like angels! All that happened over a hundred years ago, and people have been coming back and living here without any problems for a long time. Now we are as free from the plague as any other country. I’ve lived here all my life. So finish your orange.”

  Bistami did so, thinking it over. “So it was all an accident.”

  “Yes,” Ibn Ezra said. “I think so.”

  “It doesn’t seem like Allah should allow it.”

  “All living things are free in this world. Besides, it could be that it was not entirely accident. The Quran teaches us to live cleanly, and it could be that the Christians ignored the laws at their peril. They ate pigs, they kept dogs, they drank wine —”

  “We here don’t believe that wine was the problem,” Zeya said with another laugh.

  Ibn Ezra smiled. “But if they lived in their sewage, among the tanneries and shambles, and ate pork and touched dogs, and killed each other like the barbarians of the cast, and tortured each other, and had their way with boys, and left the dead bodies of their enemies hanging at the gates — and they did all these things — then perhaps they made their own plague, do you see what I mean? They created the conditions that killed them.”

  “But were they so different than anyone else?” Bistami asked, thinking of the crowds and filth in Cairo, or Agra.

  Ibn Ezra shrugged. “They were cruel.”

  “More cruel than Temur the Lame?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did they conquer cities and put every person to the sword?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The Mongols did that, and they became Muslim. Temur was a Muslim.”

  “So they changed their ways. I don’t know. But the Christians were torturers. Maybe it mattered, maybe it didn’t. All living things are free. Anyway they’re gone now, and we’re here.”

  “And healthy, by and large,” said Zeya. “Of course sometimes a child catches a fever and dies. And everyone dies eventually. But it’s a sweet life here, while it lasts.”

  When the orange and grape harvests were over, the days grew short. Bistami had not felt such a chill in the air since his years in Isfahan. And yet in this very season, during the coldest nights, the orange trees blossomed, near the shortest day of the year: little white flowers all over the green round trees, fragrant with a smell reminiscent of their taste but heavier, and very sweet, almost cloying.

  • • •

  Through this giddy air came a cavalry, leading a long caravan of camels and mules, and then, in the evening, slaves on foot.

  This was the Sultan of Carmona, near Sevilla, someone said; one Mawji Darya, and his travelling party. The Sultan was the youngest son of the new caliph, and had suffered a disagreement with his elder brothers in Sevilla and al-Majriti, and had therefore decamped with his retainers with the intent of moving north across the Pyrenees, and establish
ing a new city. His father and elder brothers ruled in Cordoba, Sevilla and Toledo, and he planned to lead his group out of al-Andalus, up the Mediterranean coast on the old road to Valencia, then inland to Saragossa, where there was a bridge, he said, over the River Ebro.

  At the outset of this “hegira of the heart”, as the Sultan called it, a dozen or more like-minded nobles and their people had joined him. And it became clear as the motley crowd filed into the ribat yard, that along with the young Sevillan nobles’ families, retainers, friends and dependants, they had been joined by many more followers from the villages and farms that had sprung up in the countryside between Sevilla and Malaga. Sufi dervishes, Armenian traders, Turks, Jews, Zott, Berbers, all were represented; it was like a trade caravan, or some dream haj in which all the wrong people were on their way to Mecca, all the people who would never become hajjis Here there were a pair of dwarves on ponies, behind them a group of one-handed and handless ex-criminals, then some musicians, then two men dressed as women; this caravan had them all.

  The Sultan spread a broad hand. “They are calling us the Caravan of Fools, like the Ship of Fools. We will sail over the mountains to a land of grace, and be fools for God. God will guide us.”