The Years of Rice and Salt Read online

  From among them appeared his sultana, riding a horse. She dismounted from it without regard for the big servant there to help her down, and joined the Sultan as he was greeted by the Zeya and the other members of the ribat. “My wife, the Sultana Katima, originally from al-Majriti.”

  The Castilian woman was bare-headed, short and slender-armed, her riding skirts fringed with gold that swung through the dust, her long black hair swept back in a glossy curve from her forehead, held by a string of pearls. Her face was slender and her eyes a pale blue, making her gaze odd. She smiled at Bistami when they were introduced, and later smiled at the farm, and the water wheels, and the orange groves. Small things amused her that no one else saw. The men there began to do what they could to accommodate the Sultan and stay by his side, so that they could remain in her presence. Bistami did it himself. She looked at him and said something inconsequential, her voice like a Turkish oboe, nasal and low, and hearing it he remembered what the vision of Akbar had said to him during his immersion in the light: the one you seek is elsewhere.

  Ibn Ezra bowed low when he was introduced. “I am a sufi pilgrim, Sultana, and a humble student of the world. I intend to make the haj, but I like the idea of your hegira very much; I would like to see Firanja for myself. I study the ancient ruins.”

  “Of the Christians?” the Sultana asked, fixing him with her look.

  “Yes, but also of the Romans, who came before them, in the time before the Prophet. Perhaps I can make my haj the wrong way around.”

  “All are welcome who have the spirit to join us,” she said.

  Bistami cleared his throat, and Ibn Ezra smoothly brought him forward. “This is my young friend Bistami, a sufi scholar from Sind, who has been on the haj and is now continuing his studies in the west.”

  Sultana Katima looked at him closely for the first time, and stopped short, visibly startled. Her thick black eyebrows knitted together in concentration over her pale eyes, and suddenly Bistami saw that it was the birdwing mark that had crossed the forehead of his tiger, the mark that had always made the tigress look faintly surprised or perplexed, as it did with this woman.

  “I am happy to meet you, Bistami. We always look forward to learning from scholars of the Quran.”

  • • •

  Later that same day she sent a slave asking him to join her for a private audience, in the garden designated hers for the duration of her stay. Bistami went, plucking helplessly at his robe, grubby beyond all aid.

  It was sunset. Clouds shone in the western sky between the black silhouettes of cypresses. Lemon blossoms lent the air their fragrance, and seeing her standing alone by a gurgling fountain, Bistami felt as if he had entered a place he had been before; but everything here was turned around. Different in particulars, but more than anything, strangely, terribly familiar, like the feeling that had come over him briefly in Alexandria. She was not like Akbar, nor even the tigress, not really. But this had happened before. He became aware of his breathing.

  She saw him standing under the arabesqued arches of the entryway, and beckoned him to her. She smiled at him. People said she had suffered a serious illness some years before, and that when she had recovered, she had seemed different.

  “I hope you do not mind me not wearing the veil. I will never do so. The Quran says nothing about the veil, except for an injunction to veil the bosom, which is obvious. As for the face, Mohammed’s wife Khadijeh never wore the veil, nor did the other wives of the Prophet after Khadijeh died. While she lived he was faithful to her alone, you know. If she had not died he never would have married any other woman, he says so himself. So if she didn’t wear the veil, I feel no need to. The veil began when the caliphs in Baghdad wore them, to separate themselves from the masses, and from any khajirites who might be among them. it was a sign of power in danger, a sign of fear. Certainly women are dangerous to men, but not so much so that they need hide their faces. Indeed when you see faces you understand better that we are all the same before God. No veils between us and God, this is what each Muslim has gained by his submission, don’t you agree?”

  “I do,” Bistami said, still shocked by the sense of alreadyness that had overcome him. Even the shapes of the clouds in the west were familiar at this moment.

  “And I don’t believe there is any sanction given in the Quran for the husband to beat his wife, do you? The only possible suggestion of such a thing is Sura 4:34, “As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them, next refuse to share their beds”, how horrible that would be, “last beat them lightly”. Daraba, not darraba, which is really the word “to beat” after all. Daraba is nudge, or even stroke with a feather, as in the poem, or even to provoke while love-making, you know, daraba, daraba. Mohammed made it very clear.”

  Shocked, Bistami managed to nod. He could feel that there was an astonished look on his face.

  She saw it and smiled. “This is what the Quran tells me,” she said. “Sura 2:223 says that “your wives are as your farm to you, so treat her as you would your farm”. The ulema have quoted this as if it meant you could treat women like the dirt under your feet, but these clerics, who stand as unneeded intercessors between us and God, are never farmers, and farmers read the Quran right, and see their wives are their food, their drink, their work, the bed they lie on at night, the very ground under their feet! Yes, of course you treat your wife as the ground under your feet! Give thanks to God for giving us the sacred Quran and all its wisdom.”

  “Thanks to God,” Bistami said.

  She looked at him and laughed out loud. “You think I am forward.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Oh but I am forward, believe me. I am very forward. But don’t you agree with my reading of the holy Quran? Have I not cleaved to its every phrase, as a good wife cleaves to her husband’s every move?”

  “So it seems to me, Sultana. I think the Quran . . . insists everywhere that all are equal before God. And thus, men and women. There are hierarchies in all things, but each member of the hierarchy has equal status before God, and this is the only status that really matters. So the high and the low in station here on Earth must have consideration for each other, as fellow members of the faith. Brothers and sisters in belief, no matter caliph or slave. And thus all the Quranic rules concerning treatment of others. Constraints, even of an emperor over his lowest slave, or the enemy he has captured.”

  “The Christians’ holy book had very few rules,” she said obliquely, following her own train of thought.

  “I didn’t know that. You have read it?”

  “An emperor over his slave, you said. There are rules even for that. But still, no one would choose to be a slave rather than an emperor. And the ulema have twisted the Quran with all their hadith, always twisting it towards those in power, until the message Mohammed laid out so clearly, straight from God, has been reversed, and good Muslim women are made like slaves again, or worse. Not cattle quite, but not like men, either. Wife to husband portrayed as slave to emperor, rather than feminine to masculine, power to power, equal to equal.”

  By now her cheeks were flushed, he could see their colour even in the dusk’s poor light. Her eyes were so pale they seemed like little pools of the twilit sky. When servants brought out torches her blush was enhanced, and now there was a glitter in her pale eyes, the torchfire dancing in those windows to her soul. There was a lot of anger in there, hot anger, but Bistami had never seen such beauty. He stared at her, trying to fix the moment in his memory, thinking, You will never forget this, never forget this!

  After the silence had gone on a while, Bistami realized that if he did not say something, the conversation might come to an end.

  “The sufis,” he said, “I speak often of the direct approach to God. It is a matter of illumination; I have . . . I have experienced it myself, in a time of extremity. To the senses it is like being filled with light; for the soul it is the state of baraka, divine grace. And this is available to all equally.”
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  “But do the sufis mean women when they say ‘all’?”

  He thought it over. Sufis were men, it was true. They formed brotherhoods, they travelled alone and stayed in ribat or zawiya, the lodges where there were no women, nor women’s quarters; if they were married they were sufis, and their wives were wives of sufis.

  “It depends where you are,” he temporized, “and which sufi teacher you follow.”

  She looked at him with a small smile, and he realized he had made a move without knowing he had done it, in this game to stay near her.

  “But the sufi teacher could not be a woman,” she said.

  “Well, no. They sometimes lead the prayers.”

  “And a woman could never lead prayers.”

  “Well,” Bistami said, shocked. “I have never heard of such a thing happening.”

  “Just as a man has never given birth.”

  “Exactly.” Feeling relieved.

  “But men cannot give birth,” she pointed out. “While women could very easily lead prayers. Within the harem I lead them every day.”

  Bistami didn’t know what to say. He was still surprised at the idea.

  “And mothers always instruct their children what to pray.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “The Arabs before Mohammed worshipped goddesses, you know.”

  “Idols.”

  “But the idea was there. Women are powers in the realm of the soul.”

  “Yes.”

  “And as above, so below. This is true in everything.”

  And she stepped towards him, suddenly, and put her hand to his bare arm.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “We need scholars of the Quran to come north with us, to help us to clear the Quran of these webs obscuring it, and to teach us about illumination. Will you come with us? Will you do that?”

  “Yes.”

  SEVEN

  The Caravan of Fools

  Sultan Mawji Darya was almost as handsome and gracious as his wife, and just as interested in talking about his ideas, which often returned to the topic of ‘the convivencia’. Ibn Ezra informed Bistami that this was the current enthusiasm among some of the young nobles of al-Andalus: to re-create the golden age of the Umayyad caliphate of the sixth century, when Muslim rulers had allowed the Christians and Jews among them to flourish, and all together had created the beautiful civilization that had been al-Andalus before the inquisition and the plague.

  As the caravan in its ragged glory rode out of Malaga, Ibn Ezra told Bistami more about this period, which Khaldun had treated only very briefly, and the scholars of Mecca and Cairo not at all. The Andalusi Jews in particular had flourished, translating a great many ancient Greek texts into Arabic, with commentaries of their own, and also making original investigations in medicine and astronomy. Andalusi Muslim scholars had then used what they learned of Greek logic, chiefly Aristotle, to defend all the tenets of Islam with the full force of reason, Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd being the two most important of these. Ibn Ezra was full of praise for the work of these men. “I hope to extend it in my own small way, God willing, with a particular application to nature and to the ruins of the past.”

  They fell back into the rhythms of caravan, known to them all. Dawn: stoke the campfires, brew the coffee, feed the camels. Pack and load, get the camels moving. Their column stretched out more than a league, with various groups falling behind, catching up, stopping, starting; mostly moving slowly along. Afternoon: into camp or caravanserai, though as they went farther north they seldom found anything but deserted ruins, and even the road was nearly gone, overgrown by fully mature trees, as thick-trunked as barrels.

  The beautiful land they crossed was stitched by mountain ridges, between which stood high, broad plateaux. Crossing them, Bistami felt they had travelled up into a higher space, where sunsets threw long shadows over a vast, dark, windy world. Once when a last shard of sunset light shot under dark lowering clouds, Bistami heard from somewhere in their camp a musician playing a Turkish oboe, carving in the air a long plaintive melody that wound on and on, the song of the dusky plateau’s own voice or soul, it seemed. The Sultana stood at the edge of camp, listening with him, her fine head turned like a hawk’s as she watched the sun descend. It dropped at the very speed of time itself. There was no need to speak in this singing world, so huge, so knotted; no human mind could ever comprehend it, even the music only touched the hem of it, and even that strand they failed to understand — they only felt it. The universal whole was beyond them.

  And yet; and yet; sometimes, as at this moment, at dusk, in the wind, we catch, with a sixth sense we don’t know we have, glimpses of that larger world — vast shapes of cosmic significance, a sense of everything holy to dimensions beyond sense or thought or even feeling — this visible world of ours, lit from within, stuffed vibrant with reality.

  The Sultana stirred. The stars were shining in the indigo sky. She went to one of the fires. She had chosen him as their qadi, Bistami realized, to give herself more room for her own ideas. A community like theirs needed a sufi teacher rather than a mere scholar.

  Well, it would become clearer as it happened. Meanwhile, the Sultana; the sound of the oboe; this vast plateau. These things only happen once. The force of this sensation struck him just as strongly as the feel of alreadyness had in the ribat garden.

  • • •

  Just as the Andalusi plateau stood high under the sun, its rivers were likewise deep in ravines, like the wadi of the Maghrib, but always running. The rivers were also long, and crossing them was no easy matter. The town of Saragossa had grown in the past because of its great stone bridge, which spanned one of the biggest of these rivers, called the Ebro. Now the town was still substantially abandoned, with only some road merchants and vendors and shepherds clustered around the bridge, in stone buildings that looked as if they had been built by the bridge itself, in its sleep. The rest of the town was gone, overgrown by pine trees and shrubbery.

  But the bridge remained. It was made of dressed stones, big squarish blocks worn so smooth they appeared bevelled, though they eventually met in lines that would not admit a coin or even a fingernail. The foundations on each bank were squat massive stone towers, resting on bedrock, Ibn Ezra said. He studied them with great interest as the backed-up caravan crossed it and set camp on the other side. Bistami looked at his drawing of it. “Beautiful, isn’t it? Like an equation. Seven semi-circular arches, with a big one in the middle, over the deep part of the stream. Every Roman bridge I’ve seen is very nicely fitted to the site. Almost always they use semi-circular arches, which make for strength, although they don’t cover much distance, so they needed a lot of them. And always ashlar, that’s the squared stones. So they sit squarely on each other, and nothing ever moves them. There’s nothing tricky about it. We could do it ourselves, if we took the time and trouble. The only real problem is protecting the foundations from floods. I’ve seen some done really well, with iron-tipped piles driven into the river bottom. But if anything’s going to go, it’s the foundations. When they tried to do those quicker, with a big weight of rock, they dammed the water, and increased its force against what they put in.”

  “Where I come from bridges are washed out all the time,” Bistami said. “People just build another one.”

  “Yes, but this is so much more elegant. I wonder if they put any of this down on paper. I haven’t seen any books of theirs. The libraries left behind here are terrible, all account books, with the occasional bit of pornography. If there was ever anything more it’s been burned to start fires. Anyway, the stones tell the story. See, the stones were cut so well there was no need for mortar. The iron pegs you see sticking out were probably used to anchor scaffolding.”

  “The Mughals build well in Sind,” Bistami said, thinking of the perfect joints in Chishti’s tomb. “But mostly the temples and forts. The bridges are usually bamboo, set in piles of stone.”

  Ibn nodded. “You see a lot of that. But maybe th
is river doesn’t flood as much. It seems like dry country.”

  In the evenings Ibn Ezra showed them a little model of the hoists the Romans must have used to move the great stones: stick tripods, string ropes. The Sultan and Sultana were his principal audience, but many others watched too, while others wandered in and out of the torchlight. These people asked Ibn Ezra questions, they made comments; they stayed around when the Sultan’s cavalry head, Sharif Jalil, came into the circle with two of his horsemen holding between them a third, who had been accused of theft, apparently not for the first time. As the Sultan discussed his case with Sharif, Bistami gathered that the accused man had an unsavoury reputation, for reasons known to them but left unsaid — an interest in boys perhaps. Apprehension very like dread filled Bistami, recalling scenes from Fatepur Sikri; strict sharia called for thieves’ hands to be cut off, and sodomy, the infamous vice of the Christian crusaders, was punishable by death.

  But Mawji Darya merely strode up to the man and yanked him down by the ear, as if chastising a child. “You want for nothing with us. You joined us in Malaga, and need only work honestly to be part of our city.”

  The Sultana nodded at this.

  “If we wanted to, we would have the right to punish you in ways you would not like at all. Go talk to our handless penitents if you doubt me! Or we could simply leave you behind, and see how you fare with the locals. The Zott don’t like anyone but themselves doing things like this. They would dispose of you quickly. I tell you now, this will happen if Sharif brings you before me again. You will be cast out of your family. Believe me” — glancing significantly towards his wife — “you would regret that.”

  The man blubbered something submissive (he was drunk, Bistami saw) and was hauled away. The Sultan told Ibn Ezra to continue his exposition on Roman bridges.

  Later Bistami joined the Sultana in the big royal tent, and remarked on the general openness of their court.

  “No veils,” Katima said sharply. “Not the izar nor the hijab, the veil that kept the caliph from the people. The hijab was the first step on the road to the despotism of the caliph. Mohammed was never like that, never. He made the first mosque an assembly of friends. Everyone had access to him, and everyone spoke their mind. It could have stayed like that, and the mosque become the place of . . . of a different way. With both women and men speaking. This was what Mohammed began, and who are we to change it? Why follow the ways of those who build barriers, who turned into despots? Mohammed wanted group feeling to lead, and the person in charge to be no more than a hakam, an arbiter. This was the title he loved the most and was most proud of, did you know that?”