by Rafik Schami
When Ibn Muqla was still at the height of his power, he had a palace built for himself in Baghdad. Legends accumulated around it. The words carved into the great stone blocks on the interior of the garden wall were a saying of his own: ‘What I create will outlast time.’
The palace had a huge garden that Ibn Muqla, who loved the animal kingdom, had converted into a unique kind of zoo where all the animals could move about freely in separate enclosures. To give the birds a sense of freedom, he had his zoo covered with a silken net stretched high in the air above the garden. A large team of keepers and veterinarians, under the direction of a Persian scientist called Muhammad Nureddin, was responsible for looking after the animals.
Ibn Muqla hoped to understand creation through study of the animal kingdom, and his staff began experiments in interbreeding. These animal experiments aroused interest but also opposition and contempt in the caliph’s palace. Ordinary people remained unaware of all these discussions and experiments, hidden as they were behind thick palace walls.
It was true that Ibn Muqla’s employees soon achieved some small degree of success with the interbreeding of birds, dogs and cats, sheep and goats, donkeys and horses, but many of the experiments led to the birth of creatures with deformities.
Progress in natural science encouraged Ibn Muqla to take another step, one that could have brought him worldwide renown. The twentieth Abbasid Caliph, al-Radi Billah, had a great liking for him. Ibn Muqla saw him as the man to stand by him in his attempts to reform the written language. The caliph was twenty-four years old, an open-minded man who wrote poetry himself and loved wine and women. He banished conservative scholars from Baghdad, his capital, and surrounded himself with liberal theologians, but like all the later caliphs he had less and less say in what went on at his court. Palace bureaucrats, princes, high officers of state, and the caliph’s wives all engaged in intrigues and conspiracies, to ensure that no reformer could stay near the caliph too long.
Ibn Muqla’s reputation, knowledge and wealth aroused much envy and hostility. At this time he was in his late forties, and he saw that the caliphate was rotten through and through. He feared that he would not be able to put his revolutionary plans into practice. Baghdad had become a place of unrest, revolution, and plotting. Ibn Muqla himself had a proud nature and a hot temper. He often reacted irritably, impatiently, and brusquely to the court officials, making himself unpopular among those close to the caliph.
Yet in spite of all the intrigues and conspiracies against him, he had become vizier to young Caliph al-Radi. Ibn Muqla felt confirmed in his belief in his own genius, and that made him arrogant.
Loyal friends, rightly anxious on his behalf, advised him to leave the palace and bask in his fame as a brilliant calligrapher, but Ibn Muqla had his own ambitious plans for the Arabic alphabet, and he needed the caliph’s support for them against the power of the mosques. However, he was mistaken in his assessment of the caliph, and he paid a high price for that.
Ibn Muqla had studied the Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, Turkish, and Greek languages, as well as the changes undergone by Arabic script from its first beginnings to his own day. Careful studies enabled him to invent a new Arabic alphabet that, with only twenty-five letters, could express all the languages known at that time. With that end in view, certain ‘dead’ letters must disappear and several new ones be introduced. In case resistance to his ideas was too great, he planned to retain the characters of the old alphabet and add four new ones, P, O, W and E, with which Persian, Japanese, Chinese and Latin words, and many languages of Africa and Asia, could have been reproduced better.
He knew that the mere idea of making any changes to Arabic script had been considered a mortal sin under all the caliphs. They had kept as many as four thousand women and eunuchs in their palaces to minister to their pleasure, they quite often liked wine better than theology, but they were unyielding when it came to matters of religion. They had famous philosophers and poets lashed or barbarically executed for suggesting the least reform to the structure of government or religion, or expressing the faintest doubt of the Quran.
The caliphs did not scruple to consider themselves the ‘shadow of God on earth,’ and their caliphate the perfect expression of divine rule. So they, and even more so their administrators, were implacable if anyone wanted to introduce any change whatsoever.
With his revolutionary reforms of Arabic script, Ibn Muqla wanted to make the Arabic characters unambiguous, and he had no idea that in so doing he was supporting the ruling Sunnis in their struggle with the Shiites. Extreme Shiite groups such as the Ismailites had always regarded the Quran as a book written on several levels and capable of various interpretations. Certain extremists went so far as to claim that what the common people understood of the Quran was merely al saher, the surface, the husk, which concealed a more important and complex kernel, batin. They were therefore called the Batinites. According to their doctrine, every word in the Quran had a double meaning. The Sunni doctrine was diametrically opposite, and said there were no double meanings in the language of God.
The caliph in Baghdad, his advisers, court philosophers, and theologians were Sunnis. They disguised their campaign against the Shiites as the struggle of a devout caliph, God’s chosen ruler, against apostates and unbelievers. They were delighted that Ibn Muqla had developed a precise system for the dimensions of written letters and a simple, beautiful and flexible script, Naskhi, which copyists – for naskh means to copy – could now use to write out the Quran fast, clearly, and without flourishes. To this day it is the script most often used for printing books.
The words of the Quran were now clearly legible, and Ibn Muqla’s scripts were the best weapon in the Sunni armoury against Shiite opposition. The caliph and his theologians, however, did not realize that Ibn Muqla wanted to introduce yet more radical reforms to Arabic script.
Caliph al-Radi loved Ibn Muqla, and praised him publicly, but when the calligrapher confided a detail of the secret of his new alphabet to him, the caliph was shocked. He warned Ibn Muqla that his enemies were moving against him, but Ibn Muqla interpreted this warning as a hint from an ally, stuck to his plan, and began to form groups of like-minded people. Some scholars and well-known translators shared his views of the necessity for radical reform of the Arabic language and its script, but they suspected it would be dangerous to support the idea, because conservatives would see it as an attack on the Quran. So the majority of reformers held back. However, Ibn Muqla scorned the danger, for he felt sure of the sympathies of Caliph al-Radi.
Ibn Muqla’s enemies, learning of his plans, told the caliph about them, presenting them in connection with his animal experiments, the only aim of which, as they saw it, was to mock God by making Ibn Muqla himself figure as a creator. And now this man also wanted to change the holy language of the Quran! The young caliph told Ibn Muqla to abandon his project.
But Ibn Muqla, who was very devout at heart but not fanatical, assured the caliph that he would sooner die than doubt a word of the holy book. In fact, he said, the simplification of Arabic script would give the language and the Quran yet wider distribution.
The two friends parted, each in the erroneous and dangerous belief that he had convinced the other.
The caliph wanted to protect the scholar whom he respected so much from intrigues, and thought that now he had seen the mortal danger threatening him.
Ibn Muqla, on the other hand, considered himself in the right as a reformer, and thought his was the only way to make Arabic script worthy of an international empire.
He wrote several treatises in which he enumerated the inadequacies of the Arabic language and its script, and put forward ideas for their improvement.
At first Caliph al-Radi did not reject reform. But the scholars had threatened to withdraw their support for him and remain true to Islam if he agreed to Ibn Muqla’s ideas. The caliph, who had already seen the murders of his father at the hands of an angry mob and his uncle as the result of a palace conspiracy – he himse
lf had only just escaped an assassination attempt – knew what that meant.
Then those intriguing against Ibn Muqla told the caliph that he had been plotting against him. The angry caliph ordered his arrest, without questioning him personally. He lacked the courage to punish his vizier the great calligrapher himself, and delegated the task to an emir at court whom he thought reliable, never guessing that this man was the leader of the conspiracy against Ibn Muqla. He had Ibn Muqla lashed, but he refused to say where he had hidden his new alphabet after writing it down. In revenge the courtier had Ibn Muqla’s right hand cut off. He seized his property and had his palace, including the zoo, burnt down. It is said that everything was consumed by the flames except for the section of wall that bore the word ‘time.’
What the fire did not destroy was stolen by the hungry people of Baghdad. The conspirators announced publicly that Ibn Muqla had been plotting against the caliph. A palace historian refutes this lie by telling us that he was not executed, as was usual in such cases, but was even treated later by the caliph’s personal physician, and dined with the caliph himself.
Ibn Muqla lamented his mutilation for the rest of his life. ‘My hand was chopped off like a thief ’s, the hand with which I twice copied the Quran.’
He was now fifty years old, and had no intention of giving up. He skilfully bound his reed pen to the stump of his wrist, and in that way he was able to practise calligraphy again, if not as beautifully as before. He founded the first great school for calligraphers, with the aim of passing on his knowledge, forming his most gifted students into a circle of initiates who would understand his reforms, remember them, and pass them on if anything happened to him. His disappointment on finding that his scholarly friends had distanced themselves from him when he was punished left him an embittered man. Now he wanted to implant the secret knowledge of his script in the hearts of young calligraphers, so that it would be preserved after his own death.
But he did not guess that he was taking another step into a trap set by his enemies, who misrepresented his plans for the school as another conspiracy against the caliph.
The caliph was angry because Ibn Muqla would not listen to him, and he ordered his judge to keep him prisoner in a house far from the city, and make sure that he could not dictate his secrets to anyone again. The calligrapher was to live there at the expense of the palace until the end of his days, but he was not to speak to any one except his guard.
One of his archenemies had his tongue cut out, and flung him into a prison on the outskirts of the desert, where he lived in isolation and misery. Protests from the poets and scholars of the time did no good.
Ibn Muqla died in July 940. The greatest poets of his epoch made moving speeches at his graveside. If he had really been conspiring against the caliph or the Quran, as his enemies claimed, no poet would have dared to praise him, let alone show that he mourned him, for the poets and scholars of the time all worked at the caliph’s court and lived by his grace and favour.
‘What I create will outlast time,’ runs the most famous saying of Ibn Muqla’s to have come down to us, and to this day it tells us of the vision of a man who knew that the rules he created for Arabic calligraphy would live as long as the script itself,” Noura ended her reading. She put the sheets of paper together and laid them on the table.
There was silence in the little room. Salman wanted to say so much, but he could not find the words.
“He was never a conspirator,” said Noura softly. Salman nodded, and at that moment they both heard the garden gate creak.
“Someone’s coming,” cried Noura, quickly putting her coat on. “Go and see who it is, and don’t bother about me. If it’s Karam I’ll be gone,” she said, pale in the face and nodding toward the window. She had opened it even before Salman reached the door of his room. As it was on the ground floor, she had only to climb over the window sill.
“Well, my little calligrapher,” said Karam at the front door, “I thought I’d just look in. There aren’t many customers in the café today,” he said, putting a bag of bread on the kitchen table and glancing at Salman. “Why, you look pale! Are you hiding something from your friend Karam?” Without more ado, he opened the door of Salman’s room and stopped in the doorway. Salman expected to hear a cry. His heart was hammering in his chest.
Disappointed, Karam came back into the kitchen. “I thought you might have a visitor. I’ve no objection, but you mustn’t keep secrets from me. So why are you so pale?”
“You startled me. I thought you were an intruder.”
Salman went back into his room, closed the window that Noura had left ajar, sat down at the table and put the stack of paper containing the story of Ibn Muqla into the drawer. Karam was on the telephone, probably to Badri, but it didn’t sound as if the latter felt like coming round to see him.
He searched the room for any traces that might give Noura away, and was deeply grateful to her for having tidied up in the kitchen so well and so quickly, leaving no sign that they had breakfasted together there.
Suddenly, however, he saw the silver comb that Noura wore in her hair on the floor. He picked up the pretty thing and held it to his face.
He could have wept, he felt so sorry to have caused Noura so much trouble and alarm with his invitation. Yet his heart laughed at Karam’s disappointment.
He opened the drawer to leaf through the article about Ibn Muqla again. Then he discovered the last page, a page that Noura had also been going to read him: a poem which a woman of the eleventh century had written about her lover.
Quickly, he stuffed all the sheets of paper back into the drawer.
And there was Karam standing in the doorway again. “You’re very industrious today. Have you had anything at all to eat?” he asked.
Salman shook his head. “I’m not hungry,” he said, and bent over his notebook again. Karam stood behind him, reading aloud from the piece of paper that Salman had in front of him: “Script is in universal equilibrium between the earthly and the heavenly, horizontals and verticals, curves and straight lines, the open and the concealed, the broad and the narrow, joy and grief, the hard and the soft, the sharp and the playful, rise and fall, day and night, Being and Nothing, creator and creation.”
He stopped. “A wonderful saying. Where did you find it?” he asked.
“In a big, fat book where Master Hamid records his secrets,” said Salman. “He locks the book up in a large cupboard with other important things.”
“What kind of secrets?” asked Karam.
“His recipes for invisible inks, two books about secret scripts, the folder with sheets of gold leaf, his expensive knife, his recipes for ordinary inks, and the book where I found those words.”
“And what else is in it, as well as clever sayings?”
“I don’t know. I only managed to glance at it. It’s very thick,” said Salman, tidying his papers to hide his nervousness. Then he put a hand thoughtfully over his mouth, as if he had just remembered something. “Oh yes, there’s something in it about letters that are dead and letters that are alive, but I didn’t understand it. Sometimes there are pages written in a secret script. The letters are Arabic, but the language isn’t, and it isn’t Persian or Turkish either,” he added.
“Letters that are dead? Are you sure?” asked Karam in surprise.
“Yes, but why are you interested in that?”
“Well, it’s always good to know what innocent people are planning. Letters that are dead?” repeated Karam, and there was a devilish glint in his eyes.
But now Karam had to go back to the café, and he finally left Salman alone. Salman went into the kitchen and climbed on a chair to look out at the street through a little window above the shelf of spices. He saw Karam going down the street in the direction of the tram stop.
He made himself tea and gradually calmed down. When he called Noura it was already after four.
“This is Salman,” he said, excitedly. “Is everything all right?”
; “Yes, dear heart. But I lost my silver comb when I jumped out of the window into the garden.”
“No, no, it had fallen under the bed earlier. Shall I keep it as a memento of our first adventure?”
“It’s yours. I bought it years ago with a tip from a rich customer of Dalia the dressmaker. But tell me, what was that sudden visit to check up on you all about?”
“I don’t understand it myself. Was it chance or an ambush – did he want to catch us out of pure curiosity, and if so why?”
“Maybe to blackmail me. Or maybe he’s just a poor, lonely man who…”
“No, no. Karam thinks nothing of women, if you see what I mean,” Salman interrupted her. “I’m sure of that, and it’s exactly what makes his sudden descent on us so odd. He said he was bored in the café.”
They talked for a while longer, developing their theories, and dreaming to themselves, but then Salman thought of something he wanted to tell Noura.
“Pray that my interrogation goes all right,” he asked her. He would have liked to tell her about this in bed, enjoying her consoling kisses, but he had forgotten.
“What interrogation?” asked Noura.
“Someone’s been informing on the boss, telling his fanatical enemies about the forthcoming founding of the School of Calligraphy even before it’s been officially announced. And Radi, the nicest of the journeymen, warned me that he’s heard Master Hamid and his assistant Samad suspect me of being the informer.”
“But you’re a Christian! How could they be stupid enough to think you’d be hand in glove with a set of radical Muslim fanatics? Don’t worry, though. Hamid may be impossible as a husband, but he’s a clever, cautious man. I won’t pray; the whole thing is probably just a bad joke. You wait and see,” she said, before hanging up.
Salman worked for about an hour, but then he felt so restless that he couldn’t concentrate. He put his books and notes away in the drawer, and slipped the silver comb into his trouser pocket. When he opened the door of his room to go out he almost died of shock, for at that very moment Karam was coming through the door again. “Somehow I just don’t feel like sitting in the café today. I thought I’d come back and make us something to eat. You’ve done quite enough work,” he said with a chilly grin.