'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 plateaux 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 semicircular 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 1 come from bridges are washed out all the time,' Bistami said. 'People just build another one.'
'Yes, but this is so much more elegant. 1 wonder if they put any of this down on paper. 1 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 this 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. 1 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?'
'Yes.'
'But when he was gone to Heaven, Muawiya established the caliphate, and put guards in the mosques to protect himself, and it has been tyranny ever since. Islam changed from submission to subjugation, and women were banned from the mosques and from their rightful place. It's a travesty of Islam!'
She was red‑cheeked, vibrant with suppressed emotion. Bistami had never seen such fervour and beauty together in one face, and he could hardly think; or, he was full of thought on several levels at once, so that focus on any one stream of ideas left him fluttering in all the others, restless and inclined to stop following that tributary; inclined merely to let all rivers of thought roll at once.
'Yes,' he said.
She stalked away towards the next fire, squatted down all at once in a fluff of skirts, in the group of handless and one‑handed men. They greeted her cheerfully and offered her one of their cups, and she drank deeply, then put it down and said, 'Come on then, it's time, you're looking ratty again.' They pulled out a stool, she sat on it, and one of them knelt before her, his broad back to her. She took the offered comb and a vial of oil, and began to work the comb through the man's long tangled hair. The motley crew of their ship of fools settled in around her contentedly.
North of the Ebro the caravan stopped growing. There were fewer towns on the old road to the north, and they were smaller, composed of recent Maghribi settlers, Berbers who had sailed straight across from Algiers and even Tunis. They were growing barley and cucumbers, and pasturing sheep and goats in the long fertile valleys with their rocky ridgelines,
not far inland from the Mediterranean. Catalonia, this had been called, very fine land, heavily forested on the hills. They had left behind the taifa kingdoms to the south, and the people here were content; they felt no need to follow a dispossessed sufi sultan and his motley caravan, over the Pyrenees and into wild Firanja. And in any case, as Ibn Ezra pointed out, the caravan did not boast food enough to feed many more dependants, nor the gold or money to buy more food than they already were from the villages they passed.
So they continued on the old road, and at the head of a long narrowing valley they found themselves on a broad, dry, rocky plateau, leading up to the forested flanks of a range of mountains, formed of rock darker than the rock of the Himalaya. The old road wound up the flattest part of the tilted plateau, by the side of a gravelly streambed almost devoid of water. Further along it followed a cut in the hills, just above the bed of this small stream, wandering up into mountains that grew rockier and taller. Now when they camped at night they met no one at all, but bedded down in tents or under the stars, sleeping to the sound of the wind in the trees, and the clattering brooks, and the shifting horses against their harness lines. Eventually the road wound up among rocks, a flat way leading through a rockbound pass, then across a mountain meadow among the peaks, then up through another tight pass, flanked by granite battlements; and then down at last. Compared to the Khyber Pass it was not much of a struggle, Bistami thought, but many in the caravan were shivering and afraid.
On the other side of the pass, rockslides had buried the old road repeatedly, and each time the road became a mere foot trail, switchbacking at sharp angles across the rockslides. These were hard going, and the Sultana often got off her horse and walked, leading her women with no tolerance for ineptitude or complaint. Indeed she had a sharp tongue when she was annoyed, sharp and scornful.
Ibn Ezra inspected the roads every evening when they stopped, and the rockslides too when they passed them, making drawings of any exposed roadbeds, coping stones or drainage ditches. 'It's classic Roman,' he said one evening by the fire as they ate roast mutton. 'They knitted all the land around the Mediterranean with these roads. 1 wonder if this was their main route over the Pyrenees. 1 don't suppose so, it's so far to the west. It will lead us to the western ocean rather than the
Mediterranean. But perhaps it's the easiest pass. it's hard to believe this is not the main road, it's so big.'
'Perhaps they're all that way,' said the Sultana.
'Possibly. They may have used things like these carts the people have found, so they needed their roads to be wider than ours. Camels of course need no road at all. Or this may be their main road after all. It may be the road Hannibal used on his way to attack Rome, with his army of Carthaginians and their elephants! 1 have seen those ruins, north of Tunis. It was a very great city. But Hannibal lost and Carthage lost, and the Romans pulled their city down and sowed salt in the fields, and the Maghrib dried up. No more Carthage.'
'So elephants may have walked this road,' the Sultana said. The Sultan looked down at the track, shaking his head in wonder. These were the kinds of things the two of them liked to know.
Coming down out of the mountains, they found themselves in a colder land. The midday sun cleared the peaks of the Pyrenees, but only just. The land was flat and grey, and often swathed in ground mist. The ocean lay to the west, grey and cold and wild with high surf.
The caravan came to a river that emptied into this western sea, flanked by the ruins of an ancient city. On the outskirts of the ruins stood some modest new buildings, fishermen's shacks they seemed, on each side of a newly built wooden bridge.
'Look how much less skilful we are than the Romans,' Ibn Ezra said, but hurried over to look at the new work anyway.
He came back. 'I believe this was a city called Bayonne. There's an inscription on the remaining bridge tower over there. The maps indicate there was a bigger city to the north, called Bordeaux. Water's Edge.'
The Sultan shook his head. 'We've come far enough. This will do. Over the mountains, but yet only a moderate journey back to al‑Andalus. That's just what 1 want. We'll settle here.'
Sultana Katima nodded, and the caravan began the long process of settling in.
Eight. Baraka
In general, they built upstream from the ruins of the ancient town, scavenging stone and beams until very little of the old buildings remained, except for the church, a big stone barn of a structure, stripped of all idols and images. It was not a beautiful structure compared to the mosques of the civilized world, being a rude squat rectangular thing, but it was big, and situated on a prominence overlooking a turn in the river. So after discussion among all the members of the caravan, they decided to make it their grand or Friday mosque.
Modifications began immediately. This project became Bistami's responsibility, and he spent a lot of time with Ibn Ezra, describing what he remembered of the Chishti shrine and the other great buildings of Akbar's empire, poring over Ibn Ezra's drawings to see what might be done to make the old church more mosque‑like.
They settled on a plan to tear the roof off the old structure, which in any case was showing the sky in many places, and to keep the walls as the interior buttressing of a circular or rather egg‑shaped mosque, with a dome. The Sultana wanted the prayer courtyard to open onto a larger city square, to indicate the all‑embracing quality of their version of Islam, and Bistami did what he could to oblige her, despite signs that it would rain often in this region, and snow perhaps in the winter. It wasn't important; the place of worship would continue out from the grand mosque into a plaza and then the city at large, and by extension, the whole world.
Ibn Ezra happily designed scaffolding, hods, carts, braces, buttressing,
cements and so on, and he determined by the stars and such maps as they had, the direction of Mecca, which would be indicated not only by the usual signs, but also by the orientation of the mosque itself. The rest of the town moved in towards the grand mosque, all the old ruins removed and used for new construction as people settled closer and closer. The scattering of Armenians and Zott who had been living in the ruins before their arrival either joined the community, or moved off to the north.
'We should save room near the mosque for a madressa,' Ibn Ezra said, 'before the town fills this whole district.'
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 17