Her soldiers nodded as they listened. That’s the way it happens, their silent faces said. The good is always crushed. Those who see the farthest have their eyes put out. Budur, seeing the way they hung on every word, like starving dogs watching people cat in sidewalk cafes, brought in more of her borrowed books to read to them. Ferdowsi’s “The Book of Kings”, the huge epic poem describing Iran before Islam, was very popular. So was the sufi lyric poet Hafiz, and of course Rumi and Khayyarn. Budur herself liked to read from her heavily annotated copy of Ibn Khaldun’s “Muqaddimah”.
“There is so much in Khaldun,” she said to her listeners. “Everything I learn at the institute I find already here in Khaldun. One of my instructors is fond of a theory that has the world being a matter of three or four major civilizations, each a core state, surrounded by peripheral states. Listen here to Khaldun, in the section entitled “Each dynasty has a certain amount of provinces and lands, and no more.”
She read:
When the dynastic groups have spread over the border regions, their numbers are necessarily exhausted. This, then, is the time when the territory of the dynasty has reached its farthest extension, where the border regions form a belt around the centre of the realm. If the dynasty then undertakes to expand beyond its holdings, its widening territory remains without military protection, and is laid open to any chance attack by enemy or neighbour. This has a detrimental result for the dynasty.
Budur looked up. “A very succinct description of core-periphery theory. Khaldun also addresses the lack of an Islamic core state that the others can rally around.”
Her audience nodded; they knew about that; the absence of alliance coordination at the various fronts of the war had been a famous problem, with sometimes terrible results.
“Khaldun also addresses a systemic problem in Islamic economy, in its origins among Bedouin practice. He says of them, ‘Places that succumb to the Bedouins are quickly ruined. The reason for this is that the Bedouins are a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it. Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization.’ He goes on to say, ‘It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess. Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls.’ And after that he gives us the labour theory of value, saying ‘Now, labour is the real basis of profit. When labour is not appreciated and is done for nothing, the hope for profit vanishes, and no productive work is done. The sedentary population disperses, and civilization decays.’ Really quite amazing, how much Khaldun saw, and this back in a time when the people living here in Nsara were dying of their plague, and the rest of the world not even, close to thinking historically.”
The time for reading ended. Her audience settled back into their chairs and beds, hunkering down for the long empty watches of the afternoon.
Budur left with her usual combination of guilt, relief and joy, and on this day went directly to Kirana’s class.
“How can we ever progress out of our origins,” she asked their teacher plaintively, “when our faith orders us not to leave them?”
Kirana replied, “Our faith said no such thing. This is just something the fundamentalists say, to keep their hold on power.”
Budur felt confused. “But what about the parts of the Quran that tell us Mohammed is the last prophet, and the rules in the Quran should stand for ever?”
Kirana shook her head impatiently. “This is another case of taking an exception for the general rule, a very common fundamentalist tactic. In fact there are some truths in the Quran that Mohammed declared eternal — such existential realities as the fundamental equality of every person how could that ever change? But the more worldly concerns of the Quran, involved with the building of an Arabic state, changed with circumstances, even within the Quran itself, as in its variable statements against alcohol. Thus the principle of naskh, in which later Quranic instructions supersede earlier ones. And in Mohammed’s last statements, he made it clear that he wanted us to respond to changing situations, and to make Islam better — to come up with moral solutions that conform to the basic framework, but respond to new facts.”
Naser asked, “I wonder if one of Mohammed’s seven scribes could have inserted into the Quran ideas of his own?”
Again Kirana shook her head. “Recall the way the Quran was assembled. The mushaf, the final physical document, was the result of Osman bringing together all the surviving witnesses to Mohammed’s dictation, his scribes, wives and companions, who together agreed upon a single correct version of the holy book. No individual interpolations could have survived that process. No, the Quran is a single voice, Mohammed’s voice, Allah’s voice. And it is a message of great freedom and justice on this Earth! It is the hadith that contain the false messages, the reimposition of hierarchy and patriarchy, the exceptional cases twisted to general rules. It’s the hadith that abandon the major jihad, the fight against one’s own temptations, for the minor jihad, the defence of Islam against attack. No — in so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the Earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy — all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain. But those moments are always brief, as the sufis themselves admit. So we should let the occasional chalice break, if needs be, to get at the truth of the water inside it.”
Encouraged, Budur said, “So how do we be modern Muslims?”
“We don’t,” the oldest woman rasped, never pausing in her knitting. “It’s an ancient desert cult that has brought ruin to countless generations, including mine and yours, I’m afraid. It’s time to admit that and move on.”
“On to what, though?”
“To whatever may come!” the old one cried. “To your sciences — to reality itself! Why worry about any of these ancient beliefs! They are all a matter of the strong over the weak, of men over women. But it’s women who bear the children and raise them and plant the crops and harvest them and cook the meals and make the homes and care for the elderly! It’s women who make the world! Men fight wars, and lord it over the rest with their laws and religions and guns. Thugs and gangsters, that’s history! I don’t see why we should try to accommodate any of it at all!”
There was silence in the class, and the old woman resumed her knitting as if she were stabbing every king and cleric who ever lived. They could suddenly hear the rain pouring down outside, students’ voices in a courtyard, the old woman’s knitting needles murderously clicking.
“But if we take that route,” Naser said, “then the Chinese have truly won.”
More drumming silence.
The old woman finally said, “They won for a reason. They have no God and they worship their ancestors and their descendants. Their humanism has allowed them science, progress — everything we have been denied.”
Even deeper silence, so that they could hear the foghorn out on the point, bellowing in the rain.
Naser said, “You speak only of their upper classes. And their women had their feet bound into little nubbins, to cripple them, like clipping the wings of birds. That too is Chinese. They are hard bastards, you take my word for it. I saw in the war. I do not want to tell you what I saw, but I know, believe me. They have no sense of godliness, and so no rules of conduct; nothing to tell them not to be cruel, and so they are cruel. Horribly cruel. They don’t think the people outside China are really human. Only the Han are human. The rest, we are hui hui, like dogs. Arrogant, cruel beyond telling — it does not seem a good thing to me that we should imitate their ways, that they should win the war so completely as that.”
“But we were just as bad,” Kirana said.
“Not when we behaved as true Muslims. What would be a good project for a history class, I think, would be to focus on what has been best in Islam, enduring through history, and see if that can guide us now. Every sura of the Quran reminds us by its opening words — Bismallah, in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Compassion, mercy how do we express that? These are ideas that the Chinese do not have. The Buddhists tried to introduce them there, and they were treated like beggars and thieves. But they are crucial ideas, and they are central to Islam. Ours is a vision of all people as one family, in the rule of compassion and mercy. This is what drove Mohammed, driven by Allah or by his own sense of justice, the Allah inside us. This is Islam to me! That’s what I fought for in the war. These are the qualities we have to offer the world that the Chinese do not have. Love, to put it simply. Love.”
“But if we don’t live by these things —”
“No!” Naser said. “Don’t beat us with that stick. I don’t see any people on Earth living by their best beliefs any more. This must be what Mohammed saw when he looked around him. Savagery everywhere, men like beasts. So every sura started with a call to compassion.”
“You sound like a Buddhist,” someone said.
The old soldier was willing to admit this. “Compassion, isn’t that their guiding principle of action? I like what the Buddhists do in this world. They are having a good effect on us. They had a good effect on the Japanese, and the Hodenosaunee. I’ve read books that say all our progress in science comes from the Japanese diaspora, as the latest and strongest of the Buddhist diasporas. They took up the ideas from the ancient Greeks and the Samarqandis.”
Kirana said, “We must find the most Buddhist parts of Islam, perhaps. Cultivate those.”
“I say abandon all the past!” Click click click!
Naser shook his head. “Then there could arise a new, scientific savagery. As during the war. We have to retain the values that seem good, that foster compassion. We have to use the best of the old to make a new way, better than before.”
“That seems good policy to me,” Kirana said. “And it’s what Mohammed told us to do, after all.”
EIGHT
Thus the bitter scepticism of the old woman, the stubborn hope of the old soldier, the insistent inquiry of Kirana, an inquiry which never got to the answers she wanted, but forged on through idea after idea, testing them against her sense of things, and against thirty years of insatiable reading, and the seedy life behind the docks of Nsara. Budur, wrapping herself in her oilcloth raincoat and hunching through the drizzle home to the zawiyya, felt the invisibilities welling up all around her — the hot quick disapproval of maimed young men who passed on the street the clouds lowering overhead — the secret worlds enfolded inside everything that Aunt Idelba was working on at the lab. Her job sweeping up and restocking the empty place at night was . . . suggestive. Greater things lay in the final distillation of all this work, in the formulas scrawled on the blackboards. There were years of mathematical work behind the experiments of the physicists, centuries of work now being realized in material explorations that might bring new worlds. Budur did not feel she could ever learn the maths involved, but the labs had to run right for anything to progress, and she began to get involved in ordering supplies, keeping the kitchen and dining halls running, paying the bills (the qi bill was huge).
Meanwhile the talk between the scientists went on, endless as the chatter in the cafes Idelba and her nephew Piali spent long sessions at the blackboards running over their ideas and proposing solutions to their mysterious mysteries, absorbed, pleased, also often worried, an edge in Idelba’s voice, as if the equations were somehow revealing news she did not like or could not quite believe. Again she spent lots of time on the telephone, this time the one in its little closet in the zawiyya, and she was often gone without saying where she had been. Budur couldn’t tell if all these matters were connected or not. There was a lot about Idelba’s life that she didn’t know. Men that she talked to outside the zawiyya, packages, calls . . . it appeared from the vertical lines etched between her eyebrows that she had her hands full, that it was a complicated existence somehow.
“Whatever is the problem with this study you are doing with Piali and the others?” Budur asked her one night as Idelba very thoroughly cleaned out her desk. They were the last ones there, and Budur felt a solid satisfaction at that; that here in Nsara they were trusted with matters; it was this that made her bold enough to interrogate her aunt.
Idelba stopped her cleaning to look at her. “We have some reason for worry, or so it seems. You must not talk to anyone about this. But — well — as I you told before, the world is made of atoms, tiny things with heartknots, and around them lightning motes travelling in concentric shells. All this at so small a scale it’s hard to imagine. Each speck of dust you sweep up is made of millions of them. There are billions of them in the tips of your fingers.” She wiggled her grimy hands in the air. “And yet each atom stores a lot of energy. Truly it is like trapped lightning, this qi energy, you have to imagine that kind of blazing power. Many trillion qi in every little thing.” She gestured at the big circular chart painted on one wall, their table of the elementals, Arabic letters and numerals encrusted with many extra dots. “Inside the heartknot there is a force holding all that energy together, as I told you, a force very strong at very close distances, binding the lightning power to the heart so tightly it can never be released. Which is good, because the amounts of energy contained are really very high. We pulse with it.”
“That’s how it feels,” Budur said.
“Indeed. But look, it’s many times beyond what we can feel. The formula proposed, as I told you, is energy equals the mass times the speed of light squared, and light is very fast indeed. So that with only a little matter, if any of its energy were released into the world . . . “ She shook her head. “Of course the strong force means that would never happen. But we continue to investigate this element alactin, that the Travancori physicists call Hand of Tara. I suspect its heartknot is unstable, and Piali is beginning to agree with me. Clearly it is very full of the jinni, both yin and yang, in such a fashion that to me it is acting like a droplet of water held together by surface tension, but so big that the surface tension is just barely holding it, and it stretches out like a water drop in the air, deforming this way and that, but held together, just, except for sometimes, when it stretches too far for surface tension, the strong force in this case, and then the natural repulsion between the jinni makes a heartknot split in two, becoming atoms of lead, but releasing some of its bound power as well, in the form of rays of invisible energy. That’s what we are seeing on the photographic plates you help with. It’s quite a bit of energy, and that’s just one heartknot breaking. What we have been wondering — what we have been forced to consider, given the nature of the phenomenon — is, if we gathered enough of these atoms together, and broke even one heartknot apart, would the released qi break a lot more of them at the same time, more and more again all at the speed of light, in a space this big,” holding her hands apart. “If that might not set off a short chain reaction,” she said.
“Meaning . . .”
“Meaning a very big explosion!”
For a long time Idelba stared off into the space of pure mathematics, it seemed.
“Don’t tell anyone about this,” she said again.
“I won’t.”
“No one.”
“All right.”
Invisible worlds, full of energy and power: sub-atomic harems, each pulsing on the edge of a great explosion. Budur sighed as this image came to her. There was no escaping the latent violence at the heart of things. Even the stones were mortal.
NINE
Budur got up in the mornings at the zawiyya, helped in the kitchen and office — indeed, there was much that was the same about her work in the zawiyya and at the lab, and though the work felt quite different in each setting, it still had a basic tedium to it; leaving her cla
sses and her walks through the great city as the place to work on her dreams and ideas.
She walked along the harbour and the river, no longer expecting anyone from Turi to show up and take her back to her father’s house. Much of the vast city remained unknown to her, but she had her routes through certain districts, and sometimes rode a tram out to its end just to see what kind of neighbourhoods it went through. The ocean and river districts were her particular study, which of course gave her a lot to work on. Wan sunlight splintered through clouds galloping on the ocean onshore wind; she sat at cafes behind the docks, or across the sea road from the strands, reading and writing, and looked up to see whitecaps dashing themselves at the foot of the great lighthouse at the end of the jetty, or up the rocky coast to the north. Pale washed blues in the sky behind the tumbling clouds, the bruised blues of the ocean, the whites of cloud and broken wave; she loved the looks of these things, loved them with all her heart. Here she was free to be her whole self. It was worth all the rain to have the air washed so clean.
In one rather shabby and storm-beaten beach district at the end of tram line number six, there was a little Buddhist temple, and one day outside it Budur saw the Hodenosaunee mother and daughter from Kirana’s class. They saw her and came over. “Hello,” the mother said. “You have come to visit us!”
“Actually I was just wandering around town,” Budur said, surprised. “I like this neighbourhood.”
“I see.” Said politely, as if she didn’t believe her. “I am sorry to have presumed, but we are acquainted with your aunt Idelba, and so I thought you may have been coming here on her behalf. But you don’t — well — but would you like to come in?”
The Years of Rice and Salt Page 59