Mirrors (21 page)

Scheherazade lived her thousand and one nights in a palace in Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River.

Her thousand and one stories were born in that land or had migrated there from Persia, Arabia, India, China, or Turkistan, just as the thousand and one marvels brought by merchant caravans from far-off lands ended up in the city’s market stalls.

Baghdad was the center of the world. All roads, of words and of things, met in that city of plazas and fountains, baths and gardens. The most famous physicians, astronomers, and mathematicians also met in Baghdad, at an academy of sciences known as the House of Wisdom.

Among them was Muhammed al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra, which got its name from the first word of the title of one of his books,
al-jabr
.

VOICE OF WINE

Omar Khayyam wrote treatises on algebra, metaphysics, and astronomy. And he was the author of underground poems that spread by word of mouth throughout Persia and beyond.

Those poems were hymns to wine, sinful elixir condemned by the powers of Islam.

Heaven has not learned of my arrival, the poet said, and my departure will not in the least diminish its beauty and grandeur. The moon, which seeks me out tomorrow, will continue rising even if it no longer finds me. I will sleep underground, with neither woman nor friend. For us ephemeral mortals, the only eternity is the moment, and drinking to the moment is better than weeping for it.

Khayyam preferred the tavern to the mosque. He feared neither earthly powers nor celestial threats, and he felt pity for God, who could never get drunk. The word “supreme” is not written in the Koran, but on the lip of a wineglass. It is read not with the eyes, but with the mouth.

CRUSADES

In the span of just over a century and a half, Europe sent eight Crusades to the infidel lands of the East.

Islam, which had usurped the sacred sepulchre of Jesus, was a remote enemy. So along the way these warriors of the faith took advantage to wipe other maps clean.

The holy war began at home.

The First Crusade set fire to synagogues and left not a Jew alive in Mainz and other German cities.

The Fourth Crusade left for Jerusalem but never arrived. The Christian warriors stopped over in Christian Constantinople, an opulent city, and for three days and nights they pillaged, sparing neither churches nor monasteries, and when there were no women left to rape or palaces to sack they stayed on to enjoy the booty, and forgot all about the final destination of their sacred enterprise.

A few years later, in 1209, another Crusade began by exterminating Christians on French soil. The Cathars, puritan Christians, refused to acknowledge the power of the king or the pope and believed all wars ded God, including those, like the Crusades, that were waged in God’s name. This very popular heresy was torn out by the roots. From city to city, castle to castle, village to village. The most ferocious massacre took place in Béziers. There everyone got the knife: Cathars and Catholics alike. Some sought refuge in the cathedral. In vain, no one escaped the butchery. There wasn’t time to figure out who was whom.

According to some versions, papal legate Arnaud-Amaury, later archbishop of Narbonne, did not hesitate. He ordered:

“Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”

DIVINE COMMANDMENTS

The literacy rate among the armed services of Christianity was not exactly high. That may explain why they were unable to read the commandments on Moses’s tablets.

They read that God ordered his name taken in vain, and in God’s name they did what they did.

They read that God ordered them to lie, and they violated nearly every agreement they signed in their holy war against the infidels.

They read that God ordered them to steal, and they pillaged everything in their path to the Orient, buttressed by the standard with the cross and by the blessing of the pope, which guaranteed their debts would be pardoned and their souls saved for eternity.

They read that God ordered them to commit carnal acts, and the hosts of the Lord fulfilled that duty not only with the numerous professionals hired by the Army of Christ, but also with the captured heathens who formed part of the booty.

And they read that God ordered them to kill, and entire towns underwent the knife, children included: out of Christian duty to purify lands soiled by heresy, or out of simple necessity, as in the case of Richard the Lionhearted, who had to slit the throats of his prisoners because they slowed his pace.

“They walk spattering blood,” a witness said.

CRAZY ABOUT FRENCH WOMEN

Imad ad-Din was the right-hand man of Sultan Saladin. In addition, he was a poet of florid hand.

From Damascus he described the three hundred French prostitutes who accompanied the warriors of Christ on the Third Crusade:

They all were wild fornicators, proud and scornful, who took and gave, sinners of firm flesh, crooners and flirts, available but haughty, impetuous, ardent, dyed and painted, desirable, delectable, exquisite, grateful, who rent and mended, destroyed and rebuilt, lost and found, stole and consoled, wantonly seductive, languid, desired and desirous, dizzy and dizzying, ever-changing, practiced, rapturous adolescents, amorous, offering of themselves, loving, passionate, shameless, of abundant hips and narrow waist, fleshy thighs, nasal voices, black eyes, blue eyes, ashen eyes. And oh so dumb.

POET PROPHET

Mohammed’s descendants dedicated themselves to fighting each other, Sunnis against Shiites, Baghdad against Cairo, and the Islamic world fractured into bits bent on mutual hatred.

At war with itself, the Muslim army disintegrated and the crusaders, finding no obstacle, marched on the holy sepulchre at the pace of conquerors.

An Arab poet, who wrote about the Arabs from the Arab point of view, described it thus:

There are two kinds of people in this land:
those who have brains but no religion
and those who have religion but no brains.

And also:

Fate smashes us as if we were made of glass,
and never again will our pieces come together.

The author was Abu Ali al-Ma’arri. He died in the year 1057 in the Syrian city of Ma’arrat, forty years before the Christians demolished it stone by stone.

The poet was blind. So they say.

TROTULA