The Years of Rice and Salt (17 page)

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 skillful 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 I want. We'll settle here.”

Sultana Katima nodded, and the caravan began the long process of settling in.

8
                                                                                                            

Baraka

In general, they built upstream from the ruins of the ancient town, scaveng
ing 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, 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 mosquelike. 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, cement, 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 toward 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.”

Sultan Mawji thought this was a good idea, and he ordered those who had settled next to the mosque while working on it to move. Some of the workers objected to this, and then refused outright. In a meeting the sultan lost his temper and threatened this group with expulsion from the town, though the fact was he commanded only a very small personal bodyguard, barely enough to defend himself, in Bistami's opinion. Bistami recalled the giant cavalries of Akbar, the Mamluks' soldiers; nothing like that here for the sultan, who now faced a mere dozen or two sullen recalcitrants, and yet could do nothing with them. And the open tradition of the caravan, the feel of it, was in danger.

But Sultana Katima rode up on her Arabian mare, and slid down from it and went to the sultan's side. She put her hand to his arm, said something just to him. He looked startled, thinking fast. The sultana shot a fierce glance at the uncooperative squatters, such a bitter rebuke that Bistami shuddered; not for the world would he risk such a glance from her. And indeed the miscreants paled and looked down in shame.

She said, “Muhammad told us that learning is God's great hope for humanity. The mosque is the heart of learning, the Quran's home. The madressa is an extension of the mosque. It must be so in any Muslim community, to know God more completely. And so it will be here. Of course.”

She then led her husband away from the place, to the palace on the other side of the city's old bridge. In the middle of the night the sultan's guards returned with swords drawn and pikes at the ready, to rouse the squatters and send them off; but the area was already deserted.

Ibn Ezra nodded with relief when he heard the news. “In the future we must plan ahead well enough to avoid such scenes,” he said in a low voice to Bistami. “This incident adds to the reputation of the sultana, perhaps, in some ways, but at a cost.”

Bistami didn't want to think about it. “At least now we will have mosque and madressa side by side.”

“They are two parts of the same thing, as the sultana said. Especially if the study of the sensible world is included in the curriculum of the madressa. I hope so. I can't stand for such a place to be wasted on mere devotionals. God put us in this world to understand it! That is the highest form of devotion to God, as Ibn Sina said.”

This small crisis was soon forgotten, and the new town, named by the sultana Baraka, that term for grace that Bistami had mentioned to her, took shape as if there could never have been any other plan. The ruins of the old town disappeared under the new city's streets and plazas, gardens and workshops; the architecture and city plan both resembled Málaga, and the other Andalusi coastal cities, but with higher walls, and smaller windows, for the winters here were cold, and a raw wind blew in from the ocean in the fall and spring. The sultan's palace was the only structure in the town as open and light as a Mediterranean building; this reminded people of their origins, and showed them that the sultan lived above the usual demands of nature. Across the bridge from it, the plazas were small, the streets and alleyways narrow, so that a riverside medina or casbah developed that was, as in any Maghribi or Arabian city, a veritable warren of buildings, mostly three stories tall, with the upper windows facing each other across alleyways so tight that one could, as was said everywhere, pass condiments from window to window across the streets.

The first time snow fell, everyone rushed out to the plaza before the grand mosque, dressed in most of their clothes. A great bonfire was lit, the muezzin made his call, prayers were recited, and the palace musicians played with blue lips and frozen fingers as people danced in the Sufi way around the bonfire. Whirling dervishes in the snow: all laughed to see it, feeling they had brought Islam to a new place, a new climate. They were making a new world! There was plenty of wood in the undisturbed forests to the north, and a constant supply of fish and fowl; they would be warm, they would be fed; in the winters the life of the city would go on, under a thin blanket of wet melting snow, as if they lived in high mountains, and yet the river poured out its long estuary into the gray ocean, which pounded the beach with unrelenting ferocity, eating instantly the snowflakes that fell into the waves. This was their country.

One day in spring
another caravan arrived, full of strangers and their possessions; they had heard of the new town Baraka, and wanted to move there. It was another ship of fools, come from the Armenian and Zott settlements in Portugal and Castile, its criminal tendencies made obvious by the high incidence of handlessness and musical instruments, puppeteers and fortune tellers.

“I'm surprised they made it over the mountains,” Bistami said to Ibn Ezra.

“Necessity made them inventive, no doubt. Al-Andalus is a dangerous place for people like these. The sultan's brother is proving a very strict caliph, I have heard, almost Almohad in his purity. The form of Islam he enforces is so pure that I don't believe it was ever lived before, even in the time of the Prophet. No, this caravan is made of people on the run. And so was ours.”

“Sanctuary,” Bistami said. “That's what the Christians called a place of protection. Usually their churches, or else a royal court. Like some of the Sufi ribat in Persia. It's a good thing. The good people come to you when the law elsewhere becomes too harsh.”

So they came. Some were apostates or heretics, and Bistami debated these in the mosque itself, trying as he spoke to create an atmosphere in which all these matters could be discussed freely, without a sense of danger hanging overhead—it existed, but far away, back over the Pyrenees—but also without anything blasphemous against God or Muhammad being affirmed. It did not matter whether one was Sunni or Shiite, Arabian or Andalusi, Turk or Zott, man or woman; what mattered was devotion, and the Quran.

It was interesting to Bistami that this religious balancing act got easier to maintain the longer he worked at it, as if he were practicing something physical, on a ledge or high wall. A challenge to the authority of the caliph? See what the Quran said about it. Ignore the hadith that had encrusted the holy book, and so often distorted it: cut through to the source. There the messages might be ambiguous, often they were; but the book had come to Muhammad over a period of many years, and important concepts were usually repeated in it, in slightly different ways each time. They would read all the relevant passages, and discuss the differences. “When I was in Mecca studying, the true scholars would say . . .” This was as much authority as Bistami would claim for himself; that he had heard true authorities speak. It was the method of the hadith, of course, but with a different content: that the hadith could not be trusted, only the Quran.

“I was speaking with the sultana about this matter . . .” This was another common gambit. Indeed, he consulted with her about almost every question that came up, and without fail in all matters having to do with women or child-rearing; concerning family life he always deferred to her judgment, which he learned to trust more and more as the first years passed. She knew the Quran inside out, and had memorized every sura that aided her case against undue hierarchy, and her protectiveness for the weak of the city grew unabated. Above all she commanded the eye and the heart, wherever she went, and never more so than in the mosque. There was no longer any question of her right to be there, and occasionally even to lead the prayers. It would have seemed unnatural to bar such a being, so full of divine grace, from the place of worship in a city named Baraka. As she herself said, “Did God make me? Did He give me a mind and a soul as great as any man's? Did men's children come out of a woman? Would you deny your own mother a place in heaven? Can anyone gain heaven who is not admitted to the sight of God on this earth?”

No one who would answer these questions in the negative stayed long in Baraka. There were other towns being settled upstream and to the north, founded by Armenians and Zott who were less full of Muslim fervor. A fair number of the sultan's subjects moved away as time passed. Nevertheless, the crowds at the grand mosque grew. They built smaller ones on the expanding outskirts of town, the usual neighborhood mosques, but always the Friday mosque remained the meeting place of the city, its plaza and the madressa grounds filled by the whole population on holy days, and during the festivals and Ramadan, and on the first day of snow every year, when the bonfire of winter was lit. Baraka was a single family then, and Sultana Katima its mother and sister.

The madressa grew as fast as the town, or faster. Every spring, after the snows on the mountain roads had melted, new caravans arrived, guided by mountain folk. Some in each group had come to study in the madressa, which grew famous for Ibn Ezra's investigations into plants and animals, the Romans, building technique, and the stars. When they came from al-Andalus they sometimes brought with them newly recovered books by Ibn Rashd or Maimonides, or new Arabic translations of the ancient Greeks, and they brought also the desire to share what they knew, and learn more. The new convivencia had its heart in Baraka's madressa, and word spread.

Then one bad day, late in the sixth year of the Barakan hegira, Sultan Mawji Darya fell gravely ill. He had grown fat in the previous months, and Ibn Ezra had tried to be his doctor, putting him on a strict diet of grain and milk, which seemed to help his complexion and energy; but then one night he took ill. Ibn Ezra woke Bistami from his bed: “Come along. The sultan is so ill he needs the prayers.”

This coming from Ibn Ezra was bad indeed, as he was not much of a one for prayer. Bistami hurried after him, and joined the royal family in their part of the big palace. Sultana Katima was white-faced, and Bistami was shocked to see how unhappy his arrival made her. It wasn't anything personal, but she knew why Ibn Ezra had brought him at such an hour, and she bit her lip and looked away, the tears streaming down her cheeks.

Inside their bedroom the sultan writhed, silent but for heavy, choked breathing. His face was a dark red color.

“Has he been poisoned?” Bistami asked Ibn Ezra in a whisper.

“No, I don't think so. Their taster is fine,” indicating the big cat sleeping curled in its little bed in the corner. “Unless someone pricked him with a poisoned needle. But I see no sign of that.”

Bistami sat by the rolling sultan and took his hot hand. Before a word had escaped him, the sultan gave a weak groan and arched his back. His breathing stopped. Ibn Ezra grabbed his arms and crossed them before his chest and pressed hard, grunting himself. To no avail; the sultan had died, his body still locked in its last paroxysm. The sultana burst weeping into the room, tried to revive him herself, calling to him and to God, and begging Ibn Ezra to keep up his efforts. It took both men some time to convince her that it was all in vain; they had failed; the sultan was dead.

Funerals in Islam
hearkened back to earlier times. Men and women congregated in different areas during the ceremonies, and only mingled in the cemetery afterward, during the brief interment.

But of course this was the first funeral for a sultan of Baraka, and the sultana herself led the whole population into the grand mosque plaza, where she had ordered the body to lie in state. Bistami could only go along with the crowd and stand before them, saying the old prayers of the service as if they were always announced to all together. And why not? Certain lines of the service only made sense if said to everyone in the community: and suddenly, looking out at the stripped, desolate faces of every person in the city, he understood that the tradition had been wrong, that it was plainly wrong and even cruel to split the community apart at the very moment it needed to see itself all together as one. He had never felt such a heterodox opinion so strongly before; he had always agreed with the sultana's ideas out of the unexamined principle that she ought always to be right. Shaken by this sudden conversion in his ideas, and by the sight of the beloved sultan's body there in its coffin on its dais, he reminded them all that the sun only shone a certain number of hours on any life. He spoke the words of this impromptu sermon in a hoarse tearing voice, which sounded even to him as if it were coming from some other throat; it was the same as it had been during those eternal days long ago, reciting the Quran under the cloud of Akbar's anger. This association was too much, and he began to weep, struggled to speak. All in the plaza wept, the wailing began again, many striking themselves in the self-flagellation that took some of the pain away.