The Years of Rice and Salt (47 page)

“Chinese men take concubines,” Ibrahim pointed out.

“Nowhere is it a good thing to be a woman,” Kang replied irritably. “But concubines are not wives, they don't have the same family rights.”

“So things are only better in China if you are married.”

“This is true everywhere. But not to be able to read, even the daughters of the rich and educated men! To be cut off from literature, to be unable to write letters to your birth family . . .”

This was something Kang never did, but Ibrahim did not mention that. He only shook his head.

“It was far worse for women before Muhammad brought Islam to the world.”

“That says very little. How bad it must have been before, and that was over a thousand years ago, correct? What barbarians they must have been. By then Chinese women had enjoyed two thousand years of secure privileges.”

Ibrahim was frowning at this, looking down. He did not reply.

All over Lanzhou
they saw signs of change. The iron mines of Xinjiang fueled the foundries being built upstream and down from the town, and the new influx of potential foundry workers made possible many more expansions, in ironworks and construction more generally. One of the main products of these foundries was cannon, and so the town garrison was beefed up, the Green Standard Chinese guards supplemented by Manchu horsemen. The foundries were under permanent orders to sell all their guns to the Qianlong, so that the weaponry flowed only east toward the interior. As most of the workers were Muslim—and dirty work it was—quite a few guns made their way west in defiance of the imperial edict. This caused more military surveillance, larger garrisons of Chinese, more Manchu banners, and increased friction between local workers and the Qing garrison. It was not a situation that could last.

The residents who had been there longest could only watch things degenerate. There was nothing any one individual could do. Ibrahim continued to work for a good relationship between the hui and the emperor, but this made him enemies among the new arrivals, intent on revival and jihad.

In the midst of all this trouble, Kang told Pao one day that she found herself to be pregnant. Pao was shocked, and Kang herself appeared to be stunned.

“An abortion might be arranged,” Pao whispered, looking the other way.

Kang politely declined. “I will have to be an old mother. You must help me.”

“Oh we will, I will.”

Ibrahim too was surprised by the news, but he adjusted quickly. “It will be good to see a child come of our union. Like our books, but alive.”

“It might be a daughter.”

“If Allah wills it, who am I to object?”

Kang studied his face closely, then nodded and went away.

Now she seldom went out into the streets, and then only by day, and in a chair. After dark it would be too dangerous in any case. No respectable people remained out after dark now, only gangs of young men, often drunk, Jahriya or Khafiya or neither, though usually it was the Jahriyas spoiling for a fight. The babblers versus the deaf-mutes, as Kang said contemptuously.

Indeed, it was intra-Muslim battling that caused the first great disaster of the troubles, or so Ibrahim judged. Hearing of the fighting between Jahriya and Khafiya, a banner arrived with a high Qing official, Xinzhu, who joined Yang Shiji, the town's prefect. Ibrahim came back from a meeting with these men deeply troubled.

“They don't understand,” he said. “They talk about insurrection, but no one out here is thinking of the Great Enterprise, how could they be? We are so far from the interior that people out here barely know what China is. It is only local quarreling, but they come out here thinking they are bound for real war.”

dynastic replacement

Despite Ibrahim's reassurances, the new officials had Ma Mingxin arrested. Ibrahim shook his head gloomily. Then the new banners marched out into the countryside to the west. They met with the Salar Jahriya chief, Su Forty-three, at Baizhuangzi. The Salars had concealed their weapons, and they claimed to be adherents of the Old Teaching. Hearing this, Xinzhu announced to them he intended to eliminate the New Teaching, and Su's men promptly attacked the company and stabbed both Xinzhu and Yang Shiji to death.

When the news of this violence got back to Lanzhou with the Manchu horsemen who had managed to escape the assault, Ibrahim groaned with frustration and anger. “Now it really is insurrection,” he said. “Under Qing law, it will go very bad for all concerned. How could they be so stupid?”

A large force arrived soon thereafter, and was attacked by Su Forty-three's band; and after that, more imperial troops arrived. In response Su Forty-three and an army of two thousand men attacked Hezhou, then crossed the river on pifaci
and camped right outside Lanzhou itself. All of a sudden they were indeed in a war.

Inflated hide rafts that for centuries had allowed people to cross the Yellow, Wei, and Tao rivers.

The Qing authorities
who had survived the Jahriya ambush had Ma Mingxin shown on the town walls, and his followers cried out to see his chains, and prostrated themselves, crying “Shaikh! Shaikh!” audibly from across the river and from the hilltops overlooking the town. Having thus identified the rebels' leader definitively, the authorities had him hauled down off the wall and beheaded.

When the Jahriya learned what had happened they were frantic for revenge. They had no equipment for a proper siege of Lanzhou, so they built a fort on a nearby hill, and began systematically to attack any movement into or out of the city walls. The Qing officials in Beijing were informed of the harrassment, and they reacted angrily to this assault on a provincal capital, and sent out imperial commissioner Agui, one of the Qianlong's senior military governors, to pacify the region.

This he failed to do, and life in Lanzhou grew lean and cold. Finally Agui sent Hushen, his chief military officer, back to Beijing, and when he came back out with new imperial orders, he called up a very large armed militia of Gansu Tibetans, also Alashan Mongols, and all the men from the other Green Standard garrisons in the region. Such ferocious huge men now walked the streets of the town that it seemed it was only a big barracks. “It's an old Han technique,” Ibrahim said with some bitterness. “Pit the non-Hans against each other out on the frontier, and let them kill each other.”

Thus reinforced, Agui was able to cut off the water supply from the Jahriyas' hilltop fort across the river, and the tables were turned; besieger became besieged, as in a game of go. At the end of three months, word came into town that the final battle had occurred, and Su Forty-three and every single one of his thousands of men had been killed.

Ibrahim was gloomy at this news. “That won't be the end of it. They'll want revenge for Ma Mingxin, and for those men. The more the Jahriya are put down, the more young Muslim men will turn to them. The oppression itself makes the rebellion!”

“It's like the soul-stealing craze,” Kang noted.

Ibrahim nodded, and redoubled his efforts on his books. It was as though if he could only reconcile the two civilizations on paper, the bloody battles happening all around them would come to an end. So he wrote many hours each day, ignoring the meals set on his table by the servants. His conversations with Kang were extensions of his day's thought; and conversely, what his wife said to him in these conversations was often quickly incorporated into his books. No one else's opinions were so important to him. Kang would curse the young Muslim fighters, and say, “You Muslims are too religious, to kill and die as they are doing, and all for such puny differences in dogma, it's crazy!”

Presumably the work in five volumes published in the sixtieth year of the Qianlong as “Reconciliation of the Philosophies of Lu Zhi and Ma Mingxin.”

And soon thereafter Ibrahim's writing in the immensely long study that Kang had nicknamed “Muhammad Meets Confucius” included the following passage:

When observing the tendency toward physical extremism in Islam, ranging from fasting, whirling, and self-flagellation, all the way up to jihad itself, one wonders at its causes, which may be several, including the words of Muhammad sanctioning jihad, the early history of Islamic expansion, the harsh and otherworldly desert landscapes that have been the home of so many Muslim societies, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that for Islamic peoples the religious language is by definition Arabic, and therefore a second language to the great majority of them. This has fateful consequences, because one's native tongue is always grounded in a physical reality by vocabulary, grammar, logic, and metaphors, images and symbols of all kinds, many of them buried and forgotten in names themselves; but in the case of Islam, instead of having a physical reality attached to it linguistically, its sacred language is detached from all that, for most believers, by its secondary and translated quality, its only partly learned nature, so that it conveys only abstract concepts, removed from the world, conveying the devout into a world of ideas abstracted and detached from the life of the senses and the physical realities of life, creating the possibility and even the likelihood of extremism resulting from a lack of perspective, a lack of grounding, to give a good example of the kind of linguistic process I mean; Muslims who have Arabic as a second language do not “have their feet on the ground”; their behavior is all too often directed by abstract thought, floating alone in the empty space of language. We need the world. Each situation must be placed in its setting to be understood. Possibly, therefore, our religion should be taught mostly in the vernacular tongues, the Quran translated into all the languages of Earth; or else better instruction in Arabic be given to all; although taking this road might entail requiring Arabic to become the first language of all the world, not a practical project and likely to be regarded as another aspect of jihad.

Another time, when Ibrahim was writing about the theory of dynastic cycles, which was held in common by both Chinese and Islamic historians and philosophers, his wife had brushed it all aside like a piece of botched embroidery: “That's just thinking of history as if it were the seasons of a year. It's a most simpleminded metaphor. What if they are nothing at all alike, what if history meanders like a river forever, what then?”

And soon afterward Ibrahim wrote in his “Commentary on the Doctrine of the Great Cycle in History”:

Ibn Khaldun, the most influential of Muslim historians, speaks of the great cycle of dynasties in his “Muqaddimah,” and most of the Chinese historians identify a cyclic pattern in history as well, beginning with the Han historian Dong Zhongshu, in his “Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals,” a system that indeed was an elaboration of Confucius himself, and which was elaborated in its turn by Kang Yuwei, who in his “Commentary on the Evolution of Rites” speaks of the Three Ages, each of which—Disorder, Small Peace, and Great Peace—go through internal rotations of disorder, small peace, and great peace, so that the three become nine, and then eighty-one when these are recombined, and so on. And Hindu religious cosmology, which so far is that civilization's only statement on history as such, speaks also of great cycles, first the kalpa, which is a day of Brahma, said to be 4,320,000,000 years long, divided into fourteen manvantaras, each of which is divided into seventy-one maha-yugas, length 3,320,000 years. Each maha-yuga or Great Age is divided into four ages, Satya-yuga, the age of peace, Treta-yuga, Dvapara-yuga, and Kali-yuga, said to be our current age, an age of decline and despair, awaiting renewal. These spans of time, so vastly greater than those of the other civilizations, seemed to many earlier commentators excessive, but it must be said that, the more we learn of the antiquity of the Earth, with stone seashells found on mountaintops, and layers of rock deposits enjambed perpendicularly to each other, and so on, the more the introspections of India seem to have pierced through the veil of the past most accurately to the true scale of things.

But in all of them, in any case, the cycles are only observed by ignoring most of what has been recorded as actually happening in the past, and are very probably theories based on the turning of the year and the return of the seasons, with civilizations seen as leaves on a tree, going through a cycle of growth and decay and new growth. It may be that history itself has no such pattern to it, and that civilizations each create a unique fate that cannot be read into a cyclic pattern without doing damage to what really happened in the world.

Thus the extremely rapid spread of Islam seems to support no particular cyclic pattern, while its success perhaps resulted from it proposing not a cycle but a progress toward God, a very simple message—resisting the great urge to elaboration that fills most of the world's philosophies, in favor of comprehensibility by the masses.

Kang Tongbi
was also writing a great deal at this time, compiling her anthologies of women's poetry, arranging them into groups and writing commentaries on what they meant in the aggregate. She also began, with her husband's help, a “Treatise on the History of the Women of Hunan,” in which her thoughts very often reflected, or commented on, those of her husband, just as his did hers; so that later scholars were able to collate the writings of the two during their Lanzhou years, and construct of them a kind of ongoing dialogue or duet.

Kang's opinions were her own, however, and often would not have been agreed with by Ibrahim. Later that year, for instance, frustrated by the irrational nature of the conflict now tearing the region apart, and fearful of greater conflict to come, feeling as if they were living under a great storm cloud about to burst on them, Kang wrote in her “Treatise”:

So you see systems of thought and religion coming out of the kinds of societies that invented them. The means by which people feed themselves determine how they think and what they believe. Agricultural societies believe in rain gods and seed gods and gods for every manner of thing that might affect the harvest (China). People who herd animals believe in a single shepherd god (Islam). In both these kinds of cultures you see a primitive notion of gods as helpers, as big people watching from above, like parents who nevertheless act like bad children, deciding capriciously whom to reward and whom not to, on the basis of craven sacrifices made to them by the humans dependent on their whim. The religions that say you should sacrifice or even pray to a god like that, to ask them to do something material for you, are the religions of desperate and ignorant people. It is only when you get to the more advanced and secure societies that you get a religion ready to face the universe honestly, to announce there is no clear sign of divinity, except for the existence of the cosmos in and of itself, which means that everything is holy, whether or not there be a god looking down on it.