The Year of Rice and Salt

As the caravan moved through the Libyan desert, the talk at night around the fires was of the Marnlukes, and of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Emperor who had recently died. Among his conquests had been the very coast they were now skirting, though there was no way to tell that, except for an extra measure of respect given to Ottoman officials in the towns and caravanserai they passed through. These people never bothered them, or put a tariff on their passing. Bistami saw that the world of the sufis was, among many other things, a refuge from worldly power. In each region of the earth there were sultans and emperors, Suleimans and Akbars and Marnlukes, all ostensibly Muslim, and yet worldly, powerful, capricious, dangerous. Most of these were in the Khaldunian state of late dynastic corruption. Then there were the sufis. Bistami watched his fellow scholars around the fire in the evenings, intent on a point of doctrine, or the questionable isnad of a hadith, and what that meant, arguing with exaggerated punctilio and little debater's jokes and flourishes, while a pot of thick hot coffee was poured with solemn attention into little glazed clay cups, all eyes gleaming with firelight and pleasure in the argument; and he thought, these are the Muslims who make Islam good. These are the men who have conquered the world, not the warriors. The armies could have done nothing without the word. Worldly but not powerful, devout but not pedantic (most of them, anyway); men interested in a direct relation to God, without any human authority's intervention; a relation to God, and a fellowship among men.

One night the talk turned to al Andalus, and Bistami listened with an extra measure of interest.

'It must be strange to re enter an empty land like that.'

Fishermen have been living on the coast for a long time now, and zott scavengers. The Zott and Armenians have moved inland as well.'

'Dangerous, I should think. The plague might return.'

'No one appears to be affected.'

'Khaldun says that the plague is an effect of overpopulation,' said Ibn Ezra, the chief scholar of Khaldun among them. 'In his chapter on dynasties in "The Muqaddimah", forty ninth section, he says that plagues result from corruption of the air caused by overpopulation, and the putrefaction and evil moistures that result from so many people living close together. The lungs are affected, and so disease is conveyed. He makes the ironic point that these things result from the early success of a dynasty, so that good government, kindness, safety, and light taxation lead to growth and thence to pestilence. He says, 'Therefore, science has made it clear that it is necessary to have empty spaces and waste regions interspersed between urban areas. This makes circulation of the air possible, and removes the corruption and putrefaction affecting the air after contact with living beings, and brings healthy air." If he is right, well – Firanja has been empty for a long time, and can be expected to be healthy again. No danger of plague should exist, until the time comes when the region is heavily populated once again. But that will be a long time from now.'

'It was God's judgment,' one of the other scholars said. 'The Christians were exterminated by Allah for their persecution of Muslims, and Jews too.'

'But al Andalus was still Muslim at the time of the plague,' Ibn Ezra pointed out. 'Granada was still Muslim, the whole south of Iberia was Muslim. And they too died. As did the Muslims in the Balkans, or so says al Gazzabi in his history of the Greeks. It was a matter of location, it seems. Firanja was stricken, perhaps from overpopulation as Khaldun says, perhaps from its many moist valleys, that held the bad air. No one can say.'

'It was Christianity that died. They were people of the Book, but they persecuted Islam. They made war on Islam for centuries, and tortured every Muslim prisoner to death. Allah put an end to them.'

'But al Andalus died too,' Ibn Ezra repeated. 'And there were Christians in the Maghrib and in Ethiopia that survived, and in Armenia. There are still little pockets of Christians in these places, living in the mountains.' He shook his head. 'I don't think we know what happened. Allah judges.'

'That's what I'm saying.'

'So al Andalus is reinhabited,' Bistami said.

'Yes.'

'And, sufis are there?'

'Of course. Sufis are everywhere. In al Andalus they lead the way, I have heard. They go north into still empty land, in Allah's name, exploring and exorcising the past. Proving the way is safe. Al Andalus was a great garden in its time. Good land, and empty.'

Bistami looked in the bottom of his clay cup, feeling the sparks in him of those two words struck together. Good and empty, empty and good. This was how he had felt in Mecca.