The Year of Rice and Salt

'Yes, exactly the same, even thought the Christians had the idea of one God. They were strange that way, contentious. They even tried to split God himself in three. So Islam prevailed. But then after a few centuries, life here was so easy that even Muslims grew corrupt. The Umayyads; were defeated, and no strong dynasty replaced them. The taifa states numbered more than thirty, and they fought constantly. Then the Almoravids invaded from Africa, in the fifth century, and in the sixth century the Almohads from Morocco ousted the Almoravids, and made Sevilla their capital. The Christians meanwhile had continued to fight in the north, in Catalonia and over the mountains in Navarre and Firanja, and they came back and retook most of al Andalus. But never the southernmost part, the Nasrid kingdom, including Malaga and Granada. These lands remained Islam to the very end.'

'And yet they too died,' Bistami said.

'Yes. Everyone died.'

'I don't understand that. They say Allah punished the infidels for their persecution of Islam, but if that were true, why would He kill the Muslims here as well?'

Ibn Ezra shook his head decisively. 'Allah did not kill the Christians. People are wrong about that.'

Bistami said, 'But even if He didn't, He allowed it to happen. He didn't protect them. And yet Allah is all powerful. I don't understand that.'

Ibn Ezra shrugged. 'Well, this is another manifestation of the problem of death and evil in the world. This world is not Paradise, and Allah, when he created us, gave us free will. This world is ours to prove ourselves devout or corrupt. This is very clear, because even more than Allah is powerful, He is good. He cannot create evil. And yet evil exists in the world. So clearly we create that ourselves. Therefore our destinies cannot have been fixed or predetermined by Allah. We must work them out for ourselves. And sometimes we create evil, out of fear, or greed, or laziness. That's our fault.'

'But the plague,' Zeya said.

'That wasn't us or Allah. Look, all living things cat each other, and often the smaller eats the larger. The dynasty ends and the little warriors cat it up. This fungus, for instance, eating this fallen orange. The fungus is like a field of a million small mushrooms. I can show you in a magni fying glass I have. And see the orange it's a blood orange, see, dark red inside. You people must have bred them for that, right?'

Zeya nodded.

'You get hybrids, like mules. Then with plants you can do it again, and again, until you've bred a new orange. That's just how Allah made us. The two parents mix their stock in the offspring. All traits are mixed, I suspect, though only some show. Some are carried unseen to a later generation. Anyway, say some mould like this, in their bread, or even living in their water, bred with another mould, and made some new creature that was poison. It spread, and being stronger than its parents, supplanted them. And so the people died. Maybe it drifted through the air like pollen in spring, maybe it lived inside the people it poisoned for weeks before it killed them, and passed on their breath, or at the touch. And then it was such a poison that in the end it killed off all its food, in effect, and then died out itself, for lack of sustenance.'

Bistami stared at the segments of blood red orange still in his hand, feeling faintly sick. The red fleshed segments were like wedges of bright death.

Zeya laughed at him. 'Come now, eat up! We can't live like angels! All that happened over a hundred years ago, and people have been coming back and living here without any problems for a long time. Now we are as free from the plague as any other country. I've lived here all my life. So finish your orange.'

Bistami did so, thinking it over. 'So it was all an accident.'

'Yes,' Ibn Ezra said. 'I think so.'

'It doesn't seem like Allah should allow it.'

'All living things are free in this world. Besides, it could be that it was not entirely accident. The Quran teaches us to live cleanly, and it could be that the Christians ignored the laws at their peril. They ate pigs, they kept dogs, they drank wine '

'We here don't believe that wine was the problem,' Zeya said with another laugh.'

Ibn Ezra smiled. 'But if they lived in their sewage, among the tanneries and shambles, and ate pork and touched dogs, and killed each other like the barbarians of the cast, and tortured each other, and had their way with boys, and left the dead bodies of their enemies hanging at the gates – and they did all these things then perhaps they made their own plague, do you see what I mean? They created the conditions that killed them.'

'But were they so different than anyone else?' Bistami asked, thinking of the crowds and filth in Cairo, or Agra.

Ibn Ezra shrugged. 'They were cruel.'

'More cruel than Temur the Lame?'

'I don't know.'

'Did they conquer cities and put every person to the sword?'

'I don't know.'

'The Mongols did that, and they became Muslim. Temur was a Muslim.'