The Year of Rice and Salt

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 made sense only if said to eve one 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.

The whole town followed the cortege, Sultana Katima leading it on her bay mare. The crowd roared in its sorrow like the sea on its pebble beach. They buried him overlooking the great grey ocean, and after that it was black cloth and ashes for many months.

Somehow they never came out of that year of mourning. It was more than the death of the ruler; it was that the Sultana continued to rule on alone.

Now Bistami, and everyone else, would have said that Sultana Katima had been the true leader all along, and the Sultan merely her gracious and beloved consort. No doubt that was true. But now, when Sultana Katima of Baraka came into the grand mosque and spoke in the Friday prayers, Bistami was once again uneasy, and he could see the townspeople were as well. Katima had spoken before many times in this manner, but now all felt the absence of the covering angel provided by the lenient Sultan's presence across the river.

This unease communicated itself to Katima, of course, and her talks became more strident and plaintive. 'God wants relations in marriage between husband and wife to be between equals. What the husband can be the wife can be also! In the time of the chaos before the year one, in the zero time, you see, men treated women like domestic beasts. God spoke through Mohammed, and made it clear that women were souls equal to men, to be treated as such. They were given by God many specific rights, in inheritance, divorce, power of choice, power to command their children – given their lives, do you understand? Before the first hegira, before the year one, right in the middle of this tribal chaos of murder and theft, this monkey society, God told Mohammed to change it all. He said, Oh yes, of course you can marry more than one wife, if you want to – if you can do it without strife. Then the next verse says "But it cannot be done without strife!" What is this but a ban on polygamy stated in two parts, in the form of a riddle or a lesson, for men who could not otherwise imagine it?'

But now it was very clear that she was trying to change the way things worked, the way Islam worked. Of course they all had been, all along – but secretly, perhaps, not admitting it to anyone, not even to themselves. Now it faced them with the face of their only ruler, a woman. There were no queens in Islam. None of the hadith applied any more.

Bistami, desperate to help, made up his own hadith, and either supplied them with plausible but false isnads, attributing them to ancient sufi authorities made up out of whole cloth; or else he ascribed them to their Sultan, Mawji Darya, or to some old Persian sufi he knew about; or he left them to be understood as wisdom too common to need ascription. The Sultana did the same, following his lead, he thought, but took most of her refuge in the Quran itself, returning obsessively to the suras that supported her positions.

But everyone knew how things were done in al Andalus, and the Maghrib, and in Mecca, and indeed everywhere across Dar al Islam, from the western ocean to the eastern ocean (which Ibn Ezra now claimed were the two shores of the same ocean, spanning the greater part of the Earth, which was a globe covered mostly by water). Women did not lead prayers. When the Sultana did, it remained shocking, and triply so with the Sultan gone. Everyone said it; if she wished to continue along this path, she needed to remarry.