The Years of Rice and Salt (66 page)

Budur looked into classes in this new field, archaeology. History that was more than talk, that could be a science . . . The people working on it were an odd mix, geologists, architects, physicists, Quranic scholars, historians, all studying not just the stories, but the things left behind.

Meanwhile the talk went on, in Kirana's class and in the cafés afterward. One night in a café Budur asked Kirana what she thought of archaeology, and she replied, “Yes, archaeology is very important, sure. Although the standing stones are rather mute when it comes to telling us things. But they're discovering caves in the south, filled with wall paintings that appear to be very old, older even than the Greeks. I can give you the names of the people at Avignon involved with that.”

“Thanks.”

Kirana sipped her coffee and listened to the others for a while. Then she said to Budur under the hubbub, “What's interesting, I think, beyond all the theories we discuss, is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially, because so much of what we did never got written down. Just the ordinary, you know, daily existence. The work of raising children and feeding families and keeping a home together, as an oral culture passed along generation to generation. Uterine culture, Kang Tongbi called it. You must read her work. Anyway, uterine culture has no obvious dynasties, or wars, or new continents to discover, and so historians have never tried to account for it—for what it is, how it is transmitted, how it changes over time, according to material and social conditions. Changing with them, I mean, in a weave with them.”

“In the harem it's obvious,” Budur said, feeling nervous at being jammed knee to knee with this woman. Cousin Yasmina had conducted enough clandestine “practice sessions” of kissing and the like among the girls that Budur knew just what the pressure from Kirana's leg meant. Resolutely she ignored it and went on: “It's like Scheherazade, really. Telling stories to get along. Women's history would be like that, stories told one after another. And every day the whole process has to be renewed.”

“Yes, Scheherazade is a good tale about dealing with men. But there must be better models for how women should pass history along, to younger women, for instance. The Greeks had a very interesting mythology, full of goddesses modeling various woman-to-woman behaviors. Demeter, Persephone . . . they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven't heard of her? I'll give you the references.”

7
This was the start of many more personal conversations over coffee, late at night in the rain-lashed cafés. Kirana lent Budur books on all kinds of topics, but especially Firanji history: the Golden Horde's survival of the plague that had killed the Christians; the continuing influence of the Horde's nomad structures on the descendant cultures of the Skandistani states; the infill of al-Andalus, Nsara, and the Keltic Islands by Maghribis; the zone of contention between the two infilling cultures in the Rhine Valley. Other volumes described the movement of Turks and Arabs through the Balkans, adding to the discord of the Firanji emirates, the little taifa states that fought for centuries, according to loyalties Sunni or Shiite, Sufi or Wahhabi, Turkic or Maghribi or Tartar; fought for dominance or survival, often desperately, creating conditions usually repressive for women, so that only in the farthest west had there been any cultural advances before the Long War, a progressiveness that Kirana associated with the ocean, and contact with other cultures by sea, and with Nsara's origins as a refuge for the heterodox and marginal, founded indeed by a woman, the fabled refugee Sultana Katima.

Budur took these books and tried reading from them aloud to her blind soldiers in the hospital. She read them the story of the Glorious Ramadan Revolution, when Turkic and Kirghizi women had led seizures of the power plants of the big reservoirs above Samarqand, and moved into the ruins of the fabled city, which had been abandoned for nearly a century because of a series of violent earthquakes; how they had formed a new republic in which the holy laws of Ramadan were extended through the year, and the life of the people made a communal act of divine worship, all humans completely equal, men and women, adult and child, so that the place had reclaimed its glorious heritage of the tenth century, and made amazing advances in culture and law, and all had been happy there, until the shah had sent his armies east from Iran and crushed them as heretics.

Her soldiers nodded as they listened. That's the way it happens, their silent faces said. The good is always crushed. Those who see the farthest have their eyes put out. Budur, seeing the way they hung on every word, like starving dogs watching people eat in sidewalk cafés, brought in more of her borrowed books to read to them. Ferdowsi's
The Book of Kings,
the huge epic poem describing Iran before Islam, was very popular. So was the Sufi lyric poet Hafiz, and of course Rumi and Khayyam. Budur herself liked to read from her heavily annotated copy of Ibn Khaldun's
Muqaddimah
.

“There is so much in Khaldun,” she said to her listeners. “Everything I learn at the institute I find already here in Khaldun. One of my instructors is fond of a theory that has the world being a matter of three or four major civilizations, each a core state, surrounded by peripheral states. Listen here to Khaldun, in the section entitled ‘Each dynasty has a certain amount of provinces and lands, and no more.' ”

She read, “ ‘When the dynastic groups have spread over the border regions, their numbers are necessarily exhausted. This, then, is the time when the territory of the dynasty has reached its farthest extension, where the border regions form a belt around the center of the realm. If the dynasty then undertakes to expand beyond its holdings, its widening territory remains without military protection, and is laid open to any chance attack by enemy or neighbor. This has a detrimental result for the dynasty.' ”

Budur looked up. “A very succinct description of core-periphery theory. Khaldun also addresses the lack of an Islamic core state that the others can rally around.”

Her audience nodded; they knew about that; the absence of alliance coordination at the various fronts of the war had been a famous problem, with sometimes terrible results.

“Khaldun also addresses a systemic problem in Islamic economy, in its origins among Bedouin practice. He says of them, ‘Places that succumb to the Bedouins are quickly ruined. The reason for this is that the Bedouins are a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it. Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization.' He goes on to say, ‘It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess. Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls.' And after that he gives us the labor theory of value, saying, ‘Now, labor is the real basis of profit. When labor is not appreciated and is done for nothing, the hope for profit vanishes, and no productive work is done. The sedentary population disperses, and civilization decays.' Really quite amazing, how much Khaldun saw, and this back in a time when the people living here in Nsara were dying of their plague, and the rest of the world not even close to thinking historically.”

The time for reading ended. Her audience settled back into their chairs and beds, hunkering down for the long empty watches of the afternoon.

Budur left with her usual combination of guilt, relief, and joy, and on this day went directly to Kirana's class.

“How can we ever progress out of our origins,” she asked their teacher plaintively, “when our faith orders us not to leave them?”

Kirana replied, “Our faith said no such thing. This is just something the fundamentalists say to keep their hold on power.”

Budur felt confused. “But what about the parts of the Quran that tell us Muhammad is the last prophet, and the rules in the Quran should stand forever?”

Kirana shook her head impatiently. “This is another case of taking an exception for the general rule, a very common fundamentalist tactic. In fact there are some truths in the Quran that Muhammad declared eternal—such existential realities as the fundamental equality of every person—how could that ever change? But the more worldly concerns of the Quran, involved with the building of an Arabic state, changed with circumstances, even within the Quran itself, as in its variable statements against alcohol. Thus the principle of naskh, in which later Quranic instructions supercede earlier ones. And in Muhammad's last statements, he made it clear that he wanted us to respond to changing situations, and to make Islam better—to come up with moral solutions that conform to the basic framework, but respond to new facts.”

Naser asked, “I wonder if one of Muhammad's seven scribes could have inserted into the Quran ideas of his own?”

Again Kirana shook her head. “Recall the way the Quran was assembled. The mushaf, the final physical document, was the result of Osman bringing together all the surviving witnesses to Muhammad's dictation—his scribes, wives, and companions—who, together, agreed upon a single correct version of the holy book. No individual interpolations could have survived that process. No, the Quran is a single voice, Muhammad's voice, Allah's voice. And it is a message of great freedom and justice on this Earth! It is the hadith that contain the false messages, the reimposition of hierarchy and patriarchy, the exceptional cases twisted to general rules. It's the hadith that abandon the major jihad, the fight against one's own temptations, for the minor jihad, the defense of Islam against attack. No. In so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy—all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain. But those moments are always brief, as the sufis themselves admit. So we should let the occasional chalice break, if need be, to get at the truth of the water inside it.”

Encouraged, Budur said, “So how do we be modern Muslims?”

“We don't,” the oldest woman rasped, never pausing in her knitting. “It's an ancient desert cult that has brought ruin to countless generations, including mine and yours, I'm afraid. It's time to admit that and move on.”

“On to what, though?”

“To whatever may come!” the old one cried. “To your sciences—to reality itself! Why worry about any of these ancient beliefs! They are all a matter of the strong over the weak, of men over women. But it's women who bear the children and raise them and plant the crops and harvest them and cook the meals and make the homes and care for the elderly! It's women who make the world! Men fight wars, and lord it over the rest with their laws and religions and guns. Thugs and gangsters, that's history! I don't see why we should try to accommodate any of it at all!”

There was silence in the class, and the old woman resumed her knitting as if she were stabbing every king and cleric who ever lived. They could suddenly hear the rain pouring down outside, students' voices in a courtyard, the old woman's knitting needles murderously clicking.

“But if we take that route,” Naser said, “then the Chinese have truly won.”

More drumming silence.

The old woman finally said, “They won for a reason. They have no God and they worship their ancestors and their descendants. Their humanism has allowed them science, progress—everything we have been denied.”

Even deeper silence, so that they could hear the foghorn out on the point, bellowing in the rain.

Naser said, “You speak only of their upper classes. And their women had their feet bound into little nubbins, to cripple them, like clipping the wings of birds. That too is Chinese. They are hard bastards, you take my word for it. I saw in the war. I do not want to tell you what I saw, but I know, believe me. They have no sense of godliness, and so no rules of conduct; nothing to tell them not to be cruel, and so they are cruel. Horribly cruel. They don't think the people outside China are really human. Only the Han are human. The rest, we are hui hui, like dogs. Arrogant, cruel beyond telling—it does not seem a good thing to me that we should imitate their ways, that they should win the war so completely as that.”

“But we were just as bad,” Kirana said.

“Not when we behaved as true Muslims. What would be a good project for a history class, I think, would be to focus on what has been best in Islam, enduring through history, and see if that can guide us now. Every sura of the Quran reminds us by its opening words—Bismallah, in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Compassion, mercy—how do we express that? These are ideas that the Chinese do not have. The Buddhists tried to introduce them there, and they were treated like beggars and thieves. But they are crucial ideas, and they are central to Islam. Ours is a vision of all people as one family, in the rule of compassion and mercy. This is what drove Muhammad, driven by Allah or by his own sense of justice, the Allah inside us. This is Islam to me! That's what I fought for in the war. These are the qualities we have to offer the world that the Chinese do not have. Love, to put it simply. Love.”

“But if we don't live by these things—”

“No!” Naser said. “Don't beat us with that stick. I don't see any people on Earth living by their best beliefs anymore. This must be what Muhammad saw when he looked around him. Savagery everywhere, men like beasts. So every sura started with a call to compassion.”

“You sound like a Buddhist,” someone said.

The old soldier was willing to admit this. “Compassion, isn't that their guiding principle of action? I like what the Buddhists do in this world. They are having a good effect on us. They had a good effect on the Japanese, and the Hodenosaunee. I've read books that say all our progress in science comes from the Japanese diaspora, as the latest and strongest of the Buddhist diasporas. They took up the ideas from the ancient Greeks and the Samarqandis.”