'A world history has to simplify,' the old one armed soldier said. His name was Naser Shah, Budur learned; his accent when speaking Firanjic marked him as Iranian. 'The trick of it is to get at causes of things, to generate some sense of the overall story.'
'But if there isn't one?' Kirana asked.
'There is,' Naser said calmly. 'All people who have ever lived on Earth have acted together to make a global history. It is one story. Certain patterns are evident in it. The collisionary theories of Ibrahim al Lanzhou, for instance. No doubt they're just yin and yang again, but they make it seem pretty clear that much of what we call progress comes from the clash of two cultures.'
'Progress by collision, what kind of progress is this, did you see those two trams the other day after the one jumped its tracks?'
Kirana said, 'Al Lanzhou's core civilizations represent the three logically possible religions, with Islam believing in one god, India in many gods, and China in no gods.'
'That's why China won,' said Hasan, his one eye gleaming with mischief. 'They turned out to be right. Earth congealed out of cosmic dust, life appeared and evolved, until a certain ape made more and more sounds, and off we went. Never any God involved, nothing supernatural, no eternal souls reincarnated time after time. Only the Chinese really faced that, leading the way with their science, honouring nothing but their ancestors, working only for their descendants. And so they dominate us all!'
'It's just that there's more of them,' one of the questionable women said.
'But they can support more people on less land. This proves they are right!'
Naser said, 'Each culture's strength can also be its weakness. We saw this in the war. China's lack of religion made them horribly cruel.'
The Hodenosaunee women from the class appeared and joined them; they too were acquaintances of Kirana's. Kirana welcomed them, saying, 'Here are our conquerors, a culture in which women have power! I wonder if we could judge civilizations by how well women have done in them.'
'They have built them all,' proclaimed the oldest woman there, who up till now had only sat there knitting. She was at least eighty, and therefore had lived through most of the war, start to finish, childhood to old age. 'No civilizations exist without the homes women build from the inside.'
'Well, how much political power women have taken, then. How comfortable their men are with the idea of women having this kind of power.'
'That would be China.'
'No, the Hodenosaunee.'
'Not Travancore?'
No one ventured to say.
'This should be investigated!' Kirana said. 'This will be one of your projects. A history of women in the other cultures of the world their actions as political creatures – their fates. That this is missing from history as we have been given it so far, is a sign that we still live in the wreckage of patriarchy. And nowhere more so than in Islam.'
FIVE
Budur of course told Idelba all about Kirana's lecture and the after class meeting, describing them excitedly while they washed dishes together, and then sheets. Idelba nodded and asked questions, interested; but in the end she said, 'I hope you will keep working hard on your statistics class. Talk about these kinds of things can go on for ever, but numbers are the only thing that will get you beyond talk.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, the world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills. Speaking of which, I think I can get you a job washing glassware in the lab. That would be good, it will give you some more money, and teach you that you want some job skills. Don't get sucked into the whirlpool of cafe talk.'
'But talk can be good! It's teaching me so many things, not just about history, but what it all means. It sorts it out, as we used to do in the harem.'
'Exactly! You can talk all you want in the harem! But it's only in institutes that you can do science. Since you've bothered to come here, you might as well take advantage of what's offered.'
This gave Budur pause. Idelba saw her thinking about it, and went on: 'Even if you do want to study history, which is perfectly sensible, there is a way of doing it that goes beyond cafe talk, that inspects the actual artefacts and sites left from the past, and establishes what can be asserted with physical evidence to back it, as in the other sciences. Firanja is full of old places that are being investigated for the first time in a scientific manner like this, and it is very interesting. And it will take decades to investigate them all, even centuries.'
She straightened up, held her lower back and rubbed it as she regarded Budur. 'Come with me for a picnic on Friday. I'll take you up the coast to see the menhirs.'
'The menhirs? What are they?'
'You will see on Friday.'
So on Friday they took the tram as far north up the coast as it ran, then changed to a bus and rode for half a watch, looking out at the apple orchards and the occasional glimpses of the dark blue ocean. Finally Idelba led the way off at one stop, and they walked west out of a tiny village, immediately into a forest of immense standing stones, set in long lines over a slightly rolling grassy plain, interrupted here and there by huge mature oak trees. It was an uncanny sight.
'Who put these here? The Franks?'
'Before the Franks. Before the Kelts, perhaps. No one is quite sure. Their living settlements have not been found with certainty, and it's very difficult to date the time when these stones were dressed and stood on end.'
'It must have taken, I don't know, centuries to put this many up!'
'It depends on how many of them there were doing it, I suppose. Maybe there were as many then as now, who can say? Only I would expect not, as we find no ruined cities, as they do in Egypt or the Middle West. No, it must have been a smaller population, taking a lot of time and effort.'
'But how can a historian work with stuff like this?' Budur asked at one point, as they walked down one of the long lanes created by the rows of stones, studying the patterns of black and yellow lichen that grew on their nobbled surfaces. Most were about twice Budur's height, really massive things.
'You study things instead of stories. It's something different from history, more a scientific inquiry of material conditions that early people lived in, things they made. Archaeology. Again, it is a science that began during the first Islamic flowering, in Syria and Iraq, then was not pursued again until the Nahda,' this being the rebirth of Islamic high culture in certain cities like Teheran and Cairo, in the half century before the Long War started and wrecked everything. 'Now our understanding of physics and geology is such that new methods of inquiry are being suggested all the time. And construction and reconstruction projects are digging up all kinds of new finds as well, and people are going out deliberately looking for more, and it is all coming together in a very exciting way. It is a science taking off, if you know what I mean. Most interesting. And Firanja is turning out to be one of the best places to practise it. This is an ancient place.'
She gestured at the long rows of stones, like a crop seeded by great stone gods who had never come back to make a harvest. Clouds scudded by overhead, and the blue sky seemed flat and low over them. 'Not just these, or the stone rings in Britain, but stone tombs, monuments, whole villages. I'll have to take you up to the Orkneys with me some time. I may be wanting to go up there soon in any case, I'll take you along. Anyway, you think about studying this kind of thing too, as a grounding for you while you listen to Madam Fawwaz and all her scheherazading.'
Budur rubbed her hand over a stone dressed by a thin lichen coat of many colours. Clouds rushed by. 'I will.'
SIX
Classes, a new job cleaning Idelba's lab, walking the docks and the jetty, dreaming of a new synthesis, an Islam that included what was important in the Buddhism so prevalent in the labs: Budur's days passed in a blur of thought, everything she saw and did fed into it. Most of the women in Idelba's lab were Buddhist nuns, and many of the men there were monks.
Compassion, right action, a kind of agape, as the ancient Greeks had called it – the Greeks, those ghosts of this place, people who had had every idea already, in a lost paradise that had included even the story of paradise lost, in the form of Plato's tales of Atlantis, which were turning out to be true, according to the latest studies of the scholars on Kreta, digging in the ruins.
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 cafes afterwards. One night in a cafe 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 modelling various woman to woman behaviours. Demeter, Persephone… they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven't heard of her? I'll give you the references.'
SEVEN
This was the start of many more personal conversations over coffee, late at night in the rain lashed cafes. 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 Wahabbi, 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 cast 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 cat in sidewalk cafes, 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 Khayyarn. 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, Whenthe 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 centre 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 neighbour. 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 labour theory of value, saying "Now, labour is the real basis of profit. When labour 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 Mohammed is the last prophet, and the rules in the Quran should s
tand for ever?'
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 Mohammed 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 supersede earlier ones. And in Mohammed'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 Mohammed'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 Mohammed'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, Mohammed'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 defence 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 needs be, to get at the truth of the water inside it.'
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 57
