by Ian Watson
Also, handily, Boston’s Roxbury district had become home a few years back to the most expensive mosque in the North-Eastern United States. Promoted by the Islamic Society of Boston and costing $24 million, it was built on city land sold at a fraction of market value, to help create a centre for moderation and dialogue as well as a place of prayer. Clerics and staff there, especially her friend Walid, helped her with Arabic translations and interpretations of religious poetry. Harvard itself was particularly keen on intellectual outreach to Islam and the Muslim community. A long-standing programme of outreach had been set in place after the 9/11 acts of terrorism.
Only a couple of weeks ago a reporter from the Boston Globe, a guy with a goofy grin and ringletty hair, who’d been hanging around the mosque, had more or less kidnapped her into a brief interview about her interest. What was his name? Paul Something. Summers, that was it. He was into Islamic outreach, at least for the moment. She’d told him about her work, since the Globe was a prestigious newspaper, thought there was nothing about her in his subsequent story. Probably much too fringe; she presumed reporters liked stuff they could manipulate into drama, or at least into this week’s simple myths and messages.
And Terry had lately accused her of being manipulative! On top of earlier counts of being idealistic to the point of naivety, as well as obsessive. To her own mind she was simply enthusiastic and committed; an idea could capture and invigorate her. As for Terry, he couldn’t commit to anything, so perhaps the commitment of others frightened him. And it was completely beyond her how one could be manipulative and naive at the same time!
There was a loud knock on her office door.
“Come,” she called.
A man, maybe in his early thirties, very short blond hair, blue-eyed, clean-shaven, dark blue suit and lilac shirt, open-necked. He smiled in a briskly professional way.
“Dr Leclaire? Abigail Leclaire?”
“That’s me.”
“My name’s Jack Turner.” He produced ID. A photo of him. His name. And above those: US Immigration & Customs Enforcement. www.ice.gov .
That was the outfit that targeted illegal immigrants. And kept watch on foreign nationals too? Back in Canada last year there’d been an outcry in the press about a guy with dual Iraqi-Canadian nationality – wasn’t that it? – whom, yes, ICE had arrested in New York when he’d briefly visited there. ICE accused him of being a terrorist sympathiser and promptly put him on a plane to the Middle East. She remembered a headline: The ICEman Cometh. Now the ICEman had come calling on her. Why in hell’s name?
“I think you have the wrong Leclaire,” she said frostily.
“I don’t think so. May we talk?”
Was this intrusion because she frequently visited the Roxbury mosque? It was unfortunately true that the mosque was linked to controversy. There’d been stories in the Boston Globe fingering the original founder of the Islamic Society of Boston as an al-Qaeda fund-raiser. Two former ISB trustees were also Islamist hotheads. Three apparently bad apples in a rather big barrel. Or allegedly bad apples. Was she now tainted too?
These days in the States, it seemed one could end up in trouble for very bizarre reasons supposedly connected with national security; farewell, Land of Liberty!
But Jack Turner completely surprised her by saying, “You just had a little piece published in the on-line American Annals of Medieval History, about some old stuff you found in the Harvard library.” From his pocket he produced a printout. “A Lost Poetisa of al-Andalus.”
Abigail well remembered her excitement when she came across two pieces of paper, folded up in the back of an early printed chapbook of Provençal verse such as were sold in medieval street-markets. Each paper was in the hand of a different scribe, evidently no connection between them. The first sheet contained a fragmentary account of what Abigail took to be an outbreak of plague in Provence, with an odd comment scrawled at the bottom: Hospitaller Have Pity. The second was the gem, a torn scrap from a poem. Although penned in Provençal script, it was actually ascribed on the sheet to Safiyya bint Yusuf al-Ballisiyya. This poetisa lived in Granada in the early 14th century, when the Alhambra palace complex was being completed. Only one other poem by her survived. Though the early 14th was a bit late to affect the original troubadours, whose tradition was in decline as well as under attack from the Dominican Inquisition trying to stamp out heresy, the 1320s saw a revival in Toulouse.
Abigail had no desire to touch material proffered by someone from a spooky agency such as ICE, so she quickly accessed that same item at www.amh.edu. There was the fragment in medieval Provençal, followed by her own translation:
…mort
se cofla, e de riba sort
mentre l'agla forta
qui molt leisons ensenha
d'amont a bas agaita
per la vezion jutjar
que fem de la vertat
abans lo terme acabat
…death
swells and overflows
while the strong eagle
teacher of many lessons
watches down from high
with the vision to judge
what we make of the truth
before our term is ended
Little enough! Yet accompanied by a longish comment about the female poets of al-Andalus, it made the on-line AAMH. And somehow attracted the attention of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement…? Uninvited, Jack Turner sat in the black leather swivel chair opposite her desk, twin to her own.
“This may be a long shot,” he said, “but I wonder what the phrase ‘eagle teacher’ might suggest to you?”
“Just those two words, out of context? That sounds to me more like a native American medicine-man rather than anything connected with an early medieval Arab woman’s poem!”
“I wasn’t thinking Redskins.”
“Native Americans,” she corrected him.
He just stared hard at her. “What does eagle evoke to you?”
“The Eagle has landed,” she replied, “on the Moon. I dunno, the bald eagle on the Great Seal of the US government. Endangered species,” she added.
“The US government is an endangered species?” he enquired.
“I didn’t mean that. There’s no punctuation of course, but there is a line-break between eagle and teacher,” she pointed out tartly.
He ignored this. “If not Redskins, how about greenbacks? You may have noticed there’s an eagle on every US Federal Reserve currency bill.”
“I don’t study money, I spend it.”
“60,000 good US dollars. Your stipend. I know. What’s Eagle Teacher in Arabic?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“Oh, I kind of assumed…”
“But I’m learning,” she said defensively, and regretted this right away.
“Going to classes?”
Classes where exactly? Taught by which Arabic speakers? Hatefully, he was contriving to make her feel, or seem, guilty of something. How many people felt, when they saw a cop, that they were guilty of some indefinable crime?
“Audio CD and book,” she told him.
The ICEman’s cold eyes appraised.
How did this badge-carrying intruder see her? Snub nose with a bridge of faint freckles, though could he see her skin flushing? Tumbly goldilocks hair that was natural; no doubt he’d mark this as her best feature. Eyes levelled and vanitied with greeny multi-focal contact lenses over pupils that were rather more grey, a strong chin but no obvious lipstick; it was subtle. Reasonably slim. And thank god for modest-sized boobs; she despised breast-fixated men, at least Terry wasn’t one of those, and she despised still more those women who deliberately dysfunctioned themselves to appease this fixation. Was Turner’s appraisal the ordinary male kind, or was he looking for signs of guilt, or at least of non-compliance?
“Just how did you…?” she began. Ah, but of course. High-speed computers were constantly scanning websites, e-mails, everything on-line, searching for key words or phrases, supposedly defend
ing the USA in a war, ‘the war against terror’. She tried a likely guess. “Eagle Teacher is a code-name for some terrorist plot, is that it?”
“You reckon so, Dr Leclaire? Supposing so, why would you choose it?”
“I certainly didn’t choose it.”
“Why would one choose it?”
“Teach the bald eagle a lesson? Meaning the government?”
“Specifically? Assassination maybe?”
“How would I know!”
“Or maybe an attack on American money? Some way to make the dollar sick?”
“I thought most money already had cocaine on it.”
He bulled onward. “Eagle Teacher might signify that you teach the eagle, or that the eagle does the teaching. In which case, who or what might the eagle be? What does this bit of verse suggest to you, historically you know?”
She shrugged. “It’s only a fragment.”
“Come on, you’re the expert.”
“If it’s a literal translation from Arabic into Provençal, perhaps the teacher is a religious figure. The phrase ‘from high’ may mean at or near the top of the hierarchy, somebody like an Imam maybe. I don’t see how this has any connection with anything of interest to you nowadays. I mean, if somebody is using Eagle Teacher as, as…”
“A code-name for a plan, just for instance?” he supplied, as if taunting her.
“Well, obviously they didn’t take it from this.”
“There wasn’t any more than those seven lines, preceded by ‘death’?”
“Nothing recoverable. I’d have published it if so!”
“I bet you would. If anything more does occur to you, we’d appreciate…” He held out a card bearing only his name and a phone number. Hastily she tucked the card under a book entitled The Forgotten Queens of Islam.
“It’s highly unlikely anything will occur to me, Mr Turner.”
She half expected him to say, We never had this conversation. Since he didn’t, maybe he hoped she’d call someone at the mosque, just for instance, which in turn might cause them to do something out of profile… Paranoia! For that, they’d have to tap her phone. Anyhow, she wasn’t even going to phone Terry to tell him.
As soon as the door closed on the ICEman, she googled www.ice.gov. Jesus, it was the men from ICE who’d nailed the founder of the Islamic Society of Boston. ICE’s Mission: “to protect against terrorist attacks.” Set up in 2003 as the largest investigative branch of Homeland Security! Mention of a Cyber Crime Center.
She clicked links. Joint Terrorism Task Force… Uhuh, and the US Secret Service were buddies under the banner of Homeland Security, although not the FBI nor the CIA, thanks for small mercies. And the Secret Service was founded first of all to protect American money, only adding the protection of presidents to their job description later on…
Eagle, she thought to herself. Islamist eagle, terrorist eagle? It seemed blindingly obvious that there couldn’t be any connection with the early Middle Ages. On impulse she typed eagle teacher into Google, and got millions of hits. Ah, but ICE must have gone for an exact phrase search. This produced 12000 hits, still far too many! A quick scan revealed that most hits were about schoolteachers associated with ‘eagle’ awards or courses or somesuch, so she added -school to remove these. Much less, but still a few thousand.
She’d been visited in person. ICE must have put something extra into their search. What, what? Abigail re-read the fragment of poem. Struck by an awful inspiration, she typed +death as an extra search term.
Only 79 hits. Right at the top of the first page, staring coldly at her from the screen, was her contribution to the American Annals of Medieval History. There she was at number one. She sat back, shocked and shaking.
Back Bay, Boston, Massachusetts: April
She’d needed to get out of her office, out of Harvard itself, see fresh faces. Inside Tealuxe, sunshine highlighted the faces of Boston’s chattering connoisseurs of the beverage: old ladies in scarves, trendy students with lip-rings or shemaghs or brightly coloured beanie caps, a chap in a long black coat with a dove-grey scarf reading Newsweek. It was still chilly outside, and the warm haven was crowded.
Abigail sipped at her Lady Grey, pushing away uncomfortable thoughts about Terry; to no avail, he always crept back.
Perhaps they’d both gotten the wrong impression of each other from the get-go. From her perspective at least, she saw now that she certainly had. She’d always been a sucker for charm, and Terry’s winning smile, smooth courtesy and lavish attention soon crashed through her flimsy defences. Yet his easy charm turned out to be just a mask, behind which lived an insecure and home-loving boy, who wouldn’t commit to anything that would force him to take responsibility and grow up.
And what had he seen in her? She didn’t know, but at the moment he probably saw an obsessive and argumentative woman, who pushed him where he didn’t always want to go. A woman who was never going to stay in Boston forever, no matter that it was a lovely place to live. This made her seem cruel, which in turn made her feel bad, yet it had all started so well.
After the stipendiary at Radcliffe came up, she arrived a couple of months early to settle in, only to find herself desperately lonely. Boston had a small town mentality; it seemed surprisingly hard to break in. She asked Terry about the city when he served her a drink. He expounded. Soon he was taking her on whirlwind tours. He knew every inch of the place, introducing her to head waiters and chefs and barmen in all the fanciest venues; an instant circle of local and useful friends. He bought her meals and delightful little gifts. The intense shared experience had rolled heedlessly into romance.
She should have known from the first encounter that Terry’s roots went deep, like the roots of Boston itself, despite new structures built above. He’d even said then, almost with an odd kind of pride, that he’d never spent more than a fortnight away from home. Abruptly, it came to her that he would never leave Boston. Therefore they should end this now, before a worse ending was forced upon them. She felt nauseous, abandoned some tea undrunk, and headed out into crisp air and the hope offered by a bright blue sky.
She turned down Clarendon Street and paused where it crossed St. James Avenue, to take in a view that always fascinated her; Trinity Church reflected in the mirror-glass wall of the Hancock Tower. The old reflected in the new.
Jack Turner’s odd questions returned to prick her. Could the words of the old poem by Safiyya bint Yusuf al-Ballisiyya be reflected in some new and destructive purpose? Hijacked by terrorists to serve their violent ends? Or had someone dug down to find an old purpose, then built anew upon it?
The whole thing seemed ridiculous. Safiyya al-Ballisiyya had penned her words more than five hundred years ago. Apart from the fact that it was unsettling to receive personal interest from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jack Turner’s bizarre visit heightened an unresolved problem which had been niggling her for quite a while. The fragment by Safiyya was obscure, to say the least. Abigail simply didn’t know what it was really about. With only a single other work by the same writer, and that one romantic in nature, there was very little context to work with.
It seemed overwhelming likely that ICE were clutching at any Islamic straw to support some flimsy case. Nevertheless, she had to get ahead of them on this poem, if only to fend off any further unwarranted government intrusion. She headed down St. James and towards the public library, determining to make Safiyya al-Ballisiyya and her curious verse a priority, even above introducing reality to Terry.
Later, when she emerged from the library into its courtyard of Italianate columns, that same guy who’d been in Tealuxe was leaning against one, still intent on Newsweek. Coincidence?
Cairo, the Fatimid Caliphate: 1145
Hakim, the Arabic name for doctor, was the name he now determined to use as his own. This gave no information about either his lineage or his birthplace, shearing him of all associations but the high purpose he was about to dedicate his whole life to.
As a m
edical student freshly arrived in Cairo, bursaried by the charity of the Nizari Ismaili community in Syria, Hakim was determined to fit in. He didn’t want the fate of the pious fellow student named Sadiq. Poor Sadiq was tolerated, just, yet was socially excluded and, though that young man surely had a very similar background to himself, Hakim made no overtures to Sadiq for many months. That wasn’t the way to advance.
Before long, the popular Abdul and his crony Naguib sidled up to Hakim to ask, “Would you care to put some milk into a cow tonight, along with us?”
Cow was what you called a whore. So-called milk cows gave you sex outdoors; free cows went to the rooms of their clients; wild cows used their own rooms; and then there were the farm cows who worked in brothels.
“Of course,” and Abdul had winked, “we examine the cows carefully first of all, to make sure they’re clean.”
Down by the wax candle market, beside the mosque of Aqmar, Hakim had seen whores clad in red leather trousers coughing suggestively to draw the attention of prospective clients. He forced himself to joke: “I certainly wouldn’t want my candle dipped in dung.”
This caused Naguib to snigger. Abdul grinned. “Buggery costs a bit extra,” he remarked.
“That isn’t for me,” Hakim said. “I need to watch my purse.”
“Surely you can afford thirty dirhams for admittance to the gateway of joy? How do you expect to instruct a nurse to examine a woman, whose body you aren’t allowed to see, if you don’t already know the female body by experience, eh?”
Hakim detected a mischievous trap. “When did I say that I have never lain with a woman?”
Abdul smirked. “An easy riddle to solve. As a baby with your mother! How can you fill humanity with purpose, if you can’t even cause ecstasy in a woman?”
