by Alan Gold
‘Not all Arabs are unread and ignorant, you know.’ Then Mustafa grinned and both men smiled. He sat back down next to Shalman. ‘My father cannot read. Nor my mother. But I want to go to Lebanon, to university there.’
‘Why don’t you?’ asked Shalman.
Mustafa simply cast his arms wide to encompass the modest house and the impoverished village beyond. ‘There is no money here. To go to a university, you need money.’
A moment of silence passed between the two young men, who in that moment seemed so alike yet so far apart. The silence was broken when Mustafa finally turned to Shalman. ‘Archaeology, you say? Let me show you something . . .’
Minutes later, after leaving Shalman to go inside the house, Mustafa came back out and dropped three coins into Shalman’s open hand, a beaming smile of pride on his face. The coins were Roman, ancient and worn but unmistakable.
Shalman recognised one of the coins immediately, and told Mustafa that he believed it was exceptionally rare. It was the Iudaea Capta coin, minted by the Romans after they had put down the Great Jewish Revolt in 70 CE. With growing excitement Shalman pointed out to Mustafa the figure of a woman in mourning sitting beneath a palm tree, and a man standing behind her with his hands bound behind his back.
‘Where did you find these?’ he asked.
Mustafa smiled. Shalman looked into the man’s eyes, and saw a shadow of doubt and mistrust cross his mind. Would he tell him?
And then Mustafa said softly, ‘One thing at a time, Shalman. One thing at a time . . .’
The House of Wisdom, Baghdad
820 CE (188 years after the death of the Prophet Mohammed)
His arrival in Bayt al Hikma, the House of Wisdom, caused not an eyebrow to be raised, not a glance to be directed his way. Zakki ben Jacob had travelled with his wife and four children from Jerusalem to the new city of Baghdad and expected some recognition, some welcome, perhaps even some excitement at his arrival. But as he stood at the doorway of the central library and surveyed the vast room, full of noise and argument, discord and debate, there wasn’t even a murmur of interest in the new face standing at the threshold.
Instead, the room resembled a huge cage of parrots, men crawling over the floor looking at unfurled scrolls, or sitting on cushions at low tables shouting at one another as they pointed to texts. As they did, younger scholars rushed up and down ladders at their masters’ bidding, finding scrolls or codices or books or drawings that would disprove or validate a particular point of view.
There was a rainbow of colours in their dress, clothes which showed that the scholars came from Africa and Arabia and India and China. Amidst the cacophony of noise and the kaleidoscope of colour were some men who stood out because they were dressed in the earthen dark and dull cloaks and cowls of Christian monks. These men, Zakki guessed, had come from the countries far to the west and north of Baghdad – lands full of impassable forests still mired in the darkness of ignorance and chilled by the frosts of winter.
Zakki ben Jacob was used to silence when he thought and read and studied in his own library in Jerusalem. But as he stood on the threshold of this monumental room, the cacophony of rabid scholarship terrified him.
Had he made a terrible mistake, accepting the invitation of Caliph Ja’far al-Ma’mun? Was he wrong to leave his comfortable home in Jerusalem to come to Baghdad?
His wife, Dorit, had been vehemently against it. Their life had been comfortable and rewarding in Jerusalem and they had been able to visit the monuments built for their ancient ancestors who were said to have been priests in King Solomon’s great temple. Similarly his children had been against going; the world they knew was in Jerusalem, not far from there, to the south-east within the Islamic caliphate.
But the emissary had been so seductive, offering Zakki so much that he’d felt compelled to agree almost on the spot. Dorit had been furious, telling him that he could earn a good living in Jerusalem and so why would he want to leave? Dorit didn’t understand that the offer from the Caliph had been far more than material; it was a chance to be a part of unfathomable intellectual stimulation among the greatest scholars of the age.
And now here he was, one of Jerusalem’s most revered doctors and philosophers, a mathematician and astrologer, a man who was recognised in all of the streets of his homeland, standing at the gateway to the greatest institute of learning in the world, and being completely ignored.
For the first time since he’d become a doctor, Zakki ben Jacob felt uneasy and uncomfortable among his peers. Here it was as though he was a void, a phantasm, a djinn without form or substance. Ill at ease, he reached up to his throat and gripped the pendant hanging around his neck. It was a glorious pendant hanging by a thick golden chain. Made of ancient metal, it was a copy of a seal created by the tunnel builder Matanyahu of the time of King Solomon. And it was his good-luck charm, a link to Zakki’s ancient lineage, and so it was his strength in times of uncertainty.
Grasping the seal in his left hand, Zakki coughed. Nobody looked up; all were too busy with the particular tasks they had set themselves. He coughed again, louder this time, and several men finally turned their eyes to him, frowned, and returned to their texts.
Resigned that he couldn’t turn back to Jerusalem, Zakki picked up his travelling bag and walked into the room, peering over the shoulders of the scholars hunched over tables, looking down at the floor where elderly men were stretched out comparing the text of one scroll against another, or who were translating from Greek into Arabic and Latin. He continued to walk around the hall until he came to a table where three men were seated. It was as though he was standing in the middle of a howling desert wind, unable to think, unable to make out any coherence in all the cacophony.
But then he heard words that stimulated his ears, words in a language native to him.
He stood for a moment at the table, and listened to the men speaking to one another in heated voices, their hands animated as they pointed at the texts in front of them. The words they used were desperate attempts to pronounce the Hebrew language from a scroll. But they were using the language so wrongly.
‘Brothers, may I be of assistance?’ he asked in a loud voice, summoning confidence.
One of the elderly men looked up at him. ‘Is the language of the Jews your native tongue?’ he asked in Arabic.
Zakki smiled and showed the man the ancient seal hanging around his neck. All could see that although the Hebrew was from an ancient era, it was clearly the language they were trying to translate.
‘I speak Hebrew and it’s my native tongue. But I also speak Latin and Greek and Aramaic. My name is – ’
All of the scholars put their fingers to their lips, demanding his silence. Zakki was confused but cut off his words at the gestures.
‘Brother, we are all here scholars of many different disciplines. Those who have been summoned have come in response to the hadith of their holy book, the Koran, which says that the ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of a martyr. That, brother, is why you have no name in this House of Wisdom. We are known only by our relationship of brother.
‘Some of us are students of medicine, some of optics, some of astronomy, some mathematics and al chemica, and so on and so forth. In our homes, we are well known and respected. And we are all revered here for our knowledge. But in this place, brother, we are all of the same height; only our books are elevated onto a table. None of us is greater, better or more than the other. Only knowledge and scholarship are elevated, not the scholar. That is why in the House of Wisdom we keep our names to ourselves.’
To Zakki, the words were like poetry: noble, powerful and intoxicating.
‘What is your field of study, brother? Is it language? Can you help us translate these ancient writings of the Greek philosophers Thales and Anaxamander into Hebrew?’
‘Perhaps,’ Zakki said, ‘but my work is that of a doctor and philosopher. I’ve trained in Rome and Alexandria, like my father before me, and his father before him u
nto the hundredth generation when, it is told, we were priests and healers in the Temple of Solomon.’
‘Then,’ said the elderly scholar, rummaging among the texts on his table, until he pulled out a thick and dusty tome, ‘you can assist us with the medical and anatomical terms used by the great Hippocrates of Kos, which we scholars of language have found difficult to translate into languages from his archaic Greek. He uses terms for the human body and its ailments with which we are unfamiliar.’
Zakki found a cushion and sat among his peers. ‘Gladly . . . brothers.’
It was his second week in the House of Wisdom when Zakki’s intellectual life was turned on its head. He had come to Baghdad at the invitation of the Caliph to share his knowledge with other scholars, and he also hoped that he would learn greater things from them.
Neither a proud nor hubristic man, Zakki was wise enough to know that there was much he didn’t know, and was always open to learn more. Like his forefathers before him, he came from a long and honourable line of priests, scholars and healers. And like them, he had always gone in search of knowledge.
He had spent a lifetime acquiring the knowledge of his professions of medicine, healing and alchemy. His rubric was that the facts he collected were just that, facts and information, often disparate and disconnected. Yet in his mind, he somehow transformed them into knowledge of the world, and through that knowledge, he could determine the right treatment for his patients.
But Zakki wasn’t satisfied. Knowledge wasn’t enough. For facts weren’t sufficient fuel to give him the wisdom on how his knowledge fitted into a universal landscape. When he was with philosophers, discussing the deepest of subjects, such as why mankind had been ordained by the Almighty One to be above the animals, he felt himself somehow like a supplicant at their feet.
When he sat and thought as a philosopher, his knowledge was insufficient. For knowledge to metamorphose into the wisdom of philosophy, what was required was the company of other minds, discussion and argument, challenge and intellectual conflict, which would, in time, lead him to deeper and deeper thoughts. And this is what he had found for the first time in his life at the House of Wisdom.
None, though, not the Muslims nor the other Jews, nor the men who had travelled from the furthest reaches of the world, challenged him, or transmuted his knowledge into the wisdom of philosophy, more than Osric the Monk. The simple bald-headed little man came to Baghdad from an abbey in a township called Glastonbury in a country called Anglia, which was north of Gallic France.
Invited as other scholars to the House of Wisdom by the Caliph, Osric of Leicester was a small and wiry man, balding yet with a face that defied all but the crudest indication of age. Osric was a monkish scholar who had brought with him to Baghdad twenty volumes of a Codex he called the Etymologiae, written a hundred years earlier by the greatest scholar of his age, Bishop Isidor of Seville. This bishop had written what Osric called ‘a summation of all the knowledge of the world’. The works contained 450 chapters of densely packed facts concerning the very earth itself, the life of men who lived in the past, religion, science and much more.
‘Not since the time of Homer, Pliny and Thucydides has a man known everything that there was to know, here on earth and in the heavens above,’ Osric had told Zakki when they first sat on low cushions, legs folded, to discuss the intersection between the books of Moses and those written by the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth.
But when Osric explained to Zakki what the long-dead bishop had written about Zakki’s own city of Jerusalem, he argued that much of the information was simply incorrect. Bishop Isidor had written that King Solomon had left a great and incalculable treasure for the benefit of mankind, yet the Romans didn’t realise that it was in the treasure house of his temple when they pulled it down to punish the Jews. So the treasure of gold, silver and precious gems was still, to this day, buried under a massive heap of stones caused when the Roman vandals destroyed Jerusalem following the Jewish revolt.
Zakki told Osric that, yes, there was stone upon stone in massive piles of rubble, far too heavy for the citizens to lift and clear away. It was so much, Zakki told him, that successive governments of the city, the Romans, Jews and now Muslims, had left it as it was for hundreds of years and it was true that nobody knew what was beneath the massive stones that in places were twice the height of a man. But to think that the Romans, the greatest scavengers the world had ever known, would have left even a single precious stone or the smallest golden object was nonsense.
Yet day after day, Osric argued that the treasure was there to be found, and that when it was, it would herald the return of Jesus Christ as Messiah in the second coming, to save the world from its misery.
‘When it is found, Solomon’s wealth will be distributed to all the poor of the earth and raise them above the status of serfs and villeins. It is even said that the noble Emperor Constantine himself, first great Roman to convert to my faith, sent his very mother, the blessed Saint Helena, to find the treasure of Solomon. Wherefore, then, should we doubt or fail to seek this treasure?’
Zakki turned on the monk. ‘What nonsense you Christians talk,’ he said sharply. ‘Helena made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to recover the cross on which your messiah was crucified. And it has been told that when they found out the Emperor’s mother was in Jerusalem, there were a thousand scoundrels who picked up branches from their gardens and made them into splinters, telling her that they were fragments of the true cross, and sold them to her for a fortune. Stories abound in Jerusalem of a man who lived there and owed a great debt, so when Helena visited the city, he convinced her that the ground which he owned where stood a pagan temple was the very land upon which Abraham almost sacrificed Isaac, and upon which your Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, and where his sepulchre was laid to rest. She wasn’t looking for any treasure of Solomon, Osric, but for the remnants of the life of your Jesus.’
The monk looked at him disbelievingly, and cited chapter and verse from Saint Isidor’s works to prove his case. To pacify the distressed Christian mystic, Zakki promised him that when he returned to Jerusalem, he would search diligently for such a treasure, but he knew in his heart that it had been dissipated when the Jews were sent on their first exile into Babylonia, and had then been dispersed around the world.
And on this point and others concerning science, ethics, theology and philosophy, Zakki and Osric argued every day. They would also read from and debate the learned Bishop Isidor’s other chapters in the Etymologiae. Zakki found it so amazing to read that he begged Osric to allow him to buy the set of books so that he could spend the rest of his life studying them, but the monk had just received an urgent note from his monastery to return to Anglia. Zakki regretted his leaving, but Osric assured him that while ever Zakki was in Baghdad, he would always have access to St Isidor because the monk would leave the volumes of the Etymologiae in the great library of the House of Wisdom where they would be available to him and every other scholar.
Zakki spent his days either disputing with other sages, reading in the library, or translating ancient works, except those days dedicated to prayer, and several weeks had passed before he decided to take some time to himself and explore the wonders of the city.
The construction of Baghdad had begun sixty years earlier by the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur when he transferred his capital from Damascus. It was in the fertile valley between the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates and hence called by the Greeks Mesopotamia. The city was replete with palms and gardens, cool spots for contemplation and roof gardens for the growing of vegetables such as carrots, herbs such as bananas, and fruits and flowers of every colour and description.
Yet despite being in existence for such a short time, Baghdad was already greater and more prosperous than Jerusalem, which had never fully recovered from the devastation wreaked by the Romans seven hundred years earlier.
Meandering through the wide city streets, Zakki found that the epicentre of the city was a huge mosque. Around
it were Islamic study houses and instruction centres for pupils from all over the world who had come to study at the feet of the great Abbasid Koranic teachers. These buildings were surrounded by a ring road and beyond them were churches for Christian worshippers and synagogues for the many Jews who lived in Baghdad. Then, surmounting these, were shops that sold meats and cloth, copies of holy books, jewellery from Asia and further east, ivory and the incredible skins of animals from Africa, and much more.
Tired from wandering in the heat of the day, Zakki walked beneath a cloth canopy attached to buildings on the side of the street and sat on a low stool at a wooden table attached to a market stall. The owner came over to him and asked him what he wanted to eat or drink.
‘Just a drink, please,’ Zakki said.
The owner looked at the scholar’s clothes and sneered. ‘I suppose you’re a Jew! Why won’t you people eat my food? Isn’t it good enough for you?’
Zakki smiled. ‘It’s probably very good, my friend,’ he said. ‘But our holy book prohibits us from eating that which hasn’t been prepared according to our ways, just as you Muslims are forbidden to drink spirits that intoxicate the mind, or like us, eat of the flesh of the pig.’
‘I’m not a Muslim, friend,’ the owner scoffed. ‘I’m a Christian, and I’ll starve in this city trying to feed people like you.’
Zakki took pity on him. ‘Then tell me, follower of Jesus, when you make bread, do you use the fat of a pig, or the milk and butter of goats or sheep?’
‘I use the milk and butter of cows.’
‘Good,’ said Zakki. ‘Then kindly bring me slices of your bread and I’ll have some olives and seeds with it.’
The owner showed the rudiments of a smile. ‘And what about some beef? I’ve slices from the haunch of a cow, if you’d like that . . .’
Zakki shook his head. ‘No, friend, just the bread.’
He sat alone, revelling in the silence of the street. Silence? It was full of the sounds of people and commerce. Yet compared to the perpetual din, the never-ending discord and shouting and arguments in the House of Wisdom, sitting here was like being in the Fields of Elysium.
