The Years of Rice and Salt

  On the voyage to Arabia, Bistami had fasted more seriously than ever in his life, even in the tomb of Chishti. Now he flowed through the stone streets of Mecca light as a feather, looking up at the palms dusting the sky with their gently waving green fronds, feeling so airy in God’s grace that it sometimes seemed he looked down on the palm tops, or around the corners into the Kaaba, and he would have to stare at his feet for a while to regain his balance and his sense of self, though as he did so his feet began to seem like distant creatures of their own, thrusting forwards one after the other, time after time. O he, O he who is He . . .

  He had separated himself from the representatives of Fatepur Sikri, as Akbar’s family he found an unwelcome reminder of his lost master.

  With them it was always Akbar this and Akbar that, his wife Salima (a second wife, not the Empress) plaintive in a self-satisfied way, his aunt egging her on — no. Women were on their own pilgrimage in any case, but the men in the Mughal retinue were almost as bad. And Wazir the mir haj was an ally of Abul Fazl, and therefore suspicious of Bistami, dismissive of him to the point of contempt. There would be no place for Bistami in the Mughal school, assuming that they established one at all, rather than just disbursing some alms and city funds from an embassy, which was how it looked as if it would come about. Either way Bistami would not be welcome among them, that was clear.

  But this was one of those blessed moments when the future was no matter for concern, when both past and future were absent from the world. That was what struck Bistami most, even at the time, even in the act of floating along in the line of belief, one of a million whiterobed hajjis pilgrims from all over Dar al-Islam, from the Maghrib to Mindanao, from Siberia to the Seychelles: how they were all there together in this one moment, the sky and the town under it all glowing with their presence, not transparently as at Chishti’s tomb, but full of colour, stuffed with all the colours of the world. All the people of the world were one.

  This holiness radiated outwards from the Kaaba. Bistami moved with the line of humanity into the holiest mosque, and passed by the big smooth black stone, blacker than ebony or jet, black as the night sky without stars, like a boulder-shaped hole in reality. He felt his body and soul pulsing in the same rhythm as the line, as the world. Touching the black stone was like touching flesh. It seemed to revolve around him. The dream image of Akbar’s black eyes came to him and he shrugged them away, aware they were distractions out of his own mind, aware of Allah’s ban on images. The stone was all and it was just a stone, black reality itself, made solid by God. He kept his place in the line and felt the spirits of the people ahead of him lifting as they passed out of the square, as if they were climbing a stairway into heaven.

  Dispersal; return to camp; the first sips of soup and coffee at sundown; all occurred in a silent cool evening under the evening star. Everyone at such peace. Washed clean inside. Looking around at all the faces, Bistami thought, Oh why don’t we live like this all the time? What is important enough to take us away from this moment? Firelit faces, starry night overhead, ripples of song or soft laughter, peace, peace: no one seemed to want to fall asleep, to end this moment and wake up the next day, back in the sensible world.

  • • •

  Akbar’s family and haj left in a caravan back to Jiddah. Bistami went to the outskirts of town to see them off; Akbar’s wife and aunt said goodbye to him, waving from camel-back. The rest were already intent on the long journey to Fatepur Sikri.

  After that Bistami was alone in Mecca, a city of strangers. Most were leaving now, in caravan after caravan. It was a lugubrious, uncanny sight: hundreds of caravans, thousands of people, happy but deflated, their white robes packed away or revealed suddenly to be dusty, fringed at the foot with brown dirt. So many were leaving that it seemed the city was being abandoned before some approaching disaster, as perhaps had happened once or twice, in time of war or famine or plague.

  But a week or two later the ordinary Mecca was revealed, a whitewashed dusty little town of a few thousand people. Many of them were clerics or scholars or sufis or qadis or ulema, or heterodox refugees of one sort or another, claiming the sanctuary of the holy city. Most, however, were merchants and tradespeople. In the aftermath of the haj they looked exhausted, drained, almost stunned it seemed, and inclined to disappear into their blank-walled compounds, leaving the remaining outsiders in town to fend for themselves for a month or two. For the remnant ulema and scholars, it was as if they were camping out in the empty heart of Islam, making it full by their own devotions, cooking over fires on the edges of town at dusk, trading for food with passing nomads. Many sang songs through most of the night.

  The Persian-speaking group was big, and congregated nightly around fires of its khitta on the eastern edge of town, where the canals came in from the hills. Thus they were the first to experience the spate that burst onto the town after storms to the north, which they heard but never saw. A wall of muddy black water slammed down the canals and spread out through the streets, rolling palm trunks and boulders like weapons into the upper half of the town. Everything flooded after that, until even the Kaaba itself stood in water up to the silver ring that held it in place.

  Bistami threw himself with great pleasure into the efforts to drain the waters, and then to clean up the town. After the experience of the light in Chishti’s tomb, and the supreme experience of the haj, there was little more he felt he could do in the mystic realm. He lived now in the aftermath of those events, and felt himself utterly changed; but what he wanted to do now was to read Persian poetry for an hour in the brief cool of the mornings, then work outside in the low hot winter sun in the afternoons. With the town broken and waist-deep in mud, there was a lot of work to be done. Pray, read, work, eat, pray, sleep; this was the pattern of a good day. Day after day passed in this satisfying round.

  Then as the winter wore on, he began to study at a sufi madressa established by scholars from the Maghrib, that western end of the world that was becoming more powerful, extending as it was both north into al-Andalus and Firanja, and south into the Sahel. Bistami and the others there read and discussed not just Rumi and Shams, but also the philosophers Ibn Sina and Ibn Rashd, and the ancient Greek Aristotle, and the historian Ibn Khaldun. The Maghribis in the madressa were not as interested in contesting points of doctrine as they were in exchanging new information about the world; they were full of stories of the reoccupation of al-Andalus and Firanja, and tales of the lost Frankish civilization. They were friendly to Bistami; they had no opinion of him one way or another; they thought of him as Persian, and so it was much more pleasant to be among them than with the Mughalis in the Timurid embassy, where he was regarded uneasily at best. Bistami saw that if his being stationed in Mecca was punishment in the form of exile from Akbar and Sind, then the other Mughalis assigned here had to wonder if they too were in disfavour, rather than honoured for their religious devotion. Seeing Bistami reminded them of this possibility, and so he was shunned like a leper. He therefore spent more and more of his time at the Maghribi madressa, and out in the Persian-speaking khitta, now set a bit higher in the hills above the canals east of town.

  The year in Mecca always oriented itself in time to the haj, in just the same way that Islam oriented itself in space to Mecca. As the months passed, all began to make their preparations, and as Ramadan approached, nothing else in the world mattered but the upcoming haj. Much of the effort involved simply feeding the masses that would descend on the town. A whole system had developed to accomplish this miraculous feat, astonishing in its size and efficiency, here on this out-of-the-way corner of a nearly lifeless desert peninsula. Though of course Aden and Yemen were rich, to the south below them. No doubt, Bistami thought as he walked by the pastures now filling up with sheep and goats, mulling over his readings in Ibn Khaldun, the system had grown with the growth of the haj itself. Which must have been rapid: Islam had exploded out of Arabia in the first century after the hegira, he was coming to understand. Al-Andalus had b
een Islamicized by the year 100, the far reaches of the Spice Islands by the year 200; the whole span of the known world had been converted, only two centuries after the Prophet had received the Word and spread it to the people of this little land in the middle. Ever since then people had been coming here in greater and greater numbers.

  One day he and a few other young scholars went to Medina, walking all the way, reciting prayers as they went, to see Mohammed’s first mosque again. Past endless pens of sheep and goats, past cheese dairies, granaries, date palm groves, then into the outskirts of Medina, a sleepy, sandy, dilapidated little settlement when the haj was not there to bring it alive. In one stand of thick ancient palms, the little whitewashed mosque hid in the shade, as polished as a pearl. Here the Prophet had preached during his exile, and taken down most of the verses of the Quran from Allah.

  Bistami wandered the garden outside this holy place, trying to imagine how it had happened. Reading Khaldun had made him understand: these things had all happened. In the beginning, the Prophet had stood in this grove, speaking in the open air. Later he had leaned against a palm tree when he spoke, and some of his followers had suggested a chair. He had agreed to it only as long as it was low enough that there was no suggestion he was claiming any sort of privilege for himself. The Prophet, perfect man that he had been, was modest. He had agreed to the construction of a mosque where he taught, but for many years it had gone roofless; Mohammed had declared there was more important business for the faithful to accomplish first. And then they had made their return to Mecca, and the Prophet had led twenty-six military campaigns himself: the jihad. After that, how quickly the word had spread. Khaldun attributed this rapidity to a readiness in people for the next stage in civilization, and to the manifest truth of the Quran.

  Bistami, troubled by something he could not pin down, wondered about this explanation. In India, civilizations had come and gone, come and gone. Islam itself had conquered India. But under the Mughals the ancient beliefs of the Indians endured, and Islam itself changed in its constant contact with them. This had become clearer to Bistami as he studied the pure religion in the madressa. Although sufism itself was perhaps more than a simple return to the pure source. An advance, or (could one say?) a clarification, even an improvement. An effort to bypass the ulemas. In any case, change. It did not seem that it could be prevented. Everything changed. As the sufi junnaiyd at the madressa said, the word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. After the winter’s great flood, this image was particularly vivid and troubling. Islam, spreading over the world like a spate of mud, a mix of God and man; it did not seem very much like what had happened to him in the tomb of Chishti, or at the moment of the haj, when it seemed the Kaaba had revolved around him. But even his memory of those events was changing. Everything changed in this world.

  Including Medina and Mecca, which grew in population rapidly as the haj approached, and shepherds poured into town with their flocks, tradesmen with their wares — clothing, travelling equipment to replace things broken or lost, religious scripts, mementos of the haj, and so on. In the final month of preparation the early pilgrims began to arrive, long strings of camels carrying dusty, happy travellers, their faces alight with the feeling Bistami remembered from the year before, a year which seemed to have gone so fast — and yet his own haj at the same time seemed as if it were on the far side of a great abyss in his mind. He could not call up in himself the feeling that he saw on their faces. He was no pilgrim this time, but a resident, and he found himself feeling some of the residents’ resentment, that his peaceful village, like a big madressa really, was swelling to a ridiculous engorgement, as if a great family of enthusiastic relatives had descended on them all at once. Not a happy way of thinking of it, and Bistami set himself guiltily to a full round of prayers, fasting, and aid of the influx, especially those exhausted or sick: leading them to khittas and finas and caravanserai and hostelries, throwing himself into a routine to make himself feel he was more in the spirit of the haj. But daily exposure to the ecstatic faces of the pilgrims reminded him how far he was from that. Their faces were alight with God. He saw how clearly faces revealed the soul, they were like windows into a deeper world.

  So he hoped that his pleasure at greeting the pilgrims from Akbar’s court was obvious on his face. But Akbar himself had not come, nor any of his immediate family, and no one in the group looked at all happy to be there, or to see Bistami. The news from home was ominous. Akbar had become critical of his ulema. He received Hindu rajas, and listened sympathetically to their concerns. He had even begun openly to worship the sun, prostrating himself four times a day before a sacred fire, abstaining from meat, alcohol and sexual intercourse. These were Hindu practices, and indeed on every Sunday he was initiating twelve of his amirs in his service. The neophytes placed their heads directly on Akbar’s feet during this ceremony, an extreme form of prostration known as sijdah, a form of submission to another human being that was blasphemous to Muslims. And he had not been willing to fund much of a pilgrimage; indeed, he had had to be convinced to send any at all. He had sent Shaikh Abdul Nabi and Malauna Abdulla as a way of exiling them, just as he had Bistami the year before. In short, he appeared to be falling away from the faith. Akbar, falling away from Islam!

  And, Abdul Nabi told Bistami bluntly, many at the court blamed him, Bistami, for this change in Akbar. It was a matter of convenience only, Abdul Nabi assured him. “Blaming someone who is far away is safest for all, you see. But now they have it that you were sent to Mecca with the idea of reforming you. You were babbling about the light, the light, and you were sent away, and now Akbar is worshipping the sun like a Zoroastrian or some pagan from the ancient times.”

  “So I can’t return,” Bistami said.

  Abdul Nabi shook his head. “Not only that, but I judge that it isn’t even safe for you to stay here. If you do, the ulema may accuse you of heresy, and come and take you back for judgment. Or even judge you here.”

  “You’re saying I should leave here?”

  Abdul Nabi nodded, slowly and deeply. “Surely there are more interesting places for you than Mecca. A qadi like you can find good work to do, anywhere the ruler is a Muslim. Nothing will happen during the haj, of course. But when it’s over .

  Bistami nodded and thanked the shaikh for his honesty.

  He realized that he wanted to leave anyway. He didn’t want to stay in Mecca. He wanted to go back to Akbar, and the timeless hours in Chishti’s tomb, and live in that space for ever; but if that was not possible, he would have to begin his tariqat again, and wander in search of his real life. He recalled what had happened to Shams when the disciples of Rumi got tired of Rumi’s infatuation with his friend. Shams had disappeared, never to be seen again, some said tied to rocks and thrown in a river. If people in Fatepur Sikri thought that Akbar had found his Shams in Bistami — which struck Bistami as backwards — but they had spent a lot of time together, more than seemed explicable; and no one else knew what had gone on between them in those meetings, how much it had been a matter of Akbar teaching the teacher. It is always the teacher who must learn the most, Bistami thought, or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

  The rest of that haj was strange. The crowds seemed huge, inhuman, possessed, a pestilence consuming hundreds of sheep a day, and all the ulema like shepherds, organizing this cannibalism. Of course one could not speak of these things, but only repeat some of the phrases that had burned their way into his soul so deeply, O he who is He, O he who is He, Allah the Merciful the Compassionate. Why should I be afraid? God sets all in action. No doubt he was supposed to continue his tariclat until he found something more. After the haj one was supposed to move on.

  The Maghribi scholars were the friendliest he knew, they exhibited the sufi hospitality at its finest, as well as a keen curiosity about the world. He could go back up to Isfahan, of course, but something drew him westwards. Clarified as he had been in the realm of light, he d
id not care to go back to the richness of the Iranian gardens. In the Quran the word for Paradise, and all of Mohammed’s words for describing Paradise, came out of Persian words; while the word for Hell, in the very same suras, came from Hebrew, a desert language. That was a sign. Bistami did not want Paradise. He wanted something he could not define, a human challenge of some indefinable kind. Say the human was a mix of material and divine, and that the divine soul lived on; there must then be some purpose to this travel through the days, some movement up towards higher realms of being, so that the Khaldunian model of cycling dynasties, moving endlessly from youthful vigour to lethargic bloated old age, had to be altered by the addition of reason to human affairs. Thus the notion of the cycle being in fact a rising gyre, in which the possibility of the next young dynasty beginning at a higher level than the last time around was acknowledged and made a goal. This is what he wanted to teach, this is what he wanted to learn. Westwards, following the sun, he would find it, and all would be well.

  SIX

  Al-Andalus

  Everywhere he went seemed the new centre of the world. When he was young, Isfahan had seemed the capital of everywhere; then Gujarat, then Agra and Fatepur Sikri; then Mecca and the black stone of Abraham, the true heart of all. Now Cairo appeared to him the ultimate metropolis, impossibly ancient, dusty and huge. The Mamluks walked through the crowded streets with their retinues in train, powerful men wearing feathered helmets, confident in their mastery of Cairo, Egypt and most of the Levant. When Bistami saw them he usually followed for a while, as did many others, and he found himself both reminded of Akbar’s pomp, and struck by how different the Mamluks were, how they formed a jati that was brought into being anew with each generation. Nothing could be less imperial; there was no dynasty; and yet their control over the populace was even stronger than a dynasty’s. It could be that everything Khaldun had said about dynastic cycling was rendered irrelevant by this new system of governance, which had not existed in his time. Things changed, so that even the greatest historian of all could not speak the last word.