Mirrors

  She had dalliances, affairs, lovers, and she flaunted them cheerfully, though Church records say they were “behaviors that would make one blush to speak of.”

  AYESHA

  Six centuries after the death of Jesus, Mohammed died.

  The founder of Islam, who by Allah’s permission had twelve wives nearly all at the same time, left nine widows. By Allah’s prohibition, none of them remarried.

  Ayesha, the youngest, had been the favorite.

  Some time later, she led an armed uprising against the caliph, Imam Ali.

  In our times, many mosques refuse entry to women, but back then mosques were where Ayesha’s fiery speeches roused people to anger. Mounted on her camel, she attacked the city of Basra. The lengthy battle caused fifteen thousand casualties.

  That bloodletting launched the enmity between Sunnis and Shiites, which to this day takes lives. And certain theologians decreed it irrefutable proof that women make a mess of things when they escape the bedroom and the kitchen.

  MOHAMMED

  When Ayesha was defeated, someone suddenly recalled what Mohammed had suggested twenty-eight years earlier:

  “Hang up your lash where your woman can see it.”

  And other disciples of the Prophet, also given to timely recollections, remembered that he had said paradise is filled with the poor and hell filled with women.

  Time passed, and by a few centuries after Mohammed’s death the sayings attributed to him by Islam’s theocracy numbered over six hundred. A good many of those phrases, especially the ones that curse women, have become religious truths received from heaven and untouchable by human doubt.

  Yet the Koran, the holy book dictated by Allah, says that man and woman were created equal and that Eve had no art or part in Adam’s seduction by the serpent.

  MOHAMMED’S BIOGRAPHER

  He was an evangelical pastor, but not for long. Religious orthodoxy was not for him. An open-minded man, a passionate polemicist, he traded the church for the university.

  He studied at Princeton, taught in New York.

  He was a professor of Oriental languages and author of the first biography of Mohammed published in the United States.

  He wrote that Mohammed was an extraordinary man, a visionary blessed with irresistible magnetism, and also an impostor, a charlatan, a purveyor of illusions. But he thought no better of Christianity, which he considered “disastrous” in the epoch when Islam was founded.

  That was his first book. Later on, he wrote others. In the field of Middle Eastern affairs, few academics could compare.

  He lived indoors surrounded by towers of strange books. When he wasn’t writing, he read.

  He died in New York in 1859.

  His name was George Bush.

  SUKAINA

  For women in some Muslim nations, the veil is a jail: a peripatetic prison that travels wherever they go.

  But Mohammed’s women did not cover their faces, and the Koran never mentions the word “veil,” though it does recommend that women cover their hair with a shawl outside the home. Catholic nuns, who do not follow the Koran, cover their hair, and in many places in the world non-Muslim women wear shawls or wraps or kerchiefs on their heads.

  But a shawl worn by choice is one thing, and a veil worn by male dictum, obliging women to hide their faces, is something else.

  One of the most implacable enemies of face-covering was Sukaina, Mohammed’s great-granddaughter, who not only refused to wear one, but denounced it at the top of her lungs.

  Sukaina married five times, and in each of her five marriage contracts she refused to pledge obedience to her husband.

  MOTHER OF ALL STORYTELLERS

  To avenge a woman who betrayed him, a king killed them all.

  At dusk he married and at dawn he widowed.

  One after another, the virgins lost their virginity and their heads.

  Scheherazade was the only one to survive the first night, and then she continued trading a story for each new day of life.

  Stories she heard, read, or imagined saved her from decapitation. She told them in a low voice, in the darkness of the bedroom, with no light but that of the moon. In the telling she felt pleasure and gave pleasure, but she tread carefully. Sometimes, in the middle of a tale, she felt the king’s eyes studying her neck.

  If he got bored, she was lost.

  From fear of dying sprang the knack of narrating.

  BAGHDAD

  Scheherazade lived her thousand and one nights in a palace in Baghdad on the banks of the Tigris River.

  Her thousand and one stories were born in that land or had migrated there from Persia, Arabia, India, China, or Turkistan, just as the thousand and one marvels brought by merchant caravans from far-off lands ended up in the city’s market stalls.

  Baghdad was the center of the world. All roads, of words and of things, met in that city of plazas and fountains, baths and gardens. The most famous physicians, astronomers, and mathematicians also met in Baghdad, at an academy of sciences known as the House of Wisdom.

  Among them was Muhammed al-Khwarizmi, the inventor of algebra, which got its name from the first word of the title of one of his books, al-jabr.

  VOICE OF WINE

  Omar Khayyam wrote treatises on algebra, metaphysics, and astronomy. And he was the author of underground poems that spread by word of mouth throughout Persia and beyond.

  Those poems were hymns to wine, sinful elixir condemned by the powers of Islam.

  Heaven has not learned of my arrival, the poet said, and my departure will not in the least diminish its beauty and grandeur. The moon, which seeks me out tomorrow, will continue rising even if it no longer finds me. I will sleep underground, with neither woman nor friend. For us ephemeral mortals, the only eternity is the moment, and drinking to the moment is better than weeping for it.

  Khayyam preferred the tavern to the mosque. He feared neither earthly powers nor celestial threats, and he felt pity for God, who could never get drunk. The word “supreme” is not written in the Koran, but on the lip of a wineglass. It is read not with the eyes, but with the mouth.

  CRUSADES

  In the span of just over a century and a half, Europe sent eight Crusades to the infidel lands of the East.

  Islam, which had usurped the sacred sepulchre of Jesus, was a remote enemy. So along the way these warriors of the faith took advantage to wipe other maps clean.

  The holy war began at home.

  The First Crusade set fire to synagogues and left not a Jew alive in Mainz and other German cities.

  The Fourth Crusade left for Jerusalem but never arrived. The Christian warriors stopped over in Christian Constantinople, an opulent city, and for three days and nights they pillaged, sparing neither churches nor monasteries, and when there were no women left to rape or palaces to sack they stayed on to enjoy the booty, and forgot all about the final destination of their sacred enterprise.

  A few years later, in 1209, another Crusade began by exterminating Christians on French soil. The Cathars, puritan Christians, refused to acknowledge the power of the king or the pope and believed all wars ded God, including those, like the Crusades, that were waged in God’s name. This very popular heresy was torn out by the roots. From city to city, castle to castle, village to village. The most ferocious massacre took place in Béziers. There everyone got the knife: Cathars and Catholics alike. Some sought refuge in the cathedral. In vain, no one escaped the butchery. There wasn’t time to figure out who was whom.

  According to some versions, papal legate Arnaud-Amaury, later archbishop of Narbonne, did not hesitate. He ordered:

  “Kill them all; for the Lord knoweth them that are His.”

  DIVINE COMMANDMENTS

  The literacy rate among the armed services of Christianity was not exactly high. That may explain why they were unable to read the commandments on Moses’s tablets.

  They read that God ordered his name taken in vain, and in God’s name they did what they did.

/>   They read that God ordered them to lie, and they violated nearly every agreement they signed in their holy war against the infidels.

  They read that God ordered them to steal, and they pillaged everything in their path to the Orient, buttressed by the standard with the cross and by the blessing of the pope, which guaranteed their debts would be pardoned and their souls saved for eternity.

  They read that God ordered them to commit carnal acts, and the hosts of the Lord fulfilled that duty not only with the numerous professionals hired by the Army of Christ, but also with the captured heathens who formed part of the booty.

  And they read that God ordered them to kill, and entire towns underwent the knife, children included: out of Christian duty to purify lands soiled by heresy, or out of simple necessity, as in the case of Richard the Lionhearted, who had to slit the throats of his prisoners because they slowed his pace.

  “They walk spattering blood,” a witness said.

  CRAZY ABOUT FRENCH WOMEN

  Imad ad-Din was the right-hand man of Sultan Saladin. In addition, he was a poet of florid hand.

  From Damascus he described the three hundred French prostitutes who accompanied the warriors of Christ on the Third Crusade:

  They all were wild fornicators, proud and scornful, who took and gave, sinners of firm flesh, crooners and flirts, available but haughty, impetuous, ardent, dyed and painted, desirable, delectable, exquisite, grateful, who rent and mended, destroyed and rebuilt, lost and found, stole and consoled, wantonly seductive, languid, desired and desirous, dizzy and dizzying, ever-changing, practiced, rapturous adolescents, amorous, offering of themselves, loving, passionate, shameless, of abundant hips and narrow waist, fleshy thighs, nasal voices, black eyes, blue eyes, ashen eyes. And oh so dumb.

  POET PROPHET

  Mohammed’s descendants dedicated themselves to fighting each other, Sunnis against Shiites, Baghdad against Cairo, and the Islamic world fractured into bits bent on mutual hatred.

  At war with itself, the Muslim army disintegrated and the crusaders, finding no obstacle, marched on the holy sepulchre at the pace of conquerors.

  An Arab poet, who wrote about the Arabs from the Arab point of view, described it thus:

  There are two kinds of people in this land:

  those who have brains but no religion

  and those who have religion but no brains.

  And also:

  Fate smashes us as if we were made of glass,

  and never again will our pieces come together.

  The author was Abu Ali al-Ma’arri. He died in the year 1057 in the Syrian city of Ma’arrat, forty years before the Christians demolished it stone by stone.

  The poet was blind. So they say.

  TROTULA

  While the Crusades leveled Ma’arrat, Trotula di Ruggiero was dying in Salerno.

  Since History was busy recording the feats of Christ’s warriors, not much is known of her. We know that a cortege forty blocks long accompanied her to the cemetery, and that she was the first woman to write a treatise on gynecology, obstetrics, and child development.

  “Women do not dare uncover their intimate parts before a male doctor, due to shame and innate reserve,” wrote Trotula. Her treatise distilled her experience as a woman helping other women in delicate matters. They opened up to her, body and soul, and told her secrets that men would neither understand nor deserve to know.

  Trotula taught women how to face widowhood, how to simulate virginity, how to get through childbirth and its troubles, how to avoid bad breath, how to whiten skin and teeth, and “how to repair the irreparable abuse of time.”

  Surgery was in fashion, but Trotula did not believe in the knife. She preferred other therapies: hands, herbs, ears. She gave gentle massages, prescribed infusions, and knew how to listen.

  SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI

  The crusaders laid siege to the Egyptian city of Damietta. In the year 1219, in the midst of the assault, Father Francis left his post and began walking, barefoot, alone, toward the enemy bastion.

  The wind swept the ground and buffeted the earth-colored tunic of this skinny angel, fallen from heaven, who loved the earth as if from the earth he had sprouted.

  From afar they saw him coming.

  He said he had come to speak of peace with the sultan, Al-Kamil.

  Francis represented no one, but the walls parted.

  The Christian troops were of two minds. Half thought Father Francis was crazy as a loon. The other half thought he was dumb as an ass.

  Everybody knew that he talked to birds, that he liked to be called “God’s minstrel,” that he preached and practiced laughter, and that he told his brother monks:

  “Try not to look sad, stern, or hypocritical.”

  People said that in his garden in the town of Assisi the plants grew upside down, their roots pointing up. And people knew that the opinions he voiced were upside down too. He thought war, the passion and profession of kings and popes, was good for winning riches, but useless for winning souls, and that the Crusades were launched not to convert Muslims, but to subdue them.

  Moved by curiosity or who knows what, the sultan received him.

  The Christian and the Muslim crossed words, not swords. In their long dialogue, Jesus and Mohammed did not come to terms. But they listened to each other.

  ORIGIN OF SUGAR

  King Darius of Persia praised “this cane that makes honey without bees,” and long before him the Indians and the Chinese knew of it. But Christian Europeans only discovered sugar when the crusaders saw cane fields on the plains of Tripoli and tasted the flavorful juices that saved the besieged Arab populations of Elbarieh, Marrah, and Arkah from hunger.

  Mystical fervor did not blind their good eye for business, so the crusaders seized plantations and mills in the lands they conquered, from the kingdom of Jerusalem all the way to Akkra, Tyre, Crete, and Cyprus, including a place near Jericho named for good reason Al-Sukkar.

  From that point forward, sugar became “white gold,” sold by the gram in the apothecaries of Europe.

  THE LITTLE CRUSADE AGAINST DOLCINO

  In the archives of the Inquisition lies the story of the final Crusade, launched at the beginning of the fourteenth century against a heretic named Dolcino and his initiates:

  Dolcino had a girlfriend named Margarita who accompanied him and lived with him. He claimed he behaved toward her with utter chastity and honesty, treating her like a sister in Christ. And when she was found to be in a state of pregnancy, Dolcino and his men pronounced her with child by the Holy Ghost.

  The inquisitors of Lombardy, according to the bishop of Verceil, recommended a Crusade with absolute dispensation for any sins committed therein, and they organized a significant expedition against the abovementioned Dolcino. The subject, after contaminating numerous disciples and initiates with his sermons against the faith, retreated with them to the mountains of Novarais.

  There, as a consequence of the inclement temperature, it occurred that many grew weak and perished from hunger and cold, thus they died not disabused of their mistaken ways. Moreover, by scaling the mountains, the army captured Dolcino and about forty of his men. Those killed and those dead of cold and hunger numbered more than four hundred.

  Along with Dolcino, the heretic and charmer Margarita was likewise captured on Holy Thursday of the year 1308 of the incarnation of Our Lord. Said Margarita was sliced up before Dolcino’s eyes, and then he too was cut to pieces.

  SAINTS VISITED FROM HEAVEN

  Saint Mechtilde of Magdeburg: “Lord, love me with strength, love me long and often. Ablaze with desire, I call to you. Your ardent love enflames me night and day. I am just a naked soul, and You within it are a guest richly adorned.”

  Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque: “One day when Jesus lay on me with all his weight, he responded to my protests thusly: ‘I want you to be the object of my love, without any resistance on your part, so that I can take pleasure in you.’”

  Saint Angela of
Foligno: “It was as if I were possessed by a device that penetrated me and withdrew, scraping my entrails. My members were aching with desire . . . And by this time God wished my mother, who for me was a huge impediment, to die. Soon my husband and all my children died. I felt great solace. God did this for me, so that my heart could be in his heart.”

  SAINTS PORTRAY THE DAUGHTERS OF EVE

  Saint Paul: “The head of woman is man.”

  Saint Augustine: “My mother blindly obeyed the one designated to be her spouse. And when women came to the house with the scars of marital anger on their faces, she told them, ‘You are to blame.’”

  Saint Jerome: “Woman is the root of all evil.”

  Saint Bernard: “Women hiss like snakes.”

  Saint John Chrysostom: “When the first woman spoke, it caused the original sin.”

  Saint Ambrose: “If women are allowed to speak again, it will bring ruin once more to man.”