Bensalem Himmich - The Polymath

Once up on the roof, the two men sat on a padded bench with a large candle in the middle. The weather was dry and warm, and the Nile waters reflected the heavens above with their brightly shining stars.

“If it weren’t for the availability of this roof, Hammu,” ‘Abd al-Rahman said, “I would certainly not have been able to stand living in this house for the past three years. Spending an hour or two up here in the evening or at night always provides me with a quiet atmosphere, and how much I have needed that! It gives me access to the whole of creation, one whereby I can direct my thoughts to a consideration of the four elements and the Creator of All Things. No sooner do I go back downstairs than my traumatized memory starts functioning again. The only way I can lighten the heavy load it imposes on me is to block it off with a barrage of books. So now start noting down some of my memory’s red-hot irons so that I may soon be released from them and feel the welcoming arms of my Lord.

“When my entire family was drowned at sea, the impact on me was, needless to say, so severe that the sheer misery of it drove me to a silence more eloquent than any words could express. Something I’ve never told you before, something that has haunted me throughout my various travels and journeys, is that I am desperately afraid of being murdered or attacked. The feeling has stayed with me throughout my time in the Maghrib. Actually, it still affects me here in Egypt, although not so strongly since at this stage of life, my own instinct for self-preservation is of minimal importance. On the other hand, in earlier days I stared death straight in the face in so many Maghribi countries with their petty regimes. I have sensed the sword of death hovering threateningly over me. The occasion when it all came closest to execution was when I was imprisoned by the Marini sultan, Abu ‘Inan, something I referred to earlier. My dear Hammu, I really felt I was inevitably going to die that time. In a vain attempt to overcome my despair, I composed a hundred-verse poem that I sent to the furious sultan as a plea for mercy. All I can remember of it today are two verses that certainly confirm my mood at the time: ‘For what circumstance should I blame the nights, in what adversity wrestle with time? That I am far distant brings sorrow enough, removed as I am from the claims of my witnesses.’

“From today’s perspective I have a much clearer appreciation of the reasons for this tear of death. The factor involved is both more general and more dominant, so record it carefully so that other scholars devoted to scholarship may take note of it.

“The sultans and rulers of this era are the primary cause of this calamity; sometimes they are its victims too. Be they major figures or simply petty tyrants, their major goal is to force religious scholars to work as their functionaries and to provide for their needs and desires, all in return for salaries and real estate that they give such scholars in accordance with their talents and abilities. Too bad for any scholar who either objects or panders too much! As a result, the image of the ideal ruler is based on a combination of conditional generosity and outright violence, a thought that finds expression in a verse of poetry attributed to Sultan Abu al-Hasan al-Akhal: ‘My wealth I hand out as I see fit, while necks are severed by the sword.’

“In the kingship business, loss of either throne or life is truly the greatest danger of all. As a result, every ruler has to confront such a likelihood in order to maintain control over his position as suits him best. That’s the way he manages to enjoy his sovereign power and its delights. For that very reason he is permanently on edge and suspicious of all those around him, even his closest confidant. He pays close attention to stories put about by rumormongers and scandal peddlers. His gifts and talents are focused on matters such as debts, preventive killings, and death threats to others.

“The covert aspect of this particular realm finds the person forced to tread on coals, often in spite of himself. Occasions for error and downfall appear at every turn, and conspirators and manipulators never take their eyes off him. Thus, every time the atmosphere between him and them deteriorates and the political fissure widens, he is forced either to use the obligation of pilgrimage as a pretext for leaving his territories for a while or else to shift his favor from one group to another in accordance with the dictates of the moment. By my life, when the religious scholar is faced with a system like this, one that so cheapens the normal order of things, he has no other tricks up his sleeve that will enable him to avoid all the pitfalls and stay focused on the scholarly life which allows him to devote all his energies to learning and writing.

“In this era of ours, politics has become a danger area, a kind of orphanage — and an appalling one at that! Just take a look at the Book of Lessons or histories by people other than me, and you’ll see how many chapters and accounts there are concerning the evil ends of prominent rulers, ministers, counselors, generals, and scholars. Our age, an age of truly excessive brutality, is dreadfully replete with methods of torture and oppression: butchery, drowning, impaling, garroting, strangulation, poison, quartering, and execution. It’s no wonder my book should be full of terms such as downfall, disaster, rebellion, deposition, abdication, aggression, destruction, murder, raid, sortie, devastation, siege, and the like.

“This is how politicians and luminaries of intrigue and manipulation behave these days. The genuine scholar has no place in such a scheme and certainly no status. Just consider any number of examples. The most glaring is what happened to my own shaykh, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Abili, who fled from the court and Hammu al-Zayyani, ruler of Tlemcen, and went to live in Marrakesh where he could live with the scholars there and learn from them. Then there’s the case of my dear friend (in spite of everything) Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib who was murdered in his prison cell at the hand of agents of Muhammad V, ruler of Granada. He had been handed over to this ruler by the Marini sultan, Abu al-‘Abbas, in exchange for a commitment of support for his own throne. Just imagine, Lisan al-Din, amazing scholar, intellectual, and poet, has his life terminated as part of a sordid pact between two rulers! My younger brother, Yahya, is yet another example of the sheer brutality of this age of ours. He too was murdered by a bunch of thugs on orders from Prince ‘Abd al-Wadi who chose to believe the tissue of rumors and lies that had been concocted against my poor brother.

“With all that in mind, shouldn’t I be just as worried about the dire possibilities of imprisonment and a grisly death?

“The other thing that keeps preying on my mind like a malignant tumor is plague. As I discussed it before:

The pestilence that beset civilization east and west in the mid-fourteenth century decimated communities and wiped out the mountain people. Many of the beauties of civilized society were swallowed up and erased. As mankind diminished in size, so too did the earth’s civilization. Garrisons and workshops were destroyed; pathways and landmarks vanished. Entire regions and houses were emptied; regimes and tribes were weakened. The entire population changed. The same fate befell both the eastern and western regions, the difference being only matters of degree and the extent to which the region was urbanized. It was as if the entire discourse of existence had pronounced the words apathy and gloom, and the response had come in a rush. God is indeed the inheritor of the earth and all who inhabit it.

“I was just sixteen when the plague hit Tunis, an age when my senses and desire to learn were at their sharpest. When the plague came (and I think it actually played a role in the downfall of the Marini, Abu al-Hasan, in Qayrawan), what terrible things I witnessed!