Bensalem Himmich - The Polymath

One of the last of these dark circles that brought our revered Master into contact with the rulers of the time saw him, garbed in his Moroccan attire, appointed by Sultan al-Zahir Barquq in 786 as Maliki judge in the Salihiya College on Bayn al-Qasrayn Street in Cairo. From such a vantage point, our Maliki judge was in a position to assess the other side of Cairo life. Upon his arrival there a mere two years earlier, he had described the city as “the center of civilization,” “the garden of the world,” and “the very portico of Islam”; he had compared the River Nile with the river of paradise. But by now he had discovered Cairo’s other side: the utterly corrupt practices and customs, the overwhelming power in the hands of wealthy and influential people, and the suffering of the poor and indigent. He himself describes the situation in his Information on Ibn Khaldun and His Travels East and West , with a combination of certainty and frustration:

I assumed the responsibilities of this lofty office and made every effort to implement God’s law as entrusted to my care. In the interests of what is right, I ignored all potential sources of reproach, refusing to be deterred by either rank or influence. In so doing, I endeavored to treat both parties on the same footing, siding with the weak against the powerful and steering well clear of all efforts at influence-peddling from either side. I paid particular attention to proffered evidence and checked the probity of people charged with offering testimony. There was a bewildering mixture of the pious and the brazen, a veritable mélange of the good and the wicked. Judges would habitually overlook the foibles of rulers and refrain from negative comments since they were keen to display their close connections with the ruling elite. The majority of them, including Qur’an teachers and imams who led the prayers in mosques, used to mingle with the Mamluk amirs. They would make a big show of their sense of justice so the rulers would think well of them and share a little bit of their prestige with the judges who had certified their probity. As a consequence, this plague of judicial corruption went from bad to worse; forgery and swindling became the order of the day.

In coping with such a situation ‘Abd al-Rahman found himself between a rock and a hard place. On one side were God’s own laws and the need to apply them just as required by the shari‘a and his own Maliki school; on the other, the political powers of the time devoutly tied to their own particular beliefs and interests. These two sides were like polar opposites, only coinciding in a noisy clash involving contradiction and discord. Anyone caught in the middle had to make whichever choice most closely matched his own sense of self and creed, no matter what the tiresome consequences might turn out to be. Thus it was that ‘Abd al-Rahman from the Maghrib chose the first of the two, absolute and sublime. Once decided on that course, he pursued it doggedly and used it to triumph over evil, relying, of course, on the One Who Never Sleeps. He always kept all necessary documents and keys close at hand. How could it have been otherwise when his excuse for coming to Egypt in the first place had been a yearning to perform the pilgrimage to Mecca — that being a pretext that would allow him to escape the clutches of the Hafsi sultan, Abu al-‘Abbas, who habitually made the great historian accompany him on his travels as a kind of badge of honor?

But how difficult and trying it was to maintain a posture of equity in dispensing justice! How our Maliki judge found himself buffeted by fierce gales, all of them blown up by clerks, agents, landed gentry, and the elite in general, resorting as part of the process to all manner of scum and swindler. Among the worst things he was accused of — apart, that is, from the most scandalous derelictions he was rumored to have committed — was that he was completely ignorant of the concept of common law. He would never compromise, come to understandings, or ‘cut someone a deal,’ as the saying went. For such people as these, it seemed as if there were two kinds of justice: one was real or authentic, which was completely useless for their purposes; the other was figurative and based on convention, something commonly accepted and practiced throughout the land. It was this latter type that judges were supposed to rely on in dealings with people’s needs and desires.

Even before our Maliki judge arrived in Cairo, he had described the city in the following terms: one who has never seen Cairo cannot appreciate the glory of Islam. Once he finally got there, he did indeed come to appreciate its culture, its wonderful architecture, and its ceremonies. But then he started to penetrate beneath the outer surface in the process of attending to matters of justice of which he was the upholder. It was at that point that he was able to gauge the distance that separated Islam’s glories from the habits of Cairo’s grandees. He came to regret the way justice had been turned into a series of clever tricks and secular deals while the rights of Muslims had been crushed beneath piles of sheer fraud and iniquity.

Our Maliki judge was patient and stubborn by nature. He employed both traits in setting himself up in opposition to the gales of rampant iniquity that now confronted him. He would proclaim the truth loud and clear, even if it meant being dismissed from his position and censured for his conduct. However, there came the time — in the middle of 787—when he was devastated by a totally unanticipated disaster: his small family was drowned at sea. Sultan Barquq had managed to intercede with Abu al-‘Abbas, the ruler of Tunis, and to get him to let ‘Abd al-Rahman’s family leave Tunis and travel by boat to Egypt. As was usually the case when describing personal misfortunes, ‘Abd al-Rahman only refers to this tragedy in the briefest and tersest of passages; almost as if the very words were like a knife twisting in the wound:

I caused a great deal of controversy, and the atmosphere between myself and the authorities became worse and worse. This situation coincided with a personal tragedy involving my wife and child. They were coming to Egypt from the Maghrib by ship. There was a storm, and they were drowned. With them went existence, home, and offspring. The pain of this loss was enormous, and a less complicated life beckoned. I decided to step down from my position.

So he petitioned the rulers of the time to give him what in his heart of hearts he was terming a ‘sabbatical’ (invoking here his own local usage). Such a break was something he really yearned for so that he could take a deep breath and nurse his colossal sense of loss. It meant turning his back on the petty concerns of daily life and instead aspiring to a yet greater learning and the Most Learned of All. After a great deal of insistence he managed to achieve his wishes and retired to his house close by the Salihiya. From his roof he could look out on the River Nile. The only person who came to see him was Sha‘ban al-Sikkit, someone who looked after him and did everything for him, including getting his food supplies and his share of the revenues from the al-Qamhiya College endowment.

‘Abd al-Rahman realized that the only real cure for his grieving heart involved undertaking the pilgrimage to Mecca. However, his nerves were so shattered that he did not have the necessary energy to plan for the journey; the hardships involved weighed heavily on his heart. Thus it was that, whenever the season arrived for the fulfillment of the solemn obligation of the pilgrimage, ‘Abd al-Rahman used to perform all the rituals involved in his own imagination, sitting in his own house in Cairo, just as al-Hallaj and other holy men had done before him. He stayed in this state of retreat for the remainder of the first lunar year and into a second. He would pass the time performing the ceremonies of a ‘mental pilgrimage’ in every aspect. Between one pilgrimage month and the one the following year, he would spend his days performing continuous litanies and reading Sufi texts. All these activities had the cumulative effect of bringing him ever closer to enlightenment; he would only allow himself to be diverted from them for short periods. He might occasionally welcome an insistent guest, take a nighttime promenade along the river, or visit the al-Azhar or al-Husayn mosques. Sometimes he used to walk through alleyways to various markets, scurrying along, enveloped by the din of humanity and the steam and smells of spices, perfumes, and various types of food and drink.