Amin Maalouf - Leo Africanus

My father gave me a knowing look, but without interrupting the sermon, without even pausing for breath:

‘ “When, in contravention of the most stringent prohibitions, you bring into your own houses marble statues and ivory figurines, reproducing the male and female and animal form in a sacrilegious fashion, as if the Creator had need of the assistance of His creatures to perfect His Creation: when pernicious and impious doubt creeps into your spirits and those of your sons, doubt which separates you from the Creator, from His Book, from His Messenger and the Community of the Believers, doubt which shatters the walls and the very foundations of Granada?” ’

As my father continued, his tone became noticeably less mocking, his movements less exaggerated and wild, his astaghfirullahs less frequent:

“ ‘When you spend for your own pleasure without shame and moderation sums which would have assuaged the hunger of a thousand poor men, and brought a smile to the cheeks of a thousand orphans? When you behave as if the houses and the lands you enjoy were yours, while all ownership belongs to the Most High, to Him alone, comes from Him and returns to Him at the time that He ordains, just as we return to Him ourselves, bearing no other treasure than our shrouds and our good deeds? Riches, my brother believers, consist not in the things which one possesses but in the things one can do without. Fear God! Fear God! Fear Him when you are old, but also when you are young! Fear Him when you are weak, but also when you are strong! Indeed you should fear Him even more when you are strong, because God will be the more merciless, and you must know that His eye passes as well through the imposing façade of a palace as through the clay wall of a hovel. And what does His eye encounter within the walls of palaces?” ’

At this point, my father’s tone was no longer that of a mimic, but that of a teacher in a Qur’anic school: his words flowed without artifice, and his eyes were fixed towards a point somewhere in the distance, like those of a sleepwalker:

‘ “When the eye of the Most High passes through the thick walls of palaces, he sees that women singers are listened to more attentively than the doctors of the law, that the sound of the lute prevents men from hearing the call to prayer, that men cannot be distinguished from women, neither in their dress nor in their gait, and that the money extorted from the faithful is thrown at the feet of dancing girls. Brothers! Just as, with the fish that is caught, it is the head which begins to rot first, it is the same in human societies, where rottenness spreads from the top to the bottom.” ’

A long silence followed, and when I wanted to ask a question, my father interrupted me with a gesture. I waited until he had completely returned from his memories and had begun to speak to me again:

‘These words which I have repeated to you, Hasan, were parts of the shaikh’s sermon delivered a few months before the fall of Granada. Whether I agree with his words or not, I am still shaken by them, even when I recall them ten years later. You can imagine, then, the effect which his sermons produced on the hard-pressed city of Granada in the year 896.

‘At the same time as they realized that the end was near, and that the evils which Astaghfirullah had always predicted were beginning to rain down upon them, the citizens of Granada became persuaded that the shaikh had been correct all along, and that it was heaven that had always spoken through his voice. Even in the poorest quarters, no woman’s face was thenceforth seen in the streets. Some, even little girls who had hardly reached puberty, covered themselves through the fear of God, but others through the fear of men, because groups of youngsters were formed, armed with clubs to call the people to do good and to distance themselves from evil. Not a single tavern dared open its doors, even on the sly. The prostitutes left the city en masse and took themselves off to the camp of the besiegers, where the soldiers made them very welcome. The librarians hid from view those works which cast doubt on dogma and traditions, those collections of poems where wine and pleasure were celebrated, and treaties of astrology or geomancy. One day some books were even seized and burnt in the courtyard of the Great Mosque. I was walking past there by chance, when the pyre was beginning to go out, and the passers-by were dispersing with the smoke. A piece of paper flying in the wind revealed that the pile contained the works of a doctor poet of time gone by, known as al-Kalandar. On this paper, half consumed by the flames, I could just read these words:

That which is the best in my life, I draw from drunkenness. Wine runs in my veins like blood.

The books burnt in public that day, my father explained to me, belonged to another doctor, one of the most relentless adversaries of Astaghfirullah. He was called Abu Amr, but the friends of the shaikh changed his name to Abu Khamr, ‘Father of Wine’.

The preacher and the doctor had only one thing in common, the habit of speaking frankly, and it was exactly this trait which stirred up the disputes whose unfolding was followed so avidly by the citizens of Granada. Apart from this, it seemed that the Most High had amused himself by creating two beings as unlike one another as possible.

Astaghfirullah was the son of a Christian convert, and it was undoubtedly this which explained his zeal, while Abu Khamr was the son and grandson of qadis, which meant that he did not find it necessary to give continual proof of his attachment to dogma and tradition. The shaikh was fair, lean and choleric, while the doctor was as brown as a ripe date, fatter than a sheep on the eve of the ‘ Id , and an ironical and contented smile rarely left his lips.

He had studied medicine from the old books, from the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Averroes, Avicenna, Abu’l-Qassis, Abenzoar and Maimonides, as well as more recent texts on leprosy and the plague, may God distance both of them from us. Every day he would distribute freely to both rich and poor dozens of bottles of theriac which he had prepared himself. But this was simply to check the effect of viper’s flesh or of the electuary, because he was far more interested in scientific experiments than in medical practice. Besides, how could he have been able, with hands which alcohol made constantly tremble, to operate upon an eye afflicted with a cataract, or even stitch up a wound? And would he have been able to prescribe diets — ‘diet is the beginning of all treatment’, the Prophet has said — or to advise patients not to gorge themselves upon food and drink, when he devoted himself without restraint to all the pleasures of the table. At the very most he could recommend old wine to assuage the sicknesses of the liver, as other doctors had done before him. If he was called ‘tabib’, it was because of all the scientific disciplines which interested him, which ranged from astronomy to botany by way of alchemy and algebra, medicine was the one in which he was least confined to the role of a mere dabbler. But he never took a single dirham from it, because that was not how he earned his living; he owned about a dozen villages in the rich Vega of Granada, not far from the lands of the sultan, surrounded by fields of wheat and barley, olive groves and above all by fine orchards. His harvest of wheat, pears, citrons, oranges, bananas, saffron and sugar cane brought him, it was said, three thousand gold dinars each season, more than a doctor would earn in thirty years. In addition, he owned an immense villa on the same hill as the Alhambra, a marvellous carmen surrounded by vines.

When Astaghfirullah held up the rich to public obloquy, he was often alluding to Abu Khamr, and it was the picture of the pot-bellied doctor dressed in silk that the poor people would call to mind. Because even those who benefited from his generosity without giving him a penny sensed a certain unease in his presence, either because some of his activities seemed to relate to magic, or because of the language of his discourse, so embroidered with learned words that it was often incomprehensible, except to a little group of learned idlers who spent their days and nights drinking with him and discussing mithridate, the astrolabe and metempsychosis. Princes of the royal family were often to be found among them, and Boabdil himself occasionally frequented their sessions, at least until the atmosphere created in the city by Astaghfirullah obliged the sultan to be more circumspect in his choice of companions.