Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree Read online

  Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree

  Book One of the Islam Quintet

  Tariq Ali

  For Aisha, Chengiz and Natasha

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Preview: The Book of Saladin

  THE BANU HUDAYL in 1499 AD

  The clan of Hassan al-Hudayl left Dimashk in 237 AH—932 AD—and reached the Western outposts of Islam in the same year. They settled near Gharnata and in the following year began to build the village which bore their name. The mansion was constructed three years later by stonemasons who had built the Medina al-Zahara near Qurtuba.

  Author’s Note

  IN MOORISH SPAIN, AS in the Arab World today, children received a given name, and were further identified by the name of their father or mother. In this narrative Zuhayr bin Umar is Zuhayr, son of Umar; Asma bint Dorothea is Asma, daughter of Dorothea. A man’s public name might simply identify him as the son of his father—Ibn Farid, Ibn Khaldun, son of Farid, of Khaldun. The Moors in this story use their own names for cities which now bear Spanish names, including several that were founded by the Moors themselves. These names, and some common Moorish words, are explained in the Glossary on p. 242.

  Prologue

  THE FIVE CHRISTIAN KNIGHTS summoned to the apartment of Ximenes de Cisneros did not welcome the midnight call. Their reaction had little to do with the fact that it was the coldest winter in living memory. They were veterans of the Reconquest. Troops under their command had triumphantly marched into Gharnata seven years before and occupied the city in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella.

  None of the five men belonged to the region. The oldest amongst them was the natural son of a monk in Toledo. The others were Castilians and desperate to return to their villages. They were all good Catholics, but did not want their loyalty taken for granted, not even by the Queen’s confessor. They knew how he had had himself transferred from Toledo where he was the Archbishop to the conquered city. It was hardly a secret that Cisneros was an instrument of Queen Isabella. He wielded a power that was not exclusively spiritual. The knights were only too well aware how a defiance of his authority would be viewed by the Court.

  The five men, wrapped in cloaks but still shivering from the cold, were shown into Cisneros’ bed-chamber. The austerity of the living conditions surprised them. Looks were exchanged. For a prince of the Church to inhabit quarters more suited to a fanatical monk was unprecedented. They were not yet used to a prelate who lived as he preached. Ximenes looked up at them and smiled. The voice which gave them their instructions had no clang of command. The knights were taken aback. The man from Toledo whispered loudly to his companions: ‘Isabella has entrusted the keys of the pigeon-house to a cat.’

  Cisneros chose to ignore this display of insolence. Instead, he raised his voice slightly.

  ‘I wish to make it clear that we are not interested in the pursuit of any personal vendettas. I speak to you with the authority of both Church and Crown.’

  This was not strictly true, but soldiers are not accustomed to questioning those in authority. Once he was satisfied that his instruction had been fully understood, the Archbishop dismissed them. He had wanted to make it clear that the cowl was in command of the sword. A week later, on the first day of December in the year 1499, Christian soldiers under the command of five knight-commanders entered the one hundred and ninety-five libraries of the city and a dozen mansions where some of the better-known private collections were housed. Everything written in Arabic was confiscated.

  The day before, scholars in the service of the Church had convinced Cisneros to exempt three hundred manuscripts from his edict. He had agreed, provided they were placed in the new library he was preparing to endow in Alcala. The bulk of these were Arab manuals of medicine and astronomy. They represented the major advances in these and related sciences since the days of antiquity. Here was much of the material which had travelled from the peninsula of al-Andalus as well as Sicily to the rest of Europe and paved the way for the Renaissance.

  Several thousand copies of the Koran, together with learned commentaries and theological and philosophical reflections on its merits and demerits, all crafted in the most exquisite calligraphy, were carted away indiscriminately by the men in uniform. Rare manuscripts vital to the entire architecture of intellectual life in al-Andalus, were crammed in makeshift bundles on the backs of soldiers.

  Throughout the day the soldiers constructed a rampart of hundreds of thousands of manuscripts. The collective wisdom of the entire peninsula lay in the old silk market below the Bab al-Ramla.

  This was the ancient space where once Moorish knights used to ride and joust to catch the eye of their ladies; where the populace would assemble in large numbers, children riding on the shoulders of fathers, uncles and elder brothers as they cheered their favourites; where catcalls greeted the appearance of those who paraded in the armour of knights simply because they were creatures of the Sultan. When it was clear that a brave man had allowed one of the courtiers to win out of deference to the King or, just as likely, because he had been promised a purse full of gold dinars, the citizens of Gharnata jeered loudly. It was a citizenry well known for its independence of mind, rapier wit, and reluctance to recognize superiors. This was the city and this the place chosen by Cisneros for his demonstration of fireworks that night.

  The sumptuously bound and decorated volumes were a testament to the arts of the Peninsulan Arabs, surpassing the standards of the monasteries of Christendom. The compositions they contained had been the envy of scholars throughout Europe. What a splendid pile was laid before the population of the town.

  The soldiers who, since the early hours of the morning, had been building the wall of books had avoided the eyes of the Gharnatinos. Some onlookers were sorrowful, others tempestuous, eyes flashing, faces full of anger and defiance. Others still, their bodies swaying gently from side to side, wore vacant expressions. One of them, an old man, kept repeating the only sentence he could utter in the face of the calamity.

  ‘We are being drowned in a sea of helplessness.’

  Some of the soldiers, perhaps because they never had been taught to read or write, understood the enormity of the crime they were helping to perpetrate. Their own role troubled them. Sons of peasants, they recalled the stories they used to hear from their grandparents, whose tales of Moorish cruelty contrasted with accounts of their culture and learning.

  There were not many of these soldiers, but enough to make a difference. As they walked down the narrow streets, they would deliberately discard a few manuscripts in front of the tightly sealed doors. Having no other scale of judgement, they imagined that the heaviest volumes must also be the weightiest. The assumption was false, but the intention was honourable, and the gesture was appreciated. The minute the soldiers were out of sight, a door would open and a robed figure would leap out, scoop up the books and disappear again behind the relative safety of locks and bars. In this fashion, thanks to the instinctive decency of a handful of soldiers, several hundred important manuscripts survived. They were subsequently transported across the water to the safety of personal libraries in Fes, and so were saved.

  In the square it was beginning to get dark. A large crowd of reluctant citizens, mainly male, had
been assembled by the soldiery. Muslim grandees and turbaned preachers mingled with the shopkeepers, traders, peasants, artisans and stall-holders, as well as pimps, prostitutes and the mentally unstable. All humanity was represented here.

  Behind the window of a lodging house the most favoured sentinel of the Church in Rome was watching the growing palisade of books with a feeling of satisfaction. Ximenes de Cisneros had always believed that the heathen could only be eliminated as a force if their culture was completely erased. This meant the systematic destruction of all their books. Oral traditions would survive for a while, till the Inquisition plucked away the offending tongues. If not himself, then someone else would have had to organize this necessary bonfire—somebody who understood that the future had to be secured through firmness and discipline and not through love and education, as those imbecile Dominicans endlessly proclaimed. What had they ever achieved?

  Ximenes was exultant. He had been chosen as the instrument of the Almighty. Others might have carried out this task, but none so methodically as he. A sneer curled his lip. What else could be expected from a clergy whose abbots, only a few hundred years ago, were named Mohammed, Umar, Uthman and so on? Ximenes was proud of his purity. The childhood jibes he had endured were false. He had no Jewish ancestors. No mongrel blood stained his veins.

  A soldier had been posted just in front of the prelate’s window. Ximenes stared at him and nodded, the signal was passed to the torch-bearers, and the fire was lit. For half a second there was total silence. Then a loud wail rent the December night, followed by cries of: ‘There is only one Allah and he is Allah and Mohammed is his Prophet.’

  At a distance from Cisneros a group was chanting, but he could not hear the words. Not that he would have understood them anyway, since the language of the verses was Arabic. The fire was rising higher and higher. The sky itself seemed to have become a flaming abyss, a spectrum of sparks that floated in the air as the delicately coloured calligraphy burnt itself out. It was as if the stars were raining down their sorrow.

  Slowly, in a daze, the crowds began to walk away till a beggar stripped himself bare and began to climb on to the fire. ‘What is the point of life without our books of learning?’ he cried through scorching lungs. ‘They must pay. They will pay for what they have done to us today.’

  He fainted. The flames enveloped him. Tears were being shed in silence and hate, but tears could not quench the fires lit that day. The people walked away.

  The square is mute. Here and there, old fires still smoulder. Ximenes is walking through the ashes, a crooked smile on his face as he plans the next steps. He is thinking aloud.

  ‘Whatever revenge they may plan in the depths of their grief, it will be useless. We have won. Tonight was our real victory.’

  More than anybody else in the Peninsula, more even than the dread figure of Isabella, Ximenes understands the power of ideas. He kicks to ashes a stack of burnt parchments. Over the embers of one tragedy lurks the shadow of another.

  Chapter 1

  ‘IF THINGS GO ON like this,’ Ama was saying in a voice garbled by a gap-toothed mouth, ‘nothing will be left of us except a fragrant memory.’

  His concentration disrupted, Yazid frowned and looked up from the chess-cloth. He was at the other end of the courtyard, engaged in a desperate attempt to master the stratagems of chess. His sisters, Hind and Kulthum, were both accomplished strategists. They were away in Gharnata with the rest of the family. Yazid wanted to surprise them with an unorthodox opening move when they returned.

  He had tried to interest Ama in the game, but the old woman had cackled at the thought and refused. Yazid could not understand her rejection. Was not chess infinitely superior to the beads she was always fingering? Then why did this elementary fact always escape her?

  Reluctantly, he began to put away the chess pieces. How extraordinary they are, he thought, as he carefully replaced them in their little home. They had been especially commissioned by his father. Juan the carpenter had been instructed to carve them in time for his tenth birthday last month, in the year 905 A.H., which was 1500, according to the Christian calendar.

  Juan’s family had been in the service of the Banu Hudayl for centuries. In AD 932 the head of the Hudayl clan, Hamza bin Hudayl, had fled Dimashk and brought his family and followers to the western outposts of Islam. He had settled on the slopes of the foothills some twenty miles from Gharnata. Here he had built the village that became known as al-Hudayl. It rose on high ground and could be seen from afar. Mountain streams surrounded it, and turned in springtime into torrents of molten snow. On the outskirts of the village the children of Hamza cultivated the land and planted orchards. After Hamza had been dead for almost fifty years, his descendants built themselves a palace. Around it lay farmed land, vineyards, and almond, orange, pomegranate and mulberry orchards that gave the appearance of children clustering about their mother.

  Almost every piece of furniture, except of course for the spoils looted by Ibn Farid during the wars, had been carefully crafted by Juan’s ancestors. The carpenter, like everyone else in the village, was aware of Yazid’s status in the family. The boy was a universal favourite. And so he determined to produce a set of chess statuettes which would outlast them all. In the event Juan had surpassed his own wildest ambitions.

  The Moors had been assigned the colour white. Their Queen was a noble beauty with a mantilla, her spouse a red-bearded monarch with blue eyes, his body covered in a flowing Arab robe bedecked with rare gems. The castles were replicas of the tower house which dominated the entrance to the palatial mansion of the Banu Hudayl. The knights were representations of Yazid’s great-grandfather, the warrior Ibn Farid, whose legendary adventures in love and war dominated the culture of this particular family. The white bishops were modelled on the turbaned Imam of the village mosque. The pawns bore an uncanny resemblance to Yazid.

  The Christians were not merely black; they had been carved as monsters. The black Queen’s eyes shone with evil, in brutal contrast with the miniature madonna hanging round her neck. Her lips were painted the colour of blood. A ring on her finger displayed a painted skull. The King had been carved with a portable crown that could be easily lifted, and as if this symbolism was not sufficient, the iconoclastic carpenter had provided the monarch with a tiny pair of horns. This unique vision of Ferdinand and Isabella was surrounded by equally grotesque figures. The knights raised blood-stained hands. The two bishops were sculpted in the shape of Satan; both were clutching daggers, while whip-like tails protruded from behind. Juan had never set eyes on Ximenes de Cisneros, otherwise there can be little doubt that the Archbishop’s burning eyes and hooked nose would have provided an ideal caricature. The pawns had all been rendered as monks, complete with cowls, hungry looks and pot-bellies; creatures of the Inquisition in search of prey.

  Everyone who saw the finished product agreed that Juan’s work was a masterpiece. Yazid’s father, Umar, was troubled. He knew that if ever a spy of the Inquisition caught sight of the chess-set, the carpenter would be tortured to death. But Juan was adamant: the child must be given the present. The carpenter’s father had been charged with apostasy by the Inquisition some six years ago while visiting relatives in Tulaytula. He had later died in prison from the deep wounds sustained by his pride during torture by the monks. As a finale, fingers had been snapped off each hand. The old carpenter had lost the urge to live. Young Juan was bent on revenge. The design of the chess-set was only a beginning.

  Yazid’s name had been inscribed on the base of each figure and he had grown as closely attached to his chess pieces as if they were living creatures. His favourite, however, was Isabella, the black Queen. He was both frightened and fascinated by her. In time, she became his confessor, someone to whom he would entrust all his worries, but only when he was sure that they were alone. Once he had finished packing the chess-set he looked again at the old woman and sighed.

  Why did Ama talk so much to herself these days? Was she really going mad? Hi
nd said she was, but he wasn’t sure. Yazid’s sister often said things in a rage, but if Ama really were mad, his father would have found her a place in the maristan at Gharnata next to Great-Aunt Zahra. Hind was cross only because Ama was always going on about it being time for their parents to find her a husband.

  Yazid walked across the courtyard and sat down on Ama’s lap. The old woman’s face, already a net of wrinkles, creased still further as she smiled at her charge. She abandoned her beads without ceremony and stroked the boy’s face, kissing him gently on his head.

  ‘May Allah bless you. Are you feeling hungry?’

  ‘No. Ama, who were you talking to a few minutes ago?’

  ‘Who listens to an old woman these days, Ibn Umar? I might as well be dead.’

  Ama had never called Yazid by his own name. Never. For was it not a fact that Yazid was the name of the Caliph who had defeated and killed the grandsons of the Prophet near Kerbala? This Yazid had instructed his soldiers to stable their horses in the mosque where the Prophet himself had offered prayers in Medina. This Yazid had treated the Companions of the Prophet with contempt. To speak his name was to pollute the memory of the Prophet’s family. She could not tell the boy all this, but it was reason enough for her always to refer to him as Ibn Umar, the son of his father. Once Yazid had questioned her about this in front of all the family and Ama had thrown an angry glance at their mother, Zubayda, as if to say: it’s all her fault, why don’t you ask her? but everyone had begun to laugh and Ama had walked out in a temper.

  ‘I was listening to you. I heard you talk. I can tell you what you said. Should I repeat your words?’

  ‘Oh my son,’ sighed Ama. ‘I was talking to the shadows of the pomegranate trees. At least they will be here when we are all gone.’

  ‘All gone where, Ama?’