Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

The Incoherence of the Philosophers

One hundred and one days after the great storm, it seems that Ibn Rushd lying forgotten in his family tomb in Córdoba somehow began to communicate with his equally deceased opponent, Ghazali, in a humble grave on the edge of the town of Tus, in the province of Khorasan; initially in the most cordial of terms, afterwards less jovially. We accept that this statement, difficult as it is to verify, may be met with some scepticism. Their bodies had decayed long ago, so that the notion of lying forgotten contains a kind of untruth, and the further notion of some sort of sentient intelligences remaining in the locations of their interments is patently absurd. Yet in considering that strange era, the era of the two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights which is the subject of the present account, we are forced to concede that the world had become absurd, and that the laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed, leaving our ancestors perplexed and unable to fathom what the new laws might be. It is in the context of the time of the strangenesses that the dialogue between the dead philosophers should be understood.

Ibn Rushd in the darkness of the tomb heard a familiar female voice whisper in his ear. Speak. With a sweet nostalgia seasoned with bitter guilt he remembered Dunia, the stick-thin mother of his bastards. She was tiny, and it occurred to him that he had never seen her eat. She suffered from regular headaches because, he told her, of her dislike of water. She liked red wine but had no head for it and after two glasses became a different person, giggling, gesticulating, talking without stopping, interrupting others, and, always, wanting to dance. She climbed on the kitchen table and when he declined to join her she stamped out a pouting solo piece containing equal parts of petulance and release. She clung to him at night as if she would drown in the bed if he let her go. She had loved him without holding anything back and he had left her, had walked out of their home without looking back. And now in the dank blackness of his crumbling tomb she had returned to haunt him in the grave.

Am I dead? he asked the phantom wordlessly. No words were necessary. There were no lips to shape them anyway. Yes, she said, dead for hundreds of years. I woke you up to see if you were sorry. I woke you up to see if you could defeat your enemy after almost a millenium of rest. I woke you up to see if you were ready to give your children’s children your family name. In the grave I can tell you the truth. I am your own Dunia, but I am also a princess of the jinnia or jiniri. The slits in the world are reopening, so I can come back to see you again. And so at last he understood her inhuman origin, and why, sometimes, she had looked a little smudged at the edges, as if she were drawn in soft charcoal. Or smoke. He had ascribed the blurriness of her outline to his bad eyesight and dismissed it from his thoughts. But if she was whispering to him in his grave and had the power to waken him from death then she was from the spirit world, a thing of smoke and magic. Not a Jew who could not say she was a Jew but a female jinn, a jinnia, who would not say she was of unearthly descent. So if he had betrayed her, she had deceived him. He wasn’t angry, he noted, without finding the information very important. It was too late for human anger. She, however, had a right to be angry. And the anger of the jiniri was a thing to be feared.

What do you want? he asked. That’s the wrong question, she replied. The question is, what do you desire? You can’t grant my wishes. Maybe I can grant yours, if I want to. That’s the way this works. But we can discuss this later. Right now, your enemy is awake. His old jinni has found him, just as I found you. What is the jinni of Ghazali? he asked her. The most potent of all the jinn, she answered. A fool without an imagination, whom nobody ever accused of intelligence, either; but with ferocious powers. I do not even want to speak his name. And your Ghazali seems to me an unforgiving, narrow man, she said. A puritan, whose enemy is pleasure, who would turn its joy to ash.

Her words felt chilling, even in the tomb. He felt something stir in a parallel darkness, faraway, so close. “Ghazali,” he murmured soundlessly, “can that possibly be you?”

“It wasn’t enough that you tried and failed to demolish my work when you were alive,” the other replied. “Now, it would appear, you think you can do better after death.”

Ibn Rushd pulled together the shards of his being. “The barriers of distance and time no longer pose a problem,” he greeted his foe, “so we may begin to discuss matters in the proper way, courteously as to the person, ferociously as to the thought.”

“I have found,” Ghazali replied, sounding like a man with a mouth full of worms and dirt, “that the application of a degree of ferocity to the person usually brings his thinking into line with my own.”

“At any rate,” said Ibn Rushd, “we are both beyond the influence of physical deeds, or, if you prefer, misdeeds.”

“That is true,” Ghazali answered, “if, one must add, regrettable. Very well: proceed.”

“Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being,” Ibn Rushd proposed. “A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist but that like any proud parent he awaits the day when his child can stand on its own two feet, make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.”

“As long as you argue from God,” Ghazali replied, “as long as you feebly try to reconcile the rational and the sacred, you will never defeat me. Why don’t you just admit you’re an unbeliever and we can take it from there. Observe who your descendants are, the godless scum of the West and East. Your words resonate only in the minds of kafirs. The followers of truth have forgotten you. The followers of truth know that it is reason and science that are the true juvenilia of the human mind. Faith is our gift from God and reason is our adolescent rebellion against it. When we are adult we will turn wholly to faith as we were born to do.”

“You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”

“There,” said Ghazali. “Good. Now, father of many bastards, you begin to speak like the blasphemer you are.” Then he turned to matters of eschatology, which, he said, was now his preferred topic, and he spoke for a long time about the end of days, with a kind of relish that puzzled and distressed Ibn Rushd. Finally the younger man interrupted his elder in spite of the requirements of etiquette. “Sir, it feels as though, now that you yourself are nothing but oddly sentient dust, you are impatient for the rest of creation to plunge into its grave as well.”

“As all true believers should,” Ghazali replied. “For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come.”

Ghazali thinks the world is ending, Ibn Rushd told Dunia in the dark. He believes that God has set out to destroy his creation, slowly, enigmatically, without explanation; to confuse Man into destroying himself. Ghazali faces that prospect with equanimity, and not only because he himself is already dead. For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world. I asked him, in that case, why has your eternal life not begun, or is this all it is, this consciousness lingering in an uncaring void, which is, for the most part, boring. He said, God’s ways are mysterious, and if he asks patience of me, I will give him as much as he desires. Ghazali has no desires of his own anymore, he says. He seeks only to serve God. I suspect him of being an idiot. Is that harsh? A great man, but an idiot too. And you, she said softly. Do you have desires still, or new desires you did not have before? He remembered how she would lay her head on his shoulder and he would cradle the back of it in the palm of his hand. Now they had passed beyond heads and hands and shoulders and lying together. The disembodied life, he said, is not worth living.

If my enemy is correct, he told her, then his God is a malicious God, for whom the life of the living has no value; and I would desire my children’s children to know it, and to know my enmity towards such a God, and to follow me in standing against such a God, and defeating his purposes. So you acknowledge your bloodline, she whispered. I acknowledge it, he said, and I beg your forgiveness for not doing so before. The Duniazát is my race and I am its forefather. And this is your wish, she softly pressed him, that they may become aware of you, and your desire, and your will. And of my love for you, he said. Armed with that knowledge, they may yet save the world.

Sleep, she said, kissing the air where his cheek once lay. I’ll be off now. I don’t usually care very much about the passage of time, but right now, time is short.

The existence of the jinn posed problems to moral philosophers from the beginning. If men’s deeds were motivated by benevolent or malignant sprites, if good and evil were external to Man rather than internal, it became impossible to define what an ethical man might be. Questions of right and wrong action became horribly confusing. In the eyes of some philosophers, this was a good thing, reflecting the actual moral confusion of the age, and, as a happy side effect, giving students of morality a task that had no ending.

At any rate, in the old days before the separation of the Two Worlds, they say everyone had his or her personal jinni or jinnia whispering in an ear, encouraging good deeds or bad. How they chose their human symbiotes, and why they took such an interest in us, remains obscure. Maybe they just didn’t have much else to do. Much of the time the jinn seem to be individualists, even anarchists, acting purely on their own personal impulses, caring nothing for social organization or group activity. But there are also stories of wars between rival armies of jinn, dreadful conflicts which shook the jinn world to its foundations, and which, if true, may account for the decline in the number of these creatures and of their long retreat from our own sweet dwelling place. Tales abound of sorcerer-jinn, the Grand Ifrits, streaking across the skies in their giant flying urns to deal colossal blows, possibly even deadly ones, to lesser spirits, although, in contradiction, it is sometimes rumored that the jinn are immortal. This is untrue, though they are hard to kill. Only a jinni or a jinnia can kill another of the jinn. As will be seen. As we shall tell. What can be said is that the jinn, when they intervened in human affairs, were gleefully partisan, setting this human against that one, making this one rich, turning that one into a donkey, possessing people and driving them mad from inside their heads, helping or hindering the path of true love, but always holding themselves aloof from actual human companionship, except when trapped inside a magic lamp; and then, obviously, against their will.

Dunia was an exception among the jinnia. She came down to earth and fell in love, so deeply that she would not allow her beloved to rest in peace even after eight and a half centuries and more. To fall in love a creature must possess a heart, and whatever we may mean by a soul, and certainly such a creature must possess the group of traits we humans call character. But the jinn, or most of them, are — as you’d expect of beings made of fire and smoke — heartless, soulless, and above mere character, or perhaps beyond it. They are essences: good, bad, sweet, naughty, tyrannical, demure, powerful, whimsical, devious, grand. Dunia the lover of Ibn Rushd must have lived a long time among human beings, in disguise, clearly, to absorb the idea of character and begin to show signs of it. One might say that she caught character from the human race the way children catch chicken pox or mumps. After that she began to love love itself, to love her capacity for love, to love the selflessness of love, the sacrifice, the eroticism, the glee. She began to love her beloved in her and she in him, but beyond that she started loving the human race for its ability to love, and then for its other emotions too; she loved men and women because they could fear, and rage, and cower, and exult. If she could have given up being a jinnia she might even have chosen to become human, but her nature was what it was and she could not deny it. After Ibn Rushd left her and made her, yes, sad, she pined, and grieved, and was shocked by her deepening humanity. And then one day before the slits in the world closed she left. But not even hundreds of years in her palace in the jinn world, not even the endless promiscuity that is the everyday norm of life in Fairyland, could cure her; and so when the slits broke open she returned to renew her bonds. Her beloved asked her from beyond the grave to reunite their scattered family and help it fight the coming world cataclysm. Yes, she would do it, she said, and sped off on her mission.

Unfortunately, she was not the only citizen of the jinn world who had reentered the human levels, and not all of them had good deeds in mind.