The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

“Of course, you will tell me you know all that. Next, you will ask me if I can show you the way. And I will reply that you must first be willing to let me show you the way. You are not as yet ready, though you think you are. And you may never be, which is a pity. You have potentiality.”

“Everybody has potentiality.”

Nur looked up at Frigate. “In a sense, yes. In another sense, no.”

“Mind explaining that?”

Nur rubbed his huge nose with a small, thin hand and then pitched his cigar across over the deck and over the railing. He picked up his bamboo flute and looked at it but laid it down.

“When the time comes, if it ever does.”

He looked sideways at Frigate.

“You feel rejected? Yes. I know that you react too strongly to rejection. Which is one reason that you have always tried to avoid situations in which you might be rejected. Though why you should then have become a fiction writer is a mystery to me. Or is it? You did persist in your intended profession despite initial rejections. Though, according to your own story, you often let long periods of time elapse before you tried again. But you persisted.

“Be that as it may, it is up to you to decide if you will be disheartened by my refusing you at this time. Try me later. When you know that you are at least a fit candidate.”

Frigate was silent for a long while. Nur put the flute to his lips and presently a weird wailing, rising and falling, issued. Nur was never without the instrument when off duty. Sometimes he would content himself with short pieces, lyrics, presumably. Other times, he would sit cross-legged on top of the forecastle for hours, the flute silent, his eyes closed. At such time, his request that he not be interrupted was honored. Frigate knew that Nur was putting himself into some sort of trance then. But so far he had not asked him more than one question about it.

Nur had said, “You need not know. As yet.”

Nur-ed-din ibn Ali el-Hallaq (Light-of-the-faith, son of Ali the barber) fascinated Frigate. Nur had been born in 1164 a.d. in Cordoba, held by the Moslems since 711 A.D. Moorish Iberia was then near the apotheosis of Saracenic civilization, which Nur had beheld in all its glory. Christian Europe, compared to the brilliant culture of the Moslems, was still in the Dark Ages. Art, science, philosophy, medicine, literature, poetry flourished in the great centers of population of Islam. The Western cities: Iberian Cordo­ba, Seville, and Granada, and the Eastern cities: Baghdad and Alexandria, had no rivals, except in faraway China.

The wealthy Christians sent their sons to the Iberian universities to get an education unobtainable in London, Paris, and Rome. The sons of the poor went there to beg for bread while they learned. And from these schools the Christians went back to transmit what they had imbibed at the feet of the robed masters.

Moorish Iberia was a strange and splendid country, ruled by men who differed in degree of faith and dogmatism. Some were intoler­ant and harsh. Others were broadminded, tolerant enough to appoint Christians and Jews as their viziers, inclined to the arts and the sciences, welcoming all foreigners, eager to learn from them, soft on matters of religion.

Nur’s father plied his trade in the vast palace outside Cordoba, the near city of Medinat az-Zahra. In Nur’s time this had been fabled throughout the world, but in Frigate’s there was scarcely a trace left. Nur was born there and teamed his father’s craft. He desired to be something else, and, since he was bright, his father used his connec­tions with his wealthy patrons to advance his son. Having demon­strated his aptitude for literature, music, mathematics, alchemy, and theology, Nur went to the best school in Cordoba. There he mingled with the rich and the poor, the important and the insignifi­cant, the Northern Christian and the Nubian black.

It was also there that he met Muyid-ed-din ibn el-Arabi. This young man was to become the greatest love poet of his times, and echoes of his songs would be found in those of the Provencal and German troubadors. The rich and handsome youth, liking the poor and ugly son of a barber, invited him in 1202 to accompany him to a pilgrimage to Mecca. During the journey through North Africa, they met a group of Persian immigrants, Sufis. Nur had encountered this discipline before, but talking to the Persians decided him to be a disciple. However, at the moment, he found no master who would accept his petition for candidacy. Nur continued with el-Arabi to Egypt, where both were accused of heresy by fanatics and narrowly escaped being murdered.