A scholar was welcome everywhere and might travel thousands of miles, welcomed in each city by a sultan, a bey or emir, presented with gifts, honored, escorted, entertained, and, above all, listened to with attention.
Here and there were signs of change. Rulers came who were ignorant or cruel men whose interests lay elsewhere than with the propagation of knowledge. Indications of decay were evident under the flush of greatness, yet for more than five hundred years the Arabs carried the torch of civilization.
A fever of discovery lay upon the world; old libraries and bookstalls were ransacked for books; scholars from all countries were welcomed; men delved, experimented, tried new things. Nothing like it had ever happened within the memory of man. The Greeks of Athens had thought, speculated, and debated, but the people of the Arab world experimented, tested, explored, and reasoned as well. New ideas did not frighten them, and the stars were close to them in their deserts. Their ships, with those of China and India, had made the Indian Ocean as busy a place as the Mediterranean.
Among other books I had found and read The Periplus to the Erythean Sea, a guide and a pilot book to all the ports of the Indian Ocean and adjacent waters; the Hudud al-Alam, a geography and guide first published in 982, as well as the work of Sharaf al-Zaman Tahir Marvazion, China, The Turks and India, written in 1120.
Until the beginning of the Conquest, the Arab had lived on the outer edge of civilization, subject to its influences but accepting little of its teaching. A practical people, they were not inclined to speculate or form theories. They introduced the objective experiment and the accurate observation of phenomena. Their lives as shepherds, desert travelers, or seamen had given them a working knowledge of the stars that developed into a study of astronomy.
Arab ships had sailed to China, to Malacca, Sumatra, Borneo, and Java. Their religion had been established in islands unheard of in Europe, and where their religion went, trade followed. The pilgrims who made the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, brought with them itineraries, and these helped to build the geographical knowledge of the Arabs.
At the library most of the books had leather covers on paper of good quality but handwritten by such as me. They were of a size easily handled or carried and convenient for use. Several lists had been prepared of available books, one of those The Fihrist of al-Nadim, to which I often referred.
Haroun and I had taken to meeting in a wine shop near the great mosque. We often drank a date wine flavored with cassia leaves or ate Foul Madumnas, a dish of beans, hard-boiled eggs, and lemon, into which we dipped bread, eating as we talked.
We talked of alchemy, into which I was delving, of the writings of Jabir ibn-Hayyan, known to the Franks as Geber, who experimented in al-Kufah about 776, and of the writings of al-Rhazi, the greatest in chemical science. Jabir had described the two operations of reduction and calcination, and advanced almost all areas of chemical experiment. It was the good talk of young men to whom ideas are important, to be alive was to think.
“Tonight,” I told him, “I go to the house of Valaba!”
“You are fortunate,” Haroun said ruefully, “you will go as a guest, I as a guard!”
It was night upon the banks of the Guadalquivir, and under the orange trees, under the palms and the chinar trees, there was music and laughter, the soft play of light from many lanterns, the stir and movement of people. Bronze lamps threw their light through colored glass from trees and balconies. It was a colorful, shifting, and kaleidoscopic scene.
From across the spacious court a haunting voice sang to the music of a lute and a qitara, a song filled with the sad loneliness of desert spaces. Only an hour ago I had been staring in discouragement at my dull student’s clothing, longing for just one of the gems lost with my ragged coat. True, I had bathed, and I had brushed my clothing with care, but it looked like nothing more than it was.
I would not go. I would look like a skeleton of death at a place where all was elegance and beauty. I would not shame myself nor the memory of my ancestors.
A slave appeared, and a genii could have come no more suddenly. “Oh, Master, I come from Abu-Yusuf Ya’kub! He begs to offer tribute to Your Eminence!”
With that he took from his shoulder a long bag. Opening it with a gesture, he drew out of it a magnificent suit of clothing, a mantle … everything.
Now I stood beneath the palms wearing breeches called sirwal, baggy breeches of black, of the thinnest wool, carrying a sheen like silk; a short jacket called a damir of the same material and trimmed with gold; a zibun, or shirt, of the finest silk; a crimson sash of silk, and a mantle of black wool of the same material as the suit, but brocaded with gold and crimson. My turban was of dull but rich red, and in my sash I wore a jeweled dagger sent me by Ya’kub, but alongside it my Damascus dagger that had been my companion through so many troubles.
Valaba would be somewhere about, and Ya’kub would be here. The gift from Ya’kub surprised me, although it was customary to make such presentations to traveling scholars—gifts of clothing, horses, purses of gold coins, sometimes slaves were given when a scholar shared his knowledge with a ruler.
Suddenly, my name was spoken. It was Averroes. The qadi smiled and put a hand on my shoulder. “So? Valaba has captured you at last! She has been looking forward to this, Kerbouchard! It is not often we have a distinguished geographer among us, and particularly one who has sailed the seas himself!”
Geographer? Who was I to argue the point? Call me what they would, I alone knew my ignorance. True, I had read more of geography and studied more maps, charts, and portolans than most, and I had sailed what to Moslems were unknown seas, yet I was woefully ignorant of so much I needed to know.
The term “unknown seas” distressed me. Man has gone down to the sea since the beginning of time, and often left accounts of his voyages, yet so much has not been told. The call of the horizon finds quick response in the heart of every wanderer.
We of the Veneti had legends of sailing to distant lands, faint, cloudy stories of brooding cliffs and crashing waves, of temples, gold, and strange cities. Julius Caesar wrote in his Commentaries about our great, oak-hulled ships with leathern sails, but he knew nothing of what ports they visited or with what strange cargoes they returned. Perhaps records of their far-flung voyages had been kept in the great destroyed libraries of Tyre, Carthage, or Alexandria.
We strolled across the garden, Averroes and I, and many turned to look, for the qadi was a great man and a noted scholar. We talked of geography, medicine, and the stars, and I told him of remedies used among our people, and of healing herbs of which my father had spoken.
Ya’kub came toward us, walking with Valaba. There was a somewhat surprised look in her eyes to see me in my new finery, gratifying to me. We walked among the trees, followed by all eyes. This stroll was sufficient to make my fortune in Spain, yet who they were meant less to me than what they were saying and that I, a mere wanderer, was accepted as an equal by Averroes himself.
Wherever my eyes turned there were beautiful women, fingertips stained with henna, the luster of their eyes heightened with antimony. Many wore a comb at the back of the head attached to a scarf of gauzy material, but all their costumes were striking and beautiful.
The Prophet forbade the wearing of silk, but he who was a good husband should have understood women better than that. These all wore silk, and many of the men did as well. Silk had come to Spain with the Moors, and by the tenth century was the principal export, ornamental silks and tapestries being shipped to all the ports of the Near East. Until the birth of the silk industry in Spain the Coptic silks of Egypt and the Sassanid silks of Persia had been preferred. Now the Spanish silks superseded all others.
Almeria was especially known for its turbans for women and damask for drapes. Lightweight, contrasting to the heavier satins, velvet and damasks were made in Catalonia and Valencia. Court robes and vestments for the clergy were ordered from Spain by most of the Christian nations.
For a moment Valaba and I were alone. “It was gracious of you to invite me here. I have done nothing”—I waved a hand—”to compare with these, although I have ambitions.”