Before the crossing came to an end, a middle-aged woman sat down beside me and started nursing her baby with her breast fully exposed. To my left was a man who looked like a merchant, snoring away in a deep slumber. I closed my eyes, hoping to find deep within me something to distract me from the breast on the one hand and the snoring on the other, but to my surprise the woman asked me to listen to the story she wanted to tell me and then to give her advice.
"My life has been full of calamities, dear Sir," she told me, "and I am beset with worries. After prayers to God I protest the way a man from Tarifa has behaved. The fates have clearly allowed him to overwhelm me. He pronounced the threefold divorce on me, then married me to another man, but only so that he could marry me again. But the second time the complaints he made against me were even worse. I told him to bring witnesses to confirm his accusations of fornication against me, but the only witnesses he had were the ones he saw in his dreams. A corrupt sorceress had told him that his dreams were true, but he would not tell me her name. He then converted to Christianity and refused to acknowledge that he was this child's father. Once that happened, I asked him to be rid of me, and he agreed, but only on condition that I cross the straits and never come back. So here I am, Sir, just as you see me, totally deprived and with no way of eking out a living or meeting my child's needs."
I took a sum of money out of my purse and gave it to her, mouthing some appropriately comforting words. She was amazed and delighted at my generosity. Imagine my surprise therefore when, just as the boat was anchoring, I saw my neighbor who had been snoring so loudly leap up and yell at the woman, "That lewd woman, my Lord, keeps going back and forth across the straits. With every voyage she manages to arouse people's sympathy by exposing her breast and her baby and cooking up a whole load of stories. By God, they're all a pack of lies!"
I took the man aside. "Abdallah," I said, trying to calm him down.
"How do you know my name?" he asked in amazement.
"We're all Abdallahs, God's servants," I replied.
"True enough. Just two weeks ago that woman told me a story too, and I gave her some money just as you have. Then last week she told me another one that made me forget the first! This time, the story was that her husband was laid up in bed because of a wound he'd suffered at the hands of the Castilians. He'd given her the task of collecting enough funds so that the two of them could escape with their baby as Muslims and cross over to Sabta. But this time I had no choice but to expose this trickster woman in full sight and hearing of all the passengers."
By now the woman herself had vanished into thin air and was not to be found among the disembarking passengers.
"You did wrong, my good man!" I said, turning back to him. "If you'd told me about this beggar woman when she was still with us, I would have given her even more. When this woman is forced to expose herself in public, it's poverty that's showing us the one weapon she possesses, her imagination. That is her only recourse, her means of livelihood, just as is the case with writers who compose poetry, stories, and books of magamat* and zajal* poetry. She only told me one story. Had she told me many more, I would have given her yet more money. I am not bothered as to whether or not they are true. Our Lord is generous in both His rewards and forgiveness."
"Servant of God," the man replied, concealing his annoyance and amazement, "I don't think you can be either a merchant or a politician. And you can't be planning to stay in Sabta."
"You're correct on the first point, my brother," I replied, "but only circumstance and fate can tell whether you'll be right about the second."
He paused for a moment. "The people in Sabta," he said before saying farewell, "are either merchants like me or else merchants in politics. Among the rest of the elite you'll find legal specialists who play fast and loose with the Maliki school of law. Haven't you heard that Sharif Idrisi and even Judge Ayyad have both had to flee from this city of theirs? If you are of the Sufi persuasion, then your stay in this city-provided things work out well-will not be a long one. Just consider the case of God's saint, Abu al from Sabta.* He was forced to flee from Marrakesh. Once you've done that, you should bear the consequences in mind…"
After checking on my baggage, I mounted my horse and scanned the scene. Looking back, I could make out the woman with all the stories in the distance getting back on the ferryboat in preparation for the return trip to Algeciras. I made for an empty space close by and sat down on a tree stump in order to think about my situation and the next phase in my journey. However I was soon overcome by a powerful need for sleep and started having a very vivid dream. In it the ferryboat was being tossed around by a savage thunderstorm; the woman with all the stories was recounting the terrors of the sea, while the men on board kept trying in vain to shut her up. I watched as the merchant from Sabta picked up both her and her child and threw them overboard into the raging seas. Only a few moments later the winds snatched at the boat's sails, dragged it down, and rolled it completely over. Everyone, myself included, was tossed into the waters and began screaming for help in a total panic. At first I tried to help others, but then I was swimming for my own life. It was useless, and there I was staring death in the face. I handed things over to God Almighty and started sinking, sinking, sinking…
Part Two. Sabta, Haven of My Love and Monotheism
Knowledge is a mark of transcendence. Peace may bring security to an enemy. Serenity with your own self is the right path. Prayer with sincerity is a weapon. Beware of illusory hopes, of futile action, of things that corrupt the wisdom of custom and the principles of happiness.
Genuine retreat involves the soul's escape from whatever is evil and destructive. It does not require a distancing of oneself from other people; nay rather, the astute adept is the one who is not governed by the destiny of categories; he is a category in his own right. He is from the people and one of the people.
1
"sABTA, WITH ITS SEVEN HILLS, will become the base from which I will be operating, my line of defense, and my refuge. It is there that I intend to investigate the state of affairs and appropriate spiritual postures and to engage with the foundations of measures." That is what I had told my students on the day I left Murcia, and I expounded on it whenever they came to me, either as individuals or as groups from Granada and its environs where most of them had been forced to seek refuge.
By now almost two years have passed since my arrival in Sabta.
News kept on arriving about the way the cities of Spain were being swallowed up. More personal bits of information concerned the way my elder brother was involving himself in corrupt politics. I also kept hearing about people dying: men I had known, my servant Salman, and some of my students who had been killed. More recently, my sister, Zaynab, had died too. Shortly before her own death she had sent me news of Maymuna's passing.
"You'll remember, dearest of brothers," she had written to me, "the day when I told you that, when you had come back from your excursion together, she had slept better than ever before. You asked me how that could be, and I told you that she was just like a nursing baby that had got everything that it could want or desire. It was only one hour after your departure that I realized that she had closed her eyes forever. I didn't tell you about it at the time because I didn't want to add another source of pain to all your worries."