“From today’s perspective I have a much clearer appreciation of the reasons for this tear of death. The factor involved is both more general and more dominant, so record it carefully so that other scholars devoted to scholarship may take note of it.
“The sultans and rulers of this era are the primary cause of this calamity; sometimes they are its victims too. Be they major figures or simply petty tyrants, their major goal is to force religious scholars to work as their functionaries and to provide for their needs and desires, all in return for salaries and real estate that they give such scholars in accordance with their talents and abilities. Too bad for any scholar who either objects or panders too much! As a result, the image of the ideal ruler is based on a combination of conditional generosity and outright violence, a thought that finds expression in a verse of poetry attributed to Sultan Abu al-Hasan al-Akhaclass="underline" ‘My wealth I hand out as I see fit, while necks are severed by the sword.’
“In the kingship business, loss of either throne or life is truly the greatest danger of all. As a result, every ruler has to confront such a likelihood in order to maintain control over his position as suits him best. That’s the way he manages to enjoy his sovereign power and its delights. For that very reason he is permanently on edge and suspicious of all those around him, even his closest confidant. He pays close attention to stories put about by rumormongers and scandal peddlers. His gifts and talents are focused on matters such as debts, preventive killings, and death threats to others.
“The covert aspect of this particular realm finds the person forced to tread on coals, often in spite of himself. Occasions for error and downfall appear at every turn, and conspirators and manipulators never take their eyes off him. Thus, every time the atmosphere between him and them deteriorates and the political fissure widens, he is forced either to use the obligation of pilgrimage as a pretext for leaving his territories for a while or else to shift his favor from one group to another in accordance with the dictates of the moment. By my life, when the religious scholar is faced with a system like this, one that so cheapens the normal order of things, he has no other tricks up his sleeve that will enable him to avoid all the pitfalls and stay focused on the scholarly life which allows him to devote all his energies to learning and writing.
“In this era of ours, politics has become a danger area, a kind of orphanage — and an appalling one at that! Just take a look at the Book of Lessons or histories by people other than me, and you’ll see how many chapters and accounts there are concerning the evil ends of prominent rulers, ministers, counselors, generals, and scholars. Our age, an age of truly excessive brutality, is dreadfully replete with methods of torture and oppression: butchery, drowning, impaling, garroting, strangulation, poison, quartering, and execution. It’s no wonder my book should be full of terms such as downfall, disaster, rebellion, deposition, abdication, aggression, destruction, murder, raid, sortie, devastation, siege, and the like.
“This is how politicians and luminaries of intrigue and manipulation behave these days. The genuine scholar has no place in such a scheme and certainly no status. Just consider any number of examples. The most glaring is what happened to my own shaykh, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Abili, who fled from the court and Hammu al-Zayyani, ruler of Tlemcen, and went to live in Marrakesh where he could live with the scholars there and learn from them. Then there’s the case of my dear friend (in spite of everything) Lisan al-Din ibn al-Khatib who was murdered in his prison cell at the hand of agents of Muhammad V, ruler of Granada. He had been handed over to this ruler by the Marini sultan, Abu al-‘Abbas, in exchange for a commitment of support for his own throne. Just imagine, Lisan al-Din, amazing scholar, intellectual, and poet, has his life terminated as part of a sordid pact between two rulers! My younger brother, Yahya, is yet another example of the sheer brutality of this age of ours. He too was murdered by a bunch of thugs on orders from Prince ‘Abd al-Wadi who chose to believe the tissue of rumors and lies that had been concocted against my poor brother.
“With all that in mind, shouldn’t I be just as worried about the dire possibilities of imprisonment and a grisly death?
“The other thing that keeps preying on my mind like a malignant tumor is plague. As I discussed it before:
The pestilence that beset civilization east and west in the mid-fourteenth century decimated communities and wiped out the mountain people. Many of the beauties of civilized society were swallowed up and erased. As mankind diminished in size, so too did the earth’s civilization. Garrisons and workshops were destroyed; pathways and landmarks vanished. Entire regions and houses were emptied; regimes and tribes were weakened. The entire population changed. The same fate befell both the eastern and western regions, the difference being only matters of degree and the extent to which the region was urbanized. It was as if the entire discourse of existence had pronounced the words apathy and gloom, and the response had come in a rush. God is indeed the inheritor of the earth and all who inhabit it.
“I was just sixteen when the plague hit Tunis, an age when my senses and desire to learn were at their sharpest. When the plague came (and I think it actually played a role in the downfall of the Marini, Abu al-Hasan, in Qayrawan), what terrible things I witnessed!
“It exacted a terrible toll from me in that both my parents died along with a number of my shaykhs — may God have mercy on them all. Becoming an orphan in this way was to have a profound effect on both my sense of lineage and my scholarly career. Even though I was still in the prime of my youth, I could feel in my bones the onset of middle age. The sheer feeling of dejection that affected me manifested itself in both my heart and outward expression.
“The very sight of death in general and of wanton carnage in particular serves to remind people of the fact that they will all inevitably die. Every single day they are alive is potentially their last.
“My dear Hammu, I have seen things that no tongue can describe. I have seen graves overflowing with corpses too many to be encompassed by the eye. I have seen cities turned into wastelands peopled only by piles of rotting bodies, places populated only by the spirits of men crushed and resigned. I have seen terror writ large on faces and bodies cowering behind arches and walls. I have watched as tame animals and even predatory birds have fled from living and dead as fast as they can. And I have seen other unmentionable things that my memory has forever suppressed, silencing my tongue and its language faculties.
“I can recall that from the bottomless pit of terror I used to beg God to give me the power to put a stop to so much death by performing miracles and wondrous deeds. During my dreams, by night and day, I would feel myself granted this gift. I would set spirits free, put an end to misery, and devise cures. It was only when I woke up that I found myself ranting away while my soul returned to its habitual weakness.
“People of the time give this plague names associated with terror and rage: ‘the great perdition,’ ‘the dreadful disease,’ ‘the epidemic,’ or ‘fatal,’ or ‘mighty plague.’ So, Hammu, note down now some details about it that I have not been able to include in my previous writings.
“God knows best, but it appears that everything started in the region of the Mongol tribes and of the Great Khan. A series of wars there about a decade or more ago led to the accumulation of horrifying numbers of corpses, and the putrefaction they caused was carried by the winds to European territories, both east and west. Tunis was infected by commercial sea traffic from Sicily, aided and abetted by caravans over land and shifting wind patterns that spread it from one region to another.