The Duniazát, Page 2

  After Dunia left our world, the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown with the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up, and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic.

  But Dunia’s children thrived. That much can be said. And almost three hundred years later, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, even the Jews who could not say they were Jews, the great-grandchildren of Dunia’s great-grandchildren climbed onto ships in Cádiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked across the Pyrenees, or flew on magic carpets or in giant urns like the jinni kin they were. They traversed continents and sailed the seven seas and climbed high mountains and swam mighty rivers and slid into deep valleys and found shelter and safety wherever they could, and they forgot one another quickly, or remembered as long as they could and then forgot, or never forgot, becoming a family that was no longer exactly a family, a tribe that was no longer exactly a tribe, adopting every religion and no religion, all of them, after the centuries of conversion, ignorant of their supernatural origins and of the story of the forcible conversion of the Jews, some of them becoming manically devout while others were contemptuously disbelieving. They were a family without a place but with family in every place, a village without a location but winding in and out of every spot on the globe, like rootless plants, mosses or lichens or creeping orchids, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone.

  History is unkind to those it abandons and can be equally unkind to those who make it. Ibn Rushd died (of old age, or so we believe) while travelling in Marrakesh barely a year after his rehabilitation, and never saw his fame grow, never saw it spread beyond the borders of his own world and into the infidel world beyond, where his commentaries on Aristotle became the foundations of his mighty forebear’s popularity, the cornerstones of the infidels’ godless philosophy, saecularis, which meant the kind of idea that came only once in a saeculum, an age of the world, or maybe an idea for the ages, and which was the very image and echo of the ideas he had spoken only in dreams. Perhaps, as a godly man, Ibn Rushd would not have been delighted by the place history gave him, for it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need of belief, and a stranger fate still for a man’s philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders, because in the world he knew it was the children of his dead adversary, Ghazali, who multiplied and inherited the kingdom, while his own bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth.

  A high proportion of the survivors ended up on the great North American continent, and many others on the great South Asian subcontinent, thanks to the phenomenon of “clumping,” which is part of the mysterious illogic of random distribution; and many of those afterward spread out west and south across the Americas, and north and west from that great diamond at the foot of Asia, into all the countries of the world, for of the Duniazát it can fairly be said that, in addition to peculiar ears, they all have itchy feet. Ibn Rushd was dead, but he and his adversary continued their dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

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  About the Author

  Salman Rushdie has written twelve novels, including “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights,” which will be published in September.

  Credits

  Cover Illustration by Boris Pelcer

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