A Sultan in Palermo

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Idrisi’s reflections on beginnings and chance encounters. His first meeting with Rujari.

THE FIRST SENTENCE IS crucial. He knew that from instinct and his study of old manuscripts. How well the ancients understood this, how carefully they chose their beginnings, how easily their work must have progressed after that decision had been made. Where to begin? How to begin? He envied them the choices their world had made possible, their ability to search for knowledge wherever it might be found.

His mother had taught him that the people of the Book, who insist that all knowledge before the time of their own Prophets is worthless, betray their own ignorance. She had told him of how, when the city had been taken by a special breed of the Prophet’s warriors — men who feared knowledge more than death — her grandfather, a venerated mathematician of Qurtuba, had been publicly stripped of his dignity and put to the sword, together with eighty other scholars. The zealots who killed in the name of religion referred to the world of the ancients as ‘the time of ignorance’, a world in which people were unburdened by the need to worship a single god. How they must have blasphemed to their heart’s content. A world without apostates. A smile lightened his face for a moment before the cloud returned.

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