The Year of Rice and Salt

This small crisis was soon forgotten, and the new town, named by the Sultana Baraka, that term for grace that Bistami had mentioned to her, took shape as if there could never have been any other plan. The ruins of the old town disappeared under the new city's streets and plazas, gardens and workshops; the architecture and city plan both resembled Malaga, and the other Andalusi coastal cities, but with higher walls, and smaller windows, for the winters here were cold, and a raw wind blew in from the ocean in the autumn and spring. The Sultan's palace was the only structure in the town as open and light as a Mediterranean building; this reminded people of their origins, and showed them that the Sultan lived above the usual demands of nature. Across the bridge from it, the plazas were small, the streets and alleyways narrow, so that a riverside medina or casbah developed that was, as in any Maghribi or Arabian city, a veritable warren of buildings, mostly three storeys tall, with the upper windows facing each other across alleyways so tight that one could, as was said everywhere, pass condiments from window to window across the streets.

The first time snow fell, everyone rushed out to the plaza before the grand mosque, dressed in most of their clothes. A great bonfire was lit, the muezzin made his call, prayers were recited, and the palace musicians played with blue lips and frozen fingers as people danced in the sufi way around the bonfire. Whirling dervishes in the snow: all laughed to see it, feeling they had brought Islam to a new place, a new climate. They were making a new world! There was plenty of wood in the undisturbed forests to the north, and a constant supply of fish and fowl; they would be warm, they would be fed; in the winters the life of the city would go on, under a thin blanket of wet melting snow, as if they lived in high mountains, and yet the river poured out its long estuary into the grey ocean, which pounded the beach with unrelenting ferocity, eating instantly the snowflakes that fell into the waves. This was their country.

One day in spring another caravan arrived, full of strangers and their possessions; they had heard of the new town Baraka, and wanted to move there. It was another ship of fools, come from the Armenian and Zott settlements in Portugal and Castile, its criminal tendencies made obvious by the high incidence of handlessness and musical instruments, puppeteers and fortune tellers.

'I'm surprised they made it over the mountains,' Bistami said to Ibn Ezra.

'Necessity made them inventive, no doubt. Al Andalus is a dangerous place for people like these. The Sultan's brother is proving a very strict caliph, I have heard, almost Almohad in his purity. The form of Islam he enforces is so pure that I don't believe it was ever lived before, even in the time of the Prophet. No, this caravan is made of people on the run. And so was ours.'

'Sanctuary,' Bistami said. 'That's what the Christians called a place of protection. Usually their churches, or else a royal court. Like some of the sufi ribat in Persia. It's a good thing. The good people come to you when the law elsewhere becomes too harsh.'

So they came. Some were apostates or heretics, and Bistami debated these in the mosque itself, trying as he spoke to create an atmosphere in which all these matters could be discussed freely, without a sense of danger hanging overhead – it existed, but far away, back over the Pyrenees – but also without anything blasphemous against God or Mohammed being affirmed. It did not matter whether one was Sunni or Shiite Arabian or Andalusi, Turk or Zott, man or woman; what mattered was devotion, and the Quran.

It was interesting to Bistami that this religious balancing act got easier to maintain the longer he worked at it, as if he were practising something physical, on a ledge or high wall. A challenge to the authority of the caliph? See what the Quran said about it. Ignore the hadith that had encrusted the holy book, and so often distorted it: cut through to the source. There the messages might be ambiguous, often they were.

But the book had come to Mohammed over a period of many years, and important concepts were usually repeated in it, in slightly different ways each time. They would read all the relevant passages, and discuss the differences. 'When I was in Mecca studying, the true scholars would say…' This was as much authority as Bistami would claim for himself; that he had heard true authorities speak. It was the method of the hadith, of course, but with a different content: that the hadith could not be trusted, only the Quran.