The Year of Rice and Salt

And soon thereafter Ibrahim's writing in the immensely long study that Kang had nicknamed 'Mohammed Meets Confucius' included the following passage: When observing the tendency towards physical extremism in Islam, ranging from fasting, whirling and self flagellation, all the way up to jihad itself, one wonders at its causes, which may be several, including the words of Mohammed sanctioning jihad, the early history of Islamic expansion, the harsh and otherworldly desert landscapes that have been the home of so many Muslim societies, and, perhaps most importantly, the fact that for Islamic peoples the religious language is by definition Arabic, and therefore a second language to the great majority of them. This has fateful consequences, because one's native tongue is always grounded in a physical reality by vocabulary, grammar, logic, and metaphors, images and symbols of all kinds, many of them buried and forgotten in names themselves; but in the case of Islam, instead of having a physical reality attached to it linguistically, its sacred language is detached from all that, for most believers, by its secondary and translated quality, its only partly learned nature, so that it conveys only abstract concepts, removed from the world, conveying the devout into a world of ideas abstracted and detached from the life of the senses and the physical realities of life, creating the possibility and even the likelihood of extremism resulting from a lack of perspective, a lack of grounding. To give a good example of the kind of linguistic process I mean: Muslims who have Arabic as a second language do not 'have their feet on the ground'; their behaviour is all too often directed by abstract thought, floating alone in the empty space of language. We need the world. Each situation must be placed in its setting to be understood. Possibly, therefore, our religion should be taught mostly in the vernacular tongues, the Quran translated into all the languages of Earth; or else better instruction in Arabic be given to all; although taking this road might entail requiring Arabic to become the first language of all the world, not a practical project and likely to be regarded as another aspect of jihad…

Another time, when Ibrahim was writing about the theory of dynastic cycles, which was held in common by both Chinese and Islamic historians and philosophers, his wife had brushed it all aside like a piece of botched embroidery: 'That's just thinking of history as if it were the seasons of a year. It's a most simple-minded metaphor. What if they are nothing at all alike, what if history meanders like a river for ever, what then?'

And soon afterwards Ibrahim wrote in his 'Commentary on the Doctrine of the Great Cycle in History':

Ibn Khaldun, the most influential of Muslim historians, speaks of the great cycle of dynasties in his 'Muqaddimah', and most of the Chinese historians identify a cyclic pattern in history as well, beginning with the Han historian Dong Zhongshw in his 'Luxuriant Dew of the Spring and Autumn Annals', a system which indeed was an elaboration of Confucius himself, and which was elaborated in its turn by Kang Yuwei, who in his 'Commentary on the Evolution of Rites' speaks of the Three Ages, each of which, Disorder, Small Peace and Great Peace, go through internal rotations of disorder, small peace and great peace, so that the three become nine, and then eighty one when these are recombined, and so on. And Hindu religious cosmology, which so far is that civilization's only statement on history as such, speaks also of great cycles, first the kalpa which is a day of Brahma, said to be 4,320,000,000 years long, divided into fourteen manvantaras, each of which is divided into seventy one maha yugas, length 3,320,000 years. Each maha yuga or Great Age is divided into four ages, Sarya yuga, the age of peace, Treta yuga, Dvaparayuga and Kali yuga, said to be our current age, an age of decline and despair, awaiting renewal. These spans of time, so vastly greater than those of the other civilizations, seemed to many earlier commentators excessive, but it must be said that, the more we learn of the antiquity of the Earth, with stone seashells found on mountaintops, and layers of rock deposits enjambed perpendicularly to each other, and so on, the more the introspections of India seem to have pierced through the veil of the past most accurately to the true scale of things.

But in all of them, in any case, the cycles are only observed by ignoring most of what has been recorded as actually happening in the past, and are very probably theories based on the turning of the year and the return of the seasons, with civilizations seen as leaves on a tree, going through a cycle of growth and decay and new growth. It may be that history itself has no such pattern to it, and that civilizations each create a unique fate that cannot be read into a cyclic pattern without doing damage to what really happened in the world.