The Year of Rice and Salt

Even during all this trouble, in the evenings Ibrahim and the heavily pregnant Kang would retire to their verandah and watch the Tao River flow into the Yellow River. They talked over the news and their day's work, comparing poems or religious texts, as if these were the only things that really mattered. Kang tried to learn the Arabic alphabet, which she found difficult, but instructive.

'Look,' she would say, 'there is no way to mark the sounds of Chinese in this alphabet, not really. And no doubt the same is true the other way around!' She gestured at the rivers' confluence. 'You have said the two peoples can mix like the waters of these two rivers. Maybe so. But see the ripple line where the two meets. See the clear water, still there in the yellow.'

'But a hundred li downstream. Ibrahim suggested.

'Maybe. But I wonder. Truly, you must become like these Sikhs you talk about, who combine what is best from the old religions, and make something new.'

'What about Buddhism?' Ibrahim asked. 'You say it has already changed Chinese religion completely. How can we apply it to Islam as well?'

She thought about it. 'I'm not sure it's possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.'

Ibrahim sighed. 'There has to be a god. The universe could not arise from nothing.'

'We don't know that.'

'I believe Allah made it. But now, it may be that it is up to us. He gave us free will to see what we would do. Again, Islam and China may have two parts of the whole truth. Perhaps Buddhism has another part. And we must find whole sight. Or all will be desolation.'

Darkness fell on the river.

'You must raise Islam to the next level,' Kang said.

Ibrahim shuddered. 'Sufism has been trying to do that for centuries. The sufis try to rise up, the Wahhabis drag them back down, claiming there can be no improvement, no progress. And here the Emperor crushes both!'

'Not so. The Old Teaching has standing in imperial law, the books by your Liu Zhu are in the imperial collection of sacred texts. It's not like with the Daoists. Even Buddhism finds no favour with the Emperor, compared to Islam.'

'So it used to be,' Ibrahim said. 'As long as it stayed quiet, out here in the west. Now these young hotheads are inflaming the situation, wrecking all chance of co-existence.'

There was nothing Kang could say to that. It was what she had been saying all along.

Now it was fully dark. No prudent citizen would be out in the streets of the rude little town, walled through it was. It was too dangerous.

News arrived with a new influx of refugees from the west. The Ottoman sultan had apparently made alliances with the steppes emirates north of the Black Sea, descendant states of the Golden Horde that had only recently come out of anarchic conditions, and together they had defeated the armies of the Safavid empire, shattering the Shlite stronghold in Iran and continuing east into the disorganized emirates of central Asia and the silk roads. The result was chaos all the across the middle of the world, more war in Iraq and Syria, widespread famine and destruction; although it was said that with the Ottoman victory, peace might come to the western half of the world. Meanwhile, thousands of Shiites Muslims were headed cast over the Pamirs, where they thought sympathetic reformist states were in power. They did not seem to know that China was there.

'Tell me more about what the Buddha said,' Ibrahim would say in the evenings on the verandah. 'I have the impression it is all very primitive and self concerned. You know: things are the way they are, one adapts to that, focuses on oneself. All is well. But obviously things in this world are not well. Can Buddhism speak to that? Is there an "ought to" in it, as well as an "is"?'

Ifyou want to help others, practise compassion. If you want to help yourself, practise compassion." This the Tibetans' Dalai Lama said. And Buddha himself said to Sigala, who worshipped the six directions, that the noble discipline would interpret the six directions as parents, teachers, spouse and children, friends, servants and employees, and religious people. All these should be worshipped, he said. Worshipped, do you understand? As holy things. The people in your life! Thus daily life becomes a form of worship, do you see? It's not a matter of praying on Friday and then the rest of the week terrorizing the world.'

'This is not what Allah calls for, I assure you.'

'No. But you have your jihads, yes? And now it seems the whole of Dar al Islam is at war, conquering each other or strangers. Buddhists never conquer anything. In the Buddha's ten directives to the Good King, non violence, compassion and kindness are the matter of more than half of them. Asoka was laying waste to India when he was young, and then he became Buddhist, and never killed another man. He was the good king personified.'

'But not often imitated.'