The Year of Rice and Salt

The result has been that while a small percentage of human beings have lived in a wealth of food, material comfort and learning, those not so lucky have been the functional equivalent of domestic beasts, in harness to the powerful and well off, creating their wealth for them but not benefiting from it themselves. If you happen to be a young black farm girl, what can you say to the world, or the world to you? You exist under all four of the great inequalities, and will live a shortened life of ignorance, hunger and fear. Indeed it only takes one of the great inequalities to create such conditions.

So it must be said that the majority of humans ever to have lived, have existed in conditions of immiseration and servitude to a small minority of wealthy and powerful people. For every emperor and bureaucrat, for every caliph and qadi, for every full rich life, there have been ten thousand of these stunted, wasted lives. Even if you grant a minimal definition of a full life, and say that the strength of spirit in people, and the solidarity among people, have given many and many of the world's poor and powerless a measure of happiness and achievement amidst their struggle, still, there are so many who have lived lives destroyed by immiseration that it seems impossible to avoid concluding that there have been more lives wasted than fully lived.

All the world's various religions have attempted to explain or mitigate these inequalities, including Islam, which originated in the effort to create a realm in which all are equal; they have tried to justify the inequalities in this world. They all have failed; even Islam has failed; the Dar al Islam is as damaged by inequality as anywhere else. Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality – the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell – is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by as humans do, the beasts labouring as beasts do, the homeless preta suffering in fear at the edge of bell, and the inhabitants of hell enslaved to pure immiseration.

My feeling is that until the number of whole lives is greater than the number of shattered lives, we remain stuck in some kind of prehistory, unworthy of humanity's great spirit. History as a story worth telling will only begin when the whole lives outnumber the wasted ones. That means we have many generation s to go before history begins. All the inequalities must end; all the surplus wealth must be equitably distributed. Until then we are still only some kind of gibbering monkey, and humanity, as we usually like to think of it, does not yet exist.

To put it in religious terms, we are still indeed in the bardo, waiting to be born.

The old woman read the pages her husband had given her, walking up and down their long verandah, full of agitation. When she had finished, she put her hand on his shoulder. The day was coming to its end; the sky in the west was indigo, a new moon resting in it like a scythe. The black river flowed below them. She went to her own writing stand, at the far end of the verandah, and took up her brush, and in quick blind strokes filled a page.

Two wild geese fly north in the twilight. One bent lotus droops in the shallows. Near the end of this existence Something like anger fills my breast; A tiger: next time I will hitch it To my chariot. Then watch me fly. No more hobbling on these bad feet. Now there is nothing left to do But scribble in the dusk and watch with the beloved Peach blossoms float downstream. Looking back at all the long years All that happened this way and that I think I liked most the rice and the salt.

Chapter One. The Fall of Konstantiniyye

The Ottoman Sultan Caliph Selim the Third's doctor, Ismail ibn Mani al Dir, began as an Armenian qadi who studied law and medicine in Konstantiniyye. He rose quickly through the ranks of the Ottoman bureaucracy by the efficacy of his ministrations, until eventually the Sultan required him to tend one of the women of his seraglio. The harem girl recovered under Ismail's care, and shortly thereafter Sultan Selim too was cured by Ismail, of a complaint of the skin. After that the Sultan made Ismail the chief doctor of the Sublime Porte and its seraglio.

Ismail then spent his time slipping about unobtrusively from patient to patient, continuing his medical education as doctors do, by practising. He did not attend court functions. He filled thick books with case studies, recording symptoms, medicines, treatments and results. He attended the janissaries' inquisitions as required, and kept notes there as well.