In the Name of God, the Beneficent, the Merciful.
All praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds.
Master of the Day of Judgment.
Daoud stood perfectly still, looking into the violet sky, reciting in
his mind the salat, the prayer required of a Muslim five times daily.
This was Mughrab, the moment when the last light of sunset had drained
away. An evening breeze cooled his face, welcome after a day of
traveling under the summer sky of Italy. Oriented by a bright crescent
moon just rising, he faced southeast, toward Mecca. His back was to the
stone wall of the inn called the Capo di Bue, the Ox's Head, where he
and Sophia and Celino had decided to spend the night. On the other side
of the wall, loud voices contended for attention, the sound of travelers
in the common room settling down to supper.
Praying in the dusk reminded Daoud that he was alone. What would it be
like now in El Kahira, the Guarded One? He would be praying with
hundreds of fellow Muslimin, standing shoulder to shoulder, all equal
before God, in the Gray Mosque, all listening to the call of the blind
muezzins from the minarets--"Come to the house of praise. God is
Almighty. There is no god but God."--all facing the Prophet's birthplace
together in holy submission. Daoud's prayer might be the only one going
up to God tonight from anywhere near Rome.
All around him towered ruins. The silhouettes of broken columns rose
against the darkening sky, and across the Appian Way the ragged shape of
what had once been a wall. Pines stood tall and black where, according
to Lorenzo, some wealthy woman of ancient Rome had her tomb.
He tried to forget his surroundings and to think only of the salat. It
was hard to concentrate when he could not assume the proper positions
for prayer--raise his hands, kneel, strike his forehead on the ground.
He fixed his mind on the infinity of God.
"Do not try to see Him," Abu Hamid al-Din Saadi had told him. "If you
see Him in your mind, you are looking at an idol."
Daoud did not try to see God, but as he prayed, a Muslim all alone in
the heart of Christendom, he could not help but see Sheikh Saadi, the
Sufi master who had brought him to Islam.
* * * * *
The face was very dark, the rich black of a cup of kaviyeh. Out of the
blackness peered eyes that _saw_--saw into the very souls of his
students.
Often as he sat listening to Sheikh Saadi read from the Koran, the Book
to be Read, and explain its meaning, voices from the past reproached
him. The voice of Father Adrian, the chaplain of their castle, rang in
his mind. The quiet voice of his mother, teaching him the Lord's Prayer
and the Hail Mary, whispered to him. Like thunder his father spoke of
war and of what it was to be a knight.
He could escape the torment of these voices only by listening closely to
the Sufi sheikh. Saadi was trying to teach him how to be good, and that
was the same thing his mother and father had wanted for him. So they
would not mind if he learned from Saadi.
Sheikh Saadi, wearing the white woolen robe of a Sufi, sat on a
many-colored carpet of Mosul, an open copy of the Koran resting on an
ornately carved lectern before him. His hand, as dark as the mahogany of
the stand, caressed the page as he read aloud.
"'Such as persevere in seeking their Lord's countenance and are regular
in prayer and spend of that which We bestow upon them secretly and
openly, and overcome evil with good: Theirs will be the Heavenly Home.'"
_Mohammedan dogs!_ Daoud remembered Father Adrian in his black and white
robes shouting in the chapel at Château Langmuir. _Satan is the author
of that vile book they call the Koran._
By the age of eleven Daoud had already known cruelty and evil at the
hands of the Turks who had captured him, kindness with Baibars, and
goodness with Sheikh Saadi. The Sufi sheikh had never made any claim,
but Daoud had no doubt that he often walked and talked with God.
"Secretly and openly are we to give," the old man was saying. "God has
been generous to us, and we must be generous in turn. When you are kind
to a bird or a donkey, or even to an unclean animal like a pig or a dog,
He loves you for it. He loves you more when you are kind to a slave or
to a woman or to one of the unfortunate, like a cripple or an
unbeliever."
"Daoud is both a slave and unbeliever," said Gamal ibn Nasir with a
faint sneer. "Must I be kind to him?" Daoud stared at Gamal, burning
with hatred, all the more because what he said was true.
Gamal was a slender, olive-skinned boy whom no one dared cross, because
he was a grandson of the reigning Sultan of Egypt, Al Salih Ayub. Most
of Saadi's students were boys of noble family, and Daoud knew that he
was permitted to enter this circle only because all men feared and
respected Baibars. And even though he studied Islam with them because it
was Baibars's wish, Daoud remained fil-kharij, an outsider, because he
was an unbeliever.
The boys sat in a semicircle, their rectangles of carpet spread over the
blue and white tiles of the inner courtyard of the Gray Mosque, where
Saadi had been teaching since long before these students were born. The
old black man sat with his back to the gray stones of the western wall,
the stones that gave the mosque its name. He taught in the late
afternoon, when he and the boys could sit in the shade.
"God is compassion itself, Gamal," Sheikh Saadi said with a smile, "but
even He may find it hard to love a mean spirit." The sultan's grandson
blushed angrily, and his eyes fell.
Thinking about the compassion of God, Daoud opened his eyes wide as a
startling idea occurred to him. But after the insult from Gamal his
tongue felt thick in his throat and the palms of his hands went cold at
the thought of speaking. He still stumbled over the Arabic tongue in
which Sheikh Saadi conducted his lessons.