Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf Read Free Book Online Page A

silence followed, and when I wanted to ask a question, my father interrupted me with a gesture. I waited until he had completely returned from his memories and had begun to speak to me again:
    â€˜These words which I have repeated to you, Hasan, were parts of the shaikh’s sermon delivered a few months before the fall of Granada. Whether I agree with his words or not, I am still shaken by them, even when I recall them ten years later. You can imagine, then, the effect which his sermons produced on the hard-pressed city of Granada in the year 896.
    â€˜At the same time as they realized that the end was near, and that the evils which Astaghfirullah had always predicted were beginning to rain down upon them, the citizens of Granada became persuaded that the shaikh had been correct all along, and that it was heaven that had always spoken through his voice. Even in the poorest quarters, no woman’s face was thenceforth seen in the streets. Some, even little girls who had hardly reached puberty, covered themselves through the fear of God, but others through the fear of men, because groups of youngsters were formed, armed with clubs to call the people to do good and to distance themselves from evil. Not a single tavern dared open its doors, even on the sly. The prostitutes left the city en masse and took themselves off to the camp of the besiegers, where the soldiers made them very welcome. The librarians hid from view those works which cast doubt on dogma and traditions, those collections of poems where wine and pleasure were celebrated, and treaties of astrology or geomancy. One day some books were even seized and burnt in the courtyard of the Great Mosque. I was walking past there by chance, when the pyre was beginning to go out, and the passers-by were dispersing with the smoke. A piece of paper flying in the wind revealed that the pile contained the works of a doctor poet of time gone by, known as al-Kalandar. On this paper, half consumed by the flames, I could just read these words:
    That which is the best in my life, I draw from drunkenness. Wine runs in my veins like blood.

    The books burnt in public that day, my father explained to me,belonged to another doctor, one of the most relentless adversaries of Astaghfirullah. He was called Abu Amr, but the friends of the shaikh changed his name to Abu Khamr, ‘Father of Wine’.
    The preacher and the doctor had only one thing in common, the habit of speaking frankly, and it was exactly this trait which stirred up the disputes whose unfolding was followed so avidly by the citizens of Granada. Apart from this, it seemed that the Most High had amused himself by creating two beings as unlike one another as possible.
    Astaghfirullah was the son of a Christian convert, and it was undoubtedly this which explained his zeal, while Abu Khamr was the son and grandson of qadis, which meant that he did not find it necessary to give continual proof of his attachment to dogma and tradition. The shaikh was fair, lean and choleric, while the doctor was as brown as a ripe date, fatter than a sheep on the eve of the ‘
Id
, and an ironical and contented smile rarely left his lips.
    He had studied medicine from the old books, from the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Averroes, Avicenna, Abu’l-Qassis, Abenzoar and Maimonides, as well as more recent texts on leprosy and the plague, may God distance both of them from us. Every day he would distribute freely to both rich and poor dozens of bottles of theriac which he had prepared himself. But this was simply to check the effect of viper’s flesh or of the electuary, because he was far more interested in scientific experiments than in medical practice. Besides, how could he have been able, with hands which alcohol made constantly tremble, to operate upon an eye afflicted with a cataract, or even stitch up a wound? And would he have been able to prescribe diets – ‘diet is the beginning of all treatment’, the