But first on her list of things to do, on many mornings, was to visit the White Crescent Disabled Soldiers' Home, a vast converted army barracks a long way up the river park. This was one of those duties Idelba had pointed her towards, and Budur found it both harrowing and uplifting – like going to the mosque on Friday was supposed to be and never really had been. The larger part of this barracks and hospital was taken up by a few thousand blind soldiers, rendered sightless by gas on the eastern front. In the mornings they sat in silence, in beds or chairs or wheelchairs as the case might be, as someone read to them, usually a woman: daily newspapers on their thin inky sheets, or various texts, or in some cases the Quran and the hadith, though these were less popular. Many of the men had been wounded as well as blinded, and could not walk or move; they sat there with half a face, or without legs, aware, it seemed, of how they must appear, and staring in the direction of the readers with a hungry ashamed look, as if they would kill and eat her if they could, from unrealizable love or bitter resentment, or both all mixed together. Such naked expressions Budur had never seen in her life, and she often kept her own gaze fixed on whatever text she was reading, as though, if she were to glance up at them they would know it and recoil, or hiss with disapprobation. Her periph eral vision revealed to her an audience out of a nightmare, as if one of the rooms of hell had extruded from the underworld to reveal its inhabitants, waiting to be processed, as they had waited and been processed in life. Despite her attempts not to look, every time she read to them Budur saw more than one of them weeping, no matter what it was she read, even the weather reports from Firanja or Africa or the New World. The weather actually was one of their favourite readings.

Among the other readers there were very plain women who nevertheless had beautiful voices, low and clear, musical, women who sang their whole lives without knowing it (and knowing would have ruined the effect); when they read many in their audience sat forward in their beds and wheelchairs, rapt, in love with a woman to whom they never would have given a second glance could they have seen her. And Budur saw that some of the men leaned forward in the same way for her, though in her own ears her voice was unpleasantly high and scratchy. But it had its fans. Sometimes she read them the stories of Scheherazade, addressing them as if they were angry King Shahryar and she the wily storyteller, staying alive one more night; and one day, emerging from that antechamber of hell into the soaked sunlight of cloudy noon, she almost staggered at the realization of how completely the old story had been turned on its head, Scheherazade free to walk away, while the Shahryars were imprisoned for ever in their own wrecked bodies.

THREE

That duty accomplished, she walked through the bazaar to the classes she was taking, in subjects suggested by Aunt Idelba. The madressa institute's classes were folded in to the Buddhist monastery and hospital, and Budur paid a fee, with money borrowed from Idelba, to take three classes: beginning statistics (which began with simple arithmetic, in fact), accounting and the history of Islam.

This last course was taught by a woman named Kirana Fawwaz, a short dark Algerine with an intense voice hoarsened by cigarettes. She looked about forty or forty five. In the first meeting she informed them she had served in the war hospitals and then, near the end of the Nakba (or the Catastrophe, as the war was often referred to) in the Maghribi women's brigades. She was nothing like the soldiers in the White Crescent home, however; she had come out of the Nakba with the air of one victorious, and declared in the first meeting that they would in fact have won the war, if they had not been betrayed both at home and abroad.

'Betrayed by what?' she asked in her harsh crow's voice, seeing the question on all their faces. 'I will tell you: by the clerics. By our men more generally. And by Islam itself.'

Her audience stared at her. Some lowered their heads uneasily, as if expecting Kirana to be arrested on the spot, if not struck down by lightning. Surely at the least she would be run down later that day by an unexpected tram. And there were several men in the class as well, one right next to Budur, in fact, wearing a patch over one eye. But none of them said anything, and the class went on as if one could say such things and get away with it.

'Islam is the last of the old desert monotheisms,' Kirana told them. 'It is belated in that sense, an anomaly. It followed and built on the earlier pastoral monotheisms of the Middle West, which predated Mohammed by several centuries at least: Christianity, the Essenes, the Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Mithraists and so on. They were all strongly patriarchal, replacing earlier matriarchal polytheisms, created by the first agricultural civilizations, in which gods resided in every domesticated plant, and women were acknowledged to be crucial to the production of food and new life.

'Islam was therefore a latecomer, and as such, a corrective to the earlier monotheisms. It had the chance to be the best monotheism, and in many ways it was. But because it began in an Arabia that had been shattered by the wars of the Roman empire and the Christian states, it had to deal first with a condition of almost pure anarchy, a tribal war of all against all, in which women were at the mercy of any warring party. From those depths no new religion could leap very high.

'Mohammed thus arrived as a prophet who was both trying to do good, and trying not to be overwhelmed by war, and by his experiencing of divine voices babbling some of the time, as the Quran will attest.'

This remark drew gasps, and several women stood and walked out. All the men in the room, however, remained as if transfixed.

'Spoken to by God or speaking whatever came into his head, it did not matter; the end result was good, at first. A tremendous increase in law, in justice, in women's rights, and in a general sense of order and human purpose in history. Indeed, it was precisely this sense of justice and divine purpose which gave Islam its unique power in the first few centuries AH, when it swept the world despite the fact that it gave no new material advantage – one of the only clear cut demonstrations of the power of the idea alone, in all of history.

'But then came the caliphs, the sultans, the divisions, the wars, the clerics and their hadith. The hadith overgrew the Quran itself, they seized on every scrap of misogyny scattered in Mohammed's basically feminist work, and stitched them into the shroud in which they wrapped the Quran, as being too radical to enact. Generations of patriarchal clerics built up a mass of hadith that has no Quranic authority whatsoever, thus rebuilding an unjust tyranny, using frequently falsified authorities of personal transmission from male master to male student, as if a lie passed down through three or ten generations of men somehow metamorphoses into a truth. But it is not so.

'And so Islam, like Christianity and Judaism before it, stagnated and degenerated. Because its expansion was so great, it was harder to see this failure and collapse; indeed, it took up until the Nakba itself to make it clear. But this perversion of Islam lost us the war. It was women's rights, and nothing else, that gave China and Travancore and Yingzhou the victory. It was the absence of women's rights in Islam that turned half the population into non productive illiterate cattle, and lost us the war. The tremendous intellectual and mechanical progress that had been initiated by Islamic scientists was picked up and carried to much greater heights by the Buddhist monks of Travancore and the Japanese diaspora, and this revolution in mechanical capacity was quickly developed by China and the New World free states; by everyone, in fact, except for Dar al Islam. Even our reliance on camels did not come to an end until midway through the Long War. Without any road wider than two camels, with every city built as a kasbah or a medina, as tightly packed as a bazaar, nothing could be done in the way of modernization. Only the war's destruction of the city cores allowed us to rebuild in a modern way, and only our desperate attempt to defend ourselves brought any industrial progress to speak of. But by then it was a case of too little and too late.'