' Thanks.'

Kirana sipped her coffee and listened to the others for a while. Then she said to Budur under the hubbub, 'What's interesting, I think, beyond all the theories we discuss, is what never gets written down. This is crucial for women especially, because so much of what we did never got written down. just the ordinary, you know, daily existence. The work of raising children and feeding families and keeping a home together, as an oral culture passed along generation to generation. Uterine culture, Kang Tongbi called it. You must read her work. Anyway uterine culture has no obvious dynasties, or wars, or new continents to discover, and so historians have never tried to account for it – for what it is, how it is transmitted, how it changes over time, according to material and social conditions. Changing with them I mean, in a weave with them.'

'In the harem it's obvious,' Budur said, feeling nervous at being jammed knee to knee with this woman. Cousin Yasmina had conducted enough clandestine 'practice sessions' of kissing and the like among the girls that Budur knew just what the pressure from Kirana's leg meant. Resolutely she ignored it and went on: 'It's like Scheherazade, really. Telling stories to get along. Women's history would be like that, stories told one after another. And every day the whole process has to be renewed.'

'Yes, Scheherazade is a good tale about dealing with men. But there must be better models for how women should pass history along, to younger women, for instance. The Greeks had a very interesting mythology, full of goddesses modelling various woman to woman behaviours. Demeter, Persephone… they have a wonderful poet for this stuff too, Sappho. You haven't heard of her? I'll give you the references.'

SEVEN

This was the start of many more personal conversations over coffee, late at night in the rain lashed cafes. Kirana lent Budur books on all kinds of topics, but especially Firanji history: the Golden Horde's survival of the plague that had killed the Christians; the continuing influence of the Horde's nomad structures on the descendant cultures of the Skandistani states; the infill of al Andalus, Nsara and the Keltic Islands by Maghribis; the zone of contention between the two infilling cultures in the Rhine Valley. Other volumes described the movement of Turks and Arabs through the Balkans, adding to the discord of the Firanji emirates, the little taifa states that fought for centuries, according to loyalties Sunni or Shiite, sufi or Wahabbi, Turkic or Maghribi or Tartar; fought for dominance or survival, often desperately, creating conditions usually repressive for women, so that only in the farthest west had there been any cultural advances before the Long War, a progressiveness that Kirana associated with the ocean, and contact with other cultures by sea, and with Nsara's origins as a refuge for the heterodox and marginal, founded indeed by a woman, the fabled refugee Sultana Katima.

Budur took these books and tried reading from them aloud to her blind soldiers in the hospital. She read them the story of the Glorious Ramadan Revolution, when Turkic and Kirghizi women had led seizures of the power plants of the big reservoirs above Samarqand, and moved into the ruins of the fabled city, which had been abandoned for nearly a century because of a series of violent earthquakes; how they had formed a new republic in which the holy laws of Ramadan were extended through the year, and the life of the people made a communal act of divine worship, all humans completely equal, men and women, adult and child, so that the place had reclaimed its glorious heritage of the tenth century, and made amazing advances in culture and law, and all had been happy there, until the Shah had sent his armies cast from Iran and crushed them as heretics.

Her soldiers nodded as they listened. That's the way it happens, their silent faces said. The good is always crushed. Those who see the farthest have their eyes put out. Budur, seeing the way they hung on every word, like starving dogs watching people cat in sidewalk cafes, brought in more of her borrowed books to read to them. Ferdowsi's 'The Book of Kings', the huge epic poem describing Iran before Islam, was very popular. So was the sufi lyric poet Hafiz, and of course Rumi and Khayyarn. Budur herself liked to read from her heavily annotated copy of Ibn Khaldun's 'Muqaddimah'.

'There is so much in Khaldun,' she said to her listeners. 'Everything I learn at the institute I find already here in Khaldun. One of my instructors is fond of a theory that has the world being a matter of three or four major civilizations, each a core state, surrounded by peripheral states. Listen here to Khaldun, in the section entitled "Each dynasty has a certain amount of provinces and lands, and no more".'

She read, Whenthe dynastic groups have spread over the border regions, their numbers are necessarily exhausted. This, then, is the time when the territory of the dynasty has reached its farthest extension, where the border regions form a belt around the centre of the realm. If the dynasty then undertakes to expand beyond its holdings, its widening territory remains without military protection, and is laid open to any chance attack by enemy or neighbour. This has a detrimental result for the dynasty. – Budur looked up. 'A very succinct description of core periphery theory. Khaldun also addresses the lack of an Islamic core state that the others can rally around.'

Her audience nodded; they knew about that; the absence of alliance coordination at the various fronts of the war had been a famous problem, with sometimes terrible results.

'Khaldun also addresses a systemic problem in Islamic. economy, in its origins among Bedouin practice. He says of them, "Places that succumb to the Bedouins are quickly ruined. The reason for this is that the Bedouins are a savage nation, fully accustomed to savagery and the things that cause it. Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization." He goes on to say, "It is their nature to plunder whatever other people possess. Their sustenance lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls." And after that he gives us the labour theory of value, saying "Now, labour is the real basis of profit. When labour is not appreciated and is done for nothing, the hope for profit vanishes, and no productive work is done. The sedentary population disperses, and civilization decays." Really quite amazing, how much Khaldun saw, and this back in a time when the people living here in Nsara were dying of their plague, and the rest of the world not even,close to thinking historically.'

The time for reading ended. Her audience settled back into their chairs and beds, hunkering down for the long empty watches of the afternoon.

Budur left with her usual combination of guilt, relief and joy, and on this day went directly to Kirana's class.

'How can we ever progress out of our origins,' she asked their teacher plaintively, 'when our faith orders us not to leave them?'

Kirana replied, 'Our faith said no such thing. This is just something the fundamentalists say, to keep their hold on power.'

Budur felt confused. 'But what about the parts of the Quran that tell us Mohammed is the last prophet, and the rules in the Quran should stand for ever?'

Kirana shook her head impatiently. 'This is another case of taking an exception for the general rule, a very common fundamentalist tactic. In fact there are some truths in the Quran that Mohammed declared eternal – such existential realities as the fundamental equality of every person how could that ever change? But the more worldly concerns of the Quran, involved with the building of an Arabic state, changed with circumstances, even within the Quran itself, as in its variable statements against alcohol. Thus the principle of naskh, in which later Quranic instructions supersede earlier ones. And in Mohammed's last statements, he made it clear that he wanted us to respond to changing situations, and to make Islam better – to come up with moral solutions that conform to the basic framework, but respond to new facts.'