Naser asked, 'I wonder if one of Mohammed's seven scribes could have inserted into the Quran ideas of his own?'

Again Kirana shook her head. 'Recall the way the Quran was assembled. The mushaf, the final physical document, was the result of Osman bringing together all the surviving witnesses to Mohammed's dictation, his scribes, wives and companions, who together agreed upon a single correct version of the holy book. No individual interpolations could have survived that process. No, the Quran is a single voice, Mohammed's voice, Allah's voice. And it is a message of great freedom and justice on this Earth! it is the hadith that contain the false messages, the reimposition of hierarchy and patriarchy, the exceptional cases twisted to general rules. It's the hadith that abandon the major jihad, the fight against one's own temptations, for the minor jihad, the defence of Islam against attack. No – in so many ways, the rulers and clerics have distorted the Quran to their own purposes. This has been true in all religions, of course. It is inevitable. Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the Earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain. But those moments are always brief, as the sufis themselves admit. So we should let the occasional chalice break, if needs be, to get at the truth of the water inside it.'

Encouraged, Budur said, 'So how do we be modern Muslims?'

'We don't,' the oldest woman rasped, never pausing in her knitting. 'It's an ancient desert cult that has brought ruin to countless generations, including mine and yours, I'm afraid. It's time to admit that and move on.'

'On to what, though?'

'To whatever may come!' the old one cried. 'To your sciences to reality itself! Why worry about any of these ancient beliefs! They are all a matter of the strong over the weak, of men over women. But it's women who bear the children and raise them and plant the crops and harvest them and cook the meals and make the homes and care for the elderly! It's women who make the world! Men fight wars, and lord it over the rest with their laws and religions and guns. Thugs and gangsters, that's history! I don't see why we should try to accommodate any of it at all!'

There was silence in the class, and the old woman resumed her knitting as if she were stabbing every king and cleric who ever lived. They could suddenly hear the rain pouring down outside, students' voices in a courtyard, the old woman's knitting needles murderously clicking.

'But if we take that route,' Naser said, 'then the Chinese have truly won.'

More drumming silence.

The old woman finally said, 'They won for a reason. They have no God and they worship their ancestors and their descendants. Their humanism has allowed them science, progress – everything we have been denied.'

Even deeper silence, so that they could hear the foghorn out on the point, bellowing in the rain.

Naser said, 'You speak only of their upper classes. And their women had their feet bound into little nubbins, to cripple them, like clipping the wings of birds. That too is Chinese. They are hard bastards, you take my word for it. I saw in the war. I do not want to tell you what I saw, but I know, believe me. They have no sense of godliness, and so no rules of conduct; nothing to tell them not to be cruel, and so they are cruel. Horribly cruel. They don't think the people outside China are really human. Only the Han are human. The rest, we are hui hui, like dogs. Arrogant, cruel beyond telling it does not seem a good thing to me that we should imitate their ways, that they should win the war so completely as that.'

'But we were just as bad,' Kirana said.

'Not when we behaved as true Muslims. What would be a good project for a history class, I think, would be to focus on what has been best in Islam, enduring through history, and see if that can guide us now. Every sura of the Quran reminds us by its opening words Bismallah, in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. Compassion, mercy how do we express that? These are ideas that the Chinese do not have. The Buddhists tried to introduce them there, and they were treated like beggars and thieves. But they are crucial ideas, and they are central to Islam. Ours is a vision of all people as one family, in the rule of compas sion and mercy. This is what drove Mohammed, driven by Allah or by his own sense of justice, the Allah inside us. This is Islam to me! That's what I fought for in the war. These are the qualities we have to offer the world that the Chinese do not have. Love, to put it simply. Love.'

'But if we don't live by these things '

'No!' Naser said. 'Don't beat us with that stick. I don't see any people on Earth living by their best beliefs any more. This must be what Mohammed saw when he looked around him. Savagery everywhere, men like beasts. So every sura started with a call to compassion.'

'You sound like a Buddhist,' someone said.

The old soldier was willing to admit this. 'Compassion, isn't that their guiding principle of action? I like what the Buddhists do in this world. They are having a good effect on us. They had a good effect on the Japanese, and the Hodenosaunee. I've read books that say all our progress in science comes from the Japanese diaspora, as the latest and strongest of the Buddhist diasporas. They took up the ideas from the ancient Greeks and the Samarqandis.'

Kirana said, 'We must find the most Buddhist parts of Islam, perhaps. Cultivate those.'

'I say abandon all the past!' Click click click!

Naser shook his head. 'Then there could arise a new, scientific savagery. As during the war. We have to retain the values that seem good, that foster compassion. We have to use the best of the old to make a new way, better than before.'

'That seems good policy to me,' Kirana said. 'And it's what Mohammed told us to do, after all.'

EIGHT

Thus the bitter scepticism of the old woman, the stubborn hope of the old soldier, the insistent inquiry of Kirana, an inquiry which never got to the answers she wanted, but forged on through idea after idea, testing them against her sense of things, and against thirty years of insatiable reading, and the seedy life behind the docks of Nsara. Budur, wrapping herself in her oilcloth raincoat and hunching through the drizzle home to the zawiyya, felt the invisibilities welling up all around her – the hot quick disapproval of maimed young men who passed on the street the clouds lowering overhead – the secret worlds enfolded inside everything that Aunt Idelba was working on at the lab. Her job sweeping up and restocking the empty place at night was… suggestive. Greater things lay in the final distillation of all this work, in the formulas scrawled on the blackboards. There were years of mathematical work behind the experiments of the physicists, centuries of work now being realized in material explorations that might bring new worlds. Budur did not feel she could ever learn the maths involved, but the labs had to run right for anything to progress, and she began to get involved in ordering supplies, keeping the kitchen and dining halls running, paying the bills (the qi bill was huge).

Meanwhile the talk between the scientists went on, endless as the chatter in the cafes Idelba and her nephew Piali spent long sessions at the blackboards running over their ideas and proposing solutions to their mysterious mysteries, absorbed, pleased, also often worried, an edge in Idelba's voice, as if the equations were somehow revealing news she did not like or could not quite believe. Again she spent lots of time on the telephone, this time the one in its little closet in the zawiyya, and she was often gone without saying where she had been. Budur couldn't tell if all these matters were connected or not. There was a lot about Idelba's life that she didn't know. Men that she talked to outside the zawiyya, packages, calls… it appeared from the vertical lines etched between her eyebrows that she had her hands full, that it was a complicated existence somehow.