Abu-al-Walîd Muhammad ibn-Ahmad ibn-Rushd (it would take that long name, passing through "Benraist" and "Avenris" and even "Aben Rassad" and "Filius Rosadis," a hundred years to become "Averroës") was at work on the eleventh chapter of his work Tahãfutal-Tahafut ("Destruction of the Destruction"), which maintains, contrary to the Persian ascetic al-Ghazzali, author of the Tahãfut al-Falãsifah ("Destruction of Philosophers"), that the deity knows only the general laws of the universe, those that apply not to the individual but to the species. He wrote with slow assurance, from right to left; the shaping of syllogisms and linking together of vast paragraphs did not keep him from feeling, like a sense of wonderful well-being, the cool, deep house around him. In the depths of the siesta, loving turtledoves purred throatily, one to another; from some invisible courtyard came the murmur of a fountain; something in the flesh of Averroës, whose ancestors had come from the deserts of Arabia, was grateful for the steadfast presence of the water. Below lay the gardens of flowers and of foodstuffs; below that ran the bustling Guadalquivir; beyond the river spread the beloved city of Córdoba, as bright as Baghdad or Cairo, like a complex and delicate instrument; and, encircling Córdoba (this, Averroës could feel too), extending to the very frontier, stretched the land of Spain, where there were not a great many things, yet where each thing seemed to exist materially and eternally. His quill ran across the page, the arguments, irrefutable, knitted together, and yet a small worry clouded Averroës' happiness. Not the sort of worry brought on by the Tahãfut, which was a fortuitous enterprise, but rather a philological problem connected with the monumental work that would justify him to all people—his commentary on Aristotle. That Greek sage, the fountainhead of all philosophy, had been sent down to men to teach them all things that can be known; interpreting Aristotle's works, in the same way the ulemas interpret the Qur'an, was the hard task that Averroës had set himself. History will record few things lovelier and more moving than this Arab physician's devotion to the thoughts of a man separated from him by a gulf of fourteen centuries. To the intrinsic difficulties of the enterprise we might add that Averroës, who knew neither Syriac nor Greek, was working from a translation of a translation.
The night before, two doubtful words had halted him at the very portals of the Poetics. Those words were "tragedy" and "comedy." He had come across them years earlier, in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in all of Islam could hazard a guess as to their meaning. He had pored through the pages of Alexander of Aphrodisias, compared the translations of the Nestorian Hunayn ibn-Ishaq and Abu-Bashãr Mata—and he had found nothing. Yet the two arcane words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics—it was impossible to avoid them. Averroës laid down his quill. He told himself (without conviction) that what we seek is often near at hand, put away the manuscript of the Tahãfut, and went to the shelf on which the many volumes of blind ibn-Sina's Moqqãm, copied by Persian copyists, stood neatly aligned. Of course he had already consulted them, but he was tempted by the idle pleasure of turning their pages. He was distracted from that scholarly distraction by a kind of song. He looked out through the bars of the balcony; there below, in the narrow earthen courtyard, half-naked children were at play. One of them, standing on the shoulders of another, was clearly playing at being a muezzin: his eyes tightly closed, he was chanting the muezzin's monotonous cry, There is no God but Allah. The boy standing motionless and holding him on his shoulders was the turret from which he sang; another, kneeling, bowing low in the dirt, was the congregation of the faithful. The game did not last long—they all wanted to be the muezzin, no one wanted to be the worshippers or the minaret. Averroës listened to them arguing in the "vulgar" dialect (that is, the incipient Spanish) of the Muslim masses of the Peninsula. He opened Khalil's Kitãbal-'Ayn and thought proudly that in all of Córdoba (perhaps in all of Al-Andalus) there was no other copy of the perfect work—only this one, sent him by Emir Ya'qübal-Mansur from Tangier. The name of that port reminded him that the traveler abu-al-Hasan al-Ash'ari, who had returned from Morocco, was to dine with him that evening at the home of the Qur'anist Faraj. Abu-al-Hasan claimed to have reached the kingdoms of the Sin Empire [China]; with that peculiar logic born of hatred, his detractors swore that he had never set foot in China and that he had blasphemed Allah in the temples of that land. The gathering would inevitably last for hours; Averroës hurriedly went back to his work on the Tahãfut. He worked until dusk.
At Faraj's house, the conversation moved from the incomparable virtues of the governor to those of his brother the emir; then, out in the garden, the talk was of roses. Abu-al-Hasan (having never seen them) said there were no roses like those which bedeck the villas of Andalusia. Faraj was not to be suborned by flattery; he observed that the learned ibn-Qutaybah had described a superb variety of perpetual rose which grows in the gardens of Hindustan and whose petals, of a deep crimson red, exhibit characters reading There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His prophet. He added that abu-al-Hasan must surely be acquainted with those roses. Abu-al-Hasan looked at him in alarm. If he said yes, he would be judged by all, quite rightly, to be the most pliable and serviceable of impostors; if he said no, he would be judged an infidel. He opted to breathe that Allah held the keys that unlock hidden things, and that there was no green or wilted thing on earth that was not recorded in His Book. Those words belong to one of the first suras of the Qur'an; they were received with a reverential murmur. Puffed up by that victory of dialectics, abu-al-Hasan was about to declare that Allah is perfect in His works, and inscrutable. But Averroës, prefiguring the distant arguments of a still-problematic Hume, interrupted.
"I find it less difficult to accept an error in the learned ibn-Qutaybah, or in the copyists," he said, "than to accept that the earth brings forth roses with the profession of our faith."
"Precisely. Great words and true," said abu-al-Hasan.
"Some traveler, I recall," mused the poet Abd-al-Malik, "speaks of a tree whose branches put forth green birds. I am pained less by believing in that tree than in roses adorned with letters."
"The birds' color," said Averroës,"does seem to make that wonder easier to bear. In addition, both birds and the fruit of trees belong to the natural world, while writing is an art. To move from leaves to birds is easier than to move from roses to letters."
Another guest indignantly denied that writing was an art, since the original Book of the Qur'an— the mother of the Book— predates the Creation, and resides in heaven. Another spoke of Al-Jahiz of Basra, who had stated that the Qur'an is a substance that can take the form of man or animal—an opinion which appears to agree with that of the people who attribute to the Qur'an two faces. Faraj discoursed long on orthodox doctrine. The Qur'an, he said, is one of the attributes of Allah, even as HisMercy is; it may be copied in a book, pronounced with the tongue, or remembered in the heart, but while language and signs and writing are the work of men, the Qur'an itself is irrevocable and eternal. Averroës, who had written his commentary on the Republic, might have said that the mother of the Book is similar, in a way, to the Platonic Idea, but he could see that theology was one subject utterly beyond the grasp of abu-al-Hasan.
Others, who had come to the same realization, urged abu-al-Hasan to tell a tale of wonder. Then, like now, the world was horrible; daring men might wander through it, but so might wretches, those who fall down in the dust before all things. Abu-al-Hasan's memory was a mirror of secret acts of cowardice.