Which author would you love to have dinner with?
13th of August 1720
Fez, Morocco
The heat is a verdict. You have sat long enough in this city to understand this is not a figure of speech. August does not arrive in Fez as a guest arrives, with ceremony and the possibility of departure; August arrives as a sentence, and the city endures it as the sentenced endure what they cannot appeal. The walls take on the colour of old bone. The air refuses to move. Even the fountain cannot argue the heat down. You hear it behind my words: the water falling, the water rising, the water falling again, as the righteous are instructed to do.
I have been sitting here since Dhuhr. My brass inkhorn and my opinions await me beside the tiles. They are among the most patient things I own, which is a virtue I would admire more in paper if I did not suspect that paper feels nothing.
You have sat with me long enough this afternoon that I owe you an honest account of my thoughts. Not the thoughts I would offer the court, not the thoughts I would commit to the opinions that await their reckoning, but the thoughts of an August afternoon in shade, in the Qarawiyyin quarter, in the fifty-fourth year of a life that has not been, on the whole, displeasing to me, though it has not been without its cost.
This morning I sat in judgement. I wish you to understand that this is not a figure of speech. I sat in the place appointed for judgement, with the authority of nineteen years and the Maliki tradition behind me, and men came before me with their claims and their counter-claims, their witnesses and their silences, and I weighed what was brought, and I pronounced. This requires no commendation; it is the work. A qadi who requires praise for pronouncing judgement has mistaken the office for an achievement. The office is an obligation. If there is an achievement, it lies elsewhere, in some account that is not mine to keep.
I will tell you, and I say this not as complaint but as precise observation, that the law this morning was clear. Entirely clear. The scholars of the Maliki tradition, whose words I have spent my life learning and whose great compendium I have carried in my head since I was young enough to be mortified by my own ignorance, spoke without ambiguity. The precedents admitted no dispute. The man before me received a verdict that was correct, and accepted it, and departed, and the law was satisfied.
And yet I carry it into the afternoon.
Do not mistake this for weakness. A man who carries nothing out of his courtyard is a man who has not truly heard what was brought before him. The law says: weigh the evidence, apply the principle, pronounce. It does not say: feel nothing while you do so. It requires impartiality of the verdict, not emptiness of the heart. I have observed, in nineteen years, that those who achieve emptiness of heart achieve also a certain fluency of pronouncing that I have never been able to envy. God dispenses justice with perfection. We are only His imperfect instruments. An instrument that does not register the force applied to it is not precision; it is insensibility, and insensibility in a judge is a corruption that does not announce itself, and for that reason is the most dangerous corruption of all.
What I carry now is not fat, whatever my colleagues may say behind their hands. What I carry is accumulation. Long years of hearing what men do to one another in their need, their fear, their smallness, and, let us be fair, for fairness is the least we owe the record, in their moments of unexpected and unrepeatable grace. Both, always. The law provides a framework for both. What the law does not provide is an account of what both cost to witness. That accounting belongs to God alone, and to no earthly tribunal.
So. I sit beside my fountain. My inkhorn awaits. And the afternoon gives me what the morning could not: quiet, shade, and the freedom to consider questions found in no legal code I have studied.
You asked me something. Yesterday, or the day before, or perhaps only this morning; the heat has disordered my sense of when things were said. You asked me, and I shall render it now in terms I find more fitting: if God permitted you one man of letters to sit at your table this evening, living or dead, of any land or tongue, to receive your hospitality and speak with you as two men speak when the day’s obligations have been fulfilled, whom would you choose?
I have been holding this question since you asked it. Patience is not passivity; it is the act of holding a thing at arm’s length until its true shape becomes visible. So I held your question through the case I have mentioned and the others I have not, through Dhuhr and now past Asr, and I find that the shape of my answer has, in the course of these hours, become clear.
I surprised myself. That, too, is worth noting.
You might expect me to name a scholar of the tradition. Khalil ibn Ishaq, whose brief and exacting compendium has been the lattice upon which I have grown every argument of my professional life, and who settled in a single sentence matters that lesser men write volumes to obscure. Or Ibn Rushd of Cordoba, whose work on the law and on the reach of reason I can still recite from memory after thirty years, and thirty years is, I think, the only reliable test of whether a book has entered a man or merely passed through him. Or Ibn Khaldun of Tunis, whose account of how peoples rise and fall is, in my considered judgement, the most honest reckoning of power ever committed to paper in any tongue I have encountered. These are appropriate answers. They are answers that reflect well upon the office and upon the man who holds it.
But I do not want the appropriate answer.
A man who has spent nineteen years in the appropriate answer may, at the end of a hot August afternoon, with his fountain and his inkhorn and his accumulated weight, permit himself the true one.
His name was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. He was a man of Castile, a soldier, a captive, a collector of debts for the Spanish Crown, and the author of, among other works, a great history of a knight who was mad and who was, nevertheless, entirely admirable. He died some one hundred and four years before this afternoon; I have done the reckoning. He is not known to me as a scholar of the law or of theology. He is known to me through a rendering, imperfect and hard-won, that arrived in this city by way of the merchants of Salé, and which I received as I receive all knowledge that crosses my threshold: without prejudice as to its origin. Knowledge is an obligation. Were we not directed by the Prophet, upon whom be peace, to seek it even unto China? The merchants of Salé are somewhat closer than China, and what they brought me was worth the crossing.
In this history of the mad knight there is a man given charge of an island. He is not, by birth or education, the obvious instrument of governance. He is a man of large appetite and uncomplicated decency, appointed to govern by the whim of those who did not intend the appointment seriously. He has no learning in the law. He has no library behind him, no tradition whose weight might steady him in the moment of judgement. He has only, as I have come to understand it, a quality of attention: a willingness to hear what stands before him and to ask himself, plainly and without sophistication, what a good man would do.
And he judges rightly.
I have thought about this man more than is perhaps useful for a judge of the Maliki school to admit. We have answers, in the tradition, for the judge who reaches the correct verdict by an incorrect process; we have frameworks for the authority of a ruling arrived at without proper precedent, without established testimony. The tradition is not silent on this. But when I apply the tradition to this governor, it settles the legal question and leaves standing the larger one, which I shall put to you plainly: what does it mean that this man, arriving at justice by a road no scholar would recognise, arrived nonetheless? What does that say about the nature of justice, about the source from which it flows, about whether that source is, in the end, the One I serve?
Was the island ever truly governed, or was it only endured?
I should like to ask Cervantes that. This is the first of the questions I would carry to the table.
The other question is harder.
Cervantes was taken from a ship in the Mediterranean in the year 1575, some one hundred and forty-five years before this August afternoon. He was taken by corsairs and brought to Algiers, and he remained there five years in captivity while his family laboured to assemble his ransom. I know this trade. I know it as I know the quality of light in this courtyard at Asr: it is part of the air of this coastline, of this world I inhabit, and has been so for as long as men have sailed the middle sea in search of what other men possess. I say this as a man of law describes what is before him, not in condemnation and not in justification, but as the condition of things before they are formally put to him for judgement.
Cervantes was ransomed. He returned. And then he wrote, in the fullness of years, his history of the mad knight, and in that history there is a quality of mercy that I find it necessary to characterise with care, because imprecision here would do him a disservice.
It is not the mercy of a man who has not been tested. It is not the mercy of a theologian who holds mercy as an abstraction drawn from sacred text, kept at a safe distance from the body. It is the mercy of a man who has been tested until the bone is visible, and who has decided, on the evidence before him, that mercy remains the correct verdict. That folly deserves tenderness more than it deserves contempt. That the ridiculous and the suffering are not separate conditions but one condition wearing different faces on different days.
No man who sat five years in a corsair’s city and emerged to write so tenderly of folly and of mercy can be entirely my enemy. I use the word with legal precision; I mean that there is no case to bring against such a man. The evidence does not support one.
And yet I should like to ask him: did he forgive the sea?
Not as a pleasantry, and not as the opening of a conversation among men too civil to say what they mean. I mean the question as a judge poses it: deliberately, with the intention of receiving a true answer. Forgiveness is a legal act as much as it is a spiritual one. It closes the case. It releases the one who forgives from the obligation of grievance, as it releases the one forgiven from the weight of outstanding debt. It is a formal act, not merely an internal resolution: an event, a closing of accounts. And I should like to know whether Cervantes performed this act; whether he stood, in whatever court his conscience could convene, and declared: the sea took five years from me, and the sea is forgiven, and the account is closed.
Or whether he did not. Whether the tenderness of the great work is the tenderness not of a man who forgave, but of a man who could not quite forgive, and found in writing his book a way to be merciful anyway, in the face of a debt that was never fully settled.
These are not the same source of tenderness. They look alike from the outside. A judge learns to tell the difference.
There are accounts in a man’s life that resist closure. I will say no more of this.
So. I would pour Cervantes tea. Green tea, with mint, strong and sweet, because this is the hospitality of this city, and it would give me a modest satisfaction to watch a Castilian soldier navigate a glass of it without embarrassing himself. I would pour him tea, and I would ask my question about the island, and my question about the sea, and I would listen as I listen to testimony I believe to be true: with the whole of my attention, and without a verdict already written.
Perhaps he would ask me something in return. Perhaps he would put a question to a qadi of Fez about the nature of mercy, or the cost of judgement, or whether in my fifty-four years I have ever known a man who was fully equal to his office. And I would answer, or I would not, according to whether the question deserved an answer or only a silence.
I have been told that certain silences are also a form of testimony.
You will observe that I have not named a jurist, a theologian, or any scholar whose works lie closer to my calling. I am aware of what this reveals. I am not, at this hour of the afternoon, greatly troubled by it.
The afternoon asked me for the true answer, and I have given it. Let the record show it, if any record is kept of what men say beside fountains on August afternoons when no one is listening who will carry it further.
The inkhorn has waited long enough. My opinions do not write themselves.
The fountain falls. The shade holds. The walls keep the colour they have always kept. In God’s keeping are all the things I cannot resolve, and all the questions I have put to no one but the air.
(He taps the table. Once. He returns to his papers.)
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