Free Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

drown in the bed if he let her go. She had loved him without holding anything back and he had left her, had walked out of their home without looking back. And now in the dank blackness of his crumbling tomb she had returned to haunt him in the grave.
    Am I dead? he asked the phantom wordlessly. No words were necessary. There were no lips to shape them anyway. Yes, she said, dead for hundreds of years. I woke you up to see if you were sorry. I woke you up to see if you could defeat your enemy after almost a millenium of rest. I woke you up to see if you were ready to give your children’s children your family name. In the grave I can tell you the truth. I am your own Dunia, but I am also a princess of the jinnia or jiniri. The slits in the world are reopening, so I can come back to see you again. And so at last he understood her inhuman origin, and why, sometimes, she had looked a little smudged at the edges, as if she were drawn in soft charcoal. Or smoke. He had ascribed the blurriness of her outline to his bad eyesight and dismissed it from his thoughts. But if she was whispering to him in his grave and had the power to waken him from death then she was from the spirit world, a thing of smoke and magic. Not a Jew who could not say she was a Jew but a female jinn, a jinnia, who would not say she was of unearthly descent. So if he had betrayed her, she had deceived him. He wasn’t angry, he noted, without finding the information very important. It was too late for human anger. She, however, had a right to be angry. And the anger of the jiniri was a thing to be feared.
    What do you want? he asked. That’s the wrong question, she replied. The question is, what do you desire? You can’t grant my wishes. Maybe I can grant yours, if I want to. That’s the way this works. But we can discuss this later. Right now, your enemy is awake. His old jinni has found him, just as I found you. What is the jinni of Ghazali? he asked her. The most potent of all the jinn, she answered. A fool without an imagination, whom nobody ever accused of intelligence, either; but with ferocious powers. I do not even want to speak his name. And your Ghazali seems to me an unforgiving, narrow man, she said. A puritan, whose enemy is pleasure, who would turn its joy to ash.
    Her words felt chilling, even in the tomb. He felt something stir in a parallel darkness, faraway, so close. “Ghazali,” he murmured soundlessly, “can that possibly be you?”
    “It wasn’t enough that you tried and failed to demolish my work when you were alive,” the other replied. “Now, it would appear, you think you can do better after death.”
    Ibn Rushd pulled together the shards of his being. “The barriers of distance and time no longer pose a problem,” he greeted his foe, “so we may begin to discuss matters in the proper way, courteously as to the person, ferociously as to the thought.”
    “I have found,” Ghazali replied, sounding like a man with a mouth full of worms and dirt, “that the application of a degree of ferocity to the person usually brings his thinking into line with my own.”
    “At any rate,” said Ibn Rushd, “we are both beyond the influence of physical deeds, or, if you prefer, misdeeds.”
    “That is true,” Ghazali answered, “if, one must add, regrettable. Very well: proceed.”
    “Let us think of the human race as if it were a single human being,” Ibn Rushd proposed. “A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge. The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind’s long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age. It is not that God does not exist but that like any proud parent he awaits the day when his child can stand on its own two feet, make its own way in the world, and be free of its dependence upon him.”
    “As long as you argue from God,” Ghazali replied, “as long as you feebly try to reconcile the rational and the sacred, you will never