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

defeat me. Why don’t you just admit you’re an unbeliever and we can take it from there. Observe who your descendants are, the godless scum of the West and East. Your words resonate only in the minds of kafirs. The followers of truth have forgotten you. The followers of truth know that it is reason and science that are the true juvenilia of the human mind. Faith is our gift from God and reason is our adolescent rebellion against it. When we are adult we will turn wholly to faith as we were born to do.”
    “You will see, as time goes by,” said Ibn Rushd, “that in the end it will be religion that will make men turn away from God. The godly are God’s worst advocates. It may take a thousand and one years but in the end religion will shrivel away and only then will we begin to live in God’s truth.”
    “There,” said Ghazali. “Good. Now, father of many bastards, you begin to speak like the blasphemer you are.” Then he turned to matters of eschatology, which, he said, was now his preferred topic, and he spoke for a long time about the end of days, with a kind of relish that puzzled and distressed Ibn Rushd. Finally the younger man interrupted his elder in spite of the requirements of etiquette. “Sir, it feels as though, now that you yourself are nothing but oddly sentient dust, you are impatient for the rest of creation to plunge into its grave as well.”
    “As all true believers should,” Ghazali replied. “For what the living call life is a worthless triviality when compared to the life to come.”
    Ghazali thinks the world is ending, Ibn Rushd told Dunia in the dark. He believes that God has set out to destroy his creation, slowly, enigmatically, without explanation; to confuse Man into destroying himself. Ghazali faces that prospect with equanimity, and not only because he himself is already dead. For him, life on earth is just an anteroom, or a doorway. Eternity is the real world. I asked him, in that case, why has your eternal life not begun, or is this all it is, this consciousness lingering in an uncaring void, which is, for the most part, boring. He said, God’s ways are mysterious, and if he asks patience of me, I will give him as much as he desires. Ghazali has no desires of his own anymore, he says. He seeks only to serve God. I suspect him of being an idiot. Is that harsh? A great man, but an idiot too. And you, she said softly. Do you have desires still, or new desires you did not have before? He remembered how she would lay her head on his shoulder and he would cradle the back of it in the palm of his hand. Now they had passed beyond heads and hands and shoulders and lying together. The disembodied life, he said, is not worth living.
    If my enemy is correct, he told her, then his God is a malicious God, for whom the life of the living has no value; and I would desire my children’s children to know it, and to know my enmity towards such a God, and to follow me in standing against such a God, and defeating his purposes. So you acknowledge your bloodline, she whispered. I acknowledge it, he said, and I beg your forgiveness for not doing so before. The Duniazát is my race and I am its forefather. And this is your wish, she softly pressed him, that they may become aware of you, and your desire, and your will. And of my love for you, he said. Armed with that knowledge, they may yet save the world.
    Sleep, she said, kissing the air where his cheek once lay. I’ll be off now. I don’t usually care very much about the passage of time, but right now, time is short.
    The existence of the jinn posed problems to moral philosophers from the beginning. If men’s deeds were motivated by benevolent or malignant sprites, if good and evil were external to Man rather than internal, it became impossible to define what an ethical man might be. Questions of right and wrong action became horribly confusing. In the eyes of some philosophers, this was a good thing, reflecting the actual moral confusion of the