The Years of Rice and Salt (48 page)

Ibrahim read this in manuscript and shook his head, sighing. “I have married one wiser than myself,” he said to his empty room. “I am a lucky man. But sometimes I wish that I had chosen to study not ideas, but things. Somehow I have drifted outside the range of my talent.”

Every day
news of more Qing suppression of Muslims came to them. Supposedly the Old Teaching was favored over the New Teaching, but ignorant and ambitious officials arrived from the interior, and mistakes were made more than once. Ma Wuyi, for instance, the successor to Ma Laichi, not to Ma Mingxin, was ordered to move with his adherents to Tibet. Old Teaching to new territory, people said, shaking their heads at the bureaucratic mistake, which was sure to get people killed. It became the third of the Five Great Errors of the suppression campaign. And the disorder grew.

Eventually a Chinese Muslim named Tian Wu rallied the Jahriyas openly, to revolt and free themselves from Beijing. This happened just north of Gansu, and so everyone in Lanzhou stockpiled again for war.

Soon the banners came, and like everything else the war had to move through the Gansu Corridor to get from east to west. So though much of the fighting took place far away in eastern Gansu, the news of it in Lanzhou was constant, as was the movement of troops through town.

Kang Tongbi found it unnerving to have the major battles of this revolt happening east of them, between them and the interior. It was several weeks before the Qing army managed to put down Tian Wu's force, even though Tian Wu had been killed almost immediately. Soon after that, news came that Qing general Li Shiyao had ordered the slaughter of over a thousand Jahriya women and children in east Gansu.

Ibrahim was in despair. “Now all the Muslims in China are Jahriya in their hearts.”

“Maybe so,” Kang said cynically, “but I see it doesn't keep them from accepting Jahriya lands confiscated by the government.”

But it was also true that Jahriya orders were springing up everywhere now, in Tibet, Turkestan, Mongolia, Manchuria, and all the way south to distant Yunnan. No other Muslim sect had ever attracted so many adherents, and many of the refugees streaming in from the wars to the far west became Jahriya the moment they arrived, happy after the confusions of Muslim civil war to join a straightforward jihad against infidels.

Even during all this trouble, in the evenings Ibrahim and the heavily pregnant Kang would retire to their verandah and watch the Tao River flow into the Yellow River. They talked over the news and their day's work, comparing poems or religious texts, as if these were the only things that really mattered. Kang tried to learn the Arabic alphabet, which she found difficult, but instructive.

“Look,” she would say, “there is no way to mark the sounds of Chinese in this alphabet, not really. And no doubt the same is true the other way around!”

She gestured at the rivers' confluence. “You have said the two peoples can mix like the waters of these two rivers. Maybe so. But see the ripple line where the two meet. See the clear water, still there in the yellow.”

“But a hundred li downstream,” Ibrahim suggested.

“Maybe. But I wonder. Truly, you must become like these Sikhs you talk about, who combine what is best from the old religions, and make something new.”

“What about Buddhism?” Ibrahim asked. “You say it has already changed Chinese religion completely. How can we apply it to Islam as well?”

She thought about it. “I'm not sure it's possible. The Buddha said there are no gods, rather that there are sentient beings in everything, even clouds and rocks. Everything holy.”

Ibrahim sighed. “There has to be a god. The universe could not arise from nothing.”

“We don't know that.”

“I believe Allah made it. But now, it may be that it is up to us. He gave us free will to see what we would do. Again, Islam and China may have two parts of the whole truth. Perhaps Buddhism has another part. And we must find whole sight. Or all will be desolation.”

Darkness fell on the river.

“You must raise Islam to the next level,” Kang said.

Ibrahim shuddered. “Sufism has been trying to do that for centuries. The Sufis try to rise up, the Wahhabis drag them back down, claiming there can be no improvement, no progress. And here the emperor crushes both!”

“Not so. The Old Teaching has standing in imperial law, the books by your Liu Zhu are in the imperial collection of sacred texts. It's not like with the Daoists. Even Buddhism finds no favor with the emperor, compared to Islam.”

“So it used to be,” Ibrahim said. “As long as it stayed quiet, out here in the west. Now these young hotheads are inflaming the situation, wrecking all chance of coexistence.”

There was nothing Kang could say to that. It was what she had been saying all along.

Now it was fully dark. No prudent citizen would be out in the streets of the rude little town, walled though it was. It was too dangerous.

News arrived
with a new influx of refugees from the west. The Ottoman sultan had apparently made alliances with the steppes emirates north of the Black Sea, descendant states of the Golden Horde that had only recently come out of anarchic conditions, and together they had defeated the armies of the Safavid empire, shattering the Shiite stronghold in Iran and continuing east into the disorganized emirates of central Asia and the Silk Roads. The result was chaos all across the middle of the world, more war in Iraq and Syria, widespread famine and destruction; although it was said that with the Ottoman victory, peace might come to the western half of the world. Meanwhile, thousands of Shiite Muslims were headed east over the Pamirs, where they thought sympathetic reformist states were in power. They did not seem to know that China was there.

“Tell me more
about what the Buddha said,” Ibrahim would say in the evenings on the verandah. “I have the impression it is all very primitive and self-concerned. You know: things are the way they are, one adapts to that, focuses on oneself. All is well. But obviously things in this world are not well. Can Buddhism speak to that? Is there an ‘ought to' in it, as well as an ‘is'?”

“ ‘If you want to help others, practice compassion. If you want to help yourself, practice compassion.' This the Tibetans' Dalai Lama said. And Buddha himself said to Sigala, who worshiped the six directions, that the noble discipline would interpret the six directions as parents, teachers, spouse and children, friends, servants and employees, and religious people. All these should be worshiped, he said. Worshiped, do you understand? As holy things. The people in your life! Thus daily life becomes a form of worship, do you see? It's not a matter of praying on Friday and then the rest of the week terrorizing the world.”

“This is not what Allah calls for, I assure you.”

“No. But you have your jihads, yes? And now it seems the whole of Dar al-Islam is at war, conquering each other or strangers. Buddhists never conquer anything. In the Buddha's ten directives to the Good King, nonviolence, compassion, and kindness are the matter of more than half of them. Asoka was laying waste to India when he was young, and then he became Buddhist, and never killed another man. He was the good king personified.”

“But not often imitated.”

“No. But we live in barbarous times. Buddhism spreads by people converting out of their own wish for peace and right action. But power condenses around those willing to use force. Islam will use force, the emperor will use force. They will rule the world. Or fight over it, until it is all destroyed.”

Another time she said, “What I find interesting is that of all these religious figures of ancient times, only the Buddha did not claim to be a god, or to be talking to God. The others all claim to be God, or God's son, or to be taking dictation from God. Whereas the Buddha simply said, there is no God. The universe itself is holy, human beings are sacred, all the sentient beings are sacred and can work to be enlightened, and one must only pay attention to daily life, the middle way, and give thanks and worship in daily action. It is the most unassuming of religions. Not even a religion, but more a way to live.”

“What about these statues of Buddha I see everywhere, and the worship in the Buddhist temples? You yourself spend a great deal of time at prayer.”

“Partly the Buddha is revered as the exemplary man. Simple minds might have it otherwise, no doubt. But these are mostly people who worship everything that moves, and Buddha is just one god among many others. They miss the point. In India they made him an avatar of Vishnu, an avatar who is deliberately trying to mislead people away from the proper worship of Brahman, isn't that right? No, many people miss the point. But it is there for all to see, if they would.”

“And your prayers?”

“I pray to see things better.”

Quickly enough
the Jahriya insurrection was crushed, and the western part of the empire apparently at peace. But now there were deep-seated forces, driven underground, that were working all the while for a Muslim rebellion. Ibrahim feared that even the Great Enterprise was no longer out of the question. People spoke of trouble in the interior, of Han secret societies and brotherhoods, dedicated to the eventual overthrow of the Manchu rulers and a return to the Ming dynasty. So even Han Chinese could not be trusted by the imperial government; the dynasty was Manchu after all, outsiders, and even the extremely punctilious Confucianism of the Qianlong Emperor could not obscure this basic fact of the situation. If the Muslims in the western part of the empire revolted, there would be Chinese in the interior and the south coast who would regard it as an opportunity to pursue their own rebellion; and the empire might be shattered. Certainly it seemed that the sheng shi, the peak of this particular dynastic cycle (if there were any such thing), had passed.

This danger Ibrahim memorialized to the emperor repeatedly, urging him to infold the Old Teaching even more firmly into imperial favor, making Islam one of the imperial religions in law as well as fact, as China in the past had infolded Buddhism and Daoism.

No reply ever came to these memoranda, and judging by the contents of the beautiful vermilion calligraphy brushed at the bottom of other petitions returned from the emperor to Lanzhou, it seemed unlikely that Ibrahim's would be received any more favorably. “Why am I surrounded by knaves and fools?” one imperial commentary read. “The coffers have been filling with gold and silver from Yingzhou for every year of our rule, and we have never been more prosperous.”

He had a point, no doubt; and knew more about the empire than anyone else. Still, Ibrahim persevered. Meanwhile more refugees came pouring east, until the Gansu Corridor, Shaanxi, and Xining were all crowded with new arrivals—all Muslim, but not necessarily friendly toward each other, and oblivious of their Chinese hosts. Lanzhou appeared to be prospering; the markets were jammed, the mines and foundries and smithies and factories were all pouring out armaments, and new machinery of all kinds, threshers, power looms, carts; but the ramshackle west end of town now extended along the bank of the Yellow River for many li, and both banks of the Tao River were slums, where people lived in tents, or in the open air. No one in town recognized the place anymore, and everyone stayed behind locked doors at night, if they were prudent.

Child of mine coming into this world

Be careful where you take yourself.

So many ways for things to go wrong;

Sometimes I grow afraid.

If only we lived in the Age of Great Peace

I could be happy to see your innocent face

Watching the geese fly south in the fall.

Once Kang was helping Ibrahim clean up the clutter of books and paper, inkstones and brushes, in his study, and she stopped to read one of his pages.

“History can be seen as a series of collisions of civilizations, and it is these collisions that create progress and new things. It may not happen at the actual point of contact, which is often racked by disruption and war, but behind the lines of conflict, where the two cultures are most trying to define themselves and prevail, great progress is often made very swiftly, with works of permanent distinction in arts and technique. Ideas flourish as people try to cope, and over time the competition yields to the stronger ideas, the more flexible, more generous ideas. Thus Fulan, India, and Yingzhou are prospering in their disarray, while China grows weak from its monolithic nature, despite the enormous infusion of gold from across the Dahai. No single civilization could ever progress; it is always a matter of two or more colliding. Thus the waves on the shore never rise higher than when the backwash of some earlier wave falls back into the next one incoming, and a white line of water jets up to a startling height. History may not resemble so much the seasons of a year, as waves in the sea, running this way and that, crossing, making patterns, sometimes a triple peak, a very Diamond Mountain of cultural energy, for a time.”

Kang put the sheet down, looked at her husband fondly. “If only it were true,” she said to herself.

“What?” He looked up.

“You are a good man, husband. But it may be you have taken on an impossible task, out of your goodness.”

Then, in the forty-fourth year
of the Qianlong Emperor's reign, rain fell for all of the third month. Everywhere the land was flooded, just at the time when Kang Tongbi was nearing her confinement. Whether general rebellion across the west broke out because of the misery caused by the floods, or was calculatedly initiated to take advantage of the disaster's confusion, no one could say. But Muslim insurgents attacked town after town, and while Shiite and Wahhabi and Jahriya and Khafiya factions murdered each other in mosque and alleyway, Qing banners too went down before the furious attacks of the rebels. It became so serious that the bulk of the imperial army was rumored to be heading west; but meanwhile the devastation was widespread, and in Gansu the food began to run out.

Lanzhou was again besieged, this time by a coalition of immigrant Muslim rebels of all sects and national origins. Ibrahim's household did everything it could to protect the mistress of the house in her late pregnancy. But even this high in its watershed, the Yellow River had risen dangerously with the rains, and being located at the confluence of the Yellow and the Tao made things worse for their compound. The town's high bluff began to look not so high. It was a frightening sight to see the rivers risen so startlingly, brown and foaming at the very tops of their banks. Finally, on the fifteenth day of the tenth month, when an imperial army was a day's march downstream, and relief from the siege therefore almost in sight, the rain fell harder than ever, and the rivers rose and spilled over their banks.