1At the far western end of the lands of Islam, where the old world ran out into the ocean, there was a city called Córdoba. Travellers said its streets were lit with lamps at night for miles, when the capitals of the Christian kings were dark and deep in mud. One of its rulers had gathered a library so great that the list of the books alone filled forty-four volumes.
2Muslims ruled there. But Jews and Christians lived under them for hundreds of years, each people by its own law, and Jewish physicians sat at Muslim tables, and Christian monks came down from the north to learn Arabic. It was never an equal peace, and it was sometimes broken. Still, it was a peace, and a great deal grew in it.
3In that city, a dozen years and a few streets apart, two boys were born. One was a Muslim: Muhammad son of Ahmad, of the house of Rushd, whose grandfather had been the chief judge of Córdoba. One was a Jew: Moses, the son of Maimon, whose father was a judge among his own people. The first would be called Averroes by the Latins, and the second Maimonides.
4They were sons of the same city and they read the same Greek master, and each loved the faith he was born to and served it all his life. As far as anyone knows, they never met.
5There was a third boy, and you will not find his name in any book but this one. He was Hakam, a bookbinder's apprentice in the street behind the great mosque. He was fourteen in the year the city changed hands.
6A new power had come out of the mountains of Africa: stern men, sure that they alone understood the oneness of God. When they took Córdoba they did not keep the old peace. They told the Jews and the Christians of the city: take our faith, or leave, or die. The synagogues were shut.
7On a night in that year, the judge Maimon came to the bookbinder's back door. The binder was a Muslim and had bound the Jew's books for twenty years, and he did not hesitate. He sent Hakam with a handcart.
8They packed by one covered lamp. Hakam had never seen so many books in a house. The judge chose among them with a face like a man choosing among his children. What could not go on two mules was left on the shelves for whoever came.
9A boy of about ten stood in the middle of the room, holding a book to his chest with both arms and getting in everyone's way. That was Moses. A smaller boy held on to his shirt. That was his brother David.
10"Give it here, it must be wrapped," said Hakam.
11"I am not finished with it," said the boy.
12"You can finish it where you are going."
13"Where are we going?"
14Hakam did not know. No one in the room knew. He wrapped the book in oilcloth and gave it back, and the boy carried it out himself into the dark. The family went through the river gate before dawn, and the binder's apprentice stood in the street with an empty handcart. He thought: a city has just grown smaller and does not know it.
15The family of Maimon wandered for years. They went from town to town in Spain. They crossed to Africa and lived in Fez. They took ship for the Holy Land through a storm that nearly drowned them. They came at last to Egypt, to the old town of Fustat beside Cairo, and there the father died.
16Moses wanted only to study. His brother David made it possible. David became a trader in precious stones, and went and came on the long sea roads, and kept the whole household, so that Moses could sit with his books. Moses wrote afterward that his brother had gone out to trade and earn, while he himself sat at home in safety.
17Then David took passage for India. He carried with him the family's whole wealth, and other people's too. The ship went down in the Indian Sea, and he with it.
18The news took Moses like a blow to the body. He lay in bed for a year with fever and a sickness of the heart. Eight years afterward he wrote to a friend that he was mourning still. David had grown up on his knees, he wrote; he was his brother and his pupil. Whenever he came upon a page of David's handwriting, his grief woke as if it were the first day.
19There was no one now to keep the household: David's widow, his small daughter, all of them. Moses would not take pay for teaching the law of God. So the scholar who had wanted only to sit with books went out at forty to earn bread as a physician.
20He was a good one. He had read Galen and he had read Ibn Sina. In time he was called to the court in Cairo, where the great Saladin now ruled, and he served the Sultan's minister and the Sultan's household. Thus a Jew driven out of the west by Muslims was honoured in the east by Muslims, and he treated their children, and they trusted him with their lives.
21Hear how his days went, for he set it down himself in a letter. Each morning he rode to the palace in Cairo and was kept there half the day. He came home to Fustat hungry in the afternoon. And his courtyard was full: Jews and Muslims and Christians, great men and beggars, all waiting. He washed his hands and begged them to let him eat one mouthful. Then he saw them, one after another, until night, lying on his back from weariness, and he could scarcely speak.
22He did not ask at the gate what any of them believed. A fever does not ask.
23In the scraps of the night he wrote. He set the whole law of his people in order. And he wrote, in Arabic, a book for a beloved pupil who was troubled: a young man who held to the Torah with his whole heart, and who had also studied the sciences, and feared that he must tear himself in two. Moses called it the Guide for the Perplexed. Its teaching was that the pupil need not be torn. The God who gave the law also made the mind, and does not ask a man to put it out.
24He had learned from Greeks and from Muslims and he said so. Long before, in a small work on the health of the soul, he had told his readers that what he taught there was not his own invention; he had gathered it from the sages of his people and from the philosophers also, old and new. And he gave his reason in a single line:
25"Hear the truth from whoever says it."
26Now go back to Córdoba, to the other son.
27Ibn Rushd did not have to flee in the year the city changed hands. He was a Muslim, and learned in the law, and the new rulers had use for him. He became a judge like his grandfather, in Seville and then in Córdoba itself.
28When he was past forty he was brought before the ruler of the west, the Commander of the Faithful, in his palace at Marrakesh. The ruler asked him at once: "What do the philosophers hold about the heavens? Were they made in time, or have they always been?"
29Ibn Rushd was seized with fear. It was a question men had been ruined for answering. He stammered that he did not busy himself with philosophy. But the ruler began to talk the question through himself, with such learning that the judge saw there was no trap in it, and found his tongue.
30Soon after, an old counsellor of the court sent for him. The Commander of the Faithful, he said, had been complaining that the books of Aristotle were dark and hard to follow. Would that someone might make them plain! The counsellor was too old. Ibn Rushd was not.
31He gave it nearly thirty years. He went through the works of the Greek master, book by book, and for many he wrote three commentaries: a short one for beginners, a middle one, and a great one that set out the master's words line by line and weighed every line. He did this after his day's work in court.
32His books were bound in the street behind the great mosque. Hakam was a master binder by then, with grey in his beard. He did not understand a tenth of what he bound.
33There were those who said that such study was a danger to faith. Ibn Rushd answered them as a judge answers, from the law itself. The holy Book, he wrote, calls on people again and again to look at the heavens and the earth and to reflect. To reflect well one needs the tools of reasoning. And if those tools were first made by people of another faith, long ago, what of it? One does not refuse a good knife because of who forged it. As for the fear that reason and revelation must collide, he wrote:
34"Truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it."
35He was nearly seventy when it turned. There was war with the Christian kings of the north, and the ruler needed the favour of the stern preachers and the crowd. Ibn Rushd had enemies. They carried tales. An order went out against the study of the ancients, and the old judge was brought to trial in his own city, and sentenced.
36His books were burned in the square of Córdoba.
37Hakam the binder stood in the crowd and watched his own work go into the fire, thirty years of it, the goatskin covers curling. He was a pious man, and he could not see how God was served by this.
38He heard, too, of what the old judge afterward called the worst thing that befell him in his trouble. He had gone with his son into a mosque in Córdoba for the afternoon prayer, and a mob of the lowest of the city rose and drove them both out. He was banished to Lucena, a small town to the south which in older days had been a town of Jews.
39Now the binder was past sixty. He had no power and no learning. But he had a thing that judges and rulers forget about. He had the second copies.
40A binder always has them: the spoiled gatherings, the sets ordered and never paid for, the exemplar kept back to copy from. They were under the floor of his shop. The order said that the books were to be given up. Hakam thought about the order. He thought about a night nearly fifty years before, and a boy who was not finished with his book.
41He did not give them up. He could not keep them either; a search would find them. So he did what the judge Maimon had done. He sent them out of the city by night.
42He sent some north, in a wool merchant's bales, to Toledo, where the Christians now ruled and where, strange to say, Christian priests and Jewish scholars sat together turning Arabic books into Latin. He sent others east along the coast with a Jewish trader bound for the towns of Provence. He asked nothing for them. To the trader he said only, "Find them a reader."
43"Of what faith?" said the trader, who was a careful man.
44"One that can read," said Hakam.
45The ruler's anger passed, as the anger of rulers does. After two or three years Ibn Rushd was called back to honour in Marrakesh. He had hardly arrived when he died there, an old man far from his own city.
46He was buried in Marrakesh. But after three months his people asked for him, and he was taken up and carried home across the sea to lie with his fathers.
47A man who saw the burial train enter Córdoba wrote down what he saw, and it has not been forgotten. The body came on a single mule. On one side of the saddle hung the coffin. And on the other side, to make the load balance so that the beast could walk, they had hung his books.
48Hakam saw it too, from his doorway, the last year of his life. The old mule came up the street behind the great mosque, stepping carefully. A man on one side, and what the man had written on the other, and the one weighing as much as the other. He put his hand over his mouth.
49They buried the coffin, and in his own land the old judge was little read for centuries. But the bales had reached Toledo, and the trader had reached Provence.
50In Fustat, in the last years of his life, a weary physician was sent the commentaries of a judge of Córdoba, whom he had never met. He read them between the patients. He wrote to a pupil that this Ibn Rushd had hit the truth well. And when a scholar in Provence wrote asking how the Greek master should be studied, the old man wrote back that Aristotle should be read with the commentaries, and he named Ibn Rushd among the three best.
51So the two sons of Córdoba met at last, on a page, in Egypt, when one of them was already dead. The Jew whom the city had driven out told his people to learn from the Muslim whom the city had burned.
52And they did. The Jews of Provence put the judge's books into Hebrew and kept them for four hundred years. The Christians of Toledo put them into Latin. In the cold cities of the north, in Paris and Oxford, where young men were just beginning to gather around teachers, they read Aristotle through his eyes. They did not even use his name. They called him simply the Commentator, as one might say the Sun.
53Neither of them was converted by the other's faith, nor asked to be. Moses died a faithful Jew. Ibn Rushd died a faithful Muslim and a judge of the sacred law. What passed between them, and through them to the north, was not a creed. It was a way of holding a lamp.
54As for Hakam the binder, he left no book and no saying. He left a habit. His grandsons, who kept the shop, were known in that street for a strange custom. Whenever they bound a book, they made a second.