Arabic Science Fiction by Ian Campbell

Author:Ian Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

(Maḥmūd 1965, p. 98)

The soldiers proceed to take him to prison, where he is subsequently tried, convicted, and executed: “And the sword struck my neck in front of the Umayyad Gate.” This scene takes place in a still-earlier period, that of the ‘Abbasid caliphate—which ruled over Egypt from 750 to 969, when the Fatimids took over (Kennedy, pp. 316–317)—with its capital in Baghdad and its tense relations between Arabs and Persians. We can see the parallels between twentieth-century Dāwūd experimenting with the serum [’iksīr], his analogue not quite being able to taste the spices [tawābil], to the pharmaceuticals [‘aqāqīr] he claims to sell, to the poison [samm] that he is killed for selling and which kills Dāwūd when he succumbs to the temptation to inject himself with the elixir for the third time. This confusion among chemicals lends credence to Barbaro ’s argument that Spider is at its root an exercise in the alchemical and the Gothic, but in fact, ‘Abbasid culture was intensely interested in proto-scientific approaches to medical treatment, and the word ‘aqāqīr might better be translated as “remedies,” for it lacks the dual meaning of phármakon. This is a despotic prosecution of a helpless foreigner, a man without rights: the only evidence given against him is the commander’s manifestly false testimony that he saw Isaac kill, with bloody hands. Still more salient here are the various interjections Isaac makes: “may god forgive you,” “by god’s mercy,” as well as many others while on trial. This scene takes place ninety percent of the way through the text of Spider, but these words are the first to mention Islam or traditional culture: everything else has taken place in an Egypt characterized by Dāwūd’s exercises in scientific detection. While the real Egypt of 1965 would be full of such interjections, only the distant past contains them in this version of history. Even so, nobody takes Isaac’s repeated oaths and protestations as a serious indicator of his innocence, not that they have any interest in whether he’s innocent.

Once the sword takes Isaac’s life, Dāwūd shifts to a new existence, one in which he is a holy man in the Sinai desert:My life was prayer and worship, my food dried fruit and barley. I spent my long day in contemplation and rosary beads. People sought me out from the edges of the world that I might grant them blessings. (Maḥmūd 1965, p. 100)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.