That duty accomplished, she walked through the bazaar to the classes she was taking, in subjects suggested by Aunt Idelba. The madressa institute's classes were folded in to the Buddhist monastery and hospital, and Budur paid a fee, with money borrowed from Idelba, to take three classes: beginning statistics (which began with simple arithmetic, in fact), accounting and the history of Islam.
This last course was taught by a woman named Kirana Fawwaz, a short dark Algerine with an intense voice hoarsened by cigarettes. She looked about forty or forty five. In the first meeting she informed them she had served in the war hospitals and then, near the end of the Nakba (or the Catastrophe, as the war was often referred to) in the Maghribi women's brigades. She was nothing like the soldiers in the White Crescent home, however; she had come out of the Nakba with the air of one victorious, and declared in the first meeting that they would in fact have won the war, if they had not been betrayed both at home and abroad.
'Betrayed by what?' she asked in her harsh crow's voice, seeing the question on all their faces. 'I will tell you: by the clerics. By our men more generally. And by Islam itself.'
Her audience stared at her. Some lowered their heads uneasily, as if expecting Kirana to be arrested on the spot, if not struck down by lightning. Surely at the least she would be run down later that day by an unexpected tram. And there were several men in the class as well, one right next to Budur, in fact, wearing a patch over one eye. But none of them said anything, and the class went on as if one could say such things and get away with it.
'Islam is the last of the old desert monotheisms,' Kirana told them. 'It is belated in that sense, an anomaly. It followed and built on the earlier pastoral monotheisms of the Middle West, which predated Mohammed by several centuries at least: Christianity, the Essenes, the Jews, the Zoroastrians, the Mithraists and so on. They were all strongly patriarchal, replacing earlier matriarchal polytheisms, created by the first agricultural civilizations, in which gods resided in every domesticated plant, and women were acknowledged to be crucial to the production of food and new life.
'Islam was therefore a latecomer, and as such, a corrective to the earlier monotheisms. It had the chance to be the best monotheism, and in many ways it was. But because it began in an Arabia that had been shattered by the wars of the Roman empire and the Christian states, it had to deal first with a condition of almost pure anarchy, a tribal war of all against all, in which women were at the mercy of any warring party. From those depths no new religion could leap very high.
'Mohammed thus arrived as a prophet who was both trying to do good, and trying not to be overwhelmed by war, and by his experiencing of divine voices babbling some of the time, as the Quran will attest.'
This remark drew gasps, and several women stood and walked out. All the men in the room, however, remained as if transfixed.
'Spoken to by God or speaking whatever came into his head, it did not matter; the end result was good, at first. A tremendous increase in law, in justice, in women's rights, and in a general sense of order and human purpose in history. Indeed, it was precisely this sense of justice and divine purpose which gave Islam its unique power in the first few centuries AH, when it swept the world despite the fact that it gave no new material advantage – one of the only clear cut demonstrations of the power of the idea alone, in all of history.
'But then came the caliphs, the sultans, the divisions, the wars, the clerics and their hadith. The hadith overgrew the Quran itself, they seized on every scrap of misogyny scattered in Mohammed's basically feminist work, and stitched them into the shroud in which they wrapped the Quran, as being too radical to enact. Generations of patriarchal clerics built up a mass of hadith that has no Quranic authority whatsoever, thus rebuilding an unjust tyranny, using frequently falsified authorities of personal transmission from male master to male student, as if a lie passed down through three or ten generations of men somehow metamorphoses into a truth. But it is not so.
'And so Islam, like Christianity and Judaism before it, stagnated and degenerated. Because its expansion was so great, it was harder to see this failure and collapse; indeed, it took up until the Nakba itself to make it clear. But this perversion of Islam lost us the war. It was women's rights, and nothing else, that gave China and Travancore and Yingzhou the victory. It was the absence of women's rights in Islam that turned half the population into non productive illiterate cattle, and lost us the war. The tremendous intellectual and mechanical progress that had been initiated by Islamic scientists was picked up and carried to much greater heights by the Buddhist monks of Travancore and the Japanese diaspora, and this revolution in mechanical capacity was quickly developed by China and the New World free states; by everyone, in fact, except for Dar al Islam. Even our reliance on camels did not come to an end until midway through the Long War. Without any road wider than two camels, with every city built as a kasbah or a medina, as tightly packed as a bazaar, nothing could be done in the way of modernization. Only the war's destruction of the city cores allowed us to rebuild in a modern way, and only our desperate attempt to defend ourselves brought any industrial progress to speak of. But by then it was a case of too little and too late.'
At this point the room was quite a bit emptier than it had been when Kirana Fawwaz began; and two girls had exclaimed as they stormed out that they were going to report these blasphemies to the clerics and the police. But Kirana Fawwaz only paused to light a cigarette and wave them out of the room, before continuing.
'Now,' she went on, calmly, inexorably, remorselessly, 'in the aftermath of the Nakba, everything has to be reconsidered, everything. Islam has to be examined root and branch and leaf, in the effort to make it well, if that is possible; in the effort to make our civilization capable of survival. But despite this obvious necessity, the regressives prattle their broken old hadith like magic charms to conjure jinns, and in states like Afghanistan or Sudan, or even in corners of Firanja itself, in the Alpine Emirates and Skandistan, for instance, the hezbollah rule, and women are forced into chador and hijab and harem, and the men in power in these states try to pretend that it is the year 300 in Baghdad or Damascus, and that Haroun al Rashid will come walking in the door to make everything right. They might as well pretend to be Christian and hope the cathedrals will spring back to life and Jesus come flying down from heaven.'