The West and the Witch-Queen: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E05

(662 – 710 CE · Northern Africa ) 

The Narrator shares the small part he played in bringing Islam to North Africa west of Egypt, as well as a remarkable conversation he had with Dihya, a Christian Berber queen whose frustrated Muslim enemies believed could see into the future. 

Based on Chapter 5 of End by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder, and over the course of three days he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode five of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy it. On each outward journey, the sands of the Sahara stretched off to my left, and the blue of the Mediterranean stretched off to my right. That reversed on the return trip, of course. The Arabs had not appreciated just how big North Africa was when they first dubbed everything on the far side of the Nile Al Maghreb, the West. It soon became necessary to divide the vastness up into specific territories, and so we have the origins of today's North African countries. Libya was the Lower West, Tunisia was known as the Near West, Algeria was referred to as the Middle West, and what is now Morocco was the farthest west. If asked to think about it at all, most people today imagine the Arabs swallowed up North Africa in one bite. There is some small truth to that general misconception. After Governor Amr ibn al As secured some of the lower west from his base at Fustat, he ordered his nephew Ukbah to lead a flying column of Arab cavalry as far west as they could, as fast as they could. They rode all the way to the Atlantic in one long raid, living off the land as they went. Upon reaching the ocean and learning that there was no more Al Maghreb in front of him, it is said that Ukbah rode his horse out into the waters and cried, O God, if the sea had not prevented me, I would have galloped on forever like Alexander the Great, upholding your faith and fighting the unbelievers. I do not know how much of that is true, but it makes for a good story. I do know many people today would believe me if I said Ukbah's mad dash from Egypt to the Atlantic somehow magically made all of Northern Africa Muslim. I know this because others have said it, and no one objects. You would not believe how many European history books gloss over the next five decades of Islamic history in North Africa in a few paragraphs to get to the good bit where the Muslims invade Spain. Well, I was living and working my way up and down the lower west and near west and middle west, and sometimes even the farthest west, during the fifty years between Amr ibn al Ass's death and the first Muslim army crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, and I will linger here a while to say some things that are worth saying. I want to speak about how the peoples of a third of a continent fought against Islam before embracing it. I want to speak about the Berber people, and I want to speak about the witch queen Dia. I want to tell you how I found my deepest happiness in the faith through years of effort, only to lose it again in a single conversation. So let me begin with the fight against Islam. It was one thing for Ukbah and his cavalry column of Arab horsemen to ride from one end of the southern Mediterranean to the other, but that does not mean the locals started speaking Arabic and praying five times a day towards the Kaba, does it? No, in the beginning there was much resistance to the sudden arrival of Islam in the West. The African territories of my once beloved Carthage had been thoroughly Christianized during my absence over the last four centuries. Why should the Libyans and the Berbers and the more recently settled Romans and Vandals who made their homes along the coastline and in the hinterland of the southern shore of the Mediterranean, embrace a new faith out of Arabia when they had already accepted a new religion from the Holy Land? Well, clever Ukbah came up with a reason, or maybe there really was a miracle. You be the judge. One of his soldiers' horses wandered outside of camp, and when the man went to retrieve his steed, he found a golden goblet buried in the sand it was standing over. The cup was a famous one that had gone missing in Mecca some years before. As the soldier dug the cup out of the sand, water began to flow. What is more, anyone who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca would tell you the water tasted exactly like the water from the Zamzam well. The Zamzam well, of course, is the one that miraculously provided for the infant Ishmael, the very first Arab, when he and his mother were abandoned in the desert by Ibrahim, or Abraham, if you prefer, at God's command. It was their survival by that well that led Abraham to erect the Kaba, the house of God, just steps away from where the water sprang forth. If the cup and the water were both from Mecca, surely this random place in the wilderness of the Near West must be magically connected very closely to the Kaba somehow. And just like that, the newly founded town of Karawan, a corruption of the word for camp, became the fourth holiest city in Islam after only Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. How fortunate for the Islamic faith, God's will was made manifest for all to see. Or perhaps Ukbah and his men found a peculiar tasting water seat near their camp and concocted a good story, just as I once buried a horse skull where the first walls of Carthage would rise, so a true sign could be discovered and communicated to future citizens. Who knows? I do know it was a lot easier to talk to people about the miraculous when there was a local example they could draw inspiration from, and if that turned a trickle of converts into a torrent, was that not God's will however we arrived at it? But even the miracle at Kiruwan was not enough to inspire the sudden embrace of Islam in North Africa. No, in fact, Ukbah was killed a full fifteen years after founding the great holy city in the Near West. He and his personal guards were massacred in an ambush by thousands of Christian Berbers, descendant of long dead Iarbus' Numidians. This led our glorious Muslim armies to destroy the great Christian stronghold of Roman Carthage, tearing down its walls and filling in its harbor to ensure no one would ever live there again. It occurs to me I speak of this as if this impacted my life much. It did not. I was a rich merchant going about my business as rich merchants often do. Wars were other people's business. I would ride out in a camel caravan bearing goods from the east, and I would ride back in another camel caravan bearing goods from the west. I made a healthy profit in both directions, and the battles between Muslim and Christian armies touched me not at all. When presented with the opportunity, I bought and sold from both sides. No, what really bothered me as the years rolled on was how my travelling companions and I had to stay on the caravan road that hugged the coast to such an extent that we would weave north and south for days at a time to keep the coast in sight, rather than shorten our route dramatically by cutting across the desert. Now please understand, I was in no great rush. A man who lives forever does learn a thing or two about patience. Still, it seemed wrong to me that we timed out our daily journeys so that we could spend almost every night in some fortified place rather than in a temporary camp out in the wilderness. Were we not men of the desert? Why were we riding camels if they were going to eat and drink at the end of every day like a horse or a mule? I complained from time to time, but someone sensible was always there to warn me travelling through the desert was to invite disaster. Even those few desert Berbers who had embraced Islam so far were not good enough Muslims yet to pass up the opportunity to play the brigand if the opportunity arose. The wilds of the African interior were their domain, and they answered to no one there except themselves. What about God? I would ask whoever was warning me. They've heard of him, would come the reply. Rarely has an old joke been trotted out so proudly by so many people claiming to have coined it themselves. Joking aside, the merchants I travelled with were adamant that if I wished to go about my business unmolested, we must all travel together on the established coastal route and pay the settled Libyans and Berbers along the way a fee to be our innkeepers and night watchmen against their wilder brethren. It irked me the lack of freedom. This is how much I had grown and changed in the last century, where before I was content to sit in Roman Aila and let the camel caravans come to me rather than risk the Arab bandits who called the desert their home. Now I found myself painfully constricted at travelling in the security of an Arab camel caravan walking beside the sea for fear of Berber bandits out in the desert. It was crazy, but it seemed as if the desert called to me. I was not afraid of it. In truth, I was not afraid of the Berbers either. My merchant friends might prefer to play it safe, but I had known the Berbers since before anyone called them that. A Berber is just a Numidian by a different name. I am very well acquainted with Numidians, the horsemen who roamed North Africa and fought for or against Carthage as the spirit moved them. So how did the Numidians come to be called Berbers? The Greeks called anyone who did not speak Greek a barbarian, because their nonsensical speech sounded to a Greek like barbar, and somehow between the fall of the Carthaginians, the gradual decline of the Western Romans, the sudden arrival of the Germanic Vandals, and the eventual reconquest of much of the area by Greek speaking Eastern Romans, the proud Numidians came to be called first barbarians in their own homeland, and then Berbers. The western most of them, who in antiquity had been the Mori of Mauritania, came to be called Moors through the same mangling of words over time, and soon enough that term and Berber became interchangeable. Berbers were Moors, and Moors were Berbers, although funnily enough, Arabs could be lumped in with Moors, but not with Berbers, and all Muslims could be called Saracens by Christians, for Moors and Berbers and Arabs alike all lived in tents when it was our pleasure to do so. We were Saracenoi in Greek, and some variation of Saracen in the bastard languages devolving from Latin faster than you would believe. I am sorry, I drifted from my train of thought there. To return to the point, I knew the Berbers who made their home in the wilderness well enough that I did not fear them as my colleagues did. I thought on it, and I prayed on it, and when I looked into the future I saw a world where everyone in the Sahara considered himself a Muslim. How far away was that future? I could not say, but I felt it might be in me to hasten the day. I will be honest, dear listeners, since parting with Amar ibn al As during the first Muslim Civil War, I had felt my faith dim somewhat. Where was the universal embrace of the faith leading to one religion and global peace that I thought I had seen? Why was something that had seemed so easy proving to be so difficult? I decided I had to do something. I had to try to make a difference. Now I did not take total leave of my senses, of course. I took some precautions. I banked portions of my accumulated wealth at every caravan stop between Alexandria and the eastern edge of the Middle West. I would be able to come out of the desert again anywhere along almost three thousand kilometers of coastline, with enough coins and goods squirreled away to begin again. When all was in readiness, I bought new robes of dazzling white, allowed my current travelling companions to get a good distance ahead of me, and when they rounded a bend in the road ahead, I took my camel up over a dune and into the wadi beyond, making my way out into the deep desert fast enough that even if my colleagues did double back to look for me, they would never catch up. I prayed as I rode. I prayed that I would find new purpose on this adventure. I prayed that just as Amr had inspired me, I could inspire whoever found me. I prayed that I might be a catalyst who would help bring peace from one end of the Sahara to the other, just as a man could ride clear across Arabia without fear of brigands. Brigands was that who the Berbers were? Bandits in their own land? No. They were nomads who wandered where they willed, and where their flocks and herds needed to go. While they often had no use for strangers, they would not murder me on sight if I did not make them do so by hostile act or breach of custom. I was sure of it. I was sure they would not kill a man who could speak their native tongue and behave as they wished him to behave. By the afternoon of my second day journeying out into the wilderness, I could make out the distant figures of mounted men shadowing me to the left and right, in front of me and behind me. They must have been confused. Why was I alone? Where was I going when there was nothing in front of me but emptiness for further than any of them had bothered to ride in their lives? As the sun began to set, these figures converged on me from all sides. It was a fine entrapping maneuver, executed by people whose ancestors had made up some of the finest light cavalry in the world since even before Elishat and I founded Carthage together. I called out to the riders when they came within hailing distance. I could tell they were surprised I spoke their language, for their glances back and forth among each other as they swarmed me spoke volumes. Still, they did come for me, as I knew they would. I was not one of them, not entitled to the hospitality shared between nomads with ancestral ties. They boxed in my camel with practised ease, and I offered no resistance as they hauled me from my saddle and down to the ground. They dismounted themselves, daggers drawn, and I was made to answer their every question. Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing out here? Why are you all alone? I answered them in a calm voice with my hands up. I am Muhammad al Rumi. I am from Elah in the east, beyond Egypt, but not so far as Jerusalem or Mecca. I have come to talk to you. I am not alone because you are with me now. Well, they had more questions after that, of course, but I answered all of them in a quiet, friendly voice. I did not object when they searched me for weapons and valuables, confiscating everything they found of both. I even told them where in my saddle bags they could find some silver before they found it for themselves. When they were done looting me, I asked one of them to fetch my prayer rug. What do you need that for? I was asked, for while they had now thoroughly stripped me and my camel of everything that took their fancy, the rug remained rolled up and tied across the camel's rump. It is now truly dark. There is no light in the west at all. Is that not so? I asked them. That is so, one of them agreed. Then it is time for evening prayer. I will thank God for this day, and the new friends I have made. Here, let me show you, I said. I took the carpet from reluctant fingers, unrolled it upon the ground with a practised flip of my wrist, and then I performed my ablutions with sand for lack of water. Several of them jumped when I sang out the call to prayer. The Berbers watched in wonder, some whispering among themselves that they had seen or heard some of this before. I stepped onto my prayer mat and performed the prescribed movements and words of evening prayer. When I was done, I said in Berber, O God, I come to this place to speak to these men about their future, our future, your future. Grant us all wisdom and patience as we grow to know each other better. Well, this definitely set them to talking among themselves, but there was no talk of slitting my throat. At length they agreed they would take me back to their camp for the night, something I agreed to cheerfully as if they had asked for my opinion. We all knew I was coming as a prisoner, but they gave me the courtesy of riding my own camel back with my hands untied. We rode by moonlight, and the whispers of men carried across the empty desert louder than you would believe. I could hear them debating the whole way back who I might be, what I might want, and whether they wanted to hear it or not. I marked carefully who was most for and against me. Within an hour I could see a distant fire of camel dung burning somewhere off ahead of us, a warm and friendly orange light in a world of silver and black, and we followed the glow in until I could see the camp was the right size for half a dozen families to be travelling together. My captors called out their arrival, and the shepherd boy on watch sang back a happy reply. I am sure everyone in the camp was surprised to see me and my camel among the returning party. While I had always been confident of my safety, I decided to make my presence a valuable and welcome one. My friends, I called out loud enough for those inside the camp's tents to also hear a stranger was among them, on this first night of our meeting, I would like to tell you stories of the great heroes of your people. While I am not of you, I do know and honor your deeds. Today the Arabs have transformed the world, but I know the truth. The Arabs of Arabia and the Berbers of the Sahara are of one heart, and of one mind. If the Arabs are great, and they are great, then the greatness of you and your ancestors is also a thing to celebrate. Well, I had already made an impression on my original captors with my calm response to being taken prisoner, and with my prayer. Now they had brought me back to their people, and the offer to hear their own stories told by a stranger was too novel to be refused. People poured out of tents to get a look at me, and I soon had the whole band, men, women, and children, spellbound as I told tales of the King Iarbus I once knew, of Shoshank and Osarkon who became pharaohs in Egypt, of Gala and Baga and Bacchus, of Massanisa and Syphax and Jagurtha, of Gauda and both Jubas. I spoke of the Roman Emperor Severus Septimus, and of the great general and governor Lucius Quietus, the right hand of Emperor Trajan, who was the descendant of my old Iberian friend Marco, not that I mentioned that. I did not just speak of kings and warriors, though. I told them of Tyrannes, remembered today as the great Roman playwright Terence. I told them of Saint Monica of Hippo and her son, the famous Saint Augustine. I told them of Arius, whose Aryan rejection of the Holy Trinity cut Christianity into two camps, a schism still felt even as I spoke to them. Dear listeners, I think I have proven to you over the last few days that when I get going I can spin a yarn two in an entertaining way. That night I was in rare form, and I wove a dazzling, interconnected web of triumphs and tragedies, of passion and woe, and all of these stories were of Berbers whose names echoed down through the hallways of eternity. I only paused from time to time to drink deeply of the water and goat's milk they thrust into my hands whenever my voice became hoarse. The children fell asleep in their mothers' arms, wives whispered in their husbands' ears before retiring to the tents. Still I held their menfolk wrapped, some of the stories they knew, of course, but many more were new to them. My audience were not kings and princes who had bards to recite the stories of their ancestors. These were shepherds and sometime bandits who did what they could to scrape a living out of the wastelands at the margin of the civilized world. To hear how much people like them had achieved was heady stuff indeed. In the wee hours, finally, I came to the present, and concluded my evening's performance with and I put it to all of you here now that the story of the Berbers is only just beginning. I was once like you, I heard of a thing called Islam and a people called Muslims, and I thought, what does that have to do with me? Well, I have seen every desert to the east of you since becoming a Muslim. If the Arabs can do that alone, imagine what they can do with a people as great as you by their side. Together we will see every desert to the west of you, and every land to the north and south of you as well before we are done. Well, that was just an opening gambit, of course, but it was a satisfactory ending to an evening of storytelling. I was rewarded with warm applause, food, and more drink. They were so taken with me they even helped me set up my tent and returned all my stolen goods to me. I did not sleep that night. Instead I meditated, sitting upright and arose before dawn the next morning to call the faithful to prayer at sunrise. There were no Muslims present yet beyond myself, of course, but I aimed to change that. For many my early morning summons after a late night was as unwelcome as some find a cockerel's crow, but a few curious people did emerge from their tents to see what was happening. Of those a couple wiped the sleep from their eyes and aped my behavior as I conducted my morning prayers. By midday that handful were joined by others, and still more joined us in the afternoon and at sunset. By the time evening prayer rolled around, all the men and some of the women had gathered around me well in advance asking, Is it time yet? Is it time? I had to tell them to wait for true darkness to fall, and when I conducted my prayers, almost everyone prayed along with me. Even those who did not join in looked on without anger. The Berbers all knew something magical had happened in the east. They understood that Constantinople no longer ruled in Egypt or Palestine or Syria, and that the mighty Sassanids no longer ruled anywhere at all. How could anyone not see the hand of God in that? How could anyone not want to be on the right side of God when God's chosen people started riding towards you? That night I did not tell stories of the Berbers. I told stories of Mohammed, peace be upon him, and of his companions. I was very clear that the Berbers could go on doing and believing whatever they wanted forevermore if that was their desire. But I said if they wanted to become part of this great mission from God, there was a place for them as equal partners in the Uma, the universal community of fellow Muslims. It did not go quite as easily as that, of course, but soon enough I had most of the small camp praying with me five times a day. And though the prayers were in Arabic, I preached sermons to them in their native tongue. Within a month I had converts saying, There is no God but God, and Muhammad, peace be upon him, is his messenger. Within a year I had funded several of the family's elders to make the pilgrimage to nearby Carowan. One even went all the way to Mecca. When they returned I said to these most devout of my followers, My time with you is now done. Who would you have me speak to next? They introduced me to the next group of nomads, who in turn introduced me to the next, and so I slowly converted the desert Berbers in ones and twos and tens and hundreds, and even thousands over the years. It brought me a lot of peace, a lot of happiness, and no one ever raised a hand to me, nor I to them. It restored some of my shaken faith to see the good that Islam could do. I was a man of God, and God is great. In time I could ride across the desert for a month in any direction, and stay every night as another family's honored guest. Even if they had never heard me preach before, they had heard the holy word said to them by someone I had taught. If Islam had saints in the manner of the Catholics, no doubt I would have been canonized for my work bringing my faith into the wilderness. As it was, I was given a place by the fire and a meal wherever I went. You must remember I spent the first several thousand years of my life wishing I could rely upon such a welcome without fear. It felt good right down to my bones. I should say I was not just converting people to Islam, I provided a valuable service to every community that offered me a place among them. It was within my power to help people resolve their disputes amicably. Where before families and clans and tribes might need to resort to violence for want of an arbitrator, a traveling wise man of sound moral character, respected by both sides, is a much prized, impartial judge who can be called upon to mediate, offer compromise, and pass judgment in a way no one with a stake in the outcome would be allowed to do. I was often as celebrated for bringing peace between neighbors as I was for bringing God into their lives. That was how I spent a lifetime, until I needed to die and replace myself with a devout disciple of the same name. It was a joy to hear people praise the man they had known before while embracing his replacement, a man so clearly at peace with himself and with God that he could wander through the wilderness and always find a home among the honest men and women who dwelled there. What little I heard of the world outside during those years came in snatches whenever the Berbers I was travelling with made their way into a settled area. Much of what I heard troubled me, some of it troubled my followers among the desert Berbers. Soon enough it troubled everyone living in Al Maghreb. Find three or more strangers together, and you could win a wager they were speaking about the war against the witch queen. Now I have already mentioned in passing that the great Arab cavalry commander Ukba, who rode from Fustat to the Atlantic Ocean, was cut down in an ambush of Christian Berbers. The leader of those Christians was hunted down and killed by a large Muslim army, but that army was in turn smashed by a new uprising of desert and mountain Berbers led by a woman named Dia. It was said that Dia could see the future, and for that reason she never lost a battle. The Muslim governors in Egypt and the Lower West abandoned control of everything further west to Dia's control, and for five years she ruled an independent Berber kingdom, or I suppose you might say queendom, as she was its only ruler, in the Middle West. She burned every farm and village in the near west she could to create a barren wasteland between her and the Muslim armies who she knew would come for her. Tens of thousands of settled Berbers were made homeless by this scorched earth policy, and as Dia was the one doing the burning, the refugees fled east and south into the arms of Islam. Why does God allow this to happen? Refugees who had lost everything would ask me. All things happen as God wills it, I said. If you are here with me now, God wanted it so. And then my followers and I fed them, clothed them, sheltered them, and led them in prayer. A lot of Berbers came to submit to the will of God because of the anti Muslim resistance of the Christian witch queen Dia. One day I was approached by a group of old Berber men while I was helping to build a mosque in an oasis town. They were all of them devout converts to Islam. Peace be with you, Muhammad al Rumi, they greeted me. And with you peace, I returned their polite salams. We would ask something of you. Something dangerous, their leader said. Dangerous? I asked, looking around the building site. No mortar or mud brick was likely to do me harm. Yes. When you came here to us, you walked among strangers, and now we are all friends. The leader waved his hand to include everyone in the group, many of whom had only a few years earlier been on opposite sides of clan feuds. Praise God, I said. Praise God, they all agreed. So what would you ask of me? I set down my tools and assumed the calm pose of a patient man willing to listen. Mohammed Al Rumi, the witch queen Dia has as many Berbers under her control in the Middle West and Farthest West as we have here with us on this side of the no man's land she has created. The Caliph in Damascus is sending a great army, and many of us and our sons and grandsons will soon ride with it against her and her followers. Berbers on both sides of the coming war will die. Can you not go to her before that happens? Perhaps you can persuade her to accept the will of God. At this many of the old men nodded vigorously to add their silent support to their leader's words. You would ask me to surrender myself to her people and request an audience, I asked. Yes, please, the leader said. If God wills it. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply. To my converts it might have looked like I was praying, but in truth I was looking into my future. I often did that in those days in the desert, and I always drew so much comfort at seeing Muslims in the future. There we were at work, at play, at prayer, at meals, Muslims everywhere. I walked among them in every future I could see. It gave me an unshakable confidence that I would live forever as part of the Uma. In the specific vision I had that day, I saw myself sailing a ship northward between Morocco and Spain. I am certain of the location as I recognized the headlands from all my years as a Phoenician and Carthaginian. My vessel was a horse ferry, and it was full of beautiful Berber horses. I cast my inner eye around for some sign of danger, but there was only the horse ferry. It was my destiny to be on that ship one day, and as I currently stood in an oasis town deep in the Sahara Desert, I knew I would survive whatever they were asking of me. I opened my eyes. I am at God's service. Who will give me a camel? I shall go west. I interviewed the old men further about what they knew of Dia and what they wanted from me. I organized appropriate provisions and a small gift that I was told would be well received if she was prepared to greet me with the hospitality a queen should offer an ambassador, or any desert Berber should offer a guest. I was ready within an hour, and left after midday prayers. I wore dazzling white robes again, and I rode out with nothing more threatening than a paring knife. I had no idea what would happen beyond my survival, but I could not imagine how a weapon would help me in my ride into the witch queen's realm. The journey was a long one, made worse by the abandoned land I travelled through. There was no one left there to offer traveller hospitality, and there was no food and very little water to forage. Dia's patrols burned whatever they found and poisoned all the known water sources. One man with ample rations and a good knowledge of the train could eke out a crossing of the scorched earth, but I knew even a camel mounted invading force would struggle mightily to do the same without a supreme effort of logistics and strategic maneuver that was beyond almost all Muslim armies at the time. The fact that my camel was not dying under me impressed the witch queen's Berbers to no end when they captured me. I think they searched the camel more thoroughly than they searched me, pressing on its hump and abdomen, examining its teeth and eyes, rubbing its legs and shoulders. We need to poison more wells and springs, they murmured among themselves. This is a happy camel which will make Dia very unhappy indeed. They were also impressed with my lack of weapons. When the only blade they could find on me was my humble paring knife, they laughed and handed it back to me along with a piece of cheese, which I cut into pieces and shared among them even though I would have loved to keep it all for myself. Riding past the abandoned farms and burnt out villages had given me no opportunity to supplement the dry provisions in my camel's saddlebags. I made a good impression on my captors in just the same way I had made an art out of impressing desert Berbers all over the west in the last several decades. It was only when I insisted on praying five times a day as a Muslim that they surprised me. No, one of them protested during one of my prayer breaks as we rode up into the mountains of the Middle West. We are all Christians here. If you must pray, pray as a Christian does. I rose from my prayer mat, brushed some imaginary dust off my robes, and then I clasped my hands in front of me. In a mix of Berber, Latin, and Greek, I recited all of the liturgy for a high mass off the top of my head as fast as I could. Most of my captors were laughing and clapping by the end. The one who had yelled at me in the first place frowned mightily and muttered that it was a sacrilege for me to speak those words. I told him I was a Christian before I was a Muslim, my friend. It's the same God. We're all people of the book. Worship God your way if it brings you peace. I did it your way when I was younger. Today I worship my way. If you ever have questions about the difference, ask them. We have long days of riding ahead of us. Talking will help pass the time. By the time we arrived at Dia's court at the base of a mountain, half my escort was praying with me five times a day facing east, though none had said the sacred words of conversion yet. I told myself there was nothing wrong in that. Their time would come, God willing. The witch queen Dia kept her court in a way that would have been familiar at once to King Ayarbus, even though he had been dead more than fifteen hundred years at that point. She ruled from a tent city that travelled wherever she willed. There were horse lines around the perimeter, and the different Berber clans who lived with her set up their camps in clusters around her enormous command tent and its collection of intimate and pleasant smaller tents and enclosures. On the day I met her, Dia's travelling court was nestled in a narrow cleft between two great sandstone bluffs, sheltered from the wind and the worst of the heat of the sun. The sunlight bounced around between those two great rock faces, bathing us all in a red yellow glow. My captors handed me off to a squad of magnificent royal guardsmen, who in turn handed me off to two of the tallest Berber men I had ever seen. I would learn very soon these were in fact Dia's sons. They led me into her presence in an open space behind her command tent. There was a smattering of awnings overhead, and several carpets and pillows strewn around haphazardly on the ground. Dia stood alone beside a life sized statue of the Virgin Mary when her sons brought me to her. Mary and Dia both wore matching blue shawls, the statue's base had long handles set into it, and I intuited at a glance it was carried with her wherever she went. Her royal procession included a holy talisman, the mother of God was always with the queen of the Christian Berbers. In that moment I knew my mission to convert her was doomed before its start. I decided to talk peace instead. Dea was a very tall woman herself, and the long hair piled up on top of her head and held in place with wooden pins made her seem like a giant. She could have been a dwarf, though, and even in a crowd I would have known she ruled here. She held her chin up and made eye contact in just the same way my long dead friends Erashat and Elishat had done when they were queens. Those two never looked at me as Dia did, though. To her I was like a desert scorpion scuttling out from under an overturned rock. So you have come at last, Dea said, holding up a hand to halt my approach. Her sons flanked me on either side, close enough to seize me without warning. I had every confidence they could wring my neck like a chicken if their mother asked it of them. You knew I was coming? I asked in a casual tone. I wanted to appear friendly and unconcerned. I was also interested to learn if there was any truth to the stories about her powers of prognostication. I have seen my share of charlatans in my time, but I am always prepared to become a true believer. Who better than I would know what is possible when it comes to seeing the future, after all? Dea waved her sons to stand away from me, and she looked me up and down without moving her head. I knew someone like you would come. I don't need to see the future to know what Arabs cannot win through war, they will try to win with talk of peace. I am no Arab, I corrected her, playing for time. No, but you pretend to be. You dress like one, and talk like one, and pray like one, so you are the same thing, she said. What is your name? Muhammad al Rumi, I replied, making a small bow from the waist. Ah, and you even have a name like one. She pursed her lips as if tasting something sour. Were you born Muslim, or are you a convert? She asked. In that lifetime I was claiming to be born a Muslim, but I sensed that was the wrong answer to give her. I said instead, I was born in Eylah and converted to Islam as a young man. Next she asked me, and what was your name at your christening, Mohammed al-Rumi? What did your father and godfather call you before you decided to take the name of Mohammed? Peace be upon him, I added out of habit. That has not been my experience, Dia said, adjusting her blue shawl. Answer my question. My name before my conversion was John, I said. I will call you John then. She waved me over towards a pair of plump pillows on a carpet in the shade of the nodding. I prefer not to speak the name of your prophet if I can help it. Before sitting down, I have a gift for you, I said. She arched an eyebrow but otherwise remained still. Her sons tensed as I slowly produced a thin scroll from my sleeve. They must have known I had been searched thoroughly, but they still did not like me pulling anything out of anywhere in the presence of their mother. One of them took the gift from me as if it might bite, and crossed the distance to his mother in two enormous strides, setting it down gently in her now upturned hand. She unrolled it to reveal a fine painting of a pair of Egyptian ducks, which she showed to both of her sons and to me before looking down to admire it herself. I have heard you enjoy pictures of birds, I said, repeating what the old Berbers who asked me to see her had told me. Desert birds, Dia said in a distracted voice as she admired the picture. It really was a lovely piece. I promise you, Dea, these birds are never out of sight of the desert, I said. She made a face at that, but I decided to insist. Don't let their webbed feet fool you. They might swim around in the upper Nile, but the hills looking down on the river are barren. When they fly, they are high above a green ribbon surrounded in all directions by red and yellow and grey sand. You have a way with words. She rolled up the scroll again and handed it back to her nearest son before waving him to stand a small distance beside and behind me. I suppose that is why they chose you to come here. Now she gestured again for me to sit at one of the two pillows under the awning. I sank down onto the closest and waited in silence for her to join me on the other one. Seated, we were eye to eye. She really was a tall woman. I have been asked to speak with you, yes. Who? she asked. I beg your pardon, I replied, not following her. Who asked you to speak with me, John? she clarified. Berbers, I said. Muslim Berbers? she asked. Yes, I replied. She pursed her lips at this for a moment before nodding. And what shall we talk about, John? Whatever you like, Dea. I am either your prisoner or your guest. Either way, I am at your service. I gave another little bow on my cushion. You are not all you seem to be, Dea said, pointing at my face. I know what you really are, John. She said it with such conviction that for a moment I wondered if she really did have powers. What am I? I asked. You are the serpent in the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I am Eve. You would hiss your sweet words at me with a forked tongue, and it will lead to my ruin. She waved her arm around to take in her outdoor court, the distant tents of her followers, the great red and yellow sandstone cliffs hemming us in. You would see me and my people cast out of the garden. I looked around at the wasteland her people called home. Whatever water there was must be coming from a well, I did not see one green plant anywhere. This place was no garden. It was only valuable to a people who appreciate the safety of a desert refuge. Islam had more than enough such places in the wastelands we already ruled. I would never take this place from you, I said, meaning every word. And I would never ask you to give up your faith if it means as much to you as mine does to me. Now I gestured politely to the statue of the Virgin Mary who was looking down at both of us, the fifth figure hearing our otherwise private conversation. Pay the jizya and worship in your own way, your grace, just as you have always done. There will be no more slaughter of Berbers by either side if you and I can make peace. I thought it was very well said, and Dea did smile, but it was not a happy expression. She was baring her fangs at my words. Do you hear him hiss, my sons? If I surrender and pay a tax, no more Berbers will be killed. Is that the best you can do, John? It is the truth, your grace. From where we sit in the west all the way to beyond the Caspian Sea, people now pay the jizya and live in peace under Moslem rule, I said, with the unshakable faith of a man speaking the truth. People say I can see the future, John. Let me tell you how this will play out. Bia closed her eyes and clasped her hands in front of her, as if in prayer to the statue watching over us. If I accept your terms, my people will stop fighting your people. You say I can keep worshiping as I choose in exchange for a small tax, but the truth is my Christians will become a lesser people in our own land. We will pray quietly, in private, and we will not be allowed to debate with a Muslim on equal footing or speak our truth to someone who might want to hear it. Meanwhile, men like you will walk among us with your thoughtful gifts and pleasant manner. One by one my people will become your people, and before you know it, they will ride off to bring your faith to new people who never did you any harm. Many of my people will die fighting your wars. They will die with your God's name on their lips, expecting to go to your paradise instead of my heaven. Berbers will still die in their thousands, they will just do it for your cause instead of their own. Dea opened her eyes and spread her hands before her, palms up. How did I do? Again, I had the strange thought that she could actually see the future somehow. I know there are people who can do that because I am one of them. There may be some truth to what you say, I admitted, choosing my words with care. Where would you say I went wrong? she asked. We have the same God, your grace. He has just spoken to us more recently than he spoke to the people who wrote your Bible. Once your people understand that, the fighting between us will stop. If they take it upon themselves to help other people see the truth too, that is a good thing. It will stop the fighting between those people and us as well. Eventually the whole world will agree on the important things, and where we disagree, we will have a peaceful way to settle those disputes. Under Islam, wars will end forever. You burn every Berber farm between us and you today. She snapped her fingers in front of my face to interrupt me. I would keep you and your kind far away from me and my kind, John. Trust a Berber to know how far an armed party can ride across the desert before their camels start to die. This is how much I will destroy for the sake of my people. What did the Romans say? They made a desert and called it peace. That is how I will protect my people. You can have the east, and we the west, and the gap in the middle shall be wide enough that no Moslem army will ever cross it and live. You are misremembering your Tacitus, I said. What? she snarled. The Roman you just misquoted, his name was Tacitus, I said. He was writing a speech given by a warlord who lived among the painted people in the far north of Britain, beyond Hadrian's wall. The full quote is They rob, kill, and plunder all under the deceiving name of Roman rule. They make a desert and call it peace. Tacitus was writing a biography of his father in law, the Roman general who did much to finalize the conquest of Britain. Have you read the book? Dia tilted her head, as if I might make more sense at a strange angle. No, she admitted. The point of the speech is that the Romans did not care about the painted people. The warlord was telling his followers the Romans would destroy everything, and then they would call it peace because there was nothing left worth fighting over. I held my hands out in front of me with my palms up, just as she had done to me earlier. Dia. You have driven tens of thousands of your fellow Berbers from their farms and villages to create your buffer. You tore down their homes, burned their crops, killed their livestock, poisoned their wells. To them, they are the painted people, and you are the Romans. She slapped at my outstretched hands, and I felt her touch as an explosion of sensation, like a shock of static electricity. My Berbers are with me here. Those Berbers who fled east are not mine. Call them painted people if you like, they chose you over me, and that means I have nothing to do with them any longer. Her sons were edging in on us now, close enough to reach down and haul me up off my pillow. I ignored them, reaching out with my hands again in supplication. That's right, I agreed. The Berbers who fled east were welcomed by Islam, and they know if they ever want to return to what belongs to them, they need to do it as part of a Muslim army that will defeat you. I ask you, your grace, Queen Dea of the Christian Berbers, do you think you can stand against us forever? Admit now that the world is changing. Pay your jizya, worship as you like, and let the Berbers you have made homeless rebuild their lives. Dea adjusted her blue shawl, closed her eyes, and clasped her hands in front of her again, the very image of a Berber Mary, mother of God. She was silent for a long time with her eyes moving behind her eyelids. When she spoke again she was quiet enough that I doubt even her son standing just behind me could hear her. You are right, John. I cannot stand against you forever. The world is changing, and I refuse to change with it. I will die fighting your kind, and I will be remembered as a witch for the sin of having won as often as I have. But that is not the end of this story. I felt she had more to say, and so I leaned forward and asked softly, what is the end? There is no end, Ea whispered. Some version of this will go on forever. You think Islam is the final answer, and that if you can just get everyone to agree with you there will be peace? Christians feel the same, John. Other religions not yet born will also feel that way. We shall all struggle against one another, taking turns in victory and defeat, until people find something new to fight about. That is the nature of us, and of faith, and of history. With that she opened her eyes and seized my outstretched wrists hard enough that I could not pull away. She had a grip that could crack a walnut, but I would not have been able to pull away even if she was weak as a kitten. I found myself frozen, paralyzed by a sensation I could not understand. Where before I had thought there had been some kind of charged spark when we briefly touched, now it felt as if I had lost control of my arms all the way up to the shoulders. I tingled and twitched and spasmed under her grasp in a way that I would not feel again until a century or so ago when I once tried to screw in a light bulb while holding the copper base instead of the glass top. Something impossible was passing between us, and while I tried to process what was happening she hissed at me You sit there telling me Islam is the only way forward, and I am the fool standing in its way? Be honest with yourself, John. You are wrong, and you know it. And despite the strange sensation running up and down my arms as the witch queen squeezed my wrists, I felt my mind fall into that calm place within myself, where I could snatch glimpses of the future. Only this time, for the first time since converting to Islam, I did not see the mosques and the masses of people praying together that had been my constant touchstone for the last century. I saw myself sailing a ship into a harbor as cathedral bells rang. I saw myself standing godfather to a friend's baby at a christening. I saw myself attend another friend's bar mitzvah and another friend's Hindu funeral. I saw myself watch a parade for Chinese New Year pass by on a twentieth century city street crowded with people of all races. Nothing anywhere that I could see was written in Arabic. In that instant, while my arm still spasmed at her touch, I understood it all with a terrible clarity. The visions I had so enjoyed of Islam's future had shown me only a small part of the larger truth. Yes, Islam was destined to be one of the world's great religions, but it would be only one among many. The meteoric rise I was part of would someday find its limits. I was not making the world a better place, just a different one. I felt something in my chest lurch, a tremor to match the shutters of my arms. I felt dazed, dizzy, a little sick. I also felt something I had not expected. I was relieved. For a very long time I had been trying to reconcile my faith with what I saw the faithful do. How would Islam bring about world peace when there had already been wars between Muslims? Well, it could not. People would still be people, whether they were Muslim or not. Dia released my wrists, and I sagged back on my pillow, slumping so far back that one of her sons reached down and put a massive hand on my shoulder to steady me. My arms were all pins and needles. I looked at her, and she was looking back at me with understanding, and perhaps even a begrudging apology in her gaze. She knew what she had done to me, what I saw, I am sure of it. My arms were still tingling as she spoke in a normal voice, so her sons could not help but hear her. I will make you one more prediction, John. I have told you I will die fighting You will not. You are going to live for a long, long time, and when you do finally die, you will see your death coming a long way off. You will choose your moment for yourself when you are ready, and you will do it for a much better reason than Islam. With that she got up off her pillow and walked over to the statue of the Virgin Mary, putting a hand on its shoulder for a moment of reverence before turning to speak to her sons. We are done here. There is nothing to be gained by more talk. Give him his camel back and enough food to get him back to his own kind. This time order our people to keep him in sight, but not to ride within earshot of him. Tell them as long as he is riding east, he's free to go. If he turns around, tell them to kill him before he starts praying at them again. Also have our people note every well and seep he uses during his journey. I want every water source poisoned as they return to us. I rose to my feet clumsily because of my arms. I had so many questions for her, but she would not even permit me to make the polite goodbyes that should have been the bare minimum of exchange between a guest and his host in the deep desert. When I opened my mouth, she waved me away as one would shoe a fly. Her sons closed in and took me from her presence without another word spoken. What more can I say? The rest of my journey went just as Dia had commanded. I was given my camel and provisions, and I had regained control of my arms and hands by the time it was necessary for me to hold the reins and ride away from the witch queen's court. My escort followed me eastward without ever getting close enough to converse with me. That was fine. I was no longer in the mood to try to convert them to Islam. I was still reeling from the experience of meeting someone who could make me see and feel what I had just seen and felt. I rode ever eastward for many days and nights, giving up my watering holes one by one to the watchful eyes of my distant Christian escorts. I did not care. I was still grappling with what I should think and feel when I saw the tiny silhouettes of camels on the horizon in front of me. Dia's men turned around and left me to meet the Muslim patrol, and I was eventually brought to the general organizing the next great army of Gazis, Arabs and Berbers alike, ready to make its way westward. I told him what little I could of Dia's whereabouts and the conditions of the no man's land her force was maintaining. He thanked me for my intelligence and dismissed me back to my important work proselytizing Berbers in the deep desert. My heart was not in that work anymore. I now saw many things in my visions that had been invisible to me before. My future would have both Muslim and non Muslim lives to live, and one was as good and as bad as the other. Converting people to Islam was now just a thing I knew how to do, not a calling to fill my days with purpose. What was worse, while I would not have given it a second thought before, it bothered me that more and more of my converts were joining the great army about to march against Ea. The deserts of North Africa were emptying of fighting men, just as the warriors of Arabia had come together decades earlier under the banners of Islam and ridden off to war and glory. What the Arabs had done was miraculous, divinely inspired, but what the Berbers were doing now, that was designed and calculated by mortal men. Preachers and imams and seers and even my own humble self had walked among the Berbers, taught the Berbers, brought them our faith knowing they would one day fight for that faith. Why had I not seen the wrong in that? How had I been so blind? I wish I could have spoken to Dia about those questions, and so many more. I never got a chance. Within a year Dia was dead. Elite cadres of Arab and Berber camel cavalry made lightning fast raids across her frontier to capture several oases that were too large for her people to permanently poison. With these bases seized, the rest of the great army of infantry and horse cavalry could cross the buffer in safety, knowing they had water waiting for them at the end of their journey. I heard Dia died with a sword in her hand, leading her people in a valiant last stand with the statue of the Virgin Mary still standing next to her even as she was cut down. Her head was sent to the caliph. I am told her sons converted to Islam and joined the great army as it continued to ride west, although I never saw them again myself. Within ten years of Dia's death, every Christian in northern Africa paid the jizya and acknowledged Muslim supremacy. Their people joined the faith in droves. My faith had won, but I had lost my passion for it along the way. By the time a Berber general led ten thousand of his countrymen into Spain, I had long since given up preaching in the desert. I was again a merchant, just a merchant. Once the invasion of Spain was well underway, I bought a boat and made a good living ferrying horses from North Africa to Spain, just as I had seen in my vision. Of course, when I saw my vision I assumed I would be happy to be part of bringing Islam to Spain. Instead it was just a job. I did it for a while, and then I moved on to other things. Speaking of which, I suppose I am also now ready to talk about things beyond Islam. It would still be a part of my life on and off for many lifetimes, but I no longer felt a part of it the way I had before. I could see a future beyond it, and so I no longer owed it what I thought I had before. Part of me is still sad about that. Another part is grateful that I met a woman who could set me straight, even if she did hate me and everything I represented at the time. Anyway, I think I need to clear my head for a moment. I have been speaking about one thing for a very long while now. If I am going to change subjects, I might as well take a break, stretch my legs, maybe fetch something from the cottage to help me along when I get back to this. If you will excuse me. First, if you are enjoying it, please tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. This may be the third and final season, but I plan to leave the series up as long as people continue to take an interest in it. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix available on Amazon. If you want a copy of the story for yourselves, that would be so appreciated. Fourth, I have a link to a typeform survey in the show notes for each episode. Tell me a little about yourself and feel free to ask me questions. I have already done a QA mailbag episode during the run of this series, and I probably will do another one in a little while once people have had a chance to find it and enjoy the show after the final episode airs. Fifth, while this may be the final season of the Tape Recorder trilogy podcast, I already have plans for two more shows, so please remain subscribed to this channel for updates on those when they are ready to be shared. Finally, while I don't want to break up the episode with ads, I do have a Patreon account with extra content for those of you who are willing to support this channel with a donation. A link to that is also in the show notes. With that said, thank you so much for your time and attention, and I look forward to you enjoying the next episode soon.