A Game of Philosophers, Pilgrims, and Poets: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E11

(2015 · Northern India, & 814 – ~1273 CE · Christendom,  Al-Andalus, Constantinople, Cairo, Baghdad, & Rum) 

The Narrator resumes his story, this time with his unexpected guest listening as he works. To amuse himself, he tells stories of his time with al-Khwarizmi, Omar Khayyam, and Rumi, confident those giants of medieval Islamic thought will be new to her.  

Based on the first half of Chapter 10 of End by Geoff Micks.

Enjoying the show? Tell us a little about yourself, submit a comment, and/or ask a question through this short survey.

For more, visit my podcast website and personal website. 

Follow me on Bluesky. 

Follow me on Substack.

Join my Facebook page.

Support me on Patreon.

Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

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, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode eleven of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy it. Say hello, Melissa.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

You said I wasn't supposed to say anything.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

I did, but I also told my audience about you earlier, and now I want them to know we met on better terms today than yesterday. I want them to know you have encouraged me to finish this project before you and I discuss what you say we need to discuss. I also want to say to whoever ends up typing this up, that if Melissa speaks again on tape, I would like her name to appear in capitals with a colon before her words, so people know who is talking.

SPEAKER_01 1:31

You think someone is going to make a printed transcript of your tapes?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

I do not know exactly what is going to happen, but as I much prefer books to radio, yes, if I have my druthers, this will all end up being a book one day. Fair enough?

SPEAKER_01 1:44

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Okay, now back to just me talking and you listening. You asked for a story. I have plenty I still want to share, and I need to pick up the pace. I started today talking about my life after the first outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe. That was in the reign of Justinian, around five hundred and forty one AD. Now, as you were coming up the road, I was about to mention the death of Charlemagne in I think that was eight hundred fourteen AD. I suppose I am lingering for so long in these few centuries because of the rise of Islam, and of the Franks and the Papacy who made Western Europe into Christendom. Well, it was an interesting time to be alive. I am pretty sure may you live in interesting times is an English curse they mangled from some other culture during the days of their empire. A German philosopher cleaned it up a little for them. History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history. Well, whichever euphemism you want to use, I lived through great moments and terrible moments. I have more of both still to share. Let me also remind you I always try to live in the least terrible places, but I could only ever stay still for at most half a lifetime before moving on and establishing myself as a new person somewhere else. There were two refuges I bounced back and forth between for generations the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and the monasteries of Italy or Spain or Britain or France and Germany. Oh, I should say I am going to start calling Francia France and Germany, because that is when that happened. When Charlemagne's only surviving son died, the Franks did as they had done since Clovis, and stupidly split Francia up among his grandsons. From this division we have the beginnings of France and Germany, as well as the seeds of all the wars France and Germany have fought over the lands between them that have at times belonged to one branch of Charlemagne's descendants or the other. But I was not talking about the wars, I was talking about the monasteries, and about the house of wisdom in Baghdad too. As I have said, I was a travelling book merchant for much of Charlemagne's reign, and my business took me all over, but whenever I wanted to put down roots for a while, a monastery or the house of wisdom was an excellent place for an immortal being to enjoy some years. The Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad believed deeply in the Hadith that Muhammad, peace be upon him, had once said It is the duty of Muslims to seek knowledge wherever they can, even unto China. Now Hadiths are things people say the Prophet said, and not all Hadiths may be true quotations. I have my personal suspicions about a man from Mecca talking about China even as a euphemism for the ends of the earth, but that is neither here nor there. The caliphs believed it, and the caliphs had the money and the power to make it happen. They also had a new wondrous thing from out of China, if you can believe it, paper. Where papyrus does not last very long, and making parchment from animal skins is a long and expensive process, paper was almost as cheap and easy to manufacture as papyrus, but produced a better writing surface that lasted much, much longer when properly stored. The Abbasid Caliphs paid the top scholars in the world to come to Baghdad and copy all the knowledge in the world from old records onto new ones of paper, and then they expected their collection of intellectuals to build upon the words of the ancients and advance the collected understanding of the world forward, for God willed it to be so. It was a beautiful dream that was made into a reality for hundreds of years, and I discovered I could always find work at the House of Wisdom as a translator and a secretary to one of the great thinkers the Caliph sponsored. Just proving I could read and write Greek and Latin and Syrian and Arabic was enough to secure me a job, to say nothing of everything else I had to offer. During my days at the House of Wisdom, I also finally learned Persian. You can think of the Abbasid Caliphate as just the Muslim edition of the Persian or Parthian or Sassanid Empire in many ways. Anyway, with this new tongue, there was no job I could not do in Baghdad. I also fell in love with Persian poetry. I will talk more about that soon, I am sure, but for now let me say the house of wisdom was a special place to me. I loved being there, and it was the safest place in the whole world for a long, long time. What a shame all those geniuses studying science and medicine and mathematics and physics and everything else were all so observant. I never managed to stay more than fifteen years before someone would remark on how I did not age. At that point I bought up a load of books and travelled away to Christendom to start a new life wherever I ran out of inventory. When I did finally sell my last book at whichever monastery that might be, I would invest the money I made during my travels into real estate or trading companies, and then, free of the money a vow of poverty would otherwise strip from me, I took holy orders. I enjoyed the peace of it, when it was peaceful. I also enjoyed the hard work of it. Most monasteries began out in the wilderness, surrounded by forests and marshes and other uncultivatable land donated by the Franks or the Lombards or the Visigoths or the Anglo Saxon nobility, who feared for their souls and thought giving a chunk of unproductive land stolen by their grandfathers at swordpoint, was a fair price to pay to secure admission into heaven. The monasteries all planned to grow rich over time as they transformed those wastelands into farmlands. I swung a lot of axes and worked a lot of shovels during my time as a monk, but that was good. There is a deep satisfaction to be found in a hard day's work, and a deep contentment in knowing what the future held in store for me. I knew when to eat, when to sleep, when to pray, when to sing, when to write, and when to labor. My fellow monks tended to be a good lot on the whole. I was happy among them. It was a bittersweet moment for me whenever one of them would finally observe, Isn't Brother John blessed to be aging so gracefully? Then they would all compliment me on my good fortune. Sometimes the brothers would even mention me especially in group prayer, asking God to continue to show me his favor. I found I often had plenty of time to arrange my disappearance when I was leaving a monastery. I could retrieve my funds out of wherever I had invested them years before, and then tell my brothers I had received an unexpected inheritance, making a donation to the monastery with some of my prophets. Having softened the ground with the abbot or the prior with my generous gift, I would then beg permission to go on a pilgrimage to well, it does not matter where, maybe Rome, maybe Camino de Santiago, maybe even Jerusalem. My brothers were always happy to grant an old man's request. I was in such good health for my age. Perhaps my pilgrimage was part of God's plan. It is so very easy to change identities on a pilgrimage, dear listeners. Shave off your monk's tonsor and grow in your hair and beard naturally, give up your monk's habit for fine clothes and bold colours, switch your name and native language. Even if I ever did run into someone who knew me as a monk, I would be unrecognizable to them as a wealthy travelling merchant. Brother John never looked or sounded like that. I would write a letter to the monastery a year or two later saying Brother John had died in his sleep on his journey and been buried in consecrated ground for the sake of giving my friends closure. And that was that. Back to the house of wisdom I would go as fast as my legs could carry me to become some philosopher's assistant again. It was all very neat and tidy, until the Northmen came Viking. Please mark that, dear listeners, calling them Vikings is to name them for what they did, not who they were. The people living in what today is Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, who left their homes to trade and raid throughout the rest of Europe, said that they were going Viking. They did not call themselves Vikings any more than Americans call themselves drivers as a people just because many of them drive cars and trucks. Anyway, the Northmen came, and my easy back and forth between Baghdad and the monasteries of Christendom soon became more and more complicated. Now I had to find a monastery that was safe from raiders, because there are very few things Northmen liked more than attacking a monastery. They knew any place monks had built up out of years of toil and charitable offerings would be unguarded, and would also have many precious things the raiders could destroy for the value of the base metals. Oh yes, let me shame them for a moment about this. Just like the Franks in the days before Charlemagne, these Northmen did not use coins. Their common currency was hack silver, which is exactly what it sounds like. How much silver do you want for this? And then they would take some silver, probably stolen from a monastery, and hack off the right weight to close the transaction. I am sorry, the very notion of not having a currency but still running a thriving economy based on pillage upsets me. Anyway, so effective were these Northmen and their Vikings, that soon enough no monastery was safe. They went along coastlines and down rivers. They terrorized islands and estuaries. Soon enough they were beaching their boats and walking inland for days, going up into the hills and mountains to winkle out the vulnerable monasteries wherever they might be. It was a nightmare, but it did not stop there. By the time the Northmen were willing to abandon their boats, they started putting down roots in whatever country would cower before them. In the British Isles they rolled over all but one of the existing Anglo Saxon kingdoms to the point where two thirds of Britain was ruled by something called Dane Law, while the other third paid Dane Geld, gold given freely to the Danes to persuade them not to take it by force. On the mainland it was even worse, in the same way Lombardy was named for the Lombards and Francia was named for the Franks, soon enough there was a Normandy for the Northmen who slaughtered the grandsons and great grandsons of Charlemagne's people to the point where the Franks carved off a generous portion of their kingdom in exchange for peace. Within two generations these Northmen went native and became the Normans, a people who would one day conquer England, the new name created when the last kingdom of Anglo Saxons reconquered the parts of the island answering to Dane Law. The Normans would also go on to carve out improbable new kingdoms for themselves in distant Sicily and the far off Holy Land. Great Killers, the Normans Far to the east more Northmen made their way up and down the great rivers that cut across the vast lands between the Baltic and the Black Seas. These raiders and traitors would become the Russians, and their prowess as killers was so renowned that the emperors in Constantinople started recruiting them into a special guard unit. You can tour the balconies of Heia Sophia and see where the Ofs have carved graffiti into the stonework during long church services. Ragnar was here. Half Dan carved these runes. Eric is bored. Idiots Talented Killers, but idiots. Unable to guarantee my safety in Christendom with the Northmen running wild, I decided instead to take my bookselling business to Al Andalus when I could not stay in the House of Wisdom. I would do ten years in Cordoba at the court of the Umayyad Caliphate, and ten years in Baghdad at the court of the Abbasid Caliphate. In the beginning I trusted in the distance and the deep animosities between the two rival factions to prevent people from my old life from recognizing me in the new one. Most of the time that worked. When it did not, I usually fled to the anonymity of Rome or Constantinople. There were very few people alive at any one time in the world who would know me among both the Umayyads and the Abbasids, and would also have the opportunity to ever discover me living as a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian. Within a century my wealth was firmly divided into five parts, four maintaining homes in each of those cities, and the final part following me around as I journeyed from place to place. Sometimes I lost one or two or even three of these fortunes, but there is always enough safe and secure elsewhere for me to rebuild. I am a survivor. I always have been. Talented killers only worry me when I am in their way, so why would I ever find myself in that position? Meanwhile, they tend to be easy marks once the killing is done. They squander their fortunes as fast as they accumulate them. They knew they could always go steal more whenever they found themselves short of hack silver. And that is how I wrote out what today is colorfully called the Dark Ages. It really was not that bad, provided you had the freedom to run for your life when need be, and the finances to start over again afterwards. I suppose this is where I should explain why, in all my lifetimes and all my stories, I do not mention being a farmer. Except for my time as a slave, you have not heard me talk of tilling the earth and watching a crop grow, of the harvest, of the long winter work when you do the jobs you have no time for during the rest of the year. I tell you truly, dear listeners, farming just is not the life for a man like me. For one thing, men who work the land are almost always at the bottom of a hierarchy that extends above and beyond them, and their options for justice are limited. It is true some people farm a lifetime in peace and plenty under good rulers while paying fair taxes, but that situation never lasts forever, does it? I do last forever, so sooner or later as a farmer, I am going to become the victim of forces beyond my control. Second, and speaking of forces beyond my control, I am often a sailor, but I stand in awe of just how much farmers succeed and fail because of the forces of nature. Too much rain, too little rain, a late frost, an early frost, hail storms, dust storms, just good old fashioned regular storms, locusts, blight, birds, rodents, wandering livestock, any of these can destroy a crop at any time. Even if none of that gets you, you still need to worry about the harvest that you do get to bring in. Can you get to all of it before it rots in the field? Can you store it? How much does the local lord take as his share? What about the miller? How much does that leave you? Of that, how much do you sell? Who will give you a fair price? How much will it cost you to get it to them? What about seed for the following year? Now even if all of that goes right, there are still things that can go spectacularly wrong. Unexpected taxes, wars, rebellions, invasions, bandits, barn fires, business partners who welch on their promises, creditors who demand too much interest, the tax man or debt collector who comes at an inopportune moment. All that you built up can be torn down in an instant with no warning. No warning at all. Now I have saved the worst for last, at least as far as I am concerned. Farming communities are tight knit, family oriented groups, whose memory goes back generations and whose vision for the future always worries about the late spring, the early winter, the ram who rides the ewes without producing any lambs. You think the geniuses of the house of wisdom were observant? Farmers watch every little thing, and they are motivated by a constant fear of misfortune. I am sure I must put up a hundred red flags to anyone who actually has the time and inclination to keep an eye on me. Let me list the farmer's questions for you. Where is he from? Who are his people? How did he buy that farm? How is he planning to run it without any family? Now imagine I do somehow manage to marry into the community. Even with a wife and some hired farmhands, it will take the neighbors no time at all to move on to new questions. Why aren't they having children? Is something wrong with her? Is something wrong with him? Regardless of who they pin the infertility on, I'm the butt of jokes in less than five years, and within ten, everyone, absolutely everyone with eyes to see and tongues to wag, has noticed and mentioned that I grow no older, no sorer, no grayer. The farmer always ages faster than the Lord, so what kind of farmer am I who does not age at all? I do not have sons and grandsons doing the hard work for me in my declining years, so why am I doing so much better than the old men who were young when I first bought old so and so's farm? Why do my knees not warn me of the coming storm? Why is my back not bent? How do I still have a thick head of dark brown hair when they have all balded and greyed? Not having satisfactory answers to those questions made me an outsider. I could be an everyday fixture of a farming community for half their lifetimes, but I would never be one of them, never be trusted, never be welcome. I hated farming, and I only did it a few times just to see if it ever got any better. It was always variations of the same thing. No, I much preferred to own land and lease it out to be worked by others for me. Then it was my agents who asked for the rent whether the farmer had it or not. I tried to be a just landlord. If a hailstorm beat down a district's crops, I did not come four months later expecting a normal harvest. Flip that around, though. If they told my agent about a hailstorm and no one else in the area had the same complaint, well, I had the patience to wait a few years to detect a trend, and then my men would put that family out, giving the farmer's wife enough coins to keep her children from starving in the time it took for her husband to find work as a laborer. More than that I cannot do. Those tight knit communities I mentioned before almost always thought of me as one of the fair absentee landlords, and I took my cue from that. Those sorts of people have had enough boot heels on their necks over the years to know the good ones from the bad ones. No, I never liked farming, but I owned a lot of farmland. When I say I had homes in Cordoba, Rome, Constantinople, and Baghdad, it was the rents of farmlands around those four cities that supported those homes, and no Northmen could take that from me.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

I'm sorry, can I ask a question?

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 19:33

Have you been talking like this into the tape recorder the whole time? I asked you to tell me a story, and you were just going on and on without mentioning anyone by name.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

You're right. I apologize. I have been going back and forth between stories about people and little sermons. You have caught me in the middle of a sermon that has gone on too long.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

I did not mean to interrupt you. It just seems like you were rambling a little.

SPEAKER_00 19:57

I I suppose that's true. Thank you. What would you like me to talk about instead?

SPEAKER_01 20:02

Well, you talked a lot earlier about the house of wisdom in Baghdad. You said you worked for famous men. Would I know any of them?

SPEAKER_00 20:10

How are you with history? The tape recorder cannot see the face you're making. Dear listeners, she's making a face that suggests she doesn't know much history. Okay, well, why don't we play a game? I'm going to talk about some of the famous people I met, and sooner or later you're going to recognize one of them, okay? Okay. Okay. My first boss at the House of Wisdom was Are you ready for this? Muhammad Ibn Musa al-Khwarezmi.

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Now who is he?

SPEAKER_00 20:43

He wrote the compendious book on calculation by completion and balancing.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

Um no, sorry. I've never heard of that.

SPEAKER_00 20:52

Would it help if I gave you the name in Arabic? I don't speak Arabic, so I don't see how Kitab al-Mustafar Fihasab algebra wa alla mukabala.

SPEAKER_01 21:03

Okay. Honestly, I have no idea. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

Algebra. Algebra.

SPEAKER_01 21:10

Right. No, I hear you say the word. It really doesn't mean anything to me. I'm sorry, I don't know what it means.

SPEAKER_00 21:17

It means completion, or maybe more literally, the restoration of broken parts.

SPEAKER_01 21:22

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 21:23

Would it help if I told you European translators mangled Al Khwarismi's name as Algorithmi?

SPEAKER_01 21:29

Like algorithm? Yes. Then no, sorry. I mean I know he must be a mathematician, and I know what an algorithm is, but I do not know who you are talking about. This game of yours isn't off to a very good start.

SPEAKER_00 21:45

I am sure you learned about this man's work in school.

SPEAKER_01 21:48

Maybe I did. It's really not ringing a bell. You get that I'm an American, right? There aren't a lot of Muslim books in our education system.

SPEAKER_00 21:56

I bet you every dollar in your bank account against every dollar and Pound and rupee in every one of my bank accounts that you were made to learn about this in at least high school.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

Well I guess I have forgotten him. Who is Algorithmi?

SPEAKER_00 22:10

Alchorizme.

SPEAKER_01 22:11

That's him, yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:13

He invented algebra.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Oh, yeah, okay, you got me. I did learn that back in the day, although I've forgotten almost all of it.

SPEAKER_00 22:20

Algebra, algebra, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:23

Right. No, I wouldn't have guessed that. I suppose that is cool in a really uncool kind of way.

SPEAKER_00 22:29

Uncool.

SPEAKER_01 22:30

Well, he made math more complicated.

SPEAKER_00 22:32

No, he absolutely did not.

SPEAKER_01 22:35

Okay, well you and I had very different math teachers, I guess. Go on then. Tell me about Algoritmi. Al Khurismi. Right. You said you worked for him?

SPEAKER_00 22:45

I did, yes. The man was a wonder, Melissa. I do not know how old I am exactly, but I know if I lived twice as long again, my mind still would never work the way Muhammad Ibn Musa Al Khharismi's mind worked. He was running the House of Wisdom in Baghdad before he was forty. The Abbasid Caliph was willing to pay extravagant sums for scholars to attend his court. You did not even need to be a Muslim. Christian, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, even some faiths from much further afield. The caliph did not discriminate. If you were brilliant enough to be recognized as brilliant by the brilliant people already in the caliph's employ, you would live a life of luxury and never need to worry about money again. Of all those scholars and academics in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, none of them ever doubted Al Kharismi was the best of them. There seemed to be nothing he could not do. Everyone wanted to work for Al Kharismi, but even with unlimited funding he would not hire just anyone. I secured a spot on his team when I told him how I used Indian numbers, what today in English we call Arabic numbers, to keep my business accounts as a bookseller. He was in the process of making those numbers a global standard, and he was delighted to interview a potential new secretary who was already comfortable with them. If you sell five books apiece to twenty seven Imams, with the first Imam paying you fifteen dinars, and each subsequent Imam paying you one more dinar than the Imam before him, with four Imams in each of six cities, and three in a seventh city, and if you pack the books carefully in strong boxes that hold a dozen books each as you travel from city to city, how much silver do you have at the end? How many boxes did you take with you between each of the cities if you discard each container once it is empty? Al Qurismi asked, and then he handed me a wax tablet and a stylus to work out the problem. As I slogged my way through it, he nodded and smiled, nodded and smiled. I believe he could check my work just from the movement of my stylus. When I was done, he told me the answer without even looking at my laborious calculations. Well, yes, I said, handing him the tablet to show I was correct. But of course, you already knew the answer. It was your question. No, he said. I picked the numbers at random. Here, let me show you an easier way to figure out the answer. And he did, and it was so much easier. We did the exercise again and again with different numbers, and it was always so easier for me to answer using his method. Meanwhile, he always had it worked out in his head, even as the words were still leaving his lips. He could do anything in his head faster than he could say it aloud, and for years I got to watch him up close as he worked his wonders. He wrote a book on how to perform mathematical functions using Indian numerals and the decimal point that codified and then far exceeded everything I had been doing since my days in Ayla. Dear listeners, Melissa? All the addition and subtraction and multiplication and division you learned in school treating numbers as quantities instead of portions of shapes as the Greeks did? Thank Alcharismi. So persuasive and universal did this work become that corruptions of Alcharismi's name became the word for digit in Spanish and Portuguese, as well as algorithm in English. Next, he wrote his book on algebra, that was the first major new mathematical thought since Euclid. To find an unknown value, simplify how you express the problem, recognize where things are equal to one another, and then imagine the unknowns as part of a larger whole that forms a square. That square allows simple comparisons and calculations, whose results can then be scaled back to discuss just the original portion of the larger square. With this new math of completions and balancing, you can discover the values of any unknown factor from your understanding of the known factors. Incredible. I know exactly how it works, but I never would have come up with it myself. I watched a new kind of math born out of an original thought come into existence, one that now is used at least a billion times a day every day. I did not care that I was just fetching and carrying, copying and translating, doing errands and making Al Khurismi's life easier. Freeing him to do what only he could do is my contribution to the miracle he created. I will give one small example of the work I did. I kept his parents at a respectful arm's length. Now Muhammad Ibn Musa al Khurismi was, as you may have gathered, a Muslim. His mother and father were not. They were fire worshippers, Zoroastrians, and while the house of wisdom was open to all religions, the devout Muslim head of the institution that prospered thanks to the patronage of the Abbasid Caliph could not have his doting and very non Muslim parents underfoot. Al Khurismi had other secretaries who could calculate or translate or transcribe, but I had the knack for getting his parents in and out of his presence as quickly as possible without hurting their feelings. He called it parent duty, and whenever I was able to persuade them to go on holiday or on a religious retreat far from the capital, he would call down blessings upon me and thrust dinars into my hands, ostensibly to help his parents with their travel expenses, but we both knew I was keeping those coins as my reward for getting his mom and dad to leave the city for a while. Anyway, back to Al Khorizmi's work, because his story should be about his deeds, not his odd relationship with his parents. In addition to his books, Al Khorizmi also oversaw a team of seventy geographers who corrected the map of the world the Greeks of Alexandria had patched together centuries earlier. Al Khorizmi determined the true latitude and longitude of hundreds of cities and mountains and lakes and rivers, such that his map showed the true distance between points. As a landmark navigator with five thousand years and more of experience, it was incredible to see math worked out on sand tables and wax tablets confirm what I had sensed from experience must be true, but would never have known how to calculate or document. Al Charismi fixed calendars, Al Charismi studied the stars, Al Charismi built astrolabes that allowed other clever men to adjust their own calendars and maps by referencing the heavens we all shared together. He thought deeply about numbers and time and distance and how they all work together. And then, one terrible day, he told me out of the blue that we had known each other for forty three hundred and five days, and I had not aged a single one of them. Al Kharismi wanted me to sit down with some of his physician friends. Medicine was not his field, but he thought it was important that I should be examined by learned men who would record their findings for posterity. Using much the same sweet talk I used to deflect his parents, I put him off until after Friday prayers. Meanwhile, I begged, borrowed, and stole as many copies of his books as I could possibly manage, and fled Baghdad that very night, making my way back to the monasteries of Christendom again. I did not return to Baghdad until I was sure my genius patron was safely dead. I could not risk him discovering my secret and trying to puzzle it out. When that man had questions, he turned his whole mind to finding the answers. Al Charismi would have been the death of me without meaning me any harm if I had ever held his full attention long enough for others to notice. Okay, enough of that. On with the game. Are you ready for another famous name? If you did not get Al Charismi, I do not expect you to get this one either. I should also say this fellow did not work at the House of Wisdom, although he certainly would have been welcome there if he had not found a different wealthy patron instead. The Abbasid Caliphate had a habit of local sultans setting themselves up as independent rulers while paying lip service to the caliph in Baghdad. This fellow worked for his local sultan. Have you heard of Omar Kayam?

SPEAKER_01 30:31

Again, no, I'm sorry. Was he another mathematician?

SPEAKER_00 30:36

He was another mathematician and calendar maker, yes. I would not put him in Al Kharismi's league, but almost no one can match up to those standards. Omar was still an incredible mind, but I remember him most for his sense of fun, which is not a quality one immediately thinks of when we talk about mathematicians from the golden age of Islam. Omar loved life, and he lived every day to its fullest. A man like that needs someone to be in charge of his entertainment, and so I fell back on my experience as an event planner during my life in Greece. Yes, I still did translation and transcription for Omar, but I was much less his secretary and much more the man who made sure there was always a good time somewhere lined up for him to enjoy when his workday was done. Tonight? he would ask absently, standing over his sand table, stick in hand. Fatima and her friends are performing at the Green Parrot, I would say. His head would snap up, and his eyes would dance as surely as Fatima would that evening. Will Aisha be there too? he would ask. I will make sure of it, I would promise. Then he would return to his calculations with new vigour, dashing out his Indian numerals into the sand with his stick as if forceful strokes would see the work done faster. The promise of the night to come somehow focused him to produce his best work. I will never forget the time we had to make a hasty pilgrimage to Mecca together to persuade people that Omar was actually a devout Muslim and should be treated as such. He was enjoying himself in ways that would make the long dead Umayyads in their abandoned pleasure palaces blush. Anyway, as great a mathematician as he was, I am sure he would be happy to learn he is remembered today for his poetry as much as for his calculations. Persian poetry is even better than Arabic poetry, in my opinion, and Omar Kayam is one of my favourite poets. The things he would come up with. No Persian writes about life the way an Arab does. The two peoples just see the world differently. Persian poetry is honest and open and forthright in a way an Arab poet would never contemplate. There is a line in the Shaname, the Book of Kings, now the national poem of Iran, that reads Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate, that uncivilized Arabs have come to make me a Muslim. The poet who wrote that was himself a Muslim. He was writing for a Muslim audience, and the Muslim audience loved it. That sort of thing just would not fly in Arab poetry after the time of ignorance. Meanwhile, good Muslims that they were, Persian poets have no problem writing about getting drunk and asking God to explain himself. Sometimes God is drunk in these poems too, or is not the highest power but just a higher power to men, while also at the mercy of still higher powers. Good Muslims write this stuff in the Persian poetic tradition, and they are celebrated for it. Their poetry is also built differently. Persian poetry tends towards strict forms that can be appreciated both in its message and also in the discipline and demands of its structure. Are you a fan of Shakespeare, Melissa?

SPEAKER_01 33:38

What? Sorry, I mean yes. Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, the Merchant of Venice, that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 33:47

That sort of thing, yes. I want you to imagine Persian poetry is like Shakespeare's prose. You can love it for its plot, but you can also love how Shakespeare plays within the meter of iambic pantameter, how wordplay often has hidden meanings and jokes, puns, and homonyms, all while fitting together inside the framework of iambic pantameter. Persian poetry does that too, but the meter is denser, the rules stricter. Imagine telling a story in thousands of phrases, where each phrase conforms to something like the five seven five beat of a haiku. Each line can be appreciated as a work on its own, like a haiku, while also fitting into a larger hole in a way a haiku never does, calling forward and backward and building into a cumulative narrative structure as it goes. That is Persian poetry, and Omar Kayam wrote poems in his free time to please friends and impress women and tweak the nose of rival scholars. It is some of the best poetry ever written. I am so happy for my now long dead patron that a Victorian era English gentleman named Edward Fitzgerald translated his works, and the British Empire went wild for it. Imagine if Oppenheimer or Fermi, a thousand years from now, are remembered for songs they wrote in their free time, and only showed to other physicists working on the Manhattan Project, or the women in the saloons in Los Alamos. That is Omar Kayam's legacy. As long as I am talking about Persian poetry, I do have one more, even though this is much later and needs a little bit of a setup.

SPEAKER_01 35:16

Is this going to be about Rumi?

SPEAKER_00 35:18

Oh good. You have heard of him.

SPEAKER_01 35:20

Since you started talking about Persian poetry, I've been waiting for you to say something about Rumi.

SPEAKER_00 35:25

At the start of this game, I hoped you might have heard of him. I've read he is now the best selling poet in the United States, which is quite an accomplishment for an Afghan Persian Turkish Sufi mystic jurist who has been dead for seven hundred and fifty years.

SPEAKER_01 35:38

You see a lot of him on the internet.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

Do you? I suspect that is actually the work of an American free verse poet who has interpreted Rumi's work from English translations. None of the clever Persian wordplayer Dense Meter remains, I'm afraid, but it is still wonderful work. I have copies of most of it in my cottage. What Fitzgerald did for Omar Kayam two centuries ago, Coleman Barks did for Jalal Aden Muhammad Rumi a few decades ago. I am very happy that it is so. Rumi's poetry was the best. Just to hear him speak something that beautiful from out of nothing, from just out of his mind, is a memory I cherish every day.

SPEAKER_01 36:16

I really can't say anything about the man himself. People share memes over Facebook. I like what I've seen.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

Memes over Facebook. Okay, well I don't need to know what that means. Anyway, Jalal Adin Muhammad Rumi was the son of one of the most famous judges and scholars in the Kharezmin Empire, one of those sultanates I mentioned that cropped up as the Abbasid Caliphate fragmented into secular powers that mostly ignored Baghdad. Khwarezmiya stretched from Iran to China and from the Hindu Kush to where the mountains melt down into the vast steppe of Central Asia. If you do not know about the Kharezmin Empire, that is because they offended a man I have no doubt you do know, Chingis Khan. When Jalal A Din Mohammed Rumi was eleven years old, Chingis Khan had already united Mongolia and conquered much of China. He sent a trade mission west to the Khwarezmians to reopen the Silk Road between China and the Muslim and Christian worlds. The Khersmians took the travelers for spies, they confiscated all their goods and beheaded the Mongol leaders of the trade mission. Chingis Khan had not planned on invading the Khersmians, so he gave them the chance to pay hefty reparations and offer an abject apology for the misunderstanding. The Khersmians told Chingus Khan to saw it off. That is not a thing you get to say to Chingis Khan. So Chingis Khan rode west with somewhere between one and two hundred thousand men, and over the next two years his forces killed one out of every four people in Khwarezmia. The Empire ceased to be, and today most people have never even heard of it. That is what happens when you pick a fight with Chingis Khan. After one of his slaughters, Chingis Khan even said to the survivors, O people, know that you have committed great sins, that the greatest among you have committed these sins. If you ask me what proof I have for these words, I say it is because I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you. A pithier way of saying that when you insult Chingis Khan, he will end your world. Anyway, Jalal Adin Muhammad Rumi and his father fled west, along with everyone else who could possibly get out of the way of Chingis Khan. Fortunately, Rumi's father was so famous for the quality of his mind and the justice of his decisions that he was welcomed wherever he went once he was safely out of Kwersmia. The family journeyed through Iran and Iraq and Syria, staying wherever a rich man wanted to host a great man, or wherever poor people needed a neutral arbitrator to settle a disagreement among them. Rumi's famous father eventually decided to make the pilgrimage to Mecca before accepting a permanent position as a judge in the town of Kanya in what today is southern Turkey. There is a famous story where the foremost Persian poet of the day saw the father followed by his son walking towards him. He remarked, Here comes the sea, followed by an ocean. Maybe that is true, and maybe it is one of those apocryphal stories that always springs up when something is so patently true in hindsight. Think about this. When the then world famous scholar, whose fame opened doors for him wherever he went, is now only remembered for being the father of his son, you know Jalal Adin Muhammad Rumi must have really been something. When you and I started talking about him, we just called him Rumi, and now we are at the point of his story where that comes into play. I mentioned the family settled in Kanya in southern Turkey after making the pilgrimage to Mecca. That territory had been the breakwater of Islamic expansion since the days of Caliph Umar al Katab, and so when it finally was conquered centuries later, the new Muslim Turkish rulers took to calling it Rum Roman. The now adult Jalal A Din Muhammad, after spending all of his teenage years as a refugee, took the name Rumi of Rum to celebrate finally having a home. Of course, in his lifetime thousands of people would come to call him Malawi, Malana, my master, our master, but that is neither here nor there. From here on out I will call him Rumi, and I will say with pride I sat at his feet for months at a time while he told us right from wrong, and composed poetry and songs, and played a reed flute, and taught us a form of holy meditation through dance, still practiced today by whirling dervishes. I missed the murder of his best friend and muse Shams. I say murder, but no one really knows. Shams was a wanderer before he met Rumi. The two became such fast friends that it was said they could have whole conversations without speaking a word. One day Shams was seen going out the back door of Rumi's house, and he was never seen again. Did jealous followers murder him? Did he just walk away from his best friend and never return? I do not know. I arrived after all of that, having heard of a great poet and mystic living in Rum from friends in Damascus. I made the journey north and met Rumi shortly after he had experienced his revelation. Rumi had gone looking for his lost friend, not even sure if he was dead or alive, before he realized that he did not need to find him, because shams lived within him. Everyone you love lives within you always, because that is what love is, what love means, what love does. No one can ever really die if they are loved, and God lives within all of us because God loves us, and we love God. Then Rumi started writing new poetry, much of it dedicated to Shams or even said to be authored by the absent shams. To quote some of my hippie visitors, these poems were out there, even within the Persian tradition, and Rumi never stopped making them until his dying day. He said universal truths in a way no one had ever said them before, and he offered up new truths that you accepted as soon as they passed through his lips. It was revolutionary. It was miraculous. Rumi had tapped into the pulse of the universe, and he could describe the sound of its heartbeat to us. Just to sit there and listen to that man was to know you were in the presence of divine inspiration. No one could hear him speak or read the words his disciples recorded and not believe he was connected to a higher power communicating to us through him. Do you know how easy it would have been for Rumi to found a new religion or build a new empire? I have no doubt he could have done so. Maybe even he should have done so. Instead, he told us to love and be loved, to not be so hard on ourselves and on each other, to know we are all connected, a part of a greater whole that unites us together in ways we cannot understand. He told us it is okay to laugh at ourselves, and at each other. He told us music is good for the soul. He told us loneliness and longing and doubt and fear are things we build up inside ourselves to keep ourselves from being happy, but what we build up on our own can be torn down if we wished it so. He said there is no greater power in creation than two people coming together in a way where no words need to be said, but complete understanding and trust and empathy and respect and love flow back and forth between them. In that exchange there is God. We make God happen when we even try to do that. God is happy with us when we are good to each other. I am not explaining it well. I do not know that it can be explained well by anyone else. But him. The important thing is Rumi talked about love in a way that made it the only thing in the universe a cosmic force for good that connects us all and creates God out of those connections. I will say, and it should not matter, but it does, he also did all of this within the rules and restrictions of Persian poetry, and he did it off the top of his head. He did not do drafts, he did not do revisions, he composed in front of his disciples who sat there with pens and styluses at the ready. Rumi just opened his mouth, and his heart poured out in perfect Persian poetry. What Shakespeare is to the English language, Rumi is to Persian. But where Shakespeare was a playwright, Rumi was a philosopher poet, a Sufi mystic, a devout Muslim who was also a pan religionist, because there are so many ways to know God, so why fight about the specifics? Even while he was writing about Shams or on behalf of Shams, Rumi was always thinking about other people. What small thing could he do to make other people happy as they made him happy? Sometimes he composed in Arabic and Greek too, just to make people in his audience smile to hear his words in their native tongue. That is just one example of how a small thing can matter so much to others, so why not do the small thing? Rumi had a beautiful soul, and I meditate on his words every day. I rarely live up to his ideals, but I know I am blessed to have spent time in his presence. I never knew anyone who met Jesus. I knew people who knew Mohammed, peace be upon him, but I never met the apostle of God myself. I met Jalal Aden Muhammad Rumi, and he could have asked anything of me, and I would have done it. He told me to love myself, love others, love God, and whatever I do, do not try to take life too seriously. I try. Sometimes I lose track of things, but I do try. I wept for days when he finally died. And then I laughed on and off for years whenever the thought of those tears struck me. Rumi is not dead, because he is loved, and he lives forever in that love. I'm sorry, I suppose that all sounds a little silly.

SPEAKER_01 46:23

No, not at all.

SPEAKER_00 46:25

Over the years, a lot of hippies have come to visit me. They think I'm living up here as some kind of hermit. They ask me for wisdom. I mostly quote them roomy. They always take it pretty well.

SPEAKER_01 46:38

I guess they would.

SPEAKER_00 46:40

Okay, okay. One more for my game, and then I will move on. Um but I'm also looking at how much tape is left on the side of the cassette. Give me a second to flip the tape over. One second. You have been listening to the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast, and there is a lot more to come. Here are a few ways you can help support this program. 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.