Shahada: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S3E01

(2015 CE · Northern India & 600 - 633 CE · The Holy Land  & Arabia) 

Emotionally scarred after surviving a global pandemic and exhausted by Christianity's internal fracas and schisms, the narrator meets Amr ibn Al-As, who inspires him to become a Muslim. 

Based on the Intro and Chapter 1 of End by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks, Paulette Anderson Micks, Melissa Buttrill, and Rohan Makdani 

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 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, my name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season three, episode one of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy!

SPEAKER_00 0:47

They both wake up in the wee hours to put the pieces in place for the day to come. He moves around his cottage with even more purpose than usual. She takes a slow inventory of her possessions in her room at the hostel. Both think of the other as they pack their bags. His waxed canvas haversack was chosen to be nondescript and functional. It bears the wear and tear of decades of use. Her backpack and duffel bag were both chosen for comfort and their carrying capacity. They are so new they still have a whiff of fresh polyester and plastic about them. He packs fast, knowing what he wants to take with him if he never gets to come back. A spare pair of wool socks, a pocket knife, toiletries, sunglasses, a light jacket, the tapes he has recorded over the last two days, half a million Indian rupees, and 5,000 US dollars divided evenly among the haversacks inside and outside pockets. He takes a book of Persian poetry off his shelves and walks to his desk. He pulls open the top drawer where the silver picture frame looks up at him. He lifts it up, feeling the heft of the glass and metal. Too heavy, he says to himself. He flips open the back and takes the old photograph of himself and the boy out. He puts it between the pages of the book for safekeeping and adds the slim volume to the haversack. He gives the bag an experimental bounce. The whole thing is light enough to run with, if he needs to run. Last thing, he says as he replaces the empty frame in the desk drawer. He goes to the doorway to the kitchen, reaching up to the high hidden shelf atop the door frame's heavy lintel. He finds the small flat key just where he left it. For a moment he considers putting it in the bag too, but thinks better of it, putting it in the breast pocket of his shirt instead. In a worst case scenario, he can survive without the haversack much easier than without the key. She unpacks and repacks everything, item by item, running through a mental tally as she goes. She came to India to meet one man, and every item she brought with her had a purpose. She hopes today will be the day of reckoning. If it is, she will not be returning to the hostel tonight. She will leave this room with everything she brought into it two days earlier. She pauses as she examines the old magazine clipping with his picture. Something has changed. Not the picture, but what she can see when she studies it. Last night the two of them spoke by phone about how free will interacts with her ability to see the future, and now she perceives he is trying to change his fate. Many options that were there yesterday are now gone, and new options have opened up before him. He is still the only man in the world she cannot read as easily as a newspaper headline. But the differences in the shape of his destiny are clear to her. Where yesterday his fight or flight response had moved him to defend his home, now he is prepared to abandon it, just like every other thing he has ever loved. She sighs, deep and weary. This makes things harder. He is content with his preparations. His go bag is a luxury he has not always enjoyed before, and with it he knows he can slip away and start over somewhere else if need be. He steps out into his backyard and walks straight to the fence, swinging first one leg over it, then the other. He moves through the forest and rough terrain behind his cottage with a comfort and familiarity that would not be available to any would-be pursuers. After fifty paces he can no longer see his cottage in the early light through the brush. After a hundred paces, he comes to a jumbled heap of rock shrouded in dense vegetation. He pauses, letting his woodcraft reach out to sense if he is about to disturb an animal that would prefer its privacy. The rocks are uninhabited and so he steps among them with quiet confidence. Now he is invisible even to someone a few feet away. Here he hangs the haversack from a waiting branch, tugging at it to make sure it is secure. He emerges from his hiding place and looks back to ensure his cache cannot be seen from the outside. Good, he says, turning on his heel and striding back to his cottage, clearing the back fence with ease, letting his peacock and pehens out of their coop to have the run of the yard, and then making for the woodshed. She checks out at the hostel's front desk, explaining to the manager that she might be coming back, or she might stay the next night with her uncle, depending what time it gets to be when her visit with him wraps up.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

Will you be looking for another taxi today?

SPEAKER_00 5:38

The manager asks. Yes, she says.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Would you mind having breakfast before you go? If you're willing to wait a short while before leaving, my cousin can drive you. He's a very good driver.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

The manager says. She thinks about it for a moment. Her journey to and from the cottage yesterday was a long one, and so today's fare would be a plump job for a cabbie. In a country where women traveling alone need to be cautious about cabs, would the cousin of a hostile manager be a safer choice than a total stranger? It would also not hurt to begin her day with a full stomach. After all, yesterday her uncle had only allowed her half a glass of bourbon before pulling a large knife on her and demanding she leave his property. As she often does, she looks into her future for any sign of danger from the suggestion. She sees none. That and her appetite makes her mind up for her. She says. The manager thanks her profusely, nodding and smiling and hustling around from behind the desk to hold the hospital door open for her as she walks out with her pack on her back and her duffel bag swinging at her side. Back in the cottage's yard, he has put together all the elements required to start a fire in the fire pit. Balls of crumpled up newspaper sit below a nest like tepee of sticks and twigs. A supply of larger kindling, trimmed with his parangues, sit at the ready. Matches, he mutters, patting his pockets absently. He knows he left them inside but enjoys the mannerism anyway, feeling the key lying flat and safe in his breast pocket as he does so. He steps into the cottage, grabbing a cup of coffee and the tape recorder and some blank tapes, as well as the matches while he is inside. He emerges back out into the morning light and takes a deep breath of the mountain air.

SPEAKER_02 7:30

Today will be a good day, come what may, he declares to no one.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

He strikes a match, touches it to the newspaper in several places, and then expertly builds up his fire from humble beginnings, through an awkward middle of burning sticks and arriving new wood until in the end he is rewarded with a merry blaze. I'm ready, he says, taking a seat in a comfortable Adirondack chair he has made himself some years before. On one arm rests his coffee cup, and on the other sits a tape recorder. He stretches his feet out towards the fire, takes an appreciative sip of his morning elixir, and picks up the tape recorder. Two days ago it was an unwelcome presence in his home, but now he is as comfortable with it as an old friend. He thumbs the record button as he brings it to his mouth.

SPEAKER_02 8:26

Good morning, dear listeners. Let me begin today with an apology and a confession. I did not tell you the whole truth yesterday. I kept something from you. Now I suppose you already took that as a given. I have told you about thousands upon thousands of years of my life in the last two days, so of course I have kept many things from you. There is more to say than I could ever tell. No, I should say something happened yesterday that I should have told you about afterwards. But I did not do that because I was upset. The woman I have been seeing in my visions of the future arrived as I was beginning to tell you about the adventures of my friend Pythias. Our first meeting went badly. She says she will come back again today. I expect that will go badly as well. That is why I stopped talking about Pythias and started growling about the damned Romans. When I am angry, I often think about the Romans. I ended yesterday's recordings as the Romans of Rome ended, and let that be the end of them. When I think of what the eastern half of the Roman Empire did over the next thousand years of my life after the outbreak of Bubonic Plague, I do not think of those peoples as the same Romans who destroyed Carthage. They spoke Greek, worshipped Christ, ruled from Constantinople, and lost more wars than they won as their empire shrank and shrank, until one day they were all gone. Does that sound very Roman to you? Five centuries ago, about a hundred years after the Muslim Ottomans finally snuffed them out, some German historian coined the term Byzantine as a handy label to refer to those people. Do not expect me to use that word today. They called themselves Roman. They called me a Roman when I lived among them. Their enemies, which often included me, thought of them as Roman. They may not be what you think of when you think of Romans, but they were their own kind of Roman for longer than the Romans of Rome. I will not call them by a name they never heard in all their long history. I'm sorry, I digress. I was confessing I did not tell you about the young woman, and now I shall. She came to my home yesterday around midday. She did not at first conform to my visions. Confused I explained what she was supposed to say, and then she said it. I fulfilled my own prophecy, fool that I am. Does that mean I am to fulfill the rest of it too? Do I die in this place or die soon? When I look at her, all my instincts scream danger, even though my eyes cannot see the threat she poses. She says my fears do not have to become reality, which is both true and not at all reassuring. I have heard from enough oracles and fortune tellers in my time to know a hedge when I hear one. Does not have to happen, still leaves every possibility that it will happen exactly the way I fear. She could give me a clearer answer if she wanted, and the fact that she does not is the most damning thing I can pin on her at the moment. She also says she has not come here to harm me, which is also not reassuring. I did not go to Crete to harm Icarus, but I still watched Deedlas' boy fall out of the sky. Why is she here? Why has she come all this way? What does she want from me? All those questions I could leave unanswered, but this next one I need to know. Why can I not see any life from myself after meeting her? If I could just get one glimpse of a possible tomorrow, I would be relieved. I cannot see it, and that means whatever danger she brings with her is still in front of me. She says she can see many futures for me, and many futures for her, and that we need to talk about them. Apparently I have the power to make her live forever, and she has come to talk me out of it. Tell me, does that not sound like a trick to you? When I have seen the future, I always saw possibilities. She says she sees the future in absolutes, in things that will happen unless she changes them. My own ability to see the future and live forever seems to complicate things for her. I wonder, does that frighten her? When I am frightened of something, I run away, and I live. She has tracked me down from the far side of the world. Far from running away, she has come all this way to find me, to speak with me, to talk me out of giving her my gift, as if my gift is something I have the power to give to others in the first place. Do you think I would not have let Deddy live forever if it was in my power to do so? Or Erashat? Or Elishat? Or Marco, or Irene? How many dear friends would I still have with me today if I could make them as I am? And now this young woman, barely more than a child, comes to me saying the purpose of her trip is to stop me from granting her the thing I cannot grant to anyone, a thing that most people would love to have if they could have it. No, there is more at play here than I understand. She will return at some point today, and I will hear her out. If at any point I do not like what I hear, I will go. I have already lived in this same place under one identity much longer than is my custom. I have been putting off making a change for many reasons, but maybe this is the kick in the pants I need. It will be harder this time than ever before, but I will do as I have always done. I will figure it out, and I will survive. Until that moment comes, if it comes, this memoir goes on. So where shall I resume my story this morning? I sort of spluttered out last night as darkness fell. I meant to go on into the rise of Islam, and then I stopped to call my unwelcome visitor using my neighbor's telephone. Shall I go back to where I left off then? Two days ago, I started this project with my very first lifetime during the Ice Age, and ended with my time as a slave during what today we think of as the Bronze Age. Yesterday I began with my time as a Phoenician, and ended with the first outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe during the reign of Justinian. Today I shall start by talking about Mohammed, peace be upon him, and how I came to live many lifetimes as a member of the Uma, the community of those who submit to the will of God. I was a proud Carthaginian for much longer than I was ever a Mohammedan, a Muslim, a Muslim. Still, being one of them was all consuming even more than it was to be a great man from a great city. A humble man of God in a like minded community has more going for him than a rich man who goes through life alone. Even when they were terrible people, they were my terrible people. I was happy among them. So yes, let me pick up my story where I left it last night. When the plague burned itself out, I sold my house in Constantinople to my cook housekeeper for a pittance and sailed away. There were too many bad memories there, and I needed a fresh start. I wanted to go somewhere untouched by plague, somewhere untouched by war. I wanted to go someplace where I could catch my breath for a generation or two. I settled eventually on a place I mentioned briefly yesterday. Elath. Today it is called Akaba, an Arabic name meaning obstacle, for it is a difficult place to reach travelling overland without using the Roman road that had fallen into disrepair and was mostly under the shifting sands by the time people started calling it Akaba. Well, it was Elath in the days of King Solomon, when I helped him build a treasure fleet there where his territory touched the north end of the Red Sea. I sailed all the way to Toprabane, today's Sri Lanka. There and back, three times in six years for Solomon and King Hiram of Tyre, on the orders of the Queen Mother Arishat, my first patron among the Royal Women of Tyre. I never really bothered with the place after that for more than a thousand years, but I can tell you what happened. When the Romans took over Judea, they started calling Elath Ela, the local word for pistachia, a cultivated nut tree. Ela became a wealthy place under the Romans as a major port and an industry town exporting copper and pottery in addition to its nuts. After the Romans put down one of the Jewish revolts to the point where Jerusalem was all but depopulated, the provincial legion garrisoning the empty capital was transferred to Ela and stayed there for hundreds of years, only marching out to fight whatever the great empire to the east was calling itself at the time, or more rebelling Jews, or raiding Arabs, or whoever else was causing trouble. In those days where Romans were the most reliable killers around, you could always count on them to march out from Ela, knock the necessary heads together, and then return to their comfortable barracks before the town suffered for lack of their business. As happened everywhere that the Romans settled their soldiers for long enough, the locals were soon speaking Latin and Greek in addition to their own Hebrew and Aramaic and Arabic. For an out of the way spot, Ela became a sophisticated city, a place where new people and new ideas were always welcome. For example, even before Christianity stopped being a persecuted religion conducted in secret, Ala was home to the first ever purpose built church in the world, as opposed to some converted pagan temple or courthouse. Ala's church was already twenty years old when the foundation stones for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem were laid. As Christianity became a major organ of Roman imperial government, Elah's Church was among the first to have a bishop. Three hundred and twenty five years after the birth of Christ, a bishop from Alah represented his flock at the first council of Nicaea that at last defined what it meant to be a Christian. Years later, another bishop of Ela was at the Council of Chalcedon in the year of our Lord four hundred and fifty one to agree that Jesus had two natures in one, man and divine at the same time, which is just the sort of fine detail that sounds boring today, but which people built their lives around debating back then. Finally, in the year of our Lord five hundred and fifty four, two years after the plague ended, a bishop from Aila attended the Synod in Constantinople called by Justinian, where it was agreed that all of the writings of the theologian Origen, more than two thousand scholarly works on Christianity and all, should be considered anathema, and burned wherever they were found to prevent his ideas from corrupting other Christians' faith. I do not remember exactly what Origen said about God's relationship and intention with human souls, but it ruffled enough feathers at the time that a lot of very important men had to travel to shout about it to other important men. I ferried scores of church officials hither and yon in those first years after the bubonic plague. That is when someone told me You know, the plague never touched Ayla. Never, I said. Never, he said. The Bishop of Ayla told me so. You mean it hasn't gotten there yet, I tried to correct him. The plague swept the world from one end to the other, friend. If it was going to touch Ayla, it would have done it by now. God must truly bless that place, the fellow told me piously. So I went to Ala. There was no longer a Roman garrison when I got there, but I was fine with that. The emperors in Constantinople had moved what remained of their armies up to the front in the wars with the Sassanids to the east, so if Aila was no longer strategically important enough to have troops on hand, that also meant it was far enough from the fighting that it was not likely to be pulled into conflict. No plague, and peace besides? Yes, Aila would do nicely for a tired old wanderer like me. Now I just mentioned the Sassanids, and I suppose many of you dear listeners may not know of them. There has always been a power to the east of the Mediterranean. When I first came to Tyre it was the Assyrians. Later it was the Babylonians, then the Persians, then the Parthians. The house of Sassan overthrew the Parthian King of Kings seventy years before the first church was built in Ala, and after that everyone living outside their realm called those people Sassanids. They called their empire Aronshar, the land of the Iranians. That should bring you up to speed. The Bubonic Plague had hit the Sassanids as hard as it hit us, and while Constantinople lay exhausted and confused, the Sassanids very narrowly avoided a revolution by the peasantry that would have looked something like the French Revolution had it come to fruition. Instead, a new King of Kings stepped up and restructured his empire into a perfect implement for war, just as Napoleon would one day harness revolutionary France to do his bidding. That Sassanid and his son and grandson went after what was left of the Roman world as if defeating us would solve all their problems, and the two battered empires struggled on for more than a century of back and forth chaos, where neither could ever catch a breath. Not that I minded. I was safe and sound, tucked away down in Ayla, a place with no plague and no war. When I needed to change lives, I would confess to the bishop that I had sired a bastard on one of my trading expeditions, and abandoned the baby with his mother years ago. The man of God always told me I had to make things right. I I would sail away as a penitent man in search of his son. I would return a few years later, with the opposite facial hair to whatever I had sailed away with, wearing the fashion of a distant land. I am John's son, John, I would say in good Greek with a foreign accent that matched my clothes. Then I would pay a generous sum for a requiem mass to be held in the Aila Church to honor my father, who I would say died on the voyage home. And there you have it. I was a new man who could take possession of his father's estates. No one ever doubted I was who I said I was. Everyone always said I looked just like my late father, who was a good man, and a good Christian, who dedicated his life to peace and trade. Peace and trade It was a good way to live. What did other people's wars matter to me? Well, if I can gloss over the great wars to the north and east, I do need to say a little about a small war to the south. Now Ala was a major port at the north end of the Red Sea, as I have already described to you. The lands on the eastern shore of the Red Sea to the south of Ela are known as the Hejaz. The high plateau bordered by vast empty seas of sand to the east of the Hejaz is known as the Najd. Those two places have been sparsely populated since before recorded time by people known as Arabs. They believe themselves to be the descendants of Ishmael, the youngest son of Abraham, or Ibrahim, if you prefer, and so sometimes they also call themselves Bani Ismail Ishmaelites. In Greek, which was the language of what was left of the Roman Empire by the time I was living in Ala, they were often dismissively known as Sarakenoi, people who live in tents. If you have ever heard Muslims called Saracens, that is where that word comes from. That is for later in my story, of course. Now I was dimly aware that where the hijaz meets the Najd, there were trade routes with camel caravans travelling through the desert from oasis to oasis. I never bothered much with these trade routes myself, because anything I wanted from them would find its way to me in Ala at some point, without my having to ride out into a terrible wasteland full of murderous Arab bandits to get it. Still, the trade routes were out there, and just like anywhere else where such things existed, towns existed too. One of the more prosperous of these towns was a place called Mecca. Much of its prosperity can be credited to the Kaaba, a house of God with a magical black stone that had fallen from the heavens embedded into one of its walls. Three hundred and sixty different gods and goddesses and cult totems and idols and angels and demons claimed it as their sacred place, and so Arabs travelled from all over Arabia to Mecca to pay homage to the effigies of their higher powers who surrounded the Kaaba in a ring of permanent reverence. The world was full of preachers and seers in those days, all claiming we were on the brink of a tremendous upheaval. Would you expect anything else with great plagues and wars sweeping from one end of creation to the other? Even among the people who live in tents, those who visited the edge of the desert saw enough of the horror swirling around Romans and Sassanids alike, to tell terrifying stories to the Arabs living in the Najed and Hijaz, whenever they made their pilgrimages to Mecca. One of these seers became more than a seer. Now I was not there, and I imagine many of you, dear listeners, have already heard this story, so I will say it as quickly as I can. I will not ask you to believe what the prophet had to say, but please do accept that he existed, and what he said and did changed the world. I cannot say for a fact that Jesus Christ existed. I never met him, nor even anyone who claimed to have met him. I was living in Gades all the way out in southwestern Spain on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean, when the Nazarene may or may not have been preaching the gospel in the Holy Land. With that said, I was in Ala when Mohammed, peace be upon him, lived in Mecca, roughly sixty miles inland from the middle of the eastern shore of the Red Sea. I never met the great man himself, but I met hundreds of people who knew him well. Their faces always glowed whenever they spoke of him. Muhammad, peace be upon him, was forced out of Mecca by the local rulers. He sent his followers to another caravan trading city called Yathrib, and then he followed them there. This migration is called the Hidra, and just as the Romans marked their calendars from the foundation of Rome and the Christians marked their calendars from the birth of Christ, so the Muslims mark their calendar from the Hidra. The year of our Lord six hundred twenty two is the year of Hidra I. From the Hidra on, the prophet was not just another seer, he was the leader of a faith, and that faith had an army. Again, I was not there, and if I paid little attention to the epic struggle between the Roman Emperor in Constantinople and the Sassanid King of Kings in Tesaphon, you can imagine how much less I cared for the battles between a few hundred men on horses and camels, fighting in the desert about which god or gods, none of which were my god or gods at the time, should be worshipped at the Kaba in Mecca, a place I had only heard of at second and third hand. I will skip over the specifics then, and say in the end, Mohammed, peace be upon him, won. The idols were cast down, and the Kaba became the exclusive home of God. After that, everything changed. For all of history up to that point, the Arabs had been a nothing people. Oh, there are always exceptions, I suppose. One Arab even went on to be emperor back when Rome was still the capital of the Roman Empire. People called him Philip the Arab, and he was not a bad ruler. Rome celebrated her thousandth anniversary during his reign, and he had an enormous garland of silk flowers hung from the neck of the Colossus of Nero as part of the millennial celebrations. I remember because my maintenance company was paid extra for that. I liked Philip the Arab in a distant sort of way, and that is also how I thought about the Arabs. Distantly. Even when I lived in Ayla, a town full of Arabs, I did not really think of them as a people who mattered. Mohammed, peace be upon him, was an Arab. He spoke Arabic. God, known in Arabic as Allah, spoke to Mohammed in Arabic. That means the Arabs were a chosen people, blessed by Allah, with a divine mission. They had to explain where other faiths had gone wrong. They had to spread the word of Allah, the word of God. How could anyone doubt the Arabs were a special people? Had the plague touched them? Did the wars between Romans and Sassanids consume them as the Christians and Zoroastrians were consumed? Who else did God talk to? Yes, Jesus was a holy man who spoke to God, but that was centuries ago, and the message had been distorted by clever Greeks picking apart the words and putting them back together in a more pleasing way. Yes, God had spoken to the Jews long ago, but had they listened to him since? How could anyone claim to be God's chosen people when he allowed them to be enslaved and scattered by the Babylonians and the Romans over and over again? No, it was the Arabs who had received the final word, words said to them in Arabic, and in the years after the prophet's death his teachings were collated together in one book, the Holy Quran, and entire generations of people dedicated themselves to memorizing the whole thing word for word, front to back, so no one could ever edit it in the future. Meanwhile, the whole of Arabia was whipped up into a frenzy of orthodoxy to this new faith. The black stone of the Kaba could have no rivals, so similar pilgrimage points in the desert with a white stone and a red stone were eradicated so thoroughly I cannot tell you quite where they were anymore. The Yemenis in the south were brought into the faith, and the Syrians to the north. And then the Muslims came to Ela. They rode magnificent horses and flew banners of green or black or white, and everyone in Ala put down whatever we were doing to watch them ride through the Hijaz gate and into the center of town. I stood next to the bishop as he greeted the Arabs. Welcome to Ala, gentlemen. The leader of the column pulled back on his reins and danced his horse in a pretty circle in front of us. I am Sheikh Amr Ibn Alas, a companion of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, and peace be with you, bishop. And peace be with you, the bishop replied politely. I am sure he appreciated that the commander of the armed men who had ridden into our town spoke of peace. What can I do for you, Amr Ibn Alas? We ride to war, bishop, but our quarrel is not with you. You have many Muslims living among you here in Ela. Those who wish to join me and my men may do so. Those who wish to stay, I have brought people with me to build a new Muslim town, just over there. Amar Ibn El As gestured casually at the higher ground to the northeast. Anyone here who wishes to be a Muslim may live there and worship God as we worship him. For everyone else who stays here, you will now pay jizya of one dinar a year, and for that you shall all live in peace and not be required to fight with us in the wars to come. To be clear, dear listeners, this was a very reasonable offer. Jizya is a tax for the right to not be a Muslim living under Muslim rule. It was never charged to slaves, women, children, the very old, the chronically sick, Christian holy men who had taken vows of poverty like monks and hermits, the insane, the blind, or the destitute, for they do not have the means to pay it. Nor did any man who joined the armies of the Prophet to become a Gazi, a warrior for God, need to pay for the privilege to worship wrongly while in the service of God. It was all very fair. Muslims would much rather have subjects paying a tax to be left alone than force someone to join their faith without true commitment. Still, the bishop was the shepherd of his flock, the leader of his community. He plucked up his courage and asked the Arab, and what happens if we do not pay this jizya? Amar ibn alas looked down from his horse with a smile. Jesus said, Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. There is no more Caesar, bishop. There is only God, and you will pay your taxes to him just as you paid them to Caesar. God wills it. I was impressed that this man had come out of the desert quoting Jesus to a bishop to make him pay to remain a Christian, but the bishop did not quite see it that way. There is a Caesar, in Constantinople. He is my emperor, and Ala is part of his empire, the bishop said. Amr Ibn Alas perked up in his saddle at this, and looked first one way, then the other, then back over his shoulder. And where is this emperor? Where is his empire? My men and I ride north on a mission from God, and we seek the Roman who would stand in our way. Do you see Romans with swords in their hands here in Ela, the only Roman place that matters between Mecca and Jerusalem? No, the bishop admitted. No. Do you know what I see? What I will see if I go in any direction from this place? Arabs. Arabs riding out because God wills it. You do not need to join us, but you do need to admit we rule this place now. We will rule it in peace, and it will cost you one dinar a year to live as you have lived before, which I would wager you is less than you ever paid your Caesar back when he still had the ability to gather his taxes. Ammer arched an eyebrow as he finished speaking. You would win that wager, the bishop admitted. There you have it. The Arab smacked his thigh in delight, and his high strung horse snorted, prancing sideways in distress. Amir never broke eye contact with the bishop even as he brought the animal back under his control. He was a natural horseman. You may pay your jizya to the mayor of the new town we will build up there, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the words of the messenger of God may seek the truth in that place, for God wills it. With that, Amr Ibn El Ash dug his heels into the side of his horse and rode out the far side of the square, followed by his men, all cheering God wills it, God wills it, God wills it with joy and adulation from the backs of their thundering horses. As they rode past me I saw one Arab carrying a green banner streaming above and behind him so that it seemed to fill up the whole sky. In that moment I had a strange sense of vertico, as if the world was following away beneath my feet. I had seen that man and that horse and that flag before. Many times, in fact. I had glimpsed them in my future since I first started having glimpses of my future. I made another connection in my mind's eye too. In the visions I had while praying in the Hea Sophia, as bubonic plagues swept through Constantinople, I saw that great church become a mosque decorated with Arabic writing. Whatever this new faith coming out of the desert was, it was going to be important. I could sense that all the way through me, and the impact of that sensation forced me to take a step back and throw my hands out to try to regain my lost balance. When the riders were gone, the bishop looked around at the faces in the square. Let us go into the church and pray, he called out in a strong voice, offering reassurance and calm. Many people most people answered his summons at once and began making their way towards the church doors. They were his flock, and he was their shepherd, and all of them felt they had just seen the wolf run through the pasture. I did not move, though. I was all of a sudden so terribly weary of Christianity. I knew everything the bishop would say from his pulpit before he said it. He would give a sermon about the dangers of being led from the one true faith. He would lead his people in prayer for the success of imperial arms against this new threat to their peace and security. Then he would oversee a mass that was neither orthodox, nor monophysite, nor Nestorian, threading instead a compromised middle course that left none of his congregation totally happy without driving any of them to actually leave the church. Well, I was ready to leave the church. Not just Aila's church, but the church. Not since Irene had I lived a Christian life with conviction and joy in my heart. It is not a bad faith, and I have certainly paid lip service to worse over the course of my life, but I was hungry for more. I was hungry for something new, something certain, something I had been seeing in my dreams since the world was young and cold. I wanted what inspired Amar ibn Alas to ride north. What had I just seen? For all the ignorant might have to say about the Arabs conquering with frenzy and fury, that man rode through our town with a joy in his heart, and a smile on his lips. No blood was spilled. He made an educated joke to take some of the sting out of his demand that we acknowledge our new reality, and then he rode on again to complete his mission from God. It was the most reasonable, polite, and peaceful conquest I have ever endured, and I have endured many conquests in my time. It is a popular belief today that Islam spread across the world through savagery and bloodshed, but far more territory was won by conversations like the one I had just described than by battles. By the time Aber Ibn al Ass died, his people would rule more land than Alexander the Great, and that Macedonian boy king fought many more battles in his thirty two years than Amur would in his almost eighty, the Arabs won more with their words than with their swords. The will of God seemed to fill those men up with an inner fire that kept them warm even on the coldest nights. They had such purpose in those first years after the death of the prophet that no force in the world could stand against them. Even as my neighbors were filing into the church to hear the platitudes of our bishop, I knew I was done with the old words. I was ready to hear something new. I went home and meditated deeply in the silence and privacy of my inner study. I summoned up glimpses of the future, and all I saw was Islam. Call to prayer in ten thousand cities across a thousand years and more, millions of men and women worshiping together in unison, over and over again. I saw Arabic writing in every one of these fish, a writing system that at the moment was only used by people living in tents in the wastelands on the fringes of two ancient empires. Yes, Islam was going to be important, maybe the most important thing I had ever seen, and I found myself at the beginning of one of the great turning points of history. Would I be swept up in the events or would I be part of building the future? I decided to sleep on it, and I awoke rested, refreshed, and ready to do something meaningful with the rest of my life. I was among the first who walked the short distance to the new Muslim Ela being built on a low hill above ancient Ela. Who can tell me more about the Word of God? I asked. Now Amur's builders were only just beginning their work, but at my question they all downed their tools and gathered me up in handshakes and embraces that somehow picked me up from outside their community and ushered me into its holy of holies, a square marked out by pegs and string that would one day become a mosque, a prayer hall. There I was introduced to their Imam, the man who led his fellow Muslims in prayer five times a day. I have converted, willingly and unwillingly, to many faiths over the years. Even when I think the particulars particularly interesting, I still take a somewhat jaundiced eye to the whole thing. For example, I had lived as a Christian for almost three hundred years at that point, but I was still deeply suspicious of how Christianity borrowed from the religions that had gone before while claiming no relationship and rejecting the rest as false. What was worse, as Christianity evolved, it was constantly turning against itself, saying this new thing was now true and that old thing was now false, and anyone who believed the old truth was wrong. Islam is refreshingly honest and accepting about what has come before. It believes Abraham and Moses spoke to God, just as the Jews do. It believes Jesus spoke to God too, although Christians are mistaken when they call Jesus God's son. Among those earlier prophets it also counts Muhammad, peace be upon him, as the final prophet, although within his own lifetime and the lifetime of those who knew him, he was more commonly known as the messenger of God, or the apostle of God. Muslims believe that what Allah said to Muhammad, peace be upon him, was the same truth that had been said to Abraham and Moses and Jesus, but that the word of God had been distorted over time by Jews and Christians. It had been edited, massaged, changed. The final revelation was delivered to the Arabs in Arabic because only they could be trusted to make the truth known without changing a single word. It was baked into the foundation of their faith that they would not change a word of the word. Do you know how many holy texts I have seen corrupted over the centuries? Things that began pure as silver, but tarnished just as fast? And yet I sensed in the very air we all breathed together that this time would be different. This time the word would last. The Imam was an old man with failing eyesight, which was why he did not ride out to war with Amar ibn Elas. Both the Imam and Amur were companions of the Messenger of God. They had heard the word of God from his own lips, and that was so important in those first early days. The memory of desert peoples is astonishing, for much of their life is spent telling stories and reciting poetry to one another, while they wait out the heat of the day or the cold of night, or for their flocks to graze, or for the sand to stop blowing. As such, every word the apostle of God said among his companions was remembered and repeated amongst them. Shortly after his death it was all collated into one great book, the Holy Koran, and with this and the Hadiths, sayings thought to also be of Muhammad, peace be upon him, but not included in the Holy Book, a Muslim could live his life in submission to the will of God. It was all very refreshing. I was there at the birth of a new faith, and I could speak at length with people who had actually heard its delivery with their own ears and seen it with their own eyes, people who now dedicated their life to sharing what they had heard and seen with others. When the Imam learned I could not only speak Arabic, but write it, he offered up a mighty thanks to God, and before I knew it, papyrus and ink bottles and quills were being thrust into my hands by everyone in the community. Copy the holy book for us. Copy the holy book for us. God wills it, God wills it. I spent many happy days transcribing the Imam's copy of the Holy Koran, and no sooner was I done a single page than someone would snatch it up and run off to read it to his friends and family. It was a beautiful thing to see such passion for anything, but it is also worth saying the words in the Holy Koran are themselves beautiful and deeply moving. The Arabs, as a people, are lovers of poetry, and when God spoke to the Arabs in Arabic through Muhammad, Peace be upon him, the words he gave them were themselves poetic. To read and hear the holy words in Arabic is to be in the presence of a great work of art. Imagine a piece of music that never fails to move you. Now imagine God wrote it to tell you the truth. That is the Holy Quran to a speaker of Arabic. I will pause here a moment and say, as a man who lives forever, I am less interested in paradise than mortal men and women. Even now, while waiting for Melissa to visit again, I hope the eternal world to come will never be my concern. I plan to live forever. As such, there should be no confusion that I am deeply concerned with this world. When I looked into the future at that time in my life, all I saw was Islam and Muslims living and worshiping together in peace. It was beautiful, and I wanted to be a part of it. When I felt ready to declare myself a Muslim, I proclaimed, There is no God but God, and Muhammad, peace be upon him, is his messenger. Just like that, it was done. My Muslim brothers wanted me to take a new name to mark my rebirth as a member of the Uma. I asked if it was a sin to call myself Muhammad, and I was assured there could be no better choice. Most of them already had young sons named Muhammad. How then will we tell each other apart? I asked. So they named me Mohammed al Rumi, Mohammed the Roman. Dear listeners, I hope you can appreciate the irony that I had to proudly wear the moniker of a people I loathe as part of my new identity. I protested that I was no Roman, but to the Arabs anyone from the Empire was a Roman, and I was a well travelled, well educated, well spoken man, all virtues they considered very Roman indeed. Defeated, I took the name with as much grace as I could manage, and John became Mohammed al Rumi. Throughout my life as a Muslim, I was often Mohammed Ibn Mohammed al Rumi, Muhammad the son of Mohammed the Roman, for just as John had sailed away and returned as his son, so too did Mohammed only need to ride away on a camel for a few years to return as his heir. All that is still to come, of course. As a Muslim, I went to the mosque five times a day to pray, or I prayed at home or at work if I was unable to join the community of Muslims on the heights overlooking Ela. Praying five times a day might seem alike a lot to a Christian, but Muhammad, peace be upon him, did not come up with that number out of thin air. Just as Allah and the Archangel Gabriel told him where Jews and Christians had wandered from the path, so too did they tell him that the Zoroastrians, the first monotheists and the state religion of the Sassanids, had found some small piece of the truth while worshipping their Lord of Light at burning altars in their fire temples. The fire worshippers, as we dismissively called them, prayed five times a day standing up while facing a flame, a symbol for their god's power to combat darkness. We Muslims prayed five times a day through genuflection towards the Kaba in Mecca, the house of God on earth rebuilt by Abraham, or Ibrahim, if you prefer, during his time in the desert. There was a discipline to praying that often. It marked my days and gave my life structure. It was peaceful and soothing. In my meditations upon God, I often saw enormous crowds of people praying together in great prayer halls yet unbuilt all around the world. I found true comfort and inspiration in these glimpses of what was still to come. I should spare a moment to say I remained friends with many of the Christians of Ela. I knew enough theology to explain myself when someone challenged my conversion, but that became less and less common as more and more people embraced the new faith along with me. Ala had been a town open to new ideas since the days of the Roman garrison, and Islam was not a frightening unknown thing there as it was in so many other places. Even the bishop invited Muslims into his home on a regular basis. He could not stop the rise of Islam in Alah, so he continued to be a community leader, even as people changed faiths. Was it that different from him juggling the different interpretations of Christianity embraced by members of his own congregation? Between prayers, I dedicated myself to memorizing the holy book I was transcribing, and I also learned what today are called Arabic numbers, but which my fellow Muslims called Indian numbers. I found them fascinating. I had been aware in a vague way for many years that the Arabs used different symbols in different ways than I was used to in traditional mathematics, but now, upon regular interactions with learned men, I found to my delight that there was a magic in having ten digits zero through nine that I could arrange in rows and columns to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division all faster than I could manage with any abacus or reference table of calculations. I have always been good with numbers, but with these new Arabic numbers as tools, I found I could make miracles happen. Soon I was helping everyone in Ayla, Muslim and Christian and Jew alike, audit their business practices to identify waste, find unexpected surpluses, invest for the future, collect income from unlikely sources, and get the most value for their money when they did spend it. Soon I was making as much money as an accountant, business manager, and financial planner as I ever had as a trader, which was good, as the wars between Islam and the Roman Empire were disrupting my usual trade routes. Amr Ibn al As and his comrades won three great victories in the Holy Land, which I admit surprised me. Outnumbered, untrained, undisciplined, and ill equipped, the Arabs still managed to outmaneuver and outfight the veteran Roman armies of Constantinople. I am sure the Arabs' morale and motivations helped. Promised paradise in the next world if they died fighting the non believers, they threw themselves into the fray with God's name on their lips and in their hearts. Soldiers fighting for pay on behalf of the distant master rarely fight as well as warriors fighting with their brothers and cousins and fathers and uncles all around them, for whom displaying courage is the only thing that matters in life, and death is just a moment's pain on the way to eternal pleasure. It also helped that Amr Ibn al As and the other commanders like him were smart enough to draw the Romans out into open ground on the edge of the desert, where the Arabs could attack and retreat at will without fear of pursuit. Arabs only fought the battles they could win, and that, combined with the will of God, of course, saw them victorious over and over again in actions big and small. After Damascus was taken and the wars of the Holy Land were all but done, Amr Ibn Al As passed back through Ala on his way to the place once called Yathrib, now renamed Medina, the city of the Prophet. I learned later that he spoke with our Imam at some length, asking how the new Muslim Ayla was coming along, and also admitting the administrative details of conquering Palestine and Syria were more than he had imagined. He asked our Imam if he knew anyone who could help him with the paperwork of running an army and governing a province. That prompted the Imam to introduce me to the Sheikh. This is Muhammad al Rumi. He has embraced our faith. Praise God. Praise God, Amar and I said together. He is blessed with many languages that he can speak, read, and write. He is also gifted with a deep and vast understanding of numbers. I would recommend him to you as your secretary, the Imam said. Well, I looked over at the old man in surprise, for this was the first I was hearing of that. Still, before I could protest, Amur asked me, Do you know the Word of God as well as you know the tongues of men? I have been transcribing the holy book since before my conversion, I said. Amur began to quote a passage at random, and when he paused I continued on where he had left off. The Sheikh embraced me. You must help me in God's cause. It is written, the Imam chimed in cheerily. Now many things might be the will of God, but you dear listeners know I am no soldier. Yes, I have fought from time to time in my lone life, but I had no interest in trying to conquer the world as part of some religious quest. That sounded like a very easy way to get killed, and I am exceedingly good at not dying. No, no, I had to say something, and so I decided the most likely way to get what I wanted was to plead cowardice. I am honored by the faith you would place in me, but I am not a man who could take another man's life. When God made me he did not make me with that kind of steel, and the lack of it would put others among your men at risk. Amr Ibn Alas looked me up and down for a moment. Then he drew his sword. It was a magnificent curved blade meant to cut down at a man from the back of a horse, and it would have no difficulty removing my head from my shoulders if that was the Sheikh's intention. It was not. Instead he held the sword over his head, turned back to some of his men waiting a polite distance away, and he shouted God is great God is great. They drew their own swords and began crying out God is great, God is great, God is great back at us. Amr Ibn Al As returned his blade to his scabbard and smiled at me. There are many ways to fight for God. I have warriors enough, and when I need more, God will provide. Today I need someone to write my letters, keep my ledgers, read my petitions, and order the affairs of my campaign. Where I can find a thousand Arabs to fight for me with sword and lance, I am hard pressed to find one with the education to fight for me with ink and papyrus. All the best Arab secretaries are already working for other governors, or have become governors themselves, or spend their days copying the holy book as fast as they can, praise God. I told your Imam my trouble, and he told me of you. That is God's hand at work, my friend. Without seeing a way to refuse the will of God when it was stated so clearly, I accepted with a humility that Amer later told me he found endearing. That is how I came to be personal secretary to one of history's greatest conquerors, a man little known outside the Muslim world for the sin of being just one of a score of superb Arab generals who seem to appear from nowhere all at once, to swallow up a third of the Christian world and all of the Zoroastrian Assassinate Empire in a quick succession of gulps. Speaking of quick gulps, I wouldn't mind taking a short break to get something to drink. I'll uh turn the tape over while I'm at it. I will return shortly. 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. 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