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By Root 591 0

in any terms they pleased. He'd grown up in one of the world's last absolute monarchies, where the very soil of the nation belonged to the king, and the law was what the reigning monarch said it was-subject in name if not in substance to the Koran and the Shar'ia, the Islamic legal traditions which dated back to the Prophet himself. These laws were fair-or at least consistent-but very stern indeed. The problem was that not everyone agreed about the words of the Koran, and therefore about how the Shar'ia applied to the physical world. Islam had no pope, no real philosophical hierarchy as other religions understood the concept, and therefore no cohesive standard of application to reality. The Shi'a and the Sunni were often-always-at each other's throats over that question, and even within Sunni Islam, the Wahabis-the principal sect of the Kingdom-adhered to a stern belief system indeed. But for the Emir this very apparent weakness of Islam was its most useful attribute. One only had to convert a few individual Muslims to his particular belief system, which was remarkably easy, since you didn't have to go looking for those people. They identified themselves virtually to the point of advertising their identities. And most of them were people educated in Europe or America, where their foreign origin forced them to cleave together just to maintain a comfortable intellectual place of self-identity, and so they built upon a foundation of outsiderness that had led many of them to a revolutionary ethos. That was particularly useful, since along the way they'd acquired a knowledge of the enemy's culture that was vital in targeting his weaknesses. The religious conversions of these people had largely been preinstalled, as it were. After that, it was just a matter of identifying their objects of hatred-that is, the people to be blamed for their youthful discontent-and then deciding how to do away with their self-generated enemies, one at a time, or as a grand coup de main, which appealed to their sense of drama, if not their scant: understanding of reality.

And at the end of it, the Emir, as his associates had taken to calling him, would be the new Mahdi, the ultimate arbiter of all of the global Islamic movement. The intra-religious disputes (Sunnis and Shi'a, for example) he planned to handle through a sweeping fatwa, or religious pronouncement of tolerance-that would look admirable even to his enemies. And, after all, weren't there a hundred or more Christian sects who had largely ended their own internal strife? He could even reserve to himself tolerance of the Jews, though he would have to save that for later years, after he had settled into the seat of ultimate power, probably with a palace of suitable humility outside the city of Mecca. Humility was a useful virtue for the head of a religious movement, for as the pagan Thucydides had proclaimed, even before the Prophet, of all manifestations of power, that which most impresses men is restraint.

It was the tallest of orders, the thing he wanted to accomplish. It would require time and patience, and its success was hardly guaranteed. It was his misfortune that he had to depend upon zealots, each of whom had a brain, and the consequent strong opinions. Such people could, conceivably, turn on him and seek to replace him with religious outlooks of their own. They might even believe their own concepts-they might be true zealots, as the Prophet Mohammed had been, but Mohammed, blessings and peace be upon him, had been the most honorable of men, and had fought a good and honorable fight against pagan idolaters, while his own effort was mainly within the community of Faithful. Was he, then, an honorable man? A difficult question. But didn't Islam need to be brought into the current world, and not remain trapped in antiquity? Did Allah desire His Faithful to be prisoners of the seventh century? Certainly not. Islam had once been the center of human scholarship, a religion of advancement and learning that had, sadly, lost its way at the hands of the great Khan, and then been oppressed