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Though you have struggled, wandered, traveled far, It is yourselves you see, and what you are. —Farid ud-Din Al Attar, The Conference of the Birds
This is the tldr of the book
The Nasrid sultans, heirs to the empire of Al Andalus, to the foothold of Islam in Europe, seemed to have few talents beyond losing the territories won by their forefathers.
They preferred beauty to war:
“I thought you always named your slaves after flowers and precious stones,” said Luz. “Coral and Amber and Jasmine. I’ve never heard of a slave with a holy name.”
She looked as though she had been born to a life without chairs, though Fatima knew, or rather heard, that northerners sat at high tables to eat and work and dress. Their clothes reflected this uprightness and pinched them around the waist; Luz’s own gown was not made for sitting on the floor, and bunched up unflatteringly. She did not seem to notice or to mind.
some men, the obsequious ones, pressed their hands to their hearts and bowed their heads.
What will be so different? Power will change hands—the key to the city will hang on one neck instead of another. But the rest of us will go about our lives as we have been—only we will pay taxes to someone else, with different coins. The era of sacks and sieges and slaughter is over. Yes?”
What palestinians thought
for Luz’s argument depended on its own impenetrable logic.
“Are you free?” she asked. “You can’t even call yourself what you are because you’re not a man. You have masters, you just said so. How can you make me free if you’re not free yourself?”
They hate me because I do in the daylight what their own kings are ashamed to do in the dark. They have concubines, just as I do, but in their religion these women are adulteresses damned to hell, their children bastards. That’s not our way. Our sons will be princes, our daughters will marry into the finest families, and none of them will be bastards, because there is no shame in what we do. And for that, they call me a libertine.”
When you have your own, you’ll understand. All your grand ideas about justice and fairness die when your children are born. There is no life so precious that you would not sacrifice it for theirs.”
Not everybody has to be friendly in order to be good.”
real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice.
