Traces Erased by the Sun

translated by Robert Irwin

How might a ninth century proto-rationalist have understood the world? Although it's difficult to say with certainty, or at least with both certainty and honesty, one could do worse than to examine the life, the times, and the writings of one Abu al-Bayda al-Rabahi.

Al-Rabahi was born in a tribal settlement near Basra around the year 830 C.E. His education brought him to the city proper, where he established himself as a schoolteacher, poet, and minor grammarian. Basra was sacked by Zanj rebels in 871. Al-Rabahi escaped, possibly during the attack or possibly during the siege that preceded it. Reconstruction efforts in Basra began after the rebellion was crushed in 883. Al-Rabahi returned to the city at this time and resumed teaching as Basra rebuilt. He likely died before 923, when the city was sacked yet again in yet another conflict.

Basra in the 860s was a major port city and center of Arabic grammar and literature, under the polity of the Abbasid Caliphate, and with a distinct cultural identity. Its wealth was built on plantations, and those plantations were built on marshland, and large numbers of slaves were required to clear those marshlands and work those plantations. The living conditions of those slaves were miserable, and a charismatic political entrepreneur was able to take advantage of the instability of the central Abbasid government and of the violent outbreaks between Basra's rival factions, to rally those slaves and to stage a revolt against the caliphate that lasted nearly fifteen years.

Basra fell near the start of the revolt. After surrendering, the remaining townspeople were rounded up and slaughtered, the city's wealth was plundered, and its mosque and port were razed. Basra remained unpopulated until reconstruction began.

It's not difficult to understand, at least intellectually, how al-Rabahi would have processed the destruction of Basra. Prior to the revolt, al-Rabahi's position was similar to that of a schoolteacher today; he was a literate, undercompensated, structurally vulnerable urban professional, dependent for his security upon the strength of the central government and of his city's institutions, and therefore likely a believer in both. His belief would have eroded away upon witnessing the inability of the Abbasid military to subdue the rebels in the two years prior to the siege, the inability of the city's rival factions to maintain order during the siege, and the inability of the local garrison to repel the invaders during the attack. After the destruction of Basra, in his exile, al-Rabahi would have had to come to terms with his new reality. From his manuscript, it becomes clear that the way that he began to understand the world is that civilization is fleeting and ruin is the rule rather than the exception.

Al-Rabahi likely completed Traces Erased by the Sun after returning to Basra, and this return is worked into the (fictional) framing narrative of the book. The narrator returns to Basra and finds the city in ruins. He seeks shelter from the midday sun in a half-collapsed house, where he finds books with pages bleached by exposure to the sun, so he sets about collecting the remnants and compiles them into the present volume.

The book is written in typical adab style, containing parables, poetry, anecdotes, and philosophical digressions, arranged into somewhat of a convoluted structure. The overall theme is the inevitable and cyclical nature of ruin. The primary preoccupation is how to conduct oneself as a gentleman given that reality. The prescription is the insistence on culture, manners, and intellectual rigor, even as the world burns. The Zanj Rebellion and the destruction of Basra are constant in the background.

A couple of examples are in order. The first is a parable that speaks to a cause of ruin:

A certain sheikh recounted to me:

In ages past and eras long dissolved, two tribes dwelt upon the opposing banks of a single river. They lapped from its crystalline flow, took root within the sanctuary of its precincts, and found shade beneath the interwoven canopy of its palms.

But when Time bit them with its fangs and forced them to sup upon its bitterest torments, a discord festered between them regarding the mending of the irrigation channels and the stalling of the date harvest, disputes concerning both the immediate present and the distant future. And who among men would forgo his own draught that his neighbor might be slaked? Who would endure the parching of his own throat until the season of hardship had withered away?

Each faction declared: "Should I hasten to the labor, my own flesh shall waste; yet should I tarry and wait, my children shall surely perish."

Thus, they abandoned the river to neglect. They scattered into the wastes of schism and petty disputation until the conduits cracked and the embankments crumbled. Then, a fire erupted among the palms, ignited by a spark of unknown origin, a spark that eluded even the discernment of the most sagacious observer.

A black wind arose, bearing aloft the ashes of the charred palm fronds, and a rain as dark as liquid pitch fell upon both villages alike, failing to distinguish between the oppressor and the oppressed.

The sheikh said: "How excellent was Nasr ibn Sayyar when he cautioned his people, saying:

I see amidst the ash the glow of embers,
And soon, I fear, they shall burst into flame.
For fire is kindled by the rubbing of two sticks,
And the beginning of war is but a word.
I said in wonderment, 'Would that I knew:
Are the Umayyads awake, or are they dreaming?'"

There are multiple references to the Zanj Rebellion here. The most obvious one is the inability of Basra's rival factions to keep the peace during the siege. The "black wind" and "rain as dark as liquid pitch" evoke the burning of plantations and sugar refineries. The poem that ends the parable is also a veiled reference; the historical context of the poem is that it was sent to the Umayyad caliph in 747 C.E. to warn about the Abbasid Revolution. Al-Rabahi's inclusion of it here draws a parallel between that earlier revolution and the Zanj Rebellion to further illustrate the cyclical nature of ruin.

(As an aside, the usual meaning of the poem is that there is danger in ignoring small problems before they become disasters, like the aphorism "a spark neglected makes a mighty fire". Its usage here is somewhat complicated, since the primary cause of ruin described in the main body of the parable comes from neglecting the common good in favor of one's own interests. The juxtaposition might be to reinforce the claim that neglect of the common good sets the stage for catastrophe rather than merely gradual ruin.)

As our second example, consider the following poem that argues for the preservation of literature in the face of destruction. The salt-flats are literal; the rebellion began in the salt-crusted marshlands surrounding Basra. The "noon-heat of parting" suggests the hardship of al-Rabahi's thirteen years of displacement. The word "shell" is an early Abbasid metaphor for the wording of a text (in which a "pearl" of meaning is contained).

I cast my gaze where the salt-flats wrap themselves
In shrouds of shimmering mirage, until the very plains contract.
Between the tablets of a silence whose lines now flicker,
And an eye that, in the noon-heat of parting, is torn away,

It is as if my sight, now that the glare has sunk deep within it,
Has become a blade to carve a trace that already begins to dissolve.
I do not stay the house as its pillars succumb to the dust;
Rather, for the sake of a single letter, I rise above the remains.

For truthfulness is the tethering of meaning to its primal ore,
Though the torrent overflows or the pastures of refuge fail us.
And if the soul should lose its way in the moon-blanched wasteland,
The highest virtue remains: to preserve the parchment and the shell.

Al-Rabahi's manuscript is in some ways surprisingly modern. His ideas about the inevitable and cyclical nature of ruin anticipate modern discussions of systemic fragility, tail risks, and the brittleness of large-scale coordination. Eleven hundred years later we still find ourselves asking the questions of how to preserve norms when institutions have difficulty enforcing them and what value there is in acting with nobility when incentives reward the opposite. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

In his translator's preface, Irwin states the two reasons that he decided to translate al-Rabahi's work. The first is that it gives us an unusual glimpse into Abbasid society, unusual both because of al-Rabahi's status as (merely) a minor provincial scholar and because of its uncommon subject matter. The second reason is that it teaches the lesson that the preservation of culture depends on the innumerable minor figures who work toward that end. As to why Irwin would offer those reasons to a modern English-speaking general audience, we first need to learn something about Robert Irwin.

II.

Traces Erased by the Sun

by Robert Irwin

Robert Graham Irwin was born in Guildford in the year 1946 C.E. His education brought him to the city of Oxford, and he later established himself as a lecturer, literary fantasy author, and medieval Islamic scholar.

Basra was shelled extensively in the 1980s and early 1990s, during the Iran-Iraq War and during the Battle of Basra following the 1991 Gulf War. Although in London at the time, in his role as the Middle East editor for the Times Literary Supplement, Irwin would have been keenly aware of the destruction Basra suffered, and the stark contrast between Basra as a ruined city following the conflicts and Basra as the "Venice of the East" prior to the conflicts.

Basra in the 1970s was Iraq's primary port and one of the country's most culturally vibrant cities. Its wealth was built on oil exports and shipping traffic. However, those export and shipping terminals were located on the Shatt al-Arab waterway, and control of the waterway was one of the most sensitive and long-running disputes between Iran and Iraq. Additionally, Basra's population was largely Shi'a, and in late 1980 Saddam Hussein was worrying that newly-revolutionary Iran might inspire unrest in the city.

The Iran-Iraq War began in September 1980, and Basra became a focal point, enduring near-constant bombardment throughout. Half of Basra's population fled during the war, entire districts were leveled, and the Shatt al-Arab waterway became a combat zone.

On March 1, 1991, one day after the Gulf War ceasefire, a returning Iraqi tank gunner fired a shell into a portrait of Saddam Hussein that was hanging over the main square in Basra. This act ignited a spontaneous rebellion, which was met with a brutal counter-offensive a few days later by Hussein's forces, who massacred the citizens.

It's not difficult to understand, at least intellectually, how Irwin would have processed the modern destruction of Basra. Irwin was concerned with the ways in which patterns of folly repeat across time, the extent to which the preservation of culture depends on fragile institutions, and the absurdity of reconciling those two concerns. He would have been sensitive to the abstract historical rhyme in which Basra repeatedly comes to ruin, as well as to the concrete fact of the destruction of Basra's historic Old City and of its libraries and museums.

Irwin wrote Traces Erased by the Sun after the Gulf War, and this context is the subtext of his (fictional) translator's preface.

The book is a work of fiction, presented as a translation of a ninth century adab manuscript, and in typical Irwin style, is obsessed with logic and structure, narrative reliability, and the dark undercurrents of Islamic history. The overall theme is the inevitable and cyclical nature of ruin. The primary preoccupation is the interplay between the necessity of, and the absurdity of, the preservation of culture in the face of destruction. The Gulf War is constant in the background.

A couple of examples are in order. Returning to our parable ("A certain sheikh recounted to me"), we can see multiple references to the Gulf War. The most obvious is the imagery of the black rain ("rain as dark as liquid pitch"), the toxic rain over the Persian Gulf region resulting from the burning of Kuwaiti oil wells by Iraqi forces upon their retreat in early 1991. The "discord... regarding the mending of the irrigation channels and the stalling of the date harvest" alludes to the historical tensions over water rights and oil resources that preceded the invasion of Kuwait. The line by Nasr ibn Sayyar, "the beginning of war is but a word", is repurposed to hint at the political rhetoric and brinkmanship in the lead-up to the military escalation.

Returning to our poem ("I cast my gaze"), we can again see multiple references to the Gulf War. The "shrouds of shimmering mirage" suggest media coverage that distorts the truth, and the sun blindness ("my sight, now that the glare has sunk deep within it") suggests "CNN War" fatigue and the over-exposure of information. The contracting plains ("until the very plains contract") evoke the "Highway of Death" and the "kill boxes" of modern warfare. The "moon-blanched wasteland" evokes white phosphorus and the ghostly hue of night vision. Stepping back, the poem can be viewed as a comment on the irony of journalism documenting the destruction of libraries and museums, themselves repositories documenting history.

The whole damn book is like this. It's ostensibly about the chivalry of ruin, but it's really about the Zanj Rebellion, but it's really about the Gulf War, but it's really really about the historical rhyme, but it's really really about the absurdity of it all.

If you pretend that Irwin was playing it straight with his "translation", you walk away with the feeling that al-Rabahi made a convincing case that one must insist on culture, manners, and intellectual rigor, even in the face of inevitable ruin. If you read it as the literary fiction that it is, you walk away with the feeling that Irwin made a convincing case that, although al-Rabahi's attitude is necessary, it's still absurd.

III.

At this point in the ACX book review it is customary to make an explicit normative argument about a pressing issue of the day, exposit the theories of the book under review in light of that pressing issue, and win over ACX reader hearts and minds, not just with respect to the contest, but with respect to the cause of one side or the other of the issue.

Alas, that simply is not Irwin's style.^[1] He refuses to moralize (al-Rabahi is something of a moralist, but Irwin is not) and he rarely makes a direct argument (rather preferring allusion, indirection, and irony; the "argument" of the absurdity of al-Rabahi's attitude is only evident if one understands the context in which Irwin wrote and is able to parse out the irony). Instead, he leaves us to grapple with the question ourselves: How can we reconcile the two facts that (1) we really do need to insist on culture, and (2) that insistence really is absurd?

I suspect that Irwin had an answer, although for the foregoing reasons it's difficult to say with certainty (or, again, at least with both certainty and honesty). So, the best that I can do is (1) summarize the book's argument that the tension really exists, and (2) provide explicitly what I suspect was Irwin's answer. If you don't consider "the tension between the necessity of and the absurdity of the preservation of culture in the face of destruction" to be a pressing issue of the day, then that's on you.

IV.

Successfully navigating across the two readings the labyrinth of adab that Irwin writing as al-Rabahi wrote, we arrive at roughly the following argument:

Civilizational ruin is cyclical and (therefore) inevitable.
During periods of ruin, the institutions of a civilization become unable to preserve their culture. Regardless of the cause of ruin, the effect is that institutions lose the ability to transmit norms, maintain continuity, or protect the conditions under which their culture can flourish.
If a culture is to be preserved, then during those periods in which institutions are unable to preserve the culture, it falls to individuals to preserve the culture.
Acting with culture, manners, and intellectual rigor is therefore a moral stance in the face of ruin. It acknowledges the individual's role in preserving culture during periods of ruin, and takes the position that preserving culture is a moral good.
This moral stance is an element of every culture that is able to preserve itself across cycles of ruin. If a culture fails to inculcate this moral stance, then the culture dies out when its institutions fail.

However,

The insistence of a single individual acting to preserve culture and manners during a catastrophe that marks a period of civilizational ruin is an absurd mismatch of scale.
Culture is unable to prevent the failure of the institutions of its civilization, and yet demands its own preservation when those institutions fail. During those periods of ruin, there is no reward for preserving the culture other than that preservation in and of itself, and therefore the demand is absurd.

To be clear, Irwin the historian would have rejected this argument. As a rule, he was skeptical of grand, sweeping narratives that treat disparate events as instances of a single explanatory cause, and the particular trope of "ruin is cyclical" is a common one in medieval writing. The way to understand this argument is that Irwin, as al-Rabahi, is making a more or less standard medieval argument, but also that Irwin, as a literary fiction author, is writing the argument in a way that demonstrates the absurdity of its conclusions.

Even though Irwin would have rejected the argument, he would not have rejected the claim that there really is a necessity to preserve culture, but he would have seen that necessity as more of a professional or scholarly ethic rather than a moral necessity. That is, even though the argument is flawed, there really is still a tension between necessity and absurdity, but the necessity is a property of scholarship rather than a general human necessity. As a result, my conjecture about how Irwin would answer the question of how to resolve this tension, is that he would say that the tension comes with the territory; when you sign up to be a scholar, you take upon yourself the professional obligation to preserve the culture that is the subject of your scholarship, along with the ensuing absurdity of that obligation.

I'll end this review with my own answer,^[2] which is different from my conjecture about Irwin's answer.

Defined briefly, culture is the ideas, actions, and artifacts of a people. The ideas of a culture are memes in the Dawkins sense of the word. They propagate themselves across the individuals of a people through the actions and artifacts of that people. So when we talk about a culture, we're really talking about its ideas. The actions, the artifacts, and the people are incidental; the people are just the substrate on which the ideas grow, the actions are just the mechanics of growth, and the artifacts are just its mechanisms.

A highly cultivated person is therefore merely a substrate that has been fully utilized by the ideas of his culture. Those ideas have sunk their roots deep into his mind. The content of his thought is directed and orchestrated by those ideas.

In the event of a civilizational catastrophe, the highly cultivated person will insist on the manners and refinements of his culture, because in any event he will insist on the manners and refinements of his culture, because his mind belongs to the ideas of his culture. It is only if and when his mind-local instances of those ideas die out, and their roots wither or are extracted, that his mind becomes free to grow a different culture.

Viewed this way, the real absurdity appears to be that a person would hand over his mind to be fodder for a culture. However, it's not as absurd as it appears. For one thing, enculturation starts young, before a person has developed the capacity to critically examine the ideas of his culture. For another, the relationship is more symbiotic than my rhetoric above was suggesting. A highly cultivated person reaps genuine social benefits that, all else being equal, are not available to an uncultured person.

So the short answer is, reciprocity. A highly cultivated person reaps greater social benefits than an uncultured person, but the cost of those benefits is the concession of his mind to his culture's ideas.

Footnotes.