Illustration by Boris Pelcer

In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi, or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town.

The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of tinajas, the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and, because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveller had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.”

Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular. He took her into his cottage as his housekeeper and lover, and in the muffled night she whispered her “true”—that is to say, false—Jewish name into his ear, and that was their secret. Dunia the jinnia was as spectacularly fertile as her prophecy had implied. In the two years, eight months, and twenty-eight days and nights that followed, she was pregnant three times and brought forth a multiplicity of children, at least seven on each occasion, it would appear, and on one occasion eleven, or possibly nineteen; the records are vague. All the children inherited her most distinctive feature: they had no earlobes.

If Ibn Rushd had been a scholar of the occult arcana, he would have realized then that his children were the offspring of a non-human mother, but he was too wrapped up in himself to work it out. The philosopher who could not philosophize feared that his children would inherit from him the sad gifts that were his treasure and his curse. “To be thin-skinned, farsighted, and loose-tongued,” he said, “is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what’s coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past. If our children are fortunate, they will inherit only your ears, but, regrettably, as they are undeniably mine, they will probably think too much too soon and hear too much too early, including things that are not permitted to be thought or heard.”

“Tell me a story,” Dunia often demanded in bed in the early days of their cohabitation. Ibn Rushd quickly discovered that in spite of her seeming youth she could be a demanding and opinionated individual, in bed and out of it. He was a big man, and she was like a little bird or a stick insect, but he often felt that she was the stronger of the two. She was the joy of his old age, but she demanded from him a level of energy that was hard to maintain. Sometimes all he wanted to do in bed was sleep, but Dunia saw his attempts to nod off as hostile acts. “If you stay up all night making love,” she said, “you actually feel better rested than if you snore for hours like an ox. This is well known.” At his age, it wasn’t always easy to enter into the required condition for the sexual act, especially on consecutive nights, but she saw his elderly difficulty with arousal as proof of his unloving nature. “If you find a woman attractive, there is never a problem,” she told him. “Doesn’t matter how many nights in a row. Me, I’m always horny. I can go on forever—I have no stopping point.”

His discovery that her physical ardor could be quelled by narrative had provided some relief. “Tell me a story,” she said, curling up under his arm so that his hand rested on her head, and he thought, Good, I’m off the hook tonight, and gave her, little by little, the story of his mind. He used words that many of his contemporaries found shocking, including “reason,” “logic,” and “science,” which were the three pillars of his thought, the ideas that had led to his books’ being burned. Dunia was afraid of these words, but her fear excited her and she snuggled in closer and said, “Hold my head while you’re filling it with your lies.”

There was a deep, sad wound in him, because he was a defeated man, had lost the great battle of his life to a dead Persian, Ghazali of Tus, an adversary who had been dead for eighty-five years. A hundred years earlier, Ghazali had written a book called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” in which he attacked Greeks like Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and their allies, Ibn Rushd’s great precursors Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Ghazali had suffered a crisis of belief at one point, but had recovered with such conviction that he became the greatest scourge of philosophy in the history of the world. Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of proving the existence of God, or even of proving the impossibility of there being two gods. Philosophy believed in the inevitability of causes and effects, which was an insult to the power of God, who could easily intervene to make causes ineffectual and alter effects if He so chose.