Leo Africanus

Hasan and his family arrive at the Moroccan port of Melilla. On the road, they are ambushed and robbed by bandits while the muleteer flees. When they are rescued by a group of soldiers, they tell Muhammad that the muleteer has been deliberately leading travelers into the ambushes, and many exiles from Granada have fallen prey to the trap.

In Fez, they seek out Khali, who demands that Muhammad leave Warda since Muhammad’s fixation on Warda dishonors not only their family, but also the entire Granadan émigré community. Muhammad refuses and is forced to stay at one of the nicer and more respectable hostelries in the city. The owner of the hostelry finds a house for them, but it is a step down from the luxury the family knew in Granada. Also, even though Warda has returned, Muhammad still pines for Granada, and Salma is resolved to find a soothsayer who can “cure” him. 

In the marketplace of Fez, Salma encounters Gaudy Sarah. She tells Salma that even her relatives who converted were later persecuted and killed. Even in Portugal, only Jews who could afford to give money were spared from having to convert or go into exile. Sarah chose to leave for Fez. Together, Salma and Sarah visit various soothsayers to find a “cure” for Muhammad, including a clairvoyant named Umm Busar who shows Hasan some “jinns” and a sisterhood led by a princess that claims to be able to communicate with demons. Salma also consults an astrologer, who makes a prediction in the form of a poetic verse: “Death will come, and then the waves of the sea, / Then the woman and her fruit will return” (99).

Finally, Salma goes to a mu’azzimin (exorcist) who claims Muhammad must be possessed by a demon and teaches her a spell to exorcise it that involves pouring perfume over Muhammad’s head while he sleeps. Muhammad wakes up in the middle of the ritual. Believing his wife was trying to poison him, he immediately divorces her.

Salma, Mariam, and Hasan move in with Khali. Hasan’s grandmother dies, leaving Khali and Salma to mourn. Muhammad appears, and Hasan is surprised at his own mixed feelings about his father. Also, Astaghfirullah delivers an elegy, describing how death gives life meaning. Khali argues with Astaghfirullah, causing him to passionately state that death is preferable to dishonor. In doing so, he humiliates the former sultan Boabdil, who is also present at the funeral.

At school, Hasan befriends a boy named Harun, the son of a porter. Harun earns the nickname “the Ferret” because of his ability to “ferret” out information from the city’s widespread and well-informed community of porters. Hasan and Harun get into the habit of exploring Fez on their own. In a disreputable suburb of the city, they sneak peaks into taverns until Hasan spies his father Muhammad getting drunk in one tavern. The sight leaves Hasan shocked and humiliated as he quietly returns home with Harun.

Persecution increases back in Granada under the Inquisition. First Christians who converted to Islam are pressured to recant. Then, Muslims who have a Christian ancestor are ordered to convert or face persecution. Under the latter law, Hamid is imprisoned by the inquisitors and tortured to death. This act ignites a revolt in Granada that is quickly and bloodily repressed.

The Muslims who were too poor to leave Granada are forcibly baptized. They write to the émigré community in Fez, asking them to consult their religious authorities on what they should do. A religious leader from the city of Oran answers their concerns: As long as they remain faithful to Islam in their hearts, they commit no sin.

Khali is commissioned to write letters to various Muslim rulers, begging them to liberate Granada, and agrees to deliver the letter to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople personally. At the age of 10, Hasan wants to accompany his uncle on his mission, but his father refuses him permission. However, Hasan cheers up when the barber Hamza offers him an after-school job helping him with his business.

Harun and Hasan take a job gathering manure that is used to heat the hammam (bathhouse). Harun challenges Hasan to spy on a women’s hammam with him, but Hasan declines. Hasan does remain outside while Harun sneaks inside. Once outside, Harun refuses to divulge anything. The next day, Harun goes in a second time. Again, he does not tell Hasan anything.

Khali returns and gives optimistic news to the community, saying that the Turks desire to defeat Castile and see the Muslim community returned to Granada. However, in private, Khali confides to Hasan that all the Muslim sovereigns are preoccupied with their own foreign affairs and conflicts. Also, Khali admits that he gave optimistic news to the Granadans because he was too afraid to try to convince them to move on.

Muhammad takes Hasan and Mariam on a tour of the countryside, seeking land to rent for a business venture. When they are alone, Mariam notes how much Khali loves Hasan and asks Hasan if he will love her future children as much as Khali loves him. Hasan tries to assure her. Mariam only admits that she is afraid of men and wants him to protect her.

While spending the night at a village named ‘Ar Shame, two lions threaten the family, trying to knock down a fence barricading their hut. Warda prays to the Madonna while Muhammad vows to go to a village named Taghya, the location of the tomb of a saint celebrated for his power over lions. The lions eventually go away without causing any real harm. As he promised, Muhammad takes his family to Taghya.

Hasan learns that the reason Mariam asked for his help was because she is engaged to marry a much older man who is known as the Zarwali because he originated from the mountain of Beni Zarwal. The man is wealthy and won the favor of the Sultan by working as an effective tax collector, something he achieves by terrorizing the local population. Muhammad agreed to the marriage in exchange for the Zarwali’s support of his plan to start a new silk business. Hasan learns from Gaudy Sarah that the Zarwali has a bad reputation and has dozens of women in his harem. Hasan enlists Harun to gather more information about the Zarwali. Meanwhile, having turned 13, Hasan undergoes the rite of manhood called the Great Recitation. During the ceremony, Hasan realizes his feelings for his father have become tainted by his father’s treatment of his mother and Mariam’s engagement.

His investigation successful, Harun tells Hasan that the Zarwali made his fortune through banditry, especially of refugees from Granada. Also, he has murdered numerous wives out of jealousy. Hasan manages to confirm these accounts with Gaudy Sarah. Encouraged by Harun, Hasan confronts his father, who dismisses the allegations against the Zarwali as lies. When Hasan persists, his father slaps him. In the heat of the moment, Hasan tells Muhammad that he saw him drunk in a tavern, which devastates Muhammad.

Harun has the idea of going to Astaghfirullah. He and Hasan convince him that the Zarwali is an extremely amoral man. In a sermon to the Granadan community, Astaghfirullah denounces the Zarwali, spreading word of his misdeeds far and wide. Enraged, the Zarwali breaks off the betrothal with Mariam and his entire business relationship with Muhammad.

Muhammad eventually gets over the abrupt end of his alliance with Zarwali and starts a new venture growing grapes and figs. Meanwhile, Hasan is dedicated to his studies in college, even studying forbidden subjects like astrology and philosophy. Hasan had also been regularly visiting Mariam, who signaled whenever Muhammad was away at his farm by placing a knotted blade of grass through a crack in their house wall.

One day, Hasan discovers that Mariam was taken away on the false allegation that she came down with leprosy and brought to the city’s leper colony. This was brought about by the Zarwali, using his political connections. Despite Khali’s distaste for Muhammad’s relationship with Warda, he is determined to try to use his connections with the Sultan to free Mariam. Hasan comforts Warda and is surprised that he feels some attraction for her. Hasan suppresses his feelings. Soon, he, Muhammad, and Khali reconcile as they plan to help Mariam.

Hasan turns the narrative to a friend of his at college, Ahmad the Lame. From their first meeting, Ahmad is disrespectful toward his professor, loudly boasts about being descended from the Prophet, and claims he got his limp from being wounded fighting the Portuguese. Hasan would later doubt his claims of prestigious ancestry and would find out that Ahmad was disabled since birth. Hasan finds Ahmad to be a faithful friend, but also an exasperating one. Meanwhile, at the court of the Sultan of Fez, Khali befriends the heir to the throne, Prince Muhammad. The old sultan dies the day after Khali visits the royal court, something Hasan describes as a “strange coincidence.” 

The new Sultan of Fez decides to send Khali on a diplomatic mission to the ruler of the Soudan, Askia Muhammad Touré. Hasan happily agrees to accompany him on the caravan headed south. They pass through Sefrou, a town impoverished and subjected to heavy taxation because a prince of the royal family lives there; the ruins of a pagan temple; and a mountain village surrounded by dozens of deep wells. Also, they pass a location known as Umm Junaiba, where travelers traditionally jump and dance as they pass an oasis. If they do not, according to the local tradition, they are in danger of becoming ill. Khali is the only member of the caravan who does not do so.

The caravan also comes across a tribe living in a cold, mountainous region, the Mestasa, whose members copy and sell books. Impressed by how educated the tribe is, Hasan speaks with one of them, who explains that the tribe has the freedom of mountain life but also the benefits of civilization from the caravans that pass through.

While in a region named Sijilmassa, Khali becomes sick. Hasan reflects on his uncle’s promise to convince the Sultan to free Mariam. Before the caravan departs for the Soudan, Hasan speaks with Mariam at the leper quarter across a water course that separates the quarter from the rest of the city. When a woman leper gets near Mariam, Hasan throws stones to drive her off, but Mariam, still compassionate despite her ordeal, says she has befriended the woman. Mariam is delighted when Hasan vows he will not marry until she is freed. At Warda’s place, Hasan symbolically seals his promise by taking a faded, knotted piece of grass and kissing it.

Near Timbuktu, a nobleman in the town of Ouarzazate sends an emissary to the caravan. Because the nobleman’s court is too far off their path, Khali sends Hasan in his stead. Hasan gives him gifts in his uncle’s name, including a poem written by Khali himself. There is a lavish feast, and Hasan is presented with gifts for himself and his uncle, including a slave girl named Hiba who speaks Arabic. After Hasan returns to Khali, he wonders whether the gift of the Arabic-speaking slave was meant to honor Hasan or to insult him since she represented the subjugation of people who spoke the language. Hasan finds Hiba beautiful but agrees to his uncle’s advice that he leave her covered because it is Ramadan and to avoid arousing jealousy among the other men in the caravan.

The caravan reaches Timbuktu. Hasan falls in love with the city and finds it to be the best city he ever visited. The first night in Timbuktu, Hiba dances for Hasan, and he vows they will never part. Despite still being seriously ill, Khali decides to leave before the summer gets too severe since the mission has been unsuccessful, the journey took longer than he promised the Sultan, and he is running out of money. On the way back to Fez, Khali’s health worsens, and he dies. Hasan must have him buried on the side of the road in the desert. 

In his will, Khali charges Hasan with getting the caravan safely back to Fez and asks him to marry his youngest daughter, Fatima. Khali’s testament also mentions that Khali had convinced Muhammad and Salma to remarry. Since Islamic law forbids a divorced couple from immediately remarrying, Khali recounts that he suggested Salma marry a friend who would then divorce her, allowing her to remarry Muhammad. Also, he tells a story of a woman who stripped naked in the ocean and let the waves caress her like a man. Then her ex-husband could get around the law by reclaiming her from the sea. Although the story is presented humorously, Hasan is horrified, seeing this remarriage as fulfilling the astrologer’s earlier prediction (Part 2, Chapter 2). Hasan never asks his parents how they got around the law over remarriage.

Hasan returns to find that Astaghfirullah has died and Ahmad the Lame has returned to his home, the Sultanate of Marrakesh, to join the resistance to the Portuguese invasion. Also, Hasan finds himself in a similar situation to his father Muhammad. While he loves his slave, Hiba, he is not attracted to his cousin and betrothed, Fatima, who is sickly and ill-humored.

Hasan goes to the Sultan’s court to report on the mission to Timbuktu. After speaking with the Sultan about recent events, Hasan tries to convince the Sultan to free Mariam. The chancellor promises to do so. Later, Harun accosts Hasan, arguing that by eating with the Sultan he violated Islamic law since his food was paid for through sinful tax practices. Hasan counters that speaking with the Sultan is all he can do to free Mariam. In the meantime, one of his college professors arranges a job for Hasan managing a hospital.

Months pass, and Hasan receives no word from the Sultan. Hasan sees the chancellor, who tells him Mariam needs to be properly investigated to make sure she shows no symptoms of leprosy. Hasan and Harun give the news to Mariam, who has become more embittered. On the way from the leprosy district, Harun declares that he wants to marry Mariam. 

Hasan begins his job as a maristan administrator. While there, he encounters a patient, an old man who was a businessman unfairly locked up in the hospital because his rival used his connections at the Sultan’s court. However, Hasan learns when the same man jumps on him and smears dirt on his face that he is genuinely insane. With horror, Hasan realizes this is why his request to free Mariam has not been respected: Countless people demand their relatives be freed from medical confinement and wrongly claim they are unjustly imprisoned.

Harun swears that he will free Mariam, even if it means becoming a fugitive. Hasan is confused by Harun’s passion for Mariam, so Harun admits that the day he went to the hammam, he saw Mariam. Rather than calling for someone to kick him out, Mariam flirted with Harun. Harun’s plan to bribe a guard and escape from Mariam succeeds, and they flee to the mountainous region of Bani Walid.

His vow not to marry until Mariam is freed fulfilled, Hasan marries Fatima. On their wedding night, Fatima faints. Hasan is unable to wake her up and consummates their marriage while she is unconscious. Later, Fatima tries to engage in dirty talk—“Don’t you want to visit my little sister?” (186)—which shocks Hasan and makes her painfully embarrassed, although Hasan reassures her. By the end of the year, Fatima becomes pregnant, which causes Hasan to seek better-paying work. At his mother Salma’s advice, he decides to become a merchant.

Fatima gives birth to a daughter, Sarwat. With the help of a Genoese merchant he knows from the caravan to Timbuktu, Master Thomasso de Marino, Hasan starts his business. Thomasso commissions Hasan to buy a stock of burnouses from the town of Tafza for import to Spain and Italy. Hasan agrees despite his lack of experience. Worse, Hasan learns from his mother that the Sultan of Fez is planning to attack Tafza because the town had been defying government authority.

Regardless, Hasan sets out for Tafza, where he learns that the town used to be an independent republic. However, a clan was exiled for inciting civil conflict, and they went to the Sultan of Fez, saying that if restored to their position in Tafza, they would acknowledge the Sultan’s sovereignty. Still, Hasan’s business transactions in Tafza are successful. When an army from Fez surrounds the town, Hasan is even able to help negotiate a peace in which Tafza avoids conflict by paying a hefty sum to the Sultan.

Hasan’s business in international trade becomes extraordinarily successful. Meanwhile, Hasan falls more in love with Hiba, comforting her when she is upset by Fatima giving birth while she has had no children. Hiba admits to Hasan that a soothsayer from her tribe told her she would never have children. She pleads for Hasan to one day set her free, but he refuses, reasserting his vow to never leave her.

The Sultan requests that Hasan go to his former friend, Ahmad the Lame, who is fomenting rebellion in the middle of the Portuguese invasion, and convince him to instead support the Sultan’s army in repelling the invaders. Through subtle use of flattery, Hasan manages to get the Sultan to pardon Harun and Mariam for becoming fugitives and even order the Zarwali’s exile. Henceforth, Hasan finds himself as a favorite of the Sultan.

Hasan goes to the northern coastal region of Morocco, where the Sultan of Fez and Ahmad the Lame are leading separate armies to battle the Portuguese. As the Sultan ordered him to do, Hasan tries to talk Ahmad down. However, he is horrified when he realizes that Ahmad the Lame is not as concerned about defeating the Portuguese as he is about raising a loyal army to carve out his own North African kingdom. Disgusted, Hasan gives up and leaves.

The Zarwali is exiled by being forced to take a pilgrimage to Mecca. While passing through Beni Walid, he is ambushed and captured by Harun, who drags the Zarwali to his house in the mountains. There he makes Mariam strip and orders the Zarwali to see if he can find any signs of leprosy on her body. He kills the Zarwali at Mariam’s feet.

Fatima dies giving birth to a stillborn son. Meanwhile, the murder of the Zarwali backfires on Hasan. Although the Sultan admits Hasan is innocent of the act, the fact that the Sultan had granted a pardon to Harun and Mariam only for them to kill an influential man implicates Hasan enough that he must be exiled for two years. Reluctantly leaving Fez, Hasan agrees to return Hiba to her tribe.

Hasan and Hiba find themselves facing an unseasonably cold evening. Despite Hasan’s own misgivings, Hiba convinces him to take refuge with her in a cave. It turns out Hiba had predicted that a snowstorm would strike the area. Hasan is horrified to find that his guards died in the snowstorm and the wealth he brought with him was looted.

Even so, Hasan still takes Hiba back to her tribe. Hiba goads the tribal elders into auctioning over each other to buy her back for the sake of honor. Hiba is freed, and Hasan becomes wealthy again. Hasan heads further south and finds, to his horror, that Timbuktu is being devastated by a fire. Hasan passes through the kingdom of Bornu, which is so wealthy and luxurious even dogs have gold leashes, but whose king has not paid the foreign merchants who sold him such luxuries. Next, he sees the king of Gaogu, who in contrast is extremely generous. Finally, Hasan arrives at his destination: the Nile River.