Halep and Niwa

In the turmoil of late October the family of Shultankonyi Osman moved into Amatodate Abbey. As usual, the Abbé exercised his autocratic prerogative to silence anyone who might object to a group of Muslims moving in, on the principles of sanctuary— As soon as old Kachituvan-neni had raised her complaint, saying that Muslims were predisposed to kill any Christian on sight, Musa Abbé had retorted that the mere fact that Osman, with his wife, children, and guest, deigned to show up at all already contradicted her claim. It was however quite impossible to find any more space in the main residential compound. Eventually, a tool-shed had to be evacuated to make space for them. It was hardly glamorous, but it was better than falling to the Satraps— and, besides, they might not get along with the rest of the refugees, who had suffered grievously under the Qarataimir militias.

The guest who came with the Shultankonyi was a learned man: a Hafiz, or someone who had had the entirety of the Quran memorized. He was also a curious-looking foreigner and would have stood out in any crowd, Christian-Taimir or Muslim-Taimir. We learned later that Halep-hafiz was a Laurentine, transplanted from the other end of the Little Ocean. He had come to Taimiria on the auspices of his mentor at an academy in Iqaluit, since contact and dissemination of doctrine between the continents had been lost for a number of centuries.

"I have no hope of my mission succeeding anymore," confessed Halep-hafiz to Makarios Niwa, the Metropolitan's emissary. "The Qarataimir have proved to be uneducatable bumpkins; stubborn heretics; they never listened nor adopted any doctrine I have come to spread." The Qarataimir had asserted to him, among other things, that the Quran was dictated by Gabriel to the Prophet Muhammad in Ottoman Turkish rather than Arabic, something which grated on poor Halep's ears. "These people would sooner die for the Turkish race than they would for the one true God!" he lamented. He did however spare the Shultankonyi the worst of his denouncements, for he was indebted to them.

It is worth mentioning what had transpired between the Hafiz and the Metropolitan's emissary when they first met. Makarios Niwa was the one the people at Amatodate called "Aspag", the Metropolitan of Archangel himself, or someone equal to him. It had not mattered to the people that Makarios had been sent out of Archangel more or less as a running-boy for the head of Christendom, or that he had dropped out of seminary in his final year, and lost his faith to boot. Halep had not realized this, and tried to start a debate with Makarios, thinking him to be a man of faith. But the Aspag only laughed at him, saying, "how like you foreigners to be quibbling over fairy tales at this time, when human lives are so much at stake?" 

After about a week of unpleasantness, Makarios gradually began to offer his responses to the Hafiz's challenges to the best of his abilities, based on his training in the seminary. He discovered that the fellow lived for the debate, and in time they formed a close friendship despite disagreeing on almost everything.

A family in Aleppo. Photo by AFP/George Ourfalian [source]

References

1. The names "Halep" and "Niwa" allude to the modern cities of Aleppo, Syria and Mosul, Iraq.

2. The title "Aspag" is plagiarized from the Irish word meaning "bishop".

3. The name of the character "Kachituvan" is plagiarized from a street name in Penampang, Sabah.
4. The Metropolitan's emissary being treated as identical to the Metropolitan himself mirrors similar events in Halldór Laxness's 1989 novel Under the Glacier.