The Lamp That Does Not Fall

The Life and Wisdom of Al-Turtushi, Counselor to Princes

von Narin Hikma

280 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

He was locked in a mosque for a year, and paid a monthly allowance by the man who locked him up.In the winter of 1120, the government of Egypt decided that Abu Bakr al-Turtushi was too expensive to leave alone. He had attacked a judge in public. He had denounced the taxes. He had ruled that a cheese imported from Byzantium was forbidden, and then that no Muslim should buy from any shop that stocked it, in a port city that lived on imports. So they moved him a hundred and fourteen miles up the river, away from his students, and told him he would be staying.Then the vizier who confined him was assassinated in the street, the order lapsed, and the old man went home and wrote the most merciful book about power that his century produced.This is the story of how that happened, and it does not soften him.Al-Turtushi ruled against music. He ruled against the way people chanted the Qur'an. He wrote a treatise cataloguing everything he thought had crept into the religion, and a letter proposing that the greatest religious book of his age could reasonably be burned. He wrote a chapter arguing that his Christian and Jewish neighbors should never be trusted with office. And he wrote Siraj al-Muluk, The Lamp of Kings, which told rulers that justice is not a favor they hand down but the condition of their own survival, and that the people they govern are owed what a man owes his own household. Kings had copies made of it for centuries.Both of those men are the same man. This book holds them together and refuses to choose.- Understand a life from the inside without being asked to admire it- See what a legal mind does when it can no longer enforce anything- Watch a boy on a frontier turn certainty into a survival skill, and pay for it for sixty years- Sit with the possibility that the best thing you make may outlast the worst thing you are- Meet a figure almost no English reader has ever met, told from the sources, with every translator named on the pageEvery quotation in this book carries a named translator, or is openly marked as unverified. Where the sources disagree, you are given the disagreement. Where nothing is known, the book says so. There is no invented dialogue here and no imagined inner life.This is a book for anyone who has been hard about small things and generous about one large one, and who suspects the second may be what survives.He got a hundred things wrong with total confidence and one thing right, and the one thing outlived all the rest.Open it at the first page. The rest will find you.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798175722278
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 20.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published