AL-BAKRI, THE SPANIARD

(11th century)--Principal Arab chronicler of the Khazar polemic. His text was only recently published (Kunik and Rosen, 44), translated from the Arabic by Marquart (Osteuropaische und ostasiaische Strifzuge, Leipzig, 1903, 7-8). Along with Al-Barkri's, another two reports on the Khazar polemic (i.e., conversion) have been preserved, but they are incomplete, and it is not always clear whether they refer to the Khazar's conversion to Judaism, Christianity, or to Islam. In addition to Al-Istakhri's report, this part of which has been lost, there is also a report of Masudi the elder, the author of Golden Pastures, who believed the Khazars had abandoned their faith during the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786-809), a time when many Jews were being expelled from Byzantium and from the caliphate to Khazaria, where they were received without resistance. The other chronicler of the polemic was Ibn Al-Athir, but his testimony has not been preserved in its original form--it comes to us from Dimasci. Finally, as the most reliable and most exhaustive source, there is Al-Bakri, who claims that, after the year 731 and the wars with the caliphs, the Khazars accepted peace and Islam from the Arabs. Indeed, the Arab chroniclers Ibn Rustah and Ibn Fadlan mention many Islamic places of worship in the Khazar Empire. they also speak of a "twofold kingdom", which can be taken to mean that at one point Islam was adopted in the Khazar state on an equal footing with some other confession, and the kaghan professed the religion of Mohammed, while the Khazar king espoused Judaism. According to Al-Bakri, the Khazars subsequently converted to Christianity and finally, after the polemic under Kaghan Sabriel-Obadiah in 763, which the Islamic representative did not attend because he was poisoned on route, they adopted Judaism.

Al-Bakri believed the crucial moment when the Khazars first deserted their faith and converted to Islam. The Holy Book has many levels to it--he wrote--as confirmed by the first imam when he says, "Not a single word of this book sent through the Angel descended from heaven without his dictating it to my pen; not one was written without my repeating it aloud, and each he explained to me eight times: the literal meaning and the spiritual sense, the line that is changed by the preceding line and the line that changes the succeeding line, mystery and ambiguity, the particular and the general." Following some of the indications marked by the medical authority Zachary Razi, Al-Bakri believed that the three religions--Islam, Christianity, and Judaism--could be taken as three levels of the Holy Book. Every nation adopts these levels from the Holy Book in the order that suits it best, thereby expressing its deepest nature. He did not take the first level of meaning into consideration, because this is the literal level, called avam, and it is accessible to everyone regardless of his faith. The second level--the level of allusions, of figurative meanings, called kavas and understood by the elite--represents the Christian church, and covers the present moment and the sound (voice) of the Book. The third level, called avila, embracing occult meanings, represents the Jewish level in the Holy Book, the level of mystical depth and numbers, the Book's alphabetical level. And the forth, anbia, the level of prophetic rays and tomorrows, represents the Islamic teaching in its most essential meaning, the spirit of the Book, or the seventh deep of the deep. In first accepting the highest level (anbia), and only later the other levels of the Holy Book, and even then not in sequence, the Khazars showed that Islamic teaching suited them best. After that, they never really abandoned Islam, although they went on to convert to Christianity and then to Judaism.

Proof of is that, before the collapse of the Khazar Empire, the last Khazar kaghan converted back to the faith that had originally been adopted and espoused Islam, as Ibn al-Athir recorded so well.

The report of the Spaniard Al-Bakri was written in carefully chosen Arabic, the same spoken by the angels, but in the last years of his life, when he was already old, Al-Bakri's style changed. He had started to feed his sixty-seventh year; he was bald, left-handed, and right-legged; and all that he still sported was a fine pair of big eyes, like two small blue fish. One night he dreamed that a woman was knocking on his door. From the bed he could clearly see, through an opening in the door, her moonlit face, which she had powdered with fish flour the way virgins do. When he got up to let her into the house, he found that she was not standing at the door knocking, but sitting on the ground. Seated, she was as tall as Al-Bakri. But when she began to pull herself to her feet, it took so long and she rose so high that Al-Bakri took fright and woke up, only to find himself not in his bed, where he had been dreaming the dream, but in a cage above water. He was a young man of twenty, left-legged, with long curly locks and a long beard, to which an utterly unexplained memory was tied--he was dipping his beard in wine and washing the breast of a girl with it. He did not know a single word of Arabic, and with his jailer, who baked him bread out ground fly flour, he spoke fluently in a language that the jailer understood but he himself did not. He really knew no language any more, and this was the only trace of his old, pre-waking self. The cage hung suspended over the water; when the tide came in, only his head peeked over the waves, but when it went out, he could catch a crab or a turtle with his hand, because the sea receded and the river rose, and he washed the salt water off with fresh water. He wrote in his cage by using his teeth to cut letters into the shell of a crab or turtle, but since he did not know how to read what he had written, he dropped the animals back into the water, never knowing what messages he was sending out into the world. At other times, catching turtles at low tide, he would receive messages on their shells and read them, but he never understood a word of what he read. He died dreaming of salty female breasts in a gravy of saliva and toothache, relearning the language of the Holy Book from the tree on which he hung.