KORA, FARABI IBN

(8th and 9th centuries)--The Islamic representative in the Khazar polemic. Reports about him are scarce and contradictory. He is not mentioned by Al-Bakri , the most important Islamic chronicler of the Khazar polemic. This is believed to be out of respect for Ibn Kora himself. That is, Ibn Kora did not like to have names mentioned in his presence, not even his own. He believed that a world without names was cleaner and purer. The same name conceals both love and hate, both life and death. He was fond of saying that revelation had come to him once when a fly was drowning in his eye as he watched a fish, and thus the fish feed on the fly. According to some records, Ibn Kora never even reached the Khazar capital and did not even take part in the famous polemic, although he had been invited to join. Al-Bakri claims that the Jewish participant in the polemic had dispatched a man to poison or slay Ibn Kora, but according to other sources, Farabi was detained on the way and arrived only after the debate was over. However, the outcome of the polemic shows that the Islamic representative was very much present at the court of the Khazar kaghan. When the participants were suprised to see Ibn Kora, for some of them thought he was dead and that his rings should be prepared for his funeral feast; he calmly crossed his legs, looked at them with eyes like two shallow dishes of onion soup, and said:

One of the principal arguments believed to have been used by Farbi Ibn Kora in the name of Islam has been preserved. The Khazar ruler showed the representatives of the three religions--the Jew, the Arab, and the Greek--a coin., It was triangular; one side bore a denomination of five tears (which is how the Khazars marked their money), and the other the image of a man on a bier showing a bunch of rods to three young men. The kaghan asked the dervish, the rabbi, and the monk to interpret the scene on the coin for him. According to Islamic sources, the Christian representative said that it had to do with an old Greek story: the father on his death bier shows his sons that they can be strong only if they stay together, like the unbreakable bunch of rods, but they are easy to break one by one if they are separated. The Jew said that the scene represented the limbs of the human body, which maintain the body only through common effort. Farabi Ibn Kora disagreed with both these interpretations, He claimed that the triangular numisma had been minted in hell, and that therefore, the scene on it could not be interpreted as his predecessors had done. It depicted a murderer who, because of his crime, had been condemned to drink poison and was already lying on the bier prepared for him. Standing in front of him were three demons: Asmodeus, the demon of the Hebrew Gehenna, Ahriman-Shaitan, the devil of Islamic Djehenem, and Satan, the devil of the Christian hell. The murderer held three rods in his hand, meaning that he would be killed if the three demons protected the murder victim, and saved if the demons decided against the victim. The message of the triangular coin was, therefore, clear. Hell had sent it to earth as a warning to men. A victim not represented by any of the three demons, the Islamic, the Hebrew, or the Christian, would remain un-avenged, and his murderer would be spared. The most dangerous thing, therefore, is not to belong to any of these three worlds as was the case with the Khazars and their Kaghan. Then you are entirely without protection and can be killed by anyone with no one having to pay for it.

Farabi Ibn Kora was clearly trying to show the kaghan that is was essential and unquestionably useful for him and his people to abandon their faith and convert to one of the three powerful confessions, depending on which representative was best able to interpret the world for him and offer the truest answers to his questions. Farabi Ibn Kora's interpretation of the scene seemed the most persuasive, and the kaghan accepted his arguments, submitted to Islamic teaching, removing his belt, and prayed to Allah.

Those Islamic sources that believed that Ibn Kora never took part in the polemic and never even reached the court of the Khazar kaghan, because he had been poisoned en route, cite a certain text that, they say, could be his biography. Ibn Kora was convinced that his entire life had already been inscribed in a book and was patterned according to a story told long, long, ago. He read A Thousand and One Nights and a thousand and two other similar stories, but nowhere did he find the one that he lived his life by. He had a horse so swift that its ears flew like birds, even when he stood in place. Then one day the caliph of Samaria sent him to Itil to win over the Khazar kaghan to Islam. Ibn Kora started preparing for his mission. Among other things, he obtained the poems of the Khazar Princess Ateh and found one that seemed to be what he had so long been looking for, the story that had patterned his life. The only thing that did not fit and that surprised Ibn Kora was that the text spoke of a woman, not a man. Everything else fit; even the kaghan's court was called a "school". Ibn Kora translated the account into Arabic, thinking how the truth was merely a trick. The translation is found in a Note About the Traveler and the School.