KHAZAR POLEMIC
Dimasci writes that during the polemic, which was to decide what confession the Khazar were to adopt, there was great unrest in the land. During the debate at the sumptuous court of the Khazar kaghan, the Khazar state started to walk. It was completely in motion. Nobody could meet anybody twice in the same place. A witness saw a crowd of people carrying huge rocks and asking: Where should we put them? They were the frontier stones of the Khazar Empire, the boundary markers. For Princess Ateh had ordered that boundary markers be carried, that they not touch the ground until it was decided what would happen to the Khazar faith. Exactly when this happened has not been established, but Al-Bakri <al-bakri.htm> notes that the Khazars adopted Islam before other religions, and that this was in the year 737 after Isa. Whether the conversion to Islam coincided with the polemic is a different question. It obviously. Thus, the year of the polemic remains unknown, but its essence is perfectly clear. Under strong pressure to adopt one of three religions--Islam, Christianity, or Judaism--the kaghan summoned the his court three learned men--a Jew who had been expelled from the caliphate, a Greek theologist from the university in Constantinople, and one of the Arab interpreters of the Koran. The Latter, named Farabi Ibn Kora <kora.htm> , was the last to join the polemic, because he had trouble getting to the kaghan's court. Therefore, the first to speak were the Christian and Hebrew representatives, and the Greek began winning the kaghan over to his side. A man with soupy eyes and freckled hair, he sat at the royal table and said:
"In a barrel the most important thing is the hole; in a jug, what is not the jug; in the soul, what is not man; in the head, what is not the head, which is to say the word . . . . Now, listen, you who do not feed on silence.
"Unlike the Saracens or Jews, in giving you the cross we Greeks will not take your word as security. You are not required to take up our Greek language with the cross; on the contrary, you may keep your Khazar language. But know that this will not be the case if you adopt Judaism or the law of Mohammed. If you adopt either of those religions, you will also have to adopt their language."
Upon hearing these words, the kaghan was prepared to accept the tenets of the Greek, but then Princess Ateh spoke up and said:
A man who sells birds to me that living in a town on the Caspian shores are two renowned artists--a father and a son. The father is a painter, the man told me, and you will recognize his work by seeing the bluest of all blues you have even seen. His son is a poet, and you will recognize his poems by feeling that you have heard them before, not from someone else, but from a plant or animal. . . .
I put on my traveling rings and set out for the Caspian shores. When I reached the town, I made inquires and found the two men. I recognized them immediately from the bird vendor's description: the father painted glorious pictures, and the son wrote marvelous poems in a lovely, entirely unknown (to me) language. I liked them both but they also liked me and asked: "Which of the two of us will you choose?"
"I have chosen the son," I told them, "because he doesn't need a translator."
But the Greek would not let himself be pulled by the earring, and remarked that we humans are whole because we are made of two who are lame, and that women can see because they are composed of two who are one-eyed. As an illustration he told the following story:
When I was a young man, I fell in love with a girl. She didn't notice me, but I didn't give up, and one evening I spoke of my love so passionately to Sofia (that was her name) that she embraced me and I felt her tears on my cheek. I immediately knew from their taste that she was blind, but that didn't bother me. We were still embracing when suddenly horse hoofs could be heard thudding through the nearby woods.
"Is that a white horse whose hoofs can be heard through our kisses?" she asked me.
"We don't and won't know," I replied, "until it comes out of the forest."
"You haven't understood a thing," she said, and at that moment a white horse emerged from the woods.
"Yes, I have, I've understood everything," I responded and asked her the color of my eyes.
"Green," she said.
"Look, my eyes are blue. . . ."
The kaghan was impressed by the Greek representative's story, and he was on the verge of adopting the Christian God when, sensing what was happening, Princess Ateh decided to leave. Before going, she turned to the kaghan and said:
This morning my master asked me whether I felt in my heart as he did in his. I had long nails with silver thimbles that whistled and I was smoking nargileh, blowing green smoke rings.
In answer to my master's question, I replied, "No!"--and my pipe dropped from my mouth.
My master departed, disheartened, because he didn't know that as I watched him go I was thinking: It would have been the same had I said yes!
The kaghan flinched at these words and realized that, although the Greek was wearing the voice of an angel instead of shoes, the truth was on the other side. Finally he turned to the caliph's man, Farabi Ibn Kora, and asked him for his interpretation of the dream he had dreamed on one of the previous nights. An angel had come to him in his dream with the message that God was pleased by his intentions, but not by his deeds. Then Farabi Ibn Kora asked the kaghan:
"In your dream, was it an angel of recognition or an angel of revelation? Did it appear in the form of an apple tree or something else?"
When the kaghan answered it had been neither, Ibn Kora remarked:
"Of course it was neither, because it was a third angel. That third angel is Adam Ruhani, and you and your priests are trying to lift yourselves up to him. Those are your intentions, and they are good. But you are trying to achieve this by conceiving Adam as a book being written by your dreams and your dream hunters <../red/hunter.htm> . Those are your intentions and they are wrong, for you perform them by creating your own book in the absence of the Holy Book. Since the Holy Book is given to us, accept it from us, share it with us, and discard your own. . . ."
Upon hearing these words, the kaghan embraced Farabi Ibn Kora, and that put an end to it all. He adopted Islam, doffed his shoes, prayed to Allah, and ordered the name bestowed on him by Khazar tradition, before his birth, to be burned.