THE IFREET FATHER, Teresa Noelle Roberts 2/7
He lit a lamp, but that only made it worse. The flame took on the face of a djinni, telling him that his soul surely belonged to Iblis. Abdullah tried to pray, but he could not find a way to beg Allah for forgiveness that, even to his own ears, did not sound hollow. Even if he returned the emerald and confessed, the boy was still dead.
The djinni in the flame seemed to grow, filling the room. It called others of its ifreet kind to mock him, to tell he was irredeemably wicked.
He fled the room and tried to distract himself by talking to Labbannah, but being with her only reminded him that she would go to Paradise and he would go to Jahannam amongst the demons and the ifreet, the most evil of the djinn. He tried going out, but the voices of the ifreet dogged him on the street. He tried hiding again in his strong-room, but that was worst of all: alone in the strong-room, he was not alone at all, for his gems spoke to him with the voices of beautiful women, and he knew that for all his guilt and regret, he would succumb to their seduction and sin again.
Despair found fertile ground in his small soul, especially when the ifreet whispered to him that there was no hope.
Labbannah found him in the morning in his strong-room, his face black from suffocation, the great emerald lodged in his throat.
Labbannah wailed and tore at her garments. She had loved her father greatly, even if the face he showed her was far better than that he chose to show the rest of the world. And now he was not only dead, but disgraced and condemned to Jahannam. That jewel was surely Hamdun’s stolen emerald, the talk of all Cordoba. And on top of theft and sending another to his death, her father had added suicide to his sins.
A voice that sounded like her father’s whispered in her ear, “I am in neither Paradise nor Jahannam, but among the djinn.”
Sometimes when a djinni whispers in one’s ear, it sends a useful idea, not an evil one. Labbannah left off her weeping and ran for her books.
A day and a night she spent in research. When she found hints but no answers, she dressed herself in white garments of mourning, put a veil over her face like a pious countrywoman, and went to the Caliph’s great library, which was open to all in the city who could read.
As a precocious girl, Labbannah had befriended one of the librarians, a woman so old that her face had the shrunken, wrinkled look of an annoyed monkey or a newborn babe. Fatima’s mind, though, was sword-sharp, and from much study she knew something of every subject from alchemy to the zodiac.
“A person like your father, in whom bad and good war, may indeed be transformed to a djinni after death,” old Fatima confirmed. “The djinn, being formed of fire rather than ordinary flesh, live for centuries. In so much time the person would surrender to either to Iblis or to the Most High. But it is truly a test of a soul, for many among the djinn are evil, followers of Iblis, who is father to them all.”
“If my father could not resist temptation here in Cordoba, where there is a mosque practically on every corner, not to mention the temples of the Jews and the churches of the Christians, all telling one how to live a good life, what chance does he have surrounded by ifreet?”
“Is it not said that even the great-grandson of Iblis himself found his way to Paradise?”
“When guided by the Prophet himself.” Labbannah had found that story in her research. “I cannot imagine the blessed Prophet traveling from Paradise to save the soul of one fat, thieving merchant, even if deep down the merchant has good in him.”
“The Prophet, peace be upon him, would not, but you could. Since you were the person your father held dearest, you are more likely than even the Prophet to save him. But the journey will be hard, for you must go to the Kaf, the homeland of the djinn.”
“But the Kaf lies at the very edge of the world!” Labbannah had never set foot outside Cordoba, but with her father’s soul at stake, she found herself braver than she ever imagined. “Very well,” she said, trying to trust that all would be as it should be, “Inshallah I shall go to the Kaf.”
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