Theological Origins of Modernity

epilogue
He remembered it as if it were yesterday. He had been a young student in
the Nizamiya Madrasa in Baghdad, the greatest city in the world. He had
risen early, walked to the school down broad streets and dark alleyways,
past palaces with towering iron gates guarded day and night by large men
with great scimitars, by marbled mosques with golden spires blazing in
the sun, and through shaded bazaars fi lled with goods from Samarkand,
Cordoba, Lahore, and Marrakesh, jostled by the endless multitude of the
faithful and the unfaithful who called the city home. He had been on his
way to hear his teacher, the one they called Th e Guide to the True Faith.
He’d hoped to arrive early to fi nd a place amidst the throngs of students
and scholars who came to hear the teacher speak. But that day there had
been no soft voice explaining the words of the Prophet and the wisdom
of the philosophers. His teacher was not there. No one knew why. Later,
they’d learned that he had been overcome by some kind of ailment, unable
to eat or drink or speak. What could have caused such a thing? Th ey’d
prayed that God the benefi cent would cure him, but as the days passed he
did not return to the school. Years later they learned he had been overcome
by doubt and despair. Who could blame him? Th ere was reason to despair.
Th eir world was falling to pieces. Vizier Nizam al-Mulk, the great patron
of learning, had been murdered by an Isma’ili assassin, and the Seljuk Sultan
Malikshah, who had brought victory to the faithful, and with it peace
and prosperity, had died suspiciously of food poisoning less than a month
later. Both were replaced by incompetents.
Th eir teacher had left Baghdad, abandoning all of his worldly goods and
his glittering career, wandering for ten years in the west from Damascus
and Jerusalem to Alexandria, Medina, and Mecca, before settling in his ancestral
Tus far in the east. What years those had been! Th e empire shaken
by internal strife, coarse Turkomen appearing everywhere, menacing the