“Almahdi” by Sonja Srinivasan (Fiction ’19)

Almahdi

The conversion was an unlikely story.

For over two decades, Professor Philippe Halston had been the rock star at Rudyard University’s history department who brought in grants, acclaim, students, and visiting lecturers from afar, an expert on the Enlightenment and pre-Industrial Revolution secular European thinking. He lived an immaculate life with an immaculate house and an immaculate career untainted by failure. After getting his Ph.D., Rudyard had offered him the best deal: a low teaching load–and only graduate classes when he did have to teach–and a joint appointment in the history department and the magnificent-sounding Institute for European Studies, which was just an office with its own letterhead and three professors to its name. Philippe spent most of his days–and some of his nights–in the grand graduate library of Rudyard, with its elegant, molded, white, high ceilings. But one humid night, Philippe pulled the wrong volume from the shelf while trying to read up on Spanish Enlightenment thinking in the 18^th Century for a book he was reviewing.

The glossy, fuchsia-jacketed book was about Averroës, subtitled The Father of Western European Secular Thought. Philippe had heard the name discussed maybe once or twice in grad school, as the Andalucian Muslim scholar was given less recognition than other philosophers. He opened the book and skimmed the table of contents, as was his wont, thumbed through the illustrations and paintings, and landed on Chapter 3. He found it so fascinating that he devoured chapter after chapter of the brittle, yellowing pages while standing there at the stacks, and vowed to read the three other volumes on Averroës on the shelf. Philippe recognized a huge gap in his knowledge and felt immensely humbled that he knew so little about someone so influential to European thought. Only at 2 a.m. did he hear the thunder outside and decide to drive home before the storm hit. Though Philippe welcomed this intellectual diversion, he soon forgot it in the throes of his main research.