Keeper of the Words

About this book

He drank the water of Zamzam for three things. He named two. He never told anyone the third.If you have ever gone back to work the morning after a funeral, and felt guilty for the small relief of doing something you knew how to do, this book was written for you.In fifteenth-century Cairo, Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani set out to write a commentary on the Sahih of al-Bukhari, the most revered collection of the Prophet's sayings. It took him twenty-five years. In those years he buried all five of his daughters: two to the plague in a single month, one after she came home ill from pilgrimage, one at twenty-one after losing her own husband and child, and the eldest with a baby inside her. After every funeral, he went back to the desk. The book he finished, Fath al-Bari, is still open on the desks of scholars all over the world.Keeper of the Words is a narrative biography, told in scenes and drawn closely from the record kept by his devoted student al-Sakhawi. It follows an orphan who first heard al-Bukhari by accident, through a window in Mecca, and never knew which pages he had missed; a young poet who caught a friend borrowing lines; a scholar who humiliated a rival before the sultan and wrote a cruel pun that all of Cairo repeated; a husband whose wife once prayed against him, and stayed; a chief judge who feared what office did to men and took it anyway; and an old man who fell in love at sixty-one, in a city far from his graves.In these pages you will: Feel why the work you kept doing through your worst grief was never a betrayal of the people you lost See how a life's great work can become the place where the dead are kept Meet a real scholar, proud and funny and sometimes petty, instead of a stained-glass saint Walk the Cairo, Mecca, Damascus and Aleppo of the Mamluk age, where every chain of the Prophet's words passed through human hands Nothing here is dressed up. Where the sources are silent, the book says so. Where the author imagines, the book tells you.This is a book for anyone who has carried a grief to work that nobody there could see, and for anyone who loves the long, patient labor of keeping words alive.On the morning he was buried, a cloud came over a city where it almost never rains, and let down a little water that nobody had asked for.Open the first page. He is still keeping them.