Fihrids

Kairouan was the only home her father had ever known, and it would be the only home Fatima would know for the whole of this chapter of her life.

To call Muhammad Al-Fihri simply a merchant would understate the shape of the man.

He dealt in the goods that moved along the trans-Saharan routes and the Mediterranean Sea lanes both.

Cloth woven in the workshops of Kairouan itself, leather tanned and worked by craftsmen whose names were known throughout the region, and increasingly gold and salt carried up from the caravan routes that stretched south into lands few in the city had ever seen with their own eyes.

He was a man who understood in his bones that wealth was not an end but an instrument, and that the measure of a life was not what one accumulated, but what one built with what one had accumulated.

This was not sentiment.

It was, in the Al-Fihri household, something closer to doctrine.

Picture, if you will, the courtyard of that house on an ordinary afternoon.