Sahnun

There is also, running through the era, a current of religious contention, for Kairouan is a city where the Maliki school of jurisprudence has become deeply entrenched, and its scholars, proud and often independent-minded, do not always sit comfortably beneath the authority of an emir who they feel oversteps the proper bounds between worldly power and religious governance.

The great jurist Sahnun, whose influence over Maliki law in Ifriqiya will prove foundational for centuries, is a contemporary of this period, and the currents of scholarly and political tension that swirl around figures like him are part of the same unsettled atmosphere that Fatima's family lives within.

For a merchant family like the al-Fihris, all of this The taxation, the military tension, the religious and political undercurrents translates into something very practical, an erosion of the predictability upon which trade depends.

Muhammad Al-Fihri has built his life's work on the assumption that goods can move safely along the roads, that prices will hold roughly steady from season to season, that the relationship between a merchant and the authorities who tax him will remain within understood bounds.