“You may be strangers,” said ibn Samman, “but our lord Oromasd is not. We, the Badawi, are the specially favored children of Oromasd. The farmers who tend their fields and their flocks, the city dwellers who run their commerce, none of them know Oromasd the way the Badawi do. They are caged up inside their concerns, and they think of Oromasd as something apart from themselves, something distant and special. We see Oromasd every day in the world about us, we travel constantly through the land he made. We feel the coolness of his breezes and the warmth of his sun and the sweetness of his water. He is most truly our father—and is it not written than a son shall defend his father’s honor?
“You say the cause is so remote from our daily life, O wizard, yet the cause is here all about us. Each d
