What would you do for peace and stability? The City of Brass, by S.A. Chakraborty

 I am a few years late to the Daevabad trilogy, but every once in a while, the buzz is earned.  You should read S.A. Chakraborty's The City of Brass.  I have yet to read the next books in the series, but the first is outstanding.  Let us consider some very big questions of political leadership and the tradeoffs that one must make for the sake of peace and stability.  It is not often that I read a book and do not know where I stand.  I do not know where I stand.  It is extraordinarily difficult to nominate Ghassan al Qahtani, the reigning king in Daevabad, for the Nobel Peace Prize, but it is also difficult to say that he does not have a point, or even that he is acting out of selfishness.  He is not.  This is good.

The novel is about djinns, and I have never studied the mythology of djinns, but Chakraborty has.  I shall not bother to research what she invented, and what was based on historical lore because I do not care.  I have enough other items on my reading stack.  Anyway, djinns are fire elementals.  There are also water elementals (marids), air elementals (peris), and humans are of the Earth.  Long ago, djinns got far too involved in human affairs, and had affairs, and when humans and djinn procreated, the offspring were "shafit," who also had magical powers, which just spread more chaos.  Along came Suleiman, who put a curse on the djinn, directing them to stay out of human affairs, and to stop fucking humans and making shafit.  The aftermath was that one particular tribe of djinn-- the Daeva-- came to rule in Daevabad, the titular city of brass.  Its location is not precisely specified, being magical and hidden and such, but one can make some rough guesses based on the -bad suffix and some of the cultural distinctions between the Daeva and, say, the Geziri, who come from the southern part of the Arabian peninsula.  There are other tribes from locations ranging from North Africa to China.

Anyway, the Daeva come to power and harshly restrict any human-djinn procreation, because they don't want another Suleiman coming along.  Are there any corrupt deals in which they look the other way?  Yes, but that's politics, right?  Regardless, that's their approach.  And one can understand it.  If you have any sympathy for the shafit, though, you can sympathize with a rebellion led by the Geziri, overthrowing the Daeva in a war a millennium and a half before the book begins.  What, though, shall the Geziri do?  They have to manage the tribal conflicts, the possibility of another Suleiman, the attendant possibility of another curse, and hence they still must manage the shafit, and there are no easy answers.  That's the quick version of the backstory.

The novel starts in Cairo with Napoleon and the Ottoman Empire going back and forth over control of Egypt.  A girl in the streets who has some degree of healing powers, being shafit, is trying to scrape out a living when she accidentally summons an enslaved djinn and an ifrit, who duke it out.  The enslaved djinn, Dara, disappeared in the long-ago war, and is either Han Solo, Darth Vader, or both.  Kind of both.  He figures out what she is, and gets her to Daevabad.  Basically, the first quarter of the book is dull because it is just Dara getting Nahri to Daevabad, and "we are going on a quest" books are dull.  When they get to Daevabad, the fun starts because that's when you see the real problems.

King Ghassan al Qahtani is the Geziri ruler in Daevabad.  This guy is now one of my favorite characters.  Ghassan has no malice.  His only goals are peace and stability.  Dara shows up in Daevabad with Nahri in tow.  Ghassan has a problem.  He has many problems.  His first big problem is the management of inter-tribal conflict within Daevabad, and that means dealing with the Daeva.  You know what would help?  Cozying up to them.  Dara just dropped a major gift in his lap, if he can use her properly.  You see, the leaders of the Daeva were the Nahids-- healers, amongst other things.  The problem is that the Nahids are all dead, and that creates even more problems because djinns get magical illnesses which only Nahids can treat.  Ghassan comes up with a scheme.  Declare Nahri to be a pureblood Daeva-- a Nahid-- and marry her off to his eldest son.  Oldest trick in the book.

Dara?  Remember how I described him as both Han Solo and Darth Vader?  Ghassan's problem with him is that he is a folk hero to the Daeva, but maybe his war record is not exactly one of pure knight-like chivalry.  That's a whole, big mess of problems, right there.

Forgive and forget.  Peace and stability.

Then he has his second son, Alizayd.  Ali is about as close as you have to a truly sympathetic good guy, if a bit stiff.  A devout muslim, where everyone else is faking it, Ali is all about honor and all that.  More still, he cares about the shafit, so he's betrayed his own honor, in a sense, to try to help the shafit because wasn't that why his own family overthrew the Daeva in the first place?

Does Ghassan really not care about the shafit?

Well here's the problem, as Ghassan sees it.  He can't let the shafit out of Daevabad, because he cannot risk another Suleiman coming along.  The djinn have been cursed before, and Ghassan's remit is to prevent that.

But the shafit's conditions are horrendous!  And they are.  Money!  Jobs!  Ali has been studying human economics, such as they are in the Middle East in the late 18th Century, when capitalism was in its mere infancy, having not yet spread around the world.  Zero-sum thinking, which was at the core of monetarist ideology, still predominated, and that was how Ghassan understood the economic world.  Ali implores his father to consider the conditions of the shafit, and his father says, yes, but with what money?  With whose jobs?  Thinking that any benefit that goes to the shafit in the closed system of Daevabad must come at the cost of the purebloods, he rejects that too, leaving the shafit trapped, unable to achieve any economic advancement, and disallowed from leaving, in a system that has yet to understand what can come of abandoning zero-sum economic thinking.

And the only one with a chance of such "progressive" thinking is Ali, keeping in mind that this "progressive" idea-- capitalism-- is now falsely understood to be a force for oppression rather than emancipation.  The very economic forces that Ali wants to set in motion are those coming from a Scottish economist who wrote a book in 1776.

Great year, that.

From an economic perspective, trade is the answer, because voluntary trade is positive sum and the principle of comparative advantages will lead to efficient outcomes, but the mathematics here were not well developed in Ghassan's time, even as Ali was trying to learn them, while trying to help the shafit.

Remember, Ali is your conscience.  (Basically, your only conscience.)

Yet from a supernatural perspective, it wasn't clear Ghassan could do it anyway.  What kind of trade or economic arrangements could he make, given Suleiman's charge?  Would following Ali's guidance lead to civil war and the fall of the Qahtani, bringing back the harshest of the Daeva?  With their contempt for the shafit  (perhaps they simply round up and kill the shafit)?  Is Ghassan to listen to his Jiminy Cricket son?  Play that out.

It is not malice, as painful as it is to watch Ghassan reject Ali's entreaties, behind Ghassan's actions.  Rather, it is a constrained understanding of what he can do.  He has no malice, even towards Dara, knowing full well the brutality of Dara's actions in the past.

Is it forgiveness, truly, that motivates Ghassan when the worst war criminal in the history of the djinn shows up at his doorstep?  Ghassan understands that concepts like vengeance and forgiveness aren't even the point.  Dara shows up, and if keeping the peace means letting him walk, he walks.  Because what is the cost of doing otherwise?

Ghassan is an amazing leader, in some ways.  I'd hate the guy.  Yet, he is a characterization of the moral dictate that a leader's moral charge is not the moral charge of an individual citizen.  That is not to say he has a free pass to do immoral things.  We do not see him shoot a citizen on 5th Avenue just to prove that he can get away with it.  No, it isn't that kind of thing.  Instead, Ghassan is forced to make tradeoffs of a kind that an individual need not make.

Are his choices always right?  I'm not certain I can say that, but what is clear is that he is thinking first about peace and stability.  He is sacrificing his own honor and compassion.

Is that right?  You can make a strong case that he is wrong.  Would you sacrifice the shafit?  Read what they go through, and you may not.  You may just go with Alizayd.  Yet it is not out of disregard for the shafit that Ghassan does what he does, and to fail to recognize that is to fail to recognize the constrained nature of political choices.  Having not yet read the next two books, that looks like a set-up for another revolution to me.  The Geziri overthrew the Daeva because the Geziri led a coalition of tribes who couldn't stomach what was being done to the shafit, and if the Geziri can't live up to the promise, that coalition may collapse under its own weight.  Alizayd, after kinda-dying isn't going to play along, Nahri isn't really pureblood, and Dara?  Well.

But this is a moral question.  What tradeoff do you make?  How highly do you value peace and stability?  And how harshly do you judge a leader who places perhaps too high a premium on those values?

Consider the Civil War.  There is a contrarian perspective-- interesting, if only to check your reasoning-- based on the observation that it was unusual that the United States seemed to need a civil war to abolish slavery, when other countries found another way to move forward.  Advocates of this line of reasoning-- generally, those who seem sympathetic to the Confederacy-- ask, what if the North had let the South secede?  How long would slavery have endured?  Add up the dead, add up the numbers kept enslaved for that additional hypothetical period of time, and you have two sides of an inequality.  If the deaths on one side come up too high, it becomes morally defensible to side with the Confederate apologists.  If slavery were to endure too long in a hypothetical Confederacy, then Lincoln was right.  The calculus of constrained morality.

The shafit are kept in brutal conditions, and Ghassan is trying to avoid another civil war.  His family came to power promising better conditions for the shafit.  By the end of the first book, he is arguably James Buchanan, though.  It is hard to write that, as James Buchanan was the second-worst president in all of history.  Buchanan tried to steer a kind of middle path-- a middle passage, if you will-- on slavery, making an eventual war all but inevitable.  The damage that James Buchanan did to the country was not out of malice.  But, he fucking sucked.  He did not want the country to break apart, but he couldn't see a way through.

Ghassan is rather smarter than Buchanan, yet he is suppressing a conflict that is both cultural and ultimately one of moral atrocity where his tribe was supposed to be the one that rode to the rescue of the shafit.  He is trying to maintain peace and stability.  Good goals.

What if those are ultimately impossible?

Then just be right.  Be just.

Steve Tibbetts, "Wish," from Big Map Idea.