"Her Majesty?" Shirin searched for his eyes as she spoke, but they were shrouded in shadow. "Does she make laws for you now?"
"She disrupts my tranquility with all her talk about Islam and Shi'ites. Perhaps it's age. She never used to talk about the Shi'ites. But now she wants to bring the Islam of Persia to India. She forbade Sunni mullahs even to attend the wedding. But if it pleases her, what does it matter? I despise them all."
"But why Samad? Why sentence him to death?"
"Frankly I don't really care about this poet, either way. But he has not tried to help himself. When I allowed him to confront the mullahs who accused him, he refused to recite the Kalima, 'There is no God but Allah.'"
"What did he say?"
"Perhaps just to spite them, he would only recite the first phrase, 'There is no God,' the negation. He refused to recite the rest, the affirmation. He said he was still searching for truth. That when he finally saw God he would recite the remainder; that to affirm His existence without proof would be giving false evidence. I thought the mullahs would strangle him on the spot." Arangbar laughed to himself as he watched her turn again to the window. "You have to admit that qualifies as blasphemy, by any measure. So if the mullahs want him so badly, why not let them have him?"
"But Samad is a mystic, a pantheist." Shirin returned her eyes to Arangbar. "For him God is everywhere, not just where the mullahs choose to put Him. Do you remember those quatrains in his Rubaiyat that say,
"Here in the garden the sunshine glows,
A Presence moves in all that grows.
He is the lover, the belov'd too.