Finally! After over a month of work, it is finally complete!

Jonathan Edelstein has always been one of my favourite short fiction writers, as evidenced by my numerous binds of his previous works. But this is my most ambitious of them all to date. A 335-page chonker of his short stories about the Mutandaverse — A sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, Afrocentric and Afrofuturistic universe.

Jonathan Edelstein has cropped-up in this blog for several times now, and not without good reason. I knew him from almost a decade ago on an internet forum and his stories - short and long-form - have captivated me by their depth and ingenuity.

So no surprise, I decided to bind yet another short fiction of his. After my first two binds of his work, I actually made a promise to myself to bind two more stories of Jonathan's before the year closes out.

One of them was Of Letters They Are Made, and the other is this: The Purim of the Philosophers.

Ever since I started fanbinding, this short story has been on my to-turn-into-a-book list for months.

I can only hope I have done the story justice!

I maaaaay have overused the drawings of Shaun Tan for this particular bookbind.

I may or may not be sorry.

After the month-long odyssey that was my last bookbind, I decided to take it easy and embarked on something much simpler and easier: a short story.

Then I decided to rizz it up a bit by adding photos, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Edelgard reminds me of no character more than Paulo Abacar from Jonathan Edelstein’s alternate history webnovel Malê Rising (started in 2012), which I strongly recommend reading (this post mostly relates to the 1840-1854 arc, which is covered by the first 12 pages of the thread.).  

Malê Rising’s premise is that the Malê Rebellion, a revolt of Brazilian Muslim slaves and freedmen, does well enough under the leadership of Paulo Abacar that the Brazilian government buys them off by exiling them to Africa, where they take over the western part of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1840, overthrowing Sultan Ali bin Bello (who flees to Adamawa) and establish the Sokoto Republic, a radical ideological state based on Islamic liberation theology, and Jacobin republicanism, with the ultimate goal of creating a state strong enough to suppress the slave trade and slavery and spread liberty through conquest.  

Although the First Sokoto Republic is nominally a republic lead by a council of ministers, among them economics minister Joao de Silva (the leader of a more secular and democratic faction), war minister Amilcar Said (the leader an authoritarian faction, who wants to build a new caliphate through “Jacobin jihad”), and education minister Nana Asma’u, the daughter of the founder of the overthrown Sokoto Caliphate and Bello’s aunt, who prefers peaceful expansion. Abacar occasionally overrides the council, though, when he feels it is necessary.

In 1843, he allies with the British Empire, agreeing to become their proxy in the Cockpit of Africa in exchange for money for the construction of mills and foundries.  In 1849, he invades the slaver empire of Dahomey (and the city-states of the Borgu peoples, who happened to be in the way.).

Although Dahomey is defeated, Abacar is killed in the siege of Dahomey’s capital, Abomey, after which the British take over Dahomey, the Borgu chiefs reassert their independence, and Amilcar Said establishes himself as emir over most of the Sokoto Republic’s territory, with the exception of a rump republic led by Joao de Silva around the cities of Ilorin and Jebba.

How do I say that they are similar?

1. Both Abacar and Edelgard had a deeply traumatic period in their teenage years when they were brutalised and when they saw many people they cared about die, and then resolve to never let anything like what they had gone through happen to them ever again. (In Abacar's case, it was being a slave in Brazil, where the majority of slaves historically died within the first decade of their service, after which he comitted to do everything in his power to abolish slavery and the slave trade.)

2. Both believe in spreading liberty through conquest. (Abacar adds "like Napoleon".) Additionally, both believe that they will win in the long term even if their state collapses and they die, which they view as a probable outcome. Paulo Abacar is not fazed when he hears that Sokoto's economy can only last for three more years without outside support, and that even with the help of the Royal Navy, the Sokoto Republic would still have a coin flip's chance of making it through the next decade. He believes that as long as his ideology exists, his people have tasted freedom, and the slaver empires are destroyed, it will be impossible for the injustices of the past to continue. "Prometheus gave fire to humanity, and for this was cast down by the gods and punished, but the gods could not take fire away from humanity; Napoleon spread liberalism through Europe before being defeated, and was cast as foreign and abhorrent, but his ideas took root and sprang forth again in 1848.”

3. Both believe in Imam Shafi’i’s maxim that “knowledge without action is arrogance”, although of course Edelgard has never heard of Shafi’i.  However, in Edelgard’s case, this (¾ of the time) results in her downfall, as she acts too quickly and with insufficient consideration.

4. Both of them intend to create a centralised and meritocratic system of government, but initially give military elites and members of the local nobility who are willing to support them power in government (Large parts of Sokoto are still ruled by local emirs, chiefs, and so forth until 1847, and many of said emirs and chiefs retain power as governors even afterwards.)

5. Both are willing to make compromises in the name of expanding righteousness.  Abacar uses the tactics of slave-catchesrs agaisnt the French army in the Napoleonic war, becomes a member of the militia of the same country that kept him as a slave, and later agrees to become Britain’s enforcer in the Cockpit of Africa in exchange for money and guns.

Additionally, the relations of Abacar to the other two great reformers of the Cockpit of Africa are echoed in FE3H.

El-Hadj Umar Tall, the Tukulor Caliph, used to be respected by Abacar, but they break with each other after the establishment of the Sokoto Republic, and then Tall (who previously was just trying to be an enlightened absolute monarch who helped the underclasses like Usman dan Fodio) turned into a reactionary primarily motivated by wanting Abacar's head on a pike for heresy and apostasy. Abacar, however, still believes that Tall is a good ruler and inspired, and even despite knowing that a confrontation that leaves only one of them alive is inevitable (or would be if Abacar was not killed in Dahomey), tells Tall that he should at least eliminate slavery if he wantsto walk the path of righteousness, which Tall accepts.

As for his relationship with Ali bin Bello, who he overthrew in his coup that established the first Sokoto Republic :

Abacar : I'll work with you so long as you free the slaves and respect the Rights of Man and Citizen.

Bello : NO

Abacar : [coups Bello, who escapes to Adamawa, which fights an inconclusive war against Sokoto]

Bello [to the Sultan of Adamawa] : I DEMAND that you free the slaves and respect human rights in your new territories

Sultan of Adamawa : [exiles Bello to Kanem Bornu]

Abacar : WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL ME YOU BELIEVED THAT 3 YEARS AGO????

Bello : [founds a sect who believe that politics is too inherently backstabby to mix with religion, gets politically involved anyway, gets exiled to Arabia, gets captured by the Saudis, talks his way out]

Of course, there are quite a lot of differences, too!

Most notably, Abacar is deeply religious, and his belief is intensified by oppression, while Edelgard's faith is broken. These are diametrically opposed…

Or are they? It has been speculated on the FE reddit that, for Edelgard, belief that she is on the wrong side of history has replaced her religious belief, and what is Abacar's view of God but a force guiding the world to righteousness?  Abacar believes that a ruler or thinker of any or no religion can be righteous so long as they value liberty, that old customs that are unjust must be destroyed, and that over-commitment to orthodoxy is a political straightjacket.

Another difference is that, while Abacar refuses any title, Edelgard declares herself to be an Emperor.  This is partially a result of different political socialisation (there does not appear to be a republican tradition in the FE3H world that Edelgard knows about, while Abacar is inspired by America, France, Haiti, and Paraguay, at a very minimum, Edelgard is the rightful heir to a monarchy, and the person Abacar tries to set himself up as a successor to (Usman dan Fodio) never took political title), and partially a result of their different ages (remember that Abacar spent 30 years traveling the world, learning, thinking, healing, and writing poetry before becoming leader of the Malê, while Edelgard becomes leader of Adrestia only a few years after being freed from dubstepper captivity.)

Oh, and Abacar dies in his first major confrontation with a regional power, namely Dahomey, while on the offensive, in a battle that his forces win. Edelgard, in 3 out of 4 paths, ends up with her back to the wall and lashes out. The other one is the one in which she wins.  The only time we see Abacar with his back to the wall is in 1808, during the Peninsular War, when he is in his early 20s and has only recently escaped from slavery.  This is when he uses the tactics of Bahian slave-catchers against a French spy, because to be able to use a skill in pursuit of liberty and not do so is arrogant ;  however, by the time he leads Sokoto in his 50s, he is somewhat less willing to use bad means to pursue good ends.

(also, Abacar is 5'3" or 5’4”, wears a red uniform [based on a Peninsular War era British uniform] when on campaign after 1843, is depicted in platform boots in a now-deleted artwork, and there's also a cargo cult rebellion in Brazil in the 1850s that believes that he held the flaming sword of Allah and that after his death he used it to fight against the gods of slavers in Heaven.)

Although the Sokoto Republic collapsed after little more than a decade, Abacarism became a major force in Malê Rising.  The jajis (traveling religious teachers) spread Abacarist Islam to the Yoruba peoples, who united with the Ilorin Republic into the Oyo Alliance, which was strong enough to exact concessions from the British Empire, as was the Sokoto Empirate, which, despite falling to authoritarianism, retained many of the practices which made the original Sokoto Republic strong, and on the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of the First Sokoto Republic, the Emirate was overthrown and the Second Sokoto Republic lasts to the present day.  Although Abacar never came close to his dream of a Nijeriyya Republic stretching from Futa Jallon to Ouaddai, many of the states in that region, like the Tukulor Caliphate, the Adamawa Emirate, and the Kanem Bornu Empire, developed and centralised in response to the Sokoto Republic, limiting European colonialism, and resulting in a more prosperous Africa as a whole.  Abacarism spread as far as Indonesia, and would inspire other reformist ideologies like Belloism.  And, eventually, many of the states in the area unite into an EU-style democratic supranational entity.  

P.S. :  Although this might seem like Adrestian propaganda, I actually think Claude would probably be the best ruler of the three, even though he’s a SOB. (If Edelgard had spent a decade travelling, thinking, and writing, like Abacar did, before taking over Adrestia, it might be different.) However, Edelgard’s war was necessary to prompt reform.  If Fodlan had continued as it did, it likely would have ended up being colonised.  

The Ray Bradbury Challenge: Day 629

Short story: The Examination of Cloth by Jonathan Edelstein, from Beneath Ceaseless Skies, May 2018. Recommended.

Poem: Domestic Violence by Roger Reeves, listened to on the Poem of the Day podcast, from May 2018. Highly Recommended.

Essay: Biblical Series VI: The Psychology of the Flood by Jordan Peterson. Recommended.

What is the Ray Bradbury Challenge?