Sold through ARTSHARKS ARTHouse
By Reda Abdulrahman

Farook had committed the seventeenth deadly sin.

In Agrabaja, the sultan had two deadly sins: an inexplicable lethargy and, as a result, far too much time on his hands. This was, of course, back in the day when a sultan reigning was a sultan born; a madman could access the throne as readily as a genius. On the spur of the moment, he instigated many creations and events birthed from his eccentricities. His subjects had been often, for instance, subjected to organizing tiger races, golden camel sculpture competitions, and sowing the sands with the royal jewels so that emerald trees and ruby roses would emerge and blossom.

Of course, all that didn’t work. The tigers rebelled, striping many of the hapless onlookers. The camels glistened to life, and then galloped away with half the kingdom’s fortune in their humps and hooves. The jewel trees bloomed steadily throughout the rain season until the summer sun withered them to ashes.

When the sultan’s schemes unraveled, he simply thought up new ones. He prided himself in his ingenuity and imagination. This time, inspired by some scattered biblical readings he’d found in his late father’s extensive library, he decided to make a list of deadly sins. Any of his subjects who acted upon one of those sins would be exiled to the desert along with those runaway tigers and camels.

At first, the sins were basic enough. Killing. Stealing. Kissing your brother’s wife. But as the sultan became obsessed with lengthening the list, he had to come up with more outlandish sins. By the fifteenth sin, it was illegal to hang out your underwear to dry in the sun, because it could be a tempting sight from a neighbor’s window. By the sixteenth sin, it was forbidden to kill ants, because ants embodied servitude and this should be encouraged in the kingdom. But the seventeenth sin, it was inexcusable to cook with onions, because onions had a putrid smell when they were discarded and tossed into the streets, and this offended the sultan’s nose. He claimed the winds carried these smells even to the highest window of his palace.

Farook joined the men and women—by their number they could have made up a small village—and shouldered his belongings on his back and his horse’s. He had been making leek soup for dinner. Like so many others, he hadn’t heard of the seventeenth deadly sin. The sultan’s nose had caught him, and patrolling guards had seized him.

The men and women followed the beacon of the setting sun and made their way across the deserts. They walked for many miles and many moons, until the sun lingered in the sky for nearly all night as well as all day, and the terrain became rocky and green. They people they met here were pale-faced but warm-hearted, and welcomed them and their horses and camels. Farook was spellbound by a sign from Allah, confirming that this was their promised land. The houses of worship in this land were topped by onion-shaped domes.

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