04. 08. 2020.
Rome, Castel Sant'Angelo
02:45 GMT +2
Mudar sat and silently considered the missives scattered across the low table before him. News from the western wilayahs was troubling however there appeared to be some positive indicators from the unofficial mission to the Cossacks along the northern shore of the Black Sea that negotiations may be possible. The revolution had been difficult, he was not a military man and his background as an academic had not prepared him for the campaign. Force of arms had triumphed and he had gone from the head of an a little known Islamist Party to the ruler of the civlized world but he was keenly aware that the actual strategist and architect of their victory was the Chechen, Emir Umar Ivanovitch Ryzaev.
Ryzaev was not an evil man, nor was he particularly adept at political maneuvering. Perhaps that was why the warlord was loyal to Mudar who as a Professor of Political Economy was reasonably talented at managing both sectors of the state. Their initial policy points, the construction of regional regime controlled Madrassas to educate a cadre capable of filling out the administration of the Caliphate, and the tabulation of all goods and means of production within the boundaries of the ummah for eventual expropriation in order to further develop the core provinces were his brainchildren-he was aware that they were desperate plays. The only possible means of stabilizing the ummah would be foreign investment and the normalization of diplomatic relations with as many of the global powers as possible.
The Islamic Revolution demanded an uncompromising stance towards the pagan nations. Mudar was less religious than a man titled Caliph may be expected to be but there would only be so much that the hardliners and the more devout citizenry would tolerate. Hajid Yacine, Maahir al-Damascus, and Celik Osman were all men after his own heart. Yacine and al-Damasus had both been his colleagues at the State Political Institute in Communist times and both had come to religion only as a pragmatic stand-in for the discredited materialism of the 20th century.
The other two, Ryzaev and Turkovic were warriors and constituted the hardliner faction within the council of Emirs. Mudar trusted Turkovic as the man had been a colonel in the Red Army before the dissolution of the Arab and Turkish Socialist Federation, he was at least a professional. Ryzaev was a natural talent such as that could exist in the profession of arms. He had come of age fighting the Cossacks in the romantic mountains of the Caucasus,trading blow for blow and taking part in the myriad feuds that consumed the mountain peoples. At the time of the Islamic Revolution when Mudar and his colleagues had lead a motley “battalion” of students and veterans to seize the office of the Presidium of the Arab and Turkish Socialist Federation from the remnants of the Revolutionary Guard, Ryzaev had descended from the mountains with his Mujaheddin and seized the Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Republic, a satellite of the ATSF. The choice had been apparent then, the Revolution relied upon the martial prowess of Ryzaev and when prowess didn’t work he employed ruthlessness.
These talents were all fine and well when they had been driving the Imperialist Crusaders from the Ummah and even when they were carrying the green banner abroad in service of the lesser Jihad, but now in the days of civil administration it was a complication if not a hindrance to the Caliph. He drummed his finger along the armrests of his chair and returned to the present. Mudar was alone in his office, he worked long hours and it was surely long after the rest of his non-essential staff had gone home. He rose and stretched, his body ached from a mixture of old rugby injuries and the more recent pains from the revolution. Despite not being a military man he had lived rough as any for the last several months and even now being in Rome was not restful.
The Castel Sant’Angelo had been expropriated from the Holy See and turned into the personal residence and office of the Caliph. It had been fortified beyond those that pre-dated the modern era and was jokingly called, Qanafadh or hedgehog because of the defenses that now bristled from the elegant structure. In the immediate aftermath of conquest the Caliph had walked nearly every street in the city, guarded by the Roman contingent of the Liwa al Aluminin. The academic in him delighted in the knowledge that he was treading the same streets as Cato or Cicero, but the statesman in him could recognize that the population and the distance from the heart of the Ummah made the Eternal City only a temporary capital.
Truthfully the apparatus of state was not meaningfully shifted from Baghdad and in reality only the absence of the Caliph deprived the ancient city between the Tigris and Euphrates of the august position of capital. It was inevitable that they would have to return to the East, though Baghdad would be imprudent due to its extreme distance from the new western provinces which, fractious as they were now, would someday constitute the economic heart of the Caliphate. Mudar grabbed hold of a cold china cup that had been filled with pungent black tea, it was ice cold and had been set down steaming hot by his receptionist some hours ago.
The Caliph drank it and reflected that his son would be devastated if he ordered his family to relocate. Arham ibn Mudar was an enthusiastic classicist and because of his Greek mother from Trebizond and Mudar’s own ambiguous ethnic roots in Damascus he identified as Rumani. Mudar had tolerated the boy erecting a shrine to Sol Invictus and carrying a dog eared copy of Caesar’s Gallic War everywhere he went between ages 7 and 14.
Even now the Caliph was informed by his intelligence agencies that the young man was investing whatever money he could find into the formation of a syncretic lodge that professed to examine the Abrahamic religions to find commonalities and rites that could be associated with the so called, “hyborian” past. Followers of the book were guaranteed religious freedom providing they paid the Jizya, pagans were not, and the fact that his son flirted with overt paganism was a headache for the Caliph who could not bring himself, as an academic, to outlaw study that violated the Quran-despite the recommendations of his advisers. The Caliph was a deeply religious man, not slavishly so however and this allowed him to offer some leeway, but the word of god was relatively inflexible and someday he knew he would have to reign in his son.
They would have to leave Rome. Perhaps Arham could remain but the government would have to leave. He returned to his seat and penned a short order that would transfer his household and staff to Constantinople. A second order was written to shift the State Economic Planning Ministry from Baghdad to the same city of the world’s desire. The question of foreign investment and diplomacy would have to be addressed on a subsequent day, but Mudar was able to rest knowing that he settled at least one of the pressing issues on his schedule.
