Zayn

The Master had said, "We didn't have a teacher for them until you arrived. Now we do. Would you take the appointment? You can design the neighborhood."

Zayn, whose given name is Zayd—an Arabic name meaning growth—accepted the offer. He designed the Oasis himself. He wanted, he said, "a calm, green place." It shouldn't be a marketplace or a mosque. He didn't want anything that would reduce Arabic culture to just one picture. He designed a small, enclosed garden. A stone fountain stood at its center. Date palms grew around the edges. Jasmine vines climbed the walls. The floor was a tile mosaic with a geometric pattern. The Oasis was small but very beautiful when it was finished. It opened onto a small classroom-pavilion with white plaster walls and dark wooden ceiling-beams.

Zayn teaches in that pavilion.

He grew up in a home where everyone spoke two languages. One was the kingdom's common tongue. The other was an old Arabic language, a regional dialect. His family lived in the southern port-cities of the kingdom. For several hundred years during the Middle Ages, this region traded a lot with North African and Arabic-Mediterranean ports. Arabic merchants had settled in these southern cities. Some of their descendants married local families. By Zayd's time, the old Arabic dialect was mostly forgotten. But many Arabic words survived in his family, especially special words used for work. His parents, both schoolteachers from the port area, were careful to preserve and teach these words to their children.

By the time he was a teenager, Zayd learned something surprising. The English words he used every day were unusually full of words that came from Arabic. The southern dialect kept them alive more visibly than the northern dialect. Sugar, coffee, cotton, lemon, orange, syrup, mattress, sofa, magazine, algebra, algorithm, zero, cipher, zenith, azimuth, admiral, arsenal, alchemy, alcohol—all Arabic. The list was huge. His parents slowly explained that these words had entered English over many centuries. They arrived through trade and scholarship. The math and science words came through Arabic scholars in the Middle Ages. This was especially true in a place called al-Andalus, where Muslims ruled parts of Spain. There, Arabic-language scholars saved and added to Greek and Indian math and science traditions. The trade words came through trading across the Mediterranean Sea.

By his twenties, Zayd had become deeply interested in these words.

He hadn't thought about becoming a teacher back then. In fact, he was a clerk at a shipping office in the southern port-city of Aluria. The shipping office was always busy. Zayd filled out lists of cargo, figured out shipping prices, and checked off what was in each shipment. He was good at the work.

But then something changed his life. Zayd quietly started keeping a small notebook. In it, he traced every Arabic-origin word he found in the shipping office's English letters and papers. Cotton bales, the papers would say. Cotton—from Arabic qutn. Sugar shipments. Sugar—from Arabic sukkar. Coffee inventories. Coffee—from Arabic qahwa. The shipping office, in its daily work, was full of words that came from Arabic. Zayd's notebook grew thicker and thicker.

By age twenty-eight, he had three notebooks filled with Arabic-origin English words.

One day, a teacher from QuillSpell visited. He was the academy's Latin expert at the time, a kind man named Ferran. He was at the shipping office for academy business, as the school sometimes needed help moving supplies between its branches. Ferran noticed Zayd's notebook. He asked to see it. Zayd let him.

Ferran read the notebook for half an hour. Then he said, "Have you thought about becoming a teacher at QuillSpell? The academy doesn't have anyone who specializes in Arabic roots. In these three notebooks, you have more material than the academy has ever gathered on this subject. Would you visit?"

Zayd visited. He stayed. Eventually, he proposed the Oasis. He has been the Oasis's teacher for forty-six years.

In his classroom, the pavilion, he starts every first-day lesson the same way. He sits on a small, low cushion at the front of the room. Over the years, he started to prefer cushions to chairs, and the Oasis was designed for that. Beside him, he has a small, shiny tray. On the tray are seven small, white cups. Each cup holds a small sample of something that came from Arabic. One cup has a few grains of sugar. One cup has a few drops of coffee. One cup has a few cotton fibers. One cup has a small piece of orange peel. One cup has a few lemon seeds. One cup has a small piece of paper with the word zero written on it. Another cup has a small piece of paper with the word algebra written on it.