Death of the Profiteer

Sadriddin Ayni's novel of a Bukharan usurer. It opens with the narrator, a madrasa student in 1312 of the Hijri calendar, left without lodging: Bukhara had something like a hundred large madrasas and nearly as many small ones, yet no habitable cell could be found. All of them were formally waqf and unsellable under sharia, but fatwas from clerics practised in lawful stratagems had turned every cell into private property in the hands of men with money, and poor students were left struggling for somewhere to live. A friend mentions one Qari Ishkamba, who owns several bought cells and might lend one — and it is the name, rather than the prospect of a room, that catches the narrator's attention. Text in Dari/Persian.

Author: صدرالدین عینی

Original title: مرگ سودخور