Ustad Kamran arrived, as he always did, precisely at the seventh hour of the day.
It was not a minute before, and never a minute after. In eleven years of tutoring Shehzade Ali al-Shirazi, the man had not once been late, had not once cancelled his lessons without three days prior notice which he delivered in writing, and had not once been caught off guard by anything Ali said in these eleven years. He took a particular professional pride in this and Ali was aware of it. Ali found it, if he was being honest with himself, a personal challenge.
The study was the best room in Ali's wing of the palace which was adorned with high ceilings, a latticed window that let the morning light fall in geometric patterns across the floor, shelves built floor to ceiling along three walls and filled with more books than most universities in Faras could claim. The Sultan had spared nothing on his son's education. Whatever else Bahram al-Shirazi felt about his boy who had a weak Rooh and the Saint's warning hanging over his cradle, he had made certain that his boy's mind would be unimpeachable.
Ali was already seated when Kamran entered, which was unusual. Normally Ali arrived precisely thirty seconds after his tutor, a habit Kamran had long since given up commenting on. Today Ali had been at his desk since the Fajr prayer, with a cup of tea that had long gone cold at his elbow, three books were open in front of him and a fourth was in his hand.
Kamran stopped just inside the doorway and looked at him the way a man looks at a familiar road that has unexpectedly developed a new turning.
"You slept poorly," he commented.
"I did sleep fine," Ali argued calmly, while turning a page without looking up. "I woke up early today. So, there is a difference."
"There is." Kamran set his leather satchel on the chair across the desk and began removing his materials with the unhurried precision of a man who had been doing this since long enough that the ritual itself was a form of thought. "What are you reading?"
"Kitab al-Kharaj. Ibn Qudama's commentary on the original. And before you ask any further, yes, I have already read the original which I did read two years ago, and I am currently reading the commentary because Ibn Qudama disagrees with three of the original conclusions and I want to understand whether his disagreement is principled or political."
Kamran sat and folded his hands on the desk with the patience of a man who had learned that the best thing to do when Shehzade Ali was in this particular mood was to let it develop at its own pace. "And which is it?"
"It's political which is dressed as principled." Ali set the book down and finally gazed at his tutor. "The third conclusion in which he challenges the concerns of the taxation of travelling merchants versus settled ones. The original text argues that travelling merchants should be taxed at a lower rate because their contribution to trade routes benefits the Sultanate beyond the simple value of their goods. Ibn Qudama argues they should be taxed equally because equal taxation is just." Ali took a pause before he continued speaking again.
"Ibn Qudama was appointed to his position by the Settled Merchants' Guild of Baghdad. The Guild had been lobbying against preferential rates for travelling merchants for forty years before he wrote this commentary."
Kamran was quiet for a moment. "That context is not in the text."
"No, it's not but, it is in a footnote in a separate administrative history of the Baghdad court that is shelved under political biography rather than economics. Nobody cross references them which they should."
Kamran looked at his student with the expression he reserved for moments like this — not quite pride, not quite surprise, something that sat precisely between the two and refused to commit to either. He had tutored the sons and daughters of three noble families before the Sultan had summoned him to the palace. None of them had read footnotes in administrative histories for recreation.
"What you are describing," Kamran chose his words carefully, "is a form of institutional corruption that predates Wazir Farhad by several decades."
Ali's expression did not change. "I am just describing a pattern and patterns are interesting."
"Patterns can also be dangerous to discuss openly."
"I am not discussing it openly. I am discussing it with you. In a room with no windows facing the courtyard." Ali leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling in the way he did when he was thinking about something he had already finished thinking about and was simply arranging the conclusion for presentation.
"Ustad. If a Sultanate's taxation policy has been shaped for forty years by the commercial interests of one guild, and if that policy has over those forty years measurably reduced the prosperity of travelling merchants while increasing the wealth of settled ones, and if the settled merchants now control enough of the court's financial advisory positions to prevent any review of that policy then, what is the correct term for the condition the Sultanate is in?"
Kamran did not answer immediately. This was not because he did not know the answer. It was because he was deciding how much of the answer, he was willing to say aloud inside a palace whose walls had ears he could not fully account for.
"Capture," he said finally. "The precise term is regulatory capture."
"And what is the prescribed remedy?"
"Theoretically? An authority outside the captured system with sufficient power and independence to audit and restructure." He paused for a breath. "Practically, it requires either a Sultan willing to override his own advisors or a crisis large enough to make the cost of inaction higher than the cost of reform."
Ali nodded slowly. He picked up his tea, realized it was cold, and set it back down with the mild displeasure of someone who had expected better from inanimate objects. "The lower quarter of Shiraz lost thirty percent of its travelling merchant traffic in the last four years. The three covered markets that served them have closed. The tax revenue from those markets, which used to fund the northern water channels, has not been replaced. The northern water channels now serve one third of the homes they did six years ago." He glanced at Kamran.
"I read the municipal infrastructure reports. They are filed in the administrative archive under public works which nobody gives attention to let alone reading them carefully."
Kamran was very still. "Where are you going with this, Shehzade?"
"Nowhere yet." Ali opened the Kitab al-Kharaj again and smoothed the page with his palm. "I am building a bigger picture out of a puzzle. And puzzles take time to develop into sensible pictures." He looked up. "What did you bring for today?"
Kamran, after a moment, reached into his satchel and removed a bound text and two rolled maps. "Trade law. We were going to continue with the maritime codes of Basra."
"Good." Ali pulled the maps towards him and unrolled the first one across the desk, anchoring its corners with two books and an empty ink pot. "Show me the tariff jurisdiction lines. I want to understand where Basra's authority ends and where Faras's begins, and I want to know who arbitrates disputes in the overlapping zones."
Kamran began to explain. Ali listened in the manner that particularly defined him, completely still, eyes moving between the map and his tutor's face, occasionally asking a question so precisely targeted that it made Kamran reorganize whatever he had planned to say next. This was the version of Ali that the court never saw. The court saw the fragile prince, the weak-Roohed boy who was kept behind palace walls for reasons the Sultan had never publicly explained. They saw someone to be managed around, accounted for, occasionally pitied.
They did not see this. They did not meet this version of Shehzade Ali al-Shirazi who was like the Sharpest blade in the room.
An hour into the session, Ali straightened and set down his pen.
"Ustad. Hypothetically. If a city of middling size and I am not talking about a capital, nor a backwater, but something in between, a city with a functioning market, a port or a major road junction, mixed population, existing administrative structure but acknowledged inefficiencies, if such a city were given to a young administrator with full authority to restructure its tax and trade policy, what would be the minimum time required to show measurable improvement in revenue and quality of life indicators?"
Kamran set his own pen down. He recognized this tone. It was the tone that preceded something Ali had already decided and was now constructing the rational architecture around. "That depends entirely on the administrator."
"Assume the administrator has read everything in this room. Has cross-referenced the administrative histories with the economic texts. Understands regulatory capture, tariff jurisdiction, municipal infrastructure dependency and the specific ways in which settled merchant interests tend to distort trade policy over time."
"Then theoretically," Kamran calculated and answered slowly, "perhaps two years for initial measurable results. Three for anything that could be called structural change."
Ali nodded. He picked up his pen and made a note in the margin of the map that Kamran could not read from across the desk.
"Hypothetically," Kamran uttered after a moment, "what city were you thinking of?"
Ali looked up. For just a moment, behind the careful composure he wore like a second skin, something else moved through his eyes which was not recklessness, nor arrogance but, something older and more patient than either. Something that looked, in the morning light falling through the latticed window, almost like certainty.
"I have not decided yet," he answered. "I am still building the picture."
Kamran looked at his student for a long moment. Then he unrolled the second map.
"Then let us make sure the picture is complete," he addressed. "Show me what you know about Shiraz's eastern trade corridor."
Ali leaned forward. Outside the latticed window, the city of Shiraz went about its morning, entirely unaware that in a palace study surrounded by books nobody else had bothered to cross-reference, a prince it had long since written off was building something.
Quietly. Carefully. One footnote at a time.