They said he survived the fall? What a load of shit!

In the face of this print music culture, 'faking' was the ability—at once respected and disrespected—to improvise a song (or a part in an arrangement) without reading the notation.

[…]permit me to say that the Harranians were Arabs and that the Arabs in occupying Spain and Andalusia did not lose their nationality; they remained Arabs. […] The fact that they preserved their former religion, Sabaeanism, does not mean they should be considered foreign to the Arab nationality.

Their task was a remarkable one: to world-proof the inventory of the military. To make sure that objects didn't stop working whenever they moved.