There is a game going on at www.basenotes.net in which a journalist, Marian Bendeth, interviews a panel of modern perfumers asking them where they would go if they could travel back to the time of their choosing, to meet, chat and co-create with a perfumer of the past.

I am nobody and they would not call me, but I could not stop wondering what I would say myself if the demand was done to me. So I started to imagine where I would really like to go, as a perfumer, and in what epoch. I realized that as a perfumer as well as a person, the place, the date and the person that most of all I would love to meet coincided.
The place is the Arabic Peninsula, the date is 14 hundred years ago and the person is the Prophet of Islam himself.
Before his advent the spirituality of perfume was confined in the temples, kept as a secret by rabbis and priests, in the same way that spirituality itself was the privilege of their casts.
Muhammad (SAS) is the man who said “three things of this material world were rendered dear to my heart, the feminine gender, perfumes and prayer”. He ordered all his follower to use perfume for the Friday prayer, to perfume the dead and to use perfume (natural) as a purification for women following their monthly disturb. His numerous injunctions regarding the use of perfume promoted the culture of the spirituality of perfumes which culminated in the use of scents in the mortar used to build mosques. His well recorded teachings about the medical use of Aromatic materials have been the starting point of Islamic medicine, which is the fount from which our own modern medicine comes, even though as a simple branch and not as a natural outcome of it.

He rendered the use of perfume a religious action for all Muslims, putting directly into their hands what was previously reserved to the religious casts of priests, exactly as he called the people to call directly on their creator without the intermediary of a religious hierarchy. There is not a man in human history that made so much for bringing perfume to all than the prophet of Islam.

The demands on Basenotes are:
• If it was possible to travel back in time to any particular century and decade of your choice to meet your number one inspirational Perfumer:
• Who would you like to meet?
• What specific questions would you want to learn from them?
• If you could bring anything back with you, what would that be?
• If you could team up together in that time period, who would you like to co-create a fragrance for?
• If you could bring anything back with you, what would that be?

The person that I would go to meet, of course is the prophet himself, and for this I would renounce all the perfumes of the world.
I would bring back nothing with me, nothing material at all, the record of him would be enough to fill my life, I would have drunk from his light.
I would maybe dare to ask him to make a bespoke perfume for him, but what I would like to learn from him is not about only about perfumes and their meaning, it is justice, righteousness, truth and reality.