In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘And besides,’ said Fawzia, ‘what would Nabeel do back here? Look at Isma‘il—just sitting at home, no job, nothing to do …’

  Isma‘il shrugged. ‘But still, he wanted to come back. He’s been there three years. It’s more than most, and it’s aged him. You’d see what I mean if you saw him. He looks much older. Life’s not easy out there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The Iraqis, you know,’ he pulled a face. ‘They’re wild … they come back from the army for a few days at a time, and they go wild, fighting on the streets, drinking. Egyptians never go out on the streets there at night: if some drunken Iraqis came across you they would kill you, just like that, and nobody would even know, for they’d throw away your papers. It’s happened, happens all the time. They blame us, you see, they say: “You’ve taken our jobs and our money and grown rich while we’re fighting and dying.” ’

  ‘What about Saddam Hussein?’

  ‘Saddam Hussein!’ he rolled his eyes. ‘You have to be careful when you breathe that name out there—there are spies everywhere, at every corner, listening. One word about Saddam and you’re gone, dead.’

  Later Isma‘il told me a story. Earlier in the year Egypt had played a football match with Algeria, to decide which team would play in the World Cup. Egypt had won and Egyptians everywhere had gone wild with joy. In Iraq the two or three million Egyptians who lived packed together, all of them young, all of them male, with no families, children, wives, nothing to do but stare at their newly bought television sets—they had exploded out of their rooms and into the streets in a delirium of joy. Their football team had restored to them that self-respect that their cassette-recorders and television sets had somehow failed to bring. To the Iraqis, who have never had anything like a normal political life, probably never seen crowds except at pilgrimages, the massed ranks of Egyptians must have seemed like the coming of Armageddon. They responded by attacking them on the streets, often with firearms—well-trained in war, they fell upon the jubilant, unarmed crowds of Egyptian workers.

  ‘You can’t imagine what it was like,’ said Isma‘il. He had tears in his eyes. ‘It was then that I decided to leave. Nabeel decided to leave as well, but of course he always needed to think a long time about everything. But then at the last minute he thought he’d stay just a little bit longer.

  My mind went back to that evening when I first met Nabeel and Isma‘il; how Nabeel had said: ‘It must make you think of all the people you left at home when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself.’ It was hard to think of Nabeel alone, in a city headed for destruction.

  A little later we went to Isma‘il’s house to watch the news on the colour TV he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case, in the centre of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage of the epic exodus: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in jallabeyyas, some carrying their TV sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part.

  There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1 The slave’s first appearance: E. Strauss (now Ashtor), ‘Documents for the Economic and Social History of the Near East’ (Zion, n.s. VII, Jerusalem, 1942).

  2 Khalif ibn Iaq: The and the in the name Iaq are distinct consonants. The system of notation used here for transcriptions from Arabic is broadly similar to that of the Encyclopaedia of Islam. In general, I have tried to keep transcriptions to a minimum, usually indicating the spelling of a word or name only upon its first occurrence. As a rule I have included the symbol for the Arabic consonant ‘ain (‘) wherever it occurs, except in place names, where I have kept to standard usage. Specialists ought to be forewarned that if, in these pages, they seek consistency in the matter of transcription, they shall find only confusion—a result in part of the many different registers of Arabic that are invoked here. On the whole where the alternative presented itself, I have favoured the dialectical usage over the literary or the classical, a preference which may seem misleading to some since the rural dialects of the Delta differ markedly in certain respects from the urban dialect that is generally taken to represent colloquial Egyptian Arabic.

  3 A German army had arrived: Ibn al-Qalânisî, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades, pp. 280, (ed. and trans. H. A. R. Gibb, Luzac & Co. Ltd., London, 1967).

  4 ‘That year the German Franks’: The historian was the famous Ibn al-Athîr (quoted by Amin Maalouf in The Crusades through Arab Eyes, tr. Jon Rothschild, Al Saqi Books, London, 1984).

  5 Among the nobles: See Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades, Vol. II, pp. 279–80, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1952).

  6 ‘There was a divergence’: Ibn al-Qalanisi, Damascus Chronicle, p. 282.

  7 ‘the German Franks returned’: Ibn al-Athir, quoted by Amin Maalouf in The Crusades through Arab Eyes. Ibn al-Qalanisi wrote a vivid description of this engagement in The Damascus Chronicle, pp. 281–4. See also Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades, Vol II, pp. 281–4; and Virginia G. Berry, ‘The Second Crusade’, in A History of the Crusades, Vol. I, pp. 508–10 (ed. K. M. Setton, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969). Hans Eberhard Mayer discusses the Crusaders’ decision to attack Damascus in The Crusades, p. 103, (tr. John Gillingham, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988).

  8 They were … quick to relay news: One of the services that merchants rendered each other in this period was the supplying of information (see Norman Stillman’s article, ‘The Eleventh Century Merchant House of Ibn ‘Awkal (A Geniza Study)’, p. 24 (in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XVI, pt. 1, 1973). Not long after Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s lifetime an Arab scholar was to tell Sultan Salâ al-Dîn’s (Saladin’s) son, al-Malik al-âhir, that merchants were ‘the scouts of the world’. (Cf. S. D. Goitein, ‘Changes in the Middle East (950–1150), as illustrated by the documents of the Cairo Geniza’, p. 19, in Islamic Civilisation, ed. P. Richards, Cassirer, Oxford, 1973).

  9 ‘things which have no price’: My translation is based on Strauss’s transcription in ‘Documents for Economic and Social History of the Middle East’. The line quoted here is line 17.

  10 ‘two jars of sugar’: Ibid., line 18.

  11 ‘plentiful greetings’: Ibid., line 23.

  12 The Slave’s second appearance: S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1973 (henceforth Letters). The quotations from Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s letter in the next four paragraphs are all taken from Goitein’s translation in this volume (pp. 187–92).

  13 This is another eventful year: Cf. Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades, Vol. II, p. 226. See also, H. A. R. Gibb, ‘Zengi and the Fall of Edessa’, in A History of the Crusades, Vol. I.

  14 I had … won a scholarship: The body in question is the Inlaks Foundation, of London, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them. I am grateful, in particular, to the foundation’s director Count Nicoló Sella di Monteluce for his encouragement and support.

  15 At that moment, I … expected to do research: I would like to add a tribute here to the late Dr Peter Lienhardt of the Institute of Social Anthropology, who supervised my D. Phil. at Oxford. I consider myself singularly fortunate in having had him as my supervisor: he was endlessly generous with encouragement, fearsome in his debunking of pretension, and tireless in the orchestration of logistical support. Yet if I think of him today as the best of supervisors, it is not for all those virtues, inestimable as they are, but one yet more valuable still, being the rarest of all in academics: that he did everything he could to make sure that I was left to myself to follow
my interests as I chose. My gratitude to him is inexpressible.

  16 Laaîfa: Neither this nor the names of any of the settlements around it are their actual names; nor are the names of those of their inhabitants who are referred to in the following pages.

  Laaîfa

  1 Being the kindest … of men: I would like to acknowledge here my enormous debt to the late Professor Aly Issa of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria. Professor Issa cleared a path for me through all the official hurdles that surround the enterprise of ‘fieldwork’ and because of him I was able to move into Lataifa within a few weeks of arriving in Egypt. I remember him with the deepest respect and affection and it is a matter of profound regret to me that he is not alive today to see this book in print.

  My thanks arc due to many others in the Faculty of Arts, a place of which I have the warmest memories. Amongst others, Hisham Nofal, Mohammad Ghoneim, Moustafa Omar, Merwat al-Ashmawi Osman, Taysser Hassan Aly Gomaa and Moustafa Awad Ibrahim, who were research students in the Department of Anthropology at the time, did a great deal to make me feel welcome when I first arrived in Alexandria. I would like to thank them all for the hospitality and friendship which they showed me then, and with which they have enriched all my subsequent visits. I would also like to thank in particular Professor Ahmed Abu-Zeid of the Faculty of Arts.

  3 They are both … Mar: The name is Mir, properly speaking.

  4 Like English, every major European language: Albanian, which uses ‘Misir’ as well as ‘Egjypt’, is an exception—probably because of its large Muslim population.

  5 The fort has other names: See Stanley Lane-Poole’s The Story of Cairo, pp. 34–5 (J. M. Dent & Co., London, 1902); and Desmond Stewart’s Cairo, 5,500 years, p. 28 (Thomas Y. Creswell & Co., New York, 1968). A. J. Butler also discusses the name of the fortress briefly in his monumental Arab Conquest of Egypt (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1902), pp. 244–6.

  6 Babylon’s principal embankment: W. Kubiak points this out in his excellent monograph Al-Fustat, Its Foundation and Early Urban Development, pp. 43–7 & 117–8 (American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, 1987). See also Oleg V. Volkoffs Le Caire, 969–1969, p. 7 (L’Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale du Caire, 1971); and Janet L. Abu-Lughod’s Cairo, 1001Years of the City Victorious, pp. 4–5 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1971).

  7 In Ben Yiju’s time: See Nâîr-e-Khosraw’s Safarnama (Book of Travels), p. 55, (trans. W. M. Thackston Jr, Persian Heritage Series, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, No. 36, Persian Heritage Foundation, New York, 1986).

  8 ‘fossaton’: Cf. W. Kubiak, Al-Fustat, p. 11; Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Cairo 1001 Years, p. 13; and Desmond Stewart, Cairo, pp. 42–3.

  9 Their army routed the Egyptians: Cf. Stanley Lane-Poole’s A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages, p. 102 (Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, London, new impression, 1968); and Oleg V. Volkoff’s Le Caire, p. 44.

  10 In its original conception al-Qahira: Volkoff, pointing out that it was not for nothing that the city was called al-Qâhira al-Marûsa, ‘the Guarded’, compares it to Peking and Moscow (Le Caire, p. 49).

  11 Archæological excavations have shown: The various different kinds of mud and earth that were used as building materials in medieval Fustat are discussed at length in Moshe Gil’s article, ‘Maintenance, Building Operations, and Repairs in the Houses of the Qodesh in Fusâ’, p. 147–52 (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, XIV, part II, 1971). The terms used in Lataifa and Nashawy for the kinds of earth that serve as building materials are in many instances the same as those current in medieval Fustat (e.g. in aswad, în afar, turâb).

  12 Possibly Fustat even had … look of an Egyptian village: My speculations about the appearance of medieval Fustat are founded largely on Wladyslaw Kubiak’s description of the archaeological findings at the site (in his monograph Al-Fustat). I hasten to add that Kubiak does not himself suggest that the medieval city had a rustic appearance: however, the findings described in the monograph seem to me definitely to indicate that likelihood. See in particular the section on ‘Streets’, pp. 112–117. Some medieval travellers reported Fustat to be provincial in aspect but crowded and busy, while others spoke with admiration of large multi-storeyed buildings, suggesting that houses in some parts of Fustat were of imposing dimensions (Cf. Oleg V. Volkoff, Le Caire, p. 22; and S. D. Goitein, ‘Urban Housing in Fatimid and Ayyubid Times’, p. 14, Studia, Islamica, 46–7, 1978). In all likelihood the township had a few wealthy neighbourhoods which were built on a very different scale from the dwellings inhabited by the vast majority of the population. In many details the domestic architecture of medieval Fustat appears remarkably similar to that of rural (Lower) Egypt today. Indeed there was clearly a direct continuity between the living patterns of the surrounding countryside and those of the city of Fustat. Dwellings in medieval Fustat even made provision for cattle pens or zarîbas within the house (Cf. S. D. Goitein, ‘A Mansion in Fustat: A twelfth-century Description of a Domestic compound in the Ancient Capital of Egypt’, in The Medieval City, ed. H. A. Miskimin et. al., Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977). The word zariba has of course passed into the English language as ‘zareba’. A contemporary zariba is soon to play a part in this narrative.

  13 The ‘Palestinian’ congregation: The principal doctrinal division within the Jewish community of medieval Fustat lay between the Karaites and the other two groups, known collectively as the Rabbanites; the Karaites took the Bible as their sole sacred text while the others invested the Talmud and other later Rabbinical writings with the authority of Scripture as well, as do the majority of Jews today. Of the two Rabbanite groups, the ‘Iraqis’ consisted of Jews from the area of Mesopotamia, who followed the rites prescribed by the schools of that region, while the ‘Palestinians’ of course followed the rites of the school of Jerusalem. See S. D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, p. 18 (Univ. of California Press, Berkeley, 1967); and Norman Golb’s article, ‘Aspects of the Historical Background of Jewish Life in Medieval Egypt’ (in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1967).

  14 Incredible as it may seem, excavations: See G. T. Scanlon’s ‘Egypt and China: Trade and Imitation’, p. 88 (in Islam and the Trade of Asia, ed. D. S. Richards, Oxford and Philadelphia, 1971); and Ruth Barnes’s article ‘Indian Trade Cloth in Egypt: The Newberry Collection’ (in the Proceedings of the Textile Society of America, 1990).

  15 For Ben Yiju the centre of Cairo: It was once thought that the synagogue of Ben Ezra was originally a Coptic church, but that theory has long been discredited by S. D. Goitein, although it continues to be widely propagated. A church was indeed converted into a synagogue in Fustat, in the ninth century, but it probably belonged to a different congregation and stood upon another site. (Cf. A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, p. 18; and Vol. II, p. 149, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971). Goitein has persuasively argued that the church which changed hands in the ninth century was bought by the ‘Iraqi’ congregation, which, being composed mainly of immigrants, probably needed a site for its synagogue. The site of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra on the other hand had probably belonged to the ‘Palestinians’ since antiquity.

  16 It is known to have had two entrances: See S. D. Goitein’s ‘The Sexual Mores of the Common People’, p. 47 (in Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam, ed. A. L. al-Sayyid Marsot, Udena Publications, Malibu, 1979); and Vol. II of his Mediterranean Society, pp. 143–52.

  17 For the Synagogue … the influx of migrants: Cf. S. D. Goitein, ‘Changes in the Middle East (950–1150)’, p. 25; and ‘Mediterranean Trade in the Eleventh Century: Some Facts and Problems’, p. 61, (in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East, ed. M. A. Cook, Oxford University Press, London, 1970).

  18 The North Africans … affinity for the flourishing trade: Jews and Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East may have turned increasingly to the India Trade after the tenth century because they had been sq
ueezed out of the Mediterranean trade by the Christian states of the northern coast. (See, for example, S. D. Goitein’s article ‘Portrait of a Medieval India Trader; Three Letters from the Cairo Geniza’, p. 449, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vol. 50, part 3, 1987). After the twelfth century Jewish merchants appear to have been gradually pushed out of the eastern trade by the Muslim association of Kârimî merchants. (Cf. W. J. Fischel, ‘The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt’, pp. 166–7, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. I, part 2, E. J. Brill, London, 1958.)

  19 The vast majority … were traders: See S. D. Goitein, Studies in Islamic History and Institutions, pp. 277–8 (Leiden, Brill, 1966). As Goitein points out elsewhere, the upper crust of the Jewish community in Fustat was formed largely by the members of the ‘Iraqi’ and Karaite congregations, not by the ‘Palestinians’: ‘as a rule it was the middle and lower middle classes and not the economically and socially highest layer of Jewish society which have left us their day to day writings in the Geniza.’ (‘Changes in the Middle East [950–1150]’ p. 18.) See also Goitein’s article ‘The Sexual Mores of the Common People’, p. 50.

  20 Their doctors … studied Hippocrates: Cf. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. II, p. 249

  21 The chambers … known by the term ‘Geniza’: Cf. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, p. 1.

  22 The Geniza … was added: For the date of the construction of the Ben Ezra Geniza see S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. I, p. 18. On 31 December 1011, a Jewish funeral procession was attacked by Muslims, and twenty-three people were taken captive and threatened with death. They were saved at the last moment by the personal intervention of the Caliph. Goitein has suggested that this incident may have had a direct connection with the addition of the Geniza at the time of the synagogue’s reconstruction in 1025. ‘Recalling the terrifying events of December 1011, they must have mused: Corpses must be removed from the city notwithstanding the constant menace by the rabble. But why take the same risk with papers? Let’s have a place in the synagogue roomy enough for storing discarded writings now and for ever. The idea was materialized and the result was the Cairo Geniza.’ (‘Urban Housing in Fatimid and Ayyubid Times’, p. 6.) The Geniza does however contain several documents that predate the rebuilding of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in the eleventh century. (See Simon Hopkins’s article ‘The Oldest Dated Document in the Geniza’, in Studies in Judaism and Islam, ed. Shelomo Morag et al., Hebrew University, Jerusalem, 1981.)