Just as English Grand Tourists dusted off their gerundives and optatives before heading for the Classical world, Maghribi travellers mugged up on their classical Arabic before going east. Few, though, went as far as a scholar of Tangier who boasted, ‘I did not enter the East until I had committed to memory 34,000 lines of pre-Islamic poetry.’ Later travellers, however, were often disappointed by what they found. Basrah Arabic, like BBC English, was once famous for its perfection but, says IB, ‘I was present one day at the Friday service in the Great Mosque of al-Basrah, and when the preacher rose and recited his discourse he committed in it many gross errors of grammar. I was astonished at his conduct and spoke of it to the qadi Hujjat al-Din, who said to me “In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the science of grammar.”’
One traveller, al-Abdari, made other people’s linguistic shortcomings a major theme in the book of his journey to Mecca and back, begun in 1289. A merciless pedant who hailed from the Moroccan town of Hahah, he gloatingly published syntactical blunders together with the names of their perpetrators. When not behaving like a linguistic Red Guard, he still had little to say in favour of anything. He got off to a crabby start – ‘In this age of ours, the harvest of virtuous men is blighted’ – and thought the Alexandrians ‘fetid … for, as you know, ports are stinking places’. This was only limbering up. The Cairenes provoked al-Abdari into a full-blown rant, purple in face and prose: ‘Among them, the generous man is meaner than a firefly, the brave man more timid than a whirring locust, the scholar more ignorant than a moth that flies into a flame, the eminent lowlier than a woodlouse, and the sedate more fickle than a gnat. Their orators stammer like adolescents, their mighty are more abject than beggars …’ and so on, for five pages of elegantly rhymed vitriol. A whole section is devoted to the pernicious Cairene vice – ‘We seek refuge with God from such an abasement of morals!’ – of eating in public. Here, and elsewhere, he reminded me of a headmaster of mine. And, as is often the case with headmasters, al-Abdari became lovable in the soft focus of memory: his tomb is extant and, like that of the putative IB in Tangier, still venerated.
A far more likeable character, and the author of the most celebrated book of travel before that of IB, is Ibn Jubayr of Valencia. It was said that the governor of Granada, in a fit of pique, forced him to drink seven cups of wine; the governor later regretted his action, and in expiation gave Ibn Jubayr seven cups filled with gold coins. These funded his pilgrimage to Mecca. He sailed to Alexandria in 1182, travelled up the Nile and crossed the Red Sea to Arabia. Returning two years later through the Levant at the height of Crusader power there, he set sail across the Mediterranean with a group of Christian pilgrims and watched them celebrate a candlelit Hallowe’en at sea. His Travels are a priceless record of the interplay between Christendom and Islam; they are also a splendid read. In his descriptions of sea travel Ibn Jubayr is an Arabic Conrad. Here he is, becalmed in the eastern Mediterranean:
On Wednesday 23rd a breeze stirred from the east, languid and sickly. At first we hoped that it would grow in strength; but it was no more than a dying sigh. Soon the water was covered by a thin mist, the waves were stilled, and the sea resembled a courtyard paved with glass. Of the four winds not a breath remained. To our eyes the surface of the water seemed like an ingot of silver. And there we lay, bobbing idly, as if lost between two skies.
IB was not unique. He was part of a long tradition of Maghribi travel writers, and it would be a fair guess to suppose that he had read at least Ibn Jubayr before leaving Tangier at the age of 21. If so, I would wager a dinar to a dirham that one passage, above all, stuck in his mind:
If you are a son of this Maghrib of ours and wish for success, then head for the land of the east! Forsake your homeland in pursuit of knowledge … The door to the east lies open: O you who strive after learning, enter it with a glad greeting! Seize the chance of freedom from the cares of the world before family and children ensnare you, before the day comes when you gnash your teeth in regret for the time that is gone …
Ibn Jubayr went on to recommend a sort of medieval Interail, insured by Providence: if you get bored with a place, simply move on, for ‘in every village people will shower you with your daily bread’. It is, literally, a philosophy of loafing around. No better copy could have been written to promote the life of the scholar-gipsy.
When the Prophet famously said that Muslims should seek out knowledge even if they have to look for it in China, China still had the metaphorical sense that Timbuktu had for us before the days of the Paris-Dakar Rally. IB, unlike his predecessors, followed the advice to the letter – and having reached the literal China, he then turned around and went to the literal Timbuktu as well. But of this he had no idea as he left Tangier, a not untypical spiritual backpacker.
*
Next morning, I had an early breakfast on the hotel terrace. Overhead, hundreds of swifts screamed and scudded. The girl in charge of the small rooftop kitchen brought my pot of tea, and asked me how long I was staying. ‘I’m going when I’ve finished my breakfast,’ I told her.
She glanced around the terrace, then whispered, ‘Khudhni ma’ak. Take me with you.’
I smiled; then realized that she meant it.
*
I was taking a short cut through the cemetery of Rabat, down to the beach, when I was startled by a voice: ‘Shall I walk with you, or do you prefer to be alone?’ it said, in Arabic. I looked round and saw a tall young man, wearing jeans and an unwashed white shirt.
‘Thank you, but on the whole I prefer to be alone.’
‘As you wish,’ he said, and he branched off on another of the many tracks that doodled between the graves.
I didn’t think any more about the meeting; but on the way up from the beach, I bumped into the man again. We greeted each other.
‘Like you,’ he said, ‘I’m a stranger here.’
‘“And all strangers are kin to one another”,’ I quoted.
‘“Wa laysa ghariban man tana’at diyaruhu
Walakinna man wara ’l-turabu gharibu”,’ he continued.
It suddenly struck me how improbable the situation was – to be reciting pre-Islamic verse with someone whose name I didn’t know, standing on a pavement between a roaring highway and a drainage ditch that, all too evidently, doubled as a public lavatory – and how topical those last two lines were:
He is not a stranger whose home is far away;
But he who’s laid in earth, he is the stranger.
‘How appropriate,’ I said. ‘We met in a cemetery.’ We both laughed.
In a café overlooking the Bou Regreg, the wide river that separates Rabat from its smaller sister of Sala before slipping into the ocean, Khalid told me his story. It was short: he was from Miknas and so far had failed to find work there or anywhere else. ‘I’m fed up with the kingdom, the King, the lot. I must go abroad. Ali ibn Abi Talib said, “Abroad, a fortune gives you a home; at home, poverty makes you an alien.”’
‘But what about poverty abroad? You may not find work.’ Or if you do, I thought, what sort of work? Someone I met in Tangier told me that three members of his family were in Italy. They sent home $500 a month and were, he said, ‘in things like drug-dealing’. Then there were those reports of violence against Maghribi immigrants in Paris and Marseille, the deportations, the unimaginable shittiness of being an illegal alien.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Khalid said. ‘I prefer al-taqarfas abroad to staying here.’ He saw me looking puzzled. ‘It’s a Moroccan word, something like “to fall apart”. I don’t want a living death at home. Martyrdom on the path of God is far better – I mean, if you go, and fail, you’ve still succeeded in God’s eyes.’ I thought of the usual pictures of economic migrants, bedraggled and abject creatures, and compared them with these adamantine martyr’s eyes.
We sat and talked about abroad, that mythic place, Lotus Land or Circe’s island, until I noticed it was dark. ‘I must go,’ I said, thinking of my hosts.
‘Take this,’ Khalid said. ‘It will keep you safe.’
Touched, I thanked him, and put the slip of paper carefully in my pocket. ‘You are strange people,’ I said, rising to go.
Khalid laughed. ‘Inta fi ’l-Maghrib wa la tastaghrib. You’re in the Maghrib: don’t consider anything strange.’
In the taxi, Khalid’s jingle kept going round in my head. He was right. There was nothing strange or new in wanting to go out of Africa. The motive now was expressed in economic terms, but the language that described it – martyrdom, the path of God – was spiritual. Ex Africa nunquam aliquid novi. Perhaps, if I was looking for a reincarnation of the young IB, I had just met him.
The British Ambassador’s Residence, at least on the inside, resembled a small English country house, transported to the Bou Regreg and made comfortable by a staff of Edwardian proportions. Its châtelaine, Arlene Fullerton, carried a small remote-control device which I assumed was something to do with security; in fact, it summoned the butler.
William, her husband, was a scholarly Arabist; and with Arab hospitality he had invited me, a passing stranger, to stay. While he dealt with ambassadorial paperwork in his study, I gave Arlene my thumbnail sketch of IB. ‘He’s a sort of Arabic Marco Polo.’ I hated myself whenever I said that. ‘But vastly more interesting. And of course he went much further.’ I went through IB’s destinations, which were also mine. Arlene then began to catalogue her own travels as a diplomatic consort, mostly in the Arab world but with a spell as First Lady of the Falklands. I had noticed the photograph of William, gubernatorially plumed and sword-girt, standing beside the famous London cab. ‘Now that’s one place IB didn’t get to,’ she said.
‘Oh yes he did,’ I retorted. I sensed her asking herself, understandably, if her husband had invited a lunatic to stay, and quickly explained about the Royal Air Maroc in-flight magazine. Arlene, my sanity re-established, seemed relieved.
After dinner, we all retired early. ‘We don’t often get a night in like this,’ William said. ‘Where is it tomorrow? Oh yes, Peru.’
Next morning, I rose to find that my hosts had long since left for work. I breakfasted alone and damp, having been chased across the lawn by a sprinkler. At dinner the night before, I had mentioned my conversation with Khalid and his phrase about ‘martyrdom on the path of God’. ‘Many of the migrants really are martyred,’ said William. ‘Rafts capsize in the Strait of Gibraltar, people get suffocated stowing away.’ Now, opening today’s Libération, which lay on the breakfast table, I found grim confirmation of his words: five migrants, in this case Tunisians trying to get to Italy, had died of asphyxiation in a cargo hold. The same article also revealed that over the past twenty-eight days alone 2,773 illegal immigrants, nearly all Moroccans and Tunisians, had been caught on and around the tiny Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria.
It seemed to me that money by itself was not enough to explain this lemming-like exodus. Starvation might force one to gamble with the sea and the Italian coastguard; but these young men, while hard up, were not starving. I wondered if what propelled them was not economics, but genetics. After all they, no less than IB, were heirs to the Arab and Berber pastoralists who had ranged across North Africa. If there is a gene for wanderlust, the Maghribis are sure to have it.
That afternoon I drove to the Villa Baghdad to meet the man who, if anyone, could tell me about the tomb in Tangier. Dr Abdelhadi Tazi, sometime Moroccan Ambassador to Tripoli, Tehran and Baghdad (twice, hence the name of his house), member of the Moroccan Royal Academy and editor of the new Arabic edition of IB’s Travels, was in his late seventies, but sparkled with energy. I was not surprised when he said he had fourteen children. One of them appeared, a girl of about 12. ‘Greet your uncle,’ her father told her, and she delicately presented one cheek to be kissed, and then the other. We sat in a room rich with cushions and books, overlooking a lawn on which sprinklers threw out miniature rainbows. Gunpowder tea was brought, and dates in light and melting pastry. ‘I have them sent from Baghdad,’ he said. ‘The dates are from al-Basrah. There are none better!’ Basrah dates have been the connoisseur’s choice since antiquity; because of sanctions and the Iran-Iraq war, which devastated the Basrah palmeries, they are now a rarity.
‘You live in San’a? A most beautiful city! When you return there, in sha Allah, you must give my greetings to my brother the Qadi Isma’il al-Akwa’, and to his brother the Qadi Muhammad.’ He spoke Arabic with panache, savouring selected words as if they were the finest Basrah dates.
He asked me which editions of the Travels I had. ‘Well, I’ve got the Hakluyt Society version,’ I said.
‘Ah, the late Professor Sir Hamilton Gibb. And dear Professor Beckingham. In the study of IB, you Europeans are our masters! I am only … an amateur. And in Arabic?’
‘Only the Beirut one done by Dar al-Turath,’ I admitted, feeling the reflected lustre of Gibb and Beckingham rapidly fading. ‘It isn’t much good.’
‘Hmm … These Beirut editions are a grave disservice to the memory of our shaykh, IB.’
‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I said.
‘Unfortunately, you will not have found a copy of my own edition. His Majesty bought up most of the print run to give away.’
This was bad news. I had already trawled the bookshops of Tangier and Rabat in search of the edition. Now it seemed there was no chance of finding the one thing which, apart from IB’s blessing, I had hoped to take away from Morocco. Dr Abdelhadi said he was working on a second edition; but I might have to wait years for it.
For the next couple of hours we talked of nothing but IB. I soon realized that Dr Abdelhadi was no less obsessed with the traveller than I. From time to time, when I came up with some new interpretation or reference, he would utter a little cry, in English, of ‘Congratulations!’ or ‘Bravo!’, and jot down a note. On each occasion, my academic ego was given a small lift.
I brought the conversation round to the tomb in Tangier. Dr Abdelhadi smiled. ‘That tomb, I fear, is nothing more than a phantasm, a dream! Ibn Marzuq, as you will know, tells us that IB was appointed qadi “in some town of al-Maghrib” after his return. Well, Ibn al-Khatib has solved the puzzle of which town: the text of a letter is preserved in the manuscript of his Nufadat al-jirab which he addressed to “IB, Qadi of Tamasna”. Now, the capital of Tamasna at that time was Anfa, and we may reasonably assume that our shaykh is buried there.’
All this was new to me. My pulse quickened at the thought of an expedition to look for the real tomb. But where was Anfa? ‘Forgive me, I’m not so well acquainted with Maghribi topography …’
‘Of course. I forget that you are a Mashriqi, an Easterner. A Yemeni! Anfa has disappeared. The Portuguese destroyed it in, I think, 1468.’
‘But there must be some remains.’
‘If there are,’ Dr Abdelhadi said, ‘they are underneath Casablanca. It was built on the site of Anfa. Remember what Jalal al-Din al-Rumi said:
When we are dead, seek for our resting place
Not in the earth, but in the hearts of men.
Later, when I was about to leave, Dr Abdelhadi asked me if I had tried betel. IB devoted an excursus to its botany and its alleged aphrodisiac properties. I said I had chewed it in Aden.
‘I too have tried it. IB writes about it as if it were Viagra! Did it … have any effect on you?’
‘I’m not married, or at least only to my books.’
He looked concerned. ‘Then, since you are now my friend, I shall give you another wife.’ He disappeared briefly, then returned carrying five volumes. ‘My edition. The very last copy!’
I left the Villa Baghdad overjoyed and covered in Dr Abdelhadi’s kisses.
Back in the Residence I dipped into the edition. The fifth volume, out of which dropped a book-mark from the Dubai Inter-Continental Hotel, was entirely made up of indexes. There was even an Index of Indexes, which contained thirty-four items, including Weapons, Food and Drink, Gems and Jewellery, Scents and Aromatics, and Diseases. (This passion for listing characterized scholarship in the age of IB. The traveller’s contemporary al-Nuwayri, for example, compiled a thirty-one-volume encyclopaedia and universal history. It includes over a hundred pages, divided into some ninety sections, on ‘What the poets have said about the bodily members’.) The footnotes were, to say the least, eclectic. They revealed a polymathy worthy of the medieval cosmographers: there were references to Afghan diplomats, to the street map of Moscow, to a paper Dr Abdelhadi presented to the 1981 International Conference on Mineral Water, and to his fifteen-volume Diplomatic History of Morocco; there was even a mention of the far-travelled date sweetmeats I had just eaten in the Villa Baghdad and which IB ate in Khwarizm near the Aral Sea; and there were strange juxtapositions – one note mentioned a letter sent to a wife of the Khan of the Golden Horde by Pope Benedict XII, while the next quoted an elegant pornographic verse in allusion to a curious gynaecological feature of this same lady, which IB had described from hearsay. I was going to enjoy the footnotes: like Dr Abdelhadi himself, they sparkled with exclamation marks.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 4
