Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  ‘And God is the most knowing,’ I said.

  If shrine publicists ever had a catchphrase it must have been, ‘If you want to get ahead, get a head’. The main prayer hall of the mosque has one as well, that of St John the Baptist. (Or, the Christians say, St John Damascene; or, IB thought, of the Baptist’s father, Zechariah. Since I later visited Zechariah’s head in Aleppo, there seems to be some confusion.) The Ottomans honoured it with a fine marble reliquary in the style of Leeds Town Hall. Among the clutter inside, I noticed on a table by the cenotaph a pair of Victorian decanters.

  In addition to the resident head and the visiting head, the mosque also used to have one of the earliest copies of the Qur’an, a bit of the stone from which the springs sprang when Moses struck it, and some pillars from the Queen of Sheba’s throne. For good measure, Jesus will land on the south-eastern minaret on Doomsday. There seemed to be something for everyone.

  The Iranians were enjoying themselves gravely. Some of the ladies had their photograph taken next to the pulpit, and then one of the clerics began delivering a homily interspersed by beautiful tenor Qur’anic recitation. I heard a hushed chattering behind me. It was another pilgrim party. They were Indian Isma’ilis, the women in floral print dresses and matching capes that looked as if they had been run up from valances and pelmets, the men in white trousers and tunics of a stuff so sheer that a good Damascus downpour would have rendered them transparent. They hardly looked to be the spiritual descendants of the Assassins.

  In IB’s time, the prayer hall was home to circles of instruction in which professors, both male and female, would teach the orthodox Sunni sciences. ‘It contains also’, he wrote, ‘a number of teachers of the Book of God, each of whom leans his back upon one of the pillars of the mosque.’ As I was about to leave, I noticed the scene he had described, a group of men gathered around a column at the far west end of the hall. They chanted in unison, frowning with concentration, their master stopping them every two or three words to correct minutiae of intonation and elision. The rigidly orthodox IB would have been relieved to see that, despite the preponderance of Indian and Iranian Shi’ites, someone was keeping the Sunni side up.

  The Qur’an class was taking its time, in contrast to IB who, in this same prayer hall, attended a sort of Islamic crammer. The course involved listening to a reading and exposition of the entire corpus of the Prophet’s sayings in fourteen sittings. IB listed more than a dozen scholars with whom he rubbed shoulders here in the Umayyad Mosque, and who gave him ijazahs, or diplomas. These were the heavyweight traditionists of their day: a contemporary reader would have heard the solid clunk of dropping names. They included Ibn al-Shihnah, a centenarian yet, according to a contemporary, ‘sound of knee … He took a daily cold bath and still enjoyed conjugal relations’; al-Birzali of Seville, who had studied under two thousand masters and had diplomas from a thousand of them; A’ishah bint Muhammad, also a professional seamstress; and the doughty spinster Zaynab, who had travelled much in the East and spent her daylight hours transmitting traditions. By listing these scholars who had converged on Damascus from across the Muslim world, IB was showing that he had plugged himself, in a somewhat wobbly fashion, into the medieval Islamic internet.

  I left the mosque by the west door to inspect a nearby fountain mentioned by IB. It is now a chic meeting-place, with a gallery and a café frequented by young people in existentialist black. There were many polo-necks, floppy hairdos, and floppy hands draped over chair-backs to reveal wrist-watches. The café is post-Battutian but still old: two hundred years ago Ali Bey described it as ‘crowded with the idlers of the city’ and – like me – was mildly shocked to see Damascene ladies smoking water-pipes. The reek of longueurs, languor and carefully cultivated ennui mingled with the tobacco smoke.

  ‘This place’, said the man on the next table in English, ‘is full of … how do you say? … mutathaqqifin.’

  I had already met him as he was guiding tourists around the Umayyad Mosque. ‘Well, muthaqqafin are “cultivated people”, so mutathaqqifin ought to be “would-be cultivated people”.’

  ‘I love the way you can play around with Arabic,’ said my neighbour’s companion. He spoke with a hint of the English Midlands, and turned out to be a Kashmiri from Nottingham. Just before, I had heard him talking to the guide in a low and portentous voice about ‘that certain subject’. Now, the ice broken, he let me into his secret. ‘My family are always on at me to get married. To be honest, I’m more interested in studying Arabic. So I thought I’d come here, find a wife, and kill two birds with one stone. Ahmad’s helping me. But the trouble is, I’ve only got a fortnight.’ He sighed.

  I explained why I was in Damascus. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ I said, ‘IB was here only a few days longer than you, and he managed to get married and study the entire Sahih of al-Bukhari.’

  The Kashmiri looked glum.

  I left them to their marital machinations and headed back to the hotel. It was a fine Ottoman building in the Saruja Quarter, with a black-and-white marble fountain in the courtyard. My room gave on to a rickety balcony above a pergola’d street; a large coop on the roof opposite contained several perky hens. On the landing outside the room there was a shell-shaped porphyry washbasin, which it seemed a sacrilege to use, like brushing your teeth in a font.

  Most of the other guests were New Zealand backpackers. Like the girls I had met in Tangier, they suffered from a national claustrophobia and treated it with large doses of travelling. ‘I’m just moseying around,’ one of the travellers told me. ‘I’ve done thirty-three countries so far … Think I can make it sixty.’ Most of the talk, however, was on the shifts and wrinkles of travel – jabs, visas, how to make a few dollars by smuggling cigarettes into Jordan.

  The theme continued in a series of notebooks kept at the reception desk. They formed a fascinating codex of information. There were pages of Swedish in a looping, girlish hand, beautiful hand-drawn maps minutely annotated in Japanese, scrawls by Rob from Wellington. If Lonely Planet is the pilgrim guide of our times, then notebooks like these are an ever-expanding, polyglot apparatus criticus. Some of what I could read was in the ‘regional characteristics’ genre beloved of medieval geographers: Iranians are extremely hospitable, Cairene shopkeepers dodgy, certain men in Istanbul slimy. There were several references to ‘gropers’: ‘Attention Girls: if you’ve got a nice round bum and 36DD tits, keep out of the Aleppo souk – it’s full of septic tossers and you’ll get shababbed out of your mind!’ (Shabab is Arabic for ‘young men’.) A marginal note to this entry read: ‘If you fancy yourself that much, stay at home with a mirror.’ A marginal note to the marginal note said: ‘Chauvinist toss-pot.’

  The Sudanese receptionist heard me chuckling. ‘These notebooks’, he said, ‘are full of aja’ib.’ He couldn’t have chosen a better word: aja’ib, the wonders of wandering, the mirabilia of metropolises.

  None of this helped me to find the one place in Damascus that I particularly wanted to visit. The Sharabishiyyah Madrasah, the college in which IB lodged, was in his time a recent foundation by a wealthy merchant named al-Sharabishi, the Hatter. (Sharbush, plural sharabish, is a variant of tarbush and the ancestor of the fez.) A rapid tour of other Damascus madrasahs that afternoon had given me no leads. The guardian of the tomb of Saladin, all that is left of the Aziziyyah Madrasah, hadn’t heard of the Hatter’s College and was more interested in improving his English. We acted out a dialogue from a textbook, in which a couple called Pedro and Lucille discussed Dickens, Thackeray, Byron and Oscar Wilde; in the background God’s warrior slumbered in his tomb beneath a lewd chandelier that precisely resembled a bunch of prodigious, pendent condoms.

  The condoms seemed to be standard issue. In the Adiliyyah, headquarters of the Arab Academy, they depended again above Saladin’s brother al-Adil. Also in the tomb-chamber was a bust of the great one-eyed poet al-Ma’arri. He was a surprising character to find in a college of religious science. Verse of his such as

&n
bsp; There are two types of people:

  Those with brains and no religion,

  And those with religion and no brains

  earned him the nickname of ‘the Heretic’. The poet seemed to have some awful skin problem – the bronze leaf was peeling off him to reveal white plaster beneath.

  No one was in evidence to ask about the Hatter’s College, so I tried the Zahiriyyah across the road. It was similarly deserted. The tomb-chamber, despite its fine mosaics and marble dado, reeked of neglect. Mouldering empty vitrines occupied niches around the walls. It was a sad end for al-Zahir Baybars, the early Mamluk Sultan and hammer of the Crusaders – but perhaps no more bathetic than the circumstances of his death, brought about by a dreadful mix-up involving a lunar eclipse and a goblet of poisoned koumiss.

  Only one madrasah showed signs of life, the Qur’an College founded by Tankiz, Sultan al-Nasir’s vice-regent in Syria. IB described him as ‘a governor of the good and upright kind’; his many public works included the removal of the city’s frogs, to the croaking of which he had a particular aversion. But poor Tankiz fell victim to cold-war paranoia: al-Nasir got it into his head that he was a Mongol mole and sent Bashtak, builder of the palace on Crimson Street in Cairo, to arrest him. Tankiz died soon after, in gaol in Alexandria.

  I knocked on the college gate, set in a fine portal inscribed with the date AH 727, the year after IB’s visit. There was an answering echo within, followed by footsteps. A pretty teenaged girl opened the door and led me in. Inside there were display cases containing novelty rubbers and other juvenile stationery; murals of cartoon schoolkids covered the walls and even the mihrab, or prayer-niche, in which an angelic cousin of Dennis the Menace sat reading the Book of God. Mamluk purists would stretch their eyes, but at least Tankiz’s Qur’an College was still exactly what it was founded to be. ‘And’, the director told me, ‘it will remain so for ever, in sha Allah, as long as people do not abandon Islam.’ I left having drawn another blank on the Hatter’s College, but thinking that the good and upright Tankiz would be delighted, once he had got over the shock of seeing his school Disneyfied.

  *

  That evening, after another cerebro-burger and a pink grapefruit juice, I explored the newer parts of central Damascus. There was a chill in the air, and the doleful descant of sock-sellers. I was drawn by a neon sign saying VICES CENTER; a closer inspection, however, revealed that the first part of the sign had not lit up – COMMUNICATION SER. Next door to this disappointment was the Hejaz Railway Station, the northern terminus of the line that Lawrence and his Bedouin blew up in Arabia. A German locomotive dated 1908 was parked outside on the station approach; on top of it was a sign in the shape of a smaller steam engine, advertising a restaurant in unseemly pink neon. Then, in a sidestreet by the station, I spotted something that more than made up for the absence of vices: a row of bookshops.

  The first specialized in science textbooks. ‘If it’s history and geography you’re after,’ said the owner, ‘then go to Hikmat Hilal. He’s two doors away.’

  One should try – indeed, one is encouraged by a tradition of the Prophet – to refrain from thinking about the meanings of Arabic personal names. There are too many men called Jamil, ‘Beautiful’, who are not; Saddam ought to be ‘one who crashes frequently’, and is the usual word for the bumper of a car; Khadijah, a common girl’s name, is cognate with the word for an abortive she-camel. But Hikmat Hilal – Wisdom of a Crescent Moon, or Philosophy of a Parenthesis – had the right ring for a bookseller. To me the name suggested a stooped, ascetic figure in reading glasses.

  Mr Hikmat did wear glasses but looked prosperous rather than ascetic. He sat, suavely suited, beneath a framed calligraphic panel in superb gilded script. It was a familiar fragment of verse: ‘A man’s best friend is his library.’ Near it hung another calligraphic panel, the Qur’anic Chapter of Daybreak:

  Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak from the mischief of His creation; from the mischief of the night when she spreads her darkness; from the mischief of the witches who blow upon knots; from the mischief of the envier, when he envies.

  Mr Hikmat saw me looking at the text. ‘There is great beauty and great terror in those few words, is there not?’

  ‘I think it’s one of the finest pieces of Arabic prose in existence.’

  ‘You are a Muslim?’ he asked, tentatively.

  ‘No. A Masihi.’

  ‘So am I. A Roman Catholic.’ I glanced again at the prominently displayed Qur’anic text. ‘You think I am a little … syncretic? Well, in the Qur’an itself God says: “We have revealed the Qur’an in the Arabic tongue.” I am an Arab, of the tribe of Tayy.’

  I decided immediately that I liked Mr Hikmat.

  A quick look around the shelves revealed that most of the stock was on the Islamic sciences of Tradition studies, jurisprudence and Qur’anic interpretation. I asked if there was anything on the history of madrasahs in Damascus.

  ‘But of course. Al-Nu’aymi’s Al-daris fi tarikh al-madaris. Absolutely indispensable. Let me see …’ He flicked through a ledger. ‘Ah, as I thought. It’s in the flat. As it happens, I was about to shut up and go there. Why don’t you come? There may be one or two other things of interest to you.’

  As we drove into the suburbs, Hikmat explained that in addition to the shop and his own library at home, he had a flat to house most of his stock on history and geography. Eventually we arrived at a nondescript block. Other than a small table, a few chairs and a television – left on and blaring adverts – the flat contained nothing but books. They lined the walls in ceiling-height shelves and covered much of the floor in neat stacks. Hikmat began to look for Al-daris but was quickly sidetracked.

  ‘Look, here’s al-Ramhurmuzi’s Wonders of India. A fascinating work, but of course rather too early for IB … The Travels of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, the Arabic translation. That’s a little closer to your period. Ah, here we are … Abu ’l-Fida’s geographical encyclopaedia, contemporary with IB. So sad they never met!’

  I went off on my own trip, and rapidly became intoxicated. Hikmat had moved to another room, but I could still hear his running commentary: ‘poetry on the Mongol invasions … a history of the Assassins … an original Leiden imprint – very rare and expensive …’

  The doorbell rang rudely. Hikmat emerged from the other room with a pile of books, put them on the table and opened the door. Two women came in, whom Hikmat introduced as his wife and sister-in-law. There was a prolonged kerfuffle about some article of feminine clothing. ‘How should I know where it is?’ Hikmat exclaimed petulantly. He strutted about, waving his hands and mumbling. Finally, the article – an elaborate frock – was found behind a pile of books, together with a bottle of Red Label. Mrs Hikmat poured generous slugs and we sat around the table. The ladies questioned me about my background.

  ‘And precisely how long have you been in Yemen?’ asked the sister-in-law. She had a curious, unstable half-smile like a Siamese about to pounce.

  ‘About fifteen years.’

  ‘Just as I thought. It’s a girl, isn’t it? You’ve fallen in love, haven’t you? But don’t take that step! Don’t convert! Promise me you’ll never do it. Who is more important – that girl or Jesus?’

  Hikmat was looking at the ceiling. He spoke gently. ‘I think you have nothing to fear. Tim is a … an orientalist.’

  She seemed to relax a little, but kept eyeing me warily.

  Soon afterwards, the ladies left and we continued our tour of the bookshelves. Much later, I glanced at my watch and noticed that it was eleven o’clock. I suggested to Hikmat that he might want to go home.

  ‘I was waiting for you to say that you’d had enough,’ he replied. ‘Oh! And what about Abu ’l-Fida’s Short History of Mankind, with the continuation by Ibn al-Wardi? Very important … Completely indispensable.’

  Hikmat found me a taxi and I returned to the hotel with a pile of books. Up in my room I turned straight to the chapter in the madrasah history on t
he Sharabishiyyah, the Hatter’s College. ‘It is in the Street of the Sha”arin’ – the Hair-Sellers? – ‘adjoining the Bath of Salih, north of the Bird Market, inside the Gate of the Water-trough.’ I could hardly have asked for a more precise address, and was so delighted that I almost overlooked a footnote: ‘It has completely disappeared. Not a trace of it remains.’

  Undeterred, I set out the following morning with the address on a scrap of paper. The diligent inverse archaeologist should, after all, adopt a diachronic perspective; doubtless, my expedition would generate a laconic footnote – ‘The site of the Sharabishiyyah is now occupied by a motorcycle repair shop’, or some such.

  The easy bit was Bab al-Jabiyah, the Gate of the Water-trough. Inside, I entered an endless walk-in wardrobe called Suq al-Qumaylah, the Market of the Little Louse, and selected an elderly clothes merchant. He pondered over the address. ‘The only thing that means anything to me is al-Sha”arin,’ he said at length. ‘They were the people who sold the goat-hair cloth that the badw use for their tents. There’s still one of them left.’ He summoned a boy to lead me to the sole remaining goat-hair tent-fabric merchant. I felt a growing excitement.

  The goat-hair merchant was mystified by the address but passed me on to an uncle, another elderly man. He read the address over several times. ‘There were plenty of sha”arin around here when I was young. But I’ve never come across the Bath of Salih, or the Bird Market, and my family’s had this shop for five generations. You could try Hajj Yusuf.’

  Another boy led me to Hajj Yusuf, a very old man who was sitting outside a shop on the Street Called Straight. I perched beside him on a low stool. He was a bit deaf, so I explained my quest very slowly and loudly. A small audience gathered.