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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  ‘Since you’re into tombs,’ he said, ‘we must take you to visit Sayyidah Zaynab.’

  I was reluctant. IB gave Zaynab only a passing mention, lifted from Ibn Jubayr’s Travels; but Abu Ala assured me that I would be impressed. He turned off the highway into a suburb distinguished by, if anything, its utter lack of distinction. A few minutes later, he pointed ahead. Two minarets covered in dark blue, turquoise and gilded tiles rose above the grey buildings. We parked the car and entered a courtyard of white marble, in the middle of which was a large, square mosque-tomb, also encrusted with tiles and crowned by a golden dome.

  I admitted that I was, now, impressed. ‘And I suppose that’s real gold leaf.’

  Abu Ala smiled. ‘No. Real gold bricks. You know what the Iranians are like about anyone related to the Prophet … Well, Sayyidah Zaynab was his granddaughter, and when the Shah was overthrown Khomeini put a lot of the royal wealth into reconstructing this place.’

  The building was certainly of an opulence seldom seen since the days of Shah Abbas. Most of the visitors were also Iranian. They moved around in awed groups led by subfusc mullahs. As we followed one of the parties into the tomb, I heard the shoe-monitor say to Abu Ala, ‘The foreigner isn’t allowed in.’

  ‘He’s a Muslim,’ Abu Ala replied, giving me an almost imperceptible wink.

  We made our way around two men who were fervently kissing the threshold. ‘That’s a bit over the top,’ Munir whispered audibly in their direction.

  ‘We all find our own paths to God,’ I hissed back, trying to sound conciliatory. But the threshold kissers were evidently too engrossed to have heard.

  It was prayer time, and we found ourselves almost treading on worshippers in mid-prostration. Above us, the vaulted space shone with chandeliers and mirror mosaics in a glitter of crystal, glass and silver – Coleridge’s sunny dome with caves of ice reinterpreted by Barbara Cartland. The tomb itself was surrounded by a cage of solid silver, no dainty feminine affair but an industrial-grade structure strong enough to contain an angry rhino. Beside the cage was a sort of large letter-box. I saw a lady in a chador drop a gold bangle into the slot.

  As we retrieved our shoes, I noticed that I was panting. My breath, quite literally, had been taken away – by the excitement of being an interloper, by the hyperdecoratedness of the place, but above all by the sheer fervour that permeated it, like a nerve gas. It hardly mattered that the centre of attention – Sayyidah Zaynab, al-Sitt, the Lady – was, in the opinion of the highest medieval authorities, a case of mistaken identity.

  We returned to the highway and resumed our journey south. In July 1348, while he was on his way home from the Far East, IB watched a procession taking place along this road. I had been reading about the background to it the night before in one of my purchases from Hikmat, the two-volume Short History of Mankind. This work came to an abrupt end in the same year, 1348 – a year in which the history of mankind itself seemed to be ending.

  In its final few pages the Syrian historian Ibn al-Wardi, who had taken over the writing of the annals after the death of the original author seventeen years earlier, quoted at length from a treatise of his entitled Al-naba an al-waba, The Pest Investigated. Despite the subject, it is written in jaunty rhyming prose, full of jingles and wordplays. The Black Death, he wrote, emerged fifteen years before from the Land of Darkness: ‘Ah, woe to him on whom it calls! It found the chinks in China’s walls – they had no chance against its advance. It sashayed into Cathay, made hay in Hind and sundered souls in Sind. It put the Golden Horde to the sword, transfixed Transoxiana and pierced Persia. Crimea cringed and crumpled …’ I apologize to Ibn al-Wardi for the levity of the translation: he was not exactly trying to be funny. Then again, perhaps there is a touch of humour, of the deepest black, the literary equivalent of the grinning, cavorting cadavers of Holbein’s Dance of Death – as if the author were releasing a nervous titter in the face of the approaching horror.

  All too soon the pestilence was close enough for him to report on its symptoms: ‘He who spat blood found, within two or three nights, a lodging in the ground, while those around him knew their own days would be few.’ The obituaries began: ‘News reached us of the death of Qadi Zayn al-Din in Safad, of Shaykh Nasir al-Din in Tripoli, of our friend Shaykh Abdulrahman in Aleppo, of my brother Yusuf …’ There was a report of lights seen flitting around the tombs in the town of Manbij; then of the death in Damascus of the scholar al-Umari, ‘Who once sent me some verses in his own hand:

  In the town of al-Ma’arrah live a family of scholars –

  The Wardis, authors of every glorious work …’

  Ibn al-Wardi had copied out his own epitaph. The book ends two lines later.

  When I showed the passage to my Yemeni friend Hasan, a medical man like his pharmacologist ancestor, he pointed out that the symptoms noted by Ibn al-Wardi – spitting blood, death within two or three days – are those of pneumonic plague. Alongside this came the bubonic form heralded by the swellings known variously to Arab commentators as almonds, cucumbers or kabab, meatballs. Michael Dols, in his essential work The Black Death in the Middle East, cites the third term as the origin of a Cairene curse, still current – ‘A meatball upon you!’ to which the reply is, ‘And two meatballs on you!’

  Time, and science, have taken the terror out of buboes; it is now almost impossible to comprehend the fear they excited. Few descriptions, however, could be as elegantly, surreally nasty as that of the Welsh poet Ieuan Gethin, writing less than a year after Ibn al-Wardi: ‘Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit; it is seething, terrible, wherever it may come, a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry, a burden under the arms, a painful angry knob, a white lump. It is of the form of an apple, like the head of an onion … a grievous thing of an ashy colour …’

  Arab physicians recommended a range of prophylactic measures. Among those mentioned by Dols are eating pickled onions before breakfast, drinking syrup of basil or a suspension of Armenian bole, avoiding cabbage, garlic and aubergines, carrying pomanders, sleeping in a room open to the north wind, keeping jolly company – as Boccaccio’s characters did in the Decameron – and wearing talismans, certain ringstones and clothing in particular colours. It was also held to be beneficial to read books, particularly the Qur’an, histories and humorous works – although presumably not The Pest Investigated.

  When all else failed, as it did, one could always pray. Someone saw the Prophet in a dream and passed on his prescription to the Damascenes: the Qur’anic Chapter of Noah to be recited in the city’s mosques 3,363 times. (The Black Death brought on a fashion for precise figures: the Pope was informed after the epidemic that the global death-toll was 42,836,486.) The recitation must have had little effect; six weeks later, IB watched a last-ditch attempt:

  At the time of the Great Plague at Damascus [on 24 July 1348, according to a contemporary historian], the viceroy ordered a crier to proclaim that the people should fast for three days. At the end of this period all conditions of men assembled in the Umayyad Mosque, until it overflowed with them. They spent the night there in prayers, liturgies and supplications. After the dawn prayer, they all went out together, barefoot, carrying Qur’ans. The entire population joined in the exodus, male and female, small and large; the Jews went out with their book of the Law and the Christians with their Gospel, their women and children with them, all in tears and humble supplications, imploring the favour of God through His Books and His Prophets. They made their way to the Mosque of the Footprints and remained there in supplication until near midday.

  In Christendom, the calamity of the Black Death provoked religious persecution: the Jews were widely believed to be spreading the pestilence in a well-poisoning campaign abetted by the Moors of al-Andalus. They paid the price in pogroms. In Damascus, however, the three Religions of the Book got together. It was appropriate for the place that claimed to be the origin of monotheism.

  To a certain extent, it worked: ‘God lightened their affliction; th
e number of deaths in a single day reached a maximum of two thousand, while in Cairo it rose to twenty-four thousand.’

  ‘Glory to God!’ exclaimed the guardian of the Mosque of the Footprint (now singular), as he handed me back the Travels. ‘This story reminds me of years ago, when I was a boy, and there was a great drought. We all went to the Shrine of Moses, not far from here, and prayed for rain. Then we slept among the graves. I couldn’t get to sleep, and I saw the figure of a man in a white robe walking along the wall of the shrine. I called out to the others, but the figure vanished. And then the rain started falling. You see, prayers are answered in this place.’

  I hadn’t expected this postscript to IB, but it tied in with the traveller’s tentative ascription of the footprints, ‘which are said to be those of Moses’. The guardian, however, disagreed. ‘Your writer’s information was wrong. They were made by the Prophet Muhammad. When he was 12 years old he came to Damascus from Mecca in a caravan of merchants. But he didn’t want to go into the city. You see, it was the earthly paradise, and he thought it would distract him from the heavenly one.’

  I remembered Mandeville – ‘and in that place was Adam made as some men saye’.

  ‘So’, the guardian continued, ‘he couched his camel here and alighted. This was the nearest he got to Damascus.’

  Al-Harawi’s guidebook was noncommittal: ‘It is said that they are the footprints of prophets.’ On the next page, however, he claimed to have tracked down a footprint of Muhammad in one of the city’s madrasahs. (He was something of a connoisseur of the subject: later, he bought his very own footprint of the Prophet in Abbadan for the bargain price of twenty-four dinars.) As a footnote to the confusion, an English visitor in 1601 saw Muhammad’s print, ‘a great hudge foote of stone’, on Jabal Qasiyun.

  Like the pavement outside the Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles the Islamic world is littered with celebrity footprints. They come in all sizes. The rule of thumb is, apparently, the earlier the celebrity the bigger the foot. Old Testament means outsize: I have inspected a footprint of Job in the Qara Mountains of Dhofar which was at least a size seventeen. And the law works exponentially – IB judged Adam’s footprint on his eponymous Peak in Serendip to be eleven spans, or over seven feet long. (Since the matching print was said to be on the seabed, twenty-four sailing hours away, our common ancestor must have been of extraordinarily Mannerist proportions.) Celebrated animals, like the Prophet Salih’s she-camel, have also left their marks.

  Questions of faith apart, not many of these marks are especially footlike. A few, though, are too good to be true: in Anatolia, I was told the story of a Turkish princess who threw herself from the roof of a mosque to avoid being raped by Christian soldiers. ‘She landed on her feet,’ my informant explained, ‘and so hard that she made these marks here.’ He pointed to a pair of dainty size threes impressed in a slab of marble. I was surprised to see that the princess had been wearing stiletto heels; a closer scrutiny, however, revealed that the marks were those of bolt holes. The slab was the empty podium of a classical statue.

  The Damascus footprint was let into a marble window sill, and was reasonably convincing. It looked about the right size for a 12-year-old boy, and had the splayed, spatulate toes of a desert traveller. Beside it was a jug of water. ‘I wash it every day,’ the guardian explained.

  One question had been bothering me. ‘I thought that Ibn Jubayr counted nine footprints. Where are the others?’

  The guardian looked ruffled. ‘They are … I hate to say … covered by buildings and asphalt.’

  I was shocked. This was no way to treat relics.

  ‘But’, the guardian added hastily, ‘we do have the historian Ibn Asakir. He’s buried out there.’ He pointed through the window to a jungly patch behind the mosque. There was no indication of a grave. ‘I know the spot exactly,’ the guardian explained, ‘because one day I was doing some gardening and I, er, dug him up. But I put him back.’

  That evening over tea in the bookshop, Hikmat chuckled when I told him about the accidental exhumation of Ibn Asakir. Soon, we were joined by a small gentleman with a library complexion, and a glamorous woman in leggings, one of those Levantine ladies with Steinway legs and intimidating hair. Talk turned to pre-Islamic poetry. A worried-looking man came in and inquired, in undertones, whether there was anything on shari’ah ordinances regarding conjugal relations and the menstrual cycle; he departed with a thick volume and a look of relief. Then a youngish couple turned up and picked Hikmat’s brains on editions of the Sahih of al-Bukhari, the corpus of tradition studied by IB in the Umayyad Mosque. Hikmat discoursed knowledgeably.

  ‘If I may ask,’ the woman said to Hikmat, ‘to which madhhab do you yourself belong?’

  Hikmat beamed, archly. ‘The Roman Catholic one.’

  There was a tiny pause, and an exchange of glances from the corners of eyes.

  ‘A chasuble’, said Hikmat, ‘doesn’t make a priest, nor an aba an alim.’ He poured another round of tea.

  I left them in the middle of a good-natured argument on whether, historically, Christians or Muslims have been hungrier for power.

  ‘Remember what the Christians said in Spain: “Never have we seen a more gentle conqueror than the Muslims.”’

  ‘The whole history of imperialism has been …’

  ‘Just look at the state of Yugoslavia. Now, if …’

  ‘… the Islamic conquests …’

  Hikmat’s voice followed me out on to the street. ‘Please! With respect, the Arab conquests. I am an Arab, of the tribe of Tayy!’

  Northern Syria

  Old Men of the Mountains

  ‘Above Jebilee, there dwell a people, called by the Turks, Neceres, of a very strange and singular character … being such Proteus’s in religion, that no body was ever able to discover what shape or standard their consciences are really of.’

  Henry Maundrell, A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem

  at Easter AD 1697

  IBN BATTUTAH MET a great many people during his travels. But, as Hikmat had said to me in his book-flat, it was a pity that he never met Abu ’l-Fida. The Syrian nobleman was one of those rare personalities who, in retrospect, seem to have embodied the spirit of an age. Born in 1273 into a branch of Saladin’s family which had until recently ruled the town of Hamah, he was introduced to a further world by his tutor Ibn Wasil. This aged scholar had spent some months in southern Italy in the intellectual Schatzkammer of the Emperor Manfred, whom he later held up as a mirror for the young prince. ‘He used to tell me’, Abu ’l-Fida recalled, ‘that Manfred knew ten theorems of Euclid by heart.’

  Abu ’l-Fida’s upbringing was martial as well as academic. Aged 12, he witnessed the expulsion of ‘al-Ustibar’, the Hospitallers, from their great fortress of al-Marqab; four years later at Tripoli he gagged at the stench of rotting Crusaders; not long after, he was in charge of dragging a giant mangonel through the snow from Crac des Chevaliers to the siege of Acre. Later, he skirmished with the Mongols and took part in the ever-popular sport of Armenian-raiding. Then, as peace descended on the fourteenth century, he turned from swordplay to wordplay, composing verses whose nearest literary equivalent in English is the Spectator crossword.

  He was a close friend of Sultan al-Nasir, who regularly had him brought to Cairo by the barid, the Mamluk Federal Express, to hunt near the Pyramids with panthers and gyrfalcons. Al-Nasir invested Abu ’l-Fida with robes of ermine and cloth-of-gold, and eventually with the title of Sultan of Hamah which his ancestors had borne. The occasion was celebrated with a magnificent procession in Between the Two Castles.

  Abu ’l-Fida, warrior, hunter, poet and sultan, was also an accomplished astronomer and botanist; the chief physician in Cairo deferred to him on medical matters; he wrote that useful Short History of Mankind, continued by Ibn al-Wardi and finished off by the Black Death; his volume of geographical tables was the most up-to-date thing of its kind, and became a major source for European mapmakers from the Renaissance on. Un
der this remarkable man, Hamah became an Islamic Parnassus.

  At the time of IB’s first Syrian trip, Abu ’l-Fida was writing hard, continuing his history and revising his geography. He was working under pressure of time, and he knew it. ‘I do not believe’, he would say to his courtiers, ‘that I shall outlive my sixtieth year, for no member of the Ayyubid house of Hamah has done so.’ At the beginning of that year he composed a verse in the Andalusian manner and in sentiment somewhere between Horace and Piaf:

  I do not rant at Time or blame him,

  For with diversions have I tamed him.

  I’ve lived a blessed life, full of delights

  That please the senses – sounds, and tastes, and sights –

  With pure cups carousing, in paradise browsing.

  True to the family curse, Abu ’l-Fida died in 1331 aged 59 years and 8 months by the Islamic calendar. He was buried in a mosque-tomb complex he had built in the outskirts of Hamah, set in a garden by the River Orontes and, in his own words, ‘one of the most delectable of spots’.

  The Islamic Museum in Cairo owns a personal relic of Abu ’l-Fida – a brass pen-box inlaid in gold, silver and copper with a dense herbarium of arabesques in which lurk the Sultan’s blazon. I had looked for but failed to find this apotheosis of the pencil-case. Now I left Damascus, in search of Battutiana and to visit the delectable tomb of the polymath prince of Hamah.

  *

  Hamah, set on the banks of a river and the verge of genteel ennui, a city of teashops, public parks and fizzing weirs, of fine old buildings restored with a bridgework of new ashlar, has something of the feel of Bath. In an age when most cities have spilt out of their ancient settings it is still relatively compact, almost hidden in the Orontes valley, recognizably IB’s comely town ‘surrounded by orchards and gardens, supplied by water-wheels like revolving spheres’.

  Dusk was falling when I arrived. I walked down to the river, drawn by the sound of the water-wheels, or norias. They were as tall as three-storey houses yet twirled as easily as spinning-wheels, powered by the slick black belt of the Orontes. The noise was deafening. (‘Noria’ comes via al-Andalus from the Arabic na’urah, itself connected with a root signifying the gushing of liquids and the roaring of beasts.) A man was watching one of the wheels. Suddenly he turned and spoke to me. ‘The poets have written much on the subject of norias.’ It sounded more like Ibn Juzayy than a conversational opener. ‘To what would you liken the sound of this one?’