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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  By now it was mid-afternoon, and we still had to find al-Kahf, ‘the Cavern’, the most secluded of the Assassin castles. But on my way out of al-Marqab the gatekeeper asked if I’d seen the paintings. I was surprised: decorations in this temple to militarism? ‘They’re in a small room off the chapel,’ he explained. ‘We only discovered them this year. They’d been whitewashed over.’

  I returned to the chapel, and in a small sacristy to the north of the apse found a fresco. Part of it had flaked away, but it clearly showed the twelve apostles in various stages of youth and age, beardedness and baldness. They looked down from the low vaulted ceiling; I felt that I was the one under scrutiny. Then I noticed that the saints were blind: their eyes had been carefully removed – according to an old belief, the powdered pigment cured ophthalmia. I imagined Qalawun’s forces entering the deserted chapel, surprised by this sudden burst of faces; and, perhaps, by their ordinariness. It was only a fancy, but I wondered if these fragile images might be portraits. The Hospitallers began to seem more human.

  As we drove back into the interior of the mountains, we passed a sign to a village called al-Khanziriyyah, ‘Piggy’. Abu Firas’s gruff explanation was that there were ‘some funny places around here’. A little further on he pointed out the Bramble, up on its perch above the Valley of Hell. ‘And look down there. We could have taken that road through the valley. It would have cut out miles. They didn’t tell us about it because they were afraid.’ I rather fancied a trip to Hell in a yellow Mercedes; but the shadows were lengthening and it was no time for Dantesque frivolities.

  Rashid al-Din Sinan, the most celebrated leader of the Syrian Nizaris, died in 1192. His successor was keen to show outsiders that, like the old Old Man, he was a disciplinarian. According to Crusader historians, the opportunity arose a couple of years later when he was entertaining Henry of Champagne at the Cavern. In the midst of the diplomatic niceties, the Old Man ordered two of his warriors to leap from the battlements. And leap they did – ending up, as one romance put it, ‘mors et fenis/ Sur les roches agues desrompis corps et pis’.

  It is one of those elastic stories that get stretched to different times and places. Sometimes the witness is not Henry (who died soon afterwards, parodically, in an accidental defenestration at Acre) but Frederick II von Hohenstaufen; sometimes it takes place in northern Persia; Alexander the Great, in the medieval legends, ordered a death leap; Peter the Great is said to have commanded a Cossack to jump from a tower in Copenhagen, to impress the King of Denmark. In the case of the Nizaris it seems to be more than a myth, for the sober and veracious Ibn Jubayr wrote about their leap of faith well before it entered European literature.

  Something inspired us to offer a lift to an off-duty soldier who, it turned out, was going in the direction of al-Kahf. He seemed reluctant to accept, and as we drove off he began frantically clicking his prayer beads. Abu Firas smiled at me, his diagnosis of endemic phobia confirmed. But the soldier gradually calmed down and even pointed out a couple of landmarks, the shrines of Adam’s son Seth and of the Prophet Salih. The light faded, the road deteriorated and the scene became increasingly druidical. Finally, on an eminence above a densely tree’d valley, the soldier told Abu Firas to stop. ‘That’s al-Kahf,’ he said, pointing to a line of cliff, tousled with vegetation, at a spot where the valley split.

  I looked at my watch, then at the castle, and reckoned I could just make it back to the car before total darkness descended. ‘Right. If you could wait, Abu Firas, I’ll be back as soon as possible.’

  Abu Firas didn’t look happy. The soldier clicked his prayer beads in alarm. ‘Don’t go,’ he said. ‘The forest is full of boars, huge ones. They can cut you in two with their tusks!’ He made a horrible diagonal slicing movement across his chest.

  Two things came to mind: al-Khanziriyyah, ‘Piggy’; and a passage I had recently come across in the memoirs of a boar-hunting man, the local twelfth-century nobleman Usamah ibn Munqidh – ‘I remember seeing a boarlet, about the size of a kitten, attack the hoof of my page’s horse. The page drew an arrow from his quiver, speared the animal and held it up in the air. I was astonished that so tiny a creature could be so ferocious.’

  I asked the soldier how big the boars got. He stretched his arms out to their full extent. ‘And more. Maybe two metres.’

  ‘I’m not going,’ I said.

  We stood for a while, looking up the valley. I pictured its Gadarene inhabitants … a crazy dash through Rackhamesque thickets. The sun was setting, turning the clouds pink. They seemed more solid than mere vapour, to have a sponginess about them, like freshly excised lungs.

  Back in Hamah I dined once more at the butcher’s, and ordered the only thing possible after a day of Assassin castles: hearts en brochette.

  *

  The mountains of Syria seem to breed fictions and heterodoxies. As well as the Nizaris there was a sect who, IB wrote, ‘hate the Ten [Companions of the Prophet] and – an extraordinary thing – never mention the word “ten”. When their brokers are selling goods at auction in the bazaars and come to ten, they say “nine-and-one”. One day an [orthodox] Turk happened to be there, and hearing a broker cry “nine-and-one”, he laid his club about the man’s head saying, “Say ten!”; whereupon the broker cried “Ten! … for the sake of the club.”’

  IB was equally intrigued by the Nusayris, now usually known as Alawis because of their devotion to the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali. Although they were nominally Muslims, the Mamluk authorities had to force them to build mosques; but, IB wrote, the house of God was often used ‘as a refuge for their cattle and their asses. Frequently too a stranger on coming to a village of theirs will stop at the mosque and recite the call to prayer, and then they call out to him, “Stop braying! Your fodder is coming to you.”’ An orthodox Syrian contemporary of IB was equally scathing, and described the Alawis variously as infidels, hypocrites, ignoramuses, pantheists, trinitarians, metempsychosists, Manichaeans and pseudo-Sabians. ‘In short, their only invariable doctrine is to ensure plentiful supplies of food, drink and sex.’

  The Alawis have generally had a hard time from the orthodox majority, and on one memorable occasion were raided by a force sent by the Pasha of Acre and commanded by Lady Hester Stanhope. The greatest catastrophe to befall them, however, took place seven years before IB’s visit. In the traveller’s version of events, a charismatic leader claiming to be the Awaited Mahdi persuaded the Alawis to arm themselves with myrtle branches. ‘They made a surprise attack on the town of Jabalah while the [male] inhabitants were engaged in Friday prayers, and entered the houses and dishonoured the women.’ In the backlash, IB says, about twenty thousand Alawis were killed. The only reason they were not completely wiped out was that ‘they were the labourers of the Muslims in the tillage of the soil’. The labourers had their revenge on the forces of orthodoxy 663 years later, in Hamah, armed with more than myrtle branches.

  Although the Alawis have now run Syria for the past thirty years, their beliefs are still little understood. Most of my scant information came from orthodox medieval sources written in indelible vitriol. But I had also read in more recent and impartial accounts that, true to IB’s comment, they had begun to build mosques voluntarily only in the 1970s; that, like the Nizari Isma’ilis, they had degrees of esoteric initiation; and that their knowledge had been transmitted down the generations through a succession of illuminati called Babs, ‘Doors’. Perhaps, I reasoned, a visit to the shrine of the eighth-century Ibrahim ibn Ad’ham, an orthodox Sufi saint also regarded by the Alawis as a Door, would provide a glimpse into the obscure corridor of their beliefs.

  Ibrahim ibn Ad’ham is a complex figure, at times mysterious, orphic, asleep in a garden as a viper fans him with a bunch of narcissi; at others touchingly human, an ascetic haunted even in his dreams by the tempting smell of sakbaj, a sort of oriental boeuf bourguignon. He is also a well-travelled saint. Born into one of the ruling families of Transoxiana, he underwent a Buddha-like conversion to the ho
ly life then made his way to Syria. Late medieval accounts claim that he lived for a time in a hermitage near Fez, and at the same period stories about him travelled east to India and Indonesia. He even popped up recently in Somerset, while I was having tea with an aunt. We were talking about memory. ‘How strange it is’, said Aunt Madge, ‘that I can still remember poems I learned when I was a girl! There’s that one about Abou Ben Adhem. I can see myself now, standing there and reciting it …

  Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

  Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

  And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

  Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

  An angel writing in a book of gold …’

  She recited, or incanted, in a voice so light that eighty years seemed to slip away from her.

  I drove to visit the tomb in Jabalah in a Mercedes even older than that of Abu Firas. As we passed a particularly large portrait of Basil, the driver mentioned that the President’s late son was buried nearby. ‘In Qirdahah. That’s where they come from. You ought to see the tomb – it’s like a very big villa. They’ve put up a five-star hotel. Oh, and there’s an international airport.’

  I assumed he was having me on about the airport; perhaps even daringly poking fun at the ruling family. Then I saw something that made me literally rub my eyes: a large sign to the ‘Martyr Basil International Airport’. It was an accolade normally reserved for superpower presidents and rinasciamento painters. If the Alawis honoured Basil thus, I must be in for a sepulchral treat in Jabalah.

  Ibrahim ibn Ad’ham’s tomb was in a mosque next to the bus station. It was empty except for a thin sleeping man and a fat comatose one. Paint was flaking like dandruff off the ceiling and piers of the prayer hall. In the tomb-chamber a mass-produced rug hung on the wall, showing the Atatürk Bridge in Istanbul. Ibrahim’s cenotaph, a giant bedlike structure with football-sized knobs, lay beneath a very dusty chandelier. Where was the parcel gilt, the smoking thurible charged with eaglewood? Where the riddling gnostic shaykhs looking beyond the door into infinity?

  The fat man had followed me in and was hovering behind the tomb. I asked him if he could tell me any stories about the saint; in response he pointed to a brief framed biography, which told me nothing I didn’t already know. He then shadowed me heavily out of the mosque. As I was leaving the main entrance, an old man zipped through it on a red scooter. The doors of Alawi perception remained firmly shut.

  I had meant to ask about Ibrahim al-Jumahi, the ‘notable devotee’ who ran the saint’s guest-house in IB’s day; and about the annual visitation described by the traveller, when devotees and dervishes came from across Syria bearing candles, and a great fair was held on the outskirts of the town. But something told me that the carnival was long over.

  Disappointed by medieval Jabalah, I snubbed it and made for the Roman theatre. In an office in the vaulted entrance I found a genial man who introduced himself as Abdullah Zakariyya. He chatted learnedly on the theatre, which he was restoring, and on the town’s later history. When I steered him on to Ibrahim ibn Ad’ham, he confirmed my expectations about the great annual visitation of the saint’s tomb. ‘You have to remember that you’re talking about a long time ago,’ he said.

  I admitted that I often forgot; then, forgetting again, asked if the name Ibrahim al-Jumahi meant anything to him.

  ‘It’s al-Jumahi with a short a,’ Abdullah replied, correcting my pronunciation. ‘Ibrahim al-Jumahi was the intendant of the saint’s hospice in the fourteenth century. The traveller IB called him “a notable devotee”.’

  I was impressed.

  ‘And’, he went on, looking pleased with himself, ‘I am his descendant.’

  *

  Perhaps it was the after-effects of temporal vertigo, or perhaps it was the graffito I spotted near my hotel – b’ahibbak b’ahibbak w’allah b’ahibbak! (‘I love you I love you, God I love you!’), followed by a large $; whatever, I couldn’t take al-Ladhiqiyyah seriously.

  When IB visited the port city, it was famous for a hospitable monastery where Muslim visitors were given ploughman’s lunches. Today, the entertainment is more sophisticated: in the hotel lobby, a Beirut satellite channel was previewing the annual Miss Lebanon contest, ‘120 lovely girls, next Thursday, 8 p.m. GMT, 11 Saudi time’. I escaped to my room and the autobiography of Usamah ibn Munqidh, who had written on the ferocity of boarlets. The memoirs of a nonagenarian written eight hundred years ago were the perfect antidote to dollar signs and dolly birds. I opened the book and read my way out of al-Ladhiqiyyah.

  Usamah was fascinated by being so old:

  I wonder that my hand, too weak to hold a pen,

  Speared lions long ago, in its young day;

  That when I walk with stick in hand the ground,

  Though solid, clings beneath my feet like clay.

  He also wrote of the effect of time on his memory. ‘One for whom the passage of years has been long may be excused a certain forgetfulness – which, after all, is the inheritance of Adam’s sons.’ But like his coeval, my Somerset aunt, Usamah could recall fragments from the past with remarkable clarity: Lu’lu’ah for instance, nanny to three generations of the Munqidh family, trying to do her washing with a piece of cheese; al-Yahshur, a pampered hawk that slept on a fur-lined bed; and his father’s favourite Zaghari bitch – ‘At night the pages would play chess by the light of a lamp which they placed on her head. She would sit there, without moving, until her eyelids drooped. My father, God bless his soul, would scold the pages and say, “You’ve blinded my hound!” But they never took any notice.’

  I fell asleep imagining that last tableau, a game of chess far away on a tiny continent of light.

  *

  ‘Al-Sarmini, Purveyors of Soap’ was almost the first thing I saw inside the Aleppo suq, and it had Battutian resonances. IB wrote that Sarmin ‘is a pretty town with a great quantity of orchards, their principal tree being the olive. Brick soap is manufactured there and exported to Cairo and Damascus.’ I had failed to find the place on the map; but here in Aleppo was a Sarmini still in the ancestral business. Mr Sarmini took a brick of olive-oil soap and broke it open. The inside was veined with green from the juice of laurel leaves. (I sympathized with Usamah’s nanny – in poor light, the soap would have been indistinguishable from a lump of Sage Derby.) ‘As recommended by Avicenna’, Mr Sarmini said, ‘for the treatment of dandruff, lice, impetigo and quba.’ I bought a year’s supply. Whatever the last complaint was, it had an unpleasant ring to it.

  Mr Sarmini directed me to the Great Mosque, a building admired by IB. ‘In the court there is a pool of water surrounded by a pavement of vast extent; the pulpit is of exquisite workmanship, inlaid with ivory and ebony.’ As in Damascus, the mosque is a surprise, a sudden open space set in the circuit-board complexity of the surrounding markets. IB’s vast pavement is laid out in bordered rectangles, imitating the carpeted interior of a prayer hall; it was dotted with elderly Aleppans who dozed in chairs or read. The prayer hall itself has two notable features. The first is a large brass grille protecting the burial place of Zechariah’s head. According to the Short History of Mankind, the relic was discovered a few years after IB’s visit. Rumours had been circulating about a sealed room. Against all advice, one of the mosque officials located the chamber and opened it up. Inside was a marble ossuary. ‘He removed the lid and found a portion of a skull. At the sight of it those present fled in awe.’ The official resealed the chamber; ‘but thereafter he was smitten with the falling-sickness. In the final attack he bit his tongue clean off, and died soon afterwards.’ It was a warning to the curious.

  The other notable feature was the minbar, the pulpit of exquisite workmanship IB had mentioned. It was new when the traveller saw it, a gift from Sultan al-Nasir. I was delighted to see it in place and not removed to a museum; then, as I approached the door that closed off the staircase, appalled. Some unspeakable person had covered it with a thick coat of varnis
h. The colour and finish reminded me of an old tuck-shop favourite called Caramac.

  And then something else caught my eye – the dark gleam of polished ebony – and I realized with renewed delight that the sides of the pulpit were in their original, uncaramelized state. ‘The leading Greek geometricians’, wrote Ibn Khaldun, ‘were all master carpenters. Euclid, the author of the Book of Principles, was a carpenter and known as such. The same was the case with Apollonius, the author of the book on Conic Sections, and Menelaus and others.’ Similarly, the carpenter who made this pulpit must have been a master geometrician: its surface was an interlocking mass of marquetry polygons in fruitwoods, set off by deep-cut ivory trefoils and miniature screen-work of criss-crossing ebony balusters with tiny ivory knobs at the nodes. A few bits of inlay had gone missing; otherwise, it was as crisp and fresh as when IB had seen it. The workmanship was indeed exquisite. With its interplay of polychromatic parts, it was a Bach fugue for the eyes.

  Next to the pulpit a man was lining himself up to pray. ‘Look!’ I said to him, making him flinch. ‘Isn’t it beautiful!’ He studied me for a few seconds and seemed to decide that, if I was a nutcase, I was a harmless one. I left him contemplating the minbar, distracted from his devotions.

  At the Baron Hotel, nothing had changed since my last stay: the same dark-panelled dining-room and BOAC calendars, the same books and little marquetry thrones in the reading-room. I even had the same bedroom with its Turkey carpets, big chintz curtains, solid furniture and chocolate-tiled bathroom. It was rather like staying with an Aunt. There have been murmurings about the Baron’s standards of hygiene; but if it was good enough for – as one is informed by a leaflet – the kings of Iraq and Sweden, Kemal Atatürk, Lawrence of Arabia, Princes Bibesco and Cantacuzino, Mr and Mrs Theodore Roosevelt, Dame Freya Stark, Yuri Gagarin, Valentina Tereshkova, Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen and Mrs Doris Duke (who may have got on to the list because of her noble-sounding surname), it was good enough for me. I had a beer in the bar and exchanged nods and semi-smiles with an English-looking man of my own age, similarly jacketed, who looked suspiciously like a travel writer.