That evening, I was sitting in the hotel restaurant feeling lost – linguistically, culturally, temporally – when a strange encounter took place. Not knowing how to summon the waiter in Turkish, I called him in the Arabic of San’a (‘Ya Izzay!’ carries better than ‘Er, excuse me …’). At this, two men on the next table suddenly turned and stared at me as if I had been the risen Lazarus.
After the initial shocks – theirs of discovering an Englishman who spoke Yemeni Arabic, mine, more unnerving, of finding out that they were Israelis – we exchanged histories. The Israelis had been born in Tel Aviv to Yemeni parents: Yirham’s came from a town towards Aden, Reuben’s from a village near San’a. We spoke in Arabic. Now and again, Reuben would hold up his hand and ask me to repeat something; then he would say the phrase to himself, shaking his head gently. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘when I hear you … I remember my father and mother. Your speech was their speech’, his voice cracked, ‘exactly.’
I had released a warm flood of nostalgia. ‘When my great-grandmother died,’ said Yirham, ‘she was a hundred and five. And her last words were, “I want to go back to Yemen.”’
‘We’re always saying that,’ Reuben added. ‘Life isn’t easy. We orientals don’t get on with the Shiknaz, the Ashkenazis. And Tel Aviv is all rush. A hundred times worse than London. Yemen … Yemen we remember as somewhere unhurried. All that sitting around, telling stories, chewing qat.’
‘You make it sound like the Promised Land,’ I said.
They nodded.
Reuben excused himself. He returned with a damp towel. ‘Israeli qat,’ he announced.
I sat there until late at night, on the terrace of the Sun Rise Hotel, with the Zionist Enemy, exchanging jokes, proverbs, lines of songs, all of us missing Yemen, I a Yemen from which I had been absent too long, they a Yemen they had never seen, taking what Turkish law – if it had heard of it – would have regarded as a highly illegal drug. It was probably the worse qat I have ever chewed; but we were talking the same language.
*
The following morning Reuben and Yirham headed back to the land which, for them, had failed to live up to its promise. I left the coast for Konya, drawn like IB by a remarkable man: Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, known to the Turks as Mevlana, ‘Our Master’. Born in 1207 in the northern foothills of the Hindu Kush, the future Mevlana and his family moved to Anatolia to escape the advance of the Tatars. He was brought up in the scholarly, Persianized surroundings of Seljuk Konya and became a legist and professor. And then something very strange happened. In IB’s version of the story, a seller of sweetmeats came into the room where Mevlana was lecturing and offered him a cake. Mevlana abandoned his lecture and disappeared with the sweetseller. ‘After many years he returned; but he had become demented, and would speak only in Persian rhymed couplets which no one could understand. His disciples used to follow him and write down that poetry as it issued from him, and they collected it into the book called the Mathnawi.’
‘Speaking crazily, weeping crazily, laughing crazily,’ said Mevlana, in the Mathnawi, of another returned wanderer, ‘men and women, small and great, were struck with bewilderment.’ He could have been describing his own reappearance in Konya, spouting rhyming stories that inhabit the borderlands between comedy, philosophy and madness. The Mathnawi is the masterpiece of a holy fool. Gradually, the reader slips into a magical-real world in which a dialogue between a king and a slave on accident and substance, or a housewife having a metaphysical chat with a chickpea, seem utterly normal. There are violent swings of scale: ‘Once upon a time there was a huge, enormous city, only its size was no more than the size of a saucer. Very huge it was, very wide and very long, really tremendous, tremendous as an onion.’ As IB suggests, it is nonsense – but the nonsense of the ‘pole’, or spiritual axis of his age, the nonsense of Carroll and Blake that talks of many things, of an immense world of delight closed by your senses five.
Mevlana would often utter his couplets while dancing, or as he revolved around a pillar in his college. After his death the order he had founded – the Mevlevis, the so-called Whirling Dervishes – continued the dance and made it the central feature of a balletic, hieratic and mystical ritual known as sema. For six centuries, Konya was the pivot of the dervish world. Then came Atatürk, who in 1925 banned the Mevlevis, Stalinistically, for ‘reactionary conspiracy’. They were permitted to whirl again in 1953, but only once a year on the anniversary of their master’s death. The Mevlevis, one of the most important of all the mystical brotherhoods to spring out of medieval Islam, were now seen by the authorities as potentially subversive Morris dancers. Business, however, saw them as a moneyspinner: along the Konya road, the pirouetting dervish had become a favourite logo on eateries and service stations. I was going to miss the annual Mevlana Festival, and it didn’t bother me one bit.
It was good to be away from the coast, from the fruity smells of sweat and sun-oil, ripening at the end of a long summer. Perhaps the traveller al-Maqdisi overstated things when he wrote that all cities on the sea are hotbeds of fornication and sodomy, but I knew what he was getting at. Inland Konya, in contrast, was a picture of continence, a city of beards and of foreheads lumpy from praying. lt was also continental: heat radiated from the ground, but there was a hint of a chill in the air, of steppe winds from the east. The year was on the turn; I was back in Asia, and back in the Islamic world.
Mevlana’s mausoleum-complex was closed, but I walked around it in the fading light, my eyes fixed on the conical turquoise dome that floats above that spiritual omphalos, that adytum of dervishes, the tomb of the saint. A dumpy woman stood at the door, stooping to read the opening times. I went to do the same and realized that she was murmuring, clutching the door handles in supplication, not reading but praying.
*
Come, come again, and again …
Come, be you unbeliever, idolator or fire-worshipper …
Our hearth is not the threshold of despair;
Even if you have broken your vow of repentance a hundred times,
Come again.
The quotation hung above the entrance to Mevlana’s tomb-chamber. We took him at his word, Turks, trippers and travel writers, and piled into the mausoleum, this spiritual Alice’s Restaurant, carrying our shoes in white plastic bags. The whiff of rancid trainers mingled with the odour of sanctity; devotees raised their hands in supplication before the tombs of Mevlana, his family and followers – a fleet of them, sailing for salvation, each with a turban at the masthead – while tourists raised their cameras to get a better shot. In the adjoining hall where the Mevlevis had once whirled in their sema ceremony, broody peasant women clucked at the preserved underpants of defunct dervish-masters. In the mosque, a tourist ran his video camera along cases of open manuscripts as if scanning bar-codes at a supermarket checkout.
IB described Mevlana as ‘a saint of high rank’. This is an understatement. His mana was so concentrated that even a sip of spring rainwater in which a corner of his turban had been dipped was held to transmit high-calorie blessings. The distribution of this water became an annual event, held in April; a year or two after IB’s visit to Konya, Abu Sa’id, Tatar Ilkhan of the Two Iraqs, presented the Mevlevis with a vessel worthy of the ceremony. I found the April Cup in a corner of the tomb-chamber. ‘Cup’ was also an understatement. It stood waist-high, and was of dark bronze and hard to see in the gloom. Then I stooped down to inspect it more closely, and saw that the entire surface was inlaid with silver and gold. One cartouche stood out from the rest, polished by passing fingers: it showed a slender enthroned ruler between two Mongol pages. The ruler’s features were almost worn away; but I wondered if this might be a portrait of the donor – the boy-king over whom Sultan al-Nasir sighed, ‘the most beautiful of God’s creatures’, as IB remembered him from their meeting in Baghdad – Abu Sa’id, calligrapher, lutenist and descendant of Genghis Khan. Portrait or not, with its barbaric, almost Texan proportions married to such exquisite decoration, the April
Cup overflowed with the spirit of the late Mongol age.
IB mentioned the Mevlevis’ ‘vast hospice in which food is served to all wayfarers’. In my imagination I had seen myself here, discussing mysteries over tripe soup. The hospice was much enlarged in Ottoman times, and Mevlevis still stirred the cauldrons in the kitchen; but the cooks were waxworks, the cooking fires lit only by red light bulbs. The mysteries had evaporated.
I gave up on dervishes and decided to look for other survivals from IB’s time. The traveller admired the carpets of the region, ‘which have no equal in any country, and are exported to Syria, Egypt, Iraq, India, China and the lands of the Turks’. Almost incredibly, carpets woven for the Great Mosque in Konya – probably when Sultan Ala ’l-Din built the main prayer-hall a century before IB’s visit – were still in use there until the 1900s. I had read that some of them were preserved in the Mevlana complex. A thorough search had, however, drawn a blank. I tried the mosque: perhaps I would find a carpet, even a tiny fragment, in its original setting. As Battutian relics went, a carpet on which the traveller might have prayed would be the equivalent of the True Cross.
In the mosque I found a superb minbar in a forest of columns – bunches of asparagus tied with ribbons, all of stone – but not a stitch of a Seljuk carpet. Next door stood two polygonal mausolea with pointed roofs, stark as spacecraft in the hard sunlight. The authorities had recently restored one of them, and commemorated the work above the original Arabic foundation text - IN ROMAN CHARACTERS. ‘Vandals!’ I hissed. ‘Is nothing sacred?’
I wandered crossly around Konya, haunted by the omnipresent face of Atatürk, axer of Arabic, dissolver of dervishes, iconoclast. As night fell my annoyance increased. Some national celebration was taking place and the streets of Konya were hung with illuminations: roses, tulips and – tip-toeing through them in dolly-mixture neon – dervishes. I returned, nauseated, to the hotel, hardly suspecting that I was about to enter a Konya, a universe, which IB knew.
My entrée came via the combination, unlikely anywhere but in Turkey, of a wrestler and a carpet merchant. The wrestler was performing physical jerks in the hotel foyer; when he had finished, we fell into conversation about Seljuk Konya. He had heard about the Great Mosque carpets but didn’t know what had become of them. ‘Let’s ask my friend Kamil,’ he suggested. ‘He runs a carpet shop and knows everything about Konya.’ And, I thought, remembering the patter of these salesmen in Alanya and Antalya, there’ll be apple tea in six languages and no obligation to buy.
We met Kamil on the street. The wrestler passed me on to him, and the two of us walked together towards his shop. ‘Where are you from, my friend?’ he asked. I could predict the coming half-hour with accuracy.
‘Britain. But I live in Yemen.’
All of a sudden, there on the pavement, Kamil took my arm and turned me to face him. His eyes filled with tears, the cords of his neck tightened, and he began to sing – a slow, sobbing dirge. Several passers-by stopped and listened. I recognized the words ‘Yemen’ and ‘flower’. When he had finished, he wiped his eyes and we walked on as if nothing had happened.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, wondering if I had found another exile from Yemen, ‘you’ll have to explain.’
‘It is difficult,’ Kamil said. ‘But it means roughly: “This is Yemen. Its flower is … çemen.” I don’t know what it is in English, but it is not sweet. Bitter. “They go there and do not return. I wonder why.” It is about our Osmanlı soldiers who went to your Yemen and didn’t come back.’ I lived, of course, in the graveyard of the Ottomans: Yemen, where, a hundred years ago, Anatolian conscripts had died by the thousand; Yemen, whose flower, as I found out later from the dictionary, is bitter cumin; a place whose name is, a century on, as sadly, musically evocative for the Turks as Picardy is for us.
In the shop Kamil gave me the foreseen apple tea and a display of his stock (there was no obligation to buy), following my reactions with the searching eye of all carpet sellers and other psychoanalysts. The phrase ‘You like this one’, which began as a question, gradually became a conjecture, then a gentle imperative. Uncannily, he knew exactly what I liked. I steered the discussion, however, on to IB and the Seljuk carpets of Ala ’l-Din’s mosque. Kamil thought they might have been taken to Istanbul. He then asked me what else my Arab traveller had to say about Konya.
I gave him a summary of IB’s account of Mevlana and his dervishes. ‘And now,’ I concluded, ‘they are gone. Or at least they’re no more than a tourist attraction …’
‘No! You are wrong,’ Kamil interrupted. ‘God protects those who love him. And tonight,’ he smiled arcanely, ‘God willing, you will meet them.’
God willed it. At ten o’clock Kamil and I walked along a shadowed side-street near Mevlana’s mausoleum. ‘You are not the first unbeliever I have brought here,’ Kamil confided. ‘And you should know that the others have left as converts.’
I swallowed. ‘I thought you said there was no obligation to buy.’
We entered a gate, crossed a courtyard and came to a door with many pairs of shoes at the threshold. We added ours and went in. Inside was a small lobby which three men – one middle-aged and clean-shaven, one in his twenties, tall and bearded, and a youth – were using as a changing-room. I had a glimpse of tight white trousers, soft boots, high fawn caps; the tall man was adjusting the folds of a long white skirt. It was a uniform I had already seen – on the waxwork dervishes in Mevlana’s museum-mausoleum. The men were utterly absorbed in their robing and seemed not to notice us. We passed from here into a large room lined with more men and boys, all in mufti, sitting cross-legged on low mattresses around the walls. There had been a low hum of voices; as we entered, the room fell silent. After a lot of wriggling, a couple of boys ended up on the floor and Kamil and I were squeezed into the line on either side of an old man with a shaven head. I had hoped to be an unobtrusive observer; instead, I was sitting almost in the lap of Shaykh Nuri Kılcı, usually known as Hajji Baba, master of the Mevlevi-Kaderi dervishes.
For a moment Hajji Baba appraised me, bright-eyed and bushy-bearded, both gnome-like and gnomic. We exchanged a few Arabic pleasantries, then he switched into Turkish with Kamil interpreting. The whole room was looking and listening.
‘What is your name? Tim? What is a “Tim” doing here, among us?’ Kamil interjected some words of explanation, and Hajji Baba’s eyes narrowed. ‘You have lived in Yemen for fifteen years and you are not a Muslim? Who are these Yemenis that they have not directed you in the true path? You need stronger, younger men who will beat you!’ He slapped me on the back of my neck, gently, then grinned. Suddenly his expression changed to one of the utmost gravity. ‘Look at yourself,’ he said softly. ‘Your hair is going grey. You might die tonight. And then you will go to the Eternal Fire. You do not know yourself. First know yourself, then you will know God and take Him into your heart. Your heart is a palace for Him. You are beautiful: make yourself more beautiful still!’ He took my shoulders, pulled me downwards and tenderly kissed the top of my head.
Throughout this monologue the audience hung on Hajji Baba’s utterances. The only movement was of a boy who brought us tea, approaching on his knees. I, however, had only one concern: not to belch. On account both of our close proximity and the very large raw onion I had eaten with my supper, it would not have been a pleasant experience for the shaykh of the Mevlevi-Kaderis.
I soon forgot the turmoil in my gut, for the sema had begun. A man on our right chanted a litany in Turkish interspersed with Arabic. While this was happening, I was at last able to study the sema-goers. There were perhaps seventy of them, mostly in early middle age but with a sprinkling of older and younger men, and a few boys. What was remarkable about them was, like IB’s cobbler host in Antalya, their ordinariness. I tried to imagine how they had spent the day: driving taxis, selling carpets, keeping accounts, extracting teeth. They looked as unlikely a set of mystics as you might meet anywhere.
The litany ended, and a flute began to pla
y. It was a simple melody but mesmeric, like a Satie Gymnopédie. ‘Listen to this reed, how it makes complaint, telling a tale of separation … The cry of the reed is fire, it is not wind … It is the fire of love that has set the reed aflame; it is the surge of love that bubbles in the wine!’ Divine love, separation of soul from Creator, ecstatic champagne: with this allegory Mevlana returned from his travels. No one, said IB, could understand him; now, as we listened, it began to make sense.
The sema-goers intoned the Islamic creed, then other phrases which ended on a long glissando syllable, huuuu; as it died away they prostrated themselves. Some sobbed. I noticed Hajji Baba give a sign, and two drums began to beat, insistently. The whole room chanted la ilaha illa ’llah, There is no god but God. Faster and faster it went; then another almost imperceptible sign from Hajji Baba and the rhythm changed, and the chant, to a simple Allah … Allah … The men rocked back and forth. At first I remembered the swaying dancers at al-Husayn’s mawlid in Cairo; but the dervishes of Konya soon left them standing – the rocking became more vigorous, even violent. A youth opposite snatched breaths between Allahs with loud sobs and gulps, and sweat flew from him: he seemed on the verge of hyperventilation, of collapse, and I now thought of IB’s Shrieker, a dervish of Bursa who died of ecstasy. And still the intensity increased.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 31
