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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  Just this side of frenzy the two elder dancers appeared. They crossed the room on their knees and kissed Hajji Baba’s hand. He stroked their faces, then they rose and began to turn, pirouetting on the left foot and propelled by the right, which rose and fell in time with the drums. As their speed increased their skirts billowed out and became perfect cones of white. Their arms were outstretched, right palm upwards, left downwards. I knew from my reading on the dervishes that their hands were meant to transmit barakah from heaven to earth – rather like spiritual lightning-conductors. Books, however, had not prepared me for what now took place – a gradual emptying of the mind of everything but these two revolving figures, cycle and epicycle, and that deafening throb: Allah … Allah …, the great iamb, the music of the spheres.

  Eventually the dancers retired, kissing once more the hand of their gnostic conductor, and others came on – those prosaic mystics in trousers and sweat-stained shirts. The last to dance was the youth I had seen robing earlier. In seconds he was a conic blur, weightless, on the point of levitation. Thus he remained, time in suspense, until at last Hajji Baba nodded to the drummers and the rhythm slowed, the corolla of skirts folded, the heartbeat became still. In the silence and acrid-sweet stink of sweat, someone began to recite from the Qur’an. I looked from face to face around the room and remembered that IB had described the scene, and such voices, ‘that work upon men’s souls and at which hearts are humbled, skins creep, and eyes fill with tears’. The recitation began: ‘Ha-Mim Ayn-Sin-Qaf. Thus Allah, the Mighty One, the Wise One, inspires you as He inspired others before you.’ Again, the mystic letters.

  When the reading finished, Hajji Baba turned to me and asked how I felt. After the catharsis of the sema, I could only honestly say that I felt empty.

  ‘Then,’ he said very quietly, ‘with what will you fill this emptiness?’

  We looked at each other, the crowd suddenly absent – like potential lovers. Shocked, I looked away. The room flooded back.

  I heard Hajji Baba speaking, then Kamil translating. ‘He says your nafs is too strong, that it is making you fight against Islam. You know the meaning of nafs?’

  I nodded. ‘For a moment I entertained the idea of spending the rest of my life in the service of this shaykh,’ wrote IB of the island-hermit of Abbadan; ‘but I was dissuaded from it by my importunate nafs.’ By his worldly, appetitive spirit.

  Hajji Baba spoke again. ‘And’, said Kamil, ‘he says that your head is too full of books.’

  Mats were spread and laid with peaches, melons, grapes and cucumbers. Hajji Baba picked the ripest and sweetest fruit and passed it to me on a plate – the simat of the dervishes, the food served to all wayfarers, unbelievers and idolators included. After we had all eaten, he recited Mevlana’s grace and we dispersed into the midnight streets, shivering after the bath-heat of the room, shirts stiffening with sweat-frost. As Kamil and I were leaving, Hajji Baba patted my shoulder and said, ‘I think you will not sleep tonight.’

  He was right. A pair of tomcats growled and scrapped under the bedroom window. My stomach growled and scrapped. And my mind span and pulsed, noisy with the strangeness of it all: of looking for a carpet and finding the sema; of glimpsing a world IB had known, officially dead but living on in the back streets of Konya; and of hearing the language of the coast – a language of love, dance, wine, ecstasy – spoken in the dialect of angels.

  Some time after three the microcosmic belch broke out, tremendous as an onion. Then someone chucked a bucket of water over the cats. The spinning ceased, the pulse slowed; sleep came.

  *

  ‘The Sultan of Akridur makes a practice of attending afternoon prayers in the congregational mosque every day.’ I entered the mosque, the Travels open in my hand. ‘He sits with his back to the wall of the qiblah.’ I sat, sultanically, against the wall facing Mecca. ‘The Qur’an readers take their seats in front of him on a high wooden platform.’ I looked up: there it was, a double-decker dais. It was an extremely unusual piece of furniture, but I had missed it when I came in – my nose was stuck in the text. Perhaps Hajji Baba was right, and my head was overstuffed with books.

  So far, IB would have had no trouble recognizing Akridur, the Turkish Eğridir, west of Konya, set on a lake surrounded by apple orchards and the peachy mountains of Pisidia. ‘We lodged there in a college opposite the mosque.’ I crossed from the mosque to the college, exactly opposite, entered through its superbly carved portal and found myself in … a tourist bazaar. As I walked around the courtyard, peering into the little rooms that opened off it, I wondered where IB had stayed. In jeans, or sunglasses? In leather jackets, or tie-dyed T-shirts? Only the eagles knew – stone ones, perched above the courtyard on reused Byzantine capitals, looking down with ancient, pterodactylic Weltschmerz.

  Eğridir was an urbs in rure with a good sprinkling of chic women in jeans. But as I travelled south-west towards IB’s next destination, Gölhisar, ‘Lakecastle’, the demography became increasingly bucolic. Jeans gave way to elasticated floral print trousers; the women inside them grew in volume. In Burdur market the sellers of peppers were, to a woman, deeply upholstered and covered in chintz. At the same time, the buses that I rode diminished in size and shared the roads with carts and tripping horses. The wider world impinged little, although I noticed that the usual amulets dangling from one rear-view mirror – ‘Muhammad’ in Arabic script, and an anti-Evil Eye eye of blue glass – had been joined by an Internet Explorer 4 CD: a mixture of faith, superstition and technology.

  I tried to pronounce, sotto voce, the names of villages we passed. At Höyüğü, I realized I would need a lot of practice to develop the necessary embouchure. At least my ignorance of Turkish was shared with IB. He claims to have picked it up later but Gibb, in an uncharacteristically wry footnote, dismisses the claim as ‘fanfaronade’.

  We passed from a land of bright lakes and orchards to one of muted colours – swatches of yellow stubble, brown earth, black burnt stubble, grey road and two-tone trees in silver and dark green – then entered a luminous upland plain fringed with cream hills. Mindful of Hajji Baba’s comment about books, I had suppressed the tic that made me turn to the Travels every few minutes. But as the bus neared Gölhisar, I reread IB’s description of it: ‘a small town surrounded on every side by water in which there is a thick growth of rushes. There is no way to approach it except by a path like a bridge constructed between the rushes and the water, and broad enough only for one horseman. The city is on a hill in the midst of the waters and is formidably protected and impregnable.’ As in Eğridir, I was impressed by IB’s ability to recall a scene over twenty years later, with neither notebooks nor, for this Anatolian back-of-beyond, independent sources to jog his memory.

  The only problem was that Gölhisar bore no resemblance whatsoever to IB’s description. True, there was a hill with some ruins on it; but the hill stood on sloping ground, so any lake would have had to defy gravity. The Arthurian vision of castle and rushy mere evaporated.

  In my Turkish equivalent of Indo-Arabic, I asked at the bus station whether I was in the real Gölhisar. The ticket man looked momentarily surprised (I suppose it is rather ill-mannered to turn up in a place and immediately accuse it of being an impostor); then he laughed, and explained that we were, without doubt, in the unique and genuine Lakecastle. I was also able to elicit the following information: there was a castle but no lake at Lakecastle; a lake, Gölhisar Gölü, existed, but it was five miles from the town; at Lakecastle Lake, however, there was no castle – let alone a castle on an island, for there was no island.

  I began to wonder if IB had got it wrong. Certainly, there are problems with his Anatolian itinerary. At one point, for example, he strikes off east and travels as far as Erzerum. ‘We stayed there for three nights,’ he says, ‘then left for the city of Birgi, where we arrived in the late afternoon.’ Even allowing for IB’s tendency to elasticate time, as an account of an eight-hundred mile journey it is undeniably terse. But, while this bli
p could be the result of enthusiastic editing, it was far harder to reconcile IB’s Gölhisar with the place I was in. Even so, there was something – a verisimilitude – about his description of Gölhisar. I caught a bus to the turn-off for the lake, and set out to look for the invisible island.

  The lane was paved with cowpats and perfumed with aniseed. A mile or so off the main road I came to Yamadı, a village of tottering balconies decked with pepper ropes and chilli necklaces. The village ended with a cuboid tomb-chamber, ogivally roofed, and an old lady. I asked her who was buried in the tomb, hoping for a Battutian lead; she answered at length, patting the building now and then while I grinned and nodded encouragingly. Having understood nothing, I said in Turkish ‘I don’t speak Turkish,’ uttered a sonorous Arabic prayer, and passed on.

  After another mile or two, I saw a corner of lake and made for a hill that overlooked it. It would be the perfect vantage point for spotting vanished islands. Near the hill I had another one-sided conversation, with a man working in a sugar-beet field. As he spoke, I noticed a large dyke running through the field. Cattle grazed in water meadows beneath the hill, which was fringed with rushes. Drained land … I had solved the problem of the missing island: it was the hill. ‘Is there a road?’ I asked, pointing towards it. In reply, the farmer led me to a raised track – IB’s ‘path like a bridge’.

  As I crossed the causeway – it had been enlarged, clearly at a recent date, to tractor width – I congratulated IB on his powers of recollection, and reproved myself for doubting them. The only thing missing now was his town and its fortifications. I quartered the hill and found plenty of potsherds of a burnished red ware that looked far older than the fourteenth century and, alarmingly, dozens of recently sloughed snakeskins; but not a trace of a medieval building. A defensive tower on the summit, looking out over the undrained part of Lakecastle Lake, turned out to be a square rock outcrop.

  There was only one area left to explore, a wide terrace at the base of the hill, north of the causeway. And here, at last, in a field of tomatoes, I spotted something that could only have been Islamic and medieval – a bit of blue-glazed faience tile. It was a minor yet pleasing monument. But if it came from IB’s Gölhisar, what had happened to the rest of the town?

  I found a clue at the head of the causeway. Here stood a big new barn, as yet unroofed, built partly of large and finely worked blocks of ashlar. Like the burnished sherds they had a pre-medieval look to them; other bits of masonry that lay about nearby – fluted column drums, part of an acanthus frieze – were unquestionably classical. The enlarged causeway also incorporated some dismembered ancient buildings. Probably, I surmised, IB’s Gölhisar had been no more than a classical or Byzantine site recycled and given Islamic touches; now it had itself been recycled, and possibly not for the first time. I thought back to the madrasah at Eğridir where IB had stayed, constructed from bits of Byzantine buildings and a Seljuk caravanserai, and now turned into a mini-complex of boutiques. It was all part of the same process, cycle and recycle. Nothing was ever sacred.

  *

  My discoveries were hardly earth-shattering. But at night over my diary and rakı, that melancholy spirit, I thought again that it would have been good to share them with a rafiq, a travelling companion. Instead, I shared them with ghosts – with IB, and with less substantial future ghosts: you.

  At the same time I didn’t envy IB, who seems never to have had a minute to himself. His arrival in Denizli even sparked off a fight between rival Akhi groups, each desperate to earn honour by looking after the stranger. ‘The altercation’, he says, ‘grew so hot that some of them drew knives.’ (I too was the object of a minor altercation in Denizli – between the touts of rival pensions.)

  As well as enjoying the energetic welcome of the Akhis, IB schmoozed with sultans. He gives us an insight into his technique: questioned by a prince about other rulers he had met, IB realized that ‘his idea was that I would praise those of them who had been generous and find fault with the miserly. I did nothing of the kind; on the contrary, I praised them all.’ These courtierly skills usually earned IB a meal, a robe and some cash. On one occasion, however, they provoked an overdose of hospitality. During his fortnight in the generous thrall of Sultan Muhammad ibn Aydın of Birgi, IB admitted, ‘I began to weary and wished to take my leave.’ By the time he did, he had collected some of his most vivid Anatolian memories – of a stone that fell from the sky, a mountain camp under the walnut trees, and endless presents of butter in sheep’s stomachs.

  IB’s Birgi was the capital of a principality that included Ephesus and Smyrna; today it has shrunk to a dot on the map, on a hill above the Little Meander. A footnote in Gibb refers the reader to Murray’s Guide of 1895 and to the learned Phippson’s slightly later five-volume Reise und Forschungen in westlichen Kleinasien. Cavalierly, I had failed to consult either work. Birgi was thus a surprise, a cascade of pantiles down a hillside in which, out of an island of firs, rose an immense, metropolitan mosque. It was built of large ashlar blocks the colour of shortbread; the minaret was a tall cylinder of ginger brick diapered with voided blue lozenges. I looked for an inscription and found one over the main door: ‘Built by the Amir … the Holy Warrior, the Fighter at the Frontiers, Sultan Muhammad ibn Aydın, in the year 712’ – IB’s hospitable captor himself, ‘one of the best, most generous, and worthiest of sultans’.

  ‘You can read Arabic?’ said a voice by my side. I turned and nodded to the speaker. ‘I am studying Arabic at high school,’ he continued. ‘Islamic high school. But it is not one of my best subjects. However, I am always first in English, and nearly first in history. I think you are interested in the history of Birgi?’

  It all came out in a flood – IB, his travels, mine – which only ran out at Birgi, the Sultan, the stone that fell from the sky, the camp under the walnut trees, the stomachs of butter. The boy looked at me solemnly. I wondered what he saw: bore, or maniac?

  ‘We shall look for these things together,’ he said.

  Yalçın took me into a mausoleum by the mosque. Several tombs lay under a dome, again of ginger and blue brick. ‘Here is Sultan Muhammad. It is written that he died in 1334, in an accident while hunting,’ he said, translating from a typed card by the tomb. ‘And look, here are his sons – Isa, Ibrahim and Ghazi Umar Bey. It says that Ghazi Umar fought on the island of Chios, and that he was a friend of … “Cantacuzene”.’

  This last, surprising piece of information about Ghazi Umar, whom IB met here in Birgi and then in Smyrna, I confirmed later from Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. The Turkoman prince’s friendship with the Byzantine Emperor John V Cantacuzene was compared, the historian wrote, ‘in the vain rhetoric of the times, to the perfect union of Orestes and Pylades’; the Emperor, for his part, looked on Ghazi Umar with ‘sentimental passion’. On one occasion, Gibbon went on, the prince rescued the Empress Irene from the Bulgarians. She invited him to visit her but, ‘by a peculiar strain of delicacy, the gentle barbarian refused’. (A fictionalized version of Umar also appears in the Decameron, in which, less delicately, he rapes the Sultan of Babylon’s daughter.) As yet unaware of these ramifications, I simply enjoyed meeting the mortal remains of characters from the Travels, and doing so in live and enthusiastic company.

  The prayer-hall of the mosque was a perfect arrangement of dark and light, an airy cuboid beneath a walnut ceiling. Beside a mihrab of turquoise and black tiles stood a pulpit, also of walnut, richly carved and patinated dark chocolate. As we admired it, we were joined by the imam. ‘I preach from this every Friday,’ he said, with understandable pride. He pointed out three gilded bosses on the side of the pulpit. ‘The earth, in the middle,’ he explained, ‘and beside it the sun and the moon. These’, he said, indicating a ring of smaller gilded polygons around the bosses, ‘are the planets.’

  ‘I think Sultan Muhammad was interested in astronomy,’ Yalçın said.

  I went to my bag and pulled out Gibb’s translation of the Travels.

  ‘“Have
you ever seen a stone that fell from the sky?”’ the Sultan asked IB. ‘“I have never seen one, nor ever heard tell of one,”’ the traveller replied. ‘Then they brought in a great black stone, very hard and with a glitter in it. I reckoned it a hundredweight. The Sultan ordered the stonebreakers to be summoned, and at his command four of them beat on it as one man, four times, with iron hammers, but made no impression on it. I was astonished at this phenomenon, and he ordered it to be taken back to its place.’

  As I read, Yalçın translated for the imam. Then I asked if the meteorite was still in existence; it was, after all, not the sort of thing that would get thrown away. But they had never seen the göktaşı, the skystone, nor heard tell of it.

  The double doors of the pulpit bore a fine Arabic inscription. It was a hadith, a saying of the Prophet: ‘O God, I seek refuge with You from work that does not profit, from hearts that are not humble, from prayers that are not answered, from appetites that are not sated.’ This time it was the imam who translated for Yalçın. And, as he did so, another scene from the Travels played itself out: ‘The Sultan asked me to write down for him a number of hadiths of the Prophet. Then he commanded the professor to write an exposition of them for him in the Turkish language.’

  I looked around the prayer-hall. Sultan Muhammad had clearly been an avid hadith-collector: each window was furnished with walnut shutters, each shutter carved like the pulpit with a saying of the Prophet. It was a most legible building and, for one put up by a minor Turkoman warlord in a parenthesis in history, thoroughly civilized.

  While the mosque was gloriously intact, the secular monuments of Sultan Muhammad seemed to have disappeared completely. IB described an audience-hall ‘with an ornamental pool in the centre and a bronze lion at each of its corners, spouting water from its mouth’. Here, long-haired Byzantine pages served their delicate barbarian masters with sherbert and biscuits in gold bowls. Yalçĭn and I made do with ayran, diluted yoghurt, in a tea-garden north-west of the mosque. It overlooked a dry watercourse that flowed in the spring when the snow melted up on the slopes of Bozdağ.