In the course of a year of travelling I had been inside mosques from Tangier to the Crimea. In the seventeen I have lived in San’a, a place where the rules of the ancients still apply, I have never entered a single one. I think I knew how IB felt, standing at the door of Hagia Sophia, peering into the great murmuring vault.
Inside, it was chilly. The paving and panelling, all of marble, exuded a thin film of sweat. The floor, white, worn and polished by feet, seemed to flow like molten wax. The walls were of many colours and patterns – thrushes’ eggs, liver sausage, trout-skin, blood slides. Paul the Silentiary enumerated the sources of the marble: Carystus, Phrygia, Sparta, the Iassian hills, Lydia, Lybia, the lands of the Moors and the Celts and of Atrax. I looked ahead and up, into the vast emptiness. It is a space that could swallow Nôtre-Dame, that ingests even tour groups, breaking their voices down into a low ambient hum.
It wasn’t always so empty. ‘Immense was the supply of heads and bones, crosses and images, that were scattered by this revolution over the churches of Europe,’ said Gibbon of the pillage of Constantinople and Hagia Sophia by Dandolo’s ‘crusaders’. But Byzantium, if Ludolph von Suchem is to be believed, had limitless stocks: when the Emperor’s Catalan mercenaries asked for a bonus payment in the form of holy relics over a century after the Venetian sack, ‘he granted their prayers, set up as many bodies of saints as the Catalans numbered heads, and the gentlemen stood afar off and chose each a body in turn, according to their rank’.
With the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque, the new Islamic broom swept the relics and images away. The mosaics were whitewashed over. Now, though, the whitewash is being removed. My eye was drawn to the focal point of the apse, to a patch of cobalt and gold. As I strained to make it out, someone switched on a spotlight and the image sprang out of the gloom: the Virgin and Child. The Child was turning in His mother’s lap, raising His fingers – to catch her hand, or to bless? I climbed to the gallery for a better look.
From close to, Christ seemed a miniature boy rather than an infant – too old for laps. He looked slightly upwards, almost smiling. Mary gazed off to the right, the north, as if at some distant event, detached, resigned. I think her hand was feeling for His, to cling on; but it was hard to say – the movement was arrested, a single frame caught between motion and stillness, divinity and humanity.
It was a strange image, full of emotion but devoid of sentiment, beautiful and disturbing at once. Stranger still was that it was flanked by a pair of hanging roundels bearing the Arabic words ‘Allah’ and ‘Muhammad’, sombre as funerary hatchments. The meeting was surprising, but utterly logical: mystic letters, God and His prophet in Arabic script, floating next to the Logos in human form. If al-Khadir, Elijah and St George could get together, then why not God in His abstract and fleshly forms?
More surprising, on reflection, was that it had taken secularism to reveal this happy double theophany – the militant secularism of Atatürk that had turned the church-mosque into a museum and stripped away both the rules of the ancients and their whitewash. There was, I remembered, an Islamic precedent. The Ka’bah at Mecca, wrote al-Harawi in his pilgrim guide, ‘had originally contained images of the angels and the prophets, of the Tree of Paradise, of Abraham, and of Jesus the son of Mary and his mother. In the year in which he occupied Mecca, the Prophet gave orders that these images should be obliterated, with the exception of that of the Messiah and his mother.’ Not long after the Prophet’s death, the Ka’bah was burned. Among the victims of the fire was the Madonna of Mecca, Our Lady of the Ka’bah.
Here the juxtaposition survived, more eloquent than a septuagint of sermons. And could there have been a setting more appropriate than the junction of Europe and Asia, and a building dedicated to Hagia Sophia, Divine Sagacity? It was strange to think that out there, right now, people were at each other’s throats, doctrinally, physically, hounding each other with dogmas, and had been for the last fourteen centuries. Strange, and blackly funny. Someone deserves an alpha for wit, an omega for taste. The Devil, presumably.
*
After a month in Constantinople IB said farewell to his princess, turned east once more and set off to milk the teats of Time. It was time also for me to part from him, at least for the moment. My notebooks were bursting – 856 pages of A5, closely written – and I hadn’t even reached the end of the first sifr, or volume, of his safar, his journey. (Sifr is originally a scroll, something you unroll as you read it; safar is the unscrolling of the earth beneath you as you travel. Sifr and safar, reading and rolling, riding and writing: that process as circular as the round world and as old as Gilgamesh.) God willing, IB and I would meet up again somewhere between here and China. We had come a long way since our first meeting in the Greater Yemen Bookshop, but there was much further still to go, and more wonders to look for. Many more: ‘For God’, said old Captain Buzurg of Ramhurmuz, ‘created his wonders in ten parts; and nine of these ten are in the East.’
I went to a travel agent’s to confirm my ticket. As I was waiting, someone came in and asked in French about a flight to Belgrade. I turned and saw a man in his early twenties, small and wiry, beady and feral as a ferret. He wore hip black jeans, a small black backpack and a black triceps-revealing T-shirt. Judging by his accent and colouring, he had to be a Maghribi. He was clean shaven but his armpits, I noticed, were unIslamically hairy. There was something puckishly attractive about him.
He wasn’t getting very far, so I translated from the travel agent’s English into Arabic. Jamal replied in Arabic heavily sauced with French. ‘Tell him’, the agent said, ‘that he can’t get a single. He must buy a return.’
‘Why?’
‘This is the rule. He has an Algerian passport.’
I translated. Jamal decided to give up.
We left together and strolled through the Byzantine Hippodrome. Jamal talked of his passion for kung fu, I of mine for IB.
‘It’s a good thing you didn’t try to follow IB through Algeria,’ he said.
‘You mean the problems?’
He nodded. ‘I’ve got problems there myself,’ he confided. ‘I can’t go back. You see, I got into trouble with the police.’ He pointed to his crotch.
My mind somersaulted through the possibilities.
‘I was in prison. They burned my prick with cigarettes.’
In answer to my wordless question, he pulled a wallet from his pocket and extracted a grubby passport-sized photograph. It showed a young man with a bushy, Islamic-puritan beard. The face looked familiar. ‘Who is it?’
Jamal laughed. ‘It’s me! They locked me up and tortured me, all because I was a Muslim with a beard.’
I stared at him, astonished. The transformation was almost unbelievable; but the faces were indeed the same. ‘And now?’
‘I’m a Muslim without a beard.’
We walked on. ‘If I can get to Belgrade, I’ll cross from there to Italy, and from Italy to France, in sha Allah. I’ve got a diploma in animal health, and I want to carry on studying, get a degree.’
Over tea in a café, Jamal talked more about his future. I wasn’t taking it in – I was still dizzy from the revelation of his past. I just watched and listened to this prodigy, this kung fu fundamentalist. He had successfully repackaged himself. That, I supposed, was what it was all about: packaging. You have a beard, you get tortured; you have an Algerian passport, you can only get a return. Rules of the ancients.
Suddenly he looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get going. You know what the Prophet said, God bless and protect him? “Seek knowledge, even if you have to go to China.”’
‘Or France,’ I said.
We entrusted each other to the safekeeping of God.
I watched him walking away, rucksack bobbing, until he was swallowed up by the pavement crowds. I would never raise IB’s ghost; but there went his spirit, restless as ever.
Bibliographical Note
There are some thirty known manuscripts
of the Travels. The earliest may be in the hand of IB’s editor and amanuensis, Ibn Juzayy. From the provenance of the manuscripts, it seems that the work circulated mainly in North Africa. Abridgements were however known in the Levant and one of these, written in Aleppo in the seventeenth century, appeared in an English version in 1829. (The translator, the Reverend Samuel Lee, began his career as a carpenter’s apprentice in Shropshire, picked up eighteen languages in his spare time, became Chaplain to Cambridge Gaol and ended up in the professorial chairs of both Arabic and Hebrew.)
Defrémery and Sanguinetti’s edition of the complete Arabic text appeared in Paris between 1853 and 1858 (a reprint was published in the same city in 1979). It has been translated into many languages, including Swedish, Armenian and Chinese, and even retranslated, for unfathomable reasons, from Spanish to Arabic. The Hakluyt Society accepted H.A.R. Gibb’s proposal for a five-volume English version as long ago as 1922. Gibb died in 1971, shortly before the publication of Volume III. Professor Beckingham had by this time taken over the project; the fourth and final volume of text appeared in 1994. Beckingham himself died in 1998; Volume V, consisting of indexes, was published in 2000 under the supervision of Professor A.D.H. Bivar. All five volumes are available via the Hakluyt Society, c/o The British Library, London. (Gibb also produced a single-volume abridgement in 1929, reprinted in London in 1983.)
Dr Abdelhadi Tazi, in his Arabic edition (Rabat, 1997), has synthesized much of the Western scholarship on IB and made it available to the Arab reader, adding many valuable insights of his own. His Introduction is long and fascinating, his indexes extremely useful.
For a full bibliography of works on and pertinent to the Travels, the reader of English can do no better than to consult Ross E. Dunn’s excellent The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a historian’s view of the work ‘within the rich, transhemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London and Sydney, 1986). The IB bibliography is still growing, and in surprising directions: a collection of papers published by the Ecole Supérieure Roi Fahd de Traduction and entitled Ibn Battuta (Tangier, 1996), includes feminist, Jungian, post-imperial/-colonial and ethno-semiotic analyses of the text. If he knows about it, the old Tangerine must be perplexed, but not a little pleased.
Acknowledgements
Many people helped me during my travels. They include, in Morocco, Muhammad Dahduh of the Abdullah Gannun al-Hasani Library, Abdelmajid Domnati, William and Arlene Fullerton, Hasan Ridwan and, especially, IB’s effervescent editor, Dr Abdelhadi Tazi of Rabat; in Egypt, Rachel Davey, Toby Macklin, Muhammad Nur and Lionel Thompson; in Syria, Hikmat Hilal and Abdullah al-Jumahi; in Oman, Claudia Cooper, Steve Dover, Abdullah al-Fadli, Michael Gallagher, Thumna al-Gandel, Shahina Ghazanfar, Colin Hepburn, Qahtan Khawar, HE Malallah al-Liwati, Dr Isam al-Rawas, Awfit al-Shahri, Ali al-Shikayli and, above all, my old friends Muhammad Ali Williams Nur and his wife Habibah; in Turkey, Yalçın Karaca and Hugh Pope; and, in the Crimea, Viktoria Arkhiptseva, Aleksandr Gavrilov and, in particular, Nina Suvorova, without whom I would have been utterly lost.
Various forms of assistance were also given by Tim Callan, the Reverend Dr Mark Chapman and Linda Collins, Stephen Day, the Reverend Canon Paul Iles, Brendan MacSharry, and Tim Morris and Ianthe Maclagan. Jay Butler, Michael Maclagan, Christopher Tanfield and Bruce Wannell helped with aspects of the text. My agent, Carolyn Whitaker, and my editor, Gail Pirkis, were assiduous in their long-distance communications and indulgent of my whims. Martin Yeoman drew the decorations from an eclectic range of sources. The Authors’ Foundation and the Society of Authors provided a generous grant. The Hakluyt Society kindly gave permission for me to quote from their English version of IB’s Travels, translated by the late Professors Sir Hamilton Gibb and Charles Beckingham. (All who study IB are indebted to Gibb and Beckingham, and to the nineteenth-century editors of the Travels, Defrémery and Sanguinetti. If there is a special corner of heaven for Arabists, they are there, and probably still poring over the text.) Perhaps most important of all, Hasan al-Mujahid al-Shamahi of San’a was a first, unlooked-for link with the world of IB.
To all of the above I extend my grateful thanks.
Bayt Qadi, San’a
August 2000
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