The Riddle and the Knight

by Giles Milton

  The Ottomans never took advantage of their victory. The country, which had prospered under the Lusignans and Venetians, now became a backwater—run virtually as a private estate by rapacious Ottoman

  The Riddle and the Knight

  governors (often Greeks from Constantinople) who shamelessly extorted taxes from the local population. Little was repaired or restored after the conquest, and Famagusta, like Lefko§a, has remained a town in ruins for the last four centuries. ast areas lie buried under piles of rubble; there has been neither the money nor the inclination to repair them. There are scattered remnants of churches ever^vhere. Sometimes these are nothing more than shells, their roofs long since staved in. In other places, skeletal arches rise sk^-Avards like the ribcages of giant dinosaurs. Windows gape at the slc', and buttresses lean against nothing but the wind. Soon the walls themselves will collapse into powder, for everything here is constructed from sandstone and the salty corrosion of the sea air scratches away at its surface. The name Famagusta means "Sunken in Sand," and it could scarcely be more appropriate: the sandstone walls will one day make a lovely beach. Even the huge port—the pride of Northern Cyprus—is overcome with neglect. There was only one ship in the harbour on the dav I arrived, and its rusting hulk looked less than seaworthy. I checked the name: it was called the Tirana and was heading for .-Vlbania.

  There are few places in the world where history has so dramatically repeated itself. Turn towards the old town and it is still in ruins from the 1571 invasion. Turn towards the new town, Varosha, where the large Greek population used to live, and it is still in ruins from the 1974 invasion. Todav the whole area is strictly out of bounds, fenced off with barbed wire and patrolled by the UN. but it is possible to get an overview from the top of Palm Beach Hotel. Several miles of seafront hotels lie abandoned, along with thousands of shops and homes: the buildings are said to have been kept in exactly the state in which they were left all those years ago, and thousands of Greeks hope one day to return to their homes. But after more than twenty years of abandonment and neglect, most are in a sorry state. Many are visibly crumbling, and the damage they sustained during the fighting gets worse by the year. A single light burns at night from one of the forty disused hotels: it is the UN observation post, which overlooks the wreckage of war.

  The day after my visit to Famagusta I had an appointment with the Mufti of Cyprus, leader of Northern Cyprus's faithful, whom I hoped

  Cyprus

  would be able to verify Mandeville's account of Muslim beliefs. I had expected him to be dressed in a long cloak with a flowing white turban wrapped around his head, and imagined I would find him in a mosque, seated in front of an open Koran. As it happened, I couldn't have been more mistaken.

  The Mufti is a pleasant-looking chap called Ahmed Djemal. On the day I met him, he was wearing the bottom half of what looked like an old pinstripe suit and an open-necked shirt, and was chain-smoking Royals cigarettes. "Fifty a day," he said with a sigh, "except during Ramadan."

  I had brought with me Mustafa, my interpreter, for the Mufti didn't speak English. When I asked Mustafa if he'd ever met his spiritual leader, he shook his head. 'T didn't even realize he lived in Lefko^a," he said.

  We climbed up to the first floor, where the receptionist—a pretty girl with bright lipstick and colourful clothes—smiled and pointed to the Mufti's room. "Just walk in," she said. "You'll find the Mufti in there."

  I opened the door and was greeted by an immense poster of Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Turkish secular nation. It was the first clue to the message that the Mufti was keen to express: that Islam does not have to dance hand in hand down the road of political extremism.

  His room could have come straight from an MFI catalogue. The black leather sofa perfectly matched the Formica coffee table; a lava lamp and some seventies chrome would have completed the decor. As the Mufti called his secretary and asked for coffee, the sun broke the cloud in two and poured through the window, momentarily brightening Ataturk's frown.

  Mustafa chatted with the Mufti in Turkish, then turned to me with a smile. "The Mufti is most interested in your knight," he explained, "and is glad you wish to present the good things about Islam."

  I asked if there were bad things. The Mufti lit a cigarette and nodded. "In some parts of the world, yes. But remember, we're not like the Islamic regime in Iran, nor do we practise the Islam of the Arab countries." He paused before adding with a note of pride: "Here in Cyprus

  The Riddle and the Knight

  we are open-minded and strive for the truth in Islam. We are a secular country which is more modern even than Turkey. We are very forward-looking/'

  He was beginning to sound like a spokesman for the former Soviet Union, and I suggested, with a hint of mischief, that what he really meant was that no one cared about religion anymore.

  "It's very true that the attendance rates in our mosques is extremely low/' he said. "Our big problem is that the education of the imams is lower than the education of the local people. How can they attract new people into the mosques when they are so poorly educated? Most are over sixty and it is too late to retrain them."

  I asked if foreign tourists had a bad effect on Islam, if people were attracted by more alluring lifestyles. "It is the foreigners who always stir up trouble," he said. "There are always a few who want to start up fights . . ."

  Fights! This surprised me. I knew that the Greek part of the island had a reputation for attracting English lager louts, but I'd never heard of any problems on the Turkish side.

  "No, no, no," he said. "Not the English. I'm talking about Saudi Arabians and Iranians. It is the extremist Arab students who come here and start fights with the modern students who don't like their Islamic views. It is these foreign tourists and students who cause all the problems. They pray in the streets and the schoolyards. They are very negative-minded, and this is not what Islam is about. We don't need that sort of thing here."

  The Mufti was outspoken in his criticism of Islamic extremists, and he proudly told me that the Turkish Cypriots were even keener followers of Ataturk's secular policies than the Turks. They got rid of the Arabic language before Turkey. They abandoned their national dress. They threw away their fezes. And to cap it all, the Mufti of the time agreed to become a civil servant appointed by the Prime Minister. When Ahmed reaches sixty, he has to retire. But all this, he assured me, has enabled Cypriots to come to a closer understanding of Islam: "There are those who argue that imams shouldn't be paid because they weren't paid in Mohammed's time. Next they'll be saying that mosques have to be built with palm leaves as they were in the earliest days. But Islam

  !(>

  I

  I

  Cyprus

  has to be open to the modern world. Extremism is a deviation from the faith."

  He stopped talking, and I asked Mustafa to read the Mufti a few extracts from Sir John's book. Although Mandeville was fearful of Islam, he writes from an extremely informed point of view. Unlike many of his contemporaries—to whom the killing of Muslims was a moral obligation—Sir John was both curious and tolerant, and instead of stressing the differences between Islam and Christianity, he was interested in the similarities.

  "I will tell you," he writes, "something of their laws and their creed, as is contained in the book of their law, the Koran . . . The Saracens accept the Incarnation, and they will willingly speak of the Virgin Mary . . . and that the angel Gabriel told her that she had been chosen by God before the world's beginning to conceive Jesus Christ and bear Him; they say she bore Him and yet was a virgin afterwards as she was before . . . Each year they fast for a whole month, eating only in the evening . . ."

  The Mufti listened carefully to Mustafa and nodded at the end of every sentence. "He was an intelligent man," he said at last. "He's right in nearly everything he writes."

  But once again, the story was not as straightforward as it seemed. For although Mandeville was indeed one of the first Europeans ever to write about
Islam, I had unearthed a little-known book by a Dominican friar named William of Tripoli. His Tractatus de Statu Saracenorum — written some twenty years before Sir John was born—also gave details about Muslim customs, and seemed to have provided Mandeville with a large number of his details. But The Travels differed in two significant respects: its tone was far more tolerant than William of Tripoli's book, and more importantly, it was far more widely read.

  The Mufti let out a long sigh and muttered something in Turkish. "The Mufti has something important to say," said Mustafa.

  "What your man said is true," began the Mufti. "Christians and Muslims are very similar. They both believe in God, and they both have the same goal." He paused to light a cigarette. "But there is a difference, and it is this. God gave his book directly to Mohammed, who wrote down God's word in the Koran. The Bible is merely an interpre-

  The Riddle and the Knight

  tation, written through the pens of your saints. Where the Koran records the word of God, the Bible merely interprets the word of God."

  He drank his coffee in one gulp and drew heavily on his cigarette. "There is only one edition of the Koran and that is in Arabic. There are eighteen editions of the Bible worldwide, translated and rewritten. When we pray from the Koran, we always do so in Arabic, for God's word is in Arabic. When we interpret the Koran, we are permitted to do so in the language of our country. Interpretation differs from country to country, from people to people. But the text—the core of the book— always remains the same."

  The ash on his cigarette had grown perilously long, and as he moved his hand, it dropped off, sending a fine spray of ash onto his trousers and shoes. "So when you enter a mosque, you will always hear people praying in Arabic. That is because you can only pray in Arabic. And as the Koran says, when you are called to prayer, you should run as fast as you can."

  "People don't," I said.

  "No," said the Mufti. "I'm afraid they don't."

  He chatted away in Turkish for a moment, then fell silent as Mustafa translated what he had said. The Mufti, he told me, would like to inquire as to the health of the British royal family.

  I said that, as far as I was aware, they were very well, thank you. His voice dropped to a whisper, and he moved his chair closer. "Did you know," he said as he pushed the door shut with his foot, "that Prince Charles has converted to Islam. Yes, yes. He is a Mushm."

  When? How? Where? I bombarded him with questions.

  "Ssshh," he said. "I can't say any more. But it happened in Turkey. Oh yes, he converted all right. When you get home, check up on how often he travels to Turkey. You'll find that your future king is a Muslim."

  I asked him more but he wouldn't tell me. Instead, he told me that many Christians become Muslims, and that what had happened wasn't at all unusual. I then asked if Muslims ever becam.e Christians, but he shook his head. "You cannot convert from Islam," he said.

  This I knew, but I had heard rumours of Muslims praying at Christian shrines. I was told that local Turkish Cypriots would leave fiowers

  Cyprus

  on the tomb of St. Barnabas near Famagusta, and that they would Hght candles in the few remaining churches in Northern Cyprus.

  The Mufti nodded slowly. "This, Tm afraid, is true/' he said. "1 haven't heard of it happening at the tomb of St. Barnabas, but I do know that people go to Apostolos Andhreas monastery and light candles there in the chapel. It is very bad. In Islam, you cannot ask for help from anyone but God. There are no saints in Islam."

  Some days after meeting the Mufti, I drove up the coast road from Famagusta to Bogaz, turning away from the sea shortly after the ruins of Salamis. The land here is almost completely flat, yet the road twisted around imaginary bends as if climbing the mountains that stood in the distance. I had promised to deliver a letter to the grandmother of a woman who worked at my wife's school, but I had been given the wrong directions to her village. Once I was off the main road, there were no more signposts to Sinirustu, and I asked a couple of farmers for the quickest route. They all pointed across the fields towards the mountains. A few minutes later, I asked some other farmers, and they pointed me back across the fields towards the sea.

  When I arrived finally in the village, which stood in the heart of the dry and airless plain that covers the middle of the island, I noticed a large crowd gathered in a field. Women in homespun clothes and men in jackets were standing in a circle. It was a funeral, and as I drove past, the body, wrapped in a white linen sheet, was slowly lowered into the ground. The women of the village were weeping, while overhead a falcon wheeled on the warm currents of air. It seemed to present a complete picture of death.

  I suddenly had a panic. What if this was the old woman I was meant to be visiting? Perhaps she had died since I'd left England. It would be awful to have to take that news back to London. I drove into the village and—heart pounding—asked two women sitting by the roadside where I would find Aysa Husseyni.

  "Up there," they said with a smile. "You'll find her at home. But she's upset . . . her neighbour died only yesterday."

  Muslim funerals happen very quickly after the person's death. Aysa's neighbour had indeed died only the day before, yet her body

  The Riddle and the Knight

  had already been interred. Preparation of the corpse is full of ritual. The body is washed, and its nose and mouth cleaned three times. Then it is wrapped in a white cloth and taken to the cemetery, where five or six men pray for the deceased. It is lowered into the ground facing Mecca and covered with earth. Within a day of dying, the person has been buried.

  But the grieving is not over, and among the Turks in Cyprus, there are many traditional customs to honour the dead, some of which are still practised in the remoter rural communities. On the third and the fortieth day, a long and beautiful sixth-century poem, known as the "Mevlid" after its author, is traditionally recited. Then the guests are given sweets and rosewater, followed by a feast of the deceased's favourite food.

  In ancient times, the Turks used to dance after a burial and weep when a child was born. The deceased, they said, no longer had to suffer the trials of living; the child, sadly, had the misfortune of being brought into the world.

  Sinirustu was thoroughly rural, and most of the inhabitants were farmers. Apart from a couple of tractors parked in a field, the village could have belonged in another century. Despite the massive population exchanges between Turks and Greeks after the 1974 war, the landscape of rural Cyprus can't have changed a great deal since Sir John's time. The feudal system lingered on until the Ottoman conquest, and even today, many peasants live on smallholdings and work small plots of land.

  I walked slowly up to Aysa's house. The garden had gone to seed, and the tumbledown cottage was in a sorry state of disrepair. Aysa Husseyni, ancient and wizened, sat in an armchair in the shade.

  "Who are you?" she asked as she emerged from a snooze. But before I had a chance to answer, her mind had trailed off to other things. She was not well, she told me. She was old and her neighbour had just died. It was sad because she was too old to go to the funeral, and it was a shame because she was such a kind woman. She pointed to her two little grandchildren who were playing in the yard. "Birth . . . and death," she said. "Birth and death."

  I slowly nodded, for there was little I could add. Two grandchildren had been born and a woman had died, and for a small village in Cyprus

  Cyprus

  this had been the pattern for thousands of years. There were no headstones in the cemetery to record the passing of hves. No inscription had been placed in the mosque to honour the famous. A name could live on for a generation or two, but then it was forgotten. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust . . .

  A i'rrnnb Bxr Snhn

  I would censure all Pliny's, Solinus', Strabo's, Sir John Mandeville's, Olaus Magnus', Marco Polu's lies, correct those errors in navigation, reform Cosmographical Charts, and rectify longitudes, if it were possible .. .

  The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton,
1621

  ^fk^ or all his descriptions of the places he visits and the people he ^ K meets, Sir John is almost completely silent about himself. He /^^ says nothing about his family, his home, or when or why he was knighted. Was he married? Did he have children? If so, he thinks it of little interest to the reader, and for much of The Travels only his thoughts and opinions provide clues as to what sort of a person he might have been.

  Not until the end of the book does he describe exactly how he feels after thirty-four years of travelling:

  I have been on many honorable journeys . . . [and] I am now come to rest, a man worn out by age and travel and the feebleness of my body, and certain other causes which force me to rest. I have compiled this book and written it, as it came into my mind, in the year of Our Lord Jesus Christ 1356 . . . On my way home I made my way to Rome to show my book to our Holy Father the Pope. And I told him of the marvels I had seen in different countries, asking that he with his wise council would examine it . . . And a little while afterwards, when he had examined it all the way through, he said to me that certainly everything was true that was in it.

  A Second Sir John

  This claim to have visited Rome and gotten papal approval for his work immediately aroused my suspicions. I felt sure that no book so openly critical of the Catholic Church would have received a blessing from the pontiff. More damaging for Sir John's credibility was a glaring inaccuracy that convinced me he had invented the whole tale. For the popes of the time were living in exile in Avignon, and they didn't return to Rome until 1377. If Mandeville really had taken his book to the Pope, he would have travelled not to Rome but to Provence.

  It was most unlike Mandeville to make such an obvious mistake, and the more I investigated this anecdote about Rome, the more I felt sure that this passage was not the work of Sir John. For it only occurs in a few of the surviving manuscripts, suggesting that it was added at a later date by a scribe who was either too young, or too ignorant, to know that the popes were living in Avignon at the time when Sir John was on his travels.