City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  All the ages of man and all the races of Islam seemed to be represented: moustachioed Arabs, dark-skinned Somalis, small South Indians in lungis, huge Delhi businessmen bulging out of their pyjamas, prodigiously bearded Afghans swathed in shawls like Old Testament prophets - all of them surging up through the Meena Bazaar towards the Jama Masjid steps.

  As they walked, some threw Id alms to the cripples, lepers and Bangladeshi refugees who lined the way like a guard of honour, palms extended, heads bowed. As you passed you could hear them murmuring ‘Ya Allah! Ya Allah!’ Mixed in with the beggars sat the occasional hawker eager to empty his stock of mosque caps or rosary beads before the holy month had ended.

  The tide of Muslims washed on, up into the mosque. We had all arrived early - the prayers were not due to start for another half-hour — but already the vast courtyard was three-quarters full. Seven or eight thousand figures had taken up position kneeling on prayer carpets, so that as you walked in through the great red-stone gate you were confronted by rank upon rank of white-clad backs topped with brightly coloured turbans or embroidered mosque-caps.

  To get a better view, I climbed the narrow staircase leading to the balcony at the top of the east wall. This platform was also fast filling up, but I managed to edge my way along the wall-walk to the shade of a chattri at the south-east corner. Here, a group of young Muslim girls in new mirror-work costumes were sitting cross-legged under the watchful eye of their father; each one wore a tinsel hairband plaited into her pigtails. Choosing a space on the edge of the wall, a respectful distance apart from the girls, I dangled my legs over the edge and took in the spectacle unfolding below.

  I have always thought that Hinduism is at its most sympathetic and comprehensible in the countryside: a simple roadside shrine, a sacred river, a holy spring - these things are the life-blood of that great religion. In the same way, Islam has always been an urban faith, ill at ease with the wilderness; its civilization has always flourished most successfully in the labyrinths of the ancient bazaar towns of the East. Certainly there can be no doubt that Islam looks at its most impressive in a great urban cathedral mosque, especially on an occasion like Id.

  From all directions people were still pouring out of the maze of the Old City and heading towards one of the three gates of the Jama Masjid — three seething crocodiles of humanity heading towards the same walled courtyard. Within minutes the last remaining areas of pink stone flooring were covered with bodies and had turned homespun-white. The mosque was now packed full, but still crowds were pouring in. Finding the courtyard full, latecomers were taking up their stations in perfectly straight ranks first on the steps, then in the roads leading up to the mosque, then out in the gardens and bazaars beyond. Five minutes before the prayers were due to start, the waves had nearly stilled. Twenty or thirty thousand people were kneeling down facing westwards, patiently waiting for the final prayers of Ramadan. Had I taken up my station on the same day two, three or even four hundred years earlier the same spectacle would have presented itself, completely unchanged.

  Then the Imam began to speak.

  For thirty minutes Imam Bukhari - the direct descendant of the mullah Shah Jehan called from Bukhara to inaugurate his new mosque on 23 July 1656 - addressed the faithful through the minaret’s loudspeakers. His Urdu was difficult to understand, but his message was clearly political - there were frequent references to America, Israel, Kashmir and Rajiv Gandhi. Overhead, flights of pigeons wheeled through the minarets, cutting over the heads of the congregation towards the Red Fort. One of the girls beside me began to fidget, and her father tried to retain her interest by pointing out Delhi landmarks visible from our turret. Bukhari reached his climax and, with a final burst of electronic feedback, the sermon rasped to a close.

  Then the prayers began. The congregation stood up and raised their open palms to their ears. They bent double, and from the front prayer aisle came the distant cry: Allah hu-Akbar! God is Great! Bismillah e rehman e rahim! In the name of God most generous and merciful! The faithful knelt down and placed their heads on the ground: La Allah illah Allah, Muhammad Resul-allah! There is no God but God and Muhammad is the Seat of God! Over and over again, for twenty-five minutes, the heads rose and fell before the final triumphant cry of Allah hu-Akbar! Then, to mark the end of the service, three enormous thunder-flashes were let off in the rear gatehouse. The sound ricocheted off the walls of the Red Fort and echoed back; a plume of purple smoke rose into the morning air.

  Everyone stood up. The worshippers headed off in their own directions, and the ordered chequerboard shattered. Suddenly patches of pink sandstone were again visible in the courtyard. The crowd flowed out through the gates and the pink patches grew. All around, men were embracing and wishing each other ‘Id Mubarak.’

  The little girls in my chattri were standing expectantly around their father who was distributing Idi — their long-awaited Id pocket money. Below, in the Meena Bazaar, the dhabas had begun to fill with feasting families, all wolfing down piles of biryani rice, extra-large cajra puris and a special Id sweet named peni (made with minced carrots but surprisingly tasty.)

  I sat in a dhaba in the shade of a tarpaulin, nibbling Id sweets and watching the festive crowds milling all around me. It was only nine o‘clock. But already it was becoming unbearably hot.

  During the sweltering Id of 1333, a camel caravan could be seen winding its way through the narrow passes and defiles of the Hindu Kush. On the principal camel sat an irascible Muslim judge. He had been travelling for eight years and was now heading south towards Delhi, the capital of the Sultan of Hindustan.

  Sheikh Abu Abdullah Muhammed ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammed ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati, known to his friends by the diminutive Ibn Battuta, had left his birthplace of Tangier in the early June of 1325. He was then only twenty-one, a callow aristocrat fresh from law school. Resolving to ‘quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home’, he headed off along the North African coast in the direction of Mecca, driven onwards by what he described as ‘an overmastering impulse from within’. At the beginning of his journey he suffered badly from homesickness. ‘I set out alone,’ he wrote, ‘finding no companion to cheer the way with friendly intercourse, and no party of travellers with whom to associate myself.’ By the time he arrived in Tunis he was so ‘affected by loneliness that I could not restrain my tears and wept bitterly.’

  Since then, however, the Moroccan had completed his pilgrimage and visited Palestine, East Africa, Khorasan and Byzantium. He had married several times, bought himself a small harem of slave girls, and gained a reputation as a traveller and a teller of interesting tales. No longer was Ibn Battuta inexperienced or vulnerable. Instead his diaries had begun to assume something of the knowingness of incipient middle age; at times, indeed, he was in danger of becoming priggish and opinionated. As with many later European voyagers, travel in this part of the world, far from broadening the mind, seemed instead to lead to a blanket distrust of anyone of a different creed, colour or class.

  Thus while Ibn Battuta was tolerably enamoured of a pretty Greek slave girl he had bought in Ephesus, he wrote that the filthy freedmen of her accursed race were ‘swine eaters’, drinkers of intoxicating liquors and ‘enemies of Allah’. Provincial Muslims, so he discovered to his horror, could sometimes behave almost as badly. The beautiful and promiscuous Muslim women of the Maldives, for example, he thought shockingly immodest, and though Battuta frequently ‘ordered them to wear clothes ... I met with little success.’

  China was even worse: ‘I was sorely grieved that heathendom had so strong a hold over [this rich country],’ he wrote after a few weeks in Qanjanfu. ‘Whenever I went out of my house I used to see any number of revolting things. It distressed me so much that I used to keep indoors and go out only in case of necessity.’

  Expecting little good to come out of any country even partially populated by non-Muslims, Ibn Battuta had few expectations of India. The Hindus, he knew, at least refrained from eating pigs (unlike the
Chinese or the disgusting Christians of Byzantium), but he had heard that they had other habits the very thought of which made him swoon. ‘The Hindus venerate oxen,’ he wrote, ‘and it is said that they actually drink the oxen’s urine when they fall sick.’ Later, on witnessing a sati (the immolation of a Hindu widow), Ibn Battuta was so shocked he nearly fell off his camel.

  As he rode down the narrow goat-trails of the Khyber Pass, Battuta would have known that the Delhi Sultanate was violent frontier country, constantly in a state of war with the pagan Mongols to the north and the infidel Hindus to the south. In this connection he mentions one of his friends, Malik Warna, who chose to move to India from the then far more peaceful and civilized country of Afghanistan. Battuta clearly thought his decision extraordinary: ‘Warna was an excellent man, with a liking for hunting, falcons, horses, slaves, servants and rich and kingly robes ... Of course India is no place for a man of his character.’ ‘A man is honoured in that country,’ he continues, ‘according to what may be seen of his actions, conduct and zeal, since no one in India knows anything of family or lineage.’

  It was, in short, no place for a gentlemen. But more worrying even than India’s lack of blue-blooded Arab families, was the prospect of its tyrannical Sultan, the blood-thirsty parricide Muhammed bin Tughluk.

  Stories of Tughluk’s excesses were common across the width of Asia. A Chancellor of the Exchequer who had failed to prevent thieves penetrating his treasury was summarily beaten to death. A mystic who refused to retract a statement accusing Tughluk of tyranny had his mouth held open by skewers while excrement was poured down his throat. Worst of all was the fate that befell a captured rebel general: he was flayed alive ‘and when he had been flayed his flesh was cooked with rice and sent to his sons and family.’

  Ibn Battuta soon felt the deadening hand of Tughluk’s rule. Having passed from the Mediterranean to the Indus without attracting the attention of a single government official, Battuta, like so many subsequent travellers, crossed the Indian frontier only to find himself caught up in an impenetrable web of bureaucracy: no sooner had they set foot on the east bank of the Indus than intelligence officials ‘wrote to Delhi informing the king of our arrival and giving him all the details concerning us.’ The traveller was then grilled by the corrupt Indian border officials: ‘Their custom was to take a quarter of everything brought in by the merchants and to exact a duty of seven dinars for every horse.’ None of this was at all to the Moroccan’s taste: ‘The idea of having my baggage searched was most disagreeable to me. There was nothing valuable in it, though it seemed a great deal in the eyes of these people.’

  Battuta put up with all this for he had reason to believe that the Sultan would amply reward him for his efforts. Delhi may have been a relatively unsophisticated frontier town, a vast barracks-metropolis built to defend Islam’s boundary with the Mongols and Hindus, but it was still very much a land of opportunity: an ambitious Muslim could achieve great wealth and prominence there in very little time. Ibn Battuta was always one to try his luck. After all, as he wrote in his diary: ‘Muhammed bin Tughluk was especially well known in his generosity to foreigners for he preferred them to the peoples of India. He singles them out for favour ... [especially] Arabs for whom he has a particular affection.’

  Formalities completed, Battuta again mounted his camel. Beating off an ambush by ‘eighty infidels on foot’, he and his train headed off on the last stage of his journey through the burning plains of the Punjab towards the mighty Indian capital and the palace of the Sultan.

  Few maps of modern Delhi bother to mark Begampur. It lies engulfed amid the new colonies that have recently sprung up along the way to Mehrauli, a small enclave of mud-walled, flat-roofed village life besieged by a ring of high-rise apartments. The smart metalled road which links the new colonies to Aurobindo Marg gives out a few hundred feet before you get to the village. Bouncing along the rubble track, you arrive in the midst of a dust storm of your own creation.

  I saw Begampur for the first time on a hot evening in early May. As the dust began to subside, shafts of late afternoon light could be seen raking down the village streets. Beyond the flour mill, the rim of the horizon was on fire; mynas and parakeets were calling to roost.

  Wandering from house to house I asked for directions to the ruins of the palace. The villagers shrugged their shoulders: what palace? Finally, turning a corner, I saw what I was looking for.

  Lying amid waste land to one side of the village, there rose the jutting silhouette of a cyclopean wall. It was flanked on one side by a great domed hall, supported on a quadrant of megalithic arches, each one at least twelve feet thick; to its side the palace wall rose upwards with a colossal, almost Romanesque massiveness.

  The walls of both palace and hall were completely undecorated; there was none of the intricate sculptural filigree normally embroidered on the stonework of early Islamic buildings. This puritanical, megalithic masonry was the chosen style of Muhammed bin Tughluk. From here, the grim Hazar Ustan or Thousand Pillared Palace, Tughluk ruled the largest and most powerful empire India had known since the time of Ashoka, one and a half millennia previously. From here he controlled a web of spies and informers that ran from Madurai to Attock, from the beaches of Malabar to the mangrove swamps of Bengal.

  Climbing up several flights of narrow, twisting stairs, I reached the Sultan’s penthouse pavilion with its view over the rooftops of Begampur. Ibn Battuta describes arriving at this place through a succession of now-vanished gates and courtyards, each surrounded by cohorts of trumpeters and guards. It was the second court that contained the infamous corps of executioners.

  ‘Tughluk was far too free in shedding blood,’ writes Battuta. ‘Every day hundreds of people - chained, pinioned and fettered - were brought to [the sultan’s hall] and those who were for execution were executed, those for torture tortured, and those for beating beaten. It was but seldom that the entrance to his palace was without a corpse. One day as I arrived at the palace my horse shied at the sight of a white fragment on the ground. I asked what it was and one of my companions said: “It is the torso of a man who was [this morning] cut into three pieces.”’

  To enter into the third court, the visitor had to receive the written permission of the Sultan. Only the most distinguished visitors were admitted: ‘The third gate opens into the Thousand Pillars,’ noted Battuta.

  It is here that the Sultan holds his audiences ... [He] sits cross-legged on a throne above a great dais while one hundred elite guards stand on either side carrying shields, swords and bows ... [When all the functionaries have assembled] fifty elephants are brought in. Each is adorned with silken cloths and has its tusks shod with iron for the greater efficacy of killing criminals. These elephants are trained to make obeisance to the Sultan and incline their heads, and when they do so the Chamberlain cries in a loud voice: ‘Bismillah!’

  Then the musicians and dancers come in. The first to enter are the daughters of the infidel Indian kings who have been taken captive during that year. After they have sung and danced, the sultan presents them to the amirs and the distinguished foreigners.

  Eventually the time came for Battuta’s own audience with the Sultan. Battuta presented the gifts he had brought from Khorasan; and in return he was given the post of Qazi (or judge) and presented with two villages, a pension of twelve thousand dinars and a house in which to live. He was terrified of the Sultan, but for his own safety decided the best policy was to cling to the Tughluk’s fingertips ‘and every time he said any encouraging word to me I kissed his hand, until I had kissed it seven times.’

  It is obvious from his writings that Battuta was most impressed by what was to be for eight years his adopted city. Delhi then consisted of five or six distinct districts dotted between the banks of the Jumna and the plains around the old Hindu fort of Lal Kot. Several of these settlements had recently been united into a single city called Jahanpanah (The Refuge of the World) by a great loop of wall forty miles long. Its total popu
lation was just under half a million.

  ‘Delhi,’ writes Batutta, is a ‘vast and magnificent city, uniting beauty with strength. It is surrounded by a wall that has no equal in the world, and is the largest city in India, nay in the entire Muslim Orient.’

  Other authorities fill out the Moroccan’s picture: ‘The houses are built of stone and brick, and the roofs are of wood,’ noted the Arab geographer al-Umari in his encyclopaedic Masalik-ul-Absar Fi Mamalik-ul-Amsar (‘The Visions of the Kingdoms’). ‘There are great monasteries, large open spaces, and numerous baths. There are also about two thousand small mosques and hermitages. Gardens extend on three sides of the city in a straight line for twelve thousand paces.’

  The domes of one of Jahanpanah’s finest buildings, its great cathedral mosque, lay just a little to the south of the pavilion where I was now sitting. Rising up above the rooftops of Begampur, the mosque - a great ripple of egg-shaped cupolas arranged around a shady cloister garth almost as broad as that in the Old Delhi Jama Masjid - dwarfed the village that lay scattered all around it.

  Mosque at Begampur

  The building had certainly seen better days. From my rooftop I could see that one side of the prayer hall roof had collapsed. The once gleaming whitewash was dark and smoke-blackened; in places the plaster had fallen away to reveal the messy rubble-walling beneath. Goats grazed on the grass growing unkempt between the paving stones. But despite the decay, the mosque still somehow retained a profound and venerable grandeur. Its strength lay in its simplicity. Its pillars were just rectangular blocks of mousy-grey ashlar; its capitals plain but for a fringe of simple water-leaf scallops. There was no colour, little ornament, no distraction. Yet the utter simplicity of the individual parts focused attention on the balance and harmony of the whole: the rhythm of the arches, the rise and fall of the cupolas, the austere curves of the domes. Unerringly, the eye was drawn towards the towering ivan punctuating the middle of the west wall.