by Annie Hawes
In Sidi Boumedienne’s day the cities of the Maghreb were booming from the trans-Saharan trade, overflowing with wealthy merchants making fortunes from the precious goods pouring in from Ghana and the Sudan, Niger and Mali. The coffers of the emirs, too, were overflowing with the taxes they earned from the traders and merchants. And the universities of Tlemcen and of Bejaia benefited from the riches of their cities, and the new thirst for knowledge. Theoreticians, researchers, manuscripts, new ideas, especially in science and medicine, were in constant circulation between here and the Islamic universities of el-Andalus – of Toledo, Valencia, Cordoba, Seville – and to the east as well, to Cairo and Baghdad, even as far as Asia and distant Samarkand. Not just Muslims, but Jews and Christians of enquiring mind would come here to study philosophy, law, medicine, and above all mathematics, under Muslim masters. Christian and Jewish education was still, Liamine says, hamstrung by theology. But here in the Muslim world, ideas were allowed to flow freely, untrammelled by doctrine. So when the Christian king of Sicily launched the massive project of making a reliable map of the whole of the known world, who did he call in? Ten Muslim geographers. He did not trust his fellow Christians, whose scientific spirit might still be dulled by myth and superstition.
Ismail wonders gloomily what can have gone wrong. Would you believe it was the same place? Liamine says that the great men of that time were truly following the precepts of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, who told his followers that the ink of the scholar was more precious than the blood of the martyr. Seek learning, he said, though it be in China.
The Arabic language was recognized, he says, from the tenth century on, as the main vehicle of learning. The Jewish scholar Maimonides, born in Cordoba, even wrote his Guide to the Perplexed – a handbook of Hebrew law – in Arabic. This Guide contained a summary of rationalist critiques of religion so powerful that, the story goes, the rabbis of the time sought to ban it. They said that a man who unexpectedly died while reading that section was bound to go to hell: he would indubitably meet his Maker as an atheist! Meanwhile, the universities of many European cities had begun teaching Arabic, among them Paris, Bologna and Naples. It was thanks to the Italian connection that our European Copernicus came across the works of the astronomist Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who had died in 1274, already well on his way to proving that the earth went round the sun, and not vice versa.
The list of the illustrious names that flocked to this area of intellectual and cultural ferment in Sidi Boumedienne’s day and beyond is enormous. The finest minds of el-Andalus and of Arabia, and the earliest of the Renaissance men of Europe all came together here, often engaging, it seems, in fiery public debate: the culture of the Peoples of the Book was now in full flood. There was the historian Ibn Khaldun, nowadays credited as a founding father of sociology; the Catalan philosopher Raymond Lulle, the Pope’s envoy; Ibn Arabi of Andalusia, metaphysician; Ibn Hamdis, renowned Sicilian poet; various distinguished North African travellers, including Ibn Battuta – who gave us the first written account of the riches of Sijilmassa, and is reputed to have travelled three times as far as Marco Polo. Also my favourite, Averroes, real name Ibn Rushd – another Andalusian and a committed rationalist – whose commentaries on Aristotle were translated from his own Arabic into Hebrew and Latin around 1230, so they were accessible once more to European thought, and to such men as Thomas Aquinas. Even more impressively – considering present times – he wrote a treatise arguing that any society which oppresses its women is bound, eventually, to degenerate and collapse. Lovely man.
Liamine’s list goes on and on. The mind boggles. And the hangover does not help. Or the fact that, to my shame, many of the renowned Arabic names he cites are unknown to me. One that does stick in my mind, though, is Ibn Tufail, a philosopher and physician who died in 1185 and whose works, according to our guide, were the inspiration for Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli tales. Ibn Tufail’s story of a child brought up by a wolf-mother, alone on a jungle island, was written with much more serious intent than that of his imitator, though: it was an investigation into the possibility of a ‘pure’ philosophy, unadulterated by social preconception. So there you have it. Walt Disney, we now know, owes a debt to twelfth-century Islamic philosophy.
Sidi Boumedienne’s remains lie in a jewel-like complex of small buildings with central courtyards – guest houses for visiting students, the meeting rooms of the zawiya, where Ibn Khaldun himself once taught, and a little hammam for them, too – on this grassy promontory high above the town, looking out across the lovely plain to the city with its scattered orchards, vineyards and olive groves. The Alhambra style is much in evidence here too: the same forests of slim, graceful pillars and enclosed courtyards, calm rectangular pools at their centres, honeycombs of vaulted ceilings. And a kind of air-vent roofed in those pale green glazed tiles, too. Sidi Boumedienne’s mosque itself, built a couple of hundred years after his death, owns a pair of massive cedar doors that are miracles in themselves. They were made in Spain, it seems, and came sailing spontaneously across the sea from el-Andalus. Or so the story goes . . .
While we ooh and aah over the view, Liamine gives us the low-down on Sidi Boumedienne. He began life in el-Andalus as the son of a lowly weaver, but soon worked his way up in the world of religion and philosophy, crossing the sea to study first in Fez, then in Mecca, where he chose the path of the Sufi mystics, renouncing the riches of this world and all its vanities, and went on to teach in the universities of Cordoba, Fez and Baghdad before coming on down to the Maghreb. Here, as well as popularizing Sufi mysticism – till now the religious philosophy of a small literary elite – over the whole area, he also converted the sultan of Bejaia, up on the coast near Algiers, to his point of view. Hold on tight for this bit of the story. Sidi Boumedienne, invited to an evening party at the sultan’s palace, sat silent amid the displays of wealth and excess, listening to the flatterers and fawners who surrounded the sultan, inflating his pride and ego beyond all reasonable bounds. Disgusted, our hero called for silence, walked up to the sultan and spread out his burnous before the monarch’s eyes. Whereupon, in the cloak’s folds, the sultan saw a terrible vision of his city and all its earthly delights reduced to dust and ashes, causing him to realize how vain and fleeting were the things of this world. So now, thanks to Sidi Boumedienne’s cloak of persuasive powers, the sultan became a Sufi mystic too, and went off to live as a hermit on a small rocky island just off his city’s shores – an island that belonged to the Republic of Pisa.
Is Liamine certain of this? I can swallow the magic-cloak part all right, but what was an Italian city-state doing owning a North African island in the year eleven-seventy-something?
Liamine is extremely sure. Not for nothing does he have a university degree, he says, challengingly. The merchants of Italy had a great interest in the Maghreb at the time: her city-states, of course, were after a share in the rich commerce of Africa. The Republic of Genoa, too – my own regional capital, back home in Italy – had claimed itself an island off Algiers for trading purposes.
So, back to the Italian connection. Have we not heard of Fibonacci, the Italian mathematician who discovered the mathematical sequence of the same name, and who is credited with introducing the Arabic numerals we use to this day into Europe? Well, he studied here alongside Sidi Boumedienne the Andalusian. Fibonacci’s interest in maths was a supremely practical one to start with, according to Liamine. His father was a merchant, the Maghreb representative of the merchants of Pisa. Fibonacci junior, growing up on the coast at Bejaia, was sent to study with the mathematicians of the Maghreb simply to improve his accounting skills and boost the family business. He soon appreciated the superiority of the streamlined Arabic system, with its all-important zero, over the cumbersome Roman numerals still used in Europe – and in 1202 published his book Liber Abaci, introducing this marvellous invention to his homeland.
Those Arabic numerals may be in worldwide use today, but at the time they got a lot of bad press – so much s
o that, in 1280, the Christian Church took the view that these strange foreign symbols, with their magical powers of increasing wealth out of all proportion, were without doubt some Islamic mystic code with dangerous heretical implications. Fibonacci’s book was banned, and the astute bankers of Florence, who had taken to the new system like ducks to water, were now forbidden to use it. But there was no way to halt the flood of progress. The word ciffra – ‘cipher’ – used by the Church at the time to condemn the Arabic numerals is nowadays the ordinary Italian word for ‘number’.
We arrive now at the whitewashed tomb of Sidi Boumedienne which has survived here intact ever since the thirteenth century, only to find, to our horror and amazement, that the last few days of our own century have been its undoing. It has been desecrated. Someone has thrown green paint all over it and bashed at it with what must have been a sledgehammer. Liamine can’t believe it. He was up here a week ago. This has happened since then! He and Ismail stand and gaze at it in appalled silence.
It must have been attacked, they tell us, once the power of speech has returned to them, by intégristes – the local word for Islamists. Green, Liamine adds gloomily, still informative as ever, is the colour of Islam.
Liamine is distraught; Ismail is just angry. They may disapprove of the marabout cults, but that doesn’t mean they agree with people going around desecrating their tombs. You must have respect for the believers, says Ismail, who are devout Muslims, even if mistaken. And for the marabouts themselves – as great men, if not as holy objects.
Listen to this, says Liamine. ‘En louant ce qu’il croit, le croyant loue sa propre âme: c’est pourquoi il condamne les croyances étrangères à la sienne. S’il était juste, il ne le ferait pas.’ (‘Praising what he believes in, the believer is praising his own soul: and that is why he condemns beliefs that are not his own. A just man would not do this.’)
Do we know who wrote that? Sidi Boumedienne! Who died in 1197. And still people have learned nothing.
14
Back in the taxi, much excited conversation is going on in the front seat about the desecration. The proportion of French to Arabic is just enough to tantalize, but not enough for us to guess what Ismail and Liamine are saying. Eventually we get the distilled version.
This is what comes of cancelling the elections. Of course it wasn’t the Front for Islamic Salvation who did this: Liamine himself voted for them. So did Ismail. So did lots of good people – to show that they’d had enough. The only other choice was to vote for the Pouvoir. Most of the other parties had withdrawn – or called for a boycott because of the gerrymandering. But this was certainly not what our guides had in mind: senseless destruction.
Being Europeans, the first thing that occurs to us in this emergency is to suggest a soothing glass of al-kohl in some nearby hostelry. Probably not the correct move in Islamic circles, though. So we sit quietly in the back of the taxi and say nothing. Ismail drives on, silent now.
Eventually, downtown again, we pull up on a broad main road before a massive mosque which Liamine, now on remote control, tells us is the one modelled on the Grand Mosque of Cordoba. Sidi Boumedienne himself will have prayed here. It was brand new when he was alive. Do we want to go in? They will wait for us in the car.
It seems only polite to leave them alone for a bit. By now I have lost whatever will-power I once possessed, anyway. If I can’t just sit quietly somewhere, without being told about bizarre and surreal miracles or witnessing bizarre and senseless vandalism –and two nice boys being very upset by it – I may as well go and look at a mosque. I clamber out of the taxi. Gérard, who has evidently become a Boumedienne groupie on the spot, is making a beeline for the keyhole-arched doorway. Guy is following hotfoot, burnous flying. So much for the three musketeers. They have forgotten all about my handicapped female status.
Liamine calls through the window. Am I going in too? If so, I need to go round to the side entrance, not the main one – there’s a place just inside the door there where I can borrow a haik.
And so, a few minutes later, I find myself standing inside the atrium of the side entrance, trying to put on a haik for the first time in my life. Fortunately, there are no witnesses, no doorman or woman, just a row of these big white lengths of cloth hanging from a series of hooks. Not garments at all, but great, unwieldy strips of material several yards long and two yards wide. Somehow you have to get this stuff wrapped around yourself in a way that covers your whole body and head, yet leaves your arms and legs free to move. Tricky. My first attempt meets the first criterion, but certainly not the second. I’ve trussed myself up like a chicken: can’t even take a step. I wish I’d bothered to examine the haik-clad women we’ve met more closely. Some haiks certainly look as if they’re actually sewn up into a sort of bell-shape. Couldn’t I have got one of those? I sincerely hope nobody is going to walk in and catch me at this. At last I come up with a functioning solution. Right round the body under the armpits, across the front first, leaving the arms free. Now wrap right round again, over the shoulder and covering the head. Yes! The last length flips triumphantly forward over the other shoulder, leaving an end I can cling on to from the inside, under my chin, to stop the whole shebang falling off. It certainly feels right. My legs are covered to the ground, but I can still walk. And I seem to have created that authentic drapey-shawl effect at the back without even trying. Hurrah. I’ve cracked it. Sandals off now. I can go in at last. Little do men know what an easy life they have of it.
Once I’ve settled in to my haik, it turns out to be exactly the right garment for my state of mind. Very comforting, like being in bed under your sheets, yet walking about at the same time. I can look out at everything, but nothing can look in at me. I don’t have to interact with anyone: I am invisible. Perfect. Through the open courtyard beyond, the late-afternoon sunlight is flooding into this cool and shadowy place; more light slants in through coloured glass. Small groups of men of all ages are dotted here and there, leaning against the wide pillars or sitting on patterned kelims, listening to the imam. Some are meditating, some quietly praying. A wonderfully tranquil atmosphere, and a pleasing sense of energy and purpose in the quiet discussions taking place in among the niches and pillars around this spacious, airy prayer-hall.
Maybe I am having an epiphany? Inside a big white bag, inside a mosque: can this be my true destiny?
No. Not really. For all I know, one half of them may be discussing their next green-paint-and-hatchet assault on the precious relics of the other half. I wouldn’t know which side to take. Calvin, or the Old Church? I love the stories of demon lovers and wishing trees, of djinns and Holy Confectioners and the magical uses of henna. Drumming and dancing yourself into a frenzy at a moussem sounds very appealing, too. But I can certainly see why young people here would want their religion to be an active one, committed to changing things for the better in the here and now, and not a fatalistic baraka-seeking pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die opium sop. Religion may not, in my book, be the best way to get political change, but then, evidently, there’s not much alternative in this country. Would I go along with the ones who wanted to get rid of the superstitious marabout-djinn angle on Islam, clean it up and make it more rational? I suppose, if I was an Algerian and a Muslim, the answer would be yes. Strip the magic cloak from Sidi Boumedienne, and return him to the enlightened world of science and intellect that was once his.
Well, this is great. Put on a haik and discover you’re a closet puritan. That your great-great-grandfather would be proud of you, after all. Whatever next?
Gérard and Guy, as you’d expect from people who hadn’t been obliged to take a DIY drapery course before they entered, are already out of the mosque and back in the car by the time I reappear. They tell me that the boys don’t want to go on with the tour. They can’t face it. They don’t want paying, either, not after what we’ve been through together. We’re going to buy them a quiet restful dinner instead. Good. That was quite enough baraka in one dose for a weakling like me.
Off up another warren of back streets, we order a fish dinner in a tiny, crowded restaurant that looks like something you would have found in Paris in the 1940s, complete with lacy, hand-crocheted half-curtains at the windows. And a big fat bouncy woman taking our orders, in a very relaxed headscarf, loosely knotted on the top of her head, plenty of curls escaping. How fast I’m learning to notice things that would normally mean nothing to me.
Within seconds she has spotted my henna moon-and-star, which have so far escaped our guides’ notice. What a very unusual ménage I seem to be setting up for myself, she says. How many of them are my fiancés? Do I need all of them? Don’t I have a spare one for her? And she goes off cackling back to the kitchens.
Do we fancy a beer? asks Liamine. Because he does.
We surely do. Aha! Not such different reactions to trauma as we imagined, then.
Or maybe, says Guy, a bottle of white wine to go with the fish?
But no. This place doesn’t stock wine, only beer. Must be more of that anti-francisant business. They certainly aren’t short of wine in the area, we know that. We’re still suffering the consequences.
Still, the beer is good. Hair of the dog, I say, taking my first cool, frothy sip. Poil du chien.
Ismail seems startled, not to say horrified, by this remark.
It’s an English expression, I explain. Hair of the dog that bit you. It means a hangover cure.
Ismail is greatly relieved. The phrase ‘The Dog’ has been used locally for a century or so, it seems, to describe the French settlers and their hated colonial culture. It seemed to him that I was making some obscure criticism of their beer drinking.