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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

‘Come in,’ said another voice.

  I entered the shop, puzzled, and greeted the two men. The owner of the second voice, a lighter-skinned man, explained. ‘He means he acted the part of IB’s groom in the TV series.’ They both laughed. I was given a glass of tea, and the lighter man handed me a business card: ‘GROUPE GNAWA EXPRESS TANGER, Abdelmajid Domnati, Maître de Groupe’. The walls of the shop, or rather office, were covered in newspaper clippings, mostly in German; a number showed pictures of my three hosts with other musicians. ‘We have many fans in Germany,’ Abdelmajid explained. ‘They like the spiritual content of our music. The Stonz also were interested in Gnawa music.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘You know – Brian Jones, Mick Jagger …’

  ‘Oh, those Stones.’

  ‘And look at this …’ He passed me a CD. Its cover showed a familiar bearded face. ‘You see … You have found IB! This was sent to us by a German friend, Burchard. He is their maître de groupe.’ The CD, entitled simply ‘Ibn Battouta’, was by a German band called Embryo. Frustratingly, the musicians had no CD player. In the space of twenty-four hours I had bumped into IB three times – on the plane, in the hotel, and now on a CD; but he remained inscrutable.

  ‘Come,’ said Abdelmajid, as though he had read my thoughts. ‘We shall visit the real IB.’

  He led me out of the shop, through the Gate of the Stick, and into a perplexing three-dimensional maze of alleyways. We climbed up and down steps and passed through tunnels. Even though Abdelmajid lived in the area, we got lost and ended up against the blank wall of a dead end. Eventually, after asking the way, we turned into a steep and crooked lane – IB Street – and there before us was the tomb chamber, lying in deep shadows cast by tall houses.

  ‘Whoever is responsible for this has little taste,’ Abdelmajid said, eyeing some beige and chocolate tiles around the door. He was right: they could have been a remnant from a DIY megastore, and were set in grey cement rendering like the crust on a porridge pan. A boy was summoned to find the guardian. He soon returned with a grave, shaven-headed and grey-bearded man carrying a key. ‘Is he a Muslim?’ the guardian asked. Abdelmajid said that I was, but without much conviction, and then excused himself. I didn’t contradict him.

  The interior of the tomb was lined with a dado of blue tiles; above this, the walls were painted pink and decorated with a silver arabesque frieze. Qur’ans rested on shelves, and around the walls hung strings of giant prayer beads. The tomb itself was covered in an embroidered black pall sheathed in transparent plastic, like the upholstery of a brand-new car. I said a brief prayer for the soul of IB, then reclined next to the guardian on a green satin cushion.

  We sat in silence, in the presence of the physical IB. I could think of nothing to say, except that I didn’t think much of the pink. It wasn’t awe, or even anticlimax; it was a kind of extreme neutrality, brought on by everything turning out to be rather as expected. I had experienced the same feeling – or apathy, non-feeling – on first visiting the Pyramids.

  A voice broke the silence – my own. ‘So this is IB.’

  The guardian nodded. ‘He was born in this street. And from here he went on pilgrimage to the House of God. Reflect on how far he travelled, on foot and by sea, without cars or aeroplanes.’

  I tried, dutifully, to reflect. There was another long silence. Then I remembered a question I had meant to ask. ‘Are there any members of the IB family here in Tangier?’

  The question immediately sounded silly. It was like asking for the Chaucers in London.

  ‘There are none,’ said the guardian.

  Wishing that Abdelmajid had not gone, I looked around the chamber for inspiration and noticed a small mihrab set into the wall, a niche showing the direction of Mecca. ‘Do people pray here?’

  ‘They come to recite the Holy Qur’an, after the dawn prayer.’

  This raised my spirits. ‘Then I must try to come.’

  ‘It is better for you not to come. There are many drunkards and other wicked people about at that hour.’

  Again we sat in silence. I could hear my watch ticking. Then I thanked the guardian, put a donation in the box – ‘It is not necessary,’ he said – and left with a last look back at the porridge-like walls.

  I don’t know what I had expected from the tomb. Whatever it was, I had not found it. I suppose I had been hoping for a vibration or two. The tomb’s appearance, a combination of municipal washroom and front parlour, had not helped; a poker-work sign (‘Dunroamin’?) wouldn’t have been out of place. Neither had the poker-faced guardian, whom I could picture ferrying the dead across the Styx. Worse, phrases I had read about the tomb rose up to haunt me – ‘authenticity open to question’, ‘considerable doubt as to the true identity of its occupant’, ‘possibly some distant relative of the traveller’ – phrases which, in my desire to find the real, physical IB, I had conveniently buried.

  Who then was the real IB? The Concealed Pearls, the Islamic biographical dictionary of the fourteenth century, lists him as Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yusuf, of the tribe of Lawatah and the city of Tangier, surnamed IB. The Lawatah are descendants of the Lebu, a people mentioned in Pharaonic records – the Libyans of the Greeks – who originated in the region of Cyrenaica. They spread into Egypt early on, and by the ninth century AD had settled in the far south-west of present-day Morocco; there are also said to be Christian Lawatah on Malta. After the coming of Islam the Lawatah, like many of the other tribes collectively known as Berbers, claimed an Arabian origin. There were plenty of stories to back up the idea. One told of a South Arabian ancestor wandering all the way to Libya, a journey of 1,800 miles – a fair distance given that he was looking for some lost camels. Historians from Ibn Khaldun onwards have gleefully trashed such tales; but while their reasoning may be based on sound scholarship, it all seems rather unfair – in the same league as denying Father Christmas. A family like IB’s were totally Arabized, and to pick nits about the traveller’s Arabness would be like questioning a Cornishman’s Englishness because his ancestors were Celts and not Anglo-Saxons. IB himself would have been aghast to be called a Berber, a word which in Arabic as in the European languages has the ring of ‘barbarian’.

  IB’s family name is more of a problem. One theory explains ‘Battutah’ as a Maghribi diminutive of the Arabic battah, ‘duck’, and a pet version of the girl’s name Fatimah. The notion that ‘IB’ should mean ‘Son of the She-Duckling’ is charming enough to be plausible. But then so are the various other suggestions that have been put forward: Son of the Father of a Tassel/of an Egg-Shaped Bottle/of a Bad Woman with an Ellipsoidal Body. (‘Battut’, it should be added, is the Arabic for Donald Duck.)

  My uneasy suspicion that I had come all the way to Tangier to visit the tomb not of IB but of some cousin of his many times removed – if its occupant was even that – was partly dispelled by lunch in La Grenouille on the rue Rembrandt. A BBC nature programme on crustaceans, broadcast by a Spanish satellite channel, was showing silently on a television set in the corner. I ate a solitary and excellent meal of snails, sole and tarte au citron. Over coffee, I decided to leave Tangier. I needed help, and I had a convoluted introduction to a gentleman in Rabat who might give it.

  Later that afternoon I was in the Grand Socco, on my way to thank the kind Abdelmajid, when a man in a grubby white T-shirt sidled up and walked along beside me. ‘I saw you at the station,’ he said softly, in English.

  I had indeed been at the railway station, booking a ticket to Rabat for the following day. I replied in Arabic, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch what you said.’

  ‘I saw you at the station,’ he repeated, in Arabic.

  ‘You are very observant.’

  ‘You did not travel.’ He was keeping pace beside me. Neither of us looked at the other.

  ‘What you say is true.’

  ‘You will not travel?’

  ‘God is the most knowing.’ I turned to face him. ‘I a
m an amateur of historical geography. Perhaps I might be of service?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man, reinsinuating himself into the crowd.

  I found my way to the Gate of the Stick. The headquarters of the Groupe Gnawa Express were shut, so I continued upwards into the kasbah, the citadel. After several dead ends, I came to a lane which ran parallel to a long, high wall. This was punctuated by a small gateway, like the entrance to a walled garden. I turned into it, and found myself on a cliff overlooking the sea.

  The transition from the introverted city to this blustery crag was a complete surprise. For a few moments, I felt dizzied and disorientated, like a sleepwalker who awakens inches from the head of a staircase. I sat on a low parapet perched high above the end of Africa and Islam.

  Ludolph von Suchem, IB’s German contemporary, wrote that the Strait of Gibraltar was so narrow that ‘upon one bank there stands a Christian woman and on the other bank a heathen woman washing their clothes, and wrangling and quarrelling with one another’. I looked in vain for the coast of Europe. (Granted, it was a dim and vaporous day; but Suchem must have been a particularly gullible landlubber, for among the other sailors’ yarns he recorded is one about a great fish, ‘the Troya marina or sea-swine’. To frighten it away you had to ‘stare at it with a bold and terrible countenance’; conversely, you could feed it bread.) Neither could I see, beneath the waves, the remains of a bridge which medieval Arab geographers believed had joined the two continents, and which would be revealed again at the end of time.

  Another legend, one which appears in some of the early Qur’anic commentaries, told that this spot had been the point of departure for Moses and al-Khadir. In the Qur’an, al-Khadir – the immortal ‘Green Man’ – was the Prophet’s spiritual guide on an epic quest for the Fountain of Life; he later became a metaphor for far travel and honorary grand master of all Islamic mystical orders. Later, I was to bump into him in Damascus, and by the Black Sea. Now, sitting here on the parapet, I remembered this Islamic Gilgamesh; and thought of that sudden and dreamlike transition through the gate in the high wall, from the intervolved alleyways of the city to this disclosure of the wide sea – where, down in the port, a ship was now calling its passengers, bellowing ‘Come! … Come!’; and felt that I had stepped into the frontispiece of a book of travels far older than IB.

  Even if I ignored the doubts about its authenticity, I could not imagine IB in that tomb, with its pink walls and dismal guardian. But I could picture him up here on this parapet, looking out to sea like a Moorish Boy Raleigh. This was where the vibrations were!

  I left the parapet with the sun, and wandered back down through the madinah. The cafés on the place de France were full, but I found a table on the boulevard Pasteur and sat down to write up my diary. A few minutes later I became aware of an animated Australian voice at the next table.

  ‘… they ain’t being themselves. They look like they got special permission to dress like that.’ The speaker must have noticed that I’d tapped into her conversation, for she suddenly addressed me. ‘Excuse me. Do you speak English?’ I nodded. ‘It’s a bit of a funny question, but … what do you think about our clothes?’

  My neighbours were two girls of the sun-burnished, tennis-playing sort admired by John Betjeman. One was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and loose trousers, the other a white ankle-length dress and a headscarf.

  ‘She means,’ said the other girl, ‘do you think we should, well, wrap up a bit more? It’s just that we seem to get a lot of … attention. And look at this lot!’ She indicated the daringly clad Moroccan girls on their evening promenade.

  ‘I think you’re both most respectably dressed,’ I said. ‘It’s probably just that you’re what they call the Other.’

  ‘You are a Pom,’ said the first girl. ‘We thought so. I was just saying – oh, I’m Alison and this is Lucy – that you mustn’t get too obsessed about putting on layers and layers, or you end up looking like a bloody snowman.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I said.

  ‘Do you live here?’ Lucy asked.

  I said I was passing through.

  ‘So are we,’ said Alison. ‘Like a dose of salts!’ They had been in Morocco for about ten days; in that short time they seemed to have covered most of the country. Where did they get the energy? To me, a train ride to Rabat seemed like a major undertaking.

  ‘And we’ve been on a camel ride in the desert,’ added Lucy. I smiled. ‘I know, it’s a bit of a cliché. But this is our first Arab country. We’ve already been round Europe – Greece, Italy, France, Spain …’

  I’d always wondered why they did it. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  Alison thought for a moment. ‘Oh, you know, there’s nothing at home. Just whingeing families. And then you look at the map and you think, “Christ! We’re bloody miles from anywhere!”’

  ‘There’s so much to see,’ said Lucy, ‘and so little time to see it in.’

  I thought of my own journey that lay ahead – not only the train ride to Rabat, but the further one – and rose and bade them good-night. A few yards along the boulevard, I turned and waved to them. The café was brightly lit; but, suffused with sun and travel, they seemed brighter. In fact, they positively thermo-luminesced.

  *

  Like present-day Antipodeans, medieval Maghribis were aware of living a long way from anywhere. IB tells an anecdote to illustrate this:

  When I was in Sin Kalan [Canton] I heard that there was a venerable shaykh over two hundred years old who neither ate nor drank nor excreted nor had intercourse with women, though his powers were intact, and that he lived in a cave outside the city, giving himself to devotion. I went to the cave and saw him at the entrance. He was thin, very ruddy, showed the traces of his devotional practices, and had no beard. I greeted him; he took my hand, sniffed it, and said to the interpreter: ‘This man is from one end of the world and we are from the other.’

  The verbal root of ‘al-Maghrib’, gharaba, means both ‘to set (sun)’ and ‘to be remote’, and for Near Easterners the Maghrib, the Occident, evoked the distantly exotic in the same way that ‘Orient’ still does, vestigially, for western Europeans. Persians like the eleventh-century Nasir Khusraw believed that people in al-Andalus, which medieval geographers included in the Maghrib, had eyes like those of cats. Other Persians, among them IB’s contemporary Mustawfi, placed in the Maghrib legendary sites like the City of Brass and the City of Women – a sort of Islamic-socialist-feminist commune; the Maghribis set these myths in the East. Even today, a Middle Eastern Arab who regards Cairo as his back yard looks on anywhere to the west of it almost as a world apart. Maghribis are indeed peculiar in subtle ways, using Arabic instead of Indian numerals and retaining in their handwriting fossilized features of Kufic, the script that went out of general use in the Middle East nearly a thousand years ago. Most noticeable of all, they are set apart by their fiendishly incomprehensible spoken dialects. Ali Bey noted that ‘when the famous Orientalist Golius came into this country [Morocco], he could not understand a word of their Arabic, but was obliged to make use of an interpreter’.

  Maghribis, the Antipodeans of Islam, have been both its most adventurous travellers and its greatest travel writers. Such was their output that, even if he never left his study, their educated compatriot could – like Defoe’s Compleat English Gentleman – make the tour of the world in books. Probably the earliest Maghribi travel writer was Yahya ibn Hakam, who went on two embassies for the Caliph of Cordova, the first in 840 to Constantinople, the second some years later to the King of the Norsemen. On both occasions Yahya, nicknamed ‘the Gazelle’ on account of his great beauty, serenaded the ruler’s wife in troubadour fashion with lyrics of his own composition – a charming form of diplomacy which could well be emulated today to the benefit of international relations. Sadly, the Gazelle’s account of his travels is only known from a few fragments.

  Another early Andalusian traveller to the fringes of civilization was Abu Hamid, born in Granada towards the end
of the eleventh century. He wrote a descriptive geography, liberally truffled with wonders (the rulers of China have miscreants licked to death by a rhinoceros), adventure (the author wrestles with a squid which has tried to steal his knife) and useful tips (sealskin sandals reduce the pain caused by gout). In the middle of the twelfth century, Abu Hamid wandered around the Aral Sea region, travelled up the Volga and spent some years by the Danube, probably in what is now Hungary. In his account of these places and of lands further north he gave an early puff to caviare, ‘the finest of all preserved delicacies in the world’, and described with an illustration the construction and use of skis. Among the peoples he mentioned are ‘red-skinned northerners with blue eyes and flaxen or blond hair, who drink a liquid made from barley; this drink is as sour as vinegar but it agrees with them since, as their diet consists of honey and the flesh of beavers and squirrels, they are hot-tempered’, which must be one of the earliest descriptions of the Lager Lout. Abu Hamid’s interest in comparative anthropology is shown by a snippet of dialogue between him and the Christian King of Bashghard. The King has heard Abu Hamid encouraging the Muslim royal mercenaries to marry four wives and refrain from wine:

  King: This is not logical! Alcohol strengthens the body, and women weaken it. This Islam of yours runs contrary to common sense.

  A.H.: But there is a difference between us. You Christians take wine with your food and do not get drunk. But Muslims who drink do so with the express aim of getting inebriated. They lose their minds; they go crazy. On the matter of polygamy, Muslims are naturally hot-blooded, so they enjoy plenty of sex; and you should bear in mind that if you permit them four wives they will father more children, and your army, who are Muslims, will increase.

  King: Hmm. Perhaps we should listen to what this shaykh says … In fact, he is most logical!

  Abu Hamid and the Gazelle were, however, exceptional in the choice of their destinations. Most Maghribi travellers headed for Arabia, drawn by the irresistible centripetal force of Mecca and al-Madinah. Pilgrimage, a sacred duty for Muslims who are able to undertake the journey, was the primary incentive to travel. The way east led into the heartland of Arab-Islamic culture, and visitors from the end of the world would eagerly set about improving themselves there. Ibn Khaldun, himself a Maghribi, wrote that the East was superior to the West because of ‘the additional intelligence that accrues to the soul from the influences of sedentary culture’. For the Maghribis, the whole experience was a sort of Grand Tour: travellers like IB were treading a similar road to the one which eighteenth-century Englishmen, nineteenth-century Americans and the Australasians of today would follow around Europe.