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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  By the early nineteenth century, the hospital had fallen on hard times. Its inmates, wrote Ali Bey, existed ‘in the greatest misery … while the administrator is clothed in the greatest luxury’. Qalawun and IB, however, would be delighted to know that today, more than seven centuries after its foundation, it is thriving again. Low, temporary-looking buildings have sprung up among the ruins of Qalawun’s vaults, a blend of Piranesi and Portakabin.

  I called on the director and showed him IB’s description of the hospital. He smiled wistfully. ‘Today, we are not so well funded. And we’re only an eye hospital. But we still deal with about 300 cases a day.’

  I said that he must be proud to be part of a 700-year-old tradition.

  The director thought for a moment. ‘It sometimes makes me think how slowly we’ve progressed. I mean, we think we know everything now. But the basic technology is the same. Even when your traveller was here, they were performing cataract operations. I always try to remember that verse of the Qur’an: “You have been given but a little knowledge”.’

  As I left the hospital, I noticed a smudgy mark on one of the old columns: a palm-print, rust-coloured. It was blood, and reasonably fresh. I was surprised; but then, perhaps an eye hospital was the natural habitat for the Evil Eye.

  Later, I went back to the tomb chamber with al-Maqrizi and turned to the section on the tomb’s joint occupant, Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qalawun. The Sultan died, I read, in the Citadel of Cairo in 1341. He was 57 years old and had reigned for forty-three of them, not counting two periods when he was temporarily deposed.

  Al-Nasir had been born with his fists clenched. When the midwife prised them open, blood ran from his hands. ‘This was taken as an omen, that those hands would shed much blood,’ wrote the biographer Ibn Hajar. ‘And it was as they predicted.’ The three years between the death of Qalawun and the succession of al-Nasir in 1293 were rich in coups, and one of the first acts of the new child-sultan was to execute the murderers of his brother and predecessor – having first had them paraded on camels with their severed hands dangling around their necks. Later, when he had a convicted burglar crucified in drag on Bab Zuwaylah, the southern gate of Cairo, there were murmurings that he had gone too far. ‘But’, he retorted, ‘what else can one do with common people and market types? They only fear a tyrant.’ IB was shocked by the severity of al-Nasir’s officers in crushing a riot against European merchants in Alexandria: thirty-six of the Muslim ringleaders were sliced down the middle and the halves displayed, Damien Hirst-fashion, on either side of the street. (The public display of anti-western militants is still a feature of Egyptian political life; bisection seems to have been abandoned.)

  The Sultan’s bloody hands and long reign created unparalleled prosperity. The population of Cairo doubled to half a million – probably ten times that of London – and the city became a full-blown consumer society: the value of left-overs and packaging was said to be a thousand gold dinars a day. Friar Symon thought Egypt in 1323 to be ‘the most beautiful, stable and prosperous country in the whole world … Nobles and peasants … and foreigners of whatever condition, with no possibility of bribery, are subject to the infliction of the same penalties; and’, he continued enthusiastically, ‘this especially when it is a case of capital punishment, death being inflicted by crucifixion, decapitation, or cutting in two with a sword.’

  The friar was less enthusiastic about Mamluk leisure pursuits. Polo he thought a namby-pamby affair compared with the tournaments of Christian knights, although he conceded its popularity: when the Sultan took part, the spectators raised such a din that ‘they seem to hinder the motion of Arcturus, and to crash with the inhabitants of Sodom’. Symon also dismissed the Sultan’s attachment to hunting as effeminate. Admittedly, al-Nasir never roughed it. On his hunting expeditions he would take a portable steam-bath, as well as a phalanx of physicians, pharmacists and antimony appliers.

  Al-Nasir’s greatest passion, however, was building. His palaces, forerunners of contemporary Gulf taste, dripped with gold and lapis lazuli; his mosques – around thirty of them – were panelled with rare marbles. He rebuilt the Citadel mosque entirely, went off the new design, knocked it down and rebuilt it all over again. IB admired the Sufi monastery of Siryaqus, another of the Sultan’s foundations and situated in his favourite hunting country. Al-Nasir would drop in on the ascetics after the chase, rather in the manner of the English nobility of the eighteenth century with their resident hermits. (The asceticism was, of course, five-star: the mystics had their own sauna and live-in masseur.)

  IB also praised al-Nasir’s generosity to the Mecca pilgrims in providing food, water and camel transport for the poor and weak. Few pilgrims, however, travelled in the style of the Sultan’s favourite wife. She took a herd of milch cows and a portable kitchen garden, and lunched and dined all the way to Mecca and back on greens and fried cheese, prompting al-Maqrizi to wonder that she did not die of indigestion.

  Fried cheese was a regular feature of court life. When the Sultan slept, plates of it were placed nearby, together with bowls of stew, bananas and cream, and glasses of sherbert. The midnight feasts were not for him, but for his bodyguard: he was terrified that they would fall asleep, leaving him exposed to the silent dagger in the night. He knew that the threat came from within, and killed some two hundred of his most senior officers; with the rest he played a furious game of snakes and ladders, promoting and demoting at whim. Only a few fortunate myrmidons escaped these violent swings of fortune, and even with these he could fly into a rage, clobbering them with his boots.

  Al-Nasir died, unusually for a Mamluk sultan, of natural causes. His funeral was conducted without pomp. The corpse was placed on a bier borne by two mules and preceded by a single candle. Orders were given for the shops to be closed, and people were prevented from watching the cortège. Here in the tomb chamber waited the director of the hospital, the four grand qadis and a few other notables. They washed the body in a fountain outside the mausoleum, wrapped it in a winding-sheet and prayed the prayers for the dead over it. Al-Nasir was then lowered into the grave next to his father. ‘Glory be to the One who changes not, nor ceases,’ wrote al-Maqrizi. ‘This was the greatest ruler in the inhabited world, and he died a stranger.’

  It is a nice epitaph. The Mamluks ruled the Arab Islamic heartland for 250 years, and were still a power in Egypt when Napoleon invaded; but they were always strangers – Turkic and Circassian slaves from beyond the far end of the Black Sea, an oligarchy of displaced persons. The Arab establishment never let them forget that they were outsiders. Ibn Hajar wrote at the beginning of his biographical dictionary The Concealed Pearls: ‘Properly speaking, we should have started with names beginning with a long a; but since only Turkic names, like “Āqush”, and those of women, like “Āminah”, begin thus, I have postponed them so that the names of Islamic scholars may have due precedence.’ The Mamluks were not only displaced literally, alphabetically; they were bracketed together with women.

  IB lists a few of the Mamluk grandees (‘Arghun the Dawadar … Tushtu, who was known as “Green Chickpeas” … Bashtak’), but for him their society was impenetrable. For me, too, they were as yet no more than outlandish names carved on splendid tombs.

  The following day I set off southwards from the tomb of al-Nasir and Qalawun, along the main street of medieval Cairo. It was here that al-Abdari lost his mule and Ibn Sa’id, another fastidious traveller from the Maghrib, made the mistake of hiring one of the city’s 30,000 donkey taxis. ‘No sooner was I in the saddle than the beast shot off, raising a cloud of black dust which blinded my eyes and soiled my robes.’ Seizing the opportunity of a traffic jam, Ibn Sa’id threw himself off the donkey and did what all Arabs of a literary bent used to do when in a state of extreme emotion: ‘I extemporized a verse –

  This city is sheer hell, alas,

  For him that hires a taxi-ass.

  I, driver, on your donkey sit,

  Eyeless in Cairo from the grit,

>   While all along the street you tear,

  Tornado-like, behind your fare.

  O driver, show some mercy, please!

  I beg you now, upon my knees,

  Ere in earth’s winding-sheet I’m trussed,

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’

  I walked, past al-Husayn Square then, dodging the hawkers of scent, through an unfragrant underpass. I paused to eat some hawawishi, fried mince sandwiches, in a tiny Mamluk-period shop where the walls oozed with generations of cooking oil, then rejoined the ancient street. The crowds were thinner than in IB’s time, but the smells were still the same – incense, smoked fish, crushed coriander, freshly trodden dung, freshly killed meat. The only anachronisms were the post-Columbian odours of tobacco smoke and guava.

  ‘All the amirs’, wrote IB, ‘vie with one another in charitable works and the founding of mosques and religious houses.’ The buildings are still there, interposed between the shop fronts and looped about with carving – here an inscription, there an escutcheon bearing some symbol of office. It seemed that every Amir of a Thousand, Keeper of the Pen-box and Lord High Polo Sticks had put up a tomb-mosque.

  I passed through Bab Zuwaylah, site of the cross-dressed crucifixion, and entered the Tentmakers’ Suq, where they sew appliqué awnings for saints’ festivals and have recently diversified into King Tut scatter-cushions. For about a mile, my route was overwhelmingly Mamluk and remarkably free of motor traffic. But after the Saddlers’ Suq the timeline began to kink: I crossed a roaring highway, then came to the huge ninth-century mosque of Ibn Tulun with its strange cresting, like stick-men dancing along the parapet, and its helical minaret – a miniature ziggurat, or a giant helter-skelter. I passed under an aqueduct punctured by another highway and, four miles from my starting point, reached the Mosque of Amr.

  Founded in 641 by the Muslim conqueror of Egypt and in a state of structural flux ever since, the ancient mosque’s only remaining features are its name and its numen. The rebuilds were not a matter of taste, but of necessity. IB noted that the building had become a public highway. Ibn Sa’id, still fulminating from his experience with the donkey taxi, lamented the state of the most venerable Islamic monument in Egypt. People picnicked in it, he grumbled, and threw rubbish in the courtyard; the ceiling was a mass of cobwebs, the walls covered in graffiti. ‘And yet’, he went on, ‘my soul was elated here … There was some mysterious sanctity inherent in the mosque. It derived from the Prophet’s companions who were present at its building.’ Name and numen were, are, in fact, everything.

  I passed a bus station, then Babylon, the Roman and Coptic centre of the city. Over the millennia, Cairo has done a triple jump towards the north; my southward route had taken me backwards in time. Now it took me out of the confusing conurbation and into a familiar suburban present, over a metro line, under flyovers, past petrol stations.

  IB had left Cairo by the same route, heading for Upper Egypt. In the Travels he is uncharacteristically silent about his own experiences in the megapolis of the Islamic world. A disembodied spectator, he tells us nothing about where he slept, what he ate or whom he met. Now tentatively, he walks into the picture again. ‘I stayed on the night following my departure at the convent which the Sahib Taj al-Din ibn Hanna built at Dayr al-Tin.’ Taj al-Din, who had been Vizier to the young Sultan al-Nasir, placed in the convent some relics of the Prophet: a fragment of a wooden basin, his kohl pencil, an awl which he used for mending his sandals and a Qur’an in the hand of the Prophet’s son-in-law, Ali. The Vizier, IB explains, ‘endowed the convent with funds to supply food to all comers and goers and to maintain the guardians of these sacred relics’.

  For me, a secular relic-hunter, a documented Battutian overnight had irresistible cachet. Even if the convent lay somewhere among the tatty industrial nether regions of the city, I had to find it. I followed the highway towards Helwan, the Dagenham of Cairo. To the west, scabrous skyscrapers overlooked the Nile. Nearer to hand I passed what looked and smelt like a manure recycling plant, then entered a zone of cement factories. Someone directed me through one of these. I scaled the far wall of the yard and found myself, quite unexpectedly, in the country.

  ‘You are a traveller,’ said the café owner, waving away payment for my plate of fried aubergines. ‘Did you know, Uncle Muhammad, that he’s come all the way from Yemen?’

  ‘Yemen …’ said Uncle Muhammad. ‘I was there in 1964. In the army.’ He paused, silently remembering his time in Egypt’s Vietnam. ‘Do they still chew that drug there – what’s it called? – qat?’ He puffed out his cheek and rolled his eyes.

  ‘They do. In fact, I myself chew it every day,’ I said.

  He shuddered. ‘I seek refuge with God!’

  I quickly changed the subject to the Convent of the Relics. Overlooking my admission that I was a crazed dope-head, Uncle Muhammad offered to take me there.

  We walked along a dusty road lined with mud-brick cottages, a fragment of rural Egypt marooned among the factories, then turned off into an oasis of palms and other trees. There was a mosque, a fine Ottoman building and at least three centuries too late for IB. Bits of earlier walls stood in the gardens, no doubt the remains of IB’s convent. Inside the mosque, Uncle Muhammad showed me the reliquary, a tall thin room lined with blue-and-white tiles. From the ceiling hung a model boat, rather like a Turkish caique and rigged with cobwebs. ‘The relics were taken to the Mosque of al-Husayn about a hundred years ago. But’, he added, pointing upwards, ‘we’ve still got Noah’s Ark.’

  We went out into the sunlight and wandered around the garden looking at the remains of the earlier structure. I tried to imagine how it had looked in the 1320s, to rebuild mentally IB’s enormous convent, and failed. The relics of his night here were all but gone. Even the Nile, which in his day flowed by the gardens, had receded to the west. Arab poets could conjure up a genius loci from the slenderest of materials:

  The abandoned dwellings spoke to me, though they were silent: ‘Our silence is, in part, a form of speech …’

  Now, if it was, I couldn’t hear it.

  On the way back to the café, Uncle Muhammad invited me to stay the night. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘your Battutah stayed here.’ I was touched but worn out after my urban hike and looking forward to a solitary evening in the Husayn Hotel. I climbed back over the cement factory wall, returned to the highway and caught the number 201 bus back into town.

  *

  Travel writing is, after autobiography, the most egocentric form of literature. But in eighteen pages on Cairo, between his arrival there and his night in the convent outside the city, IB himself appears only once. I was beginning to wonder exactly what he had got up to. In late medieval times the possibilities were endless. They included everything from Qur’anic studies through shadow plays and street storytellers to dancing camels and professional farters. Perhaps a well-brought-up provincial Maghribi like IB would have taken one look at Cairo – ‘this threshing-floor for the chaff of humanity, this dustbin of the world, this refuge of vice,’ his fellow countryman al-Abdari had called it – and fled. He does not record how long he stayed on his first visit; but, passing through again a couple of months later, he says baldly, ‘I stayed only one night in Cairo.’ I wanted to fill in the gaps, and turned to al-Maqrizi.

  Exhortations and Reflections on Settlements and Monuments is a whopper of a book, nearly a thousand dense folio pages. I have called it a guidebook; certainly, a Mamluk donkey driver wanting to mug up on the Knowledge would find it all here: quarters, suburbs, streets, alleys, mosques and tombs. There are fifty pages alone on churches and synagogues. But the topography that al-Maqrizi set out to write, nourished by reading and his own observation, grew into a literary mutant, a panoramic, diachronic combination of Pevsner, Pepys and the A to Z.

  I began where I had started my walk that morning, outside al-Nasir’s tomb. Of all the streets of the city, al-Maqrizi wrote, this was the busiest. It took its name, Between the Two Castles, from a pair of Fatim
id palaces which once stood on either side of the road. Formerly, Cairene aristocrats would gather here to read biography, history and poetry, ‘and to feast their souls on all manner of goods such as delight the five senses’. By the fourteenth century, however, while it was still by day the grandest shopping street in town, it became at night a haunt of ‘unspeakable lewdness and debauchery’. The stream of people was so dense that certain despicable men would ‘pleasure themselves against youths and women, to the point of ejaculation’, without their victims knowing what was happening. (According to an English friend who lived in Cairo, at least one descendant of the despicable men is alive and well. He is to be found on rush-hour buses and, judging by her account, is not as discreet as his forebears.) More conventional sex maniacs could nip around the corner into the Candle Market and pick up a tart, immediately identifiable by her red leather trousers.

  And all this, I reflected, was going on under the noses of the Qur’an readers, as they chanted their requiems in the window seats of the sultanic mausoleum. The juxtaposition of angelic and priapic, of ejaculations pious and profane in this Mamluk Knightsbridge was, somehow, exquisite. ‘Therein is what you will …’

  I returned the following morning to Between the Two Castles. Its racier inhabitants have moved across the Nile to the Saudi-haunted nightclubs in Pyramids Road and, looking around at the surviving medieval monuments, one might imagine that the Mamluks did a lot of praying, studying and dying, and not much else. One purely secular monument, however, survives: the palace built by Bashtak, one of those outlandish amirs whose names IB recorded.

  The palace stands on Between the Two Castles, but its entrance is in a sideroad, Darb al-Qirmiz, or Crimson Street (qirmiz provides the first five letters of ‘crimson’). I passed a guard of tethered geese and entered a courtyard. A massive doorway in a humbug-striped wall of red and white led into an entrance hall, from which rose a staircase.