The first floor was pure theatre. The entire space was filled with a multi-storey atrium with a fountain in the middle and surrounded by columns and iwans, vaulted side chambers. Stucco windows high above shone with Bashtak’s blazon, a red diamond on a white stripe. Friar Symon had peeped into a similar interior and pronounced it the house of God and the gate of Heaven. Heaven, I thought, must have been freezing in winter. Even now, in September, the place was chilly. I warmed myself in a few blotches of sunlight in a latticed window, and listened to the sounds that rose from the street below – passing feet and hooves, horse bells, hammering, the rasp of files, a ripple of voices, the occasional strongly expressed opinion. Mamluk sounds.
As a living space, the hall must have been desperately uncomfortable. Equipped with a cenotaph instead of a fountain, it would have made a fine tomb chamber. Even the lavatory was sepulchrally proportioned, about eight feet by five, and twenty feet tall. I tested the acoustic with a snatch of ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls’. It was superb. The effect on Mamluk farts must have been megaphonic.
Upstairs, from a screened triforium gallery on the second floor, there was a concubine’s-eye view of the hall; more lattices looked down to the street. I found my way on to a terrace and climbed a succession of external staircases. More terraces rose in Babylonian profligacy, clustering around the central atrium. Finally, I was level with the domes of Qalawun’s and al-Nasir’s mosque-tombs. I caught my breath and looked out.
The street below was a dizzying crevasse. Beyond the domes stood crumbling iwans interspersed with later building. From this height, the processes that had shaped the city seemed not architectural, but fungal. Successive structures were parasites on the waste of decayed dynasties, like blewits on a cowpat. Before me was a tell that began with Mamluk masonry, then Ottoman, followed by concrete, then wooden shanties, the whole finished off by an airy bidonville of junk – packing cases, rolls of wire, sticks, bicycle frames. It was a living Troy, and all the strata were inhabited simultaneously. I watched the inhabitants of the top layer going about their business, washing, cooking, keeping pigeons and growing things in pots. (Aerial horticulture has a long history in Cairo. An eleventh-century Persian visitor wrote, ‘I heard that a certain man made a roof-garden on the seventh floor, and took up a bullock to raise water. He grew oranges, citrons and bananas.’)
From the roof of Bashtak’s palace a Cairo was revealed which hid itself at street level, a city recycling itself upwards. But Bashtak himself remained buried in the Travels, a mere name under Some of the amirs of Cairo. It was only when I extended my visit with some textual travel that the bare set of his palace sprang to life. Bashtak’s story, I discovered, would have been beyond the most inventive of scriptwriters – unless, that is, they could imagine a scenario in which Piers Gaveston joined the cast of Dynasty.
From Ibn Hajar’s Concealed Pearls, I learned that Sultan al-Nasir’s crush on the young Mongol Ilkhan of Iraq and Persia – ‘the most beautiful of God’s creatures’, as IB later described him – was so unbearable that he instructed his slave-buyers to find him a mamluk who resembled him. They came up with Bashtak, ‘a graceful, lightly bearded youth’ from the steppe. Al-Nasir was immediately besotted. He showered Bashtak with fiefs, de luxe slave girls, and a fresh wardrobe every day – everything, Ibn Hajar says, from brocade cloaks lined with squirrel fur down to gaiters.
Not surprisingly, Bashtak turned into a dandy. Mamluk fashion-victims would analyse and imitate his manner of tying the turban. And, whether despite or because of the supply of concubines, he also turned into a monstrous lecher who even seduced, it was whispered, peasant women and fishwives. As al-Maqrizi put it, ‘he was quite incontinent with respect to vaginas’.
A few years after IB’s visit to Cairo, Qawsun - another star of the Mamluk brat-pack – bought and refurbished a particularly fine palace on Between the Two Castles. Bashtak was beside himself with jealousy. He immediately bought a mansion directly opposite Qawsun’s, wheedled the Sultan into giving him a large piece of land adjoining it and built the palace which I had visited – demolishing, in the process, ten small mosques. ‘And thus’, says al-Maqrizi, ‘did the street once more live up to its name of “Between the Two Castles”.’ Perhaps as a final nose-thumb at his rival, Bashtak, the quintessential spoilt horror, turned the ground floor of his mansion into a sweet-shop.
Sultan al-Nasir’s Cairo was the nearest the fourteenth century got to Hollywood. Most of the mamluks from the steppe ended up as menials and extras; but those with looks and luck like Bashtak, and the others who elbowed, backstabbed and flirted their way to the top, found themselves in a world of fabulous wealth. Qawsun married the Sultan’s daughter and pursued gold and rare gemstones as hungrily as Bashtak chased women. When another palace of Qawsun’s was plundered during a temporary fall from grace, so much gold flooded the Cairo bullion market that the price dropped by nearly half. Bashtak, after his death, was found to have amassed 1.7 million dinars in cash alone – about seventy million dollars’ worth at today’s prices. Those who didn’t get their hands on gold, jewels and the Sultan’s daughter could always spend a vicarious evening in Between the Two Castles, listening to the latest episode of The Arabian Nights. And, as in the Nights and Hollywood, reversals of fortune could be sudden and catastrophic: Bashtak and Qawsun were both executed after the death of their sugar-daddy, al-Nasir. (Bashtak would have enjoyed his rival’s crucifixion: the crowds who turned up to watch it could buy Qawsun-shaped lollipops.)
Even in his lifetime, Bashtak’s palace was a white elephant. Reading al-Maqrizi, I recalled my own feelings about that great morgue of a house: ‘Whenever he went there, Bashtak’s heart would shrivel. His soul knew no joy as long as he stayed in it. In the end, he sold it.’
To wander through the warrens of al-Maqrizi’s Settlements was as strange and thrilling as exploring the physical palace and city. Bashtak, a name mentioned in passing in the Travels, was now made flesh. And when, on several later occasions, I happened to pass the palace, I would look up and imagine him in his window seat, trying to get warm, letching through the lattice.
Now I had set and actors, I spent a morning in the Museum of Islamic Art looking for the props. Dark wood was inlaid with white ivory, brass and copper with silver and gold, and glass enamelled in royal blue and sealing-wax red. The love of colour and geometry reminded me of the Moroccan madrasah I had visited; clearly, the same nimble fingers and Euclidean minds had been at work here, too.
The difference lay in the heraldry. Almost every object bore a device: there were lozenges and fesses, fleurs-de-lis and Maltese crosses, chalices and double-headed eagles. The combination of sombre field, rich pattern and blazon was a first cousin of Gothic; such an ensemble seen against the backdrop of Bashtak’s great hall would have thrilled Pugin and made Lord Leighton sick with envy.
IB, it seemed, had never penetrated the grande luxe world of Mamluk interiors. But when I looked closely, I began to spot points of contact, tangential ones, with his own world, fragments from the Travels. There, on a mosque lamp dated 1319, was the blazon of the amir Almalik – vert two polo sticks erect addorsed argent. IB had bumped into him at the Delta hermitage where he had his dream of far travel. Among the metalwork I found a brass box inlaid with the arms of Tuquz-damur, one of the amirs on IB’s Cairo list, whom the traveller later met in Mecca – an eagle displayed in base a chalice. And nearby, on a pierced lantern cover, was a point of contact with my own world – the propeller-like cinquefoil voided of the Rasulid dynasty of Yemen; beside it was the name of Sultan al-Mujahid, IB’s host there and the ancestor of my friend Hasan.
The similarity with European heraldry was obvious. The difference was that Mamluk arms were not badges of honour, but of office. Bashtak’s diamond represented a buqjah, a napkin in which clothes were wrapped; the Beau Brummell of medieval Cairo was Jamdar, Master of the Robes, in the amirarchy. Later, reading al-Maqrizi on the ranks of the Mamluk state, I was reminded of another system. T
wenty years earlier I had almost reached its summit: splendid in a tie sprinkled with my own badge of office, a fleur-de-lis (which, in its true heraldic form, is of Mamluk origin), I controlled school lunch queues and cast my vote in the election for captain of cricket. I had been elevated to the vertiginous rank of praepostor.
Dr Arnold and the other fathers of the Victorian public school could well have been students of Mamluk society. For while Sultan al-Nasir went in for a most unheadmasterly form of favouritism when it came to the prettier prefects, the Mamluk system was in general not unlike a drawn-out version of Rugby. Young males – mostly from the Kipchak steppe but also from Anatolia, Armenia, the Caucasus and Cathay – were deprived of their liberty at great expense (five thousand dinars, the price of a first-rate mamluk, would at today’s bullion rates just about cover ten years of private education; the fees, of course, went to the lucky fathers and slave-dealers). The new boys were regimented into boarding houses. Their main subject of study was Arabic, the Latin of Islam. They played compulsory games of a warlike nature, particularly archery and the use of the lance. A matronly presence was there in the shape of eunuchs, who supervised the boys’ domestic lives and looked after their uniforms. Clothing was strictly regulated, although a certain degree of ostentation was permitted to senior mamluks – the gold belt was perhaps the equivalent of a waistcoat in Pop. Discipline was fearsome, especially where a suspicion of sex was involved: any boy seen performing the special ablutions required in Islam after sexual activity was submitted to an immediate underpant inspection. If traces of what my dictionary delicately explains as ‘seeing evil dreams’ were found, all well and good; if not, ‘death came to the boy from every quarter’.
(As might be expected, Friar Symon had something to say about Mamluk sexuality. His translator renders it with a blushing ‘…’ The original, however, hardly needs translation: ‘Ab Admiraldo [sc. amir] usque ad Soldanum [sc. sultan] inclusive, sunt sodomite pessimi et vilissimi, et eorum multi cum asinis et bestiis operantur iniquitatem.’ The statement is a generalization nearly as gross as the good friar’s Latin. But there is a seed of truth in at least the first part: al-Maqrizi noted that in his day homosexuality was becoming so widespread among the better sort of mamluk that, in order to attract attention, women had to go à la garçonne and wear boys’ caps. Elsewhere, he mentioned a mosque founded by a certain Zankadah the Reformed Catamite.)
By the end of the fourteenth century the boarding-house system had collapsed. Delinquent mamluks rampaged through the streets of the city, ‘more lustful than apes, more thievish than rats and more vicious than wolves’. Al-Maqrizi looked back with a sigh to the time when the playing-fields of Cairo had turned out ‘noble administrators of kingdoms, captains steadfast in the path of God, natural rulers who strove to manifest good and to restrain the unjust oppressor’. It might be Sir Henry Newbolt on the muscular gentlemen who ruled Britain’s Victorian empire.
Through the texts, I was filling in some of the gaps in IB’s strangely impersonal account of Cairo. But there was another book I wanted to get hold of, an earlier guide to the city mentioned by al-Maqrizi and written within a year of IB’s visit. Toby, my friend from Garden City, took me to a bookshop where he thought I might find a copy.
The bookseller was sitting outside his premises, a row of lock-up garages. ‘By al-Zubayri? I can’t say I’ve come across it,’ he said. ‘But you could try looking.’ We went in.
I laughed. The place was a literary version of Cairo itself, a living tell of books. They were stacked up to the ceiling and had invaded lofts and lean-tos. Even assuming that al-Zubayri’s work had survived and been published, and that there was a copy here to be found, finding it would take weeks, perhaps years, of patient excavation. Much of the stock in the lower strata had died off, like coral at the base of a reef. It had become purely structural; any attempt to extract volumes from lower down the piles would have sent the whole edifice crashing to the ground. For anyone with delusions about the immortality of the written word, it was a sobering vision.
A good number of the more accessible books were early twentieth-century works on vampires, ghosts and other aspects of the occult, and on sexology. Even more were concerned with magic and conjuring. I came across Tricks with Watches; Toby was tempted by The Manipulation of Billiard Balls. From these fragments of dead libraries we constructed a picture of the reading classes of Cairo in the Khedivial twilight – pashas in tarbush and waxed moustache, turning pages with moist fingertips, plotting illusions and seductions.
As we left the shop I spotted a row of matching octavos on a table by the door, and felt the slight jolt that comes from seeing the familiar displaced. I checked. It was the same edition as my father’s – Nelson’s Encyclopaedia of 1913 – and had the same slightly animal odour that clings to reference books long thumbed. People had often hinted to my father that it was out of date; I had to point out, when I moved to Yemen, that I was not going to live in a distant sanjak of the Ottoman Empire. But he remained loyal to those tatty maroon volumes, his contemporary. I ran my hand along the spines. I too was fond of Nelson’s, companion of many happy hours on the loo. (How deprived are the squatting nations! Defecation and ingestion of knowledge are such complementary activities.)
As we walked, I enthused to Toby about Nelson’s. Back at his flat in the mock-Gallic arrondissement of Garden City, he announced that I was due for an info-technological update. He opened Stella beers and, on his computer, something called HotBot. ‘It’s probably the best search engine for your purposes,’ he explained.
I said I’d take his word for it. I was happy pottering around the ginnels and culs-de-sac of al-Maqrizi’s Settlements or Nelson’s. What pleasure could there be in whizzing along the flash interstates of the World Wide Web, propelled by a search engine, and one so ludicrously named?
In less than a minute, the Ibns had appeared on the screen – Battutah, Hajar, Jubayr, Khaldun, Sa’id and the rest of them, members of the medieval scholarly internet. I was prepared to forgive HotBot for regarding Ibn Battutah (72 matches) as a different person from Ibn Battuta (205 matches). Toby showed me which buttons to press and went to make supper.
Most of IB’s appearances were passing mentions in bibliographies. But there were also some esoterica. IB, I discovered under ‘Planetary Nomenclature’, had lent his name to a heavenly body. An association of saluki enthusiasts quoted him in their website, and he was cited under Coconuts in ‘Johan’s Guide to Aphrodisiacs: Fruit and Nuts’: ‘Among the properties of this nut are that it strengthens the body, fattens quickly, and adds to the redness of the face. As to its aphrodisiac quality, its action in this respect is wonderful.’ And there, on the list of an Italian record distributor, was the CD I saw but didn’t hear inside the Gate of the Stick in Tangier. A further search led me to a discographic website run by a certain Malcolm. It had an entry on Embryo, the German group who had made the CD: ‘They started out as a pretty classic space rock band and then got very jazzy in a fusiony period heavy on vibes, and then Burchard started travelling around the world …’
I could go on almost indefinitely, I thought, chasing the shadow of IB between cyberspace and al-Maqrizi’s Settlements. But, like Burchard, I felt it was time to get going.
Upper Egypt
Eastward from Edfu
‘I suppose that, wherever one goes, one sees in great measure what one expects to see.’
Edward Granville Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians
‘I ARRIVED IN the town of al-Aqsur [Luxor] on the thirteenth day of the month of Jumada ’l-Ula. It is a fine and large town on the bank of the Nile, and it contains the tomb of the pious ascetic Abu ’l-Hajjaj al-Aqsuri. I saw there on the river many boats of enormous size, like great palaces, with many storeys one above the other. The markets there are broad and expansive, but many of the goods in them are tawdry items, inscribed with images in the manner of the ancients. The people say that these images are a form of writing devised by Hermes [Trismegistos],
who is also called by the name of Khanukh [Enoch] that is Idris (on him be peace).
‘Above the shops where these goods are sold they fix large signs written in the Afranji [Frankish] script. The reason for this is that God Almighty in His wisdom has given the inhabitants of al-Aqsur sustenance from the Afranj, who visit the town in great numbers. When I was in Alexandria I saw many of these Afranj, merchants from al-Bunduqiyyah [Venice] and Janawah [Genoa], but never so many as I saw here. Moreover, the Afranj who visit al-Aqsur are unparalleled as to ugliness. Most of them are tall and fat, with straw-coloured hair and white faces tinged with redness. This redness is increased by the action upon their skin of the sun and, as I was told by a worthy and pious shaykh of the town whose name I have forgotten, because al-Qubt [the Copts] sell them different sorts of intoxicating drinks. I heard also that some of the Muslims also sell these drinks, may God Almighty punish them for their wickedness.
‘It is an extraordinary thing, but these Afranj do not hide their ugliness. On the contrary, they reveal their members in ways of which I do not wish to speak, men and women alike. Most of them also carry on their backs saddle bags [khirajah], both small and large, in the manner of pack-animals. In these they carry their travelling-provisions. It is a most undignified sight.
‘Even more extraordinary is the fact that these Afranj, who as is well known are Nasara [Nazarenes, i.e. Christians], also venerate the berbas which are the temples of the ancient idolaters. I watched the manner of their veneration. They first present an offering to the gatekeeper who sits at the gate of the berba. Next, they circumambulate within the courtyard of the berba. Before them walk mutawwifs [pilgrim guides, a term usually applied to those at the Ka’bah in Mecca]. These mutawwifs are plainly distinguishable by the small pennons which they carry. As they walk, they speak to the visitants, advising and exhorting them in strange tongues. As for the visitants, they reply to these exhortations with a great babble. Also, many of them repeatedly cover their eyes with talismans like small boxes. When I saw this, I was unable to restrain my laughter.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 12