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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  ‘Who? Baddudah? Can’t say I know the fellow.’

  ‘He was here a long time ago. Nearly seven hundred years.’

  ‘I know I’m a shaybah, a greybeard, but I’m not that old.’

  The audience laughed.

  ‘What about the Bath of Salih?’ I shouted. ‘And the Bird Market?’

  Hajj Yusuf was silent for a long time. He seemed to have gone into a trance. Then his face began to twitch. A dreadful thought crossed my mind: he’s having a stroke. ‘Really, don’t worry if …’

  ‘That’s it! Elizabeth will know!’

  The name rang a bell … perhaps someone at the Institut Français. ‘Who’s Elizabeth?’

  ‘Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Great Britain. Who else?’ He grinned, grabbed me by the beard and gave me a smacking, slobbery kiss on the cheek.

  The audience laughed; and after the initial surprise I, the fall-guy, joined in. As I watched Hajj Yusuf shaking and wheezing, a vision came to me: of an earnest Syrian walking into a shop in the City of London in the late 1990s and asking for directions to something that sounded suspiciously like the Wild Goose Market, at the Sign of Ye Olde Cock and Bull.

  I gave up on the Hatter and his college and went to console myself in the Bath of Sultan Nur al-Din. IB said of its builder, Saladin’s predecessor, that he was ‘a man of saintly life of whom it is told that he used to weave mats and live on the proceeds of their sale’. Since the bath was flourishing at the time of IB’s visit, it is more than likely that the traveller was a customer there. The bathkeeper locked my valuables away, and I removed my clothes in a carpeted enclosure beneath a substantial dome – it was more like a basilica than a changing-room – then donned a waist wrapper and a pair of the platform clogs known as qibqab. (In 1263 this delightful onomatopoeia, something like ‘clipclops’, featured in the execution of an Ayyubid prince. He had unwisely raped the wife of Sultan Baybars, subsequent victim of the poisoned koumiss. Captured afterwards by the Sultan, he was handed over to the dishonoured Sultana who had her slave-girls bludgeon him to death, slowly, with their bathtime footwear.)

  I qibqabbed through the innards of the bath-house and found the hot room, where my spectacles steamed up and I blundered into a group of fleshy and amused Kuwaitis. Later, pink and clean, I cooled off for a while in the tepid room, into which the management had introduced an otiose and barbarian addition – a sauna.

  As I was about to re-enter the changing area, a hand went for the towel around my waist. ‘Thank you,’ I said firmly to its unseen owner, ‘I’m sure I can manage on my own.’ The hand came back. I thought of going for my qibqabs; but, in a flash, the towel was off and, simultaneously, replaced with a fresh one. The operation was so deft that even IB, that crusader against bath-house nudity, wouldn’t have complained. The attendant wrapped more towels around my shoulders and head, and I returned to the domed hall, where I chatted with the Kuwaitis over camomile tea. Speakers in the vault relayed the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka. It went rather well with all the clipclopping.

  While he would have drawn the line at Johann Strauss the Younger, Sultan Nur al-Din might not have disapproved in principle of music in his bath. When he founded his hospital, he appointed as its first medical director one Abu ’l-Majd ibn Abu ’l-Hakam who, as well as being the foremost physician in Damascus and an accomplished astronomer, was also a talented lutenist, hautboyist and amateur organ-builder. His musical abilities perhaps came in useful in the new post, since music was held to be ‘efficacious in expanding the chest and revitalizing the spirit, thus strengthening the heartbeat and ensuring the proper function of the organs’. The hospital – inspiration for the great maristan that I had visited in Cairo – still stands, not far from the bath.

  According to IB, the funding for the infirmary came from the sale of some copper kitchenware that a saintly alchemist had turned into gold. The gatekeeper dismissed the story with a laugh. ‘What really happened’, he said, ‘was that Nur al-Din captured a Frankish prince and was going to put him to death. But the prince offered a ransom, and gave the Sultan five castles and half a million dinars. Not that it did the Frank any good. He died on his way home.’

  Inside, the hospital was laid out like a madrasah, with a central court and surrounding iwans. In the main iwan, the director would sit between ward rounds and lecture. Treatment continued here until the nineteenth century. Today, the building is a museum of science and medicine.

  Some of the exhibits were intriguing. There was an anaesthetic gag, which the label said would be soaked in a concoction of hashish, opium and belladonna; a pair of Ottoman prepuce snippers; and a birthing-chair from the same period – it had tall balusters attached to the armrests, to be gripped for extra purchase, and a cut-out in the seat that made it resemble a regal thunderbox. My favourite item, however, was an ancient and etiolated suqunqur, a type of skink, salted and displayed in a glass jar. According to the label, this nasty-looking creature was for centuries the sovereign aphrodisiac of the Islamic world – more potent even than Aleppan pistachios or the fox-testicle orchid.

  Curious to learn more about the suqunqur, I later turned to the thirteenth-century pharmacopoeia compiled by al-Muzaffar, another ancestor of my Yemeni friend Hasan. Only male skinks are used, al-Muzaffar explained. The best time to hunt them is in the spring, when they rut. They are disembowelled, stuffed with salt and suspended upside down in the shade – like game, they improve with age. Thereafter they are best preserved in a wicker basket. As well as the skink’s flesh, its fat and kidneys may also be administered with honey, rocket seeds or, where permissible, vintage wine possessing a fine bouquet. (The physician and Egyptologist al-Baghdadi also suggests the addition of powdered cocks’ testicles.)

  IB mentions several aphrodisiacs in the Travels. None was more effective than the pills which a certain yogi made for the Sultan of Madurai in southern India. ‘Among their ingredients were iron filings, and the Sultan was so pleased with their effect that he took an overdose and died. The Sultan was succeeded by his nephew, who’, he adds drily, ‘showed high consideration for that yogi and raised him in dignity.’

  My research threw up a number of aphrodisiacs which had eluded IB: a fish with a face like an owl’s and a crest like a cock’s, the effect of which al-Idrisi says is the same as that of the skink, found in a certain reservoir in Xinjiang; a preparation, noted by al-Mas’udi, obtained from the sebaceous excretions of Indian elephants; a root found in the Atlas Mountains and so powerful, Leo the African wrote, that a man accidentally urinating on it will ejaculate immediately, while the hymen of a virgin girl doing so will be ruptured; and an aquatic version of the suqunqur mentioned by the geographer al-Zuhri, found in the Caspian, which if kept in the mouth enables a man to have sexual intercourse a hundred times in succession, ‘or indeed until he drops dead or spits it out’. Compared with this last statement, claims made for the suqunqur proper are modest. Al-Zuhri’s Caspian variety, I suspect, is more closely related to the Sudanese Blister Beetle discovered by Roald Dahl’s fictional Uncle Oswald.

  One of the most fertile sources of recherché materia medica is al-Qazwini’s twelfth-century cosmography, The Wonders of Creation. Some of the remedies sound enjoyable (chewing frankincense prevents amnesia); some less so (to cure an itching anus, insert a few cloves of garlic); some are alarming (to calm an epileptic fit, place a live electric catfish on your head); others nauseating (hepatitis is alleviated by drinking a pint of urine from a pre-pubescent boy, boiled with honey in a copper vessel); one sounds positively kinky (nursing mothers can improve lactation by massaging their breasts with the sweat of wrestlers). Perhaps I have chosen a flippant selection; but then, the medieval Iraqi practice of using mould from water jars as a salve sounds silly – until we recall penicillin.

  That evening, the hotel receptionist was in no need of aphrodisiacs; but he did need a translator. He was in love with a French girl, and wanted to send her a billet doux. I grimaced, remembering the last such thing I had translate
d – on papyrus, for a Copt in Luxor. It is hard to put your heart into a love letter when you are per pro.

  The receptionist handed me a folded page. It was a verse by the contemporary Syrian poet Nizar al-Qabbani. I read it through, then began to write:

  Love for you has taught me to try the medicine of apothecaries,

  To knock on the doors of fortune-tellers,

  To leave home and comb the pavements,

  To hunt for your face in the rain and in the headlights of cars …

  Love for you has taken me into cities of sadness

  Which I have never entered before.

  As a love letter written in Damascus, in November, it could hardly have been bettered. I went to bed and lay there, listening to the distant swish of cars and the rain dripping through the pergola.

  The rain persisted over the next few days, as I visited some of the sites in and around Damascus that IB had described. There were plenty of them, and it was hard to know where to begin. In the end, I began at the beginning.

  ‘When night drew its shadow over him,’ the Qur’an says of Abraham, ‘he saw a star. “That”, he said, “is surely my God.” But when it faded in the morning light, he said: “I will not worship gods that fade.” When he beheld the rising moon, he said: “That must be my God.” But when it set, he said: “If Allah does not guide me, I shall surely go astray.” Then, when he beheld the sun shining, he said: “That must be my God: it is larger than the other two.” But when it set, he said to his people: “I am done with your idols.”’

  The cave where, according to Damascene legend, Abraham was born and later hit on the idea of monotheism lies at the northern end of Jabal Qasiyun, the slab of mountain overlooking the city. The mountain, IB says, ‘is the place of ascent of the Prophets (on them be peace)’ – and, I would add, of the sellers of overpriced beans (on them be a plague). The traveller explained that up the spiritual elevator of Qasiyun went Adam, Moses, Jesus, Job, Lot and a job-lot of seventy anonymous prophets – these days downgraded to forty martyrs – who starved to death in the Cave of Hunger. ‘They had with them only one loaf, and it continued to circulate amongst them, as each preferred to give it to his neighbour, until they all died together.’ IB does not explain why they played pass-the-parcel instead of nipping down to the nearest grocer’s.

  To visit Abraham’s alleged birthplace, I hired a taxi belonging to a small and neat retired army officer called Abu Ala, who wore a tweed suit and striped tie. With us came his son-in-law-to-be, Munir, who described himself as ‘a topography graduate’. We drove through the drizzle along a highway lined with gaunt tower-blocks then, where the road began to rise, turned off into the ex-village of Barzah, a higgledy-piggledy suburb strewn across the hillside. There, despite the presence of Munir the topographer, we got lost.

  We chose a house and tapped on the gate. A man in late middle age opened it, and we asked if he knew the Cave of Abraham.

  ‘This is it,’ said the man.

  He led us into a yard. Before us rose a small cliff, topped by a few cement-block houses; tucked away under the cliff was a door. Through this was a roomy mosque. Inside, we climbed a stone staircase up to a gallery, rather like an organ loft, where a large ginger tom was dozing at the entrance to a tunnel. The sequence of transitions was unexpected, and intensely dreamlike.

  We squeezed into the tunnel, which was whitewashed and barely big enough for the four of us. It ended in a pit, a deep hollow in pink rock polished by many hands. The pit glistened in the feeble lamplight, like some bodily cavity seen through an endoscope.

  ‘This’, said our guide, ‘is where the Prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, was born.’ He quoted the Qur’anic story of the prophet, then added that the act of praying four times in the tunnel, which points directly to Mecca, returns the worshipper to a sinless state, ‘as if he had emerged from his mother’s womb. And God is the most knowing.’

  As the little lecture was going on, I remembered a remark of IB’s: ‘I have also seen in the land of Iraq a village in which Abraham (on him be peace) is said to have been born.’ Al-Harawi’s pilgrim guide, the authority on such matters, plumped categorically for Iraq. Abu Ala voiced my thoughts. ‘What about the tradition that Abraham was born near Babylon?’

  The guardian gave Abu Ala a sharp look, then climbed down into the cavity. ‘Look! Here are the marks of his mother’s feet, where she squatted to give birth.’ He squatted. ‘And here are the marks of her fingers where she grasped the rock.’ He grasped the rock. ‘How can you disbelieve?’ He stared at each of us in turn, challenging us to argue. None of us spoke. As we left the tunnel, the ginger cat shifted and grinned in his sleep.

  *

  The next day, I followed IB to the tomb of ‘the pious devotee Rislan, known as the Grey Falcon’. Rislan, IB says, was a disciple of the famous twelfth-century Sufi shaykh, al-Rifa’i. One year, at Mecca, the two of them bumped into an old friend; al-Rifa’i remembered that he had left a cluster of dates unharvested on one of his palms near the Iraqi town of Wasit, intending to give it to this friend. Undeterred by the thought of a 1,600-mile round-trip, ‘Rislan said to him, “By thy command, O my master, I shall fetch it.” The shaykh gave him permission, and he departed at once, came back with the cluster and laid it in front of him. Al-Rifa’i’s followers at Wasit later related that on the evening of that day they saw a grey falcon which swooped down upon the palm tree, nipped off the date cluster and bore it away into the air.’

  According to the hagiographer al-Nabhani, Rislan was also in the habit of flying through the air in human form, sitting cross-legged. A visit to the saint’s tomb, he noted, improved one’s prospects for the afterlife: ‘Shaykh Rislan used to say, “Any flesh which has entered my sanctuary will not be consumed by the Fire.” A certain man went to pray there. With him he had some meat from the butcher; when he got home and cooked it, it remained raw.’

  The tomb didn’t look a restful spot. It was situated on a traffic island, and its nearest neighbour was a funfair. Inside the gate, however, the sounds of traffic and jollity were muted. A large man was standing by one of the windows of the tomb-chamber and reciting the Fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur’an. When he finished, he turned and saw me. For a few moments, we stared at each other. I had never seen anything like him: he had the physique of a wrestler and wore a voluminous black cloak and a red headcloth secured with a double rope of camel hair, and he carried a silver-knobbed malacca cane. His enormous beard was of a luxuriance and blackness seen only on pantomime pirates. Strangest of all were two thick, glossy dreadlocks, tucked behind his ears. This apparition strode over to me, majestic and fiery-eyed like a figure from an Assyrian frieze, and offered me a Marlboro.

  He smiled broadly when I greeted him in Arabic, and gripped my arm. ‘Did you know that Khalid ibn al-Walid pitched his tent just over there?’ he asked, pointing to a spot not far from the tomb. ‘He was the bravest of our commanders!’ He went off into a long and vivid reminiscence about the seventh-century Muslim conqueror of Syria. I wondered if I was listening to a ghost … But a ghost who smoked Marlboros?

  Eventually, I extracted myself from his grip and showed him IB’s account of Shaykh Rislan. ‘Ah, the Grey Falcon,’ he said. ‘I know the story.’ He kissed the pages and shut the book reverently. ‘Can you not see the light of faith emanating from the tomb of Shaykh Rislan?’ he asked, turning to give the tomb a smart military salute. ‘You know, about twenty years ago they were going to knock this place down and turn it into a pleasure garden. A pleasure garden! Can you believe it? They brought a bulduzir …’

  ‘And’, I interrupted, ‘the machine broke down.’

  ‘You know the story!’

  ‘I’ve heard it before,’ I said, remembering the saint of the tramlines in Alexandria. ‘Or a similar one, about another wali. I visit a lot of walis.’

  ‘Then you are a Muslim, as I thought.’

  ‘Well, actually, I’m not.’

  He looked concerned, held h
is palms skywards and recited the Fatihah – this time not for the soul of a dead saint, but for that of a live infidel. ‘May God guide you to the true path of Islam’, he concluded, ‘and save you from the everlasting Fire.’ He struck another Assyrian attitude, saluted and strode away.

  Over at the tomb-chamber I peered through a grille decorated with ribbons and branches of greenery. All I could make out in the gloom inside was a few words of an inscription – ‘Rislan, he who knew God …’ I thought of the story of the steak rendered miraculously rare. Presumably, a visit to Shaykh Rislan’s tomb only fireproofed halal meat; it wouldn’t safeguard Christian flesh.

  I walked back along the Street Called Straight, entering it through the Roman Gate of the Sun. The pagan structure supports a minaret finished off with a short sharp spire – an alternative Messianic landing site on the Last Day. To my right was the Christian Quarter, on my left the Jewish Quarter and, ahead, the Muslim Quarter. All three faiths were convinced that if you didn’t convert, you would end up as a kebab on the Everlasting Barbecue; or in the vegetarian Hell of more recent Christianity, that you would be excluded from God’s presence for ever and ever, or condemned to a sort of theological nuclear winter, or at the very least end up somewhere that wasn’t as nice as it might have been. Looking up at Jabal Qasiyun, I reflected that things had been a lot easier in Abraham’s day, when you could get away with being a plain old monotheist.

  On my next expedition, again with Abu Ala and Munir the topographer, I became an involuntary and very temporary convert. We were driving southwards on another drizzly morning, on our way to another venerated site, the Mosque of the Footprint. Munir was telling me that the dreadlocked, Marlboro-smoking Assyrian was a devotee of Shaykh Rislan. ‘They say that Rislan had the same kawafir,’ he explained. I was savouring the incongruity of the French loan-word – coiffure – when, suddenly, Abu Ala slowed down.