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

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  I had my suspicions about the columns, the new masonry on the palace mound, the cement-block paths which were being laid across the site, and the designer lamp standards which wouldn’t have looked out of place by the pool of the Holiday Inn along the road. The site, it seemed, was being turned into a tourist attraction, like the homogenized sandcastle forts of the north. I pictured a visitors’ centre where they would display excerpts from IB – minus, of course, nasty smells, messy betel and scrotal hernias. The city of Dhofar had been systematically robbed of its stone by old Sultan Sa’id; now, under his son, the little that remained was being systematically tarted up. ‘Places,’ quoted al-Maqrizi,

  when you reflect on them, resemble men:

  Some are inclined to happiness, others to grief.

  At present, the genius loci of the city of Dhofar was not a happy one.

  Back home, Qahtan came to tea. He had driven the minibus on the last leg of my journey to Salalah, refused my fare and given me a tour of the city. My first encounter with a Dhofari on home ground confirmed IB’s views about their virtue and affection for strangers. Now, Qahtan agreed that the medieval site had an unhappy atmosphere, but put it down to earlier events. ‘Al-Balid’, he said, ‘was destroyed by God. Some people say its inhabitants were wasteful, that they wore fine silks once and then threw them away. Others say that the king was, well,’ he looked at the carpet, ‘… going with his daughter, or even that it was the City of Sodom.’ These destruction stories were like locusts, swarming, landing in one spot, then passing on elsewhere.

  A couple of miles to the west of the medieval city of Dhofar is an area called al-Haffah. Habibah had identified it as IB’s commercial suburb, ‘al-Harja … one of the dirtiest, most stinking and fly-ridden of bazaars, because of the quantity of fruit and fish sold in it’. It is still the main shopping centre; but in the Qabusian age the smells have been banished. One aspect of IB’s description, however, had not changed.

  IB noticed that ‘most of the sellers in the bazaar are female slaves, who are dressed in black’. I was delighted to find that, at least in the scent bazaar, nearly all the shop signs bore women’s names. Several were staffed by Indians; but in the others the proprietresses themselves were in charge, matrons whose prerogative seemed to be to sit on the pavement. While none was dressed in black, several wore brown, which happened to be that year’s black. My eye, however, was caught by a bulky African-looking lady swathed in jazzy prints. She wore a small gold rosette in one nostril, and a huge coral-studded ring hung, bull-fashion, from the cartilage of her nose, giving her a fearsome aspect. She sat amid her stock, which overspilled the shop on to the pavement – hundreds of bottles and flasks, ranks of incense-burners, and jar upon jar of ingredients to be pounded, compounded and combusted by the ladies of Salalah. She looked like a high priestess of olfactory obeah. Her name, according to the board above the shop, was Radiyyah bint al-Da’n Ashur.

  I squatted before her like a supplicant at Delphi, and asked about her best grade of frankincense. ‘I only stock najdi, from the uplands,’ she said testily. ‘Most of the other stuff’s rubbish. But if you were here in the autumn I could give you hawjiri.’

  ‘Where’s that from?’

  ‘Jabal Samhan – the mountains behind Hasik.’

  Hasik! The settlement of fish-bone houses where IB had observed the export of frankincense. I explained what had brought me to Dhofar, and added that women – diplomatically, I omitted the mention of slaves – had run the retail trade in IB’s time.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she called to her neighbour. ‘He says we women were running the suq … when? … 670 years ago!’ Radiyyah beamed. Her slight initial severity had melted away. I took the opportunity of asking her about the unusual make-up worn by wedding guests.

  She laughed, a deep contralto. ‘Oh, we put that on because we’re khuddam, slaves.’ I flinched at the word IB had used; political correctness had clearly not reached Dhofar. ‘With these white faces you can’t tell the difference between us and the Arab women … Anyway, that’s the idea. And the other reason is that when there’s a wedding on, men think a lot about sex. If their wives are made up like this, the husbands won’t look at other women. Their own wives look like brides.’

  ‘But surely it makes the problem worse: all the women look like brides.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘you are a clever man. Perhaps our men are stupid, no?’

  I noticed the ‘no’, and realized that Radiyyah’s speech was littered with these little rising interrogatives. IB too had heard them: ‘Every sentence they speak they follow up with “no?” So for example they say “You eat, no? You walk, no? You do so-and-so, no?”’ He located the phenomenon in Qalhat. In both Sur and Tiwi I had kept my ears open for it. Now I realized that either the dialectic quirk – the equivalent of the ‘innit’ of Estuarine English – had migrated, or IB had misplaced it by several hundred miles.

  Not a great squatter, I found my legs had seized up. Radiyyah, however, seemed firmly rooted to the pavement. I noticed a padded stool inside the shop and asked her why she didn’t sit in comfort. ‘Oh, I’m much too old to be getting in and out of chairs.’ She made them sound like instruments of torture.

  I couldn’t guess her age. Radiyyah might have been forty, or sixty. She was no coquette, but she had a twinkle in her eye as she opened a little phial of scent and dabbed it on my wrist. I noticed the label, Asmah Li – ‘Permit Me …’ – and suggested that it was a good name for dropping hints.

  She laughed. Then she looked at me with her initial sternness. ‘You’re married, no?’ I shook my head. ‘You must marry now,’ she said gravely. ‘We never know the hour of our death. Do it before it’s too late.’

  ‘I think it’s probably too late already in my case. Unless you’ve got something’, I said, glancing at her stock, ‘to make me young again.’

  ‘Hah! You’re still a boy. Anyway, scents can’t make you young. They can only bring back memories of youth.’

  She had put her finger on it: of all organs, the nose is the most nostalgic.

  ‘Then,’ I said, looking at this philosopher of smells, ‘what about something to enchant a beloved?’

  She thought for a moment. ‘No. Only the heart can enchant a beloved.’

  Not much happens in Salalah by day, other than activities connected with personal grooming and adornment. I had a haircut, then went to get a ring adjusted. In the silversmith’s I met a grey-bearded gentleman who was supervising the repoussé encrustation of his camel-stick. We compared rings, introduced ourselves and were delighted to discover that Shaykh Hasan bin Ghafaylah had once been the guard of a very distant kinsman of mine in Hadramawt. He also belonged to the Bayt Imani, the clan of Wilfred Thesiger’s desert travelling companions. I asked after his famous cousins Bin Kabina and Bin Ghabaisha, whom I had met in 1990.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ said Shaykh Hasan. ‘And most of the Bayt Imani. There are hardly any of us left now. The others all moved.’

  I remembered the Bayt Imani tribesmen asking my advice. ‘We’re in a quandary,’ they said. ‘We live in the borderlands between three countries, Oman, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. What nationality should we be?’

  ‘Yemeni,’ I had replied immediately, loyal to my adopted country. ‘Failing that Omani. Never, never Saudi.’

  Now, fearing the worst, I asked what had become of them.

  ‘They went to Abu Dhabi. Shaykh Zayid gave them money and villas.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief.

  At night, a thick tropical lethargy descends on Salalah, and even less happens in what Bertram Thomas called ‘the land of sloth’. The evening after my conversation with Radiyyah, I went for a slow spin with three men in a Landcruiser. The exhausting business of going to the café to gossip has been superseded by the jisiyam, the ‘GSM’ mobile telephone, and my three companions spent most of the time chatting, simultaneously, in Swahili and two dialects of Arabic.

  Feeling left out, I excused myself on the c
orniche and walked slowly back towards Muhammad and Habibah’s villa. The seaward pavement was dotted with sandals, laid out neatly like choreography symbols. Down on the sand groups of men sat around glowing water-pipes, for at night the beach turns into a great open-air smoking-room. One group had a pair of cockatoos. The male, they explained, lived in al-Haffah, the female in the further suburb of Awqad; they brought them together here every evening. The birds were obviously much in love.

  I walked on, in soulful mood, then turned inland through the coconutteries. Above, fronds rustled in the light sea-breeze. The grove was dark and arras-like. I remembered IB’s legend about the genesis of the coconut palm. Like the date, it has a human origin: a certain Indian philosopher, the traveller wrote, took the severed head of a vizier, ‘planted a date-stone in his brain, and tended it until it grew into a tree and produced this nut. The story’, he admits, ‘is a fiction, but we have related it because of its wide circulation.’

  The wind picked up, and there was a heavy thud nearby. I wondered about the probability of being brained by a falling coconut. The thought reminded me of the conversation in the Scent Suq, and Radiyyah’s Horatian advice on marriage. Another thud: perhaps it was already too late …

  La vie est brève

  Un peu d’espoir

  Un peu de rêve

  Et puis – Bonsoir.

  I made it back to the villa, however, and recounted the events of the day to Muhammad and Habibah. It was good to have people, and not just a diary, to share discoveries with – particularly one as important as Radiyyah and her fellow shopkeepers. Later, as I lay in bed, I recalled a similar sense of excitement from long ago. As a child, I had been briefly addicted to I-Spy books. Someone who styled himself ‘Big Chief I-Spy’ had designed the series to instil a laudable sense of empiricism in the young. The little volumes covered subjects such as trees, nationalities and motor cars; when you spotted one of the items listed – a hornbeam, for example, or a Belgian – you put a tick against it and earned points according to its rarity. I never sent a completed book to Big Chief I-Spy, but I could still remember his address: ‘The Wigwam’, Bouverie Street, London EC4. Perhaps inverse archaeology was a sophisticated version of I-Spy, in which a female shopkeeper was the equivalent of, say, an Aston Martin and worth at least seven points. Coconuts would be on a par with Ford Populars, a paltry one point. A scrotal hernia, however, or a Rasulid, would – like the virtually unattainable Studebaker Golden Hawk – score a whopping ten.

  Habibah, too, had had an eventful day. Her Yemeni carnelian ring had caused a fit of hysteria at a ladies’ party in Taqah. ‘The women were convinced that the stone was possessed by a jinni,’ she explained. The supernatural was a special interest of Habibah’s and she collected spells involving blood and armpit hair. For her Dhofar was fertile ground: as long ago as the thirteenth century, Ibn al-Mujawir had noted that ‘Dhofari women are sorceresses on account of their proximity to the Island of Suqutra. They go from Dhofar to Java in a single night.’ Even in recent years, the witches of Dhofar apparently held knees-ups by the lagoon at Khawr Ruri, arriving on hyenas.

  We sat and talked of magic, then decided it would be prudent to light some of Radiyyah’s frankincense. Habibah took a fass, a ‘gemstone’ of it, and placed it on glowing charcoal. It bubbled like toasting cheese, then the fumes rose, spooling slowly upwards in a thick cobwebby skein. The jinn smelt it, and fled.

  The days, and weeks, unwound. My watch, which usually gains, ran slow. Nadia, Muhammad and Habibah’s 6-year-old daughter, trilingual in Arabic, English and Hungarian, discovered a way of controlling me that was more potent than any Dhofari sorcery. The direct method – ‘Please don’t start another conversation about history’ – failed; so she took to kidnapping my diary, to me more precious than all the gold of al-Haffah. ‘I’ve got your book of secrets …’ she would say. And I would only get my secrets back when I had watched Aladdin with her.

  We went on trips. Mughsayl, towards the Yemeni border, reminded me of the Dorset coastline from Charmouth to Golden Cap, but with camels on the beach. Further west, at Rakhyut, we snorkelled with sardines, and watched an osprey fishing and a ray gliding through the water, maroon with white spots like a Jermyn Street handkerchief. Behind the village we picked up a yokel in a wooded coomb. ‘We got loads of cows in these parts, no?’ he told us. ‘Some people’s got herds of six hundred, no? All local cows, mind. Them foreign cows can’t live here, no?’

  The man was speaking Arabic, but it was not his first language. Dhofar and the neighbouring regions are part of the Arabian Celtic fringe and home to a number of pre-Arabic tongues. At least one, Bat’hari, seems recently to have gone the way of Manx. Jibbali is alive and well, but with the increasing Omanization of Dhofari life its future looks bleak.

  Jibbali is more correctly called Shahri, after the Shahrah people who are the oldest inhabitants of the area. Incomers, the Qara, subjugated them and propagated a ‘black legend’, which claims that the Shahrah are the Qur’anic people all but wiped out by God because they slaughtered the Prophet Salih’s she-camel. The story is illustrated, strip-cartoon fashion, on a rock in downtown Salalah. Impressed in limestone are the camel’s footprints, the marks of Salih’s walking-stick, and a notch where the camelocides sharpened their knives. Finally come some black smears, said to be the beast’s blood.

  The Qara conquerors lorded it over the Shahrah and married their women, thus ensuring the survival of Shahri as the mother tongue of succeeding generations. It is a lisping, liquid language rich in poetry and metaphor. Miranda Morris, an authority on Modern South Arabian languages, has translated a verse about a beautiful woman:

  Shaikha is the cargo-ship of the Sultan,

  Already far from New York.

  Her cargo has been unloaded in a secret place …

  Among men, Shaikha is ‘adored as are milch camels’; other women, however, envy her down to her toes, which, ‘dyed with henna / … were a source of pain to the co-wife’.

  It seems at first strange that IB the nascent ethnologist failed to mention the indigenous languages of the region; but he clearly went no distance inland from the Arabophone city of Dhofar. Later visitors reacted variously to the Dhofaris of the hinterland. In the 1830s Captain Haines thought their figures ‘would have delighted the eye of Canova’ and added that ‘they were frequent lookers on at my crew when playing cricket’ (O for the Dhofari view of the game!). Sixty years later, Theodore and Mabel Bent were less impressed by the Qara: ‘We never had to deal with wilder men in our lives … They got hold of our Christian names, and were for ever using them, to our great annoyance.’ Bertram Thomas, however, visiting in the 1920s, was fascinated by Qara life and keenly recorded practices such as the stimulation of lactation in cows by twat-blowing.

  Qara and Shahrah life are now changing fast. Miranda Morris writes that the Shahri word ezirit, ‘a track that is temporarily in heavy use; especially to water and to settlements where beautiful women are to be found’, is now also used for motor roads. And Muhammad told me that one day in Salalah he saw a mountain man in full traditional dress – an indigo loincloth, dagger and .303 rifle – pull a plastic card from behind his dagger sheath and take money out of a cash-point machine.

  It was bad enough to be tainted with the blood of Salih’s she-camel; but the Shahrah have also been identified as a remnant of Ad, the people whom the Qur’an says were destroyed by a hurricane for opposing the Prophet Hud. The association may explain why there is a tomb of Hud in Dhofar – even though there is a perfectly good one in Hadramawt, famous since at least the beginning of Islam. IB visited the Dhofari tomb, ‘half a day’s journey from the city, on the sea-coast’. Late one afternoon, Qahtan took me in his minibus to the mausoleum seen by IB, a short drive east of Salalah and in sight of the sea. As with most Dhofari monuments which have not been rebuilt in the international Islamic taste, the little four-domed building had been enthusiastically restored. I went in but Qahtan, whose innate reticence seemed
to extend to the dead, lingered at the door. ‘Aren’t you going to greet Hud?’ I called. He entered, mumbled a quick Fatihah with downcast eyes, and was out of the door.

  The sun set. Qahtan did his ablutions from a well, then chanted the adhan, the call to prayer, in a high quavering voice. Unless it was an invitation to me, there was no one else around to join him. I sat inside the darkening tomb while he prayed outside on his Michelin Man windscreen shade.

  As we drove back towards Salalah Qahtan said, ‘I felt a great fear around that tomb.’

  I smiled. ‘So it was the jinn you were calling to prayer.’

  There was no reply. I was beginning to regret the flippant comment when Qahtan spoke again. ‘There was once a Mahri girl who disappeared. You see, she had married a jinni. One day, years later, a man who knew the jinn turned up and offered to get her back. He said, “I’ll lead one of you down to her. To save her, this man must take hold of her arm. She will change into a wolf, a rat, a snake and other beasts, but he must not let go of her. And he must neither look at her nor mention the name of God.” But no one was brave enough to go.’

  I thought of Eurydice, and of all the tales that must have wandered around the world before cultural boundaries began to harden. ‘I bet there are lots of old stories like that,’ I said, hoping to hear more.

  Qahtan took his eyes off the road for a moment and looked at me. ‘It’s not an old story. I was one of the ones who was asked to get the girl.’

  Later, we drove out of Salalah and on to the jurbayb, the plain between the ocean and the Qara Mountains. At night it became a vast drive-in salon, dotted with cars and groups of men who reclined on cushions, drinking coffee and eating dates. ‘We Arabs’, said Qahtan as we left the road, ‘have three concerns: al-bawsh wa ’l-hawsh wa ’l-qahwah fi ’l-hawsh – camels, flocks and coffee in the yard.’ But this was no ordinary yard: paved with platinum, vaulted with sapphire, lit by a topaz moon – no sultan, no Solomon had conceived such mystical architecture.