Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (14 page)

Today, the worst of the jams have moved west to Tahrir (Liberation) Square. But there are three days in the year when the old centre of Cairo reverts to its former self with a vengeance. Unwittingly, I had arrived at their climax. The square next to the Mosque of al-Husayn surged with slow-moving crowds, as the waves of the sea. The Husayn Hotel, overlooking the square, had one room free.

‘You’re lucky,’ said the receptionist. ‘We’re fully booked for the Mawlid, but you came at just the right moment.’ It seemed that the room had been vacated because of a death; I didn’t enquire further.

The Mawlid, or Festival, of al-Husayn commemorates the Prophet’s grandson, killed in 681 at Karbala in Iraq. The body of the greatest Islamic martyr stayed where it was; his head, however, worked its way westward, with long stopovers in Damascus and Ascalon, until it arrived in Cairo in 1153. Al-Maqrizi’s guidebook tells a story about the high-wattage
barakah
, or divine blessing, which radiates via the relic. When Saladin took over Egypt, reports reached him of a palace servant of the old Fatimid régime who knew where his former masters had hidden a great treasure. The man refused to reveal the cache, and was subjected to a particularly horrible torture: ‘Dung beetles were put on his head and bound in place with a
crimson
cloth. It is said that this is the most unbearable of tortures, since the beetles gradually burrow into the victim’s brain.’ In this case, although the torture was repeated several times, the beetles died on each occasion and the old retainer was unharmed. When asked what his secret was, he replied, ‘When the head of Imam al-Husayn arrived in Cairo, I was one of those who carried it. What secret is more potent than this?’

For centuries, the Mawlid has been a giant beanfeast for the distribution of blessings. Descendants of al-Husayn camp around the magnificent mosque that contains their ancestor’s head, accompanied by members of the Sufi orders which they lead. Spectators come from far away, to mill, gawp, drink tea and ingest a little
barakah
. Looking over them from the top floor of the hotel, I guessed there were three or four football crowds’-worth – perhaps 150,000 people. In the surrounding streets there must have been several times more.

Down at ground level I blundered into a slow-motion scuffle taking place around a stall distributing free
mulukhiyyah
, the mucilaginous and delicious dish made from Jew’s mallow. Bystanders were helping themselves to water from an enormous green hip-flask, inscribed with Qur’anic verses and strapped to the back of a small and dervish-like man. Someone next to me cut the throat of a sheep. The sheep looked understandably surprised, then its head flopped back with an indignant gurgle. Thick, venous gore spurted over the paving stones. As I was wondering how this would go down in Trafalgar Square, a woman pressed her palm into the blood then stuck her hand down another woman’s neck. The butcher strung the sheep up on a lamp-post and peeled away the skin. It came off like a diver’s wetsuit.

I drank free Mawlid tea, heavy with cinnamon, with a farmer from south of the Pyramids. He explained that a palm print of sacrificial blood on the spine averts the Evil Eye and cures epilepsy. ‘Of course,’ he said, taking in the tents and the crowds with a sweep of his arm, ‘this isn’t Islam. It’s pure heresy!’ He was grinning, and patently enjoying himself.

The farmer asked if I was a Muslim. I shook my head. ‘Did you hear about the American professor who converted? Well, soon afterwards he came to Egypt. And do you know what he said? He said, “Thank God I converted to Islam before I saw the Muslims.” You know,’ he confided, ‘if you became a Muslim you’d be better than us.’

I smiled. I’d come across the same fancy in every Islamic country I’d visited; come across it, or its mirror image, in the
Mirabilia Descripta
of IB’s contemporary Friar Jordanus, who believed that oriental converts to Christianity were ‘ten times better, and more charitable withal … than our own folk’. The American (or British, or Russian) professor also popped up regularly from Marrakesh to Muscat. The implication was that by converting one automatically became a sort of spiritual and moral
Übermensch
. It was a daunting prospect for a woolly Anglican, even one who is platonically fond of Islam.

I told the farmer that I envied a certain king of the Caucasus mentioned by the geographer Ibn Rustah. He prayed on Fridays with the Muslims, on Saturdays with the Jews, and on Sundays with the Christians. ‘Since each religion claims that it is the only true one and that the others are invalid,’ the king explained, ‘I have decided to hedge my bets.’

The farmer laughed. ‘I suppose it’s all right if you’re a king and don’t have to work. But what about the rest of us? We can’t afford to spend half the week praying. And’, he added, ‘I don’t think the
shaykhs
of al-Azhar would think much of it.’ I looked across the road to the venerable mosque-university, that bastion of Islamic orthodoxy, and felt inclined to agree. In spiritual, as in physical refreshment, one is expected to show brand loyalty, to drink Coke or Pepsi but not both.

That evening I had supper with some friends who lived in Garden City, Toby Macklin and Rachel Davey. Afterwards, Toby and I returned to the Mawlid. We walked in a stream of people over the flyover, closed to traffic for the festival, that leads to al-Husayn Square. The sound of the Mawlid crowd was an unbroken roar, like breakers in a storm.

We reached the square and were sucked in by the human undertow. It was impossible to stop moving. We caught, just in time, an old man who staggered and nearly fell in front of us. After one complete circuit of the square, we snagged on the tent of the Faydi Shadhili order and stood watching the scene inside. A man was chanting the
dhikr
, verses invoking God’s blessing, in a voice amplifed to rock-concert volume. Another accompanied him on a tambourine. Two lines of young men wearing
jallabiyyahs
and facing each other swayed sideways to the beat, moving first the same way, then in opposite
directions
. In the centre of the line facing us was a tall boy in a pin-striped sky-blue
jallabiyyah
and immaculate white turban. His face was veiled in an unchanging half smile, unearthly but knowing, as if mesmerized by his own suppleness. Toby shouted something in my ear.

‘I can’t hear a thing,’ I bawled back.

‘I said, “It’s like watching John Travolta.”’

John Travolta, though, was too obviously vertebrate; the
dhikr
star in front of us looked to me more like an ecstatic sea-anemone.

The next tent was also occupied by the Faydi Shadhilis. A gaunt and waiterly man in a dark suit beckoned us in, and we took our places in a line of wooden café chairs. Next to us, a berobed gentleman sat receiving hand kisses; most of the other VIPs were in suits and ties and looked like Rotarians. The din was enormous, conversation impossible. We sat for a while sipping hibiscus squash and nodding reverently towards our hosts, then left. During another circumambulation of the square, I was disappointed to find that in the tent of the Rifa’is no one was rolling in fire or biting the heads off live snakes, as IB had seen members of the order doing in southern Iraq; equally, I was mystified by the presence in another tent of a newish Volvo saloon, parked next to the
dhikr
chanter. At around 1.30 a.m. Toby left for Garden City and I for my room in the Husayn Hotel. The crowds and the noise showed no sign of abating, but I surprised myself by falling asleep immediately.

The following morning, except for a few bloodstains that marked the martyrdom of sheep, there was nothing to show that the Mawlidgoers had been there. They had all gone – the chanters, the invertebrate boy, the coloured tents, the Volvo – off to the next festival in the calendar. I thought of my rave-going niece and her sudden disappearances to Nottingham or Hemel Hempstead.

Over breakfast, I reread IB on Cairo. He wrote at length on the Nile, the sweetness of its water and its annual inundation. It was an accurate if workmanlike account. On the Pyramids he was less successful: ‘The Pyramids is an edifice of solid hewn stone, of immense height and circular plan, broad at the base and narrow at the top, like the figure of a cone.’ To be fair, all medieval writers in Arabic describe the Pyramids as conical – ‘pyramidal’ was not yet in the dictionary. But to reduce them to a single circular structure suggests that he had no more seen them than had the authors of the European
mappae
mundi
who, convinced that they were the granaries of Joseph, drew them as rustic tithe barns. What mattered in Cairo, and formed the bulk of IB’s chapter, was its illustrious Muslims – those who lay in the city’s vast cemeteries and, especially, the living scholars, judges and Mamluk grandees who ran the greatest city in the Islamic world. Like IB, I turned a blind eye to the pharaonic and started, instead, at the top of the fourteenth-century social pyramid.

I didn’t have far to go. Sultan al-Nasir is buried just around the corner from the Husayn Hotel, in a mausoleum on the main street of medieval Cairo. Since being a Mamluk ruler was the political equivalent of leading an infantry charge on the Somme, sensible sultans built their tombs as soon as possible, and always added a
madrasah
, both to the greater glory of God and as a sort of pension plan for the afterlife. Al-Nasir was no exception: he built his college-mausoleum in 1304, at the morbidly early age of 19. Its sombre, almost brutal façade impends over the street like an ironclad in dock, relieved by a Plimsoll line of monumental script and by a gothic doorway pinched from the Crusader church of St George in Acre. The mix of Saracenic and Frankish was a surprise – like my parish church in Bristol, but with the elements reversed. Al-Nasir, in the event, survived another forty years on the throne and, despite having built a perfectly good mausoleum of his own, ended up next door in that of his father Qalawun.

I passed beneath the great barred windows where, in the Mamluk heyday, Qur’an reciters would sit night and day, chanting a requiem for the dead within. Also in attendance were eunuchs, who guarded the sultanic tombs. They were a touchy lot, and al-Maqrizi warns in his guidebook that the eunuchs at the mausoleum of one of al-Nasir’s daughters once beat up a Qur’an reader. ‘You have dared to come into the presence of our mistress’, they shrieked, ‘
without underpants!
’ Al-Maqrizi does not explain how the lapse was discovered.

Unchecked, I entered Qalawun’s tomb complex through bronze doors which gave on to a massive slit-trench of a corridor. To the right, another doorway led into the tomb chamber where, suddenly, the dimensions shot upwards and outwards to enclose a soaring octagonal space: high above floated Corinthian capitals, like great gilded Savoy cabbages, and stucco windows set with grass-green and buttercup glass; the walls were encrusted in
pietra dura
and mother-of-pearl in a pattern of hexagons, quincunxes, reflecting Kufic script and
arrow
-headed meanders. ‘It might have been designed by bees,’ said a poet of the newly built mausoleum, ‘for in it stone has softened like wax.’ Shadows cast by huge knobbled screens of turned wood created a dappled, jewelled chiaroscuro in which Qalawun and al-Nasir shared a diminutive wooden cenotaph, gabled-ended and rather like a Wendy house. Qalawun, born on the steppe in a felt tent and sold as a slave, had ended up in a necropolitan masterpiece.

Across the entrance corridor, the
madrasah
students enjoyed less spacious accommodation. At the time of IB’s visit the college was flourishing, with courses in jurisprudence and medicine. A century later, al-Maqrizi wrote that the teaching staff were ‘mere boys and unqualified persons – not that anyone listens to them’. On the morning of my visit, the only sign of life in the college was a small cat with foxy ears, patrolling the shadows.

For IB, however, the third part of Qalawun’s foundation was the most remarkable. Early in his career Qalawun had been cured of colic in the hospital of Damascus. He was so impressed by the treatment that he vowed to build something bigger and better in Cairo if he became sultan. The result was the
maristan
, the great hospital of which IB wrote, ‘no description is adequate to its beauties. It is equipped with innumerable conveniences and medications, and its revenue is reported to be a thousand dinars a day’. The various wards specialized in fevers, dysentery and ophthalmology. Patients enjoyed
a
Palm Court ambience, with fountains and a resident orchestra. Qalawun took a personal interest in the latest medical technology, and among his prized gadgets was a gold bleeding bowl of Greek manufacture. It incorporated a gauge in the form of a statuette calibrated to ten-drachm intervals, and a fail-safe device: when the amount of blood reached three Damascene ounces, a mechanical voice in the statuette called out in Greek, ‘Enough! Enough!’

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.