Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (5 page)

‘… they ain’t being themselves. They look like they got special permission to dress like that.’ The speaker must have noticed that I’d tapped into her conversation, for she suddenly addressed me. ‘Excuse me. Do you speak English?’ I nodded. ‘It’s a bit of a funny question, but … what do you think about our clothes?’

My neighbours were two girls of the sun-burnished, tennis-playing sort admired by John Betjeman. One was wearing a long-sleeved
shirt
and loose trousers, the other a white ankle-length dress and a headscarf.

‘She means,’ said the other girl, ‘do you think we should, well, wrap up a bit more? It’s just that we seem to get a lot of … attention. And look at this lot!’ She indicated the daringly clad Moroccan girls on their evening promenade.

‘I think you’re both most respectably dressed,’ I said. ‘It’s probably just that you’re what they call the Other.’

‘You
are
a Pom,’ said the first girl. ‘We thought so. I was just saying – oh, I’m Alison and this is Lucy – that you mustn’t get too obsessed about putting on layers and layers, or you end up looking like a bloody snowman.’

‘Absolutely,’ I said.

‘Do you live here?’ Lucy asked.

I said I was passing through.

‘So are we,’ said Alison. ‘Like a dose of salts!’ They had been in Morocco for about ten days; in that short time they seemed to have covered most of the country. Where did they get the energy? To me, a train ride to Rabat seemed like a major undertaking.

‘And we’ve been on a camel ride in the desert,’ added Lucy. I smiled. ‘I know, it’s a bit of a cliché. But this is our first Arab country. We’ve already been round Europe – Greece, Italy, France, Spain …’

I’d always wondered why they did it. ‘Why?’ I asked.

Alison thought for a moment. ‘Oh, you know, there’s nothing at home. Just whingeing families. And then you look at the map and you think, “Christ! We’re bloody miles from anywhere!”’

‘There’s so much to see,’ said Lucy, ‘and so little time to see it in.’

I thought of my own journey that lay ahead – not only the train ride to Rabat, but the further one – and rose and bade them good-night. A few yards along the boulevard, I turned and waved to them. The café was brightly lit; but, suffused with sun and travel, they seemed brighter. In fact, they positively thermo-luminesced.

*

Like present-day Antipodeans, medieval Maghribis were aware of living a long way from anywhere. IB tells an anecdote to illustrate this:

When I was in Sin Kalan [Canton] I heard that there was a venerable
shaykh
over two hundred years old who neither ate nor
drank
nor excreted nor had intercourse with women, though his powers were intact, and that he lived in a cave outside the city, giving himself to devotion. I went to the cave and saw him at the entrance. He was thin, very ruddy, showed the traces of his devotional practices, and had no beard. I greeted him; he took my hand, sniffed it, and said to the interpreter: ‘This man is from one end of the world and we are from the other.’

The verbal root of ‘al-Maghrib’,
gharaba
, means both ‘to set (sun)’ and ‘to be remote’, and for Near Easterners the Maghrib, the Occident, evoked the distantly exotic in the same way that ‘Orient’ still does, vestigially, for western Europeans. Persians like the eleventh-century Nasir Khusraw believed that people in al-Andalus, which medieval geographers included in the Maghrib, had eyes like those of cats. Other Persians, among them IB’s contemporary Mustawfi, placed in the Maghrib legendary sites like the City of Brass and the City of Women – a sort of Islamic-socialist-feminist commune; the Maghribis set these myths in the East. Even today, a Middle Eastern Arab who regards Cairo as his back yard looks on anywhere to the west of it almost as a world apart. Maghribis are indeed peculiar in subtle ways, using Arabic instead of Indian numerals and retaining in their handwriting fossilized features of Kufic, the script that went out of general use in the Middle East nearly a thousand years ago. Most noticeable of all, they are set apart by their fiendishly incomprehensible spoken dialects. Ali Bey noted that ‘when the famous Orientalist
Golius
came into this country [Morocco], he could not understand a word of their Arabic, but was obliged to make use of an interpreter’.

Maghribis, the Antipodeans of Islam, have been both its most adventurous travellers and its greatest travel writers. Such was their output that, even if he never left his study, their educated compatriot could – like Defoe’s
Compleat English Gentleman
– make the tour of the world in books. Probably the earliest Maghribi travel writer was Yahya ibn Hakam, who went on two embassies for the Caliph of Cordova, the first in 840 to Constantinople, the second some years later to the King of the Norsemen. On both occasions Yahya, nicknamed ‘the Gazelle’ on account of his great beauty, serenaded the ruler’s wife in troubadour fashion with lyrics of his own composition – a charming form of diplomacy which could well be emulated today
to
the benefit of international relations. Sadly, the Gazelle’s account of his travels is only known from a few fragments.

Another early Andalusian traveller to the fringes of civilization was Abu Hamid, born in Granada towards the end of the eleventh century. He wrote a descriptive geography, liberally truffled with wonders (the rulers of China have miscreants licked to death by a rhinoceros), adventure (the author wrestles with a squid which has tried to steal his knife) and useful tips (sealskin sandals reduce the pain caused by gout). In the middle of the twelfth century, Abu Hamid wandered around the Aral Sea region, travelled up the Volga and spent some years by the Danube, probably in what is now Hungary. In his account of these places and of lands further north he gave an early puff to caviare, ‘the finest of all preserved delicacies in the world’, and described with an illustration the construction and use of skis. Among the peoples he mentioned are ‘red-skinned northerners with blue eyes and flaxen or blond hair, who drink a liquid made from barley; this drink is as sour as vinegar but it agrees with them since, as their diet consists of honey and the flesh of beavers and squirrels, they are hot-tempered’, which must be one of the earliest descriptions of the Lager Lout. Abu Hamid’s interest in comparative anthropology is shown by a snippet of dialogue between him and the Christian King of Bashghard. The King has heard Abu Hamid encouraging the Muslim royal mercenaries to marry four wives and refrain from wine:

King
: This is not logical! Alcohol strengthens the body, and women weaken it. This Islam of yours runs contrary to common sense.

A.H
.: But there is a difference between us. You Christians take wine with your food and do not get drunk. But Muslims who drink do so with the express aim of getting inebriated. They lose their minds; they go crazy. On the matter of polygamy, Muslims are naturally hot-blooded, so they enjoy plenty of sex; and you should bear in mind that if you permit them four wives they will father more children, and your army, who are Muslims, will increase.

King
: Hmm. Perhaps we should listen to what this
shaykh
says … In fact, he is most logical!

Abu Hamid and the Gazelle were, however, exceptional in the choice of their destinations. Most Maghribi travellers headed for Arabia, drawn by the irresistible centripetal force of Mecca and al-Madinah. Pilgrimage, a sacred duty for Muslims who are able to undertake the journey, was the primary incentive to travel. The way east led into the heartland of Arab-Islamic culture, and visitors from the end of the world would eagerly set about improving themselves there. Ibn Khaldun, himself a Maghribi, wrote that the East was superior to the West because of ‘the additional intelligence that accrues to the soul from the influences of sedentary culture’. For the Maghribis, the whole experience was a sort of Grand Tour: travellers like IB were treading a similar road to the one which eighteenth-century Englishmen, nineteenth-century Americans and the Australasians of today would follow around Europe.

Just as English Grand Tourists dusted off their gerundives and optatives before heading for the Classical world, Maghribi travellers mugged up on their classical Arabic before going east. Few, though, went as far as a scholar of Tangier who boasted, ‘I did not enter the East until I had committed to memory 34,000 lines of pre-Islamic poetry.’ Later travellers, however, were often disappointed by what they found. Basrah Arabic, like BBC English, was once famous for its perfection but, says IB, ‘I was present one day at the Friday service in the Great Mosque of al-Basrah, and when the preacher rose and recited his discourse he committed in it many gross errors of grammar. I was astonished at his conduct and spoke of it to the
qadi
Hujjat al-Din, who said to me “In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the science of grammar.”’

One traveller, al-Abdari, made other people’s linguistic shortcomings a major theme in the book of his journey to Mecca and back, begun in 1289. A merciless pedant who hailed from the Moroccan town of Hahah, he gloatingly published syntactical blunders together with the names of their perpetrators. When not behaving like a linguistic Red Guard, he still had little to say in favour of anything. He got off to a crabby start – ‘In this age of ours, the harvest of virtuous men is blighted’ – and thought the Alexandrians ‘fetid … for, as you know, ports are stinking places’. This was only limbering up. The Cairenes provoked al-Abdari into a full-blown rant, purple in face and prose: ‘Among them, the generous man is meaner than a firefly, the brave man more timid than a whirring
locust
, the scholar more ignorant than a moth that flies into a flame, the eminent lowlier than a woodlouse, and the sedate more fickle than a gnat. Their orators stammer like adolescents, their mighty are more abject than beggars …’ and so on, for five pages of elegantly rhymed vitriol. A whole section is devoted to the pernicious Cairene vice – ‘
We seek refuge with God from such an abasement of morals
!’ – of eating in public. Here, and elsewhere, he reminded me of a headmaster of mine. And, as is often the case with headmasters, al-Abdari became lovable in the soft focus of memory: his tomb is extant and, like that of the putative IB in Tangier, still venerated.

A far more likeable character, and the author of the most celebrated book of travel before that of IB, is Ibn Jubayr of Valencia. It was said that the governor of Granada, in a fit of pique, forced him to drink seven cups of wine; the governor later regretted his action, and in expiation gave Ibn Jubayr seven cups filled with gold coins. These funded his pilgrimage to Mecca. He sailed to Alexandria in 1182, travelled up the Nile and crossed the Red Sea to Arabia. Returning two years later through the Levant at the height of Crusader power there, he set sail across the Mediterranean with a group of Christian pilgrims and watched them celebrate a candlelit Hallowe’en at sea. His
Travels
are a priceless record of the interplay between Christendom and Islam; they are also a splendid read. In his descriptions of sea travel Ibn Jubayr is an Arabic Conrad. Here he is, becalmed in the eastern Mediterranean:

On Wednesday 23rd a breeze stirred from the east, languid and sickly. At first we hoped that it would grow in strength; but it was no more than a dying sigh. Soon the water was covered by a thin mist, the waves were stilled, and the sea resembled a courtyard paved with glass. Of the four winds not a breath remained. To our eyes the surface of the water seemed like an ingot of silver. And there we lay, bobbing idly, as if lost between two skies.

IB was not unique. He was part of a long tradition of Maghribi travel writers, and it would be a fair guess to suppose that he had read at least Ibn Jubayr before leaving Tangier at the age of 21. If so, I would wager a
dinar
to a
dirham
that one passage, above all, stuck in his mind:

If you are a son of this Maghrib of ours and wish for success, then head for the land of the east! Forsake your homeland in pursuit of knowledge … The door to the east lies open: O you who strive after learning, enter it with a glad greeting! Seize the chance of freedom from the cares of the world before family and children ensnare you, before the day comes when you gnash your teeth in regret for the time that is gone …

Ibn Jubayr went on to recommend a sort of medieval Interail, insured by Providence: if you get bored with a place, simply move on, for ‘in every village people will shower you with your daily bread’. It is, literally, a philosophy of loafing around. No better copy could have been written to promote the life of the scholar-gipsy.

When the Prophet famously said that Muslims should seek out knowledge even if they have to look for it in China, China still had the metaphorical sense that Timbuktu had for us before the days of the Paris-Dakar Rally. IB, unlike his predecessors, followed the advice to the letter – and having reached the literal China, he then turned around and went to the literal Timbuktu as well. But of this he had no idea as he left Tangier, a not untypical spiritual backpacker.

*

Next morning, I had an early breakfast on the hotel terrace. Overhead, hundreds of swifts screamed and scudded. The girl in charge of the small rooftop kitchen brought my pot of tea, and asked me how long I was staying. ‘I’m going when I’ve finished my breakfast,’ I told her.

She glanced around the terrace, then whispered, ‘
Khudhni ma’ak
. Take me with you.’

I smiled; then realized that she meant it.

*

I was taking a short cut through the cemetery of Rabat, down to the beach, when I was startled by a voice: ‘Shall I walk with you, or do you prefer to be alone?’ it said, in Arabic. I looked round and saw a tall young man, wearing jeans and an unwashed white shirt.

‘Thank you, but on the whole I prefer to be alone.’

‘As you wish,’ he said, and he branched off on another of the many tracks that doodled between the graves.

I didn’t think any more about the meeting; but on the way up from the beach, I bumped into the man again. We greeted each other.