Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (10 page)

‘By the way,’ said the driver as I paid him, ‘my name is also al-Mursi.’

‘Your family name?’ I asked, surprised.

‘No, my given name. It’s very common here.’ Such is the devotion of the Alexandrians to their holy men that generations of sons have been named after a town far away in the south-east of Spain. As I rang the bell to Lionel’s flat, I felt I might be getting somewhere.

The flat was half-way up a twelve-storey block. Lionel had filled it with orientalia and made it into a comfortable roost for a migratory, slightly old-fashioned bachelor. We filled in a lacuna of several years since we had last met. ‘And now,’ Lionel concluded, ‘I may be graciously retired. But it’s still the same old story: it’s not love that makes the world go round. It’s
hysteria
.’

‘White-hot, incandescent hysteria!’ I added, completing Lionel’s catchphrase.

I told him about my conversation in the taxi. ‘Oh yes, they’re
great
ones for saints, the Alexandrians,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to ask my Lord Burleigh about saints. He should be here soon.’

Burleigh, an old Alexandrian friend of Lionel’s also known as Muhammad, appeared shortly, resplendent in tweed jacket and yellow silk stock. I asked him about the elusive Burhan al-Din the Lame, but he hadn’t heard of him. He did, however, add to the taxi driver’s story of Abu ’l-Durdar, the saint of the tramlines. ‘They say – and God is the most knowing – that during the Second World War a bomb was heading straight for the tomb when a white cloud appeared and diverted it. A British soldier was standing at the spot and would have been killed. He converted then and there.’

Over supper we talked more about the supernatural. Burleigh told the story of a property developer who had built an office block in the nearby suburb of Rushdi. He made a
nadhr
– a holy pledge usually involving the giving of alms – which he would discharge when the building was finished. ‘He forgot about the pledge, or couldn’t be bothered with it. And the jinn came and took the place over. No one’s ever been able to stay in it. Some policemen once tried spending the night there, for a bet. But they were hurled around – really flying through the air. The building’s on the main road and worth a fortune. But it’s never been occupied, except by those jinn.’

I tend to be sceptical about scepticism; however, I found it hard to believe that a valuable piece of real estate would be abandoned because of bumps in the night. But as he drove me back to my hotel, Burleigh pointed it out. It stood dark and windowless between brightly lit blocks, like a single rotten tooth. All the openings on the lower floors were walled up. It was a warm evening, but I shivered. A phrase came to mind:
the abomination of desolation
.

Next morning, I set off along the Corniche to call on the two saints mentioned by the taxi driver: Yaqut, whom IB visited, and Yaqut’s spiritual master, al-Mursi. Al-Mursi’s mosque-tomb was built in the 1940s in the Mamluk-baroque-revival style. It is a tall, creamy, octagonal structure, cathedral-sized and topped by four domes on high drums and by a slender minaret. With its fretted cresting and relief carving, the building looks like a very large ivory reliquary. A relipuary, of course, is precisely what it is. Inside, al-Mursi lies in a
tomb
covered with a rich pall and surrounded by candles. The enclosure around the tomb is piped with striplights in green, the colour of Islamic sanctity, and by illuminated signs exhorting one to pray; which is what several dozen men and women, the latter decorously separated by a barrier, were doing. A few other men were sitting against columns, reading the Qur’an or dozing, and the place had the rustly, sleep-inducing air of a public library. There was a sort of fervour about the worshippers, but it was laid back. I noticed, framed on a column, a piece of advice given to al-Mursi by his own spiritual master al-Shadhili, author of the
Litany of the Sea
: ‘Know God, and be as you like.’

I went and sat with the doorkeeper in the lofty entranceway. It was filled with pigeonholes and resembled an Oxbridge porters’ lodge, except that the pigeonholes contained shoes and sandals. The doorkeeper was delighted when I showed him the reference to his saint in IB’s
Travels
. Turning the page, he saw the
Litany of the Sea
: ‘It is written here’, he said, ‘that “His disciples still recite it every day.” And now, they still do! How old is this book? Six hundred and fifty years! Glory be to God!’

Some other men joined us, and the
Travels
was passed eagerly from hand to hand. ‘Look! Here is Sidi Yaqut … And someone called al-Kindi. No, we don’t know him; but listen to what the book says: “He used to wear a turban of extraordinary size. Never either in the eastern or in the western lands have I seen a more voluminous headgear than this.”’ They all laughed.

‘If God wills,’ said the doorkeeper, ‘you will pray the noon prayer with us.’

I gulped. People were always assuming that I was a Muslim. It was the way I spoke. My Arabic has the rhythms and cadences of the Arabian Peninsula. Besides, I had learned through experience to classicize my speech further: once, offering to carry some bags for the Egyptian wife of a friend, I inadvertently slipped in a Yemeni dialect word and said what sounded to her like, ‘Do let me ravish your baskets.’ She declined, with a shriek. Now, to the ears of the doorkeeper, my speech – littered with imprecations to prolong my listeners’ lives and reward their goodness – was ‘Arabic as it was sent down from heaven’. For Arabs one is what one speaks. I could hardly be anything but a Muslim. ‘Um,’ I said, looking at my watch, ‘I must go and visit some more saints first.’

‘As you like,’ said the doorkeeper. ‘Our city is full of
walis
.’ He beamed with civic pride. Lionel was right: the Alexandrians were great ones for saints.

I retrieved my shoes from their pigeonhole, took my leave of the doorkeeper and his friends and walked the hundred or so yards to the mosque-tomb of Sidi Yaqut. If anything, it was even bigger than that of his guru, and the juxtaposition smacked of post-mortem rivalry. The building was unfinished, a skeleton of reinforced concrete filled in with red brick. It reminded me of a ‘Bako’ building set I had played with as a child. Inherited from my pre-Lego elder siblings, it consisted of a base drilled with holes into which you inserted metal rods; between the rods you had to slot grooved bakelite bricks. One of the workmen explained that they were nearly ready to begin sticking on the façades. To see the mosque as yet unclad was faintly shocking, like catching sight of a bishop in Y-fronts.

The workmen pointed out Yaqut’s tomb, in a sort of undercroft, then introduced me to Shaykh Hilal, the imam of the new mosque. I explained my reason for coming, and added that I thought IB would have been delighted to see the saint so magnificently remembered.

‘“Only he shall inhabit God’s places of worship who believes in God and the Last Day, and performs the prayer,”’ Shaykh Hilal intoned, quoting from the Qur’an. The word ‘inhabit’ had a secondary sense of ‘build’. ‘And it is all being achieved by private subscription, not government funding.’

Standing there on the steps of his unfinished cathedral in immaculate white
jallabiyyah
and graduated aviator shades, Shaykh Hilal looked the part – head of a consortium of spiritual investors. We talked a little more, but I felt that his eyes, just visible through the tinted glass, were looking not at me but into me, probing around for my soul. I saw a question begin to form on his lips and, not wanting to be revealed as an infidel quite so close to where I’d been taken for a believer, I wished the Shaykh success and left.

I had so far found no trace of the Alexandrian holy man who most influenced IB, Burhan al-Din the Lame. Shaykh Hilal had not heard of him; the doorkeeper of al-Mursi’s mosque had said, ‘Burhan al-Din … No, I don’t know him. But’, he added, ‘I seem to remember a Maghribi traveller looking for him a couple of years ago.’

That earlier Maghribi, IB, described Burhan al-Din as ‘the learned, self-denying, pious and humble imam, one of the greatest of
ascetics
and a devotee of outstanding personality … I spent three days as his guest.’ He went on to recall

A miracle of his
. One day, when I had entered his room, he said to me: ‘I see that you are fond of travelling and wandering from land to land.’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I am fond of it,’ although there had not as yet entered my mind any thought of penetrating to such distant lands as India and China. Then he said: ‘You must certainly, if God will, visit my [spiritual] brother Farid al-Din in India, and my brother Rukn al-Din Zakariyya in Sind, and my brother Burhan al-Din in China, and when you reach them convey to them a greeting from me.’ I was amazed at his prediction, and the idea of going to these countries having been cast into my mind, my wanderings never ceased until I had met these three.

It was frustrating to find out nothing about the man from whom IB learned of his destiny. Later, a trawl through the literary sources proved as fruitless; it did, however, net some other curiosities. I discovered in al-Nabhani’s
Compendium of Saintly Miracles
that a supernatural bond existed between the occupants of the two great Alexandrian mosque-tombs. Al-Mursi telepathized the birth of his future disciple Yaqut in distant Ethiopia and, although it was the middle of summer, ordered
asidah
to be cooked in celebration – the equivalent of Christmas pudding in July. Years later, Yaqut, who had been bought as a slave, happened to be with his merchant owner at sea near Alexandria when a storm blew up and threatened to sink the ship. Yaqut’s master vowed that if they were saved he would present the slave to al-Mursi. They landed safely, but as Yaqut was found to have scabies, the merchant offered al-Mursi another slave. Al-Mursi refused: ‘I don’t want this one. I want the slave you pledged to me.’ Yaqut eventually became a Muslim St Francis, interceding on behalf of distressed animals and birds. One story tells that a dove rode on his head from Alexandria to Cairo, so that the saint could complain on her behalf to a muezzin who was killing her squabs.

The introduction to al-Nabhani’s hagiography lists different types of
karamah
, or saintly miracle. These range from the useful ability to write out texts at great speed, to bodily metamorphosis and the Einsteinian concept of the scrolling up or unscrolling of time and
space
. Among the stranger miracles are what might be termed telephagy – the belly of an absent hungry person is filled simultaneously as the saint eats – and the knack of seeing the names of crimes, including adultery, written in black on the offending member.

Reports of similar miracles are scattered throughout the
Travels
. In IB’s time, scholars eagerly discussed and analysed sainthood and miracles. Holy men were held to have access to a world of spiritual intellection in which all times and places were co-existent – hence their ability to foretell the future, travel with great speed and appear at the same time in different locations. It is the sort of strange hypothetical realm which contemporary physicists explore, more clumsily, with their particle accelerators. In fact, meta- and particle physicists have more in common than one might suppose: both tug, if in slightly different directions, at the knots which hold the cosmos together; both look beyond the immediate world of sense perception into one where cause can only be deduced from effect – a quark is as invisible as an angel; both are confronted by Manichaean polarities – miracles and black magic, cheap energy versus total destruction. For laymen, the theories behind both ways of looking at creation are equally esoteric, and to believe in either of them needs faith.

IB was intrigued by the world beyond the senses and by the holy men who could look into it. In his day there were a lot of them about: al-Nabhani, whose hagiography covers around 1,300 years, lists more saints and miracles for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries than for any other period. Also, a disproportionate number of holy men came from the Maghrib: a contemporary of IB’s said that ‘saints sprout from its soil like grass’. IB was born not just in a medieval Age of Aquarius, but in its California.

The law of supply and demand applied to sanctity no less than to any other commodity. There were simply too many saints in Morocco and al-Andalus for home consumption, so the region exported them. The greatest holy men of Egypt, like al-Mursi and al-Shadhili, were from the west. In his eastward journey, IB was surfing a wave of sanctity. He himself was often tempted to give up the world; but what he calls his ‘importunate self’ – his materialist ego – was too strong. He was never more than an enthusiastic amateur of the spirit, a Dr Syntax of mysticism.

Had he joined the mystics, he would have been lost to the world of travel literature, and probably would have gone the way of Herr
Hornemann
of Göttingen who, according to Sir Richard Burton, ‘set out from Cairo in 1798; became, it is supposed, a Marabut or Santon in Káshná; and disappeared about 1803’. If one didn’t disappear, one was liable to be pestered to death – literally, in the case of a holy man of Damawand in Persia who was killed by the inhabitants of the village where he lived, lest he relocate himself and his divine blessings. Even in death one could be horribly molested. The body of a certain Moroccan saint was exhumed and buried so often that he had four tombs in four different villages, each eager for its share of holiness. When the saint’s son ordered the graves to be examined, they found his father’s corpse in each one.

Walking back along the Corniche, I reflected that the physical Alexandria of today would be all but unrecognizable to IB. But the intangible city – the one built on devotion to saints, holy pledges and belief in miracles – was in remarkably good shape. To travel with IB I would have, in effect, to keep my third eye peeled.

Before I left the country, something happened to me in Upper Egypt, in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, which I find hard to explain except in terms of this other, non-physical context. Perhaps it was even a very minor
karamah
.