Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (11 page)

*

The air from the Rosetta, or Bolbitine, branch of the Nile was fresh, but the teahouse was fuggy with gossip. One of my fellow tea-drinkers leaned towards me and said in a stage whisper, ‘You know, Princess Diana was killed by the British intelligence services …’

‘Yes,’ another confided, ‘and for some time before that she had been wearing a
headscarf!
’

I was in a flippant mood. ‘Then I’ll let you in on something. Her mother-in-law has been wearing a headscarf for years. She doesn’t do it much in public. Mostly when she’s out with her horses.’

They smiled. They knew we were playing with symbols, of which the headscarf is a potent one. It can render its wearer a toff or a pleb, a martyr or a traitor (a woman MP in Turkey was recently stripped of her nationality for wearing one in Parliament).

The whole world was buzzing with Diana, but nowhere was as thick with rumours as Dodi’s ancestral home. They had settled on Egypt like a plague of locusts, chirping away in cafés and on the pages of the press: Diana was pregnant by Dodi; she was going to marry
Dodi
; she had married Dodi; she was thinking of converting to Islam; she had converted to Islam; she had converted after Dodi played her cassettes of al-Sha’rawi, a man regarded by many as a modern
wali
. Columnists compared the affair to that of Antony and Cleopatra, with the Royal Family as the vengeful Octavian; or to the rumoured intention of Richard the Lionheart to marry his sister to Saladin’s brother, or to Saladin himself, with the Royal Family as the interfering Pope who stymied the match. An Egyptian was to file a lawsuit against the Queen and Tony Blair: the plaintiff had always cherished the notion that Britain champions democracy and religious freedom, and by plotting against Diana they had caused him psychological damage. The price of this damage, he said, should be $170,000.

I bade the tea-drinkers good-night. I’d had enough of headscarf-and-dagger conspiracies. And I’d had a long day.

IB left Alexandria to visit the greatest living holy man in Egypt, his countryman al-Murshidi, who led ‘a life of devotion in retirement from the world, and bestowed gifts from the divine store, for he was indeed one of the greatest saints who enjoy the vision of the unseen’. Al-Murshidi’s retirement was, however, metaphorical, for like Diana he suffered from his own celebrity. Despite living in an obscure village thirty miles from Alexandria he ‘was sought by the amirs and ministers of state, and parties of men in all ranks of life used to visit him every day’. Many pestered saints take to pillars or other inaccessible spots; but not al-Murshidi. He rose to the occasion, making his hermitage the Garsington Manor of fourteenth-century Egypt. All his visitors were fed: ‘Every man of them would express his desire to eat some flesh or fruit or sweetmeat at his cell, and to every one he would bring what he desired, though that was often out of season.’ I had left Alexandria on a minibus not knowing if, like Yaqut, al-Murshidi was still revered or whether, like Burhan al-Din the Lame, he had dropped from the hagiography.

One of the largest women I have ever seen hauled herself on to the minibus and sat next to me. She had a child of about four who sat in rather than on her. Whenever he became fretful, she smothered him with her arms and breasts. There are plenty of bulky Egyptians – in Alexandria I noticed a sign saying ‘KURHAUS AND OBESITY MANAGEMENT’ – but I had never actually come up against one quite so enormous. It struck me that you rarely saw older Egyptians
of
great size, and I wondered whether a day came when they could no longer fit through the door and had to stay at home, shut away like the Monster of Glamis, getting bigger and bigger. On the cramped minibus seat there was no question of maintaining a demure Islamic distance from female flesh. There was too much of it.

We drove for a while along the busy Cairo motorway, then turned off into an aqueous, nacreous nether land of water and wobbling horizons. In every direction there were dikes and rice fields, some covered in water like sheets of mercury. Animals and birds were everywhere: buffalo, docile as old dogs, following small boys on thin cords; buffalo wallowing in the channels, half submerged like lumpy logs of mahogany; ducks, geese and small boys splashing in the canals. In one village a flock of geese shimmied between the wheels of our bus and those of a lorry, like a drunken
corps de ballet
. Humans seemed to take on the guise of animals. Tall, thin peasants in white
jallabiyyahs
and baseball caps had an avian profile, like the egrets that followed them through the rice fields. A man squatting in a dike glared up at the minibus like an annoyed toad.

My neighbour left the minibus in a village, and I stretched gloriously, released from my soft, damp prison. Soon afterwards we arrived in Fawwah, through which IB passed on his way to al-Murshidi’s hermitage. I climbed into a
calèche
, drawn at a lick by a high-stepping roan, and was dropped at the convent of the Khalawati dervishes.

The dervishes are long gone, replaced by the local office of antiquities. The Director was keen to show me the restored portal of the National Fez Factory set up by Muhammad Ali Pasha; the portal was clearly his baby, and he seemed crestfallen when I declined. But he kindly deputed two assistants to take me to al-Murshidi’s village. IB’s memory or his editor had concertina’d the distance from Fawwah to the village, Munyat Bani Murshid. Rather than being ‘separated from it by a canal’, it was beyond the town of Mutubis and two more bus rides away.

No one seemed to know what, if anything, remained of al-Murshidi. But Hajj Ali, the elder of my two companions, was a regular of more local tombs, and on the short walk to the bus garage he pointed out several long-dead
walis
. I asked about Abu ’l-Najah, a saint whose tomb in Fawwah IB mentioned. ‘Oh, he’s just here, behind the Bank of Egypt.’

The tomb-chamber was roofed with a later pot-bellied dome and crowned with a stone turban. It stood on the bank of the Nile; beside it some fishermen were mending their nets. Under the little building flowed a water channel which Hajj Ali said cured all sorts of illness. We looked through a heavy bronze grille and saw a tomb swathed in green, on which a large green turban sat beside an open Qur’an. Hajj Ali told me that the grille had floated to the spot along the river. ‘Smell the sweet breeze from the tomb,’ he instructed me. ‘It comes from the saint, not from any perfumes.’ I sniffed, and the air did seem slightly scented – holy air-conditioning, I thought.

In fact, the whole of the western Delta reeked with the odour of sanctity. In Mutubis, between buses, we visited another pot-bellied mausoleum and had tea with the guardian, an ex-policeman who bore a striking resemblance to Ronald Reagan. He proudly showed us the pall he had embroidered for his saint – much as an English parish spinster might display her altar-frontal – and told us that during a drought in 1958 water had suddenly gushed up beside the tomb.

We arrived at Munyat Bani Murshid on a particularly crowded minibus. Hajj Ali and his colleague, another Mursi, were looking dishevelled and sweaty, and I hoped I hadn’t brought them on a wild
wali
chase. We stood by a dike, looking lost, until a middle-aged man detached himself from a domino game in a café across the road and offered his assistance. Tentatively, I asked if there were any memories of al-Murshidi, the saint.

‘How could we not remember him? All the villages in Egypt were born at the tombs of saints. Our saint is just around the corner.’ Then he added, ‘Did you know that the traveller IB came to see him in – when was it? – 1326, I think.’

I was astonished. So far in Egypt, IB had hardly been more than a name. Now, in a secluded spot surrounded by rice fields, someone was talking about his visit as if it had happened within living memory. As we walked to the saint’s tomb I explained why I had come and the man, who introduced himself as the local schoolmaster, quoted from the
Travels
: ‘“Arriving at the cell of this shaykh before the hour of afternoon prayer” – you have come a little later in the day – “I saluted him … He rose to meet me, embraced me, and calling for food invited me to eat. He was dressed in a black woollen tunic.”’ He was word-perfect. As he read, or recited, it seemed that the years which
had
elapsed since the original visit were insignificant beside the constants of place and memory. I had chanced, I felt, on one of those fragments of existence withdrawn from time.

The mosque-tomb had been added to over the years, and most of it looked recent. The schoolmaster introduced us to the imam, a man in his thirties. Under a red and white turban, he had a bony, chiaroscuro face, the sort IB would have described as ‘displaying the marks of his devotions’. We went inside the screen around the saint’s tomb and the imam intoned the inscriptions on the tombstone in a deep bass, then the Qur’anic verses on the screen itself: ‘The friends of God need have no fear; neither should they sorrow. They are the ones who have believed and been pious, and they shall rejoice in the world below and the world above.’ He looked at me, ascetically beautiful as an El Greco saint. ‘You are a Muslim?’

‘A Masihi.’

There was a pause. Then he smiled. ‘Our religion is tolerance. We are not like the bearded ones.’

‘In Yemen, where I live,’ I said, ‘there is a saying: “If whiskers meant anything, tomcats would be pashas.”’

The imam grinned and repeated the proverb, chuckling, as he circled the tomb, adjusting its coverings, tucking the saint up.

We went and sat in the vestry, where the imam had a desk with his name engraved on a brass plate. Sport Cola and biscuits were brought. The late summer afternoon was humid with the exhalations from the rice fields. The weather had been the same when IB was here. I opened the
Travels
and read aloud: ‘“When I prepared to sleep, he said to me ‘Go up to the roof of the cell and sleep there’, for this was during the summer heats … So I ascended to the roof and found there a straw mattress and a leather mat, vessels for ritual ablutions, a jar of water and a drinking-cup, and I lay down to sleep.”’

The schoolmaster took over, from memory: ‘“That night, as I was sleeping on the roof of the cell, I dreamed that I was on the wing of a huge bird which flew with me in the direction of Mecca, then made towards the Yemen, then eastwards, then went towards the south, and finally made a long flight towards the east, alighted in some dark and greenish country, and left me there.”’ It was very quiet in the vestry. You could hear the bubbles bursting in the Sport Cola. He continued: ‘“I related my dream to the shaykh and he said: ‘You shall make the Pilgrimage to Mecca and visit the tomb of the Prophet at al-Madinah, and you shall travel through the lands of Yemen and Iraq, the lands of the Turks, and the land of India. You will stay there for a long time and you will meet there my brother Dilshad the Indian, who will rescue you from a danger into which you will fall.’”’

And so it came to pass. And then, without warning, something about the setting – I think the late summer heaviness, the pop and biscuits – took me back to a day about twenty-five years earlier when, in my mother’s kitchen in Bristol, a Shinto priest had cast my horoscope and spoken about the approximate date of my death. He had hedged his bets: ‘Something may change in you, and you will avoid it.’ But I was still in the danger period.

I had rarely mentioned the prophecy to anyone, but I told it now. The imam spoke: ‘The Prophet – peace be upon him – said: “Astrologers tell lies even when they tell the truth.” Knowledge of the
future
is God’s, even if He sometimes permits His prophets and saints to look into it, like Joseph – peace be upon him – with Pharaoh, and like our own saint here with IB. Today there are people who claim to tell the future and to interpret dreams. Most of this comes from the Devil. God knows whether they are impostors. There are also saints, but they keep their identity concealed. Things have changed.’

‘And some things have not changed,’ said the schoolmaster. ‘IB wrote, “He then gave me a travelling-provision of
ku’aykat
, small cakes, and silver coins.” We have no silver coins; but do you not think that
ku’aykat
is better Arabic than
baskawit
?’ He offered me a biscuit, and we all laughed.

I thanked the imam and the schoolmaster and bade them farewell.

‘
Hasalat barakah
,’ said the imam, ‘you have brought blessings with you.’

‘Even if I am not a Muslim?’

‘You are a guest. Ours, and the saint’s.’

Hajj Ali and al-Mursi left me at the Nile Barrage. I walked across it and stopped in the middle. Upstream, Mutubis was varnished in late-afternoon light like a brand-new Canaletto. The great volume of water flowing beneath me had a plastic, almost fleshly look,

As if its waves were the wrinkles on a belly,

And its eddies navels.

I remembered how even the crotchety Symon Semeon, watching the Rosetta Nile, had been entranced by this ‘famous and interminable river, navigable from the Mediterranean Sea to Upper India where dwells Prester John’.