Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (23 page)

The Umayyad dynasty lasted a bare three decades after the death of Caliph Umar in 720. But the Arabs have endured, and so has the Umayyad vision of paradise – an earthly if not a heavenly one – on the walls of their mosque. Arriving in Damascus, I had felt cheated by the poets and their brooks, leas and glades; here, at any rate, they survived in perpetual springtime.

The medium-sized woman had left the courtyard. The only other visitors were pigeons, scores of them, pecking up seed from the paving. Then a crocodile of schoolchildren came in chattering excitedly, and the pigeons took off with a great downdraft of wings and an aviary whiff. They wheeled overhead, a flock of flying circumflexes. The children were followed by a party of Iranian pilgrims, mostly women in black but with a few men in old dark suits, led by a pair of turbaned and bearded clerics. Some of the women scattered seed for the pigeons; one came over to me and gave me a date, ready stoned.

I followed the Iranians into the Shrine of al-Husayn, a large room at the eastern end of the courtyard. Here, in a recess behind a beribboned silver grille, the martyr’s head had touched base on its journey to Cairo. No connection with al-Husayn and his descendants is too tenuous for the Iranians who, one by one, kissed the recess passionately. When I told the guardian of the shrine that I had recently been to the Mawlid of al-Husayn in Cairo, he smiled. ‘That’s just a legend. The Cairo head isn’t Sayyidna al-Husayn’s. It belonged to his grandson, Zayd. The real head went back to Karbala in Iraq.’

‘And God is the most knowing,’ I said.

If shrine publicists ever had a catchphrase it must have been, ‘If you want to get ahead, get a head’. The main prayer hall of the mosque has one as well, that of St John the Baptist. (Or, the Christians say, St John Damascene; or, IB thought, of the Baptist’s father, Zechariah. Since I later visited Zechariah’s head in Aleppo, there seems to be some confusion.) The Ottomans honoured it with a fine marble reliquary in the style of Leeds Town Hall. Among the clutter inside, I noticed on a table by the cenotaph a pair of Victorian decanters.

In addition to the resident head and the visiting head, the mosque also used to have one of the earliest copies of the Qur’an, a bit of the stone from which the springs sprang when Moses struck it, and some pillars from the Queen of Sheba’s throne. For good measure, Jesus will land on the south-eastern minaret on Doomsday. There seemed to be something for everyone.

The Iranians were enjoying themselves gravely. Some of the ladies had their photograph taken next to the pulpit, and then one of the clerics began delivering a homily interspersed by beautiful tenor Qur’anic recitation. I heard a hushed chattering behind me. It was another pilgrim party. They were Indian Isma’ilis, the women in floral print dresses and matching capes that looked as if they had been run up from valances and pelmets, the men in white trousers and tunics of a stuff so sheer that a good Damascus downpour would have rendered them transparent. They hardly looked to be the spiritual descendants of the Assassins.

In IB’s time, the prayer hall was home to circles of instruction in which professors, both male and female, would teach the orthodox Sunni sciences. ‘It contains also’, he wrote, ‘a number of teachers of the Book of God, each of whom leans his back upon one of the pillars of the mosque.’ As I was about to leave, I noticed the scene he had described, a group of men gathered around a column at the far west end of the hall. They chanted in unison, frowning with concentration, their master stopping them every two or three words to correct minutiae of intonation and elision. The rigidly orthodox IB would have been relieved to see that, despite the preponderance of Indian and Iranian Shi’ites, someone was keeping the Sunni side up.

The Qur’an class was taking its time, in contrast to IB who, in this same prayer hall, attended a sort of Islamic crammer. The course involved listening to a reading and exposition of the entire corpus of the Prophet’s sayings in fourteen sittings. IB listed more than a dozen
scholars
with whom he rubbed shoulders here in the Umayyad Mosque, and who gave him
ijazahs
, or diplomas. These were the heavyweight traditionists of their day: a contemporary reader would have heard the solid clunk of dropping names. They included Ibn al-Shihnah, a centenarian yet, according to a contemporary, ‘sound of knee … He took a daily cold bath and still enjoyed conjugal relations’; al-Birzali of Seville, who had studied under two thousand masters and had diplomas from a thousand of them; A’ishah bint Muhammad, also a professional seamstress; and the doughty spinster Zaynab, who had travelled much in the East and spent her daylight hours transmitting traditions. By listing these scholars who had converged on Damascus from across the Muslim world, IB was showing that he had plugged himself, in a somewhat wobbly fashion, into the medieval Islamic internet.

I left the mosque by the west door to inspect a nearby fountain mentioned by IB. It is now a chic meeting-place, with a gallery and a café frequented by young people in existentialist black. There were many polo-necks, floppy hairdos, and floppy hands draped over chair-backs to reveal wrist-watches. The café is post-Battutian but still old: two hundred years ago Ali Bey described it as ‘crowded with the idlers of the city’ and – like me – was mildly shocked to see Damascene ladies smoking water-pipes. The reek of
longueurs
, languor and carefully cultivated ennui mingled with the tobacco smoke.

‘This place’, said the man on the next table in English, ‘is full of … how do you say? …
mutathaqqifin
.’

I had already met him as he was guiding tourists around the Umayyad Mosque. ‘Well,
muthaqqafin
are “cultivated people”, so
mutathaqqifin
ought to be “would-be cultivated people”.’

‘I love the way you can play around with Arabic,’ said my neighbour’s companion. He spoke with a hint of the English Midlands, and turned out to be a Kashmiri from Nottingham. Just before, I had heard him talking to the guide in a low and portentous voice about ‘that certain subject’. Now, the ice broken, he let me into his secret. ‘My family are always on at me to get married. To be honest, I’m more interested in studying Arabic. So I thought I’d come here, find a wife, and kill two birds with one stone. Ahmad’s helping me. But the trouble is, I’ve only got a fortnight.’ He sighed.

I explained why I was in Damascus. ‘If it’s any consolation,’ I said,
‘IB
was here only a few days longer than you, and he managed to get married
and
study the entire
Sahih
of al-Bukhari.’

The Kashmiri looked glum.

I left them to their marital machinations and headed back to the hotel. It was a fine Ottoman building in the Saruja Quarter, with a black-and-white marble fountain in the courtyard. My room gave on to a rickety balcony above a pergola’d street; a large coop on the roof opposite contained several perky hens. On the landing outside the room there was a shell-shaped porphyry washbasin, which it seemed a sacrilege to use, like brushing your teeth in a font.

Most of the other guests were New Zealand backpackers. Like the girls I had met in Tangier, they suffered from a national claustrophobia and treated it with large doses of travelling. ‘I’m just moseying around,’ one of the travellers told me. ‘I’ve done thirty-three countries so far … Think I can make it sixty.’ Most of the talk, however, was on the shifts and wrinkles of travel – jabs, visas, how to make a few dollars by smuggling cigarettes into Jordan.

The theme continued in a series of notebooks kept at the reception desk. They formed a fascinating codex of information. There were pages of Swedish in a looping, girlish hand, beautiful hand-drawn maps minutely annotated in Japanese, scrawls by Rob from Wellington. If
Lonely Planet
is the pilgrim guide of our times, then notebooks like these are an ever-expanding, polyglot apparatus criticus. Some of what I could read was in the ‘regional characteristics’ genre beloved of medieval geographers: Iranians are extremely hospitable, Cairene shopkeepers dodgy, certain men in Istanbul slimy. There were several references to ‘gropers’: ‘Attention Girls: if you’ve got a nice round bum and 36DD tits, keep out of the Aleppo souk – it’s full of septic tossers and you’ll get shababbed out of your mind!’ (
Shabab
is Arabic for ‘young men’.) A marginal note to this entry read: ‘If you fancy yourself that much, stay at home with a mirror.’ A marginal note to the marginal note said: ‘Chauvinist toss-pot.’

The Sudanese receptionist heard me chuckling. ‘These notebooks’, he said, ‘are full of
aja’ib
.’ He couldn’t have chosen a better word:
aja’ib
, the wonders of wandering, the mirabilia of metropolises.

None of this helped me to find the one place in Damascus that I particularly wanted to visit. The Sharabishiyyah Madrasah, the college in which IB lodged, was in his time a recent foundation by a
wealthy
merchant named al-Sharabishi, the Hatter. (
Sharbush
, plural
sharabish
, is a variant of
tarbush
and the ancestor of the fez.) A rapid tour of other Damascus
madrasahs
that afternoon had given me no leads. The guardian of the tomb of Saladin, all that is left of the Aziziyyah Madrasah, hadn’t heard of the Hatter’s College and was more interested in improving his English. We acted out a dialogue from a textbook, in which a couple called Pedro and Lucille discussed Dickens, Thackeray, Byron and Oscar Wilde; in the background God’s warrior slumbered in his tomb beneath a lewd chandelier that precisely resembled a bunch of prodigious, pendent condoms.

The condoms seemed to be standard issue. In the Adiliyyah, headquarters of the Arab Academy, they depended again above Saladin’s brother al-Adil. Also in the tomb-chamber was a bust of the great one-eyed poet al-Ma’arri. He was a surprising character to find in a college of religious science. Verse of his such as

There are two types of people:

Those with brains and no religion,

And those with religion and no brains

earned him the nickname of ‘the Heretic’. The poet seemed to have some awful skin problem – the bronze leaf was peeling off him to reveal white plaster beneath.

No one was in evidence to ask about the Hatter’s College, so I tried the Zahiriyyah across the road. It was similarly deserted. The tomb-chamber, despite its fine mosaics and marble dado, reeked of neglect. Mouldering empty vitrines occupied niches around the walls. It was a sad end for al-Zahir Baybars, the early Mamluk Sultan and hammer of the Crusaders – but perhaps no more bathetic than the circumstances of his death, brought about by a dreadful mix-up involving a lunar eclipse and a goblet of poisoned koumiss.

Only one
madrasah
showed signs of life, the Qur’an College founded by Tankiz, Sultan al-Nasir’s vice-regent in Syria. IB described him as ‘a governor of the good and upright kind’; his many public works included the removal of the city’s frogs, to the croaking of which he had a particular aversion. But poor Tankiz fell victim to cold-war paranoia: al-Nasir got it into his head that he was a Mongol mole and sent Bashtak, builder of the palace on Crimson Street in Cairo, to arrest him. Tankiz died soon after, in gaol in Alexandria.

I knocked on the college gate, set in a fine portal inscribed with the date
AH
727, the year after IB’s visit. There was an answering echo within, followed by footsteps. A pretty teenaged girl opened the door and led me in. Inside there were display cases containing novelty rubbers and other juvenile stationery; murals of cartoon schoolkids covered the walls and even the mihrab, or prayer-niche, in which an angelic cousin of Dennis the Menace sat reading the Book of God. Mamluk purists would stretch their eyes, but at least Tankiz’s Qur’an College was still exactly what it was founded to be. ‘And’, the director told me, ‘it will remain so for ever,
in sha Allah
, as long as people do not abandon Islam.’ I left having drawn another blank on the Hatter’s College, but thinking that the good and upright Tankiz would be delighted, once he had got over the shock of seeing his school Disneyfied.

*

That evening, after another cerebro-burger and a pink grapefruit juice, I explored the newer parts of central Damascus. There was a chill in the air, and the doleful descant of sock-sellers. I was drawn by a neon sign saying VICES CENTER; a closer inspection, however, revealed that the first part of the sign had not lit up – COMMUNICATION SER. Next door to this disappointment was the Hejaz Railway Station, the northern terminus of the line that Lawrence and his Bedouin blew up in Arabia. A German locomotive dated 1908 was parked outside on the station approach; on top of it was a sign in the shape of a smaller steam engine, advertising a restaurant in unseemly pink neon. Then, in a sidestreet by the station, I spotted something that more than made up for the absence of vices: a row of bookshops.

The first specialized in science textbooks. ‘If it’s history and geography you’re after,’ said the owner, ‘then go to Hikmat Hilal. He’s two doors away.’

One should try – indeed, one is encouraged by a tradition of the Prophet – to refrain from thinking about the meanings of Arabic personal names. There are too many men called Jamil, ‘Beautiful’, who are not; Saddam ought to be ‘one who crashes frequently’, and is the usual word for the bumper of a car; Khadijah, a common girl’s name, is cognate with the word for an abortive she-camel. But Hikmat Hilal – Wisdom of a Crescent Moon, or Philosophy of a Parenthesis – had
the
right ring for a bookseller. To me the name suggested a stooped, ascetic figure in reading glasses.

Mr Hikmat did wear glasses but looked prosperous rather than ascetic. He sat, suavely suited, beneath a framed calligraphic panel in superb gilded script. It was a familiar fragment of verse: ‘A man’s best friend is his library.’ Near it hung another calligraphic panel, the Qur’anic Chapter of Daybreak:

Say: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak from the mischief of His creation; from the mischief of the night when she spreads her darkness; from the mischief of the witches who blow upon knots; from the mischief of the envier, when he envies.