Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (24 page)

Mr Hikmat saw me looking at the text. ‘There is great beauty and great terror in those few words, is there not?’

‘I think it’s one of the finest pieces of Arabic prose in existence.’

‘You are a Muslim?’ he asked, tentatively.

‘No. A Masihi.’

‘So am I. A Roman Catholic.’ I glanced again at the prominently displayed Qur’anic text. ‘You think I am a little … syncretic? Well, in the Qur’an itself God says: “We have revealed the Qur’an in the Arabic tongue.”
I
am an Arab, of the tribe of Tayy.’

I decided immediately that I liked Mr Hikmat.

A quick look around the shelves revealed that most of the stock was on the Islamic sciences of Tradition studies, jurisprudence and Qur’anic interpretation. I asked if there was anything on the history of
madrasahs
in Damascus.

‘But of course. Al-Nu’aymi’s
Al-daris fi tarikh al-madaris
. Absolutely indispensable. Let me see …’ He flicked through a ledger. ‘Ah, as I thought. It’s in the flat. As it happens, I was about to shut up and go there. Why don’t you come? There may be one or two other things of interest to you.’

As we drove into the suburbs, Hikmat explained that in addition to the shop and his own library at home, he had a flat to house most of his stock on history and geography. Eventually we arrived at a nondescript block. Other than a small table, a few chairs and a television – left on and blaring adverts – the flat contained nothing but books. They lined the walls in ceiling-height shelves and covered much of
the
floor in neat stacks. Hikmat began to look for
Al-daris
but was quickly sidetracked.

‘Look, here’s al-Ramhurmuzi’s
Wonders of India
. A fascinating work, but of course rather too early for IB … The
Travels
of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, the Arabic translation. That’s a little closer to your period. Ah, here we are … Abu ’l-Fida’s geographical encyclopaedia, contemporary with IB. So sad they never met!’

I went off on my own trip, and rapidly became intoxicated. Hikmat had moved to another room, but I could still hear his running commentary: ‘poetry on the Mongol invasions … a history of the Assassins … an original Leiden imprint –
very
rare and expensive …’

The doorbell rang rudely. Hikmat emerged from the other room with a pile of books, put them on the table and opened the door. Two women came in, whom Hikmat introduced as his wife and sister-in-law. There was a prolonged kerfuffle about some article of feminine clothing. ‘How should I know where it is?’ Hikmat exclaimed petulantly. He strutted about, waving his hands and mumbling. Finally, the article – an elaborate frock – was found behind a pile of books, together with a bottle of Red Label. Mrs Hikmat poured generous slugs and we sat around the table. The ladies questioned me about my background.

‘And precisely how long have you been in Yemen?’ asked the sister-in-law. She had a curious, unstable half-smile like a Siamese about to pounce.

‘About fifteen years.’

‘Just as I thought. It’s a girl, isn’t it? You’ve fallen in love, haven’t you? But don’t take that step! Don’t convert! Promise me you’ll never do it. Who is more important – that girl or Jesus?’

Hikmat was looking at the ceiling. He spoke gently. ‘I think you have nothing to fear. Tim is a … an orientalist.’

She seemed to relax a little, but kept eyeing me warily.

Soon afterwards, the ladies left and we continued our tour of the bookshelves. Much later, I glanced at my watch and noticed that it was eleven o’clock. I suggested to Hikmat that he might want to go home.

‘I was waiting for you to say that you’d had enough,’ he replied. ‘Oh! And what about Abu ’l-Fida’s
Short History of Mankind
, with the continuation by Ibn al-Wardi? Very important …
Completely
indispensable.’

Hikmat found me a taxi and I returned to the hotel with a pile of
books
. Up in my room I turned straight to the chapter in the
madrasah
history on the Sharabishiyyah, the Hatter’s College. ‘It is in the Street of the Sha”arin’ – the Hair-Sellers? – ‘adjoining the Bath of Salih, north of the Bird Market, inside the Gate of the Water-trough.’ I could hardly have asked for a more precise address, and was so delighted that I almost overlooked a footnote: ‘It has completely disappeared. Not a trace of it remains.’

Undeterred, I set out the following morning with the address on a scrap of paper. The diligent inverse archaeologist should, after all, adopt a diachronic perspective; doubtless, my expedition would generate a laconic footnote – ‘The site of the Sharabishiyyah is now occupied by a motorcycle repair shop’, or some such.

The easy bit was Bab al-Jabiyah, the Gate of the Water-trough. Inside, I entered an endless walk-in wardrobe called Suq al-Qumaylah, the Market of the Little Louse, and selected an elderly clothes merchant. He pondered over the address. ‘The only thing that means anything to me is al-Sha”arin,’ he said at length. ‘They were the people who sold the goat-hair cloth that the
badw
use for their tents. There’s still one of them left.’ He summoned a boy to lead me to the sole remaining goat-hair tent-fabric merchant. I felt a growing excitement.

The goat-hair merchant was mystified by the address but passed me on to an uncle, another elderly man. He read the address over several times. ‘There were plenty of
sha”arin
around here when I was young. But I’ve never come across the Bath of Salih, or the Bird Market, and my family’s had this shop for five generations. You could try Hajj Yusuf.’

Another boy led me to Hajj Yusuf, a very old man who was sitting outside a shop on the Street Called Straight. I perched beside him on a low stool. He was a bit deaf, so I explained my quest very slowly and loudly. A small audience gathered.

‘Who? Baddudah? Can’t say I know the fellow.’

‘He was here a long time ago. Nearly seven hundred years.’

‘I know I’m a
shaybah
, a greybeard, but I’m not that old.’

The audience laughed.

‘What about the Bath of Salih?’ I shouted. ‘And the Bird Market?’

Hajj Yusuf was silent for a long time. He seemed to have gone into a trance. Then his face began to twitch. A dreadful thought crossed my mind: he’s having a stroke. ‘Really, don’t worry if …’

‘That’s it! Elizabeth will know!’

The name rang a bell … perhaps someone at the Institut Français. ‘Who’s Elizabeth?’

‘Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Great Britain. Who else?’ He grinned, grabbed me by the beard and gave me a smacking, slobbery kiss on the cheek.

The audience laughed; and after the initial surprise I, the fall-guy, joined in. As I watched Hajj Yusuf shaking and wheezing, a vision came to me: of an earnest Syrian walking into a shop in the City of London in the late 1990s and asking for directions to something that sounded suspiciously like the Wild Goose Market, at the Sign of Ye Olde Cock and Bull.

I gave up on the Hatter and his college and went to console myself in the Bath of Sultan Nur al-Din. IB said of its builder, Saladin’s predecessor, that he was ‘a man of saintly life of whom it is told that he used to weave mats and live on the proceeds of their sale’. Since the
bath
was flourishing at the time of IB’s visit, it is more than likely that the traveller was a customer there. The bathkeeper locked my valuables away, and I removed my clothes in a carpeted enclosure beneath a substantial dome – it was more like a basilica than a changing-room – then donned a waist wrapper and a pair of the platform clogs known as
qibqab
. (In 1263 this delightful onomatopoeia, something like ‘clipclops’, featured in the execution of an Ayyubid prince. He had unwisely raped the wife of Sultan Baybars, subsequent victim of the poisoned koumiss. Captured afterwards by the Sultan, he was handed over to the dishonoured Sultana who had her slave-girls bludgeon him to death, slowly, with their bathtime footwear.)

I qibqabbed through the innards of the bath-house and found the hot room, where my spectacles steamed up and I blundered into a group of fleshy and amused Kuwaitis. Later, pink and clean, I cooled off for a while in the tepid room, into which the management had introduced an otiose and barbarian addition – a sauna.

As I was about to re-enter the changing area, a hand went for the towel around my waist. ‘Thank you,’ I said firmly to its unseen owner, ‘I’m sure I can manage on my own.’ The hand came back. I thought of going for my
qibqabs
; but, in a flash, the towel was off and, simultaneously, replaced with a fresh one. The operation was so deft that even IB, that crusader against bath-house nudity, wouldn’t have complained. The attendant wrapped more towels around my shoulders and head, and I returned to the domed hall, where I chatted with the Kuwaitis over camomile tea. Speakers in the vault relayed the Tritsch-Tratsch Polka. It went rather well with all the clipclopping.

While he would have drawn the line at Johann Strauss the Younger, Sultan Nur al-Din might not have disapproved in principle of music in his bath. When he founded his hospital, he appointed as its first medical director one Abu ’l-Majd ibn Abu ’l-Hakam who, as well as being the foremost physician in Damascus and an accomplished astronomer, was also a talented lutenist, hautboyist and amateur organ-builder. His musical abilities perhaps came in useful in the new post, since music was held to be ‘efficacious in expanding the chest and revitalizing the spirit, thus strengthening the heartbeat and ensuring the proper function of the organs’. The hospital – inspiration for the great
maristan
that I had visited in Cairo – still stands, not far from the bath.

According to IB, the funding for the infirmary came from the sale
of
some copper kitchenware that a saintly alchemist had turned into gold. The gatekeeper dismissed the story with a laugh. ‘What really happened’, he said, ‘was that Nur al-Din captured a Frankish prince and was going to put him to death. But the prince offered a ransom, and gave the Sultan five castles and half a million dinars. Not that it did the Frank any good. He died on his way home.’

Inside, the hospital was laid out like a
madrasah
, with a central court and surrounding
iwans
. In the main
iwan
, the director would sit between ward rounds and lecture. Treatment continued here until the nineteenth century. Today, the building is a museum of science and medicine.

Some of the exhibits were intriguing. There was an anaesthetic gag, which the label said would be soaked in a concoction of hashish, opium and belladonna; a pair of Ottoman prepuce snippers; and a birthing-chair from the same period – it had tall balusters attached to the armrests, to be gripped for extra purchase, and a cut-out in the seat that made it resemble a regal thunderbox. My favourite item, however, was an ancient and etiolated
suqunqur
, a type of skink, salted and displayed in a glass jar. According to the label, this nasty-looking creature was for centuries the sovereign aphrodisiac of the Islamic world – more potent even than Aleppan pistachios or the fox-testicle orchid.

Curious to learn more about the
suqunqur
, I later turned to the thirteenth-century pharmacopoeia compiled by al-Muzaffar, another ancestor of my Yemeni friend Hasan. Only male skinks are used, al-Muzaffar explained. The best time to hunt them is in the spring, when they rut. They are disembowelled, stuffed with salt and suspended upside down in the shade – like game, they improve with age. Thereafter they are best preserved in a wicker basket. As well as the skink’s flesh, its fat and kidneys may also be administered with honey, rocket seeds or, where permissible, vintage wine possessing a fine bouquet. (The physician and Egyptologist al-Baghdadi also suggests the addition of powdered cocks’ testicles.)

IB mentions several aphrodisiacs in the
Travels
. None was more effective than the pills which a certain yogi made for the Sultan of Madurai in southern India. ‘Among their ingredients were iron filings, and the Sultan was so pleased with their effect that he took an overdose and died. The Sultan was succeeded by his nephew, who’, he adds drily, ‘showed high consideration for that yogi and raised him in dignity.’