Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (25 page)

My research threw up a number of aphrodisiacs which had eluded IB: a fish with a face like an owl’s and a crest like a cock’s, the effect of which al-Idrisi says is the same as that of the skink, found in a certain reservoir in Xinjiang; a preparation, noted by al-Mas’udi, obtained from the sebaceous excretions of Indian elephants; a root found in the Atlas Mountains and so powerful, Leo the African wrote, that a man accidentally urinating on it will ejaculate immediately, while the hymen of a virgin girl doing so will be ruptured; and an aquatic version of the
suqunqur
mentioned by the geographer al-Zuhri, found in the Caspian, which if kept in the mouth enables a man to have sexual intercourse a hundred times in succession, ‘or indeed until he drops dead or spits it out’. Compared with this last statement, claims made for the
suqunqur
proper are modest. Al-Zuhri’s Caspian variety, I suspect, is more closely related to the Sudanese Blister Beetle discovered by Roald Dahl’s fictional Uncle Oswald.

One of the most fertile sources of recherché
materia medica
is al-Qazwini’s twelfth-century cosmography,
The Wonders of Creation
. Some of the remedies sound enjoyable (chewing frankincense prevents amnesia); some less so (to cure an itching anus, insert a few cloves of garlic); some are alarming (to calm an epileptic fit, place a live electric catfish on your head); others nauseating (hepatitis is alleviated
by
drinking a pint of urine from a pre-pubescent boy, boiled with honey in a copper vessel); one sounds positively kinky (nursing mothers can improve lactation by massaging their breasts with the sweat of wrestlers). Perhaps I have chosen a flippant selection; but then, the medieval Iraqi practice of using mould from water jars as a salve sounds silly – until we recall penicillin.

That evening, the hotel receptionist was in no need of aphrodisiacs; but he did need a translator. He was in love with a French girl, and wanted to send her a
billet doux
. I grimaced, remembering the last such thing I had translated – on papyrus, for a Copt in Luxor. It is hard to put your heart into a love letter when you are
per pro
.

The receptionist handed me a folded page. It was a verse by the contemporary Syrian poet Nizar al-Qabbani. I read it through, then began to write:

Love for you has taught me to try the medicine of apothecaries,

To knock on the doors of fortune-tellers,

To leave home and comb the pavements,

To hunt for your face in the rain and in the headlights of cars …

Love for you has taken me into cities of sadness

Which I have never entered before.

As a love letter written in Damascus, in November, it could hardly have been bettered. I went to bed and lay there, listening to the distant swish of cars and the rain dripping through the pergola.

The rain persisted over the next few days, as I visited some of the sites in and around Damascus that IB had described. There were plenty of them, and it was hard to know where to begin. In the end, I began at the beginning.

‘When night drew its shadow over him,’ the Qur’an says of Abraham, ‘he saw a star. “That”, he said, “is surely my God.” But when it faded in the morning light, he said: “I will not worship gods that fade.” When he beheld the rising moon, he said: “That must be my God.” But when it set, he said: “If Allah does not guide me, I shall surely go astray.” Then, when he beheld the sun shining, he said: “That must be my God: it is larger than the other two.” But when it set, he said to his people: “I am done with your idols.”’

The cave where, according to Damascene legend, Abraham was born and later hit on the idea of monotheism lies at the northern end
of
Jabal Qasiyun, the slab of mountain overlooking the city. The mountain, IB says, ‘is the place of ascent of the Prophets (on them be peace)’ – and, I would add, of the sellers of overpriced beans (on them be a plague). The traveller explained that up the spiritual elevator of Qasiyun went Adam, Moses, Jesus, Job, Lot and a job-lot of seventy anonymous prophets – these days downgraded to forty martyrs – who starved to death in the Cave of Hunger. ‘They had with them only one loaf, and it continued to circulate amongst them, as each preferred to give it to his neighbour, until they all died together.’ IB does not explain why they played pass-the-parcel instead of nipping down to the nearest grocer’s.

To visit Abraham’s alleged birthplace, I hired a taxi belonging to a small and neat retired army officer called Abu Ala, who wore a tweed suit and striped tie. With us came his son-in-law-to-be, Munir, who described himself as ‘a topography graduate’. We drove through the drizzle along a highway lined with gaunt tower-blocks then, where the road began to rise, turned off into the ex-village of Barzah, a higgledy-piggledy suburb strewn across the hillside. There, despite the presence of Munir the topographer, we got lost.

We chose a house and tapped on the gate. A man in late middle age opened it, and we asked if he knew the Cave of Abraham.

‘This is it,’ said the man.

He led us into a yard. Before us rose a small cliff, topped by a few cement-block houses; tucked away under the cliff was a door. Through this was a roomy mosque. Inside, we climbed a stone staircase up to a gallery, rather like an organ loft, where a large ginger tom was dozing at the entrance to a tunnel. The sequence of transitions was unexpected, and intensely dreamlike.

We squeezed into the tunnel, which was whitewashed and barely big enough for the four of us. It ended in a pit, a deep hollow in pink rock polished by many hands. The pit glistened in the feeble lamplight, like some bodily cavity seen through an endoscope.

‘This’, said our guide, ‘is where the Prophet Abraham, peace be upon him, was born.’ He quoted the Qur’anic story of the prophet, then added that the act of praying four times in the tunnel, which points directly to Mecca, returns the worshipper to a sinless state, ‘as if he had emerged from his mother’s womb. And God is the most knowing.’

As the little lecture was going on, I remembered a remark of IB’s:
‘I
have also seen in the land of Iraq a village in which Abraham (on him be peace) is said to have been born.’ Al-Harawi’s pilgrim guide, the authority on such matters, plumped categorically for Iraq. Abu Ala voiced my thoughts. ‘What about the tradition that Abraham was born near Babylon?’

The guardian gave Abu Ala a sharp look, then climbed down into the cavity. ‘Look! Here are the marks of his mother’s feet, where she squatted to give birth.’ He squatted. ‘And here are the marks of her fingers where she grasped the rock.’ He grasped the rock. ‘How can you disbelieve?’ He stared at each of us in turn, challenging us to argue. None of us spoke. As we left the tunnel, the ginger cat shifted and grinned in his sleep.

*

The next day, I followed IB to the tomb of ‘the pious devotee Rislan, known as the Grey Falcon’. Rislan, IB says, was a disciple of the famous twelfth-century Sufi
shaykh
, al-Rifa’i. One year, at Mecca, the two of them bumped into an old friend; al-Rifa’i remembered that he had left a cluster of dates unharvested on one of his palms near the Iraqi town of Wasit, intending to give it to this friend. Undeterred by the thought of a 1,600-mile round-trip, ‘Rislan said to him, “By thy command, O my master, I shall fetch it.” The
shaykh
gave him permission, and he departed at once, came back with the cluster and laid it in front of him. Al-Rifa’i’s followers at Wasit later related that on the evening of that day they saw a grey falcon which swooped down upon the palm tree, nipped off the date cluster and bore it away into the air.’

According to the hagiographer al-Nabhani, Rislan was also in the habit of flying through the air in human form, sitting cross-legged. A visit to the saint’s tomb, he noted, improved one’s prospects for the afterlife: ‘Shaykh Rislan used to say, “Any flesh which has entered my sanctuary will not be consumed by the Fire.” A certain man went to pray there. With him he had some meat from the butcher; when he got home and cooked it, it remained raw.’

The tomb didn’t look a restful spot. It was situated on a traffic island, and its nearest neighbour was a funfair. Inside the gate, however, the sounds of traffic and jollity were muted. A large man was standing by one of the windows of the tomb-chamber and reciting
the
Fatihah, the opening chapter of the Qur’an. When he finished, he turned and saw me. For a few moments, we stared at each other. I had never seen anything like him: he had the physique of a wrestler and wore a voluminous black cloak and a red headcloth secured with a double rope of camel hair, and he carried a silver-knobbed malacca cane. His enormous beard was of a luxuriance and blackness seen only on pantomime pirates. Strangest of all were two thick, glossy dreadlocks, tucked behind his ears. This apparition strode over to me, majestic and fiery-eyed like a figure from an Assyrian frieze, and offered me a Marlboro.

He smiled broadly when I greeted him in Arabic, and gripped my arm. ‘Did you know that Khalid ibn al-Walid pitched his tent just over there?’ he asked, pointing to a spot not far from the tomb. ‘He was the bravest of our commanders!’ He went off into a long and vivid reminiscence about the seventh-century Muslim conqueror of Syria. I wondered if I was listening to a ghost … But a ghost who smoked Marlboros?

Eventually, I extracted myself from his grip and showed him IB’s account of Shaykh Rislan. ‘Ah, the Grey Falcon,’ he said. ‘I know the story.’ He kissed the pages and shut the book reverently. ‘Can you not see the light of faith emanating from the tomb of Shaykh Rislan?’ he asked, turning to give the tomb a smart military salute. ‘You know, about twenty years ago they were going to knock this place down and turn it into a pleasure garden. A
pleasure garden!
Can you believe it? They brought a
bulduzir
…’

‘And’, I interrupted, ‘the machine broke down.’

‘You know the story!’

‘I’ve heard it before,’ I said, remembering the saint of the tramlines in Alexandria. ‘Or a similar one, about another
wali
. I visit a lot of
walis
.’

‘Then you are a Muslim, as I thought.’

‘Well, actually, I’m not.’

He looked concerned, held his palms skywards and recited the Fatihah – this time not for the soul of a dead saint, but for that of a live infidel. ‘May God guide you to the true path of Islam’, he concluded, ‘and save you from the everlasting Fire.’ He struck another Assyrian attitude, saluted and strode away.

Over at the tomb-chamber I peered through a grille decorated with ribbons and branches of greenery. All I could make out in the
gloom
inside was a few words of an inscription – ‘Rislan, he who knew God …’ I thought of the story of the steak rendered miraculously rare. Presumably, a visit to Shaykh Rislan’s tomb only fireproofed
halal
meat; it wouldn’t safeguard Christian flesh.

I walked back along the Street Called Straight, entering it through the Roman Gate of the Sun. The pagan structure supports a minaret finished off with a short sharp spire – an alternative Messianic landing site on the Last Day. To my right was the Christian Quarter, on my left the Jewish Quarter and, ahead, the Muslim Quarter. All three faiths were convinced that if you didn’t convert, you would end up as a kebab on the Everlasting Barbecue; or in the vegetarian Hell of more recent Christianity, that you would be excluded from God’s presence for ever and ever, or condemned to a sort of theological nuclear winter, or at the very least end up somewhere that wasn’t as nice as it might have been. Looking up at Jabal Qasiyun, I reflected that things had been a lot easier in Abraham’s day, when you could get away with being a plain old monotheist.

On my next expedition, again with Abu Ala and Munir the topographer, I became an involuntary and very temporary convert. We were driving southwards on another drizzly morning, on our way to another venerated site, the Mosque of the Footprint. Munir was
telling
me that the dreadlocked, Marlboro-smoking Assyrian was a devotee of Shaykh Rislan. ‘They say that Rislan had the same
kawafir
,’ he explained. I was savouring the incongruity of the French loan-word –
coiffure
– when, suddenly, Abu Ala slowed down.

‘Since you’re into tombs,’ he said, ‘we must take you to visit Sayyidah Zaynab.’

I was reluctant. IB gave Zaynab only a passing mention, lifted from Ibn Jubayr’s
Travels
; but Abu Ala assured me that I would be impressed. He turned off the highway into a suburb distinguished by, if anything, its utter lack of distinction. A few minutes later, he pointed ahead. Two minarets covered in dark blue, turquoise and gilded tiles rose above the grey buildings. We parked the car and entered a courtyard of white marble, in the middle of which was a large, square mosque-tomb, also encrusted with tiles and crowned by a golden dome.

I admitted that I was, now, impressed. ‘And I suppose that’s real gold leaf.’

Abu Ala smiled. ‘No. Real gold
bricks
. You know what the Iranians are like about anyone related to the Prophet … Well, Sayyidah Zaynab was his granddaughter, and when the Shah was overthrown Khomeini put a lot of the royal wealth into reconstructing this place.’