Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (3 page)

*

In 1348, less than a quarter of a century after that strange porch was added to my parish church in Bristol, a new arrival from the east disembarked at a quay a few yards away. IB, on his way back from China, had already run into this traveller in Damascus and Cairo. Reaching Tangier, he found that the traveller had got there before him and had killed his mother. Scientists call it
Pasteurella pestis
; it also goes by the name of the Black Death.

The golden fourteenth century turned to dust. Europe luxuriated in rampant melancholy and the cult of the body vile. The central Islamic lands fell under a succession of brutish and short regimes. In China, the Ming defeated the Tatar Yuan in 1368. In 1389 the Ottoman Turks, whom IB had seen in Anatolia in the first flush of military success, conquered the Serbs; in the following year they captured the remaining Byzantine possessions in Asia Minor. The century ended with Tamerlane and his neo-Tatars rampaging through the eastern Islamic lands and India. Calamity followed calamity; God seemed to have reverted to his vengeful Hebraic youth, and the world IB had known was never the same again.

And yet that world had survived, in the
Travels
. Like IB himself, it had filled out as I read. Towards the end of the book it had become so visible, so vivid, that I could slip in and out of it – a virtual fourteenth century. And it had become addictive. What would I do when I finished? I could start at the beginning again. But I knew that cerebral travel was not enough: from those very first words – ‘My departure from Tangier, my birthplace …’ my feet had been itching for the physical, visitable past. The more I read of the
Travels
, the stronger became the itch. There was only one way to cure it.

It would be an enormous undertaking. But I felt certain that the remains of IB’s world were out there to be tracked down – not just the great buildings of Mamluk Cairo or Palaeologue Constantinople, but also the minor monuments: a scholar’s pen box, houses of fishes’ bones, half-forgotten graves, buffalo-milk puddings, smells, sounds. And people. (The
Travels
mentions the names of around 1,500 individuals met over thirty-odd years. Ibn Hajar’s
Concealed Pearls
, the
Islamic
Who’s Who
of the fourteenth century, does only slightly better with 5,400 entries for the entire hundred years. Perhaps there would be other Hasans.) I began to think of my journey as a sort of Proustian, inverse archaeology. Instead of recreating past lives by examining objects and places, I would start with a life – IB’s – and go off in search of its memorabilia, fragments of existence withdrawn from time.

I put together a packing list. It included books by IB’s contemporaries: the Persian traveller Mustawfi, a recorder of marvels (armless tailors, a milkable turtle, an emetic bridge); the Syrian poet-historian-geographer and warrior-prince Abu ’l-Fida; al-Abdari, the ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ of Moroccan travel; Sir John Mandeville, whose travels (rather more textual than terrestrial) coincided in date with those of IB and who apologized to his readers for failing to describe Paradise; and Friar Jordanus, who made no apology for failing to describe Aran, a part of Azerbaijan. The tenth chapter of his
Mirabilia Descripta
runs in its entirety:

Concerning Aran, I say nothing at all, seeing that there is nothing worth noting.

Then there were Friars Symon Semeon, a rather maiden-auntish Irishman, and Giovanni de’ Marignolli, who wrote in what one authority calls ‘atrocious Latin’, and who dropped a diplomatic brick by presenting the Muslim Khan of the Golden Horde with a gift of strong liquor (the Khan probably enjoyed it - according to IB, he was a boozer); the Reverend Ludolph von Suchem, who said that in Cairo ‘one can see, above all, elephants and gryphons’; and the somewhat over-hyped Venetian who died a year before IB left home, Marco Polo. I decided as far as possible to forego post-medieval guidebooks, since they tend to omit the most interesting sights such as gryphons.

Later, God willing, I would embark on another journey – to write what traditional Arab authors call a
dhayl
, a ‘tail’, to IB’s
Travels
. According to a seventeenth-century blurb, I could do no more:

All master-works of travel, if you will but look,

Are merely tails that drag at Ibn Battutah’s heel.

For he it was who hung the world, that turning wheel

Of diverse parts, upon the axis of a book.

My aim would be the same as his (as expressed by his editor, never a master of the sound-bite) – ‘To give entertainment to the mind and delight to the eyes and ears, with a variety of curious particulars by the exposition of which he gives edification and of marvellous things by adverting to which he arouses interest.’ IB’s European contemporaries called this, more snappily, lust and lore.

Morocco

One End of the World

‘Her fingertips, outstretched, sketched a farewell,

Her eyes, downcast, asked when I would return.

And I replied, “What traveller went forth

Who knew the fate God had in store for him?”’

Unattributed, quoted in al-Abshihi (d. 1446),
Al-mustatraf

I
T WAS A
truly astonishing revelation. I read it again, this time with the italics it deserved: according to a short piece on him in the Royal Air Maroc in-flight magazine, IB had been, ‘by turns, an ambassador in China appointed by the Sultan of India, a judge and
a Muslim religious official on the Falkland Islands
’.

For a few dizzying moments, thoughts galloped around my head like Tatar horsemen: IB made it across the Atlantic; he probably did give his name to potatoes; world history would have to be rewritten; the reviewer is mad; I am mad.

Fortunately, the magazine was trilingual, and a look at the Arabic and French versions cleared things up. IB had not dispensed
shari’ah
on Goose Green. The Falklands were in fact ‘Juzur al-Maldif’, confirmed by the French ‘Iles Maldives’. The Maldives, I realized, must have rearranged themselves in the translator’s mind as the Malvinas. Geographical howlers have a long and distinguished history, and just as Shakespeare mentioned the coast of Bohemia, the Baghdad geographer Ibn Hawqal had written of ‘the shores of Tibet’. That was a thousand years ago; but even now, it seemed, in the age of word-processors and satellite navigation, the Indies could still be misplaced in the New World. As the plane taxied to the runway, I remembered spotting in an English digest of the Arabic press an article on the
Chechens
– in Arabic ‘Shishan’ – which the spellcheck-happy translator had entitled ‘Muslim Views on the Shoeshine War’.

For a moment I wondered if the pilot might head dyslexically for Tanjore or Tanjungselor; but, two and a half hours later, he landed us with perfect orthography at the IB International Airport in Tangier, in ‘A land’, the traveller wrote,

where charms were hung upon me,

Whose earth my skin first touched.

I had come to Tangier, as I imagined, to visit his tomb and seek his blessing for my own travels.

My first destination, however, was his hotel – the Hôtel Ibn Batouta. I wondered, as the
grand taxi
negotiated the steep and narrow streets above the harbour, what IB would have made of the address – 8 rue Magellan, off rue Cook. The hotel was terraced into the hillside and draped with flashing coloured lights; its amenities included a Pizzeria-Steak House and a Salon de Coiffure. As I signed the register, I mentioned my quest to the receptionist. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you have found IB already!’ He pointed to a naïve oil painting above our heads, which showed a bearded man in a Wordsworthian setting. Beside the man lay what looked like a school satchel bulging with scrolls, and in the background a ship lay placidly at anchor.

‘Come with me,’ the receptionist invited. ‘I will show you another picture of IB.’ In the television lounge, he pointed to an old framed photograph on the wall.

‘But it’s a photograph,’ I said.

‘Yes. A very old photograph.’

‘And he’s smoking a water-pipe.’

‘Ah, IB knew that water-pipes are healthier than cigarettes.’

‘But tobacco came from America, and photography was only invented a hundred and fifty years ago.’

‘IB’, said the receptionist, with unanswerable finality, ‘was a very great traveller.’

I took my room key and went to unpack. I was beginning to understand why most research on the fourteenth century took place in the less surprising setting of libraries.

A Syrian contemporary of IB, Abu ’l-Fida, wrote that Tangier was famous for three things – its grapes, its pears, and the brainlessness of its inhabitants. At about the same time, another geographical encyclopaedist, a native of the nearby Moroccan town of Sabtah, explained the reason: ‘Outside Tangier is a spring called Barqal. Its water is said to cause stupidity. They diagnose their imbeciles by saying, “It’s not their fault. They’ve drunk the water of Barqal.”’ While in the city, I was careful to mix the tapwater with duty-free scotch, and suffered no ill effects that I am aware of.

Other than these scant comments, my reading had turned up little information on Tangier in the time of IB. The pace of Tangerine events picked up in 1471, a century after IB’s death, when the Portuguese captured it; the city later passed through various other European hands, yet managed to retain its Arabness. The Spanish adventurer Domingo Badia y Leblich – a probable Napoleonic spy who travelled and wrote under the name Ali Bey – found early in the nineteenth century that the short passage across the Strait of Gibraltar was like being ‘transported to another planet’.

Since then, things have changed. IB would have been hard put to recognize his native city if he had come with me to the boulevard Pasteur that evening, to watch the
paseo
. Among the men, there was not a burnous-wearer in sight; a few even sported shorts. The women were divided into two groups: long coats plus headscarves, and bare arms with skin-tight trousers. From a head-count made over a mint tea at a pavement café, I estimated the groups to be roughly equal in number. IB, I thought, would have regarded the second category with a mixture of pious horror and anthropological fascination. As the call to prayer sounded, distant and weary, I asked myself how one could pray in Calvin Klein; perhaps lycra would help.

I returned to the hotel and climbed the stairs to the Pizzeria-Steak House, wondering if they did a pizza IB: the dough would be made from Luristani acorn flour; Damietta buffalo cheese would take the place of mozzarella; it would be topped by flakes of South Arabian dried shark and coarse-ground Malabar pepper, and presented on a platter of Omani banana leaves. But the chef had not risen to the challenge, and I dined on a discus-solid
quattro stagione
to the beat of Spanish dance music. Completing the Mediterranean scene, couples – the girls were all from the bare-armed group – gazed into each other’s eyes and fed each other pizza.

The dance music followed me to bed, in a room beneath the staircase to the restaurant. I lay listening to the pounding bass and the clatter of feet above my head. Other sounds rose from the port below, the strigine hoot of a train and the orotund honk of a ship in harbour. Tangier echoed to the sound of arrival and departure. I fell asleep thinking that the pizza probably tasted better if someone fed it to you.

I was awakened by a brass band blowing
fortissimo
at 4.45 a.m. A very sharp trumpet, a swaggering trombone and a flatulent sousaphone, egged on by a snare drum and a cheering crowd, were blasting away at some comic-opera march. I groaned into the pillow. It was an aural mugging, grievous bodily harmony. But the band moved off, playing as it went, fading into the night; and distance gave the music a strange pathos. I fell asleep again, wondering if I had dreamed it.

In the morning, the receptionist assured me it had not been a dream. ‘It was a wedding,’ he said. ‘They were going to get the bride.’

I went and sat with a coffee and a
pain au chocolat
at the Café de France, one of the best places from which to observe passing Tangerines. There were some oddities. A boy walked past who had a nose like Federigo da Montefeltro’s in the famous portrait. A respectably dressed woman in her forties, hurrying to an appointment, suddenly stopped to harangue a tree; then, as suddenly, she looked at her watch, muttered something and was off like the White Rabbit. I suppose I was looking for a reincarnation of the untravelled IB; but if he passed by, he was disguised by the shades and Latinate haircut that seemed
de rigueur
for younger Moroccan men. The girls too, even if they dressed less anatomically than for their evening promenade, looked no different from girls on the other side of the
Mediterranean
. Morocco, however, had not been entirely expunged from the place de France, and morning brought out the older generation – a few men in burnouses, and women on their way to market, wearing the red-and-white striped stuff of the Rif and topped by straw hats bearing a heavy crop of pompoms. But in this overwhelmingly European setting they somehow managed to look alien, as Morris men might on Oxford Street. I spotted some other picturesque characters: a stray from Woodstock in a shocking pink T-shirt, beads and a white beard of the sort that only Victorian clergymen and very ancient hippies can grow; and, on the arm of a dapper Moroccan who had clearly once been handsome, a large and elderly Englishman from within whose carapace of summer-weight tweed an Audenesque head moved slowly, periscopically, as if he were a turtle on a constitutional. It seemed that even the recent past, the Tangier of International Zone days, was all but extinct. What chance had I, then, of finding the Tangier of IB? Wherever it was, it was not here on the place de France. I paid for my breakfast and went to look for the tomb.