Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (35 page)

If we caught a
sh
ī
r m
ā
h
ī
, the fish on which IB lived during his voyage through these waters, we caught it under a different name. Now, as I lay between the fishermen, within four parts of silent harmony, four lines so sinuously plied, it hardly seemed to matter. The fourteenth century was far away, and so was the twentieth, as we bobbed in the eternal present on Sawqirah Bay.

*

My sea fever had been cooled by the day’s fishing, and I knew I had to get on. Khamis and the fishermen told me that the Kuria Murias were best approached from the Dhofar end, and that the prospects of transport along the coast were slender. The following morning I headed reluctantly inland.

The day began with the greatest imaginable rarity of Arabian travel, an unalloyed
mirabile
, a hen’s tooth, a mare’s nest: a lift with a woman. She wore a gold mask and treated the straight road and horizontal plain like a downhill slalom. She dropped me somewhere in Jiddat al-Harasis, an East Anglia of gravel where gazelles leap under an immense sky. Another lift, then several hours in a place called al-Aja’iz, the Old Women. On the main Muscat-Salalah road, I was comfortably benighted in the Quitbit Resthouse.

Next morning a lorry of excruciating slowness took me across a minimal, almost a nihilistic landscape – a mere joint between earth and sky, both the colour of plaster. The rare verticals, a milepost or the odd lone bush, assumed enormous significance. At Thumrayt I boarded a minibus.

The change was sudden and disorientating: one minute a Venusian desert, the next, green and rolling moors, cowpats and fat cattle. Then, just as my vision had adjusted, we began to drop down to a shining plain, down to the ocean and Salalah, whose name means the Glittering One.

Dhofar

The Importance of Being Rasulid

‘“Are you quite sure you are pure-bred?”’

Bertram Thomas, anthropologizing in
Arabia Felix

T
HAT NIGHT, SALALAH
glittered. Two society weddings were in full swing, and troupes of plump women and thin girls tottered from one party to the other wearing gilded platform sandals, long-tailed dresses with the trains gathered over one arm, and what looked like the entire stock of the Salalah gold
suq
. The women rattled audibly above the thump of amplified nuptial music; Indian maids shadowed them, like bum-boats in a convoy of treasure galleons. But there was something even more arresting than this mass movement of bullion: the women’s faces. Each was thickly plastered in white, the eyes bordered by black lines that swept upwards, geisha-style; three green dots descended the chin, with more green along the jawline; other lines swept back on either side of the nose, which was finished off with large spots of boot-polish black on each nostril lobe. At first sight, it looked as if a game with a make-up box had gone horribly wrong. But seen
en masse
, together with all that gold, the maquillage suggested the splendid as much as the sinister – the Thesmophoriazousae, perhaps, on a shopping spree in Ophir.

I watched the spectacle from a café, wide-eyed. My neighbour, however, was from distant Muscat and was not impressed. ‘They are slaves,’ he said, looking at the ghostly faces. ‘Why can’t they resign themselves to their allotted fate of blackness?’

Next morning, Habibah admitted that she often felt a bit underdressed when out and about in Dhofari society. ‘They don’t put on
all
that stuff every day, though,’ she explained. ‘Only for a ladies’ dance called
al-tabl
.’ (Joyce Grenfell came to mind:

So gay the band,

So giddy the sight,

Full evening dress is a must,

But the zest goes out of a beautiful waltz

When you dance it bust to bust.)

Habibah was the perfect hostess. She was a keen collector of Dhofari lore and gossip, and a talented cook. In Salalah I grew fat on chickens in
mulukhiyyah
, mutton with garlic and okra, and the fish called Sultan Ibrahim, fried and dipped in sesame paste. The
mulukhiyyah
always took me back to Cairo and our first meeting, in the City of the Dead, in a house full of sisters and bewitching smells near the mausoleum of Qayt Bey. Muhammad, a friend originally from Birmingham, had fallen in love with –
inter alia
– Habibah’s nose. He took me to plead his case with her father. My speech was finely honed, thickly honeyed; he consented, they married. They worked in Cairo, England and Hungary, and were now living in a villa in the coconutty suburbs of Salalah. From here, Muhammad inspected schools while Habibah explored areas of local culture which few outsiders have penetrated. Who else could have told me that Dhofari men like hair on a woman’s legs?

‘Don’t expect us to drink your bathwater,’ she had warned me when I arrived.

‘I’m sorry?’

She picked up a book – a Lebanese edition of the
Travels
– and opened it at a marked page: ‘“When we washed our hands after the meal,”’ she read, ‘“one of the sons of Shaykh Abu Bakr took the water in which we had washed, drank some of it, and sent the servant with the rest of it to his wives and children, and they too drank it. This is what they do with all visitors to them in whom they perceive indications of goodness.”’ She shut the book. ‘You see, I’ve been doing my homework.’

I was impressed. Habibah went on: ‘The tomb and hospice of Shaykh Abu Bakr, where they entertained IB, are a bit of a problem. They’re somewhere inside the Ribat Palace complex, so they may be difficult to get to. The same goes for the tombs of the Rasulid sultans.
But
you’ll be pleased to know that we’re almost next door to al-Balid.’

Again, she had thrown me:
al-balid
means ‘the silly man’. ‘Who’s he?’

Habibah gave me a hermetic look, suggestive of ancient wisdom. ‘Al-Balid is a local pronunciation of al-Balad, “Town”. In other words IB’s City of Zafar, where he stayed with the preacher Isa ibn Ali. I think’, she said, smiling, ‘I have passed the test to be your research assistant.’

My list of Battutiana for Zafar, or Dhofar, was long, and I could do with help in tracking them down. The list was also varied. Fourteenth-century Dhofar was a cosmopolitan place which belonged not so much to the Arabian Peninsula as to the monsoon. Now far from the familiar central Islamic lands, IB was confronted by the new and the strange: coconuts, dried sardines as animal fodder, slave women running the
suq
, and elephantiasis and scrotal hernias ‘from which God preserve us!’ All of these I intended to investigate, together with various sites mentioned by IB. It was unfortunate that the hospice and tomb of IB’s holy host were out of bounds inside the Sultan’s palace; but, as it happened, I had already found the saint’s tomb, or part of it, without even trying.

In England several months before, I had happened to ring up an old friend, an historian of Islamic art. We chatted about my travel plans. ‘I suppose you’ll go looking for that Dhofari holy man IB mentioned,’ Venetia said.

‘I didn’t know you were a fan of IB.’

‘Oh, I dip into him now and again. And I co-authored an article on his
shaykh
’s tombstone. It’s in London. In the V&A.’

And so, by a fluke, was I, ringing from a public phone in the basement.

The tombstone is covered in dense and accomplished script and decorated with deeply carved mosque lamps. As Venetia points out in her article, it is Gujarati work, probably from Cambay. Also in the Victoria and Albert Museum are two similar stones from the tomb of al-Wathiq, the Rasulid governor of Dhofar and a very great-uncle of my Yemeni friend Hasan. All these monuments had been seen by IB, who noted that the tombs were places of refuge for criminals and discontented soldiers. He would of course have been utterly appalled by their removal – and no less amazed that
they
should have ended up in a wonder-house in the distant, barbaric island of Anqiltarah.

The arrival of IB’s ship at the city of Dhofar took place in state:

The sultan’s slaves come out to meet ships in a
sambuq
, carrying with them a complete set of robes for the owner of the vessel or his agent, and also for the captain and the
kirani
[Anglo-Indian ‘cranny’], who is the ship’s clerk. Three horses are brought for them, on which they mount and proceed with drums and trumpets playing before them from the seashore to the sultan’s residence, where they make their salutations to the vizier and the
amir jandar
[the commander of the army]. For three nights, hospitality is supplied to all who are in the vessel. These people do this in order to gain the goodwill of the ship owners, and they are men of humility, good dispositions, virtue, and affection for strangers.

The sultan of the time, al-Mughith, was a grandson of al-Wathiq of the V&A tombstone. IB was staying next to the palace but did not meet him personally. Al-Mughith, he says, was only seen at Friday prayers; when he emerged from the palace at other times, he always travelled in a camel litter ‘covered with a white curtain embroidered in gold; the sultan and his familiar ride in it in such a way as not to be seen’ – the medieval equivalent of a limousine with tinted windows. Moreover, anyone caught gawping was severely beaten: ‘Consequently the inhabitants, when they hear that the sultan is at large, run away from his route.’

Dhofar had been incorporated into the Rasulid state of Yemen by al-Muzaffar, the great-grandfather of IB’s reclusive sultan. I have quoted this energetic sovereign on the aphrodisiac properties of the skink; he was also a prolific author on other subjects as diverse as Islamic jurisprudence and the science of stain removal. Despite his busy writing schedule, he still found time to conquer Mecca and extend his rule in other directions. When, in 1278, the Hadrami ruler of Dhofar impounded a ship from Aden, al-Muzaffar had a perfect pretext for an expedition. The Rasulid force took so long on the road that al-Muzaffar grew thin from worry and the rings dropped off his fingers; but in the event Dhofar fell after a brief resistance. ‘Our
troops
’, he said, ‘took five months to reach their goal, and five days to take it.’

The city prospered under the Rasulids, and IB saw it at the height of its wealth. The dynasty, however, fizzled out early in the fifteenth century. As Muhammad and I left the villa to explore the medieval town, I wondered what had happened to the descendants of al-Muzaffar, al-Wathiq and al-Mughith. Judging by my experiences so far, I half expected to bump into a late-twentieth-century Rasulid; then reminded myself that it was all a long time ago.

We came to a break in the coconut groves and a large fenced-off area. Inside was a high mound, the site of the palace which IB called ‘the Castle’ and an earlier traveller, Ibn al-Mujawir, ‘al-Qahirah’ – Cairo, the Victorious. We climbed the tell, passing incongruously new-looking walls, and stood in the breeze on the summit. Before us lay a tufty ruin-field that ran down to the shore and the creek, now silted up, where IB had arrived from Africa. Behind, beyond a shining empty interspace lapped by coconut palms, rose the Qara Mountains. This inland vista resembled some imagined geography – the great Gromboolian plain, perhaps, and the Hills of the Chankly Bore.

Towards the shore we found the remains of the dog-legged Sea Gate through which the ships’ masters and merchants, crannies, supercargoes and IB had come to Cairo-on-Sea, brought by the monsoon, greeted by fanfares and splendid in robes; now it is lost in a waste of tussocks, smashed bottles, rotting limestone and windblown sand. The mosque, however, presented a different picture: much of the masonry of its walls had been plundered, but the interior had sprouted a small forest of brand-new polygonal columns. Here we were joined by a European archaeologist, who enthused about the process of consolidation which was, he said, only just beginning. He had a gleam in his eye, and clearly belonged to the Knossos school of archaeology.

‘I thought archaeologists were meant to dig down, not build up,’ said Muhammad after the man had gone.

I had my suspicions about the columns, the new masonry on the palace mound, the cement-block paths which were being laid across the site, and the designer lamp standards which wouldn’t have looked out of place by the pool of the Holiday Inn along the road. The site, it seemed, was being turned into a tourist attraction, like the
homogenized
sandcastle forts of the north. I pictured a visitors’ centre where they would display excerpts from IB – minus, of course, nasty smells, messy betel and scrotal hernias. The city of Dhofar had been systematically robbed of its stone by old Sultan Sa’id; now, under his son, the little that remained was being systematically tarted up. ‘Places,’ quoted al-Maqrizi,

when you reflect on them, resemble men:

Some are inclined to happiness, others to grief.

At present, the
genius loci
of the city of Dhofar was not a happy one.

Back home, Qahtan came to tea. He had driven the minibus on the last leg of my journey to Salalah, refused my fare and given me a tour of the city. My first encounter with a Dhofari on home ground confirmed IB’s views about their virtue and affection for strangers. Now, Qahtan agreed that the medieval site had an unhappy atmosphere, but put it down to earlier events. ‘Al-Balid’, he said, ‘was destroyed by God. Some people say its inhabitants were wasteful, that they wore fine silks once and then threw them away. Others say that the king was, well,’ he looked at the carpet, ‘… going with his daughter, or even that it was the City of Sodom.’ These destruction stories were like locusts, swarming, landing in one spot, then passing on elsewhere.

A couple of miles to the west of the medieval city of Dhofar is an area called al-Haffah. Habibah had identified it as IB’s commercial suburb, ‘al-Harja … one of the dirtiest, most stinking and fly-ridden of bazaars, because of the quantity of fruit and fish sold in it’. It is still the main shopping centre; but in the Qabusian age the smells have been banished. One aspect of IB’s description, however, had not changed.