Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (4 page)

For many Muslims, tomb visiting is something to be done regularly, like changing the oil in a car: it ensures the smooth running of history. History being people rather than artefacts, IB and other travellers headed for tombs in the places they visited as we might head for art galleries. The deceased, for their part, need human contact as much as the living. A Maghribi traveller who settled in Yemen never ceased to dwell guiltily on his family’s tombs lying unvisited back in Morocco, for ‘the dead feel pain if separated from their living relatives’; IB’s contemporary Ibn Khaldun wrote that the dead have sense perception, and that a dead man ‘sees the persons who attend the burial and hears what they say, and he hears the tapping of their shoes when they forsake him’. The idea of burning one’s dead is still considered extraordinary. I have not yet admitted to my Muslim friends that I forked my father’s ashes into a Lincolnshire flowerbed.

To translate oneself from
ville
to
madinah
, passing through the press of the Grand and Petit Soccos into Tangier proper, is to enter, if not another planet, then at least another continent. The street map I had resembled the biopsy of some many-vesicled organ and was next to useless. Besides, I didn’t know precisely where I was going. I headed upwards. Here, the light was different, diffusing off peeling walls of rose madder and primrose. The smell was different too, and there was an odour of long habitation, of centuries of simmering
tajines
.

At the top of the climb I reached a gateway. Inside it a dwarf was sitting on the step of a small shop. I asked him where I was. ‘This is Bab al-Asa, the Gate of the Stick. It’s where they used to flog people. Like this!’ he said, springing up and wielding an imaginary birch. When he had exhausted himself, I explained that I was looking for the tomb of IB.

‘Then you’ve come to the right place,’ said a voice from inside the shop. ‘I was IB’s
sa’is
.’

His syce? His groom? I looked into the shop and saw a dark-skinned man in a burnous, sitting on a donkey saddle.

‘Come in,’ said another voice.

I entered the shop, puzzled, and greeted the two men. The owner of the second voice, a lighter-skinned man, explained. ‘He means he acted the part of IB’s groom in the TV series.’ They both laughed. I was given a glass of tea, and the lighter man handed me a business card: ‘G
ROUPE
G
NAWA
E
XPRESS
T
ANGER
, Abdelmajid Domnati, Maître de Groupe’. The walls of the shop, or rather office, were covered in newspaper clippings, mostly in German; a number showed pictures of my three hosts with other musicians. ‘We have many fans in Germany,’ Abdelmajid explained. ‘They like the spiritual content of our music. The Stonz also were interested in Gnawa music.’

‘The who?’

‘You know – Brian Jones, Mick Jagger …’

‘Oh, those Stones.’

‘And look at this …’ He passed me a CD. Its cover showed a familiar bearded face. ‘You see … You have found IB! This was sent to us by a German friend, Burchard. He is their
maître de groupe
.’ The CD, entitled simply ‘Ibn Battouta’, was by a German band called Embryo. Frustratingly, the musicians had no CD player. In the space of twenty-four hours I had bumped into IB three times – on the plane, in the hotel, and now on a CD; but he remained inscrutable.

‘Come,’ said Abdelmajid, as though he had read my thoughts. ‘We shall visit the real IB.’

He led me out of the shop, through the Gate of the Stick, and into a perplexing three-dimensional maze of alleyways. We climbed up and down steps and passed through tunnels. Even though Abdelmajid lived in the area, we got lost and ended up against the blank wall of a dead end. Eventually, after asking the way, we turned into a steep and crooked lane – IB Street – and there before us was the tomb chamber, lying in deep shadows cast by tall houses.

‘Whoever is responsible for this has little taste,’ Abdelmajid said, eyeing some beige and chocolate tiles around the door. He was right: they could have been a remnant from a DIY megastore, and were set in grey cement rendering like the crust on a porridge pan. A boy was summoned to find the guardian. He soon returned with a grave,
shaven-headed
and grey-bearded man carrying a key. ‘Is he a Muslim?’ the guardian asked. Abdelmajid said that I was, but without much conviction, and then excused himself. I didn’t contradict him.

The interior of the tomb was lined with a dado of blue tiles; above this, the walls were painted pink and decorated with a silver arabesque frieze. Qur’ans rested on shelves, and around the walls hung strings of giant prayer beads. The tomb itself was covered in an embroidered black pall sheathed in transparent plastic, like the upholstery of a brand-new car. I said a brief prayer for the soul of IB, then reclined next to the guardian on a green satin cushion.

We sat in silence, in the presence of the physical IB. I could think of nothing to say, except that I didn’t think much of the pink. It wasn’t awe, or even anticlimax; it was a kind of extreme neutrality, brought on by everything turning out to be rather as expected. I had experienced the same feeling – or apathy, non-feeling – on first visiting the Pyramids.

A voice broke the silence – my own. ‘So this is IB.’

The guardian nodded. ‘He was born in this street. And from here he went on pilgrimage to the House of God. Reflect on how far he travelled, on foot and by sea, without cars or aeroplanes.’

I tried, dutifully, to reflect. There was another long silence. Then I remembered a question I had meant to ask. ‘Are there any members of the IB family here in Tangier?’

The question immediately sounded silly. It was like asking for the Chaucers in London.

‘There are none,’ said the guardian.

Wishing that Abdelmajid had not gone, I looked around the chamber for inspiration and noticed a small
mihrab
set into the wall, a niche showing the direction of Mecca. ‘Do people pray here?’

‘They come to recite the Holy Qur’an, after the dawn prayer.’

This raised my spirits. ‘Then I must try to come.’

‘It is better for you not to come. There are many drunkards and other wicked people about at that hour.’

Again we sat in silence. I could hear my watch ticking. Then I thanked the guardian, put a donation in the box – ‘It is not necessary,’ he said – and left with a last look back at the porridge-like walls.

I don’t know what I had expected from the tomb. Whatever it was, I had not found it. I suppose I had been hoping for a vibration or two. The tomb’s appearance, a combination of municipal washroom
and
front parlour, had not helped; a poker-work sign (‘Dunroamin’?) wouldn’t have been out of place. Neither had the poker-faced guardian, whom I could picture ferrying the dead across the Styx. Worse, phrases I had read about the tomb rose up to haunt me – ‘authenticity open to question’, ‘considerable doubt as to the true identity of its occupant’, ‘possibly some distant relative of the traveller’ – phrases which, in my desire to find the real, physical IB, I had conveniently buried.

Who then was the real IB?
The Concealed Pearls
, the Islamic biographical dictionary of the fourteenth century, lists him as Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yusuf, of the tribe of Lawatah and the city of Tangier, surnamed IB. The Lawatah are descendants of the Lebu, a people mentioned in Pharaonic records – the Libyans of the Greeks – who originated in the region of Cyrenaica. They spread into Egypt early on, and by the ninth century
AD
had settled in the far south-west of present-day Morocco; there are also said to be Christian Lawatah on Malta. After the coming of Islam the Lawatah, like many of the other tribes collectively known as Berbers, claimed an Arabian origin. There were plenty of stories to back up the idea. One told of a South Arabian ancestor wandering all the way to Libya, a journey of 1,800 miles – a fair distance given that he was looking for some lost camels. Historians from Ibn Khaldun onwards have gleefully trashed such tales; but while their reasoning may be based on sound scholarship, it all seems rather unfair – in the same league as denying Father Christmas. A family like IB’s were totally Arabized, and to pick nits about the traveller’s Arabness would be like questioning a Cornishman’s Englishness because his ancestors were Celts and not Anglo-Saxons. IB himself would have been aghast to be called a Berber, a word which in Arabic as in the European languages has the ring of ‘barbarian’.

IB’s family name is more of a problem. One theory explains ‘Battutah’ as a Maghribi diminutive of the Arabic
battah
, ‘duck’, and a pet version of the girl’s name Fatimah. The notion that ‘IB’ should mean ‘Son of the She-Duckling’ is charming enough to be plausible. But then so are the various other suggestions that have been put forward: Son of the Father of a Tassel/of an Egg-Shaped Bottle/of a Bad Woman with an Ellipsoidal Body. (‘Battut’, it should be added, is the Arabic for Donald Duck.)

My uneasy suspicion that I had come all the way to Tangier to visit the tomb not of IB but of some cousin of his many times removed – if its occupant was even that – was partly dispelled by lunch in La Grenouille on the rue Rembrandt. A BBC nature programme on crustaceans, broadcast by a Spanish satellite channel, was showing silently on a television set in the corner. I ate a solitary and excellent meal of snails, sole and
tarte au citron
. Over coffee, I decided to leave Tangier. I needed help, and I had a convoluted introduction to a gentleman in Rabat who might give it.

Later that afternoon I was in the Grand Socco, on my way to thank the kind Abdelmajid, when a man in a grubby white T-shirt sidled up and walked along beside me. ‘I saw you at the station,’ he said softly, in English.

I had indeed been at the railway station, booking a ticket to Rabat for the following day. I replied in Arabic, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch what you said.’

‘I saw you at the station,’ he repeated, in Arabic.

‘You are very observant.’

‘You did not travel.’ He was keeping pace beside me. Neither of us looked at the other.

‘What you say is true.’

‘You will not travel?’

‘God is the most knowing.’ I turned to face him. ‘I am an amateur of historical geography. Perhaps I might be of service?’

‘Thank you,’ said the man, reinsinuating himself into the crowd.

I found my way to the Gate of the Stick. The headquarters of the Groupe Gnawa Express were shut, so I continued upwards into the kasbah, the citadel. After several dead ends, I came to a lane which ran parallel to a long, high wall. This was punctuated by a small gateway, like the entrance to a walled garden. I turned into it, and found myself on a cliff overlooking the sea.

The transition from the introverted city to this blustery crag was a complete surprise. For a few moments, I felt dizzied and disorientated, like a sleepwalker who awakens inches from the head of a staircase. I sat on a low parapet perched high above the end of Africa and Islam.

Ludolph von Suchem, IB’s German contemporary, wrote that the Strait of Gibraltar was so narrow that ‘upon one bank there stands a Christian woman and on the other bank a heathen woman washing
their
clothes, and wrangling and quarrelling with one another’. I looked in vain for the coast of Europe. (Granted, it was a dim and vaporous day; but Suchem must have been a particularly gullible landlubber, for among the other sailors’ yarns he recorded is one about a great fish, ‘the Troya marina or sea-swine’. To frighten it away you had to ‘stare at it with a bold and terrible countenance’; conversely, you could feed it bread.) Neither could I see, beneath the waves, the remains of a bridge which medieval Arab geographers believed had joined the two continents, and which would be revealed again at the end of time.

Another legend, one which appears in some of the early Qur’anic commentaries, told that this spot had been the point of departure for Moses and al-Khadir. In the Qur’an, al-Khadir – the immortal ‘Green Man’ – was the Prophet’s spiritual guide on an epic quest for the Fountain of Life; he later became a metaphor for far travel and honorary grand master of all Islamic mystical orders. Later, I was to bump into him in Damascus, and by the Black Sea. Now, sitting here on the parapet, I remembered this Islamic Gilgamesh; and thought of that sudden and dreamlike transition through the gate in the high wall, from the intervolved alleyways of the city to this disclosure of the wide sea – where, down in the port, a ship was now calling its passengers, bellowing ‘Come! … Come!’; and felt that I had stepped into the frontispiece of a book of travels far older than IB.

Even if I ignored the doubts about its authenticity, I could not imagine IB in that tomb, with its pink walls and dismal guardian. But I could picture him up here on this parapet, looking out to sea like a Moorish Boy Raleigh. This was where the vibrations were!

I left the parapet with the sun, and wandered back down through the
madinah
. The cafés on the place de France were full, but I found a table on the boulevard Pasteur and sat down to write up my diary. A few minutes later I became aware of an animated Australian voice at the next table.