Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (42 page)

Time which antiquates Antiquities, and hath an art to make dust of all things, hath yet spared these
minor
Monuments
. They were less than minor: they were minimal. But, for a moment, I felt I had unearthed a colossus.

*

Back in Salalah, Qahtan, his
shaykh
, a goat and I went for a picnic on a mountainside from which only three of us returned. (I shall put it in writing: contrary to Sir Wilfred Thesiger’s statement in
Arabian Sands
, the Khawar are a noble clan and generous to strangers.) My mention of the leopard spoor in Wadi Hadbaram elicited a long story from Qahtan about a three-hour wrestling match between a leopard and a Mahri. It ended with the Mahri sticking his hand down the leopard’s throat and ripping out its gorge, which he carried in triumph to hospital. The man, however, soon tired of newfangled treatments and discharged himself. He stewed his victim and plastered his wounds with leopard lard.

I was reluctant to leave, reluctant to wear trousers again (for most of the past month I had lived in waistcloths), reluctant to say farewell to friends. But I was in danger of becoming a stationary thing, of little worth. As we parted, Habibah told me I’d be missed; not only by her, Muhammad and Nadia, but also by several Dhofari ladies of her acquaintance who had been discussing, she said, the exceeding whiteness of my legs.

On second thoughts, perhaps it was time to get back into trousers.

After performing the Mecca pilgrimage once more IB left Jeddah by sea, bound for India; ‘but’, he wrote, ‘that was not decreed for me’. He ended up instead at Aydhab, from where he retraced his earlier route, via Cairo, to Syria. From the Syrian port of al-Ladhiqiyyah he sailed to Alanya, and began a tour of the Turkoman sultanates of Anatolia
.

Anatolia

Hajji Baba, the Skystone and Other Mysteries

‘When he attended the
sema
, the dome of the mosque would rise into the air and he would see the revolutions of the angels.’

al-Nabhani (d. 1931),
Jami karamat al-awliya
, on the dervish

Sumbul al-Rumi

A
T THREE O’CLOCK
in the morning my neighbour the travesty artiste made an intimate suggestion on the balcony of the Yayla Hotel (‘Cheap and Comfort’). Half Turk, half Greek, male during the day and female when he performed, as he did nightly, at the Banana Club, he was way beyond the brief of inverse archaeology. I politely declined the suggestion.

Sleep was not among the few amenities on offer at the Yayla. Since midnight the hotel had shaken to an incessant, seismic beat –
boom-shagga-boom-shagga-boom
– from Pub 13 across the road. ‘What are they doing?’ I asked the travesty artiste, as a stream of young men went in.

He sighed. ‘Dancing, and looking for girlfriends.’

We sat and drank
raki
and talked about cleavage simulation. At four o’clock I went to my room and lay down. The bedsprings rattled to the disco beat, like drumsnares. Finally, at five, Pub 13 fell silent. In the stillness, rock gave way to Prufrock, and I asked myself what I was here for. It was not my first existential crisis; but nowhere had it been as profound as here in Alanya.

Mediterranean Turkey was doubly foreign. Like IB, I had left the Arabophone world; unlike him, I also seemed to have entered one
where
they spoke an entirely different cultural language – a sort of Euro-Teutonic. Most of the tourists in Alanya were
ur
Germans but even some of the Turkish visitors affected rimless spectacles and
gemütlich
lapdogs. Sauerkraut was served with everything; every other building seemed to be a disco. One nightclub, the Whiskey Go Go, offered ‘Sex on the Beach’. To be fair, it was not an activity but a pop group; but it seemed to sum up the ineffable crassitude of the place. Where was the Alanya of IB?

Gone.

So it appeared, anyway, as dawn broke. But later that morning, swimmy with lack of sleep, I climbed the road to the headland and came to another Alanya. It began with a gateway, the entrance to IB’s ‘magnificent and formidable citadel, built by the exalted Sultan Ala ’l-Din’. As I wrote down the inscription above the gate I wondered if IB had also stood here with pen and notebook.

Ala ’l-Din, the Seljuk Sultan of Rum, was keen to leave his mark. He gave the ancient Coracesium not only a new citadel but also a new name – al-
Al
ā
’iyyah, after himself. (An inexplicable Turkish aversion to voiced pharyngeals, glottal stops and geminate semi-vowels soon deformed this into ‘Alaya’; the intrusive
n
is probably part of a process by which the place will eventually become ‘Almanya’, or Germany.) At the same time, according to a helpful information board at a café beside the gate, Ala ’l-Din was busy with the traditional Turkish sport of Armenian-bashing: ‘He purifies the coastal regions from Armenians,’ it said, in a frisky historic present surrounded by winking fairy lights.

IB arrived in Alanya a century later, in 1331. The glorious line of the Seljuks of Rum had ended twenty years earlier when the last sultan, pressed by creditors and by the Tatar Ilkhan of the Two Iraqs, took poison. That other great Turkish dynasty, that of the Ottomans, was still in its infancy. The Ottoman baby was rapidly turning into a hyperactive toddler; but for the moment it shared Anatolia with nine other statelets, founded by rival Turkoman chieftains among the ruins of the Seljuk sultanate. Western European travellers thought the Turkomans uncouth and bestial; Ludolph von Suchem went as far as to call them ‘in all respects mean, and with the same customs as
Frisians
’. IB, however, was among co-religionists; moreover, he now had a taste for princes, however petty or newly Islamized. In Turkey he was in for a multiplicity of sultans. I had little idea of what
remained
from their short-lived princedoms. I knew there were plenty of Seljuk and Ottoman remains; but what had the Karamano
ğ
ulları, the Aydıno
ğ
ulları, the Candaro
ğ
ulları (or
İ
sfendiyaro
ğ
ulları) and their fellow Turkoman dynasties left behind, other than their very long names? In the annals of Anatolia they were little more than a parenthesis.

Alanya, away from the sauerkraut and Sex on the Beach, was magnificently Seljuk. I explored the citadel, contouring with its walls around the headland and losing myself in lanes loud with the racket of crickets. Down at sea-level a fat Seljuk tower loomed over the harbour like a giant biscuit barrel. Nearby was a vaulted dockyard. It squatted in the water, solid as a Victorian viaduct, each arch big enough to admit a Seljuk warship; the inside eddied with light and shadow, part grotto, part undercroft and slippery with seaweed.

IB arrived here from al-Ladhiqiyyah on a Genoese merchantman. ‘We travelled with a favouring wind,’ he remembered, ‘and the Christians treated us honourably and took no passage-money from us.’ Earlier writers had also praised the Genoese mariners, who enjoyed a virtual monopoly on Mediterranean shipping. ‘They are a dark-eyed people with the same colouring and finely shaped noses as the Arabs,’ wrote the twelfth-century geographer al-Zuhri. ‘Indeed, they are the Quraysh of the Christians,’ he went on, paying them the highest possible compliment – Quraysh are the tribe of the Prophet. For their part the Genoese occasionally gave their sons orientalizing names like ‘Turco’ and ‘Soldan’, so the admiration must have been mutual.

Now, though, a different sort of Frank dominated the Mediterranean. I sat in the dockyard and watched them jet-skiing, parascending, and bungee-jumping off a crane across the bay. In a way I envied them - not their frantic forms of relaxation, but their conviviality. I faced a prospect of one-night cheap hotels, empty
raki
bottles and no company save the shade of IB and my diary, mute tyrant of my evenings. IB himself had come to Turkey with a
rafiq
, a travelling companion, a Tunisian called Abdullah al-Tuzari. (He was to remain with him until his death in Goa a dozen years later, a dim figure of whom, beyond the slender facts of his name and the time of his demise, we learn next to nothing.) I could have done with my own flesh-and-blood
rafiq
, someone with whom I could speak the same language.

*

Antalya, along the coast, was less furiously touristic. Ottoman houses, and streams – ‘springs of excellent water,’ IB wrote, ‘sweet and very cold in summer’ – tumbled down the hill to a perfect harbour. Looking on to the town from above, I could make out bits of the walls which according to IB had divided the various communities of the port – Franks, Byzantines, Jews and Muslims. Now, fragmented, they made a dot-to-dot puzzle within the scattered jigsaw of gardens and pantiled roofs. Above all this rose Sultan Ala ’l-Din’s Yivli Minare, the Fluted Minaret, like a chunky propelling pencil.

As usual, IB was more interested in people than in buildings, and he remembered a meeting on the second day of his stay in Antalya. A young cobbler came up to him, ‘wearing shabby clothes and a felt bonnet’, and invited him to dinner. Despite his appearance, the man was leader of the Akhis, a sort of cross between a guild, a dining society and an Islamic YMCA. IB was duly treated to ‘a great banquet, with fruits and sweetmeats, after which the Akhis began singing and dancing’. The welcome was to extend across Anatolia. IB praised the Akhis not only for their hospitality, but also for their ardour ‘to restrain the hands of the tyrannous and to kill the agents of the police’. Strange as this may sound, in fourteenth-century Islamic cities the constabulary were a byword for corruption, and no figure was more hated than the copper’s nark.

The Akhi network disbanded not many decades after IB’s Anatolian visit, but I was pleased to discover near the harbour a small mosque built by a certain Akhi Yusuf. The imam showed me the founder’s tomb. I wondered if I had discovered IB’s shabby and generous cobbler, but found out via the imam’s Qur’anic Arabic that Akhi Yusuf had lived a good eighty years too early. It was a curious conversation, full of long pauses and verilies – the Islamic equivalent of talking Latin with a pre-Vatican II priest.

Still in search of Akhi memorabilia, I tried a different tack. IB described the furnishings of the Akhis’ hospice with unusual precision. Among them were ‘five candelabra of the kind called
baysus
, each in the form of a brass column with three feet, which supports a brass lamp with a tube for the wick’. A visit to Antalya Museum, however, while it turned up candlesticks Roman and Ottoman (and exotica such as mystical flagellation aids and Santa Claus’s jawbone) produced no
baysus
. It also reminded me how much had happened in Asia Minor: a lot, and much of it far longer ago than the fourteenth
century
. The quantity of classical statuary alone was astonishing: beneath a portico stood a long line of emperors and demigods, all facing the doorway to the restoration workshop. It was the first time I had seen a museum where the exhibits, and not the visitors, queued. That parenthesis in history in which IB had visited Anatolia was, I now realized, a mere interjection.

That evening, I was sitting in the hotel restaurant feeling lost – linguistically, culturally, temporally – when a strange encounter took place. Not knowing how to summon the waiter in Turkish, I called him in the Arabic of San’a (‘
Ya Izzay!
’ carries better than ‘Er, excuse me …’). At this, two men on the next table suddenly turned and stared at me as if I had been the risen Lazarus.

After the initial shocks – theirs of discovering an Englishman who spoke Yemeni Arabic, mine, more unnerving, of finding out that they were Israelis – we exchanged histories. The Israelis had been born in Tel Aviv to Yemeni parents: Yirham’s came from a town towards Aden, Reuben’s from a village near San’a. We spoke in Arabic. Now and again, Reuben would hold up his hand and ask me to repeat something; then he would say the phrase to himself, shaking his head gently. ‘You see,’ he explained, ‘when I hear you … I remember my father and mother. Your speech was their speech’, his voice cracked, ‘exactly.’

I had released a warm flood of nostalgia. ‘When my great-grandmother died,’ said Yirham, ‘she was a hundred and five. And her last words were, “I want to go back to Yemen.”’

‘We’re always saying that,’ Reuben added. ‘Life isn’t easy. We orientals don’t get on with the Shiknaz, the Ashkenazis. And Tel Aviv is all rush. A hundred times worse than London. Yemen … Yemen we remember as somewhere unhurried. All that sitting around, telling stories, chewing
qat
.’

‘You make it sound like the Promised Land,’ I said.

They nodded.

Reuben excused himself. He returned with a damp towel. ‘Israeli
qat
,’ he announced.

I sat there until late at night, on the terrace of the Sun Rise Hotel, with the Zionist Enemy, exchanging jokes, proverbs, lines of songs, all of us missing Yemen, I a Yemen from which I had been absent too long, they a Yemen they had never seen, taking what Turkish law – if it had heard of it – would have regarded as a highly illegal drug. It was
probably
the worse
qat
I have ever chewed; but we were talking the same language.