Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (52 page)

As medieval Islamic tourism went, a city break in Christian Constantinople was something of a rarity. But IB was by no means the only Muslim in the capital. ‘Muslims in Constantinople’, wrote al-Umari, ‘are shown respect and hospitality. Indeed, some are resident in the city. Praise God, they suffer no contempt or scorn, but are allowed to have their mosques and imams.’ He added, perhaps wishfully, that any emperor who mistreated the Muslim community risked being deposed by the Patriarch. The tradition of respect was a long one. Ibn Rustah, writing in about 900, says that the Emperor would invite all the Muslim prisoners-of-war to Christmas dinner. ‘Huge amounts of food were served, both hot and cold. As it was
brought
in the Master of Ceremonies called out, “By the life of the Emperor’s head, I declare this banquet entirely free of pork products!”’ On leaving, the prisoners were each given two gold dinars and three silver dirhams.

I found the Palace of Blachernae next door to a football pitch and a piece of waste ground dotted with goats. There were no fanfares; only a man trying out his novelty car horn at the gate. Neither were there whispering guards or silent courtiers, mummified in cloth of gold and etiquette. And there were no tourists. The place looked totally unvisited; but a bulky woman bumbled out of her cement bungalow, plonked impertinently in the palace courtyard, and took 300,000 lira off me. (Inflation is nothing new: IB noticed that the Byzantine gold hyperperon, debased under Andronicus, ‘is not good coin’.) Only one bit of the palace remained, a three-storey arcaded façade of grey stone chequered in rusty brick. Behind it, the floors had gone and the walls were cobwebbed and fire-blackened. IB remembered seeing ‘mosaics of creatures both animate and inanimate’; I scanned the ground, looking for tesserae among the rubbish, until I saw a glint of gold. I stooped down … A curtain twitched in the bungalow: the Mistress of Blachernae was watching. The gold tessera was a discarded sweet-wrapper.

*

Of all the churches IB visited, only one is immediately identifiable. ‘It is called in their language
Aya Sufiya
. I can only describe its exterior. As for its interior I did not see it.’ But what an exterior! – a scrummage of vaults, semidomes and buttresses, a rippling architectonic musculature hefting up the huge central cupola like the world on Atlas’s shoulders.

Not that IB noticed. Or rather, what remained in his memory was two-dimensional: marble paving and
pietra dura
in the temenos of the church, gold and silver plaques on its doors. Also he recalled people – judges, pen-pushers from the Patriarchate, churchwardens, sweepers and lamplighters. IB’s is not a photographic memory, but that of a miniaturist in which figures are set against richly decorated planes. Two figures are central, one of them IB himself. I stood before the west front of Hagia Sophia, among the chattering coach parties and fallen conkers, and tried to picture their meeting. It is one of the most extraordinary in the whole literature of travel.

Account of the King Jirjis, who became a Monk
. This king invested his son with the kingdom, consecrated himself to the service of God, and built a monastery outside this city, on the bank of its river. I was out one day with the Greek appointed to ride with me when we chanced to meet this king, walking on foot, wearing hair-cloth garments, and with a felt bonnet on his head. He had a long white beard and a fine face, which bore traces of his austerities; before and behind him was a body of monks, and he had a pastoral staff in his hand and a rosary around his neck. When the Greek saw him he dismounted and said to me, ‘Dismount, for this is the king’s father.’ When the Greek saluted him the king asked about me, then stopped and said to the Greek (who knew the Arabic tongue), ‘Say to this Saracen, “I clasp the hand that has entered Jerusalem and the foot that has walked within the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Resurrection, and Bethlehem”,’ and so saying he put his hand upon my feet and passed it over his face. I was amazed at their belief in one who, though not of their religion, has entered these places. He then took me by the hand and as I walked with him asked me about Jerusalem and the Christians living there, and questioned me at length. I entered with him into the enclosure of the Great Church. When he approached the main door, there came out a number of priests and monks to salute him, for he is one of their great men in the monastic life,
and
when he saw them he let go my hand. I said to him, ‘I should like to go into the church with you,’ but he said to the interpreter, ‘Tell him that every one who enters it must needs prostrate himself before the great cross, for this is a rule laid down by the ancients and it cannot be contravened.’ So I left him and he entered alone and I did not see him again.

The monk was of course not the Emperor’s father but his grandfather, Andronicus II. Deposed in 1328, he had remained for a time, Lear-like, losing his sight, in the echoing emptiness of Blachernae, until forced to take on the monk’s habit. Gibb and others have pointed out two further problems in IB’s account. The first is that the elder Andronicus’s monastic name was not Jirjis, George, but Antony; the second that, however we stretch the elastic chronology of the
Travels
, by the time IB arrived in Constantinople the ex-Emperor was dead.

The name is not so worrying. After all IB dictated the
Travels
more than twenty years on, without notes, and to have remembered any Greek names at all would have been a remarkable feat. Some of his stabs are far from the mark. For example, the Golden Horn appears as ‘Absumi’ – probably a garbled version of
potamos
, river. ‘Andronicus’, with its unArabic consonant cluster -
ndr
-, could conceivably be lopped and deformed by an Arab and by the passage of time into ‘Jirjis’. (I am grasping at a phonemic straw; but then, several people in Yemen are convinced that my name is Ahmad Kandash. Work that one out.)

Timing, however, is a greater problem. Andronicus-Antony died in February 1332; IB, according to Gibb, could not have arrived in Constantinople before September. Perhaps then IB misunderstood the monk’s identity, or was misled; perhaps the monk was another member of the imperial family; or perhaps,
pace
Gibb, the conundrum of IB’s chronology
could
be twisted into a solution, like a four-dimensional Rubik’s Cube.

Does any of this matter? Whoever Jirjis was, the meeting – a meeting – did take place. The details are convincing – the pastoral staff, the rosary, the coarse garments, the hand held then released. Gibb himself, a canny and not unsceptical scholar, admits the passage bears the ‘unmistakable stamp of truth’. And it is a meeting that takes place still: with Umm Baha in the Egyptian desert, the old stationer
of
Aleppo, Hajji Baba of Konya, the Imam of Feodosia; and with Hasan in San’a, with whom I often saunter around predestination and free will, Aquinas and Mu’tazilism, keeping in step until we come to the inevitable Qur’anic threshold – ‘Whoever adopts a
din
other than Islam, it will not be accepted of him.’
Din
is religion;
din
is also custom, the rules of the ancients. Meetings, and partings.

In the course of a year of travelling I had been inside mosques from Tangier to the Crimea. In the seventeen I have lived in San’a, a place where the rules of the ancients still apply, I have never entered a single one. I think I knew how IB felt, standing at the door of Hagia Sophia, peering into the great murmuring vault.

Inside, it was chilly. The paving and panelling, all of marble, exuded a thin film of sweat. The floor, white, worn and polished by feet, seemed to flow like molten wax. The walls were of many colours and patterns – thrushes’ eggs, liver sausage, trout-skin, blood slides. Paul the Silentiary enumerated the sources of the marble: Carystus, Phrygia, Sparta, the Iassian hills, Lydia, Lybia, the lands of the Moors and the Celts and of Atrax. I looked ahead and up, into the vast emptiness. It is a space that could swallow Nôtre-Dame, that ingests even tour groups, breaking their voices down into a low ambient hum.

It wasn’t always so empty. ‘Immense was the supply of heads and bones, crosses and images, that were scattered by this revolution over the churches of Europe,’ said Gibbon of the pillage of Constantinople and Hagia Sophia by Dandolo’s ‘crusaders’. But Byzantium, if Ludolph von Suchem is to be believed, had limitless stocks: when the Emperor’s Catalan mercenaries asked for a bonus payment in the form of holy relics over a century after the Venetian sack, ‘he granted their prayers, set up as many bodies of saints as the Catalans numbered heads, and the gentlemen stood afar off and chose each a body in turn, according to their rank’.

With the Ottoman conquest of 1453 and the conversion of Hagia Sophia to a mosque, the new Islamic broom swept the relics and images away. The mosaics were whitewashed over. Now, though, the whitewash is being removed. My eye was drawn to the focal point of the apse, to a patch of cobalt and gold. As I strained to make it out, someone switched on a spotlight and the image sprang out of the gloom: the Virgin and Child. The Child was turning in His mother’s lap, raising His fingers – to catch her hand, or to bless? I climbed to the gallery for a better look.

From close to, Christ seemed a miniature boy rather than an infant – too old for laps. He looked slightly upwards, almost smiling. Mary gazed off to the right, the north, as if at some distant event, detached, resigned. I think her hand was feeling for His, to cling on; but it was hard to say – the movement was arrested, a single frame caught between motion and stillness, divinity and humanity.

It was a strange image, full of emotion but devoid of sentiment, beautiful and disturbing at once. Stranger still was that it was flanked by a pair of hanging roundels bearing the Arabic words ‘Allah’ and ‘Muhammad’, sombre as funerary hatchments. The meeting was surprising, but utterly logical: mystic letters, God and His prophet in Arabic script, floating next to the Logos in human form. If al-Khadir, Elijah and St George could get together, then why not God in His abstract and fleshly forms?

More surprising, on reflection, was that it had taken secularism to reveal this happy double theophany – the militant secularism of Atatürk that had turned the church-mosque into a museum and stripped away both the rules of the ancients and their whitewash. There was, I remembered, an Islamic precedent. The Ka’bah at Mecca, wrote al-Harawi in his pilgrim guide, ‘had originally contained images of the angels and the prophets, of the Tree of Paradise, of Abraham, and of Jesus the son of Mary and his mother. In the year in which he occupied Mecca, the Prophet gave orders that these images should be obliterated, with the exception of that of the Messiah and his mother.’ Not long after the Prophet’s death, the Ka’bah was burned. Among the victims of the fire was the Madonna of Mecca, Our Lady of the Ka’bah.

Here the juxtaposition survived, more eloquent than a septuagint of sermons. And could there have been a setting more appropriate than the junction of Europe and Asia, and a building dedicated to Hagia Sophia, Divine Sagacity? It was strange to think that out there, right now, people were at each other’s throats, doctrinally, physically, hounding each other with dogmas, and had been for the last fourteen centuries. Strange, and blackly funny. Someone deserves an alpha for wit, an omega for taste. The Devil, presumably.

*

After a month in Constantinople IB said farewell to his princess, turned east once more and set off to milk the teats of Time. It was
time
also for me to part from him, at least for the moment. My notebooks were bursting – 856 pages of A5, closely written – and I hadn’t even reached the end of the first
sifr
, or volume, of his
safar
, his journey. (
Sifr
is originally a scroll, something you unroll as you read it;
safar
is the unscrolling of the earth beneath you as you travel.
Sifr
and
safar
, reading and rolling, riding and writing: that process as circular as the round world and as old as Gilgamesh.) God willing, IB and I would meet up again somewhere between here and China. We had come a long way since our first meeting in the Greater Yemen Bookshop, but there was much further still to go, and more wonders to look for. Many more: ‘For God’, said old Captain Buzurg of Ramhurmuz, ‘created his wonders in ten parts; and nine of these ten are in the East.’

I went to a travel agent’s to confirm my ticket. As I was waiting, someone came in and asked in French about a flight to Belgrade. I turned and saw a man in his early twenties, small and wiry, beady and feral as a ferret. He wore hip black jeans, a small black backpack and a black triceps-revealing T-shirt. Judging by his accent and colouring, he had to be a Maghribi. He was clean shaven but his armpits, I noticed, were unIslamically hairy. There was something puckishly attractive about him.

He wasn’t getting very far, so I translated from the travel agent’s English into Arabic. Jamal replied in Arabic heavily sauced with French. ‘Tell him’, the agent said, ‘that he can’t get a single. He must buy a return.’