Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (53 page)

‘Why?’

‘This is the rule. He has an Algerian passport.’

I translated. Jamal decided to give up.

We left together and strolled through the Byzantine Hippodrome. Jamal talked of his passion for kung fu, I of mine for IB.

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t try to follow IB through Algeria,’ he said.

‘You mean the problems?’

He nodded. ‘I’ve got problems there myself,’ he confided. ‘I can’t go back. You see, I got into trouble with the police.’ He pointed to his crotch.

My mind somersaulted through the possibilities.

‘I was in prison. They burned my prick with cigarettes.’

In answer to my wordless question, he pulled a wallet from his
pocket
and extracted a grubby passport-sized photograph. It showed a young man with a bushy, Islamic-puritan beard. The face looked familiar. ‘Who is it?’

Jamal laughed. ‘It’s me! They locked me up and tortured me, all because I was a Muslim with a beard.’

I stared at him, astonished. The transformation was almost unbelievable; but the faces were indeed the same. ‘And now?’

‘I’m a Muslim without a beard.’

We walked on. ‘If I can get to Belgrade, I’ll cross from there to Italy, and from Italy to France,
in sha Allah
. I’ve got a diploma in animal health, and I want to carry on studying, get a degree.’

Over tea in a café, Jamal talked more about his future. I wasn’t taking it in – I was still dizzy from the revelation of his past. I just watched and listened to this prodigy, this kung fu fundamentalist. He had successfully repackaged himself. That, I supposed, was what it was all about: packaging. You have a beard, you get tortured; you have an Algerian passport, you can only get a return. Rules of the ancients.

Suddenly he looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get going. You know what the Prophet said, God bless and protect him? “Seek knowledge, even if you have to go to China.”’

‘Or France,’ I said.

We entrusted each other to the safekeeping of God.

I watched him walking away, rucksack bobbing, until he was swallowed up by the pavement crowds. I would never raise IB’s ghost; but there went his spirit, restless as ever.

Bibliographical Note

There are some thirty known manuscripts of the
Travels
. The earliest may be in the hand of IB’s editor and amanuensis, Ibn Juzayy. From the provenance of the manuscripts, it seems that the work circulated mainly in North Africa. Abridgements were however known in the Levant and one of these, written in Aleppo in the seventeenth century, appeared in an English version in 1829. (The translator, the Reverend Samuel Lee, began his career as a carpenter’s apprentice in Shropshire, picked up eighteen languages in his spare time, became Chaplain to Cambridge Gaol and ended up in the professorial chairs of both Arabic and Hebrew.)

Defrémery and Sanguinetti’s edition of the complete Arabic text appeared in Paris between 1853 and 1858 (a reprint was published in the same city in 1979). It has been translated into many languages, including Swedish, Armenian and Chinese, and even retranslated, for unfathomable reasons, from Spanish to Arabic. The Hakluyt Society accepted H.A.R. Gibb’s proposal for a five-volume English version as long ago as 1922. Gibb died in 1971, shortly before the publication of Volume III. Professor Beckingham had by this time taken over the project; the fourth and final volume of text appeared in 1994. Beckingham himself died in 1998; Volume V, consisting of indexes, was published in 2000 under the supervision of Professor A.D.H. Bivar. All five volumes are available via the Hakluyt Society, c/o The British Library, London. (Gibb also produced a single-volume abridgement in 1929, reprinted in London in 1983.)

Dr Abdelhadi Tazi, in his Arabic edition (Rabat, 1997), has synthesized much of the Western scholarship on IB and made it available to the Arab reader, adding many valuable insights of his own. His Introduction is long and fascinating, his indexes extremely useful.

For a full bibliography of works on and pertinent to the
Travels
, the
reader
of English can do no better than to consult Ross E. Dunn’s excellent
The Adventures of Ibn Battuta
, a historian’s view of the work ‘within the rich, transhemispheric cultural setting of medieval Islam’ (Berkeley and Los Angeles, London and Sydney, 1986). The IB bibliography is still growing, and in surprising directions: a collection of papers published by the Ecole Supérieure Roi Fahd de Traduction and entitled
Ibn Battuta
(Tangier, 1996), includes feminist, Jungian, post-imperial/-colonial and ethno-semiotic analyses of the text. If he knows about it, the old Tangerine must be perplexed, but not a little pleased.

Acknowledgements

Many people helped me during my travels. They include, in Morocco, Muhammad Dahduh of the Abdullah Gannun al-Hasani Library, Abdelmajid Domnati, William and Arlene Fullerton, Hasan Ridwan and, especially, IB’s effervescent editor, Dr Abdelhadi Tazi of Rabat; in Egypt, Rachel Davey, Toby Macklin, Muhammad Nur and Lionel Thompson; in Syria, Hikmat Hilal and Abdullah al-Jumahi; in Oman, Claudia Cooper, Steve Dover, Abdullah al-Fadli, Michael Gallagher, Thumna al-Gandel, Shahina Ghazanfar, Colin Hepburn, Qahtan Khawar, HE Malallah al-Liwati, Dr Isam al-Rawas, Awfit al-Shahri, Ali al-Shikayli and, above all, my old friends Muhammad Ali Williams Nur and his wife Habibah; in Turkey, Yalçın Karaca and Hugh Pope; and, in the Crimea, Viktoria Arkhiptseva, Aleksandr Gavrilov and, in particular, Nina Suvorova, without whom I would have been utterly lost.

Various forms of assistance were also given by Tim Callan, the Reverend Dr Mark Chapman and Linda Collins, Stephen Day, the Reverend Canon Paul Iles, Brendan MacSharry, and Tim Morris and Ianthe Maclagan. Jay Butler, Michael Maclagan, Christopher Tanfield and Bruce Wannell helped with aspects of the text. My agent, Carolyn Whitaker, and my editor, Gail Pirkis, were assiduous in their long-distance communications and indulgent of my whims. Martin Yeoman drew the decorations from an eclectic range of sources. The Authors’ Foundation and the Society of Authors provided a generous grant. The Hakluyt Society kindly gave permission for me to quote from their English version of IB’s
Travels
, translated by the late Professors Sir Hamilton Gibb and Charles Beckingham. (All who study IB are indebted to Gibb and Beckingham, and to the nineteenth-century editors of the
Travels
, Defrémery and Sanguinetti. If there is a special corner of heaven for Arabists, they are there, and
probably
still poring over the text.) Perhaps most important of all, Hasan al-Mujahid al-Shamahi of San’a was a first, unlooked-for link with the world of IB.

To all of the above I extend my grateful thanks.

Bayt Qadi, San’a

August 2000