Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (7 page)

I wandered along the dusty paths and came to a ruinous but pretty
madrasah
, or college of Islamic science. In its courtyard was a pool lined with turquoise tiles which, when operational, must have presented a Hockneyesque aspect. Outside the ruins were more storks, nesting on the domed tombs of holy men and in pachydermatous trees which looked as old as the buildings. The tombs were so generously spattered with stork guano that they seemed to have been hastily whitewashed. I wondered how so indelicate a creature could have been invested with such an aura of sanctity. Oblivious of both their holiness and their personal squalor, the storks clacked away contentedly at each other, sounding like slowed-down football rattles – hence their Arabic name,
laqlaq
. Where there were no
laqlaqs
there were egrets, flocks of them, chattering and snickering out of the trees like guests at a manic drinks party.

The
laqlaqs
of Shallah, however, have to concede in holiness to its
nuns
. These live in a gloomy stone-lined pool, attended by an old lady with a tray of hard-boiled eggs. ‘Where are they?’ I asked her.

‘Wait and look. You’ll see them.’

After a few minutes, a mole-like head appeared from beneath the overhanging side of the pool, followed by a sleek body that glinted beneath the water. Another one emerged, then a third. These were the celebrated eels of Shallah. They cruised the pool languidly, then
slid
back into their hiding places. There was something sinister and Svengalian about the spectacle.

An obese eel may sound like a paradox, but in proportion to their length of three or four feet these were positively podgy. The old lady explained the reason. ‘Women who want babies come here and buy my eggs. They feed them to the eels and, God willing, become pregnant.’

‘What about the cats?’ About a dozen of them lazed around the pool. ‘They look pretty well fed too.’

‘The
nuns
get the whites and the cats get the yolks,’ she told me.

A young French couple arrived, and asked me if I had seen
les anguilles
. ‘You have to give them an egg before they’ll come out,’ I said, wanting to see the eels in action. The girl bought one from the old lady, who separated the white from the yolk. She motioned to the girl to throw it in.

This time, the eels darted out of their lairs like muscular torpedoes. Watching them voraciously feeding on the fragments of egg, it struck me that while a semiologist would have trouble divining the significance of storks, the link between engorged eels, eggs and pregnancy was obvious to the point of grossness. ‘Now, God willing,’ I said to the girl, ‘you will have a baby.’

‘A baby?’

I explained the legend of the Bassin aux Anguilles.

‘I don’t want a baby!’ She glanced at her partner, who was grinning. ‘Not yet, anyway …’ The old lady sat beaming with approval, surrounded by her cats.

I had not yet found the tomb of Sultan Abu ’l-Hasan, and asked one of the gardeners for directions. He led me to a ruined chamber open to the sky, and pointed to a slender white marble grave marker. It was the length of a man and the shape of an old-fashioned strawberry cloche. Along its apex ran an inscription. It was as crisp as the day it was cut, and seemed to have been carved not in stone but in some more malleable substance, like icing sugar.

The gardener asked me where I was from. When I told him, he said, ‘Then you and the Sultan are in-laws. His wife, Shams al-Duha, was English.’

I was surprised; but the idea was not totally implausible, as Abu ’l-Hasan had close contacts with Christian Europe. His army, with which he brought much of north-west Africa to heel, included a 5,000-strong Iberian Christian contingent. As well as being a successful warrior, Abu ’l-Hasan was a poet. He neatly versified his sultanic manifesto thus:

I give to God His due both in public and private;

I defend honour from the defilement of suspicion;

I am bountiful to such as I choose;

I smite with my sword the bases of necks.

He would, I felt, have approved of his gravestone, for he was also an accomplished calligrapher who copied and gilded three Qur’ans, one each for the holy cities of Mecca, al-Madinah and Jerusalem.

In 1348, when news of his death in battle near Tunis reached Fez, his son Abu Inan proclaimed himself sultan. Not long after, the dead ruler turned up in Morocco, alive; Abu Inan, deprived of his inheritance by this precocious resurrection (Abu ’l-Hasan had in fact escaped from the battle unnoticed), immediately made war on his father. When IB met the latter, he was back in Tunis and still fighting; but the traveller managed to give him a condensed version of his adventures, in a tower overlooking the field of battle. Abu ’l-Hasan died, this time incontrovertibly, in 1351 and was buried in Marrakesh. The following year, Abu Inan had a belated burst of filial piety and
transferred
his father’s remains to Shallah; IB, at home between trips to Spain and west Africa, took part in the cortège.

The Marinid dynasty to which Abu ’l-Hasan and Abu Inan belonged were known in Europe through Moroccan wool exports – the origin of the name ‘merino’. Their fame in the Islamic east resulted from the sensational demise of an earlier sultan: he had dyed his beard and was lying on his back waiting for the henna to take effect when he was stabbed to death by a black eunuch. His successor immediately ordered a pogrom of eunuchs in retaliation for the murder, and to conceal the fact that he had instigated it. Apart from such occasional blips in the succession, the Marinids were exemplary rulers. But a cloud hung over them. Like both preceding dynasties, they were Berbers; unlike them, they developed a complex about their origins – perhaps because they chose for their capital Fez, a hyper-Arab and rather po-faced city founded by a descendant of the Prophet. Eventually, in the manner of many non-Arab rulers before and since, they slammed the door on the skeleton in the cupboard by discovering a definitive pedigree that went back to the Prophet’s ancestor, Adnan.

The Marinids further increased their respectability – and simultaneously invested in heavenly futures – by pouring their money into magnificent mosques and
madrasahs
. The finest of these were the ones built by IB’s patron Abu Inan, who also founded a Sultanic Academy which included, along with IB on his return, grammarians, rhetoricians, historians, mystics, an archivist and an analyst of dreams. Abu Inan’s own scholarly abilities were of a high order, judging by his writings that have survived. A certain massaging of one’s literary patron never goes amiss, but IB was not entirely exaggerating when he wrote of him:

In the disciplines of Qur’anic commentary, Prophetic Tradition, Maliki jurisprudence and Sufi literature, his is the highest attainment; he solves their difficulties with the light of his understanding, and illuminating apothegms are projected from his memory … I have not seen any of the kings of the world whose concern for religious knowledge attains this degree.

Writing in Rome nearly two centuries later, Leo the African recalled this Marinid cultural apogee – the age of IB and Abu Inan – as a time when the Sultan would give poets laureate not only large
sums
of cash but also a fine horse, a fine slave-girl and, literally, the shirt off his back. He remembered too standing as a young man at this very spot, by the tomb of Sultan Abu ’l-Hasan, and copying the inscription. I began to do the same but soon gave up, defeated by its self-conscious, almost wilful intricacy. The light was going, and I bade the Sultan farewell.

Nearby, I bumped into a respectable-looking man who asked me for a cigarette. I gave him one; he immediately disembowelled it. I spotted him shortly afterwards, reclining beneath a bush and happily befuddled, surrounded by a cloud of kif and hibiscus and by the clacking of
laqlaqs
.

Altogether, it was a fine spot for a necropolis.

*

Before leaving Rabat I walked across the bridge over the Bou Regreg to Sala. Four centuries ago, in the great days of privateering, the town was home to those premier-league pirates, the Salee Rovers. Today, the place feels as innocuous as Bideford and, despite the short distance over the river from the capital, almost as provincial. I had come to see a building which, however, rivals anything to be found in the Marinid capital Fez.

As with many of the best buildings in Morocco, the
madrasah
founded by Abu ’l-Hasan in 1341 gave little away on the outside. Crossing the threshold into its courtyard was like opening a plain cloth binding to find it contains a pop-up book vividly coloured in greengage-green, sky blue, royal blue, turquoise, ivory and cinnamon. After the initial surprise came another: the inside was too small for the outside. But I realized that, although the courtyard was small, it was made to seem smaller by its decoration. Every single surface was covered either in carving or in polychrome tilework, as if the designer had suffered from acute
horror vacui
. The overall effect was of a very expensive bibelot.

When my eyes had adjusted, I was able to focus on the different areas of pattern. The floor, walls and dwarf peristyle columns were covered with
zillij
, tile mosaic. By turns, I sorted out the various colours; then the individual geometrical elements – stars, triangles and rhomboids; then, as happens with that oversized hound’s-tooth check made fashionable by Chanel, my vision began flicking between positive and negative – was that a white star with a small
blue
one in the middle, or was it a small blue star surrounded by paper-dart shapes? Finally, I gave up looking and saw an ensemble, harmonious as the double helix. The Moroccan national airline chose well when they put
zillij
on their salt packets.

Above the
zillij
was a narrow band of tiles, this time bearing Qur’anic verses. The inscriptions nestled among arabesques like flurries of crisp leaves. Above the tiles, the walls were covered with carved stucco the colour of old bones and bearing more inscriptions, then, higher still, designs made up of swags, lacy bow-ties and sycamore propellers. Finally there was a richly sculpted cornice of dark cedar. It framed the only visible surface which was not in some way adorned: the sky.

Through an archway at one end of the courtyard was a small prayer-hall. Here the lower part of the walls was left plain, so as not to distract the worshippers’ attention. At the opposite end of the courtyard I spotted a marble tablet. It was inscribed with a verse: ‘Rejoice,’ it said,

for within this splendid building,

In this extraordinary interior,

You are in select company.

Looking about me, I agreed that the
madrasah
had good reason to be proud of itself.

The guardian took me up a staircase to the first floor and showed me the students’ rooms, now empty. They were as plain as monks’ cells. ‘When the Sultan built this college,’ he said, ‘he was following the verse in the Holy Qur’an which tells us that knowledge is the true sultan.’ Above, there was another floor of cells. The staircase continued upwards to the roof, where we sat on a parapet overlooking the town. Below us, a group of women walked past. ‘Look at them!’ exclaimed the guardian in a voice clearly meant to be heard down on the street. ‘They go wherever they want. And the men are no better. They sit all day in the cafés, the mosques are empty …’

I left him to his reflections and returned to the courtyard, where I sat on the tiled floor with my back against a pillar.

There was something of the quadrangular, self-contemplating air of medieval Oxbridge about the place. But it was Oxbridge hung with brocade, an architecture not of space but of surfaces. The scholars
who
spent their formative years in such a setting were marked by it for life: the literature of IB’s period was as lavishly decorated and inward-looking as its architecture. ‘It was an age’, a Moroccan historian has written, ‘of condensations and exegeses, of condensations of the condensations and exegeses of the exegeses, and of commentaries on all these.’ A not uncharacteristic work was an exegesis of the word ‘In’ in the phrase ‘In the name of God’. Not a lot of what was written was new; but a lot was written. The free-thinking Ibn Khaldun disapproved, and wrote a chapter of his
Prolegomena
under the title, ‘The great number of scholarly works available is an obstacle on the path to scholarship.’ We can only guess what he would have said about our own undammable, computer-generated slurry of words.

Writing in the Marinid period was akin to
zillij
-making. Even the most mundane correspondence put out by the ruler’s Department of
Insha
(letterwriting, also style, contrivance and, significantly, construction work) was composed with an obsessive attention to ornament, the prose rhymed and sometimes internally sub-rhymed. Only airmail letters escaped prolixity. Written on lightweight ‘bird-paper’ and flown by carrier pigeon, they were restricted to what one authority called ‘the marrow, the cream of words’.

IB left the Maghrib at the age of 21 and never spent long enough in the literary capitals of the Arab world to develop the required baroqueness of phrase. So, when Abu Inan instructed him to set down his
Travels
, the Sultan brought in the young Andalusian belletrist Ibn Juzayy to empurple the Tangerine’s prose. Ibn Juzayy was a literary prestidigitator. Among his achievements was a long ode devoid of the letter
r
(which no doubt became the party piece of labdacism sufferers). For the most part he merely tidied and rearranged IB’s original, for much of the
Travels
is written in a plain style, Hemingway to the prevailing Pater. But now and then he pops up in the text like a literary jack-in-the-box: ‘Ibn Juzayy says …’; ‘Ibn Juzayy remarks …’; ‘Ibn Juzayy adds: My father (God’s mercy on him) used frequently to recite …’ It is rather endearing, even if today it would be thought ill-mannered.