10 - 16 May 2001
Issue No.533
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 10 - 16 May 2001 Issue No.533 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
In the footsteps of Ibn Battutah
Turi Munthe reviews Travels with a Tangerine, recently published in London, and interviews its author, Tim Mackintosh-SmithTravels with a Tangerine: a Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, London: John Murray, 2001. pp368
One of the Traditions of the Prophet, rescued by Baghawi, the Afghani of Herat in his Mishkat, reads: "Journey even as far as China seeking knowledge." Ibn Battutah, Tim Mackintosh-Smith's avuncular 'Ibn Battutah', seems to have taken this to heart and done just that. In the process -- partly because of bad weather, partly because he took extensive detours into and out of the pockets of possible patrons, but mostly because he clearly preferred the chase to the catch (what one might call a perennial arriviste) -- he covered three continents and travelled 75,000km, three times as far as Marco Polo. All this, in the deepest civility of the blooming Middle Ages, between 1325 and 1354, just as that other great traveller, the Plague, was beginning its decidedly more sinister peregrinations across the length and breadth of the known world.
The frontpiece of a 1551 Islamic atlas with the Holy Ka'ba in the centre and the Islamic countries encircling it
Ibn Battutah, like Mackintosh-Smith, was born into a culture of travel. Just as there are fore-runners to Mackintosh-Smith (perhaps too many -- the would-be English travel-writer might almost be described as a cultural feature of the Middle East: "Admire the zillij tiles, listen to the sighs of awe-affecting Englishmen scribbling in their notebooks on the steps of the Mosque..."), so Ibn Battutah was following the footsteps of countless other Muslim scholars and wanderers who set out across the Islamic geographical ummah. They travelled in pilgrimage, in search of fortune, and out of sheer curiosity. The tradition of the rihlah, or journey, may predate Islam, but certainly by the 14th century it was as accepted a part of a gentleman's education as the Grand Tour was for that of European and American ladies at the end of the 19th century. These many travellers had many purposes. Some, like Ibn Fadlan in the 10th century, set off to chart the extent of the Muslim world and convert the recently conquered. Others, like Azhari, native of Herat, dived deep into the heartlands of the Arab world (most notably Iraq, the Hijaz, and the deserts of Basra where he was captured by marauding Bedouin) in search of perfect Arabic. The rihlah, by Ibn Battutah's time at least, was a well-established form of tourism, just as travel-writing was a well-established literary genre, and it had the added spiritual cachet that made travel (anywhere and for any reason) echo with the reflected holiness of pilgrimage.
Ibn Battutah's Rihlah -- both in geographical and literary terms -- emerged from this tradition but shattered it at birth. He out-wrote his contemporaries (if time is a measure of quality) by centuries, and out-walked them by continents. Travels with a Tangerine begins, as Ibn Battutah began in 1325, on the end of Africa, in Tangiers -- Ibn Battutah being, of course, the Tangerine. It covers the first seven years of Ibn Battutah's trek, and ends on the end of Europe, in Constantinople. By this time Ibn Battutah was just warming up: he wasn't even a quarter of the way through his journey and still had the big ones to tick off: Greater Iraq, India, Sind and China. Tracking these short seven years, however, has taken Mackintosh-Smith through those urban Narnias that are Cairo, Damascus and Istanbul, via the near-mythical islands of the Kuria Murias (real but unnameable for fear of sparking etymological warfare and political chaos), into the wastelands of the Crimea and the mystic realms of Anatolia. The result of this literary partnership -- between Ibn Battutah the traveller, and TMS the chronicler -- is one of the better travel-books I have read.
This Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah is a lived exegesis of the Rihlah, Ibn Battutah's massive (five volumes in the most recent edition) account of his travels. It is also a re-enactment of the Rihlah itself. One example will serve. In Stary Krim, near the Southern coast of the Crimea, stands the Church of St John the Baptist. Ibn Battutah happened to be passing through in the early 1330s, and found a rather war-like icon on one of the walls. A resident monk told him simply "This is the figure of the prophet Ali." Ibn Battutah briefly notes "I was deeply surprised," but the comment has left scholars of all ilks baffled for centuries, wondering what on earth the Prophet Mohamed's son-in-law was doing on the inside of a Crimean church.
Mackintosh-Smith arrived at the same spot some 660 years later only to meet a contemporary re-edition of Ibn Battutah's resident monk, who tells him -- surprisingly -- that the figure is St Nicholas. More surprising still, is that the later author (Mackintosh-Smith) proves the earlier monk correct. He writes: "I left the church with a strange feeling: that, in a sense, I had continued Ibn Battutah's conversation where he had left off, two-thirds of a millennium ago." If the Rihlah is a monument of knowledge and a masterpiece of travel, Mackintosh-Smith has paid his dues to both -- settling footnotes that even Sir Hamilton Gibb, Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford and translator of Ibn Battutah's original, gets wrong, but doing it all with a respectful wink at the lived experience of his master traveller-guide.
Mackintosh-Smith (MS) is a scholarly man -- "wedded to my books" he tells us. Captivated by the intricacies of Arabic (and its ironies: a near-mute landlord on the coast of Oman being called Abu Kalam, or Father of Speech), and the academic complexities of what he calls the 'inverse archaeology' he is engaged in, he is not the most obvious of traveller-types. But by playing the roll of sponge-bag in Ibn Battutah's luggage, he has allowed himself to indulge a much less ordered side of himself. Ibn Battutah the sensualist (what a libido!), the romantic, the joker, the socialite, the holy-man addict has etched himself into MS the footnote-fetishist, to such an extent that the best of the stories in Travels with a Tangerine are those of this later, 21st century traveller. If MS describes a meeting between Ibn Battutah and Andronicus II, deposed emperor turned mystic, as "one of the most extraordinary in the whole literature of travel," slightly earlier in the book, he has achieved something similar in literary terms. Without destroying it here, MS's description of his meeting with Hajji Baba, head of the Mevlevi Sufi order in Konya, is one of the most delicately crafted depictions of the mystical experience yet to come out of centuries of note-scribblings on the steps of distant mosques.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith
MS writes like a dream: "As we neared Hallaniyah Head the cliffs rose higher, tier upon tier of galleries like a collapsing Colosseum. The sea became more boisterous. Wriggle, kiss and tickle turned to slap then, around the point, to head-butt. The water went blue-black, like a bruise." His images cry out to be watched, and on the crest of real humour is a lyricism that flows throughout the book. The linguist, scholar, foot-sore walker and wit in him all melt into the story-teller. His dialogue can make you laugh out loud, and his anecdotes could be retold, verbatim, out of context. And if he has his tricks, his stories that fold oh-so-easily into place, and complicitous nods to his English readers ("Jumah catches one [a hamur fish] a yard long that looks surprised as it comes over the edge -- big lips, old and grey, something like Kingsley Amis"), these are touching too. The first because they remind you of Ibn Battutah and his own faint embroideries, and the second because fitting Dagenham, England, into the story has obviously been much harder for MS than Damietta, Damascus or Delhi.
For the reader, the effect of this double-narrative -- where you watch Ibn Battutah set off into the sunset, double-take, and then watch MS do the same thing -- is mesmerising. MS talks of a kind of "temporal vertigo" -- "the feeling of looking at a spot in time, far away yet reachable in a single, breathtaking leap." He felt it whenever he brushed too close to Ibn Battutah, when the pages of the Rihlah took on the quality of an ancient alchemical grimoire and would concertina time. Realising that Ibn Battutah's closest connection in Yemen happened to be a direct ancestor of his own best friend in San'a was one such moment; another was worrying that the monk from the Crimea mentioned above may not actually have changed in the intervening centuries. The most beautiful perhaps, is when MS meets a young boy-poet on the banks of the Euphrates in Hama, who offers him a poem of his own to rival the one Ibn Battutah had known in praise of the power of the river. And this is the greatest pleasure of the book: that you can follow Mackintosh-Smith on his time-travels.
Among the Orient-obsessed literati in England, everyone has been expecting someone to take up Ibn Battutah and walk him across the Arab world. It's the perfect excuse for a book, and would give the author the chance to take a look at the nature of travel-writing itself -- something vitally needed in a genre that has spent much too long failing to justify a lot of ethnocentric globe-trotting and introspection. Inter alia, I know two rival fame-hungry postgraduates at Oxford who have separately drawn me aside with a "I have this great idea for a book..." There will be much envy and much ill-grace that accompanies the publication of this book, for Ibn Battutah has found the perfect companion to his travels. I only hope that Tim Mackintosh-Smith will now take old Baghawi the Afghani to heart, and follow Ibn Battutah to China.
Yours is a kind of tafsir -- if this makes sense as a way of looking at your book. Can you explain tafsir generally, and your interpretation of it in Travels with a Tangerine? If not, why are you so attracted to footnotes?
I wouldn't say I'm doing a tafsir of Ibn Battutah. Tafsir is the explanation of something obscure, and Ibn Battutah's book is rarely that. Also, tafsir suggests a much drier -- and perhaps more purely academic -- approach than mine. But I suppose I do sometimes use the technique of tafsir, although I apply it not to Ibn Battutah's text but to the places he visited. This has enabled me to suggest solutions to a few geographical questions that arise in the Rihlah.
What I'm really writing is a dhayl: I am, in more than one sense, tailing Ibn Battutah. Footnotes -- both those by other scholars and my own, amassed over five years of reading Ibn Battutah and his contemporaries -- are a way into this dhayl. And the dhayl generates its own footnotes, for instance the one on the death and burial of Abul-Hassan Al-Shadhili that came out of a night spent at a tomb in Upper Egypt.
In my book, the borders between textual and geographical travel are altogether blurred. This is why I can't describe it as either a tafsir or an "academic" book, even though academics will find much of interest in it.
In general terms, in what ways do you and Ibn Battutah travel differently?
One difference is that Ibn Battutah was a traveller first, and a writer second; I suppose I'm the opposite. I have the advantage of aeroplanes and motor cars; he had a greater luxury -- time. But perhaps the biggest apparent difference is that Ibn Battutah was a Muslim travelling largely in Islamic lands, whereas I'm to some extent an outsider. And I can't follow Ibn Battutah to Mecca -- which was, after all, his original destination. That said, 18 years living in Yemen have given me a deep sympathy with Islam and a love of its traditions. I feel more at home with Ibn Battutah in mediaeval Cairo than I ever would in, say, Las Vegas. Our modes of travel and our starting points are different, but our methods of observation are not so far apart. Also our reactions: I experience, on Ibn Battutah's behalf, mild shock on seeing tight jeans in Tangier.
Also, how has writing about travel changed? What different things are you and Ibn Battutah looking for?
Obviously, every age has its own literary conventions, and by Ibn Battutah's time the rihlah was often very formulaic. His near contemporaries, like Al-'Abdari and Ibn Rushayd Al-Fihri, used the genre to display their scholarship. But Ibn Battutah was very much a free literary spirit, especially when he left the Islamic heartland and its set-piece descriptions (often borrowed from his predecessor Ibn Jubayr) of places like Jerusalem and Mecca. I'm always struck by how "modern" Ibn Battutah can be -- for example, in his tendency to confess his feelings and foibles, to admit to suffering from blisters and diarrhoea. In this way he was often rather unconventional.
However, I think it's true to say that Ibn Battutah and the travel writers of his age looked more at people and societies than at buildings and landscapes. For Ibn Battutah, human connections -- with sultans, scholars and saints -- were more important than physical descriptions. My search is more skewed to place, even though I meet along the way descendants -- usually spiritual, but in some cases physical -- of people he met. In the end though we're all of us -- Ibn Battutah, Ibn Jubayr, Sir Richard Burton and I -- looking for knowledge: and, even if one shouldn't admit it, for fame and fortune.
If there is a certain mysticism in travel -- in the search for the experience of knowledge -- are you, despite qualifying yourself as a "woolly Anglican," drawn to it?
Mysticism is an attempt to peer into the world beyond sense-perception, perhaps to glimpse God. Travel is one way of looking towards the invisible: the Creator is unfathomable, but His creation is full of ayat -- pointers, more or less cryptic, to His nature -- which are there to be seen. This intellectual mysticism was shared by both Islamic scholars of Ibn Battutah's time and by some Christians, particularly the Franciscans. The two faiths may have wandered apart over the intervening centuries, but I'm strongly aware of our common starting-point; and, yes, I'm drawn back to it.
I count myself fortunate, or rather blessed, that during my own travels I've also been able to experience the mystical directly, as Ibn Battutah often did. Evenings spent with dervishes in Konya and with Chishti qawwals in India transcend difference of faith.
How well do you get to know someone through the pages of an edited (Ibn Juzayy) text written 650 years ago?
Despite the best efforts of Ibn Battutah and of his editor, Ibn Juzayy, to project a persona -- scholar, judge, courtier and so on -- the mask slips so often that you get to know Ibn Battutah very well indeed. The Rihlah shines with a humanity totally lacking in, say, Marco Polo's book.
I think some of Ibn Battutah's contemporaries were put off by this side of his writing. For me, Ibn Battutah's honestly is the greatest joy of his book. Homesickness, chagrin, self-importance, exhaustion, sexual desire -- all these traits and the many others he displays are utterly human, and timeless. H A R Gibb, who translated Ibn Battutah into English, was spot-on when he said: "Of the multitudes that crowd upon the stage in the pageant of mediaeval Islam there is no figure more instinct with life than his."
Can you explain why Arabic, as a language (roots, structures, intonation, formulae -- à la masha' Allah at appropriate times, and the endless succession of greetings and goodbyes), appeals to you?
Arabic is a whole fascinating landscape in itself, or perhaps a qamus, an ocean. I love exploring its backwaters, and coming across surprises at every turn: discovering, for example, a sign at a filling station in Oman that says mamnu' al-sabr fil-batrul (something like "We don't give credit on petrol sales": or that in the Franco-Arabic of Morocco they call a roundabout al-rondpoint.
At the same time, the conventions of Arabic are home territory. When the physical or social geography of a place is unfamiliar -- in India, say, or the Crimea -- it's tremendously comforting to find an Arabic speaker. Just as there is an Islamic ummah, there is an ummah of Arabophones.
And finally, could you describe for me your love affair with food?
For me, food is one of the most direct routes back to Ibn Battutah. By looking at a building he saw, I'm observing history; by eating what he ate, I'm ingesting it. Apart from this, Ibn Battutah was a sensuous person who enjoyed, among other pleasures, sex and food. In these straighter-laced times it would be hard to research his tastes in the former, which were insatiable; multiple marriages and slave-girls just don't fit into today's world of passports and borders. So perhaps a stuffed quail is the next best sensual experience to a concubine.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page