Spain, Morocco, and West Africa, 1350-1357 CE
Kamal’s
grandfather was alamin, or trustee, of the perfume-makers of Granada, one of
the Moorish emirates of Andalusia, in southern Spain. The task of the trustee of the guild was to
inspect and certify all weights and measuring tools used in the trade. Kamal’s own father was a glove-maker. These two crafts – perfumery and glove-making
– were intimately connected, the glove-makers applying perfume to their
materials to dispel the natural odor of the leather. However, when Abu-Ishaq Ibrahim ran away to
Cairo, Kamal, who was a younger son, was taken on by his grandfather as an
apprentice. Perfumery, after all, was a
secretive trade, and these secrets could not be allowed to die out.
“Why did Ishaq
Ibrahim run away?” Kamal often asked.
“God knows, and
he’s not saying,” replied Kamal’s grandfather.
“Now, mind your work – you’ll spoil the batch. Making an excellent scent requires patience and attention.”
With
a sigh, Kamal returned to his chores.
The workshop was a strange place, full of wonders. In one corner of the room, water lilies were
being cold-steeped in animal fat, to create a kind of scented gelatin. Another batch of scent was hot-steeping. Kamal carefully measured out various
astringents – ginger grass and aspalathus – which he added, pinch by pinch, to
a pot of olive oil. This prepared the
oil, making it more receptive to floral and other scents that would be imparted
to it, later. Bottles of pure alcohol,
derived from distilled wine, stood ready to hand. Alcohol was forbidden, as a drink, but the
qadi, or Islamic judge, of Granada had delivered a fatwa, long ago, permitting
its use as a raw material. In any event,
the Prophet himself had recommended the use of perfume, as Kamal’s grandfather
frequently remarked.
“Not
surprising,” Kamal thought, impiously.
Muhammad, after all, probably had been employed, before the Revelation, hauling
frankincense and myrrh to supply the perfumeries of Egypt and Palestine.
Why did Ishaq Ibrahim run away? He just could not pry the thought from his
brain. Noticing that his grandfather had
slipped out of the room, Kamal walked over to the window, pushing open the
shutters to allow some fresh air into the heavily-scented chamber, which reeked
of oil and musk.
Inside
it was dark, outside brilliantly sunny, the white-washed walls of the town
gleaming among pomegranate trees. At the
top of the hill – for Granada was a hilly town – stood the fortified qasbah,
and behind its battlements the russet-colored walls of the Alhambra, the Emir’s
new palace. Kamal had never been inside
the royal complex, but he had heard it was incomparably beautiful, with a
garden of spouting fountains laid out like a vision of Paradise. By all accounts, however, the resemblance to
Paradise was superficial. Despite the
beautiful inlay work, the delicate painting, and the fanciful arabesques and
columns, the palace was a place where slave girls became queens, and where
brothers murdered each other. No wonder
Allah had decided to scourge humanity, first by sending the Mongols, and now by
ravaging the world with a terrible plague.
The Mongols, at least, had converted to Islam, but the plague was like a
demon – it didn’t care. It killed
Christian, Jew, Muslim, and pagan without distinction, and sooner or later,
surely, it would find its way to Granada.[1]
Kamal
hurried across the workroom, grabbing an oily rag, and quickly removed one of
the pots from its charcoal-fueled burner. Some of the precious liquid had bubbled up vigorously,
splashing out, filling the chamber with acrid smoke as the essence sizzled
among the glowing coals.
“Damn
you!” his grandfather cried. “Do you
realize how much a mistake like that costs us!”
Kamal
was cuffed on the head, but accepted the punishment with resignation.
“Next
time you do that, I’ll send you to Serendip[2]
yourself to fetch us more cinnamon sticks, you fool! Those spices are nearly worth their weight in
gold.”
“Sorry,”
Kamal said, hurriedly, taking up a bar of wax, for it was time to melt wax in
one of the pots, to reduce the intensity of an especially harsh scent.
“There
are three notes to every scent, Kamal,” his grandfather said, sharply, standing
close to him. “What are they?”
“The
top, middle, and base,” Kamal recited.
“Which
ones are the most important?”
“The
middle and the base; the top is just the first impression – it evaporates after
less than an hour. The middle and base
notes of the scent last longer, and interact, but the base lasts the longest of
all.”
“I
tell you, Kamal – this is better than glove-making. Your father will go blind, stitching Moroccan
goat hides together. You could be a
great perfumer if you apply yourself – you know how to read?”
His
grandfather was being facetious. True,
they were artisans, but they were hardly destitute, being in a luxury
trade. All the men of the family had
been educated.
“Read
Ibn Sina’s treatise on distillation; read Al-Kindi’s Kitab Kimiya’ al-ʼItr, which is the very textbook of our craft! And memorize every hadith of Bukhari
concerning scents, because there will always be these fanatics who will try to
tell you perfume is evil….”
Kamal
glanced through the open window toward the Alhambra’s walls. The call to prayer was rising from the
minarets of the city’s mosques, wavering across the tile rooftops. While his grandfather spread out his prayer
mat and prepared to offer his salat there on the workroom floor, Kamal took up
his oily rag and carefully slid the hot-steeping pots from the burners before
hurrying to say his own prayers.
I don’t want to make scents, he thought,
closing his eyes as he knelt down and prostrated himself in the direction of
Mecca. I want to study sharia.
* * *
The
plague eventually reached Granada, and it turned out to be a boon for the
perfume trade, as everyone wanted scents to cover up the reek of death. A letter also arrived from Morocco, from the Marinid
Sultan, addressed to “Abu Ishaq Ibrahim es-Saheli.” The letter astonished Kamal’s grandfather so
much that he nearly died, on the spot, and had to be led to his bed and made to
lie down, rubbing his chest.
“What
is it, grandfather?” Kamal asked.
“That
boy who ran away,” was all his grandfather could say, at first, trying to catch
his breath. “Ya Allah! He is dead.”
“That’s
terrible news,” Kamal said. “But why
would the Sultan of Morocco send word of his death?”
“It’s
complicated – here, read it for yourself….”
Kamal
took the letter and walked to the nearest window. The seal was large, thick, ornate. The finest parchment had been used, and the
calligraphy was beautifully-rendered – curving Arabic script speckled with dots
and dashes. Ya Allah! Kamal’s eyes
devoured the Sultan’s words… well, probably the words of some scribe. But still….
“One
of us will have to go sort all this out,” Kamal’s grandfather said, from across
the room. “You should go, Kamal. The plague is getting worse. The Emirate is divided, and the Christians
are on the march. I did not train you,
and pass on all my secrets, to have them lost.
Go to Morocco. I know you’ve
always wanted to travel. Now’s your
chance….”
* * *
The
news about Ishaq Ibrahim es-Saheli was hard to believe, and yet it had to be
true: the Sultan of Morocco would not
have written such a letter in jest.
Kamal hurried at once for the coast, and he managed to find a ship,
bound for the nearby African coast, just before the Christian armies advanced
and laid siege to the ports. As he made
his way to Marrakesh, traveling afoot by day, and sleeping at the zariyas, or
lodges of Sufi shrines during the night, he thought about what a wondrous life
his uncle must have led. He wanted to
tell everyone he met the amazing story, but he did not dare reveal it – most
people would laugh and say it could not possibly be true.
I know why Ishaq Ibrahim ran away now,
Kamal thought, laying down one night in a moonlit courtyard alongside other
travelers. He wanted to be an architect, not a perfumer….
And
what luck! Ishaq Ibrahim had made his
way to Cairo, informing his parents only that he intended to make the Hajj, and
would return eventually. But he never
did return. Instead, he met a fabulously
rich African king, a black prince whose pilgrimage caravan included one hundred
camels laden with gold, a man so rich and generous that the gold markets
collapsed wherever he went. The king’s
name was Musa, and Ishaq Ibrahim, passing himself off as a skilled Andalusian
architect, managed to talk his way into the ruler’s entourage, returning with
him to the Bilad al-Sudan – the mysterious lands lying south of the Sahara, the
great Sea of Sand.[3]
In
due course, Kamal reached the red-walled city of Marrakesh, the capital of the
Marinid Sultans, but his luck ran out:
he presented his royal latter at the palace gate, only to be turned away
without explanation by the guards.
Intimidated, he withdrew to the great open marketplace, the Jamma
al-Fanaa[4],
situated next to the qasbah, in front of the great mosque. It was a chaotic place, but Kamal allowed the
chaos to cheer him up – and, indeed, it was entertaining. Here he saw jugglers and snake-charmers, boys
leading Barbary apes on chains, sellers of brassware and glass bangles,
magicians, men pressing oranges and lemons to make juice, dancing boys, and
story-tellers. All sorts of people were
here, in the marketplace – Arabs, Berbers, and the black men and women of the
Sudan, who were so numerous in the bazaar that one might think the city
belonged to them. Kamal paused, at a
corner of the market, to listen to a poet reciting the following:
Morocco
blest, in size, in health!
Brave
in nobles, great in wealth:
Here
will the homeless wanderer find,
Welcome
to cheer his drooping mind:
One
doubt only can now remain,
Such
as to give a moment’s pain:
Whether
the eye or ear can boast,
The
privilege of blessing most!
“Why
is the palace closed like this?” Kamal asked, sitting down in a tea stall. “Are they afraid of the plague?”
“No,”
said a well-weathered old fellow, sipping his tea at the table where Kamal had
seated himself. “There is some sort of
trouble, that’s all. The old Sultan
marched off, a few years ago, to try to recover Ifriqiya[5],
but he was shipwrecked, on his way home, and now his son, left behind as
regent, is seizing power.”
Kamal
ran his hands over his face and said, “I came all this way to see the Sultan!”
“So
did I, lad,” the old fellow laughed, “but don’t you worry – they’ll get it
sorted out, one way or another. As the
Persians say: takht-ya-takhta!”[6]
“What does that mean?”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re
either on the throne, or you’re dead,” the old man replied, chuckling. He sipped his tea, adding, “Trust me, lad –
if you want to live a long, peaceful life, stay away from thrones. I’ve come all the way from Egypt through one
plague-ridden city after another, but I’ve never been in more danger than I was
when I was friends with a Sultan.”
The
old fellow introduced himself as ʼAbu ̔Abdallah
Muhammad Ibn Battuta, of Tangiers – he was forty-six years old, he said, and he
had been to every part of the Dar-ul-Islam except the Sudan, which was where he
wanted to go next, if the Sultan would allow it.
“You’ve
been everywhere, really?” Kamal asked.
“You’ve been on the Hajj?”
“Several
times,” Ibn Battuta replied.
“You’ve
been to Persia?”
“Persia
and Byzantium.”
“And
India?”
“Yes
– I was a qazi, in Delhi, in fact.[7] I knew the Sultan there, at the time,
Muhammad ibn Tughluq, who was crazy. He
had an elephant stomp on a man’s head, in my presence, just to make a point
clear.”
“Ya
Allah!” Kamal muttered, not sure if he believed this story.
“I’ve
been to the Maldive Islands[8]
– I was qazi there, too – and to the Zanj cities on the Swahili Coast… and to
Sumatra and Java, and even to China.” Laughing, he added, “I’ve also been to
Andalusia… where you’re from, if I don’t mistake that accent?”
“How
did you come to make such a remarkable journey?”
“I
went on the Hajj,” Ibn Battuta smiled, signaling the waiter to bring him
another cup of tea. “It sort of got out
of hand…. I was your age, just a pup,
when I left. Would you believe I only
just returned? I’m addicted to travel,
you see.”
“But
what about getting married, having a family?”
“Oh,
I just got married and divorced as I went along – sometimes I was given
concubines, as a gift – it’s all God’s will anyway.”
“How
did you support yourself?”
Ibn
Battuta laughed again, leaning forward with a conspiratorial wink. “You get yourself to the frontiers of the
Dar-ul-Islam, lad, and you can pass yourself off as anything you want: in the new Muslim lands, they’ll snap up
anyone who sounds like they might be Arab or Berber. They think we’re all scientists and
scholars: I’ve been to places where they
think any white fellow who can recite a few passages from the Qur’an must be descended
from the Prophet himself.”
“But isn’t that cheating?”
Receiving a new cup of tea, Ibn
Battuta shook his head. “No, lad. It may have been a stretch, when I first made
the claim, but I actually have become
a scholar of sharia, over the years, and now there’s nothing on this earth I
haven’t seen and can’t judge.”
* * *
Ibn Battuta befriended Kamal, and
together they explored the sights of Marrakesh, the garrulous old traveler persuading
the muezzin to take them up to the top of the highest minaret of the Mosque of
the Kutubiyin, from which they enjoyed a remarkable panorama.
“Most of the city seems to be
ruins,” Kamal pointed out.
“It’s very old,” Ibn Battuta
explained. “It reminds me a little of
Baghdad, though the bazaars of Baghdad were much better.”
Kamal was far more interested in the
madrassa, with its library, built by Sultan Abuʽl-Hasan, whose son was now in
revolt. They tarried a while, attending
a few fascinating lectures on the sharia together, and Kamal confessed his
desire to study Islamic law in earnest himself.
“What is your family’s trade?”
“We make perfume – and gloves.”
“Well,” Ibn Battuta nodded. “Learn everything you can. You never know when it might become useful.”
At last, word arrived that the
Sultan would receive his petitioners – but not in Marrakesh. He was returning to Fez, which was to be the
new capital. To those in the know, this
change could mean only one thing: the
father had been vanquished.
* * *
The Sultan’s son, ʼAbu Inan Faris, had
won the battle against his father, and returned to Fez with his victorious army
– a stunning cavalcade of warriors in chain mail, bearing long lances and
carrying fluttering red flags. They rode
through the city gates shouting, “Allah-u akbar! Allah-u akbar!”[9] The palace gates were opened, and the khutba
was read, in the grand mosque, in the name of the new Sultan, thereby letting
everyone know that a new regime was in power.
“ʼAbu Inan Faris spent several years
at Fez, ruling the country as regent during his father’s absence,” Ibn Battuta
explained as they traveled northward, via Miknasa. “He has supporters there – and his own
palace. Marrakesh, no doubt, would be
too dangerous….”
Shrewd despite his age, the young
Sultan first received at Fez those petitioners who claimed scholarly
credentials as well as those with mercantile connections. After all, having the lawyers and businessmen
firmly in one’s camp was a strong opening move in the chess game of kingship. Ibn Battuta, who could claim justly to be
both scholar and trader was one of the first visitors to be received, and he
took Kamal with him as a favor, and because he had taken a liking to the young
man, who reminded him of himself at the same age.
When the vizier introduced Kamal,
explaining who he was, the Sultan said, in a gracious aristocratic accent, “Your
uncle was late ambassador to our court, from Mansa Musa, Sultan of Mali. He made a name for himself down there. He is credited with building several mosques
and palaces – the largest and most beautiful buildings of the Sudan.”
The Sultan explained that an agent
of the Maqqari – a family of merchants based in Sijilmasa – had sent word of
Ishaq Ibrahim’s death from Timbuktu.
Mansa Musa apparently had given Ishaq Ibrahim architectural commissions
worth forty thousand mithqals of gold during his long sojourn in Mali.
“My lord – forty thousand mithqals?” Kamal was aghast. A mithqal was four and a quarter grams, and
each mithqal was equal, in coinage, to a gold dinar.
“Yes,
which is why you must go to Timbuktu to sort out your uncle’s affairs: indeed, you should go with our esteemed
subject, the Hajji[10] Muhammad
ibn Battuta. No one knows more about the
world than he does, and he is to leave for Mali with the next season’s
caravans, with our leave and blessing.”
“I’ve no money for such a long
journey, my lord,” Kamal replied. “I
scarcely had enough money to come here.”
“Arrangements will be made,” the
Sultan smiled. “Go to Sijilmasa and
apply to the Maqqari family in my name.
Meanwhile, an advance shall be provided to you, sufficient to attend to
your immediate needs.”
“I could never repay it,” Kamal
said, lowering his head.
“You will soon be very rich, Kamal,”
the Sultan assured him. “The Sultan of
Mali does not confiscate the property of foreigners who die in his
country. He waits for their relatives to
come claim it.”
* * *
When Kamal received his advance, he
immediately gave thanks to Allah, for a Sultan’s notion of daily expenses far
exceeded anything he had ever dreamed of.
It was exhilarating to have so much money at his disposal, but also a
little frightening. After their
interviews with the Sultan, Ibn Battuta and Kamal retired to tea shop, in the
souk, where the old traveler said, “What’s your plan, lad?”
“I don’t really have one,” Kamal
answered, still awe-struck by the small fortune he had been given – a pittance,
perhaps, for a Sultan, but more money than he had ever seen before.
“Well, there’s no point in going
down to Mali empty-handed. Acquire merchandise and do some trading.”
“When do the caravans leave?”
“Oh, not for another four or five
months. It’s the month of Rabi al-Awwal
right now – this is when the caravans return from the Sudan. We’ll go to Sijilmasa and join the caravans
when they return to Mali. I know a
jurist there, named Muhammad al-Bashiri, who is the brother of a man I met in
Qanjanfu, in China. We can stay with
him.”
Sijilmasa lay on the other side of
the Atlas Mountains, and was the central town of the Tafilalt Oasis, which had
been created by turning the waters of the Wadi Ziz into a number of irrigation
canals, watering fields of grain and groves of date palms. The town stood on the east bank of the river,
between the oasis and the desert – a fine, walled city inhabited by the wealthy
merchants who controlled the caravan trade with Mali. The farmers of the Oasis were Berbers, and
most of the merchants were from Arabia or Andalusia, but the leaders of the
caravans were mostly men of the Sanhaja, the “Veiled Ones,” whom the Berbers
called the Iznagen, or “Oasis People.”[11] As promised, Ibn Battuta arranged temporary
lodging with the theologian, Muhammad al-Bashiri, who was overjoyed to hear
news of his brother, so far away in China.
Kamal, meanwhile, enjoying the
hospitality of the jurist, was able to invest the funds advanced to him by the
Sultan, through the Maqqari family, in the ingredients and implements necessary
for making perfumes: he rented a little
workshop, in the qasbah, the Suq Ben Aqla, near the busy potteries, and at once
set to work making small batches of excellent perfume, which he measured out carefully
into the most beautiful, ornate, colored glass bottles, some of them rather
large, but others very small. Never in
his life had he devoted so much care and even love into his grandfather’s art,
but as he worked he kept thinking that these bottles of perfume might buy him a
new life. Carefully, he packed the
bottles in straw and wrapped them in sackcloth.
To Kamal’s delight, Muhammad al-Bashiri
had agreed to begin his instruction in the Maliki tradition of sharia. This was the legal tradition, or madhhab,
followed by Ibn Battuta and, indeed, by almost every jurist in the Maghreb and
Andalusia.
“All of the madhhabs in the
Dar-ul-Islam[12]
base their findings on the following four kinds of evidence,” Muhammad
Al-Bashiri taught. “First, we look to
the Qur’an, to see if Allah himself has given us direction. Next, we consult Sunnah, the statements and
decisions of the Prophet, peace be upon him.
Thirdly, if no guidance can be found either in the Qur’an or in Sunnah,
we must fall back on Ijmaʼ, which is scholarly consensus. Finally, all the madhhabs agree that Qiyas –
analogy – may be used for any new situation unforeseen by the previous three
methods of deduction.”
“Analogy?” Kamal asked. “Why would Allah not give us all the knowledge
we might need in the Qur’an?”
“Well, the Qur’an was given to the
people of that time: Allah could not
very well reveal the entire future of the universe to them, could he? No one would be able to survive, having such
knowledge. But we believe that the Qur’an
is perfect, being a gift from God:
contained within it are clues that allow us to extrapolate – by analogy,
you see – and so discover an answer to every legal question.”
“I see,” Kamal nodded.
“Now, we of the Maliki madhhab allow
one other source of evidence for deduction:
ʼurf. That is, local
customs. If these do not contradict
Islamic principles, then we believe they are permitted.”
Kamal studied hard when he was not
busy in his rented shop, making perfumes.
Under Muhammad al-Bashiri’s direction, he copied out two books in their
entirety, the ‘Muwattah’ of Malik ibn Anas, the founder of the Maliki madhhab,
and the ‘Mudawwanah,’ consisting of notes and deductions compiled by two of
Malik ibn Anas’s own students. Ibn
Battuta himself explained that individual hadith were not as important to the
Maliki as they were to jurists of the other madhhabs. The hadiths approved by Maliki were all to be
found in the collection made by Bukhari, but in general the Maliki jurists
tended to put more stock in the recorded traditions of the first three
generations of Muslims who lived in Medina after the Prophet’s death.
“Their examples and their ideas are
the living Sunnah of the Messenger, peace by upon him,” Muhammad al-Bashiri
said. “If these traditions are not
contrary to the principles of Islam, we must assume they represent the
earliest, most accurate interpretation of the teachings of the Qur’an and the
wisdom of the Prophet.”
Ibn Battuta, meanwhile, purchased
four camels and forage enough to last them four months. Kamal also equipped himself thus, for that
was the custom: merchants traveled to
Mali with four camels – one for their provisions and three laden with
merchandise. Several caravans were
organized over the course of the season, which began in the autumn. Khabirs, or Leaders, set up their headquarters
in the caravanserai on the edge of the Suq Ben Aqla, recruiting merchants to
join them. It was far too dangerous, Ibn
Battuta explained, for anyone to try to reach Mali alone. The Sanhaja of the desert-dwelling tribes –
who hired themselves as guides to the khabirs – would not allow anyone to pass
through their territory without paying for protection. Then there was the matter of paying to use
the wells belonging to the Sanhaja – it was easier if such delicate matters
were handled by one man.
Kamal and Ibn Battuta left Sijilmasa
with one of the last caravans of the season, which departed at the beginning of
the month of Muharram.
* * *
The caravan included not only merchants
from Sijilmasa, Fez, and Tilimsin in Ifriqiya, but stray pilgrims returning
from Mecca, and a few faqirs, unaffiliated with formal Sufi orders, who were
leaving Morocco on account of the new Sultan’s recent proclamation banning
non-tariqa religious mendicancy. The
khabir at the head of the caravan was a Massufa named ʼAbu Muhammad Yandakan. He wore a large blue turban with a long
face-cloth that hid all but his nose and two discerning eyes. He was attended by two assistants, who acted
as messengers, and a scribe, who looked after the caravan’s general funds.
Kamal was new to desert life, but
Ibn Battuta had spent literally years of his life traveling with caravans, and
was utterly unfazed by the new routine. On
the first day, they marched from Sijilmasa following the afternoon prayer, and
they did not halt for the sunset or dusk prayer: indeed, they continued right on until dawn,
when ʼAbu Muhammad Yandakan called out the order to halt. The merchants and their servants immediately
dismounted from their camels, but made sure to bend their left front legs and
tie them in that position, high up, to prevent the beasts from running
off. Kamal did not like to do this, for
fear of hurting his camels, but Ibn Battuta snapped, “Do it! If your camels run away, you will die. Don’t worry – they’re tough animals.”
The camels clearly did not like
being tied up like this, but Kamal had to admit that they stayed close by,
hobbled up like that, giving everyone a chance to face eastward and offer their
dawn prayers. Afterward, they pitched
their little tents, lying down to rest until mid-afternoon, when the khabir
would rouse them all for another march. They
crossed sandy wastes, speckled with stunted acacia trees, and then followed the
gentle curves of a dry desert wadi, snaking through desiccated hills composed
of jumbled basalt stones the color of old iron.
Finally, they reached level, sandy wastes, where there were only a few
thorny bushes, widely-separated. Each
night, they would light an aromatic fire of dried camel dung, and spend a
little time eating their rations – sweet dates from the Sijilmasa oasis and
millet pounded into porridge. The water
in their leather bags was wretched, but palatable if boiled to make green
tea. Ibn Battuta regaled his companions
with stories of his travels – the manner in which strangers were received by
the Swahili, and how they built mosques out of dried coral there; the entourage
of a Byzantine princess, whose caravan he had accompanied into the steppes; the
artful cookery of the Persians – which made everyone hungry – and the scent of
the pepper markets of Malabar.
For the first two weeks, after
passing through the hills, they found waterholes in the dry wadis where their
camels could drink, although they often had to dig several feet, into the sand
and gravel of the streambeds, to find any moisture. Eventually, however, they came to the sand –
to the ʽarq, an endless undulation of dunes extending southward into an
oblivion of haze and shimmering mirages.[13] Here, there was no water at all, but the
camels, Kamal was assured, could last fourteen days without a drink. The pale foxes that lived in the desert, in
fact, were thought to pass their entire lives without drinking, deriving all
their water from the few fibrous desert plants they ate, or from their
prey. Even so, the camels were
wretchedly thin by the time the caravan reached Taghaza.
* * *
Taghaza was the strangest place
Kamal had ever seen – certainly the most barren. The entire town was built out of blocks of
salt, with roofs made of camel hides – even the mosque. The landscape in all directions was sand,
with not a tree in sight. There was but
one well, but the water was so saline that no one could drink it; even the
inhabitants had to send for water from a well situated a day’s march away.
“Ya Allah,” Kamal muttered under his
breath as he walked through this oddest of towns, where there seemed to be
nothing but salt, and no food at all except dates and a little grain from
Sijilmasa, or the flesh of slaughtered camels.
The people spoke a peculiar dialect
of Arabic, much infused with Berber, which Kamal could barely comprehend even
though the men of Taghaza tried to speak simply, gesturing with their
hands. They were all slaves, they explained,
sent here by the Massufa. Caravans came
from Walata, to obtain salt, which was highly-valued in Mali. They took Kamal out, a short distance, from
the village to show him how they mined the salt, clearing away layers of sand
and loose salt to get at slaps of rock-hard salt lying beneath the desert. Marveling at what he saw, Kamal returned to
Taghaza to join Ibn Battuta, who was brushing away a buzzing cloud of flies
with a sour look.
“Allah has forsaken this place,” the
old traveler muttered. “There’s nothing
good here.”
Kamal, however, noticed that many of
the other merchants were purchasing salt, especially a man named Zayyan, who
had come down from Tilimsin.
“Why on earth are you buying salt?”
Kamal asked him as the merchant watched the Taghaza slaves carry huge
rectangular slabs of salt off to the caravan’s camp, stacked and wrapped in
camel-hide.
“It’s used as money by the blacks
along the Nile.[14] In some places, it’s even more sought after
than gold.”
“Why?”
“It’s so hot they can’t survive
without it,” Zayyan replied, laughing heartily as he gestured to his purchase. “That’s at least forty dinars’ worth.”
Kamal wondered if he should buy
slabs of salt, too, but unlike the other merchants, he had not set out with his
camels half-laden, anticipating this opportunity. In any event, he doubted if the toiling
slaves of Taghaza had much need for his perfumes.
They remained at the salt mines for
ten miserable days, until the fifteenth day of the lunar month of Safar, slowly
collecting enough water to see them through the next leg of their journey. ʼAbu Muhammad Yandakan warned them that they
would have to travel ten nights without water, but by a stroke of luck they
discovered a temporary pool of sweet water, protected by two rocky outcrops. Here, they quenched their thirst, washed
their clothes, and watched as the camels fought each other, thrusting their
heads three and four at a time into small leather buckets.
The desert beyond this watering hole
was dazzling – a wilderness of mirages and wind-blown sand. The well-beaten path they had followed from
Sijilmasa this far disappeared completely, and they had to rely solely on the
guide that ʼAbu Muhammad Yandakan had hired at Taghaza, who wore a patch over
one eye and whose remaining eye was half-clouded over. Even so, they were assured that no one knew
the way across the desert better.
“Be careful,” the guide warned them,
but the merchants’ luck finding water had made them too cocky for their own
good. They began to ride off on their
own to hunt, or ranged forward seeking any sparse pasture for their
camels. Zayyan, the fool, insisted on
playing with snakes, although Kamal and Ibn Battuta urged him not to do this. One day, he seized a snake in its hole, but
was bitten. Frantically, he tried to
drain out the poison by scoring the wound with his knife, but even so his hand
became painfully swollen. At last, he
slit the throat of one of his camels and cut out its stomach, in which he laid
his wounded hand all night, again with little improvement. In the morning, he chopped off his own finger,
had his servants bind his wound, and did his best to keep up with the rest of
the caravan.
Zayyan was lucky. After
a quarrel with his maternal cousin, Ibn ʼAdi fell behind, out of disgust, and
disappeared in the desert.
“We must go back!” Ibn ʼAdi insisted. “My cousin is out there somewhere!”
“Inshallah, he will survive, but probably not,” replied ʼAbu
Muhammad Yandakan. “You will never find
him, and if by some miracle you do, you will never be able to find your way
back, or catch up with us. The caravan
must keep moving.”
Further along, they passed another caravan which had backtracked,
looking for several of their own men who had become lost; further along, under
a lone bush, they discovered one of these men, lying dead with a whip clutched
in one hand, only a mile away from the next watering hole.
They
paused to bury the man, ʼAbu Muhammad Yandakan saying only, “The desert teaches
by taking away” – an oft-repeated Arabic saying among the Mussafa.
While they were still several days’
from their destination, all of the merchants wrote to their agents or friends
in Walata, or to anyone they thought might assist them, for no caravan could
reach the city unless water and other provisions were brought out to meet the
in-coming camels. Ibn Battuta wrote to
Ibn Badda, a merchant from the town of Salaʼ, in Morocco, and this message
along with all the others was given to a takshif, a Massufa messenger specially
hired to ride on to Walata alone.
“It’s a dangerous job,” Zayyan
explained, rubbing his bandaged hand.
“Sometimes the takshif doesn’t make it.
They say the desert ahead of us is full of jinn. They bewitch men and lead them astray. The takshif must stay focused if he is to
survive, and if he dies, then so do we.”
Kamal took a deep breath. He was beginning to wonder if he would ever
survive to see the Bilad al-Sudan, let alone return home to Granada.
* * *
Walata was the first proper Massufa
town on the other side of the desert crossing from Sijilmasa, a town of low,
red-walled brick houses plastered with red mud, on the edge of the Sea of Sand,
with a rocky ridge of red hills rising immediately behind it, to the north and
west. There were no wadis, but a little
water raised from subterranean springs enabled the inhabitants to grow dates
and a few fields of excellent watermelons.
“You can leave your camels and cargo
in the square,” ʼAbu Muhammad Yandakan said.
“No one will touch any of it. You
must all go pay your respects to the Farba – the Sultan’s deputy.”
Kamal accompanied Ibn Battuta and
the other merchants to the Farba’s house, where he sat on a thick carpet, under
an archway, surrounded by guards carrying bows, spears, and onyx-hide
shields. The soldiers all wore
wide-brimmed hats covered with copper, curving up to a point, from which a
plume of ostrich feathers sprouted.
Behind them – immediately behind the Farba – stood the headmen of the
Massufa. A court attendant showed the
merchants where to stand, and although the Farba was seated only a few feet
away, and spoke in Arabic, his every word was repeated by the attendant.
Afterward, the mushrif, or customs
inspector, invited the merchants to his house, introducing himself as Mansa Ju,
which meant ‘Sultan’s Slave.’ Ibn
Battuta at first angrily refused to attend this gathering, but Kamal insisted
that he come, saying, “He is a royal official – it would be unseemly not to put
in an appearance.”
The merchants were given calabashes,
cut in half, filled with a mixture of pounded millet, milk, and honey, which they
all had to drink, each declaring the repast to be good.
“Intolerable!” Ibn Battuta snapped
as they took their leave of the town’s governor. “Clearly, these black men hold us in contempt
– they won’t even do us the courtesy of speaking with us! And what was all that with the calabashes?”
Kamal held his tongue, for although
the reception of the merchants had been an oddly formal ceremony, he had not
noticed any outright contempt on the part of the Farba – merely the aloofness
typical of royal officials even in Granada.
As for Mansa Ju, he had seemed a nice enough man, if unacquainted with the
ways of Arabs and Berbers.
“Oh, it’s just the way they do
things down here,” Ibn Badda assured them when they were finally installed in
their host’s house. “The inspector was
just being hospitable. By the end of the
season, you’ll be used to everything.”
“Well, I don’t like it,” Ibn Battuta
snarled.
“You don’t have to, but it’s their
country. They make the rules here: you can either follow them or leave.”
Kamal tried not to laugh, for Ibn
Battuta’s sake, but he had to admit that Ibn Badda had a point.
“I’ll leave with the next caravan
heading back to Sijilmasa – and I shall tell the Sultan how poorly we are
treated here.”
Ibn Badda chuckled, shaking his
head. “Well, then, a group of pilgrims
will be leaving for Sijilmasa in a few days’ time. They’re probably the last caravan that will
make the crossing this season.”
* * *
Since it seemed as if Ibn Battuta
was determined to return to Morocco, Kamal decided to hire a Massufa guide and
continue on his way to Timbuktu. Ibn
Badda assured him that the road was safe:
there was no need to wait for the rest of the caravan.
Shortly after leaving Walata, they
came to the Sahel, the “shore” of the Sea of Sand, a dry savannah country of
sparse grasses and acacia trees that gradually gave way to a more wooded
landscape filled with baobab trees. The
Massufa guide explained that the trees were very old, and this Kamal could well
believe, for they had very stout trunks.
However, the trunks were not solid; like camels, these trees had the
ability to store away enormous quantities of water in their interior
hollows. Some of the trees were so large
an entire caravan could have sheltered under one of them, and several
hollowed-out trees boasted enormous bee-hives, while in one such tree Kamal was
astonished to find a weaver working his loom, having made his home and shop
inside the trunk.
“Who are the people of Mali?” Kamal
asked his guide as they rode along through the vast and thinly-populated
countryside.
“Mali people all Mandé, mostly
Bambara,” the guide responded.
“Different castes there are. Like
us, being Muslims, foremost the Jula – the merchants.”
They had no need of provisions, not
after leaving Walata. Kamal, at his
guide’s insistence, purchased forty dinars’ worth of salt from Zayyan, and this
they used as currency to purchase whatever they required. Indeed, when they came to villages, the women
ventured forth, unashamed, with millet, milk in goatskin bags, chickens, lotus
fruit, rice, haricot beans, and a small dark seed from which a sort of couscous
was made. The guide urged Kamal to buy
the couscous, which they called funi, as the rice was not healthy for white
men.
Although Timbuktu lay to the east of
Walata, they traveled south to the river in order to reach it. Arab and Berber traders long ago had decided
that this river was the Nile, albeit hundreds if not thousands of miles
upstream from Egypt. However, the river
was not well known: traders from the
north had only seen that part of its course in the vicinity of Jenne, Timbuktu,
and Kawkaw.[15] In the Manding tongue, the river was called
Jeliba – “Great River” – while the Massufa simply termed it, “River of
Rivers.” They passed quickly through the
bustling market town of Zaghari, where a number of Muslim heretics had taken refuge,
and came to the riverbank at Karsanju.[16]
“From here it will be best to go on to
Timbuktu by boat,” the guide said, taking his leave and accepting payment for
his services. Kamal accordingly sold his
camels to one of the Jula merchants, and to seal the transaction shared a
calabash of juice with the man – an oddly effervescent, stimulating concoction
made from something called the kola nut, which he learned was a significant
article of trade in the region.
All the boats on the river were the
property of the Bozo, the fisherman caste, who called themselves “Masters of
the River,” although their Bambara overlords dismissed them as the “Bamboo
House People,” on account of the little huts they constructed along the
riverbank. Mostly they were former
slaves, taken in the wars through which the mansas of Mali had expanded their
empire: moreover, many of them were
pagans, still honoring a totem shaped like the horns of a bull, and their long,
narrow canoes, called kalungos, also were horn-shaped.
The river flowed toward the east,
through many channels, forming wooded islands, but the main channel was over a
thousand yards wide. Kamal had never
seen anything like it, either in Andalusia or Morocco, but even more surprising
were the alligators he sometimes saw, gliding through the water, or lying on
exposed mud-banks along the shore. Every
evening, they steered for the bank and camped at one of the villages, trading
salt for fish, rice, and couscous. After
several days, however, the woods along the north bank of the river became
thinner, and soon sand dunes could be seen again, as well as a thriving village
alongside a landing crowded with boats.
“Timbuktu, port this is – ashore
going,” the Bozo boatmen explained.
“Name Kabara is – this place.”
Kamal nodded, following the Bozos’
words as best he could. He was beginning
already to learn something of the Manding language.
Kamal and his trade goods were set
on shore, and he learned that the city was a short march north of the river, on
the edge of the desert. So, hiring
porters to carry his baggage, he made his way on foot to the gates of Timbuktu,
on foot.
* * *
The Farba of Timbuktu received Kamal
with every mark of respect, albeit according to the customs of Mali, and soon
enough the young Andalusian was conducted to the house of the Maqqari family’s
agent, one of the young scions of that famous lineage of trans-Saharan traders.
“Praise be to Allah, who created the
world!” Ibn Maqqari cried, offering Kamal a warm greeting. “We did not know what to think! It has been so long since your uncle died –
peace be upon him! But you have come –
finally – and this makes us happy.”
Ibn Maqqari called for green tea,
inviting Kamal to sit down. He was
astonished by the merchant’s home – indeed, by everything in Timbuktu. The entire city was built of mud, shaped by
hand, giving all the buildings, large and small, a rounded, slightly askew
appearance. However, within they were
very neat and tidy, decorated with carpets, brass and copperwares, intricately
carved wooden screens, and even plastered walls painted with floral designs. Even more astonishing was the fact that Ibn
Maqqari’s wife and daughter joined them, unveiled, serving the tea and
honey-cakes with their own hands.
“Who is the stranger, father?” Ibn
Maqqari’s daughter asked.
In Kamal’s country, women were not
entirely confined and veiled, but he had noticed that in Morocco, where the
fundamentalist Almovorid dynasty had reigned for nearly two centuries, prior to
the rise of the Marinids, the men were considerably more jealous and
unreasonable. Ibn Maqqari, however, had
adopted the easygoing ways of Mali. He
had married a Sudanese woman, and his daughter’s visage and form, therefore,
was a blend of Arab and African features that took Kamal’s breath away,
literally. All through the journey, the
old traders had warned him that the women of the Sudan were as beautiful as the
houris of Paradise, but he had not believed them.
“This, my dear, is the nephew of my
old friend, Ishaq Ibrahim, the Andalusian architect.”
“Bismillah!” exclaimed the
merchant’s wife, who was a queenly, stout Malian lady. “You have come all that way?”
“The journey was indeed difficult,” Kamal
replied, “but much is at stake, I gather.”
“Yes, yes,” Ibn Maqqari nodded. “Your uncle left behind quite a fortune, and
I will be very pleased to have it off my hands.”
Without further ado, Ibn Maqqari
finished his tea and took Kamal to his well-secured storerooms, to show him his
uncle’s treasure. The young man braced
himself: four hundred pounds of gold is,
after all, four hundred pounds of
gold.
“Ya Allah,” was all he could say,
staring into the large chest. He had to
wonder, seriously, if there was that much gold circulating in all of Granada.
“Your uncle died after a short
illness, but he dictated a will, which names you as his executor.”
“Me?” Kamal snorted.
“Well, it’s a good thing they sent me,
then, isn’t it?”
Ibn Maqqari nodded. “I will give you the document itself –
witnessed by me as chief of the Arabs and Berbers. Now comes the hard part. I’m afraid your uncle married two women of
this country, and let me just say that they will not stand for any funny
business. Everyone in Timbuktu is a merchant at heart – even the women. You’d better deal straight with them, and
have the qazi present to witness everything.”
* * *
Kamal was feasted by Ibn Maqqari, enjoying a proper meal for
the first time in weeks – mutton pilaf glistening with ghee – but when he went
to Ishaq Ibrahim’s house to meet his widows, the two ladies made it quite clear
that the matter of inheritance was to be settled at once. They had waited for a settlement for years. Could Kamal not see what a state their
household had fallen into? What had
taken him so long?
Reading the will, Kamal sat down
with his uncle’s widows in their dusty but sprawling mud-walled mansion and
said, “The Qurʼan has laid out rules for inheritance in the fourth sura: that shall guide us in the division of the
estate, but first we must tally up my uncle’s wealth.”
The counting was done by Kamal and
Ibn Maqqari together, observed by the two widows, while the qazi offered advice
regarding the proper division of the estate.
Ishaq Ibrahim had left behind forty-five thousand dinars’ worth of gold,
from which outstanding debts totaling three thousand dinars had to be
deducted.
“Does Ishaq Ibrahim’s father still
live?” the qazi asked.
Kamal hesitated, glancing at the two
widows and the dismal condition of his uncle’s mansion. What a question! But having begun to study law, Kamal recently
had memorized the fourth sura of the Qurʼan, in particular the verses
concerning inheritance, and he knew that if his grandfather was still alive,
the matter was finished – the old man would inherit everything.
“He died,” Kamal said.
It’s
not exactly a lie, Kamal thought. The plague was raging in Andalusia… if I’m
honest with myself, I must accept that probably my grandfather is dead by now. Perhaps everyone is.
Following the rules laid down in the
Surah an-Nisa of the Qurʼan, they set aside seven thousand dinars – one-sixth
of the estate – as the inheritance due to Kamal’s father. No small windfall for a glove-maker! But was he still alive to enjoy it? As for the widows, the youngest was to have
one-quarter share, or ten thousand five hundred dinars, while the eldest, who
had borne a daughter, received five thousand two hundred and fifty dinars. However, her daughter’s portion was fourteen
thousand dinars – the one-third share laid down by Allah’s commandment. Following Maliki madhhab rules regarding
inheritance, everything remaining was to be appropriated to the use of the
residuaries. Since Kamal was the only
residuary, his share thus was seven thousand two hundred and fifty dinars.[17]
To Kamal’s dismay, however, the two
widows seemed rather unhappy with this settlement, but he soon learned the
reason for their displeasure.
“We have become accustomed to a high
standard of living,” the youngest widow replied, sourly. “We have been living for years on borrowed
funds, you see.[18] Much of what has just been given to us has
already been spent, despite economies.”
* * *
Kamal remained with the widows,
whose names were Fatima and Noor. The
eldest wife’s daughter, meanwhile, was named Heera, after the name of the cave
outside Mecca where the Prophet had received the first revelation of the
Qurʼan. She was only a little younger
than Kamal, but as yet unmarried, and – to Kamal’s surprise – she was a black
woman of Mali, like her mother. That
evening, after Fatima and Noor had retired to their rooms, Heera joined Kamal
in the antechamber, removing the scarf from her head to reveal strands of
intricately braided hair. She smiled
brightly, and Kamal was struck both by her beauty and her natural charm.
“I crave a private word with you,
Kamal,” she said. “We are cousins after
all.”
“Oh, no,” Kamal said, staring at
her.
“Are you upset because I am not
white, like you?” she asked.
“No,” Kamal replied, quickly. “No – it’s not that at all. You’re not Ishaq Ibrahim’s daughter, are
you?”
“My father was your uncle’s business
partner,” Heera explained. “When he
died, your uncle married my mother.”
“Then you’re not adopted?”
“No.”
“Thanks be to God,” Kamal smiled,
closing his eyes and sighing with relief.
“If you were adopted, you would not be entitled to your inheritance.”
Heera gave him a wry, inquiring
look, and said, “Your grandfather isn’t dead, is he?”
“I have no idea,” Kamal
admitted. “But he’s an old man. What need does an old man have for so much
money? He is not poor. Anyway, trying to take all that back to
Andalusia, I would probably get myself killed by bandits. My uncle made a new life here – he had a
family. The money should stay here, with
you.”
“What about yourself? Will you go back?”
“I think I might like to stay,
actually,” Kamal replied. “I like it
here. And I have a feeling the plague
will remain north of the desert – Inshallah.[19] This is a haven.”
“Will you become a trader, then?”
“I thought I might do some trading,
yes,” Kamal nodded, “but I’d like to study sharia, too, and become a
jurist. I hear there’s an excellent
madrassa here in Timbuktu.”
“Yes! Your uncle built it – and the mosque, and the
palace, too. You must see them for
yourself. Wonders, they are. Mansa Musa praised your uncle to the skies
and showered him with every blessing.”
Kamal stood and walked over to one of his bags, still unpacked. He opened it and produced a small bottle of
perfume, which he gave to Heera.
“I made this,” he said. “My family are perfumers to the Emirs of
Granada.”
Heera admired the beautifully
crafted, shiny bottle, unstopped it, sniffed the scent, and placed a tiny dab
on her fingertip, applying it to her neck.
“Beautiful!” she exclaimed,
smiling.
“Keep it,” Kamal insisted. He blushed, adding, “The women of Andalusia
do not hide themselves, like the Moorish women do, but still, I am unaccustomed
to speaking so openly with a lady.”
“You’re doing a good job so far,”
Heera laughed, gently, giving him an encouraging look.
“Everything is so different here,”
Kamal said. “I’m afraid I still have
much to learn.”
“Don’t worry – I will teach
you. And don’t be so bashful. In our culture, it is normal for a man – even
married men – too have female friends who are not their wives: and the women, too, have male friends. We are not a jealous people, like the Arabs
and Berbers.”
* * *
Kamal quickly became absorbed into
the routines of life in Timbuktu, and Heera and he soon became close friends as
they spent each evening chatting, his cousin explaining to him how things were
done here in Mali.
The city of Timbuktu had been
founded by Massufa migrants from Walata.
They had brought Islam and their language – Tamasheq – to the region, intermarrying
with the Mandé, and their town also had hosted a few hundred Arab and Berber
residents on a more or less permanent basis for nearly two hundred years. By now, with the city just coming into its
own, nearly the entire population was of mixed ancestry. Kamal, however, soon learned to distinguish
the different castes into which the population was divided, for apart from the
tribal and clan divisions of the Mandé there were occupational divisions as
well. The ʼulema, or Islamic scholarly
caste, for instance, were called the karamogo, and they presided over the
Sankoré Madrassa, which was attacked to the Friday Mosque. Most of the inhabitants were Jula, or
merchants, but there also were members of the sixteen quiver-bearing clans –
the military nobles whose lineages provided consorts for the Malian rulers.
Kamal was fascinated by the Sankoré
Madrassa, for here in the African wilderness was one of the great libraries of
the world. Keenly conscious of the
isolation of Mali, and determined to build a great Islamic society in this far
corner of the Dar-ul-Islam, Mansa Musa had brought literally tens of thousands
of manuscripts to Timbuktu. Even more
books, meanwhile, had been copied out by the scholars of Mali, who added new
works to the storehouse of knowledge almost daily. Anyone who wanted to learn could study at the
Sankoré: poor scholars were hosted for
free, while the well-to-do – young men like Kamal – contributed to the waqfs,
or endowments, that supported the academy.
Alongside students of every color, Kamal studied diligently, and the curriculum
was both rigorous and comprehensive. The
scholars at Sankoré were expected to master the Arabic language and learn to
recite the Qurʼan in its entirety from memory.
However, that was just the beginning of their training. In addition to studying the reasoning and
decisions of the Maliki madhhab, the scholars at Sankoré also learned history,
geography, chemistry, astronomy, and algebra.
Kamal decided not to send his
father’s portion of the inheritance off to Andalusia immediately, just in case
his grandfather was still alive. Instead,
he took charge of it, as executor, and invested in trade, purchasing stocks
from the merchants who had come across from Sijilmasa. He bought cowries from the Maldives, cutlery,
paper, sandalwood, spices, glass, and every other thing one could imagine; with
Heera’s help, he formed a partnership with Jula traders who carried these goods
to the southern forests, where white merchants were not allowed to go – to the
secret places, hidden from Arab and Berber curiosity, where the Malians
obtained their gold.
The heat of summer came, and the sun
shone down so fiercely that wax melted, and the juxtaposition of interior
shadows and exterior brilliance was extreme enough to hurt one’s eyes. Ibn Battuta, to Kamal’s surprise, turned up,
complaining as usual. He had gone
directly to the mansa’s court, near the town of Kangaba, and had come away,
after a few months, disgusted and emaciated by sickness.
“These damned people haven’t figured
out whether they’re Muslims or pagans,” the old traveler snarled, calling on
Kamal at the mansion where he resided with his uncle’s widows and Heera. “You should have seen the ceremonies I had to
witness. They learn the Qurʼan by heart,
but the mansa has female slaves and even his own daughters running around naked
at court, and all sorts of heathen sooth-sayers and what-not, and no end of
ceremonies… and did we get any robes of honor?
Any gifts of gold? Nothing. Mansa Musa may have had a reputation for
generosity, but his brother is the lord of all skinflints! He gives me a calabash of mush and expects me
to disrobe and cover myself with dust!
Damn these people to hell. I
can’t wait to get back to Morocco.”
Kamal heard Ibn Battuta’s
complaints, but said very little; indeed, he was happy to bid the Moroccan
pilgrim farewell, for he soon pressed on in the direction of Kawkaw, determined
to find a place where someone might give him gold for doing nothing. After months among the people of Mali, he
still did not realize that sharing a king’s own food was a gift far greater
than mere gold. The mush, Kamal
realized, was a symbol of respect and brotherhood – a symbol entirely lost on
Ibn Battuta, who might as well have been blind and deaf, so constricted he was,
by his own dark desires.
Ibn
Battuta is a greedy, lazy man, Kamal thought. It was not a charitable idea, he admitted,
but he could come to no other conclusion.
How odd it was, he thought, that someone could be so well-traveled,
perhaps the most well-traveled man who had ever lived, and still be a bigot,
deep down inside.
Kamal dismissed Ibn Battuta: he had decided, rather firmly, to remain in
Mali, and thus he set about learning the local languages. The Manding tongue spoken by most of the
people in the empire was a relatively simple tongue compared with Andalusian
Arabic. Sentences were constructed with
the subject first, then the object, and finally the verb, whereas in Arabic –
and in the Massufa language – the verb often came first, followed by the
subject and then the object. Moreover,
in Manding, there were no inflections for gender, while various relationships
were expressed by means of post-positions.
Finally, the language was tonal, so that slight adjustments in
pronunciation could dramatically alter the meanings of certain words that
otherwise were identical. All of these
things Kamal learned from Heera, and, at some point – it was difficult to
remember – they had started kissing, and, well… one thing led to another. There were few things quite as seductive,
Kamal realized, as learning a foreign tongue from a beautiful young woman.
* * *
There was no prohibition against
cousins marrying in Islam. Indeed, it
was rather common: the Prophet Muhammad
himself had married one of his cousins.
In any event, Kamal and Heera were not related, strictly speaking, and
since they were friends and lovers, no one saw any reason to impede their happy
union. Indeed, Mansa Suleyman – the
ruler of Mali – appointed Kamal to be his royal perfumer, and Kamal opened a
new trade, exporting civet musk to Morocco, the musk being acquired by hunters
in the southern jungles, beyond the frontiers of the Malian Empire.
Compared with Granada – even
compared with Morocco – Mali was politically stable, which was, of course, good
for trade. Mansa Suleyman was not
especially popular, but he was a shrewd and just ruler. The only threat during his reign was posed by
his queen, the Qasa, who conspired against him with one of the army
commanders. Mansa Suleyman caught wind
of the conspiracy, however, and imprisoned his queen. In accordance with Mandé custom, the mutinous
army commander was shown no mercy, all the more so because his treachery aided
a revolt by the Wolof people in the western part of the empire.
Years passed, and Kamal became one
of the leading foreign merchants of Timbuktu, residing in his uncle’s old
mansion with his wife, Heera. They
multiplied their combined inheritance, year by year, becoming wealthy and
well-known. Kamal, meanwhile, completed
his studies at the Sankoré Madrassa and received a diploma declaring him to be
competent to judge all cases concerning commerce, estates, or family law. Indeed, he was as proud of this attainment as
he was of his fortune. He rarely thought
about Andalusia at all, except when remembering how much better his life in
Mali was.
And then it happened.
Kamal might have anticipated it, but
he had been too caught up in the excitement and wonder of making a new life in
a new land. We can’t escape from history, he told himself, when it finally
happened.
A man turned up in Timbuktu, from
Granada itself, with a letter from Kamal’s grandfather. The fellow had meant no harm, but he had
heard that Kamal was in Timbuktu, and had applied to the qazi for an
introduction. The qazi reported this
irregularity to Mansa Suleyman, who summoned Kamal to appear at court. Sensing danger, Kamal did not obey the
summons.
“You must flee,” Heera advised. “Don’t go before the mansa – he will kill
you. The mansa is just, but he is very
strict, and if he finds out you have lied….”
“But where will I go?” Kamal asked,
terrified. “If I try to reach Sijilmasa,
I won’t make it. If I join a caravan,
they’ll catch me: if I try to make it
alone, I’ll die. And I can’t go to the
southern forests, either: the pagans
would kill me.”
“I know a place,” Heera said,
breathlessly, seizing his head between her hands, forcing him to look at
her. “Go to the cliffs of
Bandiagara. Seek refuge with the people
there: but you must not let on that you
are a Muslim or they might kill you.”
“What manner of people are there?”
“People of the old religion who have
fled to the hills. It is the
Dar-ul-Harb, and full of demons, but it’s your only hope.”[20]
Kamal disappeared, while there was
still time, although it was difficult to tear himself away from Heera. He crossed the river and traveled south and
west, into the bush. It was a dry
country, a country of red earth, yellow grass, and rocks, thorny bushes, scattered
trees… at last, he saw the Bandiagara Escarpment, sweeping across the horizon,
a line of cliffs over a thousand feet high, stretching on for as far as the eye
could see.
Wiping the sweat from his brow,
Kamal proceeded toward the cliffs until he could see, perched high up the
mountainside, under an overhanging rock ledge, the most peculiar town he had
ever laid eyes on – a jumble of round and square structures, many of them
shaped vaguely like people, with conical roofs made of thatch and wood. This was the secret land of the Dogon, a
people no one in these parts could account for.
They had come from the east, fleeing from those who were converting to
Islam – from those who, lacking gold, hunted pagan men and women for the slave
trade. Kamal took a deep breath,
wondering what he should do next. The
Dogon, after all, were trying to hide:
to them, all Muslims were slave traders, but – perhaps worst of all –
they were people who connected others to the larger world. The Dogon were a people of secrets: the Muslims were a people of
revelations. Kamal could think of few
sins worse than denying Allah and the Qurʼan.
He wondered, looking up at the strange Dogon town, whether telling the
truth or lying was the better part of valor?
Lying
got me into this, he decided. I’ll tell them the truth, and – Inshallah –
I will be spared.
Historical Note:
This
story is based on the history of the Kingdom of Mali during the reign of Mansa
Musa and Mansa Suleyman; it also draws upon the Rihla of Ibn Battuta –
the account of the Moroccan travelers’ journeys that was dictated to the
Andalusian writer Ibn Juzayy. Kamal and
the members of Ishaq Ibrahim’s family are fictitious, but the Andalusian
architect is not: he did, indeed, design
the world-famous monuments of Mali, and it is recorded that his family was
involved in the perfume trade in Granada.
All the people mentioned in connection with the caravan journey are
historical. The poem inserted into the story is quoted by Ibn Battuta's amanuensis, Ibn Juzayy, but no author's name is given, and I have not been able to trace its origin.
My
purpose, in writing this story, is fairly complex: I wanted to show how Andalusian, Moroccan,
and African Islamic societies were interconnected in the 14th
century, less than two hundred years before the European colonization of the
Atlantic World. I also wanted to show a
West African Islamic society in its formative stages: historians have noted that Islam in West
Africa passed through distinctive stages – first, a period of encounter, in
which Muslim minorities lived ensconced within pagan societies, followed by a
period of “accommodation,” in which a Muslim ruling elite emerged, finding
common ground with a still largely pagan society. This is the situation at the time of this
story. Later, there would be a period of
“reform,” when syncretistic (i.e., “melting pot”) Islam is challenged by
fundamentalist “reformers” seeking to extirpate what they consider to be pagan
accretions.
This
is a very timely tale, especially when we reflect upon recent events in the
modern country of Mali. Islamic
fundamentalist rebels took over the northern and eastern parts of the country
during the summer of 2012, including the cities of Timbuktu and Gao (old
Kawkaw). The tombs of the Sufi saints of
Timbuktu have been destroyed, but the fate of the Sakoré Library – one of the
greatest medieval libraries in the world – hangs in the balance. As a center of tolerant Maliki learning, it
is unlikely to be spared by the heretical and intolerant Wahhabi rebels. Officially, the library – indeed, much of
Timbuktu – is a UNESCO World Heritage site.
The stated goal of the main rebel army is to create a separate Tuareg
state, but an Al-Qaeda connected sub-section of the rebel army also wants to
impose a strict Wahhabi interpretation of sharia throughout the “liberated”
territories.
Postscript: Since the writing of this story, Timbuktu has been liberated from the Wahhabi raiders, and - to the great relief of scholars - it was discovered that the people of the city had risked their lives to hide and protect the contents of the great library during the occupation. Consequently, although some items undoubtedly were lost, most of the library was saved.
Postscript: Since the writing of this story, Timbuktu has been liberated from the Wahhabi raiders, and - to the great relief of scholars - it was discovered that the people of the city had risked their lives to hide and protect the contents of the great library during the occupation. Consequently, although some items undoubtedly were lost, most of the library was saved.
[1] The Black Death had arrived in Europe in 1348, two years before the
beginning of this story.
[2] Serendip was the Islamic name for the island of Ceylon, or Sri
Lanka, off the southeastern coast of India.
[3] The Sudan, in this period, did not refer to the modern country, but
to the whole of sub-Saharan Africa from the Atlantic coast to the Red Sea.
[4] This is the famous “Market at the End of the World,” so-called
because Morocco was, for a long time, the western frontier of the Islamic
World.
[5] Ifriqiya, the origin of the modern word “Africa,” in this period
referred only to the region corresponding to the modern countries of Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
[6] Literally, “A throne platform or a funeral bier.”
[7] A qazi is an Islamic judge.
[8] An archipelago of coral atolls off the southwestern coast of
India.
[9] Allah-u akbar, meaning, “God is great!” A very common Islamic slogan.
[10] Anyone who had made the Hajj to Mecca was permitted to take the
title al-Hajji. In the Middle Ages, most
people could not afford to make the Hajj.
[11] In this story, the Sanhaja and Massufa are synonymous. They are better known today as the Tuareg.
[12] Dar-ul-Islam – the “House of Islam,” or the area of the world that
either was under the rule of Islamic kings or else was predominately
Muslim. A Muslim equivalent of the
Western term “Christendom.”
[13] The Arabic term ʽarq is the source of the word
“erg,” used by geologists for large fields of sand dunes.
[14] Medieval Muslims believed that the great river of Mali – the Niger
– was actually the Nile. They had no
proper comprehension of the shape or size of Africa in those days.
[15] The medieval Kawkaw is today’s Gao, in Mali.
[16] These “heretics” were members of the schismatic ʼIbazia sect, whose beliefs about the nature of Allah were different
from those of other Sunni Muslims.
[17] Establishing the value of a dinar is difficult since we do not have
good economic records from this period.
However, the daily wage of an artisan in Granada in the 14th
century probably was around 2-3 dinars per day.
Prices in Mali seem to have been somewhat higher. A base annual income in Timbuktu might have
been approximately 1,500-2,000 dinars a year.
[18] Loaning money at interest was forbidden in Islam, but loans were
still possible: those incurring debt
paid a loan transaction fee, and a series of loan maintenance fees, rather than
interest.
[19] We are not certain what the Black Death actually was, but high
altitudes and climatic extremes – intense cold, aridity, and heat – seem to
have stopped it. According to our
records, the plague did not reach either India or sub-Saharan Africa.
[20] Dar-ul-Harb, meaning “House of War” – this was how Muslims referred
to the non-Islamic world, against which it was lawful to wage jihad.
Copyright, William Lailey 2012.
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