Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Read Online Free Page B

London.
    ‘There are none,’ said the guardian.
    Wishing that Abdelmajid had not gone, I looked around the chamber for inspiration and noticed a small
mihrab
set into the wall, a niche showing the direction of Mecca. ‘Do people pray here?’
    ‘They come to recite the Holy Qur’an, after the dawn prayer.’
    This raised my spirits. ‘Then I must try to come.’
    ‘It is better for you not to come. There are many drunkards and other wicked people about at that hour.’
    Again we sat in silence. I could hear my watch ticking. Then I thanked the guardian, put a donation in the box – ‘It is not necessary,’ he said – and left with a last look back at the porridge-like walls.
    I don’t know what I had expected from the tomb. Whatever it was, I had not found it. I suppose I had been hoping for a vibration or two. The tomb’s appearance, a combination of municipal washroom and front parlour, had not helped; a poker-work sign (‘Dunroamin’?) wouldn’t have been out of place. Neither had the poker-faced guardian, whom I could picture ferrying the dead across the Styx. Worse, phrases I had read about the tomb rose up to haunt me – ‘authenticity open to question’, ‘considerable doubt as to the true identity of its occupant’, ‘possibly some distant relative of the traveller’ – phrases which, in my desire to find the real, physical IB, I had conveniently buried.
    Who then was the real IB?
The Concealed Pearls
, the Islamic biographical dictionary of the fourteenth century, lists him as Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Yusuf, of the tribe of Lawatah and the city of Tangier, surnamed IB. The Lawatah are descendants of the Lebu, a people mentioned in Pharaonic records – the Libyans of the Greeks – who originated in the region of Cyrenaica. They spread into Egypt early on, and by the ninth century AD had settled in the far south-west of present-day Morocco; there are also said to be Christian Lawatah on Malta. After the coming of Islam the Lawatah, like many of the other tribes collectively known as Berbers, claimed an Arabian origin. There were plenty of stories to back up the idea. One told of a South Arabian ancestor wandering all the way to Libya, a journey of 1,800 miles – a fair distance given that he was looking for some lost camels. Historians from Ibn Khaldun onwards have gleefully trashed such tales; but while their reasoning may be based on sound scholarship, it all seems rather unfair – in the same league as denying Father Christmas. A family like IB’s were totally Arabized, and to pick nits about the traveller’s Arabness would be like questioning a Cornishman’s Englishness because his ancestors were Celts and not Anglo-Saxons. IB himself would have been aghast to be called a Berber, a word which in Arabic as in the European languages has the ring of ‘barbarian’.
    IB’s family name is more of a problem. One theory explains ‘Battutah’ as a Maghribi diminutive of the Arabic
battah
, ‘duck’, and a pet version of the girl’s name Fatimah. The notion that ‘IB’ should mean ‘Son of the She-Duckling’ is charming enough to be plausible. But then so are the various other suggestions that have been put forward: Son of the Father of a Tassel/of an Egg-Shaped Bottle/of a Bad Woman with an Ellipsoidal Body. (‘Battut’, it should be added, is the Arabic for Donald Duck.)
    My uneasy suspicion that I had come all the way to Tangier to visit the tomb not of IB but of some cousin of his many times removed – if its occupant was even that – was partly dispelled by lunch in La Grenouille on the rue Rembrandt. A BBC nature programme on crustaceans, broadcast by a Spanish satellite channel, was showing silently on a television set in the corner. I ate a solitary and excellent meal of snails, sole and
tarte au citron
. Over coffee, I decided to leave Tangier. I needed help, and I had a convoluted introduction to a gentleman in Rabat