Amitav Ghosh - In an Antique Land - History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

Schechter had to work for several weeks inside the Geniza chamber, sorting out its contents with the help of the ‘scoundrel beadles’. The documents inside were of many different kinds and only a small portion of them had a religious content, properly speaking. But the people who used the Geniza would not have countenanced the modern distinction between the ‘secular’ and the ‘religious’: for them there was little that fell outside the scope of God’s work, no matter whether it had to do with marriage, prayer or porterage contracts. The Geniza did, in fact, contain innumerable Scriptural and rabbinic documents of great importance, Biblical manuscripts in particular. But it was neither a religious library nor an archive: it was a place where the members of the congregation would throw all the papers in their possession, including letters, bills, contracts, poems, marriage deeds and so on. Often the same piece of paper would contain several different writings, for paper was expensive in the Middle Ages, and people were thrifty in its use. These bits and pieces were thrown haphazardly into the Geniza, and over the centuries the people who occasionally cast their hands into the chamber disarranged them even more. To complicate matters further, large quantities of printed matter and books were also deposited in the Geniza from the sixteenth century onwards.

Schechter eventually decided to leave behind the printed fragments and take only the written ones. He filled about thirty sacks and boxes with the materials and with the help of the British Embassy in Cairo he shipped them off to Cambridge. A few months later he returned himself — laden, as Elkan Adler was to put it, ‘with the spoils of the Egyptians’.

In 1898 the manuscripts that Schechter had brought back from Cairo were formally handed over to the University Library, where they have remained ever since, well-tended and cared for, grouped together as the Taylor-Schechter Collection. The collection contains about a hundred and forty thousand fragments and is the largest single store of Geniza material in the world. It is in this collection, spread over a few dozen documents, that the stories of Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave are preserved — tiny threads, woven into the borders of a gigantic tapestry.

Other hoards of documents, very similar to the Geniza material, were discovered in the Jewish cemetery in Fustat at the turn of the century and then again a decade or so later. Within a few years they too had reached Europe and America, a large part of them going into private collections.

By the First World War, the Geniza had finally been emptied of all its documents. In its home country however, nobody took the slightest notice of its dispersal. In some profound sense, the Islamic high culture of Masr had never really noticed, never found a place for the parallel history the Geniza represented, and its removal only confirmed a particular vision of the past.

Thus, having come to Fustat from the far corners of the known world, a second history of travel carried the documents even further. The irony is that for the most part they went to countries which would have long since destroyed the Geniza had it been a part of their own history. Now it was Masr, which had sustained the Geniza for almost a millennium, that was left with no trace of its riches: not a single scrap or shred of paper to remind her of that aspect of her past.

It was as though the borders that were to divide Palestine several decades later had already been drawn, through time rather than territory, to allocate a choice of Histories.

11

I CAME BACK to Lataifa a week before the end of Ramadan. In my bag I had a few gifts — an illuminated copy of the Qur’an for Shaikh Musa, a leather wallet for Jabir, a ball for the boys’ soccer team, and so on. I arrived standing in the back of a pick-up truck, at a time of evening when the boys and young men of the hamlet were always to be found sitting beside the main road, talking with their friends. Some of them ran towards me as soon as I climbed out of the truck. I waved, but to my surprise they neither smiled nor waved back. I noticed that their faces were unusually solemn, and suddenly I was stricken with apprehension.

‘Something terrible has happened while you were away, ya mister,’ said the first boy to reach me.

‘What?’

‘You remember Shaikh Musa’s son, Hasan?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘He’s dead; he died a few days ago.’

‘He was buried just the other day,’ one of the other boys said. ‘There was a big ceremony and everything. You missed it.’

Later that evening I went to see Shaikh Musa, carrying the present I had bought for him in Cairo. I wasn’t sure whether this would be the right moment to give it to him, but I took it along anyway, because I didn’t want to turn up empty-handed at his house.

I was met at the door by his son Ahmed. He was wearing a crumpled jallabeyya and he looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes. I shook his hand and uttered the customary phrases of mourning. Whispering the responses, he led me into the guest-room.

Shaikh Musa was sitting in a corner. The room was dark; all the windows were shut and the lamp had not been lit. He rose to his feet with some difficulty and mumbled the usual words of greeting: ‘Welcome, how are you,’ and so on, just as he would have if I had dropped in for a casual chat about cotton farming. I said the conventional words of consolation and then tried to add something of my own. ‘It’s terrible news,’ I said. ‘I was very shocked …’

He acknowledged this only with a gesture and for a while the three of us sat in silence. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw that he was unshaven, with several days stubble showing white against his dark skin. He seemed to have aged terribly since I had last seen him: he looked as though he’d shrivelled and withered; his jallabeyya had suddenly outgrown him.

When I handed him the package I had brought with me he acknowledged it only with a slight inclination of his head. Ahmed took it from him, mumbling a word of thanks, and a moment later he left the room.

After we had been alone for a while, Shaikh Musa said softly: ‘He was ill when you saw him; you saw how he had that pain in his head that night. It got a little better so he went back to his camp. But then it took a turn for the worse and he had to go into the military hospital. Ahmed visited him there, and I would have gone as well, but Ahmed came back and said that it was all right, he would be well soon, the doctors had said not to worry. And then one night, we had news that he had died. It was very late, the time of the suhur, but we hired a truck from the next village and I and one of my brothers set off at once for Mansourah. When we got there we found that his officers and fellow soldiers were sitting up, keeping vigil beside his body. The army even gave us a car to bring the body back, and the officers and soldiers came too, so that they could attend his funeral.’

‘What happened to him?’ I asked. ‘What sort of illness was it?’

A look of puzzlement came into his eyes as he turned to look at me. ‘He was ill,’ he said. ‘He had a pain in his head; you saw how his head was bandaged.’

My question seemed cruel and I did not persist with it. We sat in silence for a while, and then his two young grandchildren came into the room with their schoolbooks and an oil lamp. They opened their books to study, but in a few minutes something distracted them and they began to play instead. To my relief I saw a slight smile appear on Shaikh Musa’s face.

‘If you had been here at the time,’ he said, ‘you would have seen his funeral and the mourning-reception afterwards. So many people came to mourn with us …’