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

‘By all means,’ the Sidi’s grandson said, ‘we are at your service,’ and at his touch the tomb opened quite easily. Then all the people who had gathered there saw for themselves, what they would never have believed otherwise: that the Sidi’s body was still whole and incorrupt, and that instead of being affected by the decay of time, it was giving off a beautiful, perfumed smell.

Everyone who was there was witness to the event and nobody, not even the effendis, could deny the miracle that Sidi Abu-Kanaka had wrought. And so it happened that the canal was made to take a slight diversion there, and on that plot of land the people of the village built a maqâm for the Sidi. The Sidi, in turn, extended his protection over Nashawy and kept its people from harm. Once, for instance, when a gang of armed thieves set out to attack Nashawy the Sidi summoned up a miracle and surrounded the village with a deep, impassable moat. In the years that followed, time and time again, he gave the villagers proof of his benevolence with miracles and acts of grace.

‘This is the story that people tell here,’ Ustaz Sabry said to me, as I scribbled furiously in my notebook. ‘You see how the fellaheen can thwart the government when they choose …’

Yet, although everyone in the village revered the Sidi, there was no mowlid to honour his name; Nashawy’s annual mowlid commemorated a saint from the settlement’s parent village, far in the interior. Then one year there was a terrible accident at the Nashawy mowlid. A boy who had climbed on to the roof of a house to get a better view of the chanting of the zikr, lost his footing on the straw and fell off, breaking his neck. The people of the village were so horrified that they ran back and shut their doors, and the streets of the village were deserted, night after night, while everyone cowered at home. There were many who interpreted these events as a sign that the village ought to begin celebrating a mowlid in honour of Sidi Abu-Kanaka.

There was so much fear in Nashawy in those days, said Ustaz Sabry, that one night he and some of the other teachers decided that they ought to do something to counter the panic that had overtaken the village. What they did was this: they formed small groups, together with the other educated people in the village, and every night after the sunset prayers they walked through the lanes crying the name of God out loud, and calling upon the fellaheen to come out of their houses. Nobody joined them the first night, but over the next few days more and more people came out, until finally every man was out in the lanes shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’. Thus the villagers got over their fear and Nashawy slowly returned to normal.

Later the teachers got together and decided that the time had come to call a halt to the extravagances of the mowlid. The celebration of mowlids for local saints was not a part of the true practice of Islam, Ustaz Sabry argued; such customs only served to encourage superstition and religious laxity. Besides, the fellaheen wasted a lot of money on the mowlid each year, money they had worked hard to earn, and which they would have done better to spend on fertilizers and insecticides.

For a few years after that, the villagers celebrated Sidi Abu-Kanaka’s mowlid, but on a much reduced scale. But then there was further disagreement about the saints and their mowlids and in the end the Imam and many others declared that things being as they were, it was better not to hold a mowlid at all.

‘Is that Imam Ibrahim you’re referring to?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Ustaz Sabry, in surprise. ‘Have you met him? He hardly goes out at all nowadays.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t met him. But I’ve heard a lot about him; people say that he was once famous as a “man of religion” in this area.’

One of the college students, a lean, wiry youth with deep-set eyes, cast a startled glance in my direction. ‘Nowadays people laugh at his sermons,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t seem to know about the things that are happening around us, in Afghanistan, Lebanon and Israel.’

Ustaz Sabry shrugged. ‘He’s from another time,’ he said. ‘What he knows about religion is what he learnt from his father in the village Qur’an school, the kuttâb.’

‘He doesn’t know anything about today’s world,’ said the student. ‘When you deliver the Friday sermons, ya Ustaz Sabry, it’s so inspiring — everyone feels they should do something about all that’s happening in the world around us.’

Ustaz Sabry threw him a nod of acknowledgement. ‘It’s the times that are different,’ he said. ‘When Imam Ibrahim was a young man it was very hard for people like him to go to college or university and they didn’t have many dealings with the big cities. How were they to learn about the real principles of religion?’

‘But I’ve heard Imam Ibrahim reads a lot,’ I said. ‘And that he’s very knowledgeable about traditional kinds of medicine.’

‘Yes,’ conceded Ustaz Sabry, ‘that is true, no doubt about it. He’s read many of the classical texts and he’s very knowledgeable about plants and herbs and things like that — or so they say.’

Zaghloul interrupted him with a sudden outburst of laughter. ‘Those leaves and powders don’t work any more,’ he said. ‘Nowadays everyone goes to the clinic and gets an injection, and that’s the end of it.’

‘But Imam Ibrahim’s learnt to give injections too,’ Ustaz Sabry said, ‘just like all the other barbers.’

‘Except that he sticks in the needle like it was a spear,’ said the weaver.

In the laughter that followed I got up to leave, for it was late now, and I had a long day’s notes to write out. Ustaz Sabry rose to see me out and invited me to come back again soon, so we could have another talk. At the door he turned and asked the two college students to accompany me.

‘It’s dark outside,’ he said, overruling my protests. ‘You won’t be able to find your way back; you city people always get lost in villages. These two boys, Nabeel and Isma‘il, will take you to your room.’

6

‘I HEARD SOMETHING about those friends of yours,’ Shaikh Musa suddenly exclaimed, while we were sitting in his guest-room talking about everything that had happened in the years I had been away. ‘You know those two fellows you used to talk about so much, Nabeel and Isma‘il — I heard something about them.’

‘Yes?’ I said. ‘What was it?’

‘Someone told me, I can’t remember who,’ he said. ‘It was many years after you went back to India.’

He paused to think, scratching his chin while I waited impatiently.

‘I heard they were going to Iraq,’ he said at last. ‘They had gone to Cairo to make the arrangements.’

‘Nabeel and Isma‘il!’ I said. ‘Are you sure you’re thinking of the right names?’

‘Yes,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘I would sometimes ask about them when I met people from Nashawy: how they were, what they were doing. Things like that. Didn’t you know they were going?’

‘No,’ I said. I could only shake my head, in stupefaction: it had never occurred to me that Nabeel might have left Egypt and gone abroad.

It was several years now since I had last heard from Nabeel. He and I had corresponded regularly for a while after my departure, but then I had changed address several times in New Delhi, while he had gone off to do his stint in the army, and one way or another our correspondence had been ruptured and never resumed. In the intervening years I had assumed that he and Isma‘il had become employees of the Agriculture Ministry, just as they had always intended to.

When I first met them, that night at Ustaz Sabry’s house, they were still students at an agricultural training college in Damanhour. They had only a short while to go and once in possession of their degrees they would each be entitled to a job in the Agriculture Ministry. They knew it would be several years before they actually got those jobs — they would have to serve their drafts in the army first, and then there would be a long wait while the Ministry tried to find places for them (no easy matter since it had to cope with thousands of new graduates every year). Still they were very sure in their minds that the eventual security would be well worth the wait, and they had both decided long before that they would send their papers in to the Ministry as soon as they had served their time in the army.