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

My mind went back to that evening when I first met Nabeel and Isma‘il; how Nabeel had said: ‘It must make you think of all the people you left at home when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself.’ It was hard to think of Nabeel alone, in a city headed for destruction.

A little later we went to Isma‘il’s house to watch the news on the colour TV he had brought back with him. It sat perched on its packing case, in the centre of the room, gleaming new, with chickens roosting on a nest of straw beside it. Soon the news started and we saw footage of the epic exodus: thousands and thousands of men, some in trousers, some in jallabeyyas, some carrying their TV sets on their backs, some crying out for a drink of water, stretching all the way from the horizon to the Red Sea, standing on the beach as though waiting for the water to part.

There were more than a dozen of us in the room now. We were crowded around the TV set, watching carefully, minutely, looking at every face we could see. There was nothing to be seen except crowds: Nabeel had vanished into the anonymity of History.

Prologue

1 The slave’s first appearance: E. Strauss (now Ashtor), ‘Documents for the Economic and Social History of the Near East’ ( Zion , n.s. VII, Jerusalem, 1942).

2 Khalif ibn I aq:The and the in the name I aq are distinct consonants. The system of notation used here for transcriptions from Arabic is broadly similar to that of the Encyclopaedia of Islam . In general, I have tried to keep transcriptions to a minimum, usually indicating the spelling of a word or name only upon its first occurrence. As a rule I have included the symbol for the Arabic consonant ‘ain (‘) wherever it occurs, except in place names, where I have kept to standard usage. Specialists ought to be forewarned that if, in these pages, they seek consistency in the matter of transcription, they shall find only confusion — a result in part of the many different registers of Arabic that are invoked here. On the whole where the alternative presented itself, I have favoured the dialectical usage over the literary or the classical, a preference which may seem misleading to some since the rural dialects of the Delta differ markedly in certain respects from the urban dialect that is generally taken to represent colloquial Egyptian Arabic.

3 A German army had arrived:Ibn al-Qalânisî, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades , pp. 280, (ed. and trans. H. A. R. Gibb, Luzac & Co. Ltd., London, 1967).

4 ‘That year the German Franks’:The historian was the famous Ibn al-Athîr (quoted by Amin Maalouf in The Crusades through Arab Eyes , tr. Jon Rothschild, Al Saqi Books, London, 1984).

5 Among the nobles:See Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades , Vol. II, pp. 279–80, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1952).

6 ‘There was a divergence’:Ibn al-Qalanisi, Damascus Chronicle , p. 282.

7 ‘the German Franks returned’:Ibn al-Athir, quoted by Amin Maalouf in The Crusades through Arab Eyes . Ibn al-Qalanisi wrote a vivid description of this engagement in The Damascus Chronicle , pp. 281–4. See also Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades , Vol II, pp. 281–4; and Virginia G. Berry, ‘The Second Crusade’, in A History of the Crusades , Vol. I, pp. 508–10 (ed. K. M. Setton, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1969). Hans Eberhard Mayer discusses the Crusaders’ decision to attack Damascus in The Crusades , p. 103, (tr. John Gillingham, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988).

8 They were … quick to relay news:One of the services that merchants rendered each other in this period was the supplying of information (see Norman Stillman’s article, ‘The Eleventh Century Merchant House of Ibn ‘Awkal (A Geniza Study)’, p. 24 (in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient , XVI, pt. 1, 1973). Not long after Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s lifetime an Arab scholar was to tell Sultan Salâ al-Dîn’s (Saladin’s) son, al-Malik al- âhir, that merchants were ‘the scouts of the world’. (Cf. S. D. Goitein, ‘Changes in the Middle East (950–1150), as illustrated by the documents of the Cairo Geniza’, p. 19, in Islamic Civilisation , ed. P. Richards, Cassirer, Oxford, 1973).

9 ‘things which have no price’:My translation is based on Strauss’s transcription in ‘Documents for Economic and Social History of the Middle East’. The line quoted here is line 17.

10 ‘two jars of sugar’:Ibid., line 18.

11 ‘plentiful greetings’:Ibid., line 23.

12 The Slave’s second appearance:S. D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders , Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1973 (henceforth Letters) . The quotations from Khalaf ibn Ishaq’s letter in the next four paragraphs are all taken from Goitein’s translation in this volume (pp. 187–92).

13 This is another eventful year:Cf. Steven Runciman, History of the Crusades , Vol. II, p. 226. See also, H. A. R. Gibb, ‘Zengi and the Fall of Edessa’, in A History of the Crusades , Vol. I.

14 I had … won a scholarship:The body in question is the Inlaks Foundation, of London, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank them. I am grateful, in particular, to the foundation’s director Count Nicoló Sella di Monteluce for his encouragement and support.

15 At that moment, I … expected to do research:I would like to add a tribute here to the late Dr Peter Lienhardt of the Institute of Social Anthropology, who supervised my D. Phil. at Oxford. I consider myself singularly fortunate in having had him as my supervisor: he was endlessly generous with encouragement, fearsome in his debunking of pretension, and tireless in the orchestration of logistical support. Yet if I think of him today as the best of supervisors, it is not for all those virtues, inestimable as they are, but one yet more valuable still, being the rarest of all in academics: that he did everything he could to make sure that I was left to myself to follow my interests as I chose. My gratitude to him is inexpressible.

16 La aîfa:Neither this nor the names of any of the settlements around it are their actual names; nor are the names of those of their inhabitants who are referred to in the following pages.

La aîfa

1 Being the kindest … of men:I would like to acknowledge here my enormous debt to the late Professor Aly Issa of the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Arts, Alexandria. Professor Issa cleared a path for me through all the official hurdles that surround the enterprise of ‘fieldwork’ and because of him I was able to move into Lataifa within a few weeks of arriving in Egypt. I remember him with the deepest respect and affection and it is a matter of profound regret to me that he is not alive today to see this book in print.