Bruce Sterling - Essays. Catscan Columns

On Wednesday, Moluccan separatists bombarded the Indonesian embassy, near my hotel, with Molotov cocktails. A dozen zealots were injured. Nobody outside Holland and Indonesia know much about the Moluccans, an Asian Moslem ethnic group with a nationalistic grievance. They'd love to raise hell at home in Indonesia, but when they do they're shot out of hand by fascist police with teeth like Dobermans, so they raise a stink in the old Mother Country instead, despite the fact that Holland can do almost nothing for them. Europe is full of exiles--and full of its own micro-nations: the Flemish, the Magyars, Gypsies, Corsicans and Bretons, Irish who remember Cromwell, Jews who remember Nebuchadnezzar, Basques who remember Hannibal, all like yesterday.

Ibn Battuta's world was similarly polyglot, and divided into "nations," too, run by mamelukes and moghuls who doted on tossing dissidents to packs of ravenous man-eating dogs. Muhammed Tughlug, the radiant Sultan of Delhi, punished rebels (very loosely defined) by having them cut in half, skinned alive, and/or tossed aloft by trained elephants with swords strapped to their tusks. It was bad news to cross these worthies, and yet their borders meant little, and ethnicity even less. A believer was a citizen anywhere in Islam, his loyalties devoted to Civilization--the sacred law of the Prophet--and then to his native city. Ibn Battuta was not a "Moroccan" countryman or a "Berber" ethnic, but first a learned Islamic scholar, and second a man of Tangier.

It may soon be much the same in Europe--a vague attachment to "Western democratic ideals," while one's sense of patriotism is devoted, not to one's so-called country, but to Barcelona or Amsterdam, Marseille or Berlin. (Cities, mind you, with populations every bit as large as entire nations of the medieval world.) At this period in history, the aging institution of the nation-state is being torn from above and below--below by ethnic separatists, above by the insistent demands of multinational commerce and the global environment.

Is there a solution for the micronations-- besides, that is, the dark horrific example of the "Final Solution?" Maybe. Let the Lithuanians "go"-- give them "freedom"--but with no local currency, no local army, no border tariffs or traffic control, no control over emigration, and with the phones and faxes open 24 hours a day. What is left? City-level government, in a loose ecumenicum.

A good trick, if anyone could pull it off. It's contrary to our recent political traditions, so it seems far-fetched and dangerous. But it's been done before. Six hundred years ago, in another world ... The fourteenth century, what Barbara Tuchman called _A Distant Mirror_.

In Alanya, a city of medieval Anatolia, Ibn Battuta had his first introduction to the interesting organization known as the fityan. He was invited to dinner by a remarkably shabby man in an odd felt hat. Ibn Battuta accepted politely, but doubted that the young fellow had enough money to manage a proper feast.

His interpreter laughed, for the shabby young man was a powerful sheik of the fityan. "The fityans were corporations of unmarried young men representing generally the artisan classes of Anatolian towns ... The code of conduct and initiation ceremonies were founded on a set of standards and values that went by the name of futuwwa ... referring in concept to the Muslim ideal of the `youth' (fata) as the exemplary expression of the qualities of nobility, honesty, loyalty and courage. The brothers of the fityan were expected to lead lives approaching these ideal qualities, including demonstrations of generous hospitality to visiting strangers ... By the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries, the fityan associations existed in probably every Anatolian town of any size. In an era of political upheaval and fragmentation ... the fityan were filling a crucial civic function of helping to maintain urban cohesiveness ..."

Far from humble poverty, Ibn Battuta found his medieval youth-culture hosts occupying a fine downtown lodge crammed with pricey Byzantine rugs and Iraqi glassware. The lads were dressed to the nines in long cloaks, boots, knife-decked cummerbunds and snazzy white bonnets with pointed white peaks two feet high. "They brought in a great banquet, with fruits and sweetmeats, after which they began their singing and dancing." He was "greatly astonished at their generosity and innate nobility."

No more so, perhaps, than myself and my Canadian caravan companion when we found ourselves in a retrofitted nineteenth-century stove factory downtown in The Hague. Now a filmhouse, it was crammed with young Dutch media-devotees in the current multinational fityan get-up of black jeans and funny haircuts. Their code of conduct was founded in a set of standards and values that goes by the name of "cool." Six hundred years from now, the names of Mark Pauline, Laurie Anderson and Jean Baudrillard may mean little, but at the moment they are the stuff of a Sufi-like mystical bond.

We gave them a few names and second-hand homilies: Mandelbrot, ART-MATRIX, _Amygdala_, Jaron Lanier, Ryoichiro Debuchi--with addresses and fax numbers. We are pagans, of course, and we have video screens; but basically little happened that would have surprised the lads of the fityan--except for the shocking anomaly that many of us were women.

In his travels through Anatolia, Ibn Battuta stayed with no less than 25 separate fityans. But then, he was a professional.

In my time off, I tramped the streets seeking the curiosities of cities and the marvels encountered in travels. Would the hashish have surprised Ibn Battuta? I rather doubt it. You can buy hashish in The Hague in little plastic bags, for about six bucks a pop, quite openly. A hole-in-the-wall place called The Jukebox offers a varied menu: Senegalese marijuana, Swazie, Columbian, Sensemilla ... and various global subspecies of hash: Chocolata, Ketama, Kabul, Sputnik, Zero-Zero ... It's a teenage thing, bubblegum. They're not allowed in bars, Dutch teenagers. They have to smoke this harmless hashish stuff instead. They seem rather moody and somber about it, for they don't kick up their heels, scream, giggle, or frighten the horses. They just get red-eyed and a bit sluggish, and listen to old Motown records while sipping orange soda and playing of all things, backgammon. They huff hash like monsters and nobody thinks a damn thing of it. Shocking.

In the Maldive Islands, Ibn Battuta was appointed a judge. The lax and easy life of the tropical Indian seas offended his sense of propriety. Once he sentenced a thief to have his right hand severed, a standard punishment by the sacred law, and several sissy Maldivans in the council hall fainted dead away at the sight of it. The women were worse yet. Most Maldivan women, he related, "wear only a waist-wrapper which covers them from the waist to the lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and elsewhere. When I was appointed judge there, I strove to put an end to this practice and commanded the women to wear clothes; but I could not get it done. I would not let a woman enter my court to make a plaint unless her body were covered; beyond this, however, I was unable to do anything."

Poor fellow. Later in his career Ibn Battuta had the good luck to accompany a slave-train of six hundred African women as they were force-marched across the blistering Sahara. There was a great deal of money in the slave-trade; its master-traders were very well-respected. Ibn Battuta owned several slaves in his career, but he was an unlucky master; they could not keep up with his restless migrations, and drowned, or froze, or fell ill, or were sold. He does not keep count of the number of children he sired, but there were many, mostly by slave-women.

What atrocities are we committing today, that we too take in stride?