In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler's Tale

LATAÎFA

1

I FIRST BEGAN to dream of Cairo in the evenings, as I sat in my room, listening, while Abu-‘Ali berated his wife or shouted at some unfortunate customer who had happened to incur his displeasure while making purchases at his shop. I would try to shut out the noise by concentrating on my book or my diaries or by turning up the volume of my transistor radio, but Abu-‘Ali’s voice always prevailed, despite the thick mud walls of his house and the squawking of the ducks and geese who lived around my room.

Nobody in Lataifa liked Abu-‘Ali; neither his relatives, nor his neighbours nor anyone else in the hamlet — not even, possibly, his own wife and children. Some actively hated him; others merely tried to keep out of his way. It was hard to do otherwise; he was profoundly unlovable.

Still, dislike him as they might, Abu-‘Ali’s neighbours and kinsmen also held him in fear. The children of the hamlet were always careful to be discreet when they mimicked him: they would look up and down the lanes to make sure that neither he nor his burly eldest son, ‘Ali, were in sight, and then, screwing up their faces in imitation of his scowl, making imaginary sunglasses out of their fingers and thumbs, they would arch their backs and stagger down the lane, labouring under the weight of gigantic bellies.

Everybody in the area knew of Abu-‘Ali’s temper and most people did their best to avoid him, so far as they could. As for me, I had no choice in the matter: by the time I had learnt of Abu-Ali’s reputation, I was already his lodger, and he, on his own initiative, had assumed the role of surrogate father as well as landlord.

I was not the first person in the hamlet to find himself thrust into an unwelcome proximity with Abu-‘Ali. It so happened that his house sat astride the one major road in the area, a narrow, rutted dirt track just about wide enough to allow two lightweight vehicles to squeeze past each other without toppling into the canal that ran beside it. The road served a large network of villages around Lataifa and a ragged procession of pick-up trucks roared up and down it all day long, carrying people back and forth from Damanhour, the capital of the Governorate and the largest city in the region.

Abu-‘Ali’s house was so placed that it commanded a good view of the road and, being the man he was, Abu-‘Ali was diligent in exploiting the strategic potential of its location. He spent much of his time on a small veranda at the front of his house, lying on a divan and keeping a careful eye on the traffic. At the busier times of the day, he would lie on his side, with one arm resting voluptuously on the gigantic swell of his hip, watching the passing trucks through a pair of silver-tipped sunglasses; in the afternoons, once he had eaten his lunch, he would roll on his back and doze, his eyes half-shut, like an engorged python stealing a rest after its monthly meal.

One of the elders of the hamlet, Shaikh Musa, told me once, when I was having dinner at his house, that Abu-‘Ali had always been obese, even as a boy. He had never been able to work in the fields because he had hurt his leg as a child, and had soon grown much heavier than others of his age. People had felt sorry for him to begin with, but later the injury had proved such an advantage that everyone had begun to wonder about its authenticity: it had given him an excuse for not working on the land and as a result his father had allowed him to go through school. Nothing was heard of his injury thereafter. Later, he’d even gone on to college in Damanhour, which was unusual at the time for a fellah boy, the son of an unlettered peasant. Sure enough, he had seen to it that his time in college was well spent: he had cultivated contacts with students from influential families, and with bureaucrats and officials in Damanhour. It hadn’t surprised anyone when he succeeded in getting a permit to set up a government-subsidized shop for retailing essential commodities at controlled prices.

That permit was to become Abu-‘Ali’s passport to prosperity: his was the only shop of its kind in the area (he had made sure of that) and everybody had to go to him if they wanted to buy sugar, tea, oil and suchlike at government-subsidized prices. Often his customers were more supplicants than patrons, for there was nothing to prevent him from choosing whom to sell to: people who got on the wrong side of him frequently discovered that he was out of tea or kerosene or whatever it was they wanted. It was all the same to Abu-‘Ali: he had no shortage of customers — they had to come to him or go all the way to the next village, Nashâwy, a mile and a half down the road.

It was thus that Abu-‘Ali had grown so large, Shaikh Musa said (he was generally extremely reluctant to discuss Abu-‘Ali but on this occasion he permitted himself a laugh): for years he had eaten meat like other people ate beans, and eventually he had swollen up like one of the force-fed geese his wife reared on their roof.

‘Women use their forefingers to push corn down the throats of their geese,’ added Shaikh Musa’s son Ahmed, an earnest young man, who was a great deal more heedful of my duties as a gatherer of information than I. ‘Corn, as you ought to know, is harvested just before winter, towards the start of the Coptic year which begins in the month of Tût …’

It had long been a point of pride with Abu-‘Ali that he possessed more — more gadgets, especially — than anyone else in Lataifa. It was therefore a matter of bitter chagrin to him that he had not been the first person in the village to buy a television set. One of his own half-brothers, a schoolteacher, had beaten him to it.

He was often reminded of this by a cousin’s son, Jabir, a boy in his late teens, with bright, malicious eyes and a tongue that bristled with barbs. Sometimes, when we were sitting in Abu-‘Ali’s guest-room in the evenings, Jabir would turn to me and ask questions like ‘What’s the name of the captain of the Algerian soccer team?’ or ‘Who is the Raïs of India? Isn’t it Indira Gandhi?’ The questions were entirely rhetorical; he would answer them himself, and then, sighing with pleasure he would glance at his uncle and exclaim: ‘Oh there’s so much to be learnt from television. It’s lucky for us there’s one next door.’

It always worked.

‘I don’t understand this television business,’ Abu-‘Ali would roar. ‘What’s the point of buying a television set now, when our village doesn’t even have electricity?’

Smiling serenely, Jabir would point out that a television set could be run perfectly well on car batteries.

‘Car batteries!’ Abu-‘Ali’s voice would be breathy with contempt. That’s like burning up money. I’m telling you, and you pay attention, let the electricity come to Lataifa as the government’s promised, and you’ll be able to watch the biggest and best TV set you’ve ever seen, right here, in this room, God willing. It’ll be better than the best television set in Nashawy, insha’allah, and it’ll be in colour too.’

A sly smile would appear on Jabir’s blunt-featured face, with its adolescent’s crop of stubble and unquiet skin. ‘There’ll be other colour TVs here soon,’ he would say, leaning back contentedly against the bolsters on the couch. ‘My uncle Mustafa is going to get one for our house any one of these days, insha’allah.’

All Abu-‘Ali could do in retaliation was glare at him; he knew he was no match for Jabir’s tongue. He would have loved to ban Jabir from his house, but it so happened that Jabir’s father was a cousin in the paternal line, and thus a member of the extended family, or lineage, of which Abu-‘Ali was nominally the head: he couldn’t have thrown Jabir out of his house without offending a whole platoon of relatives. Besides, it so happened that Jabir was also best friends with one of Abu-‘Ali’s sons, a schoolboy of his own age, about sixteen or so. The two of them were always together, with their arms around each others’ shoulders, giggling, or talking in furtive, experimental whispers. There was little Abu-‘Ali could do to rid his house of him; constrained as he was by the obligations of kinship, he had to choke daily on the gall of hearing about the soccer matches that his son and Jabir watched on the TV set in the house next door.

‘What’s in this soccer stuff, I want to know?’ Abu-‘Ali would explode from time to time. ‘Isn’t there work to do? Allah! Is the world going to live on soccer? What’s going to become of …’

But laggardly though he may have been in the matter of television, Abu-‘Ali was undeniably the first person in the hamlet to acquire a form of motorized transport — a light Japanese moped, fragile in appearance, but extraordinarily sturdy in build. The moped was normally used by one of his older sons, who drove it to his college in Damanhour every day. He was very jealous of his custodianship of the vehicle and would never allow his brothers or cousins to use it — but his father, of course, was another matter altogether.

Every now and again, Abu-‘Ali would roll off his divan, send his wife in to fetch his best dark glasses, and shout for the moped to be wheeled out into the courtyard. He would hitch up the hem of his jallabeyya and then, lifting up his leg, he would mount the vehicle with a little sidelong hop, while his son held it steady. To me, watching from the roof, it seemed hardly credible that so delicate a machine would succeed in carrying a man of Abu-‘Ali’s weight over that bumpy dirt track. But to my astonishment it invariably did: he would go shooting off down the road, his jallabeyya ballooning out around him, while the moped, in profile, diminished into a thin, sharp line — it was like watching a gargantuan lollipop being carried away by its stick.

It was no accident that Abu-‘Ali had acquired so many possessions: everyone agreed that he had a remarkable talent for squeezing the last piastre from everything that came his way. People often said that it was useless to bargain with Abu-‘Ali: in the end he would get exactly what he wanted.

I was soon to discover the truth of this for myself.

One afternoon, about a month or so after I had arrived in Lataifa, Abu-‘Ali came up to my room to pay me a visit. This was an unusual event because it called for the climbing of a narrow flight of stairs. I lived on the roof of his house, in an old chicken-coop, which his wife had once used for her poultry. Her stock of ducks, chickens, pigeons and geese had been moved to a pen, at the far end of the roof, and the coop had been turned into a makeshift room for my benefit, with a bed, a desk and a chair.

I had discovered since moving in that an afternoon visit from Abu-‘Ali was generally good cause for apprehension. At that time of the day he was normally to be found lying inert upon his divan, resting after his midday meal; it was unusual for him to so much as turn on his side, much less attempt an assault on the stairs that led to the roof. He had only visited me twice before in the afternoon, and on both occasions it was because he had wanted a discussion in private, while his children were away at work or in school. On one of those occasions he had tried to lay claim to my transistor radio, my best-loved possession, and on the other he had indicated, after a prolonged and roundabout conversation, that the rent I was paying was not satisfactory and that either I or the ‘doktór’ who had brought me to his house would have to do something about it.

I had been brought to Abu-‘Ali’s house by Doctor Aly Issa, Professor in the University of Alexandria, and one of the most eminent anthropologists in the Middle East. An acquaintance of Doctor Issa’s had led us to Abu-‘Ali, who had declaimed: ‘I swear to you, ya doktór, the Indian shall stay here and we will look after him as we do our own sons, for your sake, ya doktór, because we respect you so much.’

Being the kindest and most generous of men, Doctor Issa had all too easily allowed himself to take Abu-‘Ali at his word. It had been agreed upon very quickly — all except how much I was to pay. The Professor had brushed aside my anxiety on that score: ‘That will be easily settled, I will write him a letter — don’t worry about it.’

And so he had, but Abu-‘Ali had seen little merit in Doctor Issa’s letter. Now, having settled himself on my bed, he took the dog-eared letter out of the pocket of his jallabeyya once again, and read it through, clicking his tongue and frowning.

‘Tell me,’ he said at last, ‘where did you stay while you were in Alexandria?’

‘A small hotel,’ I answered.

‘And how much did it cost?’

‘Two pounds a night.’

He gave a little nod of satisfaction and put the letter away. ‘Hotels are expensive,’ he said, ‘you’re lucky to be staying here with us. We will cook for you, wash your clothes for you, provide you with anything you need. You must ask for whatever you want whenever you want it. To us you are just like our sons — why we will even give you our own money if you like.’

He reached into his pocket for his wallet and held it out to me, smiling, his eyes vanishing into the folds of his immense, fleshy face. ‘You can take this,’ he said. ‘You can have our money.’

I stared at the wallet, mesmerized, wondering whether custom demanded that I touch it or make some other symbolic gesture of acceptance or obeisance, like falling at his feet. I saw myself shrinking, dwindling away into one of those tiny, terrified foreigners whom Pharaohs hold up by their hair in New Kingdom bas-reliefs.

But the wallet vanished back into his pocket in a flash, before I had time to respond. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘that is how much we love you.’

‘I was just thinking,’ I stammered, at last, maybe I could buy my own food.’

‘How can you do that?’ he responded indignantly. ‘The shops are far away, and you know it would cost you at least a pound a day if you were to buy your food in town. No, no, you must eat with us.’

‘No, I meant, I could give you the money …’ My Arabic had begun to falter now under the strain of bargaining, and I was slowly sinking into a tongue-tied silence.

‘No, no, it’s not a question of money. You are our honoured guest. You can see that I don’t care for money. I have a big shop downstairs, and I sell many things there. Next year I will add a second floor to my house, insha’allah. You know I have sent my sons to school and college; you can see that I don’t care for money at all.’

‘Please tell me,’ I said, ‘how much do you think I should pay?’

He sighed thoughtfully, rubbing his moustache.

‘No,’ he said, ‘you must tell us how much you would like to give us.’

And so it went on for a good hour or so, before he would allow himself to be cajoled into naming a sum.

That evening, at sunset, I was standing on the roof, looking out over the tranquil, twilit cottonfields, when Abu-‘Ali’s voice exploded out of the porch below, roaring abuse at his wife. I went back into my room and in an effort to shut out the noise, I began to turn the dial on my radio, scanning the waves for the sound of a familiar language, listening for words that would make me feel a little less alone. As the night wore on, the thought of hearing Abu-‘Ali’s voice for months on end, perhaps years, began to seem utterly intolerable.

It was on nights like that that my dreams of Cairo were most vivid.

2

CAIRO IS EGYPT’S own metaphor for itself.

Everywhere in the country except the city itself, Cairo is Egypt. They are both spoken of by the same name, Mar, a name that is appropriate as well as ancient, a derivative of a root that means ‘to settle’ or ‘to civilize’. The word has a long history in Arabic; it occurs in the Qur’ân but was in use even before the advent of Islam. It is the name by which the country has been known, in its own language, for at least a millennium, and most of the cultures and civilizations with which it has old connections have accepted its own self-definition. The languages of India, for example, know Masr by variations of its Arabic name: ‘Mishor’ in Bengali, ‘Misar’ in Hindi and Urdu. Only Europe has always insisted on knowing the country not on its own terms, but as a dark mirror for itself. ‘Egyptian darkness,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary, quoting the Bible, ‘intense darkness (see Exodus x.22).’ Or ‘Egyptian days: the two days in each month which were believed to be unlucky’; and: ‘Egyptian bondage: bondage like that of the Israelites in Egypt.’

Like English, every major European language derives its name for Egypt from the Greek Ægyptos, a term that is related to the word ‘Copt’, the name generally used for Egypt’s indigenous Christians. Thus German has its Ägypten, Dutch Egypte, Polish and Estonian Egipt: old resonant words, with connotations and histories far in excess of those that usually attach to the names of countries. A seventeenth-century English law, for example, states: ‘If any transport into England or Wales, any lewd people calling themselves Egyptians, they forfeit 40 £’—a reminder that words like ‘gypsy and ‘gitano’ derived from ‘Egyptian’.

Europe’s apparently innocent ‘Egypt’ is therefore as much a metaphor as ‘Masr’, but a less benign one, almost as much a weapon as a word. Egypt’s own metaphor for itself, on the other hand, renders the city indistinguishable from the country; a usage that brims with pleasing and unexpected symmetries.

Like Egypt, Cairo dwindles into a thin ribbon of settlements at its southern extremity; towards the north it gradually broadens, like the country itself, into a wide, densely populated funnel. To the south lies Upper Egypt, the , a long thin carpet of green that flanks the Nile on both sides; to the north is the triangle created by the river, as perfect as any in Nature, the Delta. Egypt’s metaphor, Egypt itself, sits in between like a hinge, straddling the imaginary line that since the beginning of human history has divided the country into two parts, each distinct and at the same time perfectly complementary.

To most Egyptians outside Cairo, their metaphor stands for the entire city: the whole of it is known as Masr — the city’s formal name al-Qâhira is infrequently used. But Cairo, like Delhi or Rome, is actually not so much a single city as an archipelago of townships, founded on neighbouring sites, by various different dynasties and rulers.

When the people of Cairo speak of Masr, they often have a particular district of the city in mind. It lies towards the south, and it goes by several names. Sometimes it is spoken of as Old Cairo, Masr al-Qadîma or Mar al-‘Atîqa, sometimes as Mari Gargis, but most often as Fusâ Mar, or simply Fusâ. On a map, the quarter seems very small, far too small to be so rich in names. But in fact, small as it is, the area is not a single island within Cairo, but rather a second archipelago within the first.

It was a small enclave within this formation that eventually became home to Abraham Ben Yiju, the master of the Slave of MS H.6: a Roman fortress called Babylon. The fort was built by the emperor Trajan in 130AD, on the site of an even earlier structure, and the Romans are said to have called it Babylon of Egypt, to distinguish it from the Mesopotamian Babylon. The name may have come from the Arabic Bâb il-On, ‘The Gate of On’, after the ancient sanctuary of the Sun God at Heliopolis, but there are many contending theories and no one knows for sure. The fort has had other names, most notably Qar al-Shama‘, Fortress of the Lamp, but it is Babylon that has served it longest.

The entrance to Babylon was once guarded by two massive, heavily buttressed towers: one of them is now a ruined stump, and the other was incorporated several centuries ago into the structure of a Greek Orthodox church. Today the towers, and the gateway that lies between them, are separated from the Nile by several hundred metres. But at the time when the fortress was built the river flowed directly beside it: the reason why the towers were so solidly constructed is that they served as Babylon’s principal embankment against the annual Nile flood. In the early years of Babylon’s history, the towers were flanked by a port. As the centuries advanced and the conurbation around the fortress grew in size and importance, the river retreated westwards and the docks and warehouses gradually expanded along the newly emerged lands on the bank. In Ben Yiju’s time the port was one of the busiest in the Middle East; it was said to handle more traffic than Baghdad and Basra combined.

Today there is a steel gate between Babylon’s twin towers, and millions of visitors pour through it every year. But the fort’s second great gateway, in its southern wall, is no longer in use: its floor is deep in water now, swamped by Cairo’s rapidly rising water-table. A thick film of green slime shimmers within its soaring, vaulted interior, encircling old tyres and discarded plastic bottles. Incredible as it may seem, this putrefying pit marks the site of what was perhaps the single most important event in the history of Cairo, indeed of Egypt: it was through this gateway that the Arab general ‘Amr ibn al-‘Â is thought to have effected his entry into Babylon in 641AD — the decisive event in the futû, the Muslim victory over the Christian powers in Masr.

For Babylon, ironically, the moment of capitulation marked its greatest triumph for it was then that this tiny fortress fixed the location of the country’s centre of gravity, once and for all. It was Alexandria that was Egypt’s most important city at the time of the Arab invasion; founded by Alexander the Great in 332BC it had served as the country’s capital for almost a thousand years. Babylon, on the other hand, was a mere provincial garrison, a small military outpost. By rights therefore, it was Alexandria’s prerogative to serve as the funnel for the assimilation of the newcomers.

But the conquering Muslim general, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, broke with the usual practice of invaders by electing to base his army not in the country’s capital, but in an entirely new city. The location he chose was the obvious one — the site the Arab army had used for its camp while laying siege to Babylon. The fortress was thus the promontory that served to anchor the Cairo archipelago: ever afterwards Egypt’s capital, Masr, Egypt’s metaphor for itself, has lain within a few miles of Babylon.

The legend goes that on the morning when ‘Amr was to lead his army against Alexandria he woke to find a dove nesting on top of his tent. Loath to invite misfortune by disturbing the bird, he left the tent behind and upon returning to Babylon after his successful assault on Alexandria, laid out his new city around the nest-topped tent. The legend is universally believed in Cairo, and everyone who repeats it adds that the name of ‘Amr’s city, al-Fusâ, was derived from the Arabic for tent. But in fact the story came into circulation long after the event and is almost certainly apocryphal. It is possible that the name does not come from an Arabic source at all, being related instead to the Latin-Greek word ‘fossaton’, which is also the parent of an archaic and unglamorous English word, ‘fosse’, or ditch.

Fustat served as Egypt’s capital for more than three centuries, but then a new invasion and a new set of conquerors moved the centre of power a couple of miles northwards. The new rulers were the Fatimids, a dynasty which had its beginnings in North Africa, in an esoteric Shî‘a sect whose members were known as Ismâ‘îlîs. In 969AD one of their generals, a former Greek slave called Jawhar al-Rûmî, marched against Egypt with a hundred thousand men. Their army routed the Egyptians in a battle near Fustat and the inhabitants of the city soon sued for peace. Like ‘Amr ibn al-‘As before him, Jawhar the Greek marked out the boundaries of a new township right beside the conquered city. Soothsayers are said to have named the town al-Qâhira, the Martial, or the Victorious, because the planet Mars, al-Qâhir, was in the ascendant at the time of the foundation ceremony. It was this name that was to pass into European languages as Cairo, Le Caire and the like.

In its original conception al-Qahira was a planned capital, an early forebear of New Delhi, Canberra, Brasilia and other such haunts of officialdom. The Caliph had his residence there and it contained many notable buildings, but everything in it was the personal property of the rulers and its shops and bazaars existed only to serve him and his entourage. In time the character of al-Qahira was to change entirely and it was to become a frantic, crowded district, the bustling nucleus of the conurbation of Cairo. But all that came later: in the early years of the twelfth century when Ben Yiju first came to Masr it was probably still a relatively solemn, bureaucratic kind of place. At the time, the Fatimids, who had long since embarked on a course of catastrophic decline, were clinging to the last tatters of their power, and their capital was still largely a ceremonial and administrative township. It was Fustat then that probably had something of the busy, market-place character of al-Qahira today.

Thriving hub though it was, medieval Fustat probably presented an unremarkable kind of appearance. Archæological excavations have shown that its dwellings were, for the most part, made of the material that is still most in evidence in rural Egypt today, dried mud and straw — a substance that sounds somehow more glamorous when spoken of by the term ‘adobe’, a term appropriately applied here, since the word probably derives from the Arabic al-ûb, ‘the brick’. Possibly Fustat even had something of the distinctive look of an Egyptian village: that tousled, mop-haired appearance that is characteristic of fellah houses, with great ricks of straw and firewood piled high on their roofs.

But in fact there was nothing remotely rustic about medieval Fustat, whatever its appearance. With the political ascendancy of the Fatimid Empire, it had come to play a pivotal role in the global economy as the entrepôt that linked the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean: the merchandise that flowed through its bazaars came from as far afield as East Africa, southern Europe, the western Sahara, India, China and Indonesia. By Ben Yiju’s time Fustat had long since become the largest island in the emerging archipelago of Masr: the juncture of some of the most important trade routes in the known world and the nucleus of one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities on earth.

But although it may have been Fustat’s markets that first attracted Ben Yiju to Masr it was Babylon that was to become his spiritual home there. The fortress had remained relatively unchanged over several centuries and was still largely populated by Christians of various denominations, with Copts in the majority. But there were also at least three Jewish groups in Babylon, each with a synagogue of its own — they were the ‘Iraqis’, the ‘Palestinians’ and the Karaites. The ‘Palestinian’ congregation followed the rites of the school of Jerusalem, and despite its name, it included the indigenous Jews of Egypt. It was the Palestinian synagogue that Ben Yiju was to join.

By the time Ben Yiju came to Masr, Babylon had long since been eclipsed by the thriving township of Fustat. But in the end it was the hardy little fortress that proved to have the greater staying power. Today, the entrance to what remains of Fustat lies a short distance from Babylon’s towers, but very few tourists pass through it. Fustat can be smelt before it is seen — it is a gigantic open refuse-pit, an immense rubbish-dump.

The site is guarded by a large steel gate which looks as though it belongs in a prison. But it swings open easily enough, with a push, and a dusty path curls away from it, between the mounds of refuse, towards a stretch of reed-filled marshland in the distance. In places, where the decomposing matter has caught fire spontaneously under the fierce glare of the Cairo sun, thin tendrils of smoke spiral torpidly towards the sky. Children play in puddles of grey ooze and a few figures in torn, flapping jallabeyyas move slowly through the refuse, dragging piles of cardboard and plastic behind them. Incredible as it may seem, excavations in this suppurating wasteland have yielded huge quantities of Chinese pottery and other riches: it was here that some of the earliest and most valuable fragments of Indian textiles have been found.

The last skeletal remains of the city whose markets once traded in the best the world could offer lie a little further along the path: the outlines of a few foundations and some brick walls and arches, pushing through pools of oily slime, clawing at the earth. In the distance shanties grow in tiers upon the ruins, and they in turn fade gently, imperceptibly, into the scraggy geometry of Cairo’s skyline — into a tableau of decay and regeneration, a metaphor for Masr.

3

I OFTEN THOUGHT of telling Shaikh Musa that I wanted to move out of Abu-‘Ali’s house; for a while I even considered asking him to help me make some other arrangement. I had always felt secure in his friendship, from the moment of our first meeting: there was a gentleness and a good humour about him that inspired trust, something about the way he rocked his short, portly frame from side to side as we talked, the way he shook my hand every time we met, his round, weathered face crinkling into a smile, and cried: ‘Where have you been all this while? Why haven’t you come to see me?’

There were times when I had the distinct impression that Shaikh Musa was trying to warn me about Abu-‘Ali. The two of them were of the same age after all, in their mid-fifties; they had grown up together, and Shaikh Musa probably knew him as well as anyone in the hamlet. Once, while dining with Shaikh Musa and his family, I had the feeling that he was cautioning me, in an oblique and roundabout way, telling me to be careful with Abu-‘Ali. It was only because of a series of unfortunate interruptions that I didn’t beg him right then to find me some other house to live in.

We were sitting in his bedroom that evening. Shaikh Musa, his son Ahmed, his two grandsons and I were eating out of one tray, while the women of the household were sharing another, at the other end of the room. It was something of a special occasion for I had just crossed an invisible barrier. Whenever I had eaten at Shaikh Musa’s house before, it had been in the ‘mandara, the guest-room on the outside of the house, facing the lane; every house had one, for this was the room where male guests were usually received. But on this occasion, after saying his evening prayers, Shaikh Musa had risen to his feet and led me out of the guest-room, into the lamplit interior of the house.

We had gone directly to his bedroom, pushing past a nuzzling sheep tethered by the door. Shaikh Musa chased a brood of chickens off an old sheepskin, sending them scuttling under his bed, and we seated ourselves on the floor and played with Ahmed’s two young sons while waiting for the rest of the family. After Ahmed returned from the mosque, two women came into the room carrying a pair of trays loaded with food. The trays were set out on the floor, and the women gathered around one, while we seated ourselves at the other; each tray was as big as a cartwheel, and there was plenty of room for all of us.

There were three women in the room now, all of them young, one in the first bloom of her adolescence with a gentle, innocent face and a rosy complexion — a family inheritance shared by many of the inhabitants of Lataifa. From the strong resemblance she bore to Ahmed, I knew at once that she was his sister. The other two women were a good deal older, perhaps in their mid-twenties. One was a pale, pretty, self-possessed young woman, dressed in a long, printed skirt. The other was dark and thick-set, and she was wearing a black fusân, a heavy, shapeless robe that was the customary garb of a fellah woman.

I had encountered all of them before, occasionally at the doorway to Shaikh Musa’s house and sometimes in the guest-room when they came in to hand out tea. There were times when I had the impression that I had passed them in the lanes of the hamlet, but I was never quite sure. The fault for this lay entirely with me, for neither they nor anyone else in Lataifa wore veils (nor indeed did anyone in the region), but at that time, early in my stay, I was so cowed by everything I had read about Arab traditions of shame and modesty that I barely glanced at them, for fear of giving offence. Later it was I who was shame-stricken, thinking of the astonishment and laughter I must have provoked, walking past them, eyes lowered, never uttering so much as a word of greeting. Shaking hands with them now, as we sat down to dinner, I tried to work out the connections between them and the rest of the family. The pretty woman in the printed dress was Ahmed’s wife, I decided: her clothes and her bearing spoke of a college, or at least a high-school, education. Since Ahmed had been through school and college too, I had every reason to assume that they were a couple. As for the other woman, the dark one in the black dress, it took me no more than a moment’s thought to reach a conclusion about her: she was the wife of Shaikh Musa’s other son, I decided, Ahmed’s younger brother, Hasan.

I had never met Hasan, for he was away, serving his draft in the army, but I had heard a great deal about him. Shaikh Musa spoke of him often, and with something more than the usual warmth of a father remembering a son long absent. He had shown me a picture of him once: he was a strikingly good-looking young man, with a broad, strong face and clear-cut features; in fact, he bore a marked resemblance to a picture of Shaikh Musa that hung on the wall of his guest-room, a photograph taken in his youth, in army uniform.

Unlike Ahmed, who had been through school and college, Hasan had not had an education. He had been taken out of school at a fairly early age; Shaikh Musa had brought him up as a fellah, so that at least one of his sons would profit from the land their ancestors had left them. It was that shared background perhaps that lent Shaikh Musa’s voice a special note of affection when he spoke of Hasan: Ahmed was the most dutiful of sons and he helped Shaikh Musa on the land as often as he could, but there was an unbridgeable gap between them now because of his education. Ahmed worked as a clerk, in a factory near Damanhour, and he was thus counted as a mowazzaf, an educated, salaried man, and like all such people in the village, his clothes, his speech, his amusements and concerns, were markedly different from those of the fellaheen. Hasan, on the other hand, fell on his father’s side of that divide, and it was easy to see that their shared view of the world formed a special bond between them.

I was soon sure that the woman in the black dress was Hasan’s wife. I overheard Shaikh Musa saying a few words to her and, detecting a note of familiarity in his voice, I attributed it to his special closeness to his younger son. But now I began to wonder where his own wife was and why she had not joined us at our meal.

The meal that was set out on the tray in front of us was a very good one: arranged around a large pile of rice were dishes of fried potatoes, cheese preserved in brine, salads of chopped tomatoes and fresh dill, plates of cooked vegetables, large discs of corn-meal bread, and bowls of young Nile perch, baked with tomatoes and garlic. Everything was fresh and full of flavour, touched with that unnameable quality which makes anything grown in the soil of Egypt taste richer, more distinctively of itself, than it does anywhere else.

It was when I complimented him on the food that Shaikh Musa suddenly raised his head, as though a thought had just struck him.

‘Things are cheap in the countryside,’ he said, ‘much cheaper than they are in the city. In the city people have to buy everything in the market, for cash, but here it isn’t like that; we get everything from the fields. You should not expect to pay as much here as you would in the city. This is just a little hamlet — not even a big village like Nashawy.’

I was taken aback for a moment, and then I realized that he was referring obliquely to Abu-‘Ali: he had asked me once how much I paid him and had sunk into an amazed silence when I quoted the sum. But before I could say anything, Shaikh Musa changed the subject: resorting to one of his favourite ploys he began to talk about agriculture.

‘And these,’ he said, pointing at the cucumbers on the tray, ‘are called khiyâr. The best are those that are sown early, in spring, in the month of Amshîr by the Coptic calendar.’

Not one to be left behind in a conversation of that kind, Ahmed immediately added: ‘Amshir follows the month of ûba, when the earth awakes, as we say, and after it comes Barmahât …’

Later, after dinner, when Shaikh Musa and I were alone in the room for a while, he began to wax expansive, talking about his boyhood in Lataifa and about Abu-‘Ali as a child. But once the family returned he cut himself short, and there was no opportunity to discuss the matter again for shortly afterwards he got up and left the room.

No sooner had Shaikh Musa left than Ahmed began to tell me how cotton was rotated with the fodder crop berseem. ‘Write it down,’ he said, handing me my notebook, ‘or else you’ll forget.’

I scribbled desultorily for a while, and then, searching desperately for something else to talk about, I happened to ask him if his mother was away from the hamlet.

A hush immediately descended upon the room. At length, Ahmed cleared his throat and said: ‘My mother, God have mercy on her, died a year ago.’

There was a brief silence, and then he leaned over to me. ‘Do you see Sakkina there?’ he asked, gesturing at the woman in the black fustan. ‘My father married her this year.’

For a moment I was speechless: in my mind Shaikh Musa was very old and very venerable, and I was oddly unsettled by the thought of his marrying a woman a fraction his age.

His wife noticed me staring and smiled shyly. Then, Ahmed’s wife, the self-possessed young woman in the cotton dress, turned to me and said: ‘She’s heard about you from her family. You have met her uncle, haven’t you? Ustaz Mustafa?’

Again I was taken completely by surprise. But now things began to fall into place.

4

JABIR, ABU-‘ALI’S YOUNG relative, had woken me one morning, soon after I arrived in Lataifa. ‘Get up, ya mister,’ he said, shaking me. ‘Get up and meet my uncle.’

I sat up bleary-eyed and found myself looking at a short, plump man who bore a strong family resemblance to Jabir; he had the same rosy complexion, blunt features and bright, black eyes. He also had a little clipped moustache, and the moment I saw it I knew it was the kind of moustache that Jabir was sure to aspire to once his feathery adolescent whiskers had matured.

At that time, I was still innocent of some of the finer distinctions between salaried people and fellaheen but I could tell at once, from his starchy blue jallabeyya and white net skull-cap, that Jabir’s uncle did not make his living from ploughing the land. Jabir’s introduction made things clearer, for he added the word Ustaz, ‘Teacher’, to his uncle’s name — a title usually given to men who had been educated in modern, rather than traditional, forms of learning.

‘This is Ustaz Mustafa,’ said Jabir. ‘My uncle. He studied law at the University of Alexandria.’

Ustaz Mustafa smiled and, nodding vigorously, he addressed me in classical, literary Arabic. ‘We are honoured,’ he said, ‘to have Your Presence amongst us.’

I was dismayed to be spoken to in this way, for in concentrating on learning the dialect of the village I had allowed my studies of classical Arabic to fall into neglect. I stuttered, unsure of how to respond, but then, unexpectedly, Jabir came to my rescue. Clapping me on the back, he told his uncle: ‘He is learning to talk just like us.’

Ustaz Mustafa’s face lit up. ‘Insha’allah,’ he cried, ‘God willing, he will soon be one of us.’

I noticed that he had a habit of flicking back the cuff of his jallabeyya every few minutes or so to steal a quick look at his watch. I was to discover later that this gesture was rooted in an anxiety that had long haunted his everyday existence: the fear that he might inadvertently miss one of the day’s five required prayers. That was why he looked much busier than anyone else in Lataifa — he was always in a hurry to get to the mosque. ‘I have read all about India,’ said Ustaz Mustafa, smiling serenely. ‘There is a lot of chilli in the food and when a man dies his wife is dragged away and burnt alive.’

‘Not always,’ I protested, ‘my grandmother for example …’

Jabir was drinking this in, wide-eyed.

‘And of course,’ Ustaz Mustafa continued, ‘you have Indira Gandhi, and her son Sanjay Gandhi, who used to sterilize the Muslims …’

‘No, no, he sterilized everyone,’ I said.

His eyes widened and I added hastily: ‘No, not me of course, but …’

‘Yes,’ he said, nodding sagely. ‘I know. I read all about India when I was in college in Alexandria.’

He had spent several years in Alexandria as a student, he said; he had specialized in civil and religious law and now practised in a court in Damanhour. He talked at length about his time at university, the room he had lived in and the books he had read, and in the meanwhile two of Abu-‘Ali’s sons came up to join us, carrying a tray of tea.

Soon, the conversation turned to village gossip and for a while, to my relief, I was forgotten. But Jabir was not going to allow me so easy an escape: he had noticed that Ustaz Mustafa’s questions had unsettled me and he was impatient for more entertainment.

‘Ask him more about his country,’ he whispered to his uncle. ‘Ask him about his religion.’

The reminder was superfluous for, as I later discovered, religion was a subject never very far from Ustaz Mustafa’s mind. ‘All right then,’ he said to me, motioning to the boys to be quiet. ‘Tell me, are you Muslim?’

‘No,’ I said, but he didn’t really need an answer since everyone in the hamlet knew that already.

‘So then what are you?’

‘I was born a Hindu,’ I said reluctantly, for if I had a religious identity at all it was largely by default.

There was a long silence during which I tried hard to think of an arresting opening line that would lead the conversation towards some bucolic, agricultural subject. But the moment passed, and in a troubled voice Ustaz Mustafa said: ‘What is this “Hinduki” thing? I have heard of it before and I don’t understand it. If it is not Christianity nor Judaism nor Islam what can it be? Who are its prophets?’

‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘There aren’t any prophets …’

‘So you are like the Magi?’ he said, bright-eyed. ‘You worship fire then?’

I shook my head vaguely, but before I could answer, he tapped my arm with his forefinger. ‘No,’ he said, smiling coquettishly. ‘I know — it’s cows you worship — isn’t that so?’

There was a sharp, collective intake of breath as Jabir and the other boys recoiled, calling upon God, in whispers, to protect them from the Devil.

I cleared my throat; I knew a lot depended on my answers. ‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘In my country some people don’t eat beef because … because cows give milk and plough the fields and so on, and so they’re very useful.’

Ustaz Mustafa was not to be bought off by this spurious ecological argument. ‘That can’t be the reason,’ he began, but then his eyes fell on his watch and a shadow of alarm descended on his face. He edged forward until he was balanced precariously on the rim of the bed.

‘You still haven’t told me about this “Hinduki” business,’ he said. ‘What is your God like?’

I tried to stutter out an answer of some kind, but fortunately for me Ustaz Mustafa wasn’t really paying attention to me any more.

‘Well thanks be to Allah,’ he said quickly, eyeing his watch. ‘Now that you are here among us you can understand and learn about Islam, and then you can make up your mind whether you want to stay within that religion of yours.’

He jumped to his feet and stretched out his hand. ‘Come with me to the mosque right now,’ he said. ‘That is where we are going — for the noon prayers. You don’t have to do anything. Just watch us pray, and soon you will understand what Islam is.’

I hesitated for a moment, and then I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I have many things to do.’

‘Things to do?’ cried Ustaz Mustafa. ‘What is there to do here that you can’t do later? Come with us — it’s very important. Nothing could be more important.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’ he insisted quietly. ‘Just come and watch — that’s all I’m asking of you.’

And just then the voice of the muezzin floated over from a nearby mosque, singing the call to prayer, and before I could say another word Ustaz Mustafa and the boys had vanished from the room.

But I couldn’t go back to work even after I was alone again. I began to wonder why I had not accepted Ustaz Mustafa’s invitation to visit the mosque and watch him at his prayers; he had meant well, after all, had only wanted to introduce me to the most important element of his imaginative life. A part of me had wanted to go — not merely that part which told me that it was, in a sense, my duty, part of my job. But when the moment had come, I’d known that I wouldn’t be able to do it: I had been too afraid, and for the life of me I could not understand why.

But soon enough, Ustaz Mustafa came back to talk to me again. This time he had a child in his arms. ‘This is my son,’ he said, tweaking the child’s cheeks. He glowed with love as he looked at the boy.

‘Say salâm to the mister,’ he said, and the child, alarmed, hid his face in his father’s shoulder.

Ustaz Mustafa laughed. ‘I missed you the last few days,’ he said to me. ‘I was busy in the evenings — I had to go and meet someone in Nashawy, so I couldn’t come to talk to you. But today I decided that I would come over as soon as I got back from work.’

I was better prepared for him this time, and I began to talk at length about the hamlet’s history and his family’s genealogy. But Ustaz Mustafa had little time for matters of that kind, and soon he began to steal anxious glances at his watch over his son’s back.

Eventually he brushed my patter aside and began to ask questions, first about my family and then about Indian politics — what I thought of Indira Gandhi, was I for her or against her, and so on. Then, with a wry, derisory smile he began to ask me about ‘The Man from Menoufiyya’—the current nickname for the President, the Raïs — phrasing his questions in elaborately allusive, elliptical forms, like riddles, as though he were mocking the Raïs’s habit of spreading surrogate ears everywhere. My answers left him a little disappointed however, for many of his riddles had stock responses with which I was not then familiar.

Suddenly the bantering note went out of his voice.

‘Tell me something,’ he said, ‘tell me, are you a communist?’

He used a word, shiyu’eyya, which could mean anything from ‘communist’ to ‘atheist’ and ‘adulterer’ in the village dialect; my understanding of it was that it referred to people who rejected all moral and ethical laws.

‘No,’ I said.

‘All right then,’ he said, ‘if you’re not a communist, tell me this: who made the world, and who were the first man and woman if not Adam and Hawâ?’

I was taken aback by the abruptness of this transition. Later I came to expect elisions of this kind in conversations with people like Ustaz Mustafa, for I soon discovered that salaried people like him, rural mowazzafeen, were almost without exception absorbed in a concern which, despite its plural appearance, was actually single and indivisible — religion and politics — so that the mention of the one always led to the other. But at the time I was nonplussed. I mumbled something innocuous about how, in my country, people thought the world had always existed.

My answer made him flinch. He hugged his sleeping son hard against his chest and said, ‘They don’t think of Our Lord at all, do they? They live only for the present and have no thought for the hereafter.’

I began to protest but Ustaz Mustafa was not interested in my answers any more. His eyes had fallen on his watch, and he rose hurriedly to his feet. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I will take you with me to the graveyard, and you can watch me reciting the Quran over my father’s grave. You will see then how much better Islam is than this “Hinduki” of yours.’

At the door he turned back for a moment. ‘I am hoping,’ he said, ‘that you will convert and become a Muslim. You must not disappoint me.’

Then he was gone. A moment later I heard the distant voice of a muezzin, chanting the call to prayer.

He had meant what he said.

He came back the next evening, his Quran in his hands, and said: ‘Come, let’s go to the graveyard.’

‘I can’t,’ I said quickly. ‘I have to go out to the fields.’

He hesitated, and then, not without some reluctance, decided to accompany me. The truth was that walking in the fields was something of a trial for Ustaz Mustafa: it demanded ceaseless vigilance on his part to keep particles of impure matter, like goat’s droppings and cow dung, from touching his jallabeyya, since he would otherwise be obliged to change his clothes before going to the mosque again. This meant that he had to walk with extreme care in those liberally manured fields, with his hem plucked high above his ankles, very much in the manner that women hitch up their saris during the monsoons in Calcutta.

Before we had gone very far we came upon some of his relatives, working in a vegetable patch. They invited us to sit with them and began to ask me questions about the soil and the crops in India. Ustaz Mustafa soon grew impatient with this and led me away.

‘They are fellaheen,’ he said apologetically. ‘They don’t have much interest in religion or anything important.’

‘I am just like that myself,’ I said quickly.

‘Really?’ said Ustaz Mustafa, aghast. We walked in silence for a while, and then he said: ‘I am giving up hope that you will become a Muslim.’ Then an idea occurred to him and he turned to face me. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘would your father be upset if you were to change your religion?’

‘Maybe,’ I said.

He relapsed into thoughtful silence for a few minutes. ‘Has your father read the holy books of Islam?’ he asked, eagerly.

‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

‘He must read them,’ said Ustaz Mustafa. ‘If he did he would surely convert himself.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He is accustomed to his own ways.’

He mulled the issue over in his mind, and when we turned back towards Lataifa he said: ‘Well, it would not be right for you to upset your father. That is true.’

After that the heart went out of his efforts to convert me: he had a son himself and it went against his deepest instincts to urge a man to turn against his father. And so, as the rival moralities of religion and kinship gradually played themselves to a standstill within him, Ustaz Mustafa and I came to an understanding.

A connection was already beginning to form in my mind now, as I turned towards Shaikh Musa’s wife. ‘Is Ustaz Mustafa really your uncle?’ I asked her, uncertain of whether she was using the word in a specific or general sense. ‘Your father’s real brother, your ‘amm shagîg?’

She was too shy to address me directly, at least in Ahmed’s presence, so he spoke for her. ‘Ustaz Mustafa is her real uncle,’ he said. ‘Her father and he were carried in the same belly. They still live in the same house.’

‘But then Jabir must be her cousin,’ I said in astonishment. ‘They must have grown up in the same house.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed, ‘she is Jabir’s bint ‘amm, his father’s brother’s daughter.’

He could have added: ‘If Jabir were older he could have married her himself.’ Certainly Jabir’s parents and relatives would probably have wished for nothing better, since a marriage between first cousins, the children of brothers, was traditionally regarded as an ideal sort of union — a strengthening of an already existing bond.

‘So she is of Abu-‘Ali’s lineage then?’ I asked Ahmed.

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed, ‘Abu-‘Ali is her father’s first cousin. His half-sister is her grandmother as well as Jabir’s. She still lives in their house: you’ve met her.’

And so I had, a portly matriarch dressed in black, with fine features and delicate papery skin: she bore not the remotest resemblance to Abu-‘Ali. I remembered her because of the posture of command she had assumed, perfectly naturally, with one knee flat on the floor and the other drawn up to support her arm and clenched fist. A glance from her had been enough to keep even Jabir quiet.

‘Yes,’ said Ahmed, ‘Abu-‘Ali’s father was her great-grandfather’s brother. And of course, his father, Abu-‘Ali’s grandfather, was my great-great-grandfather’s brother.’

By this time I had lost my way in this labyrinth of relationships. It was only much later, when Shaikh Musa helped me draw up a complete genealogy of hamlet of Lataifa (all of whose inhabitants belonged ultimately to a single family called Laîf) that I finally began to see why he was always so careful never to voice a word of criticism about Abu-‘Ali: his wife, Sakkina, was Abu-‘Ali’s great-grand-niece. The lines of the genealogy led inexorably to the conclusion that Abu-‘Ali had played a crucial part in arranging the marriage.

It became clear to me then that there were complexities in Shaikh Musa’s relationship with Abu-‘Ali that I did not understand, and probably never would; that it would be deeply embarrassing for him if I were to ask him to help me find some other house, or family, to live in.

I realized then that my deliverance from Abu-‘Ali would not come as easily as the dreams that took me to Cairo.

5

FOR BEN YIJU the centre of Cairo would have lain in a modest building near the eastern walls of the fortress of Babylon: the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, also known as the ‘Synagogue of the Palestinians’. The building was destined to last until a good seven hundred years after Ben Yiju’s lifetime; it was still standing late into the nineteenth century. In 1884 it was described, by a British historian and archaeologist, A. J. Butler, as a small and somewhat simplified version of a Coptic basilica. By then most of its woodwork was gone and in ‘point of detail there is not much remaining …’

When Ben Yiju first saw it, the building probably had a faint whiff of novelty about it, having been completely rebuilt only a hundred years or so earlier, in about 1025. It is known to have had two entrances then: one for the men, the main gateway, and a ‘secret door’ leading to a wooden platform inside the building, the women’s gallery. The main chamber of the synagogue had a gabled ceiling and glass windows, and it was decorated with woodwork of very fine quality: some of it has survived and can still be seen in the Louvre, and in museums in Cairo and Jerusalem.

As far as Ben Yiju was concerned, his membership of this synagogue was probably more a matter of birth than personal preference. His origins lay in a region that was known as Ifrîqiya in the Arabic-speaking world of the Middle Ages — an area centred around what is now Tunisia. The region had fared badly in the eleventh century and over a period of several decades, since well before Ben Yiju’s lifetime, its merchants and traders had been moving eastwards, towards Egypt. Jews figured prominently among these migrants and those amongst them who moved to Masr generally chose to join the ‘Palestinian’ congregation in Babylon. Ben Yiju was thus following a well-marked trail.

For the Synagogue of Ben Ezra the influx of migrants from Ifriqiya was to prove providential: the newcomers proved to be the most industrious members of the community and they soon assumed its leadership, setting the pattern for the others in matters of language and culture, as well as trade and commerce. The North Africans appear to have had a particular affinity for the flourishing trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean and over a period of several centuries the Jewish traders of Fustat counted as an integral part of the richly diverse body of merchants who were involved in the conduct of business in Asian waters. Carried along by the movements of that cycle of trade many of them travelled regularly between three continents — men whose surnames often read like the chapter headings of an epic, linked them to sleepy oases and dusty Saharan market towns, places like El Faiyum and Tlemcen.

Thus it was no ordinary congregation that Ben Yiju joined in Masr: it consisted of a group of people whose travels and breadth of experience and education seem astonishing even today, on a planet thought to be newly-shrunken. Yet, unlike others of that time who have left their mark on history, the members of this community were not born to privilege and entitlement; they were neither aristocrats nor soldiers nor professional scholastics. The vast majority of them were traders, and while some of them were wealthy and successful, they were not, by any means, amongst the most powerful merchants of their time — most of them were small traders running small family businesses. Yet, despite their generally modest circumstances, a majority of the men were endowed with a respectable level of education, and some were among the most learned scholars of their time. Their doctors, for example, studied Hippocrates and Galen in Arabic translation, as well as the medical writings of Arab physicians and scholars, such as Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and al-Râzî. Indeed, one member of the Synagogue’s congregation is reckoned to have been one of the finest minds of the Middle Ages: the great doctor, scholar and philosopher Mûsa ibn Maimûn, known as Maimonides. Like so many others in his community, he too had close familial links with the India Trade.

The greatest achievement of the Ben Ezra congregation, however, was the product of largely fortuitous circumstances. The Synagogue’s members followed a custom, widespread at the time, of depositing their writings in a special chamber in the synagogue so that they could be disposed of with special rites later. This practice, which is still observed among certain Jewish groups today, was intended to prevent the accidental desecration of any written form of God’s name. Since most writings in that epoch included at least one sacred invocation in the course of the text, the custom effectively ensured that written documents of every kind were deposited within the Synagogue. The chambers in which the documents were kept were known by the term ‘Geniza’, a word that is thought to have come into Hebrew from a Persian root, ganj, meaning ‘storehouse’—a common element in place-names in India and Iran, particularly beloved of the British who sprinkled it liberally across their Indian settlements, in odd Anglicized forms like ‘Ballygunge’ and ‘Daltongunj’.

Every synagogue in the Middle East once had a Geniza and in accordance with custom, their contents were regularly emptied and buried. The Geniza of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was added when the synagogue was rebuilt in 1025AD, but for some reason — possibly reverence for the past, possibly mere oversight — it was never cleared out. For more than eight centuries papers continued to accumulate inside the Geniza. At the peak of the community’s prosperity, during the first two and a half centuries after the rebuilding of the Synagogue in 1025, great quantities of manuscripts poured in. Then, towards the middle of the thirteenth century, the flow dried to a trickle, and only swelled again some three hundred years later, when the Spanish Inquisition sent yet another wave of Jewish immigrants flooding in to Egypt. Papers (and later, books) continued to accumulate intermittently in the Geniza until the nineteenth century, by which time Fustat had become a poor neglected backwater in Cairo’s rapidly expanding archipelago. The document that is thought to be the last to be deposited in the Geniza bears the date 1875: it was a divorce settlement written in Bombay.

For centuries the Synagogue of the Palestinians lay forgotten within the half-abandoned precincts of the ancient fortress of Babylon. In about 1890, the eleventh-century building, the structure that Ben Yiju saw, was finally torn down and a new one was erected in its place: it still stands on the site today.

Until recently the site of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra lay at one end of a plateau of rubble; an expanse of shattered brick and stone, that looked as though it had been flattened by a gigantic hammer. The Synagogue itself, an undistinguished, rectangular building, seemed just barely to have survived: much of its masonry had crumbled, and the shutters had fallen away from many of its windows. Its most striking feature was a pair of wrought-iron gates; although much discoloured and corroded, they were still graceful, their sinuous forms exuberantly Art Deco: they looked as though someone had ordered them from Paris in a flush of enthusiasm after a summer holiday. Above the narrow gateway, held in place by a length of iron tubing and a few heavy stones, was a Star of David, a little askew and festooned with cobwebs.

Today the building is once again rejuvenated, its exterior scrubbed and well-tended. Prefabricated huts have sprouted in the rubble outside, where young engineers stand behind drawing-boards, their toes tapping gently to the beat of muted rock music: a team of Canadian experts and restorers has arrived, Mountie-like, to rescue the Synagogue from the assaults of Time.

A few men wait for tourists at the entrance to the Synagogue, standing behind desks spread with beads, necklaces, bronze scarabs and busts of Nefertiti. One of them has been there for years, a plump, smiling man, dressed in a shirt and trousers. His trinkets and souvenirs do not seem to change much from year to year — in fact he never seems to do much business at all — but he is always full of smiles, good-natured, and helpful. He explains that ‘Amm Shahata, the caretaker, is inside, he can take visitors in and explain everything — he is Jewish, yahûdi, he knows all about the Synagogue.

In a while ‘Amm Shahata appears, a sprightly old man, very thin and a little stooped. He too is dressed in a shirt and trousers, and his skull-cap is very much like any Egyptian Muslim’s. The two men exchange some companionable banter; his Arabic is indistinguishable from theirs, the staccato speech of working-class Cairo. He tells you his name: ‘Nathan in Hebrew and Shahata in Arabic.’ Close up he looks unexpectedly old, his teeth are gone and veins stand out on his forehead.

‘Amm Shahata soon lets it be known that he is a busy man: he has no time to waste; he ushers you briskly through the gateway and leads you into the main chamber of the Synagogue. Prisms of light shine through coloured windows; you are in a room with a very high ceiling, but otherwise of modest, schoolroom size. In the centre is a raised, octagonal altar, with benches arranged in rows on either side. The room has two levels. At the upper level is the women’s gallery, which runs around three sides of the room. At the far end of the gallery, on the left, is a small hole, high up in the wall; it opens into an empty chamber adjoining the back wall. ‘Amm Shahata points at the opening; that is the Geniza, he tells you, where a lot of papers were found, years and years ago.

You wish it were indeed the old Geniza, but it cannot be. It is no higher than a bare six feet or so while the Geniza of the old Synagogue is known to have been at least as tall as the rest of the building, some two and a half storeys high. The old Geniza was probably left standing for a while, after the rest of the structure was torn down, but it must have perished later.

Of course, you have no cause to be disappointed. The Synagogue’s location has not altered, whatever the changes in its outer shell. The fact is that you are standing upon the very site which held the greatest single collection of medieval documents ever discovered.

It was here, in this forlorn corner of Masr, that the memories of Abraham Ben Yiju and his slave lay preserved for more than seven hundred years.

6

ONCE, ON A very hot afternoon, when the sweat was dribbling off my face on to my notebooks, I gave up trying to work, and sat in my room with the door open, hoping to trap a breath of fresh air. It was very still that day, with the moisture from the freshly-watered cotton fields and rice paddies hanging heavy in the air. At intervals, as though frightened by the stillness, the ducks and chickens with whom I shared the roof would burst into an uproar, erupt out of their coops and flap around the roof in a gale of frenzied squawks, undaunted by the flat, white heat of the afternoon.

As I sat watching, a pair of ducks began to race around and around the roof, one in pursuit of the other. They were of a species I had never seen before I came to Egypt: squat, ugly creatures, almost suicidally self-absorbed, with large red warts on their necks and mangy black and white bodies. The pursuer was the bigger of the two, and it soon caught up with the other and pinned it to the floor with its beak. Then, after it had hoisted itself on top, it raised one leg and suddenly its penis appeared, a bright, wet pink, about as long as a thumbnail. It flapped its tailfeathers for a moment, pressing against its mate, and then tumbled off, a look of bafflement on its face. I watched spellbound: I had had no conception that ducks had penises and vaginas.

I happened to look up then and I saw Jabir, standing silently in the stairway, watching me.

He began to laugh.

‘You were watching like it was a film, ya Amitab,’ he said, laughing. ‘Haven’t you seen ducks do that before?’

‘No,’ I said.

His laughter was infectious; I found myself laughing with him.

He came into the room and seated himself on the chair, taking care to keep his clean jallabeyya from touching the floor.

‘So tell me then,’ he said, throwing me a glance of interested inquiry. ‘What do you know on the subject of …?’

He used a word I had not heard before. I must have looked puzzled, for he gave an incredulous gasp and said: ‘You mean you’ve never heard of …?’

It was the same word again.

I shook my head and he sank back in the chair, knocking his head with his fist, nearly dislodging his white skull-cap.

‘Ya Amitab,’ he said in mock despair. ‘What are you going to do in life if you don’t know about that?’

‘About what?’ I said.

This only made him laugh. ‘If you don’t know you don’t know,’ he muttered mysteriously.

‘Don’t know about what?’ I said, in exasperation.

‘It’s not important,’ he said, grinning, elliptical. ‘It’s good to put a distance between your thoughts and things like that. But tell me this — of course you have circumcision where you come from, just like we do? Isn’t that so, mush kida?’

I had long been dreading this line of questioning, knowing exactly where it would lead.

‘Some people do,’ I said. ‘And some people don’t.’

‘You mean,’ he said in rising disbelief, ‘there are people in your country who are not circumcised?’

In Arabic the word ‘circumcise’ derives from a root that means ‘to purify’: to say of someone that they are ‘uncircumcised’ is more or less to call them impure.

‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘yes, many people in my country are “impure”.’ I had no alternative; I was trapped by language.

‘But not you …’ He could not bring himself to finish the sentence.

‘Yes,’ I said. My face was hot with embarrassment and my throat had gone dry: ‘Yes, me too.’

He gasped and his incredulous eyes skimmed over the front of my trousers. For a moment he stared in disbelieving curiosity, and then, with an effort, he said: ‘And when you go to the barber to have your hair cut, do you not shave your armpits like we do?’

‘No,’ I said.

He leant forward, frowning intently. ‘So tell me then,’ he said, pointing a finger at my crotch. ‘Don’t you shave there either?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘But then,’ he cried, ‘doesn’t the hair grow longer and longer until …’

Inadvertently his eyes dropped and he stole a quick look at my ankles. I am convinced, to this day, that he fully expected to see the ends of two long, curly braids peeping out from the ends of my trousers.

That evening, towards sunset, I went for a walk in the fields. A fair distance from the hamlet I came upon Jabir and some other boys of his age, sitting beside a small canal. They had their textbooks with them and they were taking advantage of the comparative quiet of the fields to catch up with their schoolwork. I stopped dead when I saw Jabir; I was not sure whether we were still on speaking terms. But to my relief he waved cheerfully when he saw me coming, and then he and his friends jumped to their feet and fell in beside me.

‘You should go on with your studies,’ I said. ‘There’s still plenty of light.’

‘We should be returning now,’ Jabir said, ‘it will soon be time for the evening prayers. Look — the moon is already up.’

I looked up and saw a full moon, brilliant against the fading purple of the evening sky. It was very quiet, except for the creak of distant water-wheels; in Lataifa, far away, the first lamps were beginning to shine.

Jabir had his arms around the shoulders of the other boys. ‘Do you want to hear something?’ he said. He was whispering but I could hear him clearly in the sunset hush.

‘I was talking to him this afternoon,’ he said, gesturing at me with his chin. ‘And do you know, he doesn’t know what sex is?’

I had checked in the dictionary as soon as he’d left: he was using the same word he’d used that afternoon.

‘What’s this you’re saying, ya Jabir?’ one of the boys exclaimed. ‘He doesn’t know what sex is?’

‘What am I telling you?’ Jabir retorted. ‘He doesn’t know. I asked him.’

‘And he looks so grown up and all.’

‘But he doesn’t know a thing,’ said Jabir. ‘Not religion, not politics, not sex, just like a child.’

There was an awed silence. ‘Do you think he doesn’t know about “beating the ten” either?’ one of the boys whispered. I was not familiar with this expression at the time, but the gesture of the fist that accompanied it gave me a fair idea of its meaning.

‘No,’ said Jabir, ‘he’s like a child, I told you. That’s why he’s always asking questions.’

‘Shouldn’t we tell him?’ one of the boys said. ‘How’s he going to grow up if he doesn’t beat the ten?’

‘It’s no use,’ said Jabir. ‘He won’t understand; he doesn’t know a thing. Look, I’ll show you.’

He detached himself from the others and called out to me: ‘Ya Amitab — stop, wait a minute.’

Taking hold of my elbow he led me to the edge of the canal. ‘Look at that,’ he said, pointing at the reflection of the full moon on the water. ‘What is it? Do you know?’

‘Of course I know,’ I scoffed. ‘It’s Ahmed, Shaikh Musas son, shining his torch on the water.’

There was a hushed silence and Jabir turned to cast the others a triumphant look while I walked on quickly.

‘No, ya Amitab,’ one of the boys said, running after me, his voice hoarse with concern. ‘That’s not so. It’s not Ahmed shining his torch in the water — that’s a reflection of the full moon.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re absolutely wrong. Ahmed told me he would be going out for a walk today with his torch.’

‘But if it’s Ahmed how is it that we didn’t see him?’

‘We didn’t see him because he was a long way off. His torch is very powerful. It works on four batteries. He’s just bought new batteries — yesterday in Damanhour.’

And thus we argued, back and forth, and by the time we reached Lataifa I had nearly won the argument.

7

FOR A LONG time afterwards, I remained a child in Jabir’s eyes.

One evening, shortly after the start of Ramadan (which stretched over July and August that year), Jabir took me to a mowlid, a fair in honour of a saint’s birthday, in a village that lay across the fields. Several other boys from Lataifa went with us, among them Jabir’s younger brother, Mohammad, and a nephew of Shaikh Musa’s, a shy, quiet boy of fifteen, called Mabrouk.

As we walked across the fields towards the distant lights of the mowlid, Jabir and the other boys told me about the legend of Sidi ‘Abbas of Nakhlatain, in whose honour the mowlid was being celebrated.

Sidi ‘Abbas had lived in Nakhlatain long, long ago, long before anyone could remember, and he had been famous throughout the region for his godliness and piety: people had said of him that he was a ‘good man’, gifted with ‘baraka’, the power of conferring blessings. Such was his fame that a large crowd gathered in his village when he died, and so many people were witness to the miraculous events that graced his funeral. Trying to lift the Sidi’s bier, the men of the village found, to their amazement, that they couldn’t move it at all; dozens of them tried, only to find that they could not so much as budge it. It was only when the Sidi’s son lent a hand that the body began to move, but even then, it was not he who moved the body: the Sidi had moved of his own volition.

The Sidi’s body had led the wonderstruck people of the village into a mosque, and there the Sidi had communicated with them, telling them to build him a domed tomb, a maqâm: they were to celebrate his mowlid there every year. The people of the village had done as he had said, and in the following years the Sidi demonstrated his power to them time and time again, through miracles and acts of grace. Once, for instance, some thieves who were escaping with a herd of stolen water-buffalo were frozen to the ground, buffaloes and all, when they drew abreast of the Sidi’s tomb. Such was the Sidi’s power that anything left touching his tomb was safe: farmers who were late going home in the evening would even leave such valuable things as their wooden ploughs leaning against its walls, knowing that they would not be touched. Once, someone left a plough with leather thongs there, propped up against the tomb. After a while a mouse came along and, since mice like to nibble at leather, it had bitten into the plough’s thongs. But no sooner had its teeth touched the plough than it was frozen to the ground; that was how it was found next morning, with its teeth stuck in the thongs. Even animals were not exempt from the rules of sanctuary that surrounded the Sidi’s tomb.

The tomb was visible from a long way off, across the fields: a simple, rectangular structure with a low dome and a large open space in front which served as a public space — a common threshing-floor, as well as the site of the village’s weekly market. Now the tomb was festooned with dozens of small bulbs, its freshly whitewashed walls dotted with puddles of coloured light. The square in front was crowded with people, some thronging into the tomb, and others circulating amongst the fairground stalls that had been erected all around it.

A stall-owner called out to us as we walked into the square. ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s see what you young fellows can do.’

There were several airguns balanced on his counter, pointing at a board with dangling balloons and candles. Smiling encouragement, he thrust a couple of guns into our hands. I was stooping to take aim when I heard Jabir’s voice behind me: ‘From India …’

I looked over my shoulder and quickly turned back again. A large crowd had gathered around me; much larger than the crowds in any of the other stalls. ‘Doesn’t know anything,’ I heard Jabir say, ‘Nothing at all …’ I squeezed the trigger, trying to keep my sights steady on a large balloon.

‘You missed,’ said Jabir.

Ignoring my mumbled retort, he turned back to his audience. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he whispered. ‘Doesn’t know a thing.’

I tried to fix the balloon in my sights again, while people clustered eagerly around Jabir. ‘Doesn’t pray, doesn’t even know Our Lord …’

‘What’re you saying? Doesn’t know Our Lord!’

I squeezed the trigger, and once again the pellet thudded into the board, wide of the balloon.

‘Doesn’t know the Lord! Oh the Saviour!’

I shuffled off quickly to the next stall where a boy was selling pink, fluffy candy. Jabir’s voice followed me: ‘Reads books and asks questions all day long; doesn’t have any work to do …’

‘Can we talk to him?’ somebody asked.

‘No,’ Jabir said magisterially. ‘He won’t understand a word you say. Only we in Lataifa know how to talk to him.’

I began to push my way quickly through the crowd, towards the other end of the square: I was hoping to put a distance between myself and Jabir, but he was not to be shaken off and followed hard on my heels. But then, providentially, I earned a brief respite; he and his cousins spotted a row of swings on the edge of the square and went running off to join the queue.

By the time I worked my way through the crowd their turns had come and they were heaving themselves back and forth, their jallabeyyas ballooning out around them, each trying to outdo the other. The crowd began to cheer them on and one of the boys swung high enough to go all the way around the bar in a complete circle. Jabir attempted a couple of mighty heaves himself, to no effect, so he jumped off, shrugging dismissively. ‘I wasn’t trying,’ he said, dusting his hands. ‘I can do it when I try.’

Then he marched us off across the square again, towards the Sidi’s tomb. ‘We should see the zikr,’ he said sternly to his cousins. ‘That’s the most important part of the mowlid.’

A group of about thirty men, of all ages, had gathered in front of the tomb. Standing in rows, with their feet apart, they were jerking their heads and their torsos from side to side while a man dressed in a white turban chanted into a microphone. They swung their bodies in time with the rhythm, only their heads and their upper bodies moving, their feet perfectly still.

‘They are Sûfis,’ Jabir said for my benefit. ‘They are invoking God by chanting his name.’

Some of the men had shut their eyes, and the others looked rapt, mesmerized by the rhythm and the movement. As the singer increased the tempo, their heads began to move faster, keeping time, their eyes becoming increasingly glazed, unseeing.

Jabir and his cousins were soon bored by the zikr. ‘Makes me dizzy,’ one of them said, and we went off to look at the stalls again.

It was not long before Jabir had a new audience.

‘Doesn’t know Our Lord, doesn’t know anything … if you ask him how water-wheels are made, he’ll say: “They have babies”.’

‘Oh the black day!’

‘No!’

‘Go on, ask him.’

‘Do water-wheels have babies, ya doktór?’ one of the boys said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They lay eggs.’

‘Did you hear that? He thinks water-wheels lay eggs.’

I began to yearn for the solitude of my room, and to my relief, I did not have to wait long before the boys decided to head back across the cotton fields.

Early next morning, Jabir burst in, his face flushed with excitement. ‘Do you know what happened last night?’ he said, shaking me out of bed. ‘There was a murder — a man was murdered at the mowlid.’

‘What happened?’ I said confusedly.

It had happened near the swings, Jabir said, exactly where we had been last night. The murdered man had been sitting on a swing when someone had come along and asked him to get off. He was pushed when he refused, and had fallen off and died, hitting his head on a rock.

And now, Jabir said, drawing himself up to his full height, there would be a blood feud. That was the law of the Arabs: ‘Me and my brother against my cousin; me and my cousin against the stranger.’ This was a serious matter: if a man killed someone, then he and all his male kin on the paternal side could be killed in revenge by the dead man’s family. They would have to go and hide with their maternal relatives until their uncles and the shaikhs of the land could talk to the dead man’s family and persuade them to come to a council of reconciliation. Then, when the grief of the dead man’s family had eased a little, an amnesty would be declared. The two lineages would meet in some safe central place, and in the presence of their elders they would negotiate a blood-money payment. That was thâr, the law of feud; damm, the law of blood; the ancient, immutable law of the Arabs.

‘All that for pushing a man off a swing?’ I asked, bleary-eyed.

Jabir paused to think. ‘Well, maybe a little one,’ he said wistfully. ‘Just a small feud.’

‘Who was the man who was killed?’

‘His name was Fathy,’ said Jabir, ‘but people called him “the Sparrow”. He was from the village down the road: Nashawy. Now there’ll be a feud there.’

I was somehow very doubtful, but for all the attention Jabir paid me, I could have been a six-year-old child.

8

IT WAS MABROUK, Shaikh Musa’s nephew, who was responsible for improving my standing in Jabir’s eyes.

That year Mabrouk’s father had done exceptionally well from his vegetable plot. He’d taken a risk the autumn before by planting a lot of carrots after the cotton harvest. Everyone had tried to dissuade him — his wife, his brothers (including Shaikh Musa) and most of his cousins and relatives. The carrots would have to be harvested all at the same time, they had said, and what if the prices in the market were low that week? He would end up selling a whole truckload of carrots at a loss; it was better to plant many different kinds of vegetables, less of a risk.

Mabrouk’s father had not paid any attention. He was an obstinate sort of man, and their arguments had only served to settle his resolve. As it turned out, he had been lucky. The price of carrots happened to be exceptionally high at the time of his harvest, and he made an unexpectedly large profit.

A few weeks later, he put all his savings together, and he and two of his brothers hired a truck and went off to Damanhour. When the truck returned, several hours later, the three brothers — all men of ample girth — were sitting in front, squeezed in beside the driver. In the back was a mysterious object, about as big as a calf but of a different shape, wrapped in several sheets of tarpaulin. The truck went quietly around to Mabrouk’s house, and the object was unloaded and carried in through a back entrance, still wrapped in its tarpaulin sheets.

I knew nothing of this until Mabrouk burst into my room that afternoon: I heard the sound of feet flying up the stairs, and then Mabrouk threw the door open and caught hold of my arm.

‘Come with me, ya doktór,’ he cried. ‘You have to come with me right now, to our house. My father and my family want you.’ He was in a state of such feverish excitement that he could not bring himself to wait until I closed my notebook; he virtually dragged me out of the room right then, never letting go of my elbow.

Abu-‘Ali and his family were astonished to see Mabrouk racing through their house, for he had always had a reputation for being unusually shy. Jabir told me once that despite being the tallest and fastest amongst the boys of their age, Mabrouk wasn’t allowed to play in the forward line of their soccer team: the sight of an open goal was sometimes enough to bring on one of his attacks of shyness.

But now, Mabrouk was transformed; as we hurried through the lanes he talked volubly about how his father and his uncles had hired a truck and gone to Damanhour. But when I asked what exactly they had bought, he shook his head and smiled enigmatically. ‘Wait, wait,’ he said, ‘you will see.’

By the time we got there, a crowd had collected in Mabrouk’s lane, and his house was in an uproar. His father had been waiting for me, and after a hurried exchange of greetings, he spirited me past the crowd in his guest-room and led me quickly to a walled courtyard at the back, next to the pen where the livestock was kept — the most secret, secluded part of the house, the zariba. Their acquisition was standing in the middle of the courtyard, like a newborn calf, with an old shoe hanging around it to fend off the Evil Eye.

It was a brand-new diesel water-pump, the first of its kind to come to Lataifa. There were several such pumps in the surrounding villages: they were known generically as ‘al-makana al-Hindi’, the Indian machine, for they were all manufactured in India.

Mabrouk, his father, his mother and several cousins and uncles, were standing around me now, in a circle, looking from me to the machine, bright-eyed and expectant.

‘Makana hindi!’ I said to Mabrouk’s father, with a show of enthusiasm. ‘Congratulations — you’ve bought an “Indian machine”!’

Mabrouk’s father’s eyes went misty with pride as he gazed upon the machine. ‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘Yes, that’s why we asked you to come. You must take a look at it and tell us what you think.’

‘Me?’ I said. I was aghast; I knew nothing at all about water-pumps; indeed, I could not recall ever having noticed one before coming to Lataifa.

‘Yes!’ Mabrouk’s father clapped me on the back. ‘It’s from your country, isn’t it? I told the dealer in Damanhour, I said, “Make sure you give me one that works well, we have an Indian living in our hamlet and he’ll be able to tell whether we’ve got a good one or not.’ ”

I hesitated, mumbling a few words of protest, but he nudged me eagerly forward. A quick look at the anxious, watchful faces around me told me that escape was impossible: I would have to pronounce an opinion, whether I liked it or not.

A hush fell upon the courtyard as I walked up to the machine; a dozen heads craned forward, watching my every move. I went up to the machine’s spout, stooped beside it and peered knowledgeably into its inky interior, shutting one eye. Standing up again, I walked around the pump amidst a deathly silence, nodding to myself, occasionally tapping parts of it with my knuckles. Then, placing both hands on the diesel motor, I fell to my knees and shut my eyes. When I looked up again Mabrouk’s father was standing above me, anxiously awaiting the outcome of my silent communion with this product of my native soil.

Reaching for his hand I gave it a vigorous shake. ‘It’s a very good makana Hindi,’ I said, patting the pump’s diesel tank. ‘Excellent! ‘Azeem! It’s an excellent machine.’

At once a joyful hubbub broke out in the courtyard. Mabrouk’s father pumped my hand and slapped me on the back. ‘Tea,’ he called out to his wife. ‘Get the doktór al-Hindi some tea.’

Next day Jabir came to visit me in my room, late in the evening. He seemed somehow subdued, much quieter and less cocky than usual.

‘I was talking to Mabrouk,’ he said, ‘I heard he took you to his house to see their new “Indian machine”.’

I shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He did.’

‘And what was your opinion?’ he asked.

‘They’ve bought a good machine,’ I said. ‘A very good one.’

Jabir sank into silence, nodding thoughtfully. Later, when he rose to leave, he stopped at the door and declared: ‘My father and my uncles are thinking of buying an Indian machine too, insha’allah.’

‘Good,’ I said.

‘I hope you’ll come with us,’ he said.

‘Where?’

‘When we go to Damanhour to buy it,’ he said, shyly. ‘We would profit from your opinion.’

I stayed up a long time that night, marvelling at the respect the water-pump had earned me; I tried to imagine where I would have stood in Jabir’s eyes if mine had been a country that exported machines that were even bigger, better and more impressive — cars and tractors perhaps, not to speak of ships and planes and tanks. I began to wonder how Lataifa would have looked if I had had the privilege of floating through it, protected by the delegated power of technology, of looking out untroubled through a sheet of clear glass.

9

SOON THE MONTH of Ramadan arrived and I began to think of taking a holiday. First I would go to Alexandria, I decided, to talk to Doctor Issa, and to see whether I could make arrangements for moving out of Abu-‘Ali’s house. After that I would go to Cairo: I had spent one night there when I first arrived, but I had seen nothing other than the airport, and the station. Now at last, the time had come to pay the city a proper visit.

As the days passed the thought of my trip became ever more exciting. We were then well into Ramadan, and I was one of the handful of people in the hamlet who were not fasting. I had wanted to join in the fast, but everyone insisted, ‘No, you can’t fast, you’re not Muslim — only Muslims fast at Ramadan.’ And so, being reminded of my exclusion every day by the drawn, thirsty faces around me, the thought of Cairo and Alexandria, and the proximity of others among the excluded, grew ever more attractive.

From the very first day of the lunar month the normal routines of the village had undergone a complete change: it was as though a segment of time had been picked from the calendar and turned inside out. Early in the morning, a good while before sunrise, a few young men would go from house to house waking everyone for the suûr, the early morning meal. After that, as the day progressed, a charged lassitude would descend upon Lataifa. To ease the rigours of the fast people would try to finish all their most pressing bits of work early in the morning, while the sun was still low in the sky; it was impossible to do anything strenuous on an empty stomach and parched throat once the full heat of the day had set in. By noon the lanes of the hamlet would be still, deserted. The women would be in their kitchens and oven-rooms, getting their meals ready for the breaking of the fast at sunset. The men would sit in the shade of trees, or in their doorways, fanning themselves. Their mouths and lips would sometimes acquire thin white crusts, and often, as the hours wore on, their tempers would grow brittle.

I often wondered whether there were any people in the village who were occasionally delinquent in their observance of the fast. It was true that the most vulnerable people — pregnant women, young children, the sick, the elderly, and so on — were exempted by religious law, but even for those of sound body the fast must have been very hard: those were long, fiercely hot summer days, and it must have been difficult indeed to last through them without food, water or tobacco. Yet I never once saw a single person in Lataifa breaking the fast, in any way: there were occasional rumours that certain people in such and such village had been seen eating or drinking, but even those were very rare.

In every house as the sun sank slowly towards the horizon, the women would lay out their trays and serve the food they had cooked during the day. Their families would gather around, ravenous now, with cool, tall glasses of water resting in front of them. They would sit watching the lengthening shadows, tense and still, listening to their radios, waiting for the shaikhs of the mosque of al-Azhar in Cairo to announce the legal moment of sunset. It was not enough to see the sun going down with one’s eyes; the breaking of the fast was the beginning of a meal of communion that embraced millions of people and the moment had to be celebrated publicly and in unison.

When the meal was finished and the trays had been cleared away, the men would wash and change and make their way to the mosque, talking, laughing, replete with a sense of well-being which the day’s denials had made multiply sweet. I would go up to my room alone and listen to the call of the muezzin and try to think of how it must feel to know that on that very day, as the sun travelled around the earth, millions and millions of people in every corner of the globe had turned to face the same point, and said exactly the same words of prayer, with exactly the same prostrations as oneself. A phenomenon on that scale was beyond my imagining, but the exercise helped me understand why so many people in the hamlet had told me not to fast: to belong to that immense community was a privilege which they had to re-earn every year, and the effort made them doubly conscious of the value of its boundaries.

In the evenings, after the prayers, the hamlet would be full of life and laughter. Where at other times of the year the lanes and paths were generally empty by eight o’ clock, they were now full of bustle and activity: children going from house to house, chanting and demanding gifts, and people visiting their families and staying up late, gossiping and joking with their friends.

The night before I left for my trip to Cairo and Alexandria, I went to see Shaikh Musa to say goodbye. He and his family were resting after breaking the day’s fast. They had eaten well and Shaikh Musa had just returned from the mosque. He was sitting on a mat in his bedroom, puffing on his shusha, a homemade hookah, making up for all the tobacco he had had to deny himself during the day.

He was in high spirits. ‘Welcome, ya Amitab,’ he said. ‘How are you, come and sit here, beside me.’

As soon as I’d sat down he pointed at a young man sitting across the room and said: ‘Do you know who that is?’

The room was lit only by the glow of a single oil lamp, but I recognized the young man he had pointed to the moment I saw him. It was his younger son Hasan. He looked very much like the photograph Shaikh Musa carried in his wallet: robust, with clean, chiselled features, and a pleasant, rather shy smile. He lifted his right hand to his heart to welcome me to his house, and we shook hands and exchanged the customary greetings.

‘You have brought blessings.’

‘God bless you.’

‘You have brought light to our house.’

‘The light is yours.’

His face was sunburnt, ruddy, and he was wearing the khaki fatigues of the Egyptian army.

‘He’s on leave,’ Shaikh Musa said. ‘The army let him go for a few days so he could visit his family.’

Just then Sakkina appeared in the doorway and handed Hasan a tray with three glasses of tea on it. He took it from her without a word and she disappeared back into the kitchen. Neither she nor Hasan spoke to each other, but it struck me suddenly that they were probably of exactly the same age: as children they would have worked in the same groups in the cotton fields, picking weevils from the plants, and they would have played together in the hamlet’s threshing-grounds in the evenings. I could not help wondering about the nuances of their present situation, about how they dealt with each other as stepmother and stepson.

‘He got here this afternoon,’ Shaikh Musa said. ‘He’s been travelling all morning.’

I asked Hasan where he had come from and he told me that he was posted in Mansourah, a small town a couple of hundred miles away, at the other end of the Delta. His voice sounded tired and when he had finished speaking he leant his head back against the wall.

‘He’s not well,’ Shaikh Musa explained. ‘He’s got a pain in the head.’

I saw then that he had a bandage tied around his forehead. I had not noticed it before for it was largely hidden by his thick, dark hair.

‘He comes home for a day and look what happens to him,’ Shaikh Musa said in mock outrage. ‘Shouldn’t the government extend his leave, at least?’

In a short while other people began to arrive. Some were relatives who had heard that Hasan was back on leave, and some were friends of Shaikh Musa’s from nearby villages. I soon realized that some of them were from Nashawy, and the moment there was a break in the conversation I asked if there was going to be a feud in their village. They looked at one another in puzzlement at first, and when I recounted the story that Jabir had told me they began to laugh.

The boy had imagined it, they said. There would be no feud, even though it was true that the man called the Sparrow had died. The police had made a report, and it had been settled between the two families. The Sparrow had been a poor man, none too sound in the head, with very few relatives in the area. The man who had knocked him over was from a big and powerful family. There was no question of a feud: the elders of the two families had sat down and decided on a token payment and that was that, khalas.

Shaikh Musa, listening intently, sighed and shook his head. ‘Nashawy!’ he said. ‘There’s always some trouble there.’

It was a big, bustling place, Nashawy, with almost fourteen hundred people, fully a thousand more than Lataifa! All those people living crowded together; no wonder they had trouble.

They began to talk about Nashawy, and listening to them I wondered why I had not visited the village yet. It was just a mile or so down the road, and I would often hear the drivers of the pick-up trucks that went past Lataifa shouting ‘Nashawy? Nashawy?’ In my first few weeks in the hamlet I had often thought of climbing on for the ride. But now I had heard the name so often that it had begun to sound like a challenge: it had become a place that I would have to prepare for, just as I was preparing myself for Cairo.

A little later, when I got up to leave, Shaikh Musa’s guests invited me to visit Nashawy, but Shaikh Musa cut them short. ‘He doesn’t have time now,’ he said. ‘He’s going to Cairo, to Masr.’

He and his two sons came to the door to say goodbye. Shaikh Musa stood in the middle, holding his two grandsons by the hand, his eldest son, Ahmed, on his right and Hasan, the younger, on his left. ‘Come back soon, ya mister,’ he said, ‘and tell us about your trip. We want to hear about it, about Masr.’

‘I’ll tell you about it,’ I said, ‘as soon as I return.’

At the end of the lane, I looked back: Shaikh Musa was still there, the picture of happiness and fulfilment, surrounded by his sons and grandsons.

‘Do you know what they say about Masr?’ he shouted after me. ‘They say she’s the umm al-duniyâ, the “mother of the world”.’

10

IN THE EIGHTEENTH century, a new breed of traveller began to flock into Cairo, Europeans with scholarly and antiquarian interests, for whom Masr was merely the picturesque but largely incidental location of an older, and far more important landscape. By this time Europe was far in advance of the rest of the world in armaments and industry, and on the points of those weapons the high age of imperialism was about to be ushered in. Masr had long since ceased to be the mistress of her own destiny; she had become a province of the Ottoman Empire, which was itself enfeebled now, allowed to keep its territories only by the consent of the Great Powers. The Indian Ocean trade, and the culture that supported it, had long since been destroyed by European navies. Transcontinental trade was no longer a shared enterprise; the merchant shipping of the high seas was now entirely controlled by the naval powers of Europe. It no longer fell to Masr to send her traders across the Indian Ocean; instead, the geographical position that had once brought her such great riches had now made her the object of the Great Powers’ attentions, as a potential bridge to their territories in the Indian Ocean.

Over the same period that Egypt was gaining a new strategic importance within the disposition of European empires, she was also gradually evolving into a new continent of riches for the Western scholarly and artistic imagination. From the late seventeenth century onwards, Europe was swept by a fever of Egyptomania: sphinxes and pyramids began to appear in houses and gardens throughout the continent; several operas were written around themes from ancient Egypt; a succession of Popes became interested in the placing of Rome’s obelisks, and none other than Sir Isaac Newton took it upon himself to prove that Osiris, Bacchus, Sesostris and Sisac were but different names for the same deity. Concurrent with this growing interest, the study of Egyptian antiquities passed from being an esoteric and quasi-mystical pursuit into a freshly-charted field of scholarly enterprise, and in the service of the new science several travellers undertook journeys of discovery into Egypt.

It was against this background that the first report of the Geniza was published in Europe. In 1752 or ’53, a Jewish traveller, Simon Van Geldern, an ancestor of the German poet Heinrich Heine, visited the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, in Babylon. The visit appears to have been an unremarkable one: all that Van Geldern had to say of it was that he had ‘looked around’ the Geniza and paid five coins. Effectively, the event passed unnoticed. At that time European scholarly interest was focused on the Egypt of the ancients; the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was too much a part of Masr to merit attention.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Egypt had become the scholarly counterpart of those great landmasses that were then being claimed and explored by European settlers: unknown to herself, she was already well on her way to becoming a victim of the Enlightenments conception’s of knowledge and discovery. In fact, the first detailed plan for the conquest of Egypt was conceived not by a soldier but by a philosopher, Karl Liebniz, as early as 1670. More than a hundred years later, when Napoleon conceived of his invasion of Egypt, it was partly on the model of a scientific expedition.

In the decades immediately after Napoleon’s invasion of 1798, Egypt attracted the husbandry of the Western academy in a way that no other place ever had. Yet all through this period, despite the concentrated efforts being expended on the soil around it, the Geniza remained entirely unnoticed: it was then still a part of a living tradition, and the conquering scholars had little interest in the dishevelled and unglamorous inhabitants of contemporary Masr.

More than a hundred years passed after Simon Van Geldern’s visit with no public notice being taken of the Geniza at the Synagogue of Ben Ezra. By the time the next reports were published, Masr had passed into the control of the British, and her position on the route to India had become her curse, the proximate cause of her annexation. The visit that first brought the Geniza to the attention of the scholarly world occurred in 1864, and then, soon enough, events began to unfold quietly around it, in a sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history.

In the summer of 1864, when the construction of the Suez Canal was well under way and Egypt was being readied, once again, to become the stepping-stone to India, a scholar and collector of Judaic antiquities by the name of Jacob Saphir paid several visits to the Synagogue of Ben Ezra while passing through Egypt. The synagogue was still greatly venerated by the Jewish inhabitants of Cairo, and travellers were often directed to it as a site worthy of pilgrimage.

On his visits, Saphir had the Geniza pointed out to him from a distance and was told that it contained many worn and tattered old books. But when he asked to look into the chamber he met with a flat refusal. There was a snake curled up at the entrance, the officials of the synagogue told him, and it would be extremely dangerous to go in. Their refusal made Saphir all the more determined to investigate, and he returned to the Synagogue after obtaining permission to enter the chamber from the head of the Rabbinical court. The officials were not impressed, and they told him, laughing: ‘Can a man risk his life for nothing? He won’t even live out the year!’ They relented only when Saphir assured them that he knew how to charm snakes, and promised them a reward.

As Saphir found it, the Geniza was full to a height of two and a half storeys; it was open to the sky on top, and strewn with rubble and debris within. He left after spending two exhausting days inside, without encountering ‘any fiery serpents or scorpions’, and taking only a ‘few leaves from various old books and manuscripts’. Upon closer examination, none of those fragments proved to be of any value, but describing his visit in his memoirs, Saphir added the rider: ‘But who knows what is still beneath?’

His account appeared in 1866, arousing interest within a small circle of scholars, and lending credence to rumours that a potential treasure trove of documents was waiting to be uncovered in Cairo.

The Synagogue of Ben Ezra was probably visited again, soon afterwards, by a man who eventually put together one of the largest collections of Hebrew manuscripts in the world. He was a Crimean Jew of the Karaite sect, Abraham Firkowitch, a collector renowned as much for his unscrupulousness as for his fine judgement. The collection he assembled over his lifetime is now in the State Public Library in St. Petersburg. The manuscripts were bought in two lots: Firkowitch sold the first one himself, and the second was acquired soon after his death in 1874. The second lot alone contains about fifteen times as many Biblical manuscripts as there are in the British Museum. The German scholar Paul Kahle, who devoted the better part of a lifetime to the study of Firkowitch’s collection, estimated that in all the libraries of Europe, taken together, there were not even as many as a third of the number of Biblical manuscripts as there were in this one collection in St. Petersurg. It is known that many of these documents were from the Cairo Geniza, but as to which they were there is no way of knowing because Firkowitch never revealed his sources. He had obtained many of his documents by swindling synagogue officials in various parts of the Middle East, and it was his practice to conceal his collecting methods behind a veil of secrecy.

If there is an irony today in the thought that a Jewish collector, not so very long ago, would have seen reason to steal manuscripts from his fellow Jews in Palestine in order to take them to Russia, it is not one that would have been apparent to Firkowitch: he was merely practising on his co-religionists the methods that Western scholarship used, as a normal part of its functioning, throughout the colonized world.

Over the next few years more and more Geniza documents began to change hands. Already in the 1880s substantial quantities were being carried away to Palestine, Europe and the USA — by collectors who were often still unaware of the very existence of the Geniza. Towards the end of that decade, in 1888, a Jewish Briton, who was to play an important part in the dispersal of the Geniza, happened to spend Yom Kippur in the company of some of the prominent Jewish families of Cairo. His name was Elkan N. Adler, and upon his return to London he published an account of his visit in the Jewish Chronicle. He took issue there with those of his fellow British Jews who passed through Cairo and showed no interest in its Jewish community. For his own part he declared himself to be very well-satisfied with his experience. ‘It is not often,’ he wrote, ‘that a European has the opportunity of joining the aborigines in celebrating their feasts.’

In the course of his visit Adler had developed an acquaintance with a family that held a position of enormous influence within the city’s Jewish community; their name was Cattaoui and they were to play a critical part in the subsequent history of the Geniza. The Cattaouis are thought to have come to Egypt by way of Holland and like most of the leading Jewish families of Cairo in the late nineteenth century, they were Sephardic rather than ‘Oriental’ Jews. By this time the indigenous Jews of Cairo, those whose relationship with the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was most direct, were a small and impoverished minority within the community. The Cattaouis had themselves once lived in a Jewish enclave of Cairo, but they were one of the first families to come out of the âra. They had gone on to establish a prosperous banking firm with offices in Cairo, Alexandria and Paris, and at the time of Adler’s visit they were by far the most powerful family within the community.

The founder of the clan, Ya‘qub Cattaoui, was the first Egyptian Jew to be granted the title of ‘bey’, and in the early 1880s he was also made a baron of the Habsburg Empire. After this, mindful of their standing as Austrian aristocrats, the family often styled itself ‘von Cattaoui’. Little did the Barons von Cattaoui realize that they were to be instrumental, one day, in providing Elkan Adler with an opportunity to observe an aboriginal feast.

In his account of his stay in Cairo, Adler mentioned the private synagogue of the Cattaouis and their adjoining residence, a magnificent palace that had once belonged to a Pasha. He also included a small anecdote about the current head of the family, Moses Cattaoui.

About six years before Adler’s visit, the British had been confronted by an armed uprising led by Ahmed Arabi Pasha, a popular figure, venerated in Egypt to this day. The Egyptians were defeated in 1882, and in the aftermath of the war the British assumed direct control of the country’s administration. Soon afterwards the British ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Dufferin, was sent to Cairo to fashion a plan for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the country. The Cattaouis made their mansion available to him for the length of his stay, and in recognition of this service, Queen Victoria later sent Moses Cattaoui her portrait — a token which he treasured, writes Adler, ‘with no little pride’.

Adler was given a glimpse of a remarkable document in the Cattaouis’ strong-room: the eight-hundred-year-old decree issued by the Caliph, giving possession of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra to its congregation. He also paid a visit to Fustat and was horrified to learn that the Synagogue was soon to be torn down and rebuilt. But otherwise the visit made no great impression on him: his inquiries about the Geniza elicited nothing of significance, and he came to the conclusion that ‘nowadays no Hebrew MSS of any importance are to be bought in Cairo.’ When he wrote his account of his journey, the Geniza did not so much as earn a mention.

Within a couple of years, just as Adler had been told, the old structure of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was indeed torn down and the building that stands on the site today was put up in its place. The Geniza must have been disturbed in the process of demolition, for the rapid dispersal of its contents appears to have begun at about that time. The officials of the synagogue and the notoriously canny antiquities dealers of Cairo were clearly well aware that those documents could command good prices on the international market, and through their efforts a large number of documents made their way at this time to libraries in Paris, Frankfurt, London, Vienna and Budapest. The Bodleian Library at Oxford also managed to acquire a large collection of Geniza manuscripts in these years, through the efforts of two members of its staff who were quick to recognize their value.

At Cambridge, on the other hand, the manuscripts went virtually unnoticed. The expert in Hebrew documents in Cambridge then was Dr Solomon Schechter, a scholar of great distinction and a forceful, charismatic man, who also happened to be blessed with a natural warmth of spirit and a great deal of charm. He was sent several documents from the Geniza by a learned Rabbi, the scholarly Solomon Wertheimer of Jerusalem. In a few years Schechter’s name was to become more closely linked with the Geniza than any other, but until well into the 1890s he was of the opinion (like many other scholars) that these ‘Egyptian fragments’ were of little real importance. Rabbi Solomon Wertheimer wrote him several letters begging him to forward the documents to Oxford if he saw no value in them, but his pleas went unheeded: Doctor Schechter had not yet found the time to unpack them from their boxes.

At about this time Elkan Adler must have realized that he had been wrong in his initial assessment, for he returned to Cairo in what was to prove the decisive year in the life of the Geniza, 1896. He took with him letters from his brother, Herman Adler (who was later to become the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire), and was received with great cordiality by the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, Rafaïl ben Shimon ha Cohen, and by his warders, who were none other than the senior members of the Cattaoui family. Between them, they granted Adler permission to enter the Geniza and to carry away a certain quantity of documents of his choice. He was personally conducted to Fustat by the Rabbi Rafaïl and, after spending three or four hours immersed in the chamber, he took away a sackful of documents. The material he gathered that day is now spread over several libraries, and a part of it forms the nucleus of the important collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York.

That very same year, 1896, two Presbyterian women, Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson, returned to England after a visit to Egypt, carrying a small collection of Geniza documents. The women were sisters, identical twins with scholarly inclinations, whose large personal fortunes allowed them to travel widely in the Middle East. They had acquired a good deal of experience in manuscripts and antiquities in the course of their wanderings, and on this occasion they were convinced that some of the documents they had brought back with them were of considerable value.

Back in Cambridge, they picked out two fragments that seemed particularly interesting and took them to Solomon Schechter, the Reader in Talmudics. Schechter agreed to look at them, but chiefly out of politeness, for he was still sceptical about the value of the ‘Egyptian fragments’. But it so happened that he was taken completely by surprise. One of the documents immediately caught his interest, and next morning, after examining it in his office, he realized that he had stumbled upon a sensational discovery. In great haste, Schechter sent out a note from the University Library:

Dear Mrs Lewis,

I think we have reason to congratulate ourselves. For the fragment I took with me represents a piece of the original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus. It is the first time that such a thing was discovered. Please do not speak yet about the matter till tomorrow. I will come to you tomorrow about 11 p.m. and talk over the matter with you how to make the matter known.

In haste and great excitement,

Yours sincerely,

S. Schechter.

Schechter’s note is dated 13 May 1896. On that very day, Mrs Lewis sent an announcement of the discovery to the prestigious London journal, The Academy. The letter was published three days later, under the title, ‘Discovery of a Fragment of Ecclesiasticus in the Original Hebrew’ and it began: ‘All students of the Bible and of the Apocrypha will be interested to learn that, among some fragments of Hebrew MSS which my sister Mrs. Gibson and I have just acquired in Palestine a leaf of the Book of Ecclesiasticus has been discovered to-day by Mr S. Schechter, lecturer in Talmudic to the University of Cambridge.’

In his own preliminary report published in a learned journal called the Expositor later the same year, Schechter announced that he had found a part of the original text of Ecclesiasticus (The Book of Wisdom) by Jesus Ben Sira, which was known to have been written in about 200BC: the original Hebrew had been lost centuries earlier and the book had survived only in Greek translation. ‘If it could be proved,’ he wrote, ‘that Sirach, who flourished in about 200BC composed his work, as some believe, in the Rabbinic idiom … then between Ecclesiasticus and the books of the Old Testament there must lie centuries, nay there must lie, in most cases, the deep waters of the Captivity.…’

Neither of the announcements mentioned the Geniza of Fustat as the source of the document: the discovery had so excited Schechter that he had already begun thinking of travelling to Cairo to acquire whatever remained of the documents. Secrecy was essential if the plan was to succeed. He quickly succeeded in enlisting the support of Doctor Charles Taylor, the Master of St John’s College, Cambridge. Taylor was a mathematician but he took a keen interest in Rabbinic studies and he persuaded the University to exercise its considerable influence on Schechter’s behalf. Schechter left in December 1896, taking with him a letter of recommendation for the Chief Rabbi of Cairo from Herman Adler, then the Chief Rabbi of England, and a ‘beautifully ribboned and sealed credential’ from the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, addressed to the president of the Jewish community of Cairo.

The times could not have been more propitious for Schechter’s visit. The British administration in Egypt was then presided over by Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer. Known to his subordinates as Over-Baring, he had served in various administrative posts in India and Egypt, and had found little reason to be enthusiastic about the abilites of their modern inhabitants. So little did he think of Egyptians that once, upon hearing a famous Egyptian singer singing a song that went ‘My love is lost, O! People find him for me’, he is known to have commented that it was typical of Egyptians to expect to have somebody else look for their loves. He expressed his opinions trenchantly in an essay entitled ‘The Government of the Subject Races’: ‘We need not always inquire too closely what these people, who are all, nationally speaking, more or less in statu pupillari, themselves think is best in their own interests … it is essential that each special issue should be decided mainly with reference to what, by the light of Western knowledge and experience … we conscientiously think is best for the subject race.’

Under Lord Cromer’s supervision British officials were moved into key positions in every branch of the country’s administration. Thus, by the time Schechter arrived in Cairo, a beribboned letter from the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University was no mere piece of embossed stationery: it was the backroom equivalent of an imperial edict.

Schechter was fortunate in that Cromer himself took an interest in the success of his mission. The precise details of what transpired between Schechter and British officialdom and the leaders of Cairo’s Jewish community are hazy, but soon enough the Chief Rabbi of Cairo and Joseph M. Cattaoui Pasha came to a decision that seems little less than astonishing, in retrospect. They decided to make Solomon Schechter a present of their community’s — and their city’s — heritage; they granted him permission to remove everything he wanted from the Geniza, every last paper and parchment, without condition or payment.

It has sometimes been suggested that Schechter succeeded so easily in his mission because the custodians of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra had no idea of the real value of the Geniza documents — a species of argument that was widely used in the nineteenth century to justify the acquisition of historical artefacts by colonial powers. In fact, considering that there had been an active and lucrative trade in Geniza documents for several years before Schechter’s visit, the beadles and petty officials of the Synagogue could not have been ignorant of their worth. And impoverished as they were, it is hard to believe that they would willingly have parted with a treasure which was, after all, the last remaining asset left to them by their ancestors. In all likelihood the decision was taken for them by the leaders of their community, and they were left with no alternative but acquiescence. As for those leaders, the motives for their extraordinary generosity are not hard to divine: like the élites of so many other groups in the colonized world, they evidently decided to seize the main chance at a time when the balance of power — the ships and the guns — lay overwhelmingly with England.

Schechter, however, took nothing for granted: all the while that he was working in Fustat he took care to cultivate the leaders of the Jewish community in Cairo. He was a man of considerable wit, and he described his relations with the Chief Rabbi and his family with characteristic pithiness in his letters to his wife. Of his manner of dealing with the Rabbi’s brother, who had become his advisor, he wrote: ‘I flirted with him for hours, and am taking Arabic lessons three times a week. You see how practical your old man is.’ He also decided to take the Chief Rabbi to the Pyramids which, remarkably, he had not seen: ‘It will cost me about ten shillings, but that is the only way to make yourself popular.’ The Rabbi was so charmed that in a later letter Schechter was moved to remark: ‘The Rabbi is very kind to me and kisses me on the mouth, which is not very pleasant …’

Other members of the community did not merit quite the same degree of cordiality. Of the custodians of the synagogue, Schechter wrote, in a letter home: ‘For weeks and weeks I had to swallow … the annoyance of those scoundrel beadles whom I have to Baksheesh.’ Describing his experiences at leisure later, he was to write: ‘The whole population within the precincts of the Synagogue were constantly coming forward with claims on my liberality — the men as worthy colleagues employed in the same work [of selection] as myself … the women for greeting me respectfully when I entered the place, or for showing me their deep sympathy in my fits of coughing caused by the dust. If it were a fête day, such as the New Moon or the eve of Sabbath, the amount expected from me for all these kind attentions was much larger, it being only proper that the Western millionaire should contribute from his fortune to the glory of the next meal.’

It must be counted as one of the remarkable features of that age that it could induce Schechter, an otherwise kindly and humane man, himself a member of a family of impoverished Romanian Hasidim, to use a species of language that would have been immediately familiar to any British colonial official. Yet Schechter was writing of his own co-religionists, and moreover of the very group who had sustained the Geniza for almost a thousand years, and whose extraordinary achievement he was then engaged in appropriating. Lord Cromer would probably have expressed himself in more forthright language, but he would have been in complete sympathy with a view of the world in which the interests of the powerful defined necessity, while the demands of the poor appeared as greed.

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 …’

‘If only I’d known,’ I said. ‘I’d have come back at once.’

He looked down at his feet and fell silent. I wanted to tell him my big news, that Dr Issa had arranged for me to leave Abu-‘Ali’s house, to move out of Lataifa, to Nashawy. But the moment did not seem appropriate, and in a while I got up to leave.

‘He was so young,’ Shaikh Musa said. ‘And his health was always so good.’

He rose to his feet, and when his face was level with mine I saw that he was weeping. ‘Al-duniya zayy kida,’ he said helplessly. ‘The world is like that …’ He went quickly back inside after seeing me out, and I turned and walked away.

So it happened that I never kept the promise I had made to tell him about Masr.

12

I LEFT EGYPT in 1981, and it was not until seven years later that circumstances permitted me to begin a serious inquiry into the story of the Slave of MS H.6: in the ten years that had passed since I first came across Goitein’s brief reference to Abraham Ben Yiju and his Slave, my path had crossed theirs again and again, sometimes by design and sometimes inadvertently, in North Africa, Egypt and the Malabar, until it became clear that I could no longer resist the logic of those coincidences.

I started upon the Slaves trail hoping that I would be able to ask for guidance from Goitein himself: I took encouragement from an article published in India, in 1963, in which he had tried to interest Indians in the Geniza. But I soon discovered, to my great disappointment, that he had died in 1985, at the age of eighty-five. The only alternative left was to start by going through Goitein’s work and tracking the Slave through references to Abraham Ben Yiju.

The blitheness of that beginning did not long survive the discovery of the enormity of that task. The complete bibliography of Goitein’s writings runs into a seventy-page book, with a twenty-two page supplement. It contains a total of 666 entries in Hebrew, German, English and French. His writings were published in Europe, America, Israel, Tunisia, India and Pakistan, and they included pieces in popular magazines, a Hebrew play and, of course, innumerable books and articles. At the age of thirty Goitein had started single-handed upon the kind of project for which university departments usually appoint committees: an edition of the Ansâb al-Ashrâf, (The Noble Lineages), a 2,500 page work by the ninth-century Arab historian, al-Balâdhuri. His interest in the Geniza had begun with a visit to Budapest in 1948 and had continued through the rest of his life. His monumental study, based on his Geniza research, A Mediterranean Society, was acclaimed as a landmark in medieval scholarship as soon as the first of its five volumes appeared in 1967. It was to establish him as possibly the greatest of the Geniza scholars, the pioneering researcher without whose labours an inquiry into the lives of Ben Yiju and the Slave of MS H.6 would not be possible today.

Scanning through the relevant parts of Goitein’s oeuvre, I discovered that his interest lay, on the whole, in the broad sweep of history, so that the references to individuals, such as Ben Yiju, were scattered randomly through his writings like the windblown trail of a paperchase. Some of those references led to the work of other scholars, such as E. Strauss, who had first edited the letter of MS H.6. Others pencilled in the outlines of Ben Yiju’s career, in passing, while pointing in two further directions: on the one hand to certain specific Geniza documents, and on the other to one of Goitein’s own unfinished works, a project which he had named ‘the India Book’.

The references to this work began in the 1950s not long after Goitein first started working with the Geniza documents. His researches had led him to a large number of letters and other manuscripts referring to the trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. He soon conceived of a plan to publish them as a collection, under the title of The India Book, but as his work proceeded he found ever-increasing quantities of material, and the project was continually deferred, while other aspects of his research took precedence. The India Book was never abandoned however: he announced that the book would contain about three hundred documents, and in 1964 he even published the catalogue numbers of those documents, including those that referred to Ben Yiju, as a guide to other researchers. But despite his announced intentions, the book was still unfinished when he died in 1985, in Princeton.

The road now led directly to Princeton University, where Goitein had taught for many years: I was told that his colleagues and students in the Department of Near Eastern Studies had compiled an archive of his papers there. Eventually I went to visit the archive myself but a disappointment awaited me there: I found that access to most of his papers on the India trade was restricted because an edition of his notes for the projected India Book was in preparation, although it was unlikely to be published within the next several years. From the papers that I was allowed to see, I had the impression that Goitein had in fact already published most of his information regarding Ben Yiju’s life in scattered bits and pieces, for much of the material was already familiar from my earlier reading.

At the end of the visit it was clear to me that there was only one way forward now, and that was to go to the Geniza documents themselves, directly to Ben Yiju’s own papers. But across that road lay a seemingly impassable barrier: the obstacle of language.

Ben Yiju’s documents were mostly written in an unusual, hybrid language: one that has such an arcane sound to it that it might well be an entry in a book of Amazing Facts. It is known today as Judæo-Arabic; it was a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, written in the Hebrew script.

Judæo-Arabic evolved after Muslim armies, recruited mainly from the Arabian peninsula, conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa in the seventh century. The language of the conquerors soon came to supplant the other languages of the empire, including Aramaic, the language then generally in use among the Jews of those regions. But of course, Jews continued to use Hebrew for religious purposes and, in time, when they started writing in their newly adopted tongue, it was in the sanctified alphabet of their Scriptures.

From this odd smelting came an alloy that had its own distinct sheen and texture, with little resemblance to the language written by Muslim Arabs. Written Arabic, in its usual form, is the literary variety of the language and is more or less standard throughout the Arab world, from Morocco to Iraq. Spoken Arabic, on the other hand, varies so much from region to region that the speech of an Iraqi is almost incomprehensible to a Moroccan. A great gulf separates the two registers of Arabic, the formal, literary language, and the slangy, regional dialects: for all practical purposes they are separate languages, with their own distinct vocabularies and grammars.

Judæo-Arabic, determinedly contrary, was not like either form of Arabic: unlike the dialects, it was a written language, and unlike written Arabic, it had the vocabulary and grammar of the spoken language. It was in a way something much simpler than either form of Arabic: a representation of colloquial speech in writing. But since colloquial Arabic has always varied between regions, Judæo-Arabic too tended to take on somewhat different colours in different parts of the Arab world. The language of the Geniza documents, for example, has a strong flavour of North African Arabic, since so many members of the community were from that region.

But although Judæo-Arabic was much closer to the spoken language than literary Arabic, it was not uniformly colloquial. The people who used it would often try to introduce Arabic classicisms into their written language, with varying degrees of success. Often they would use words and spellings which would have startled well-educated Muslim Arabs, but which they took to be elegant usage. Eight centuries later, those odd solecisms often have an awkward, endearingly human grace, where the correct form would seem merely formal or stilted.

At the same time, everyone who wrote Judæo-Arabic had a thorough knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, and though they were not usually able to use Hebrew as a language of expression, they were well able to quote in it. Thus their prose is studded with Hebrew proverbs and long passages from the bible, as well as legal and religious terms from the archaic language Aramaic.

When I first read about it, Judæo-Arabic sounded bafflingly esoteric: it is not easy, after all, to see oneself sitting down to leaf through a collection of eight-hundred-year-old documents, written in a colloquial dialect of medieval Arabic, transcribed in the Hebrew script, and liberally strewn with Hebrew and Aramaic. At its easiest, Arabic is very difficult for a foreigner, and such knowledge as I had of it was mainly of the dialect spoken around Lataifa: a broad, peasant tongue, so earthy that my accent would often earn sniffs from waiters in Cairo restaurants and provoke shopkeepers to ask to see my money before they reached for their shelves. Those experiences had given me something of the fellah’s diffidence about his language: it would never have occurred to me that this simple, rustic dialect could be of any use in so rarified a domain of erudition as the reading of twelfth-century Judæo-Arabic manuscripts.

Worse was still to come, for I soon discovered that there was no accepted method of learning to read the manuscripts except through a long apprenticeship with one of the handful of scholars who had made a lifetime’s speciality of the subject. The only other means was to take copies of those documents that had been published, and to compare them with the actual folio pages — smudged, worn eight-hundred-year-old bits of paper — until such time as one’s eyes grew expert in deciphering the script.

At that point I almost gave up, but just then, when all the tunnels on the road seemed finally to have closed, a short conversation with one of the foremost experts in the field, Mark Cohen, a one-time student of Goitein’s, and custodian of his archive at Princeton, gave me pause. The language was not as difficult as it seemed, Mark Cohen told me; Hebrew characters were easy to learn, and once the writing had been deciphered, the Arabic itself was fairly simple. It was the deciphering of the documents, rather than the language itself, that was the hard part: the language would not present a particular problem to someone who knew colloquial Arabic. The palæography, on the other hand, the deciphering of the texts, was often extremely difficult, yet many students had been known to grow quickly adept at it. Of course, I would never be equipped to produce authoritative editions of Geniza texts, but it was perfectly possible, if I worked hard at the palæography and learnt to decipher and transcribe the documents, that I would be able to deal with them well enough to follow the stories of the Slave of MS H.6 and Abraham Ben Yiju.

Mark Cohen’s encouragement made up my mind: I decided I couldn’t give up without trying.

To my surprise I found that he was right, that the Hebrew script was indeed much easier to decipher than cursive Arabic since the letters stood apart, each by itself. Soon enough, I made other surprising discoveries. I found that some of the usages of the dialect of Lataifa were startlingly close to those of the North African Arabic spoken by Ben Yiju; that far from being useless the dialect of Lataifa and Nashawy had given me an invaluable skill.

Over the next couple of years, as I followed the Slave’s trail from library to library, there were times when the magnifying glass would drop out of my hand when I came upon certain words and turns of phrase for I would suddenly hear the voice of Shaikh Musa speaking in the documents in front of me as clearly as though I had been walking past the canal, on my way between Lataifa and Nashawy.