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

GOING BACK

1

LOOKING BACK, IT seems to me now that until I returned in 1988, Shaikh Musa had not realized himself quite how dramatically things had changed in Lataifa since my departure, seven years ago. As we sat talking on that rainy evening when I arrived at his door, I had the impression that he was looking back with new eyes, as though the sharp edges of my memories had served to strip away a dense layer of accretions that had gathered upon his surroundings, like bark.

But it was not long before he entered gleefully into the spirit of my wonderment, and soon enough he even began to manufacture little surprises of his own for our mutual delectation. The morning after I arrived, for example, he sent his grandson scampering out of the room on a secret errand while we were eating our breakfast. When the boy returned he had a tray in his hands, and sitting in the middle of it, like a crown on a cushion, was a richly-beaded glass of iced water.

Shaikh Musa paused to listen to the tinkling of the ice as he handed me the glass. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘even my brothers house is full of wonders now.’

It was a couple of years since his brother’s refrigerator had arrived: it had been bought for him by Mabrouk, his eldest son, who was away working in Iraq. He had come home at the end of Ramadan and one afternoon he and some other boys had hired a truck and gone off to Damanhour without telling anyone. When they returned in the evening, the truck was carrying a refrigerator, hidden under a sheet of tarpaulin.

That was two years ago, of course, when refrigerators were still a novelty. Now, every other house in Lataifa had one: many people had iced water sent out to them in the fields while they were working, and some families froze the meat they sacrificed at ‘Eid so that it lasted for weeks on end.

Shaikh Musa’s was one of the few houses that had neither a refrigerator nor a television set. Being deprived of something that other people took for granted was a novel and unaccustomed experience for Shaikh Musa’s family: they had never really felt the lack of anything before since they owned more land than most. But of course, you couldn’t buy things like refrigerators with earnings that came solely from the land: for money of that kind you had to go away, to Iraq, or Libya, or the Gulf.

Once, on his way to the market in Damanhour, Shaikh Musa had stopped to look at the showroom where his nephew Mabrouk had bought his refrigerator. It was near the centre of the city, a huge place, with glass windows, and salesmen dressed in suits and ties. He looked in through the window, but he hadn’t felt like walking in, dressed in his fellah’s jallabeyya and cap. It had come as a shock to think that boys like Mabrouk thought nothing of going into places like that, no matter what they were wearing: they went straight in and sent those effendis running around, in their suits and ties, obeying their orders.

Shaikh Musa laughed when I reminded him how Mabrouk had once come running up to my room to take me to see the ‘Indian machine’ his father had just bought; how everyone had been taken by surprise because Mabrouk was thought to be one of the shyest boys in the hamlet.

‘You wouldn’t know him now,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘He’s so smart, he can paint the air with his talk.’

Most of the young men of Mabrouk’s generation were gone now, all but a handful of the eager schoolboys who had never tired of asking me questions; those who had stayed back had done so only because they hadn’t been able to find a job ‘outside’, or because their families needed them on the land. There had always been a fair number of people from the area working ‘outside’ of course, but now it was different; it was as though half the working population had taken leave of the land and surged into Iraq.

The flow had started in the early 1980s, a couple of years after the beginning of the war between Iraq and Iran; by then Iraq’s own men were all tied up on one front or another, in Iran or Kurdistan, and it was desperately in need of labour to sustain its economy. For several years around that time it had been very easy for an Egyptian to find a job there; recruiters and contractors had gone from village to village looking for young men who were willing to work ‘outside’. People had left in truckloads: it was said at one time that there were maybe two or three million Egyptian workers in Iraq, as much as a sixth of that country’s population. It was as if the two nations had dissolved into each other.

But after the war with Iran ended the Iraqis had immediately changed their policies; their demobilized soldiers had wanted jobs and in order to encourage the migrant workers to go home the government had made new rules and regulations, restricting the flow of currency and suchlike. Over the last couple of years it had become hard to find jobs ‘outside’ and some of the young men who had left had begun to trickle back to their villages.

Ahmed, Shaikh Musa’s son, had often talked of going to work in Iraq: he’d wanted to give his wife and children some of those things that other people had in their houses — a television set, a fridge, perhaps a washing-machine. But Shaikh Musa had refused to hear of it — he had told him to put the idea out of his head, at least so long as he was alive. The reports he had heard about Iraq had made him anxious: the boys who went there often came back with frightening stories — about how they had been mistreated by their employers and sometimes even attacked on the streets by complete strangers for no apparent reason. The Iraqis resented immigrants, he had been told, because they took their jobs away while they were fighting on the front: their ‘souls had sickened’, as the saying went, through their long years of war, and they often vented their rage on foreigners.

After hearing those stories Shaikh Musa had resolved not to let Ahmed go. What if something were to happen to him while he was away, far from home? He had already lost one son; he couldn’t bear to think of another picture hanging on his guest-room wall, next to Hasan’s. He would not let Ahmed go, no matter how many things other people had in their houses; it would have been good to have those things, but it was better to live in peace and fear God.

Of my younger friends in Lataifa, only one still remained in Egypt — Jabir. Shaikh Musa had sent word to his family early that morning, knowing that I would want to see him, but Jabir had gone to Damanhour and wouldn’t be back till later.

‘Why hasn’t Jabir “gone outside”?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t he ever want to leave?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘He went once for a few months while he was in college and he’s wanted to go back again, ever since. All his friends are outside; even Mohammad, his younger brother, has gone away to Jordan. Jabir has been trying to go for a long time, but it just hasn’t worked out, that’s all. But I heard recently that he’s found something and might be on his way soon; they say he’s even cut his beard in preparation.’

‘His beard!’ I said in surprise. ‘Did Jabir have a beard?’

Shaikh Musa laughed perfunctorily.

Yes, he said, Jabir had sported a beard for a while; he had grown it while he was away in college, in the city of Tanta. Everybody was amazed when he came back for the holidays one summer, wearing a beard cut in a distinctively Muslim style. It wasn’t surprising of course, for Jabir was always a bright boy, and all the brightest young men had beards now, and many wore white robes as well. Jabir sometimes delivered the Friday sermon in the mosque nowadays, and he too wore white robes for those occasions. He surprised everyone the first time, including his uncle Ustaz Mustafa: he had looked very impressive in his flowing robes and beard, and he had spoken very well too, in beautiful language, with many quotations and polished phrases. Ustaz Mustafa, who had studied in Alexandria himself, said later that Jabir had spoken well even by the standards of the best orators in colleges and universities.

There was a touch of awe in Shaikh Musa’s voice now, as though he could barely imagine the courage and daring it would cost a fellah boy, from a tiny hamlet like Lataifa, to throw himself into the flamboyantly public world of religious debate in cities and universities. Even though he was as devout and strictly observant a Muslim as any, he would not have dreamed of entering that milieu: he considered himself far too ignorant to enter into learned arguments on matters of religion.

After breakfast we set off to visit Abu-‘Ali: Shaikh Musa had decided that since he was the person who had first introduced me to Lataifa, it was only fitting that I go to see him before visiting any other house in the hamlet. The prospect of meeting Abu-‘Ali was not one that I had looked forward to, yet once we set out for his house I was suddenly curious, eager to know how he and his family had fared.

From what I knew of Abu-‘Ali, I was fairly sure that his fortunes had more than kept pace with his neighbours’, but I was still taken by surprise when I entered his compound. A large soaring new carapace had sprouted upon the dilapidated, low-slung house of my memories: the room on the roof, where I had gone to live, years ago, was now a part of a brightly-painted, three-storeyed mansion. The spindly old moped that had so miraculously borne Abu-‘Ali to and from Damanhour had vanished, and in its place was a gleaming new Toyota pick-up truck.

But Abu-‘Ali himself was exactly where he had always been, stationed at a vantage point overlooking the road. The moment we stepped into his compound, he thrust his head out of a window, sidewise, like the MGM lion. ‘Come in, come in,’ he roared. ‘Where have you been all these years, my son? Come in, come in and bring blessings upon my house.’

At the sound of his voice his wife rushed out to the veranda to greet us, followed closely by several new additions to her family. Smiling warmly, sweet-natured as ever, she welcomed me into the house, and after we had gone through a long list of salutations, she introduced me to three recently-recruited daughters-in-law, pointing out each of their children, one by one.

I had half-expected, from the unforeseen vigour of Abu-‘Ali’s roar of welcome, that he too would come hurrying out to the veranda to greet us; in my imagination I had already pictured our meeting, quailing at the thought of exchanging hugs and kisses across the billowing expanse of his stomach. But although Abu-‘Ali’s roars continued unabated, he failed to materialize in person. I discovered why when his wife led us to him. He had grown even fatter than I remembered; the image of an engorged python that I had carried away with me seemed pitifully inadequate for the sight I was now confronted with: his stomach now soared above him like a dirigible in flight as he lay on his back, intermittently flapping his hands and feet as though to propel himself through the air.

His voice had not been diminished by his body’s spectacular enlargement however, and as soon as we were seated he began to chronicle the growth of his family’s fortunes in an earth-shaking roar. Much as I had expected, he had been one of the first people in the area to become aware of the opportunities that were opening up in Iraq, during the war with Iran. He had sent his eldest son there soon after I left, and the others had followed, one by one. He had taken care, however, to make sure that they were never all away at the same time; he needed at least one of them at home, to help with the running of his business in Lataifa. There was a lot to take care of, for he was no longer just a shopkeeper now — with the money his sons had sent back from Iraq, he had bought two pick-up trucks and gone into transportation. So successful had the venture been that he was now thinking of setting up yet another business, a flour-mill, or maybe even a modern poultry-farm.

While telling us the story, Abu-‘Ali broke off from time to time to order his daughters-in-law and grandchildren to fetch some of the things his sons had brought back from Iraq. Following his instructions, they filed obediently through the guest-room, carrying by turns a TV set, a food processor, a handful of calculators, a transistor radio, a couple of cassette-players, a pen that was also a flashlight, a watch that could play tunes, a key-ring that answered to a handclap and several other such objects. Shaikh Musa and I stared awestruck as these possessions floated past us like helots gazing at the spoils of Pharaoh.

When the parade was complete, at Abu-‘Ali’s instructions his wife led us upstairs to show us their newly built apartments. Following her up the staircase I was assaulted by a sudden sensation of dislocation, as though I had vaulted between different epochs. The dirt and chaos of the ground floor, where Abu-‘Ali and his wife lived, the flies, the grime, and the scattered goats’ droppings, stopped abruptly halfway up the staircase: above that point the floors were meticulously clean, covered in mosaic tiles. Where my room, the old chicken-coop, had once stood, there was now a large kitchen, adjoining an opulently furnished bedroom. It had been incorporated into a complex of four apartments, one for each of Abu-‘Ali’s sons. The three who were married had already moved in, but the youngest, a bachelor, still lived downstairs whenever he came home on visits from Iraq.

We visited the apartments of her three married sons in turn. They were very alike, each with a drawing-room appointed with ornate furnishings of a kind often seen in the windows of shops in Cairo and Alexandria. It was evident that the drawing-rooms were rarely used, and even Abu-‘Ali’s wife seemed hesitant to step past their curtained doorways. Neither Shaikh Musa nor I could bring ourselves to go in, despite her repeated urgings: it was clear that Abu-‘Ali had now risen to an estate where neither his family nor his neighbours were fit to use his furniture.

Such were his gleanings from that distant war.

2

IT WAS PROBABLY in the mid-1140s or so that Ben Yiju began to think seriously of returning to the Middle East. At about that time, after many years of silence, he finally received news about a member of his family — his younger brother Mubashshir, who as far as he knew was still living in their homeland, Ifriqiya.

The news probably arrived in the wake of a long series of distressing reports from Ifriqiya: travelling merchants and friends had probably kept Ben Yiju informed of how the region had been laid waste by Sicilian armies over the last several years, and of how its people had been stricken by famine and disease. Thus Ben Yiju was probably already in a state of severe anxiety when his friend Khalaf wrote to him from Aden, relaying a brief message from his brother.

‘Shaikh Abû Isq ibn Yûsuf arrived here this year,’ wrote Khalaf. ‘He reports that your brother Mubashshir has arrived in Egypt. He has asked for passage to join you: you should know this.’

Ben Yiju’s papers provide only indirect signs of the impact this message had on him. His immediate response was probably to write to his friends to beg for more news, and to ask them to make arrangements for the payment of his brother’s onward passage to India. As it turned out, however, his efforts were to no avail: his brother proved more elusive than he had expected and his inquiries met with nothing more than comforting generalities. ‘Concerning the news of your brother Mubashshir,’ Khalaf wrote back, ‘he is well, but he has not arrived here [in Aden] yet.’

But Ben Yiju must have continued to write to his friends at regular intervals, asking them to persist in their inquiries, and to do what they could to send Mubashshir on to Mangalore. For their part, they appear to have exerted themselves on both counts, but despite their efforts Mubashshir continued to absent himself from Aden. Eventually, despairing of success, Yusuf ibn Abraham wrote back to say: ‘My master [Ben Yijû] mentioned Mubashshir, his brother [in his letter]: he has not arrived here in all this time, and nor have I seen a letter for my master from Egypt. If such a letter for my master appears his servant will send it to him.’ Later in the same letter he added the ominous comment: ‘As for the news of Egypt, my master will hear it from the traders …’

Such news as Ben Yiju received from the Middle East could only have given him further cause for anxiety. From 1143 onwards, for several successive years, his homeland, Ifriqiya, had been the target of attacks launched by King Roger II of Sicily. Disease and famine had followed upon these raids and large numbers of people fled the region. Along with a substantial section of the Jewish population of Ifriqiya, the Ben Yiju family was swept away from Mahdia at about this time and deposited in Sicily — unbeknownst to their brother Abraham, living in quiet, untroubled prosperity in distant Mangalore.

At the same time other, still more sombre, portents were taking shape on the two mirrored rims of the Mediterranean. In western Europe the sermons of Bernard of Clairvaux had aroused a frenzy of religious fervour, and preparations for a new Crusade were under way amidst widespread massacres of Jews. In Germany things had come to such a pass that the despairing Jews of Cologne had begun to lament: ‘Behold the days of reckoning have come, the end has arrived, the plague has begun, our days are completed, for our end is here.’ At about the same time, in the far west of North Africa the al-Muwaid (Almohad) dynasty was gaining in strength, and its armies were advancing steadily through the Maghreb, towards Ifriqiya. Between 1145 and 1146 they took the cities of Oran, Tlemcen and the oasis of Sijilmasa, on the north-western border of the Sahara. For seven months they tried peaceably to convert Sijilmasa’s large Jewish population to Islam. When their efforts went unrewarded they put a hundred and fifty Jews to the sword. The rest, led by their judge, quickly converted. They were relatively lucky: at about the same time a hundred thousand Christians and Jews were massacred by the Almohads in Fez, and a hundred and twenty thousand in Marrakesh.

Far away though he was, Ben Yiju was probably not unaware of the bloodshed and turmoil that had stricken his homeland: it so happens that the Geniza has yielded a letter addressed to Ben Yiju’s friend, the indefatigable traveller Abu Zikri ha-Kohen Sijilmasi, which contains a detailed account of the events in North Africa. The letter was written by Abu Zikri’s son, in Cairo, and sent to him in Aden, in 1148. Not long before, in about 1145, Abu Zikri Sijilmasi had been stranded in Gujarat after being captured by pirates. On that occasion Ben Yiju had penned a letter to him, on behalf of his brother-in-law, the ‘nakhoda’ Mahruz, from Mangalore. Now, three years later, upon learning of the events in North Africa, Abu Zikri would certainly have made an effort to pass the news on to Ben Yiju in Mangalore.

As luck would have it, there was more bad news in store for Ben Yiju: his friend Khalaf had come to know that Mubashshir was now thinking of travelling to Syria, rather than India, and in 1148 he wrote to Ben Yiju to let him know that his hopes for a reunion with his brother were unlikely to be soon fulfilled.

‘I asked [some people] about your brother Mubashshir,’ Khalaf wrote. ‘They said that he is in good health and that everything is well with him. I asked them about his departure for Syria and they said they knew nothing of it, but that all is well with him. Should he happen to come to Aden your servant will do his best for him, without my master’s asking because he esteems him [my master] greatly.’

It may have been this piece of news, following hard upon other events, that finally made up Ben Yiju’s mind. He had probably already written to Madmun to sort out whatever tangle it was that had kept him so long absent from Aden. From his friends’ letters it would seem that he had written to others as well, mentioning thoughts of return. ‘Every year you speak of coming to Aden,’ wrote Khalaf in his letter of 1148, ‘but you never do it.’

This time Ben Yiju did do it: a year later, in 1149, he was back in Aden, with all his worldly goods and his two adolescent children.

On 11 September 1149, Ben Yiju wrote his brothers a long letter from Aden. His return had stirred many long-settled memories, and he was now overcome with a desire to reclaim his family and the remembered landscapes of his childhood: ‘I do not know what to write,’ the letter begins, ‘so strong is my longing and so ardent my yearning.’

The thought uppermost in Ben Yiju’s mind at the time of writing was of providing reassurance and succour to his family. He had heard, he wrote, that their circumstances were now so dire that they had been reduced ‘to a single loaf of bread’ and he had tried to send them some goods to tide them over the worst, but the shipment had gone astray because of the uncertainty of their present location. He was writing now to offer them whatever else he could; to let them know that he had returned from India and arrived safely in Aden, ‘with my belongings, life, and children well preserved’, and money ‘enough to live on for all of us’. ‘[Therefore], I ask you, my brother[s],’ he urged, ‘come to me under any circumstances and without delay … I have a son and a daughter, take them and take with them all the money and riches—may God fulfil my wishes and yours for the good. Come quickly and take possession of this money; this is better than strangers taking it.’

But he had another reason too for urging his brothers to join him in Aden ‘under any circumstances and without delay’: with his departure from India his yearning for his family had grown so powerful that he now longed to reaffirm his bonds with them through a familial union of another kind. Also, find out,’ he directed them, ‘who is the best of the sons of my brother [Yûsuf] or the sons of your sister Berâkhâ, so that I may marry him off to my daughter.’

But it was not until he penned the last lines of the letter that Ben Yiju gave expression to the anxiety that the recent events in North Africa had caused him: ‘I heard of what happened on the coast of Ifriqiya, in Tripoli, Jerba, Kerkenna, Sfax, al-Mahdia and Sousse. But I have had no letter to tell me who lives and who is dead. For God’s sake, write to me about it and send the letter in the hands of trustworthy people so that I may have some peace of mind. Shalom.’

The address that Ben Yiju wrote on the back was every bit as expressive of the uncertainties of the time as the letter itself. It was sent to al-Mahdia, ‘if God will, or anywhere else in Ifriqiya.’

In the event, the letter did not fulfil the destiny Ben Yiju had intended for it. As luck would have it, it fell into the hands of his brother Mubashshir, in the port of Messina, in northern Sicily. His other brother, the pious and unworldly Yusuf, was then living at the far end of the island, in Mazzara, along with his wife and his three sons, Surûr, Moshe and Shamwâl. Disobeying his brother’s instructions, Mubashshir chose not to inform Yusuf’s family about the letter: as Ben Yiju was to learn to his cost, Mubashshir was a man who had few scruples where money was concerned.

Ultimately rumour proved more conscientious than kinship, and somehow Yusuf did eventually learn that a letter from his brother Abraham had made its way to Sicily. Yusuf’s sons were all well-educated and dutiful young men, and none more so than the eldest, Surur. Having heard rumours of the letter, and possibly also of the proposal of marriage contained in it, Surur appears to have taken the task of locating his uncle on his own shoulders. A letter that he wrote at that time to a family acquaintance in Mahdia bears witness to the painstaking thoroughness with which he conducted his inquiries.

‘I wished to ask,’ Surur wrote, whether [my master] has any news of my father’s brother, Abraham, known as Ben Yijû, for we have not heard from him [for some time] … Last year … a letter of his reached Messina, where it fell into the hands of my uncle Mubashshir, who took it with him. We have not seen it, and do not know what was in it. So our minds are in suspense, as we wait to hear news of how he is. May I request my Master, to kindly write us a brief note, to let us know whether he has heard any news of him and where he is …’

But the times were hard: the entire region was in turmoil, devastated by war. It would be a long time before Surur and his family next heard news of their uncle ‘Abraham, known as Ben Yiju.’

3

WITHIN MINUTES OF leaving Abu-‘Ali’s house, I was brought to a halt by the sound of a familiar voice calling out my name. A moment later Jabir was beside me, and we were pounding each other on the back, exchanging handshakes, slapping our hands together, sending echoes down the lanes.

Jabir was greatly changed and looked much older than his twenty-five years: his face had grown considerably rounder and heavier; the hair at the top of his head had receded and at his temples there were two very prominent patches of grey (mere spots, as he was quick to point out, compared to mine). Once the greetings were over, we quickly agreed that we had a great deal to talk about, so we took leave of Shaikh Musa and headed towards his house. He had a room to himself now, Jabir said, and we could sit there in peace and talk as long as we liked.

On reaching the house, he led me quickly down a corridor, past his cousins and aunts, to a small room furnished with a desk and a bed. After ushering me in, he slammed the door and turned the key, locking out the troop of children who were following close behind us.

I was astonished: in all the time I had spent in Lataifa and Nashawy, I had never seen anyone shut a door upon people in their own house. But when I remarked on this it was Jabir’s turn to be surprised.

‘You used to shut your door,’ he said. ‘Have you forgotten or what? We had to bang on it if we wanted to come in.’

Gesturing to me to seat myself on the bed, he cocked his head at the door. ‘There’s too much noise outside,’ he said. ‘Too many people: I was away in college for such a long time that now it’s become very hard for me here, with so many people in the house.’

He had first left Lataifa in 1982, he said, the year after my departure from Egypt. He had gone to Tanta, a large town about sixty miles from Cairo, to do a degree in commerce at the university there.

‘It was wonderful,’ he said wistfully. ‘I lived on the campus, sharing a room with other students, and we all became close friends. We spent most of our time together, in class and afterwards.’

‘Did you find it hard?’ I asked. ‘Being away from your cousins, your family?’

He threw me a look of surprise. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all, and anyway I saw them from time to time. I was very busy, I was learning so many things, seeing new places, it was so exciting to be there …’

Cutting himself short, he reached under his bed and pulled out a green plastic suitcase. A few shirts and trousers were neatly packed away inside, along with some books and several small packets, carefully wrapped in paper. Picking out one of those packages, he handed it to me and watched, smiling, as I undid the string.

‘It’s the wallet you gave me before you left Lataifa and went to Nashawy,’ he said. ‘You brought it back from Cairo — do you remember? I always use it when I go to the city, and if people ask me about it, I tell them about the Indian who gave it to me, and how he once mistook the moon for Ahmed Musa’s torch.’

Laughing, he reached into his suitcase again, thumbed through a wad of photographs and handed me one. It was a picture I had taken myself, years ago, of Jabir, in a field near Lataifa; I had sent it to him later, from India, with one of my letters. I was proud of the picture, for I had succeeded in catching him at an unguarded moment, looking towards the camera in the way that came most naturally to him, with an expression that was at once challenging and quizzical, something between a smile and scowl. Seeing that picture again, after so many years, I realized that it was neither Jabir’s grey hair nor the shape of his face that was responsible for the difference in his appearance: the real change lay somewhere else, in some other, more essential quality. In the Jabir who was sitting in front of me I could no longer see the sly, sharp-tongued ferocity my camera had captured so well that day — its place had been taken by a kind of quiet hopelessness, an attitude of resignation.

Jabir explained the other photographs in the pile as he handed them to me, one by one: they had been taken later, mainly in the gardens and buildings of his university. In the earlier photographs he was always with the same group of friends, classmates with whom he had shared a room for a couple of years. Most of them were working ‘outside’ now, so they had lost touch with each other. But they had been inseparable for the first couple of years; they had studied together and gone on holidays together, to Cairo, Aswan and the Sinai. It was clear from the tone of Jabir’s voice that the memories of those friendships meant a great deal to him, yet I couldn’t help noticing that in many of the pictures he looked like the odd man out, standing straight and looking fixedly into the camera, while the others around him threw themselves into attitudes of exuberant student horseplay. It was easy to see that they were all city boys, from middle-class families: they wore different clothes in each picture, pastel-coloured running-shoes, jeans and T-shirts. Jabir’s clothes, on the other hand, looked as though they had been bought in the bazaar at Damanhour, and the same few shirts and trousers recurred in several pictures in succession, as though to prove that he had stayed true to his frugal village upbringing.

The beard that Shaikh Musa had mentioned appeared about three-quarters of the way through the pile of photographs. At first it had the look of cotton fluff, but later it took on a quite impressive appearance, reaching down to the line of his collar.

‘It took me a long time to grow that beard,’ he said. ‘I looked much better when I had it — more respectable. I never had to bargain when I went to the market — no one would try to cheat me.’

I made no comment and, after turning over a few more pictures, he added that it was in college that he had begun to learn the real meaning of Islam, from talking to some of his teachers and fellow-students. They had read the Quran together every day and held long discussions that lasted late into the night.

‘I was not involved in politics or anything,’ he said, ‘and I didn’t join any groups or societies. But I learnt to recognize what is wrong and what is true. I don’t know how to explain these things to you: you don’t understand matters like these.’

‘Why did you shave your beard off?’ I asked.

His fingers slid over his freshly shaven chin in a slow, exploratory movement. ‘My family wanted me to,’ he said.

‘Especially my mother.’

‘Why?’

‘They were afraid,’ he said. ‘There’s been trouble between the government and certain Islamic groups, and they were worried that something might happen to me — even though I don’t belong to any group or party.’

He shook his head and let out an ironic snort of laughter. ‘This is a Muslim country,’ he said. ‘And it isn’t safe to look like a Muslim.’

Then, abruptly, he dropped the subject and began asking me why I had not written for so long and what I had been doing since I left Egypt. My recital was a long one, and towards the end of it he grew pensive and began to ask detailed questions — about how much I had paid to fly to Egypt and the current exchange rates of the Indian rupee, the American dollar and the Egyptian pound.

‘I may have to buy an air-ticket soon,’ he said, at length. ‘I’ve been trying to get a job outside. I worked in Iraq while I was in college, and if God wills I shall go there again.’

The first time he went, he said, was after his second year in college. One of his cousins, who was a foreman on a construction site in Baghdad, had taken him there so he could earn some money during his summer vacation. He had had to get a special kind of passport, because as a rule the Egyptian government did not allow its citizens to go abroad until they had completed their time in the army. Getting the passport hadn’t been easy, but it had proved to be well worth it, in the end. He had earned so much money that his father was able to add a new room to their house.

He showed me a few photographs taken in Iraq, and I immediately recognized several other faces, besides his — friends and cousins of his, whom I’d known in Lataifa or Nashawy. The pictures were mostly taken in markets and parks in Baghdad, on holidays — I could almost see them myself, setting off in their best clothes, their faces alight with the pleasurable apprehension of being on their own in a faraway city, with their pockets full of money, well out of the reach of their parents and elders.

‘What was it like there?’ I asked.

‘I was young then,’ Jabir said, ‘and I was sometimes a little scared.’

The Iraqis were very rough in their ways, he explained. He and his cousins and friends wouldn’t usually go out at nights; they would stay in their rooms, all of them together, and cook and watch television. But despite all that, Iraq was better than some other places; from what he had heard, the Gulf Emirates were much worse. At least in Iraq everyone got paid properly. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t care how the Iraqis behaved — all he wanted was to go back, after finishing with college and the army.

For a while it had looked as though things would go exactly as he had planned. His time in the army had passed quickly and without hardship, for his college degree had earned him a comfortable bookkeeping job in his unit.

‘I was near Alexandria and it was nice,’ he said. ‘The officers treated me differently, not like the other soldiers, because I’d been to college and everything. They treated me almost like I was one of them.’

He had applied for a passport as soon as he got out of the army, and wasted no time in writing letters to his friends and cousins in Iraq, asking them to look out for job openings. He had expected that he’d be able to find a job without difficulty, just as he had the last time. But soon he discovered that things had changed. Iraqi soldiers and reservists had begun to go back to work and there were fewer and fewer jobs for foreigners. Worse still, the Iraqi government had established strict new laws which made it hard for Egyptian workers to send money home. But dozens of his friends and relatives were still there, of course, and they were managing well enough — anything was better than sitting idly at home, after all. So he had written to them again and again, asking them to let him know as soon as they heard of a job — he didn’t care what it was, he just wanted a job, somewhere ‘outside’, in Iraq or wherever.

In the meantime, he had come back to Lataifa to wait until he was notified about the government job to which he was entitled by virtue of his college degree. It was not much to look forward to, for the salary was a pittance, a fraction of what a construction worker could earn in Iraq. But still, it was something. He had waited for months to hear about the job, and when the notification still hadn’t arrived, he had begun to work with a bricklayer, as an apprentice: there were many houses being built now, in Lataifa and Nashawy, with the money that people were receiving from ‘outside’.

‘It’s just for the time being,’ Jabir said quickly. ‘Until I find a job outside. I’ll leave as soon as I hear of something, insha‘allah.’

Piling the photographs together, he put them away again, rearranging his suitcase in the process. I could tell from the way he did it that packing his suitcase had become a habit with him.

‘I made a mistake,’ he said at last, shutting the suitcase. ‘I thought a degree would help me, so I went to college. It was an exciting time and I learnt so much, but at the end of it, look, what am I doing? I’m a construction worker. I wasted time by going to college; I missed the best opportunities.’

And as a measure of his folly, there was the example of his brother Mohammad, who had planned his future better. Mohammad was a year younger than Jabir, but he looked older, being taller and more heavily built. Unlike Jabir, he had never taken an interest in his studies and had barely managed to get through school; the thought of going to college had never entered his mind. Instead, he did his National Service as soon as possible, and then apprenticed himself to a carpenter in a nearby village. After spending a few months in acquiring the rudiments of the trade, he got himself a job in Jordan — that was at a time when jobs were still easy to get. He’d been in Jordan ever since, making good money. Recently he had written to say that he was coming home for a while — there was a chance that he might be able to get a job in Italy soon and he wanted to make arrangements for his future.

Jabir broke off there, his lips tightly pursed. He wouldn’t say any more but the rest was clear enough: Mohammad wanted to get married before going off again. He had probably saved enough money to buy a house or an apartment — in Damanhour perhaps, or somewhere else — so he was now in a position to make a good marriage and set up house. In all likelihood, the only reason he had waited so long was because Jabir was older, and therefore entitled, by custom, to marry first. But, of course, Jabir had no savings and no means of buying an apartment of his own. And without one he wouldn’t be able to marry someone compatible, a girl with a college education — instead he would have to marry a cousin from Lataifa, and live with his family, with no place to call his own. That was why it was imperative for him to find a job as soon as possible; time was running out — Mohammad had waited long enough, and no one would blame him now if he went ahead and got married. He had more than done his duty by custom.

In some part of his mind, Jabir was probably entirely in sympathy with his brother’s predicament, yet if Mohammad were to be the first to marry, it would be a public announcement of his own failure. I had only to look at Jabir’s face to know that if that happened he would be utterly crushed, destroyed.

Turning his back on me, Jabir busied himself with his suitcase, repacking it yet again, as though to satisfy a craving. ‘I’ll be going back to Iraq soon,’ he said, in a voice that was barely audible.

I couldn’t see his face but I knew he was near tears.

4

THE RETURN TO Aden, undertaken with such gladness of spirit, was to bring nothing but tragedy to Ben Yiju. Such were the misfortunes that befell him there that within three years or so he uprooted himself once again. It was to Egypt that he now moved, and shortly after his arrival there, he tried once more to establish direct communication with his brother Yusuf, in Sicily.

The letter he wrote on this occasion was a long one, like the last, but his mood and his circumstances were greatly changed and the nostalgic exuberance that had seized him upon his return to Aden had now yielded to a resigned and brokenhearted melancholy. Writing to his brother now, he felt compelled to provide him with an account of some of the events that had befallen him since he last wrote, in 1149.

‘I wrote a letter to you a while ago,’ Ben Yiju told Yusuf. ‘It reached Mubashshir, but he did not care to deliver it to you: [instead] he arrived in Aden [himself].’

But Mubashshir’s visit, so long awaited, had not turned out as Ben Yiju had expected: ‘I did all that was in my power for him and more, but he dealt me a ruinous blow. The events would take too long to explain, O my brother …’ A couple of lines scribbled in the margin provides a hint of what had passed between them. In the course of his stay in Aden, Mubashshir had defrauded his brother of a huge sum of money: As for Mubashshir, he is nothing but a lazy man; malevolent in spirit. I gave him whatever he asked for, and in return he dealt me a ruinous blow. The price of my deeds was a thousand dînârs …’

Yet, painful as it was, the discovery of his brother’s dishonesty was a small matter compared to the weight of Ben Yiju’s other misfortunes: in the meantime he had also suffered the loss of his first child, the son born of his union with Ashu, to whom he had given the joyful name Surur.

The surviving copy of the letter still contains a part of the passage in which Ben Yiju tells Yusuf of his son’s death. He had once had, he writes, two children like sprigs of sweet basil …’—but here the sentence breaks off, for the letter has been badly damaged over the centuries. The little that remains of the passage is punctuated with a bizarrely expressive succession of silences, as though time had somehow contrived to provide the perfect parentheses for Ben Yiju’s grief by changing the scansion of his prose. It reads:

And the elder [of the two children] died in Aden …

I do not know what to describe of it …

I have left a daughter, his sister …

It was partly because of this daughter, Sitt al-Dâr, that Ben Yiju was now writing to his brother; he had been separated from her for prolonged periods over the last several years, and her future was now his most pressing concern.

Soon after moving to Aden, Ben Yiju had transferred his base out of that city and into the highlands of the interior, to a city called Dhû Jibia, which served as one of the principal seats of the ruling Zuray’id dynasty. For about three years afterwards he had lived mostly in the Yemeni mountains while his daughter remained in Aden, in the custody of his old and faithful friend Khalaf ibn Ishaq, living in his house as a member of his family.

The reasons for Ben Yiju’s move are not entirely clear, but the loss of his son must have played a part in inducing him to leave Aden. In any event, he was already living in the mountains when he received news of yet another loss, just a couple of years after his arrival in Aden.

In 1151 Ben Yiju’s old friend and one-time mentor, Madmun ibn Bundar, died in Aden. Ben Yiju was to read of his death in a letter from a correspondent: ‘The news reached your exalted honour’s slave, of the death of the lord and owner Mamûn … the stalwart pillar, Nagîd of the land of Yemen, Prince of the communities, Crown of the Choirs …’ To Ben Yiju the news of Madmun’s death must have come as a terrible blow: among his few surviving pieces of verse is a Hebrew poem, composed in memory of his friend.

In some ways, however, Ben Yiju evidently found a good deal of fulfilment in his new home in the Yemeni highlands. Such documentation as there is on this period of his life suggests that he enjoyed a position of some prominence within the Jewish communities of the interior, and he may even have been appointed to serve as a judge. Yet there must also have been many anxieties attendant on living in that relatively inaccessible region: his correspondence shows that he was greatly concerned about the safety of the roadways, for instance, which is hardly surprising considering that he was separated from his only surviving child by a wide stretch of difficult terrain, in a divided and war-torn land.

An extraordinary dilemma was to result from Ben Yiju’s long separation from his daughter. His friend Khalaf, whose house she was living in, eventually approached him with a proposal of marriage for her, on behalf of one of his sons. The documents provide no indication of what her wishes in the matter were, but it is more than likely of course that Khalaf was acting with her consent; it is even possible that it was the young couple themselves who had prevailed upon him to speak to Ben Yiju about a betrothal, expecting that the request could hardly be refused when it came from a friend of such long standing.

But close though Ben Yiju was to his friends in Aden, he stood apart from them in one respect: their family origins, unlike his own, lay in the region of Iraq. The matter need not have made a difference had Ben Yiju chosen to ignore it, for such marriages were commonplace within their circle. But in the event Ben Yiju chose to disregard his long-standing association with Khalaf and his family: almost as though he were seeking to disown a part of his own past, he now decided that he could not let his daughter marry a ‘foreigner’. Instead, he began to dream again of reaffirming his bonds with his family in the accepted fashion of the Middle East, by marrying her to her cousin, his brother Yusuf’s eldest son, Surur.

In his letter to his brother he explained the matter thus:

Shaikh Khalaf [ibn Ishaq] ibn Bundâr, in Aden, [asked her hand] for his son. She had lived 3 years in their house. But I refused him when I heard of your son Surûr. I said: the brother’s son comes before foreign people. Then, when I came with her to Egypt, many people sought her hand of me. I write to you to tell you of this: to say less than this would have been enough.

But in a culture where marital negotiations can cast the whole weight of a family’s honour upon the scales of public judgement, the refusal of a proposal from an old friend, of distinguished lineage, cannot have been a simple matter. It is probably not a coincidence therefore that the Geniza contains no record of any further communication between Ben Yiju and his friends in Aden. His rejection of Khalaf’s offer may well have led to an irreversible break with him and his kinsmen, including Yusuf ibn Abraham: indeed, it may even have been the immediate cause of his departure.

Thus it was on a note of real urgency that Ben Yiju wrote to his brother upon arriving in Egypt. He had been told, he said, that Yusuf had a son, Surur, who is learned in the Torah’, and if he were to send him now to Egypt, to marry his daughter, he would have all his goods—‘and we will rejoice in her and in him, and we will wed them …’ For Ben Yiju everything now hung on a quick response from his brother. ‘Address your letters to me in Egypt, insha’allâh,’ he exhorted Yusuf, ‘let there be a letter in the hands of your son, Surûr.’

Indeed, beset by grief, disillusionment and misfortune, Ben Yiju now had no recourse other than his brother and his nephews. To the two couriers who were to carry his letter to Sicily he entrusted a confession of quiet despair.

‘Sulîmân and Abraham will tell you of the state I am in,’ Ben Yiju wrote. ‘I am sick at heart.’

5

I COULD HAVE found Nabeel’s house myself of course, but in the end I was grateful to the children who insisted on leading me there: on my own I would have been reluctant to knock on the doors of the structure that stood there now. The mud-walled rooms I so well remembered were gone and in their place stood the unfinished shell of a large new bungalow.

The door was opened by Nabeel’s sister-in-law, Fawzia. She clapped her hands to her head, laughing, when she saw me outside. The first thing she said was: ‘Nabeel’s not here — he’s not in the village, he’s gone to Iraq.’

Then, collecting herself, she ushered me in and after putting a tea-kettle on the stove, she sat me down and told me the story of how Nabeel had left for Iraq. His father, old Idris the watchman, had died the year after I left, and his wife had not long outlived him. Nabeel had been away from the village on both occasions. He was in the army then, and he hadn’t been able to return in time to see them before they died. On her deathbed his mother had called out for him, over and over again — he had always been her favourite and she had long dreamed of dancing at his wedding. On both occasions Nabeel had come down for a quick visit, to attend the ceremonies; he did not say much, either time, but it was easy to see that he had been profoundly affected.

His best friend, Fawzia’s brother Isma‘il, had long been urging him to apply for a passport so he could work in Iraq after finishing his National Service. Nabeel was not particularly receptive to the idea at first: he had always wanted a job in a government office, a respectable clerical job, and he knew that in Iraq he would probably end up doing manual labour of some kind. But the death of his parents changed his mind. He put in an application for a passport, and in 1986, soon after finishing his time in the army, he left for Iraq with Isma‘il.

Things had turned out well for him in Iraq; within a few months he had found a job as an assistant in a photographer’s shop in Baghdad. It didn’t pay as much as Isma‘il’s job, in construction, but it was a fortune compared to what he would have earned in Egypt.

Besides it was exactly the kind of job that Nabeel wanted. ‘You know him,’ Fawzia said, laughing. ‘He always wanted a job where he wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty.’

There was a telephone where he worked, she said, and the man who owned the shop didn’t mind him receiving calls every now and again. ‘We’ll give you the number,’ she told me. “Ali’s got it written down somewhere; he’ll find it for you when he gets back.’

Once every couple of months or so the whole family — she, her husband Ali and his younger brothers — made the trip to Damanhour to telephone Nabeel in Baghdad. When it was Nabeel’s turn to get in touch with them he simply spoke into a cassette-recorder and sent them the tape. In the beginning he had written letters, but everyone had agreed that it was nicer to hear his voice. He’d even sent money for a cassette-recorder, so they wouldn’t have to take the tapes to their neighbours.

Later Nabeel had sent money for a television set and a washing-machine and then, one day, on one of his tapes he had talked about building a new house. Those tumbledown old rooms they’d always lived in wouldn’t last much longer, he’d said. He would be glad to have a new house ready, when he came back to Egypt. He would be able to get married, and move in soon afterwards. His brothers were overjoyed at the suggestion: they called back immediately and within a month he had sent them the money to begin the construction.

‘He sent a new tape a few days ago,’ Fawzia said. ‘We’ll listen to it again, as soon as ‘Ali gets back.’

After we had finished our tea Fawzia showed me proudly around the house: three or four rooms had already been completed on the ground floor, including a kitchen, a bathroom and a veranda. The wiring was not complete and the walls were still unpainted, but otherwise the house was perfectly habitable.

When the ground floor had received its finishing touches, Fawzia said, the builders would start on a second floor. After his marriage, Nabeel and his wife would live upstairs, they would have the whole floor to themselves. Their other brothers could build on top of that, if they wanted to, later; it all depended on whether they went away as Nabeel had, and earned money ‘outside’.

‘How different it is,’ I said, when Fawzia took me into the new guest-room and showed me their television set and cassette-recorder. ‘The first time I came here was at the time of your wedding, when you and ‘Ali were sitting outside, with your chairs up against the mud wall.’

Fawzia smiled at the recollection. ‘The saddest thing,’ she said, ‘is that their mother and father didn’t live to see how things have changed for us.’

Her voice was soft and dreamlike, as though she were speaking of some immemorially distant epoch. I was not surprised; I knew that if my own memories had not been preserved in such artefacts as notes and diaries, the past would have had no purchase in my mind either. Even with those reminders, it was hard, looking around now, to believe how things had once stood for Nabeel and his family — indeed for all of Nashawy. It was not just that the lanes looked different; that so many of the old adobe houses had been torn down and replaced with red-brick bungalows — something more important had changed as well, the relations between different kinds of people in the village had been upturned and rearranged. Families who at that time had counted amongst the poorest in the community — Khamees’s, ‘Amm Taha’s, Nabeel’s — were now the very people who had new houses, bank accounts, gadgetry. I could not have begun to imagine a change on this scale when I left Nashawy in 1981; revisiting it now, a little less than eight years later, it looked as though the village had been drawn on to the fringes of a revolution — except that this one had happened in another country, far away.

Earlier that day, I had talked at length with Ustaz Sabry about the changes in Nashawy, the war between Iran and Iraq, and the men who’d left to go ‘outside’ (he was leaving himself soon, to take up a good job in a school in the Gulf).

‘It’s we who’ve been the real gainers in the war,’ he told me. The rich Arab countries were paying the Iraqis to break the back of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. For them it was a matter of survival, of keeping themselves in power. And in the meantime, while others were taking advantage of the war to make money, it was the Iraqis who were dying on the front.

‘But it won’t last,’ he had said, ‘it’s tainted, “forbidden” money, and its price will be paid later, some day.’

It had occurred to me then that Jabir, in his exclusion, was already paying a price of one kind; now looking around the house Nabeel had built, I began to wonder whether he was paying another, living in Iraq.

‘What are things like in Iraq?’ I asked Fawzia. ‘Does Nabeel like it there?’

She nodded cheerfully. He was very happy, she said; in his tapes he always said he was doing well and that everything was fine.

‘You can hear him yourself when ‘Ali comes home,’ she said. ‘We’ll listen to his tape on the recorder.’

There was a shock in store for me when ‘Ali returned: he had one of his younger brothers with him, Hussein, who I remembered as a shy, reticent youngster, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. But now Hussein was studying in college, and he had grown to resemble Nabeel so closely in manner and bearing that I all but greeted him by that name. Later, noticing how often Nabeel’s name featured in his conversation, I realized that the resemblance was not accidental: he clearly worshipped his elder brother and had modelled himself upon him.

We listened to the tape after dinner: at first Nabeel’s voice sounded very stiff and solemn and, to my astonishment, he spoke like a townsman, as though he had forgotten the village dialect. But Fawzia was quick to come to his defence when I remarked on this. It was only on the tapes that he spoke like that, she said. On the telephone he still sounded exactly the same.

Nabeel said very little about himself and his life in Iraq; just that he was well and that his salary had recently been increased. He listed in detail the names of all the people he wanted his brothers to convey his greetings to, and he told them about various friends from Nashawy who were also in Iraq — that so and so was well, that someone had moved to another city, that someone else was about to come home and so on. Then he went through a set of instructions for his brothers, on how they were to use the money he was sending them, the additions they were to make to the house and exactly how much they were to spend. Everyone in the room listened to him rapt, all the way to the final farewells, though they had clearly heard the tape through several times before.

Later, Fawzia got Hussein to write down Nabeel’s address, and the telephone number of his shop, on a slip of paper. ‘The owner will probably answer the phone,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘You have to tell him that you want to talk to Nabeel Idris Badawy, the Egyptian. It costs a lot, but you can hear him like he was in the next room.’

Hussein took hold of my elbow and gave it a shake. ‘You must telephone him,’ he said emphatically. ‘He’ll be so pleased. Do you know, he’s kept all your letters, wrapped in a plastic bag? He still talks of you a lot. Tell me, didn’t you once say to him …’

And then, almost word for word, he recounted a conversation I had once had with Nabeel. It was about a trivial matter, something to do with my university in Delhi, but for some reason I had written it down in my diary at the end of the day, and so I knew that Hussein had repeated it, or at least a part of it, almost verbatim. I was left dumbfounded when he finished; it seemed to me that I had witnessed an impossible, deeply moving, defiance of time and the laws of hearsay.

‘You can be sure that I will telephone him,’ I said to Hussein. I explained that I was travelling to America soon, in connection with the research for the book I was writing, and I promised to call Nabeel as soon as I arrived.

‘You must tell him that we are well,’ said Hussein, ‘and that he should send another cassette.’

‘He’ll be really surprised!’ said Fawzia. ‘He’ll think someone’s playing a joke on him.’

‘We’ll write and tell him,’ said ‘Ali. ‘We’ll write tomorrow so he won’t be surprised. We’ll tell him that you’re going to phone him from America.’

For a while we talked of other things, of the state of politics in India and the Middle East and what it was like to watch the World Cup on television. It was only when it was time for me to leave that I got to ask ‘Ali whether Nabeel liked living in Iraq.

‘Ali shrugged. As far as he knew, he said, Nabeel was well enough. That was what he always said at any rate. The fact was, he didn’t know; he had never been there himself.

‘God knows,’ he added, people say life is hard out there.’

It was dark outside now and I couldn’t stay any longer. After we had said our goodbyes, Hussein insisted that he would see me to the main road. On the way, we stopped at his cousins’ house and took one of Isma‘il’s younger brothers along with us. It turned out that they, like Nabeel and Isma‘il before them, were best friends, and were studying at the same college as their brothers had.

It was eerie crossing the village with the two of them beside me. It was as though a moment in time had somehow escaped the hurricane of change that had swept Nabeel and Isma‘il away to Iraq: the two cousins so much resembled their brothers that I could have been walking with ghosts.

6

BEN YIJU’S SECOND letter, unlike his first, did eventually reach his brother Yusuf and his family. They were then resident in a small town called Mazara (Mazara del Vallo), near the western tip of Sicily, not far from Palermo. Mazara had once been a busy port, serving ships from North Africa and the Levant, but the current hostilities between Sicily and Ifriqiya had affected its traffic badly and sent it into a sharp decline. In terms of material sustenance it had little to offer Yusuf and his family, who were reduced to extremely straitened circumstances while living there. But it had other compensations: through its long trade contacts with Ifriqiya, it had imbibed something of the cultural and educational ambience of that region, and Yusuf and his sons probably felt more at home there than they would have in other, more rudely prosperous parts of the island. Still, there can be no doubt that they felt themselves to be suffering the privations of exile in their new home: looking across the sea from the shores of that provincial town, the material and scholarly riches of Egypt must have shone like a beacon in the far distance.

It is easy to imagine, then, the great tumult of hope and enthusiasm that was provoked in this dispossessed and disheartened family by the arrival of Ben Yiju’s letter. The young Surur for one clearly received his uncle’s proposal of marriage with the greatest warmth: his immediate response was to set off for Egypt to claim his bride.

The preparations for Sururs voyage threw his whole family into convulsions of excitement. The elderly Yusuf and his wife launched upon a severe regimen of fasting and prayer to ensure his safe arrival, and Surur’s brother Moshe went along to accompany him on the first leg of the journey.

To arrange Surur’s passage to Egypt, the two brothers had first to proceed to a major port, since Mazara itself no longer served large eastbound ships. In the event they decided to go to Messina on the other end of the island rather than to nearby Palermo — probably because they knew that that was where they would find the courier of their uncle’s letter, Sulîmân ibn arûn. They boarded a boat on a Friday night, having agreed upon a fare of three-eighths of a gold dinar, in exchange for being taken to a lighthouse adjoining Messina.

Arriving in Messina nine days later, they sought out their wayward uncle, Mubashshir, who was then living in that city. In this instance, Surur reported in a letter to his father, his uncle ‘did not fall short [of his family duties],’ and invited him and his brother to stay in his house. Later, the brothers sought out two friends of Ben Yiju’s, one of whom was the courier Suliman ibn Satrun. Their efforts were immediately rewarded: ‘I shall take care of your fare,’ said Ibn Satrun to Surur, and you will go up [i.e. to Egypt] with me, if God wills.’

But now, seized by a yearning for travel, young Moshe too began to insist that he wanted to go on to Egypt with Surur. Ibn Satrun and their uncle Mubashshir both counselled against it—‘they said: “There is nothing to be gained by it. He had better go back to his father” ’—but Moshe was determined not to go back to Mazara ‘empty-handed’. The matter was now for their father to decide, Surur wrote, and in the meanwhile they would stay in Messina to await his instructions.

Upon receiving the letter, Yusuf must have decided against allowing Moshe to go any further, for when Surur next wrote to his parents he was already in Egypt and his brother was back in Mazara. The letter he wrote on this occasion was a short one. ‘I have sent you these few lines to tell you that I am well and at peace,’ he wrote, and then went on to convey his greetings in turn to various friends at home as well as to his parents and his brothers, Moshe and Shamwal. But Surur had yet another reason for writing home at this time: he wanted a certain legal document from his father and in the course of his letter he asked him to send it on to Palermo, possibly with Moshe, so that it could be forwarded to him in Egypt.

As it happened, the letter rekindled Moshe’s yearning for travel and prompted him to set out for Egypt himself. But the times were not propitious and the store of good fortune that had carried Surur safely to his destination ran out on his brother: Moshe’s ship was attacked on the way and he was imprisoned in the Crusader-controlled city of Tyre.

Their parents, already prostrate with anxiety, were to learn of these developments in a letter from Surur. ‘We were seized with grief when we read your letter,’ Shamwal wrote back from Sicily, ‘and we wept copiously. As for [our] father and mother they could not speak.’ But their tears were soon stemmed: later in the same letter, they discovered that matters had already taken a happier turn. Moshe had since written to Surur from Tyre to let him know that he was now ‘well and in good cheer.’

At home in Sicily meanwhile, things had got steadily worse. Food was short, the price of wheat had risen and the family had already spent most of its money. ‘If you saw [our] father,’ wrote Shamwal, ‘you would not know him, for he weeps all day and night … As for [our] mother, if you saw her, you would not recognize her [so changed is she] by her longing for you, and by her grief. God knows what our state has been after you left … Know that all we have is emptiness since God emptied [our house]. Do not forget us, oh my brothers; to visit us and to write to us. You must know that those of your letters that reached us conjured up your two noble faces [for us]. Send us letters telling us your news, the least important and the most; do not scorn to tell us the smallest thing, till we know everything.’

But gradually things improved. The brothers were reunited in Egypt, and Surur must have announced his wedding to his cousin shortly afterwards. His father, overwhelmed, wrote back to say: ‘Come quickly home to us, you and your uncle’s daughter … and [we shall] prepare a couple of rooms for her, and we shall celebrate [the wedding] …’

The marriage did indeed take place: a list recording Sitt al-Dar’s wedding trousseau, now preserved in St. Petersburg, is proof that this child of a Nair woman from the Malabar was wedded in 1156 to her Sicilian cousin, in Fustat.

Both Surur and Moshe went on to become judges in rabbinical courts in Egypt, where they were probably later joined by their parents and Shamwal.

As for Ashu, neither Ben Yiju nor his nephews mention her in their letters. In all likelihood she never left India but remained in Mangalore after Ben Yiju’s departure.

Ben Yiju himself disappears from the records after his daughter’s marriage. His son-in-law and his other nephews do not mention him in their later correspondence, and nor, as far as I know, is his death referred to in any other document in the Cairo Geniza. There are many conceivable endings to Ben Yiju’s story and if the most pleasing amongst them is one which has him returning to Ashu, in the Malabar, the most likely, on the other hand, is a version in which he dies in Egypt, soon after his daughter’s wedding, and is buried somewhere in the vicinity of Fustat.

As for Bomma, there is no mention of him either, in Ben Yiju’s correspondence with his brothers. But his story is not ended yet: one last journey remains.

MY RETURN TO Nashawy and Lataifa culminated in an unforeseen ending.

It so happened that my visit coincided with one of the regions annual events, a mowlid dedicated to the memory of a saintly figure known as Sidi Abu-Hasira, whose tomb lies on the outskirts of Damanhour.

As with all mowlids, a buzz of anticipation preceded the start of this one, and over a period of a few days I had the story of Sidi Abu-Hasira repeated to me over and over again. Except for a few unexpected twists, it was very similar to the legends that surrounded other local holy men such as those of Nashawy and Nakhlatain: like those other legends, it was set in a distant past, and it recounted the miracles wrought by a man of exemplary piety and goodness. The Sidi had been born into a Jewish family in the Maghreb, it was said, but he had transported himself to Egypt through a miracle that later found commemoration in his name: he had crossed the Mediterranean on a rush mat, which was why he was called ‘Sîdî Abû-ara’, ‘the Saint of the Mat’.

After arriving in Egypt, the story went, he had converted to Islam and had soon come to be recognized as a ‘good man’, endowed with the blessed and miraculous gift of ‘baraka’. Eventually the Sidi had settled in Damanhour, where a large group of disciples and followers had gathered around him. Upon his death, they had built a tomb for him, on the outskirts of Damanhour, and it was there that his mowlid was now celebrated. Because of his Jewish origins, I was told, the Sidi still had many followers in Israel and ever since the opening of the borders they came to Damanhour in large numbers every year. Indeed so many tourists came to attend the mowlid nowadays, and recently a large new memorial had been built on the site of Sidi Abu-Hasira’s tomb.

I had missed the mowlid while living in Nashawy, because I had happened to be away in Cairo over the week when it was celebrated; now it seemed as though everyone I knew was determined to prevent my missing it again. The mowlid was a wonderful spectacle, I was told; there would be lights everywhere, stalls with pistols and airguns, swings and carousels; the streets would be lined with kebab-shops and vendors’ carts and thronged with crowds of sightseers. The tourists alone were a good reason to go, they said, it was not often that one got to see foreigners in a place like Damanhour.

I was persuaded easily enough, but I had so much to catch up with in Lataifa and Nashawy after my long absence that I didn’t have time to think of much else. The mowlid began towards the end of my visit, and my time seemed so pitifully short that I let it pass with no particular sense of regret. A couple of days before my departure I was told that the mowlid was over: that would have been the end of the story had it not been for Mohsin the taxi-driver.

Mohsin was from a hamlet near Nashawy, a corpulent youth in his mid-twenties or so. He had a little brisding moustache, and he always wore freshly laundered white jallabeyyas — great, dazzling garments that billowed around him like parachutes. Mohsin was a good talker, full of self-confidence, and amazingly knowledgeable about such things as the exchange rates of various kinds of dinars and the prices of Nikons and Seikos. He had acquired this stock of information while living in the Gulf where he had spent a couple of years working in construction. He hadn’t cared much for his work however; climbing scaffolding didn’t suit him. Eventually he had succeeded in persuading two of his brothers, who had jobs in Iraq, to join him in investing in a second-hand van, and for the last several months he had been ferrying passengers back and forth between the towns and villages of the district.

The day before my departure Mohsin drove me to the railway station in Damanhour to buy a ticket for Cairo, and on the way he explained that he was growing tired of spending his days on those dusty rural roads. Lately, seeing so many tourists coming into Damanhour for the mowlid, he had begun to think along a different track. It had occurred to him that it would be nice to have a permit that would let him take tourists back and forth from Alexandria and Cairo and places like that.

That was how the idea of our paying a visit to the tomb of Sidi Abu-Hasira came to be mooted. He had never been there himself, said Mohsin, but he had always wanted to go, and he would be glad to take me there next morning, on the way to the station. It was no matter that the mowlid was already over — the stalls and lights would probably be there still, and we would be able to get a good whiff of the atmosphere. And so it was agreed that we would stop by at the tomb when he picked me up at Lataifa next morning, to take me to the station.

I spent the rest of the day making a last round of Nashawy, saying good-bye to my friends and their families: to Khamees, now a prosperous landowner with two healthy children; to Busaina, who had recently bought a house with her own earnings, in the centre of the village; to their brother ‘Eid, newly-returned from Saudi Arabia, and soon to be married to the girl to whom he had lost his heart, years ago; to Zaghloul, miraculously unaffected by the storm of change that was whirling through the village; to ‘Amm Taha, whose business in eggs had now expanded into a minor industry and made him a man of considerable wealth; even, inadvertently, to Imam Ibrahim, who greeted me civilly enough, when we ran into each other in the village square. Finally I said goodbye to Fawzia, ‘Ali and Hussein, who made me promise, once again, that I would soon telephone Nabeel in Iraq.

When Mohsin arrived in Lataifa next morning, I was taking my leave of Shaikh Musa, Jabir, and several others who had gathered in his guest-room. The leavetaking proved even harder than I had imagined and in one way or another my farewells lasted a great deal longer than I had expected.

In the meanwhile Mohsin had busied himself in preparing an appropriate accompaniment for the moment of my departure: a cassette of Umm Kolthums had been cued and held ready, and the moment I climbed into the van a piercing lament filled the lanes of Lataifa. We began to roll forward in time with the tune, and after a final round of handshakes, Mohsin sounded a majestic blast on his horn. The younger boys ran along while the van picked up speed, and then suddenly Lataifa vanished behind us into a cloud of dust.

We stopped to ask directions on the borders of Damanhour, and then turned on to a narrow road that skirted around a crowded, working-class area. Nutshells and scraps of coloured papers lay scattered everywhere now, and it was easy to tell that the road had recently been teeming with festive crowds. Mohsin had never been to this part of the city before but he was confident that we were headed in the right direction. When next we stopped to ask for the tomb of Sidi Abu-Hasira, we were immediately pointed to a large structure half-hidden behind a row of date palms, a little further down the road.

I was taken by surprise at my first glimpse of the building; it looked nothing like the saints’ tombs I had seen before. It was a sleek, concrete structure of a kind that one might expect to see in the newer and more expensive parts of Alexandria and Cairo: in that poor quarter of Damanhour, it was not merely incongruous — its presence seemed almost an act of defiance.

A long, narrow driveway led from the entrance of the compound to a covered porch adjoining the tomb. The grounds seemed deserted when we turned in at the gate, and it was not till we were halfway down the drive that we noticed a handful of men lounging around a desk, in the shade of the porch. One of them was dressed in a blue jallabeyya; the rest were armed and in uniform.

At the sight of those uniforms Mohsin suddenly became tense and apprehensive. Like me, he had expected to see a domed tomb, with some candles burning outside perhaps, and a few people gathered around a grave: the uniforms instantly aroused that deep mistrust of officialdom that had been bred into him by generations of fellah forefathers. I could tell that his every instinct was crying out to him to turn the van around and speed away. But it was already too late: the men were on their feet now, watching us, and some of them were fingering their guns.

The van was surrounded the moment we drew up under the porch. Reaching in through my window, a hand undid the lock and jerked the door open. I stepped out to find myself face to face with a ruddy, pink-cheeked man, dressed in a blue jallabeyya. He was holding the door open for me, and with a deep bow and a smile he gestured towards a police officer seated at the desk under the porch.

The officer was a young man, probably a recent graduate from training school. He watched with a puzzled and slightly annoyed expression as I walked over to his desk.

‘What are you doing here?’ he snapped at me, in the kind of tone he might have used towards a slow-witted subordinate.

‘I came to look at the tomb,’ I said. ‘I heard there was a mowlid here recently.’

On hearing me speak he realized I was a foreigner and there was an instant change in his tone and manner. He looked me over, smiling, and a gleam of recognition came into his eyes.

‘Israïli?’ he said.

When I told him I was Indian, his smile vanished and was quickly replaced by a look of utter astonishment. Confirming what I had said with a glance at my passport, he turned to me in blank incomprehension. What was my business there, he wanted to know; what was I doing at that tomb?

My Arabic was becoming tangled now, but as best I could I explained that I had heard about the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira and decided to pay the tomb a visit on my way to the station.

From his deepening frown, I knew that my answer had not been satisfactory. The mowlid was over, he said, the tourists were gone, and the tomb was closed. The time for sightseeing was now well past.

Opening my passport, he thumbed through it again, from back to front, coming to a stop at the page with my photograph.

‘Are you Jewish?’ he said.

‘No.’

‘Muslim?’

‘No.’

‘Christian?’

When I said no yet again he gave a snort of annoyance and slammed my passport on the desk. Turning to the others, he threw up his hands. Could they understand it? he asked. Neither Jewish, nor Muslim, nor Christian — there had to be something odd afoot.

I started to explain once more, but he had lost interest in me now. Rising to his feet, he turned towards Mohsin, who was waiting near the van. The man in the blue jallabeyya was standing beside him, and when the officer beckoned, he pushed Mohsin forward.

Mohsin was terrified now, and he would not look at me. His habitual confidence and good humour had ebbed away; he was cringing, his vast rotund form shaking with fear. Before the officer could speak, he began to blurt out an explanation. ‘It’s nothing to do with me, Your Excellency,’ he cried, his voice rising in panic. ‘I don’t know who the foreigner is and I don’t know what he’s doing here. He was staying in a village next to ours, and he wanted to visit this tomb on the way to the station. I don’t know anything more; I have nothing to do with him.’

The officer spun around to look at me. ‘What were you doing in a village?’ he snapped. ‘What took you there? How long have you been travelling around the countryside without informing the proper authorities?’

I started to explain how I had first arrived in Lataifa as a student, years ago, but the officer was in no mood to listen: his mind could now barely keep pace with his racing suspicions. Without a pause he rattled off a series of questions, one after another.

Who had I been meeting in the villages? he asked. Were they from any particular organization? What had I talked about? Were there any other foreigners working with me?

My protests and explanations were brushed aside with an impatient gesture; the officer was now far too excited to listen. I would soon have an opportunity to explain to someone senior, he told me — this was too serious a matter for someone in his position to deal with.

Seating himself at his desk he quickly wrote out a note and handed it to the ruddy-faced man in the jallabeyya, along with my passport and Mohsin’s papers.

‘Go with him,’ he told me. ‘He will take you where you have to go.’

Mohsin and I found ourselves back on the van within moments, with the man in the jallabeyya sitting between us. He was holding Mohsin’s papers and my passport firmly in his hands.

‘Everything will soon be clear, sir,’ he said, when I asked him where he was taking us. He was heavily-built, with a moustache that was almost blonde, and a clear-cut, angular profile that hinted at Macedonian or Albanian forbears somewhere in his ancestry.

He raised our papers reverentially to his forehead and bowed. ‘I’m under your orders and at your command, taht amrak wa iznak …’

I noticed then that his speech, except for its elaborate unctuousness, was exactly that of a fellah, with only the faintest trace of a city accent. Dressed as he was, in his fellahs cap and jallabeyya, he would have been perfectly at home in the lanes of Nashawy and Lataifa.

Mohsin interrupted him, with a sudden show of anger, demanding to know what crime he had committed. He had regained his composure a little now that he was back in his van.

In reply the man began to thumb through Mohsin’s licence and registration papers. Then, in a voice that was silky with feigned deference, he pointed out that the permit did not allow him to carry passengers.

Instantly Mohsin’s shoulders sagged and his self-possession evaporated: the man had taken his measure with practised accuracy. The papers had probably taken Mohsin months to acquire, maybe cost him a substantial sum of money, as well as innumerable hours spent standing at the desks of various government officials. The thought of losing them terrified him.

When Mohsin next spoke his voice was hoarse and charged with an almost hysterical urgency. ‘You sound as though you’re from the countryside around here, sir,’ he said. ‘Is your village in this area?’

The man in the jallabeyya nodded, smiling affably, and named a village not far from Damanhour. The name seemed to electrify Mohsin. ‘Alhamdu’lillah!’ he cried. ‘God be praised! I know that village. I know it well. Why I’ve been there many times, many times.’

For the rest of the drive, in a desperate effort to invoke the protective bonds of neighbourhood and kinship, to tame the abstract, impersonal terror the situation had inspired in him, Mohsin mined every last vein of his memory for a name that would be familiar to his captor. The man humoured him, smiling, and deflected his questions with answers that were polite but offhand. Skilled in his craft, he knew perfectly well that there was no more effective way of striking terror into a village boy like Mohsin than by using his own dialect to decline his accustomed terms of communication — those immemorial courtesies of village life, by which people strove to discover mutual acquaintances and connections.

By the time we reached our destination, a high-walled, heavily-guarded building on a busy road, Mohsin was completely unnerved, drenched in sweat. He protested feebly as we were herded in past an armed sentry, but no one paid him any attention. He was marched quickly off towards a distant wing of the building while I, in turn, was led to a room at the end of a corridor and told to go in and wait.

The room was a pleasant one, in an old-fashioned way, large, airy and flooded with light from windows that looked directly out into a garden. From what I could see of it, the building seemed very much in the style of colonial offices in India with high ceilings and arched windows: it took no great prescience to tell that it had probably been initiated into its current uses during the British occupation of Egypt.

In a while the curtain at the door was pushed aside and a tall man in gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses stepped into the room. He was casually dressed, in a lightweight jacket and trousers, and there was a look of distinction about him, in the manner of a gracefully ageing sportsman.

Taking off his sunglasses, he seated himself behind the desk; he had a lean gunmetal face, with curly hair that was grizzled at the temples. He placed my passport and the note from the officer in front of him, and after he had looked them through he sat back in his chair, his eyes hard and unsmiling.

‘What is the meaning of this?’ he said.

I knew I had to choose my words with care, so speaking slowly, I told him that I had heard many people talking about the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira over the last several days. They had said that many tourists came to Damanhour to visit the mowlid, so I had decided to do some sightseeing too, before catching the train to Cairo, later in the day.

He listened with close attention, and when I had finished, he said: ‘How did you learn Arabic? And what were you doing travelling in the countryside?’

‘I’d been here years ago,’ I said, and I explained how, after learning Arabic in Tunisia, I had come to Egypt as a doctoral student and been brought to that district by Professor Aly Issa, one of the most eminent anthropologists in Egypt. Fortunately I had taken the precaution of carrying a copy of the permit I had been given when I first went to live in Lataifa and I handed it to him now as proof.

My interrogator examined the document and then, giving it back to me, he said: ‘But this does not explain what you were doing at the tomb. What took you there?’

I had gone there out of mere curiosity, I told him. I had heard people talking about the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira, just as they talked about other such events, and I had thought I would stop by to take a look, on the way to the station. I had had no idea that it would become a matter of such gravity, and I was at a loss to understand what had happened.

A gesture of dismissal indicated that my interrogator had no intention of offering me an explanation. ‘What was it that interested you about that place?’ he asked again. ‘What exactly took you there?’

‘I was just interested,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

‘But you’re not Jewish or Israeli,’ he said. ‘You’re Indian — what connection could you have with the tomb of a Jewish holy man, here in Egypt?’

He was not trying to intimidate me; I could tell he was genuinely puzzled. He seemed so reasonable and intelligent, that for an instant I even thought of telling him the story of Bomma and Ben Yiju. But then it struck me, suddenly, that there was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story — the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago. Nothing remained in Egypt now to effectively challenge his disbelief: not a single one, for instance, of the documents of the Geniza. It was then that I began to realize how much success the partitioning of the past had achieved; that I was sitting at that desk now because the mowlid of Sidi Abu-Hasira was an anomaly within the categories of knowledge represented by those divisions. I had been caught straddling a border, unaware that the writing of History had predicated its own self-fulfilment.

‘I didn’t know Sidi Abu-Hasira was a Jewish saint,’ I said at last. ‘In the countryside I heard that everyone went to visit the tomb.’

‘You shouldn’t have believed it,’ he said. ‘In the villages, as you must know, there is a lot of ignorance and superstition; the fellaheen talk about miracles for no reason at all. You’re an educated man, you should know better than to believe the fellaheen on questions of religion.’

‘But the fellaheen are very religious,’ I said. ‘Many amongst them are very strict in religious matters.’

‘Is it religion to believe in saints and miracles?’ he said scornfully. ‘These beliefs have nothing to do with true religion. They are mere superstitions, contrary to Islam, and they will disappear with development and progress.’

He looked down at his papers, indicating that the subject was closed. After a moment’s silence he scribbled a couple of sentences on a slip of paper and rose slowly to his feet.

‘We have to be careful, you understand,’ he said in a polite, but distant voice. ‘We want to do everything we can to protect the tomb.’

He stood up, gave my hand a perfunctory shake and handed me my passport. ‘I am going to instruct the man who brought you here to take you straight to the station,’ he said. ‘You should catch the first train to Cairo. It is better that you leave Damanhour at once.’

Leaving me sitting at his desk, he turned and left the room. I had to wait a while, and then a policeman came in and escorted me back to the van.

Mohsin was sitting inside, next to the man in the blue jallabeyya; he looked unharmed, but he was subdued and nervous, and would not look me in the eyes. The railway station was only a few minutes away, and we drove there in silence. When we got there, I went around to Mohsin’s window, and after paying him the fare, I tried to apologise for the trouble the trip had caused. He took the money and put it away without a word, looking fixedly ahead all the while.

But the man in the jallabeyya had been listening with interest, and he now leant over and flashed me a smile. ‘What about me, sir?’ he said. ‘Are you going to forget me and everything I did to look after you? Isn’t there going to be anything for me?’

At the sight of his outstretched hand I lost control of myself. ‘You son of a bitch,’ I shouted. ‘You son of a bitch — haven’t you got any shame?’

I was cut short by a nudge from Mohsin’s elbow. Suddenly I remembered that the man was still holding his papers in his hands. To keep myself from doing anything that might make matters worse for Mohsin, I went quickly into the station. When I looked back, they were still there; the man in the jallabeyya was waving Mohsin’s papers in his face, haggling over their price.

I went down to the platform to wait for my train.

Over the next few months, in America, I learnt a new respect for the man who had interrogated me that morning in Damanhour: I discovered that his understanding of the map of modern knowledge was much more thorough than mine. Looking through libraries, in search of material on Sidi Abu-Hasira, I wasted a great deal of time in looking under subject headings such as ‘religion’ and ‘Judaism’—but of course that tomb, and others like it, had long ago been wished away from those shelves, in the process of shaping them to suit the patterns of the Western academy. Then, recollecting what my interrogator had said about the difference between religion and superstition, it occurred to me to turn to the shelves marked ‘anthropology’ and ‘folklore’. Sure enough, it was in those regions that my efforts met with their first rewards.

I discovered that the name Abu-Hasira, or Abou-Hadzeira, as it is spelt when transcribed from Hebrew, belongs to a famous line of zeddikim — the Jewish counterparts of Islamic marabouts and Sufi saints, many of whom had once been equally venerated by Jews and Muslims alike. Ya’akov Abou-Hadzeira of Damanhour, I discovered, was one of the most renowned of his line, a cabbalist and mystic, who had gained great fame for his miracles in his lifetime, and still had a large following among Jews of North African and Egyptian origin. ‘The tomb of Rabbi Abû-aîra of Morocco [in Damanhour] attracted large numbers of pilgrims,’ I learnt, ‘both Jewish and non-Jewish, and the festivities marking the pilgrimage closely resembled the birthday of Muslim saints …’

It seemed uncanny that I had never known all those years that in defiance of the enforcers of History, a small remnant of Bomma’s world had survived, not far from where I had been living.