In an Antique Land (19 page)

Yet Idris bore no grudges and counted it an achievement that he had succeeded in becoming a mowazzaf even if his job was a humble one and his wages negligible. Once, he showed me the gun he had been issued in his capacity as a watchman: he was hugely proud of it and kept it locked in a trunk under his bed. It was a British-made Enfield, of considerable antiquity, not far
removed from a blunderbuss in fact. When he stood it on the floor it looked like an up-ended cannon, reaching higher than his shoulder and dwarfing him, with his frail, stooped frame and his tendril-thin wrists. I had difficulty in believing that he had ever been able to raise that redoubtable weapon to his chin, much less fire it, but he assured me I was wrong, that he had indeed used it on several occasions in the past. The last time admittedly was some fifteen years ago, when he let fly at some thieves who were escaping through a cornfield: the thieves got away but a large patch of corn was flattened by the blast.

Idris was not personally unhappy with his lot for he counted it an honour to be paid a monthly salary by the government. Nabeel, on the other hand, hated his family's poverty, and loyal though he was to his father, he considered a watchman's job demeaning, unworthy of his lineage. He had always been treated as a poor relative by his more prosperous Badawy cousins, and he had responded by withdrawing into the defensive stillness of introspection. But there was a proud streak in him and, even more than Isma‘il, he was determined to escape his poverty and improve his family's condition.

Fortunately for Nabeel, his mother, through a mixture of determination and good sense, had succeeded in providing him and his younger brothers with the necessary means for bettering their lot. She had taken her oldest son, ‘Ali, out of school at an early age, and sent him out to work in the fields. Realizing that her family's best hope lay in educating the other children, she had somehow contrived to keep the family going, with the help of ‘Ali's meagre earnings, while Nabeel and his younger brothers went through school and college. But she was acutely aware all along that it was ‘Ali's sacrifice that had given the others the possibility of a better future, and to show her gratitude, she set
about arranging his marriage as soon as it became clear that, God willing, nothing could now prevent Nabeel from graduating.

Nabeel and Isma‘il told me about ‘Ali's forthcoming wedding at our very first meeting, when they walked with me from Ustaz Sabry's house to my room. I asked them in when we reached my door, and while I made tea Isma‘il talked at length about the forthcoming wedding.

‘Ali was going to marry Isma‘il's sister, Fawzia (who was, of course, his first cousin)—now, apart from being best friends and cousins, he and Nabeel would also be linked by marriage! It was the best kind of union, he said: the bride and groom were cousins and had known each other all their lives; they were of the same age and they had virtually lived in each other's houses since the day they were born. There would be no outsiders involved, everything would be kept within the family and arranged between relatives, so there would be none of those problems that went with bringing a stranger into one's household.

‘We will sing and dance for the bride and groom,' said Isma‘il. ‘You must come: it will be a sight that you will remember.'

‘I shall be honoured to come,' I said. ‘It will be a privilege.'

Nabeel in the meanwhile had been running his eyes silently around my room, looking from my clothes, hanging on pegs, to my paper-strewn desk and the pots and pans stored in the tiny space that served as a makeshift kitchen. He seemed to become wholly absorbed in his scrutiny while Isma‘il talked and I busied myself with the tea; he looked at everything in turn with a deep and preoccupied concentration, running his hands over his jallabeyya.

Suddenly, as I was spooning tea into my kettle, he spoke up, interrupting Isma‘il.

‘It must make you think of all the people you left at home,' he said to me, ‘when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself.'

There was a brief pause and then Isma‘il said quickly: ‘Why should it? He has us and so many other friends to come here and have tea with him; he has no reason to be lonely.'

‘It's not the same thing,' said Nabeel. ‘Think how you would feel.'

The conversation quickly turned to something else, but Nabeel's comment stayed in my mind; I was never able to forget it, for it was the first time that anyone in Lataifa or Nashawy had attempted an enterprise similar to mine—to enter my imagination and look at my situation as it might appear to me.

It took me some time to absorb the fact that Nabeel and Isma‘il were gone now: for a while I found it hard to believe what Shaikh Musa had told me. In the many years that had passed since I last met them, I had grown accustomed to thinking of the two cousins as officers in the co-op; I had even tried to imagine what their responses would be when I walked through the door.

‘Nabeel came with me to the station the day I left Nashawy,' I told Shaikh Musa. ‘He said that by the time I returned he would have his job and be settled in Nashawy.'

‘Do you know why they left?' I asked. ‘Was there any specific reason?'

Shaikh Musa shrugged. ‘Why does anyone leave?' he said. ‘The opportunity comes, and it has to be taken.'

T
O THE YOUNG
Ben Yiju, journeying eastwards would have appeared as the simplest and most natural means of availing himself of the most rewarding possibilities his world had to offer.

His own origins lay in Ifriqiya—in the Mediterranean port of Mahdia, now a large town in Tunisia. His family name ‘ibn Yijû'—or Ben Yijû, in Hebrew—was probably derived from the name of a Berber tribe that had once been the protectors, or patrons, of his lineage. The chronology of his childhood and early life is hazy, and nothing is known exactly about the date or place of his birth. Working backwards from the events of his later life, it would seem that the date of his birth was somewhere towards the turn of the century, in the last years of the eleventh or the first of the twelfth.
Since his friends sometimes referred to him as ‘al-Mahdawî' it seems likely that he was born in Mahdia, which was then
a major centre of Jewish culture, as well as one of the most important ports in Ifriqiya.

A contemporary of Ben Yiju's, the Sharîf al-Idrîsî, a distinguished Arab geographer, developed a personal acquaintance with Mahdia at about the time that Ben Yiju would have been growing up there. He had a few sharp words to say about the quality of its water, but otherwise he found much to admire in the town: it had pretty buildings, nice promenades, magnificent baths, and numerous caravanserais; its inhabitants were generally good-looking and well-dressed and ‘
altogether Mahdia offered a view of something wonderful'.

Of Ben Yiju's immediate family, only two brothers, Yûsuf and Mubashshir, and one sister, Berâkhâ, figure in his later
correspondence. Nothing at all is known about his mother, and very little about his father, apart from his name and a few incidental details.
He was called Pera
yâ (spelt Far
îa in Arabic),
and he was a Rabbi, a respected scholar and scribe. He may have dabbled in business, like most scholars of his time, but the family's circumstances seem to have been modest, and in all likelihood his principal bequest to his sons lay in the excellent education he provided them with.

Abraham Ben Yiju was certainly well enough educated to have become a scholar himself and he was very well versed in doctrinal and religious matters. His personal inclinations, however, appear to have tended towards the literary rather than the scholastic: he was an occasional poet, and he wrote a clear, carefully crafted prose, with some arresting images hidden under a deceptively plain surface.

But for all that, when it came to a choice of career the opportunities offered by the eastern trade must have seemed irresistible to the young Ben Yiju, reared as he was in a community that had made a speciality of it. And once he had launched upon it, that career would have followed a natural progression, leading him from Ifriqiya to Fustat, and then to Aden, the port that sat astride the most important sea-routes connecting the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.

Ben Yiju's papers leave no room for doubt that he did indeed move to Aden, probably for a considerable length of time, in the 1120s, or maybe even earlier. The exact dates and duration of his stay may never be known, however, because not a single scrap of material dating from that period of his life has survived: apart from a few pinpricks of light, refracted back from the letters he received in India, those years are shrouded in dark obscurity.

However, it is clear enough from his later correspondence that his early years in Aden played a formative part in his life. It was probably there, for example, that he made the acquaintance of a man who was to become first his mentor and then his partner in business, a wealthy and powerful trader called Ma
mûn ibn al-
asan ibn Bundâr.

Madmun ibn Bundar, like his father before him, was the Nagîd or Chief Representative of merchants, in Aden. He was thus the head of the city's large and wealthy Jewish community, as well as the superintendent of the ports customs offices—a man of great substance and influence, a key figure in the Indian Ocean trade, whose network of friends and acquaintances extended all the way from Spain to India.

Several of Madmun's letters figure in Ben Yiju's correspondence: crisp and straightforward in style, they are written in the prose of a bluff, harried trader, with no frills, and many fewer wasted words than was usual at the time. The letters are often spread over a number of different folio sheets, some written in his own hand, and some by scribes. Madmun himself wrote a terrible hand, a busy, trader's scrawl, forged in the bustle of the market-place. Often the carefully calligraphed copies produced by his team of scribes end in swathes of his own hasty handwriting: there is a freshness and urgency about them which make it all too easy to see him snatching the letters away to add a few final instructions while the ships that are to carry them wait in the harbour below.