In an Antique Land (7 page)

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

Suddenly the bantering note went out of his voice.

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

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

‘No,' I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had meant what he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Maybe,' I said.

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

‘I don't know,' I answered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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