Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (22 page)

Times change. A mere two centuries later and Hypatia had begun the slow descent into becoming demonised. The seventh-century writer John of Nikiu wrote that Hypatia ‘was devoted at all times to magic,
astrolabes and music and beguiled many people with her satanic wiles’. In this later account Peter has gone from being a murderous bigot to ‘Peter the Magistrate’. And Hypatia, it now seems, got what she deserved.

Truth is resilient. Over the centuries Hypatia has refused to go away. She has instead become, in a way, canonised. She has inspired hundreds of fictional and non-fictional accounts, an Adobe typeface (Hypatia Sans Pro), a lunar crater and an asteroid belt, been portrayed by Rachel Weisz in the movie
Agora
and given her name to
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy
published by the University of Washington.

Strangely, Peter the Bigot remains an obscure footnote.

Part Three

RIVER OF THE BELIEVERS

Madness and mystics

1
•
Mad kings and mad dams on the Nile

The day one becomes rich and the day one becomes bald are not known in advance
. Sudanese proverb

The name Ibn al-Haytham, outside the rather specialised field of optical physics, is not well known. Many more will have heard of Roger Bacon, the English scholar usually credited with founding experimental science. Yet it was Ibn al-Haytham, in the tenth century
AD
in Cairo, who really laid out what we now call scientific method. It was he, centuries before Roger Bacon, who first outlined the modern scientific method of experimentation and drawing conclusions from hard evidence. He was also the father of modern optics, inventor of the camera obscura, a philosopher, hydrologist – a true polymath. He also said he could dam the Nile. And that was the cause of his downfall.

Ah, so where are we exactly here? We’ve had the Greeks and the Romans and poor old Hypatia. The Eastern Roman Empire, which would continue as the Byzantine Empire until 1453, was centred on Constantinople but spread its tentacles into the Levant, Greece, Turkey and parts of north Africa. The Byzantines embraced the Greek language rather than Latin and were Orthodox Christians. The split with the Western Roman Empire had happened early, in
AD
380, followed shortly afterwards by the downfall and conquering of Rome by the Germanic tribes in the fifth century. The Byzantines, who were in power when Hypatia was killed, controlled much of Egypt and the Nile until, in the seventh century, new stirrings in the Arabian Desert brought forth an invasion army the like of which had never been seen: Islam was on the move.

The first Arabs in Egypt were true Bedouin – they disdained the great city of Memphis and lived instead in the fields of Fustat (now in central Cairo) in their tents. This alone shows their strength of purpose, their will, compared to the effete Byzantines and their glorious wealth.

But the Arabs then were no Taliban force of shark-faced dictators. They espoused tolerance and humour and believed greatly in the spread of learning. Indeed it is now a commonplace to state that it was
the Arabs who reinjected Greek learning into the West through the great encyclopaedias and learned translations of Aristotle written by their scholars.

As the Arab empire grew to encompass Afghanistan in the East and Spain in the West, a huge revival in learning occurred, a true renaissance. It was in this tradition that Ibn al-Haytham was brought up. Without visiting Egypt he wrote a book on civil engineering in which he claimed he could build a dam and a series of canals and levees to control the annual flooding of the Nile. He wrote, ‘Had I been in Egypt, I could have done something to regulate the Nile so that people could derive benefit at its ebb and flow.’ Living in Basra, in what is now Iraq, he probably felt this theoretical pronouncement would never be tested. But he had reckoned without the madness of Caliph Hakim of Egypt.

Hakim’s ‘eccentricities’ were legendary. He once had all the dogs of Cairo executed because their barking was driving him mad. Or maybe madder. (Having seen the feral-dog problem of Cairo first hand, I can offer a smidgin of sympathy here.) But it gets worse. Hakim persecuted not only Christians, but also Jews and Muslims – equally. He destroyed the ancient city of Fustat, the original Arab capital of Cairo, because its orientation ‘displeased him’. He built a great library in Cairo to rival the House of Wisdom in Baghdad; then he sacked the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem. At night he would wander in disguise in the hills of Moqattam, said to be the haunt of mystics and madmen.

Ibn al-Haytham can’t have been too thrilled when, comfortably sitting in Basra teaching the sons of the wealthy, he received a letter. His next job offer – dam the Nile. Only, it was less of an offer and more of an order, an order from a notoriously unstable ruler. But the engineer in him ignored all that and jumped at the chance to prove his theories right. He travelled to Cairo in 1011 to survey the task. Though the Pharaoh Menes, around 3000
BC
, built many canals and desired to dam the Nile, no one had attempted such an undertaking until Caliph Hakim ordered Ibn al-Haytham to do so.

Ibn al-Haytham must have known that this monumental assignment would probably take the rest of his life. But the forty-seven-year-old philosopher and scientist probably did not suspect that it would cost him his life, or might do. But once he had met Hakim and started work it became increasingly obvious that turning down the job would result in his becoming another of Hakim’s victims.

When he arrived in Egypt Hakim was so excited at the news that he
rushed to the village of Khandaq to meet Ibn al-Haytham in person. Ibn al-Haytham, who was lodging there in a small caravanserai, was on his way to Cairo. The mad Caliph was so pleased with Ibn al-Haytham’s plans that he pledged his entire treasury to complete the project.

Somewhat unnerved by his sponsor’s intensity, Ibn al-Haytham now began the long task of travelling up the Nile to find the right place to make the dam. He found it at Janadil, a village near Aswan. As they passed the Pyramids and great temples along the way Ibn al-Haytham began to get his first feelings of disquiet. He remarked on the astonishing precision and workmanship and drew the worrying conclusion that these incredible engineers, who could build the highest buildings in the world, had chosen not to dam the Nile. There must have been a reason.

At Janadil Ibn al-Haytham saw that the high granite banks would be perfect for a dam. Then he measured the opening, which owing to the disparity between the actual river banks and the granite cliffs, looked less than it was. The banks were only 1,800 feet apart. Only. But the granite was 3,200 feet apart at ground level. At a point 360 feet above the river, the granite cliffs were 12,000 feet apart. More than two miles. Sixteen times the width of the Great Pyramid.

Unfortunately he was 900 years too early. He’d found the right spot, and years later this was where the Aswan dam was built.

When Ibn al-Haytham finished his measuring he knew he was in deep trouble. Without any form of mechanical assistance he’d need a million men to complete the dam, and even then it would take one or two hundred years. It would be folly to continue. It would be folly to return.

Reluctantly he travelled to Cairo to break the news to Hakim. If Ibn al-Haytham expected to be reprimanded, punished or even killed he was wrong. Hakim, as unpredictable as ever, offered him a plum job as an adviser in his inner court. Ibn al-Haytham accepted, again out of fear. He knew about such tactics. You lull a man into a false sense of security, you invite him into your tent and shazam – you strangle him with the silken cord of his own dressing gown. The Caliph Hakim was, Ibn al-Haytham now saw, a sly man, a feared man. Sooner or later he would turn on Ibn al-Haytham, the man who had said he could dam the Nile and didn’t.

Ibn al-Haytham then pulled a master stroke out of the bag. He pretended to be mad.

Now, convincing a mad monarch that you are madder than he is takes some doing. The genuinely mad are very often gifted with a sixth sense for sniffing out the genuinely sane. It would have to be a class act. So Ibn al-Haytham went overboard: he ate foul beans off the floor – which he had placed in a bucket to look like nightsoil. He refused to answer questions except by singing answers. He insisted on wearing a mask when he left the house. He claimed it was the mask that did his talking as he had lost that power.

The ruse worked, kind of. Hakim had him removed from government and there was no question of Ibn al-Haytham being executed for failing to dam the Nile. Under Islamic law the insane have a protected status, they are untouchable. However, Hakim still had his suspicions, so he imprisoned Ibn al-Haytham in two rooms in Cairo for months, months that stretched into years. Strangely this may have been exactly the chance the scholar needed.

Imprisoned in his darkened rooms, Ibn al-Haytham began to think about light and vision. He invented the camera obscura – not surprisingly he felt as if he were trapped within one – and the camera obscura is the basis of all cameras that ever followed. He devised the first scientific thought experiments – because he had no chance of testing things in practice. He was the first to realise that the ancient Greeks were wrong about sight – we do not send out rays from our eyes that see things. Rather, light reflects off objects and that makes them visible. That he was imprisoned is obvious from his science: of the dozens of experiments he describes, only one requires the use of an assistant.

So, Ibn al-Haytham, imprisoned in Cairo for failing to dam the Nile, had much time to contemplate not just the scientific but also the mundane, the mystical and the plain insane. He pondered deeply on how to rid the world of the benighted evil of Hakim.

2
•
Hakim goes out too much

Islam arrived as a stranger and will depart as a stranger
.
Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad

The power behind the Egyptian throne at that time was not a man but Sitt al-Mulk, ‘the lady of power’. We will see that she was not the first
or last female ruler of Egypt. Her brother, and the reason she was able to rule at all, was the mad Caliph Hakim. His rule was so bad that she was welcomed as an alternative. Compared to his excesses, a woman was no madness at all.

Hakim started his problematic rule by
going out too much
. This was something no caliph should do, unless wearing a workable disguise. Hakim, on one memorable Saturday, made no fewer than six appearances. One on horseback, one riding a donkey, a third in a litter hoisted on high by a retinue of Nubian porters. At the fourth appearance he was seen on the Nile in a boat not wearing a turban. After this disgrace the fifth and sixth appearances almost failed to register.

Hakim was only eleven when his forty-two-year-old father died in the bath, as a result of taking dangerous medication after a freak accident (his foot had slipped off a carriage wheel and been twisted and snapped by the rotating spokes – he was in the process of whipping a servant at the time). It was hot weather and the body of the old Caliph needed to be buried. Hakim’s father, like Hakim himself when he grew up, was a very tall man and it is reported that no coffin would fit him. He was carried to his grave in a box with the end knocked out and his bare feet poking out.

Hakim’s sister, Sitt al-Mulk, who was sixteen years his senior, found her brother increasingly intolerable. He was obsessed with her apparent infidelities. And he hated the sound of barking dogs. There have always been stray dogs – the earliest travellers record their presence as something unpleasant but inevitable. But so terrified of Hakim were the people that they vied to complete the order for the dogs’ destruction. One breed was rendered extinct. If a dog appeared at the head of an alley, day or night, it would be chased down and killed, stoned or beaten to death immediately. To try and kill them all, which Hakim nearly managed, shows just how insane he was.

People were terrified of his random malignancies. Hakim once walked past a butcher’s shop, took a liking to the enormous cleaver stuck in a block, pulled it out and swung at the astonished butcher, cutting his head in two. He then carried on with his ramble through the city as if nothing had happened, holding the dripping cleaver by his side. Onlookers were so stunned that the butcher remained unburied, lying in his shop until three days later Hakim ordered a magnificent shroud to be sent to cover his putrefying remains.

Hakim developed a preference for nocturnal walks around the city.
Dressed in sumptuous clothes, bejewelled and wrapped in furs in winter, he and his retinue demanded that the shops be open at all hours of the night when they chose to visit them. The city became inured to this reversal of ordinary life. Indeed, as any modern visitor to Cairo will attest during the month of Ramadan, Cairenes adjust very easily to living by night. But once the city had become addicted to living at night Hakim changed his mind and decreed that no one should appear on the streets between dusk and dawn. All public amusements were banned. Wine, even for Christians, was forbidden. Gallons of wine were tipped into the Nile at Roda, turning it as red as blood. The entire grape crop was also dumped in the river, where it fermented at the bank, turning the Nile briefly into a river of alcohol. Even
mulukhiyya
, a national dish, was made illegal. (This would be like banning something like potato crisps in the UK.) Then Hakim ordered that no women should appear on the streets. Christians were forced to wear a heavy wooden cross at all times, Jews a tiny bell around their necks to warn of their arrival. Donkeys rather than horses were to be ridden by those of these religions – and this despite the Islamic ruling that Christians and Jews as ‘People of the Book’ were entitled to protection under the Caliphate.