M&G Friday
05 Sep 2008

‘Have you,’ he cried in a dreadful voice, ‘have you ever suffered?’

Gabriel Syme, The Man Who Was Thursday, G K Chesterton

The Pakistani qawwal trio, Lal Shahbazz Brothers, had reached a sort of climax when Shehzad stepped into the kitchen. He could tell from the expression on his father’s face, a rapturous grin of ecstasy that was spread from ear to ear. The imam’s hands were raised in anticipation – he was holding an invisible baton.

Even though his father was wearing headphones – an expensive, cordless Bose set that Shehzad brought back from London – the voices of the trio were still audible, a thin, discreet wail, as if coming from some far off place in the night. The lush resonance of the composition forcefully struck Shehzad, and, as if pulled by some invisible force, he strained his ear to catch it.

He could hear the joyous blend of the music, the driving, pounding beats of the tabla, dholak and pakhwa. The soaring tari, a form of ritualised handclapping, beat rhythmically to the music. In the background, the delicate twang of a sitar struggled to keep pace. It was a live recording and the ecstatic, fevered audience whooped and hollered in the background.

Shehzad felt a sharp pang in his chest, slightly to the left from the middle, where he imagined his heart to be.

The song, Midnight, was about the betrayal of a love. It was a wailing lament to loss, hurt, and anguish. A prince finds his wife in a midnight tryst with a stranger in the garden. It was their love garden that they’d planned and worked on together over the years. The stranger was even sitting on his spot on the kanapeh.

How could she do that, how? He howls in anguish at the moon, pleading for divine retribution, threatening death and destruction to her lover and all his family.

Shehzad knew the song.

It was the same song that was playing at the exact moment when Maqsood Ali Aurakzai, the Pakistani-born proprietor of the Royal Palace Hotel (34, 36, 38 Kingsmead Road, London, NW3) had eased his hard, slimy cock up Shehzad.

Unlike the imam’s CD, Aurakzai ’s recording was an old, scratchy record, an original that was reissued by Decca Pakistan in 1963.

Shehzad distinctly remembered seeing the album cover out of the corner of his eye before the qat took hold. It was strategically placed on the mantelpiece of Aurakzai’s rooftop penthouse suite at No.34, the finest of all his properties, that is to say, the least shabbiest of the three properties. It was a yellowing picture of the youthful, unsmiling brothers sitting self-consciously cross-legged on a ragged Baluchi carpet, surrounded – somewhat incongruously – by tatty Victorian furniture from the days of the British Empire.

Midnight was the last song on the brothers’ 1948 live album, Memories, recorded at the Kandy Bioscope in Hyderabad a year after Partition. It was a contentious song, its meaning and significance arousing fierce debate over the years. Not only a simple love song!, the loyal fans argued vociferously. Was not its all-too-obvious title a reference to Partition, when Pakistan was born at the stroke of midnight on August 14^th 1947? Was it not about the loss, anguish and betrayal experienced by the millions so cruelly wrenched from their homes on both sides?

The Lal Shahbazz Brothers consistently denied it, but with knowing twinkles in their eyes, stoking the embers of a faux-controversy for almost forty years. Whether they played in the dusty halls of Islamabad, or the grand Royal Albert in London, their gnomic response was always the same at these prestigious mahfil-e-sama.

No comment. No comment. Please.

Although this book was first published in 1990, it was revised and updated in 2005, with new material uncovered on Lawrence’s personal life – but most importantly, there is a kind of coda by the author on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, hence this review.

Even as a disinterested reviewer Lawrence is an infuriating subject. In a way it is ironic that so substantial a biography (500 odd pages) should be devoted to a man who was, in so many ways, so insubstantial. Lawrence was a fey creature both physically and intellectually. In the cold harsh of daylight his accomplishments are slight  He wanted to be a great revolutionary, leading the Arabs to freedom, except that the Arabs he liked were a particular kind of Arab (the Bedouin) and the freedom promised was naturally within the confines of the British Empire. He saw Arabia as the first “brown” dominion.

He wanted to be a great writer but in the end, all he managed was one major work – Seven Pillars of Wisdom – a largely florid exercise in sulky petulance in which he, the hero, is always right.

And how utterly perverse that Lawrence was fighting alongside the Arabs for their “freedom” from the Turks whilst their Muslim brethren were being so ruthlessly crushed in nearby India.

Lawrence’s Arabism comes into clear focus here. As the author points out, there was only a certain type of Arab that Lawrence cared about, those Arabs who were nomads, who lived by their ancient codes of “honour”, the “clean” Arabs as Lawrence referred to them. He hated town types, those who were considered clever, or were tainted by contact with western ideas, especially western ideas about freedom. It is vastly different from say, the Arabism of Burton, who lived amongst the Arabs and spoke Arabic fluently and who delighted in the philosophical  experience of Islam.

Lawrence’s ideas then were no different to the usual construct of the noble savage so beloved by colonial types – the Sikh in India, the Pathan in Afghanistan, the Zulu in South Africa – all singled out and hero-worshipped  for their “warrior” qualities. 

There was a certain cinematic fluidity to Lawrence, so it is perhaps natural that the moving pictures played such a pivotal role in establishing the legend of Lawrence of Arabia – and no, it’s not that picture. The American film-maker Harry Chase first presented Lawrence on screen in 1919 – and at least a million British people watched the shows in London – an astonishing number for that period. With the connivance of a number of powerful people – John Buchan, Robert Graves, Winston Churchill, the Lawrence legend was born. (Glad to say that my hero George Orwell saw through his theatrics). It reached an apotheosis  of sorts in David Lean’s 1962 epic, with Peter O’ Toole seemingly inhabiting the skin of the real Lawrence (in his diaries, Noel Coward tartly observed that if the real Lawrence had been half as pretty as O’ Toole, he would have been buggered by a lot more Turks).

The legend has been chugging along fairly steadily since then.

It is mostly myth. All he managed to do was blow up a few trains and bridges. The Arabs loved him – mostly because he paid them timeously with gold sovereigns from the government purse. And ah, Damascus, well, it was liberated by the Aussies.

And so to Iraq. The author points out the striking similarities between the Mesopotamian  campaign of 1914-1918 and the Iraqi insurrection of 1920 to the invasion by “coalition” forces of Iraq in 2003. Lawrence was a great proponent of what he called “aerial policing” i.e. bombing the shit out of the natives, and then riding in heroically with the cavalry. Churchill, then in charge of some office or the other, loved him for it, and enthusiastically sanctioned the gassing of Kurds from a great height. Yup, the wheel keeps turning.

Anyway, here’s a nice quote from Seven Pillars.

All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.

The prophet Muhammad once exhorted his followers to ‘travel in search of knowledge, even though the journey takes you to China’. It was a stricture that the medieval Islamic traveler, Ibn Battutah, took vigorously to heart, spending an amazing twenty-nine years on the road – a travel feat unparalleled in history. Battutah left his native Tangier in 1325, ostensibly on a trip to Mecca to perform his Haj. He returned to Morocco in 1355 and proceeded to write the ultimate travelogue, The Precious Gift for Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel – an astonishingly vivid (and engaging) account of his years on the road. It was a journey that took him to the Volga in the north, as far down as Tanzania and, of course, China.He left in the dust, the travelers and explorers currently mythologized in the Western pantheon – Herodotus, Marco Polo, et al. In his own way, author Tim Mackintosh-Smith is perhaps just as unique. A dedicated Arabist, he has spent the last twenty years living and writing in the Yemeni capital, Sana’a. Over the years, he has proven himself a singular voice in the call for Battutah’s rightful place in history, churning out research and articles on Battutah’s life and work. He has recently edited an accessible collection of Battutah’s own writings, The Travels of Ibn Battutah, the first (English) collection since the nineteen-twenties. It must be said that Battutah is equally ill-served by Islamic scholars – and especially in his Moroccan homeland. In the first of a planned trilogy – Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah – Mackintosh-Smith covered Battutah’s Middle Eastern and African portion of his journey. The second volume (just published) takes in the Indian section of the journey, with a third planned on China. In many ways, Battutah’s Indian trip was pivotal to shaping his personality and the creation of his legend. Even now, it is hard to imagine one man being subjected to such a mélange of adventures and misadventures.Battutah traveled from the Indus to the Malabar coast, a swathe of land under the rule of Muhammad Shah ibn Tughluq (the eponymous “hall” is the Hazar Sutun, Muhammad Shah’s audience chamber in Delhi) – a ten-year journey that brought him wealth and prestige, robbery and destitution, the love for a slave-girl and the siring of numerous offspring. Along the way he served as a qadi to numerous sultans, earning his keep (as well as a modicum of prestige).  In tracing Battutah’s journey, the wondrously informative Mackintosh-Smith seeks to restore the validity of the great traveler’s observations. Like his contemporaries, Battutah suffered from the prevailing sense of disbelief his tales engendered. Unlike his contemporaries (Herodotus, for example, wrote of seeing gigantic ants mining for gold in India) Battutah’s writings were grounded in reality. Mackintosh-Smith juxtaposes his own witty observations with dazzling effect, creating a heady blend of both irreverence and deep respect for his subject. What comes through most though, is his passion for Battutah – and it his greatest gift that he manages to pass this on to the reader.  

Publisher: Headline Review 

ISBN: 978-0755334193 

 Every once in a while, a book comes along that completely reinvigorates a genre and shakes up the often moribund world of English literary fiction. Sad thing is that in recent years, these books have often been translations – Javier Cercas’s Soldiers of Salamis, Peter Hoeg’s Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. Although author Anita Amirrezvani was born in Tehran, she now resides in the US and spent nine years developing and writing The Blood of Flowers. Well, I’ve always been skeptical of writers who say this (unless of course they’re in prison and writing on toilet paper), but in Amirrezvani’s case, it’s nine years well-spent.  The Blood of Flowers is an extraordinary book. It flummoxes the reader from the very first pages and never lets up, taking you on an extraordinary magical journey into the heart of 17^th century Isfahan. So it is kind of appropriate then, that carpets are central to the narrative of the book. The narrator is a nameless (in the old tradition of Persian folk-tales) thirteen year old girl who excels at carpet-making, not the sort of skill required for a woman in 17^th century Persia. Following the death of her beloved father (constructed by the author in heart-breaking detail), our heroine and her mother trek to the glorious city of Isfahan to live with a long-lost uncle, Gostaham, who just happens to be an expert carpet-maker in the service of the Shah. Naturally his wife is an evil shrew who hates the newcomers and does everything she can to make their lives miserable. Along the way, the young girl is apprenticed to her uncle (unofficially), makes a great carpet for the shah’s favourite courtesan, gets forced into a sigheh (temporary marriage) and finally discovers her true self. Intersperced between the plot are old Persian tales, some traditional, others made up by the author. They don’t really work, except to distract the reader. It is to the authors credit that she takes clichéd situations (for the book does abound with clichés and improbabilities) and makes them seem fresh and exciting. At its core, it is a simple coming-of-age tale, but, like Voltaire’s Candide, the main character has such a wondrous take on the world that it leaves the reader alive to the possibilities of recreating their own lives. If that isn’t the purpose of great art, then I don’t know what is. Amirezvani is at her best in the descriptive passages of the book. She brings alive the milieu of Isfahan, its sights and smells, in vivid splashes of writing that make the reader feel as if they too, are flitting between the stalls of the Naqsh-e Jahan, the “Image of the World”, the great Isfahan square, with its silks, perfumes and spices from all around the world.

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Sean Badal visited the legendary African island and found a place of mystery and history

THE defining moment came not on the white beaches, nor in the middle of the calm ocean, but in the back of a rickety Vietnamese truck with a troop of unwashed Germans.

Outside, it was pelting so hard with rain that the truck was shaking, not to mention being mired in the mud. We were shaking too; with fear. The lush greenery did not look so bucolic anymore.

Then the tarpaulin flap was lifted and a tray thrust inside, covered with what looked like a Basuto hat. A second tray followed. Underneath were thimble-like cups brimming with potent, bitter Arabic coffee. The other tray contained hot, ambrosial doughnuts redolent of cardamom and cloves. Suddenly everything else diminished in significance.

Zanzibar is that kind of place. Unsanitised, it robs you of balance and imposes surrealism instead. And it has been doing so for hundreds of years. Like Damascus, Tashkent, Casablanca, its very name resonates with the mystery of its origins and history.

The travel writer William Dalrymple summed it up when he wrote: In most parts of the world today, the traveller tends to get a sneaky feeling he has arrived too late; in Zanzibar the traveller is rewarded with that rare feeling that for once he has got there in time.

From a distance, the citys profile is stirring, its eclectic mishmash of Arabic, Indian and European architectural styles lending it the air of an ancient city. Turretted fortresses, minarets and spires vie for attention.

Fringing the city are clusters of palm trees swaying in the breeze. It is easy to see why the Omani Arabs moved their capital here from their dry lands. The name Zanzibar is derived from the Arabic phrase Zayn zalbarr, which means fair is this land.

We arrived by plane, but skimming the ocean waves on a dhow at sunset, skirting the edges of the city, was an intensely pleasurable experience. The old dhow harbour still functions at the top wedge of Zanzibars old Stone Town. It is not a gentrified tourist attraction, though. Here, the sights and smells of Zanzibar are encapsulated, their intensity multiplied many times over. In the broiling sun, glistening bodies, naked to the waist, haul their cargo out of the ancient, garishly decorated dhows, shouting out in Swahili, Arabic, French, Hindi. The dusty air reeks of distant lands and exotic places.

The Stone Town is a small strip of the island crammed with so much history it takes your breath away. It is bordered on the one side by the ocean and on the other by Creek Road, a thoroughfare that separates the old town from the new. Within this stretch lies the detritus of Zanzibars 2000 years of recorded history, built largely on successive waves of conquest and migration.

The main buildings along the promenade (the main road along the beach is Mizingani Street) reflect the cultural impositions of the towns conquerors more than anywhere else. You could call it vanity construction.

The only building with a recent lick of paint, however, is the Ithna sheri Dispensary, built as a dispensary for the poor by an Indian merchant, Sir Tharia Topan, in honour of Queen Victorias golden jubilee. It has recently been renovated with a grant from the Aga Khan Foundation (which thankfully is also planning to renovate other sites in the town). The building is now the Stone Town Cultural Centre and contains dull shops designed to fleece tourists. There is, however, an excellent book shop, The Gallery, in the centre.

Mizingani Street encourages a deep, profound indolence. The temptation to sit under a tree at the Sea View cafe in the Forodhani Gardens and watch the dhows, yachts and ocean liners weaving across the ocean is great.

After the spectacular sunsets (best seen from the deck of Pychies, a popular tourist haunt, and the only pizzeria in Zanzibar), food vendors come out selling a range of unidentifiable fried objects. Following them are the coffee sellers with their brass coffee pots and charcoal burners. The best meals, however, are to be had at Radhas, an Indian restaurant around the corner from the Sea View Cafe. It serves deliciously spiced vegetable curries for about R35. The dafu sellers on their bicycles also ply their trade here. They expertly hack the tops off young coconuts and offer the sweet elixir inside to passers-by.

Imagination

Also on the waterfront is the Palace Museum, which houses an impressive collection of sultanate memorabilia. Most fascinating is the room devoted to Princess Salme, the daughter of Sultan Said, who eloped with a German merchant to Hamburg in 1866 and wrote a book, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, about her life.

Plunging into the maze of dark and narrow streets of Stone Town is to immerse oneself in another world. Most of the houses were built in the 19th century by Arab and Indian merchants and traders. Facing the street, they look like unpleasant concrete blocks with narrow windows. Inside, they open up into cool airy courtyards with large dark rooms.

It is the doors of the houses that capture the imagination. They were built to display the owners status the more money he had, the more richly intricate were the designs and show a confluence of Swahili, Indian and Arabic styles. Some are ancient there are doors that have lintels with Egyptian fertility symbols although most have Koranic inscriptions. Caution: the houses are occupied, so it is not very polite to spend too much time peering inside, or at the doors.

Below the living spaces are the shops, piled high with goods from every corner of the globe. You can find everything from the latest London magazines ( exorbitantly expensive) to old Roman coins. In between you will stumble upon garishly decorated stores overflowing with Hindu videos (Indian movie stars are accorded the same hero worship in Zanzibar as they are in India).

If the outsides of the buildings in Stone Town are less extravagant than their waterfront counterparts, they are no less magnificent inside. Nondescript entrances lead into stunning mosques (you can spot the mosques by the posters outside denouncing Salman Rushdie) and temples, the most notable being the Bohara mosque and the Vedic Arya Samaj temple.

Christianity is represented by St Josephs Catholic cathedral and the Anglican cathedral. St Josephs is remarkably animist, containing a mixture of European and African religious figures done up in vivid colours more befitting an eastern religion. Anglican missionaries in Zanzibar purchased the old slave market after the closure of the slave trade by Sultan Barghash in 1873. They built the church on the site and the altar is reputed to be on the spot where slaves were tied and whipped.

At the edges of Stone Town, a major chunk of Creek Road is occupied by the town market. It is a colourful, noisy and smelly place, but also the best place to shop. It is not for the squeamish. Shark carcasses are strewn on the ground next to bloated corpses of cows. Fish lie flapping futilely in the heat and even the smell of the spices becomes overpoweringly nauseous. It becomes clear here why David Livingstone referred to Zanzibar as Stinkibar.

At the airport, a sour-faced Indian bride, bedecked in glitzy gold jewellery and covered in henna, looks like she is about to jet off to 100 years of servitude. Beside her, her husband beams like the proud possessor of a new car. It is easy to feel her pain, wrenched from the pleasures of Zanzibar to be subjected to the slums of Mumbai.

Decadently refined Casablanca is an intoxicating throwback to the past, writes SEAN BADAL