Страница 14 из 34
CATSCAN 7 "My Rihla"
Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battuta, gentleman and scholar, late of Tangier, Morocco, has been dead for six hundred and thirty years. To be remembered under such circumstances is a feat to compel respect.
Ibn Battuta is known today because he happened to write a book--or rather, he dictated one, in his retirement, to a Granadian scribe--called _A Gift to the Observers, Concerning the Curiosities of Cities and the Marvels Encountered in Travels_. It's more often known as "The Rihla of Ibn Battuta," rihla being an Arabic literary term denoting a pious work concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel.
Sometimes known as "the Marco Polo of Islam," Ibn Battuta claimed to have traveled some seventy thousand miles during the years 1325-1354, visiting China, Arabia, India, Ghana, Constantinople, the Maldive Islands, Indonesia, Anatolia, Persia, Iraq, Sicily, Zanzibar ... on foot, mind you, or in camel caravans, or in flimsy medieval Arab dhows, sailing the monsoon trade winds.
Ibn Battuta travelled for the sake of knowledge and spiritual advancement, to meet holy men, and to listen to the wisdom of kings, emirs, and atabegs. On occasion, he worked as a judge or a courtier, but mostly he dealt in information--the gossip of the road, tales of his travels, second-hand homilies garnered from famous Sufi mystics. He covered a great deal of territory, but mere exploration was not the source of his pride.
Mere distance mattered little to Ibn Battuta -- in any case, he had a rather foggy notion of geography. But his Moslem universe was cosmopolitan to an extent unrivalled 'till the modern era. Every pious Moslem, from China to Chad, was expected to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca--and they did so, in vast hordes. It was a world on the move. In his twenty-year peregrinations. Ibn Battuta met the same people again and again. An Arab merchant, for instance, selling silk in Qanjanfu, China, whose brother sold tangerines in Fez (or fezzes in Tangier, presumably, when he got the chance). "How far apart they are," Ibn Battuta commented mildly. It was not remarkable.
Travel was hazardous, and, of course, very slow. But the trade routes were open, the caravanserais-- giant government-supported hotels, sometimes capable of housing thousands--were doing a brisk trade from Cairo to Delhi to Samarkand. The locals were generally friendly, and respectful of learned men--sometimes, so delighted to see foreigners that they fell upon them with sobs of delight and fought for the prestige of entertaining them.
Professor Ross Du
"God made the world, but the Dutch made Holland." This gross impiety would have shocked the sufi turban off the valorous Ibn Battuta, but we live today, to paraphrase Greg Bear, in a world of things so monstrous that they have gone past sin and become necessity. Large and prosperous sections of the Netherlands exist well below sea level. God forbid the rest of us should have to learn to copy this trick, but when I read the greenhouse-warming statistics I get a shuddery precognitive notion of myself as an elderly civil-defense draftee, heaving sandbags at the angry rising foam ...
That's not a problem for the Dutch at the moment. They do, however, currently find themselves confronting another rising tide. "The manure surplus." The Dutch are setting up a large government agro- bureaucracy to monitor, transport, and recycle, er, well, cowshit. They're very big on cheese, the Dutch, but every time you slice yourself a tasty yellow wedge of Gouda, there is somewhere, by definition, a steaming heap of manure. A completely natural substance, manure; nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous, the very stuff of life--unless *there's too much of it in one place at the same time*, when it becomes a poisonous stinking burden. What goes around, comes around--an ecological truism as painful as constipation. We can speculate today about our own six hundred year legacy: not the airy palaces of the Moorish Alhambra, I'm afraid, or the graceful spires of the Taj Mahal, but billions of plastic-wrapped disposable diapers, mashed into shallow graves ...
So I'm practicing my Arab calligraphy in my scholarly cell at the Austin madrassa, when a phone call comes from The Hague. Over the stellar hiss of satellite transmission, somebody wants me and my collaborator to talk about cyberspace, artificial reality, and fractals. Fair enough. A month later I'm sipping Coke and puffing Dunhills in tourist class, with a bag full of computer videotapes crammed in the overhead bin, outdistancing Ibn Battuta with no effort more strenuous than switching batteries in a Walkman.
Aboard the plane, I strike up a discussion with a young Italian woman--half-Italian, maybe, as her father is an Iranian emigre'. She calls herself a "Green," though her politics seem rather strange--she sympathizes openly with the persecuted and misunderstood white Afrikaaners, for instance, and she insists that the Ayatollah Khomeini was an agent of British Intelligence. I have a hard time following these arguments, but when it comes to the relations of the US and Europe, her sentiments are clear enough. "After '92, we're going to kick your ass!" she tells me.
Unheard of. Europeans used to marvel humbly over our astonishing American highway system and the fact that our phones work (or used to). That particular load of manure is now history. The Europeans are happening now, and they know it. 1989 was a pivotal year for them, maybe the most momentous popular upheaval since 1789.
This century has not been a good one for Europe. Since 1914, the European body-politic has been wheezing along on one lung, a mass of fresh scar tissue when it wasn't hemorrhaging blood and bile. But this century, "The American Century," as we used to call it in 1920 when there was a lot of it still before us, is almost gone now. A lot can happen in a century. Dynasties rise and fall. Philosophies flourish and crumble. Cities rise, thrive, and are sacked by Mongols and turned to dust and ghosts.
But in Europe today, the caravanserais are open. National borders in Europe, which provoked the brutal slaughter of entire generations in '14 and '44, have faded to mere tissues, vaporous films, riddled through-and-through with sturdy money-lined conduits of trade, tourism, telecommunications. Soon the twelve nations of the European Community will have one passport, perhaps one currency. They look to the future today with an optimism they have not had since "the lamps went out all over Europe" in World War One. (Except perhaps for one country, which still remains mired in the Cold War and a stubborn official provincialism: Britain. The Dutch feel sorry for Britain: declining, dirty, brutalized, violent and full of homeless--far too much, in short, like their too-close friends, the Americans.)
My Italian acquaintance introduces me to her mother, who is a passionate devotee of Shirley MacLaine. Mom wears an Iranian gold bracelet the size of rappers' jewelry, a diamond-studded knuckleduster. Her husband, the Iranian emigre', is an architect. His family was close to the Shah, and is now a scattered Moslem hejira in a dozen Western capitals, plotting vengeance in desultory fashion, like so many White Russians in 1929. They may have a long wait. Father looks rather tired.
Off the plane, jet-lagged to hell and gone, in Amsterdam. A volunteer for the Image and Sound Festival drives me to The Hague in a very small car on a very large autobahn. Windmills here and there. Days later I inspect a windmill closely, a multistory preindustrial power-station of sailwork, levers, gears and thatch. An incarnation of a late-medieval tech that America simply never possessed. A somehow monstrous presence fit to scare the hauberk off Don Quixote.