Читать книгу A Physician on the Nile - ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī - Страница 10

Other than the lost larger book about Egypt and his own memoirs, none of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs titles deals overtly with history, whether ancient or recent. At the same time, the context of events past and current shaped not only his life, as we have seen, but also gave a structure to this book. We should examine that context a little more closely.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf came from a great city fallen on hard times. The traveler Ibn Jubayr, visiting Baghdad in 580/1184 when the young ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was still pursuing his studies there, was underwhelmed: “Of this ancient city, even if it remains the seat of the Abbasid caliphate . . . most of the traces are gone, and nothing of it remains but its famous name.”²⁰ A few years later, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf forsook this hollow heart of Islamic civilization and, as we have seen, placed himself at the new center of events, the lands ruled by Saladin. His timing, though, was off. Within only a few years, Saladin was dead, and the Ayyubid center itself suddenly looked less solid. “The sons of Saladin,” one commentator says, “were incapable of doing anything but amuse themselves or wrangle among themselves.”²¹ As a contemporary—ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs first patron and Saladinʼs confidant, al-Qāḍī al-Fāḍil—described this stage of the Ayyubidsʼ history, “they had united and flourished, but then disunited and perished.”²² The commotion at the Ayyubid center—Egypt and the Levant, the pivot between Mashriq and Maghrib, the East and West of the Arabic-Islamic world—did keep ʿAbd al-Laṭīf in pocket and on his toes, as he moved around in search of patrons. It did not supply much spiritual stability.

In compensation, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf looked back to al-Nāṣir (r. 575–622/1180–1225), the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. The caliphate had long ceased to wield its old physical power; but the institution had a rich residue of spiritual and moral force, and—especially when viewed from amid the undignified wranglings of Ayyubid princes—al-Nāṣirʼs office was hallowed by time and tradition. After all, he had 450 years of dynastic history behind him; the Ayyubid family tree looked as if it might wither in the second generation. Moreover, al-Nāṣir had sensed that the time was ripe for an Abbasid revival, and—blessed by the longest reign of any of the Baghdad caliphs—had begun to re-establish himself as both the spiritual cynosure of Sunni Islam, and the recognized mediator between the human and the divine. This is the foundation of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs preface (§§0.2–0.3), the basis on which this book is built. Elsewhere, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was more specific about the caliphateʼs reinvigorated role, following centuries of decline: al-Nāṣir, he says, “filled hearts with that awe of the caliphate that had died with the death of al-Muʿtaṣim”²³—that is, in 227/842, over a third of a millennium earlier.

In practice, then, although the caliph was short on military might, he was armed with “awe”—moral might, and spiritual mana. And if he could not impose rule by arms, he could at least enjoy a control of sorts through intelligence. Thus ʿAbd al-Laṭīf says in his preface, “My aim in offering him this book is that no news of his territories, however remote, should be concealed from the sublime corpus of his knowledge, and that nothing be hidden from him regarding the conditions of his subjects, however distant” (§0.2). Along with the overt, there was also clandestine intelligence-gathering. Al-Nāṣir had spies operating throughout his nominal realm,²⁴ and was even said to have monopolized the swiftest channels of communication, by ordering the extermination of all carrier pigeons other than his own.²⁵

In short, then, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, by observing Egypt, was serving the caliph—and, since the caliph mediated with the divine, he was also, by extension, serving God. This book is thus an act of faith.²⁶

But its preface provides the basis for something else, too. Moderate though the book is in size, it contains (or perhaps is contained within) a model of history on the grand scale. We read on the opening page that the Abbasid caliph al-Nāṣir is “supreme governor of the people of the world by the exercise among them of the commands and prohibitions of God the Exalted” (§0.2). Well, perhaps in theory, in Sunni thinking; but the thinking had been wishful at best for centuries. Later, however, ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs centerpiece chapter on monuments builds up to a conclusion which, if it cannot give substance to the wish, at least gives it striking and elegant form (§1.4.77, emphasis added):

You must . . . be aware that the Copts in Egypt are the counterparts of the Nabataeans in Iraq, that Memphis is the counterpart of Babylon, and that the Romans and the Caesars in Egypt are the counterparts of the Persians and the Kisrās [the Sasanid Persian emperors] in Iraq; also that Alexandria is the counterpart of al-Madāʾin [the old Persian capital], and Fustat [the first Arab capital of Egypt] that of Baghdad. Today, all these peoples and places come under the aegis of Islam, and are embraced by the mission of the Abbasid caliphate.

Those few lines are a reduction of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs historical and political thinking—a scale model, in effect, of a pyramid. Just as a pyramid is “a tapering form that rises from a square base and culminates at a point . . . . Its center of gravity lies at its midpoint . . .” (§1.4.7), so too does that vast basis of pasts, places, and peoples—Pharaonic, Babylonian, Hellenistic, Persian, Roman—taper upwards through time to culminate in “today,” Islam, and the Abbasid caliph. By squaring the Egyptian past with the Mesopotamian, then by triangulating those pasts with the present, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf pyramidizes history: time and space, history and geography, cultures and empires are all consummated at one point—now—and placed at the Abbasid apex and center of gravity. For ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, al-Nāṣir, controling his virtual realm through the eyes of his spies and the observations of ʿAbd al-Laṭīf himself, was like the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid on the United States one-dollar bill.

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It was only a hologram of power. And the lovingly projected structure was fated to collapse within a generation of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs death. Already—but in the late sixth to early seventh/early thirteenth century as yet unseen, even from the caliphʼs lofty viewpoint—the might of the Mongols was building, 4,500 miles to the east. In time, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf himself was to feel the thunder of their approach: hearing news of the Mongolsʼ first depredations in the lands of Islam, he called it “a tale to devour all tales, an account that rolls into oblivion all accounts, a history to make one forget all histories.”²⁷ Though he would not live to see their devastation, in 656/1258, of his native city and of his beautiful, monumental Abbasid history, one senses from those words that he felt it coming. Prescient also was his feeling that, even if al-Nāṣir had “filled peopleʼs hearts with that awe of the caliphate that had died with the death of al-Muʿtaṣim,” yet, as he continues, “the awe died once more with al-Nāṣir.”²⁸

But ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was also part of another, more durable history.