Читать книгу A Physician on the Nile - ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī - Страница 12

With the authorʼs historical and intellectual background in mind, it is now time to look at his book with fresh eyes.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs preface is, admittedly, high-flown. Professor White, no doubt with a sniff about “Oriental hyperbole”—perhaps with a brow wrinkled by the difficulty of translating some of its phrases—omitted it from both his editions (of 1789 and 1800). But you have to write high when your dedicatee is the caliph. Besides, the preface prepares the ground for that pyramid of history, the great transparent structure (though more Louvre than Giza) which both contains the book and illuminates it.

Once past the preface, however, ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs prose is mostly low-flown, and nearly always perfectly lucid. In addition to his other interests, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf was a scholar of Arabic and the author of works on grammar, syntax, and rhetoric. That does not always guarantee lucidity, but he also had an organized mind: a close look at the manuscript reveals, for example, that the four benefits of preserving ancient monuments (§1.4.57) are numbered above the line ا‎, ب‎, ج‎, د, the equivalent of a, b, c, d. And ʿAbd al-Laṭīf uses four distinct punctuation marks, plus carets to indicate the placing of inserted matter; his paragraphing may be sporadic, but it is a help.

Just occasionally, ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs language can be obscure, as if the shadow of his words cannot quite keep up with the firelight of his ideas. Sometimes he is willfully technical, as when his eye tracks slowly and in great detail—and in a crescendo of anatomical terms—down the torso of a colossus (§1.4.42). But sometimes, too, he can be sublime, as in his microcosmic glimpse of creation, which begins in “the internal parts and cavities of living beings” and ends in a hymn of praise to their Maker (§§1.4.51–53). It is at points like this that his prose is briefly transcendent. If there is anything in English remotely like it, it is perhaps only the writing of the seventeenth-century physician–metaphysician–antiquarian Sir Thomas Browne, another close observer of the natural world and debunker of misconceptions, who, like ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, transports the reader from pharaohs and pyramids to “the extasie of being ever.”⁴²

And then, in the second part of the book, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf takes us from earthly wonders and heavenly sublimity to Pharaohʼs Pickle Bowl, that pit of hell. As Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah noted, it was enough to turn oneʼs brain.⁴³ Even six and a half centuries later, minds were still being blown; near the end of a two-page note on historical accounts of cannibalism, Sir Henry Yule, who was Victorian but no prude, wrote, “Probably, however, nothing of the kind in history equals what Abdallatif, a sober and scientific physician, describes as having occurred before his own eyes . . . . The horrid details fill a chapter of some length, and we need not quote from them.”⁴⁴ It is one of the most disturbing things ever written. Even today, in an age desensitized by the moving image—by footage of emaciated fellow-humans and mass graves from Dachau to Ethiopia, from Cambodia to Srebrenica—ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs mere words still shock.

Alberto Manguel has justly said that “books merely allow us to remember what we have never suffered and have never known. The suffering itself belongs only to the victims. Every reader is, in this sense, an outsider.”⁴⁵ Except that the deliberate plainness of the telling, not just a coolness but a cold-bloodedness, makes ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs account unusually immediate. Even eight centuries are not a comfortable distance. We are not outsiders: these are human beings like us, and we are watching them, in close-up, doing terrible things to each other. We find ourselves “eye to eye with the heads of five small children, stewed in a single pot with high-grade spices” (§2.2.18). By subtitling the book “an eyewitness account,” ʿAbd al-Laṭīf is saying: not only have you been challenged to look with the author; you have also been warned.

But if the reportage of the second part (the “Admonition”) is ruthless, it is not voyeuristic. When we read in Sacyʼs translation of “détestable barbarie,”⁴⁶ the phrase jumps out as an interpolation. The Arabic says, simply, “the habit” (i.e., of cannibalism; W§2.2.8). And, strangely, the detachment, the deliberate lack of moral judgement, the avoidance of sensational adjectives, all affirm the humanity not only of the observer but also of the victims (and where hunger drives men and women mad, the perpetrators are themselves also victims, of a monstrous, gnawing necessity). Given this humanity under the harrow, perhaps most shocking of all are not the actual scenes of cannibalism, but the two instances when its perpetrators are said to have lost that last link with us—their human nature (§§2.2.7, 2.2.14).⁴⁷

Surprisingly, perhaps, where there is humanity there is also comedy, even among the horror. The humor is black, inevitably: but it is hard not to smile at the tale of the third doctor and his precipitous exit, jellified, from a window (§2.2.10). That said, one smiles as much from relief as amusement. And, in any case, well-written comedy is a deadly serious matter.

It is all the stuff of nightmares; but it had to be written down for there to be any hope of redemption. To quote Alberto Manguel again, “an inspired writer can tell the unspeakable and lend a shape to the unthinkable, so that evil loses some of its numinous quality and stands reduced to a few memorable words.”⁴⁸ Or, to return again to ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs own simile, quoted as the epigraph to this book, when you walk on a dark night with the torch of knowledge, you will reveal the horror that lies hidden—but you will also cast out the darkness that hides it.

*

No other writer described the famine so unflinchingly. There are brief confirmations that it took place, for example in al-Maqrīzī (d. 845/1442), as we shall see below, and in other slightly later chroniclers of Egypt, such as Ibn Taghrībirdī (d. 874/1470).⁴⁹ But no one else dwells on it; no other writer was so close to it and, besides, history seldom cares about the fuqarāʾ, the “paupers”—the seventh and last class of society⁵⁰ and the principal victims. (Donning my historianʼs hat, I admit that it is easy to ignore them. I am writing this in the middle of war and famine. The war I canʼt ignore: things go bang, my house shakes, my windows shatter, people whom I know are killed. The famine I might not notice. Hunger is a quiet murderer; one does not know the sort of people whom it kills.)

For the most poignant evidence in support of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs record, we have to look beyond official accounts—to the Geniza, the sprawling collection of ephemera from the ancient synagogue of Old Cairo and the most precious wastepaper basket in history. Shlomo Dov Goitein, who devoted himself to studying the documents, estimates that over half of the Jewish population in Old Cairo was wiped out in the famine.⁵¹ Even before the worst of it had struck, a letter found in the Geniza, written near the beginning of 597/in the fall of 1200 from a seemingly well-off Jewish Alexandrian to a friend in the capital, already sounded desperate:

Alexandria is in great trouble . . . . People eat up one another. This catastrophe came upon the population quite suddenly, may God grant relief in his mercy. [I] was able to purchase only three irdabbs [of wheat] and most of it has already been consumed. May I ask you to get the wheat under all circumstances. Your servant is [like one] of your family. May I never miss you.⁵²

*

How do all these apparently ill-assorted bits of the book fit together—flora and pharaonica, picnic pies and cannibalism? Of course, in Egypt, the Nile links time and geography together: ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs detailed description of the river and its habits provides the transition from the immutable Egypt of Part One into the chaotic present of Part Two. But ʿAbd al-Laṭīf also stitches his material together in subtler ways. For example, peering closely at a hillock of ancient human remains at al-Maqs, he finds that “the quantity of earth in it was almost less than the quantity of the dead” (§2.3.26). A couple of pages on, speaking of the remains of the famine victims around the Pickle Bowl, he notes that “the dead had taken over the hillocks hereabouts so completely that they . . . almost exceeded in quantity the dust of those hummocks” (§2.3.33). The unstated message is this: that what took millennia to happen at the first place happened at the second place in months. What is more, those recent dead have decayed at an untimely rate: the ancient corpses “looked better preserved than the remains of the people who perished in the year 597 [1200–1]” (§1.4.71). The past is embalmed; the present rots.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, as both an observer of current events—of history in the raw—and as a historian, knows that time flows in different ways: sometimes deep and slow, sometimes in cataracts. Like the fourth/tenth-century poet, al-Mutanabbī (and for that matter the fourteenth/twentieth-century traveler Dean Moriarty, of Kerouacʼs On the Road), ʿAbd al-Laṭīf can say, “I have come to know all about time.”⁵³

But something else holds it all together, and that is ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs sweeping gaze, which pans from al-tharā to al-thurayyā—to use the proverbial Arabic poles of reference—from the earth to the Pleiades, from dust to stardust; or, to use two of his own extremes, from the fug and dung of chicken factories to the highest esthetics of pharaonic sculpture. The panoptic view swings, as ever, between his own two poles of reference: Aristotle, for whom nothing in creation is too “ignoble” to be contemplated and analyzed (§1.4.50), and God, “Whose unity is affirmed in [His creationʼs] plurality” (§1.4.53).

That last phrase is what gives order to ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs apparent eclecticism: by looking at the many, we might catch a glimpse of the One. The looking, like the writing, is an act of faith.