Читать книгу A Physician on the Nile - ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī - Страница 13

The biography of ʿAbd al-Laṭīf by Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿah states that he finished writing this book in Jerusalem on 10 Shaʿban 603/12 March 1207.⁵⁴ The manuscript copy that we have—the only one known to exist—is, however, dated Ramadan 600/May 1204. It is thus a work in progress. (Sometimes ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs works could take a long time to progress: a treatise on palm trees, begun in Egypt in 599/1202–3, was only given its final polishing twenty-six years later in Erzincan.⁵⁵) It also bears the marks of an evolving text: marginalia as well as interlinear inserts and alternatives.

The markings look like live authorial intervention. As I read the manuscript, I feel that I am looking over ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs shoulder not only as he writes, but as he thinks. I am, of course, making an assumption—that it is in his hand, and not that of a scribe. And there, at the very end, it declares that it was indeed “written in the hand of its author . . .” (§2.3.41); except that next to the phrase, in the margin, is a note, qūbila, “checked”—that is, against an earlier copy. The word raised doubts in the minds of my predecessors White, Paulus, and Silvestre de Sacy, as to whether the manuscript is actually in ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs hand.⁵⁶ For them, it was the sort of comment a professional copyist would add, transcribing from a master copy (including, dutifully, the colophon that says the author wrote it himself). And yet there is nothing in the sense of that word, “checked, collated,” to suggest why a busy author like ʿAbd al-Laṭīf should not write it as a note to himself. All it implies is that an earlier draft had been made, and that the present copy had been compared with that earlier version. There was as yet no “master” for a professional copyist to reproduce.

It is certainly possible that ʿAbd al-Laṭīf had an amanuensis who made this fair (but not final) copy of an earlier draft. But one piece of evidence seems to prove that the manuscript is an autograph (that is, in the authorʼs hand): another manuscript, preserved in Bursa, containing a collection of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs treatises, annotated with corrections. S.M. Stern, who studied the Bursa manuscript carefully, was absolutely certain that the annotations are ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs own,⁵⁷ and they do seem to be by the same writer as this book. Stern himself had no doubts.

I will maintain a little scientific caution. As ʿAbd al-Laṭīf himself admitted, while analyzing not script but skeletons: “I am not . . . certain” (§2.3.32). Nevertheless, I feel that, in our manuscript, another triangle is complete—one made by the witnessing eye, analyzing mind, and recording hand.

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The fate of any other copies that might have existed is unknown. If a finished version did ever make it to the caliph in Baghdad, then almost certainly, like the other books in the caliphal library, “it was lost with those books which Hulagu, the ruler of the Tatars [the Mongols], threw into the Tigris.”⁵⁸ All we can do is look for the “specter” of the elusive text as it haunts other works that do survive.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs book may, for example, have inspired a short passage on the famine that mentions the kidnapping of physicians visiting the sick (the jellified doctor mentioned above was one who got away). This passage appears in more than one seventh/thirteenth-century history.⁵⁹ More notably, al-Maqrīzīʼs short study of famines in Egypt, from the past up to his own day (the early ninth/fifteenth century), includes information given in ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs account.⁶⁰ Not only are the tales of cannibalism briefly confirmed; specific details also crop up again, such as the execution by burning of thirty women (cf. §2.2.7), and the price of a bull for plowing rising to seventy dinars (cf. §2.2.33).

Other data given by al-Maqrīzī are different, however. The price of a measure of wheat is said to have reached eight dinars, while ʿAbd al-Laṭīf (§2.2.35) says five, and the sultan to have contributed to the costs of 220,000 funerals, rather than ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs 111,000 (§2.3.9). But perhaps most significantly, the present book is mentioned by title neither in this treatise, nor in the same authorʼs huge descriptive work on Egypt, usually known as Al-Maqrīzīʼs City Quarters (al-Khiṭaṭ al-Maqrīziyyah). The latter, often referred to in my endnotes, sums up most of what had been written in Arabic on Egypt, and preserves much that would have been lost. It is not remiss about naming its sources; it cites ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs autobiography several times, and includes four generations of ancestors when giving his name.⁶¹ On this book, however—and, for that matter, on the lost longer book on Egypt that ʿAbd al-Laṭīf wrote—it is silent.

Not much can be deduced from all this, except to say that the sort of stories ʿAbd al-Laṭīf tells, and even some of the detailed information he records, were doing the rounds in the centuries after he wrote this account. Then again, the material would almost certainly have been public knowledge, and not just confined to his pages. That defenestrated doctor is the stuff of urban anecdote.

We do, however, have some definite sightings of this present book in someone elseʼs work—a case not just of reading and recycling, but of plunder and plagiarism. The unacknowledged borrowings were made by Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī (649–730/1251–1330), a scholar and bibliophile originally from Palestine who moved to Egypt.⁶² In his Marvels of Architecture (Kitāb ʿAjāʾib al-bunyān), he uses quite substantial passages of ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs material on the Sphinx and the pyramids almost verbatim, merely tweaking phrases; for example, ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs “I asked” becomes an impersonal “it was asked.”⁶³ The Marvels of Architecture seems also to be lost (one is tempted to say, Serves it right), but a number of passages, including these borrowings, are preserved by al-Maqrīzī. The latter attributed them to Shāfiʿ ibn ʿAlī, and was clearly unaware of their ultimate origin.

It seems likely, therefore, that ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs two works on Egypt—the present book, and the longer one to which he often refers—had either slipped out of circulation at some point in the seventh to eighth/thirteenth to fourteenth centuries; or, perhaps, that they had never been circulated. We are extremely fortunate that this single known manuscript has survived.

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The manuscript was to have an eventful history. After ʿAbd al-Laṭīfʼs death, his books, presumably including this one, were sold in Aleppo.⁶⁴ That seems to be where it stayed, surviving the Mongol sacks by Hulagu (fresh from his Baghdad blood- and book-bath) in the seventh/thirteenth century, and by Timur at the end of the following century. At any rate, Aleppo was where it came to light again, more than two hundred years after Timur, when it was bought by the Arabist Edward Pococke, chaplain to the English “Turkey Merchants” in that city. Appointed first Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford University, Pococke took ʿAbd al-Laṭīf to England in 1636, together with the many other manuscripts he had collected. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf himself might not have disapproved: it was, after all, only another case of knowledge moving “from nation to nation and from land to land.”⁶⁵

Once in England, however, the manuscript seemed to fall under a curse.⁶⁶ According to one account, Pococke eventually began work late in life on a printed edition, but an “omnipotent” bishop commandeered the Arabic fonts at the University Press for another project, “which so vexed the good old man, Dr Pocock [sic], yt he could never be prevailʼd to go any further.”⁶⁷ It seems likelier, though, that Pococke was simply too busy to work on the manuscript (he was Professor of Hebrew as well as of Arabic) and that it was the good old manʼs son, Edward Pococke the Younger, who had started work on the printed version, as well as on a Latin translation. In this version of events, it was the son who abandoned the printing on his fatherʼs death in 1691. The younger man had expected to inherit his fatherʼs Hebrew professorship; it went to another candidate, and he pulled the work (titled Abdollatiphi Historiæ Ægypti Compendium) from the press “upon a disgust at his being disappointed.”⁶⁸

For most of the following century, the manuscript had no better luck. Thomas Hyde, the second Laudian Professor of Arabic, began his own Latin version and commentary, and even planned plates; he died in 1703, mid-project. In 1746, another incumbent of the Laudian chair, Thomas Hunt, decided to have a go, and advertised for subscribers: a total of two signed up, and the project was abandoned again. Yet another Laudian Professor, Joseph White, worked on an Arabic edition in the 1780s. At last, all seemed to go smoothly—until, when it was at proof stage, the curse struck again: White had last-minute reservations (apparently about the bookʼs typography rather than its contents), and decided not to release it.

No one, it seemed, would be edified or admonished. But then the bookʼs fortunes took a turn for the better. A German colleague, H.E.G. Paulus, persuaded White to let him publish the already typeset text (Abdollatiphi Compendium Memorabilium Aegypti) in Tübingen in 1789; from this, a rushed German translation was made by S.F.G. Wahl (Abd-allatif’s, eines arabischen Arztes: Denkwürdigkeiten Egyptens). White later brought out an updated Arabic version in Oxford in 1800, with a Latin translation on facing pages.⁶⁹ But the curse had not quite run its course. White meant to do an English translation, entitled Aegyptiaca, but only an introductory volume ever came out.⁷⁰

It took the greatest Arabist of the age to scotch the lingering ill luck. Silvestre de Sacyʼs annotated French translation, Relation de l’Égypte, is a tour de force; it was a product of the golden age of French Egyptology, itself inspired by Napoleonʼs invasion of Egypt in 1798. (Napoleon, the dedicatee of the volume, would raise Sacy to a barony.) The translation itself is sometimes rather loose and, as we have seen, inclined to make interpolations that are as judgmental as they are explanatory. Any shortcomings, though, are more than made up for by Sacyʼs notes. They are monumentally copious: the gloss on the labakh tree, for example, is a full twenty-five pages long—and it still canʼt decide exactly what a labakh was (and neither can I).⁷¹

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, however, would still have to wait another century and a half to become known to an anglophone readership. The English translation by Judge K. Hafuth Zand and Mr. and Mrs. John A. Videan, published as The Eastern Key in 1965, often follows the French master with poodle-like loyalty; it does sometimes slip the leash and correct an error in Sacyʼs version,⁷² but is more likely to bark up the wrong tree.⁷³ In diametric opposition to Sacy, however, the commentary is almost non-existent. There is, however, one extraordinary aspect to The Eastern Key, unparalleled in the history of translation and confirming Robert Irwinʼs view that “translation is like a séance with the dead.”⁷⁴ For Zand and the Videans, it was literally a séance with the dead.

The West in the early twentieth century had seen a growth in the popularity of spiritualism, the idea that it is possible to communicate with departed souls. The trend accelerated with the Great War, and the resulting massive loss of human life—and of traditional faith. It was around this time that ʿAbd al-Laṭīf became known in spiritualist as well as Orientalist circles; he was even the subject of a book entitled Healing Through the Spirit Agency: by the great Persian [sic] physician Abduhl Latif, “the man of Baghdad”, and information concerning the life hereafter of the deepest interest to all inquirers and students of psychic phenomena.⁷⁵ He was—perhaps still is—regarded as “a Universal Master who leads and directs a band of workers on and around the earth.”⁷⁶ Here is Ivy E. Videan, in cold print, in her introduction to The Eastern Key:

Our first meeting with ʿAbd al-Laṫīf was in August, 1957, when he spoke to my husband and to me during a conversation with a sensitive, Mrs. Ray Welch, in London. Since then we have had very many long talks with him, through Mrs. Welch and also through Mr. Jim Hutchings. It was not unexpected, therefore, that he should tell us in 1960 that he wished my husband to make a photographic copy of the Bodleian manuscript of the Kitāb al-ifādah for presentation to the British Museum in London, where it would be more easily accessible to a wider public. ʿAbd al-Laṫīf promised to prepare the way for the accomplishment of this plan, adding later that he would send a translator from Baghdad.⁷⁷

That translator—Mr. Zand—was necessary to the undertaking, as the Videans do not appear to have actually known the language of the original (not necessarily an impediment: think, for one, of Proust translating Ruskin). Just as necessary was M. le baron Silvestre de Sacy, though it seems he did not intervene from beyond the grave. ʿAbd al-Laṭīf, however, was involved in the project throughout. It all makes Madam Arcati and Blithe Spirit seem frightfully low-brow.

I boast no endnotes credited to “al-Baghdādī, personal communication.” That said, there are moments, when you live and work closely with a text, in which the present is revealed for what it is—merely the latest layer in a mound of lives. At such times there is no absolute past or present; only continuum.⁷⁸

In the end, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf needs no medium other than his own words. He comes across from the other side loud and clear, a man of sturdy opinions and lively enthusiasms. He is no feeble ectoplasm, but an enlightened soul if ever there was one, a firebrand on a dark night.

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Can ʿAbd al-Laṭīf illuminate anything for us today, and for readers to come? We know a lot more about the Egyptian past than he could have done. “The ancient characters that no one understands,” (§1.4.13)—the hieroglyphic ones—are now an open book; mummies, subjected to the indignity of magnetic resonance scanners, have revealed their inmost secrets. But, as well as his meditations on the ancient dead and their monuments, ʿAbd al-Laṭīf also records the deeds and voices of the latter-day dead, those hungry ghosts. Both he, the doctor, and they, the sufferers, bear witness: to the need to think historically about the future as much as the past, for prognosis as much as diagnosis.

ʿAbd al-Laṭīf described an Egypt that had gone awry. It was not only the Nile that was behaving strangely; the book draws to a close with a series of ominous happenings, both major (epidemic disease, earthquake) and minor (a dignified gentleman runs amok, a baby is born with two heads). Just as crisis had become a “natural temperament” (§2.3.2), so the temperament of nature itself seemed unbalanced.

We live in a time when the temperament not just of a river and a land, but of the entire global climate, is increasingly unbalanced; when epidemic becomes pandemic in a few short months. Only rarely do we have the evidence of the past to warn us of what happens when things go out of kilter; historians are so often deaf to the poor, the usual victims of catastrophe, that we seldom hear the most urgent warnings, let alone heed them. So when the past speaks, as it does here, in the voices of the victims, we should listen—and then the dead who people these pages may not have died in vain.