Ibn Zuraiq Al-Baghdadi: A Passenger of Time

By Ahmad Al Dosari

In fact, that night, I could not sleep a wink. I imagined Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Zuraiq al-Baghdadi's last night, sleeping restlessly until he took his last breath, beaten by despair, sorrow, homesickness, regret, and while reciting his only lines of poetry. That night, I was about to take my last breath too. Two souls passing away! The travelers would return to Baghdad with the news that my soul followed Ibn Zuraiq's soul in the same inn, inside the same room, on the second floor, in glamorous Cordoba. Yet the inn was a bad omen for everyone who came to it from the East! The news of my death shall reach the minister, who will inform the caliph. The latter will give orders to crucify meI mean crucifying my memory, because I never came back with the definite truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: May 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514494899

Ahmad Al Dosari

Ahmad Al Dosari is a Bahraini poet and novelist. He published many collections of poetry, novels, and literary studies. He has a PhD in literature and philosophy from University of Geneva. He has translated different books from French to Arabic. He is the author of 'Ibn Sina (Avicenna) Opera', the first opera written in Arabic. It was performed in Doha on the largest open theatre in the whole world. 'Ibn Sina Opera' was performed in Arabic and English by the best operatic worldwide. His novel Ibn Zuraiq Al-Baghdadi: A Passenger of Time was widely received when it was first published. Many critics admired it for being a classical historical novel and a romance. Several editions of the novel were reprinted. Dr Al Dosari presented many lectures in different universities. In Cairo, he participated in a poetic musical evening event with the Arab musician Ahmad Mukhtar. The event had the title of Al Dosari's famous novel The Sparrows of the Ancient. His novels, such as Ibn Zuraiq, The Sparrows of the Ancient, An Ordinary Man, No Free Zone, and Leukemia, carefully depict the human dimensions of the characters and gradually portray the concept of human existence. His condensed narrative discourse endows the novels with unlimited poetic richness. The setting in his novels swings between realism and imagination which makes them unique and definitely preeminent.

Book preview

(1)

It is 471 AH. It has been more than fifty years since Ibn Zuraiq passed away. I am only an insignificant clerk at the diwan (the Council of Books) of the state’s minister (al-Wazir) may Allah support his efforts. I have been travelling from one country to another since the caliph- may he prosper and live long- appointed a special mission to Mawlay,¹ the minister, who, in his turn, assigned it to me.

I have crossed Iraq, the Levant, Egypt, and Africa until I reached Andalusia, seeking the truth. What a truth! The minister had implicated me in this tough task. First, the truth of the death of Ibn Zuraiq had broken my heart. I reached Cordoba in Andalusia, the most beautiful city and, ironically speaking, the place which witnessed the tragedy of Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Zuraiq, may God bless his soul. I stopped by the inn (khan) where, it was said, he lived and spent his last days before he was found dead by the guards of Prince Abu Abd al-Rahman.

Under his pillow, they found this poem which had become my curse. I left my family three years ago and I am prohibited from returning to Baghdad before I find out the truth or else the caliph would be furious. If he is so, my family shall never see me again. The caliph’s anger is equal to God’s. However, if God is mad at me, everybody would know that I ended up in hell. But if the caliph was angry with me, nobody would know my place or what happened to me. Today, I return to Baghdad secretly. Baghdad, my paradise which I will risk entering during the last hours of the night. Then, I will head for the Chosroes Hall Arch,² under which lies the last hope that would save me of the fatal outcome of this task which is similar to a military mission. It is so much like the mission of the famous leader Moses Bin Nusair.³ What would I tell you? The more I find out about Abu al-Hasan, the closer I am to my doomed destiny: o get lost in the deserts of oblivion. I have never seen or heard a story more odd, more painful and tragic than his. I have written down every single word I heard from people around: princes and vile people, thieves and bandits, pious and devoted worshippers, merchants and poets, everything. I have even written down every colour and smell of the air in Cordoba, the pearl of the world and the obelisk of all sciences. I counted Ibn Zuraiq’s steps which appeared to me like a mirage or at least that was how I imagined them and I tried to follow them as a lunatic!

I have interrogated the owner of the inn (the Khan) in Cordoba but it was useless. I interrogated him day after day, an hour after another, a whisper following the other! I even searched every corner of the inn. The owner of the inn insisted that he knew nothing about Ibn Zuraiq. He told me that his father bought the place from the previous female owner before she passed away. He added that he knew no one who had known her. All he knew about the death of Ibn Zuraiq was that his room, where he took his last breath, was on the second floor. Nevertheless, he was not sure if that story was true. Was it merely a jumbled version of a dream? Reluctantly, he walked me to the room. He walked sluggishly as someone whose head would be cut off with a sword in a few minutes! A Christian student who came to study Arabic was staying there. I begged him to leave the room for me but he refused while looking at me suspiciously. Maybe some apprehension grew inside him due to the fact that I looked terrible because I was travelling for a long time. I tipped the owner, Abu Abdel Allah al-A’raj, two golden dinars. I guess ‘Al-A’raj’ or ‘the lame’ was his nickname for he was actually lame. He managed an agreement which was satisfactory for the student with the gingery hair. We exchanged rooms for one night. While he slept soundly and comfortably in my room, I couldn’t sleep in his.

In fact, that night, I could not sleep a wink. I imagined Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Zuraiq al-Baghdadi’s last night, sleeping restlessly until he took his last breath beaten by despair, sorrow, homesickness, regret, and while reciting his only lines of poetry. That night, I was about to take my last breath too. Two souls were passing away! The travellers would return to Baghdad with the news that my soul followed Ibn Zuraiq’s soul in the same inn, inside the same room, on the second floor, in glamorous Cordoba. Yet, the inn was a bad omen for everyone who came to it from the East! The news of my death shall reach the minister, who will inform the caliph. The latter will give orders to crucify me; I mean crucifying my memory because I never came back with the definite truth which would have relieved his tortured spirit. I never returned with a story from the farthest land and brought it to him on a camel’s back. But my family would have a funeral and my wife would probably die out of grief, though I doubted that! Months later, I would become a riddle of evil consequences after I was nothing but a piece of news, then an imaginary character invented by travellers and caravans to pass time, an addition to the story of Ibn Zuraiq. Consequently, after I had travelled all over the world to prove that Ibn Zuraiq actually existed, we both disappeared as if we never existed in this world or in history. Strangely enough, I became an illusion, a real illusion, just like him!

Oh, dear God!

That night, I swear, I was about to transform into an illusion of flesh and blood, of a funeral where my body would be buried in a foreign land without my family or someone to weep for me!

I could imagine Ibn Zuraiq so lonely suffering death caused by the pain of alienation and the great distance that separated Cordoba from Baghdad. I could imagine him writing the most wonderful poem about love, homesickness, and alienation I had ever heard. He had no companion, human or jinn. Oh, God! Alienation is painful! Twice, during that night when my soul let me down, I was about to leave that room and run away but I was embarrassed and I thought that I would be disgraced in front of the lodgers, the owner of the inn, and the Christian student who came to that land to learn our language. In the morning, while my eyes bulged because of the darkness of the previous night, he told me that he was from Hungary. The moment it was time for dawn prayer, I hurried to the Big Mosque and prayed. My soul was calm then. I stood in front of the pulpit of the mosque, reciting verses from the Holy Qur’an. It was the most beautiful pulpit in the whole world. It was as sweet as a rainy cloud. It was made of a thousand pieces of ivory and unique perfumed wood such as ebony, sandalwood, and agarwood.⁴ All were adorned with jewels. The nails which fixed the pulpit were made of gold and silver. At first, I was distracted by the amazing embellishments but soon I felt great tranquility among such wealth and luxury blessed with prayers. I contemplated the most beautiful mosque on earth and one of the wonders of the world, enjoying its magic, the ceiling and walls with verses from the Holy Qur’an engraved on them. The ceiling and walls were decorated with different embellishments enclosed inside frames, or with mosaic frescoes or glass-enamelled frescoes, or others studded with silver and gold. Numerous miniatures and columns-which I could not count and were made of marble, alabaster, and jasper-were all decorated with crowns of old civilizations that worshiped everything until they realized the existence of God. Anyone who came to pray here would think that he was in the middle of a forest of eternal ages that never came to an end; he would feel immortal himself. I felt I was in heaven rather than on earth and I admired particularly the magical voice of the muezzin.⁵ I wanted to salute him when the prayer was over; nevertheless, one of the men inside the mosque, who introduced himself as Ali Bin Husaisa from Seville, told me that I should not bother because the muezzin had already left. The latter was Jewish and his name was Ezra. He added that he never prayed with them; he only called for the prayer with his beautiful voice five times a day in Cordoba Mosque then he disappeared.

Life is wondrous! The story of this Jewish muezzin who called for the prayer of Muslims was one of the wonders of Andalusia. I went out to the mosque’s patio known as the yard of oranges. I could smell the scent of oranges mixed with the fragrance of homesickness. There, I had the feeling that I had a glance of Ibn Zuraiq’s spirit in one of the corners. It was as if his soul descended through the minaret, the like of which I had never seen before. It seemed to me as a mediator between us and heaven. That was the wonder of this world. It was twenty-three metres high. The silky chillness of the dawn overwhelmed me. The mosque was lit by many chandeliers which carried seven thousand lanterns filled with perfumed oil, a scene I had never seen before. In that particular moment my soul was lit by seven thousand lanterns from Baghdad. I waited until beams of the dawn washed my clothes. In that keen morning, waiting had the aromatic smell of Seville oranges when the beams of the sun stole the show while they were reflected on the mosaic. It was reported that the Byzantine Caesar sent the mosaic to Caliph al-Hakam al-Mustanser Ibn al-Naser. My soul felt great serenity that I wished to sleep in the oranges’ patio-that place which had needed two centuries to construct it-and forgot who I was.

However, I did not ascend to heaven. I returned to my tortured soul on earth. I imagined myself, like Abu al-Hassan, passing away in a foreign land. They would find my body days later after it had rotted! People would complain of the smell as they carried me to the cemetery. Even the gravedigger would regret his unpaid efforts which were wasted on an odd funeral of an anonymous person. A stranger is the least valuable person in this life; his funeral is the cheapest too. His existence in life is even the most ascetic. I doubt that Ezra, the Jewish muezzin, would volunteer to call people to pray over my rotten body! No one would pray over my body; I wouldn’t even get an absentee funeral prayer!⁶

If Abu al-Hasan was famous because he met the amir, he was known to the guards, the entourage and the court, and under his pillow they found a leather patch, wet by the dew of his sleepless nights, on which this short poem⁷ was written and because of which I am here wandering between Egypt and Iraq, nobody would recognize me here, not even rabid dogs. They would dump my body in the nearest hole as something useless. That is all! No one would inquire about me. My wife and children would wait for my return till they passed away. No one would inform them about my death, which will be like the death of all the people whose countenance poverty has stolen.

Who would be interested in the death of Nobody?

I am not a poet. I am barely a writer. All I possess in this life is a short book with a silly title: Description of Dogs in Karkh and the Mess They Caused in Our Neighbourhood. There is a story behind the book. The story of the estate of dogs where I wrote my silly book goes like that: some old men told me about a man who lived in that estate and who reported about his father that when Abu Ja’far the caliph distributed the estates, that spot was given to no one. Too many dogs lived there so people called it the estate of dogs. Whenever I passed by that estate, the dogs barked, ran after me, and bit me. Every single inch of my body was bitten by the dogs. Today, my body is covered with tattoos engraved by their teeth! I wished to take revenge so I wrote this book in which I described in details the dogs’ conditions and diseases, especially the serious ones.

I wish I could describe my body the way Khalid Bin Walid, the Drawn Sword of God,⁸ described his: ‘I’ve fought in so many battles, a hundred or so, seeking martyrdom that there is no spot in my body left without a scar or a wound made by a spear, an arrow, or a sword. And yet here I am, dying on my bed like an old camel. May the eyes of the cowards never rest’. My body is nothing like the body of the Drawn Sword of God. I am travelling far away; I am helpless and expecting the worst!

By writing this poem, Abu al-Hasan -may God bless his soul- managed to avoid being forgotten. However, my destiny is to be totally forgotten. Indeed, this idea has terrified me. To die, absolutely lonely, in this remotest spot, in Cordoba… and where? In the same inn where Abu al-Hasan Ali Ibn Zuraiq al-Baghdadi died? And in his own bed where he took his last breath? The smell of death is still hanging in the air. Both of us became one person in alienation and loneliness, in death, its smell! Oh dear God! Have mercy on me! Abu al-Hasan, who died twice! The actual death which is everyone’s destiny, we are all equal in facing such fate and death in the sense that he did not exist. People denied that he once existed! They denied him that he died grieving for leaving his beloved cousin, his house, and his homeland. They even denied that he ever wrote this cursed poem! They reduced him to nothing but a story told by boys, courtesans, and slaves in assemblies of leisure and pleasure. What an injustice! Abu al-Hasan existed fully through his feelings of sorrow and pain. What would be harder than such destiny?

They envied him for his death and his grief which his poem dramatized. But, why am I sure that he actually existed? How come I am confident that he was a reality though in the past three years I could not find any evidence to prove his existence in time or place? I could not find any member of his family or anyone who lived in his house, or his beloved or even someone who knew him. Not even in the jumbled words of the owner of the inn -Abu Abd Allah the lame- was I able to find any evidence of Abu al-Hasan’s existence.

I don’t know!

However, someone who writes such a poem must have existed! Who would write such a poem and ascribe it to some stranger who would not reward him? Abu al-Hasan died a stranger, like Adam’s death on earth! If he never existed or never actually was part of this existence, what gain would that poet have by ascribing his poem to a stranger; an immortal great poem? Its sad and painful tone has rocked the throne of the caliph though only swords but rarely anguish would shake thrones. Consequently, the poem made me look for a needle in a haystack. Why didn’t that poet ascribe it to himself? How would he give away such an eternal piece? In exchange of what? We know that every poet has his own style. This poem is unique in its language and in all the pain and passion it reveals. It is nothing like the poems by any of the poets we know!

I accompanied the caravan heading for Baghdad and we stopped at a spot known as ‘Monastery of the Waiter’ (Dair Al-Saqi). I didn’t know why it was called so. I told the leader of the caravan, which was scattered on the vast land in front of the inn, as desert truffles, that I was going to the monastery. Since we left Egypt, this man had been frowning and the way he walked reminded me of the dogs of al-Karkh. He made me angry when he said, ‘It is up to you but we will be off at sunrise. If you do not come back until then, you blame no one but yourself.’ He spoke to me as if he was the keeper of the caravan and not simply its leader whom I tipped a large amount of money when we were in Egypt.

What was happening to me? It was God’s will and the calamities of time. If the caliph saw that man, he would immediately appoint him as an executioner. Had the caravan left me here, I would definitely stay in the darkness of alienation. It was a wicked moment. A feeling of boredom caused by continuous travelling overwhelmed my heart.

The news about bandits was spreading all around, especially about Hammad the Thug (‘Hammad al-Saffah’). People were terrified so they stopped travelling alone in the deserts as they used to do. The soldiers of the caliph were still looking for him but they had failed so far, as Salman al-Karkhi, the caravan guide, told me.

The way to the monastery was exhausting and getting there was really hard because it was on the top of a small mountain of sharp rocks. When we reached the place, we were worn out indeed. We smelled of despair. The sun had just begun its eternal descent behind the mountain, drowsy because it had been loitering all day long on the horizon. It left the monastery so lonely hanging like a nail in the middle of a cloud of melancholy.

I was received by a deacon who was wearing a flax belt and a woollen gown that had the smell of the early ages. I thought he never left the place before. He offered me fresh food and drink. I thanked him with my two weary eyes. I welcomed the food but not the drink. I sat somewhere at the end of the monastery in a spot that looked so much like an inn. Other travellers were already there. They produced a humming sound that only a stranger would realize. The travellers were recognized by traces of exhausting journeying on their faces. A man, who worked there, and whom the deacon might have sent to me, served me some strange drink. He told me that it was a special drink which I would find nowhere but there. He added that they prepared it in the monastery and for that purpose travelling merchants, who knew the needs of that aging monastery, brought fruits from the Levant, some from Iraq and others from Egypt.

‘Sir, this is the best drink in the whole world.’The man, who was clearly fat yet energetic and active enough to serve all the flocks of passengers, addressed me.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

A lonely, isolated man was looking at me weirdly. I didn’t yield to any obsession that did not suit the prestige of the place. An old man with thin hair-(almost bald), red beard, and a face not beaten by worries, who was wearing a snood around his waist like Greek statues, brought me a lantern. Enjoying its light, I began to write to the minister about my journey, hoping that he might accept my apology in case I never found the caliph’s target.

The waiter’s face was fresh and contented. I was gazing at its details. He made me feel great tranquility and comfort; nevertheless, the sharp looks of the other man who was sitting alone, shattered those feelings. He was fully armed with a big sword next to his waist and he wouldn’t take it off even while he was sitting in the corner, as if expecting some attack by an invisible deluded person. This made me equally prepared for any mysterious attack! I had always been known for my ability