Map Reading by Abdulrazak Gurnah

Author:Abdulrazak Gurnah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Indian Ocean Journeys

Amitav Ghosh’s 1992 book In an Antique Land is an account of a year he spent in a village called Lataifa in Upper Egypt learning Arabic. He called the village Lataifa in the book, although that was not its real name. This was in the mid-1980s, when Ghosh was doing a Ph.D. in anthropology at Oxford. I am not sure why he wanted to learn the Arabic spoken in an Upper Egyptian village, and he does not tell us in his book.

The other narrative line in Ghosh’s book concerns the story of a Jewish merchant named Abraham Ben Yiju, who was born in the Maghreb in the early twelfth century, and lived most of his adult life in Aden in southern Arabia and in Mangalore in western India. Ben Yiju’s origins were in a region known as Ifriqiya, from the port town of Mahdia in modern-day Tunisia. When he was old enough, Ben Yiju moved to Fustat in Egypt, which was then at one of its peaks of prosperity, where he joined the congregation of the synagogue of Ben Ezra, where many other merchants from Ifriqiya also prayed.

After Fustat, Ben Yiju went to Aden, where he lived for several years, perhaps ten or so, before he moved to Mangalore in India, where he spent at least twenty years, and married and raised children.

Over a long period of time, the Jewish merchants of Fustat, including those of Ben Ezra, were an important part of the trade between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, travelling between Europe, Africa and Asia. Ghosh tells us: ‘The vast majority of them were traders, and while some of them were wealthy and successful, they were not, by any means, amongst the most powerful merchants of their time – most of them were small traders running small family businesses.’1

We see here the beginnings of an argument that will become important to this text: how closely the Mediterranean was linked to the Indian Ocean trade and how both were paradigms for the inter-penetrability of cultures.

But the synagogue of Ben Ezra was also remarkable for another reason. To prevent the accidental desecration of the name of God, many Jewish communities in the Middle East had a store attached to the synagogue where any writing that mentioned the name of God was kept until the store could be emptied and the documents ritually disposed of, which was done by burying them. The store was called a geniza, and Ben Ezra had one too, constructed when the synagogue was rebuilt in 1025CE. Only, for some reason, the geniza of Ben Ezra was never emptied. For the next nine centuries, through the ebbing and flowing of Fustat’s prosperity, through the Muslim conquest in 641CE and the founding of Cairo in 969CE, through Fustat’s eventual absorption into that great city and its literal transformation into a rubbish dump, the two-and-a-half-storey-high geniza filled up with papers and, later, books. What is thought to be the last document deposited in the geniza of Ben Ezra was a divorce settlement agreed in Bombay and dated 1875.

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