“As for myself, I boarded a Yemen boat…and reciting the Quranic verse, It will set sail in the name of God, and in the name of God it will cast anchor, and putting our trust in God, we set off for the island of Dahlak…A thousand Fatihas were being recited every step of the way so the boat was brim full of Fatihas. The truth is that without these Fatihas, that boat would not float safely on this sea for a single second…In short, we inched forward on the Red Sea in this fashion, threading our way night and day through coral reefs, full of anxiety as we carefully followed the shore for six days, calling at a number of islands to see the sights and passing by many others, until we came to Dahlak.”
- from Evliya Çelebi’s Matchless Pearl, his map of the Red Sea and his Book of Travels
I was in Massawa looking out to sea. I heard about a man with an 18 meter diesel sambuk and I had met a few foreign tourists ready for adventure. We teamed together to pay for the boat rental from Muhammad Ga'as, an Afar seaman who said he’d sailed these waters since boyhood. But Ga’as in his dotage didn’t trust himself to navigate the reefs, so we set sail under Captain Ahmad Din and a four-man crew, all claiming to know the way "from Suakin to Djibouti on this side, from Jizan to Aden on the other." We would soon see. None of the foreigners seemed to know the Fatiha.
The Dahlak Islands are bare, brutally hot, and pancake flat. The Umayyads established a penal colony there, but found no other use for them. Poet Abu al-Fath Nasr Allah al-Iskandari, quoted by Yaqut al-Rumi in his 13th-century Kitab al-Buldan, wrote, "The worst country is Dahlak, for whoever lands there, dies there." The saying "In dahkhalta jazirat Dahlak satansa ahlak" may owe its survival more to rhyme than meaning, but it certainly sounds forbidding: "He who sets foot on Dahlak forgets his family."
Only a handful of the archipelago's islands are inhabited today, but the largest—Dahlak al-Kabir, or Big Dahlak—was the seat of an Islamic sultanate from the ninth to the 13th centuries. To visit from Massawa requires a five-hour passage across rough seas.
From Massawa's jetty we set a course first by nearby Dissei Island's rocky summit and the mitten-shaped Buri Peninsula's northern cape, and once in the open sea by compass point alone. Ahmad Din scanned the water for the Dahlaks’ mid-ocean shoals. This time all we saw were flying fish and dolphin—the latter called Abu Salamah, Father of Safe Delivery, who may or may not know the Fatiha .
Crosswinds pushed high swells that the sambuk mounted on the diagonal, waves washing over deck and draining down the center hatch. "Is the sea big today?" we asked Ahmad Din. "Big? No, today is small. Big is in the Bab al-Mandab, the size of a house.”
At last we entered a shallow lagoon on Dahlak al-Kabir's windward side, near the site of the long-vanished sultanate's seat of power. Its traces are gone but for underground cisterns carved from coral stone and a 2000-grave necropolis. A raggedly dressed guardian named Ali Mu'min, proud herdsman of the island's 50 live camels, also watched over the cemetery’s dead. Pointing to headstones of black basalt bearing mixed Kufic and cursive Arabic funerary calligraphy incised on their polished surface, I later found a translation for one of them…
Oh God, verily Abu 'Abd Allah Muhammad, son of 'Abd al-Rahman, son of Muhammad, is Thy servant and son of Thy two servants. Thou has taken him for Thyself and hast chosen for him what is near Thee. He lies prostrate in Thy presence and controls for himself nor harm, nor profit, nor signs rendering manifest his actions, waiting for the day of reckoning, announcing that he has put aside his faults, hoping in Thy mercy, expecting Thy forgiveness, seeking protection from Thy chastisement. Oh God, be compassionate of his prostration and make him forget his loneliness. He died, may God be pleased with him, on Wednesday, 23rd of Sha'ban of the year 327 [June 15, 939].
It was mid month of Ramadan and a Dahlakian named Yunis Hassan recalled the days not long past when pearling supplied the village’s full income. One weighing 10 grams once fetched him 10,000 French "riyals," so he said, but more often he went five days without any find at all. This day he was standing guard at the newlyweds’ door of his son and bride. We knocked and entered, Yunis knowing it to be good that honeymooners receive a group of blue moon foreign visitors. They might bear pearl, or lu’lu in Arabic.
Back on board above deck, the Captain declared the wind too high for a same day return passage. We would sleep and leave before dawn. A coiled bow line was my mattress and brown bilge water, or what would have fooled me if it were said to be not, provided a goodnight last sip. I woke with the sambuk already outside the lagoon. So what they had said was not true, for I had landed in the Dahlak and not died in the Dahlak. Al-hamdu li’llah, the first words of the Fatiha.
