He who rides it, owns it

A bedouin asked the Prophet about a lost camel. The Prophet turned red in the face with anger and said, You should have no concern for it because it has a fat hump and sound feet and thus it can reach water to drink and trees to eat. Leave it until the owner finds it.

-Sahīh al-Bukhāri, Book 45:14

KhairAllah no doubt would have had a different opinion about this lost camel, for how exactly is one to determine the identity of its rightful owner. Billa Ali or Abu Jaib? Yes it carried Abu Jaib’s brand but it was Billa Ali who rode it, armed with an Enfield rifle that KhairAllah had no reason to doubt.

No clue to their count

You have lost a camel, O Friend, and everyone gives a clue to where to find it. You know not where the camel is but you know that the clues are wrong.

-The Masnavi 2:2975, Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)

Every other day KhairAllah and Rabih ran the herd through their counting gauntlet, knowing the number they’d set out with from Al-Nahud and wanting to arrive in Binban with the same. Wahid, Ithnayn, Thalātha…One, Two, Three…but everything they counted past ‘Ashara, Ten, went off the rails. Hid’ashar, Ithna’ashar, Thalāth’ashar, Thalāthawa‘ishrīn, Thalāthawathalāthīn…Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Twentythree, Thirtythree…decimal arithmetic always stumped them.

Humps and heads

Shepherds and farmers sit all day in wait for rain, while camel drovers move freely…humps will lead their way.

-Poem, recited by camel trader Muhammad Hussein Dhu’ al-Nur, in the film Camel Culture, at Sudanmemory.org

Hump is an apt synecdoche for Camel, especially at the start of the drive when it is fat and full and stands tall over the Ra’s, Head. But after days without water, it shrinks and sinks. Ra’s Māliyya, Capitalism, literally Head of Wealth, was thus the first thing Hajj Bashir counted when his camels arrived in Cairo, their Hump, Sanām, almost too Saghīr, Small, to see.

Lessons of sand and snow

Here lieth the lesson of the camel and the gentoo: Heat will move us, one way or another.

-Bill Weir, Life As We Know It (Can Be)

Here the reference is to penguins, not to the non-Muslims of India as Portuguese explorers called them (after their word Gentio, for Gentile), before the word Hindu- a Persian mispronunciation of Indus- entered Western usage, and after whom these penguins were named perhaps for their turban-like white cap on a black body. But to talk about camels and penguins is also to talk about sand and snow, and heat everywhere, as in rising temperatures that feel now more like the Sahara than Antarctica.

When wiping is harām

Jābir reports the Messenger of Allah forbade the use of camel bones or droppings for wiping (after excretion).

-Sunnah (Tradition) of Sahīh Muslim (9th C CE), Book 2:263

That makes perfect sense, there being so many smoother objects found on the Darb. Ostrich shells, petrified wood, Siyal leaves, Colocynth gourds. As a Tradition never put it, When holding a hammer in the desert, what doesn’t look like a nail might still scratch your ass.

Tea from Glass and tin

Anas reports that the Prophet was on a journey and a slave named Anjasha was chanting so that the camels be driven fast. The Prophet said, O Anjasha, Drive slowly with the glass vessels. Abu Qilaba said, By glass vessels the Prophet means women.

-Sunnah of Sahīh al-Bukhāri, Book 78:6210

In the minds of the drovers, were the Prophet’s vessels the saddle-soft Khawajas or the brittle glass from which they drank tea? We never cracked but their tea glasses one by one broke, so by the middle of the Darb all the drovers were drinking from our own dull tin cups.

Tall cock

His genital part is confected and standeth upon a sinnew insomuch as thereof a stringe may be made, for the bending of the strongest bow.

-Edward Topsell, History of Four Footed Beasts, On Camels, 1607

I’d heard of tennis rackets strung with cat gut but never long bows strung with camel penis, giving new meaning to the idiom cited by Lane, Ayru Kān Tawīl, He had Many Male Children, literally, His Cock was Tall.

Curved, low and beautiful

The camel takes its name from its characteristics, either because when they are being loaded, they lie down so that they become short and low, for the Greeks say “χαμαί” (lit. “on the ground”) for “low” and “short”, or because their backs are curved, as “καμουρ” means “curve” in Greek…

-The Etymologies, Book XII.i.35, Isidore of Seville (560-636)

I am surprised that Isidore did not consider the Arabic origin of the Latin word Camelus. If he’d only listened to KhairAllah speak to his Jamal, he would have heard him say, Yā Jamīl, Yā Jamāl, Yā Ajmal min al-Jimāl, O Beautiful One! O Beauty! O Most Beautiful of Camels!

Beare burthens and crooke knées

Camelles bée beasts that beare charges and burthens, and are milde and softe, and ordayned to beare charge and cartage of men…when they be charged they bowe and lye downe, and are méeke to them that charge them…for when they take charge upon them, they bende and crooke the knées.

-Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, Book 18:19, 13th C CE

Bartholomew might have taken a lesson from KhairAllah on how to charge a Camell that is not méeke, milde, or softe. Often he had to couch a recalcitrant one with a downward yank on his head rope and gargle Ikh! Ikh! Ikh! to keep him down when loading his burthen in place, in our case, a burthen of Khawaja’s duffle bags and camera cases.

Kneel like a camel

His knees became hard like those of a camel, in consequence of him constantly bending them in prayer.

-Eusebius of Caesarea, Early Church Historian, 4th C, referring to the Apostle James

Abu Hurairah reports the Messenger of Allah as saying, When one of you prostrates himself, he must not kneel like a camel, but rather put down his hands before his knees.

-Sunnah of Abu Dawood (9th C), Book 2:840

The drovers didn’t pray daily, certainly not five times a day, but their hands were busy whenever they did, first standing, then bending forward at the waist, then going to their knees, then dropping their forehead to the ground in a manner I’ve never seen a camel couch. I guess they believed Abu Hurairah over Eusebius, either that, or when they did their Sujūd, Prostration, they did so on their Sajjāda, Prayer Rug (in their case, a saddle blanket, and thus protected their knees).

O donkey!

I heard a camel’s frightful groan, that awesome, existentially discontented noise. The souls of the damned speak through the throats of camels. The camel debates life’s miseries with the sun. Etc. Etc.

-To Asmara, Thomas Keneally

Keneally’s protagonist spews every camel cliché he has ever heard, and by the time I was in Sudan for more than five minutes I had heard plenty and could even have added a few of my own. Trust in God but tie your camel…He who steals an egg will steal a camel…If he is idle, buy him a camel…The camel limped because of its [split] lip. Or as KhairAllah once called out to a troublesome one, O Donkey!

The genesis of camel cookery

There are too many camels in the Bible, out of time and out of place.

-New York Times, February 10, 2014

Questions remain about the Book of Genesis. Did Abraham Ride a Camel? After examining animal bones from a Jewish burial pit and reading a Sumerian love song about camel milk, one Bible scholar answered, Abraham likely both rode one and drank of one. Our boy chef Ibrahim also rode and drank of camels, one that we had butchered on the trail and he then cooked, of which we all partook with gusto.

Kalabsha, kalābish...how could i forget?

“What? A camel? My daughter leave here on a camel? Not likely! There must be a Toumbeel!”

-Diary of a Country Prosecutor, Tawfik al-Hakim

That is the thing about Arabic linguistics, especially among the illiterate, and the difficulty of learning certain words from them. Drop a few long or short vowels here, add some there, and an Automobile becomes a Toumbeel. Or Kalābish, as KhairAllah called the Pharaonic temple Kalabsha when we drank from its sulphurous well and all got sick within the hour…a place I will never forget in any pronunciation.

One good to ride

Abdullah ibn Omar reports he heard Allah’s Apostle say, Men are like camels, out of a hundred, you can hardly find a single one suitable to ride.

-Sunnah of Sahīh al-Bukhari (9th C CE), Book 81:87

We were three Khawajas, three drovers, and one Khabīr, seven riders in all, in that Dabouka of one hundred fifty head, so according to the Prophet, six of us were on unsuitable, ungaited mounts. I needn’t have been a Believer to know I was riding one of them. Shahm, as Wehr gives, Animal Fat, so highly prized when eating mutton, is also the word Sudanese pharmacists call knockoff Vaseline Petroleum Jelly, which because of my camel’s irregular stride I consumed at the other end in great quantities.

You say Camelho, i say camelão

Camelho (Portuguese), Camell (Catalán), and Camello (Spanish, with the variant Gamello). Intra-Romance derivation. Spanish: Camella, Camellej/ro, Camellería; Catalán: Cameller, Camellí, Camella, Camellot; Portuguese: Camelão, Camelaria, Cameleiro, Camelote, Camelino

-Dictionary of Arabismos in Iberian Romance Languages, Federico Corriente, 1999

The root C-M-L generates almost as many Camel words in Iberian languages as J-M-L generates in Arabic, as in these examples from Lane: Ijtamala, He Ate of a Camel; Istajmala, He (a Camel) Became a Camel [ie, the Camel reached a sufficient age to be called a Jamal, rather than a Bājil, Ribā’, or other words for an immature camel]; Jamalūn, A Building in the Shape of a Camel; and Mujāmil, One Who Cannot Answer a Question [the camel reference being found there somewhere…], although Almaany Online favors etymologies from the root’s other meaning, Beauty, for example, giving Jumālī as Cosmetologist, rather than, as does Lane, Long-Legged, Resembling a Camel, the definition no doubt KhairAllah would prefer.

Excellent booze, tasty cat

Eating cat’s meat is permissible- they say jiddi qutta, meaning “tasty cat”-…They offered me some and I ate it. God Willing, it is permissible; I have not seen anything about it in the legal texts. And they have excellent Boza [a Turkish fermented barley drink, but here meaning Merissa, Millet Beer].

-Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatname, Book of Travels, Vol. X, on the town of Dongola, Nubia, 1685

Evliya travelled all over the Ottoman world but kept Nubia and the Upper Nile for the end of his life, much as Ibn Battuta did for Africa, Mali and Niger, and he always kept stricter Islamic dietary rules for what he ate than for what he drank. In 1984, Daoud and I spent a day and a night in Dongola but other than fresh bread and oranges we didn’t go looking for any other kind of food, or for booze.