A lingering wont

I halted my she-camel in that place as if she were a high palace where I might perform the wont of the lingerer.

-from the Ode of ‘Antara Ibn Shadād (525-608), in the Mu’allaqāt, the Hanging Poems, trans. F.E. Johnson, 1893

I reined in my camel, big as a fort-/I needed to weep, needed the shame.

-same verse, trans. James Montgomery, 2017

I rode a Jamal not a Nāqa, and because I am tall he did not tower over me, and I had little time to linger long feeling anything in particular because we were hard pressed to arrive in Egypt within forty days. But other than that, yes, I could well have been in the company of ‘Antara Ibn Shadād, Son of the Camel Saddle (not to be confused in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic with Ibn Shaddād, a Heavy Smoker of Hashish), the pre-Islamic African-Arab poet-warrior and likely progenitor, at least in the mind of this Khawaja, of Kabbāshi camelmen like Mas’ūd Abu Dūd, Abdullah Mansūr, Muhammad Abu Sha’r, and KhairAllah Khair al-Sayyid.

O brother, where goest thou?

Hold, draw rein ere we sunder, sweet camel rider; list awhile to my words, nor idly answer.

-from the Ode of Ibn Khulthūm (526-584), in the Mu’allaqāt, trans. Lady Anne Blunt, 1903

We sometimes especially in the early days on the trail came upon one of KhairAllah’s confederates riding in the opposite or a cross-wise direction to ours. He and we would stop, usually dismount and brew tea for we were in no hurry if the herd could graze nearby while we sat, but never once did I ever hear KhairAllah call out, Hold Sweet Rider! It was usually something more like, Ya Akhi, Timshi Wayn? Hey Bro, Where Ya Headed?

Humor in the saddle

The bedouins, on the other hand, live separate from the community. They are alone in the country. They have no walls nor gates…They take hurried naps only when they are in company or when in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking or noise. They go alone in the desert guided by their fortitude…

-Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), Muqaddima, Chapter 2.5

Ibn Khaldun sounds like he was writing a scary movie about the bedouin…alone in the desert, taking hurried naps, hearing faint noises. But what I remember most from the Darb was the comedy. Adam Hamid laughing when Muhammad inadvertently set his clothes on fire, Abdullah laughing at a slapstick camel story, KhairAllah imitating a friend who awoke one morning to find that all his camels had been stolen, asking, Wha-Wha-Wha-What happened last night?, Ibrahim the boy cook brewing tea and calling out to his aged kinsman Bilal the Khabīr known for his love of millet beer, O Uncle! Come drink your wine! They and the others were guided less by fortitude than by humor, Damm Khafīf, Light Blood on the Forty Day Trail .

Ibn khaldun knew all about khawajas

When sedentary people mix with bedouin people in the desert or travel with them on a journey, they depend on them. They cannot do anything for themselves without them. This is an observed fact. Their dependence extends to the knowledge of the country, the right directions, watering places, and crossroads.

-Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima, Book 2.5

They do not call Ibn Khaldun the Father of Sociology for nothing. Without this insight about city dwellers needing to rely on the bedouins’ desert skills in order to stay alive, I wonder if Thorstein Veblen would have written The Theory of the Leisure Class, in which he gives the example of urban idlers with such excess time on their hands that they engage in primitive forms of travel simply in order to amuse themselves.

Pledging to Protect the pasture

There are no men who respect pledges more than the Arabians.

-Herodotus, Book 3, Chapter 8

I doubt we would have made it all the way to Egypt without the two pledges, the one that Abu Jaib gave, entrusting us to the safekeeping of his drovers, the other that KhairAllah gave to keep us safe on the trail. Even though neither were Arabian, they spoke Arabic and thus honored their language’s concept of Himāya, Protection, a word that Lane defines in the context of nomads protecting tribal pasture.

Strangers of amrīka In the parts of dār al-Kabābīsh

And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judea, and Cappadocia, and in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, in Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya around Cyrene, and strangers of Rome…

-Acts of the Apostles, 2.8-10

This is how we heard them speak in our own tongue. At day’s end we were tired, and hungry and thirsty, and we saw them dismount and couch the herd, start the fire and cut onions for aseeda, fill the pot and boil water for tea, and unroll their saddle blankets, and thus we heard them say, Here we stop, Here we eat and drink, Here we sleep.

Capital k, for kababish

…even beyond the sands of the Nomads, to the voice of lions roaring in the desert…

-Anonymous Epigram, from the Greek Anthology, Book VII, 626

The Greek colonists in North Africa’s coastal cities- Alexandria, Oea, Leptis, Cyrene, and the like- feared their inland deserts and feared even more their Nomads, which is why the Greek Anthology’s translator W.R. Paton must have thought it necessary to capitalize the letter N. On my trips to Kordofan l’ve met men from its many tribes- kawahla, shenabla, hamar, dar hamid- but the only tribesmen earning a capital letter in my mind were the Kababish.

The best regarded virgins of our clime

Prince of Morocco- Mislike me not for my complexion,/The shadowed livery of the burnished sun,/To whom I am neighbor and near bred./Bring me the fairest maiden northward born,/Where Phoebus’ fire scarce thaws the icicles…/I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine/Hath feared the valiant…

Portia- In terms of choice I am not soley led/By nice direction of a maiden’s eyes.

-Merchant of Venice, 2.1.1-14

I was surprised too, seeing his daughter as a bride in white pancake, while her brothers, younger sister, mother and grandmother better reflected their true clime, Dār al-Kabābīsh, Sudan (a Black, n., Aswad, pl. Sūdān, from the verb Sawwada, To Make a Rough Draft, To Cover Paper with Dense Writing, To Scribble), both in fact and in name.

Feeding caviar to camels

In fact, the camel yesterday was smitten./She left the other camels to come over./You have a lovely liquid wraparound eye./She stood there looking at me sideways./They feed their racing camels caviar in Qatar./The ruler of Dubai has said that he will try to buy Versailles.

-Mu’allaqa By Imru al-Qays, Frederick Seidel

“My poem is a John Philip Souza ‘Stars and Stripes Forever’ cross-species salute to Imru al-Qays,” wrote Seidel in his accompanying “translator’s note”, although he called it a “tribute”, not a proper translation. Nor should he have, for back in the 6th Century when Imru al-Qays lived in a tent, not a half mile high skyscraper, and cooked on a camel dung fire, not a gas stove, Qatar and Dubai were still dry holes in the ground and Jimi hadn’t yet sung about castles made of sand.

Westerners and easterners

The West is the envy of the East.

-Poem by Ibn Zamrak (1333-1393), inscribed in stucco on the wall of the Comares Palace, The Alhambra, Granada

We talked often about the differences between America and Kordofan, they asking us if everyone there drove cars, we asking them if everyone here drove camels. The drovers didn’t believe us when we told them that driving a camel was preferable to driving a car. Impossible, they answered…Beemers, not Ba’īrs [lit. Dung Droppers]…HiLuxes, not Hashis [Yearlings]…Nissans, not Nāqas [Females]…Jeeps, not Jamals [Males].

Nose, not hose

Barbīsh (Syria)- Tube (of a narghile, an enema, etc.)

Khartūm- Probiscus, Trunk (of an elephant), Hose

-Wehr

I was showing the drovers how our water purifying pump turned clear the dark swill poured from their newly tanned goatskins. Lucky me not to have had Wehr at hand when I needed to translate the word Tube. He might have sent me down a rabbit hole, giving a Syrian word likely to be misunderstood in Sudan, especially when the tube clogged after a minute and broke the pump. Muhammad said, It’s worthless, meaning my Elephant Trunk, not my Enema.

Drifting off al-Maktūb

Sammy: And what I remembered was pretty good…Beautiful…Beautiful…I wish we lived in Arabia. Daisy: What? Sammy: Arabia… (He drifts off)

-In Arabia We’d All Be Kings, Stephen Adly Guirgis

We sat around that seminar table in Jones Hall as if we’d been invited to a surprise party, but what would they be serving? Champagne? The Jussive? Broken plurals, hollow verbs, sun letters, dagger alifs? We didn’t hear anything about Comparative Semitics until second year, when Hamori said, And surely you see this case ending as the lost Akkadian locative. Locatives, vocatives, substantives in construct…If I’d remembered my 9th grade Latin, maybe I wouldn’t have drifted off that first day of Arabic when Udovitch greeted us with, Al-Maktūb Maktūb, The Written [has been] Written.

Bains and bêts

Cairo is different, and in the Cairo I know, more than in any other place, the stranger needs a guide, for, though the city’s principal monuments are obvious to the eye, its diversions are transitory and less easy to find…

-The Arabian Nightmare, Robert Irwin

I didn’t have a guide that first year except for the 1929 edition of Baedeker and its map of medieval Cairo, of all the nooks and crannies between Bab al-Futūh and Bab Zuweila, with its various- as Baedeker spells them- Palais, Mosquées, Midâns, Bains, Bêts, Hoshs, Haras, Khâns, Derbs, Tekkiyas, Sêbīls, Sikkets, and Sharias thrown together like ill-fitting puzzle pieces, blind corners and dead ends where you could buy a gram, if that were your purpose. But mine was only to learn my colloquial conjugations… Adakhkhan, Tadakhkhan, Yadakhkhan, Nadakhkhan, Tadakhkhanu, Yadakhkhanu…I Smoke, You Smoke, He Smokes, etc., etc.

Camel's way

Whatever the way that Love’s camel takes, that is my religion and my faith.

-Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), The Interpreter of Desires

KhairAllah would have thought it crazy to let the camels, no matter how amorously pedigreed, choose the way. “The way they take is the way I tell them to take”, his flicking whip said. “I am Khabīr al-Darb, Master of the Way, all the way to Cairo.” I needn’t have reminded him that Cairo was full of Cairenes, liars, thieves, and scoundrels to the last, all straying from Sirāt al-Mustaqīm, as the Quran’s first verse puts it, The Path of the Upright.

Maria montez and me

…an exotic enchantress in sheer harem pantaloons.

-Los Angeles Times, September 8, 1951, obituary of Maria Montez, found dead in a Paris bathtub filled with scalding water and weight reducing salts

I remember watching movies in my grandfather’s basement after Saturday night dinners, especially the repeat screenings of a 16mm Castle Films short of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (1944), with Maria Montez as the beautiful Amara, forced into concubinage to the evil Mongol Khan and rescued by the Caliph’s son Ali Baba, who at the end falls into a palace fountain after nearly being killed by the Khan and has his faithful factotum Abdullah, played for laughs by Andy Devine, wring dry his sodden Arab robe, with Abdullah giving the film’s last line, “Always the nursemaid!”

Back then I paid closer attention to Andy Devine than to Maria Montez, so I don’t remember if her harem pants were see-through. KhairAllah’s definitely were not, even after forty days of hard riding and acting as nursemaid to us greenhorn Khawajas.

How do you say no?

Like all men of the Library, I have travelled in my youth…For a long time it was believed that these impenetrable books belonged to past or remote languages…

-The Library of Babel, Borges

I have spent more time lately in the Library than travelling, so I can say that it is easier to read Lane’s Lexicon from a chair than it would ever have been in a saddle, searching for a word like Whoa! But seeking Kabbāshi equivalents of his Classical vocabulary was fruitless.

I’d say, O KhairAllah, Let us alight from these our dung makers to rest under this Father of Sweetness tree, a lone respite on the Darb of the Forty to the Mother of Cities, Qāhira, She the Victorious. And KhairAllah would say with a shake of his head, No.