Bruce Sterling - My Rihla.pdf - Bruce Sterling - margozap

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Bruce Sterling

bruces@well.sf.ca.us

CATSCAN 7 "My Rihla"

Abu 'Abdallah ibn Battuta, gentleman and

scholar, late of Tangier, Morocco, has been dead for

six hundred and thirty years. To be remembered under

such circumstances is a feat to compel respect.

Ibn Battuta is known today because he happened

to write a book--or rather, he dictated one, in his

retirement, to a Granadian scribe--called _A Gift to

the Observers, Concerning the Curiosities of Cities

and the Marvels Encountered in Travels_. It's more

often known as "The Rihla of Ibn Battuta," rihla being

an Arabic literary term denoting a pious work

concerned with holy pilgrimage and foreign travel.

Sometimes known as "the Marco Polo of Islam,"

Ibn Battuta claimed to have traveled some seventy

thousand miles during the years 1325-1354, visiting

China, Arabia, India, Ghana, Constantinople, the

Maldive Islands, Indonesia, Anatolia, Persia, Iraq,

Sicily, Zanzibar . . . on foot, mind you, or in camel

caravans, or in flimsy medieval Arab dhows, sailing

the monsoon trade winds.

Ibn Battuta travelled for the sake of knowledge

and spiritual advancement, to meet holy men, and to

listen to the wisdom of kings, emirs, and atabegs. On

occasion, he worked as a judge or a courtier, but

mostly he dealt in information--the gossip of the

road, tales of his travels, second-hand homilies

garnered from famous Sufi mystics. He covered a great

deal of territory, but mere exploration was not the

source of his pride.

Mere distance mattered little to Ibn Battuta -- in

any case, he had a rather foggy notion of geography.

But his Moslem universe was cosmopolitan to an extent

unrivalled 'till the modern era. Every pious Moslem,

from China to Chad, was expected to make the holy

pilgrimage to Mecca--and they did so, in vast hordes.

It was a world on the move. In his twenty-year

peregrinations. Ibn Battuta met the same people again

and again. An Arab merchant, for instance, selling

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silk in Qanjanfu, China, whose brother sold tangeri

nes

in Fez (or fezzes in Tangier, presumably, when he got

the chance). "How far apart they are," Ibn Battuta

commented mildly. It was not remarkable.

Travel was hazardous, and, of course, very slow.

But the trade routes were open, the caravanserais--

giant government-supported hotels, sometimes capable

of housing thousands--were doing a brisk trade from

Cairo to Delhi to Samarkand. The locals were generally

friendly, and respectful of learned men--sometimes, so

delighted to see foreigners that they fell upon them

with sobs of delight and fought for the prestige of

entertaining them.

Professor Ross Dunn's narrative of _The

Adventures of Ibn Battuta_ made excellent, and perhaps

weirdly apt, reading last April, as I was traveling

some thirty thousand feet above the North Atlantic in

the boozy tin-can comfort of a KLM 747.

"God made the world, but the Dutch made

Holland." This gross impiety would have shocked the

sufi turban off the valorous Ibn Battuta, but we live

today, to paraphrase Greg Bear, in a world of things

so monstrous that they have gone past sin and become

necessity. Large and prosperous sections of the

Netherlands exist well below sea level. God forbid the

rest of us should have to learn to copy this trick,

but when I read the greenhouse-warming statistics I

get a shuddery precognitive notion of myself as an

elderly civil-defense draftee, heaving sandbags at the

angry rising foam . . .

That's not a problem for the Dutch at the

moment. They do, however, currently find themselves

confronting another rising tide. "The manure surplus."

The Dutch are setting up a large government agro-

bureaucracy to monitor, transport, and recycle, er,

well, cowshit. They're very big on cheese, the Dutch,

but every time you slice yourself a tasty yellow wedge

of Gouda, there is somewhere, by definition, a

steaming heap of manure. A completely natural

substance, manure; nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous,

the very stuff of life--unless *there's too much of it

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in one place

at the same time*, when it becomes a

poisonous stinking burden. What goes around, comes

around--an ecological truism as painful as

constipation. We can speculate today about our own six

hundred year legacy: not the airy palaces of the

Moorish Alhambra, I'm afraid, or the graceful spires

of the Taj Mahal, but billions of plastic-wrapped

disposable diapers, mashed into shallow graves . . .

So I'm practicing my Arab calligraphy in my

scholarly cell at the Austin madrassa, when a phone

call comes from The Hague. Over the stellar hiss of

satellite transmission, somebody wants me and my

collaborator to talk about cyberspace, artificial

reality, and fractals. Fair enough. A month later I'm

sipping Coke and puffing Dunhills in tourist class,

with a bag full of computer videotapes crammed in the

overhead bin, outdistancing Ibn Battuta with no effort

more strenuous than switching batteries in a Walkman.

Aboard the plane, I strike up a discussion with

a young Italian woman--half-Italian, maybe, as her

father is an Iranian emigre'. She calls herself a

"Green," though her politics seem rather strange--she

sympathizes openly with the persecuted and

misunderstood white Afrikaaners, for instance, and she

insists that the Ayatollah Khomeini was an agent of

British Intelligence. I have a hard time following

these arguments, but when it comes to the relations of

the US and Europe, her sentiments are clear enough.

"After '92, we're going to kick your ass!" she tells

me.

Unheard of. Europeans used to marvel humbly over

our astonishing American highway system and the fact

that our phones work (or used to). That particular

load of manure is now history. The Europeans are

happening now, and they know it. 1989 was a pivotal

year for them, maybe the most momentous popular

upheaval since 1789.

This century has not been a good one for Europe.

Since 1914, the European body-politic has been

wheezing along on one lung, a mass of fresh scar

tissue when it wasn't hemorrhaging blood and bil

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e. But

this century, "The American Century," as we used to

call it in 1920 when there was a lot of it still

before us, is almost gone now. A lot can happen in a

century. Dynasties rise and fall. Philosophies

flourish and crumble. Cities rise, thrive, and are

sacked by Mongols and turned to dust and ghosts.

But in Europe today, the caravanserais are open.

National borders in Europe, which provoked the brutal

slaughter of entire generations in '14 and '44, have

faded to mere tissues, vaporous films, riddled

through-and-through with sturdy money-lined conduits

of trade, tourism, telecommunications. Soon the twelve

nations of the European Community will have one

passport, perhaps one currency. They look to the

future today with an optimism they have not had since

"the lamps went out all over Europe" in World War One.

(Except perhaps for one country, which still remains

mired in the Cold War and a stubborn official

provincialism: Britain. The Dutch feel sorry for

Britain: declining, dirty, brutalized, violent and

full of homeless--far too much, in short, like their

too-close friends, the Americans.)

My Italian acquaintance introduces me to her

mother, who is a passionate devotee of Shirley

MacLaine. Mom wears an Iranian gold bracelet the size

of rappers' jewelry, a diamond-studded knuckleduster.

Her husband, the Iranian emigre', is an architect. His

family was close to the Shah, and is now a scattered

Moslem hejira in a dozen Western capitals, plotting

vengeance in desultory fashion, like so many White

Russians in 1929. They may have a long wait. Father

looks rather tired.

Off the plane, jet-lagged to hell and gone, in

Amsterdam. A volunteer for the Image and Sound

Festival drives me to The Hague in a very small car on

a very large autobahn. Windmills here and there. Days

later I inspect a windmill closely, a multistory

preindustrial power-station of sailwork, levers, gears

and thatch. An incarnation of a late-medieval tech

that America simply never possessed. A some

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how

monstrous presence fit to scare the hauberk off Don

Quixote.

The Hague is a nineteenth-century government

town of close-packed four-story townhouses. The

pavements, built on sand, ripple and warp like the

sagging crust of an old pie. Advertisements in the

bus-stops brutally abolish any air of the antique,

though: "Mag ik u iets persoonlijks faxen? De Personal

Fax van Canon. CANON--Meeten al een Voorsprong!" Dutch

is close enough to English to nag at the ear, but it's

landmined with liquid vowels and odd gutturals. The

streets--"straats"--are awash with aging Euro baby-

boomers, leavened with a Dutch-born populace of

imperial emigres -- Dutch-Indonesian, Dutch-Surinamese,

Dutch-Chinese.

On Wednesday, Moluccan separatists bombarded the

Indonesian embassy, near my hotel, with Molotov

cocktails. A dozen zealots were injured. Nobody

outside Holland and Indonesia know much about the

Moluccans, an Asian Moslem ethnic group with a

nationalistic grievance. They'd love to raise hell at

home in Indonesia, but when they do they're shot out

of hand by fascist police with teeth like Dobermans,

so they raise a stink in the old Mother Country

instead, despite the fact that Holland can do almost

nothing for them. Europe is full of exiles--and full

of its own micro-nations: the Flemish, the Magyars,

Gypsies, Corsicans and Bretons, Irish who remember

Cromwell, Jews who remember Nebuchadnezzar, Basques

who remember Hannibal, all like yesterday.

Ibn Battuta's world was similarly polyglot, and

divided into "nations," too, run by mamelukes and

moghuls who doted on tossing dissidents to packs of

ravenous man-eating dogs. Muhammed Tughlug, the

radiant Sultan of Delhi, punished rebels (very loosely

defined) by having them cut in half, skinned alive,

and/or tossed aloft by trained elephants with swords

strapped to their tusks. It was bad news to cross

these worthies, and yet their borders meant little,

and ethnicity even less. A believer was a citizen

anywhere in Islam, his loyalties

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Bruce Sterling - My Rihla.pdf

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