ON A CAMEL MOVING FORWARD IN TIME - The New York Times 3/23/19, 2(59 PM

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ARCHIVES | 1989

ON A CAMEL MOVING FORWARD IN TIME

By ANTON SHAMMAS MARCH 12, 1989
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LEO AFRICANUS By Amin Maalouf. Translated by Peter Sluglett. 360 pp. New
York: W. W. Norton & Company. $17.95.
In 1992, when the New World celebrates the 500th anniversary of Christopher
Columbus's mission, Arabs and Jews will be united, for a change, in musing over
their lost Andalusian days, their Golden Age in Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella,
before sending the Italian sailor off to look for the Indies, had already put an end to
eight centuries of Muslim rule in the peninsula, returning the Arabs and Jews to
the East. The Jewish memory is still haunted by the nightmare of the Inquisition,
and rightly so, while the Arabs still feel nostalgic whenever the word Andalusia
crosses their minds. The fall of Granada, the last stronghold of the Moors in Spain,
in January of 1492 marked the Arabs' fall from grace. It was in that year that the
cross supplanted the crescent, and the kingdom that for centuries had served as a
cultural liaison between the Greco-Roman world and medieval Europe came to an
end.
The narrator of Amin Maalouf's historical novel, Hasan al-Wazzan - who came
to be named Leo Africanus - was born in 1488, in the waning days of Moorish

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Granada. At the age of 4, Hasan and his family went into exile, like many other
Muslims and Jews who declined to accept the new faith and managed to flee from
the outstretched arm of the Inquisition. The al-Wazzan (''the weigh-master'')
family settled in Fez, Morocco, where many Granadans had found refuge and hung
the keys to their homes up on their walls, with ''the thought that soon, thanks to
the Great Sultan or to Providence, they will find their house once again, with the
colour of its stones, the smell of its garden, the water of its fountain, all intact,
unaltered, just as it has been in their dreams.''
Amin Maalouf, a Lebanese writer who has chosen to live in Paris and who
writes in French, is infatuated by the character of Hasan al-Wazzan for a similar
reason: Leo Africanus gives him the key to an imagined, tantalizing world, far away
from the relentlessly real, albeit surrealistic, world of today's Lebanon. Mr.
Maalouf has already published three books in French: ''The Crusades as Seen by
the Arabs,'' ''Leo Africanus'' and most recently the novel ''Samarcande.'' As a
Lebanese writer, he seems to feel more free to speak his mind in French. The
passage about the Granadans who cling to the keys of their lost homes in Andalusia
ends with young Hasan's uncle telling him: ''Perhaps one day it may be necessary
for someone to dare to teach them to look unflinchingly at their defeat. . . . But I
myself do not have the courage to do so.'' Neither has Mr. Maalouf. Three years
ago, when this book was written, it would have taken a great deal of sheer
Christian-Lebanese chutzpah to write these lines in Arabic, while the devastated
Palestinian refugees were within earshot.
''Leo Africanus'' chronicles in 40 chapters the first 40 years of the life of Hasan
al-Wazzan: as a little child in Granada, a youth in Fez, a man in Timbuktu, a lover
in Cairo, an emissary in Constantinople and a scholar in Rome. In the fashion of
the Arabs, each year is named after the most prominent event that took place in
that year. The chapters are divided into four books, after the four cities in which al-
Wazzan resided: Granada, Fez, Cairo and Rome. Since he had few facts, or none,
about the life of the al-Wazzan family in Granada, Mr. Maalouf is at his best here,
with unbound imagination and a free hand. Salma, the mother of the long-awaited
Hasan, and her rival Christian co-wife Warda with her little daughter Mariam;
Muhammad the procrastinating husband, who is torn between the two, between

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conversion and exile; the Jewish Gaudy Sarah, who sells perfumes and tells
fortunes and gossips and is almost a member of the Muslim family, and many
other Granadans who watch the fall of their city - all are rendered with masterly,
compassionate strokes. This invented family album is set against the falling
Granada, whose effete grandeur is described through the eyes of the infant Hasan,
as recalled by him many years later in Rome.
In Fez the family falls apart; the father lives with Warda, his Christian wife, and his
daughter Mariam, and Hasan stays with his mother at his uncle's house. The boy
finds a lifelong friend at school, Harun, and together they roam the streets of the
city, looking for juvenile adventures. They will both meet again, many years later,
as the respective ambassadors of the Pope and the Grand Turk. At 16, Hasan
accompanies his uncle on his first diplomatic mission, and as their caravan
traverses the vast Sahara, his uncle fills in the historic gaps for young Hasan,
teaching him the art of storytelling. ''His tone was so reassuring,'' Hasan later
recalls, ''that it made me breathe once more the odours of the Granada of my birth,
and his prose was so bewitching that my camel seemed to move forwards in time
with the rise and fall of its rhythms.'' When the uncle dies, Hasan takes command
of the caravan and returns home with his first wife, while his sister Mariam is
coercively sent to the lepers' quarter in Fez by a vengeful suitor.
In 1519, at the age of 31, Hasan, who had been abducted by a Sicilian pirate,
was presented as a gift to Pope Leo X, who was later to become his patron and
loving godfather, giving him his own name - Giovanni Leone. The Granadan who
had been circumcised at the hand of a barber was baptized at the hand of a pope
and spoke several languages of the Mediterranean, including Hebrew. Adventurer,
geographer, scholar and witness to the birth and decline of kingdoms, he spent
eight years of his volatile life in Rome, where he composed the first trilingual
dictionary of Latin, Arabic and Hebrew. On March 10, 1526, he finished the Italian
manuscript of the book that gave him his most famous name, Leo Africanus:
''Description of Africa, and of the memorable things contained therein.'' The draft,
apparently, was written originally in Arabic, but was later lost.
''Description of Africa'' has a chapter called ''A most exact description of the
city of Fez.'' Over 70 pages the original Leo Africanus gives a meticulous depiction

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of the city, its geography, architecture, hospitals, baths, inns, mills, shops, markets,
manners of eating and drinking, marriages and funerals. It is so dazzlingly colorful
and rich in details that Mr. Maalouf finds himself unabashedly incorporating long
passages from it into his narrative. However, Mr. Maalouf is more a storyteller here
than a novelist. For instance, when he opens the Fez chapters with a description of
the beautiful roofs of Fez, he does not notice even a single dove. The original
description included doves ''in great plenty, of all colors.'' (The missing doves also
made me wonder whether Peter Sluglett, who translated the novel from the French
so beautifully, had ever consulted John Pory's English translation of ''Description
of Africa'' for certain phrases and words. However, I am still not sure whether it
would have made a difference.) Yet that kind of detail is exactly what I find missing
in Mr. Maalouf's otherwise captivating writing - his fictitious Leo Africanus is less
attentive than the real one.
And when in Rome, his Leo is just a bereft storyteller - one who has lost his
audience and now is surrounded by cardinals, a pope and other intriguers. The
man who witnessed the fall of the empire that had transmitted the bulk of classical
knowledge to medieval Europe manages to have a chat with Raphael three months
before the artist's death, and almost bumps into the ill-tempered Michelangelo.
The real reason behind his abduction, Hasan-Leo is led to believe, was the desire of
Rome to open a path of negotiations with Suleiman, the rising Sultan in
Constantinople, and through him with the Islamic world, a mission he tries to
fulfill. However, the Rome of Mr. Maalouf's Leo, compared to his Fez and Granada,
is pontifically trite.
''Leo Africanus'' is a beautiful book of tales about people who are always forced
to accept choices made for them by someone else. For the American reader who is
familiar only with the Columbus side of the story, it is a ''back at the farm'' of sorts.
It relates, poetically at times and often imaginatively, the story of those who did
not make it to the New World. 'I AM THE SON OF THE ROAD'
I, Hasan the son of Muhammad the weigh-master, I, Jean-Leon de Medici,
circumcised at the hand of a barber and baptized at the hand of a pope, I am now
called the African, but I am not from Africa, nor from Europe, nor from Arabia. I
am also called the Granadan, the Fassi, the Zayyati, but I come from no country,

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from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life
the most unexpected of voyages.
My wrists have experienced in turn the caresses of silk, the abuses of wool, the
gold of princes and the chains of slaves. My fingers have parted a thousand veils,
my lips have made a thousand virgins blush, and my eyes have seen cities die and
empires perish.
From my mouth you will hear Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Berber, Hebrew,
Latin and vulgar Italian, because all tongues and all prayers belong to me. But I
belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the earth, and it is to them that
I will one day soon return.
But you will remain after me, my son. And you will carry the memory of me
with you. And you will read my books. And this scene will come back to you: your
father, dressed in the Neapolitan style, aboard this galley which is conveying him
towards the African coast, scribbling to himself, like a merchant working out his
accounts at the end of a long journey.
But is this not in part what I am doing: what have I gained, what have I lost,
what shall I say to the supreme Creator? He has granted me forty years of life,
which I have spent where my travels have taken me: my wisdom has flourished in
Rome, my passion in Cairo, my anguish in Fez, and my innocence still flourishes in
Granada. From ''Leo Africanus.''
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Anton Shammas is an Israeli-Palestinian writer whose novel ''Arabesques,'' originally

written in Hebrew, was published in English last year.

A version of this review appears in print on March 12, 1989, on Page 7007013 of the National edition with
the headline: ON A CAMEL MOVING FORWARD IN TIME.

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