I was unsure for a moment, but then suddenly I remembered.
‘It’s the Quran al-Sharif you brought for me from Masr,’ he said. He opened the lid and took a long look at the cover.
‘It was after Hasan’s death,’ he said. ‘You came back from Masr, and afterwards you said you were leaving Lataifa and going away to Nashawy.’
2
EVEN AFTER I had gone to live in Nashawy, eight years before, it was always Shaikh Musa I came to visit when I had questions to ask. Shaikh Musa had known Nashawy well once, when he was younger, and his memory was still crammed with stories about its inhabitants: when we talked he would sometimes surprise himself by recalling an incident or a detail from fifteen or twenty years ago. Thinking back later, it often seemed to me that we had created a village of our own during those conversations, between the two of us.
Most of his memories dated back at least a decade, for with his advancing years, the one and a half miles to Nashawy had come to seem like an increasingly formidable distance and he rarely went there except to attend an old friend’s funeral or a relative’s wedding. The only reason why he was still able to keep up with Nashawy at all was because so many people came to visit him in his own house. That was why he enjoyed our conversations as much as I did: he liked to hear the news and keep in touch.
It was in the early days, when I first moved to Nashawy, that I was most regular in my visits to Shaikh Musa in Lataifa. He would ask me questions about who I’d met and what I’d been doing, and then he would give me advice about the people I would do best to avoid and who I ought to seek out. It was he, for instance, who first told me about Imam Ibrahim.
They were both of the same age, he told me, but you wouldn’t believe it now if you saw them together, Imam Ibrahim looked so much older. Not many people knew of him now, because he lived in seclusion and didn’t go out very much, but as a young man, his name had been well-known throughout the area: people had said of him that he had the gift of baraka.
It so happened that Imam Ibrahim belonged to one of the two founding families of Nashawy, a lineage called Abu-Kanaka. The other was the Badawy: they were the first two families to come and settle in the area. They had not been there very long, for Nashawy was not an old village by Egyptian standards: in fact, only a few generations ago the land around it had been a part of the great desert to the west. It was only after the Mahmudiya Canal was completed in 1820, linking Cairo and Alexandria, that the area was brought under the plough. But even then it was a wilderness for a long time, without people or settlements.
Then one day, two young men had set off westwards from a village in the interior, looking for land and a good new place to settle. One of those men was of Bedouin origin: his ancestors had once wandered as far afield as Libya and Tunisia, but in time, tiring of the nomadic life, they had abandoned the desert for the sown. They had settled in the Delta, where for many generations their descendants worked on the land as fellaheen, until all that remained to remind them of their Bedouin past was the name of their lineage — al-Badawy.
The other young settler was from a lineage of barbers and healers, a family called Abu-Kanaka whose members were well known throughout the region for their zeal in religious matters and for their skill in the arts of healing. The Abu-Kanaka youth who set out on that westward journey had a fine reputation, despite his tender years: all the world knew him to be a model of goodness and piety, as well as a skilled and knowledgeable healer.
So the two young men had set out from their native village, and after a long and difficult journey they reached the area around Nashawy. There was nothing there then, no houses or canals or fields, but the Abu-Kanaka youth had declared that he could feel in his heart that the land had baraka and they had decided to settle there. Soon the young Badawy man acquired some land and began to raise crops. As the years passed more and more of his kinsmen came out from their native village and they too bought land and built houses in Nashawy. Before long the village was so full of Badawy families that they came to be known as the pre-eminent lineage of the village, the ‘a
l albalad’. Later people of many other lineages settled in Nashawy, but right until the Revolution of 1952 it was the Badawy who owned most of the land and it was always a Badawy who was the chief official, the ‘omda of the village.
The young Abu-Kanaka man, on the other hand, bought no land at alclass="underline" he earned his living by healing and cutting people’s hair, as his family had always done — a humble man, with a modest house and a small family. But at the same time, his renown as a good person and a man of religion continued to grow, and when at last a mosque was built in Nashawy, he was made the Imam, the caretaker and the leader of the prayers. Such was the respect in which he was held that his son inherited the position after him and his lineage held it ever afterwards. When he died he was universally mourned and the people of the village built him a special grave, right next to the canal. Later, he even came to be acknowledged as the guardian saint of the village.
When he was a young man, Shaikh Musa said, there were many who thought that Imam Ibrahim Abu-Kanaka had taken after his famous ancestor. He had shown remarkable skill in curing the sick, for example; there was a shelf in his house that was lined with texts on medicine, and everyone knew that he was very learned in the classical arts of healing. He had soon acquired a reputation as a healer who could do miracles with his herbs and roots, and he had had patients from all the surrounding villages. He had also become known for his learning in the scriptures, and at one time he had been much sought after for his opinions on points of theology and matters of religious law and jurisprudence.
‘You must make sure to meet him,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘He’s well read in history and religion and many other things and there’s a lot you could learn from him.’
But when I asked how I might meet Imam Ibrahim, Shaikh Musa’s answer was a sigh and a doubtful shake of his head. He hadn’t seen the Imam around for the last so many years, he said, and he heard reports that he kept very much to himself nowadays and rarely went anywhere or met anyone. He had a great many troubles on his head, people said, because he had made an unfortunate second marriage in middle age, and had been tormented by domestic difficulties ever since. His son had now taken over many of his duties, and for the most part he kept to himself, living more or less in seclusion.
‘But you must try to meet him,’ said Shaikh Musa. ‘Ask the other people you meet in Nashawy: they’ll be able to tell you about him …’
3
LATER, ON SEVERAL occasions, Shaikh Musa made a point of asking me whether I had talked to anyone about Imam Ibrahim. But as it turned out, when I did eventually have something to tell him, he was taken by surprise: he was not quite prepared for how differently people of a younger generation looked upon the world, even in a place so close to home as Nashawy.
One of the people I had talked to recently was a young teacher called Ustaz Sabry. Shaikh Musa had never met him himself, but like everyone else in the area he had heard of him, for Ustaz Sabry was rapidly becoming quite a well-known figure in the surrounding villages.
‘People say he’s an impressive talker,’ said Shaikh Musa, pursing his lips. ‘But I’ve also heard it said that he’s one of those men whom we call Too-Much-Talk in these parts — has something to say about everything.’