“Only that it’s something to do with Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, the eleventh-century caliph of Egypt.”
“Okay. Al-Hakim ruled from 996 to 1021. This is a letter written about a hundred and twenty years after his death, by Yehuda Halevi.”
“The Jewish poet?” Jack exclaimed. “I know that the Geniza contained one of the richest archives of letters from him.”
Maria nodded. “More than fifty of them. He’s one of the most celebrated poets of medieval Judaism. He was Sephardic, from Spain, and had a wide circle of friends there and among the Jewish diaspora around the Mediterranean. He came on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1140, in the last year of his life, arriving in Alexandria in September of that year, probably alighting near the site of the ancient lighthouse at the very spot where you left the institute this afternoon. After several months in Cairo, he finally left on the eleventh of May 1141 for Jerusalem, where his trail is lost to history. Under the Crusaders, neither Jews nor Muslims were allowed into the city, but pilgrims like Halevi were allowed to pray at the Mount of Olives. Perhaps he died there after fulfilling his dream. He’s another shade from the past you can imagine standing on the floor of the synagogue, Jack. In fact he had quite a lot in common with General Gordon and his circle. Like them, Halevi had become convinced that religious fulfillment could be found only in the Holy Land. He lived at the time of the First Crusade, when Baldwin the Third was King of Jerusalem, and also when the Jewish community in Spain was caught between Christianity and Islam.”
“Your own ancestors, I remember.”
Maria nodded. “They were forced to convert to Christianity and adopt Christian names to avoid the Inquisition, eventually losing their Jewish identity. But I have a huge diaspora of distant cousins who chose to flee, to England, to Holland, to Constantinople, to the New World, even here to Cairo, readopting names like Sarah and Rebecca and Moses and Abraham. Handling this document from the twelfth century gives me a strange feeling, as if that Jewish identity had been lying dormant in my family for all those generations since the conversion, and not been extinguished after all.”
“They say you can never lose it,” Aysha murmured.
“And there’s something else. Like those soldiers in the late nineteenth century, Halevi also turns out to have had a fascination with what we would now term archaeology.”
“That’s what’s in this letter?”
Maria nodded. “It’s a fantastic addition to the archive. His feathery hand is instantly recognizable, and it’s incredibly exciting for me to be holding this. It’s actually Arabic, but written in Hebrew letters. The Geniza represents a rich fusion of Arabic and Jewish traditions, evidence of a cosmopolitan world far removed from the version of history peddled by the preachers of hate who indoctrinate the extremists. Halevi had been influenced in Spain by Islam just as the Jews had been in Cairo, and had come to believe that Arabic forms of expression could mediate Jewish thought, in poetry and in prose.”
“And he had an eye for the history he saw around him.”
“Correct. And now we’re getting to the nub of it. While he was in Cairo for those months in 1140 to 1141, he became good friends with the nagid, the Jewish community leader — a man named Samuel ben Hananiah — and with a wealthy merchant named Halfon ben Netanel. He also corresponded regularly with his intellectual friends back in Spain. He loved Egypt: ‘This is a wondrous land to see, and I would stay, but my locks are grey,’ he wrote. He was anxious to get to Jerusalem, but he wanted to lap up everything he could about Egypt while he was here. The caliph Al-Hakim comes into the story because the Jews in Spain had a particular fascination with the behavior of the Muslim potentates of the Near East at a time when Spanish Jews were looking anxiously over their own shoulders at their own Islamic overlords and wondering what the future might hold. Al-Hakim wasn’t exactly the flavor of the month. He was reviled among Jews and Christians alike for ordering the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 1021 and, for good measure, the Ben Ezra synagogue here in Cairo as well. But they also saw him as a complex and intriguing man who might be the basis for a lesson in morality. Halevi loved a mystery, and he was especially interested in the questions over Al-Hakim’s death. This letter seems to be a draft of something he may never have actually sent off, written to his son-in-law, the scholar and historian Abraham Ibn Ezra in Toledo.”
“Can you translate it?”
She clicked the screen, calling up an enhanced photographic image of the text with English words overlaid. Jack leaned over her shoulder and followed as she read:
To my son-in-law Abraham Ibn Ezra and my daughter Ribca, my heart belongs to you, you noble souls, who draw me to you with bonds of love. In my last letter I wrote to you of the Caliph Al-Hakim, and of how my friends the nagid and the merchant Halfon have revealed much that is new to me about his disappearance in the desert, a mystery above all others in this mysterious and beguiling land. I ask you to pass on this letter to my friends the astronomer Ibn Yunus and the mathematician Ibn al-Haytham, as they may be able to sit down with the maps I sent and their measuring instruments and make sense of the story I have been told. Al-Hakim had taken to wandering into the desert alone on his donkey south of Cairo every night, having ordered his retainers and guards to stay at the city gate. Some say he was, in truth, a god; his disappearance was a reversion to his nonhuman form. Some also say that by persecuting Jews and Christians he was going against Islamic law; yet as caliph, he was not accountable to any law, but the law to him. That is surely enough to drive any man to insanity, or to the desert! Perhaps like the pharaoh who sought the Aten in the desert, who made his temple at Fustat, aligned towards the pyramids, he was shedding that impossible burden, and seeking simplicity. When he went to the desert he went not as caliph, but as a man.
Maria looked up. “The literal translation of the epithet he uses for Al-Hakim is ‘sand-traveller,’ which itself is the literal translation of an ancient Egyptian term known only from hieroglyphs. It’s almost as if they were speaking the same language.”
Jack shook his head in amazement. “Fascinating,” he exclaimed. “That meshes with my own revelation just now in the synagogue when I realized that I knew that a stone excavated in 1890 from the synagogue precinct contained the hieroglyphic cartouche of none other than Akhenaten. It begins to fit with a wider picture, that the site of medieval Fustat was once connected with the ancient complex of Heliopolis, where northeastern Cairo now stands. Heliopolis was the center for the worship of the sun god Ra, and a logical place for Akhenaten to build a great temple to the Aten. Maurice told me that blocks from that temple have been identified in the medieval walls of Cairo. That was my first thought when Aysha told me about the British officers discovering the stone with the cartouche here in 1890. But the account in that officer’s diary makes it sound as if it came from an in situ ancient structure, not a medieval one, so it fits with what Halevi suggests about a separate Pharaonic religious complex here, one aligned to the pyramids rather than to the old cult center at Heliopolis. Is there more, Maria?”