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You feel you've been carried there on a magic carpet with an Infinite Improbability Drive that flew through the back of the wardrobe, out the secret door in the garden, down to the palace at the bottom of a sea and down a rabbit hole. Maalouf's al-Wazzan is less passionate than the reader about his remarkable life.
Like a sceptical Candide, he bears knowing but disinterested witness. In , his Muslim family flees the Inquisition in Granada — the coast a "thin streak of remorse behind us" — for Fez. From then, history keeps happening to him and he just lets it. His wanderings take him — "lightly dressed with arms swinging" — through Timbuktu, Cairo, Constantinople and Rome. He is variously a refugee, an emissary, a scholar, an exile, a lexicographer, a captive, rich, destitute, a Muslim and a Catholic. And always, a realist. He is a poet to sultans and lover to wives, slave-girls and princesses.
It is a curious habit of men, al-Wazzan notes, to name themselves after terrifying beasts instead of devoted animals. Leo the African saw "cities die and empires perish" At 12, he still believed: At 40, he thinks: Truth can sometimes be found in fiction. Nabokov declared it "childish to read a novel to gain information". Perhaps he would allow that we can gain insight.
Summer voyages: Leo the African by Amin Maalouf
For all the buckles that get swashed in Leo the African, this is a book of understanding. It offers insights into syncretism, nationalism, religious fanaticism, capitalism and the hierarchies of oppression political, social, cultural, financial, gender.
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The details — Nabokov's "subliminal coordinates" — reveal truths about real-life expediency. Surrounded by Ottoman slaughter in Cairo, al-Wazzan reproaches an Egyptian boy who laughs when his donkey stumbles over an Egyptian soldier's severed head. Whoever takes my mother becomes my step-father. Centuries later, a less vulgar equivalent remained necessary for survival. As a young man he accompanied an uncle on a diplomatic mission , reaching as far as the city of Timbuktu c.
In when returning from a diplomatic mission to Istanbul on behalf of the Sultan of Fez Muhammad II he found himself in the port of Rosetta during the Ottoman conquest of Egypt. He continued with his journey through Cairo and Aswan and across the Red Sea to Arabia , where he probably performed a pilgrimage to Mecca.
On his way back to Tunis in he was captured by Spanish corsairs either near the island of Djerba or more probably near Crete.
He was taken to Rome and initially imprisoned in Rhodes , the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller. He was soon freed and given pension to persuade him to stay.
Leo Africanus
He was baptized in the Basilica of Saint Peter's in It is likely that Leo Africanus was welcomed to the papal court as the Pope feared that Turkish forces might invade Sicily and southern Italy, and a willing collaborator could provide useful information on North Africa. Leo Africanus left Rome and spent the next three or four years traveling in Italy. While staying in Bologna he wrote an Arabic-Hebrew-Latin medical vocabulary , of which only the Arabic part has survived, and a grammar of Arabic of which only an eight-page fragment has survived.
According to Leo, he completed his manuscript on African geography in the same year.
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The book proved to be extremely popular and was reprinted five times. It was also translated into other languages. French and Latin editions were published in while an English version was published in with the title A Geographical Historie of Africa. There are several theories of his later life, and none of them are certain. According to one theory, he spent it in Rome until he died around , the year Description of Africa was published.
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This theory was based on indirect allusion in a later preface to this book. According to another theory, he left shortly before the Sack of Rome by Charles V 's troops in He then returned to North Africa and lived in Tunis until his death, some time after This was based on records by German orientalist Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter , who arrived in Italy and planned but ultimately failed to travel to Tunis to meet Leo who had since reconverted to Islam.
Yet another theory said that he left Tunis after it was captured by Charles V in for Morocco, his second home country after Granada where his relatives were still living. This was based on the assumption that Leo, having left Granada, would not have wanted to live under Christian Spanish rule again, and his wish recorded in Description of Africa that he wanted to ultimately return to his home country "by God's assistance".
It is unlikely that Leo Africanus visited all the places that he describes and he must therefore have relied on information obtained from other travellers. In particular, it is doubtful whether he ever visited Hausaland and Bornu [7] and it is even possible that he never crossed the Sahara but relied on information from other travellers that he met in Morocco.
The historian Pekka Masonen has argued that the belief of his further travels was based on misreadings by modern scholars who interpreted his book as an itinerary. At the time Leo visited the city of Timbuktu , it was a thriving Islamic city famous for its learning. Home to many scholars and learned men, Timbuktu also possessed a Great Mosque, renowned for its expansive library.
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The town was to become a byword in Europe as the most inaccessible of cities. At the time of Leo's journey there, it was the centre of a busy trade carried on by traders in African products, gold, printed cottons and slaves , and in Islamic books. He was also given the family name Medici after his patron, Pope Leo X's family.
The same manuscript also contained his original name al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi. He also wrote an Arabic translation of the Epistles of St. Paul , which is dated in January , and the manuscript currently belongs to the Biblioteca Estense in Modena.
Summer voyages: Leo the African by Amin Maalouf | Books | The Guardian
Another surviving work is a biographical encyclopedia of 25 major Islamic scholars and 5 major Jewish scholars. It was completed in Rome before he left the city in and published for the first time in Latin by Johann Heinrich Hottinger in Unlike Description of Africa , this biographical work was hardly noticed in Europe. It also contains various erroneous information, likely due to his lack of access to relevant sources when he was in Italy, forcing him to rely solely on memory.
In Description of Africa , he also referred to plans to write other books. He planned to write two other descriptions of places, one for places in the Middle East and another for places in Europe. He also planned to write an exposition of the Islamic faith and a history of North Africa.