Jerusalem. The Biography

the imperial
ulema
, who was advised by Muhammad in a dream to travel the world. He became, in his own words, ‘The World Traveller and Boon Companion to Mankind’ and travelled not only the length of the vast Ottoman realm butinto Christendom too, obsessively chronicling his adventures in an astonishing ten volumes. Just as Samuel Pepys was writing his diaries in London, Evliya, whether in Istanbul, Cairo or Jerusalem, was compiling his
Book of Travels
, ‘the longest and fullest travel account in Islamic literature, perhaps in world literature’. No Islamic writer wrote as poetically about Jerusalem, or as wittily about life.
    Evliya lived literally on his wits for he won the favour of Mehmet IV with his irresistible jokes, rhyming couplets, mischievous songs and wrestling and he was able to travel by joining the entourages of Ottoman grandees who recruited him for his religious knowledge and for his exuberant entertainment. His books are partly almanacs of amassed facts, partly anthologies of amazing stories: Evliya Celebi (a title that just means ‘gentleman’) both fought the Habsburgs and met the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, impressing him with his personal knowledge of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre. In battle, he self-deprecatingly recorded his own Falstaffian flight – ‘fleeing is also an act of courage’ – and probably the most ‘strange and comic’ scatological scene in military history. *
    He never married, and refused to take any job in the imperial service that interfered with his free-spirited travelling. He was often given slave-girls and was as witty about sex as he was about everything else: he called it ‘the sweet calamity,’ and the ‘nice wrestling-match,’ cheerfully recording his bout of impotence which was finally cured by an Egyptian snakebroth. He daringly joked that sex was the ‘greater jihad’, and the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today.
    Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. As a ‘wandering Dervish,’ he was fascinated by Jerusalem ‘the ancient
qibla
’ which ‘is at present the Kaaba of the poor (or of the dervishes)’ – the capital, the very Mecca of Sufism: he counted seventy Dervish convents, with the largest near the Damascus Gate, varying in origin from India to the Crimea, and described how a contingent from each order performedecstatic songs and dances of the
zikr
all night until dawn.
    Evliya wrote that the city, which boasted 240 prayer-niches and forty madrassas, was ‘the object of desire of the kings of all nations’ but he was most dazzled by the breathtaking beauty and sanctity of the Dome: ‘This humble one has travelled for thirty-eight years through seventeen empires and viewed countless buildings but I’ve never seen one that so resembled paradise. When a person enters, one stands dumbfounded and amazed with finger to mouth.’ In al-Aqsa, where the preacher mounted the pulpit every Friday brandishing the sword of Caliph Omar and the rituals were serviced by a staff of 800, Evliya observed how the mosaics reflected the rays of the sun so that ‘the mosque becomes light upon light and the congregants’ eyes shine with reverence as they pray’.
    In the Dome ‘all pilgrims circumabulate the Rock outside the railing’, while the Temple Mount had become a ‘promenading place embellished with roses, hyacinths, myrtle filled with the intoxicating twitter of nightingales’ and he happily embraced most of its legends – that King David had started building al-Aqsa while Solomon ‘being Sultan of all creatures ordered the demons to complete the construction’. Nonetheless, when he was shown ropes that Solomon had supposedly woven 3,000 years earlier, he could not resist exclaiming to the
ulema
: ‘Do you mean to tell me that the ropes used to bind the demons haven’t rotted?’
    Naturally he visited the Church at Easter where his reaction resembled that of the English Protestants. He worked out the secret of the Holy Fire, claiming that a hidden zinc jar of naphtha was dripped down a chain by a hidden monk to deliver the annual miracle. The festival itself was just ‘pandemonium’ and the Church ‘ lacks spirituality, more like a tourist