Al balad - historic quarter of Jeddah

Port city on the Red Sea 

Going into those old, narrow streets is like travelling back to the early port, when deep-sea trading dhows brought spices, rice, and teak from India and mangrove-wood from Africa.  

Generations of fishermen had already been sailing from the port of Jeddah when, according to Strabo, Roman vessels began trading spices from India to Egypt in the first century of the Christian era.  At the same time, the Romans established a garrison near the present-day site of the city to control the overland spice trade.

Al balad (“the city” in Arabic) is the historic port quarter of the city of Jeddah, anchorage for pilgrims making the Hajj since the seventh century CE. Today, Jeddah is an important stop on the way to the holy cities of Mecca and Madina and a port of international trade on the Red Sea.

In the homes of al balad, giant window-shutters provided airflow, keeping out the intense midday sun and allowing Red Sea breezes to cool the house in the evening. At sunset, the family would gather in a rooftop terrace open to the sky (a majlis).

The echo of the muezzin at maghrib, the breeze from the Red Sea on the rooftop terrace, the warm air in the marketplace: the sights, sounds and smells coalesce into a fusing of past and present.

Drinking tea at sunset, my wife Ann, our guide and I listened to the sounds of the port and the market.  Below us we heard the voices of seafarers hauling ropes of coconut fiber and hemp – speaking in Arabic, Farsi, Swahili, Baluchi, Pashto, Urdu and other tongues of the coastal communities of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Oman.

Ibn Battuta (d. 770 AH / 1368 CE), the most widely travelled of all Arab voyagers, wandered in the port towns of the Red Sea, leaving us accounts of the navigation techniques, boat-building, seafaring, architecture and everyday life in the region.   

Jeddah was also a confluence of land routes.  Since Biblical times a camel caravan route carried frankincense and myrrh across the rub al-khali  from Salalah in southern Oman to Palestine, the Mediterranean and to Jeddah.  The dried fragrant resin of the Boswellia sacra plant growing in the Dhofar mountains of Oman, frankincense has been valued for thousands of years and was traded along the Silk Road as far as China.  A gift of frankincense was, and still is, considered a token of high esteem and, in the Middle East, is still customarily given at the birth of a child.

In the markets of al balad you can hear bargaining over the price of frankincense and many other goods among traders who hawk their wares in many languages of the Indian Ocean.

Shortage of building materials in the desert led to distinctive building techniques.  Houses in al balad are built from blocks of coral; often, the mortar is lime from crushed seashells. Coral blocks of original construction are still visible in many shops in the quarter.

Houses seriously damaged by floods in 2009 are now undergoing restoration.

During the 19^th century the Hejaz, the western coastal plain of present-day Saudi Arabia and site of the holy places of Islam, was under the control of the Ottoman Empire.  One of the most magnificent houses in old Jeddah is bait Nassif, house of the family of Nassif, a merchant and governor in the Ottoman period. Its construction dates from the 1870s.

                                          

With over a hundred rooms and a basement cistern to hold water, bait Nassif was a house appropriate for the family of a governor.






Inside the house, the steps of the wide, gently sloping staircase are worn by the feet of generations of laden camels carrying sacks of rice to the third-floor kitchen.
The sidir tree in the courtyard of bait Nassif was for over sixty years the only tree in the entire city. The sidir is known among travelers from the West as the Christ-thorn (Zizyphus spina-cristi) .

With my wife Ann at the sidir tree in the courtyard of bait Nassif.

Deciding the future of a kingdom 

Bait Nassif was the site of discussions that would decide the political map of the region. King Abdulaziz al-Saud, founding the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the 1920s in the wake of the first world war and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, was a guest in the house for forty days.  During his stay, Abdulaziz in a delicate task sought the agreement of the citizens of the Hejaz to a union with his Kingdom.

King Abdulaziz al Saud, founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

 

Addulaziz and council at bait Nassif

 

For their part, the merchants and citizens of the Hejaz sought – eloquently, in the distinctive Arabic of the coast - and received assurance from Albulaziz, that the holy cities would continue to be respected and receive protection when their region became part of the new Kingdom.

Although the boat-building skills, the navigational methods of the seamen, and the coral-crafting of the builders are part of a disappearing world, Bait Nassif  is to become a museum, historical monument and symbol of Jeddah’s cultural heritage.

Images: photos by Ler; 
Arab astrolabe, Wikimedia Commons. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AArabic_astrolabe_2.jpg

Readings in Arabian history

Some books (a very short list) on Arab seafaring and the magnificence of the desert Arabs, before the discovery of oil changed their country and their culture forever:

Dionysius Agius. 2005. Seafaring in the Arabian Gulf and Oman: The People of the Dhow. London: Routledge.

Dionysius Agius. 2008. Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean.  Boston: Brill.

Nicholas Clapp. 1999. The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands. Boston: Mariner Books.

Freya Stark. 1936. The Southern Gates of Arabia. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

Wilfred Thesiger. 1959. Arabian Sands. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Alan Villiers. 1940. Sons of Sinbad. New York: C. Scribner's Sons.

Websites:

Photograph collection of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford:
http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/thesiger.html

ArchNet, the Islamic architecture community: http://www.archnet.org