Free Hav by Jan Morris Page A

Mehmet V tried to establish himself in the Holy Land of the Hejaz itself, his cousin Abdulmecid maintained the claim from Paris until his death there in 1944, and a contemporary aspirant to the Caliphate, Namik Abdulhamid, who says he is 125th in the true line of descent from Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s father-in-law, lives in Hav, the nearest he can get to the Turkey from which the Sultan’s dynasty and all its pretenders have been permanently exiled. Yesterday I had an audience with him.
    This had taken time to achieve. The 125th Caliph lives cautiously. I had a letter of introduction to him, from a man in Cairo whose name I should not mention, in case somebody assassinates him; and finding it difficult to discover just where the Caliph resided, this I presented to the Imam at the Grand Mosque. For a week or two there was no response. Then one evening an excited Signora Vattani told me there had been a call, good gracious Signora Morris, a call from the Caliphate! I was to be ready to be picked up at the apartment the following evening, five o’clock sharp. But five o’clock came and went without a sign, and next day I was told, without apologies, to be ready that night instead. Twice more I waited, twice more no caliphian car arrived; it was only on the fourth evening that, exactly at five as the man on the telephone had said, the doorbell rang and a big black American car, of the fin-and-chrome era, awaited me outside.
    There was a chauffeur in Arab dress, but the car’s back door opened from the inside, and there sat a dapper middle-aged man in a black suit, sunglasses and that almost forgotten badge of Ottoman respectability, a tarboosh. ‘A tarboosh!’ I could not stop myself exclaiming ‘— can you still buy them?’
    â€˜The Caliph has his own supplier, in Alexandria — Tadros Nakhla and Sons, you may perhaps know the name? Very old-established.’
    He introduced himself as the Caliph’s Wazir, and as we drove across the square he apologized for the inconveniences of the past three days. I would understand, he was sure. The Caliph was vulnerable. One had to be careful. It seemed an inadequate excuse to me, but I let it pass, and the Wazir went on to explain that because of certain, well, entanglements of a historical nature the 125th Caliph found it necessary to live in the strictest security — all through history, he reminded me, the Caliphate had been an office of the greatest delicacy — I would recall what happened to Omar in the mosque at Kufa!
    Down the Boulevard de Cetinje we sped, and out of the Old City, and before we reached the canal we turned up a gravel track, shaded by tall eucalyptus trees. ‘People say’, remarked the Wazir, ‘that this house was built for Count Kolchok’s mistress, the lovely dancer Olga Naratlova. True? False?’ He shrugged his neat shoulders. ‘It makes a nice little story. The Caliph likes the fancy.’ It looked an imposing love-nest, as we passed through lavishly ornamental gates, crossed a wide yard, and were debouched upon a portico whose doors were instantly opened by two swarthy men in khaki drill, one each side (‘Assyrians,’ the Wazir said breezily as we entered, as though they were deaf mutes). Through a bare but still luxurious hall . . . down a marbled corridor . . . two more Assyrians at a double door . . . and there rising courteously to greet me from a silken sofa was Nadik Abdulhamid.
    He wore a red tarboosh too, and a suit of exquisite pale linen, and shoes that looked like lizardskin, and he held in his left hand a string of ivory prayer-beads, and in his right a cigarette in a long holder. He was clean-shaven, with heavy blue eyes and a becoming tan. All in all the pretender to the Caliphate was very suave, and not I thought very caliph-like, and he gestured me suavely to the sofa, and suavely offered me a cigarette from a silver box engraved in Arabic, and most suavely,