This latest collaboration by Iftikhar Salahuddin and his wife Naseem - titled If Stones Could Speak: Echoes from the Past - is more than a coffee table book. It has the richer flavour of a chocolate mint one enjoys after a mellow cup of coffee.
At first glance, this sumptuously produced volume is too sophisticated to be a mere album of holiday snaps, taken by the Salahuddins on their numerous journeys throughout the world. The photographs are of stunning quality. They were obviously composed in situ (often under hurried conditions), and later then winnowed at leisure for their aesthetic content as much as their historical contribution to this dazzling photo-tapestry of civilisation.
The text accompanying each monument acts as a support to the four pillars of the book – Among the Believers, Remains of the Past, Footprints on History and Splendours of the Court. They are kept necessarily brief so as not to distract from the images. Sensibly, the authors have encouraged the stones to speak for themselves, assisted by an appropriate quotation that compresses the spirit of the building into a verse or couplet.
What is it about stones, though, that has given Man over the ages such an inferiority complex? Is it their overbearing presence in the geography that surrounds us? Is it because even though we can master shapes from stone, we cannot overcome its dominance in our lives? Or is it because stones by their very durability seem to mock Man’s transient mortality?
Religions have made a business out of stones. Stones became altars; a black stone is the corner-stone of the Holy Ka’aba; the stone pillow said to have been used by the prophet Jacob (now known as the Stone of Scone) supports the British monarch during the coronation ceremony; St Peter derived his name from the Latin word petra (‘And on this rock I will build my church’); the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem; and generations of Egyptian pharaohs commanded the ‘labour of an age in piled stones’,[1] stacked into pyramids pointing towards heaven.
Civilisations hoped to achieve posterity through stones - Persepolis, Pasargadae, Luxor, Athens, Rome, Angkor Wat, and Borobudur, to name but a few. The Salahuddins have visited and photographed them all. This book is their homage to a past that knew no borders, places that survived time, and to history orphaned by neglect. In it, they have documented the monuments of Europe, the Middle and the Far East with assiduousness. They have yet to survey South America with the same assiduousness. Perhaps their next book will examine the Mayans, the Aztecs and the moai stone effigies stranded on Eastern Island in the Pacific Ocean.
Their present book is a good example of 21st century travel writing. It is not quite in the league of that earlier tradition which the British made peculiarly their own. In the 19th century - before photography became a third eye - writers had to rely upon their powers of description. Who has not read or re-read Sir Richard Burton’s fascinating accounts of his travels in Sindh, Arabia and Africa? Or the trek made in 1924 by the intrepidAlexandra David-Néel to Lhasa? She was the first foreigner to visit that forbidden Tibetan eyrie. Later in the 20th century, travelogues by Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar) and Michael Wood’s explorations (In Search of Alexander the Great) became adjuncts to journeys relived for television channels.
Today’s world has shrunk from the exotic to the familiar to the cliché. Armchair tourists can recognise at once two-dimensional facades of like the portal at Petra in Jordan or the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut in the necropolis at Luxor or the Caves of Cappadocia in Anatolia (Turkey) – all hewn out of the living stone. But few have the time or the inquisitiveness of the Salahuddins to explore beyond and within.
They have included sixty-four separate buildings or locations. Each is more than a gem in the diadem of human civilisation. Each of them is a tribute to the talent, effort, enterprise, and skill of millions of craftsmen who died unsung so that their patrons could have their voices heard by history. Could there be any more poignant a plea than this, engraved on a column in the city founded by Cyrus the Great at Pasargadae: ‘Passer-by, I am Cyrus who gave Persians an empire, so grudge me not therefore this monument.’
No one leafing through this magnificent book by the Salahuddins will begrudge praise for all those individuals who throughout known history conceived, constructed and adorned these glorious monuments. Ralph W. Emerson had all those nameless hundreds of thousands in mind when he wrote: ‘He builded better than he knew – the conscious stone to beauty grew.’[2]
F. S. AIJAZUDDIN
[Published in DAWN EOS magazine, 21 April 2019, as ‘Stories with stories to tell’. ]
[1] Milton, On Shakespeare (1630), l.2.
[2] Ralph W. Emerson, The Poems: The Problem, (1847), st.2.
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