Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  “An incisive, anecdotal, and even humorous prewar look at Islamic culture . . . Horwitz’s style is refreshingly wide-eyed . . . He approaches the region with a fascination and verve that quickly render foolish the West’s clichés of Arabs as simple nomads or bloodthirsty tyrants.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Witty, informative, and written with enough sympathy for Arab desperation to serve as a check on the wartime impulse to demonize the enemy.”

  —USA Today

  “A book firmly in the tradition of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, in which a self-styled naif from the American boonies hilariously relates the culture shocks he experiences in unfamiliar lands.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “An irreverent travelogue through the Arab world, sort of a Charles Kuralt Meets Hunter Thompson in Cairo, Baghdad, and Beirut . . . Crammed with anecdotes and observations that tell volumes about Arab life.”

  —The Buffalo News

  “Horwitz has a discerning eye and a light touch in describing his travels, and he provides a much needed counterpoint to the recent reams of political analysis of the Middle East.”

  —Playboy

  “Thoughtful and honest . . . Baghdad Without a Map cures the anonymity of the Middle East better than any book I’ve read, and it does so without being scholarly or ponderous.”

  —The Detroit News

  “If you’re wondering how the average Joe would experience (or is just now experiencing) the Mideast, pick up a copy of this book . . . Horwitz’s misadventures have a quirky, melancholic charm.”

  —The Village Voice

  “Provides a street-level view of varied lands—from the customary, intoxicating qat-chew with Yemeni locals to a hunkered-down Baghdad on the verge of war.”

  —The Kansas City Star

  “Observant and witty.”

  —Time

  “Exceptional . . . Will Western reason ever understand such a culture, part fourteenth century, part twentieth? Creditably, Horwitz tries to interpret its paradoxes in an alert and literate personal history.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “For readers overwhelmed by news of the war, take heart. Here is an engaging tour of Iraq and its environs that offers history and insight en route, but entertainingly and with remarkably little pain.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Horwitz sees the ugly and the pompous, the homely and the humorous, in this book. It is a buoyant account, but serious as well.”

  —Boston Herald

  “Entertaining, funny, and informative.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Valuable and timely . . . With a sense of humor and eye for detail, Horwitz presents the turbulent Middle East from the vantage point of the ‘man on the street.’”

  —Library Journal

  “Witty, on-target . . . Exciting, funny, and informative—also timely.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  PLUME

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  Penguinrandomhouse.com

  Previously appeared in a Dutton edition.

  First Plume Printing, January, 1992

  Copyright © Tony Horwitz, 1991

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Plume is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC

  Portions of this book were previously published in Harper’s, Washington Monthly, and Playboy.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION

  Horwitz, Tony, 1958–

  Baghdad without a map, and other misadventures in Arabia/ Tony Horwitz : with a new epilogue by the author.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-593-18448-6

  l. Middle East—Description and travel—Journeys—Middle East. I. Title.

  2. Horwitz, Tony, 1958–

  DS49.7.H67 1992 915 .604’ 5 3-
  91-307 31

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover photograph © Anne Gransden courtesy of Superstock

  btb_ppg_c0_r1

  To Geraldine, again.

  “I think of happy days alone with you in desert places.”

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Love at First Sight

  1. We Must Go to the East

  2. YEMEN: Confessions of a Qat-Eater

  3. YEMEN: For You I Make a Special Deal

  4. PERSIAN GULF: The Strait of Hoummos

  5. CAIRO DAYS: Ozymandias Slept Here

  6. CAIRO NIGHTS: Dancing Sheik to Sheik

  7. BAGHDAD: In the Land Without Weather

  8. THE IRAQ-IRAN FRONT: Bodies

  9. THE JORDAN RIVER: I Came for the Waters

  10. LIBYA: The Colonel’s Big Con

  11. KHARTOUM: This Is the Way the World Ends

  12. SOUTHERN SUDAN: Six Dinka Deep

  13. ARABIAN FLIGHTS: Sky-High over Islam

  14. TO BEIRUT: Jusqu’au Boutiste

  15. TEHRAN: The Imam Is in the People’s Hands

  16. TEHRAN: Searching for the Twelfth Imam

  17. EXODUS FROM EGYPT: Metal Fatigue

  Epilogue: No One Makes Love to Iraq

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Sayed Hassan and Yousri Khier, for guiding me through the wiles of Cairo and Arabic; Linda Halsey, for her broad definition of travel; Jim Landers, Jack Hitt, David Hawpe, Keith Runyon, Jason Deparle, Karen House, Lee Lescaze and Barry Kramer, for deciphering smudged faxes and broken telexes, and sometimes publishing them. And Michael Ross and Barbara Slavin, for their friendship and butterball turkey at Sharia Abu Al Feda. Alfi shokr.

  Young men who like their comforts, and a dainty table, or who wish to pass their time pleasantly in the company of women, must not go to Arabia.

  —CARSTEN NIEBUHR,

  Description of Arabia, 1774

  I never saw a fat man in the desert.

  —RICHARD BURTON,

  nineteenth-century English explorer

  Prologue

  Love at First Sight

  I was driving alone, on a moonless night, along the rim of the vast desert known as the Empty Quarter. The road was black and narrow, the occasional sign written in Arabic script I couldn’t yet decipher. I turned and turned again and felt the back wheels spin in drifting desert sand.

  Retracing my route, I stopped at a small oasis of palm trees and whitewashed villas. Arab houses, particularly those in the Persian Gulf states, reveal little to the outside world. Knocking on a plain metal door set in a high wall of stucco, I wondered if the home inside was a palace or a hovel.

  The door creaked open a few inches and a woman peered out, her face concealed by a black canvas mask. It formed a beak around her nose, with narrow eye slits, like medieval armor. I asked in simpl
e Arabic if she could direct me back to the town I had left to watch the sunset, three hours before.

  She paused, glancing over her shoulder. There was a rustle of garments and the whisper of female voices. Then she invited me in and slipped behind another door to find someone who could help.

  Five women sat on a carpet in the courtyard, sipping tea from tiny glasses. They wore masks like the woman at the door, and billowy black shrouds that fell to their toes, concealing hair and skin.

  I smiled and offered the ubiquitous Arab greeting: “Salaam aleikum.” Peace be upon you. Ten eyes stared back through their peepholes. It was difficult to tell if anyone returned my smile. Then one of the women stood up and offered me a glass of tea. She spoke in hesitant English, and her voice was muffled by the veil. “I love you,” she said.

  I looked down, embarrassed, and studied the red henna dye painted in swirls across the tops of her toes. Somehow, saying “I love you, too” to a Muslim woman in a face mask didn’t seem appropriate. So I smiled and thanked her. We stood there, blue eyes to black eyes, until a man appeared at the edge of the courtyard. He wore a starched white robe and a white kerchief folded like a fortune cookie atop his head. “I love you always,” the woman said, retreating toward the black-robed huddle on the carpet.

  The man explained in a mix of English, Arabic and pantomime that I should follow the oil wells, vast laceworks of steel strung out along the highway. At night, wreathed in blinking lights, they looked like dot-to-dot drawings without the lines sketched in. Before Mohammed brought Islam to the Arabian peninsula, the bedouin worshiped stars and used them as guides in the night. These days, nomads navigated by a constellation of oil.

  The drive was long and dull, and I passed the time by replaying the courtyard scene in my head. I’d noticed a satellite dish perched atop the villa; perhaps the women had been watching television. Wasn’t “I love you” what men and women often said to each other in the West? I let my imagination drift out across the sand. Perhaps the women dreamed of strangers in the night—though probably not blond men in khakis and sneakers, sputtering bad Arabic. Perhaps the women were concubines, held captive in a desert harem. It was the sort of thing that often happened in movies about Arabia.

  Most likely the meeting was meaningless, a linguistic impasse common to rookie correspondents. “My first few months out here, I felt like Helen Keller,” a fellow journalist had confided a few weeks before, welcoming me to the Middle East. “Blind, deaf and also dumb—particularly dumb.” He chuckled and took another swig of soapy Egyptian beer. “But I’ve stopped worrying. Your average reader, even your average editor, can’t tell if you know what you’re writing about or not.”

  So I shrugged off the strange encounter. Surely, as my Arabic and my understanding of Arab subtleties improved, I’d be able to make sense of such scenes, even use them as anecdotes in my feature stories.

  But strange things kept happening. And in the two years that followed, I often found myself in dimly lit hotel rooms or dusty airport lobbies, trying to fathom notes I had scribbled just hours before. What was I to make of the teenager in Gaza, his face wrapped in a black-checked keffiya, who guided me through streets smudged with burning tires, then paused to ask, “Mr. Tony, there is something I must know. Are you Portuguese?”

  Did he know somehow I was Jewish? What did this have to do with the Portuguese?

  Months later, I arrived by boat in Beirut, amid heavy artillery fire. A lone sentry patrolled the dock, and I assumed he would ask for my papers. “Visa? Who said anything about visa?” he said with a shrug. Gesturing toward the shell-pocked shore, he slung his weapon onto his shoulder and melted back into the gloom.

  Was this an invitation or a warning?

  On a later reporting trip, to cover the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini, I found myself stuck in Tehran traffic beside a taxi driver who kept grabbing my thigh and shrieking: “America! Donkey! Torch!” He refused to accept a single riyal for the hour-long ride.

  After a time, I contented myself with scribbling in my notebooks and filling the margins with question marks. Islamic society, like the homes I had passed that first night in the desert, didn’t open easily to Westerners. To pretend that I understood all that I saw and heard was folly.

  But the mystery kept tugging, even after I left the Middle East. The margins were still filled with question marks. And some nights, when the rain raps hard against my window, I wander south to the Empty Quarter, to black masks and black eyes and red-henna toes, and wonder why it was she loved me.

  I

  We Must Go to the East

  Free lance . . . one of those military adventurers, often of knightly rank, who in the Middle Ages offered their services as mercenaries, or with a view to plunder . . . a “condottiere,” “free companion.”

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  Some men follow their dreams, some their instincts, some the beat of a private drummer. I had a habit of following my wife.

  This wasn’t a problem, except for the places she chose to go. First frostbitten Cleveland, where she had a job and I didn’t. Then Australia, her parents’ home and ten thousand miles from mine. Now, after three years Down Under, Geraldine proposed that we move Up Over again—to Cairo.

  “It’s seven time zones closer to America,” she said hopefully. Her newspaper office had just called to offer her the Middle East posting. “You like historical places,” she added. “It’s awfully old, Egypt.”

  The thought of starting over again, in another strange country, alarmed me. In a month I would turn twenty-nine, an age at which most pharaohs were already drifting toward eternity in their barges of the night. Tut didn’t even make it to eighteen. By then, he’d been ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt for seven years. At twenty-eight, I was still struggling to rise from the ranks of cub reporter.

  I quit my job and traveled home to explore my journalistic prospects. They weren’t very good. Several years of reporting on koala care at the Sydney Zoo and school board meetings in Fort Wayne, Indiana, hardly qualified me for a foreign correspondent’s job writing about Abu Nidal or the finer points of OPEC negotiations.

  Work as a stringer was the best I could hope for. “Stringer” is a descriptive non-job title. It means you are paid piecework, for occasional stories, usually when the regular correspondent is out of town or busy with a more important assignment. Stringers are the double-A players of journalism: pitifully paid, forced to travel on the cheap and strung along with the promise of being called up to the majors. Most never make it.

  So I decided to take a job-hunting swing down the East Coast, to make sure I wasn’t missing a shot at big-league journalism in America.

  “We need someone to cover education, and you’ve got experience at that,” said Editor #1, at a big paper in Boston. I moved to the edge of my chair. “Have you tried the Quincy Patriot-Ledger?” he asked. “They beat us on a lot of suburban stories. There’s also a weekly in Braintree. You might try that.”

  As the train chugged south, past Pawtucket and Providence, I perused Seven Pillars of Wisdom. “All men dream; but not equally,” wrote Lawrence of Arabia, on the opening page. “Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”

  Editor #5 glanced at my clips and said, “Good ear for quotes. Fine writing.” He stubbed out his cigarette, stared me straight in the eye. “We may have an opening on the business desk, covering metals. Are you sure that’s what you’re looking for?”

  I was looking for shortcuts, for adventure. On the train to Baltimore, I daydreamed of dusty casbahs and caftaned bedouin. The melody of Middle East cities began to enchant me. Fez, Khartoum, Bengazi, Baghdad. I read The Blue Nile. “We must go to the East,” Napoleon declared, shortly before heading off to conquer Egypt. “All great glory has always be
en gained there.” He too was almost twenty-nine at the time.

  Editor #8 handed me his business card, told me to “think small,” and suggested I stop in again—like sometime in the twenty-first century. I told him I’d rather wing it as a free-lancer in the Middle East.

  “Mr. Horwitz,” he cautioned, “you could end up with a definite flake factor in your résumé. A year here, a year there. Beware of that.”

  Stalking out through the crowded newsroom, I jumpshot my résumé into the trash and booked two tickets to Cairo.

  * * *

  Cairo. Mother of the World. In Arabic, Al-Qahira, the Triumphant. Largest city in Africa, capital of the Arab world. And on a stifling September night, the most awful and bewildering place my jet-lagged eyes had ever beheld.

  I’d never set foot in the “Third World.” Nor had my hurried reading on modern Egypt purged old stereotypes, bred of The Alexandria Quartet, the mummy collection at the British Museum and the Passover service, in which Pharaoh commanded that Hebrew sons be cast in the Nile. I knew that the Mother of the World was an overcrowded mess. But I clung to the notion that ancient glory would still be visible in the rubble.

  It wasn’t, at least not from the back steps of the Nile Hilton at nine o’clock on a Thursday night. A hundred yards away, on the opposite side of Cairo’s central square, stood the Egyptian Museum and its trove of antique treasures. But between myself and Tut’s tomb lay a dense moat of flesh and combustion, swirling dizzily through the gloom.

  There were trucks, taxis, trolleys, buggies and buses, the latter so overloaded that bodies draped from the doors, limbs stuck out of windows and a few brave passengers even clung to the rooftops, their turbans unraveling in the wind. There were men on bicycles, men on oversized tricycles, men on motorbikes—whole families on motorbikes, children crammed in the drivers’ laps, sometimes two in a lap, clutching the handlebars. There were donkeys and burros and even a camel: toting firewood, toting fruit, toting garbage, toting ashes. There were two-legged men in wooden wheelchairs, one-legged men with crutches shaped like tree limbs, and a no-legged man on a wooden skateboard, propelling himself with rapid pawing motions across the ground.