Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia Read online

  The man held up a stunning dagger, inlaid with minute bits of silver, much like the weapons I’d watched the Jewish silversmith laboring over. For the first time in three days of mock shopping, I was tempted to make a purchase.

  The younger Jew—now self-appointed translator and middleman—leaped up and strapped the dagger around my waist. “You now very strong soldier,” he said. A crowd of boys, some Jews, some not, nodded in agreement. It seemed the whole crowd was working on commission.

  I put the dagger down and feigned interest in several others. Then I glanced again at the first dagger and asked in an offhand manner what it cost. The two men consulted in Arabic and the younger one said, “Two thousand riyals.” About two hundred dollars.

  “Two thousand?” I got up to leave.

  There was another whisper of Arabic, and the young man grasped my sleeve. “Make my friend an offer,” he said. “Perhaps today he is in need to sell.” It was the first time I had heard bargaining words from a Yemeni merchant. It was also the first time I had felt some common blood flowing between me and these mocha-colored men with their beanies and ringlets.

  I picked up a stick and scribbled “500” in the dust. The old man began rolling up his carpet. I handed him the stick. He wrote “1500.” I got up to leave again. He held my arm, then wiped out the dust with his sandal and wrote “1000.” I scribbled “500” again. He turned away, as if to catch the eye of a passing shopper.

  “You have dollars?” our go-between asked. After all, dollars were worth one thing to me and quite another to them, traded on the black market. I laid a fifty-dollar bill in the dust, which equaled five hundred riyals at the official rate and perhaps seven hundred at the unofficial. The young man held it up to the sun and made some quick calculations.

  “It is good money but need more,” he declared. I emptied my pockets: a ten-dollar bill, one hundred riyals, a return plane ticket to Cairo and a few lint-covered Egyptian stamps. I draped the riyals and the stamps across the dagger’s handle. The old man considered the offer for a moment. Then he reached into a corner of his carpet and dug out two enormous worn coins like some I’d seen at a museum in Sanaa. They were Maria Theresa dollars, Austrian coins once used by the Ottoman Turks and apparently still legal tender in Yemen. He tossed them atop the dagger, then pointed at the ten dollars I was still clutching.

  I added the bill to the loot and the man nodded his consent. He pocketed the dollars, riyals and stamps. I scooped up the jambiya and Maria Theresa coins. The young man helped strap the dagger around my waist.

  “You make very big bargain,” he said, standing back. This seemed dubious. “You look like very big sheik,” he continued. This seemed even more dubious. But marching out of the market, past the silversmith and down the dusty main drag, my hand resting calmly on the hilt of the fine jambiya, I thought it likely that I was the first armed Jew to parade through the streets of Saada.

  4

  PERSIAN GULF

  The Strait of Hoummos

  If one goes into Arabia, he should carry his shroud under his arm.

  —A friend’s advice to Arabian explorer Charles Doughty

  Late one Friday night in Cairo, I was watching a scratched videotape of Dr. No, dubbed into Arabic, when the call came through from New York.

  “Tony? Jack.”

  “Jack!” I switched off the video. Jack was a former classmate and one of a dozen or so magazine editors I’d written to before moving to Cairo, in the hopes they’d throw an assignment my way. None had yet called.

  “Did I catch you at a bad time?” he asked.

  “No, just finishing off a story.”

  “Look,” he said, “there’s been some great TV footage over here on the tanker war in the Persian Gulf.” He paused. “We’d like you to get out on the water and put the story into words.”

  I’d seen the same footage earlier that night, on the English-language news. Iraqi warplanes and Iranian gunboats, drilling oil tankers with Exocet missiles and rocket-propelled grenades. Flaming hulks skidding across the TV screen. Half-charred sailors leaping overboard, into shark-infested waters.

  “Sounds great, Jack.” After weeks of stringing, it was good to be tossed some rope, however frayed. “What’s my budget?”

  “A thou for expenses, three thou for the finished piece, and a thou kill fee.” He chuckled. “That’s if the piece gets killed, not you.” He had another call waiting; he wished me luck and rang off.

  * * *

  There was one other Westerner on board the flight to the United Arab Emirates, the best jumping-off point for coverage of the Persian Gulf war. He was slumped in a window seat across the aisle, reading the Emirates News.

  “Reporter?” he asked. I nodded. “Gulf-warring it?” I nodded again. “Me too,” he continued. “Bloody dull business.” He glanced out at the twilit sky as we banked over the Persian Gulf for the plane’s first stop, at Qatar. “If there’s any heat tonight you’ll see it out the left side of the aircraft.” With that, he handed me his newspaper, yawned, and drifted off to sleep.

  I devoured every inch of newsprint. In Cairo, the only English-language daily was the Egyptian Gazette, a six-page chronicle filled with out-of-date AP stories, grainy photos of East German factories (available to the Gazette for free) and newsy nuggets on the domestic scene, such as “President Mubarak yesterday received a cable of thanks from Sultan Qaboos of Oman in reply to the President’s greetings cable marking the 17th anniversary of the Sultanate’s National Day.”

  The Emirates paper was encyclopedic by comparison, and crammed with curious glimpses of the society I was about to enter. The daily “prayer timings” were prominently displayed, alongside the arrival and departure schedule at the Emirates’ four international airports—this in a nation with the population and habitable land mass of Rhode Island. Two of the airports were only ten miles apart. An advertisement on the opposite page offered “brief but intense shopping sprees in London” and “slimming vacations in West Germany.”

  At the airport in the Emirates’ capital, Abu Dhabi, I climbed into a Mercedes taxi and tore down an empty six-lane causeway, past cloverleafs, shopping centers and lush strips of green pasted neatly onto the desert. Gleaming skyscrapers rose on both sides. The whole city looked like an architect’s model, a toy town, still under glass.

  In Cairo I’d been surprised to hear Egyptians speak disparagingly of Persian Gulf Arabs, to whom they gave the diminutive nickname “Gulfies.” The Gulfies had oil but they didn’t have a civilization to rival that of the Egyptians, who were tossing up pyramids five thousand years before the Gulfies moved out of goat-hair tents. “When the chips are down, there is only one real place in the entire area—Egypt,” a Cairo diplomat once declared. “All the rest—forgive me—are tribes with flags.”

  There was a kernel of truth underlying this arrogance. There was also a great deal of envy. Egypt had a per capita income of $560 a year. In the Emirates the figure was $24,000. At the height of the oil boom, the tiny nation had been the richest in the world.

  But a traditional culture could still be glimpsed through the shimmer. At the Abu Dhabi Sheraton, there was a room-service menu offering fresh lobster flown in from Canada, and the in-house movie schedule rivaled that of a suburban cineplex. But kisses and cuddles were edited out of the films, to avoid offending Muslim guests. There was a notice by the bed that prayer rugs were available at reception. A decal on the night table pointed the way to Mecca.

  Opting for the hotel bar, I found myself seated beside a Fort Worth oilman named Larry. “Change those Arab dishrags for ten-gallon hats and this place could be Dallas,” he said, sipping Budweiser. He was watching the Texas Longhorns play the Arkansas Razorbacks, live via satellite on a twenty-two-inch television screen. “Biggest, tallest, richest, they love that shit.” He lowered his voice. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And let me tell you, son, they’ve got it.”

  * * *


  By day, Abu Dhabi was blinding. White sky. White buildings. White-robed men in white Mercedeses, calling each other on car phones. Imported laborers provided the only color: red-turbaned Sikhs, laying green turf on the median strips. Staggering through the sunstruck streets, I took refuge in Abu Dhabi’s only historical edifice: a mud-and-coral fortress that had, until the 1960s, dwarfed the huts of what was then a pearling and fishing backwater. The fortress was now a pygmy amid thirty-story towers of steel and glass.

  The mud had been covered with whitewash and the fortress converted to a government center. Inside, an amiable English archivist, Edward Henderson, invited me into his air-conditioned office. “This building used to lack certain amenities,” he said. “Glass, electricity, potable water, that sort of thing. But by the standard of the day it was quite grand.”

  Henderson first came to Abu Dhabi in 1948, by wooden sailboat, to win oil concessions from the local sheik. The sheik invited Henderson onto the fortress rooftop to feast on dates, camel’s milk and a whole sheep lying on a bed of rice. Bedouin retainers recited poetry as they dined. “One had the feeling that life hadn’t changed for centuries,” Henderson said.

  Forty years later, Henderson was now among the legion of Westerners in the principality’s employ. “One must learn to move with the times,” he added, smiling wryly at the irony of his situation.

  It was a Friday, when most Arab offices close and reporting is difficult, so I rented a car and drove inland to a camel race I’d seen advertised in the Emirates News. The causeway swept me out of the city and into an arid plain dotted with signs for camel crossings: red triangles with humped silhouettes at the center. Thirty minutes out of Abu Dhabi there was nothing: a vast soup of oil, crusted with sand.

  It was my first real view of desert, and I searched in vain for the majestic vistas I’d seen in Lawrence of Arabia and countless other films. A nineteenth-century traveler, Alexander Kinglake, described the desert much better: “Sand, sand, still sand, and only sand, and sand, and sand again.” The wealth here had to be mineral, because there was nothing else, animal or vegetable, for miles.

  Gazing out at the bleak expanse, it was easy to understand why Islam had caught on so quickly among seventh-century Arabs. For the faithful, the Koran promises a paradise “watered by rivers. Its food is perpetual, and its shade also” (heaven also offers its guests “beauteous damsels . . . whom no man shall have deflowered before them”). It was also easy to see why the oil-rich Gulfies had quickly discarded their camels and tents for Mercedeses and modern villas. At noon the temperature was 109 degrees. Turning on the air conditioner, I eased up the tinted windows and listened to Casey Casum play American top forty on Abu Dhabi radio.

  The oasis of Al Ain announced itself with a billboard offering an unlikely bit of Mohammed’s paradise here on earth: an indoor ice rink. There was also a squat villa shaped like a flying saucer, which had touched down on a lot so vast that it would have been zoned industrial in any other land.

  Driving through town and into the desert on the other side, I couldn’t find a trace of the camel race. The directions in the newspaper were vague, and there was no one out in the blazing midday sun to ask. About to give up, I spotted a dozen men seated in the shade of a cedar tree. They wore traditional garb: a white robe with a white headdress held in place by a ring of black cord, which had once doubled as a rope to tie camels’ legs so they wouldn’t stray. A few camels and goats milled nearby. It seemed I had stumbled on a genuine bedouin encampment.

  I wandered over to ask directions. One of the men spoke English and told me that the races had ended a few hours before. But with typical Arab hospitality, he invited me to stay for lunch. The men were about to dig their fingers into a communal mound of meat and rice, and they indicated politely that I should take the first bite.

  A southpaw, I instinctively reached my left hand toward the—

  “La! La!” twelve voices cried in unison. No! A man put his left hand on his backside, reminding me of its proper use. The others laughed. I’d forgotten the first commandment of desert etiquette, but my hosts seemed good-humored about it.

  Proceeding clumsily with my right hand, I bit into a piece of sinewy flesh. It tasted like overcooked sandal. I must have made a quizzical face, because the man beside me nodded his head toward the animals milling nearby. I had missed seeing camels run and was now eating one instead.

  “Do you live here?” I asked Mobarak, the English-speaking young man who had invited me to eat. “Or do your people still roam through the desert?”

  Mobarak smiled. “Today I am a bedouin,” he said. “Tomorrow I study business administration.”

  He pointed to another cedar tree where a row of Toyota Land Cruisers was parked in the shade. The men, it turned out, were students and government workers from Al Ain. They came here only on Fridays to race their camels and picnic in the desert. Even the food had been prepared beforehand in Mobarak’s kitchen. “It is nice sometimes to live in the old way,” he said, sipping Pepsi.

  There was an older man seated beside Mobarak. His face was the color and texture of scorched almonds. Mobarak said this was his father, born near here and raised herding camels across the vast desert known as the Rub al Khali, or Empty Quarter. In those days, the Bedouin lived from well to well, relying on their camels for food, milk and hides for tents and water bags.

  The older man spoke poor English, so I asked Mobarak what his father now did.

  “Business,” he said. “Mostly he buys properties and builds on them. I cannot think of the English word.”

  “Developer?”

  The older man smiled, his mouth full of camel and rice. “Aywah,” he said. Yes, that was the word. Then he said something in Arabic I didn’t understand.

  “He says that this war between Iraq and Iran is very bad for business,” Mobarak translated. “It takes many years to grow a tree and only a minute to cut it down.”

  * * *

  After lunch, after a group snooze under the cedar tree, Mobarak led me a few miles across the desert to a place where other camel breeders were running heats in the waning sun. The track was a long spit of hoof-beaten sand, beginning at a cedar tree and ending at an oil rig. Bangladeshi grooms hoisted saddles made of toweling onto the camels, then hoisted on the jockeys, Bangladeshi boys of seven or eight. The boys were barefoot and secured to the saddles with Velcro straps across their calves. The owners, elegantly robed men like Mobarak, sat in their four-wheel-drives, windows up and air conditioning on.

  When three mounts had been readied, the grooms hit the camels with bamboo crops and the awkward beasts humped their way through the sand. A moment later, three of the cars pulled out of the shade and took off after the camels, cruising alongside the track. Windows down, the passengers yelled encouragement to their riders. “Emshee!” Move it! Fifty yards from the starting line, cars and camels disappeared in a cloud of desert sand.

  “This is quite a primitive race,” Mobarak said, rather apologetically. Usually, the owners coached their jockeys through walkie-talkies, which were wired to radio transmitters strapped to the young boys’ chests. The best camels eventually raced in a stadium with a five-mile track and seating for thousands. “It is like your Kentucky Derby,” he said.

  I asked him if the jockeys were ever Arabs.

  “These days, no,” he said. “It is a dangerous sport, and most families would not allow their sons to race. It is much safer to hire boys from Pakistan and Bangladesh.”

  We stood there watching the camels and cars take off, three by three, until the sun became a dull red flame, sinking into the desert.

  * * *

  That evening I accepted Mobarak’s invitation to visit him at his home near Al Ain. The villa was tucked into a tidy subdivision with its own small mosque. Two white Mercedeses were parked in front, alongside the Toyota Land Cruiser I’d seen that afternoon.

  A Filipino servant led me into wha
t seemed a ballroom, with carpet and walls merging into a vast ocean of baby blue. The room smelled antiseptic, as if the furniture had just been unpacked or sprayed with disinfectant. An overstuffed sofa ran the perimeter of the room, with a small coffee table forming an atoll at the precise center. The space was so vast that our voices echoed and I had to lean forward to hear Mobarak’s words.

  “You see, we can live here or in the desert, it makes no difference,” he said, as the servant poured sweet tea from a waist-high pink pot into tiny glasses. Mobarak wore a freshly pressed robe, or dishdasha, and seemed as much at ease in air-conditioned splendor as he had that afternoon squatting in the sand.

  “How many people live here?” I asked.

  “Three. Myself, my brother and my father.”

  “And none of you are married?”

  He paused. “Of course, we have all taken wives.” He rearranged the folds of his robe, offering no further details. I had shown bad manners for the second time that day. In traditional Gulf homes it is impolite to inquire directly about womenfolk. Queries about family, I later learned, are phrased in a way that translates “How many sons do you have?” or “How are those that stand behind you?”

  But Mobarak was broad-minded, and curious about “women’s liberty” and other peculiarities of Western culture. I obliged by giving a thumbnail sketch of life in urban America, touching only lightly on drugs, AIDS, crime and other blights.

  “Forgive me, but I think your culture is too free,” he interrupted. “Man is not a perfect creature. He must live under certain rules.”

  Everything Mobarak read and saw on television confirmed what his own culture taught him. Westerners drank too much and went on shooting sprees; much better not to drink at all. Men gambled away their earnings—even their wives, he had heard. Here, gambling was forbidden. He had seen a television program on New York that showed walls topped with razor wire and buildings guarded by snarling Dobermans. Here no one needed to steal, as everything was provided: free medical care, free education, a free plot of land and a job for any university graduate.