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I turned on the television in my luxury hotel suite. The state channel played Jordanian music videos in homage to King Abdallah. Montages of a young man wailing in Arabic dissolved into the object of his worship, ‘Ya Malik, ya Malik’ – O King, O King. Ten minutes later, while I unpacked and washed for dinner, the news began. The lead story was neither war in Afghanistan nor murder in the West Bank. It was King Abdallah’s courtesy call on a school. This blockbuster, hard to surpass for news value, led on to further exclusives: King Abdallah at a cabinet session, King Abdallah pouring cement on something and, the coup de grâce, the king and his queen, a beautiful Palestinian named Rania, touring another school. I liked the way the producers began and ended their broadcast on the same theme and wondered what other risks they took to keep the populace informed.
I went outside to the new Aqaba. It was a dull, quiet place at Easter 1973, when I’d hitchhiked down from Beirut and slept on the beach. Aqaba had since matured into a mini Miami of gaudy hotels and private beaches. But it was still dull and quiet. The seafront Corniche looped east and south from the Israeli border and boasted scores of modern hotels, restaurants, pharmacies and cafés where young men watched television at outdoor tables. In 1973, Aqaba and I were poorer, making do with simple fare: grilled chicken at open-air rotisseries under dried palm branches on wooden frames. There were only two big hotels. A long stretch of sand separated Aqaba and the border fence, then closed, with Eilat. On this, my first visit in twenty-nine years, the border fence had opened to turn Eilat and Aqaba into one city. Once, Aqaba had been distinctly Arab with overgrown parks, neglected beaches, wedding-cake minarets and a few camels; Eilat was defiantly Euro-Israeli, concrete slabs, grey socialist-realist architecture, bars and women in bikinis. Now, they looked the same – the same hotels, shopping centres and other investments in concrete. Despite the open fence, Aq-elat, or Eil-aba, was as segregated by race, religion and language as most other cities. The transnational corporations, which gambled on prosperity in Jordan after its 1994 treaty with Israel, were losing. The Palestinians rose against Israeli military occupation in September 2000, and the result in Aqaba was that the Radisson, the Movenpick and the rest had fewer customers than staff. I walked along the Corniche to the Movenpick, Aqaba’s largest hotel, for dinner.
The Movenpick was said to be the new hotel in a town where hotels were under construction on every spare plot. Its vast edifice straddled, via a bridge, both sides of the Corniche. It occupied acres of seafront and its own man-made hill. Its vaguely Greco-Roman columns and mosaics were ornamented with modern versions of mushrabieh, lattices and lathed woodwork that protected windows, as in old Jeddah and Yemen, from the sun and strangers’ eyes. Despite the traditional balconies clinging like spiders to flat marble walls, the Movenpick looked more MGM-Las Vegas, sans casino, than Arabian Nights.
I was the only diner. The waiter, though cordial, spent most of his time in the kitchen. Like most solitary travellers, I had for companions a book, my thoughts and whatever I happened to see. I watched the lobby. A Filipina nanny came in with a flock of fat children in American clothes. She tried to persuade them to get into a lift. The children – loud, spoiled, rich – ignored her and ran through the restaurant. They rushed past my table, upset chairs and headed towards the swimming pool. When the empty lift closed behind the nanny, I thought she would cry. The children were learning young what their parents discovered after they earned money: they could abuse servants, at least servants whose families were too far away to take revenge. New money had taken them far from their Arab traditions, which required them to treat their household, including those paid to care for children, as family.
The walk back along the Corniche put me in melancholy mood. Only in the gaps between the new and half-completed hotels could I see the water. In patches that the developers had yet to fill, old Arab men played backgammon and smoked their glass-bowled water pipes. The brighter neon of Eilat, no longer hostile and no longer out of reach, was the model for Aqaba’s honorary entry to the modern, Western world. A few young Jordanians smoked narghiles – water pipes – like old men. The narghile was becoming fashionable again in the Arab world. The boys sucking plastic- and wood-tipped tubes were wearing, not the keffiyehs of proud desert warriors, but baseball caps. And they drank Coca-Cola.
A Ramble with Staff Sergeant Amrin
In 1973, I had spent the best part of a day searching for the fortress that Lawrence had conquered in 1917. Everyone I asked then had an original notion of its whereabouts – in the hills, on the King’s Highway, somewhere near the Saudi frontier. When I found it on the beach near the old town, I slashed through a jungle that had grown in and over it. Forcing a path along the ramparts, I was rewarded with the Turkish commander’s perspective of the Red Sea when the pillars of his empire were falling. Below the ramparts were storerooms and the yard where deserters and rebels had been hanged. Later, I asked to meet old people who might have remembered Lawrence from fifty-six years earlier. Some helpful Jordanians took me to a café to meet a man who could not have been more than forty. Much discussion ensued, until I asked how a man as young as he could have known Lawrence. He sorted through papers in a beefy leather wallet and produced a photograph of himself in black desert robes with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence in David Lean’s film. Indicating the fair-skinned actor, he asked, ‘What do you want to know about him?’
Early on my first morning back in Aqaba, Ahmed Amrin came to my hotel. At five foot six, he was taller than the man he most admired, the late King Hussein. His get-up was pure California, as if he’d shown up for work as assistant director on a Hollywood set: big Wild Foot boots, Nike baseball cap, grey Levis and a V-necked sweater over a grey T-shirt. His dark goatee was trimmed like a sail, and his left hand sported a wedding ring and a Timex watch. He spoke English as a British soldier would, and he knew his job. He was a guide.
Mr Amrin had taken his degree in English at the University of Amman. His favourite playwrights were Shakespeare and Marlowe, fellow partisans of royalty. He enlisted in the Jordanian army, serving three years in England at Catterick Barracks, near Darlington, North Yorkshire, studying electronics. When he returned to Kerak, his home town between Amman and Aqaba, he married. Jordan and Israel signed a treaty of peace in 1994, and former Staff Sergeant Amrin moved to Aqaba to claim the promised riches of peacetime tourism. He studied his country’s archaeology, history, even its geology, flora and fauna. He became a first-class tour guide in a land without tourists.
‘In the tenth century BC,’ he informed me, marching over a seaside dig next to the Movenpick, ‘this was a Solomonic port. It served the Nabataeans and the “Ptolemites” ’. Mr Amrin was a rare figure for the Middle East, an honest interpreter of history. Some Arab guides omitted the connection between the land and the ancient Israelites, as most Israeli archaeologists and tour companies avoided references to the Arab, his culture and his history. To Mr Amrin, who was once Staff Sergeant Amrin of the Royal Jordanian army’s engineering corps, the story was incomplete without Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Turks and the British. The ‘Ptolemites’, descendants of Alexander the Great’s General Ptolemy, had ruled Egypt from Alexander’s death until the Roman conquest.
Mr Amrin explained how the other side of the Gulf came to be called Eilat: ‘In the Muslim era, this was called Ela or Wela, which means “palm tree”.’ The ruins were so far beneath our feet that all I could see were brick-lined trenches. The archaeologists had a way to go, but they had forced the government to preserve the ancient Nabataean – Ptolemaic remains from burial under a hotel. It may have been an economic calculation: Aqaba had plenty of hotels but not much history. Walls two millennia old gave it an edge over Eilat, whose oldest structure dated to 1949. The earthworks that Mr Amrin showed me were a small portion of the Roman achievement, a link in the empire’s land – sea communications between the fertile hills of Felix Arabia, now Yemen, and garrisons in Egypt and Palestine. The rest of it was under either the Movenpick Hotel, where no one would see it, or the Red Sea, where anyone with goggles and flippers could have a look.
Aqaba as it came to exist was the creation of Islam’s third Caliph, successor to the Prophet Mohammed, Othman. Mr Amrin’s tale jumped from the pious Othman, one of the four ‘rightly-guided’ Caliphs, to modern Jordan. He said the Emirate of Transjordan was born of the Meccan Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s struggle during the First World War. Without prompting from me, he said, ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course.’
On our way to the Turkish fortress, our shoes collected the dust of Roman and early Muslim digs. We passed beaches where Jordanians above the age of twelve wore enough clothing for an English winter and children were stripped down to bathing suits. Mr Amrin said this was the ‘free beach’, one of the last that had not been sold to developers to serve the foreign tourists who no longer flew to Jordan or anywhere else in the Levant. Beside the shore, tiny plots of garden, bordered by squares of raised earth, sprouted green vegetables and spiky herbs.
Mr Amrin was, like most other native Jordanians, a monarchist. It was not the system he admired so much as the man, or the men. He talked about the dynasty that had given its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. His story began with the patriarch, Hussein bin Ali, already an old man when the British encouraged him to lead a tribal – in Lawrence’s fantasy, national – revolt against the Ottoman Empire. His sons, Abdallah, Feisal, Ali and Zeid, harassed the Turks in the east, while Britain advanced from the west. Hussein, meanwhile, practised politics, conspiracy and diplomacy in Mecca. The Arabs were more successful at fighting than Hussein was at politics. The old man subsequently lost Mecca itself to another of Britain’s Arab supplicants, the Al-Sauds from the inland desert of Nejd. Britain’s favourite among the Hashemite sons, Feisal, became King of Syria. His throne in Damascus lasted almost a year, until France took its share of the Ottoman Arab spoils and expelled him. In compensation and for its own purposes, Britain awarded him a richer prize, Iraq with its fecund earth and its oil. The British killed at least ten thousand Iraqis to impose Feisal upon them; and his dynasty lasted until a year after the British left and a mob got its hands on his grandson, Feisal II, in 1958. Another of old Hussein’s sons, Abdallah, founded Jordan – ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course’ – in the desert between Iraq and Palestine. Jordan was the booby prize. Until Abdallah, it was nothing more than the desert waste that kept Iraq and Palestine apart, the Crusaders’ Outre-Jourdain. But it was the only one of the four Hashemite crowns – Jordan, Syria, Iraq and the Hejaz – that survived. Abdallah’s successors were his son Talal, Talal’s son Hussein and Hussein’s son Abdallah, whose picture gazed upon the ruins.
‘I can say the late king was the creator of modern Jordan,’ Mr Amrin informed me, referring to Hussein. ‘He was humble. He listened to the radio to hear the people’s complaints. He created a sense of love among the people.’
And the son?
‘I believe the same is happening with Abdallah.’
The land around the citadel had been cleared since my 1973 visit, and there was no longer any need to scratch my way through the brush. We stopped outside the walls, as Lawrence did before the Turks surrendered. Above the vast, open Mamluke gate were two metal flags, painted by hand. ‘People think that is the Palestinian flag,’ Mr Amrin was pointing at one. ‘It isn’t. It’s the flag of the Great Arab Revolt.’ A British officer had designed the red – white – green – black standard of Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s Arab army in 1917, and most Arab flags were variants of it. The Lebanese with its green cedar between red stripes was the exception. The Palestinians – the last standard-bearers of Arab nationalism – adopted the Sherifian flag without alteration. With that flag came lies: that the Arabs were an independent nation, albeit temporarily separated into states with their own flags; that the Arabs would liberate Palestine; that Arab warriors had somehow defeated the Turkish, French and British empires; and that, one day, they would expel the American empire’s pampered child, Israel, from their midst.
An old gatekeeper asked us to pay a fee. When Mr Amrin explained my purpose, the man invited us in as his guests and sat down again in the shade of the massive iron gates. Mr Amrin pointed to some writing, carved into the wall, in beautiful Kufic Arabic script, a lavish calligraphic style that originated in Kufa, Iraq: ‘This inscription honours Kalsum al-Ghuri, one of the leaders who fought the Portuguese from 1505 to 1520.’ Portuguese raiders in the sixteenth century were discovering and claiming the more vulnerable parts of Arabia, India, Africa and the Americas. Kalsum al-Ghuri appeared to have saved Aqaba, and thus Syria, from the massacres of Muslims, Jews and heterodox Christians that accompanied Portugal’s Renaissance conquests further east.
Mr Amrin showed me, between the testament to the Mamluke chief al-Ghuri and a carved verse, or sura, from the Koran, ‘a secret passage to leave the place in wartime’. I looked deep inside the walls, where a tight corridor disappeared into darkness. We didn’t go in. Next came the courtyard, a stone parade ground protected by four high walls. ‘It’s very different, if you were here in ’73,’ he said. The difference was that I could see it. Then, weeds hid the well, the storerooms and the stairs below the ramparts. Now, it seemed like the Alamo, a barren shrine to a mythic struggle. On the stones where Ottoman levies had once borne aloft their Sultan-Caliph’s flag and guarded the southern approach of empire, Turkish officers chose surrender over siege and annihilation in 1917. If they had fought to the death, and if the Turkish governors to the north had not antagonized the Arabs of the cities by hanging their leaders, might their deaths have inspired their comrades to rally and repulse the British? Would the cry ‘Remember Aqaba!’ have saved the Ottoman Empire from destruction? Turkey still held the holy cities of Medina and Jerusalem in 1917, and many thousands of Turks would die before their armies retreated for ever from Arabia and Syria into Anatolia. If the Turks, like the British, had bribed and made false promises to the Arabs, they might have made the conquest of Syria too costly for the British to carry on. Like the American empire of the twenty-first century, Turkey took Arab acquiescence as a constant in all their calculations. It was a mistake.
We marched across the quad, up and down the circling staircases, and along the ramparts. We saw where the Turkish soldiers had slept, where they ate and the vast chambers in which they received their imperial commands from the Prophet’s successor on earth, the Sultan-Caliph, in Istanbul. The dates of the inscriptions accorded to the Muslim lunar calendar. ‘We are in the year 1422,’ Mr Amrin informed me. ‘That is 5762 or 63 in the Jewish calendar.’ The Muslim Year One was AD 622, the time of Hejira, Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina.
What fascinated me was Mr Amrin’s interpretation of history. No two people, no two books, related the fables in the same way. The teller might be an Arab, an Armenian, a Turk or an Israeli. Each saw the world from the vantage of his religion, his sect, his school of philosophy and of law, his village, his tribe, his family. Mr Amrin was born in Kerak, known in Jordan for a beautiful Crusader castle and its Bedouin hospitality. ‘The first place the Muslims got to,’ he said, referring to Islam’s earliest forays outside the Arabian peninsula, ‘was Kerak. It was called Mu’ata, and it had a famous university. There, they had their first clash with the Christians.’ They lost. Two thousand Muslim horsemen needed more than belief to vanquish a force of 200,000 Byzantine regulars. ‘The Muslims had to withdraw,’ Mr Amrin said. ‘Three of their leaders were killed in that battle, and they elected Khalid bin Walid in the field.’ That was in AD 690. Seven years later, Khalid bin Walid led the Muslims to victory against Byzantium’s forces at Yarmouk. As the British and Arabs would dispatch a weakened Ottoman Empire north to its Anatolian heartland in 1917 and 1918, the Muslims of Arabia drove the Greeks from Syria to their defences beyond the Beilan Pass in Asia Minor. If the Byzantines had held at Yarmouk, if the Turks had stopped Lawrence at Aqaba, if …
Empires always get it wrong, something my country was learning, and denying, in the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent. The Ottomans, however nostalgic I may have been for the splendour of their court and the tolerance of their pre-First World War governors, also failed. ‘You know Kerak?’ Mr Amrin asked. I did. The Bedouin there had invited me to a huge mensef – a feast of boiled mutton and rice served on a communal platter that we ate without knives, forks or bread – twenty years before. Its Crusader castle had fascinated me. Its markets overflowed, its women were the most beautiful, its lambs the tastiest … I rhapsodized like an Arab court poet. Mr Amrin was not interested in my memories of Kerak. He had his own: ‘In 1910, Kerak had a famous revolt. The Ottomans sent people to the top of the tower and threw them down. Sixty-five people. They had refused to work in the army. This created anger against the Turks. After that, it was easy for Sherif Hussein bin Ali. The people were ready.’
An ingenious system of rain gutters and cisterns had kept the Turkish garrison in Aqaba supplied with water for men, animals and crops. A giant granite millstone had ground the wheat for their bread. Indicating the rust-red hills above Aqaba, Mr Amrin said the granite for the millstone and to construct the walls had come, like Lawrence’s surprise invasion, from there. When he said the rocks were from the pre-Cambrian period, I nodded as if I knew when that was.
‘This castle,’ Mr Amrin added, bringing the story forward several millennia, ‘was used as a khan for pilgrims from Egypt.’ The land route to Mecca passed through Aqaba, until Israel occupied the Negev and Eilat in 1949. Pilgrims, at least those who did not take the sea route from Suez to Jeddah, would have found within Aqaba’s caravanserai the water, the camel forage and the imperial protection they needed to continue south through the desert to Mecca and Medina. Those with more time or fervour added Jerusalem, where their father Abraham had attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar of stone that had, since the seventh century, been sheltered within a golden-domed mosque.
This citadel belonged in Aqaba, while the town’s steel and cement hotels and offices might have been in Marbella or Atlanta. New high-rise projects for Aqaba’s poor used gas heating in winter and electric air conditioners in summer, wasteful and unreliable. The Mamluke architect Khair Bey al Ala’ai knew what he was doing in the sixteenth century. He erected a fortress of clay roofs, arched and open to the breezes, with ramparts of stone mixed with clay. And it held until the twentieth century. ‘This is perfect for the climate,’ Mr Amrin said. ‘It’s cool in the sun, then warm in winter. It’s not like it is if you live in cement.’ Mr Amrin, since he had moved with his family from Kerak, lived in cement.
We ascended the staircase, following a Russian couple and their young daughter, to walk the ramparts. From the walls, Mr Amrin showed me his adopted city. ‘You see the buses?’ An array of camel-beige coaches glided through the town. ‘Aqaba is not just a tourist centre. It does business. Those buses are taking people to jobs.’ In the south-east, ships were waiting to dock. Mr Amrin said four ports made Aqaba a commercial hub: one harbour each for cement, phosphates, cargo and passengers. The caravan-like stream of buses carried workers back and forth to ports that worked around the clock. The sea trade meant that Aqaba could survive without tourists. Not all that well, if the squalor of its old city indicated anything, but well enough. There seemed to be two losers amidst the mirage of Aqaba’s prosperity: big hotel owners and Iraqi refugees. The hotel’s shareholders – who lived in America, Japan and Europe – could sell or wait or close down. The Iraqis starved.
‘You see those women in black?’ Mr Amrin asked me. This was later in the afternoon, when I was hotter and thirsty. We had left the fortress and were walking in the town’s commercial heart. All I wanted was a cup of coffee, but Mr Amrin, leading me with casual indifference past beckoning cafés and the fragrance of coffee boiling with cardamom, had a favourite place that seemed to lie miles away. ‘You see those ladies?’ he repeated. I saw them, squatting on the pavement, their backs against concrete walls, veils shading their foreheads. They were handsome-looking women, who, despite opening their palms to receive coins from strangers, retained more dignity than many who had grown up as beggars. ‘They are from Iraq. They were very rich people.’
I had seen women like them in Baghdad, once the most prosperous and modern city in the Arab world. In the first years after the war over Kuwait and under an international boycott, they sold their jewellery. Next came the silverware, the old books and the Irish linen that foreigners like myself could buy from outdoor stalls downtown in what Baghdadis called the ‘thieves’ market’. I was never sure whether the thieves were the sellers or the buyers. In time, the paintings went, then the extra furniture, the kitchen appliances, the better clothes. Finally, some of the women – and these had been among Iraq’s proudest and best-educated – sold themselves. A British television cameraman in Baghdad had told me he had sex with an upperclass Iraqi woman while her husband waited alone in a bare living room for them to finish. The cameraman then had coffee with them both, as if he had been an invited guest, before leaving a discreet gift of one hundred dollars. The American embargo starved and bled Iraq for twelve years, until the American invasion of 2003 made life there even more precarious.
The two Iraqi women in black had, nestling in the folds of their cotton cloaks, about three Jordanian dinars between them. With that, they could have bought a sandwich each at any of the cafés I longed to stop at. At the Movenpick, which was the sort of place they had once been accustomed to, they might have shared one cup of tea.
An Oriental Garden
After a long walk and many stories of Moses, of Moabites, of Edomites and of Nabataeans, and then bumping into Mrs Amrin with their young son Qais, we had our coffee in a shaded park. Tall, thorny and mangled trees that the Arabs called sidr provided shade. Young men provided the coffee, tea and sandwiches in a green Pepsi-logo’d hut. Mr Amrin knew the owner, Bassam Abu Samhadana. Both were from Kerak. Mr Abu Samhadana would sit with us every few minutes between spells of overseeing his waiters. Most of the white plastic tables hosted large families. The mothers, fathers, grandparents and uncles talked. Children ran amok among the sidr trees. In a corner of the garden – itself a triangle of open land surrounded by city streets, restaurants and business buildings – was a lone table where three women smoked narghiles, sucking hard on the long tubes to make the water bubble and the smoke fly. Their laughter, their girth, their hair piled high in colours that might have come from tubs of ice cream, their skirts cut miles above plump knees, their jewels casting sunbeams through the sidrs’ shadows, their shoes tight and black, everything about them, said: we are not from here. They might have hung ‘For Rent’ signs around their necks. ‘Sharameet,’ Mr Amrin explained. Prostitutes. The picture cried out for Delacroix and the caption, ‘Hookers with hookahs’ or ‘Oodles of odalisques’. Mr Amrin admitted they were Jordanian, but they were not from Aqaba. They were most assuredly not, he said when I asked, from Kerak.
Was Mr Amrin a Bedouin? He was, but a few generations back. ‘You can say 99.99 per cent of the original Jordanians,’ by which he meant the half of Jordan’s population who were not refugees from Palestine, ‘are Bedouin.’ Most had settled in cities, towns and villages. ‘Bedouin are peaceful people. They are very straight. If they like you, they say they like you. If not …’
Was it, I wondered, a good idea for him to have left Kerak for tourism in Aqaba? In Kerak, he had been an army-trained electrical engineer. His wife had had a job there. She came from a prominent Jordanian family, the Mejallis, who had given the country politicians, lawyers and a prime minister. In Kerak, Mr Amrin had a house and a father, mother and siblings.
In Aqaba, he said, he had seen the president of the United States. It was in 1994. Israel’s prime minister, Yitzak Rabin, King Hussein and Bill Clinton were opening the border between Israel and Jordan. ‘They were crying,’ he said. ‘The newspapers said it was because of the treaty’ – the Israel – Jordan peace – ‘but it wasn’t. It was the dust.’ The royal family kept a palace in Aqaba, and he had often seen the young princes. He had met many foreigners. Aqaba showed him more than Kerak. On 11 September 2001, he was driving American tourists in Wadi Roum, the desert through which Lawrence had marched to Aqaba in 1917. ‘One guy’s mobile rang in the back seat. He woke up and jumped. “What? The World Trade Center is destroyed?” He was very upset. His brother was on the eighty-second floor, but he was worried about another man in the building who owed him money.’
Maybe it was just as well the Americans no longer visited Aqaba. Mr Amrin did not understand them. He said he was not a businessman. I could see that when he refused payment for my day’s tour of Aqaba, its ancient citadel, its souks and Bassam Abu Samhadana’s coffee garden.
Bassam Abu Samhadana poked in and out of our conversation, administered affairs in the café and gave us lunch he’d made himself at home. We feasted on a large pan of kafta, minced and spiced lamb in yoghurt, that we ate communally. Each of us grabbed bites from the flattened circle of meat with our silver spoons or pieces of Arabic bread and took billows of white rice from a bowl. While we ate and drank tea, Bassam Abu Samhadana told us Aqaba’s gossip in a manner so relaxed he might have been stretched on a divan smoking a narghile and musing on visions rising from its smoke. He motioned to me to eat more kafta, then said that England’s Prince Edward had once visited Kerak. Bassam, as royalist as his Kerak compatriot, had tracked down the youngest son of England’s queen to present him with a Persian carpet. Did Edward like it? Mr Abu Samhadana was not sure. He smiled to make me follow his eyes to the far table, where the three professional women were receiving a Saudi gentleman. A young Jordanian in a black leather jacket hovered behind.
Ahmed and Bassam, as they instructed me to address them, blamed the Saudis for attracting prostitutes to Aqaba. Saudi millionaires brought their money and sexual frustration a few miles over their border to a conservative Arab town that, compared to any city in their kingdom, was Gomorrah-on-Sea. Ahmed and Bassam did not rate the three Jordanian prostitutes. ‘The prettier ones are the gypsies,’ Bassam said. ‘And the high-class women come from Iraq.’ The Saudi gentleman, however corpulent he was under his dark cotton gown and whatever price he was then negotiating with the leather-jacketed procurer, gave the impression of a man on a budget. He and the jacket reached an agreement. The Saudi paid for the women’s narghiles and colourful cocktails and accompanied them across the street to a Lebanese restaurant, the Ali Baba. How, I wondered, would he manage three such well-proportioned women after a large lunch?
In the evening, I walked alone along the beach, read the newspapers, ate a Lebanese dinner at the Ali Baba and returned to Bassam’s outdoor café. The day’s heat had settled, leaving Bassam’s garden cool and silent. Long necklaces of fairy lights, every other one out like a blind eye, dangled among the branches. My first day in Aqaba: was it a success? A few hours earlier, I had watched children swim at Aqaba’s last free beach – a dirt shore where women coddled babies and let the sea brush the hems of their long dresses. Boys, no more than eight or nine years old, charged by on lithe and small Arab mares, plumes and spangled bridles ablaze in the sunset. Blankets and rugs hugged dry earth nearest the water, where men and women, not one of them immodest enough to strip down to a swimming costume, wrapped the remains of picnics and called their young in from the waves. Away from the shore, boys in jeans or shorts kicked footballs, while others bought ice cream and popcorn from a two-wheeled stall. Wet children wrapped themselves in large towels, crouched with their backs to the wind and shivered. The wind rose, from the north-west, like Lawrence’s Arabs, hurling desert sand and pebbles at the dying day.
When someone travels to write about a place, he looks for what makes it different from other places. That evening in Aqaba, I could have been anywhere. The beach, apart from the modesty of the adults, resembled the quiet sea at Brindisi or the Santa Monica sands in California where I had grown up. Aqaba’s particularity lay hidden in its history, those rare occasions when some emperor or general captured it and left mud-brick remains like the Nabataean – Ptolemaic harbour or the Mamluke citadel that the Turks surrendered to a young British officer and his few hundred Arab irregulars. If not for its past, Aqaba might not have been worth the visit.
Out of the darkness of the garden café, between my chair and the kiosk, where the staff prepared coffee and food, Bassam approached wearing a red-check keffiyeh around his neck. He unwound the fluffy headscarf and handed it to me. ‘My mother made this,’ he said. ‘It’s wool.’ Stretched out, it was a yard of white cotton into which his mother had sewn dyed wool in elaborate patterns. People used to tell me that red-check keffiyehs like that were for the Bedouin. Peasants, the fellaheen, wore black and white. Bassam told a waiter to bring me tea and a narghile.
The waiter dropped the water pipe and a box of hot coals to keep us warm beside the table. ‘You want more coal?’ Bassam asked. I was warm enough. The waiter ran back to the hut for a smaller coal carrier with chips of charred wood, fahm in Arabic, for the pipe. He placed the embers on a mound of wet tobacco at the summit of the silver stem above a glass vase of water. The ceremony proceeded: he tested the tobacco, blew on the coals and inserted a plastic mouthpiece into the wood tip of an accordion cord. The sweet smoke, filtered through clear water, let me dream like a Turkish pasha.
Bassam, rubbing his hands close to the fire, asked if I liked the tobacco. Pleased, he said, ‘It’s apple.’ He flavoured his tobacco with other fruits, but apple was his favourite. He told me the story of his business. He had come to Aqaba as an inland tourist a year after Jordan ended its official state of war with Israel. He saw a disused plot of trees and shrubs and weeds between a traffic roundabout and some restaurants and asked the town’s government for a permit to sell coffee on it. It was agreed that, if he cleaned the site and the public liked his coffee, he could stay. ‘I opened with a half kilo of coffee, two kilos of sugar, two kilos of bananas, and two kilos of oranges.’ He spent what little money he had in the bank on clearing the weeds and rubbish and building the kiosk. With his profits from sales of tea, coffee and fresh juice, he bought more coffee, more sugar, more fruit. ‘I cannot drink juice here any more,’ he said. ‘I see it too much. But if I go to Syria, I drink orange juice every day.’ The business prospered. Pepsi put a canopy on his kiosk and provided a cooler for its bottles. Bassam was joining the world economy.
Israelis came to his café, usually on day trips from Eilat, and Bassam welcomed them. An Israeli guide named Menachem brought group tours to rest and drink tea under the sidr trees. I assumed Bassam had to pay him something in return. There were problems with the Israelis. What? Stealing, he said. What did they steal? Glasses. Glasses? ‘We cleared the tables,’ Bassam recalled. ‘Twenty glasses were missing. I asked Menachem to get them back. Menachem said they were taking them to drink later. I told him we had plastic cups for that.’
Despite the thefts, Bassam served the Israeli day-trippers and counted glasses before they left. When the Palestinian uprising against military occupation began at the end of September 2000, the Israelis stayed in Eilat. Western tourists, apart from a few hearty pilgrims, avoided the entire region. The source of Bassam’s suffering was neither the Israelis who stole glasses nor the foreigners who feared visiting Jordan, but the Jordanian bureaucracy. One conscientious bureaucrat almost cost him his business, his investment and his livelihood. This officer of local government took it upon himself to enforce the law with an efficiency that many Western financial consultants believe the Arab world needs if it is to assume its place in the scheme of transnational, universal, utopian capitalism. This functionary was new to Aqaba, a man who knew the regulations, a man to help forge a land of laws and not of men, an arbiter of right and wrong, the kind of man whose rightful home might have been in the FBI, an ‘I’m-all-right-Jack’ British trade union of the 1950s, or middle management at an American corporation. He did not belong in Aqaba.
Having been posted to the town from Jordan’s more austere north, the official visited Bassam’s café. He tasted the coffee and must have observed that Bassam’s clean kitchen conformed to the rules of health and safety. He noted that previous local officials had issued Bassam the papers necessary to maintain the green kiosk, its cooker, its juice squeezers and its refrigerators. The kiosk-café had a valid permit. The plastic tables and chairs, scattered among trees for the relaxation of families and occasional tourists, did not. And the observant bureaucrat saw tables where the law did not allow tables. He saw people sitting in chairs that the law did not sanction. He must have seen glasses of tea and cups of coffee on those permitless tables. Perhaps he heard a bit of laughter in the shade and observed children running round the prohibited tables on the earthen paths that Bassam had cleaned and swept amid grass that he had cut. The bureaucrat, this northerner, did his job. He had come to Aqaba to enforce the law, and he enforced it by sending men to seize every table and every chair and lock them in a government warehouse.
Patrons who had come to enjoy Bassam’s garden and to muse over Persian tobacco smoke and Turkish coffee went elsewhere. Aqaba’s citizens were not Italians to stand at a counter for a quick espresso before rushing to an office or shop. They had time for the rituals of the day, to wait for coffee to brew with cardamom seeds in a brass pot, to watch a young man light the coals and pack the tobacco into a hookah, to observe from a chair the universe revolving around them. Bassam lost them to other cafés, none so congenial as his had been, but where they might feel a chair beneath them and bang a table when the argument suited. His business declined, and the little garden resumed its empty, forlorn state. Bassam stopped sending money to his two sisters at university. Helping his father in Kerak, a filial duty, became difficult.
Bassam Abu Samhadana did what any good Jordanian whose prosperity was threatened by bureaucracy would have done: he wrote to the king. A new monarch had ascended the throne, a young man who had not been tested. The old king, as Bassam and many others among his subjects abjured, would have dealt with the legal threat to Bassam’s survival swiftly and justly. Young Abdallah, however, was a modern man. His mother was English, and his education came from the Western world where law and by-laws and regulations and rules were said to prevail. Such a modern king might leave the enforcers of law to do their work without royal interference. Abdallah’s training – his English was more fluent than his Arabic – should have inclined him to let Bassam’s remaining clients drink on their feet or drink elsewhere. Writing to such a king – unlike to his father, who had behaved like the true father of all his subjects – held perils. What if King Abdallah read the letter and rebuked Bassam for going over the head of a government official, accused him of demanding favours, prosecuted him for asking the king himself to violate the law? Bassam was a man of Kerak, and the men of Kerak were not afraid. He sent the letter, and he waited. A week is a long wait when your business is dying and your sisters and father depend on you. Bassam waited many weeks, then many months. He survived in part courtesy of loyal customers like Ahmed Amrin, who were willing to stand rather than seek another café.
King Abdallah’s letter arrived, and Bassam rejoiced. The king had read the petition, weighed the facts of the case and concluded that the Governorate of Aqaba must restore to Bassam’s café all its chairs and tables. Bassam took the letter to the government office building and showed it to the bureaucrat who had seized his property. Despite what amounted to a royal proclamation, the bureaucrat did not relent. While conceding that the king had written the letter, the man said it had no legal force. Instructions to release confiscated property had to be processed through channels. There were not only regulations – and the official had demonstrated his devotion to those – there were also procedures. And to the procedures, he was just as loyal. To enforce his decision in the case, the king would have to instruct a minister, who would pass the order down to the regional governor, who would send it from one office to another, where it would be signed and stamped by the appropriate officials, until it reached the desk of the bureaucrat in Aqaba. The chairs and the tables remained locked in the warehouse.
Bassam had an acquaintance, also from Kerak, who knew the king. The Kerak man was a soldier, who had trained the then Prince Abdallah years before in some aspect or another of military practice. Bassam contacted the soldier – by telephone or letter, I was not sure which – and asked him to tell the king what happened to royal decisions in Aqaba. The king had to be informed that, despite his ruling to the contrary, the tables and chairs remained locked away and Aqaba’s finest garden café was empty. The soldier promised to bring the matter to King Abdallah’s attention. Further days, then weeks, passed without action from the palace or a call from the soldier. With business suffering, Bassam called Amman, the capital and home of the officer who had been a mentor to the young prince before he became the king, to impress upon his Kerak compatriot the urgency of the case. If his tables and chairs were not restored soon, the café would close and Bassam would return to Kerak a failed man. His disgrace would not fail to dishonour King Abdallah, whose writ would be seen not to run as far as Aqaba, as well as the officer from Kerak.
While I listened to Bassam’s tale, told in a tranquil voice without rancour, and puffed my narghile, I imagined the dilemma of the officer in Amman. As at all royal courts, the man would have to await the right moment – perhaps when the monarch and his courtiers were talking about Aqaba or the people of Kerak or coffee or even tables and chairs. Such moments do not present themselves every day, yet his fellow son of Kerak was calling every day from Aqaba to demand justice. A man had to be careful when making requests of a king, but the same man had to protect his reputation among the people of Kerak. Months later, when Bassam had to consider bankruptcy and admitting to all in Kerak that his king and his Kerak intercessor had both failed him, King Abdallah was made aware of the insubordination of the assiduous bureaucrat in Aqaba. The fresh decision and its implementation were immediate, and, in Bassam’s view, just: the bureaucrat was transferred to a desolate corner of the northern desert and eight tables and thirty-two chairs were delivered from the state warehouse to Bassam’s garden. He was back in business.
The tobacco was burning down and the coals had turned to ash. Several empty coffee cups and tea glasses had collected on the table. Bassam told the waiter to bring a last tea before he went home. I tried to pay him for the coffee, the tea and the narghile, but he would not accept anything. All he allowed me to do, when the table was cleared and the kiosk locked, was tip the waiter. It was after midnight when I walked along the shore to the hotel. The Red Sea, as still as the open eye of a corpse, caught the lights of four countries within a compass of forty miles. The map lines made no impression on the night. Aqaba was the reason for the lines, the frontiers, the divisions. Aqaba had been the goal of a revolt against an empire on behalf, not of the rebels themselves, but of more distant empires. The fall of Aqaba was a romantic, cynical saga, that had bequeathed a century of separation, of exodus, of bloodshed. The Turks could not hold Aqaba and, with it, the rest of what had been Greater Syria. Those who conquered it, occupied and divided it, had yet to destroy and remake it wholly in their image. Bassam did not take my money for the coffee and tobacco, and he sent what he had to his father in Kerak. This was no way to run a Starbuck’s.
When the Arabs realized that France, Britain and Zionism were claiming sovereignty over them after 1918, they resisted, longer perhaps than any other colonized population. And they were still holding out. In small ways, their lives could not conform to the standards set for them by the empires – first Britain’s and France’s, then America’s – because they ate with their hands from a shared bowl, because they took time to brew coffee and prepare their tobacco, because desert traditions of hospitality and vengeance survived in their city houses, because they believed in angels. The Western world had destroyed the mass forms of their protest – their nationalism, their socialism – and was even then bombing its latest manifestation: fundamentalist, violent Islam. Standing on ruins the Greeks had left more than two millennia before, I looked at the shores of Egypt and what are now called Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. This land was indigestible. Its history was too long, its cultures too strong, its faiths too pervasive. The cost of their stubbornness has been high, but they go on paying. They have absorbed the good and the bad of civilizations that have passed here, but they have not been absorbed. They are the world’s spoilers. Imperial histories chronicle expedition after expedition – by Pharaoh, by Titus, by the Shahs of Persia, by the legions of Byzantium, by Sultans in Cairo and Istanbul, by the British army and the American armed forces – to suppress their rebellions, contain their passions and possess their wealth. Perhaps that was why I had returned, not out of pity, but in admiration.
THREE (#ulink_7cedba6b-c84c-59af-93c2-e6aebc240732)
Royal Cities (#ulink_7cedba6b-c84c-59af-93c2-e6aebc240732)
‘Here is a land blessed more than most with health and
fertility, but its health has been paralysed by its danger,
its fertility checked and blasted by the floods and
barbarism to which it lies exposed.’
REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH
The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)
Seeking the Nabataeans
LAWRENCE’S FORCES rode north from Aqaba to disrupt Turkey’s railway communications and to guard Allenby’s right as his Egyptian Expeditionary Force advanced from Gaza. Eighty-four years later, I followed the Arabs’ route in an old Toyota taxi through canyon and desert. In the gorges above Aqaba, not a plant grew in the granite. Fertility lay miles north, where Lawrence feared the peasants would resist his Arab national army as they would a Bedouin raiding party. Centuries of Bedouin raids – sheep theft was as common as on the Scottish – English borders – had made the fellaheen wary. Some attacked their liberators. A half-hour out of Aqaba, a customs officer stopped us at an anti-smuggling roadblock. When the driver told him I was a foreigner, he let us pass the Jordanians whose cars were searched.
One by one, sprigs of life exposed themselves beside the road: sage, an acacia, a donkey. The first work of man was a stone monument, left for centuries in the wind to revert to bare stone. Then, evidence of civilization: a cemetery within walls of grey rock housed a regiment of marble markers. Next to it, a village of newly painted old mud and new cement breeze-block houses, all but a few single-storey, sheltered a population half that of the graveyard.
On the right, parallel to the road, a railway line accompanied us north. The track had, until Lawrence, carried pilgrims, soldiers and supplies from Istanbul all the way to Mecca. Perhaps the peasants had been right to oppose Lawrence’s desert Arabs. Thanks to Lawrence, the Hejaz railway never ran again. In Damascus, there remained a beautiful Ottoman Hejaz Railway Station and a modern Hejaz Railway Commission whose members – Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia – distrusted one another so much that not one mile of the track blown by Lawrence’s sappers had been repaired. Like Arab unity, rebuilding the railway was relegated to the realm of millinerian expectation.
The modern era’s power pylons, telephone poles and water pipes defaced the landscape. At noon, we reached a sign that read ‘Amman, 275 Kilometres’. Another sign advertised ‘The Farm for Sale’. The car stopped, and I looked from a ridge across the sands for the farm. Nothing grew for a hundred miles. I understood why the farmer wanted to sell, but where would he find a buyer? The drought that parched his land could not be blamed on global warming. It began at the end of the Ice Age.
We turned off the main Aqaba road at the King’s Highway to Wadi Musa and Petra. In the shade of a ridge, a lonely pool of snow resisted the change of season. Beyond were villages with abundant cypress, pine and olive trees on the slopes. A two-lane asphalt road floated along the hilltops into Rajif, a large village of flat-roofed houses, a white schoolhouse, a playground and as many vegetable shops as houses. We had to wait for old men in red keffiyehs to squeeze past us in the tightening streets. More open road took us into Taibit, splashed across the slopes of many jagged hills. There were two Taibits, the new town that had grown closer and closer to the windy summits, and Old Taibit – Taibit Zamen – near the base of a wadi. The old town’s earthen hovels with lovely arched entryways had occasional mounds on their level roofs and tiny gardens in open central courtyards. Old Taibit, nearer the water that coursed down the hills, stored rainfall in cisterns that fed their trees and crops. It was a place of stone, clay and mud. Above it loomed the new cement town, itself dwarfed by a new mosque. In the streets, old men paraded everywhere in cotton robes and keffiyehs or trousers and shirts. When I asked the driver why there were no children, he rubbed his thumb against his index finger and said, ‘No money.’
To reach Petra, the ancient Nabataean capital that the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burkhardt rediscovered in 1812, we had to pass through New Petra. Here were the Movenpick, Petra Panorama, Marriott, Nabataean Castle and Grand View hotels, freshly built and doomed to bankruptcy. In 1973, this town with its shops, restaurants and amusement centres did not exist. Nor did the Visitors’ Centre, bookshop, souvenir kiosk and ticket office. Then, I had slept outside in a place called Nazal’s Camp, where I saw in the night sky every star that man had ever counted. And, counting them, I had fallen asleep.
If I fell in love with Petra as a graduate student on an Easter excursion, love went cold now. It was like revisiting an old mistress, her beauty diminished by cosmetic surgery rather than age. Petra then, six years after the June 1967 war and barely three years after the Black September civil war between Palestinian commandos and the Jordanian army, was an enchanted city of empty tombs and palaces, discovered but not desecrated. It was like no other city of antiquity – no fortifications, no encircling walls, no natural water source and no cramped streets. It was larger than other ancient cities, about 65,000 acres spread over rocky ravines, desert plain and mountains. The Nabataeans had lived in elaborate caves and freestanding palaces. They funnelled rainwater from the hills – a great natural flow collected at Petra’s base – and cut channels to carry water from Ain Musa, the Spring of Moses, to their commercial metropole. They relied on the narrow valleys, the towers of natural sandstone and their own mobile defences to protect them from marauders and invaders.
In 1973, Bedouin lived in a few of Petra’s higher caves. I met some of them and, like any other tourist, took pictures. They gave me coffee and talked politics. The only visitors disturbing their tranquillity, apart from me, were Jordanian schoolchildren on a day trip. The only people who demanded money were the young men who hired horses. They had told me – what did I know aged twenty-two? – that I was required to enter Petra on horseback. So it was that I had my first glimpse of Al-Khazaneh – the so-called Pharaoh’s Treasury – at the end of a long gorge called the Siq, on horseback. Burkhardt entered on a noble Bedouin steed, but mine was a nag who looked so hungry I should have carried her.
Jordan had used the interval of nearly thirty years between my two visits to effect ‘improvements’. At the Visitors’ Centre near the Bab Al Siq a ticket seller charged ten Jordanian dinars for entry. At a tollgate, I showed my ticket, as if in a cinema, and walked in. The horse hirers were still there, but government officials watched to guarantee they did not cheat the few foreign visitors. This time, I walked. The route was the same but the path had been paved and provided with little waste-baskets bearing the logo ‘Edico’. Workers in Edico uniforms swept the path, and signs in English explained everything. ‘Al Siq,’ the first read, ‘is 1207 metres long and 3 to 16 metres wide. It is a natural gorge of spectacular geological formation, which the Nabataeans widened in parts by carving out the rock …’ No one needed a sign to tell him the gorge was spectacular. It was like reading in the Louvre ‘Beautiful painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile by the Italian Leonardo da Vinci’.
I overtook a family that I assumed were Americans from the Midwest. The father carried a baby on his chest and wore a ‘J + B Scotch’ T-shirt, Nike trainers and a baseball cap. His wife and daughter licked ice creams and wore blue jeans. But they were speaking Arabic. In 1973, Jordanian men did not wear baseball caps or carry babies. Jordanian women – when in Jordan – wore long dresses. Petra and its indigenous visitors were adapting or assimilating to the new global empire as the Nabataeans had to Greece and Rome. I rushed ahead of them lest anything come between me and my first sight through the narrow cleft at the end of Al Siq.
The gorge opened and up shot a magnificent tomb, mountain-high, that said, ‘Stranger, beat this.’ Invaders coming to Petra by this route would have entered single file, there to be cut down one at a time by Nabataean archers on the plaza of their king’s mausoleum. It was a good place to die, overwhelming in its beauty and surprise. I did not die but the new Coca-Cola kiosk and souvenir stands were killing me. Tour guides were explaining, perhaps for the thousandth time, that the treasury, Al-Khazaneh, was never a storehouse of gold and jewels but the burial place of a king. They did not explain why Jordan had permitted the desecration of this once-solitary shrine.
I sat on a bench, listening to guides and tourists, and looked at the tomb. A headless eagle – defaced, no doubt, by iconoclasts of one monotheism or another – sat poised to soar from the perch on which Nabataean sculptors had placed him a century before the Crucifixion. Then I wandered among Petra’s palaces and tombs and theatres. In 1973, when I had slept out at Nazal’s Camp, Bedouin lived all over Petra. Like Nazal’s Camp, the Bedouin had been removed. No longer in their caves along the ridges, they lived miles away and sent their children into the ruins to beg from tourists. Some of them sold coloured rocks. ‘No, thank you,’ an American woman with legs larger than her trousers said to a little Bedouin girl. ‘I think the rocks should stay in this place.’ She also thought her money should stay in her handbag.
The children approached me. When I gave a dinar to one of the boys, his sister said I had to give another one to her. Six or seven years old, they were determined entrepreneurs. Another child, who said her name was Rima and looked about ten, gave me a stone of the same rosy stripes as the Treasury. In English, she asked if I preferred to see the Monastery or the Bedouin camp where her family lived. We came to a tea shop, whose proprietor tried to sell me silver jewellery. When I declined, he said, ‘For your wife.’ No wife. ‘For your secretary?’ He chased Rima away, perhaps resenting the competition, and gave me a glass of tea.
An American family on camels trotted behind a camel herder. Some Russians – father, mother, daughter – asked the tea vendor for directions to the Monastery. I walked on to an amphitheatre. A goat grazed near the stage on which the Nabataeans had thrilled to the tragedies of Greece. Other tourists, people like me, shooed the goat aside and took pictures of themselves. Rima and the other children tried to make them buy stones. I should not have come back. The driver, asleep in his car near the Bab Al Siq, woke and drove me to an indifferent lunch at a restaurant near the Turkish bath. He asked if I had enjoyed Petra. I didn’t answer.
The best book in English on the Nabataeans – the book that made me appreciate their achievement – was The Lost Civilisation of Petra by an Israeli who had fought in court to erase the classification ‘Jew’ from his identity card. He was the father of Juwal Levy, the young man my son and I had met aboard the Nissos Kypros. Udi Levy was, although he did not know it, waiting at home in the Negev to show me the rest of the Nabataean empire.
Ancient Philadelphia
Amman was dark by the time we reached its outskirts. Thrown like a Bedouin blanket over a batch of hilltops, the city had outgrown the Circassian village where Prince Abdallah of the Hejaz pitched camp in March 1921. Abdallah had embarked on a quixotic mission to restore his brother Feisal’s throne in Damascus after France had massacred Feisal’s Arab army at the Maysaloun Pass and robbed the Arabs of their independent state. Abdallah’s adventure, if allowed to proceed, threatened war between Britain and France. Winston Churchill, by then colonial secretary, persuaded Abdallah to accept a principality to be called Transjordan with its capital in Amman. This involved compromises for Abdallah, who must have known the French would annihilate his Bedouin troops; for the Arabs of Greater Syria, a vast majority of whom had told the American King – Crane Commission of their desire for independence and unity; and for the Zionists, whose territorial ambitions included both banks of the Jordan. Until then, Britain and its Zionist protégés had called the country Eastern Palestine. Britain revised its League of Nations Mandate in 1922 to exclude the East Bank from the Balfour Declaration’s proposed ‘Jewish home’. It assumed responsibility for Prince Abdallah’s foreign policy and, under the able direction of General John Bagot Glubb, organized his army into the Arab Legion. Zionists who rejected the revision of the Mandate and insisted the future Israel comprise both banks of the River Jordan came to be called the Revisionists. Its leaders would be Vladimir Jabotinsky, Menachem Begin, Yitzak Stern, Yitzak Shamir and, later, Ariel Sharon.
Jordan, removed from the Palestine Mandate, did not escape the Palestine problem. Half of the lighted hilltops of night-time Amman belonged to Palestinians, whose refugee camps were as much a part of the city, albeit poorer, as the East Bankers’ neighbourhoods. Jordan had fought three wars over Palestine. In 1948, Abdallah – who became king of independent Jordan in 1946 – captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In 1967, his grandson, King Hussein, lost Abdallah’s 1948 conquests. In both wars, Jordan absorbed refugees whom the Israeli army had expelled. Then came the third war. The refugees, led by Yasser Arafat, and the native Jordanians under King Hussein waged ferocious battles in 1970 and 1971. The Palestinians lost, and the Hashemite throne survived.
The city we entered had grown to include a million people on the hills where Abdallah had found about three thousand Circassian settlers and a few hundred Arabs. At one of Amman’s many traffic roundabouts, twenty young men were dancing in a large plaza. Clasping one another’s shoulders, they formed a line and kicked their legs out to the beat of the tambour, the Arab drum, and the clapping and singing of boys and girls. They were having great fun. Dance festivals had evolved over millennia: pagan feasts absorbed by Christian holidays, Christianity giving way to Islam, sacred holidays secularized by the nation. And in all of Syria, there was the dabke, a communal dance like a Scottish reel. There were the chababi, a pipe, and the tambour, and clapping, and the mixing of sexes, ages, classes. I used to see this dancing at the great mahrajans in Mount Lebanon, at regional festivals in Jebel Alawi in northern Syria, among the Druze and in the towns of the West Bank. They might celebrate a birth, a wedding, a harvest, a saint’s day. These boys, girls, men and women danced in the forecourt of Amman’s telecommunications centre, under blazing floodlights. Above them loomed a quadruple-life-size, Hollywood-style portrait of King Abdallah holding a cellphone to his ear. Amman had a new mobile telephone network! An ancient ritual that had been paganized, Christianized, Islamized and Arabized was now commercialized. How else to herald the new era?
Welcome to Amman
Penury and loyalty dictated my choice of hotel, the Shepherd’s in Jebel Amman. The old place was far less costly than the modern chains, the InterContinental, Marriott, Hilton, Radisson et al. I was not on expenses, as I had been as a journalist. My publishers’ advance was so meagre that I could not have survived on it all year if I’d slept in a tent. The Shepherd’s belonged to the Shalhoub family, whose daughter Norma had been at the American University of Beirut when I was studying philosophy there. I was twenty-one then, and she was a year or two younger. We had not gone out together, despite my repeated attempts to woo her. On my student travels, I had stayed at her family’s hotel. Then, it was managed by her father, a gregarious and well-known Amman character named George Shalhoub. For a time, he had – persuaded by his son Nader that it would be good for business – opened a British pub on the roof. George Shalhoub had died, and Nader was in charge. The pub had closed, but Shepherd’s retained the fading charm of George Shalhoub’s times.
There were only one or two other guests, like a seafront hotel in winter, and the service was nothing if not personal. I received a call as soon as I reached my room. Norma Shalhoub was inviting me to lunch the next day. How did she know I was there? Amman was a village, and Shepherd’s was a village hotel. This was the wrong place for me to bring a Jordanian maiden for the night, not that I knew any.
‘The West Bank is killing Jordan,’ Norma Shalhoub said at lunch. She was not discussing attacks by Palestinians or the arrival of West Bankers in search of work. She was talking about perception. ‘I’ve been to trade fairs in Japan three times.’ The Shalhoubs had opened a travel agency to complement their hotel business. ‘The first time, the Japanese asked if we could hear the bombs in the Iran – Iraq war. The second time, could we hear the bombs in Lebanon? And the last time, did we hear the explosions from the West Bank? They think it’s all the same.’ Amman had been tranquil since 1970.
We were at her mother’s house. Norma lived next door on one side, her brother and his family on the other. Norma’s mother gave us rice, vegetable stew and chicken grilled in the Lebanese way with lemon and garlic. Although they were patriotic Jordanians, the Shalhoubs’ ancestors had migrated to Amman from Lebanon – from the same Christian mountain village that my great-grandmother had left for France and Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century. Her food was like my grandmother’s. As a gesture to me, Norma had gone out to buy cans of beer. Like most other people in Jordan, where alcohol was legal, the Shalhoubs did not drink.
When the Israeli border opened in 1994, they built the Palace Hotel in Petra. Mrs Shalhoub remembered Udi, an Israeli tour operator, coming to the house for lunch. He was pleasant and polite, and they looked forward to working with him. But he warned them: ‘This is just the beginning, but wait. I promise you that after a year of doing business with Israelis, you’ll be anti-Semitic.’
The anticipated profits from the Palace Hotel in Petra did not materialize. Most Americans toured the Middle East on Israeli package holidays. Only the more adventurous – and such people are few – came to Jordan on their own. ‘The day tourists,’ Norma said, ‘would bring their own food – even their own water – from Israel.’ Israeli tour operators bussed the tourists to Petra for a few hours, stopped by the Palace or some other hotel to buy postcards and bussed them back over the border. It was to make them pay something, Mrs Shalhoub told me, that the government introduced the ten-dinar entry fee. Again there were stories of Israeli tourists stealing glasses. But Udi the tour operator failed as a prophet. The Shalhoubs were spared anti-Semitism by the kindness of Jewish families in America. When Mrs Shalhoub’s younger daughter, Lena, moved with her American husband to Pittsburgh, she stayed home all day with two small children in a foreign country while he worked. In Jordan, her mother, sister, aunts and cousins would have been with her. In Pittsburgh, she became isolated and unwell. Mrs Shalhoub said, ‘The only people who offered to help were Jewish.’
Norma drove me on a tour of Amman’s newer quarter, Abdoan, and its shopping centre – a mall I thought I had seen under another name in the San Fernando Valley. The logos of American suburbia beckoned: Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream, Planet Hollywood, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s. An American atmosphere pervaded Abdoan, kids in fresh-washed cars, boys and girls eyeing one another through the black lenses of reflecting sunglasses, families at outdoor tables eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola. Did I want to see the new American Embassy?
The previous embassy had been a modest stone office building whose front door opened onto the street opposite the main journalist hotel, the InterContinental. It dated from the days when anyone could walk into a US Embassy without being searched, scanned and security checked. It took a few bullets during the Black September 1970 battles but it was otherwise unharmed. The new embassy, not far from the mall, was a citadel of the American world order. It lay within a perimeter of walls that an Olympic pole vaulter could not scale. Jordanian army tanks surrounded the compound, guns pointed outwards. The embassy itself was a gargantuan block of stone, trimmed in satellite dishes, television and radio aerials and, higher than them all, a flagpole. Norma told me the embassy was self-sufficient. Its PX sold cornflakes and peanut butter so the staff would not have to buy Arab food outside. It could have been a French Foreign Legion fort in old Africa, awaiting the inevitable and futile assault by the natives.
At dinner that night, in an Italian restaurant called Romano’s, I ate alone with a book of conversations with Middle East historians – Approaches to the History of the Middle East by Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher. The author’s first interview was with Albert Hourani, whose History of the Arabs remained the standard fifteen years after its original publication. ‘Between the powerful and the powerless,’ Albert said, ‘there cannot be an easy relationship of friendship. Having power is quite different from being under someone else’s power, which is a far deeper experience, just as victory is a much less profound experience than defeat.’ Albert was one of two historians – the great Mediterranean and Crusades’ scholar Sir Steven Runciman was the other – who had advised me on Tribes with Flags. Both had since died, and I missed their counsel. Reading Albert’s reflections was like having lunch with him, as we used to in London at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. In the most diplomatic manner, he would tell me that I had misinterpreted the histories of Islam, the Crusades or the Ottoman Empire. Sitting in Amman with my book, I saw couples – well-dressed men and women – at other candle-lit tables. I thought about Albert Hourani and Steven Runciman, two of Britain’s grandest old men of letters. Ageing was sadder for the loss of your mentors. Solitary travel too was becoming a trial, when you ate alone and all the pretty women in the restaurant were with other men.
Notables in Exile
‘We’re not very numerous,’ Usama Khalidy said of his family. ‘We’re probably not more than three or four hundred.’ The Khalidys had for five centuries contributed generation after generation of scholars to the Muslim world. Their longevity as nobles of Jerusalem had prompted Usama’s younger brother, the historian Tareef Khalidy, to respond to the accusation that the Khalidys were decadent with: ‘Decadent? Three hundred years ago, we were decadent.’
Usama was the middle of three accomplished brothers. The oldest was Walid, another academic who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Tareef, the baby, taught history at Cambridge, the one in England. Before Cambridge, he taught at the American University of Beirut. Throughout Lebanon’s long war, he resisted the deadening effect of military occupations by Syria and Israel, massacres and the anti-intellectual bias of Lebanon’s Muslim and Christian sectarian barbarians.
The three Khalidy brothers – Walid, Usama and Tareef – grew up in Jerusalem during the British Mandate. Their family owned beautiful houses and a library of rare and ancient Islamic manuscripts within the stone walls of Jerusalem’s old city. Like many other Arabs and Jews, they had built villas away from the squalor of the old city – whose rain-fed cisterns sometimes bred unhealthy bacteria – on the open hills to the west. In 1948, when the Arab inhabitants were expelled or fled the violence, West Jerusalem became Jewish Jerusalem.
Usama’s father, a teacher and scholar like most of his family, had written some of the first textbooks in Arabic. ‘He did an experiment with me,’ Usama said. ‘I did not go to school until I was nine. I knew every cave in the area. I knew where to catch scorpions. I knew every plant. I knew every shepherd. I did not know how to read and write.’ Illiteracy did not impede his progress through academe. A tutor taught him enough one summer for him to pass his exams for the third-form elementary. He was nine. By the time he celebrated his nineteenth birthday, he had a degree in biochemistry. By then, he lived in Beirut. By then, there were no Khalidys in West Jerusalem.
‘I am one of the few who has had the honour of being occupied by the Israelis three times,’ Usama said, proud of his record. He spoke without anger. The way he sat, almost as if his body had fallen into a restful sleep, said he would be at home wherever he escaped. Usama Khalidy’s apparent indifference to his treatment by Israel’s armed forces was inexplicable in a man who, again and again, had been on the losing side. His first Israeli occupation took place in April 1948, when he was sixteen. The Khalidys – mother, father, three boys and two girls – remained at home south-west of Jerusalem’s old city. ‘I was coming back from school by the Jaffa Gate,’ Usama said. It was his last term at the Rashidieh School. ‘I saw the people who had been captured in Deir Yassin and been left in the sun for three days,’ he said of the most famous massacre of Palestinian Arabs, about three hundred of whom were killed by Menachem Begin’s Irgun with assistance from the Haganah over the night of 9/10 April 1948. ‘They were dropped at the Jaffa Gate. It created panic.’
Before dropping them at the Jaffa Gate, the Irgunists had put Deir Yassin’s survivors in cages and paraded them through Jerusalem’s Jewish neighbourhoods. ‘No less disgusting [than the massacre],’ the Labour Zionist historian Jon Kimche wrote in his 1950 book, Seven Fallen Pillars, ‘was the subsequent publicity parade by the Irgun of a number of poor Arab prisoners through the streets of Jerusalem.’
Was it, I asked, when they had been displayed in cages?
‘It was after they had been in the cages,’ he answered. ‘There were twenty or forty, I don’t know. They were mainly women.’
