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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
Intrigued by the Arabs, dressed in floor-length robes and yashmaks, who began holidaying in London after the 1970s oil boom, Raban wanted to discover the reality of their home lives and world view. His quest took him through Bahrain, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan.What he discovered was a far cry from the camel, tent and sand-dune archetypes of early European explorers. Oil wealth had seeped into almost every corner, and Bedouin encampments had been replaced by cosmopolitan boomtowns, camels by Range Rovers. The sons of Bedouin nomads were now studying medicine in Europe and engineering in New York. Yet in this fast-moving world, old certainties remained.Raban's gift for friendship gives us a series of affectionate individual encounters which collectively create a true and invaluable picture of Arabian society.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Arabia
Through the Looking Glass
JONATHAN RABAN
Contents
‘You can just see a little peep of the Passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it’s very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond …’
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass
One
ARABIA ON THE EARLS COURT ROAD
HE WAS WEARING A GRUBBY SHIFT and plastic sandals: he’d pulled his head-dress close round his ears, and had a shiny jacket of the kind sold on market-stalls to keep off the dank cold of a London January. Its seams had split under the armpits. Outside Earls Court station, where touts and hustlers hang around in the entrance alert for likely victims, he looked half-frozen, frightened, and too far from home.
She was a business girl from Nevern Square; an urban savage, all lipstick and gristle, in a belted leather coat that gave her the air of a fat little stormtrooper lording it over an occupied territory.
‘Coming home with me, dear?’ She blocked his way, an unlit cigarette pouched in the corner of her scarlet mouth. He stared, half-raised his hands from the windy folds of his robe.
‘Come on, darling –’
Her worn professional patter, at once intimate and impersonal, streamed out of her, too fast for a bystander to follow. There was, though, an edge of avaricious excitement in her talk. She had cornered an Arab. The usual customers of the ladies of Nevern Square are small businessmen, up in London for a conference or a meeting with the sales manager; they put up for a couple of nights in one of the warren of second-rate hotels around Earls Court, and study the postcards in tobacconists’ windows – ‘Massage …’, ‘Girl Student Seeks Employment …’, ‘Miss Tress …’
She clearly knew about Arabs. His cheap sandals, the rents in his jacket, the week-old grime of his robe and head-dress, simply were not visible to her. Looking at him, all she saw was a figure of contemporary legend, a creature of rumour and newspaper headlines. Her head must have been awash with them. Arabs had bought the Dorchester; Arabs owned half of Holborn; Arabs tipped business girls with Cadillacs and solid gold watches; Arabs closed down the whole of Harrods for an afternoon, just so that their wives could shop in decent privacy. If they wanted to take a little perfume back to their palaces in the desert, Arabs purchased a couple of suitcases first, then instructed the assistant to load them to the brim with Dior, Givenchy, Paco Rabanne. When Arabs were caught shoplifting in Marks and Spencers, they were invariably found to have thousands of pounds in cash distributed in secret pockets in their robes.
She was close to his robe now, scenting money.
‘It’s only round the corner …’
He was lost in the rapid babble of her spiel. He blinked at her, studying her mouth, like a rabbit transfixed by a stoat. Then a sudden hopeful means of escape occurred to him. He groped among the folds in his shift. Her eyes followed his hand, as if she was intent on the mechanics of a conjuring trick.
Eventually his hand reappeared. She bent towards it. He was holding a soiled little booklet of limp matches. There were just three left. He tore one off and held it to the strip of emery-paper on the bottom of the packet.
‘You like …?’ he said.
‘Oh, sod off, for Christ’s sake –’ she said, dislodging herself into the current of the crowd. He was left holding the single unstruck match in the air, in a gesture of bewildered benediction.
Earls Court is usually a reliable, if seedy, barometer of the changes in social and political pressure in the world beyond. When anything really important happens on some outcrop of the globe with an unpronounceable name, it will show up a few months later on the Earls Court Road. The street swarms with Europe’s latest arrivals: refugees, hopefuls, the new rich, the new poor, people in transit between an old life and a problematic future. Cambodian evacuees, Asians in flight from tyrannical black masters, newly-sturdy Japanese; after the murder of Allende, there were the Chileans; as the pound sank against the dollar, the crowd grew swollen with American teenagers humping backpacks, and when the Arabs raised the price of oil in 1973, it was on the Earls Court Road that one first saw the strange, beak-shaped foil masks of Gulf women and the improbably white dishdashas of husbands who walked exactly four paces ahead of their wives.
It was the masks I noticed first. They made the women look like hooded falcons, and they struck me not as symbols of Islamic female modesty so much as objects of downright menace. It happened in a summer; one day Arabs were a remote people who were either camping out in tents with camels and providing fodder for adventurous photographers, or a brutish horde threatening the sovereignty of the state of Israel; the next, they were neighbours – neighbours whose oddity far outclassed even that of the professional vagrants and wild men who find a natural asylum in Earls Court. Round every corner, one came upon the black-and-gold glint of those masks, and the black silk sheaths that encased the women as if they were corpses risen in their shrouds. The men were hardly less peculiar. Dressed for the desert, on the streets of west London they looked like a crew of escaped film extras, their head-dresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes.
These people were not the oil sheikhs of the newspaper stories which had begun to break round the heads of Arabs in London. They ate from takeaways. They set up little transient stalls of junk in the street. They kept up a kind of aimless progress around Earls Court Road, Gloucester Road, Cromwell Road, Queens Gate and the Boltons, as if they were in a state of prolonged clinical shock.
They were not paupers, either. They hung in clusters round the hi-fi and photographic shops. Their Japanese cameras dripped with intricate accessories. They carried portable stereo cassette-recorders, and kept themselves company with a grossly amplified caterwauling which sounded repetitive, maudlin and unearthly. Sometimes I caught fragments of their language – an impenetrable labyrinth of consonants which sounded more musical to my ear than the noise which came out of their tape-recorders. As neighbours, they were uniquely inaccessible: it was much like having a family of Martians moving in next door.
My new neighbours were, I supposed, the family servants and hangers-on of the people who were getting into the papers in such tiresome quantity. There were, I read, whole collegefuls of Saudi students terrorising quiet villages in the Cotswolds with their Lamborghinis and 1000cc Harley Davidsons. There were sheikhs in helicopters who landed on country-house lawns in the middle of lunch and evicted England’s landed gentry with their chequebooks. Someone pointed out a vast stretch of the Kentish Weald through my car window and announced that ‘Arab money’ had purchased every last sod within sight of our native soil.
There were the jokes: barbecued goat at the Hilton; a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from the roof of the Dorchester; the camel that got a parking ticket outside the Playboy Club … It was at least a change from the staple diet of jeers against the Irish and the Pakistanis; and ‘The Arabs’ were so evidently rich, so patently fair game, that they somehow seemed to be beyond the scope of the Race Relations Act. British xenophobia – which had lately been somewhat bridled under threat of prosecution – relieved itself in a great breaking of racist wind in the faces of the Arabs.
Whatever their effect on the economy of the West, the sheikhs and their doings were certainly adding to the general gaiety of the nation. They began to form a kind of gilded frieze populated by brilliant cut-out figures engaged in a wild dance for our snobbish entertainment. No one I ever met actually knew a sheikh, which was convenient since it allowed everyone the licence of gothic fiction when it came to talking about sheikhs. The amount of money that they splashed around was, everyone delightedly agreed, simply appalling. And their taste was, everyone said, utterly deplorable.
‘I mean, what on earth can one do,’ said Sally B. who is in interior decoration, ‘with a man who points to this hideous sofa … really the worst … sort of Heals 1958, can you imagine? … and says, “I want four of those because I have a great love of the antique”?’
‘Do you know what those houses are filled with? Giant lampstands, in foul yellow coloured glass, in the shape of bunches of bananas! And white rugs, with pile about a foot thick, made of some sort of ghastly polystyrene fur!’
These were pieces of brave imaginative guesswork, since the houses themselves remained firmly closed to all comers. With names like ‘Zayed Villa’, on streets like Bolton Gardens, they stood – empty for most of the year, as far as one could tell – like bank vaults. One could not even see through their windows, since the view was obstructed by dense, burglar-proof, aluminium zigzag shutters.
Writers of gossip columns were marvellously informative about the sheikhs: they reported their liaisons, their newly-installed swimming pools, their late-night parties, the internal horrors they had wreaked on masterpieces of British nineteenth-century architecture. Yet not even the gossip columnists appeared to have succeeded in gate-crashing whatever inside-life was going on among the London Arabs. Aside from a few doubtful sightings in Annabel’s and the Mayfair gaming clubs, the columnists were tacitly admitting defeat, with formula-phrases like ‘neighbours complained …’, ‘neighbours have recently observed …’, ‘Penny Troublesome, a close friend of Bin Shaqiq, comments …’
*
My own Arab neighbours were quite different. I was getting used to hearing names like Aqhmed, Ali and Mohammad called across the square, and hardly noticed the calligraphic revolution that was going on in the Earls Court Road. A Halal butcher’s opened up, its window a pretty conundrum of red squiggles and dots. Kebab- and kofta-houses followed. Then there were Arab doctors and dentists, then elegant Arabic graffiti at the foot of film posters, then instructions in Arabic on borough-council litter bins. The all-beef-frankfurter kiosk outside the Tube station went Arabic, and even the English shops along the road began to sprout Arabic notices. It was only when this process of decorative linguistic imperialism had nearly reached saturation point that I realised how suddenly different Earls Court Road had become; everywhere one walked, one was surrounded by those stylish, looping letters, a script of ripples and flourishes in which even the most cursory graffito takes on the air of something executed with deliberate artistry.
Earls Court tends to the squalid and the thievish: this summer-blossoming of Arabic signs gave it a touch of missing grace. Yet it also put the neighbours even further out of reach. One had only to stand on the street to see that they were living behind the veil of a language in which not a single sound was decipherable by us outsiders. All I knew of Arabic was that, like mirror-writing, it worked back to front. Staring at the signs, taking pleasure in their meaningless elegance, I couldn’t make out where one letter stopped and another began. A word was a continuous brushstroke, resiliency abstract. Cyrillic lettering, or Greek, yields all sorts of familiar footholds, but Arabic gives up absolutely nothing.
I bought a copy of the Koran. In English, it manages to be boring and frightening in equal parts. Much of it is taken up by lists of bloodcurdling threats and prophecies of what will happen to unbelievers. In the curious nudity of translatorese, these imprecations sound more thuggish than godlike; there is a dull, cumulative bathos in their succession of burnings, hangings, and dismemberments. The English Bible (and the Old Testament is even bloodier than the Koran) comes with the authoritative crust of 400-year-old ceremonial language on it; translators of the Koran usually steal much of the vocabulary of the Authorised Version, but lapse, frequently and uncertainly, into the idiom of the newspaper crime report. This gives the book an unfortunate flavour of lurid piety. Its practical instructions (how to wash yourself with sand after intercourse, for example) sound eminently sensible. Its descriptions of paradise (fountains, virgins, goblets of wine, gold jewellery, silk and brocade robes, soft couches and large numbers of carpets) are enjoyably worldly. But as the sacred book of Islam, it is hardly more comprehensible in English than the Arabic signs on the shopfronts of Earls Court. The stories of Abraham, Noah, Joseph, Jonah and Mary are far more movingly told in the Bible than they are in the translated Koran; its morality seems infinitely cramped compared with the spacious eloquence of Christ’s words in the New Testament. One catches no more than the vaguest glimpse of the inspirational force of a book which created a religious empire within a hundred years: all the richness, beauty and ambiguity, and most of the wisdom, which all introductions to the Koran claim as its essential features, are lost or clouded over in the English version. Reading it, I found my neighbours growing even more distant and inaccessible than they had seemed before.
Years before, I’d read Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence; I went on to C. M. Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands and a clutch of books by Freya Stark. Along with Richard Burton and St John Philby, these are the classic ‘British Arabists’ – the writers who have done most to create a vivid, affectionate special relationship between the English and the Arabs. It was hard, though, to pick out Doughty-Arabs or Lawrence-Arabs or Thesiger-Arabs among the new nomads of the Earls Court Road; harder still to find them among the brisk millionaire-businessmen who were flying in and out of Heathrow and Kennedy and propping up the sagging economies of the West with petrodollars.
British Arabism is an old romantic love affair in which a faint glimmer of the perverse is never far from the surface. As a historical movement, it coincides exactly with that period when England was a rich country in the first flush of its dependence on industrial technology. For Lawrence and Thesiger, Arabia was an alternative kingdom; a tough Utopia without either money or machines. In the bedu tribesman they professed to find all the simplicity, the powers of personal endurance, the stoic independence, which they feared the Englishman was losing. They loved him for his poverty, his spiritual leanness, his ignorance of the ‘soft’ life from which they themselves were on the run. In his desert they found a perfect theatre for the enactment of a heroic drama of their own – a drama whose secret subject was not really the desert at all but the decadent life of the London drawing-room.
In the prologue to Arabian Sands, Thesiger writes:
Men live [in the desert] because it is the world into which they were born; the life they lead is the life their forefathers led before them; they accept hardships and privations; they know no other way.
Looked at coldly, these are odd grounds for approval. They are qualities which, as Thesiger records with some testiness, the tribesmen themselves found it hard to recognise or applaud.
Thesiger’s heroic Arabia is recent; it belongs to the 1940s and 1950s, when the importance of oil and the changes it was bound to make in Arab society were already clearly visible. Thesiger saw them, and his horror at the prospect is cruelly frank. The bedu people whom he had lived with were, he wrote, ‘doomed’; with the coming of oil they could expect only ‘degradation’.
Thesiger’s writing (much more than Lawrence’s) has enormous power: his portrait of desert life is so loving, so rich in detail, that one would be a clod not to be moved by it. Yet I felt tricked when I read Arabian Sands: Thesiger was making me fall in love with an abstraction – with a version of the Arabs which was impossibly constricting for the Arabs themselves; a version whose roots were in England and English life, and not truly in Arabia at all.
In the jeering tattle which followed the London Arabs like a ship’s wake, there was a detectable note of perverse resentment: the Arabs had betrayed an essentially English dream of what Arabs ought to be. We had learned to love them for being heroically simple and poor; now, with their multi-national investment corporations, their Concorde-flying businessmen, their English country houses, their expensive cameras, cars and hi-fi equipment, they were flinging our sentimental illusions back in our faces. Back came Arabia Deserta. Back came Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Back came Arabian Sands.
In the place of these shapely and coherent masterpieces, all that was left was an impenetrable confusion. There were people who looked as if they might have stepped out of Thesiger, but who wore cufflinks and wristwatches which together would have accounted for a year’s substantial English salary. There were Kuwaiti businessmen in Turnbull and Asser shirts; veils and foil masks; wild-looking men with gold teeth and dirty skirts; and the newspaper stories, a ceaseless rumble of gloating distaste. It was not just that the Arabs were richer than us; it was that they were a people whom the English thought they knew, and who had suddenly turned into bewildering strangers. The English responded in the usual way, with a mixture of mockery and envy.
If I was going to pay the most perfunctory of courtesy-calls on my neighbours, I was obviously going to have to travel further than the Earls Court Road. I had been curious about the Arabs for a year; during that time I had actually met one – a mild man from Kuwait, who’d just returned from a salmon-fishing holiday in Ireland. I’d seen Arabs; I’d read about Arabs; I’d listened to endless speculative gossip about Arabs; but it was, apparently, impossible to meet them.
As a ritual preliminary, I tried to learn Arabic, taking a crash-course of a dozen lessons with a lovely Egyptian girl who had a voice that sounded like spring rain and a Ph.D in Linguistics. We stared solemnly at each other’s uvulas; she inspecting mine to find out why it wasn’t making the right noises; I inspecting hers for the sheer pleasure of looking at a piece of apparatus which was capable of producing such enchanting sounds. There is a letter in Arabic, beyond the range of the English palate and the English alphabet, which is usually represented in transcription by a 9. To make the right noise, one has to tie one’s vocal cords into a sort of reef-knot, then instantly release them, so that for a split second, in the middle of a word, one sounds like someone being strangled. We struggled for hours over the 9ayn; gurgling together into a tape-recorder.
‘It comes,’ said Fatma, ‘from deeper in the throat.’ I never found it.
What I did discover was the pure pleasure of the Arabic alphabet. Within a few hours the mysterious dots and ripples began to sort themselves out into recognisable letters. The pretty calligraphic abstractions on Earls Court Road suddenly resolved into words like ‘hummus’ and ‘shashlik’ and ‘mansaf’. The fog started to clear over one small stretch, at least, of my local Arabia.
It is an alphabet of perfect economic logic. A single little wave-shaped mark does multiple service. With a dot underneath it, it is a b; with a dot above, it’s an n; with two dots above it’s a t; with three dots above it becomes a th-sound; and with two dots below it turns into a y. The strange symmetry of Arabic writing comes from using a small repertoire of intrinsically elegant shapes – uprights, ripples, waves and simple curves – and giving them identity by annotating them with a nearly-mathematical system of dotting.
The words themselves opened the door far wider for me than I had anticipated. Each word is a tight bundle of consonants; vowels are spoken but not written. Every bundle is related to a ‘root’ – a key word which acts as father-figure to an extended linguistic family of words and meanings. The root-word of everything to do with writing, for instance, is ktb – to write. By small variations on the root, one can derive the words for document, bookseller, Koranic school, booklet, penmanship, biblical revelation, desk, office, library, bookshop, correspondence, registration, dictation, novelist, typewriter, secretary, newspaper reporter, predestination (what is written as one’s fate), subscriber, and, obscurely, cavalry detachment.
It is a language of inherent, logical ambiguity. Behind every word one uses lie the ranked shadows of all the other words in its family, crowding insistently in to give body and depth to the most casual utterance.
‘Ana haktb ktab,’ I said. ‘I am going to write a book.’
‘You must be careful,’ said Fatma. ‘It can mean “I am going to write a book”. But people may think you’re saying “I am going to get married” … you see, you are going to write the contract of marriage, you understand?’
I was very careful about saying that I was going to write a book.
Months later, someone in the British Embassy in Amman told me to look up the word for ‘child’ in the Wehr Dictionary – the treasure-house of Arabic roots. I did. The word is tifl, and it derives from the root tfl, meaning:
to intrude, obtrude, impose (upon); to sponge, live at other people’s expense; to arrive uninvited or at an inconvenient time, disturb, intrude; to be obtrusive.
The linguistic family includes the words for softness, potter’s clay, parasites, sycophants, initial stages and dawn. No richer or more sceptical definition of childhood has, as far as I know, ever been made.
As a conversational instrument, my Arabic is useless. I am limited to greetings, street directions, words for food and thank-yous. Yet the Wehr Dictionary, and the comprehension of the alphabet, seemed to shed far more light on the Arabs I saw in London than either Thesiger, Lawrence or the Koran. To live in Arabic is to live in a labyrinth of false turns and double meanings. No sentence means quite what it says. Every word is potentially a talisman, conjuring the ghosts of the entire family of words from which it comes. The devious complexity of Arabic grammar is legendary. It is a language which is perfectly constructed for saying nothing with enormous eloquence; a language of pure manners in which there are hardly any literal meanings at all and in which symbolic gesture is everything. Arabic makes English look simple-minded, and French a mere jargon of cost-accountants. Even to peer through a chink in the wall of the language is enough to glimpse the depth and darkness of that forest of ambiguity. No wonder the Koran is so notoriously untranslatable.
My short sightseeing tour around Arabic was the best possible preparation for a spell of six weeks during which I seemed to do nothing except live in the waiting-rooms of embassies. Originally, I’d thought that I would be able to visit Arab countries as one visits any others: a filled-in form, a couple of photographs, a visa and a stamp at the other end. It wasn’t so. With the exception of Bahrain (where I didn’t even need a visa), North Yemen, Egypt and Jordan, the countries I wanted to go to turned out to be like family houses at the end of long, guarded gravel drives. In central and south Arabia nationhood is still a novel concept: the tribe and the family are much stronger and more real ideas, and the nation is thought of as a big family in which the visitor is either a guest or an intruder. I was clearly a tifl; I was inviting myself at the wrong time, disturbing, sponging and being obtrusive. I found myself arguing on the doorstep with housemaids and butlers, the family dogs snapping round my ankles.
Like families, though, the countries were utterly different from one another when I made it through to the drawing-rooms. Qatar, for instance, was charming: the woman attaché was the nicest sort of hostess, inviting me to a delightful party.
‘We shall enjoy having you,’ said Qatar. ‘You will like it. February is the best month. It is spring in Doha. Everything is green. There is no humidity. The temperature is cool. I think you will have a very good time.’
I remembered these sentences later, and my sprinkling of Arabic helped me to decode them. Their truth turned out to be more symbolic than literal. I did have a very good time in Qatar, and my hosts were infinitely more kind than any tifl could have dared to hope. But the statements about the greenness, the temperature and the humidity were essentially Arabic. There was a little green; the temperature was in the high eighties; and the humidity varied between seventy and ninety per cent. Yet the general image, of a gaily hospitable springtime, was perfectly accurate. Whenever one hears what sounds like a catalogue of flat facts in Arabia, one must listen for the undertone of metaphor.
By contrast, my encounters with Saudi Arabia made me feel like an inept housebreaker. First, I was shunted to the Saudi Press Agency, where a surly man took my letter of application and slid it carefully into the bottom of a steep pile of papers on his desk.
‘Who is your sponsor in Saudi Arabia?’
‘No one. I’m an independent writer.’
‘You must have sponsor who invites you.’
‘But I haven’t a sponsor. I simply want to visit your country.’
‘Who asks you?’
‘Who asks writers?’
A small, mean glitter of victory lit up in his eyes. ‘The Ministry of Information asks writers,’ he said.
‘But will they ask me?’
‘Who knows? Inshallah. Maybe I make it easy for you and send telex.’
‘I would be most grateful if you did.’
‘But you must write letter first.’
‘I’ve already written a letter. It’s in that pile there. You just put it at the bottom of the heap.’
‘Write another letter. A long letter. All details. Then perhaps I send telex.’
After a fortnight of appointments which he didn’t keep, and telephone calls in which he claimed not to know who I was, I tried another route, through an English public relations man representing the Saudi government in London. He was friendly, and gloomy about my chances. Frankly, he could not hold out much hope. He would send a telex on my behalf. It was possible that he might get a reply. But I was anxious to leave as soon as possible, I said.
‘A year is as a grain of sand in the eye of Allah.’
Why, I asked, was it so difficult to get a visa?
‘They had a lot of trouble with Miss Linda Blandford.’
‘But that was three or four years ago. It was just one book.’
‘They are a very sensitive people,’ he said.
But he did succeed in getting me an appointment at the embassy. Being able to walk past the man on the door at their Belgrave Square offices felt, by this stage, like touching down in Riyadh.
Saudi Arabia was in his office, sorting through his mail. On the desk in front of him was a leather-bound rack of pens, a box of Kleenex, a packet of boiled sweets, three sticks of chewing-gum and a pack of Peter Stuyvesant king-size cigarettes. I watched in silence while he juggled in slow motion with these accessories. He would unwrap a boiled sweet, pop it in his mouth, wipe his fingers with a Kleenex, take a cigarette, induce a king-size spurt of flame from his leather-covered desk lighter, then begin to unpick the foil from around a stick of chewing-gum. Eventually his mouth was occupied in an astonishingly complex series of movements; simultaneously sucking, chewing and inhaling, while his hands played with a silver paper-knife. His mail finished, he picked up a pile of illustrated magazines and leafed through them. I coughed; I waved a synopsis of my book at him; I pulled faces; I lit my pipe, making as big and smoky a bonfire of the business as I could. After nearly fifteen minutes of this silent circus, he put down the last of the magazines.
‘I am sorry to have kept you waiting …’ he said, and broke into a surprising, steady flow of cold charm. He foresaw no special difficulties. He himself would send a telex. It was merely a question of confirmation from Riyadh, a simple matter which might be accomplished by tomorrow. I would hear from him by next week at the latest.
A fortnight later, I was telephoned by the public relations man. He had heard from Saudi Arabia. The Minister of Information himself had seen the synopsis of my book. A visa was certainly possible; but I should try to obtain it in one of the Gulf states. It would be easier there, he said.
Two months after this, when I was roasting in a Cairo hotel room, a letter arrived at my London flat. It came from the Saudi Arabian Embassy, and said:
Dear Sir, Kindly contact Mr Naji Mufti at this embassy Monday–Friday between 9 a.m.–3 p.m. to arrange an appointment. Mr Mufti wishes to discuss with you matters of interest to yourselves. THE SECRETARY.
I once received a threatening letter, composed from bits of type cut out from newspapers and signed A FRIEND. The two have a curious similarity of tone. When I did return to London, Mr Mufti was out. Since it is hard to make contact with Saudi Arabia, may I say here – to Mr Mufti, to Mr Sami Badr, to Mr Farouk Tawfik – that all I wanted to do was to stay, at my own expense, in Jeddah for a week. I would have liked to have visited Riyadh and seen the desert. It would have been nice to be able to sail from Jeddah to Suez up the Red Sea coast. If you want your family to continue to be the victims of Western rumour, legend and gossip (much of it, I agree, quite unnecessarily spiteful and ill-informed), then your current policy of slamming the door in the faces of strangers is by far the most effective way of ensuring more misunderstandings and more slanders.
Like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates welcomed me as a guest. They would pay my hotel bills in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and they would arrange for me to be driven into the desert to meet the bedu. It is, though, difficult to behave like a house-guest when a whole country is your host. Neither Qatar nor the emirates put any conditions on their hospitality; and all I offered in return was to send finished copies of this book to their embassies in London. I did feel rather easier in mind in those countries where I was footing my own bills; yet the system by which Qatar and the emirates admit writers to their countries is a revealing one. It wasn’t simple kindness (though I met a lot of kindness among individuals). Nor was it merely done for motives of national propaganda, on the grounds that I was likely to write more acceptable things about the country if I was having my bills picked up than if I was paying my way. It is much more, I think, a survival of tribal custom, a reminder of the stubborn familiness of even the most bureaucratised and technologised Arab nations. It was in the Qatar national museum, in the section devoted to bedu history, that I found the best explanation of my own mildly embarrassing position.
A traveller wishing to pass through the territory of a tribe approaches the chief of the tribe and requests his goodwill. If a man had to travel through territory not controlled by his tribe he would need by custom to be accompanied by a rafiq from the area in which he was travelling, under whose protection he would be.
The card went on to explain that the host tribe were under an obligation to provide the traveller with food and drink, and to accommodate him within their tents for the duration of his journey. Chiefs and rafiqs and killed camels and bedu tents have been supplanted by ministries of information, official drivers and rooms in Intercontinental hotels; but the habit of mind clings on. To be the guest of a tribe is an honourable privilege: Burton was one, so were Doughty and Thesiger. To be the guest of a government is to be instantly suspected of being a bribed hack. (And no authors of recent books about the Gulf states which I have read have come entirely clean about the way in which their expenses were paid by the governments of the countries.) In Arabia the division between the two positions remains blurred, especially in those countries where bedu traditions are still vivid, as they are in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia. At any rate, two of these patriarchal tribal houses were generous to me; offering food, shelter and the services of a rafiq. I was glad to accept.
A few days before I left London, I spotted a new nightclub in Clifford Street called the ‘El Nile’. Its window was a collage of more different brands of credit card than I knew existed. It promised Arab dancing and Oriental music. It looked a good deal more fun than the waiting-rooms in which I had recently completed a cover-to-cover reading of Hard Times, as well as filling thirty pages with copybook exercises in Arabic calligraphy and dozing over back-numbers of Middle East magazine. I had a dim notion that at last I might meet some real, off-duty London Arabs on neutral ground.
It proved almost as hard to get into as Saudi Arabia itself.
‘This is not the old club,’ said the doorman.
‘I can see that –’
‘This is new club. Oriental club. Oriental music.’
‘It says that outside.’
‘You will not like.’
‘I like Oriental music,’ I said, lying through my teeth.
‘It is expensive. Not like old club. Old club, you pay two pounds. New club, costs six. Then you pay for drink.’
‘Fine,’ I said grandly, thinking that Barclaycard Ltd would have a hard time tracking me down in the places where I was going.
‘You cannot dance.’
‘We don’t want to dance. I’ve got a limp.’
‘The floorshow is not for one hour.’
‘We’ll wait.’
‘You would not like other club, with dancing?’
‘I like the look of yours.’
‘You are very welcome. Most welcome,’ he said, in a mysterious gearshift of tone.
We sat for a while at the ground-floor bar, where a group of Algerian hostesses were painting each other’s nails. The only English in the place were an odd crew of matronly-looking girls with green Harrods carrier-bags and heavy tweed coats. Every so often one of them would amble to the door and get into a waiting chauffeur-driven car. They looked Roedean, class of ’58. When they spoke, they had gymkhanas and lacrosse-rackets in their voices. They were, said my friend, exactly what one would expect.
‘Of what?’
‘Arabs,’ she said. The ‘El Nile’ was not her idea of a night out.
We went downstairs to the blood-coloured barn of a basement. At first it looked quite empty, except for a tableful of hostesses; then one noticed occasional figures dotted in corners, like churchgoers at a badly-attended evensong. There were orange-juice men and whole-bottle-of-whisky men; no compromisers. At, I think, £2.50 for a single measure, whisky must have been far cheaper by the bottle.
It took a long time to liven up. Men drifted in in threes and fours. A surprising number of married couples arrived just before midnight, and distributed themselves around the room at separate tables. Then the floorshow began.
Belly-dancing is a peculiar art. For the most part it consists of long periods of almost total immobility in which one gets hypnotised by a single muscle twitching to music in the pelvic zone. Then, for a few seconds, the girl goes into a stamping, gyrating manic spell, before returning to that statuesque position, with the muscle going twitch, twitch, twitch, twitch, to a sort of tuneless moan on the violins.
Even my friend was moved to grudging admiration. ‘There is something in it, you know. I couldn’t do that with my tummy-muscles.’
‘It’s not her tummy-muscles that she’s doing it with.’
‘Well, whatever.’
More interesting than the belly-dancing, though, was the routine which came at the end of each act. The girl would step off the stage, and visit each table in turn, doing a lazy, overtime version of her stage performance. While she was thus engaged, the customers tucked currency into the numerous bits of elastic which kept her costume in place. By the time the first girl reached our table, she was looking like a walking money-changer’s stall, festooned in dollar bills, rials and sterling. The going rate for her bra-strap seemed to be around five dollars; for the top of her bikini-pants it went up to ten pounds. Sensitive to other people’s supertax problems, I didn’t contribute.
Yet the procedure seemed oddly devoid of any sexual charge. The money was purchasing nothing; it was simply, in that company, the only kind of applause which had any meaning. Wives looked approvingly on while their husbands forked out, and at one table, a portly gentleman in a brilliant white robe persuaded the dancer and his wife to stand together on the tabletop while he took a whole reel of flash photographs.
In the gentlemen’s lavatory, an attendant beat me to the taps in the washbasin, turning them on and testing the temperature of the water before I was permitted to wash my hands. For this service he was tipped, or so his plate seemed to claim, only in paper money, with five-pound notes on prominent display. I gave him 10p, for which he thanked me, I thought, a shade unctuously.
We left. It was all alarmingly close to stereotype. It was the kind of scene which belonged to the gossip and jokes I had wanted to avoid. At embassy after embassy I had assured the appointed representatives of the family that I wanted to see the real Arabia, to visit the new cities, to see what contemporary Arab life was like, to try to begin to understand my neighbours.
The ‘El Nile’ club presented a real difficulty. Beggars without shoes see only a world of shoes and food. They must watch the street with the monocular attention of a footwear fetishist, seeing an endless procession of polished leather going by while the rest of the world doesn’t bother even to look down. Something of the same problem afflicts the European who tries to write about Arabs: he sees their money with the same diverted and exclusive attention. It exerts a diseased fascination. Finally, like the vice which it so much resembles, it makes him go blind.
Full of pious resolutions about easy moralism, I took off for the Gulf.
Two
ISLAND LABYRINTH
JET TRAVEL MAKES A TWISTED NONSENSE of geography. In time, Bahrain is a good deal closer to London than Aberystwyth is, and the seemingly motionless speed of the Boeing 747 renders all the small, crucial distinctions of climate, culture and topography illegible. Europe slides by like a giant suburban golf-course; one can almost see the monotonous circulation of the sprinklers on the greens. It isn’t until one crosses the Bosphorus and is over Turkey that one gets into the rough – a landscape of red boulders, creased and furrowed like badly wrapped parcels. Asia Minor begins as it means to carry on, with a sudden rude surge of rock, then shale, then sand. After the barbered green of Europe, Turkey comes as a peremptory reminder that the earth is really just a crust of cooled lava on which our own native patches are no more than happy, untypical geological accidents.
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollst?ndigen Ausgabe!
