The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

During our week in Cyprus, while the US assembled its forces around Afghanistan, George played tennis in the mornings with Colin and I made calls to Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. The US was not bombing any Arab countries, and no harm had come to Americans in the Arab world. I could leave Cyprus for Aqaba, having kept my promise to my daughter. George flew back to London and his final year of history at SOAS. I read some Somerset Maugham short stories and came across the dictum ‘The wise traveller travels only in imagination’. I should have heeded him on my first journey through Greater Syria in 1987.

If not for Britain’s invasion and division of the Ottomans’ Arab provinces, I might not have made this journey or the one that was curtailed in 1987. T. E. Lawrence and his masters had created the conditions for the wars that I had come again and again as a journalist to report: not only the many between Israel’s Jewish colonists and the Arab natives, but between Arabs and Kurds, Christians and Muslims, Iranians and Iraqis. The empires brought border wars, where there had been no borders; tribal wars, where tribes had always lived; anti-colonial wars, where empires had always ruled over colonies.

I was a dual citizen: of the vibrant American empire and of its British predecessor, now a mere kingdom of northern Europe. Two passports and many allegiances. My ancestors had originated from subject peoples in Ireland long before its independence and from Mount Lebanon under the Ottoman Sultan in Istanbul. Both families were Catholic, one of their many legacies to me and another claim on my loyalty. Part native, part double imperialist, I would enter Aqaba from the Red Sea. Lawrence’s route had been, like the man himself, more circumspect. He had led a detachment of Arab irregulars from the Hejaz north through the desert to Wadi Roum, the rosy-rocked Greeks’ Valley in what became Jordan. Disabling Turkish batteries along the way, they struck south to surprise the Ottomans from the rear.

I could have gone that way, but that was not where the real war was fought, not where decisions were made. Lawrence’s five-hundred-mile march and the capture of Aqaba were episodes in the Arab myth of self-liberation. Reality was the British army, preparing to assault Gaza from Egypt. Reality was the Royal Navy, cutting Turkey’s communications between Aqaba and the Ottoman troops concentrated in the holy city of Medina. The naval guns of Great Britain had reduced the seaward walls of Aqaba’s Mamluke fortress, where a few hundred Turkish imperial troops sheltered for safety. Lawrence wrote of Aqaba in 1917: ‘Through the swirling dust we perceived that Aqaba was all a ruin. Repeated bombardments by French and British warships had degraded the place to its original rubbish. The poor houses stood about in a litter, dirty and contemptible, lacking entirely that dignity which the durability of their time-challenging bones conferred on ancient remains.’ By the time Lawrence reached Aqaba, it was as a walkover.

The capture of Aqaba transformed Britain’s eastern war. Captain Basil Liddell Hart wrote, in his biography Colonel Lawrence: The Man Behind the Legend, ‘Strategically, the capture of Aqaba removed all danger of a Turkish raid through Sinai against the Suez Canal or the communications of the British army in Palestine.’ In Hart’s words, it also inserted an ‘Arab ulcer’ in the Turkish flank.

Aqaba perched at the crux of two thighs – African Sinai in the west and Asian Arabia to the east. The penetration of Aqaba from above by Lawrence and below by the Royal Navy created the breach that would subordinate the Arab world to Great Britain and its French ally. The Ottoman loss of Aqaba presaged the novel division of Turkey’s Syrian Arab provinces into what became Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and, until 1948, Palestine, thereafter Israel. Another British campaign against Turkey in Mesopotamia would forge Arabs and Kurds against their will into a new country the British would call Iraq. The region has had no peace since.

I chose the way of the warships – the gods of the story, the powers that granted Lawrence and the Arab tribes the illusion of independent action. By the time of my journey, the United States Navy had succeeded Britain’s fleet in the Red Sea and just about every other wet region of the globe. America’s warplanes would soon send thunder and lightning from the heavens over Afghanistan to give heart to Afghan warriors assaulting their tribal enemies. Alliances with some of the natives had the same rationale in Arabia as in Afghanistan: to reduce the dangers to imperial forces. If giving guns to the Arabs saved British lives in 1917 and 1918, using Afghan against Afghan would achieve the same for Americans nearly a century later. It was the cheapest way to fight an imperial war.

TWO

Aqaba, Fourteen Years Late

‘From time immemorial it has served as both the ingress

and egress between sea and land, between Arabia and

the highlands of Sinai and Palestine, “The Gateway

of Arabia”.’

REVEREND GEORGE ADAM SMITH

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (1894)

Port of Entry

THE AFTERNOON SHIP from Sinai carried four tourists: an old Australian woman, her grown son, a Japanese man with a red backpack and me. The rest of the passengers were Egyptian workers, a few with wives and children, bound for Jordan, Iraq or Saudi Arabia. They were the Arab world’s gleaners, who collected the leavings of oil potentates, gun sellers and concrete spreaders. They washed Saudi dishes, painted monuments to dictators and provided the muscle to erect alien forms on Oriental landscapes. After a few years, or a lifetime, working in the Arabian sun, they returned home to Egypt with enough Iraqi dinars or Saudi riyals to open a shop selling Coca-Cola beside the Nile. They smelled of happiness, these moneyless but smiling young men. They waited hours without complaint for the ship to embark. Before that, they had stood in long queues at embassies for work permits and visas. In the dingy embarkation hall, a warehouse with a coffee stall and some broken benches, Egyptian policemen made them wait before taking their passports, stamping them and, at the quay, returning them in confusion. Aboard a bus that carried us from the departure building to the dock, the workers jumped up to offer their seats to the Australian matron.

Neither the heat nor the prospect of near-slavery in the desert suppressed their laughter. The Egyptian fellaheen, the peasants, had laughed at Pharaoh. They built his pyramids to quell his terror of death, and they got the joke that he did not. Two things mocked Pharaoh’s dogma of eternal life: real, undeniable death without end, without immortal soul, without reincarnation; and the fellaheen’s laughter. When Pharaoh’s mummified corpse lay dormant within gilded chambers, they robbed his grave and laughed. They laughed at Egypt’s conquerors – Alexander the Great, the Vandals, the Caliphs and the British – and still they laughed at its modern dictator, Hosni Mubarak. They called him, for his resemblance to a processed cheese logo, ‘la vache qui rit’. They laughed even more at fat Saudi princes whose vanity required them to waste their countries’ fortunes on drugs, alcohol, prostitutes, palaces and physicians to deny their mortality. If the fellaheen had known why I sailed with them to Aqaba, they would have laughed at me too.

Our ship cruised out of Egypt’s Nuweiba harbour past vacant beach chairs, umbrellas and thatched bars. This would be another year without tourists. North of the luxury beaches that Israel had occupied in 1967 and tried to keep until 1988 lay the apartment blocks, many-storeyed and unlike anything an Egyptian had ever conceived or wanted. The six- and seven-storey boxes might have blended into an American federal housing project in a cold urban ghetto, but they defaced the Egyptian shore. Architects misunderstood Egypt and its soil, its most eminent contemporary architect Hassan Fathy wrote fifty years before. They needed to design in the vernacular with bricks made of Egypt’s mud-rich earth. Egypt’s architects, however, mostly studied in the West or worked for Western firms. Contractors made money with cement and nothing from mud-brick. The last structures I saw in Egypt were cement monuments to American immortality.

The ship moved north-north-east, Africa to Asia. Arabia’s ochre hills sliced into the water to form half of an invisible chasm that emerged in the north as the Jordan and Bekaa Valleys and in the south as the Great Rift. The sun was casting Africa’s half of the valley into shadow, while the desolate, treeless slopes of the Arabian side shone against the coming darkness. A cartoon in white rock on the Saudi slope pointed our way. It was an open book perched atop a scimitar as large as England’s prehistoric chalk horses and overendowed men. In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it could have been only one book, the book, the Koran. The sword of religion, Saef ed-Din, protected, as in the past it had delivered, the Word of God. From the middle of the Gulf of Aqaba in the northern Red Sea, I could almost touch four countries – Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. To my left were Taba in Egypt and Eilat in Israel. To my right, only a stroll away, was the Saudi desert. And ahead, in the middle, was the town with the fortress that had been my destination when I set out from Turkey fourteen years before.

When Captain T. E. Lawrence invaded in 1917, there were no Eilat, no Taba, no Saudi Kingdom. Apart from the invisible demarcation between British-occupied Egypt and the Ottoman Empire that the Bedouin ignored, borders were unknown. ‘For months,’ Lawrence wrote in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, ‘Aqaba had been the horizon of our minds, the goal: we had had no thought, we had refused thought, of anything beside.’ Modern Aqaba lacked any characteristic to make it anyone’s horizon. It was, like Eilat next door, a minor beach resort with large, empty hotels and palm trees dropped in for decoration. Yet it had obsessed Lawrence, and it had eluded me in 1987. I had attempted and failed to reach it that July for the seventieth anniversary of Lawrence’s triumph. Halfway between Alexandretta in southern Turkey and Aqaba, my Beirut oubliette was as much a legacy of Lawrence’s military campaign as the mini states born of the myth of his Arab Revolt. Out of the 1917 fall of Aqaba came flag-swinging little Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan, whose squabbling and land grabs had led to the wars and mayhem and kidnappings that blocked my way in 1987 – an inconvenience compared to the tragedies imposed upon the natives.

The last words I read before disembarking at Aqaba, painted in black on the wheelhouse of the cargo ship Al Houda, were ‘Safety First’. A Jordanian officer – Jordan’s police and soldiers are the best dressed in the Middle East with their starched tunics and regimental headgear – took our passports and instructed us to board an old bus. On the quayside, Jordanian flags dropped from dark masts, the red – green – white – black motif replicated like an Andy Warhol portrait series, the shade of each depending on the way it caught the sun, how weathered it was or how it dangled from its lanyard. In Jordan, as in Egypt, flags were outnumbered by only one other artefact: pictures of the leader. When we set sail from Sinai, I was relieved that a giant effigy in Nuweiba port of President Hosni Mubarak, the air force officer whose luck had made him Egypt’s vice president when soldiers assassinated his predecessor in 1981, would be the last for a while. In Jordan, young King Abdallah’s visage proved as ubiquitous. It greeted me at the dock, welcomed me on the bus, invited me into the immigration hall, watched with unaffected lack of interest while an official stamped my passport, looked up at me from the ten-dinar banknote that I used to buy a Jordanian visa with his family coat of arms upon it and smiled as I walked through several interior checkpoints where soldiers of different units examined my documents. Outside, the young king hovered over our long taxi queue.

An old Toyota taxi took me half a mile to the next portrait of the king at what turned out to be the real taxi stand for cars going to Aqaba town. Here, we admired more images of the monarch in costumes that signified his many roles: father, soldier, tribal chief, descendant of the Prophet, bridge builder, peacemaker, Bedouin warrior, businessman, friend of the people. Like Mubarak and every other Arab leader, Abdallah was Ram ad-Dar, head of the house. In all traditional Arab houses and shops, the head’s picture – usually retouched in black and white, of an old man framed under glass on a wall above door height – dominated the most important room. President Mubarak, King Abdallah, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Bashar al-Assad in Syria and King Fahd in Saudi Arabia translated to the public sphere the senior male’s leadership of the family. I would see them in Israel, the modern society that created itself to cast off the old ways of the ghetto and of subservience at foreign courts: the same patriarchal portraits in the same positions, alone, high on a wall, old, wise and revered, a father, a grandfather or a rabbi – the Lubavitcher rebbe, a long-dead Talmudic scholar or, in some settlements in occupied territory, the American killer rabbis Moshe Levinger and Meier Kahane. Photographs of prime ministers, who came and went, sometimes in disgrace to return later, were to be seen only in government offices. No one blamed the father, the king, the president for mistreatment by his minions. If the leader knew what was done under his portraits, he would bring to justice all sergeants, bureaucrats or ministers of state who abused the leader’s trust.

My First Evening

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.