The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

‘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.