The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East

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

Royal Cities

‘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.