In the days after the attack I corresponded by email with a friend in Italy. I told her my analysis of the causes: American unconditional support for Israel meant that the Israeli government didn't have to face the hard sacrifices involved in making peace. They didn't have to make the politically unpopular move of removing the settlements from the West Bank and Gaza. Arabs knew the American role in this, and hated the Americans for it. Hence, the attack. So, as I wrote to her, ``For the sake of a few Israeli madmen determined to raise their children behind walls in Hebron we have lost the World Trade Center and who knows how many lives."
In fact, I believe, it turned out that hatred of Israel was at most a secondary motivation for Osama bin Laden. It now seems it was primarily a matter of ``We're Number One" thinking. This is ugly enough when we see it among Americans at the Olympics, but when it is used as a justification for mass murder, it is unspeakably horrible and obscene. Who cannot be chilled by Osama bin Laden's videotaped conversation seamlessly blending talk of Allah and joy at the killing of thousands.
The Islamic Arab empire and later the Islamic Ottoman empire were the greatest powers in the world in their time, and they attributed this to their practice of the true religion. In the 1700s it began to dawn on people in the Islamic world that they had fallen behind the West in technological progress, especially as manifested in war. The Middle East was no longer Number One. Bizarrely, one response to this was not to try to catch up technologically, but rather to attempt to return to the one true religion. Islamic Fundamentalism was born.
In this view, Israel is hated not so much for what they are doing to the Palestinians, but because they are the representatives of the West and a constant reminder of the technological superiority of the West, again as manifested in war.
My friend urged me not to go. She wrote, ``Two years ago I traveled quite extensively in the Middle East for a UNESCO project on women. One thing that I realized fully at that time was how much Americans are hated all over that world. It is something pervasive, and of course you are completely impotent facing that hate, because it will not be directed against you, Jerry Hobbs, a curious and intelligent individual who wants to understand. You will be just a symbol there, and as you know, symbols kill reality. And people, quite often."
She was worried that the whole world depended on George W. Bush. I tried to reassure her that, although George W. Bush is of very limited intelligence, he knows it, and he does not try to buck the advice of the people behind him, who are very smart. They have no genuine concerns for the world beyond America, but they are smart enough to understand the limits of their power and the consequences of their actions.
I lived through the Vietnam War, when war protesters allowed the American flag to become a symbol not of America, but of support for the war. This was a very bad development. Since then, I have not been able to look at displays of the flag but with suspicion. In 1988, in what I believe was the greatest desecration of the flag in my lifetime, George Bush père managed to turn the flag into a symbol of the Republican Party and a coded message that children of Greek immigrants were not real Americans.
So I can't say I was delighted when American flags sprouted all over after September 11. I found it interesting that the people who flew the flags the highest were the people who before had had the greatest contempt for New Yorkers and everything to do with New York (illustrating--for Americans, ironically--the Arab saying, ``My brother and I against my cousin; my brother, my cousin and I against the world.") I liked a comment I read on a web site somewhere; a woman who saw an ``I LOVE NEW YORK" bumper sticker in California called it ``the thinking person's flag." On the other hand, my colleague Drew McDermott has an eloquent argument on his web site for why the Left should not let the ``My Country Right or Wrong" people claim the flag as their own.
My Italian friend lives in a country, whose prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, leads a party called Forza Italia, which loosely translated means ``Go Italy!" It's as though we had a political party called ``U! S! A!" So she understands this flag-waving phenomenon.
The way she put it was this: ``I understand the need to cry all together, but why should we all be stupid together?"
On the other hand, I also wrote to my Italian friend in that first email message, ``My first reaction to the events of yesterday was `Nuke Kabul!'"
Stupidity is has its temptations.
Yet flags have not lost their appeal entirely for me. Several months later at the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics, a color guard marched in carrying the large torn flag from the World Trade Center, to utter silence, and I found it unspeakably moving.
Analysis of causes is important in cases of disaster, if only to avoid the disaster again. Shortly after the attack there began to be a few articles on ``why they hate us". But human beings naturally interpret questions about causes ethically as searches for justifications, and the general feeling, quite rightly, was that nothing can justify the September 11 attacks. Our simple-minded President's simple-minded framing of the War Against Terrorism as a matter of good versus evil then did much to suppress serious analysis.
My first stop was Ankara, Turkey, where I visited a Turkish colleague, and went to his place for dinner. When I asked his precocious eight-year-old daughter, who was amazingly fluent in English, what she wanted to be when she grew up, she said, ``An architecture--architect."
``What kind of buildings do you want to build?" I asked.
``Not long ones"--she meant `tall'--``because they fall down and kill people."
My Turkish colleague said he agreed wholeheartedly with America's War on Terrorism. He said especially we should go after the Kurds. And we should go after the countries that harbor them, especially Germany and Belgium.
Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, rejected Islam as the basis for the new Turkish state, instead striving to make it more like the West. Turkey became a secular state. My colleague said that in the 1980s the Turkish government reversed itself and made a bargain with the Turkish fundamentalists. It allowed them to thrive in exchange for their support against the Kurds. Now the fundamentalists constitute about 25% of the electorate, especially in eastern Turkey. The shadoor, once banned, has come back, and the fundamentalists have terrorists of their own.
At the Ali Baba Hotel in the desolate town of Derinkuyu, Turkey, the proprietor told me there were no rooms available. The hotel looked empty, but he said a Yugoslav tour was due to arrive soon. He asked my nationality, and when I said American, he became much more anxious to do something for me. He brought me tea. He offered to let me stay in the third bed of a three-bed room with two Turkish men. I declined. He showed me a tiny triangular room with two single beds jammed into it. He said he'd let me into someone else's room to use the bathroom, and that he'd be sharing the triangular room with me. I declined again. Finally it turned out that a twenty-mile drive through the night would bring me to another hotel, and he called ahead to reserve me a room. As I left, he said he was trying so hard to do something for me because ``You are an American, and I don't want to discriminate."
In a park in Sanliurfa in southeastern Turkey, near the Syrian border, I was approached by three Kurdish high-school students who wanted to practice their English. I asked what percentage of people in Sanliurfa were Kurdish. They said it was about one-third Turkish, one-third Kurdish, one-third Arab. I asked if they studied the Kurdish language in school. They said no, to do that they would need a government of their own. I pretended to look around, and said, ``Shhh." They laughed.
I recalled a conversation I once had with my colleague Hans Uzkoreit, a German linguist. I told him about my visit with a linguist in Brazil and his attempts to preserve the dying Indian languages, and how the Indians themselves look down on their own languages. Hans formulated what seemed to me to be exactly the right policy countries should have concerning language. Everyone should learn three languages--the language of their home community, the language of their nation, and the international language, which right now happens to be English. If any two of these are the same, that gives the student the opportunity to learn another language. This struck me as eminently rational, so much more so than the Serbs' attempt to suppress Albanian in Kosovo, that led to the war there, and the Turkish attempt to suppress Kurdish, that led to the Kurdish terrorism of the last decade.
In the ruins of the castle in Harran I met a Turkish man who spoke English. He introduced me to his veiled wife and his father. When I told him I was American, he expressed sorrow for the World Trade Center attack. He asked me if I had lost anyone I knew in the attack. I told him Thomas's story.
I have always told the stories of my narrow escapes as adventures, and now my boys do too. William told me about crash landing a small plane that way, and about carrying the bloody carcass of a deer over his shoulders in Alaska shortly after spotting a Kodiak bear, and about being attacked in a bar by his girl friend's husband, who fortunately was unarmed. And I repeat the stories as adventures. Thomas told his story of the World Trade Center attack as an adventure, and that's the way I repeated it to people. But I noticed that every time I told the story, as I described the falling debris, my voice broke.
The Turkish man did not take the story as an adventure, but as a narrowly averted private tragedy amidst a huge public horror, which indeed it was.
Normally I hate having guides. What they tell you is something you already know, something that isn't true, something you'll forget right away, or all three. As I entered Harran, I was accosted by two very obnoxious teenage boys in coats and ties who wanted to be my guide. The one named Ibrahim stuck to me like a burr and ignored all my requests to leave me alone.
A little boy about nine years old started walking beside me as well. He spoke almost no English. I asked his name, and he puffed his chest out and said, ``I'm Ibrahim!" I asked him to be my guide, in hopes of chasing big Ibrahim off. Big Ibrahim said, ``You should have two guides." He said something in Arabic to little Ibrahim, and little Ibrahim said to me, ``You should have two guides."
I ignored big Ibrahim and went where little Ibrahim led me.
When I was ready to leave, I pulled little Ibrahim behind a wall, out of sight of big Ibrahim, and gave him two million Turkish lira ($1.20) for being my guide. I did it in secret because I was afraid big Ibrahim would steal it from him. Little Ibrahim was delighted. But he was not too bright. He soon flashed the two bills at big Ibrahim. Big Ibrahim made a grab for them, but didn't get them. Then he told little Ibrahim to ask me for three million lira. Suggestible as he was, little Ibrahim assumed an angry, ugly look and demanded, ``Uç milyon!" (3 million). I responded by grabbing his hand, pretending to take back the two million. In panic he cried, ``Tamam! Tamam!" (Okay), and I released him. When I got in my car, I reached out to shake his hand. He angrily refused. But when I started to roll up the window, he suddenly extended his hand and we shook.
In the town of Kozluk, east of Diyarbakir, Turkey, I stopped at a roadside café. I nodded to a group of men as I sat down at an empty table. One asked where I was from. ``California," I said. He turned to the other men and said, ``America." They all eyed me narrowly as though I were a representative of the Devil. They were Kurdish. I asked the proprietor for a Pepsi, and he sent his boy to get one from another store.
I took out a piece of paper and asked them what the Kurdish word for ``thank you" is--``sipasdikim". I wrote it down. They asked me to join them. I did, and asked them more words. ``How are you" is ``çewan". ``Good" is ``beshim". ``Good morning" is ``roza beshim". The boy returned with the Pepsi, and I said, ``Sipasdikim." He was shocked. I asked what the word was for ``goodbye" and they said something like ``dikhatiriete." When I left, I said that as best I could.
Sometimes I do something right. I had turned them into experts with something to teach me. I had learned something useful as a result, and perhaps for a brief time made them feel a little friendlier towards Americans.
In Trabzon I met Tony, a 60-year-old retired English college lecturer, now an expat here. He said we Yanks had stood beside his Brits many times, and they would stand by us now. He said we should just wipe out the nest of vipers. Then he told me the United States would have been better off if we had never left the British Empire. King George III would never have let us treat the Indians the way we did. We talked on, and before we were through, he had told me that his earliest memory was of his father, a stranger, coming home from the war and taking his Mummy's attention away from him.
In Amasya, Turkey, two high school kids wanted to practice their English. The girl was named Esra, and the boy something like Çari. He looked typical, but she was thin, and had a short punk haircut and an irreverent style. I said Amasya was the nicest town I had seen in Turkey. ``Maybe for old people," Esra said. She wanted to live in Ankara, and was looking forward to going to university there, where she wants to study American literature and culture. Eventually she wanted to end up in Los Angeles. Not Çari. He wanted to come back to Amasya after university and go into the tourist industry.
I asked their views of Islam. Çari said he believed, but he didn't pray, or go to mosque. Esra said she had nothing to do with religion. It was clear she chafed against their treatment of women. Çari saw nothing wrong with it. He said women were fortunate that they didn't have to go to mosque--they could pray at home. It was okay with Çari that Turkey is a man's world. It wasn't okay with Esra.
I wanted to know how typical Esra was, so I asked how many girls in her class wore scarves. She said only two out of fourteen, but no one made fun of them for it.
Antakya, the former Roman Antioch, belongs to Turkey, but it lies almost on the border with Syria. It has been ruled by Muslims for the last 800 years, but in Byzantine times it was a locus of Christian culture and scholarship, and it was the seat of a Crusader kingdom after that. I wondered what the percentages today were of Turks and Arabs, and of the percentages of Muslims and Christians. But I couldn't find out. Whenever I asked someone, the answer was always the same: ``Everyone here gets along."
In Aleppo I asked Samir, a young man who ran a carpet store, what he thought of the World Trade Center attack. He said that it didn't make sense that the hijackers acted alone. They had to have had the backing of some government to pull off something that complicated. He suspected the Chinese, because of all the problems America has had with the Chinese in the last few years--the spy plane, bombing the embassy. But, I said, the perpetrators were Arab. They were just the tools, he replied. ``Or another possibility," he said. ``You have to ask who profits from it. The dollar will go down, and the euro will go up. The Europeans could have been behind the attack."
What I found heartening about these theories was that they were denials of blame. The people could have responded with claims of credit instead.
On the computer in Samir's carpet shop I found my son's web site with its pictures of the World Trade Center attack. He did not seem particularly interested. When I showed a picture of the World Trade Center in smoke, just before the collapse of the South Tower, taken from the Brooklyn Bridge, Samir saw right past the smoke and fire, focused on the other tall buildings, and said, ``In my next life, I want to be born in America."
Dave and Julie, the two Americans I met in Palmyra, Syria, told me a story that had all the earmarks of an urban legend. A week before a friend of a friend was walking down the street in London, saw a man lose his wallet, and picked it up and gave it back to him. The man was an Arab, and he said to the friend of a friend, ``I'll do you a favor. Stay out of central London three weeks from now." The friend of a friend went to the police to report this, and was shown a book of mugshots. He picked out the man. It was a known terrorist the police had been looking for for a long time.
Dave and I went for dinner at a local restaurant. His driver, Hajji Mehmet, sat down with us for a minute or two. He was pleased that I knew from his name that he had been to Mecca. I asked him what he thought would happen in Palestine. He was very uncomfortable and said little, and soon left us for a table with the other drivers. Dave and I remarked on Syrians' reluctance to discuss politics, in any form.
At the archeological site of Mari near the Iraqi border in Syria, I sat down with a group of half a dozen Arab men hanging around the ticket office. They gave me tea. I said I was an American, and a serious conversation ensued, of which I understood nothing. I of course imagined they were saying nasty things about the United States, and about me as an exemplar. I caught occasional words in Arabic. A truck driver, in leaving, as he stood by the door, closed his remarks with ``Abadan!"--``Never!" A man in the middle of the group said a sentence that in the middle had the words ``arba`a auu khamsa"--``four or five".
They asked me if I knew Arabic. I said, ``Atakkallam al-`arabiia qaliilan, laakin afham la shaii," which I think means ``I speak a little Arabic, but I understand nothing." Then I amended it: ``Afham kalimaat"--``I understand words." I said, ``Abadan," pointing toward the door, and ``khamsa," pointing toward the man in the middle. They laughed.
They asked if I had children. I always carry pictures of my family when I travel, since that is a universal connection. They gathered around to look. I showed my parents and told their ages and how healthy they are. I showed pictures of my boys, and told their ages and where they live. Then I showed a picture of Cynthia. It was not an unusual picture--just her head from the shoulders up, with her blonde hair. No one said anything, but from the interest they showed, I had a feeling I had done something wrong, as if I had just shown strangers a nude picture of my wife.
I went to an internet café in Aleppo before catching a bus to Hama. There was email from my mother telling me to read the State Department's warning and come home. It was no time for Americans to be traveling anywhere. I replied with a reassuring note about how friendly the people were, that I knew wouldn't reassure.
At breakfast in the Sultan Hotel my first morning in Damascus, I met a Belgian couple who had just been in Jordan. They said the people there do not at all avoid talking about politics, and the anti-American feeling is strong, and very much counter to King Abdullah's position. But the people there think of the king as a muppet, they said; he barely speaks Arabic, and he's completely out of touch with the people. The American government is talking to the wrong Arabs if they think there is broad Arab support for the War against Terrorism, they said.
I found an internet café near the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. The terminals were all occupied, so I sat down to wait. Everyone else there was a teenager, but unlike the other internet cafes I had been to, half of them were girls. Next to me was a very cute teenage girl, who told me the line went very fast. She was bright and self-assured and spoke excellent English, with an American accent that she couldn't explain. Maybe movies. Her father was Yemeni, her mother Italian and in the Italian diplomatic corps. She had lived in Damascus for five years. We talked about how safe Damascus is, and how that's one of the benefits of a repressive government. She said that Syria has a law that if a man talks to a woman and she doesn't like it, all she has to do is tell the police and they will arrest him.
I scooted over an inch farther away from her. She looked at me puzzled, and then laughed.
On a bus from Damascus to the old Roman ruin of Bosra I sat next to a good-looking, self-confident Syrian man who said he had lots of friends in America, including a woman in Connecticut and a woman studying English literature at Duke University. He showed me a letter a woman friend in New York had written him after September 11, describing how the day-long smell of ash and dust had been replaced by the smell of candles burning at a vigil at Columbia University.
He said he didn't think Osama bin Laden had the capability of launching an attack like September 11th's. Like many Arabs, he suspected the Israelis. It was from him that I first heard the story that four thousand Jews stayed home from work at the World Trade Center that day. I tried to convince him of the implausibility of none of those four thousand Jews warning an Italian or Irish or Puerto Rican friend.
He then drew for me various cartoons that he had seen that implicated the Jews. One showed the paths of the planes forming a Star of David. I told him he should distinguish between Israelis that are in favor of driving the Palestinians out of the West Bank, surely a minority, and those who want to live in peace with the Arabs. He had never heard of the latter. I told him every Israeli I know has worked for peace with the Arabs. But I don't think the message took, and when I didn't respond to his anti-Jewish jokes, the conversation died.
Later in the day I saw him walking a middle-aged German woman around the Roman ruins. A little after that I saw him at a table in the restaurant he had said he owned, but seemed to be owned by an older man. He bragged that the German woman had propositioned him and that he had turned her down.
In early October a Russian airliner was shot down over Ukraine by a surface-to-air missile. The passengers were mostly Israelis of Russian origin. The theory that I heard several times from Arabs was that the passengers were rich and were returning to Russia with their fortunes, something Ariel Sharon wanted to discourage. So he had the Mossad shoot the plane down.
At breakfast my last morning in Damascus I learned that the lead story on Arabic news was that the United States was considering targeting Damascus after disposing of Afghanistan. Apparently it was an ill-considered hypothetical in a statement by a deputy secretary of state.
I met a French couple, Benjamin and Élise, disembarking from the plane at the Sanaa airport in Yemen. We got rooms in the same hotel in the old town of Sanaa and went out to dinner together that night. We talked about Afghanistan. Élise thought America should have waited longer for the truth to out about the World Trade Center attack; more diplomatic efforts should have been made. I said Bush had to respond somehow. He couldn't just tighten airport security. He had to overthrow a government, and what better government than the Taliban in Afghanistan. Benjamin agreed with me. Élise said the United States was being the policeman to the world. I said in many cases that was true, but in this case it was a legitimate response to a direct attack, no matter who would or wouldn't join our side.
They had been traveling in India, and had planned to travel in Iran, but the war intervened and they decided to go straight to Yemen instead. They were at the base camp of Nambat Prabat outside Gilgit when the attack happened, and they didn't hear about it until the next day.
We grabbed a taxi back to the hotel. It shook on the cobblestones of the old town like it was about to fall apart. When we arrived, I gave the driver 50 rials. ``Khamsiin?!?!" he shouted. So there was a dispute. I asked the hotel clerk what was fair. He took the driver's side and said 150 rials was fair, no, 250 rials. So we gave him 150 rials and lost trust in the hotel clerk.
As I walked around the old town of Sanaa, camera around my neck, I had lots of miniconversations with men on the street. They all wanted their picture taken, except the ones whose picture I wanted to take.
A man called out to me--``Amriki!" I think it was a man I had told the night before that I was an American. He asked me about ``Boosh". I thought I should say something we both could agree on, so I pointed to my head and then held my fingers close together, saying ``Saughir"--small. He laughed.
I was finding my way to the Grand Mosque when a young man started walking with me. He spoke pretty good English. In front of the mosque, which I could not enter, he pointed out a building that was as old as the mosque, 600s A.D. Yemen was one of the first countries to convert to Islam. He led me to a building called the Samsarat, where I had heard there was a good view from the roof. We went up two flights of stairs but then found the door locked. I told him I wanted to go back to my hotel. He asked for money. I offered him 50 rials. He said no, 300 rials at least. I shook my head, put away my 50 rials and walked off. He followed me, continuing to ask for 300 rials. I merely answered ``Shukran"--thank you--each time. Then he said, ``Okay, give me 50 rials." I said no and kept walking. When he finally realized he'd get nothing, he shouted at me, ``I think you don't like Yemeni people!" and stalked off.
My second night in Sanaa I went to an internet café near my hotel. In Yahoo news I read that an unnamed State Department official had said that four terrorist attacks had been thwarted since September 11, including a plot to blow up the American Embassy in Yemen.
On my way out I met a young man from Canada, here to study Arabic. ``Don't tell people you're an American," he suggested. He said he had heard kids on the street say, ``I want to kill an American!" I told him I often say I'm a Canadian, but that's mostly when I'm behaving badly. He said that's when he says he's an American.
The afternoon of my second day in Sanaa I took a taxi 15 kilometers out of town to Wadi Dhahr, where there is a charming castle perched on top of a rock pillar. As I walked toward the castle two men asked me where I was from. When I said America, one reacted with shock and seething anger.
When I wanted to return to Sanaa just before dark, there were no taxis or buses or any other obvious form of transportation. I went up to a couple of men sitting in a car and offered them 500 rials to take me back to town. I think they would have done it for free. A third man got in the car and we were off. They had two large plastic bags of fresh qat leaves. Qat is Yemen's mild stimulant, about equivalent to coffee or tea. They offered, I accepted, and they were so charmed that an American would chew qat that the entire half-hour trip they picked the best, tenderest leaves off the qat branches and gave them to me. It still tasted like leaves. To improve the quality of our conversation, I pulled out my notes on Arabic and looked up a few words. The man sitting in the back seat with me looked over my notes and used them to invite me to dinner. I used them to decline. I said I had plans, but it was my stomach I was worried about.
They let me off at Maydan at-Tahrir, the main square of the new town, and I walked back to my hotel, spitting out bits of qat at every isolated stretch of street.
Back at my hotel I met Heinz, an Austrian doctor working for the UN in Syria and on vacation in Yemen, on the roof veranda, where he had recommended the photography in the late afternoon light. Benjamin and Élise had changed to a cheaper nearby hotel, and I saw Élise on its roof, hanging out laundry. We waved. I had been to the National Museum that morning. The first floor was remains of the pre-Islamic civilizations--mostly just pottery shards, but some wonderful inscriptions in the ancient South Arabian scripts. The second floor was Islamic art. As we sat at a table over tea on the roof of our hotel, I told Heinz that it was at the museum that it occurred to me that ``Islamic art" is a contradiction in terms. A great civilization, and their highest artistic achievement is beautiful bathroom tiles. Islamic art is art that is created in spite of the strictures of Islam. He pretended to look around for eavesdroppers, and then agreed with me.
This is not true of the architecture. The mosques, madrasas, palaces, and city gates are wonderful.
After dinner I went to the internet café again. I spent fifteen minutes on a computer that was glacially slow, and never got to my Yahoo mail. So the guy who ran the place, a kid of about 20, gave me his computer. I typed up my schedule for circling Yemen, but the connection crashed before I could send it. The guy was able to rescue my message and reboot, and I sent the schedule to Cynthia.
As I was leaving, the guy wanted to talk to me. He said he had been on a chatroom discussing the terrorist attacks. He told the American he was chatting with that he was Yemeni. The American cut him off completely and closed down the chatroom. He was clearly hurt by this, and wanted to know why the American had done that.
I tried to explain that the American felt anger about the attack, but had no way to express that anger. Then a Yemeni, an Arab, comes along. Here's a way to express the anger. It would be as if Yemeni children in the street threw stones at me because I was American. It wouldn't be personal.
I had a long conversation with Faraj, my driver in Yemen, at dinner in the town of Al-Baidha. We agreed that in their negotiations with the Taliban for the arrest of Osama bin Laden, the Bush administration had not taken adequate account of the concept of Arab hospitality. It was possible that something could have been negotiated had the Americans not simply bullied their way in.
Then he asked me why the supporters of Al Gore had accepted the results of the 2000 election. Why hadn't they gone to the streets and overthrown Bush. I explained that there is a respect for the institutions of government in America that overrides politics, even when those very institutions abuse their power for political ends.
I said I thought Vice-president Dick Cheney was the man really in charge in America, and he was surprised and interested.
As we stopped at a police post the next day, the policemen heard I knew a little Arabic. They surrounded me, showed me a lottery ticket, and asked me to read it. I sounded out the words slowly, not knowing what any of them meant. They were delighted at my proficiency.
At another police post, a soldier invited me to eat with them. Half a dozen of them, including Faraj, were sitting under a thatched shelter gathered around a large tray of chicken, onions, and rice. I fell backwards when I sat down, and they enjoyed that move. I reached in and grabbed a piece of white meat whenever I saw one. I picked up the rice with my fingers and sometimes ate it directly from my fingertips and sometimes let it slide into my palm, as they did. I was much less adept at this than they were, and by the end I had rice in my shirt pocket and rice all over my shirt and pants and a trail of rice between me and the plate. Then they poured some sort of yogurt mix onto the plate and brought out some rolls, and we all dipped into the yogurt with the bread. I feigned full early.
Afterwards Faraj told me I was the first tourist he had driven around who had eaten with the soldiers like that. He started calling me ``adventurous Jerry".
In the city of Al-Mukalla along the coast of the Arabian Sea, Faraj recommended we stay in a resort hotel on the beach and eat at an outdoor restaurant next-door. He pointed out the Holiday Inn down the beach a bit, and said it was owned by the bin Laden family. I had never considered it before, but I realized from the sinking feeling inside me that I could not stay or eat anyplace they owned. He assured me that our hotel and restaurant weren't owned by them.
Shortly after we entered the Wadi Hadramawt region, we passed the turnoff to Wadi al-Qasr. Faraj said that Osama bin Laden was born in a village there, near the town of Al-Hurayda. He lived there for six years before being taken to Saudi Arabia to live with his father. His mother still lives in the village. Faraj suggested America should capture her and hold her until Osama bin Laden turns himself in.
In Shibam in the late afternoon Faraj drove me across the wadi to the hill opposite the town and waited for me while I walked up to a tower famous for its views of Shibam at sunset. An 11-year-old boy named Muhammad picked me up and guided me there and up dark stairs to the mud and straw roof. As I watched the light change on the skyscrapers of Shibam, I heard him say to himself, as though practicing, that he wanted ``alf rial" (1000 rials). He led me back to the car. I gave him 50 rials. He naturally asked for more. I came to think of this as the Arabic way of saying ``thank you". From this perspective, Intifada II is the Palestinian way of saying ``thank you" for the Israelis' generous offer of land for peace.
That evening I went to a small restaurant near the city gate. A young man who spoke a little English invited me to join him, and I did. A group of men were playing cards in the corner. The cook looked like he was just heating up pita bread, but when I asked for that, he held up an egg as well, so I got an egg sandwich. Then who should come in but the 11-year-old Muhammad. He saw me and stuck his tongue out at me. I explained to everyone else that I had given him 50 rials but he had wanted 1000.
At the gas station at the turnoff to Ma'rib I took a picture of a cute little girl with Ethiopian features who was begging there, and I gave her 20 rials. She waved to me later and I waved back. She waved to me again, and I waved back again. Faraj told her something in Arabic, and we drove off. As we drove away, he told me what he had told her. He had told her I wanted to marry her.
As we drove into Sanaa after seven days circling the country, we saw something I had not seen before I left. Kids were selling tapes of Osama bin Laden's speeches on the street corners. They were not selling these tapes in and among other tapes of other people. Only Osama bin Laden, and people were snatching them up. As we waited at a stoplight, Faraj took a tape from one of the boys and popped it into his tape deck. He asked me if I wanted to buy it. I was tempted. From the screaming maniac we see in the short clips shown of Hitler in the American media, it is very difficult to understand how he could have had such an appeal to the German people. But a friend of mine who knew German and had watched movies of entire speeches could understand his power as an orator. Was it the same with Osama bin Laden? Could I, in spite of not knowing Arabic, catch something of the power of his rhetoric? As the tape played, I began to feel I could. But at the same time, I felt a very great revulsion at the horror he had committed, and by the time the light turned green, I asked Faraj to give the tape back to the boy.
Heinz had raved about the great views from the roof of our hotel, so I set out to climb up there. From the roof garden restaurant I climbed a flight of stairs and out a window onto a small balcony. A ladder there ended three feet short of the top of the wall around the roof. I stepped on an unstable wooden eave and a pipe and hoisted myself over the mud adobe wall and onto the roof. I stepped gingerly over the cables of the satellite dish and moved as close as I dared to the low wall protecting me from a tumble six stories down to the street below, in order to take pictures. Stretching from the roof to the top rung of the ladder on my way down was even more problematic; it took me five minutes to get up the nerve to trust my handhold on the pipe.
Across from the window I climbed back in was the employees' lounge, and the desk clerk and two of his friends were sitting there chewing qat. They invited me in and offered me some. We talked about Yemen and America.
Then the desk clerk said that one of his friends had quipped while I was up on the roof, ``If he falls off, America will give us all the electric chair."
My last day in Yemen I walked around the Old Jewish Quarter of Sanaa, whose former inhabitants have long since emigrated to Israel. As I walked through the narrow streets, I had my usual banter with the gangs of children I passed. I passed some boys playing soccer. They asked my name, and asked for pens. I don't think I told them where I was from. They followed me around a corner. Then one kid ran up and slapped my daypack. I turned and saw him running away. I reached the main street. Another kid threw a pebble that hit me in the ankle and ran away. About a block later another kid threw a pebble that hit me in the back of the leg and then dashed into an alley. I ignored them.
My last night in Sanaa I returned to my hotel after going around the city all day. The electricity in the neighborhood was out, but the hotel's restaurant had its own generator. I went in and sat with a German man and his driver. The German had grown up in a small village in Bavaria south of Munich, but he went to Berkeley in the '60s, became a radical, and never looked back. He had worked in Mali and Senegal, and now had worked in Yemen for three years in school construction.
He said ``Almania" (Germany) is a good word in Yemen. There were two reasons for this: lots of tourists and aid, and Germany's history with the Jews.
``Talk about being liked for the wrong reason!" I said.
``Yes," he said.
He excused himself early, saying he had an appointment with a woman about school construction. What I found remarkable about this was the idea of a man talking to a woman in Yemen.
The morning I left Sanaa I got up at 4 a.m. and finally figured out how to take a hot shower by tracing pipes and wires to determine which valves to open and which switches to toggle. When I checked out of the hotel, the clerk who spoke English was roused. The room was $14 a night, and I gave him $30 for the $28 bill. He said he didn't have change. But I saw a bunch of bills in the drawer. Finally he gave me the two-dollar change. Then he pulled out a bill for 100 rials for phone calls I had made the day before confirming my flights. I paid it, leaving me with exactly the taxi fare to the airport.
On the way through the empty pre-dawn streets, the taxi driver got a call on his cell phone. It was the hotel clerk, and he wanted to talk to me. He said I had stayed three days, not two, from the 22nd to the 24th. ``That is two days," I said. He thought a bit and then agreed. I began a diatribe against him with ``You" but cut it short with ``Have a nice day."
At the airport the man who stood in front of the X-ray machine putting suitcases on the conveyor belt said, ``Give me money." I ignored him.
On the flight from Sanaa to Cairo I read the English-language Yemen Times. Whether or not we view the ``War on Terrorism" as the USA versus the Arabs, they certainly do.
At the Damascus airport I got a taxi into town for 400 Syrian pounds. As we left the parking lot, two men appeared out of the night and asked if they could have a ride into town. I asked if they would split the cost--``Mi`tiin. Mi`tiin." (200. 200) They disappeared. The driver said, ``Very good. Very good."
In the minibus I took through the Beqqa Valley in Lebanon, I had a conversation with a man from Beirut about Canada, which is where I said I was from. My apologies to Canadians, but come on! This was the Beqqa Valley, where in the 1980s kidnap victims were held tied up for years on end.
They let me off in Chtoura on the main road, and I caught a shared taxi for Damascus. I sat in the middle of the front seat, between the driver and a moderately attractive young Lebanese woman with spangles in her lipstick. She was the first woman I had sat next to in the Middle East. We talked to each other a little, but we had hardly any language in common.
At breakfast in the Sultan Hotel in Damascus, I struck up a conversation with a British man named Peter Maxwell, who worked for a humanitarian food aid organization, Save the Children, in northern Iraq, the part not under Saddam Hussein's control but under Kurdish control. The Kurds are doing relatively well, and are the closest to being independent that they have ever been. He had been in Iraq for three years, and spent six years in Bosnia before that.
We talked about the difficulty of defining terrorism. Terrorism is directed against established governments, so naturally established governments can agree to battle terrorism. A good-versus-evil war against terrorism is a war to maintain the status quo. But some terrorism, such as the Palestinian actions, seems to be the only way to battle an injustice by an otherwise powerless people. On the other hand, he felt the Northern Ireland terrorism was illegitimate since there are democratic institutions through which to channel discontent. Of course some would challenge the fairness and efficacy of the democratic institutions.
The countryside south of Damascus was flat rock desert, except in many places where fields have been cleared of stones and plowed. Occasional low mountain ranges in the distance.
At the Jordanian border a man climbs into a pit and the car drives over it so he can check underneath. Pleasant job. The car is searched thoroughly, the luggage less so. Are they looking for terrorists?
Northern Jordan was much like southern Syria.
In Petra as I began a long hot afternoon hike up to the ``Monastery" a young man, a local, insisted I take his donkey. ``One hour walking. Twenty minutes on donkey," he said. I said ``No", and ``Shukran" with the right negative intonation, and ``La shukran" again and again, but he persisted. He stuck to my side. So I tried to walk in a way that would run him into a bush. He stopped. I stopped. I started again. So did he. I tried to walk him into a rock. He stopped again.
Finally he said, ``What just happened?"
I said, ``Everyone else here in Petra respects the tourists, and when they say `no thank you' they leave them alone. Except you."
He left me alone.
In Al-Baidha, Yemen, a dusty, garbage-strewn town in the middle of the desert, a boy I had engaged as a guide asked me if I was Muslim. Two days later in Shibam some boys I passed asked the same thing. An eight-year-old boy in a Bedouin tent where I had stopped for tea near Petra, Jordan, pointed at me, bowed toward Mecca saying, ``Allah akbar," and pointed inquisitively at me again. If adults were around, they would shush the children, seeing my embarrassment. I did not know how to answer this question when asked by children, who have such a rigid view of how the world should be.
At a Jordanian resort on the Dead Sea I met a Slovenian banker who spent much time in Palestine. I told him about these experiences, and asked how he handled them. He said he freely told Arabs he met that he was an atheist. He said it always led to good discussions as they tried to persuade him to convert.
In the Caravan Hotel in Amman I met a tall thin Dutch man from The Hague who spoke excellent Arabic. He had studied in Holland for a year and then in Amman for six months, and then had worked as a tour guide in Syria and Jordan. On this trip he was on his way to Dubai where he was going to arrange an exhibition of some Dutch artists he represented.
Another man joined us. He was from Baghdad, the first and only Iraqi I met on this trip, and maybe ever. I got up and shook his hand. He dealt in Iraqi carpets, and was also on his way to Dubai on business. He unfortunately spoke little English, so it was impossible to engage in deeper conversation, which I would have loved to do.
An older, dignified Jordanian man joined us. He bragged about how much of the world he had seen; I avoided a pissing contest. I asked him the attitudes in Jordan about the World Trade Center attack and about Afghanistan. He said every reasonable person was horrified by the World Trade Center attack. It was completely against Islamic principles, he said. Islam is a peaceful religion. But he said a distinction had to be made between terrorism and legitimate resistance to oppression. About Afghanistan he said that people objected to the high level of civilian casualties, but did not object to the military targets.
He, I, and the Iraqi talked about the Gulf War. The Jordanian said that all the U.S. cares about is oil, and that's why they didn't go on to Baghdad. They had recovered the oil as soon as they had retaken Kuwait. I said I thought the reason was that the first Bush administration wanted Saddam Hussein to remain in power, because they were afraid the alternative was the Islamic fundamentalists. The Jordanian was incredulous at this idea--Bush wanted to keep Saddam Hussein in power?! Impossible!
But the Iraqi man smiled and gave me the thumbs up. He said he'd been a soldier in the Gulf War, and he remembered American planes guarding Saddam's helicopters as they attacked the fundamentalist Shi`ites in the south.