The Arabs: Journeys Beyond the Mirage [Lingua Inglese] - Rilegato

“Intelligent and incisive . . . Mr. Lamb has the first-rate reporter’s tools, and he uses them to relate, with compelling detail, who the Arabs are.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Perhaps the best effort to examine the Middle East using a mixture of anecdote, description, and analysis to bring the region to life.” —Los Angeles Times

“A thoughtful closeup study of the Arab peoples, based on firsthand observation and on knowledge of their history. . . . An excellent piece of writing and persuasion.” —The New Yorker

“Neither pretentious nor polemical . . . A valuable contribution toward knocking down stereotypes.” —The Boston Globe

From the Trade Paperback edition.

One

A Collision of Cultures

Gamal Rasmi slumped into his chair and glanced about the dance floor, his fingers tapping a nervous beat on the tabletop. The Playboy Disco was nearly full, but he recognized not a soul. "I used to know everyone here, absolutely everyone," he said with a sigh, signaling the waiter for a German beer. The waiter didn't see him and hurried by to fill another order. The music grew louder. Gamal's fingers moved faster. "This getting married in Cairo, it may be a very stupid thing I am about to do," he said. "I may never be able to dance again."

Until recently Gamal had come to the Playboy almost every evening to dance and drink a beer or two, acting out his fantasy that he was John Travolta in the movie Saturday Night Fever. Then trauma entered his life: he got engaged. His fiancée, Manal, was a plump, silent woman who spent her time watching television and would not get into Gamal's car until he had plugged his portable TV into the cigarette lighter on the dashboard. Having only recently become conspicuously pious, Manal did not dance and did not condone the consumption of anything stronger than fruit juice. She also had started veiling--covering her hair and shoulders, but not her face, with a scarf--thus tacitly announcing that she had made her peace with God and would display her religion as a badge, which said, Look! This is who I am! This did not greatly please Gamal, but I noticed that he soon stopped drinking beer and started observing noontime prayers, bowing toward Mecca on the floor of our dining room, which we had turned into an office. "This makes me feel better inside," he said.

Gamal, who earned $175 a month as my Los Angeles Times Cairo bureau manager, was twenty-eight years old. He had a university degree in business, although he had never attended any classes. (College students are taught to memorize, not reason, in Egypt, and class attendance is not mandatory, so he crammed until dawn with the help of tutors before each exam period.) He had fulfilled his two-year military obligation, although I don't think he ever actually put on an army uniform--he had an influential friend in the army who had made some arrangement on his behalf. At heart Gamal was a rug merchant, always trying to cut a corner and turn a profit by swapping cars or investing in a boutique or cooking up some business deal. He was also an engaging young man totally devoid of spite or malice. He was impeccably honest and considered his job with me to be a contract of friendship. I would have trusted him with my life.

What most worried Gamal about getting married was the cost. First, he could not marry, or even spend time alone with Manal, until he had a fully furnished condominium. Then he would have to make a substantial dowry payment to his bride's parents. And finally, there was the lesson of his father, who divided his time between Egypt and Saudi Arabia as a used-car salesman and was supporting four wives, an acceptable arrangement in Islam as long as he remained financially responsible for them all. Gamal swore that he intended to have only one wife, but just to cover himself, he had written into his marriage contract that if he ever divorced Manal, he would owe her only twenty cents.

Gamal, still wanting his beer, signaled for the waiter again. The club was dark, and the light of candles on each small table bounced off the faces of young Egyptian couples. They wore smart Western attire, and their conversations slipped easily in and out of Arabic, English and French. The disco music had reached torture levels of intensity, and Gamal could stand it no more. "Do you want to see me dance?" he asked, and without waiting for a reply, he was up and strutting across the dance floor, alone, arms pumping, head back, lost in the flashing lights and memories of his fading bachelor days. He was a man torn, like the Arab world itself, between two forces--the traditional, conservative Islamic values passed down through the centuries and the modern, liberal temptations of Western ways imported from alien cultures thousands of miles away.

The resultant clash of cultures is hardly a new phenomenon in the developing world, yet few people have found it more unsettling than the Arabs. For them, far more than for most, the future is rooted in the past--in their own unique and rich heritage, in their belief that what Mohammed the Prophet taught thirteen centuries ago is a precise guide for today's life--and when their sons would rather watch Chicago Hope than go to the mosque, when Nike sneakers and a greed for material things replace prayer beads and the need for spiritual fulfillment, then the very foundation of their Arabness is challenged and shaken.

"Nobody was ready for all the money that descended on us during the oil boom of the seventies," Bahrain's minister of development, Youssef Shirawi, told me one day as we sipped sweet tea in his office. "In having to choose, we accepted the manifestations of a modern, Western civilization, but refused its rulings. We accepted technology, for instance, but not science. People became confused, and they ran away to find comfort in Islam."

What the Arabs wanted to do with their petrodollars was to import Western technology without sacrificing their Eastern culture. Cars were necessary for transportation, but should not be employed for death-defying racing events. Chemistry was fine in itself, though it became evil when used to produce whiskey. As Lebanon's Sheik Abdulaziz Salameh put it: "Television is a useful invention of the industrialized West. But Westerners have turned it into the home of the devil with all those films of crime, sex and immorality. We have mimicked the West in many ways. I insist that television be used for purposes more in keeping with Islamic tradition." Western technology, however, cannot be isolated. With it come Western culture and Western financial values, and the accumulation of wealth can become a religion as powerful as Islam or Christianity. The Arabs saw their world changing, and it scared them. They responded as so many others have in times of crisis: they turned to religion, heeding the muezzins' call that, like the bells of Christianity and the horn of Judaism, summoned the multitudes to prayer with promises of hope.

God is most great.

I testify that there is no god but God.

I testify that Mohammed is the Prophet of God.

Come to prayer.

Come to success.

God is most great.

There is no god but God.

The call to prayer offered a return to simpler, less threatening times. Those who abided strictly by the revelations Mohammed received while in a trance from the angel Gabriel would be rewarded with a "perfect" life. There would be no need to question. Every event, every turn of fortune, would be determined by God. Inshallah (If Allah wills it).1 Tell an Arab friend that you will see him tomorrow or wish him a safe journey or say that you hope his business meeting goes well, and the reply is always the same--"Inshallah."

"Never," warns the Koran, "say of anything, 'I shall do that tomorrow,' without adding, 'If God pleases.' Invoke thy Lord, if thou hast forgotten and say, 'Perhaps my Lord will lead me to do a more reasonable thing.'"

In many ways, the Arab world today is a religious empire. It encompasses eighteen countries and 4.6 million square miles, an area 25 percent larger than the United States.2 The largest country, Sudan, is more than three times the size of Texas; the smallest, Bahrain, would fit neatly inside the boundaries of New York City. Except for a small, aged generation of Jews and a relative handful of Christians--religious minorities have not fared well in the Middle East--94 percent of the people are Muslim.

Outsiders tend to think of the Arab world as a cohesive unit. Linguistically, culturally and religiously, it is to a large extent. Yet in political and human terms, this empire is fractured and diverse. The Saudis and Moroccans, for instance, are separated at the extreme by forty-five hundred miles and speak dialects that are mutually incomprehensible. The Tunisians eat couscous (steamed semolina with meat and vegetables); the Egyptians prefer ful (cooked beans served with a variety of foods). In Iraq 58 percent of the people are literate; in Yemen 57 percent are illiterate. A Yemeni has a per capita income of $740 a year; a Kuwaiti, $22,700. A Libyan lives in Africa, an Omani in Asia.

But until the mid-1960s, these were superficial differences to the Arab. He viewed the rivalries that divided the Arab nations as merely a temporary obstacle on the road to eventual Arab unity. Culture is a greater force than politics, he believed, and the strength of being Arab is in the heart. It is a sense of oneness among brethren, a bond born in the sharing of a history that goes back to the earliest days of mankind.

Twenty thousand years ago an ice cap covered much of Europe. The ice generated masses of cold air, which created a blockade that prevented rainstorms from drifting across the Atlantic. Unable to move west, the storms swung down across North Africa and the Middle East, and transformed the region into a land as green as the English countryside. It teemed with wildlife and was crisscrossed by great river systems. Olive groves covered what is now the Libyan desert, forests and grasslands stretched for hundreds of miles across the now-sandy wastelands of Egypt, through which the river Nile flows without a single tributary.

Later the ice cap melted, and the Atlantic rains moved northward again. Gradually the grasslands and forests of the Middle East turned into desert and steppe. Dry wadis reached through the Sahara and the Arabian Peninsula, and in his search for food and game, man was forced out of the highlands and into the valleys of the Nile, the Jordan River, and the Tigris and Euphrates rivers of Mesopotamia (now Iraq). In these valleys, some eight thousa...