Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  “Mister, fine cloth,” an embroiderer said, holding aloft a dress as I stared at the phantoms before his shop. Indeed, the dress was very fine, and I asked him how much it cost.

  “For you, my friend, only one hundred riyals.” About ten dollars.

  I went through the bartering histrionics I’d learned since my first night’s boat ride in Cairo: the eyebrows raised in mock surprise, the dismissive chuckle, the abrupt exit, the casual return.

  The merchant watched my theatrics and shrugged. “Man in next shop, he will charge the same,” he said. “You like dress, you pay.” It was the routine I’d encountered at the airport. So I paid. The embroiderer folded the dress and handed me a twig with glossy green leaves. “Chew this and you will not care that you just paid too much,” he said, returning to his needle and thread.

  * * *

  Chew qat and you will stop caring about many things. One day, a millennium or so ago, a sleepy goatherd noticed that his flock became lively after grazing on a roadside shrub. The boy sampled a few sprigs himself and felt much the better for it—and qat has been the national dish of Yemen ever since. Or so the legend goes.

  Qat is the last of Yemen’s bounty. It was here that the biblical Queen of Sheba loaded “a very great retinue, with camels bearing spice and very much gold” for the journey to King Solomon’s court. Ten centuries later, the Romans imagined Yemen a land of such fabulous wealth that they dubbed it Arabia Felix, meaning happy or prosperous Arabia. The finest coffee in the world grew here, named for the Red Sea port of Mocha from which the beans were exported. It was to celebrate this good fortune, and to guard it against marauders, that the medieval merchants of Sanaa built their fanciful towers and ringed them with ramparts of mud.

  Yemen has stood almost still ever since. Slavery endured until the 1960s. Illiteracy stuck at ninety percent. Life expectancy still hovered at forty. Bedouin roamed through sand dunes spooned out by the wind where the Queen of Sheba built her Temple to the Moon God. And the fertile coffee fields had been resown with a spindly shrub that was without value beyond the borders of Yemen.

  “I quickly became accustomed to using qat,” confessed a nineteenth-century French traveler, “and ended up getting great pleasure from its gentle stimulation and the vivid dreams which followed.” Reading this at a teahouse in the old city, I wondered whether qat explained Sanaa’s strange skyline and the odd behavior of every Yemeni I’d met.

  Across the café, a man was well into the stuff. Slumped against the wall, he crammed leaf after leaf into his mouth, working it into a dense green cud. Teeth stained, cheek bulging, he looked like a third-base coach on a last-place team in late September. Except that, like every other Yemeni male, the man carried a dagger that was broad and sharp enough to slice a man up like so much pita bread.

  I returned to my reading, looking for story ideas. I’d come to Yemen “on spec,” a polite term that editors use when they might want your stories but don’t want to commit themselves in advance. Working on spec is the lowest form of journalistic life, a notch below stringer. No assignment means no expense budget, no letters of introduction and no worker’s compensation for dagger wounds incurred in the line of duty. But so little had been written about Yemen that I figured it was worth gambling five hundred dollars or so to see what I could come up with. As I looked again at the qat-eater in the café, eyes glazed, dagger slung in his lap, the outline of a feature article suggested itself. Weed and weapons, mellowness and menace, the yin and yang of Yemeni society. A Traveller’s Guide to Arms and Qat. Why not?

  * * *

  “You must understand that my country is not like other Arab nations,” the young man said. “We want to be Yemen. We do not want to hurry up and be like the West.”

  It was two days after my arrival, in the waiting room of a government office, and I was chatting with an American-educated bureaucrat named Mansour.

  “We must get to know each other,” he said. “We must chew qat.”

  “When?”

  Mansour smiled. “Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, as you wish. All days in Yemen we chew qat.”

  “Today,” I said, scribbling down his address.

  After forty-eight hours in Yemen, I had picked up a thing or two about local customs. I knew, for instance, that qat is usually consumed after a heavy lunch, so as to buffer the stomach against the plant’s acidic juices. I also knew that most qat chews are BYO affairs, so I headed off in search of an appropriate bush to bring with me to Mansour’s.

  At Sanaa’s qat market, several thousand men in extreme good humor wandered from one open pickup to another, each vehicle loaded with what looked like piles of yard clippings. Farther back sprawled a covered bazaar, also devoted to qat, and behind that, a tired-looking vegetable and animal market, dwarfed by the commerce in shrubs.

  I joined a jostling crowd at the most popular qat stall, figuring that eight hundred Yemenis couldn’t all be wrong. After ten minutes of stiff-arms and toe-squashings, I reached the front and faced a towering pyramid of qat. Unnerved by the choice, and by the dagger hilts pressing against my spine, I quickly pointed at the closest bundle of boughs, about like your average suburban hedge. The seller wrapped the plant in pink cellophane and demanded eighty riyals, or eight dollars. Qat, like everything else in Yemen, wasn’t subject to much haggling.

  During the previous two days, I had noticed another odd thing about Yemen: the natives treated foreigners with total indifference. In Cairo, complete strangers would often demand, “Where you from? Is this wife? Have you children?” or peer into your shopping bag on the street and ask, “Food?” In Yemen, apart from a few merchants and peddlers, most people were either too proud or too stoned to even look a visiting Westerner in the eye.

  But elbowing through the crowd at the qat stall, clutching my half-crushed bouquet, I felt everything had changed. Men pointed at me, laughed, raised their thumbs and nodded approvingly. Several came up to pat me on the back and fondle my qat, trying out their pidgin English.

  “Qat nice, mister?”

  “Chew with me?”

  “Like you qat?”

  They also wanted to assist me with another purchase, which made me suspect my sudden popularity carried the whiff of easy money. The crowd parted to let an old man with a cane hobble toward me. He was my chosen escort. I had joined the fraternity of qat-chewers, and the boys of Arabia Felix wanted to initiate me with the best stuff Sanaa had to offer.

  The old man inspected my bush and didn’t seem impressed. “Good qat we find for America,” he said, leading me to a distant cranny of the qat market. He stopped at one stall and then another, inspecting the fullness and luster of the leaves. Finally, finding a shrub to his liking, he held up ten fingers. One hundred riyals. My limited budget was fast being exhausted to buy drugs.

  “We call it Yemen salad,” an onlooker said, sampling a sprig. “It gives you ideas all over the world.” I nodded, making a mental note of which bundle I’d put under my left arm and which under my right.

  * * *

  Over a hot lunch, I digested some more history on the substance I was soon to abuse. As with everything in Yemen, the information was contradictory. “It makes you feel a devil of a dog as long as the feeling lasts,” exulted a former English administrator in Yemen. One of his countrymen, a physician, disagreed. The habitual user, he wrote, resembles “a wild-looking, dull-witted automaton.” Another doctor termed qat as nothing more than a “mild stimulant,” while a third thought it an addictive amphetamine that caused high blood pressure and left the user feeling “lazy and sick.”

  Confused, I continued my research by quizzing the taxi driver, who noshed on a few sprigs as we drove to Mansour’s. I asked him if he thought qat affected health.

  “Oh yes!” he cried. “My uncle never used to chew, but then he got diabetes, so he started to chew every day. Now he is completely cured and works like ten men in the field.”

  And
was qat addictive?

  “Oh no,” he said. “I have chewed every day since the age of fifteen and I am still not an addict.”

  The only acknowledged drawback of qat was the price. In one of the world’s poorest countries, most males spent twenty dollars or more each day on the plant. And since alcohol was banned, they often spent as much again on bootleg scotch to knock themselves out after getting too wired on qat. “This is much money,” the cabbie conceded. “But I am never hungry after chewing qat. So I save much money on food.”

  The Yemen salad diet. Slimming, and economical, too. So what if it turns your teeth green?

  * * *

  Mansour lived in the sprawl of run-down suburbs encircling the old city of Sanaa. At his office, he’d worn a suit and tie, but now he greeted me in a long white robe and slippers. “Qat clothes,” he said. He led me into the small home’s finest chamber, a carpeted expanse with stained-glass windows, pillows lining the wall and a water pipe perched in one corner. “Qat room,” he said. Traditionally, Yemenis located their qat room or mafraj in the penthouses of Sanaa’s odd mud towers so chewers could enjoy a panoramic view. Women held their own chews in separate, less luxurious quarters.

  We took off our shoes and waited for the other guests. Mansour inspected my stash, as the men had done at the market, casting an expert eye on the firmness and gloss of the leaves. “This one from Taiz, not very special,” he said, holding up my first purchase. Then, examining the other, he announced: “Shibam region, maybe farther north. Very fine qat.” He guessed the exact price I’d paid for each.

  I told Mansour about the fraternal embrace I’d felt that morning at the market. He said that he had once gone through the same experience—in reverse. During three years of studying computer science in America, he decided qat was a waste of time and vowed to abstain from chewing on his return to Yemen. But back in Sanaa, he felt as though “someone had taken my passport away. There was nothing to do, no one to talk to.” In a country still centered on the home and village, qat-chewing was an enforced sociability—what afternoon tea is to some British, or a pub crawl to Australians. It was also the accepted way of settling disputes and sealing business contracts. Even Yemen’s president held regular chews with his ministers.

  Mansour, the son of a mystic Sufi healer, came back from America with another ill-fated notion. “I wanted to computerize my father’s business,” he said. It was a simple program. F2 for cough, F3 for fever, and so on. “That way he could just punch in a key and the right amulet would come up on the screen.”

  The idea went over about as well as Mansour’s attempt to kick qat. “The old man just laughed,” Mansour said. A year later, the father still dispensed herbs and prayers from memory, and his thirty-three-year-old son chewed qat every day after work.

  At three o’clock sharp, the other guests arrived. There was Mansour’s brother, who wore a robe and dagger; an aged uncle, who seemed to have just hiked in from the fields, with dusty feet, a dirty shift, and a dagger; and a young cousin who sat in a far corner and remained rather distant, inspecting the blade of his dagger. Each man dropped a bundle of qat at his feet and reached over to fondle mine, guessing its price. Despite these repeated inspections, I still couldn’t tell my two purchases apart.

  Mansour brought in bottles of Pepsi and several brass spittoons. He stirred the coals atop the water pipe and puffed it alight. Then, without so much as a prayer or a nod or a bon appétit, each man plucked the smallest leaves from his bunch and stuffed them into his mouth.

  Mimicking the others’ motions, I stripped a branch and shoved one leaf at a time between my cheek and gum. The plant tasted bitter, making me gag and spit whenever a little juice began to flow. The others, meanwhile, seemed to have no trouble chewing, chatting, smoking and sipping Pepsi all at once, at high speed. I felt as though I were competing in some odd oral decathlon.

  Mansour offered the occasional translation of the party chatter. It was workaday stuff: the weather, the price and quality of this year’s qat crop, the lopping-off of a thief’s hand in Sanaa’s central square a few days before. Then, after about half an hour, the conversation became much more animated and the men addressed me in a mix of English and Arabic.

  “America good,” declared Mansour’s brother, Abdul, apropos of nothing. A bulky and self-important man, he perched on a throne of pillows and sucked contentedly on the thirty-foot hose of the water pipe. His uncle, Mohammed, nodded and repeated the words in Arabic. “America kwayes.” Everyone laughed, as though he’d made a clever joke. Then they concentrated on their chewing. The old man had brought the smallest supply of qat, and the others made periodic contributions by tossing a sprig or two at his feet.

  Soon the pace of the babble quickened and Mansour’s English deteriorated. I had some catching up to do. I crammed a dozen leaves in my cheek, sucked hard through my teeth and reached for the spittoon. As soon as I spit, the small wad in my cheek felt dry and stale, like used-up bubble gum. I stoked myself with fresh leaves. Meanwhile, the others worked effortlessly on the same gob they’d begun chewing an hour before.

  I was so busy chewing and hacking and spitting that I didn’t notice at first that the carpet was massaging my toes. How long has this been going on? I stopped chewing for a moment, feeling a sudden urge to leap to my feet and stretch. But someone had glued my back to the cushions. When did that happen? I slumped back and closed my eyes. The tingling in my toes worked its way up my calves and along the back of my thighs and flooded into my spine. I noticed for the first time that Arab music was playing on a radio in the next room, mingling with the steady, soothing bubble of the water pipe. It sounded like a brook tumbling over smooth, small stones. Burble burble went the hubble bubble. Bubble hubble went the hurble burble . . . .

  I opened my eyes and felt at once tipsy and hyperalert, as if I’d knocked back two good Irish coffees, or eight good Irish coffees. I wanted to blurt out something special to each person in the room—all at once. Either that or go ask Mansour’s wife for a long and languorous massage.

  “I can see from the stupid smile on your face that you have discovered the wonders of qat.” It was Mansour, prone on the pillows to my right, with a rather stupid grin plastered on his face, too.

  “As a matter of—” I clamped my mouth shut as a torrent of green spittle gushed onto my shirt. Mansour handed me a spittoon. I reached for it and toppled a Pepsi bottle. The room erupted in laughter.

  “Actually, yes,” I resumed. “I feel like a million bucks and I want to know just exactly how you feel in your fingers and toes.” This gibberish was delivered in a rapid-fire burst, as though my tongue couldn’t keep pace with the thoughts racing through my head. Fortunately, Mansour felt rather expansive as well and we vaulted right over small talk and straight into politics, religion, qat, culture, dreams, qat, fears, fantasies, qat. It was all I could do to let Mansour finish a sentence before launching into a fresh thought of my own.

  “I agree with you completely but there’s a whole nother way to look at this issue,” I jabbered, convinced that I was about to deliver the most perceptive comment ever made on the topic. The topic, which was—what was it? Mansour smiled. We giggled and kept on chewing leaves, like a pair of dopey koalas.

  “I tell you a hidden truth about Yemen,” Mansour said conspiratorially. “Everything in the world, it comes first from here.” It was a typical flight of qat-fancy. Turkish steam baths were invented in Sanaa and stolen by the Ottomans, he said. The Santa Fe style of architecture originated with Sanaa’s mud-brick skyscrapers, not New Mexico’s adobe. (“My people travel a great deal,” Mansour hypothesized. “Maybe there was a Yemeni conquistador in America.”) Even the few thousand Jews of Yemen were “the real ones” because they had fled Jerusalem in biblical times.

  “William Shakespeare came from here, too,” Mansour said, reaching the punch line. “His real name was Sheik Zubayre, very common in Yemen. The English changed it to Shakespea
re.”

  I laughed and reached for the spittoon again. Mansour said his brother was an Islamic scholar, so I turned to Abdul and blurted out a question: how was it that Islam, which forbade alcohol, could allow something as pleasant as qat to flourish? It was blunt and in rather poor taste, but under the circumstances perfectly okay; the sort of exchange, between Arab and Westerner, Muslim and Jew, that would have been difficult outside the collegial cloud of qat.

  “Actually, Islam has two minds about qat,” Abdul said, puffing professorially at the water pipe. When qat first became popular in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, he explained, Arab mystics claimed it was a visionary substance that brought the chewer closer to Allah. Traditionalists countered that qat was an intoxicant, like alcohol, and should be declared forbidden or haram. Scholars in Mecca were called on to mediate the dispute, and they ruled that qat-chewing should be permitted but not encouraged; they termed the plant a “doubtful substance.”

  “Doubt is okay,” Abdul said, picking the last few leaves from the bottom of his cellophane package. “Qat is not like marijuana. Now that is a drug.”

  When the conversation was relayed to Mohammed, the old man mumbled in Arabic and Mansour translated. “He says qat is not like alcohol because if you chew alone, nothing happens.” Other Yemenis had told me they felt no withdrawal symptoms when they traveled abroad. It seemed that the nation’s addiction to qat wasn’t so much physical as social; each time people chewed, they became part of the tribe again, part of Yemen.

  Still, something strong was unsettling my body chemistry, and I asked Mansour why he thought the drug hadn’t ever caught on in the West.

  “I think Americans like drugs that hit fast and hard and then wear off, such as whiskey and cocaine,” he said. “They could never get used to something that makes you sit around all afternoon doing nothing.”