Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  On the campus at Exeter there was a book fair at which Iraqi students proudly leafed through glossy brochures supplied by their embassy and their compatriots in the Iraqi Cultural Centre in London’s Tottenham Court Road. The brochures showed Iraqi tanks charging through sand berms into Iranian territory down in the marshes just north of Kuwait. Crowds of cheering, gun-clenching Iraqi soldiers rode on the tanks, flashing victory signs, acting like it would all be over within weeks. ‘You will see,’ said one moustachioed student to me, ‘it will be a great victory.’ But Saddam had underestimated the Iranians and their capacity to throw wave after wave of poorly equipped but fanatical soldiers at the front. The ayatollahs cultivated the idea of the baseej, the volunteer martyr. The volunteers – who were often just boys – would tie scarves bearing holy verses round their foreheads then march knowingly into minefields, clearing the way for the more experienced – and less expendable – troops then to engage the Iraqis. The suicidal baseej were given little plastic keys to hang around their necks, symbolizing the keys to the gates of Paradise. It is ironic that twenty-five years later Iraq has again become the battleground for suicidal volunteers to throw themselves at an enemy, in this case the US-led Coalition and its Iraqi allies.

  For eight years, from 1980 to 1988, Saddam’s generals fought the Iranians with clouds of poison gas, power cables immersed into the marshes to electrocute the wading Persian infantry, air raids on oil terminals far down the Gulf, and eventually Scud missiles aimed at the capital Tehran. The Iraqis even had the advantage of US intelligence on their side, with Washington feeding them a steady stream of satellite images of Iranian positions. Yet despite all this Iraq’s early gains soon petered out and the war descended into one of attrition, with each side gaining a few hundred metres of useless, shell-blasted marshland, then losing it the next month. It was the First World War all over again, it was to cost the lives of nearly a million men, and it was to end in a stalemate.

  At Exeter University, I was itching to start the year abroad in Cairo and somehow, illogically, I was hoping the Iran–Iraq War might prompt our tutors to send us to Egypt sooner than planned. But they had no intention of letting us off the two initial years of hard slog in the classroom, getting to grips with glottal stops, throat-rasping consonants and the various other joys of Arabic grammar. Some people claim that Arabic is one of the hardest languages to learn, but I think this is an exaggeration. We learned the alphabet in a week – even the word itself comes from Arabic, with alif, ba, ta being the first three letters of the Arabic alphabet. True, it is written from right to left and each letter changes its shape according to whether it’s at the beginning, middle or end of a word. True, there are a handful of sounds quite alien to the Western palate, like the kh as in Khartoum, and yes, it’s most unhelpful that Arabic is usually written and printed without the inclusion of vowels, leaving you to guess where they go. But hey, there are only twenty-eight letters to cope with, not thousands as in Japanese. Arabic is not tonal, like Thai or other Oriental languages; it is pronounced as it is written. Plus it does follow a certain logic. Most Arabic words are based on a ‘root’ of three consonants. For example, anything with the letters k, t, b in it is going to be connected with writing. So kitaab is a book, maktaba is a library, kaatib is a writer, and so on.

  Still, this was always going to be a rather unusual four-year degree course, compared with, say, English Literature or Chemical Engineering. For a start, there were only fifteen of us. I looked round the tiny lecture room, wondering what had made my fellow undergraduates take on this language. One was obvious: Neil Hawkins lived in Damascus, where his father was the UN Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA) rep, so he already had a head start on the rest of us. Neil cared passionately about the Palestinians and years later went on to work on the Oslo Peace Accords, for the UN, then eventually as an adviser to the Australian government. There was Andrew Cunningham, a tall, lanky student with a penchant for Levantine dancing and embroidered waistcoats picked up on his gap year travelling through Iran. Andrew later did the exact opposite of what I did: he started out as a journalist then moved across to the financial world, assessing Middle Eastern banks for credit agencies. Then there was Peppy, an attractive girl from Oxford who confessed on day one that she had no career ambitions beyond graduating, yet lived in perpetual terror of the exams. She and I would silently pass each other notes of gossip scribbled in our recently learned Arabic; I think it was some months before either of us understood the other’s messages. There was Natalie, who decided the course was not for her and left almost immediately. Sharon too dropped out, but not until the third year when she ran off with an Irish oilman in Cairo and was last heard of living happily in Beirut. There was Rosemary, a good-time party girl who eventually followed up her good degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies by joining Club 18–30, a sequitur I could never quite fathom out. Then there were Janet, Jane and Louise, three girls who rarely spoke but sat demurely on a couch at the back of the room taking copious notes; one of our tutors nicknamed them ‘Ahl Al-Kanaba’, ‘The Couch People’, and during class discussions he would address questions to all three collectively: ‘Do the Couch People have a view on this one, perhaps?’ But my favourite, despite my initial misgivings, was a student called Peregrine Muncaster. He looked unpromising: nerdy anorak, glasses, pale freckly face devoid of all expression. Yet he turned out to have a brilliant sense of humour and a totally irreverent attitude to homework, which he got away with by fooling the lecturers with his outwardly serious demeanour. We were to become lifelong friends and explore several countries together. There was one other undergraduate I noticed that first term. Tony Fleming was a mature student in the year above us; he had served in the SAS in the Dhofar campaign in Oman, where he had been shot in the back by Marxist insurgents and paralysed. He was a familiar sight in the Arabic department, furiously pushing himself along corridors in his wheelchair and resolutely refusing to have doors held open for him. What must it be like, I remember thinking, to get shot and have to spend the rest of your life in a wheelchair?

  Now that I was enrolled I found it hard to understand why neither the coursework nor the lecturers seemed to have much connection with the realities of the modern Middle East. Like many true academics, theirs was a world of intricate grammar, of historical texts, of early pre-Islamic poetry. I yearned to learn how to speak the language of the street or to analyse the latest speech by an Arab leader, but I was told rather haughtily that if that was what I wanted then I should attend a polytechnic, not a university. To be fair, they did give us a superb grounding in the rich treasure trove that is Arabic literature. We painstakingly translated qasida, sad and moving verses by the pre-Islamic Arabian poet Imru’l Qais. He would describe his odyssey of unrequited love across the sands of the Nejd desert in what is now Saudi Arabia, searching always for his beloved whom he kept missing by just a few hours. The poet would come across an abandoned camp fire in the dunes where she and her tribe had spent the previous night and he would pick over the ashes, thinking of her, gazing at the dimples in the sand where she may have lain her perfect head.

  We were taught how Arabic novel-writing had evolved over the last century from the historical to the romantic to the realistic. We translated and read Midaq Alley by the Nobel prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz, a beguiling story of how a girl from the backstreets of Cairo in the 1940s got sucked into a life of sleaze in wartime bars with off-duty British soldiers. We read literature from the golden age of the Islamic caliphates, when art, science, architecture and writing flourished under the patronage of caliphs in Baghdad and Cairo.

  Above all, we studied the Muslim holy book, the Koran, which was ‘revealed’ to the Prophet Muhammad, who was illiterate. We were taught about the life of the Prophet and his Ansar – his companions – the birth of Islam, its early struggle to convert people in a largely godless society dominated by idol-worshippers and greedy merchants, and then the incredible, explosive speed with which Islam’s armies conquered all
before them. Within little more than a century of the Prophet’s death in AD 632 the Muslim armies had plunged deep into Europe, reaching Poitiers in France, while to the East they spread right across Arabia, into Persia and down into India. It is easy to overlook it now but Spain was under Muslim rule for more than seven centuries, a period from which the Moorish palace of the Alhambra in Granada is just one example. Islam, we learned, was not just a religion, but a way of life, a system of order and stability that, although sometimes introduced at sword-point, often replaced anarchy and barbarism.

  But although we were unknowingly being given the keys to the world of Arab and Islamic culture, it was still a relatively dry, academic course and I needed something a little more down-to-earth to keep me motivated towards getting my degree. In the first spring holiday I bought a bucket-shop ticket to Tunis, figuring this was the nearest and cheapest place for me to try out my new-found Arabic. Once again, I opted to travel alone, deciding that this would make me more receptive to people around me. Landing at Tunis-Carthage airport I quickly discovered that everyone spoke French and they expected me to as well. I decided that the further I travelled away from the Mediterranean boulevards and whitewashed villas of the capital the more I would have to use Arabic. So I hopped on a bus and headed south to the troglodyte village of Matmata, a place so other-worldly in appearance that it was chosen as one of the sets for the Hollywood blockbuster Star Wars.

  At first glance, the landscape was unremarkable, just a series of low arid hills and the odd clump of date palms. Then I spotted the sunken, underground houses for which Matmata is famous. With no warning at all the ground would stop abruptly at your feet, giving way to a great carved-out hollow, several storeys deep. Arranged around this open-air ‘well’ were a number of caves set into the earth and connected by steps, ladders or sometimes even just a long rope with knots in it. In the caves that were still inhabited, Berber women strung out washing and sang to each other while their husbands sat and smoked in the spring sunshine. At least two of these cave-houses had been made into subterranean hotels and I checked into one of them. My room was on the first floor, if you were to work upwards from the bottom of the central pit, or minus three if you were to measure it downwards from ground level. The dry-mud floor was swept clean and on my bed was a woven Berber rug to keep out the cold of the desert night. That evening there was a folklore show to entertain a coachload of German tourists bussed in from the nearby port of Gabes. The Tunisians banged drums, blew on strange pipes and played bagpipes, to the delight of the Germans. When it was all over and I could hear the coach driver revving his engines up above, I felt immensely smug retiring to my cave bedroom just a few yards away.

  I spent the next day getting to know the local Tunisians, who struck me as kind, decent people. Dressed in cool, loose-fitting robes, they invariably wore the chech, a red felt skullcap with a tiny tassel on the top. They quickly corrected me on a major faux pas I had been making. The standard Tunisian greeting is ‘laa bas’, meaning ‘no harm’ or ‘no evil’. Unfortunately I had been saying ‘libas’, which I was told meant ‘garments’ or ‘underwear’. Touring a country saying ‘pants’ to everyone you meet is probably not the best way to ingratiate yourself; it is a wonder nobody knocked me into the gutter.

  When I had set off from Gatwick for Tunis I did not have a firm itinerary in mind, just two weeks in which to explore and pick up as much Arabic as I could. But the further south I travelled the more I felt lured by the mystique of the Sahara. Just over the border in Algeria lay the massive sand dunes of the Grand Erg Oriental and according to my Michelin map there was a road that could take me there. In the far southwest corner of Tunisia I hitched a lift with a French family across the vast salt lake known as the Chott El Djerid. The blinding white crusts of salt stretched out to the horizon, sculpted by the wind to form frozen waves. It seemed there was no life there at all: nothing stirred, there were no tufts of grass, no lonely sparrow. It was an awesome place and not one you would ever want to break down in.

  Our crossing into Algeria did not go well. The French family had brought their own car over from Marseilles and it had French number plates. Not a problem in Tunisia, but apparently an invitation to trouble on the other side of the border. At the very first Algerian village we drove through the children started throwing stones at the car, not just idly but with real determination. After gentle, peaceful Tunisia this came as a shock, but I reminded myself that Algeria had gone through a bitter war of independence from France that even decades later had obviously left bad blood between them in some quarters.

  The French family dropped me off at the market town of El Oued. Despite the trading that was going on in the market square it looked significantly poorer than Tunisia. Men swathed in khaki turbans rode dilapidated donkey carts, and the inevitable mangy camel sat beneath a tattered banner that read in Arabic: ‘Min Ash-sha’ab ila Ash-sha’ab’, ‘From the People to the People’. One look at El Oued told me there was not very much going to the people here.

  I managed to hitch a lift to the next town, Touggourt, with another Frenchman, an aid worker, this time in a van with Algerian number plates, and we headed deeper into the sea of white Saharan dunes. This was the formidable desert known as the Grand Erg, which must have one of the lowest population densities on earth. Yet we stopped by the road to visit Ali, a shepherd he knew, right in the middle of nowhere. In the blazing noon heat the shepherd served us tea in his tiny hut, then brought out a sprig of the best dates I have ever tasted. They were called deglat nour, ‘fingers of light’, and they were so tender and sweet they literally melted in the mouth. The shepherd then entertained us by showing us how to find a scorpion from its imprints on the sand. It took him a minute or two to find the tracks, then his weatherbeaten hands began to move quickly over the ground. Suddenly he shouted ‘Shouf! Shouf!’, ‘Look! Look!’, and there sure enough was a vicious-looking yellow scorpion sprinting over the sand. Ali’s hand moved like a snake and he grabbed it, opening his fist just enough for us to see it squirming inside, its ugly, beady eyes looking at us from the top of its flat head. Scorpions were clearly a part of the scenery around here: just over the border in Tunisia a shop had been selling postcards of the Zookeeper of Tozeur, a man who had become immune to the venom of scorpions and who proudly displayed about eight of them clinging to his open palm.

  The Frenchman dropped me at a huge permanent tent that served as a travellers’ resthouse on the outskirts of Touggourt. Here I was in luck. I found a group of French lycée students about the same age as me who were touring Algeria, and they immediately adopted me. At dusk we sat up on the crest of a huge dune, gazing out at the expanse of the Sahara, a soft warm breeze rippling across the sand and the aroma of grilled lamb drifting up from the guesthouse. That night I tasted my first couscous, the cracked wheat that is the staple diet in North Africa, but I passed a sleepless night. The French students had all been allocated their own sleeping quarters but I was given a patch of sand just beside the tent flap. I spread out my sleeping bag, wriggled into it and thought how great it was to be out here in the Sahara. Just then I became aware of a group of Algerians I had not seen before gathering round my sleeping bag. One of them whispered, ‘Is he asleep yet?’ Convinced they were out to rob me, or worse, I decided the only thing for it was to pretend I was having a violent nightmare. I put on quite a performance, groaning loudly, thrashing my arms and twisting my head this way and that. It did the trick as they recoiled in alarm, but after that I kept my guard up until the sun’s first rays peeped over the dunes and I fell asleep until breakfast.

  Travelling with the French students ensured I attracted a lot less attention than if I had been on my own. Osman, the teacher in charge of the group, was himself Algerian, an imposing man built like a bear but with the easy smile of a football star. He did all the bargaining on behalf of the students and kept any leering local youths at bay. The French girls did not seem to have made any compromises to their dress code on account of
being in a Muslim country, and their bare arms and legs drew a combination of disapproving and wistful looks. It was as if the local Algerians could not make up their minds whether they wanted to scold them or sleep with them.

  But mostly our experiences of eastern Algeria were peaceful, not confrontational. We spent a day picnicking at an oasis which we reached in a convoy of charrettes – donkey carts. In the dappled shade of a dozen date palms we lazed on rocks, splashed in the cool clear water and ate fresh oranges. In a dusty marketplace in the town of Ouargla, a name which sounded to me like someone being strangled, we shopped for desert roses, curious petalled crystalline formations that occur in the Sahara, and I spent hours sketching the local mosques. The architecture here had a distinctly African element, with sticks poking out from mud-walled minarets where doves would alight in flocks. At one point I squatted down to get comfortable only to hear a loud ripping sound. My trousers had torn at the seam all up the back. Escorted by two of the French girls who had to ‘cover me’, I made a hasty dash for a tailor’s shop where I was kitted out with a pair of fantastically baggy khaki pantaloons. I have to say they were not my first choice, but they were all he had so I put them on, quickly discovering that the crotch was somewhere down between my knees and my ankles. As soon as I set foot outside there were roars of laughter; apparently nobody had been wearing these sort of trousers since the sixties. Still, it was an excellent way of diffusing tensions: I looked so ridiculous that people forgot to leer at the French girls.