A few days before our departure, we were walking down Hamra Street when I saw a rusty metal button on the sidewalk. Without thinking, I did what my mother had showed me as a child: I bent down, picked it up, and slipped it into my left shoe for luck. Find a button, pick it up, all the day, you’ll have good luck.
“You can’t do that kind of thing when we get to Baghdad,” said Mohamad, frowning. He was not amused by my quaint midwestern superstitions. He warned me that in Iraq I’d have to stop picking up coins and buttons and interesting hunks of metal. And I couldn’t go wandering off to poke through piles of debris or break into abandoned buildings, other habits of mine that he failed to find endearing.
“Look, I’m not an idiot,” I told him, starting to get angry. “I’m not going to walk around picking up strange objects in Baghdad.”
“I’m not talking about picking up strange objects,” he snapped, his voice suddenly taut. “I’m talking about objects that look familiar.”
“Oh,” I said.
During the invasion, American and British forces had fired cluster bombs loaded with submunitions that looked like batteries or pieces of scrap metal. Aside from these mass-produced munitions, insurgents were already planting diabolical little devices disguised as harmless everyday detritus—a tin can, a tire. These were improvised explosive devices, first introduced to the Middle East by T. E. Lawrence and others during the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans, when they trained their Bedouin cadres in the art of disrupting rail traffic by placing explosives along the tracks. Iraq’s British-installed monarchy did not survive, but Lawrence of Arabia’s tactics endured; now Iraqi insurgents were using them against the British and the Americans and whatever civilians got in the way.
There was an entire world of things I had never thought of. While I had been watching Sesame Street, Mohamad had been listening to a battery-powered radio announce which streets had snipers. While I had been digging trilobites out of the creek behind our house, or building up my interesting-hunks-of-metal collection, he had been collecting artillery shells. I had visited this world for a few months in New York after September 11. Mohamad had grown up there. He knew its shifting, unwritten rules. Now I would have to learn them too.
The day approached when we would fly to Amman, the Jordanian capital, and drive across the border into Baghdad. The day before our flight, Umm Hassane made mjadara hamra. We were in the bedroom having one of our fights when she came to tell us it was ready.
Two child-sized white wooden beds dominated the room, side by side, divided by a nightstand. They were the beds Mohamad had slept in as a kid, and we had reverted to childhood ourselves: we each sat planted on a bed, arms folded, glaring into opposite corners of the room.
Umm Hassane stood in the doorway of the bedroom. She looked from one of us to the other, then back again. She narrowed her eyes in my direction and muttered a few gruff sentences in Arabic. Then she stalked off toward the kitchen, nursing her usual expression of strenuously withheld opinion.
Beautiful, I thought. I barely know her, and now she hates me. My ex-boyfriend’s mother had blamed me for his drinking. Now this one blames me for her son’s job. And I can’t even communicate with her to explain that it’s not my fault.
“What did she say?” I asked Mohamad. I looked toward his general direction from the corner of my eye, but without turning toward him, to show that I was still mad.
He sighed. He hates translating. He did it slowly, grudgingly; I could tell by the distance of his voice that he wasn’t looking at me either.
“She said, ‘What is he doing this time? Do you want me to beat him up for you?’”
Without moving my body, so he wouldn’t think it was a truce, I inched my head around to the side. He was looking at me sidewise the same way. Our eyes met. We burst out laughing.
“We shouldn’t fight,” he said.
“Especially not over stupid things,” I said.
We stood up and walked down the hall, into the kitchen, where Umm Hassane was waiting to serve us mjadara.
PART II
Honeymoon in Baghdad
Of all the countries that we know there is none which is so fruitful in grain. It makes no pretension indeed of growing the fig, the olive, the vine, or any other tree of the kind; but in grain it is so fruitful as to yield commonly two-hundred-fold. . . . As for the millet and the sesame, I shall not say to what height they grow, though within my own knowledge; for I am not ignorant that what I have already written concerning the fruitfulness of Babylonia must seem incredible to those who have never visited the country.
—Herodotus, Histories, Book One
Chapter 5
The Benefits of Civilization
IN OCTOBER 1929, a thirty-six-year-old Englishwoman named Freya Stark set out for Baghdad from the port of Beirut. She was disappointed to find the Iraqi desert crowded with cars, trucks, and six-wheeled tour buses. Signs in English implored picnickers not to litter the desert with bags. At Rutba Wells, in the heart of Anbar Province, she found to her distress that the British military garrison served “salmon mayonnaise and other refinements,” including custard and jelly. “Even now,” she sighed, in a book she wrote to preserve the memory of the old Iraq before it disappeared, “the crossing of the desert is an everyday affair.”
She was too late. Iraq was Westernizing rapidly. The British had installed a constitutional monarchy in 1921 (the same year, not coincidentally, that they had backed a coup in neighboring Iran). They had imported enough colonial officials from India to establish a mini-Raj, complete with English memsahibs who sipped tea, nibbled crumpets, and lamented The Servant Problem. In 1927, they had discovered oil in Kirkuk. Soon the Simplon-Orient-Express and Taurus-Express railways threatened to link London and Baghdad in a journey of just eight days.
For Stark, who had devoured The One Thousand and One Nights as a child, this was a catastrophe. In a few years, she predicted, the old Iraq would be gone—drowned in a tide of custard and crumpets and other unwelcome “benefits of civilization.”
And yet, through her cynicism, she sensed the weight of some great power in that ride across the desert. So she added a hedge-betting line, one that time and history have polished up to a high reflective gloss: “Whether these Western floods, to which all her sluices are open, come to the East for baptism or drowning,” she concluded, almost as an afterthought, “is hard to say.”
Seventy-four years later, in the dark hours after midnight, Mohamad and I set out across the same desert road. We left Amman early to avoid the dangers of the road: militants and robbers—Iraqis called them Ali Babas—and the overwhelming heat.
Our driver was a lanky middle-aged man from Ramadi. He had a dark angelic face, weathered by years of desert driving, and a voice so soft we had to strain to hear him. He looked away shyly whenever addressing me and even when talking about me to Mohamad. His belt buckle announced its bootleg pedigree in massive, misspelled silver letters: Calven Klein. The supersized buckle pinned his red polyester shirt into stiff blue jeans and made him resemble an Iraqi cowboy. Silently, I christened him The Ramadi Kid.
His car was a “Jimse,” the Kid assured us with soft-spoken pride as we loaded bags and boxes into the back. We would be safe inside it; we were his guests, under his protection. He invited us to lunch with his family, in Ramadi, on our way into Baghdad.
I was excited: already invited to lunch, and we weren’t even in Iraq yet.
“We’ll see,” said Mohamad, in a tone that said, unmistakably: no. It was a generous offer, the famous desert hospitality in action, and I was eager to try Iraqi food. But Ramadi was the buckle in Anbar’s banditry belt. Bringing a carful of foreigners to lunch was a good way to attract the Ali Babas.
After 1990, when the United Nations Security Council had imposed sanctions, few goods could enter or leave Iraq legally without United Nations approval. Many Iraqis relied on U.N. food rations—rice, flour, cooking oil, sugar, and other basics (including tea)—for survival. After
the 2003 invasion, U.S. occupation authorities opened the borders and abolished import duties, and suddenly the benefits of civilization were flooding into Iraq once again: Food, stereos, satellite dishes. Opels, Renaults, Mercedes. Right-hand drives, left-hand drives, it didn’t matter. Car-starved Iraqis christened the black Mercedes-Benzes “Lailas,” after the Egyptian actress Laila Elwi. The huge white Toyota Land Rovers were “Monicas,” after the former White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Towering tractor-trailers roared and surged past us as they made their way toward Iraq, loaded with cars, cattle, television sets, refrigerators.
The postwar traffic in goods flowed out of Iraq too. Upon his return from Iraq, an American scholar got caught at John F. Kennedy International Airport with three four-thousand-year-old cylindrical seals from the Iraqi National Museum. The sculpted limestone head of King Sanatruq I of Hatra, from the second century B.C., ended up gracing the mantelpiece of a Lebanese interior decorator. Three Lebanese nationals working for Iraq’s American-appointed Interior Ministry were detained at the Beirut airport for trying to bring almost $20 million worth of Iraqi dinars into the money-laundering mecca of Lebanon. An entire country was for sale, everyone either buying or selling, our little Jimse a tiny speck bobbing on a river of loot that rushed between East and West.
All this wealth attracted the Ali Babas. There were no banks functioning in Iraq—no traveler’s checks, no wire transfers, no cash machines. Foreigners came bearing currency, computers, satellite phones. Bandits and smugglers posted lookouts on the highways and in the rest stops. The grocer who sold you gas or served you tea might also be selling information on the side. A short while later, the Ali Babas would pull up behind you, outracing your bulky Jimse in swift, sleek BMWs. One car ahead, one car behind, and you were trapped: the Kid kept a hand grenade in his glove compartment for just this contingency. Surely Freya Stark, with her longing for the unexpected, would have approved.
After Amman, the landscape flattened, stretched itself out, and gradually slunk off into the night. I lay down, at Mohamad’s suggestion. “It’s safer if nobody sees you,” he said. I didn’t argue. I hadn’t been able to sleep for days.
The Kid had fitted out his Jimse with dark curtains, like a Bedouin caravan, so his customers could travel invisibly. I drew the curtains and lay down with my head on my backpack. The two of them stayed up and talked softly in Arabic by the firefly glow of the dashboard light. “Road,” I heard dimly. “Baghdad.” And “Jimse,” which rhymed with limps.
Most Arabic words are constructed from a root, usually three consonants, called a jazr. Vowels and other consonants weave in and out among the root letters, changing the form, pronunciation, and the meaning: with other letters, the root KTB becomes book, books, write, wrote, writer, library, bookstore. Jimse, I realized as I was drifting off to sleep, was an Arabized version of an American jazr: GMC.
I woke periodically and pulled back the curtains to look out into the darkness. I could see sand, sky, stars. No telephone poles or mile signs or truck stops. Occasional murmurs of orange light in the distance signaled that there were people out there guarding sheep or fixing cars or baking bread.
A truck flickered up ahead. It was pulled over by the side of the road, its headlights illuminating the driver prostrate in the sand on a small prayer carpet. He prayed toward the east, the direction in which we were driving; kneeling in the flood of light, a tiny, private flame in the cavernous dark, he looked like the only other human in the world.
I woke again as the Jimse pulled into a patch of dusty road off the side of the highway. It was a tiny store, not much more than a shack in the desert. We stumbled in half asleep, going in seconds from the velvety black-on-black of the road to a rainbow of packaging: Turkish candy bars with iridescent lavender wrappers. Posters advertising Gauloises cigarettes with a streak of French blue. Oily pink scented tissues that reeked of gasoline and roses.
We stood squinting at the excess, the highway still buzzing inside us. A thin, dark-faced boy rushed up to us, his windbreaker zipped up against the predawn desert cold. With an urgent expression, he thrust two little plastic cups at us. “Drink,” he said.
What makes us civilized? Writers and scholars from the eighteenth-century biographer James Boswell to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss have suggested that cooking makes us human. But there is a more basic distinction between us and the millions of other species on this planet: We are the only creatures who share food with strangers, people not from our family or tribe, points out Cambridge University archaeologist Martin Jones in Feast: Why Humans Share Food.
If we can claim that civilization began anywhere, a good candidate might be Jerf el-Ahmar, a tiny village along the Euphrates about four hundred miles and eleven thousand years away from the road Mohamad and I were driving down. Jerf el-Ahmar and a handful of other sites mark a turning point in human history that the historian and archaeologist Gordon Childe christened the Neolithic Revolution. Anthropologists are still arguing about where and when it began—somewhere between eight and ten thousand years before Christ in the fertile crescent, but at different times in different places—and whether it was a sudden upheaval or a long slow evolution. But we do know that before that point, people lived nomadically, following herds of gazelles and fields of wild edible grasses whose location shifted with changes in season and climate.
And then (again, scholars still argue over why) people began to breed the wild wheat and barley they gathered for food. They settled down and began to live in one place. At Jerf el-Ahmar, archaeologists found some of the earliest evidence of permanent human habitation: grindstones, a storage pit, and, in a room that Jones points out may be the world’s “oldest known ‘kitchen,’” seeds of barley, mustard, and wheat. The barley had been cracked exactly like the bulgur we use in tabbouleh and mjadara to this day, and most likely for the same reason—to make it last longer in storage.
But the villagers of Jerf el-Ahmar also had fragments of obsidian from Anatolia in what is now modern-day Turkey, many days’ travel away by foot. The earliest permanent habitation, then, contained some of the earliest evidence of travel. And therein lies one of humanity’s most profound paradoxes: that we cannot travel, in the sense of leaving home and coming back, until we have a home to leave. Enter Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, farmer and rancher—those who stay, and those who roam.
Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century Andalusian scholar, divided society into two categories, nomadic and sedentary. Most civilizations, he believed, begin like Bedouins—strong, proud warriors who survive on little beyond their basic needs. It is their nature to plunder. “Their sustenance,” he wrote, “lies wherever the shadow of their lances falls.”
Ibn Khaldun admired the Bedouin asabiyah, solidarity or cohesion, an attitude summed up by an old proverb still common in Iraq: “Me and my brother against our cousin; me and my cousin against the outsider.” Travelers not under a tribe’s protection were outsiders, and therefore rightful prey.
But inevitably, according to Ibn Khaldun, nomadic people succumb to the temptations of sedentary life. They settle down and start producing culture—law, art, architecture, cuisine. They erect great buildings, write books, and soon grow lazy and weak from eating too much rich food, especially food made with animal fats (an evil that Ibn Khaldun warns against on several occasions). They lose their asabiyah. A new crop of nomads comes, hardened by desert life and fat-free food, and destroys the decadent urban settlements. They tear down great buildings and use the stones to build campfires for cooking their simple nomadic food. They bring civilization back to its beginnings, and the cycle begins all over again.
But that is only one part of the story.
Crossing the desert is always a gamble. Will the people you meet kill you and rob your caravan? Or will they slaughter a camel or sheep, a symbolic sacrifice, and feed you with it instead? The outcome depends on a language (and I am not talking just about Arabic) that most of us do not fully understand. We cannot go on jo
urneys unless we have a place to stop, food to eat and water to drink, somewhere to sleep in safety and people to give us these things.
And so the desert code of hospitality was born. Hospitality evolved as a way to ensure survival, not just of individuals but of a social network—a fragile web that supports human life in the vastness of the desert. This ideal of hospitality is beautifully articulated in the Old Testament story of Lot, which teaches us to protect guests because they might be angels in disguise. (It also teaches us to value the lives of male strangers more than those of our own daughters, a less beautiful ideal.)
The Arabic language retains in its DNA a history of water and survival in the desert. Before Islam, the word shariah, the path to God, meant the path to a watering hole. The word for spring, ain, is the same as the word for eye—both are essential; both produce water. Arabic folklore and literature abounds with stories of Bedouins who die nobly giving their share of water to another. To this day it is a desert tradition to greet outsiders with a liquid: a glass of water in the heat, a cup of tea against the frigid desert night.
I thanked the boy sleepily and drank the tea. It was sugary hot and tannic. Light and heat shot through my limbs, calming the highway buzz and anchoring me in place, at least for a moment.
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