by Zora O'Neill
He waved. “Good mor-ning!” he said with a heavy Arabic accent. “Where you from?”
“Good morning,” I said. “From New York. The city.” I tried to look stern and project an aura of urban toughness, but I had to unzip my vest to expose my mouth, and the zipper stuck a bit. While I was fussing, he cut the engine.
“America! I love America! Very good country,” he said. “I want to know Americans, but . . .” He trailed off, looking a little frustrated.
I gaped. He seemed to be having trouble speaking English! Could this be my chance to talk to a real, live Emirati in Arabic? I felt for my car keys in my pocket and slipped my fingers through them, brass-knuckle style, just in case. “Sabah al-kheir,” I said, walking toward his car. “Na’am, ana amreekaniya. Winta min hina?”
His reaction to my basic morning greetings and paltry question—was he from these parts?—brought the kind of reaction I had been missing so far in the Emirates. The way a smile burst across his face, I would have thought I was in Egypt.
“I’m from right around here,” he answered in Arabic. That settled it. I walked straight up and leaned on his window frame.
He had always wanted to meet more Americans, he went on, and this was a good sign, seeing me here this morning. In fact, he had been wanting to talk to someone. He’d been awake all night, driving around on this mountain and thinking.
“You look like a nice person,” he said, taking off his mirror shades. “Can I talk to you from my heart?” He pronounced this last word galbi, instead of qalbi—just as I’d read about Khaleeji accents. He was maybe a decade younger than me, with tan skin and a neatly groomed beard. His hair was silky black and curled around the collar of his white kandoura, miraculously unwrinkled for someone who had spent the night in his car.
“Sure,” I told him, still in Arabic. “What’s the problem?” I let my hand relax around the keys in my pocket. This was not the first time in my life a complete stranger had wanted to unburden himself to me. But this was the first time it was happening in Arabic.
He had been married for five years. She was a wonderful woman, very beautiful, and they loved each other. I was listening intently, one ear trained on his story and another on his accent.
“. . . but there was no baby. I understood this would be our situation,” he said with a sigh. This brought me back to full attention. No baby—this was a substantial tragedy. In my travels in the Arab world, people had often interrogated me on the subject of children, right after asking my name and where I was from. The Arab world didn’t leave much room for those who failed to procreate, and this could doom a marriage.
The man in the car carried on, saying that he and his wife had decided to divorce; they were no longer happy together. “And then two months ago,” he said, “matet.”
Again with the matet! Why did these stories end with “she died”? He was silent, glaring out his windshield, staring intently at the blinking lights by the teashop at the far end of the parking lot. After a moment, his jaw relaxed and he turned to me, his eyes shining. “I feel I was responsible,” he said quietly.
“Of course you’re not responsible!” I rushed to console him. “But I understand the reason why you feel like this. I very sorry. Your story, it a very sad story.” My Arabic was limited, but what else would I have said in English? The social expectations for children here were high, certainly, and his story, in which two people grew apart, in which a man on the verge of divorce became a widower, could have happened anywhere.
“Now my family wants me to marry again,” he said. “But all the women here are bad. Silly. All they do is talk on their mobiles and giggle.”
“Right. They not serious,” I said. “You need a woman who can understand your situation, a woman who will be serious.”
“Exactly. Thank you for listening to me. I feel better.” He sighed again. The sun was peeking up over the mountaintop next to us.
“Americans are nice people,” he said after a pause. “I know this because of how you treat animals. Arabs—they’re not nice to animals. If they’re hurt, they just throw them away. But I saw an American TV show about how you operate on dogs and cats that have been in accidents. Once they sewed up a cat’s whole leg!”
We contemplated human compassion in silence for a moment. The asphalt was warming under my feet.
He leaned toward me. “I would love to keep talking to you. Can we go somewhere and niswalif?”
This question made me giddy—not for the invitation, but because he had used the one distinctly Khaleeji word I knew: soolaf, to tell stories or chat.
I answered just so I could use the word. “Sure, let us go someplace and niswalif. Where is good? Is there a café open early?” My brain was racing ahead: we’d sit and sip coffee, and he’d tell more stories, and I’d drink in the new words, and I’d write some down, and . . .
“I don’t think anything is open,” he said. “Also, I don’t think it is good for us to sit together at a café. Are you staying in a hotel?”
“Yes, the Hilton,” I answered, too quickly. He wasn’t taking the conversation where I thought he was, surely? “Um, there is a coffee shop in the lobby,” I suggested. “We can sit there and niswalif.”
“Oh, but someone might see. Your room is more relaxing.”
He didn’t seem lecherous. And it made sense that he would prefer to talk about his private life in private, and I would find it more relaxing to speak my bad Arabic without anyone eavesdropping. The Hilton coffee shop was always packed with kandoura-clad businessmen.
“I cannot do that,” I said, feeling for the keys in my pocket. “You have to understand—I am married. My husband will be very upset if you come to my room.” Peter wouldn’t, in fact, care one bit. He trusted me.
“Please understand, you are like a sister to me!” he said, looking shocked. Maybe too shocked, fake shocked.
“Certainly,” I replied, serious and formal. “But you must understand. This is a rule I have, in every place I travel. I absolutely cannot invite you to my hotel room. I mean no offense to you.”
“But you are like a sister to me! I am your brother!” With his protests, his polite formulas, a false note crept into his voice. Or was it that I could no longer distinguish him from other, sleazier men who had used this “like a sister” line on me?
We went back and forth about six times—I was growing quite fluent on this point. Finally I had an idea. “Look, my hotel room has a patio in front of it. We can sit on the patio. It is private. But it is not inside my room. Will that be good?” On the way in, I would stop at the reception desk and order coffee to be delivered outside, to let them know what was going on. We would walk to the patio from the garden, without passing through my room.
“Are there trees around it?”
“Some palm trees. Other people can see if they look, but they are only other guests of the hotel.” This was veering toward bargaining. It was too early for bargaining.
“OK,” he said. “This will be very nice. Let’s go and niswalif. We will meet in the parking lot at the Hilton.” He seemed natural again, and somewhat cheered.
“By the way, my name is Zora,” I said to him. “What’s yours?”
“Saeed,” he said, sticking his hand out the window. Saeed means happy.
All the way down the mountain, I rehearsed nice things to say to him in Arabic. What qualities he should look for in a woman. General advice for moving on: “Keep busy. Practice your English. Work hard.” Did he have a job? He had said he owned land. Oh! Might he consider himself one of those mythical Bedouin? I could ask him what this word meant to him. I drove faster, eager for our conversation.
But I took the wrong turn off a roundabout and had to stop to check the GPS on my phone. By the time I arrived at the Hilton, nearly forty-five minutes had passed. None of the dozens of white SUVs in the parking lo
t was Saeed’s.
I waited by the hotel’s double front doors for another quarter of an hour. The wind had picked up. I squinted against the swirling grit and held my hair back with one hand. A woman in a black niqab sailed, unruffled, from her car to the lobby—practical fashion indeed. Saeed never appeared.
When I called Peter the next day and told him the story, he immediately said, “Of course it was all just one long pickup line.”
Wait—maybe I wasn’t telling the story right. But I had to admit that, the night before, while writing down what I remembered of my conversation with Saeed, I had started to doubt the man’s sincerity. In my excitement to speak Arabic, perhaps I had overlooked some inconsistencies—that unwrinkled kandoura, for one thing.
I emailed a fellow travel writer who knew the Emirates well, requesting his analysis. He replied, “Al-Ain is notorious for sex tourism, you know.” That explained the guy in the shoe store who offered to spritz me with Facebook perfume. It didn’t really explain Saeed, however. What kind of a pickup line was it to tell someone, in Arabic, that your ex-wife died? If it had been pure seduction, he had managed to devise the perfect approach for me, a slightly road-weary, overly empathetic language student. And if that was the case, I was impressed.
It didn’t matter what his true intentions were, I decided. It had made me happy just to talk to him.
What He Did Not Know
My accidental conversation with unhappy Saeed had been pleasant, but it also underscored a flaw in my idea of a desert sojourn. This country was simply too big and empty to drive around without a plan, in search of random educational encounters in mountaintop parking lots or anywhere else. In the face of this uncertainty, I returned to what I knew best: the library.
The library in question was a two-hour drive from Al-Ain, in the city of Abu Dhabi, at the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, a marvel of modern architecture that featured both the world’s largest chandelier and the world’s largest hand-woven carpet. Approaching the building, I longed for the empty desert roads. Abu Dhabi was a nerve-racking tangle of freeways, then an addling series of multilaned, multispoked traffic circles. Through it all, I kept my eye on the building’s two minarets, which stuck up above the skyline like beacons.
The library was in the north minaret, and I had imagined the slim tower with a spiral bookcase winding up its sides, illuminated by shafts of sunlight cutting through the dusty air, tended by wizened old scribes. Instead, it was an institutionally carpeted, fluorescent-lit room, accessible by elevator and frostily air-conditioned. The desk clerk was a young, bushy-bearded man. When I described, in unsteady Arabic, my project—I was studying the importance of his fine language and its classical poetry—he blinked at me through his big glasses and exclaimed, “Mashallah!”
So much had been written about Arabic since I had left academia: sociological studies, specialist dictionaries, even a five-volume encyclopedia dedicated to the language. I took the Q–Y volume to read about Quranic Arabic, as well as a few reference titles about poetry. Settling at a table with my books, I pulled my mosque-issued abaya and shayla, required for all female visitors, around me. They were heavy polyester, and I was grateful for their warmth.
In the hierarchy of Arabic literature, the Quran is at the very top, and not just because it is a holy book. Its language is concise, precise, dense with meaning, rich with metaphors and palindromes. Even in the rare verses where I understood all the words, many of the subtleties were lost on me.
Like so much in Arabic, the Quran resists translation—in fact, it specifically defies it. The Quran is not the Quran unless it is in Arabic; versions in other languages are not considered translations, only interpretations. The logic is that the Quran is the revealed word of God, as spoken to the prophet Muhammad. This is such literal thinking that, the first time I heard it, I laughed. Oh, God speaks Arabic, does He? Does He have problems remembering what makes a noun a diptote?
The more I considered this concept, the more I saw its amazing ramifications. This was a tradition that put faith in language above all. Islam is based on the premise that one human language—Arabic—was rich and precise enough to express the very word of God, exactly as He intended.
This only partially explains why the language of the Quran is so dense and complicated. The other reason, I came to appreciate in graduate school, is the literary context into which the Quran was born. In the Jahiliya, the period before Islam, a great poet was a pop star, historian, and wizard all at once. The poets of the late sixth century commemorated battles, praised leaders, and recounted tales of love and loss. Every year before the month of pilgrimage, poets from all the tribes convened near Mecca to recite their best, most moving works.
Into this poetry-mad culture came the Quran, the direct word of God. Naturally, God spoke in the poetic style of the day. And God, being God, was more skilled with words than Imru’ al-Qays, ʼAntar, Tarafa, or any of His other mortal poet creations. Not that the Quran should be mistaken for the odes that preceded it. “We have not taught the Prophet poetry,” the Lord made sure to specify, in sura 36, verse 69. The Quran is, the verse continues, a revelation.
The Quran did not follow the rigid metrical rules the poets had established, but it still followed in the tradition of poetry because it was an oral work. God spoke the verses to the archangel Gabriel, who told them to Muhammad, and the Prophet repeated them aloud to his followers, who memorized them and recited them to others. This oral tradition carried on through the centuries. I first heard verses recited in Cairo, emanating from a taxi tape deck, half sung by an idle police officer, murmured by a solo reader seated with an open book in a corner of a mosque. Everywhere I heard it, the simple, melodic chant created a little oasis of calm in the city’s din. The Quran spoken aloud effectively reenacted the moment of revelation, so that the listener would hear it just as Muhammad had. Once, I heard a recording in which the reciter’s voice caught and quavered, on the brink of tears; perhaps he had been gripped with this very sense of immediacy.
At the same time, the Quran was a bridge to written Arabic culture. The function is built right into its name: the word Qur’an comes from qara’a, the verb that means both to recite and to read. The first message that the angel Gabriel is said to have conveyed to Muhammad began with the imperative: “Read: Your Lord is the most generous, who has taught the use of the pen, has taught man what he did not know.”
Revelation came over a period of twenty-three years, and along with it came the usual codification, canonization, and all-around paperwork essential to establishing any new religion. In the later chapters, the body of revelation is no longer referred to as a qur’an, a recited-thing, but as a kitab, a book. Revelation ended with Muhammad’s death in 632, and about two decades later, the Quran was written down in a single standardized text. It was no longer just an oral, recited message but also a book that was available for all followers to read.
Along with this holy book came a need for other books about it. By the mid-seventh century, little more than thirty years after Muhammad’s death, the Islamic empire had spread into what is now Egypt, Iraq, and Iran. Some of history’s first intrepid Arabic students, better known as early converts to Islam, were reading the Quran and making mistakes—and this being the very word of God, any mistake was an egregious one. The second caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab, is renowned for his love of Arabic; he is also known for beating his scribes when they made copying errors.
So grammarians established rules for Arabic, which they deduced from the Quran, as well as from poetry. Tradition holds that Muhammad was not fond of poetry, but this did not mean it was tossed aside as irredeemably pagan. This is probably because the Quran hadn’t broken radically from it, but rather expanded on it.
Using the Quran as the yardstick for all of Arabic created some tricky situations. Because the Quran was God’s creation, it was by definition perfect. Grammarians had to account for every varianc
e; nothing could be dismissed as a stenographer’s error or a malapropism. Every grammarian was a theologian, and vice versa. In these early examinations of the language, rational analysis constantly rubbed up against faith. A morphological mistake was also a moral misstep. So, hey, no pressure.
The Quran was a powerful force when it was revealed, and fourteen hundred years later, it was still considered, among Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the paragon of Arabic expression. In Muhammad’s time, Arabic was the language of the caravan routes from the Arabian Peninsula and north into present-day Iraq; it had probably varied significantly along the way, from oasis to oasis. The Quran was a snapshot of a certain type of Arabic—that of Mecca, of the tribe of the Quraysh, and, technically, of God. Without the scripture, Arabic would have continued to shift, adapting to the vagaries of trade and possibly splitting into new languages. Instead, the Quran preserved the language for all time.
I looked up from my pile of reference books to take a breath. The bearded librarian at the desk caught my eye and gave me an encouraging smile.
In Abu Dhabi, I had arranged to rent a room through an online agency. The listing was scant on details, but it was the only option in my budget. When I arrived, somewhere in the generic midrise section of the city, I was greeted by a tall woman in a stretchy white headscarf. She immediately pulled me inside, locked the door, and removed her scarf. Then she chided me for having introduced myself in Egyptian dialect.
“My name is Farah. And you must speak real Arabic, not these accents,” she said, her face breaking into a broad, gap-toothed smile. “In Libya, we pronounce every letter the way it should be.” I stammered a Fusha reply, and we switched to English, because she spoke it brilliantly and seemed eager to practice.
I had never met a Libyan. There weren’t very many of them—barely six million in the 700,000-square-mile country, and not many outside it either. I knew only two things about Libya. One, of course, was Muammar Qaddafi, and he had recently been deposed, captured, and killed. The other was that the country’s name written in Arabic makes an uncommon kind of palindrome, a visual one: ليبيا.
