The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
and kicked their legs out to the beat of the tambour, the Arab drum, and the clapping and singing of boys and girls. They were having great fun. Dance festivals had evolved over millennia: pagan feasts absorbed by Christian holidays, Christianity giving way to Islam, sacred holidays secularized by the nation. And in all of Syria, there was the dabke, a communal dance like a Scottish reel. There were the chababi, a pipe, and the tambour, and clapping, and the mixing of sexes, ages, classes. I used to see this dancing at the great mahrajans in Mount Lebanon, at regional festivals in Jebel Alawi in northern Syria, among the Druze and in the towns of the West Bank. They might celebrate a birth, a wedding, a harvest, a saint’s day. These boys, girls, men and women danced in the forecourt of Amman’s telecommunications centre, under blazing floodlights. Above them loomed a quadruple-life-size, Hollywood-style portrait of King Abdallah holding a cellphone to his ear. Amman had a new mobile telephone network! An ancient ritual that had been paganized, Christianized, Islamized and Arabized was now commercialized. How else to herald the new era?
Welcome to Amman
Penury and loyalty dictated my choice of hotel, the Shepherd’s in Jebel Amman. The old place was far less costly than the modern chains, the InterContinental, Marriott, Hilton, Radisson et al. I was not on expenses, as I had been as a journalist. My publishers’ advance was so meagre that I could not have survived on it all year if I’d slept in a tent. The Shepherd’s belonged to the Shalhoub family, whose daughter Norma had been at the American University of Beirut when I was studying philosophy there. I was twenty-one then, and she was a year or two younger. We had not gone out together, despite my repeated attempts to woo her. On my student travels, I had stayed at her family’s hotel. Then, it was managed by her father, a gregarious and well-known Amman character named George Shalhoub. For a time, he had – persuaded by his son Nader that it would be good for business – opened a British pub on the roof. George Shalhoub had died, and Nader was in charge. The pub had closed, but Shepherd’s retained the fading charm of George Shalhoub’s times.
There were only one or two other guests, like a seafront hotel in winter, and the service was nothing if not personal. I received a call as soon as I reached my room. Norma Shalhoub was inviting me to lunch the next day. How did she know I was there? Amman was a village, and Shepherd’s was a village hotel. This was the wrong place for me to bring a Jordanian maiden for the night, not that I knew any.
‘The West Bank is killing Jordan,’ Norma Shalhoub said at lunch. She was not discussing attacks by Palestinians or the arrival of West Bankers in search of work. She was talking about perception. ‘I’ve been to trade fairs in Japan three times.’ The Shalhoubs had opened a travel agency to complement their hotel business. ‘The first time, the Japanese asked if we could hear the bombs in the Iran – Iraq war. The second time, could we hear the bombs in Lebanon? And the last time, did we hear the explosions from the West Bank? They think it’s all the same.’ Amman had been tranquil since 1970.
We were at her mother’s house. Norma lived next door on one side, her brother and his family on the other. Norma’s mother gave us rice, vegetable stew and chicken grilled in the Lebanese way with lemon and garlic. Although they were patriotic Jordanians, the Shalhoubs’ ancestors had migrated to Amman from Lebanon – from the same Christian mountain village that my great-grandmother had left for France and Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century. Her food was like my grandmother’s. As a gesture to me, Norma had gone out to buy cans of beer. Like most other people in Jordan, where alcohol was legal, the Shalhoubs did not drink.
When the Israeli border opened in 1994, they built the Palace Hotel in Petra. Mrs Shalhoub remembered Udi, an Israeli tour operator, coming to the house for lunch. He was pleasant and polite, and they looked forward to working with him. But he warned them: ‘This is just the beginning, but wait. I promise you that after a year of doing business with Israelis, you’ll be anti-Semitic.’
The anticipated profits from the Palace Hotel in Petra did not materialize. Most Americans toured the Middle East on Israeli package holidays. Only the more adventurous – and such people are few – came to Jordan on their own. ‘The day tourists,’ Norma said, ‘would bring their own food – even their own water – from Israel.’ Israeli tour operators bussed the tourists to Petra for a few hours, stopped by the Palace or some other hotel to buy postcards and bussed them back over the border. It was to make them pay something, Mrs Shalhoub told me, that the government introduced the ten-dinar entry fee. Again there were stories of Israeli tourists stealing glasses. But Udi the tour operator failed as a prophet. The Shalhoubs were spared anti-Semitism by the kindness of Jewish families in America. When Mrs Shalhoub’s younger daughter, Lena, moved with her American husband to Pittsburgh, she stayed home all day with two small children in a foreign country while he worked. In Jordan, her mother, sister, aunts and cousins would have been with her. In Pittsburgh, she became isolated and unwell. Mrs Shalhoub said, ‘The only people who offered to help were Jewish.’
Norma drove me on a tour of Amman’s newer quarter, Abdoan, and its shopping centre – a mall I thought I had seen under another name in the San Fernando Valley. The logos of American suburbia beckoned: Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream, Planet Hollywood, Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s. An American atmosphere pervaded Abdoan, kids in fresh-washed cars, boys and girls eyeing one another through the black lenses of reflecting sunglasses, families at outdoor tables eating hamburgers and drinking Coca-Cola. Did I want to see the new American Embassy?
The previous embassy had been a modest stone office building whose front door opened onto the street opposite the main journalist hotel, the InterContinental. It dated from the days when anyone could walk into a US Embassy without being searched, scanned and security checked. It took a few bullets during the Black September 1970 battles but it was otherwise unharmed. The new embassy, not far from the mall, was a citadel of the American world order. It lay within a perimeter of walls that an Olympic pole vaulter could not scale. Jordanian army tanks surrounded the compound, guns pointed outwards. The embassy itself was a gargantuan block of stone, trimmed in satellite dishes, television and radio aerials and, higher than them all, a flagpole. Norma told me the embassy was self-sufficient. Its PX sold cornflakes and peanut butter so the staff would not have to buy Arab food outside. It could have been a French Foreign Legion fort in old Africa, awaiting the inevitable and futile assault by the natives.
At dinner that night, in an Italian restaurant called Romano’s, I ate alone with a book of conversations with Middle East historians – Approaches to the History of the Middle East by Nancy Elizabeth Gallagher. The author’s first interview was with Albert Hourani, whose History of the Arabs remained the standard fifteen years after its original publication. ‘Between the powerful and the powerless,’ Albert said, ‘there cannot be an easy relationship of friendship. Having power is quite different from being under someone else’s power, which is a far deeper experience, just as victory is a much less profound experience than defeat.’ Albert was one of two historians – the great Mediterranean and Crusades’ scholar Sir Steven Runciman was the other – who had advised me on Tribes with Flags. Both had since died, and I missed their counsel. Reading Albert’s reflections was like having lunch with him, as we used to in London at the Oxford and Cambridge Club. In the most diplomatic manner, he would tell me that I had misinterpreted the histories of Islam, the Crusades or the Ottoman Empire. Sitting in Amman with my book, I saw couples – well-dressed men and women – at other candle-lit tables. I thought about Albert Hourani and Steven Runciman, two of Britain’s grandest old men of letters. Ageing was sadder for the loss of your mentors. Solitary travel too was becoming a trial, when you ate alone and all the pretty women in the restaurant were with other men.
Notables in Exile
‘We’re not very numerous,’ Usama Khalidy said of his family. ‘We’re probably not more than three or four hundred.’ The Khalidys had for five centuries contributed generation after generation of scholars to the Muslim world. Their longevity as nobles of Jerusalem had prompted Usama’s younger brother, the historian Tareef Khalidy, to respond to the accusation that the Khalidys were decadent with: ‘Decadent? Three hundred years ago, we were decadent.’
Usama