The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Read online

  TO LIFE

  A hundred reasons clamour for your going. You go to touch on human identities, to people an empty map. You have a notion that this is the world’s heart. . . . You go because you are still young and crave excitement . . . you go because you are old and need to understand something before it’s too late. You go to see what will happen.

  —COLIN THUBRON,

  SHADOW OF THE SILK ROAD

  . . . .

  So have they not traveled through the earth and have hearts by which to reason and ears by which to hear? For indeed, it is not eyes that are blinded, but blinded are the hearts which are within the breasts.

  —THE HOLY QURAN, 22:46

  . . . .

  What the fuck are you doing in Afghanistan?

  —A FRIEND

  CONTENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PREAMBLE

  PART ONE

  |

  THE ABU DHABI BAR MITZVAH

  1. IN THE AIR

  What Is Above, My Dog?

  2. ABU DHABI

  I’m Sanjay

  3. KUWAIT

  The Western Perception of Islam Department

  4. OMAN

  Go for It! Don’t Do It! Jump!

  PART TWO

  |

  NX844B1G

  5. LEBANON

  She Loves Me But I Do Not Love Her

  6. SYRIA

  Ma Fi Shi

  7. AFGHANISTAN

  Wall Save Butts

  8. PAKISTAN

  Cool Wind

  9. IRAQ

  Où Eve!

  10. IRAN

  Not Every Time You Can Eat Ice Cream

  PART THREE

  |

  ANOTHER PEOPLE BEGIN

  11. EGYPT

  Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap

  12. YEMEN

  Waa-oww!

  13. SOMALIA

  Is There Peace?

  OUTRO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION

  SELECTED SOURCES

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Everything in between “ ” is verbatim. Transcriptions are taken almost exclusively from audio recordings, and occasionally from handwritten or hand-tapped notes in the moment. A very few names have been changed.

  THE

  ABU DHABI

  BAR MITZVAH

  PREAMBLE

  I KEEP TELLING MYSELF it was worth it.

  Twenty-three countries, depending on who did the counting. Most of my first-job earnings pilfered to see them—except for what I locked in an IRA because I thought I was an adult. Just before I left America, I left my heart in San Francisco and then Skyped with it. For 534 days of summer, I spent the warm weeks of the Arab Spring in and out of my apartment in Abu Dhabi.

  I keep telling myself I’ve grown, that I’ve answered the questions I needed answered, and that I’ve learned to ask better questions. I keep telling myself to stop telling myself things.

  Fresh out of college, I fled the pressures of decision making and friend-to- friend comparisons, and the bleak job market under the cover of idealism: I would explore. I would learn about the world Nine Eleven made us fear, and I would justify my roving lusts with stories of why we needn’t fear it.

  I wouldn’t purely explore, though. I wouldn’t follow my childhood friend Danny to Syria, as we’d decided before federal grants told us both no, just to hone our Arabic and steep in the Middle East. I’d work in the Emirates, that country where Dubai was, and oil-rich Abu Dhabi. When I made landfall in a new place (its name familiar from wartime datelines), the pictures in my head matched both fully and not at all. Simple truths came wrapped in complexities I didn’t understand, and every time I thought I had learned something solid, it went soft in my sweaty palms. Impressions and new truths jabbed at each other like skittish kids on a playground, and tumbled out as jokey stories in hotel bars.

  “You’ll end up dead!” my friends said as I window-shopped flights to Beirut or Damascus or Kabul, laughing or shouting or shaking their heads. But I kept not ending up there. It seemed something was really wrong with our predictions.

  “Go here! Don’t go here!” I’d hear. And I’d listen until I really didn’t want to—until the curiosity outweighed the risk, until I felt I could climb one rung higher on the ladder of forbidden nations.

  CHAPTER 1

  |

  IN THE AIR

  WHAT IS ABOVE, MY DOG?

  WE WERE MOSTLY AMERICANS on the flight out of Chicago, crossing Greenland and Sweden, passing over Lithuania and Turkey, then Iran. No one had taken advantage of Etihad Airlines’ falcon policy, by which a bird of prey is permitted at merely three times the cost of an extra checked bag. Two more are welcome if you buy them a seat. With no such distractions, I watched the Chinese game show Just Go, and felt the world grow small: it was just as terrible as American TV, and just as glorious.

  “Juice?” said the pretty attendant in a pretty hat, balancing three glasses on a tray, two of them shades of orange.

  “What’s the orange one?” I asked.

  “It’s orange,” she said.

  Clearly, I didn’t belong. Obviously, one of the oranges was orange—or had even that been too hasty an assumption? I took the glass of the mystery orange, and a tentative nip. It was fitting, in a way: the root of the Arabic for carrot, jazar, is shared by the words for island and peninsula, as in “the Arabian Peninsula,” or “the island of Abu Dhabi.” Of course, it was total coincidence in that place where linguistic bloodlines run tangled back into ancient history, but as we headed toward Jazirat al-‘Arab, I couldn’t help but imagine our destination like a great carrot on the map.

  I had never been much for going with the flow, but a certain flow had brought me here. I left high school dreaming of Russian study, and Hebrew, and Modern Greek—languages I connected to through ancestors once or twice removed, and thought sounded sexy. But in the last four years, I had hardly questioned why I spent my first week of college auditing two Arabic classes in the hope of winning a spot. Consciously, in my only moment of choice, I just thought it would be fun.

  My cousins in Jerusalem thought I was mental. When I talked to Itai in his camp in the Negev at officer’s school in the Israeli army, where he trained boys younger than we were to train boys younger than they were, I could hear him shaking his head over the wire. “I just don’t get it. Why don’t you learn Hebrew?”

  “Because you speak English,” I said.

  In a windowless belowground classroom uptown, my elementary Arabic class met four times per week for seventy-five minutes.

  Seven miles from the deadliest attack ever on American soil, the study of this language—the official tongue of the religion claimed by these attackers—carried a special emotional charge. There were native speakers of Arabic dialects unversed in the literary language, political scientists, Hebrew-speaking Jews, and total neophytes like me, and no one denied the impression that this was a language that represented a certain opposition—that it was on the other side of something. Many of us were drawn in because we were nosy, and we looked for bridges across the murky gap.

  Downtown five years earlier, 9/11 had forced Arab and Muslim and Middle Eastern on to the airwaves—it was wartime with rhetoric to match, and the battle lines of our new enemies were painted with huge, clumsy brushstrokes. The attack had made us all forcefully self-conscious. We perceived them, assumed their perceptions of us, and then canceled all the flights to Beirut. But by learning the primary language of this region, some of us thought, we might be able to figure out what them were really thinking. Learning to spell salaam alaykum seemed like a good place to start.

  I was hooked long before I felt
the language let fall the first of its veils, revealing morphology as finely calibrated as the engine of a race car: from the words to know (‘alama) we can divine, through patterns; to teach (to make know—‘allama); to learn (to make oneself know—ta‘alama); to inquire (to seek to know—ista‘alama); scholar (a knower—‘aalim); and information (the knowns—ma‘alumaat)! And in the reverse, the unknown is knowable if we can recognize the root. A little familiarity can go a long way.

  Of course, we often guess wrong. That word for scholar—‘aalim—usually means “world.”

  “To live in Arabic is to live in a labyrinth of false turns and double meanings,” Jonathan Raban wrote in Arabia through the Looking Glass. “No sentence means quite what it says. Every word is potentially a talisman, conjuring the ghosts of the entire family of words from which it comes.” Its trademark haziness can only be cleared, as far as it will ever be cleared, by knowing as many members of that family as possible.

  And yet, the language unfolds even through the missteps, and as we skitter along the web of rules and quirks, the ghosts of Raban’s Arabic come quickly out into the daylight.

  But there are other traps. In school, from a Moroccan teacher or a Tunisian or a Syrian, we learned Modern Standard Arabic. Known as Fusha, from a root that means “to be eloquent,” MSA is the official language of two dozen countries and is spoken nowhere. Formal Arabic is the native tongue only of television (but only the news) and print. Everywhere else, regional dialect takes over, complete with homegrown rules of conjugation, syntax, vocabulary, and pronunciation.

  As a saving grace, MSA is understood far more widely than it is used. Schoolchildren learn the formalities of case endings and the sounds of the official language, but it’s like putting scaffolding on a building that’s already finished. When you begin to speak with a newscaster’s diction, they’ll get it—the news sounds like you, after all—but with every word you say, you’ll say more than you mean—and less.

  Studying in our underground vacuum we practiced a kind of childlike curiosity, abstract and theoretical and not yet made to answer to the strictures of real life. Soon, it would be. Arab friends tittered when I said something in Fusha outside the classroom. Say it again! To them, it sounds like you’re speaking in Elizabethan English, my Moroccan professor told us. Then, he continued to teach us how to sound like Shakespeare.

  BY GRADUATION, the bits of my identity I could put a finger on were well muddled in the labyrinth of that mild geographic focus: some Arabic language, political science courses that hinted at the region, too many visits to the falafel shop on Broadway that closed for sanitary violations.

  “You love the Middle East, don’t you?” someone asked me in the May drizzle at commencement. I didn’t know what to say. College hadn’t given me the tongue-tip arsenal of quotations to pluck off as needed, and I looked for words as we lined up behind St. Paul’s Chapel.

  If I’d been to more weddings, I might have looked to the chapel and seen a clue. In that same Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, the nuptially overworked chapter 13, he writes, “Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” If looking for true things was love, then I loved, and I did so with the bias of a faint hope.

  Seventy-seven years earlier in Washington, a bible lay open to that same page. As he would on three such occasions over the next dozen years, FDR put his hand over these words: love, perhaps at the first joint; hope, maybe at the knuckle. Under his palm, it said, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.” And then, the man in a morning coat and striped trousers was made president of the United States.

  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he said then. “Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” All that in a four-page speech. While he spoke of facing fear, his hand was grounded in love.

  I still loved the Middle East like a child, I could have said. I still reasoned like a child with the blackened memories of a September Tuesday in eighth grade when the headmaster told us to go home. My father was home early, too. He hugged me, and in the one extra moment we lingered I knew everything had changed. But I had no idea how, my reason clouded by fear and easy explanation. I loved the Middle East because I wanted to know something true.

  First, though, it was all rebellion. Dad a musician, mom a therapist, who both cared about people and liked new things. They had studied abroad and lived abroad and allowed me to choose any path I’d seek. They never forced one. When I was even younger, they didn’t give me any authority to fight; if they’d told me not to watch TV, I would have watched it uninterrupted til I died. They didn’t—they didn’t give me any hard limit to push against. But the world did, later on. It said, as I heard it: don’t go here.

  At the end of my first year of Arabic, Kanye’s Graduation dropped and he said what I was thinking before every class: nuh uh, you can’t tell me nothing.

  In my bones, I felt that I was the product of 9/11. I couldn’t say what that meant, but I knew that it had given me lenses to see the world, and had shaped me like a parent. I was suspicious. Before I came to New York from the leafy Philadelphia suburbs, the city scared me with its chaos and possibility. I moved to New York to lock eyes with my bogeymen, for no reason I knew but to make the world expand. America was my suburb now, and there were voices all around that told me to stay within earshot.

  Yalla, into the wild. How could I live without an answer: What if they’re all wrong?

  AFTER GRADUATION, I TOOK the Language Pledge in the spirit of curiosity at a summer program in Oakland. For ten weeks before I left for Abu Dhabi, I promised to speak only in Arabic. Just before I was to leave the continent unfettered, I met a girl there who would tether a part of me to it, and we were nearly dating before we ever said words in English.

  It was astonishingly easy to feel close when we accepted that we wouldn’t dig for meaning in the minutiae of word choice and turns of phrase, as we would have on first dates in English. Masha and I were in just the right place to simply feel at each other.

  Says Raban, Arabic “is perfectly constructed for saying nothing with enormous eloquence; a language of pure manners in which there are hardly any literal meanings at all and in which symbolic gesture is everything.” Just as the words that follow sneezes in languages around the world are loosened from their literal meaning—the French to your wishes! the Pashto patience!—Arabic back and forths often serve the connection far more than the dictionary. Something is said and heard, and meaning is made from the interaction.

  There is a single word (na‘iman!) to greet the freshly shaved or recently showered; there is a common answer to any request (‘ala ra’si—“on my head”). Words become gestures and the roots are forgotten. Na‘iman comes from one of the many words for paradise, but it’s silly to think paradise is invoked every time a friend trims his mustache.

  With only literature and textbook grammar to go on, though, we made our own symbolic gestures out of direct translations of American slang. The trouble: word-for-word renderings of “What’s up? What’s cracking? Yo dawg!” sound like total nonsense. And if we were really thinking in Arabic, calling each other “dogs”—unloved and thought unclean across the Arab worlds—should have been deeply offensive.

  The silliness was a welcome distraction from the truth: that we were getting no closer to learning how to say nothing, how to be eloquent in real live Arabic. We still said too much with every word. We shouted “What is above, my dog?” across the courtyard and thought it was hilarious.

  Masha and I both laughed at things like that, and saw each other laughing.

  It was a star-crossed beginning after a night of Iraqi food in San Francisco. I continued to eat and drink with the abandon I had practiced all through college, and by the time we got home I was vomiting and falling
in love. Masha and I had sex in the way twenty-one-year-olds do, and then, as people don’t say but maybe should, the Trojan War was lost, and we might have been parents.

  I stumbled to the bathroom and puked. Not from fear or guilt, I don’t think—just from okra. It was Fathers’ Day. I took Masha to a friend who took her to get Plan B, and we began our tumultuous courtship.

  It felt like we had skipped many of the wordy steps in the construction of American romances. Weeks later as I boarded the plane to the Gulf, she was signing her e-mails with love.

  CARROT JUICE BECAME COCKTAILS, caviars and steak in my massage recliner between Coral and Diamond classes.

  And then, by the light of a red sunset above the clouds, I caught my first glimpse of the Gulf. And we descended and the triangle of Abu Dhabi stuck out into the water like a slice of baklava. And dark came all of a sudden, eased by the moon not two hours from full, and the plane landed by the lights of the city.

  FROM: ME

  SUBJECT: HELLO HELLO

  MON AT 12:38 AM

  YOU are like the Lewis to my Clarks.

  --------

  FROM: MASHA

  RE: HELLO HELLO

  TUE AT 9:14 AM

  How will you brush your teeth without me?

  Love

  Masha