Arabia

In 1978, Jonathan Raban flew to the Arab world, visiting seven countries at the periphery of the Arabic peninsula in the time of about three months. His initial interest was triggered by the influx of Arabs into London in the late 70s and nurtured by the curious traits and patterns he observed in his neighborhood, around Earl's Court Road. In the time it took him to secure visas to the countries he had put on his itinerary (minus Saudi Arabia, which stonewalled his visa requests) – a considerable project in itself – he picked up Arabic writing and reading and then some rudimentary understanding of the Arabic language. Both would prove priceless on his trip, which resulted in a fairly entertaining book.

The book starts, in its introductory chapter, with on of the most concise descriptions of the basic concepts of the Arabic language that I know. It boils down to word roots and ambiguity of meaning, and is worth understanding. Raban has mastered this, but he has no illusions about his level of proficiency: "As a conversational instrument, my Arabic is useless. I am limited to greetings, street directions, words for food and thank-yous. Yet the Wehr Dictionary, and the comprehension of the alphabet, seemed to shed far more light on the Arabs I saw in London than either Thesiger, Lawrence or the Koran." I could say exactly the same for myself – the Wehr is still the standard thirty years on, though I haven't acquired one yet – and must encourage any traveler to the Arab world to pick up some basic Arabic – handwriting, the idea of roots, simple concepts. It is truly eye-opening, and much easier than commonly thought.

From the very beginning, writing a book was the motivation behind traveling. Raban would journey through lands that have been copiously written about (by Wilfred Thesiger, Lawrence of Arabia and Freya Stark most famously) and debunk some of the myths that have become entrenched over time. The attachment of the rural poor to their simple lifestyle was one. The intrinsic heroism of pre-Western societies was another. Raban set out to write a thoroughly modern account of contemporary Arabic life, and he refuses to be held hostage by earlier travel writing or by the romantic views of British Orientalism.

Nevertheless, and in spite of all the best intentions, the book is defined mostly by its historic context. The 1973 war between Israel on the one side and Egypt and Syria on the other was already far enough in the past to not weigh on every thought and conversation. The massacres of Palestinians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and subsequent bombing of Beirut were still a few years off.

In the middle of this, the first global oil crisis had brought European and American economies to their knees and made the fortunes of oil-producing countries, especially in the Gulf. They found themselves, head-over-heels and through no doing of their own, in the epicenter of a major economic boom that shook the traditional way of life in its foundations. The countries were giddy with prospects and innocently afraid of losing themselves. It was time of bubbly optimism and happy/anxious anything goes. Arabs quite clearly seemed to have their fortunes in their own hands, and they're running with them.

The sentiment of change, sometimes with nauseating intensity, is nicely captured in the four chapters on Bahrein and the Gulf emirates of Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. Striking for the reader of today is the description of Dubai as the most down-to-earth and quietly self-assured of the four. What is also surprising is that the overall makeup of society wasn't much different thirty years ago from what it is now.

Wealth seems ubiquitous if you move in the right circles but is forever out of reach if you don't. Thirty years ago, the gap between the citizens and Western expatriates on one side and cheap imported labor on the other was already a defining feature of Gulf societies. Pakistanis, Baluchis and Indians (and South Koreans back then) turned oil money into hotels, apartment blocks, private gardens, roads, factories, refineries, and new docks and wharfs. They watered artificial oasis in the desert, unloaded goods in the depth of the night and stand by for any services that might be required. Thus they form the backbone of a society that was ready, at a whim, to expel them from the country and send them packing. Raban tries to cross the boundary between rich/Western and poor and illuminate both sides of the economic miracle but usually gets stuck in his bushwhacking expeditions before reaching rarely seen and interesting sites.

Thanks to perspicacious observations and engaged writing, the chapters on the Gulf states make for pleasant enough reading but they're short of satisfying. This changes when the trip continues to Yemen and Egypt. Yemen is memorable for showing an unimaginable world of madness, a world of concurrent development and decay, and of hope and despair in the same people and at the same time. Raban's initial assessment is that "No one should catch their first sight of the Yemen before breakfast: it brings on vertigo and an alarming conviction that one must be suffering from some extreme disorder of one's vision." The following pages do their best to substantiate this judgment with observations and facts. This is done with much inspiration but without any mean spirit.

In Sana'a, the capital of Yemen, dust comes into its own for the first time. The city appeared to be crumbling before Raban's eyes. He writes, "If all enterprise in Europe had stopped dead in the middle of the Renaissance, and the whole edifice of civilization been left to quietly self-destruct, then London, Florence, Venice, Chartres and Amsterdam would look today much like my first impression of Sana'a." It was at this point that I thought I saw a connection to my own trip to Jordan for the first time.

(As this review is too long already, the continuation and conclusion will have to wait until tomorrow or whenever I find the time to type the rest into my little Eee.)