The Sound of Silence

I sit in a Bedu tent, made of goatskin and old sacks, drinking tea. As the sun sets, the desert air cools rapidly, and we huddle closer to the camp fire. The wind howls, our resting camels low softly in the distance, but otherwise there is only silence. Despite my limited Arabic, and the limited English of my guide, Suleiman, I chat with our hosts in their immaculate white robes and red and white chequered headdresses. Their questions are endearingly naive.

"Are there Bedu in your country? Deserts? Trees? Birds?"

Each answer is considered carefully, as if it were the sage advice of a prophet, rather than the observations of a slightly scruffy backpacker. Then the line of questioning switches from my far off exotic homeland to my suddenly not-so- personal life. How long am I travelling for? Where is my wife? How many children do I have? With the aid of Suleiman, who as a guide has been exposed to Westerners before and obviously knows a little of their strange ways, I explain that I am unmarried, that in the West people tend to marry later, that I have no children. This is greeted with sceptical laughter.

But what of, ahem, sex? Suleiman and I explain about the concept of girlfriends, dating, pre-marital sex. My audience sits in stunned silence. It's clear that despite their mobile phones and pickup trucks, their exposure to Western culture has been exceedingly limited. They look at me as if I had just told them I'd been to the moon. (As that particular heavenly body illuminates the sand, I briefly consider telling them about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. After some reflection I decide not to - I fear my credibility would evaporate instantly). Slowly a sly grin creeps across the faces of the younger ones as the implications of sex before marriage become apparent. I feel guilty. As they trudge piously away from the fire to pray, I feel a bit like the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

As Suleiman - he does not pray - and I sit in silent contemplation of the odd exchange in which we just participated, an ancient radio set hums quietly. I cannot understand the dialogue from the chat programme, but the music is familiar enough. As if to emphasise the surrealness of the situation, the unmistakable saxophone notes of Kenny G drift across the sands. I cannot contain my laughter. Dinner is served in traditional style. A communal bowl of sticky rice into which we all dip our (right) hands, fashioning a handful of rice into a congealed ball with the fingertips, before gracefully consuming without a hint of spillage. At least that's what the Bedu do; in no time at all I closely resemble an autistic five year old let loose on a rice pudding, with a sticky mess all over my face, hand, and lap. Everyone politely pretends not to notice.

I had long hoped to meet some "non-Westernised" Bedu, and here, in the red desert of southern Jordan, I found them. Suleiman and I had travelled alone, by camel, for two days to reach them. Wadi Rum is not particularly remote and many toursits visit every day. Yet the overwhelming majority do so by 4 wheel drive; early on our first morning we saw literally dozens of them roaring past us, slowing down briefly to take photos of the two eccentrics riding fully laden camels, now in the 21st Century. Part of me wished I was wearing Bedu robes instead of khaki trousers for the full Lawrence of Arabia effect.

Once they had screeched past us in some crazy catch-me-if-you-can race from sight to sight, Suleiman and I settled down to the gentle rhythm of travel by camel. We spoke little, often sharing no more than a couple of words for hours. Suleiman confided in me that he only travels in the desert by camel - he hates large groups of people and goes to the desert in search of silence and solitude. And, oh, what silence there is to be found in the desert. On our first night, having not seen another soul for the best part of six hours, we made camp in the shade of some giant red boulders. After unsaddling the camels and collecting firewood, I scrambled up the rocks to get a better view of the fast-approaching sunset while Suleiman set about preparing dinner. As the sun sank lower in the sky, the already vivid colours of the desert were tinged first orange, then red, and finally purple. Darkness came quickly, and soon an impressive canopy of stars illuminated the cloudless night sky

After a simple enough dinner of rice, potatoes, and bread (Dr Atkins would clearly not approve of Bedu living), washed down with gallons of sweet black tea, we settled in for the evening. As I lay in my sleeping bag on a mattress of desert sand I stared up at the sky and listened to the deafening, echoing silence of the night. As a habitual city-dweller I had always imagined that the phrase "the sound of silence" was a product of Simon and Garfunkel's drug-addled minds; a function of LSD or pot, or coke or whatever else long-haired types with guitars were dropping, smoking or snorting back in the Sixties. Yet at Wadi Rum I finally registered what they were talking about. Granted, it could perhaps have been something to do with the the thick clouds of distinctly "herbal" smoke drifting from the quietly grinning Suleiman, but I like to think it was something more profound.

Of course, the pursuit of silence, solitude and the elusive Bedu were not my only motivations in trekking from Rum to Aqaba by camel. T.E. Lawrence, the enigmatic, almost mythical figure immortalised in David Lean's epic film, Lawrence of Arabia, famously made the same journey in 1917. Unlike Lawrence I was not accompanied into town by a legion of irregular Arab cavalry; nor did I in fact arrive in Aqaba on my trusty humped steed, instead hitch-hiking the last few kilometres into town in the flatbed of a pickup truck driven by a pious family heading home to Saudi Arabia. Yet in some small way I liked to think of myself as following in Lawrence's footsteps.

One of the most enigmatic and most-romaticised figures in modern history, "El Awrens" as he was know in Arabic, made his name by living with the Bedu, speaking their language, adopting their customs, wearing their clothes. By virtue of his acceptance by the Arab leaders, Lawrence was able to assist, advise or lead (depending on who you ask) the Arab Revolt against Ottoman Turkish rule during the First World War, securing a legendary reputation for himself, and in the process doing a great deal to ensure an Allied victory over the Axis Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey. Lawrence's promises of Arab independence, subsequently broken by the Allied governments at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 (much to Lawrence's disgust), still haunt the Middle East today as the artificially-constructed states of Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, struggle to maintain their existence.

More than once the Bedu remind me of the total artificiality of the national borders in this region, replying with a shrug when I asked where they are from. "Some call it Saudia, some call it Jordan. We call it the desert." Theirs is a tough existence, eked out from some of the harshest conditions on earth; indeed, T.E. Lawrence famously called it "a death in life". Yet as I lay down in the sand, gazed up to the heavens, and listened once more to the awesome, deafening roar of total uninterrupted silence, I found myself starting to dread the return to civilisation. As the great desert explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote in Arabian Sands: "No man can live this life and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him the yearning to return, weak or insistent according to his nature. For this cruel land can cast a spell which no temperate clime can match." I know what he meant.

Feast, Famine, and Men Who Hold Hands

As the sun slips behind the dusty brown mountains to the West, Damascus is bathed in a beautiful golden light. As the muezzins tune up for their hauntingly beautiful renditions of the call to evening prayer, the usual noise of rush hour traffic falls eerily silent as this bustling city of five million people quickly becomes a ghost town. As the dusk twilight fades into darkness, shutters come down and the last few stragglers hurry home, leaving the Syrian capital devoid of any outward signs of life. Yet behind the closed doors of countless houses, apartments and mosques in this, the fourth holiest site in Islam, friends and family sit down to celebrate.

For this is the holy month of Ramadan, a time of introspection, observance, and self-denial. All across the Islamic world the faithful eschew the pleasures of the flesh: eating, drinking, smoking, and sex, fasting during daylight hours and feasting in darkness. For one month of the year, Muslims remind themselves of their devotion to Allah, studying the Qu'ran, praying more often and with more focus than usual, and strengthening their communal ties by sharing the hardships of the holy month. Come sunset, hungry eyes turn to the home, where the traditional meal of Iftar ("breakfast") is served.

The feast begins with a bowl of dates, passed from (right) hand to (right) hand, and copious cups of "shai", the ubiquitous sweet black tea on which the Arab world appears to run. (My dentist should be in for a bumper payday come January) My own flat's Iftar has a particularly African feel: my landlord Djbril hails from Chad, and as far as I can tell runs an open house for every Chadian in the Levant. The boundless hospitality and generosity of the Chadians ensures I am invited to join their Iftar, despite my less than monastic adherence to the rigours of Ramadan. Although I am not, nor ever will be, a Muslim, I began the month with the noblest intentions - "when in Rome" and all. Yet ideals of cultural assimilation tend to fall by the wayside when the mercury is pushing 40 degrees Centigrade and you're struggling with the peculiarities of a language whose speech patterns often resemble the last desperate breaths of a strangled kitten and whose written form neglects to mark any vowels. Not eating is one thing, but not drinking is simply impossible. Still, while I may not share the parched throats of my fellow diners, I'm certainly hungry.

After the dates, we settle down to a huge feast of chicken, rice, potatoes, salad, and bread. Simple, yet delicious, African food served with a hearty helping of laughter, affection, and community spirit. While I can barely understand 5% of the rapid-fire Chadian "9aamiya" - dialect- in which Djbril and his compatriots usually communicate, when I understand the odd word they're kind enough to slip into "foussa" - the Modern Standard Arabic with which I'm struggling - for my benefit. Conversation quickly turns to politics and history; like almost all the Arabs I've ever met the Chadians' grasp of world affairs is simply mind-boggling. These are by no means educated people, yet as well as the obvious topics of Palestine and Iraq, beloved of all Arabs, they talk about such diverse and esoteric subjects as the American political system, the IRA (it took a while to work out, but "Adam Gerry" is their endearingly erroneous rendering of the bearded Sinn Fein leader's name) and demand to know if I am named after James I of England/James VI of Scotland, James Bond, or former American Secretary of State James Baker. The depth and breadth of their knowledge is staggering; even more appealing to me is their apparent inability to take any of these weighty matters seriously. As a Brit I'm gently taunted about the occupation of Iraq; one of my tormentors points out the sad state in which the British Empire finds itself in 2007, reduced to the Falkland Islands and Basra Airport.

After dinner we drink yet more tooth-rotting tea and retire to watch television: a four part dramatisation of the overthrow of Egypt's King Farouq by General Nasser in 1952. This provokes jokes about Britain's very own Egyptian would-be usurper, Mohammed al Fayad, and his son's near miss with the throne. Like many a Daily Express reader, the Chadians are in no doubt that Dodi and "Dina" were killed by the all-powerful British secret service. The question of quite where the omniscient and omnipotent SIS' powers went when it came to finding WMDs in Iraq is politely ignored.

The Chadians are typically Arab in many ways. This is a masculine society, where intimate physical contact between members of the same sex is totally normal. As in innumerable cities across the Arab and Muslim world, it's perfectly normal for men to hold hands in the street, to kiss each other's cheeks in greeting, and to share personal space in a way unthinkable in the West. Although I won't be attempting to verify this assertion myself, I imagine that in some ways life for homosexuals here must be much easier than in the West, despite Islam's virulent hatred of gays. (Interestingly there is apparently no non-pejorative term for "homosexual" in the Arabic language: "deviant" is about the least offensive word). Is it a coincidence that many of the greatest Western "Arabists" - Lawrence and Thesiger, to name but two - were perpetual residents of the closet?

Regardless of the inherently homoerotic nature of much of Islamic and Arab culture, life for heterosexuals here is certainly difficult. The schizophrenic attitude to procreation is perhaps best evidenced by the numerous Arabic equivalents of MTV. Pop music is ubiquitous here, most of it emanating from Lebanon and Egypt. While the music is mostly appalling, the videos are quite incredible. Impossibly good-looking young women cavort onscreen in outfits that would make even Britney, Christina, or Shakira blush, thrusting their crotches in a most provocative manner and titillating the viewers with lingering closeups of cavernous cleavage and tanned thighs. It's enough to send even hardened (pardon the pun) Westerners running for a cold shower; Allah only knows what it does to frustrated young Arabs.

Yet in amongst the nubile nymphets and their soft porn shoots are pop videos aimed at a wholly different audience. Saudi artists, all male, croon saccharine ballads with lyrics like (forgive my woeful Arabic here) "I love God, God is my love, my life is all for God". Meanwhile, their faith in Allah and their submission to the dictates of the supposedly austere Wahabist Islamic creed of their homeland are rewarded onscreen with shiny watches, gleaming droptop Mercedes, and of course a couple of "pimping hoes". Unlike Fifty Cent or P Diddy, however, the Saudi stars' bitches are covered from head to toe, and sport wedding rings. All three of them. The message is clear: love God and a harem of devoted (though virginal) women will be yours. Inshallah you'll get a German sports car to drive them around in too.

As the shahada rings out across the now darkened city, a couple of middle aged men hurry past me, arms linked gaily. On the other side of the street, a young man and his stylishly dressed girlfriend walk side by side, a couple of feet apart. And in houses across the country, across the region, across the world, self-starved Muslims desperately gorge themselves in a feast of gluttony before tomorrow's resumption of the fasting, praying, and abstention of the holy month. Allah-uh akbar!

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's 5am. I sit in a dingy smoke-filled room with fake wood panels on the walls, drinking my thirty-fourth cup of tea of the evening. It seems my fervent prayers to the travel gods have been answered, and I will after all get to see the real Turkey, away from the tourist hordes. I'm in a motorway service station somewhere between Antioch and Alexandretta, waiting for a bus. Glamourous though it may sound, those two cities stopped being interesting around the seventh century AD; regardless of which, I'm not sure this tea and kebab joint by a highway was ever really a highlight of the country even in Seljuk or Mamluk times. No-one here speaks English, I've asked three people to point out our location on the map of Turkey in my Lonely Planet "Middle East" and got three totally different answers, and I can't quite shake the feeling I've been abandoned to my fate by the Sula Bus Company. Still, looking on the bright side, at least there are no tourists here...

To pass the time I read. As I turn the pages of Alexander Maitland's compelling biography of the late Wilfred Thesiger, the legendary British explorer as famed for his total rejection of modern Western civilisation as for his incredible desert traverses in Sudan, Ethiopia, Libya and Saudi Arabia, I wonder what the likes of Thesiger would make of my predicament. Not a great deal probably; when you're the first man to traverse the impassable "Empty Quarter" of southern Arabia, you've lived with the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq for seven years, and you count the Abbysinian Emperor the Ras Tefari Haile Selassi as a close personal friend, you probably don't regard Turkish truck stops as much of an adventure. Nevertheless, after a couple of weeks spent hanging out with people whose idea of "exploring" is finding a Starbucks in Istanbul, I feel suitably off the beaten track. Particularly because as time passes it seems more and more likely that I'll be seeing out the rest of my days here at this Anatolian version of a Happy Eater.

I console myself with the fact that given twenty years of sitting here I should at least have grasped the rudiments of basic Turkish. Until this morning I was rather proud of the fifty or so words (twenty of which are the numbers 1-20 I must admit) of Turkish I'd picked up; the ability to order a beer, some hummous, and a chicken shish kebab, and ask the price all earned me much appreciated kudos from the locals - on one occasion, at Ephesus I chuckled smugly to myself as a barechested Brit with a Cockney accent and a Manchester City tattoo on his left bicep (glory supporter?) paid 4 euros for the same glass of orange juice I'd just picked up for 2 lira using my amazing new Turkish skills. Now, however, as I attempt to enunciate such complex phrases as "no I don't want more sodding tea, where the fuck is the bus?", I realise the limit of my capabilities in this particular tongue was reached just after I learned "thank you" ("teshekur ederrim" if you wanted to know).

Eventually, after a couple of years, the relevant bus arrived, and I was charged a further twenty lira for the privilege of a seat, thus leaving me with the princely sum of six Turkish lira to my name. "Still", I thought, "there's bound to be a cash machine at the bus station in Antioch". After around five hours of travelling through scenery that alternated between the spectacular vistas of mountains, plains, and Mediterranean in the countryside, and the slightly less spectacular industrial dystopias of steelworks and gas refineries that dot the towns along Turkey's southeastern coast, we finally arrived at the desolate and remote Antakya Otogar: situated, of course, a good few miles from anywhere, and notable for the singular absence of any holes in the wall from which to remove hard currency. Once again I faced the less than ideal prospect of taking up permanent residency in a remote Turkish bus station.

On this occasion, however, I had not taken into consideration the legendary hospitality of the Arabs (for the cynics out there, no, that doesn't involve orange jumpsuits, beheadings, and YouTube). For the bus company was Syrian, the passengers were all Syrian, and as a guest in their country (well, nearly), they were obligated to look after me. Code of the desert you see: one day they may be passing my, er, tent, and be in desperate need of hospitality. Most of the Arabs may not live in the desert any longer, but the old ways live on. "Only six lira, no problem! Welcome to Syria! Have a chocolate chip cookie." "Mmm...don't mind if I do. Shukran". It will doubtless surprise many of you to learn this, but because of Islam's roots in the Arabian desert, such hospitality is customary not just in Arab states, but across the Muslim world (though some of the Iraqis might admittedly have let standards slip a little lately). In Rory Stewart's "The Places In Between", the former British diplomat's incredible tale of his walk from Tehran to Kathmandu in 2002, the Afghan mujehideen's desperate desire to kill an infidel Westerner (and what's more, a Brit) in their midst is tempered by Stewart's status as a visitor in their lands. Instead of chopping his head off they kill the fatted goat and let him sleep in their front rooms. I'm not recommending you try this at home or anything, but...

Anyway, after a very pleasant sojourn through the formalities at the Turkish-Syrian border, I arrived in Aleppo. Syrian immigration is quite something: polite and friendly guards sit beneath posters in a multitude of languages advising guests to report any "troublesome behaviour" from Immigration officials to their supervisor; furthermore "if this does not resolve you issue, please call Minister of Interior, phone number 337676". No, I haven't tried it yet, before you ask. You're welcome to give him a call though. Next to each of these posters, indeed all over Syria from what I can see, stands the image of a shy-looking man, seemingly much more suited to the life of a provincial optician than military dictator of one of the founder members of the infamous "Axis of Evil". This is, of course, President Bashar al-Asad, Syria's number one opthalmic surgeon, and also lifetime ruler. At least I know where to go if my contact lenses start playing up in Damascus then. As a fellow University of London alumnus I'm sure old Bashar would love to hear from me. We could compare notes on Crush and Cocktails, and bemoan the expense of being a student in London. No?

Well, bus adventure aside, I certainly feel I'm off the tourist trail here in Aleppo. Crossing the border from Turkey was like crossing into a different world. Arab and Muslim dress abound here, everything closes early today, the Sabbath, and people in the street address me in Arabic, not cliched English of the "lubbly jubbly, good price for you friend" variety. Syria's second city is everything I hoped it would be: the great souk is like every fairytale of the Orient come true at once, the Christian Quarter is an openair archaeology museum, and the locals couldn't be friendlier. I even saw my first roadsign for Baghdad earlier, as if to emphasise the fact that this is the real Middle East. Still, I think I'll stick with Syria - I hear Iraq is overrun with British and American visitors these days, and something tells me the locals are a little more welcoming here.