Читать книгу The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 14

In 1973, I had spent the best part of a day searching for the fortress that Lawrence had conquered in 1917. Everyone I asked then had an original notion of its whereabouts – in the hills, on the King’s Highway, somewhere near the Saudi frontier. When I found it on the beach near the old town, I slashed through a jungle that had grown in and over it. Forcing a path along the ramparts, I was rewarded with the Turkish commander’s perspective of the Red Sea when the pillars of his empire were falling. Below the ramparts were storerooms and the yard where deserters and rebels had been hanged. Later, I asked to meet old people who might have remembered Lawrence from fifty-six years earlier. Some helpful Jordanians took me to a café to meet a man who could not have been more than forty. Much discussion ensued, until I asked how a man as young as he could have known Lawrence. He sorted through papers in a beefy leather wallet and produced a photograph of himself in black desert robes with Peter O’Toole as Lawrence in David Lean’s film. Indicating the fair-skinned actor, he asked, ‘What do you want to know about him?’

Early on my first morning back in Aqaba, Ahmed Amrin came to my hotel. At five foot six, he was taller than the man he most admired, the late King Hussein. His get-up was pure California, as if he’d shown up for work as assistant director on a Hollywood set: big Wild Foot boots, Nike baseball cap, grey Levis and a V-necked sweater over a grey T-shirt. His dark goatee was trimmed like a sail, and his left hand sported a wedding ring and a Timex watch. He spoke English as a British soldier would, and he knew his job. He was a guide.

Mr Amrin had taken his degree in English at the University of Amman. His favourite playwrights were Shakespeare and Marlowe, fellow partisans of royalty. He enlisted in the Jordanian army, serving three years in England at Catterick Barracks, near Darlington, North Yorkshire, studying electronics. When he returned to Kerak, his home town between Amman and Aqaba, he married. Jordan and Israel signed a treaty of peace in 1994, and former Staff Sergeant Amrin moved to Aqaba to claim the promised riches of peacetime tourism. He studied his country’s archaeology, history, even its geology, flora and fauna. He became a first-class tour guide in a land without tourists.

‘In the tenth century BC,’ he informed me, marching over a seaside dig next to the Movenpick, ‘this was a Solomonic port. It served the Nabataeans and the “Ptolemites” ’. Mr Amrin was a rare figure for the Middle East, an honest interpreter of history. Some Arab guides omitted the connection between the land and the ancient Israelites, as most Israeli archaeologists and tour companies avoided references to the Arab, his culture and his history. To Mr Amrin, who was once Staff Sergeant Amrin of the Royal Jordanian army’s engineering corps, the story was incomplete without Jews, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Nabataeans, Turks and the British. The ‘Ptolemites’, descendants of Alexander the Great’s General Ptolemy, had ruled Egypt from Alexander’s death until the Roman conquest.

Mr Amrin explained how the other side of the Gulf came to be called Eilat: ‘In the Muslim era, this was called Ela or Wela, which means “palm tree”.’ The ruins were so far beneath our feet that all I could see were brick-lined trenches. The archaeologists had a way to go, but they had forced the government to preserve the ancient Nabataean – Ptolemaic remains from burial under a hotel. It may have been an economic calculation: Aqaba had plenty of hotels but not much history. Walls two millennia old gave it an edge over Eilat, whose oldest structure dated to 1949. The earthworks that Mr Amrin showed me were a small portion of the Roman achievement, a link in the empire’s land – sea communications between the fertile hills of Felix Arabia, now Yemen, and garrisons in Egypt and Palestine. The rest of it was under either the Movenpick Hotel, where no one would see it, or the Red Sea, where anyone with goggles and flippers could have a look.

Aqaba as it came to exist was the creation of Islam’s third Caliph, successor to the Prophet Mohammed, Othman. Mr Amrin’s tale jumped from the pious Othman, one of the four ‘rightly-guided’ Caliphs, to modern Jordan. He said the Emirate of Transjordan was born of the Meccan Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s struggle during the First World War. Without prompting from me, he said, ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course.’

On our way to the Turkish fortress, our shoes collected the dust of Roman and early Muslim digs. We passed beaches where Jordanians above the age of twelve wore enough clothing for an English winter and children were stripped down to bathing suits. Mr Amrin said this was the ‘free beach’, one of the last that had not been sold to developers to serve the foreign tourists who no longer flew to Jordan or anywhere else in the Levant. Beside the shore, tiny plots of garden, bordered by squares of raised earth, sprouted green vegetables and spiky herbs.

Mr Amrin was, like most other native Jordanians, a monarchist. It was not the system he admired so much as the man, or the men. He talked about the dynasty that had given its name to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. His story began with the patriarch, Hussein bin Ali, already an old man when the British encouraged him to lead a tribal – in Lawrence’s fantasy, national – revolt against the Ottoman Empire. His sons, Abdallah, Feisal, Ali and Zeid, harassed the Turks in the east, while Britain advanced from the west. Hussein, meanwhile, practised politics, conspiracy and diplomacy in Mecca. The Arabs were more successful at fighting than Hussein was at politics. The old man subsequently lost Mecca itself to another of Britain’s Arab supplicants, the Al-Sauds from the inland desert of Nejd. Britain’s favourite among the Hashemite sons, Feisal, became King of Syria. His throne in Damascus lasted almost a year, until France took its share of the Ottoman Arab spoils and expelled him. In compensation and for its own purposes, Britain awarded him a richer prize, Iraq with its fecund earth and its oil. The British killed at least ten thousand Iraqis to impose Feisal upon them; and his dynasty lasted until a year after the British left and a mob got its hands on his grandson, Feisal II, in 1958. Another of old Hussein’s sons, Abdallah, founded Jordan – ‘Don’t forget the English and the French, of course’ – in the desert between Iraq and Palestine. Jordan was the booby prize. Until Abdallah, it was nothing more than the desert waste that kept Iraq and Palestine apart, the Crusaders’ Outre-Jourdain. But it was the only one of the four Hashemite crowns – Jordan, Syria, Iraq and the Hejaz – that survived. Abdallah’s successors were his son Talal, Talal’s son Hussein and Hussein’s son Abdallah, whose picture gazed upon the ruins.

‘I can say the late king was the creator of modern Jordan,’ Mr Amrin informed me, referring to Hussein. ‘He was humble. He listened to the radio to hear the people’s complaints. He created a sense of love among the people.’

And the son?

‘I believe the same is happening with Abdallah.’

The land around the citadel had been cleared since my 1973 visit, and there was no longer any need to scratch my way through the brush. We stopped outside the walls, as Lawrence did before the Turks surrendered. Above the vast, open Mamluke gate were two metal flags, painted by hand. ‘People think that is the Palestinian flag,’ Mr Amrin was pointing at one. ‘It isn’t. It’s the flag of the Great Arab Revolt.’ A British officer had designed the red – white – green – black standard of Sherif Hussein bin Ali’s Arab army in 1917, and most Arab flags were variants of it. The Lebanese with its green cedar between red stripes was the exception. The Palestinians – the last standard-bearers of Arab nationalism – adopted the Sherifian flag without alteration. With that flag came lies: that the Arabs were an independent nation, albeit temporarily separated into states with their own flags; that the Arabs would liberate Palestine; that Arab warriors had somehow defeated the Turkish, French and British empires; and that, one day, they would expel the American empire’s pampered child, Israel, from their midst.

An old gatekeeper asked us to pay a fee. When Mr Amrin explained my purpose, the man invited us in as his guests and sat down again in the shade of the massive iron gates. Mr Amrin pointed to some writing, carved into the wall, in beautiful Kufic Arabic script, a lavish calligraphic style that originated in Kufa, Iraq: ‘This inscription honours Kalsum al-Ghuri, one of the leaders who fought the Portuguese from 1505 to 1520.’ Portuguese raiders in the sixteenth century were discovering and claiming the more vulnerable parts of Arabia, India, Africa and the Americas. Kalsum al-Ghuri appeared to have saved Aqaba, and thus Syria, from the massacres of Muslims, Jews and heterodox Christians that accompanied Portugal’s Renaissance conquests further east.

Mr Amrin showed me, between the testament to the Mamluke chief al-Ghuri and a carved verse, or sura, from the Koran, ‘a secret passage to leave the place in wartime’. I looked deep inside the walls, where a tight corridor disappeared into darkness. We didn’t go in. Next came the courtyard, a stone parade ground protected by four high walls. ‘It’s very different, if you were here in ’73,’ he said. The difference was that I could see it. Then, weeds hid the well, the storerooms and the stairs below the ramparts. Now, it seemed like the Alamo, a barren shrine to a mythic struggle. On the stones where Ottoman levies had once borne aloft their Sultan-Caliph’s flag and guarded the southern approach of empire, Turkish officers chose surrender over siege and annihilation in 1917. If they had fought to the death, and if the Turkish governors to the north had not antagonized the Arabs of the cities by hanging their leaders, might their deaths have inspired their comrades to rally and repulse the British? Would the cry ‘Remember Aqaba!’ have saved the Ottoman Empire from destruction? Turkey still held the holy cities of Medina and Jerusalem in 1917, and many thousands of Turks would die before their armies retreated for ever from Arabia and Syria into Anatolia. If the Turks, like the British, had bribed and made false promises to the Arabs, they might have made the conquest of Syria too costly for the British to carry on. Like the American empire of the twenty-first century, Turkey took Arab acquiescence as a constant in all their calculations. It was a mistake.

We marched across the quad, up and down the circling staircases, and along the ramparts. We saw where the Turkish soldiers had slept, where they ate and the vast chambers in which they received their imperial commands from the Prophet’s successor on earth, the Sultan-Caliph, in Istanbul. The dates of the inscriptions accorded to the Muslim lunar calendar. ‘We are in the year 1422,’ Mr Amrin informed me. ‘That is 5762 or 63 in the Jewish calendar.’ The Muslim Year One was AD 622, the time of Hejira, Mohammed’s flight from Mecca to Medina.

What fascinated me was Mr Amrin’s interpretation of history. No two people, no two books, related the fables in the same way. The teller might be an Arab, an Armenian, a Turk or an Israeli. Each saw the world from the vantage of his religion, his sect, his school of philosophy and of law, his village, his tribe, his family. Mr Amrin was born in Kerak, known in Jordan for a beautiful Crusader castle and its Bedouin hospitality. ‘The first place the Muslims got to,’ he said, referring to Islam’s earliest forays outside the Arabian peninsula, ‘was Kerak. It was called Mu’ata, and it had a famous university. There, they had their first clash with the Christians.’ They lost. Two thousand Muslim horsemen needed more than belief to vanquish a force of 200,000 Byzantine regulars. ‘The Muslims had to withdraw,’ Mr Amrin said. ‘Three of their leaders were killed in that battle, and they elected Khalid bin Walid in the field.’ That was in AD 690. Seven years later, Khalid bin Walid led the Muslims to victory against Byzantium’s forces at Yarmouk. As the British and Arabs would dispatch a weakened Ottoman Empire north to its Anatolian heartland in 1917 and 1918, the Muslims of Arabia drove the Greeks from Syria to their defences beyond the Beilan Pass in Asia Minor. If the Byzantines had held at Yarmouk, if the Turks had stopped Lawrence at Aqaba, if …

Empires always get it wrong, something my country was learning, and denying, in the Middle East and the Asian subcontinent. The Ottomans, however nostalgic I may have been for the splendour of their court and the tolerance of their pre-First World War governors, also failed. ‘You know Kerak?’ Mr Amrin asked. I did. The Bedouin there had invited me to a huge mensef – a feast of boiled mutton and rice served on a communal platter that we ate without knives, forks or bread – twenty years before. Its Crusader castle had fascinated me. Its markets overflowed, its women were the most beautiful, its lambs the tastiest … I rhapsodized like an Arab court poet. Mr Amrin was not interested in my memories of Kerak. He had his own: ‘In 1910, Kerak had a famous revolt. The Ottomans sent people to the top of the tower and threw them down. Sixty-five people. They had refused to work in the army. This created anger against the Turks. After that, it was easy for Sherif Hussein bin Ali. The people were ready.’

An ingenious system of rain gutters and cisterns had kept the Turkish garrison in Aqaba supplied with water for men, animals and crops. A giant granite millstone had ground the wheat for their bread. Indicating the rust-red hills above Aqaba, Mr Amrin said the granite for the millstone and to construct the walls had come, like Lawrence’s surprise invasion, from there. When he said the rocks were from the pre-Cambrian period, I nodded as if I knew when that was.

‘This castle,’ Mr Amrin added, bringing the story forward several millennia, ‘was used as a khan for pilgrims from Egypt.’ The land route to Mecca passed through Aqaba, until Israel occupied the Negev and Eilat in 1949. Pilgrims, at least those who did not take the sea route from Suez to Jeddah, would have found within Aqaba’s caravanserai the water, the camel forage and the imperial protection they needed to continue south through the desert to Mecca and Medina. Those with more time or fervour added Jerusalem, where their father Abraham had attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar of stone that had, since the seventh century, been sheltered within a golden-domed mosque.

This citadel belonged in Aqaba, while the town’s steel and cement hotels and offices might have been in Marbella or Atlanta. New high-rise projects for Aqaba’s poor used gas heating in winter and electric air conditioners in summer, wasteful and unreliable. The Mamluke architect Khair Bey al Ala’ai knew what he was doing in the sixteenth century. He erected a fortress of clay roofs, arched and open to the breezes, with ramparts of stone mixed with clay. And it held until the twentieth century. ‘This is perfect for the climate,’ Mr Amrin said. ‘It’s cool in the sun, then warm in winter. It’s not like it is if you live in cement.’ Mr Amrin, since he had moved with his family from Kerak, lived in cement.

We ascended the staircase, following a Russian couple and their young daughter, to walk the ramparts. From the walls, Mr Amrin showed me his adopted city. ‘You see the buses?’ An array of camel-beige coaches glided through the town. ‘Aqaba is not just a tourist centre. It does business. Those buses are taking people to jobs.’ In the south-east, ships were waiting to dock. Mr Amrin said four ports made Aqaba a commercial hub: one harbour each for cement, phosphates, cargo and passengers. The caravan-like stream of buses carried workers back and forth to ports that worked around the clock. The sea trade meant that Aqaba could survive without tourists. Not all that well, if the squalor of its old city indicated anything, but well enough. There seemed to be two losers amidst the mirage of Aqaba’s prosperity: big hotel owners and Iraqi refugees. The hotel’s shareholders – who lived in America, Japan and Europe – could sell or wait or close down. The Iraqis starved.

‘You see those women in black?’ Mr Amrin asked me. This was later in the afternoon, when I was hotter and thirsty. We had left the fortress and were walking in the town’s commercial heart. All I wanted was a cup of coffee, but Mr Amrin, leading me with casual indifference past beckoning cafés and the fragrance of coffee boiling with cardamom, had a favourite place that seemed to lie miles away. ‘You see those ladies?’ he repeated. I saw them, squatting on the pavement, their backs against concrete walls, veils shading their foreheads. They were handsome-looking women, who, despite opening their palms to receive coins from strangers, retained more dignity than many who had grown up as beggars. ‘They are from Iraq. They were very rich people.’

I had seen women like them in Baghdad, once the most prosperous and modern city in the Arab world. In the first years after the war over Kuwait and under an international boycott, they sold their jewellery. Next came the silverware, the old books and the Irish linen that foreigners like myself could buy from outdoor stalls downtown in what Baghdadis called the ‘thieves’ market’. I was never sure whether the thieves were the sellers or the buyers. In time, the paintings went, then the extra furniture, the kitchen appliances, the better clothes. Finally, some of the women – and these had been among Iraq’s proudest and best-educated – sold themselves. A British television cameraman in Baghdad had told me he had sex with an upperclass Iraqi woman while her husband waited alone in a bare living room for them to finish. The cameraman then had coffee with them both, as if he had been an invited guest, before leaving a discreet gift of one hundred dollars. The American embargo starved and bled Iraq for twelve years, until the American invasion of 2003 made life there even more precarious.

The two Iraqi women in black had, nestling in the folds of their cotton cloaks, about three Jordanian dinars between them. With that, they could have bought a sandwich each at any of the cafés I longed to stop at. At the Movenpick, which was the sort of place they had once been accustomed to, they might have shared one cup of tea.