The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  Either I really was too weak to pull myself from luxury, or I was capable of risking more than everything. Not just my life, but a life I would have died to save.

  I felt the discomfort of grass growing again underfoot. It was a discomfort Masha didn’t feel, shotgunning along on what was all much more like a vacation to her. So long as we weren’t being carted to an emergency room she was always happy where we were. I needed to push.

  Under a veil, I was bugged that she wasn’t more jittery. (Jealous, maybe, that she didn’t live with the tug-of-war?) I knew she wanted to understand me, but I saw a tiny tear between us, in part because I knew it was wrong to pull her into my recklessness, and I knew what made me feel alive wasn’t going to change. The other part was physics: if one thing moves and another stays, they don’t end up in the same place.

  IT WAS THURSDAY and we were late for the beach. They rent cars in Dubai all night long, and so we backtracked. Fujairah, said the man handing me keys, was only two hours away. I didn’t tell him what I’d just done.

  Masha and I made camp on the brittle coastline by the sand south of Dibba. I produced a stubby bottle of Old Monk rum. In the morning, there were warm waves at our feet and jellyfish in the sea.

  FROM: MASHA

  RE: (NO SUBJECT)

  SAT AT 5:48 AM

  I want to know you better, I want to get inside your head and see the way you think so i can understand what your silence means, what your faces mean, what everything about you means.

  CHAPTER 3

  |

  KUWAIT

  THE WESTERN PERCEPTION OF ISLAM DEPARTMENT

  WHEN MASHA WENT BACK to the United States, the icy tower felt colder. I leaped at every chance to get out. This time, it was my job that gave me a little fix. It was a confuddling job whenever I tried to explain it to friends back home, but I could say something clear this week: I was the twenty-two-year-old “trip leader” to Kuwait for twenty university students. My job was to shuttle everyone along, and to keep things safe.

  “Woo! Spring break Kuwait!” I joked. That time last year, I’d been permanently drunk on my own spring break in Nicaragua. Now, I was “in charge.”

  With eight thousand dollars wrapped in a paper envelope and tucked away in my backpack, I packed onto a bus for the Dubai Airport. Terminal 2 is detached from the main concourse, where mostly budget flights leave daily for the home countries of those who have escaped their home countries. Kuwait isn’t one of those places. We were on a kind of educational trip up and over the revolutions in Bahrain where students had been forbidden to go, to find things like cultural insight.

  We launched out of Dubai and left The World Islands behind. In less time than it took to drive from Abu Dhabi to Dubai, we were descending over a stretch of barren, oil-caked desert—a sandbox sprouting spiny TV antennae from last century.

  FOLLOWING THE USUAL gravitational forces of tourism in most major Gulf cities, our first destination was the Grand Mosque. Our tour guide was a short man with a long beard in thick black-rimmed glasses who spoke bits and larger bits of a million languages and answered his phone with, “I hope it’s not my wife!” He knew just how to make us laugh.

  He handed me his card: “Khalil. GRAND MOSQUE: western perception of islam dept.”

  I blinked. I read it again.

  Gulf countries appear, for the most part, to include young and successful parvenus who don’t seem to need your help or give half a damn what you think, but it isn’t so. In Kuwait especially, where George Bush the First finds his framed place among family photos, allies are more precious than gold, and blood runs thicker than oil.

  Perceptions are monitored and framed in a manner made possible by Kuwait’s particular circumstances: small population, strong governmental oversight, little economic disparity among citizens, a high percentage of foreign workers, money. Religiosity runs high, too, especially here at the mosque—coupled, apparently, with a deep interest in my home.

  In the late 1980s as the Grand Mosque construction was completed, Kuwait played the role of principal financier for the first-ever construction of a mosque in New York. The Kuwaiti emir laid the cornerstone of that glass and granite place I knew on 96th Street as the home of the Islamic Cultural Center.

  Khalil guided our group into the subdued prayer hall, floored in blue carpet with room for ten thousand men. There is space for about a thousand women in an adjoining hall. Khalil pointed to the dome 141 feet high, marked with the ninety-nine names for God. His phone rang.

  “I hope it’s not my wife!”

  At the end of Khalil’s tour, I turned over the back of a tissue box to find a list of “Projects of the Grand Mosque.” Number one, in Arabic: “Fatwa phone service, direct dial ‘149.’ ” Number one, in English: “Providing a fatwa (consultation) service.” A fatwa is literally an “opinion”; more specifically, it is a decision made on a point of law by a mufti, a legal expert who interprets Sharia law.

  It was important that we Anglophones knew the fatwa process was a consultation, even if we weren’t involved. It was important that we understood how Islam functioned, and not just what the buildings looked like. Khalil’s office is now the Western Perception of Islam Center. On wp-islam.com, their mission is very clear: “The WPIC primary goal is to emerge as a renowned and reputable center, recognized in the West as a trusted source of information.”

  Recognized in the West.

  The approval of the “others” was paramount. They cared about our opinion? This was high school again: life and death dramas begat by what to wear. Another’s gaze is a powerful thing . . . I see you conscious of me, and I grow more self-conscious. Talking, I make and break and remake eye contact—don’t we all?—because most other people’s eyes are deep enough to lose yourself in, if you’re willing.

  It was nice to know the Grand Mufti of Kuwait was thinking about me, too. It was nice to see the proof in brick and mortar—or reinforced marble and concrete with teakwood doors. It was comforting to realize my Winter Semiformal date was as worried about what she was wearing as I was, and that our mutual fear of rejection took root in a much deeper similarity.

  As Americans, we’ve enjoyed the comfort of confidence on a global scale, since the Marshall Plan maybe, or since Benjamin Franklin went to France and found that “every body presented me their ladies.” We’re loved everywhere we care about, or we’re hated by the reprobates of the world. We’ve thrived by responding to our every rejection with rage or silence. We are never unknown, and we have no need for nuance, and we’ll never say “sorry” on the playground.

  We’re not afraid of making fun of anyone—or, something even more deadly as a grade school tactic: pretending they don’t exist.

  But if I was leaving behind childish things, dismissal wasn’t a legitimate coping mechanism anymore. The whole point of coming here was to find an alternative to the way I saw this other place—an alternative to easy dismissal or intentional ignorance, so often those face-saving masks for fear.

  I was no longer just looking. It was as if I had been watching the world sleep and it opened its eyes to catch me. There was no ignoring this simple thing anymore: when I looked into new eyes, those eyes were looking back, too.

  Something was collapsing. My whole life I had liked believing that the easiest way to find truth was to be entirely trusting, and so I was unskeptical. I couldn’t sustain that anymore: We were all deciding how to perform. None of my interactions could be fully trusted anymore.

  That’s growing up, or so they say. “Trusting” is a nice euphemism for naive, which is a nice euphemism for stupid.

  One more young person’s transition: even my methods for seeking certainty were suspect.

  The traditional authorities I looked to were on trial, too, and there was no one left to turn to but the road. All this was disorienting, and unavoidable. As my understanding of new people slipped, I became blurrier in my own head. Who was I really if I didn’t
know who I was to other people? I could only bounce myself against these blank Others, hoping to identify myself by discovering the way they saw me.

  I could understand why a Muslim’s perception of the Western perception of Muslims could be so important. I felt how deeply I wanted to understand their perception of me. As the West Indian French psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon wrote in Black Skin, White Masks: “I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world.”

  At the Western Perception of Islam Center, I looked at Khalil looking at me looking at Kuwait looking at Westerners looking at Islam, and then I imagined how Islam saw the West and America and Jewishness and whiteness and Judaism—and then all that came back to filter into my gaze toward Islam, and Khalil would see all that in my eyes, and I would see all that in his.

  I would dive as far as I could toward truth, and then I would hold it in my head and trust Khalil to see through me. And then, the final trick: If I knew what he knew, I had control again—as if I were both actor and playwright. I could build something stable from that vantage.

  Khalil’s business card was like an invitation to playact together.

  KUWAIT WAS SUPERFICIAL, and Kuwait was mysterious. Kuwaitis said, Four days only?! Back in Abu Dhabi they gasped, Four whole days?!

  The difference, it seemed, was whether you wanted to take the place at face value—intercontinental buffets and liquorless bars—or whether you wanted to study the faces you saw. Theatergoer or theater critic.

  It was an unexpected place, and for four days I flitted about, ignorant of what was there for its own sake, and what was there to please the visitors. We stopped at the modern art museum, and the headquarters of the Kuwaiti Oil Company. We took the day-tripper’s ferry to Failaka Island forty-minutes offshore, swarming with jet skis and pockmarked by Iraqi refuse from the First Gulf War. Behind a chain-link fence: a graveyard of hellish, rusty Russian trucks and tanks and howitzers. There are Greek ruins, too, but they were off-limits; there were active digs but no one digging, and I never knew if the gates were locked with apathy or overprotection. We passed bullet holes and angry graffiti on the road by the Baskin-Robbins.

  Kuwait’s Eiffel Tower is not the National Museum (designed by a Frenchman), but a functional landmark (designed by a Dane). Every year (or decade, as necessary), Lonely Planet and Explorer choose images for their guidebooks’ covers, seeking ones that are both representative and alluring: Pakistan boasts majestic, snow-topped mountains; Saudi Arabia fronts the angular domes of Medina’s Quba Mosque. Kuwait’s good side, in the eyes of both publishers, is the two giant balls of the thirty-two-year-old Kuwait Towers. Both balls are filled with water; the tallest, which reaches 187 meters at the top, also has a restaurant. That’s where we ate on our first night, savoring the most authentic and traditional Gulfi fare: the intercontinental buffet.

  When we seek authentic, we seek something of single origins, as if anything symbolic of ours will ever have one lineage after hundreds of millennia as a species. But what makes the Khalij Khaliji, the Gulf “Gulfi,” is that particular adoption of damn near everything, of all lineages, with histories old and young and who-the-hell-cares.

  We ascended to Ofok Restaurant. The name is Arabic for “horizons,” and is pronounced just like you stubbed your toe really, really hard.

  In the evening south of Kuwait City, we drove to the home of astronomer Adel Hassan Al-Saadoun, known as the Al-Fintas Astronomical Observatory, also known as Aladdin House. The manor is half Arabian archways and gardens, half American southwest stone facade, half Ukrainian bud domes, and every inch a collector’s fantasyland. He said that he conceived of the design in his dreams.

  Every wall drips with things, wrapping around the house and spilling onto the floor. Walls of model cars, cologne bottles, paintings, antique Coke bottles, pictures of the Bushes. One room has a miniature, operational model coal factory; next door among audio trinkets is an original Edison gold-mounted wax cylinder from 1904. The song: “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?”

  It was Friday night—the first weekend night here, the Middle East’s Saturday—and I tried to think of quips about our easy survival on Kuwait’s desert island. I got nowhere, maybe because I had already short-circuited from silliness: I wandered here as the tour guide to places I’d never been, as the recipient of questions I asked myself, choosing a route for two dozen young people when I had no idea where I wanted to be.

  I also had no idea what the students thought of it all. They might have assumed, being good students, that I had led them here with a clear purpose. They might have whirred around Kuwait City and felt This is Kuwait! and been happy.

  But my questions weren’t answered here, and the need for movement was swelling again. With my head elsewhere, it took great attention to my attention to keep the group on track.

  Later, I would leave the eight thousand dollars in my bag at an outdoor Egyptian restaurant in a central square. The Egyptians were holding it for me when I got back, and we took grinning photos together. I might have learned something about responsibility or consequences or something, but I didn’t. I just wanted to get moving.

  The astronomer was an insatiable traveler, too. He looked at stars and at human progress and sought something else always, some other border to cross. Every year, he says, he tries to travel to a new country. I asked him about this year’s target. “North Korea,” he said. “Two weeks.”

  CHAPTER 4

  |

  OMAN

  GO FOR IT! DON’T DO IT! JUMP!

  MY JOB BEGAN TO ask less and less of me, and in the spaces it left, I had nothing but time to reflect, reflect, reflect. I had been in the Emirates for eight months now, watching my itch to escape manifest in spastic jaunts, and seeing the way those trips showed what didn’t work far more than what would. Like the astronomer, I asked for newness for the sake of newness.

  I remembered a paper fixed above my grandmother’s computer when I was a boy, something she’d transcribed from a dream. It said:

  DO SOMETHING. DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING!

  I can still picture the way it was taped, and the color of her computer desk. At ninety-seven, she still feels it. DO SOMETHING! But what?

  As a college grad entering the world, I sneaked things-I-still-remembered-from-school into conversations. My absolute favorite cocktail tidbit went like this: the prehistoric Lapita people had a habit of setting out into the empty ocean, looking for new islands to settle. If they found one, great. If not, they harnessed the eternally westward tradewinds and sailed home.

  Home, outward, home, outward, home. It was the second-born and their younger siblings who explored; eldest sons got the homestead, and were content to rule their tropical tracts. It had always resonated: I was a second son of a second son of a second son of a second son. Maybe we’d always been itchy.

  Four months earlier, my first trip away from the hub was to Oman. It was a blank place to me, and a rare one in this part of the world where countries’ reputations generally precede them. When I was downing Canopy or seven beers deep at PJ O’Reilly’s Irish Pub in Le Royal Méridien hotel, I thought often about Oman. I didn’t feel empty-handed when I’d come home. What was it I’d loved so much?

  TO THE SOUND OF the afternoon call to prayer, we set off in our rented Nissan toward Oman. Just like the Lapita: off the island eastward.

  For Gaar, Rachel and me, Oman had all the draws of a good road trip: it was reachable by car, and everyone said it was fantastic. (If everyone had said it was an unrepentant hellhole, I’d’ve been equally committed.)

  Gaar was my only “program coordinator” co-hiree, brought to do administrative anythings, and Rachel was more like a teaching assistant in the army of fresh alums who substituted for the lack of upperclassmen in the month-old university. Rachel was an NYU grad from a Philadelphia
mainline suburb down the street from my Quaker school. Gaar was her classmate, and a trained figure skater from a town of about three thousand in Wisconsin. For all of us, Abu Dhabi had replaced New York as “home.”

  Our car of three sped away from the eyes of city-center radars, toward the oasis city of Al Ain, where we aimed to cross the border. At the edge of the greenery, I found myself having trouble finding the biggest thing I’d ever looked for—we knew it was there, the three million people doing three million things—but according to the road signs, the entire country was missing.

  Gaar asked a shop owner in Arabic where we could find Oman, and I listened as he gave us directions that were clear, and invited us to the dead-end from which we’d just retreated. I tried to clarify. And in that moment, he said something that I’d heard so many times before gently and in surprise, this time curt and with disdain: “Do you speak Arabic?”

  I had never had a relationship that was purely based on Arabic. Masha and I made our initial sorties in its three-letter roots, but we had our East Coast biographies to soften the blows. Even Arabs I’d met and known only through Arabic had understood that it was a foreign language for me, taking my words at more (or less) than face value, and giving me more credit than I pronounced. But here I was assumed to be an Arabophone. The jab echoed the caustic “Do you speak English?” that you might hear after failing again and again to listen to instructions. The assumption: of course you do, fluently, but you’re too dumb to listen. In his assumptions, the shopkeeper was—in a way so rare and re-encouraging—a total shit.