The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

by Adam Valen Levinson

  We were lost within seconds. An alternative route to the border appeared: a sand-blown carriageway known only as “Truck Road.” As darkness fell, we hurried toward Oman both with and against the stampede of enormous semis carrying livestock and god-knows-what, slowing only for camel crossings as farmers returned from the plains. Squinting through the headlights and the froth of sand blotting them out, Gaar might have convinced me we were in a Wisconsin blizzard.

  And then we were there, waiting outside the UAE exit controls for the green light to drive our insured rental car into the Omani mountains.

  And they said no.

  We had one form, but we lacked another, something signed from the rental company in support of our trip. Turn around, they said. Go home.

  On the fringes of the Emirati cellphone network, we got the airport Thrifty Car Rental on the line, promising to send faxes as we ate “Chili Cheese”-flavored Philippine-made snacks called Boy Bawang and blasted Ke$ha from the car stereo for all the traveling truckers.

  The fax machines were silent. We waited in one of the crossing’s trillion identically nondescript offices, manned by an administrator and an officer in a white shirt puffing lazily on a cigarette.

  “Is he Indian?” The administrator asked about our Thrifty contact.

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  We laughed to belong. As the adage has it, When the Syrian guards the Emirati border while the Egyptian watches, the nice Jewish boy and girl and the gay man don’t pick fights.

  So we called again, pleading for an e-mail. And our office mates couldn’t access their own accounts. In their prevailing apathy, they acquiesced to trade seats and allowed me the guard’s chair at the border crossing office to sign into my e-mail. And voilà. Print.

  The white-shirted official took a look. “But this is just insurance.”

  “Yes?” A pause. Again, the faint odor of apathy.

  “Okay. We’ll wave you through.”

  And as my brain did dizzy somersaults and tied itself in knots, I mouthed to the team: It’s the same form. They had seen this an hour ago.

  A list of insurance options, with just one ticked off, bedazzled with Thrifty letterhead—it couldn’t be enough.

  It wasn’t. We waited and waited to be waved on to the next checkpoint, but no one ever came. And when I went looking for our mercifully impatient officer, he had lost himself among the sameness of the place. The supervisor came.

  “Go back to Abu Dhabi. Hard copy.”

  Our time on the road kept slipping away, but I kept trying to think. In a place where the systems don’t make sense, the solutions don’t have to make sense either.

  I wandered into other offices, speaking Arabic but looking as American and haggard as a wet flag. I signed on to sleeping computers with abandon, foraging for the letters Thrifty assured me they’d sent twice. Nothing worked, and we were on our own.

  But in the shadows by the offices, one blue-shirted Omani looked listless. He was delighted to speak in not-English and committed to our hunt for a working Internet and printer. When we got back into my e-mail, the promised attachment had been there all along, scanned through twice.

  “In the name of God, most Gracious, most merciful,” it said at the top in plain bold typeface, as all documents do in Islamically influenced bureaucracies. The Basmala, as it’s called, is ubiquitous in spoken and written contexts. And the Arabic root from which both grace and mercy come, means “pity, compassion, human understanding.”

  Two separate e-mails delayed in the ether, one Omani’s compassion and a dash of pity, and more than two hours later, I marched toward Oman, insofar as a man can march in the backseat of a Nissan Altima, jaw clenched and ready for anything.

  THIS BORDER IS NOT one-dimensional like the fine fountain pen line between the United States and Canada—the vague area between the Emirati backdoor and the entrance to Oman could be drawn faithfully with a crayon on a globe. The countries only finalized their border demarcation in 2008, after a decade of discussion. After ten minutes of driving through no-man’s-land, we were in every man’s land.

  Fiftyish men puffed fiftyish shishas, drank tea, and watched us move stiffly in the way only outsiders can at a roadside café a half hour into the country. A huge projector blasted Spanish soccer to the going-out crowd of northwestern Oman. The coffee tasted dark and sweet, not like the light brew served too often in the Emirates, and the mint tea smelled like Morocco and older recipes. I went to ask for more coals for the shisha.

  “You speak Arabic?” the owner asked me.

  “Ya‘atamad ‘al yom,” I said. It was my go-to joke when I had no intention of hiding my foreignness: depends on the day.

  A minute later, he was introducing me to his favorite customers—a group of five Omani men—and we three Americans were welcomed into their circle.

  We talked about soccer, about Oman, and about finding a wife for the café owner in Washington. Then we drew them our fledgling travel plans on a napkin, to Muscat and Nizwa and onward. I mentioned the difficulties of making reservations anywhere without phones or Internet.

  “Ahmed, go get a SIM from the car.”

  My useless Emirati phone was taken from me, popped open, and charged with more credit than I’d ever use. And after sitting for hours, Malik paid for everything we’d touched during the entire night.

  “No, no,” said a friend from across the table as we protested and squirmed at the niceness. “He’s the boss.”

  WE NEVER MADE IT to Muscat, where we’d planned to stay the night. We slept in Malik’s guesthouse. As it turned out, he also had morning plans to head to Nizwa and we would follow him. You do not say no to these offers. You do not say, well, it sounds nice, but it just seems a little more convenient to wake up one hour closer to the next stop in the book of my to-do list, checked out from the National Library of Missing the Pointism. Like a smoke detector in a bakery, the alarm that may sound in your head as you ask yourself, What’s in it for the other guy? is completely obsolete—here, open doors are the default. It’s not fire, it’s cookies.

  I often heard my traveling office mates say, Omanis are the nicest! It swirled around expat roadtrippers like a given truth.

  Malik was also Big Man On Campus in the costal town of Saham. Every neighbor, every kid on the beach, every guy in the streets or stooping it was a friend. He greeted the harbor security guard like an old buddy, and we drove through the gate toward the fishing ships.

  “Asmak Wahid, Asmak Ithnayn,” I read the names. Fish One, Fish Two. “Not very imaginative.” Malik laughed. Then he told me his family owned some of those boats.

  The next day at seven, an elderly Indian cook brought us hot, fresh roti and bottomless cups of sweet tea with milk. We set off for Nizwa, Gaar and Rachel following with our rental, Malik and I blasting Arabic jams in his hulking Lexus SUV.

  The mountains of the Omani interior are like blurry photographs—up close, towering piles of dirt and earthen rubble, but from afar, sharp and rugged like camels’ toenails.

  We pulled over frequently onto the shoulder. Malik would say something fast and confident over the phone and some acquaintance would skitter over the concrete divider and across the lanes of the highway to deposit jugs of water, or a shisha, or a cooler full of meat into the trunk. We gathered food and people until we parked and piled into two packed four-by-fours to head into a wadi, a valley—this one a rocky riverbed lined with high mountain walls and crystal-clear swimming pools. And still the tea flowed into glasses, poured from the passenger’s seat even as we rumbled through the valley. Oh, how on-the-nose the metaphors were: no matter how rocky the road or how cramped the backseat (four gangly grown men), hospitality prevails.

  We swam and jumped off rocks as a whole goat simmered in a pot, engulfed in the flame of dry kindling. We basked in the chilled mountain runoff under blistering sunshine. And then we ate: some things I’d never imagined before—goat’s liver, kidneys, lungs and brain—a
nd some things I’d forgotten about since eighth grade, like Mountain Dew, the inbred cousin of decent soda and Gatorade.

  “Will the brain make you stronger if you eat it?”

  “Only if it was a smart goat,” Malik’s friend Doctor Ali answered. “If it was a smart goat, it wouldn’t have gotten slaughtered.”

  So we sat in precious shade, eating dumb goat brain and daring one another to eat more. Doctor Ali mongered the eyeballs. At first, I thought my squeamishness was the product of my nurture, but no: everyone else thought eyeballs were gross, too.

  That evening we drove nine thousand feet up into Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain aptly named for its coat of well-watered shrubbery. We made camp tentless in ten-dollar blankets as night fell and pushed the heat of the desert afternoon far, far below. It was freezing. I had forgotten pants.

  As the day progressed, the Arabic I had once understood was lost entirely to the rapid-fire Omani dialect. For long moments I contented myself to clutch at familiar-sounding words. In longer moments, the friends spoke English while Malik did not, and we Americans sometimes slipped back into the easy pattern of our own language with un-Omani manners. In the dark as I was chatting with Doctor Ali, I realized Malik wasn’t with us. He had drifted toward the cars, away from everyone. I thought of the highway deliveries, how he appeared as the image of good friend confidence, and now I had pushed him away with the way that I spoke. That change required a whole new meeting—before, I was the foreigner, but English made him the stranger at his own campfire.

  I felt guilty when I tried to sleep, and freezing cold.

  Halfway through the night, I had the bright idea to spoon the fire, embers still glowing and giving off much more heat and hope than my thin, too-short blanket. With my head on a rock, I was comfy and cozy and warm. I stayed asleep as our ten hosts woke for the predawn prayer, while the embers alit and fire burned holes through my blanket.

  I awoke smelling faintly like smoked meats.

  But in the high-altitude daze of the morning, nothing seemed to matter—I was being taken care of. Blankets weren’t meant to last, tea was delivered to me at the ashen fire pit, and we switchbacked back down to Nizwa. It was true what the road trippers said about Omanis. In a time of mistrust, I was glad when certain stereotypes could withstand their first challenge.

  This had not been the playacting I would see in Kuwait. I would have dueled to defend the honor of this experience as a transparent and true one. We weren’t just performing here, I was sure of it.

  I wanted the freedom to act as anyone at all, but I was getting exhausted from all that time on stage. Always being on. Comforted by Malik and his crew at a moment I felt I had no masks on, I found new energy, a trust in simple connections that didn’t get tangled up in back-and-forth assumptions and deductions about the Other.

  We parted ways at the bottom of the mountain.

  SOMEWHERE AROUND THE TWENTIETH YEAR of the Islamic calendar, Jabir ibn-Zayd was born in a village near Nizwa. If we were noticing contemporary cultural trends in the place that would be demarcated “Oman,” this was when they may have begun.

  Jabir moved up the waterway to Basra, in present-day Iraq, and began to gather stories about Muhammad, and his sayings, from followers who had been close to him. These are the kinds of accounts that make up the collections of hadith, the “traditions.” After the Quran, the hadith are the primary manuals for every element of Islamic life, from marriage to mortgages, from fighting to peacemaking to the best day to travel. (“The Prophet . . . liked to set out on a journey on Thursdays,” says one of the hadith. That might have explained our Wednesday night trouble at the border.)

  Scholars taught their understandings, dissonant interpretations begat sects, and sectarianism did what it always does. Jabir became the first imam for the persecuted school of thought that would later be known as Ibadi. (Almost nothing is known about Abdullah ibn Ibad, the namesake of Ibadism.) It remains the only Islamic school of thought, known as a madhhab, that is neither Sunni nor Shia.

  I looked up madhhab, which comes from the simple verb “to go,” in the green dictionary every Arabic student keeps like a dog-eared bible. It has a rich entry. It begins: “Going, leave, departure; way out, escape (from); manner followed, adopted procedure or policy, road entered upon . . .”

  Five imams later, early Ibadis returned to Oman; they escaped the discrimination of the caliphate to the far corner of the Arabian Peninsula, into the craggy Hajar Mountains. Smaller proselytizing groups had gone from Basra to North Africa and the Yemeni hinterland, but only in Oman did they continue to thrive.

  Now, roughly three-quarters of the modern Omani population is Ibadi, as is a large proportion of Zanzibar, once within the coastal trading empire of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oman. Smaller Ibadi communities still exist in the Mzab Valley of Algeria and the Nafusa Mountains in Libya, and on a Tunisian island called Djerba.

  Extraneous to the frequent discussions of Sunni-Shia difference, and because they number less than three million worldwide, Ibadis are simply less familiar to the world. I asked the Internet about them.

  On the forum of an online school for Sunni Islamic study, one poster asked, “What to Do about My Ibadi Roommates,” wondering if he could live with Ibadis (he says they have great morals and know Arabic, which he’d like to learn). The sheikh answered: “It is recommended you choose Sunni housemates.”

  Of course, that wasn’t some grand dictum of Sunnism, but it sure didn’t seem like it would have been the response from the Ibadi madhhab. In 1931, during the period when European powers salivated for new territory and Oman had effectively become a British Protectorate (after a thirty-eight-minute war), W. H. Ingrams wrote: “If one looks for a parallel sect in Christianity, I should consider the Baptists or other Puritans to be nearest them, though my experience of both, having lived for a year in a country of Baptists and Methodists, and for eight in a country of Ibathis, would lead me to choose the Ibathis as being the most tolerant people in the matter of religion I have known.”

  Perhaps he had eaten goat with Malik’s grandfather in the wadi near Nizwa: “Ibathis consider others mistaken, as who does not, but they mix freely with all, and eat with even an infidel like myself.”

  For me, Ibadi tradition was something whispered in the background, and I knew it only through what I saw—the campsite on the Green Mountain, and guys like Malik.

  GUARDED BY EMPTY TOLLBOOTHS not yet in commission, the smooth highway back to Muscat runs high along the coast. Prisoner to the deranged Lady Gaga-On-Repeat singalong my tripmates had organized for themselves in the front, I suggested a turnoff at the signs for Hawiyat Najm Park, a giant sinkhole in the middle of a quiet local garden. It takes its name from the supposed means of its creation: “The Fall of a Star.” It is more than seventy feet from the sinkhole’s rim to the endlessly deep sapphire water below, and it made sense to me to try and jump off the edge.

  I peered down at it over my toes. If I could clear a six-foot ledge, I might make it. Later, I watched Rachel’s video from below.

  Gaar says quietly, “Emergency is 9-9-9-9.”

  “We don’t have a phone,” says Rachel.

  “I really think you’re going to fall, tumble down. Tumble,” Gaar shouts to me. Hawiya—“fall”—can also mean “tumble.”

  I stand for a few minutes looking down, hands on my knees, frozen. I am afraid of everything. I did not trust that I was on solid ground until my toes were hanging off the edge of a cliff. Now they were, and I was undeniably attached to something solid—it was so much harder to give that up. But that was the point, wasn’t it? To see what I could let go of and still survive? I looked down twelve of my heights and made symbols of bigger things out of every potential action and inaction.

  “You’re thinking about it too much,” Gaar says.

  Hawiya can also mean “identity.”

  I felt like I was playing host to fraternal twins, one overthinking, and the other belligerent: DO SOMETHING
. DO SOMETHING! DO SOMETHING! But one could silence the other at times. As Sam Hamilton’s second son says in Steinbeck’s East of Eden: “Sometimes a man wants to be stupid if it lets him do a thing his cleverness forbids.”

  Gaar counts from ten, and I push off from the ground, rolling slightly in the air. Behind the camera, Rachel gives a tiny squeal.

  I felt a weight lifted, but as I swam back to shore I felt it still. I had wanted to be in the air, and I had wanted to come down, but mostly I wanted to face that microscopic moment where a decision is made, where the impulse to do overcomes all those who say, Do not.

  There is a muscle somewhere between your ears that gives the final authorization for your legs to swing out of bed in the morning, for your torso to plunge into cold water, for your finger to confirm an in-app purchase. There is friction on that threshold, and it can be sanded smooth with time. But I rubbed my arms and floated and knew I was still afraid. Fear itself.

  I climbed back up the stairs. If I could do it twice, I thought . . . well, then I’d have done it twice. There were women in headscarves watching me from the park now, with a little boy sitting on the stone wall of the sinkhole. Two Omani men below were shouting confusing encouragement.

  “Go for it! Don’t do it! Jump!” they said.

  This was the moment that would marinate and crop up at moments on my couch and at the Emirates Palace and Le Royal Méridien between when I ordered my Guinnesses and when they were delivered. The thing that fueled me was the limit that fear defined, between off-limits and not. I was nothing if I didn’t confront that limit, and push it to see if it would give way to something else.

  At that moment, though, it was all prove-you-wrong showmanship. “Don’t jump! Do it!” the Omanis yelled.

  “Lestu dijaaj,” I called. It might have meant “I’m not a chicken” in formal, Quranic Arabic, but the idiom was meaningless out of English. The onlookers looked puzzled. It was insulting to their powers of observation, denying something that should have been obvious by my patent lack of feathers and wattle.