It was not a dramatic rebirth – the Mountain of the Prophet Shu’ayb is an unremarkable hump. Shu’ayb himself was still seventeen generations off; by his time mankind would be back to its wicked old ways. But for the moment it was a clean start, the world an empty stage.
Enter Sam. Sam ibn Nuh, or Shem the son of Noah, knew that the future of humanity lay in his loins and in those of his brothers Ham and Yafith. He was to beget and give his name to the entire Semitic race: perhaps it was the weight of this awesome responsibility which, the medieval traveller Ibn al-Mujawir says, he wished to alleviate by finding a place ‘with light water and a temperate healthy climate’. This stony and windswept mountain would not do, but 4,500 feet below and half a day’s journey to the south-east was a plain ringed by rocky peaks, where the flood had left a rich layer of silt.
This was the spot. Sam bounded down the mountain and pegged out a foundation trench, only to have his guideline stolen by a bird. The bird flew off with the line and dropped it on the east side of the plain. To Sam, this was a clear sign. So it was there, on the future site of the Palace of Ghumdan, under the rising of Taurus with Venus and Mars in conjunction, that he came to build the world’s first city: San’a.
Elsewhere, the receding floodwater had revealed a chain of mountains running from north to south, broken by occasional hollows and plateaux where, as in the plain of San’a, alluvial deposits would attract settlers. To the west and south the mountains ended abruptly in jagged escarpments overlooking plains; the plains lay just above sea-level and were hot and sticky but more fertile still. Eastwards, the mountains shelved into a desert which, even when Sam’s progeny had multiplied, would remain empty except for outlaws and oilmen. Far to the south-east and close to the desert’s fringe was a deep scar of a valley, hemmed in by barren steppes, where one of Sam’s descendants would settle, giving it his nickname Hadramawt – Death Has Come.
So the veil was drawn back from the rucked-up corner of Arabia called Yemen, being on the right side, yamin, of the Ka’bah of Mecca; or because it is blessed with yumn, felicity; or after Yamin the brother of Hadramawt.
All this, some say, is nonsense. Around the beginning of the Christian era San’a grew from an outpost where the road from Marib, capital of the ancient kingdom of Saba, meets the watershed; Hadramawt is just another pre-Arabic name, the traditional etymology a fanciful back-projection; Yemen, al-yaman, simply means ‘the south’.
The truth is that Yemen’s distant past is still obscure. Archaeology has hardly begun to come up with solid facts. Early Yemeni historians, though, produced their own interpretation using genealogy. At the base of the family tree comes Sam. Higher up is Sam’s great-grandson, the Prophet Hud. Hud’s son Qahtan is at the top of the trunk, and from him spring all the South Arabian tribes, branching across the map of Yemen and beyond. In the process, the names of people and places have become inextricably intertwined: the family tree has grown luxuriantly, fed by the genealogists on a rich mulch of eponyms and toponyms. To get to know Yemen as the Yemenis see it means clambering around this tree, one which spreads vertically through time and horizontally through space. History and geography, people and land, are inseparable.
The new school of historians are doing a hatchet-job on the family tree, questioning the very existence of the traditional ancestors. But in the end it hardly matters who is right. Whether Qahtan – the central figure, the South Arabian progenitor – was an actual person or not, he represents a people who share a distinctive culture, one which has lasted for at least three thousand years.
As for the story of Sam, even if it is a legend, it is the South Arabians’ Genesis.
My landfall in San’a was more prosaic than Sam’s. The Ethiopian Boeing lurched and creaked its way down through layers of turbulence. For the last couple of minutes before landing, the plane circled over the city. It was not as I had expected.
Like those desert plants which grow suddenly after decades of suspended animation, San’a had shot out suckers, tentacles of development. In the past, arrival had always been through its gates; the principal entrance, Bab al-Yaman, had come to be seen as an architectural statement of the city’s famed introversion, emphasized perhaps by a row of severed traitors’ heads along the parapet, its gates shut at night, putting a stop to all movement. Now you arrived along roads of half-finished buildings. The statement of entry had been upstaged by a preamble of petrol stations.
I was afraid that San’a, with the dissipation of its dramatic presence, might have lost something of its soul. But, just as Ingres had conjured up the East in his Paris studio – and sanitized it, giving us the odalisques but not the odours, the eunuchs but not the screams of castration – so I had invented San’a in Oxford. The mistake had been to think of it as a museum.
Today, the ribbons of building have joined into an all-but seamless urban weave. San’a is busy, at times frenetic. It suffers from traffic jams and lack of planning. But it is lively, diverse and – even with the country’s current economic difficulties – still prosperous. What I had imagined to be the timeless calm of an ancient walled city was stagnation, a comatose sleep ended by the brute kiss of revolution.
In the Old City the heart still beats. The noise of al-Zumur, the quarter named after a mosque founded in 1547 by Uzdimir Pasha, the Ottoman conqueror of San’a, pulsates outside the front door: car horns, motor-cycle taxis, two egg-sellers competing with loudhailers, the cassette shop across the road, the crackle and pop of roasting black peas. Yesterday there was a man with wild hair and a drum extemporizing songs, lays of old Baghdad (not about Harun al-Rashid, but Saddam Husayn and his adversary, George Bush: ‘O would that I were a bird,’ says Saddam. ‘For I would land on Bush’s head and …’ – the crowd is in suspense – ‘… and shit on it!’). And last Ramadan, every day before the sunset prayer, a fettered man would call for alms beneath my window; a taxi driver who had crashed, he was in gaol until he could collect the blood-money for his dead passengers. His insurance policy had been with God; now, coin by coin, the Faithful were paying out his claim. The sounds all float up from four floors below, a distraction to writing. So, San’ani houses being tall, I’ll move up another couple.
From here the ring of mountains surrounding the San’a plain can be seen in full; a tradition says they flew from Sinai to Yemen in shock when Moses asked to see the face of God. Over there is the place where Sam first began building, and through the other window is Jabal Nuqum, near the base of which the bird dropped his guideline. Even this is hardly the best place to be writing, this belvedere on the roof; it is too easy to get carried away by the skyline of which you are a part. But up here, among the birds and the occasional flying plastic bag, street noises are far away, and you could be sitting in a jewelled casket – the room is tiny, eight feet by five, and lit by coloured glass windows. It is sometimes called a zahrah – in the dictionary, ‘a flower/beauty/brightness’. My house is a few centuries old but the changeless style of San’ani architecture makes it hard to date. Only yards away a man is putting the final cursive plaster frieze on to a similar room, hanging on a swing above the chasm of the street. Behind him the dust is beginning to obscure Jabal Ayban and the road to the sea. A west wind is blowing up, banging the shutters. And with it comes the call to prayer – not the effete recorded invitation of other lands but a live, human roar: COME AND PRAY! – gusting across Yemen from Zabid to Zinjibar, from Hizyaz to Habarut and all the way to Suqutra, the Island of Dragon’s Blood off the Horn of Africa.
I must go down and pick up some more cigarettes, down the seventy-seven (I think) steps into the dark entrance hall. I slide back the bolt of the massive door and light and noise and piles of alfalfa tumble in – my neighbour sells the plant for fodder, alongside jars of marigolds, roses, basil and rue. She is veiled and wrapped in a sitarah, a large blue and red cloak like a tablecloth. Next to her a man from the Red Sea coast has tobacco from the other side of al-Mukalla on the Indian Ocean; then a boy with a headscarf full of w
alnuts from Hajjah, in the mountains north-west of San’a. In front of them is a line of barrows, some with oranges, some with plastic shoes, some with knives, razors, nailclippers, torches and mechanical drumming monkeys. Across the street are the secondhand clothes sellers. All the synthetic textile wealth of the Far East is here in a mêlée of colours and patterns. Behind the clothes is a row of gold shops, tarts’ parlours of 22-carat glitter set off by pink and peach velvet walls and more mirrors than a hairdresser’s. The sharshaf maker, who runs up a ladies’ all-enveloping outer garment of Ottoman origin (any colour as long as it’s black, any number of pleats as long as they froufrou), adds a sober note, a crow among peacocks.
The secondhand clothes sellers are a long way from the subfusc mustiness of an Oxfam shop. They are lost in a maelstrom of flying cloth and brown forearms thrusting from under sitarahs, glinting with gold bangles. Only the man selling platform shoes is alone. Menswear is often startling, with lots of fake fur and checks that shriek, but I’ve picked up a dove-grey jacket lined in scarlet which could have been from Huntsman of Savile Row, except for the stitching. Another find was a smart barathea tailcoat. I tried it on but it was tiny, shrunk by the sea and cast up on a beach from a 1930s P&O liner gone down in the Gulf of Aden, the dance band playing ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ as the sharks of al-Shihr scented the supper of their lives … Well, maybe.
One day I saw on the street something that stopped me dead. It was a piece of clothing as familiar to me as my own body, but translated into another sartorial idiom. A boy was wearing it over a zannah, an ankle-length shirt, and a miniature jambiyah, a curved dagger. He was scuffing a deflated football along. I called him to stop. There it was, grey flannel with navy piping and a fleur-de-lis on the breast pocket: my prep-school blazer.
I looked inside. ‘Steer & Geary Gentlemen’s Outfitters’. There was the ghost of an inkstain on the pocket, where my birthday Parker had sprung a leak in 1972. The space for the name-tape was empty.
As he kicked the ball away a wave of nostalgia flooded over me. It passed, leaving behind a strange, deep stillness of spirit. It was the calm of completeness, of the wheel turning full circle, of being in the right place at the right time.
If that had been an intimation of spiritual completion, a later experience, in San’a Airport customs shed, provided a fair simulacrum of Limbo. The place is a vast metal box, echoing with cries of supplication – owners begging for the redemption of their goods. To get to it I had to cross a great Stygian lake where the city’s sewage had bubbled up.
Inside the shed I found the crate containing my motor cycle. It had come here via Addis Ababa and appeared to be in one piece. I gave it a pat and made for the low buildings which house the Customs mas’ulin, the responsibles – literally, those who are asked questions. To get in I waved a piece of paper, the central portion of which was a typewritten request to import the machine into Yemen, addressed to the Director of Customs. Over the weeks it had sprouted marginalia, each ending with the enigmatic squiggle which in Arabic passes for a signature.
On my first visit to the Customs Authority I had buttonholed the Director as he was getting out of his car. Using the wing as a writing-desk and with a flourish of his costly pen, he wrote what I eventually deciphered as: ‘No objection. For the attention of the Secretariat.’ Beginner’s luck. The Head of the Secretariat had no objection either and with a second marginalium – written with a less costly but still desirable pen – passed the matter on to the Head of External Affairs. In External Affairs it was the same story: no objection, refer to another department. I noticed that the lower the position in the hierarchy, the more complex the signature became. At the same time the pens decreased in quality until, in a nameless department where bottom-drawer bureaucrats sat reading the newspaper or practising their signatures, someone was persuaded to write something with a chewed and leaking biro. By now, time was beginning to distort: I had been in Customs for a good part of each working day for a fortnight. Where could they refer the case to now? Only the tea boy hadn’t been consulted. I looked at the latest addition to the document. ‘No objection. For the attention of Director of Customs.’ The buck, it seemed, was in perpetual – and slow – motion. Like the Buddhist soul, it had described a complete circle while the officials were reincarnated in ever lowlier forms. As I left the office my eye caught the main front-page headline of a newspaper: ‘Minister of Civil Service and Administrative Reform Calls for Immediate Shake-Up.’ The paper was a month old.
As a last, desperate ploy, I returned in a suit and tie, the letter in a smart imitation leather attaché case, and headed for the Director’s office. Over the past two weeks, a bond of camaraderie had grown between us co-petitioners, but now the disconsolate men squatting by doorways didn’t recognize me. The soldier on the door of the Director’s antechamber cleared a way through the crowd. I entered the sanctum sanctorum, the eye of the storm. The few people in the room addressed the Director in hushed voices. The costly pen glided.
My turn came. ‘You may remember me …’
‘Ah,’ he interrupted, smiling. ‘The man with the fiery bicycle.’
Everyone else called it a mutur, even if fiery bicycle was what you used in written Arabic. The Director leaned back and stroked his moustache. ‘Their importation into Yemen is prohibited.’
I recited to myself the mantra of a British Resident Adviser to one of the sultans of Hadramawt in colonial days: Never get angry, be quiet, very quiet, speak and act softly. ‘I may be mistaken, but you have already written “No objection”. I beg to be allowed the honour of contributing to the exchequer by paying duty. Besides, there are thousands of fiery bicycles in San’a. Indeed, I came here today on a fiery bicycle taxi.’ I paused. No sign of softening. I went on: ‘But perhaps that was an illusion. Perhaps I, who appeared to be moving so swiftly and noisily through the traffic, was in reality riding on air and’, I looked out of the window, ‘farting.’
The Director snorted. I looked at him and saw he was laughing. He wrote in the last empty bit of margin, ‘No objection. Refer to Airport Customs Department. Calculate sum due.’ I had broken out of the circle, achieved a minor nirvana.
At Airport Customs, I watched the responsible concerned make his calculations. The process seemed to be based not on simple addition but on logarithms and exponentiality. The sum due was thirty thousand riyals.
He saw my dumbstruck look, crossed out the three and wrote a two. ‘Is that better?’
I said I was most grateful, but it still seemed a lot for two wheels. He scrubbed out the whole figure and wrote fifteen thousand. ‘Happy now?’ Such transactions are like painting in watercolour or cutting hair: go too far and the thing is ruined. I said I was delighted and left, clutching the papers.
If the customs shed is Limbo, then Ali’s Restaurant is a foretaste of Hell. ‘The San’anis possess culinary skills unsurpassed in any other land,’ wrote the great tenth-century historian and geographer al-Hamdani. Measured against the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, the comment is true: San’a has an old and indigenous cuisine. My lunch was the same as that described by Ibn al-Mujawir in the thirteenth century: wheat bread, hulbah – fenugreek flour whisked to a froth with water – and meat. Ali himself stands in a cloud of smoke on a platform high above the ground, ladling beef broth, eggs, rice and peppers into a row of stone bowls. In front of him is a rank of cauldrons, each one big enough to boil a missionary. Below him minions tend gas cylinders that send great blasts of flame shooting up. Conversations are impossible in the roar; explosions are not unknown. The bowl of saltah, as they call the mixture, is brought to you red-hot, carried with a pair of pliers and topped with a seething yellowish-green dollop of hulbah. Lumps of meat are flambéed in a wok-like vessel, and ten feet above this the ceiling is black from years of fireballs. Men squat on the floor, on benches, on tables (the ones in suits and ties are from the Foreign Ministry across the road). Those who have not yet been served wail and shriek for attention – ‘
Ya Ali! Ya Alayyy!’ – while Ali stands, erect and unhearing, his body immobile within a parabola of arms – all his own, like those of a Hindu idol. The lucky ones who have been served eat with the saltah spitting in their faces, sweat pouring from their brows. The walls are covered with a huge photographic mural of the gardens at Versailles: parterres, statues of nymphs, cooling fountains.
Lunch at Ali’s is not merely a matter of eating. It is the first step on the way to kayf. The meaning of the term has been discussed by Sir Richard Burton. One might call it, he wrote, ‘The savouring of animal existence … the result of a lively, impressible, excitable nature, and exquisite sensibility of nerve; it argues a facility for voluptuousness unknown to northern regions …’; but in the end the translator of The Arabian Nights admitted defeat: kayf is ‘a word untranslatable in our mother tongue’. Lexicographers, who cannot be so realistic, have described it as a mood, humour or frame of mind. I, who chew the leaf of the qat tree, shall attempt a definition.
Ali’s Restaurant is all to do with the humours. Blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile must be in balance to ensure perfect health and to enable the qat chewer to attain his goal of kayf, since qat excites the cold and dry black bile, prophylaxis against its ill effects means that the blood, which is hot and wet, must be stimulated. Hence the heat, the sweat, the bubbling saltah. Hence also the visits to the public baths before chewing qat, the insistence on keeping windows and doors shut during chewing, the elaborate precautions to avoid the dreaded shanini – a piercing and potentially fatal draught of cold air.
An old joke illustrates this obsession with heat. The angels, it is said, periodically visit Hell to make sure the fires are turned up. One day a group of them are detailed to check on the really wicked sinners, who spend eternity in individual ovens. Inside the first oven is a Saudi. He screams to be let out. Roasting nicely, they think, and slam the door on him. In the next oven is an Englishman; then come an American, an Egyptian and so on. All beg to be let out, but the angels show them no mercy. Eventually they open the last door. Inside sits a Yemeni, chewing qat and apparently oblivious of the flames around him. He draws languidly on his water-pipe, turns to the angels, and says: ‘Hey, could you shut that door? I’ll catch my death of cold.’
Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Page 2