Blood and Sand

by Frank Gardner

  January 15th 1983. How I love Cairo, especially now that I am at last living in the medieval Islamic quarter. Immersed in this teeming environment and surrounded by friendly, witty people whose ways and language I am beginning to understand, right now I have no desire to ever leave this place.

  On our Arabic literature course at university we had been taught that the story of The Thousand and One Nights was actually written about medieval Cairo, but that to conceal his identity and protect himself from the possible wrath of the caliph the author had pretended it was set in Baghdad. With all these teeming medieval backstreets and Islamic monuments on my doorstep it was easy to picture life as it would have been here eight hundred years ago. Many aspects, I felt sure, had probably not changed that much, like the makwagis, the laundrymen whom I saw taking a swig of water from a jug then spraying it out through their teeth to dampen the clothes before ironing them. In the historic district of Ghouriya which I now explored, most of the houses were so old they would probably have collapsed long ago if they had not been held up by each other. Many still had wooden lattice harem windows protruding out above the street. Known as mashrubiya, these intricately carved constructions were designed to let the women of the house look out on to the world without being seen themselves, a sort of architectural version of the burqa. More than once I caught a fleeting glimpse of a face peering at me from behind one of these lattice windows, dappled for a moment by the sun and shadow, then gone, vanished into the dark interior of a private house.

  I drifted aimlessly through the spice bazaar, past vivid cones of aromatic powder, then into a side street where crates of live ducks and geese were being weighed on antique bronze scales suspended from ceilings. Everywhere I went I was invited to sit down for tea, not the English milky variety but a strong dark liquid, heavily sugared and sipped from a glass with a thick sediment of tea-leaves swilling around inside. In the shadow of the massive medieval gateway of Bab Zuweila I settled down on a three-legged stool to sketch the architecture, periodically blowing the fine dust and grit off the pages of my diary. All around me Cairo street life flowed past without pause: I felt like a small rock in the middle of a fast stream. A high-pitched whistling sound would herald the baker’s boy, weaving his way through the crowd on his bicycle with one hand on the handlebars, the other balancing a wooden tray of a hundred loaves on his head. A frantic clucking would give away a chicken that had strayed into the tailors’ and was now being chased out with a broom. And always on the same street corner, Fawzi the beggar, his skinny arm outstretched in supplication, pathetically grateful for the few piastres someone might drop into his tin.

  That winter was so unusually cold that one afternoon it even hailed, which was a novel experience for most Cairenes. But within weeks spring had returned, marked by a vicious khamseen storm. The khamseen, meaning ‘fifty’, can blow any time during the fifty days of spring, and is essentially an international dust storm. Building speed and strength across the Sahara, it picks up several tons of dust, sand and donkey dung from the Sahel and Nile villages in the south, then carries it north and dumps it on Cairo. Shutting all the doors and windows in our student flat was not enough to keep out the sand, which blew in through the cracks and quickly found its way to the back of our throats. Given the often unsanitary origins of this grit it is not surprising that a lot of people fall ill during the khamseen.

  By the time the summer heat returned I was thoroughly immersed in Cairo life and I didn’t want this year to end, yet each time the temperature notched up a few degrees we knew that our return to Britain was drawing closer. By now I had arranged to spend a few days at a time with my Egyptian family and the rest based in the flat with the other students. I had an Egyptian girlfriend, although by Western standards it was a very chaste relationship. She lived with her parents in the flat across the street from ours and Peregrine used to go out on to our balcony and make a point of observing her through a naval telescope. She found this very amusing and one day we arranged by sign language to meet downstairs at the grocer’s. Asmaa, as she was called, had dark, beguiling eyes which she used to great effect. She was studying literature at Cairo University, where she complained that the classes were hopelessly oversized – her eyes widened with envy when I told her there were just fourteen in our class of undergraduates. She was fascinated to have met a khawaaga, a foreigner, who spoke Arabic and together we began to take long walks around Zamalek. Coming from a traditional family, even this was risqué for her; various brothers would trail us at a discreet distance and on the few occasions when I tried to take her hand she would chastise me with a flirtatious smile, whispering, ‘Eedak gambak, ya Frank!’ meaning ‘keep your hands to yourself’. I gave Asmaa a book about England and she gave me a fake blue pharaonic sphinx; it was well-meant but, to be honest, quite hideous and I resolved to get rid of it without giving offence. None of my flatmates would take it and I had visions of our doorman triumphantly and publicly rescuing it from the dustbin if I disposed of it in our neighbourhood. So to be absolutely certain it would never be discovered I packed the offending sphinx in my rucksack and took it with me on a trip I made with Mustafa, an Egyptian friend, deep into the Western Desert. Up on a windswept crag above the remote oasis of Dakhla, about ten hours’ bus ride from Cairo, I buried the blue sphinx where no one would find it. Afterwards I wondered if Asmaa had had to go to similar lengths to dispose of my coffee-table book about English heritage.

  Peregrine, meanwhile, had made himself very comfortable in Zamalek, where he was an habitué of several patisseries, and I never managed to persuade him to cross the Nile and meet my adopted family in Islamic Cairo. But we had a lot of fun with other young Egyptian friends, racing in convoy up to the Pyramids at four in the morning and sitting on the 4,500-year-old blocks singing in Arabic, or trying to. Even Julia and Yolanda were missing England less and liking Cairo more. We went to a lot of parties, including a fancy-dress one where I narrowly avoided being arrested for flagging down a taxi in drag. In our final month we went to an embassy bash, and it was there that I realized how far the local culture had seeped into my bones. A female diplomat whom I knew vaguely loomed towards me, offering me her cheek to kiss. I recoiled instinctively, having been conditioned to avoid any public display of affection with the opposite sex.

  I spent the last few days of my Cairo year with my Egyptian family. It was Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting and other abstentions, and I switched over to their timetable. We would wake up late and listless, then eat nothing till sundown, when Umm Layla would prepare a huge spread of food on tattered rush mats on the floor. Friends and relatives would crowd into their tiny hovel, helping themselves from the cauldrons of soup, trays of roast chicken and rice and an inexplicably popular dish called mulukhiyya. Made from some aquatic vegetable, it looked like green saliva and dribbled off the spoon in sticky, gelatinous globules. I managed to escape being made to try it right to the last.

  After all these months Ahmed decided he could now trust me enough to take me off after the meal to one of his favourite haunts: the seedy backstreet quarter known as Batniyya, the hashish capital of Egypt. In dingy and dimly lit cafés we passed men puffing desperately on improvised bongs made out of jam jars and two protruding bamboo tubes, one for inhaling, the other to support the tobacco, hash and burning charcoal. Ahmed found us a couple of chairs and explained how it worked. It was up to the customers, he said, to bring their own lumps of hash with them. When the waiter came he brought a rack holding a dozen clay pots stuffed with sweetened tobacco, which were then fitted on to the bamboo ready for inhaling. With a mischievous expression on his face, Ahmed inserted his fingers into the back of his mouth and retrieved his personal lump of hash, hidden behind his teeth, bit off a chunk and placed it on top of the tobacco. As the charcoal burned and he began to inhale, the effect was a sweet smell and a profound coughing fit from Ahmed. Tears welled in his eyes but he attacked the hash pipe with renewed vigour, pausing only to hawk up some phlegm on to the
pavement. It was not the most enchanting way of spending my last night in Cairo and I worried that if this was how the head of the family spent his taxi fares then this family was going to fall on even harder times.

  Years later, on a BBC trip to Cairo in 1998, I took an Egyptian banker friend Ossama with me to find the family. He thought I was winding him up as I led him through the dim, narrow backstreets and up the grimy steps to their home. As a well-educated, well-travelled international businessman he had never darkened the doors of a place like this, and when the door opened I think he expected me to make my excuses and leave. But instead it revealed Umm Layla, the karate-chopping mother, and it was as if nothing had changed. She embraced me in her ample bosom, sweeping me up in that same tidal wave of Egyptian hospitality I had so cherished as a student. Ossama was stunned; it was the only time I have seen him lost for words. I suppose it would be the equivalent of an Egyptian taking me to see his English friends on a tough estate in south London, except that instead of the latent threat of a mugging, here in Islamic Cairo I had found only kindness, security and generosity.

  That year in Cairo affected me deeply, giving me a lasting love of the Arab world that has survived many of its less pleasant aspects, not least getting shot by people who called themselves Muslims. My experiences in Cairo formed a bedrock for all I learned later about the Middle East and Arab culture. It was a gentle introduction, in a way, since Egyptians are generally very tolerant of Westerners and, unlike the more conservative Arab societies of the Gulf, the friends I made in Cairo were of both sexes. Time and again I found that speaking Arabic was the ice-breaker, the lubricant for every friendship and the key to understanding the rich Egyptian sense of humour. For a student of Arabic eager to learn about the Middle East, a university year spent in Egypt was the perfect grounding.

  4

  From Bedouin to Bahrain

  THE CAIRO YEAR over, I now had to think about passing the final exams for my degree. My approach to cramming at Exeter University was to spend an afternoon swotting up in the library, putter home through the country lanes on my motorbike to our shared student cottage, go on a really pounding run over the red clay hills of Devon, then meet up with friends in the local village pub. I knew I was never really going to impress the examiners with my grasp of early Arabic poetry, and my hopes of redemption through my reasonable fluency in spoken Arabic were dashed when we learned that the verbal exam consisted of reciting . . . early Arabic poetry again. What was wrong with these academics? Didn’t they know there was a thriving, cosmopolitan Middle East out there? But my salvation lay in the dissertations. These were two eight-thousand-word essays we were instructed to write on just about any Middle Eastern topic of our choice, as long as it had some scholarly merit. I chose the Islamic Architecture of the Maghreb (North Africa), and Egyptian Women, not because I had recently had an Egyptian girlfriend but because I was genuinely interested in how their role in society was changing. My research included reading works by the controversial Egyptian female writer Dr Nawal El Saadawi, who recalled in agonizing detail the horrors of being held down on a bathroom floor at the age of six and forcibly circumcised by a bunch of old women. Incredibly, this barbaric practice still occurs in parts of rural Egypt, and is perpetuated by the older women of the village in many of the countries of Saharan Africa under the pretence that it ‘conforms with tradition’, in spite of Muslim scholars insisting it has nothing to do with Islam. I finally got to meet Dr El Saadawi nearly twenty years later when I interviewed her for BBC World. Still a strikingly good-looking woman in her seventies, she was as outspoken as ever, telling me how wrong she thought it was for impoverished Egyptian farmers to be blowing their family finances on sending themselves off on pilgrimage to Mecca. ‘The Prophet Mohammad never wanted this sort of sacrifice,’ she said. She had recently been declared ‘an apostate’ by some of Egypt’s more radical preachers and was contesting a bizarre lawsuit that was trying to separate her from her beloved husband of over forty years on the grounds that she was no longer a good enough Muslim to be married to a Muslim.

  Rather to our surprise, we all achieved our degrees – in my case an unremarkable 2.2, known as a ‘Bishop Desmond’ (as in Tutu; my friend Tony scored a lowly ‘Douglas Hurd’ in Maths). Now that we were graduates in Arabic and Islamic Studies, our lecturers brightly informed us that the world was our oyster. This was not quite true, since unless we were planning to go into academia – a temptation I somehow managed to resist – a degree in Arabic was practically useless on its own. It needed to be combined with an actual profession, such as, well, journalism, but I hadn’t worked that out yet. I took a rather casual approach to job hunting, in fact I even omitted to draw up a CV. I did go to one interview before I graduated, though, which was for MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). In the small community of Western expatriates living in Cairo I had come across a British diplomat who turned out to be an SIS officer there. I had no idea of this when I took him on a tour of my favourite backstreets, nor that he was assessing me for possible recruitment, but some time later he asked if I would be interested in being put in touch with ‘the right people’ in London. Why not? I thought, this could be fun. But once I had signed a copy of the Official Secrets Act, the initial interview turned into something of a disappointment and it successfully put me off a career in the espionage business. ‘I should warn you now,’ said the man in the grey suit behind the desk, ‘that if you choose this career you will never be able to tell your friends about it, you will have to lie continually about what you do and,’ here he leaned closer towards me as if letting me into a great secret, ‘you will be unlikely ever to get any public recognition for your achievements.’ Well, that rules me out, I thought, I’m much too vain for this outfit. If I achieved something I wanted to see it recognized, so a career of tight-lipped modesty in the world of spooks simply did not appeal, either then or since.

  The trouble was that, like most twenty-two-year-olds, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do. Because of my love of running and keeping fit I had made some enquiries about taking a short service commission in the Parachute Regiment, but my parents sensibly persuaded me this would be a waste of four years of Arabic studies. There was one potential employer who took an interest in me at a campus job fair, a firm that manufactured police and military uniforms for export to the Middle East. Not quite the life of glamour I had in mind but it would do for a start, I thought, and assuming I had the job I promptly headed off round the Mediterranean for an extended backpacking trip with Carrie, my first serious girlfriend. After all that time in Egypt it felt strange to be amidst topless sunbathers on sybaritic Greek islands, or plied with wine and spirits by Italian villagers near Pompeii. We had a great time, but when I returned in the autumn I was surprised to find there was no job offer. This was getting serious. Graduates from my year at Exeter had already landed lucrative jobs in the City; one had even wangled a position with a high-octane firm of City money-brokers after scoring a third in Zoology. It was like being the only person at a party without a partner.

  In desperation I ran my finger down the London phone directory looking under ‘M’ for Middle East. I then rang up every organization that looked as if it might be a prospective employer and invited myself round for interview with anyone who would see me, wearing one of my father’s hairy old suits and carrying an empty briefcase for added effect. I accepted the first offer I got, joining a tiny firm that exported chocolates and perfume to the Arab world, on a starting salary of £6,000 a year. The kindly Egyptian boss, Sharif, had made his fortune in Kuwait and he still had many connections in the Gulf. I yearned to be sent out there to haggle with his clients, but he rightly judged me to be far too inexperienced. Instead, I got assigned to the firm’s perfumery division and soon found myself learning the distinction between the top, middle and base notes of a scent. Before long I was required to put this into practice when the firm launched a new ‘gentlemen’s fragrance’; I had to spend several weeks behind the counter
at Selfridges flogging it to potential customers. It taught me how surprisingly tiring it can be, standing up all day with a false smile on your face. Word of my deployment to a perfumery counter in Oxford Street soon got out to my friends and they took it in turns to come and have a good giggle, assuring me that I had really found my niche in life. At first, the mostly Iranian female sales assistants all assumed I was gay, since the only other two male assistants in perfumery were very much an item. When the girls discovered I wasn’t they made a big fuss of me, teaching me choice and unrepeatable expressions in Farsi in between reminiscing about the days of bikini pool parties in Iran under the Shah. But I could only take so much of squirting stuff on to the hands of ungrateful customers before I was begging to be allowed back to head office. All the new-found eighties hype about ‘male grooming’ made me think of Churchill’s pithy quote: ‘A man should damn well smell of himself.’

  Working for Sharif was both amusing and infuriating. With his residual Egyptian accent he would often mispronounce words. His lunchtime seafood takeaway order from the Regent Street deli, for example, came out as ‘Bring me a crap sandwich,’ something we all tried very hard not to envisage. Once, when he was out, we sowed cauliflower seeds in the flowerpots behind his desk and over the ensuing months we watched with some pride as they grew into vegetables in the boss’s office.

  As an antidote to London office life, I persuaded Carrie that we should spend our summer holidays somewhere really wild and adventurous, like Yemen. I went off to see Wilfred Thesiger again in his Chelsea flat, to ask his advice. Now in his mid-seventies, he greeted me at the top of the stairs in an immaculate three-piece suit, his handshake as powerful as ever. ‘Don’t drink the water there,’ he said, as we sat down in his rather gloomy living room and his ageing housekeeper brought us tea, ‘or else you risk catching guinea worm.’ Thesiger, who had worn out two kneecaps exploring Yemen’s mountains, went on to describe how he had seen people infected by this worm have it come crawling out of their necks or even, if they were very unlucky, out through their eyes. It was probably the best advice he gave me; we drank 7-Up and Coca-Cola for two weeks.