by David Winner
“Forget skyscrapers, ice water, drinks, stockmakers, New York, half chewed cigars, and statues of liberty. Think of camel bells, cyclamen and the last lions,” wrote Bill Barker, the commander of the northern province of mandate Palestine to his lover, my great Aunt Dorle in 1934, trying to encourage her to move from New York to the Middle East. Dorle was entrenched in the New York music world by that point, working with the New York Philharmonic, but she had grown up a poor little rich girl from New York inspired by the tales of Scheherazade. The Middle East was an enchanted place and Islam its enchanted religion.
But when I think of her travels in the Arab world in the twenties and thirties, it is nineteenth century composer and part time Orientalist Gioachino Rossini who comes to mind: his operas about traveling from the east to the west and visa-versa: Un Italiano in Algeria, Un Turco in Italia. What would he have called Dorle, Una Fanciulla (young girl) Hebraica in Arabia?
Certainly, Dorle’s vision of The Orient had not progressed far beyond Rossini’s. Georges Asfar, another lover in her prolific thirties (a Syrian Christian) encouraged her to think of him as her Muslim master. Like Barker, he littered his letters with Arabic, the magical language of magical places.
I’ve carried something of that flame myself the few times I’ve traveled in the Arab world, but worse than my muted Orientalism, I’ve sometimes fallen prey to an even more dangerous trope, represented by Claire Danes as Carrie from Homeland, her blond hair disguised by a hijab, walking purposefully through devious Muslim spaces.
However sophisticated and well-traveled I see myself, I’ve fallen into sinkholes of fear and prejudice while traveling in what Dorle would have called the Orient.
Casablanca was a short, cheap flight away from Lisbon where Angela, my girlfriend now wife, and I were teaching English in the middle of the nineties.While I was in Morocco, my Orientalist aunt was very much alive. Her latter-day lover (sort of, a queer Frenchman) had found us a hotel near the Djema el-Fna. In Marrakesh, we wandered around the souks, the palaces, and the mosques, gazing upon jalabeyas and hijabs and snake charmers, inhaling flowers and spices.
On the freezing bus ride from Essaouira back to Casablanca, Angela and I could not get seats together. Along the way, a group of eight-or-nine-year-old girls befriended Angela, but, later, as the cold set in, without asking anything like permission, she warmed her shoulders in the robes of the man with whom she shared her seat. The story I would tell about it later demonstrated the familiar trope of the lascivious Arab male. It was she who was trying to snuggle with him, I would boast as if that were deeply surprising, proud of my intrepid girlfriend who’d been nothing else but cold.
*
By the time I returned to North Africa in 2014, Dorle was dead, of course. The towers had long come down, the “war on terror” dragging on and on: Iraq, Afghanistan, Bush’s secret and not so secret torture, and, of course, most relevant, The Arab Spring.
In Tunis, things were not going very well after the triumphant deposal of Ben Ali. The American embassy had been attacked and physically damaged by Salafists, a Sunni school of Jihadist, several Tunisian police officers having been killed trying to defend it. The murder of a leftwing politician had led to a ferocious march down Avenue Habib Bourguiba, a Parisian boulevard lined with cafes, villas and hotels.
Like on my previous journey to North Africa, I had been already a cheap flight away, staying with friends in Normandy. Along with my desire to “explore” another part of Africa, the Arab World, there was my fascination with The Arab Spring and probably a desire to sound brave without needing to actually exhibit bravery. The State Department had warned people away from Tunisia, but their statement seemed to imply you’d be okay if you stayed near Tunis and avoided political demonstrations.
The taxi dropped me off at the grand, eighties–built Hotel Africa, made affordable by the collapse of the tourist trade, and I glimpsed the café-lined boulevard and got hit with, like in Morocco, a not very modernized version of my aunt’s fervor.
Dumping my bags off at my hotel, I bounded downstairs. I wanted to explore the boulevard and the souk that lay only a half-mile down it.
But immediately upon slipping out the doors of the hotel, I noticed a phone store on the other side of the boulevard and decided to buy a sim card, so I could more easily communicate with friends and family in other places.
The café tables were jammed together, though, no easy way to cross through. The clientele, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, were all male and as far as I could tell all Tunisian.
I tried to go around the cafes but was obstructed by large concrete blocks and barbed wire created to contain the recent protest.
But my romanticized vision of the surrounding landscape disappeared before my eyes after I’d finally slipped across the street, presented my passport, and was about to receive my sim card.
A woman in her early thirties with longish hair and western clothes served me, aided by a second woman about her age wearing a hijab.
“Detestez-vous les Arabes,” the first woman suddenly asked me, and while I was awkwardly trying to explain how I didn’t hate Arabs, the hijab-wearing woman launched into a harangue that seemed born of some racist writer’s fictional xenophobia. My blue passport had launched it.
She smiled ironically, took a deep breath and addressed me in only slightly accented English.
“America is the great Satan,” she told me casually. “They try to bring down Islam.”
She paused to smirk at me for a moment. The ease of her tone, the violence of her words made the little phone store and the avenue outside shake just slightly.
“Islam will rise up,” she continued. “and destroy America and each American.”
Unbelievably, I’m not exaggerating.
“Welcome to Tunisia,” her final retort as I slunk away, “have a good time.”
What happened had been a perfect storm, albeit a peaceful one. It was unlikely enough that the women at the phone store would run into an American at a time in which we were largely absent. Even more unlikely, I imagine, is that these professional women, working for a business on the main drag, probably a pretty good gig, would be Salafist sympathizers. And most improbable that they would have expressed their feelings so clearly and directly to an American tourist. What happened perfectly expressed the tone of the State Department warning. This wasn’t a place like Libya or Syria or Iraq where someone in black clothes with a British accent might hack off your head, but Jihadist sympathies were real and present enough to surface in a common tourist’s experience. The women at the phone store agitated me; of course, they had. Our experiences dent our psyches for both good and ill, obviously. On one hand, happening to both live (Kensington, Brooklyn) and work (a college near Journal Square, Jersey City) in communities in which many women wear niqabs covering their faces, I don’t find them oppressive the way a lot of people do, including many Muslims. On the other hand, experiencing Jihadist rhetoric first-hand in Tunis created a minor trauma that gets triggered when I venture into Arab spaces.
After leaving the phone store, I strode down Bourguiba towards the souk, shocked and frightened that my passport could evoke such anger.
A few blocks later, the center of Bourguiba was cordoned off with more barbed wire and concrete, a tank and several soldiers with assault rifles.
In the crowded souk, I did not enjoy the robes and spices, the whirr of footfall, and Arabic music. Sounds and smells that would have enticed my Dorle self suddenly felt ominous.
Tunis seemed not only scary but sad. Trash burned on the streets, and the suburban train I took to Carthage the next day was like a New York subway from the depths of the 70s: creaky, strange-smelling, stopping constantly.
Four teenage boys chanting while percussively banging a broken metal information sign seemed somehow Jihadist like the phone store women though they were most like singing the rallying cry of the Carthage football team cruising to victory that season.
*
Angela and I have don’t have children and since the death of our parents, we haven’t known what to do about Christmas.
Recently, we’ve gotten out of Dodge. In 2018, we spent a week in wintertime Rhodes. I could have flown back to America with her, but I had ten days before the beginning of my semester.
Being in Greece felt pleasant, relaxing and was a cheap launching pad to Cairo, a place that had always seemed impossibly distant, and, after the Tahir Square and its repercussions, pretty dangerous, but western tourists were going there again, at least some of them. And our orange-haired despot’s attempts to ban Moslems from my country had made me particularly keen to revisit the Moslem world.
Dorle would have fit well in the grandiose Victorian Hotel Windsor though its genteel decline had descended into squalid collapse.
In central Cairo, my new iPhone’s GPS enabled me to soar through tiny alleys and grand boulevards past mosques, markets, dogs, cats and people in traditional robes and veils. The landscape titillated me, fascinated as I was by its otherness, but also put me on edge. Like many western travelers, though we might not always name it, I’m thrilled by social ecosystems that seem unchanged over time, but most don’t unnerve me. The edge of unease I’ve sometimes experienced in Arab spaces doesn’t really come from actual experiences – which, except for that one moment in Tunis, have always been positive. This probably sounds disingenuous, like some dubious claim about the planting of evidence, but that phone store scare has been reinforced by a barrage of actual and subliminal images associated with Islam. Homeland, of course, but even in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the bad characters wear Palestinian scarves. Listen to the soundtracks of movies and television shows, and you’ll know easily if you’re in New York or Islamabad or Cairo or Berlin. Ominous minor chords place you in the Muslim world.
I assumed my next destination, the Giza pyramids, would be located in some blandly comfortable tourist zone, but the sandy mayhem of the chaotic highway grinded on until they became visible in the distance, the pandemonium of central Cairo following right behind me.
In Central Cairo, I was pretty much ignored but in Giza everyone from small children to elderly women tried to sell me anything they could or beg for coins if they had nothing to sell.
I felt uncomfortable, self-conscious. I wanted to be left alone. My unfortunate reaction to my surroundings forced me into a reckoning with myself. I’d survived central Cairo or, even worse, somehow accomplished it. I wanted it over, the fact of the country and its myriad problems, a hindrance.
That was actually how I’d subconsciously constructed my week in Egypt. Two frenzied days in the center of Cairo, then tourist friendly Giza, and finally, Alexandria, a wealthier more European Mediterranean city.
*
The train to Alexandria meandered through an industrial desert: trash, dogs, abandoned vehicles.
My hotel was located on the corniche, a semicircular bay full of beaux-arts buildings in gentle decline. An old lighthouse stood on one side and the site of the ancient library was near the other.
Things did seem calmer here than Cairo, at least along the corniche, not so grindingly poor. Egyptian families and couples ate ice cream and sipped tea. Cafes from the twenties and thirties had Parisian names like Café de la Paix.
On my first evening, I failed to properly charge the phone that was helping me navigate. Before climbing up to the hotel breakfast room the next morning, I managed to, but when I came back down again it was only at thirty percent.
With a failing phone and no decent map, I set out to see the Roman mausoleum of Kom El-Shoqafa and the column of Pompey. An eerie sense of disquiet, disorientation worsened as my phone charge plunged.
It was about 8 percent and I still had about half a kilometer to go when I was directed into an apocalyptic construction sight: mysterious half-finished concrete structures. A crowd of middle-aged women lined up in front of a rifle-bearing guard. He let some through but turned others away. I decided to take my chances.
The officer repeated a guttural Arabic word and gestured with animation as if I’d transgressed, and I quickly retreated. Diving into my guidebook, I realized Kom El-Shoqafa may have resembled the word the officer had repeated, so I gathered my courage and tried again.
When it was my turn in the line again, I nodded when the officer repeated that same word and was ushered inside: tourist privilege.
Then my phone finally died, leaving me feeling exposed, vulnerable, but in Egypt, you can count on the kindness of strangers.
A man saw me wandering apprehensively, grabbed my shoulder, and took me on a windy ten-minute walk to the mausoleum.
According to legend, a donkey fell into a pit during the middle ages and those who tried to rescue it discovered the sight. On the long journey down, I began to feel claustrophobic until anthropomorphic Roman figures with the heads like birds welcomed me into their ancient lair.
“Pompey,” I said to the ticket seller outside. And as if by magic, a boy of about thirteen and his tuk-tuk emerged from nowhere, charging me less than fifty cents for the circuitous ride to the Roman column. Afterwards, a beseeching glance at one of the guards led to the summoning of a taxi to take me back to the corniche.
*
The next day I had a six AM flight to Cairo, then another to Athens, but the Air Egypt webpage wouldn’t allow me a mobile boarding pass, and I had to to check in at the airport.
I was going to the airport in Egypt’s more European second city. My third experience in North Africa was ending. I would be leaving the developing world for the developed one. Soon, there would be little to entice or worry me.
But outside the airport was a huge crowd of people that I wouldn’t normally associate with air travel — enormous bags, traditional clothes — edging their way towards a fearsome-looking official, barking at them in that mythical tongue.
This should have been my defining moment, an anti-Eurocentric’s golden hour. I was not only the lone tourist, but the lone westerner, the only person wearing western clothes. But as I stood in back of the teeming crowd, I felt for a moment as if this was all some big mistake. Could I not just wave my American passport, and be ushered through? A darker voice imagined some separate but equal Jim Crowism coming to my rescue: a short, nicely appointed line for tourists.
But at least I live in New York: rush hour subways a part of my daily routine. Putting my bag over my shoulders I pushed myself into the crowd. And while I was having such a reaction to the otherness of those surrounding me, those surrounding me showed no obvious reaction to the otherness of me.
And I was clearly an anomaly, I realized, as I got closer to the official, in terms of Alexandria airport conventions. They all presented boarding passes, but all I had was the same American passport that I used in that Tunis phone store.
I pressed forward. When I handed the bothered official my passport, he gestured for my boarding pass until he saw my passport’s telltale blue.
“Okay,” he said, gesturing me through. Separate but equal. In 1964, the year of my birth, I wouldn’t have been limited to “colored only” restaurants in my native Charlottesville. In 2019, in Alexandria, I entered the airport with no boarding pass.
Another man was checking documents and boarding passes at the door of the airport itself, but he, too, realized I was a special case. He took my passport, dashed outside, and said he’d be right back. He was pleasant and wore an official-looking uniform, but I still worried that without the blue document signaling my separate equality, I might never catch my plane.
He immediately returned with my passport and pointed me towards the Air Egypt desk inside.
At the gate, I clutched my passport and boarding pass, gleaming with relief and didn’t really mind when the hour of departure passed with no sign of the flight.
As I wiled time away by playing phone solitaire, a man approached me, the first American I’d seen in days. He pointed to the departure time of the plane and the clock on the wall. Sighing wearily, he bemoaned the country we were in, expecting a little American camaraderie.
Which despite everything, all my desire to get out of Egypt, the Orient, the uncivilized world, is exactly what I did not want to provide.
I appraised his jeans and his tee-shirt, my jeans and my tee-shirt; his sunburn and tangled hair, my sunburn and tangled hair. However differently I saw myself, the Egyptians surrounding us might have seen us as essentially similar. And if they had, they might have been fundamentally correct. Whatever my politics and sense of self, I had thought much worse things about Egypt than flights getting delayed there. Nevertheless, I had to distance myself from my doppelganger.
“Well, you know,” I told him, “it’s worse where we’re from.”
Annoyance flashed across his face before he plunged into his own phone.
Neither of the tropes born of my aunt or Homeland or even my eerie Tunisian experience were particularly reflected by my week in Egypt. There is nothing romantic or exotic about galabiyas, camels, kaftans, mosques or even pyramids. They are facts of Egyptian life. And while ominous music may pound in the background as Claire Danes slips through Islamic spaces, I strode safely through tiny alleyways and dark corridors, often completely lost if my phone wasn’t functioning. Which makes some sense as our homicide rate is nearly triple Egypt’s
*
After my father died in the fall of 2021, I visited his brother in Rome the following summer. Not needing to go back immediately to America, I decided to return to Tunis, a short flight away and now deemed safe by the State Department. Less encumbered by anxiety, I hoped to travel around the country, visit the Roman ruins of Dougga, the Great Mosque of Sidi Uqbain.
I got to the airport early in the Roman morning, feeling oddly dopey, but it was not until the taxi from the Tunis airport to Sidi Bou Said, the village outside of Tunis where I’d booked a room, that the blocked nasal passages and chest congestion suggested what an antigen test later confirmed, Covid 19.
Le Chambre Vert, where I was staying, turned out to be a room attached to one of the houses built for wealthy merchants in the 18th century. The place had a bathroom, Wi-Fi but no means that I could imagine of getting anything brought to me.
Hungry a few hours later, I put on several masks and strolled past the blue and white stone houses, glimpsed the cliffs descending to the Mediterranean and refused to pay the man who’d placed a parrot on my shoulder any money to take my picture with his bird.
Soon, the Europeans in their white summer clothes and sun-burned bodies gave way to Tunisians in the hijabs and jalabeyas, so often represented as threatening in American movies. But I worried about Covid, not terrorism, as the road got thicker with pedestrians until the obvious occurred to me, the threat came from me.
I ordered a kebab from a food stand and slipped back to the room to consume it. Quick forays into the outside world kept me fed, and on the fifth day I felt remarkably better, a Covid test revealing only one line.
I had one day left to revisit Centre Ville and the ominous phone store across from the Hotel Africa. I wanted to see if it had changed over time. I wanted to see if I had changed. Would fear and anxiety still roil me?
As the cab passed by Carthage on route, I wondered about the two women that had been there, their anger at the United States. What did they think of Kais Saied, the popular leader of Tunisia, who, in the name of the containment of radical Islam, had created a nation referendum that would pass overwhelming later that in the summer making him an African Erdogan, some queasy place between president and dictator.
Suddenly, we reached Avenue Bourguiba. There was the Hotel Africa, but the mom-and-pop phone store was gone. Orange, a multinational French phone company, had taken its place. The workers wore uniforms with corporate logos like Verizon or T-Mobile.
I peered in at them, wondering who they were and what they believed. Just because they worked for a conglomerate didn’t mean they had moderate world views, but whatever their personal opinions, Orange corporate culture surely discouraged their open expression.
Are capitalist mass culture and radical politics mutually exclusive? Not necessarily, I don’t think. All sorts of people might hearken to the convenience, comfort, and banality that came with modernity. The ideal Kabul of the Taliban (who wanted better relations with the west), Al Bagdhadi’s dream califate may well have included chain restaurants, ATMs, along with the murdered bodies of enemies on public display.
And neither the present nor former phone store across from the Hotel Africa fit into in Aunt Dorle’s sense of the Arab world, what she dreamed of while reading The Arabian Nights as a child.
However sentimentalized in movies and TV, Ali Baba, Haroun Al Rashid, Scheherazade and the lot were the genuine product of the early Islamic Middle East, primary source material for people fascinated by the Arab World.
I walked past the Orange Store down Bourguiba, eventually landing at the Medina. Where I was enthralled by tiny alleyways and traditional clothes, spices and flowers, the sounds of the hawking of household items, the chanting of the Koran.
That afternoon, after returning to Sidi Bou Said, I took the long, winding road from the village to the beach. Rather than the Europeans in scanty clothes that I had imagined so close to a tourist center, women wore modest bathing costumes reminiscent of a local beach in Turkey I’d visited years before.
The beach was lined with small, elegant tents, which protected beachgoers from the elements. Mothers and fathers, also dressed more modestly than their European antecedents, escorted children in and out of the water.
With pale (post Covid) skin and western clothes, I must have stuck out, but no one appeared to notice as I waded into the water without my shoes and sat for a moment on the sand in between a couple of the tents, observing the families surrounding me as unobtrusively as possible. The food they were eating, the games they were playing with their children, so much about them was unfamiliar to me. There were no reasonable conclusions that I could reach about the bathers surrounding me, particularly not about what Islam, the religion that they shared with nearly two billion others across the world, meant in their lives.
So often I’ve heard fellow westerners who view themselves as open-minded cast Islam as uniquely problematic (sexist, violent) among world religions.
Recently, I watched Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen’s painful but inspiring documentary about the last days of the female mayor of Kabul before the city fell. The generic indictments of Islam so often heard in the west not only catch the Taliban (who recently banned women from all universities) in their crosshairs but also the brave Afghan women, also Islamic, who fought with devastating bravery for basic human rights.
After the attacks of October 7 and the continuing Israeli siege of Gaza, Hamas has often been inaccurately equated with Daesh, the Islamic Republic. Assuming that Islam is Hamas’s raison d’être (like Daesh’s) rather than the specific Palestinian situation casts Gaza as religious conflict rather than a human rights and territorial one, and once again makes Islam seem like an existential threat to Judaism when Christian nations and societies have been primarily responsible for the harrowing historical plight of Jews like myself and Dorle.
Her sentimentalized vision of Islam and the Arab world must be taken with a enormous grain of salt, but perhaps (if we’re forced into lesser of two evil scenarios) it may be preferable to the Islamophobia roiling Europe, United States and so much of the Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu worlds.