Yemen- The Unknown Arabia Read online

  The other day – it might, in fact, have been almost any day – I had lunch at Ali’s then bought my qat from blue-eyed Muhammad across the road. He swore I wasn’t giving him what he’d paid for it (the oaths of qat sellers are notoriously unbinding). I argued. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘take it for nothing. A present.’ I folded some more notes, stuck them behind his dagger, and walked off with my purchase. Wrangling over the price is part of the business of working up a sweat. (Real mawla’is – that is, those ‘inflamed with passion’ for qat – used to run halfway up Jabal Nuqum, singing, before they chewed.) It was half past two and I was ready to start. My molar, as they say, was hot.

  In a house in the centre of San’a, I climbed the stairs to another room on a roof, grander than my own. On the way up, I called ‘Allah, Allah,’ to warn women of my presence. Perhaps I should make the point here, if it needs to be made, that this is a very male book. As a man I am excluded from the society of women, as they are from that of men. Outsiders tend to see this dual, parallel system as a form of repression. The idea never occurs to most Yemeni women. They know that they wield power in many spheres, notably in the choice of marriage partners which, given an endogamous system, is a major influence on the distribution of wealth. Women play only a small role in the public domain, as they did in the West until quite recently; at least in Yemen, in contrast to Saudi Arabia, women are able to drive cars, enter Parliament, become top-ranking civil servants. But it is in the private realm of the home that the woman dominates, in practice if not in theory; men often gather to chew qat together because their homes have been taken over by visiting women.

  The veil, so overlaid with symbolic meaning for Westerners, is for Yemeni women just another item of dress. If it is not essential as protection against the cold, then neither are stockings, bras or neckties. Casual Western observers, for whom the black sharshaf is a dehumanizer and who equate the veil with a gag, are allowing an obsession with symbolism to pull the wool over their own eyes. Underlying the use of hair- or face-coverings there are, of course, Arab-Islamic concepts of honour and modesty which the West does not share or has lost. The question of what to conceal – face, breasts, ankles, the legs of a grand piano – is not a question of sense but of sensibilities. The Turkey merchant Sir Henry Blount wrote in the seventeenth century of the Turks that they live ‘by another kind of civilitie, different from ours, but no less pretending’. His message has yet to get across. The veil is indeed a potent symbol, but a symbol of the unwillingness or inability of the West to understand the Arab world. The Iron Curtain has been and gone; the muslin curtain still hangs, and probably always will.

  Panting from the ascent, I slipped off my shoes and entered the room. It was rectangular, with windows on all sides which began a foot above the floor. Above them were semicircular fanlights of coloured glass. Into the tracery of the fanlights, and in the plaster of the walls and shelf-brackets, were worked the names of God and the Prophet, and verses of a pious nature – it was a very legible room. Polished brass gleamed everywhere: rosewater sprinklers, incense-burners, spittoons with little crocheted covers, the great circular tray with its three water-pipes. Low mattresses covered with Afghan runners lined the walls. About a dozen men were sitting on them, leaning on armrests topped with little cloth-of-gold cushions.

  I greeted the chewers, interrupting their zabj, the rapid banter, the swordplay of insults that starts all the best qat sessions. I’d scarcely sat down when an old man opposite turned on me.

  ‘I was in Sa’wan this morning, and I saw this Jew. And, do you know, he looked just like you. You could have been twins!’

  ‘But … but I haven’t got any side-locks,’ I parried feebly. Jewish Yemenis are required to advertise their religion by cultivating a pair of long corkscrew ringlets.

  ‘Ah,’ he went on, ‘you know what they say: “Jewishness is in the heart, not in the length of the side-locks.” ’

  I made a feint to gain time: ‘Tell me: exactly how many side-locks did this Jew of Sa’wan have?’

  ‘What do you mean? Two, of course.’

  ‘Well, it’s a funny thing, but I saw a Jew in the qat market today and he looked exactly like you. You could have been twins. But he had four side-locks …’

  After half an hour of this verbal fencing, the zabj lost its momentum and devolved into solo joke telling.

  ‘Once’, someone said, ‘there was a blind girl. She was twenty-five years old and longing for a husband; but whenever she brought the subject up with her father he’d say, “My daughter, you are blind. No one wants you. But don’t worry – you’ll find a husband in Paradise.” Well, one day she was up on the roof hanging out the washing when she tripped and fell, down and down, six storeys. By chance she fell into a lorry carrying bananas and was knocked unconscious. The lorry drove on. Ten minutes later she came to. Ah, she thought, I am dead. Then, as she felt the bananas, she remembered what her father had told her and gave a little shriek: “Slowly, slowly, men of Paradise! Please, take your turn!” ’

  And many more in the same vein. Yemenis, and particularly San’anis, are a mixture of earth and polish, in contrast to their dour Saudi cousins of Najd and the unspeakably polite Levantine. Their contradictory nature was explained by al-Hamdani as the result of the conjunction of Venus and Mars when Sam founded their city: the Venusian aspects, he says, are ‘religiosity, faithfulness, upright living, breadth of character, soundness in body, knowledge, poetry and dress, ease of living, and many other such qualities’; the influence of Mars imparts ‘a surfeit of passion, adultery, frivolity, fondness for music, singing and unseemly jokes, quarrelsomeness, and a tendency to mess about with knives and allow themselves to be henpecked’. As for the women of San’a, while they are ‘incomparably beautiful, swift and graceful’, they are also ‘prone to jealousy, coquettish and forward’.

  Weightier matters are discussed at qat chews, and they are a major forum for the transaction of business and for religious and political debate. Many people also chew to aid concentration on study or work, and qat is the inevitable accompaniment to all important occasions from weddings to funerals. A funeral chew is known as mujabarah, a word which also means ‘the setting of broken bones’. But at the classic San’ani chew, it is ‘lightness of blood’ – charm, amiability – that is admired, not gravitas. At a qat chew, one walks what a ninth-century poet called ‘the sword-edge that separates the serious from the frivolous’.

  My qat was good, a Hamdani from Tuzan. Qat is a dicotyledon known to science as Catha edulis. Unremarkable though it appears, chewers recognize a huge variety of types and are fascinated by its origin: when one buys qat one first establishes its pedigree. Quality is judged by region, by the district within a region, even by the field where the individual tree is grown and by the position of the leaf on it. The product of a tree planted inadvertently on a grave is to be avoided – it brings sorrow. Qat can be any colour from lettuce-green to bruise-purple. It comes long or short, bound into bundles or loose, packed in plastic, alfalfa or banana leaves. In San’a, as a rule of thumb, the longer the branch, the more prestigious it is: less image-conscious chewers – and I am one of them – buy qatal, the pickings from the lower branches.

  Just as in the West there are wine snobs, in Yemen there are qat snobs. I once found myself opposite one. Fastidiously, he broke the heads off his yard-long branches and wrapped them in a dampened towel. It was almost an act of consecration. When he had finished, he drew on his water-pipe and appraised my bag of qatal with a look that threatened to wither it. ‘Everything’, he said in an audible whisper, ‘has pubic hair. Qatal is the pubic hair of qat. Besides, dogs cock their legs over it.’ He tossed me one of the tips from inside his towel. It was as thick as asparagus, its leaves edged with a delicate russet, and it tasted nutty, with the patrician bitter-sweetness of an almond. There was a tactile pleasure too, like that of eating pomegranates – a slight resistance between the teeth followed by a burst of juice. I chased it with a slurp of w
ater infused with the smoke of incense made from sandalwood, eagle-wood, mastic and cloves.

  Qat does not alter your perception. It simply enhances it by rooting you in one place. There is a story in The Arabian Nights about a prince who sat and sat in his palace. Sentient from the waist up, his lower half had been turned to porphyry. ‘I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true,’ said Cardinal Newman. They usually are, to some extent.

  After the zabj and the jokes, conversations took place in smaller groups, then pairs, then, towards the end of the afternoon, ceased. I looked out of the windows at the city.

  ‘There are three earthly paradises,’ said the Prophet. ‘Merv of Khurasan, Damascus of Syria, and San’a of Yemen. And San’a is the paradise of these paradises.’

  Many have looked on San’a and seen a divine aesthetic at work in its setting. An Iraqi visitor earlier this century eulogized the city in verse:

  San’a, home of lofty civilization,

  Dwelling of every brave and generous lord,

  Paris, London, and all the great cities

  Of the Romans and Americans do not match you in beauty.

  The beauty of those other places is but embellishment and artifice;

  Your beauty is unaffected, the gift of your Creator.

  The mountains, says the historian al-Shamahi, are perfectly placed, ‘neither so far away as to tire the eye when it focuses on the edge of the plain; nor so close as to stifle refreshing morning breezes or constrict the views that, just before sunset, take on such wonderful colours’. They are mountains to be contemplated, like Fuji, if never so geometrical (although I once saw Nuqum, just after dawn, with a circle of cloud hovering over it, so precise that it might have been drawn by a compass).

  The climate, too, is perfect, if a bit dusty. And a little too cold in winter, added Ibn al-Mujawir, ‘when ducks get frozen alive in ponds, with their heads sticking out of the ice. Foxes come and bite the heads off.’ But San’a is not as cold as the village of Bayt Ma’din on the slopes of Jabal al-Nabi Shu’ayb, where in winter the mosque ablution pool freezes over and a qadi is said to have excused the villagers from the dawn prayer, ‘even if their bollocks are made of iron’. Very occasionally, it snows on the Prophet Shu’ayb. The event causes a certain linguistic complication, as Yemenis have no word for snow. You have to say, ‘Ice that falls from the sky … No, not hail. The stuff that falls slowly and looks like cotton.’

  San’a at street-level is crowded and labyrinthine; but from this room on the roof you can see the green of gardens hiding behind walls of dun mud. The house façades themselves are never sombre, because of the plaster friezes that zigzag round each floor, increasing in complexity with every successive storey.

  The San’a house has its prototype in the Palace of Ghumdan. Probably built early in the second century AD and first mentioned in an inscription of the third-century Sabaean King Sha’ar Awtar, the palace has been celebrated by poets and historians ever since. Exaggeration is to be expected: its shadow reached the lip of Wadi Dahr, ten miles to the north-west; its lights could be seen in the holy city of al-Madinah, 750 miles away. Ghumdan, to judge by more sober descriptions, rose ten storeys, to a height of around 120 feet – miraculously tall for its period. Built of variegated stone, it had hollow bronze lions and eagles on its parapet that roared and screeched when the wind blew. But the crowning glory of Ghumdan was its alabaster belvedere, so translucent that if you lay on your back and looked through the ceiling you could tell kites from crows as they flew overhead; the experience, according to al-Hamdani, was ‘physic for a care-worn heart’ and the nearest thing to heaven in this world:

  If Paradise’s garden is above the skies,

  Then hard by heaven the roof of Ghumdan lies.

  And if God made on Earth a heaven for our eyes,

  Then Ghumdan’s place is by that earthly paradise.

  All that is left of the palace now is a hillock to the east of the Great Mosque, covered with later building. Yet its spirit survives in the tower-house of San’a. Since the city burst its walls after the Revolution of 1962, space has not been at a premium. But people still build upwards, subconsciously imitating the Sabaean builders of Ghumdan. Every upper room is a memory of that alabaster belvedere, a place of luxury and refinement implicit in the word mafraj.

  The mafraj is not always on the roof. There are ground-floor versions with pools and fountains, and a proverb goes: ‘If your heart is at ease, even a donkey’s arsehole can be a mafraj.’ But the classic type is like the one in which we are sitting, watching the kites and crows, looking at the view (tafarraj, from the verbal root of mafraj), having our cares dispelled (again, tafarraj). In today’s roofscape, however, the bronze lions of Ghumdan have been replaced by water tanks, some fashioned as globes or Scud missiles, or by satellite dishes. CNN offers even more distant prospects than Ghumdan.

  I find myself looking towards the place where the sun must have just disappeared. This high above sea-level we are spared the more vulgar sort of sunset. The afterglow is dusty, the sky above the city like the inside of a shell. But I’m looking towards it, not at it – there’s a distortion in the window pane, interesting and annoying at the same time. A man that looks on glass, on it may stay his eye.

  It is six o’clock, or five to twelve in the Islamic day that starts with the sunset prayer. But, for a time, it is neither: the Hour of Solomon has begun, al-Sa’ah al-Sulaymaniyyah. Sa’ah has among its root meanings in the dictionary ‘to be lost, to procrastinate’. At the Hour of Solomon time refracts, as if bent by a prism.

  No one speaks. Introspection has replaced conviviality. Somewhere, my fingers are working at the qat, polishing, plucking. When it was still light I found a fat horned caterpillar. A good sign – no DDT – but you don’t want to chew one.

  Were there a singer here, this would be his time. But the songs of the Hour of Solomon are as perilous as they are beautiful. Earlier this century in the days of Imam Yahya, singers could only perform in locked rooms, their windows stuffed with cushions. They had to hide their instruments for fear of imprisonment (fortunately, the old lute of San’a was small enough to be carried in the voluminous sleeves then worn). The Imam had banned singing with good reason: the songs are siren songs that tell of the flash of teeth beneath a veil like a silver coin in a well, of the saliva of lovers’ kisses intoxicating like wine, of beauty that is cruelly ephemeral. Lasting we thought it, yet it did not last.

  It is now quite dark. The coloured windows of neighbouring houses are lighting up, like Advent calendars.

  We qat chewers, if we are to believe everything that is said about us, are at best profligates, at worst irretrievable sinners. We are in the thrall of ‘the curse of Yemen’ and ‘the greatest corrupting influence on the country’ (two British ambassadors to San’a); we are in danger of ‘loss of memory, irritability, general weakness and constipation’, and from our water-pipes ‘there is certainly a danger of getting a chancre on the lips’ (Handbook of Arabia, 1917); worse, we are prone to ‘anorexia’ and to becoming ‘emotionally unstable, irritable, hyperactive and easily provoked to anger, eventually becoming violent’ (Journal of Substance Abuse, 1988), while in Somalia, qat has ‘starved the country’s children’ and ‘exacerbates a culture of guns and violence’ (San Francisco Chronicle, 1993); even if we don’t turn nasty, we ‘doze and dribble green saliva like cretinous infants with a packet of bulls-eyes’ (the English writer David Holden). In Saudi Arabia we would be punished more severely than alcohol drinkers; in Syria blue-eyed Muhammad would be swinging on the end of a rope.

  In contrast to the above quasi-scientific poppycock, the only full and serious study of the effects of qat (Kennedy’s – funded, it should be noted, by the US National Institute of Drug Abuse) concludes that the practice appears to have no serious physical or psychological effects. Yemenis themselves, while admitting that their habit is expensive, defend it on the grounds that it stimulates mental activity and concentration; they point out that at lea
st the money spent on it remains within the national economy.

  Qat has inspired a substantial body of literature. Compare, for example, Holden’s dribbling infants with a description of a handsome chewer by the seventeenth-century poet Ibrahim al-Hindi:

  Hearts melted at his slenderness. And as he chewed, his mouth resembled

  Pearls which have formed on carnelian and, between them, an emerald, melting.

  As well as poetry, there is a weighty corpus of scholarly literature on the legality of qat in Islam. It has been unable to find any analogy between the effects of the leaf and those of the prohibited narcotics. In the end, though, the question of its desirability and permissibility revolves around matters of politics, taste, ethnocentrism and sectarian prejudice.

  I can just make out my watch. Half past seven. Time, which had melted, is resolidifying. It is now that I sometimes wonder why I am sitting here in the dark with a huge green bolus in my cheek; why I, and millions of others, spend as much time buying and chewing qat as sleeping, and more money on it than on food.

  If we are to believe another major Western study of qat, we are ‘making symbolic statements about the social order’ and engaging in an activity that is ‘individual, hierarchical, competitive’.* Where you chew, and with whom, is certainly important. But to reduce it all to a neat theory – rumino ergo sum – is to over-simplify. It ignores the importance of the qat effect – something almost impossibly difficult to pin down, for it is as subtle and as hard to analyse as the alkaloids that cause it. It takes long practice to be able to recognize the effect consciously, and even then it sidesteps definition except in terms of metaphor, and by that untranslatable word, kayf.