Around the World in 50 Years (44 page)

Because Saudi customs and etiquette are tightly structured and taken seriously, and their violation could give unintended offense, we had to learn the rules, among which, as set forth by our internal facilitator, were these:

Don't discuss unpleasant topics in social situations.

Accept the first cup of coffee as an acknowledgment of the host's hospitality (even if you don't drink it). But do not accept more than three cups.

Eat and pass food and things only with the right hand.

Handle food with the first three fingers of the right hand only.

Don't let your fingers touch your mouth or tongue when eating from a communal dish.

Leave a portion of the meal uneaten.

Depart after the presentation of incense.

Do not show too much admiration for a Saudi's possessions because he may feel obligated to offer you the item under consideration.

Do not prematurely withdraw if a Saudi man holds your hand.

Men and women should avoid physical contact in public.

Do not beckon or point with the fingers.

Do not photograph people, particularly women, without first asking permission.

Do not expose the soles of your feet to Saudis or make idiomatic references to shoes.

No alcohol, pork products, pornography, or religious books and artifacts not related to Islam are permitted in the country.

Homosexual behavior and adultery are illegal and can carry the death penalty.

Public criticism of the King, the royal family, or the government is not tolerated.

Saudis are very conscious of personal and family honor and can easily be offended by any perceived insult to that honor.

Islam is the only legally and officially recognized religion.

In addition, we had to comply with the dress code for foreigners issued by the Society for the Encourage [
sic
] of Virtue and the Elimination of Vice, which decreed that men cannot wear any type of shorts, tight trousers, or fitted shirts (which left no wiggle room for a guy who'd gained 15 pounds in the past year).

You think all this is easy? Try sitting on a carpet in outgrown pants with your bare feet tucked underneath you for two hours while fetching fried rice from a communal bowl with the first three fingers of the right hand and trying to ingest it without touching your mouth or tongue while simultaneously passing the pita bread to the guy next to you with the same right hand and desperately trying to get the pepper dish without pointing at it as you praise the weather for the tenth time while taking care not to praise the furniture and longing for the incense to be presented although you are eager (without giving offense, of course) to find out exactly who is killing whom and why in the Eastern Province, all this while still absorbing your first contact with Saudi culture—the bold caption atop the entry form distributed on the arriving flight:
DEATH TO DRUG TRAFFICKERS
.

Our experiences were more relaxed and pleasant than what we'd anticipated from the instructions.

Almost every male Saudi we encountered shook our (right) hand warmly (but not uncomfortably long) and told us “America is good.” The police who enforced religious discipline ignored my belly-stretched T-shirts. When the call to prayer sounded, as it did five times a day, all businesses closed promptly—but not quite; in the open-air markets, you could usually find a shopkeeper in the back of one of the stalls who was keeping watch over his neighbors' stalls and willing to surreptitiously transact business. The netiquette in computer cafes was to lock the door until prayers were over, but let you stay and continue messaging. Traffic did not stop. And the few people who loitered on the street were not rounded up and forced to attend services. Although non-Muslims were forbidden to enter the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, our group's van took an unauthorized “shortcut” through the heart of Medina and didn't get stopped.

I got a pleasant surprise in Jeddah when we ran into a group of 14 teenage Saudi girls from a private school taking a tour with their teacher to study old buildings. Only three kept their faces covered; all the others were eager to chat, in excellent English, take photos of us, pose for photos with us, and generally behave like typical American teenagers. Nothing like this was repeated for the rest of the trip, and we never again had the opportunity to speak to a Saudi female. It was a fascinating glimpse behind the veil, and I wondered how these girls would fare in their strict society when the time came for them to marry and conform.

All in all, we had a great ten days visiting digs at Al-Ukhdood, Yathrib (Madinah), Al Via, Al Jout, Za'abal fortress, Hail, and the Zubaida Route, trotting around to look at (and try to interpret) rock carvings and inscriptions from 2,000 years ago, poking about in scores of tombs carved into sandstone cliffs in the desert behind elegant facades adorned with snakes and eagles and the five steps to Heaven, and picking over bleached bones around the ruins of ancient caravansaries. These last were situated along the routes by which spices and incense had made the land transit from Yemen to the Mediterranean, before Arab sailors learned how to put the seasonal monsoon winds to their advantage and sail up and down the narrow, coral-reef-fringed Red Sea, an innovation that wrecked the overland caravan trade around C.E. 75. We had fun, but were beyond hopeless when it came to semiotics and distinguishing among recondite inscriptions carved in Aramaic, Palmyrene, Nabatean, and early Arabic, as our professor gently noted.

During this time, the president of Yemen agreed to leave office (again), which mollified the protesters a mite, but the state still lacked a functioning government to issue visas, which put me in a dilemma. I always try to enter a country legally, with visas and passport stamps and all such folderol, and had only once departed from this procedure, in exigent circumstances, but I realized I could well be doddering or dead by the time Yemen resumed issuing visas. When our group reached the Saudi city of Najran on the edge of the Empty Quarter, to poke around the ruins of the ancient settlement of Al-Ukhdood in Wadi Najran, only two uninhabited miles from the Yemeni border, the temptation proved overpowering.

I offered our guide $200 to take me up to the border, but he told me it was too risky because the Saudis were on the alert to prevent jihadis from slipping across from Yemen. He said the Saudi military had cleared a wide stretch of land on the border, had installed heat sensors, were erecting a fence (not yet completed), and had 4
×
4s with searchlights patrolling the area—all of which presented an irresistible challenge to me.

Aided by a visibility diminishing dust storm that night, and abetted by a local with an SUV who succumbed to my offer of $200, and with my absence from our motel covered for by two members of my group, we drove about two miles past the airport to a dark and deserted area, hung a hard right, and headed up the sandy slopes for several hours, until we crossed into an unguarded part of Yemen.

*   *   *

Yemen was like traveling back in time. I stayed in the Old City part of its capital, Sana'a, a UNESCO World Heritage site that is a maze of narrow, winding old alleys lined by the world's first skyscrapers, six to seven stories tall, built of large stone blocks many hundreds of years ago, originally illuminated inside through window holes covered with thin sheets of alabaster polished to transparency.

The people were remarkably friendly. The countryside was like Arizona on steroids: The mountains, which soar from 6,000 to 11,000 feet (the highest in the Middle East), were often topped with an enchanting ancient village reached by a breath-stoppingly serpentine road and surrounded by a high, thick wall, entered through a gate out of the Arabian nights. The food was varied and delicious, albeit too spicy for most Westerners. And there were more signs on the walls proclaiming—in an artistic combination of black, green, and red paint—
DEATH TO AMERICA
than I have ever seen. The full translation was even more disturbing: “God is great. Death to America! Death to Israel! Damn the Jews! Power to Islam.”

I chanced upon a wedding at a remote village on a high plateau where most of the fierce-looking tribal guests had walked in from the hills for the festivities dressed in their newest automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They vied to have their photos taken with this rare Western visitor and insisted I hold their weapons as they entwined their arms over my shoulders. Lucky for me I'm from Poland.

On a barren hill overlooking Wadi Bahr in Yemen, 15 km north of Sana'a, I provided a perch for a young falcon. The birds are carefully trained, highly prized, and heftily priced status symbols throughout the Middle East, where they are used for hunting small animals.
Debbie Ricci

My long background evaluating female bodies provided me with vital sociopolitical insight as to why Yemeni women average a svelte and inviting 115 pounds while Saudi women tip the scales over 210, why these lithe ladies glide by in shimmering black silk robes while the similarly attired Saudi women plod by like oxcarts whose wheels are out of line. I respectfully submit five reasons for this telling and informative difference, ones you will not find in any World Bank analysis.

1. The Yemen women stride about briskly, freely, independently on their own, comprising fully half of the pedestrian population. The Saudi women are rarely allowed to walk about, and on the rare occasions when they do, must keep a respectful three paces behind the hulking, slow-moving male relative who is chaperoning them.

2. Yemen is far poorer, and consequently has fewer cars, so walking is a way of life. In Saudi Arabia, as in the other wealthy Gulf states, foreign guest workers drive the overweight denizens almost everywhere in luxurious, air-conditioned cars, severely limiting exercise opportunities.

3. The Yemenis, being poorer, are more restricted in, and conscious of, food consumption, while the Saudis just pile it on.

4. Although times may be changing a little in Saudi Arabia, it is still a bastion of arranged marriages, where the parents pick the mates and the parties take whatever is offered. In Yemen, the teenagers are more independent, and often conduct lengthy courting interviews before marrying, interviews in which looking like an oxcart would not be advantageous—unless the prospective husband is primarily seeking someone capable of heavy hauling.

5. The climate of the most populated parts of Yemen, which are mountainous, is brisk and cool, encouraging aerobic walking, while that of sea-level Saudi is so torpid and enervating that not even mad dogs or Englishmen try it.

After several days in Sana'a, I grew weary—and somewhat wary—of all the
DEATH TO AMERICA
signs, and all the pamphlets I was handed informing me that “None has the right to be worshiped but Allah.” I opted to fly to a remote part of Yemen where there were no active jihadis—the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean, about 500 miles south of Aden. I can't say it was a brilliant move, because I'd forgotten that Socotra was near that part of the Somali coast where the pirates had their lairs. Thwarted by convoys of European warships from snatching the easy maritime pickings as they had done several years before, the pirates had turned to looting and kidnapping in the surrounding land areas, including the three sister islands west of Socotra. So far they'd left Socotra alone, perhaps because none of its towns appear to have been rebuilt since they were devastated in a war with Egypt more than 50 years ago. It looks too poor for any self-respecting pirate to waste his time.

If they did come, they'd meet little resistance because the populace is too stoned to care, totally trashed around the clock. It's a long-standing part of Yemeni culture to chew
qat,
the mildly narcotic leaves of an evergreen shrub (
Catha edulis
) that is Yemen's biggest cash crop, fetching its farmers five times more per acre than fruit. Surveys show that 70 to 80 percent of the male residents chew
qat
at least three times a week, for four to five hours a day, causing
qat
cultivation to soar from 8,000 hectares in 1970 to 107,000 today, and sucking up 55 percent of the country's daily water consumption. A national average of 20 percent of family income is spent on
qat
, with many families closer to 50 percent. The locals further deplete their budgets and health by smoking cigarettes while chewing
qat
and by washing down the sticky green mess with two-liter bottles of Coke or Fanta.

Although I seldom put any raw foreign greens into my mouth without peeling or disinfecting them, curiosity overcame caution and I chewed two leaves of
qat
. They were so bitter I spit them out in less than a minute. I then added some chewing gum as a sweetener, and that enabled me to chew four
qát
leaves for five minutes, but to no effect. To get any sort of a buzz, you need to wad up both cheeks with 50 to 60 leaves, which is why the island looks as if it's suffering from a severe mumps epidemic.