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 the door? I’ll catch my death of cold.’
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 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.
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 off 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: “Jewishiness 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 she 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.
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 form Tuzan. Qat is a dicotyledon known to science as
Catha edulis
. Unremarkable though it appears, chewers recognise 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 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 in 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 damp 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 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 water infused with the smoke of incense made from sandalwood, eaglewood, 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.
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 Iman 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
, 5988), 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 least 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 oversimplify. 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 recognise the effect consciously, and even then it sidesteps definition except in terms of metaphor, and by that untranslatable word,
kayf
.
Kayf
– if you achieve it, and you will do if you choose the qat and the setting carefully – enables you to think, work and study. It enables you to be still.
Kayf
stretches the attention span, so that you can watch the same view for hours, the only change being the movement of the sun. A journey ceases to be motion through changing scenery – it is you who are stationary while the world is moved past, like a travelling-flat in an old film. Even if briefly, the chewer who reaches this
kayf
feels he is in the right place at the right time – at the pivot of a revolving pre-Copernican universe, the still point of the turning world.