Rooted in Sand
Years as a reporter in the Mideast let Neil MacFarquhar discover its diversity.
Neil MacFarquhar grew up in coastal Libya, the son of an Esso chemical engineer. He remembers long yellow days, shifting stinging sands, running with the other American expat kids through the wind-whipped roads of the oil company’s compound.
But mostly the New York Times journalist remembers the fence that kept the little Western community segregated from the rest of the country. In the decade he lived there, he doesn’t remember eating a single Libyan meal.
“You were really sort of isolated,” he says, sipping a cappuccino in an Upper West Side apartment decorated with framed Arabic calligraphy. “When we left, I felt like I had missed out on the culture, because we really didn’t know what went on beyond that fence.”
MacFarquhar, ’82, has spent his career trying to find out.
After graduation from Stanford, MacFarquhar went to Cairo to study Arabic. Eventually he spent about a dozen years reporting in the Middle East, first for the Associated Press, then for the Times—and got a lot of material that was spun into a foreign-correspondent novel, The Sand Café (PublicAffairs, 2006.) His new nonfiction book, The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday (PublicAffairs, $26.95), shares more of what he saw.
There were late-night trips to mysterious destinations and summary arrests, sudden bombings and inquisitive secret policemen. But the only time he worried was when an angry mob or suspicious cop would relieve him of his notebooks. Because that meant he might not be able to tell the story.
His lively, anecdotal book describes a world most Americans never see—Saudi Arabian sitcoms and Kuwaiti sex therapists, a culture fascinated with cooking shows and entranced by poetry. A world that is more than suicide bombers and simmering anti-Americanism.
“The region is not monolithic,” MacFarquhar insists. “There are 22 very different countries stretching from North Africa into Asia. . . . For example, Tunisia is a horrible little police state—but they have incredibly progressive laws for women and a big emphasis on birth control. Saudi Arabia is an apartheid society [segregated] by sex—but the women have an incredibly vibrant society of their own.”
Peter Waldman, a longtime San Francisco writer, met MacFarquhar in 1992 in Tehran over an illicit bottle of apple vodka. “We all covered a gazillion terrorist bombings,” Waldman says. “But Neil has always been interested and motivated as a writer by the cultural elements of the region. Wherever you were, he always knew the most knowledgeable local journalists—as well as the most beautiful artists.”
MacFarquhar says any change that comes in the Mideast is going to have to come from within. “The Iraq invasion gave democracy this image as a bad Western thing that only brings destruction—which, of course, the dictators in the region were very happy about. Anything or anyone we support now seems suspect. . . . There are people who are struggling to change the region, but our policy should be to support them indirectly.”
While he now covers the United Nations for the Times, he retains his fondness for the Mideast—the clean white dunes, the heady spice markets, the intricate Persian poetry. “The perception we have of the region is one of constant turmoil,” he says. “And certainly I wrote about it all the time, so I know where it comes from. But the violence is a scrim that blocks out everything else—just like the physical fence that surrounded me when I was a child.”
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Book Excerpt: Far More Than
Falafel
Ramzi Shwayri, the real name of the chef who introduced turkey to Ramadan, was on a mission to transform Arab cuisine. The black-haired chef, his burly frame bursting out of his uniform, tinkered with traditional recipes and introduced foods once experienced only vicariously. He wanted Arab households to get away from standard fare like falafel or kibbeh at every meal, to sample new dishes. Part of Chef Ramzi’s mass appeal was that, while cooking on television, he fielded live calls from anybody with a food question. Future Television had to add two operators to answer the phones while he was on the air. The chef, in his mid-30s, blossomed into a regional phenomenon, his satellite television broadcast considered mandatory viewing from Muscat to Marrakesh and beyond.
Watching him work felt like eavesdropping on an extended Arab living room. Once a bee plopped down into a cream dish just minutes before the show ended. Chef Ramzi told me he could not ignore it because the cameraman (“Al-humar!” he yelled in Arabic as he recounted the story—”The donkey,” a crowning insult) focused right on it. So the chef scooped it out with a large spoon and proclaimed the dish unsullied.
A woman from Saudi Arabia called immediately to complain that for the sake of hygiene—and wasn’t the chef always harping about hygiene in the kitchen—he should have tossed out the whole thing. The Sudanese woman who called next argued that bees were mentioned in the Koran as exceptionally clean insects with their own souls, so he should have left it. A Syrian man then phoned, wondering if they could drop the religious philosophizing and hauling the Koran into every single conversation for once already and just cook?
Occasionally food intersected with politics in a similarly amusing vein. This was especially true in Egypt, where humor acts like a force field to deflect the daily strain of living in such an overpopulated environment. After not eating all day during Ramadan, most Muslim households first break the fast by nibbling on a few dates before tucking into something far more substantial. In Cairo, the competition at the wholesale date market was fierce, so every year the sellers tried to come up with catchy nicknames for the dozen or so varieties to attract buyers.
During the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the dates nicknamed “Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction” were not selling well. The moniker went to a particularly long, costly date imported from Iraq, a country once famous for producing dates so thick and chewy that I sometimes felt like I was eating chocolate. “Look at them, they look just like Scud missiles,” the seller, Sayid Mahmoud, told me, scooping one out of an overflowing burlap sack. “Sales are just OK. I think people are waiting to see what happens with America. I’m sure if he uses his missiles, sales will improve.”
But “Yasir Arafat” and the revived best seller from previous years, “Osama bin Laden,” sold out fast. Like any good reporter, I took this as a barometer for the general mood—a reflection that the plight of the Palestinians and the general idea of sticking it to the U.S. were the preoccupations of the moment. However, perhaps the most telling sign of the prevailing mood was one of economic hardship. Lots of people ignored the politics of the derogatory name “Bush and Sharon” assigned to the absolute lowest-quality dates, more bitter than sweet. One shopper piling them into his bag shrugged as he told me, “At least they are so tough that I know they won’t have any mites in them.”
