The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
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Until 2000, Syria had claimed Shaba for itself. ‘Israel pulled out of Lebanon to the last bit, because Syria and Iran told them to.’
The real battle was not at Shaba, a containable sideshow. The struggle for Israel, for Palestine, was under way in the West Bank and Gaza. ‘Things have changed since 1948,’ Salibi said. ‘If there were a few shots then, many people fled. This time, the Israelis destroy whole cities and only a few people leave. They’ve been hardened. Israel is turning the Palestinians into lions. The Israelis don’t know what they are doing. They don’t know what they have done. They have, how many Sharons? Three or four? How many Palestinians will be suicide bombers?’
Kamal Salibi was born in 1928, when France was occupying Lebanon and Syria and the British held Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. His parents, his teachers and all the elders of Bhamdoun had been Ottoman subjects. The era of independence had done more to disrupt their lives by moving large numbers of people – Tolstoy’s definition of history – than had the Ottoman centuries. History was being made in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli settlers were moving in to force Palestinian Arabs out.
Salibi gave me some books to read, as he used to in Beirut. His houseboy went out to find me a taxi. That evening, he was having dinner at Usama Khalidy’s house. For them, Amman was a little like Beirut. In my taxi, between Salibi’s house and Shepherd’s, I looked at the vast hotels, Kentucky Fried Chicken shops and elegant stone houses. Amman was an unexciting city, but it had not surrendered to the vulgar brutality of Beirut and other Arab capitals. Houses had to be built of native stone, as in Jerusalem over the river. Streets were swept and washed. The cars were mostly new.
I dropped the books at the hotel and went for a walk. In the all-male cafés, men played cards and backgammon. There was no real souq, no central bazaar as in Istanbul or the other old Ottoman cities. Beirut’s souq had been a proud centre, until the civil war and the property developers reduced it to powder. Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem and Nicosia had kept their ancient marketplaces. Amman had never had a real souq, not having been a city since the days when the Romans called it Philadelphia. It had retained the culture and appearance of a large Arab – Circassian village in the Cotswolds, all quaint stone and ordered life. It was a town for driving in rather than walking. ‘In Jordan,’ Salibi had said, perhaps explaining his choice of Amman over Beirut, ‘they did not repudiate what the British taught them. If they build a road, it’s a good road. Look at the Pan-Arab Highway. The Jordanian part is beautiful. The bumps start in Syria.’ That much was true. But, as good as Jordan’s highways were, they were neither as vast nor as smooth as those next door in Iraq and in Israel.
Amman’s surrender to British and then to American culture made a kind of sense. Amman did not have much to cling to. Most of its people came from elsewhere. Its rulers were Hejazis from the Holy City of Mecca in what became Saudi Arabia. Their subjects had come there from other parts of Jordan, attracted by the royal court, administrative jobs, the army and business. Other Arabs had moved there from Lebanon, Syria and Iraq to marry or to enjoy its relative political stability. Half the city had escaped there from Palestine in the cataclysms of 1948 and 1967, unwillingly driven from towns and villages to which they believed they – or their children or their children’s children – would return. It had no claim on their loyalty.
The Grand Vizier
Everyone told me to see Zayd Rifai, former prime minister, former ambassador and now chief of the Senate. ‘He’s a great raconteur,’ the Syrian-born artist Ali Jabari said. A young woman at the Foreign Ministry told me, ‘He’s brilliant. He’s well read. When I met him, I just listened.’ (The young woman, Raya Qadi, was so beautiful that when we met I just listened.) Prince Talal bin Mohammed, a first cousin of King Abdallah, said that Rifai was a champion story-teller whose stories were sometimes true. True or not, they were good.
The first thing I noticed about Rifai was not the dark suit, possibly from a tailor in Savile Row, or the cigar, from Havana, but the blue eyes. Everything else in his Senate office spoke of Arabia. We were served Bedouin coffee – boiled cardamom – from a brass pot by a man in immaculate robes and keffiyeh. There were Persian carpets and tribal décor, a ceremonial sword and photographs of Jordan’s four kings. Rifai had the tanned skin of the desert and looked like a shrewd Arab politician. But the eyes spoke of the Ottoman Empire, whose Turks, Circassians, Bosnians, Kurds and Chechens mingled with the tribes of Arabia and Syria. Rifai, it seemed, numbered Circassians and Turks among his ancestors.
‘The family is originally from the Hejaz,’ he said. ‘One of our grandfathers went to Iraq, where he created the Rifai school of thought in Iraq in the eleventh century.’ The Rifai school was a sect of Sufis, Muslim mystics. ‘A lot of followers of the sect took on the name. There are now about twenty million Rifais in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq. The family were civil servants in the Ottoman administration. They moved from one city to another. My grandfather was born in a village of southern Syria, in the Hauran. He met my grandmother in Marjayoun and married her. My father was born there.’ Marjayoun, a large town in south Lebanon, was mostly Greek Orthodox. The Israelis had made it their military headquarters and base for their mercenary South Lebanon army from 1978 to 2000.
‘My uncles were born in Tyre and Sidon,’ Rifai said. ‘My grandfather retired to Safad.’ Safad, a mixed Arab – Jewish city in the Galilee, was just south of Lebanon’s Marjayoun. ‘My father grew up in Safad, and he worked for the British Mandate administration in Palestine. He was seconded in 1921 to Transjordan to establish the new administration. I was born here in 1936.’
Rifai said his father, who had served as prime minister to Jordan’s first three kings, advised him to avoid politics. ‘He said I should choose engineering or medicine. He really wanted me to be a doctor.’ He became a diplomat instead. His education at the Bishop’s School in Amman and Victoria College in Egypt, where Edward Said would also study, was pure British colonial. Then he made the transition, as the Arab world would, from the British to the American system. He went to Harvard. Did he study medicine? ‘Political science,’ he said. ‘I graduated in 1956. Then I did international law and relations at Columbia. I still go back and give lectures.’
In 1956, King Hussein had dismissed the British general John Bagot Glubb – Glubb Pasha – as commander of the Arab Legion. Reacting to anti-colonial criticism from Nasser’s Egyptian press, the young king had to prove his Arab nationalist credentials by putting his armed forces under an Arab. I wondered whether Rifai had known Glubb Pasha.
‘He was a wonderful man,’ Rifai recalled. ‘He became more Jordanian Arab than British. A lot of injustice was done to him. My father had to tell Glubb to leave.’ His father found the duty distasteful. Glubb had given his professional life to Jordan within the context of his loyalty to the British Empire. I had known Glubb’s son, Fares, in Beirut in the early 1970s. Short and thin like his father, he looked like photographs of Glubb Pasha as a young man. Fares spoke flawless Bedouin Arabic, had converted to Islam and was close to the Marxists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine who in 1970 had attempted to destroy the Hashemite crown that his father had sworn to defend for thirty-five years.
‘I went as ambassador to London for a few months,’ Rifai remembered. ‘Glubb Pasha used to call on me. He always referred to King Hussein as His Majesty, or our lord – sayedna. He had contributed enormously to the establishment of the army, to administration and order in this society.’ The discipline, the starched uniforms and the army band’s bagpipes owed something to Glubb Pasha.
Back in Amman with his Harvard and Columbia degrees, Rifai went on to represent Jordan in Cairo, Beirut and London, as well as at the United Nations. In 1971, he started work in the royal palace. ‘I thought I’d have a change after all we had been through.’ What Jordan had been through included the June 1967 war, when Israel captured Arab Jerusalem and the West Bank from what had been Glubb Pasha’s army; the Arab – Israeli War of Attrition that followed; and the 1970 Black September war between Palestinian commandos and Jordan’s army.
‘The most dangerous time was the period after the ’67 war,’ Rifai said. ‘For Jordan, it wasn’t a six-day war. It was a four-year war.