The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
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like that were for the Bedouin. Peasants, the fellaheen, wore black and white. Bassam told a waiter to bring me tea and a narghile.
The waiter dropped the water pipe and a box of hot coals to keep us warm beside the table. ‘You want more coal?’ Bassam asked. I was warm enough. The waiter ran back to the hut for a smaller coal carrier with chips of charred wood, fahm in Arabic, for the pipe. He placed the embers on a mound of wet tobacco at the summit of the silver stem above a glass vase of water. The ceremony proceeded: he tested the tobacco, blew on the coals and inserted a plastic mouthpiece into the wood tip of an accordion cord. The sweet smoke, filtered through clear water, let me dream like a Turkish pasha.
Bassam, rubbing his hands close to the fire, asked if I liked the tobacco. Pleased, he said, ‘It’s apple.’ He flavoured his tobacco with other fruits, but apple was his favourite. He told me the story of his business. He had come to Aqaba as an inland tourist a year after Jordan ended its official state of war with Israel. He saw a disused plot of trees and shrubs and weeds between a traffic roundabout and some restaurants and asked the town’s government for a permit to sell coffee on it. It was agreed that, if he cleaned the site and the public liked his coffee, he could stay. ‘I opened with a half kilo of coffee, two kilos of sugar, two kilos of bananas, and two kilos of oranges.’ He spent what little money he had in the bank on clearing the weeds and rubbish and building the kiosk. With his profits from sales of tea, coffee and fresh juice, he bought more coffee, more sugar, more fruit. ‘I cannot drink juice here any more,’ he said. ‘I see it too much. But if I go to Syria, I drink orange juice every day.’ The business prospered. Pepsi put a canopy on his kiosk and provided a cooler for its bottles. Bassam was joining the world economy.
Israelis came to his café, usually on day trips from Eilat, and Bassam welcomed them. An Israeli guide named Menachem brought group tours to rest and drink tea under the sidr trees. I assumed Bassam had to pay him something in return. There were problems with the Israelis. What? Stealing, he said. What did they steal? Glasses. Glasses? ‘We cleared the tables,’ Bassam recalled. ‘Twenty glasses were missing. I asked Menachem to get them back. Menachem said they were taking them to drink later. I told him we had plastic cups for that.’
Despite the thefts, Bassam served the Israeli day-trippers and counted glasses before they left. When the Palestinian uprising against military occupation began at the end of September 2000, the Israelis stayed in Eilat. Western tourists, apart from a few hearty pilgrims, avoided the entire region. The source of Bassam’s suffering was neither the Israelis who stole glasses nor the foreigners who feared visiting Jordan, but the Jordanian bureaucracy. One conscientious bureaucrat almost cost him his business, his investment and his livelihood. This officer of local government took it upon himself to enforce the law with an efficiency that many Western financial consultants believe the Arab world needs if it is to assume its place in the scheme of transnational, universal, utopian capitalism. This functionary was new to Aqaba, a man who knew the regulations, a man to help forge a land of laws and not of men, an arbiter of right and wrong, the kind of man whose rightful home might have been in the FBI, an ‘I’m-all-right-Jack’ British trade union of the 1950s, or middle management at an American corporation. He did not belong in Aqaba.
Having been posted to the town from Jordan’s more austere north, the official visited Bassam’s café. He tasted the coffee and must have observed that Bassam’s clean kitchen conformed to the rules of health and safety. He noted that previous local officials had issued Bassam the papers necessary to maintain the green kiosk, its cooker, its juice squeezers and its refrigerators. The kiosk-café had a valid permit. The plastic tables and chairs, scattered among trees for the relaxation of families and occasional tourists, did not. And the observant bureaucrat saw tables where the law did not allow tables. He saw people sitting in chairs that the law did not sanction. He must have seen glasses of tea and cups of coffee on those permitless tables. Perhaps he heard a bit of laughter in the shade and observed children running round the prohibited tables on the earthen paths that Bassam had cleaned and swept amid grass that he had cut. The bureaucrat, this northerner, did his job. He had come to Aqaba to enforce the law, and he enforced it by sending men to seize every table and every chair and lock them in a government warehouse.
Patrons who had come to enjoy Bassam’s garden and to muse over Persian tobacco smoke and Turkish coffee went elsewhere. Aqaba’s citizens were not Italians to stand at a counter for a quick espresso before rushing to an office or shop. They had time for the rituals of the day, to wait for coffee to brew with cardamom seeds in a brass pot, to watch a young man light the coals and pack the tobacco into a hookah, to observe from a chair the universe revolving around them. Bassam lost them to other cafés, none so congenial as his had been, but where they might feel a chair beneath them and bang a table when the argument suited. His business declined, and the little garden resumed its empty, forlorn state. Bassam stopped sending money to his two sisters at university. Helping his father in Kerak, a filial duty, became difficult.
Bassam Abu Samhadana did what any good Jordanian whose prosperity was threatened by bureaucracy would have done: he wrote to the king. A new monarch had ascended the throne, a young man who had not been tested. The old king, as Bassam and many others among his subjects abjured, would have dealt with the legal threat to Bassam’s survival swiftly and justly. Young Abdallah, however, was a modern man. His mother was English, and his education came from the Western world where law and by-laws and regulations and rules were said to prevail. Such a modern king might leave the enforcers of law to do their work without royal interference. Abdallah’s training – his English was more fluent than his Arabic – should have inclined him to let Bassam’s remaining clients drink on their feet or drink elsewhere. Writing to such a king – unlike to his father, who had behaved like the true father of all his subjects – held perils. What if King Abdallah read the letter and rebuked Bassam for going over the head of a government official, accused him of demanding favours, prosecuted him for asking the king himself to violate the law? Bassam was a man of Kerak, and the men of Kerak were not afraid. He sent the letter, and he waited. A week is a long wait when your business is dying and your sisters and father depend on you. Bassam waited many weeks, then many months. He survived in part courtesy of loyal customers like Ahmed Amrin, who were willing to stand rather than seek another café.
King Abdallah’s letter arrived, and Bassam rejoiced. The king had read the petition, weighed the facts of the case and concluded that the Governorate of Aqaba must restore to Bassam’s café all its chairs and tables. Bassam took the letter to the government office building and showed it to the bureaucrat who had seized his property. Despite what amounted to a royal proclamation, the bureaucrat did not relent. While conceding that the king had written the letter, the man said it had no legal force. Instructions to release confiscated property had to be processed through channels. There were not only regulations – and the official had demonstrated his devotion to those – there were also procedures. And to the procedures, he was just as loyal. To enforce his decision in the case, the king would have to instruct a minister, who would pass the order down to the regional governor, who would send it from one office to another, where it would be signed and stamped by the appropriate officials, until it reached the desk of the bureaucrat in Aqaba. The chairs and the tables remained locked in the warehouse.
Bassam had an acquaintance, also from Kerak, who knew the king. The Kerak man was a soldier, who had trained the then Prince Abdallah years before in some aspect or another of military practice. Bassam contacted the soldier – by telephone or letter, I was not sure which – and asked him to tell the king what happened to royal decisions in Aqaba. The king had to be informed that, despite his ruling to the contrary, the tables and chairs remained locked away and Aqaba’s finest garden café was empty. The soldier promised to bring the matter to King Abdallah’s attention. Further days, then weeks, passed without action from the palace or a call from the soldier. With business suffering, Bassam called Amman, the capital and home of the officer who had been a mentor to the young prince before he became the king, to impress upon his Kerak compatriot the urgency of the case. If his tables and chairs were not restored soon, the café would close and Bassam would return to Kerak a failed man. His disgrace would not fail to dishonour King Abdallah, whose writ would be seen not to run as far as Aqaba, as well as the officer from Kerak.
While I listened to Bassam’s