Glory in a Camel's Eye gives us an intimate, often surprising portrait of Saharan Africa: the cultural conflicts between native Berbers and Arabs, the clashes between devout desert-dwelling nomads and their city-dwelling counterparts. Fluent in Arabic, Tayler assembles an image of modern life very much at odds with our Western assumptions. He observes and reports "with eloquence and an eye for the improbable" (Outside).
Glory in a Camel's Eye gives us an intimate, often surprising portrait of Saharan Africa: the cultural conflicts between native Berbers and Arabs, the clashes between devout desert-dwelling nomads and their city-dwelling counterparts. Fluent in Arabic, Tayler assembles an image of modern life very much at odds with our Western assumptions. He observes and reports "with eloquence and an eye for the improbable" (Outside).
Glory In A Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert
246
Glory In A Camel's Eye: A Perilous Trek Through the Greatest African Desert
246Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
Glory in a Camel's Eye gives us an intimate, often surprising portrait of Saharan Africa: the cultural conflicts between native Berbers and Arabs, the clashes between devout desert-dwelling nomads and their city-dwelling counterparts. Fluent in Arabic, Tayler assembles an image of modern life very much at odds with our Western assumptions. He observes and reports "with eloquence and an eye for the improbable" (Outside).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780618492220 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2005 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 246 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Other Lived to Lead
The Road to the Drâa Valley
IN 1986, while in graduate school writing a master's thesis on famine in the Soviet Ukraine, I discovered two books that pointed me toward transformational peregrinations in the Arab world. The first was Wilfred Thesiger's Arabian Sands, the great British explorer's account of his postwar travels on foot and by camel with Bedouin tribesmen in the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula. Though hired by the Middle East Anti-Locust Unit to search out locust breeding grounds, Thesiger pursued a personal quest while in Arabia, a quest intimately related to the nomads with whom he lived: he hoped to "find the peace that comes with solitude, and among the [Bedouin], comradeship in a hostile world." The spirit of the Bedouin, he wrote, "lit the desert like a flame." Traversing much of Oman and Saudi Arabia in their company, he at first felt like "an uncouth and inarticulate barbarian, an intruder from a shoddy and materialistic world." So poor were the Bedouin that they wore only smocks, loincloths, and daggers, yet they never stole from him. Indeed, they proved themselves paragons of desert virtue, and, during the five years he spent roaming the sands as their guest, they became his closest friends. Thesiger emerged from the Empty Quarter hardened by heat, hunger, thirst, and tribal raids, and forever after felt himself a stranger in "civilized" company. He had, in sum, found what he was looking for among the Bedouin, and it had transformed him.
When I read Sands, I was studying Arabic, having had an inkling that adventure — another life, even — awaited me in the Arab world. Sands introduced me to the Bedouin, who were masters of terrain in which one needed stamina and courage to survive. I read and reread the book, dreaming of journeys in the Empty Quarter, but Arabia had changed much since Thesiger's day, as he himself had written. In the 1970s he had revisited his old haunts and found them an "Arabian nightmare" of oil money and skyscrapers, of Bedouin who had abandoned their camels for Land Rovers. Sands was really an elegy, a travelogue that would, he hoped, remain a "memorial to a vanished past, a tribute to a once magnificent people."
Soon after finishing Sands, I came across the other book that fired me with passion for the Arab world: Philip K. Hitti's History of the Arabs. Every word of History rang with the author's love of Arab civilization, the Islamic era of which began in the seventh century with the eruption of Arab armies, largely composed of Bedouin tribesmen, out of Arabia. In the name of Islam, the Arabs conquered all of North Africa; in Europe, they overran Spain and reached France; in Asia, they made it to China. "Around the name of the Arabs," Hitti wrote, "would gleam the halo that belongs to world-conquerors." To the Bedouin, "the Arabian nation is the noblest of all nations (afkhar al-umam). The civilized man, from the Bedouin's exalted point of view, is less happy and far inferior. In the purity of his blood, his eloquence and poetry, his sword and horse and above all his noble ancestry (nasab), the Arabian takes infinite pride.... The phenomenal and almost unparalleled efflorescence of early Islam was due in no small measure to the latent powers of the Bedouins, who, in the words of the Caliph 'Umar, 'furnished Islam with its raw material.'"
From Hitti I learned that the Bedouin were not only the archetypal wanderers, but also the co-originators of Islamic civilization, which was once one of the most progressive civilizations on earth. From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, while Europe recovered from barbarian invasions and suffered seignorialism and feudal rule, Córdoba of the Umayyad dynasty and Baghdad of the Abbasids rivaled Constantinople in splendor. While Western Europe was largely illiterate, the Arabs were conquering the Middle Eastern and North African territories of Byzantium and absorbing Hellenic culture; Arab caliphs were reading Aristotle; and Arab thinkers were syncretizing Hellenic and Islamic philosophies and transmitting Greek scholarship to Europe, thus eventually fostering the Renaissance. During the Middle Ages Arabic became a language of science and literature and, by way of Medieval Latin, contributed to English a wealth of now common words, among them "alcohol," "algebra," "syrup," and "coffee." From the eastern realms of their empire, the Arabs brought back Hindi ("Indian," later called "Arabic") numerals and passed them on to Europe; the Indian concept of zero permitted the birth of modern mathematics and science. The Arabs kept alive the ancient Greek notion that the earth was round and, through a work in Latin, delivered it to Columbus, thus aiding his discovery of the Americas.
Hitti's work taught me that the Arabs were the exponents of a civilization that differed fundamentally from that of the West. Whereas in the West commercialism and multitudinous creeds, religions, and philosophies flourish and in their cacophony offer no single answer to our existential quandaries, in most of the Arab world one religion, Islam (which translates as "submission" — to the will of God), dominates all aspects of life, demanding of its followers discipline, self-abnegation, and the observance of ritual. In the concept of Umma, the Islamic Nation, are a refutal of Western individualism and an antidote to loneliness and alienation. Moreover, and this was crucial to me as a traveler, the cities that gave birth to this civilization bore some of the most exotic and alluring names (Baghdad, Marrakesh, Damascus) that I had ever heard.
After reading Hitti, I threw myself into the study of Arabic, spending six hours every day learning grammar, listening to tapes, and meeting with my Jordanian and Palestinian instructors. A year later, in 1987, I quit graduate school, flew to Portugal, and sailed from Algeciras in southern Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar to Morocco, from where I intended to make my way east across the entire Arab world, my destination Baghdad.
This was a grand idea that owed more to rash enthusiasm than to planning. A few days after arriving in Morocco, beneath the soaring minarets and earthen ramparts of Meknès, I ate a bad kebab and it nearly killed me with a fortnight of nausea, vomiting, dizzying headaches, and diarrhea. But along with food poisoning I confronted other impediments. Darija, the Arabic dialect of Morocco, proved almost completely unintelligible to me, bearing little resemblance to the classical Arabic I had been studying. I thus found myself able to recite chapters from A Thousand and One Nights while having trouble understanding directions to the bathrooms I so often needed. There were also faux guides who set upon Nasranis ("foreigners," or more exactly, "Nazarenes," "Christians") in the streets. Day after day, as I staggered out of my hotel to buy yogurt and Lomotil, I was accosted by unemployed youths demanding I hire them as guides for tours of the medina. Few took kindly to rejection. One youth whose services I declined grew irate. "You won't hire me! Then you'll rot in a Moroccan prison!" He turned to passersby and shouted, while pointing at me, "Drug dealer! Drug dealer! This Nasrani's trying to sell me drugs! Police! Police! Drug dealer!" There were no police about, though, and I slipped back into my hotel, shaken up and uncomprehending. More incidents like this followed.
Previous travels in Europe and Turkey had not prepared me for Morocco. Still sick, I gave up and staggered aboard a plane in Casablanca, bound first for Rome and then for familiar haunts in the eastern Mediterranean. My plans for the Arab world would have to wait. I would have to prepare myself better if ever again I attempted to tread in Thesiger's footsteps.
After seven months of rambling around Italy, Greece, and Turkey, I ran out of money and returned to the States. I pursued my study of Arabic at a language institute in Washington, D.C., and wondered what to do next. Having no other ideas but wanting to return to an Arab country (any Arab country but Morocco, that is), I applied to join the Peace Corps and was called in for an interview. The Peace Corps occupied an old building in the center of town. Fans chopped the air above desks cluttered with amulets and native trinkets from West Africa and Central America; posters of smiling African children and Bolivian peasants in colorful shawls hung on yellowed walls. There was an earnestness about the besandaled employees there that I found disagreeable.
The recruitment officer to whom I spoke was a perky young woman in a frumpy dress. Scribbling and hunched over a mess of papers, she asked me to explain why I wanted to be a volunteer. I sensed that I needed an altruistic motive along the lines of Thesiger's locust research to win her over, so I said something about wanting to help people in developing countries better their lives. This platitude elicited smiles and comments about how my undergraduate degree in psychology (a discipline I had renounced) would suit the Peace Corps just fine.
She scribbled away. "Sooo ... is there any place you'd prefer to go?"
"Since I speak Arabic, I'd like to go to Yemen or Tunisia." I paused. "The only place I don't want to go is Morocco."
"Peace Corps is not a travel agency," she said, in a tone that sounded like it portended my imminent disqualification. "You can't choose your country of service."
"Then why did you ask me where I wanted to go?"
"You can state your preference, that's all. You should be ready to serve in whatever country we offer you for the good of the people..." A few weeks later she called me. "We have an opening."
"Where?"
"In Morocco."
"But ... you have nothing else?"
She told me that Morocco was all they had available in an Arab country at the time, and reminded me that if I turned her down I might lead her to believe that I saw Peace Corps as a travel agency. I thought it over for a few minutes. My money had run out, and I had no other prospects for employment. I accepted her offer and was soon on a plane for Morocco.
After three months of instruction in Moroccan Arabic and culture in Rabat, I was given a two-year assignment in Marrakesh, working with a school for the blind and with the parents of handicapped children. Dating from the eleventh century, Marrakesh is an imperial city of souks and snake charmers and hash-scented alleys largely enclosed in earthen walls on a burnt-out plain, beneath the snow-mantled peaks of the High Atlas. I took up residence in the casbah (from the Arabic qasaba, or citadel) district, far from other volunteers; I adopted an Arabic name, Jelal, because I found that few Moroccans could remember my own. There were no Bedouin in the casbah or elsewhere in Marrakesh, but there were many faux guides. Now that I was a long-term guest in their country, I was compelled to reach a sort of modus vivendi with them. I could not escape them, and they were, after all, just poor youths in a country where there was little work. But I never allowed them to intimidate me as they had the previous year. When necessary, I adopted their blustering tactics and threatening postures and used them against them. The only time I have ever hit anybody was while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Marrakesh.
In any case, I discovered a distraction that brought me closer to Moroccan life than any job with the Peace Corps ever would: Moroccan women. The first year I didn't dare engage them; the second year I found I couldn't resist. They glided down Marrakesh's alleys of dung-leavened dust, their kohl-daubed eyes alert, their breasts swinging under the silk of flowing djellabas, their hair glinting with the warm tints of henna. The prospect of marrying a rich (to them) American made me attractive enough, as did the chance to dabble in pleasures of the flesh with a forbidden Christian; they knew that Nasranis would not despise them as whores for sleeping with them.
This was new territory for me. During training, Peace Corps instructors had warned female volunteers of the trauma they could expect to suffer in adjusting to the second-class status Islamic society would impose on them, but they said nothing to male volunteers about the magic Moroccan women practiced to trap a mate (though they did warn us that irate brothers and knife-wielding fathers made "dating" an exceedingly dangerous business). The instructors said not a word about the evening paseo, during which single men and women strolled the downtown avenues, arranging trysts after exchanging little more than stares and smiles. They certainly didn't mention sbagha (painting), the practice whereby a Moroccan woman, desirous of maintaining her virginity yet determined to get off with her lover, vigorously "paints" her clitoris with the tip of his erect penis. Nor did they tell us anything about the prevalence of prostitutes, often veiled, who worked the crowds of big cities at dusk, searching for clients as the call to prayer sounded. The word qahba (whore) was not even in the Peace Corps manual of Moroccan Arabic, though it was one of the more frequently used words in the language.
So I did my time in Marrakesh, conducting trysts, evading brothers, reading Arabic literature, and yearning for even more adventure, more escape, something along the lines of what Thesiger had described in Arabian Sands. Then, at the very end of my tour, Iraq invaded Kuwait. Just as I was preparing to travel to the Middle East to try to start a career in photojournalism, another volunteer told me of a valley in Morocco's remote south called the Drâa. The Drâa was, he said, the desert wasteland from which, in the sixteenth century, warriors of the Saadi dynasty had emerged to halt the advances of the Portuguese and the Ottoman Turks. In a shivery flash of insight I saw that the Drâa was what I had been searching for all along: there, gazelles fleeted and oases of palms shimmered like seas of emerald; there, Morocco ended and the no man's land of the Sahara, vast and ready for exploration, began; and, most important, there dwelled Bedouin, unspoiled Bedouin who knew nothing of the pampered lifestyle of their oil-rich brethren in the east. Whereas much of the Arab world had been modernized, even radicalized, beyond recognition since the end of the colonial era, the Drâa, from what I could tell, had remained a sort of ur-Arab paradise.
As I packed to leave Morocco I read up on the Drâa. The valley begins 150 miles southeast of Marrakesh, on the Saharan side of the moonscape crags of the Atlas, where the red clay wadis (seasonal riverbeds) of Ouarzazate and Dadès converge. Watered by underground springs and the April melt of Atlas snows, the Drâa River cuts its way for 160 miles southeast across the 6,500-foot-high Saghro massif (an offshoot of the High Atlas) and enters the Sahara proper through Beni Slimane pass in Jbel (mount) Bani to reach the oasis village of Mhamid. From Mhamid the Drâa veers west and snakes for 375 more miles through the desert, along the base of the Anti-Atlas, to debouch into the Atlantic. The six palm oases of the Drâa's upper reaches (from Ouarzazate to Mhamid) rest on fertile loam and support ancient agricultural communities dwelling in elaborate, towered casbahs and walled villages known in Darija as qsars (from the classical Arabic qasr, or palace), made of ochre-hued adobe bricks hewn from the river's banks. The French dubbed this part of the valley the coude du Drâa, a metaphor hinting at the origin of the Drâa's name: a corruption of the Arabic word dhira' (arm). About the lower expanses of the valley beginning at Mhamid and extending to the Atlantic I could find no information.
From the ninth through the fifteenth century, the Drâa served as one of the main caravan routes between Europe and Timbuktu. The desert-wise Bedouin, or Ruhhal (from the Arabic rahala, "to wander from place to place") in the Arabic dialects of North Africa, were the master navigators of this eleven-hundred-mile channel across the sea of sand. After making the two-month crossing of the desert, lengthy, plodding caravans arrived in the Drâa bearing ivory, gold, and slaves. The last of these were among the most profitable of the caravans' commodities: the Africans whom Ruhhal traders bought from dealers in Timbuktu for fifteen to twenty talers could fetch ten times more in Marrakesh. In exchange for slaves and gold, the Ruhhal took to West Africa leather goods and textiles, and, eventually, guns; they also spread Islam in the Sahel, which is Muslim to this day. The last slave caravan, it is said, crossed the Sahara in the 1950s.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Glory in a Camel's Eye"
by .
Copyright © 2003 Jeffrey Tayler.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Table of Contents,
Copyright,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Note on Transliteration,
Prologue,
Other Lived to Lead,
Departure from Tizgui Falls,
Ouriz,
The Casbah of Tamnougalt,
Ait Hamou Said and the Berber Market of Tighoummar,
Marabout and Son,
Moonlight and Fever,
Blood in Zagora,
To the Qsar of Nesrate,
Across Narjam Pass,
Mhamid of the Gazelles,
The Dangers Ahead,
Dry Wells,
Sons of Dogs,
Mghimima,
The Great Sand Wall,
Cut du Drâa,
Ait Oubelli,
To Icht and Foum al-Hisn,
Assa and Houris in the Mists,
Âouïnet-Torkoz,
Crossing the Anti-Atlas,
To the Atlantic,
Epilogue,
Acknowledgments,
About the Author,