Brownies and Kalashnikovs Page 22

  At Beirut International Airport, we stepped into the welcoming arms of my father-in-law, who reveled in the audacity of what we had just pulled off. He immediately whisked us off to the Mufti of Sidon, Sheikh Salim, a first cousin, and handed him a marriage contract he had written based on his intimate knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence in marriage procedures. Sheikh Salim, a dour, thin, serious cleric who was everything my father-in-law wasn’t, took the contract to verify it legally and routinely asked me for my identity papers. When I pulled out my Saudi passport, his jaw fell open and he turned his gaze, eyes narrowed, to his cousin.

  “Salah bek,” he addressed him peevishly, “How do you expect me to verify the marriage of your son to a Saudi Arabian lady without all the required signatures needed on it? We have a circular from the Saudi Embassy that threatens legal punishment should we validate any marriage of a Saudi woman without the required signed papers from the Saudi Arab Ministry of Interior and her father … and you know that,” he added accusingly.

  I can still see the small, barely suppressed smile on Abu Bashar’s lips and the twinkle in his eye that relayed how much he was enjoying this challenge. He was one of the pillars of jurisprudence throughout the south of Lebanon, where he had presided as High Judge and was famous for his creativity in twisting the law with his flawless legal arguments to benefit the poorer or weaker plaintiff. Here was a case that spoke to his heart. Salaheddine Khayyat was taking on the Wahhabi usurpation of Islamic jurisprudence single-handedly.

  “Is it not a known fact that marriage in Islam is the acceptance of the two people involved without the need of a witness, should they so wish?”

  “Yes,” Sheikh Salim nodded, cautiously, “go on.”

  “And here you have a written contract with their signatures and mine. This is a de facto contract of marriage as per the literal instructions of the Qur’an and we are here to have you legally register it, NOT to question it,” he declared triumphantly.

  Muttering under his breath Sheikh Salim ordered a witness brought in before confirming our marriage contract. Adnan stepped out into the corridor briefly and brought back a very amused, random passerby. Now the marriage ceremony began. I was given strict orders to nod my head for a “yes” whenever any question was sent my way, as my grasp of classical Arabic was weak. Five minutes later, we were husband and wife. We returned to Adnan’s home where my mother-in-law was waiting, holding her breath. My new in-laws became my surrogate parents as they embraced me into their fold and loved me as one of their own wholeheartedly and unconditionally.

  My mother arrived three days after we sealed our marriage contract. I went to see her at Amti Bahija’s apartment (she had been forced to leave her penthouse and a large part of her money with ‘Abdel Nasser after his fallout with King Faysal after which all Saudi subjects were ordered to leave Egypt). I knew it would be fine with my mother, and it was. She hugged me and scolded me for leaving before my twenty-second birthday on January 24th, which she had looked forward to celebrating in England with my siblings. Disappearing briefly into her room, she returned with a gift, a beautiful leather shoulder bag, handing it to me as she smiled sadly, lifting her shoulders in a small shrug, her way of accepting my marriage as Fate. This was the last gift I would receive from her after my father forbade the mention of my name in his presence for decades, altering our relationship permanently. The following day, my father stomped into Beirut Airport and publicly accused Adnan and Abu Bashar of committing “an act of piracy,” causing them to break out in silent giggles and me to break out in an unprecedented case of hives. Unhappily, but predictably, I was never able to regain normal relations with my parents, so deep was my father’s anger at what I had done, breaking the rules of behavior and decorum expected as his obedient daughter and as a docile daughter of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

  10

  Tides of War

  ‘Come with me from Lebanon, my bride’. Song of Solomon 4:8

  To the naked eye, Beirut of 1973 was still the same frivolous and fun- loving city all the tourist brochures made it out to be. However, to those in tune with Lebanon’s darker side, the drumbeats for armed conflict amongst the Lebanese were becoming increasingly loud. What was happening to this dynamic, vibrant country? I had been away for just six months but the scene was palpably more sinister, especially amongst our circle of journalist friends. Censorship was beginning to rear its ugly head and our beloved Michel Abu Jaoude was no longer the devil-may-care wit we knew him to be. Although he remained ever the gentleman and warm friend, he was deeply disturbed at the direction politics was taking in Lebanon. His columns were becoming increasingly critical and scathing, at times even going so far as to lose the objectivity that had always been his trademark. Lebanon was teetering dangerously on the brink of civil war.

  Our first year of marriage, often predicted to be bumpy, was bumpy, but not because of personal matters. We were prepared to weather disapproval from both Adnan’s family and mine, as we hadn’t banked on anyone’s approval for being together. But what we had not anticipated affecting our lives together was the fallout of Lebanon’s politics on our dreams. Lebanon’s new president, Suleiman Franjieh, a feudal Maronite chieftain, traditionally and historically more connected to Syria than to the Maronites, had squeaked past the post in elections by just one arm-wrestled vote. With such a colorful background it was no surprise that Franjieh’s presidency would be marked by corruption and nepotism that would effectively erase what baby steps had been taken to give Lebanon a solid productive economy.

  The Palestinian issue had seeped into the social fabric of Lebanese society. The Maronite clan leader, Sheikh Pierre Gemayel, already head of a quasi-militant party for the preservation of Christian Lebanon since the days of the French mandate, was developing a deep hatred and mistrust of Muslims amongst remote Christian villages deep in the mountains and the far south. He hammered into them the credo that they could survive as Christian communities only through refusal of an Arab face to Lebanon. And the Palestinian issue was connected with its Arab face. Religious leaders of the rest of the Christian population rose in anger against Gemayel’s blatant exploitation of religion for his political ends. In defiance of Gemayel’s militias, many Christian Lebanese joined Muslim Lebanese militias in support of armed Palestinian resistance. Lifelong friends and family members stopped speaking to one another. Angry demonstrations filled the streets of Beirut daily, condemning the lack of representation in the government for the Arab face of Lebanon. The march towards self-destruction that repeatedly thundered across this star-crossed piece of geography was on the move once more. Through this crack of vulnerability, the Zionists cunningly struck into the heart of Beirut and of Lebanese cohesion.

  On April 10, 1973, an Israeli terror squad beached a rubber dinghy on the southern coastal road leading into Beirut. On board was an assassination squad led by Ehud Barak, who was dressed as a woman. As they made their way in the pre-dawn hours through a shanty town inhabited by Lebanese Shi’a refugees who had escaped the daily shelling of their villages in the south and the Bekaa Valley, the Israelis killed nine members of the same family for getting in their way. The killers’ targets were three Palestinian writers residing in Verdun, a fashionable residential neighborhood, two streets away from where we lived. The Internal Security Forces (ISF) received the news immediately of the night raid underway but were ordered to go back to bed by President Suleiman Franjieh. Prime Minister Saeb Salam was tipped off about the operation and frantically ordered the army to stop them. President Suleiman Franjieh gave counter orders to ignore the Prime Minister. The three terrorists passed within yards of a major army barracks well within sight of the soldiers inside and felt safe enough to direct early morning traffic there. Continuing on, they entered the designated apartment bloc and murdered the three Palestinian intellectuals with a silenced gun. The Palestinian intellectuals died at the hands of the Zionist assassins while the rest of Beirut slept along with President Suleiman Franjieh, the ISF and t
he army. Lebanon awoke the following morning to the terrible news.

  Splashed across the front page were the bullet-ridden bodies of Kamal Nasser, Mohammed Yousef Najjar, Kamal Adwan, Kamal Adwan’s wife and a hapless neighbor caught in the crossfire. The three Palestinian activists had been chosen to die by Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel, in response to a botched PLO hostage-taking during the Munich Olympics in September 1972 that had resulted in the death of eleven Israeli athletes. Although their names had been officially removed from the hit list the Mossad had drawn up to spread terror amongst the Palestinians in retaliation for Munich, the Israeli government wanted them dead anyway. Israel wanted to make it clear that Palestinian freedom fighters would not be safe anywhere from the Mossad. Kamal Nasser, Kamal Adwan, and Mohammed Yousef Najjar were the designated targets because they were intellectual Palestinian activists.

  In 1973, dead people were not shown in the media out of respect for both them and their families – an act of decency that would be horrifically erased with the passage of time. A black-and-white photo taken from a respectful angle exposing one of the dead intellectuals, Kamal Nasser, was circulated in the press. He was dressed elegantly in his dressing gown and bedroom slippers and seemed to be fast asleep on his living room floor. For the first time in my life, I was looking at a dead man whom I knew. Even through the barrier of print, the horror of the finality of death gripped me, and strangely the most random of thoughts raced through my mind. He must have hurriedly put on his robe and slippers before opening the door, I thought inanely, maybe expecting the ISF, or a courier from the PLO at that early hour of the morning, but never an Israeli terrorist squad. They probably exchanged words to verify his identity then shot him before his horrified family. Tears of sympathy welled up in my eyes for Kamal Nasser, who had died so violently because he stood for a cause he believed in. He had been among the usuals at Michel Abu Jaoude’s soirées at An Nahar, a jovial, wisecracking Palestinian who had chosen to write rather than to carry arms. But as time would tell, men like him would remain at the top of Zionist (and other close neighbors) hit lists because they knew, as had the colonizers before them, what great magnitude the well-written Arabic word had in making a difference among the Arabs. How vulnerable and exposed we were to such evil forces, who decided at will who could live and who must die. Ehud Barak, having committed the necessary Zionist right of passage by killing Arabs, gained the necessary credentials to become Israel’s prime minister in 1998.

  We joined 250,000 others in the assassinated Palestinians’ funeral procession in a replay of the anger on the streets at the 1968 destruction of Lebanon’s airplanes and airport by the Israeli air force. President Suleiman Franjieh’s response to this massive outpouring of support was to bomb the Palestinian headquarters in the north and south of the capital in an attempt to erase them from the Lebanese equation once and for all. The operation began on May 1st at dawn.

  I sat bolt upright in bed that early dawn at the first stomach- churning crash of Franjieh’s bombing, one block away from our apartment. Adnan was awake, but lying silently in bed, eyes wide open. Feelings of helplessness and rage took over my entire being as I found myself shaking uncontrollably at my first brush with the sounds of war. My husband and I were pinned down in our apartment for three days under the crossfire. We had not yet reached the first anniversary of our marriage and we were already facing hurdles far more than the usual hurdles of newlyweds merging their lives and dreams together. Our lot in life was tied with that of the Arab world and we were marked to undergo many more such battles for merely existing as Arabs in an Arab land. But as Suleiman Franjieh and every one else with thoughts like him would discover, the Palestinian issue was not going to go away until justice was served.

  Six months later in that watershed year of Middle East turmoil, the October War of 1973 broke out. Spearheaded by the Egyptians in conjunction with Syria to regain land lost to the Zionists in 1967, the October War went down in military history for its initial surprise offensive, the meticulously planned and executed crossing of the Suez Canal by elite commando forces that caught the Israeli army asleep in a pre-dawn attack. This required engineering and logistics that no one credited the Egyptian army with having, least of all the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. Sadly this brilliant maneuver ended in defeat after heavy air support by the Americans carpet-bombed the Egyptian forces and extracted the cornered Israeli Army from their tight spot.

  In the midst of the war, the Arab League successfully pressured Saudi King Faysal into an oil boycott against the West and Aramco was ordered to stop pumping. The reasons were not as altruistic as many Arab nationalist believed then. When Saudi oil disappeared from the market, world oil prices quadrupled and money began pouring into Saudi Arabia’s treasury as it never had before.

  President Nixon sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on an urgent mission to remind Faysal of their oil-for-security pact and unless different measures were taken, the Pentagon threatened military action against Saudi Arabia. The American government was concerned not because its populace was suffering from the oil price rise, but because of the negative impact the embargo was having on its war machinery in Vietnam. King Faysal gave the United States a win-win solution. While the Arab world was lauding him as the unsmiling Arab hero who had kept Kissinger waiting for several days before seeing him, he secretly passed an agreement that Saudi oil would be covertly supplied to the US Navy during the oil embargo and that the embargo itself would not last longer than 1974.

  The October War was not so opportune for the poorer Arab economies. They felt the bite of Secretary of State Kissinger’s ‘carrot and stick’ policy that tied American economic aid to compliance with American strategic policies. Saudi Arabia’s oil bonanza was ‘America’s economic aid.’ The cash-strapped one-party-one-man Arab leaders soon fell in line, taking their disenfranchised nations with them, after deciding that armed resistance against Israel was unproductive and problematic for them. My previous aversion to armed resistance disappeared.

  We were disoriented by the political and social fallout on Lebanon of the October War. We were no longer clear about what to believe or expect. Who was friend and who was foe? The concept of Arab versus Zionist was no longer spelled out in black and white as it had been after the 1967 war. Both sides were turning into shades of gray as they bled into one another’s corner. And where did we belong? The emerging Lebanese warlords became intransigently belligerent at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Those selfsame movers and shakers, who had met nightly in Michel Abu Jaoude’s office at An Nahar, were fast becoming archrivals and their meetings were turning into shouting matches. Israel nudged the Lebanese further towards annihilation in 1974 by officially announcing ‘organized and systematic’ patrols and roadblocks on Lebanese territory and pre-emptive attacks on the Palestinians, without any provocation, to prevent infiltration across the border. Adding salt to the wound of Lebanese divisiveness, they regularly gave out a communiqué after their forays into Lebanese territory that ended with “our troops encountered no resistance from the Lebanese army.” In cooperation with the Israelis, the Lebanese ISF stepped up its cordon around pro-Palestinian activists and the Lebanese army repeatedly bombed the Palestinian refugee camps across the country, taking turns with the Israelis.

  “Unless we agree to carry arms, we do not belong here. Rivers of blood are going to gush across this country, and soon,” Adnan prophesied to my horrified ears.

  We shelved our plans for a future in Lebanon and grudgingly packed our bags for what was being touted as the new Eldorado: the Gulf Emirate of Abu Dhabi.

  ***

  Exile in Boomtown

  Adnan and I moved to Abu Dhabi in September 1974, adamantly insisting we would never be swayed by material temptation to stay away from our beloved Lebanon for longer than a couple of years. Despite the increasing tensions, Lebanon’s playfulness, beauty, and joie-de-vivre surpassed the rest of the Arab countries. Abu Dhabi was still a stretch of
barren desert, so desolate, so hot and so humid, that even the poorest of the Bedouin tribes had shunned it. We stepped into Abu Dhabi at the same time as its newfound oil wealth and Sheikh Zayed, its new ruler. The desert statelet did not yet have sidewalks. Rats ran boldly amongst towering piles of garbage. Goats wandered in the parking spaces of the ministries, chewing contentedly on any paper folders or mail-bags forgotten outside the buildings. What rain fell, no matter how meager, became a car-washing fest for taxi drivers in pools of muddy water that gathered in the poorly drained streets and empty lots.

  We were there to run a bookstore recently opened by my brotherin-law, a flamboyant, sharp-as-nails businessman. He had instantly jumped at the opportunity of extending his publishing and printing business in Kuwait to the fledgling emirate, where bookstores were almost nonexistent. His bookstore, All Prints, was the only one of substance in Abu Dhabi, and the run on the bookstore from the intellectually starved professionals putting Abu Dhabi together was more than the available labor could answer to. As well as being a bookstore, All Prints was the only distributor in the area of newspapers and periodicals from around the world, which made it an important outlet for the expatriates, predominantly French, English, Egyptian, and Sudanese military advisors and professionals, all avid readers. It would be another ten years before five- and six-star hotels, restaurants, nightclubs, air-conditioned shopping malls and beach clubs would begin popping up across the Gulf Emirates.