Brownies and Kalashnikovs Read online

  Adnan walked in and sat down, uncharacteristically silent, at a loss for words for the first time in his life. And he remained silent while we both gazed at Munira who eventually tired of us and fell asleep.

  I wanted a perfect world for my perfect baby’s life. So I wrote in her Baby Book under ‘events of the day of her birthday’: “A peace treaty has been signed and this time it seems definite.” Why did she have to suffer for being born Lebanese at this point in her country’s history? I resented the intrusion of the civil war into my baby’s life. I did not mention the Phalange attack on the Tal el Za’atar Palestinian refugee camp north of Beirut, killing 600 and displacing 200,000; or that in revenge for Tal el Za’atar, the Palestinian-Syrian attack on the Christianpopulated southern coastal towns of Damour and Jiyeh, killing 500 and displacing 5000; nor did I mention that Beirut was now formally divided in half by the ‘Green Line’ into West and East under the ‘security’ of the Syrians. The peace treaty I had mentioned had been signed under the auspices of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt and the United States, creating a 30,000-strong Arab Deterrent Force, in what would become a failed mission to keep the peace. To the world at large and in Munira’s Baby Book, the civil war was legally over. How I wished I could wave away the ugliness of war from our baby’s life as easily as I could keep it out of her Baby Book.

  We clung to Im Bashar, listening to her voice of reason and hope. At 72 she had the joie de vivre and daring of youth, feared no one and spoke her mind freely. Im Bashar never railed against circumstance; I never heard any statement remotely close to ‘woe is me.’ What she could not prevent, she accepted and made the best of whatever was to evolve. Im Bashar was a woman of spirit who was never impeded by her age in her zest for life. She met each and every challenge head-on and attempted to exist with as much justice delivered as she could manage. Her repeated words during the war was that right must prevail and those fighting for freedom from occupation could only come out as victors.

  On a Middle East Airlines trip back to Beirut from Europe during a relatively quiet patch of the civil war, an incident that encapsulated Im Bashar’s spirit was played out. On board with us was a Lebanese soccer team from Sidon, young men who were returning from traveling abroad for the first time in their lives. They had been forced to stay longer than intended due to fighting over control of the airport road. Now they were on their way home and could not contain their joy. As the airplane dipped into its usual sweep over the city before touching land, the soccer team got up en masse from one side of the airplane to the other to catch their first ever glimpse of Beirut from the air. The sudden shift in weight seriously upset the equilibrium of the airplane. While we grasped our lurching seats, the co-pilot rushed out from his cabin, yelling urgently for everyone to go back to their seats. The head stewardess put in her own two bits and yelled at them to shut up and buckle up. They obediently sat down and buckled up but were unable to shut up. It was impossible for them to contain their excitement at returning home and they broke out into song with the words of Lebanon’s favorite singer Feyrouz’s nostalgic salute to embattled Lebanon, ‘Bhibbak ya Lubnan. The same stewardess reappeared from First Class, her face screwed into a paroxysm of elitist rage, and furiously stamped her foot, “You are disturbing other passengers!” she screamed, pointedly referring to the First Class passengers. We were sitting right behind her in the First Class compartment. I watched Im Bashar, who had been observing the stewardess with a baleful eye and resenting her more by each minute. As the stewardess turned to smile at us in triumph, Im Bashar unsmilingly picked up her cane and moved the separating curtain aside. She looked commandingly at the young men who sat upright under her stare like schoolboys. “SING!” she ordered the young men to an outbreak of song and applause from the other passengers as well as the soccer team.

  ***

  We celebrated Munira’s first birthday on October 12, 1977 in Sidon, at her grandmother’s request. The weather was cool and crisp, the battles had subsided for now, and the Sidonians were living life as ‘normally’ as possible with the ongoing civil war. Every house had a line up of jerry cans filled with water in anticipation of sudden shelling, bundles of candles to light when the electricity was sabotaged and plenty of bread in the freezer to lessen the chances of becoming unnecessary target practice for snipers while lining up at the bakeries.

  Surrounding my in-law’s apartment were olive groves and orange orchards. We never had a problem with the extended family’s children running underfoot when the weather was fair. They would ramble through the olive groves, climbing trees and splashing their feet in the shallow brooks that ran through them, and return red cheeked and happy clutching bouquets of bright red poppies, delicate daisies and blades of grass. When it rained we managed to enjoy a cup of coffee in peace by sending them down to hang out with the neighbors’ children in the shop at the entrance to the building, a treasure chest of sugary treats and small plastic toys owned by a Maronite villager, Tanios. On the day before Munira’s birthday, Nicola, one of Tanios’s sons, a congenial, energetic employee in our bookstore in Abu Dhabi, invited us to his grandfather’s house for lunch in the nearby village of Bramiyeh. Im Bashar uncharacteristically agreed to accept the invitation, a rare event as she preferred to feed people in her own house. She liked Nicola and his grandfather, Abu Tanios, and knew the family well. They were old neighbors from the descendants of the Maronites who had fled to the coast after the Druze massacres in the mountains during the 1860 civil war.

  As our car turned into the driveway of the stone farmhouse, Abu Tanios stood up to welcome us, honored that Im Bashar had joined us. He led us to his sun-dappled patio under a shady grapevine trellis dotted with delectable clusters of fat purple grapes within arm’s reach. Im Bashar was given the place of honor in the center of a divan decked out in freshly laundered flowery chintz. Nicola’s grandmother came bustling out of the kitchen kissing us all and repeating her welcome, ‘Ahlan ahlan bil hilween, tsharraffna.” (Welcome, welcome, with the beautiful ones, we are honored.) She lead us to a long wooden table decked out in an exuberant flowery tablecloth covered from one end to the other with every known Lebanese mezza delicacy there was. Im Bashar was forced to sit in the seat of honor at the head of the table and the feasting began.

  Short, plump and pleasant faced, Abu Tanios and Im Tanios were the picture of Lebanese exuberance and hospitality. Abu Tanios proudly took us around his small orchard crowded with orange trees, apple trees, almond trees and tangerines. Then he led us to his piece de resistance, two ancient clay jars that reached the height of a full-grown man. “These khabias are my babies,” he told me proudly, patting them lovingly. “We store our olive oil in one and our drinking water in the other, where it remains cooler than it would in the refrigerator. They’ve been in our family for many many generations, handed down from father to son. My grandparents fled the mountain during the ‘events’ of 1860 with nothing but these two khabias on the back of their donkey. My father’s dying words to me were to look after the khabias and make sure they were passed on to my children.”

  “They are his one link to his past,” Nicola commented affectionately about his grandfather’s attachment to the clay jars. “Tehteh (Grandma) has serious competition in his heart with those khabias!”

  Im Bashar was up at dawn the following morning with Munira, who was also an early riser, at her side. I listened contentedly to their voices laughing and talking against the whir of the juice machine in preparation for a lavish breakfast. Squeezing oranges was an honored right of passage for every young grandchild and Im Bashar’s chance for a ‘one on one’ she so enjoyed with each child. By noon, the extended family was extended even further with the neighbors and their children. A three-tiered birthday cake was brought in and Munira and all sixteen children blew out the solitary candle several times with loud applause and laughter as we gathered happily around a table groaning with food prepared by Im Bashar and her Palestinian helper, Ameenah. After lunch we clapped and
danced to the catchy rhythm of the Tanios boys’ Khaled, Massoud and Dodo’s dirbakeh (a hand-held drum played by rapid rhythmic finger tapping) while Munira tore through her presents, glancing briefly at the toys and hugging the pretty wrapping paper.

  Meanwhile, far in the distance, the dull thunder of mortar fire continued its deadly pounding, keeping the threat of civil war and Israel firmly in everyone’s mind.

  ***

  The beauty of life is particularly striking in times of war. Munira was life celebrated. She began each day in the wee hours of the morning with the joyous announcement, “I woke up!” We loved children and Munira’s entry into our lives made us love children all the more. We decided to go ahead with our plans for a large family, war or no war.

  Our son, Amer, was born on May 24, 1978 in Abu Dhabi, which in the meantime had upgraded its hospitals, and this time Adnan was in the labor room with me. As our sleepy golden-haired son was laid in my arms, Adnan thanked my obstetrician profusely. Dr. John, a no-nonsense Indian from Kerala, glanced at him with a rare smile, “Don’t thank me; your wife did all the work.” As was to be my habit, I did not mention any of the civil war’s events in Amer’s Baby Book. Our serene baby son was named ‘Amer’ by Bushra in a plea to the Heavens to stop the war in Lebanon. ‘Amer’ is a wish Arabs give to one another for a home blessed with peace, harmony and achievement, forever.

  Amer’s birth came in the midst of Ariel Sharon’s scorched earth invasion of the south, ‘Operation Big Pines.’ On March 31, Israel invaded, allegedly to clear out 7000 PLO commandos from the south, but everyone knew that this was yet another attempt to make a grab for Lebanon’s Litani River. On April 18, 1978, Israel easily occupied the vulnerable and unprotected rich farmland and villages surrounding the Litani, one third of Lebanon’s territory. Seven hundred villagers were massacred and 160,000 villagers fled in panic and chaos into Sidon. After Sidon filled to capacity, the refugees trekked north to Beirut. Already a dangerously polarized city, and unprepared for the overwhelming numbers of the refugees, Beirut was turned into a smoldering tinder box. Sharon made it clear that he had every intention of settling down in the south.

  International pressures forced him to withdraw under Security Council Resolution 425. The United Nations Interim Forces Lebanon (UNIFIL) arrived to observe the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon. On May 24, 1978, the day Amer was born, Sharon did withdraw but not before ‘formally’ handing over twenty-three key positions spread across Lebanon’s south, forty kilometers deep, to Major Sa’ad Haddad, a renegade officer from the Lebanese Army who took command of Israel’s proxy army, the South Lebanese Army (SLA), ostensibly to keep out Palestinian infiltrators. The Israeli-SLA-controlled enclave was declared the ‘State of Free Lebanon’ where no UNIFIL, Arab Deterrent Force or Lebanese Army personnel could enter, but Israel could.

  The SLA replaced the Israeli guns with their own on the hilltops surrounding Sidon and continued the policy of sowing terror amongst the civilians by random shelling as a daily bloody reminder of who controlled the south. Sa’ad Haddad and his big guns became the source of nightmares for our children as they grew up. Nothing was scarier in their world than Sa’ad Haddad. It would take twenty-two bloody years before UN Resolution 425 would be implemented, not through UNIFIL, but through a homegrown Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, stirred into being by none other than Sharon and his ‘scorched earth’ strategy.

  12

  Dignity or Death

  While war, invasion and resistance were raging in Lebanon, resistance was stirring elsewhere in the Arab world. This time it was in the least imaginable of all Arab states, in my country Saudi Arabia and in my province the Hijaz and in Islam’s holiest city, Mecca. On November 20, 1979, New Year’s Day of the Muslim Hijra calender year 1400 we awoke to an unprecedented challenge to the Al Sa’uds’ acclaimed role as the invincible caretakers of the two holy shrines of Islam.

  At the first streak of dawn on that New Year’s Day, an untold Muslim radio and television audience around the world and 50,000 worshippers in the courtyard of the Haram, the Great Mosque of Mecca, gathered to listen to King Khalid lead the morning prayers. Instead they became captive audience to Juhayman Ibn Mohammed Ibn Saif al ‘Utaybi,’ an ex-National Guardsman and a Wahhabi Bedouin from the powerful ‘Utaybi tribe, direct descendants of the Ikhwan, who angrily denounced the Al Sa’uds’ moral and financial corruption. Under cover of the night preceding the New Year, Juhayman had barricaded himself within the Haram’s walls with hundreds of fundamentalist supporters. King Khalid immediately vanished from sight, bundled away by his guards.

  Juhayman had one demand: to cleanse Arabia from the corrupt Al Sa’uds and their foreign lackeys. He declared his brother-in-law, Mohammed Ibn Abdullah al Qahtani, a member of another powerful tribe, to be the promised Mehdi, the savior who would bring justice to the Islamic world. Juhayman’s chilling pronouncement of the arrival of the Mehdi was the most serious challenge to the Al Sa’uds since the Ikhwan’s jihad against Ibn Sa’ud in 1929. Yet more threatening for the Al Sa’uds was that ammunition for the rebel Wahhabis had been transported to the mosque by members of the National Guard, the protectors of the royal family, in National Guard trucks.

  The rebels seized thirty hapless hostages from the crowd of worshippers and retreated to the massive underground labyrinth of the Haram, where they had stored a vast supply of ammunition, dates and water, vowing to fight against the Al Sa’uds to the last man. The shaken Al Sa’uds ordered their ulema, protectors of their rule and of their oil, to come up immediately with a fatwa that would give the Al Sa’uds Islamic cover for an attack on the House of God by Muslims against Muslims. Obediently, the ulema promptly issued a fatwa against Juhayman for committing ‘ignoble crimes and an act of atheism in the House of God.’ A jihad was declared against the ‘atheists.’ But this did not go down well with the rest of the Muslim world outside of the Al Sa’ud circles. Many saw the hastily declared fatwa as a pretext to protect the Al Sa’uds rather than Islam. Furious Muslims worldwide demonstrated violently against American embassies and American interests, and held the United States responsible for the events in Mecca.

  The fighting against Juhayman and his men raged for fifteen days around the Haram without any signs of abating. It became apparent that the majority of the soldiers were firing in the air, not at the insurgents, and sector after sector of the Saudi army began to desert the Al Sa’uds and join Juhayman’s forces. What soldiers remained laid down their arms and refused orders to attack, bringing those fighting with Juhayman to outnumber those following the ulema’s orders. The Al Sa’uds, omnipotent caretakers of the two holy shrines, were in total disarray and terror with nowhere to turn except to the West. They ordered in Special French Commandos to retake the Haram. Adding insult to injury, the French Special Forces were given permission to land in Mecca and were ordered to start combat before any ulema could be hauled back in to issue a covering fatwa permitting Christians to battle devout Muslims in Islam’s holiest mosque.

  It was only after Juhayman and his rebels ran out of ammunition that they were overpowered, on December 4, 1979. One hundred and seventeen insurgents were killed, along with a dozen of their hostages in the onslaught of the French soldiers. The official death toll was 127 soldiers dead with 461 injured, but everyone knew the figures were much higher. Juhayman was dragged out and paraded, head held high and defiant. The Wahhabi insurgents were led by a group of highly educated and sophisticated logistical planners, a mixture of nationalities that included: forty-four Saudis, seven Egyptians, six from the People’s Republic of Yemen, three Kuwaitis, one Sudanese, one Iraqi, and one from the Arab Republic of Yemen. Charged as ‘atheists,’ Juhayman and his men were sentenced to death. Sixty-eight heads rolled on January 9, 1980 in an execution extravaganza held across the country in carefully selected hot spots for all to see what happened to those who challenged the Al Sa’ud.

  ***

  We were relieved that Abu Dhabi was so safe and uneventf
ul. Its nationals were satisfied with their ruler and its non-nationals kept their politics to themselves. Politics belonged in the homelands. To most of its population, Abu Dhabi was a long-distance commute, a place where people went to work. Once they accomplished their goals, they returned home, leaving nothing behind by way of culture or history except empty villas that were refilled in record time. Abu Dhabi was a comfortably humming town to live in, low key and routine. The major events in our Abu Dhabi lives revolved around our business and our children. Abu Dhabi’s bland, predictable lifestyle was just the perfect secure backdrop for raising babies. With Munira and Amer now in playschool, we felt it was a good time to have a third child. And that year, 1980, Abu Dhabi ceased to be the terra firma we had taken for granted. Fate was not going to hand us uneventful birthdates for our children no matter how hard we tried.

  In mid-September of 1980, two months before my due date, war broke out between Iraq and Iran across the Persian Gulf, just a half hour flight away from Abu Dhabi. Iraq serving as the United States’ proxy in its eternal push for oil supremacy attacked Iran in the mistaken belief that Iran’s political disarray after the 1979 Islamic Revolution would guarantee a quick victory. At the first exchange of hostilities, foreign battleships cropped up in the seas around the Arabian Peninsula to protect Arabia’s oil fields. American, French, British and Austrian flags were raised above willing Iraqi, Kuwaiti and Saudi Arabian oil carriers to hide them from Iranian jet fighters. We wondered rhetorically to one another, “Why did the Arab ships need such Western protection when these Arab countries spent the biggest chunks of their budgets on the latest technology in weaponry?”

  The declaration of war turned Abu Dhabi into a ghost town. No one wanted to be a martyr from this war, including the nationals. Just to be on the safe side, Adnan and I decided to have our baby in Sidon, ironically the least combat ridden of destinations available to us. We had our third child on November 8, 1980, a son we named after my brother Ghassan. We and the rest of Abu Dhabi flew back in when it became clear that the red line for the proxy war between the Cold War’s superpowers encircled Iraqis and Iranians only. Matters quickly settled back to normal and I felt blessed to have a chance to lead a humdrum, predicatable life.