Dining With Al-Qaeda: Three Decades Exploring the Many Worlds of the Middle East - Hardcover

HUGH POPE is currently based in Istanbul with the International Crisis Group. Previously he was a staff correspondent for The Wall Street Journal and has been engaged in the broader Middle East for three decades. He has lectured widely on the Turkic world, including at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Pope is the author of Sons of the Conquerors, one of The Economist’s Best Books of the Year, and Turkey Unveiled, a New York Times Notable Book.

1. MR. Q, I LOVE YOU
Oriental Studies Meets the Middle East

Two watermelons can’t be held in one hand.

—AFGHAN PROVERB

I urged my gaze back down to the book of Arabic grammar that lay open on my lap. However hard I pressed my lips together, the curling script kept dancing away from me. My eyes went back up to the flimsy door of my hotel room, rattling in its frame. The knocking was growing insistent. I prayed that Jean-Pierre Thieck, the exuberant Frenchman who had persuaded me to visit Syria, would soon return.

Over lunch on a faraway house boat moored to a grassy canal bank near the River Thames south of Oxford, Jean-Pierre’s wild stories of Eastern adventures had put me under his spell. Now we lodged on the upper floor of a brothel in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo. He had left on an obscure mission and, as the evening lengthened, he had not returned. From time to time, bursts of machine-gun fire echoed over the rooftops. I was only dimly aware of the cause of the fighting. I was paying more attention to the man banging on the door, a tall, virulent Iraqi truck driver from the next-door room. He was clearly determined to break in: first through the door, and then my own efforts to defend my virtue.

“Mr. Q! Mr. Q!” the Iraqi roared, beating the plywood panels. “Open the door!”

Then came silence. He’d be back, I knew. I gave up on the cartoon images of the grammar’s polite get-to-know-you conversations. Arabic Without Pain was its title, but the promise was false. I sat staring at the wall, anxiously waiting for Jean-Pierre. I was a second-year student of Persian and Arabic at Oxford University, and felt as if I was getting nowhere. Back at home, it humiliated me that friends in other faculties were climbing the foothills of scientific achievement or testing the boundaries of philosophical debate, while I spent most of my first year copying the ever-changing curves and dots of the Arabic alphabet chalked up on a blackboard as if I were in primary school. The droning of the lecturers, bored numb by our hours of simplistic drudgery, often left me fighting with sleep. None of it seemed relevant to real life. The narrow historical scope of my Oriental Studies course seemed so disconnected from everything I read in the newspapers about the dramas of the modern Middle East.

Still, those same news stories had made me anxious about traveling to the region alone. Over our house boat lunch, Jean-Pierre, then visiting Oxford for his research into the administration of Middle Eastern cities in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, had gaily insisted that I fly out on my next vacation to join him in the field. When I eventually tracked him down to the cardamom-coffee-scented corridors of a French institute in the Syrian capital of Damascus, he swept me off to Aleppo, two hundred miles to the north. Guidebook in hand, I begged to stay in the colonial-era Baron Hotel, with its creaky, cavernous iron beds, its skyward-ho airline posters from another age, and its threadbare memories of guests like Agatha Christie. After one night, however, Jean-Pierre declared the atmosphere of genteel decay claustrophobic and demanded that we decamp into a rough-and-ready hotel around the corner. It took me awhile to realize that the reason the floor below us was populated by fleshy, middle-aged ladies was that this was a whore house known locally as Madame Olga’s.

We spent three weeks in Aleppo. Sometimes Jean-Pierre took me to help with his research, notably in an ancient Aleppo merchant’s khan, or trading house in the bazaar. Here we dug out everything from nineteenth-century photographs to handwritten Korans to Chinese porcelain, buried deep in a cluttered storeroom behind the colonnaded courtyard, where years earlier camel caravans unloaded their wares. I jostled with donkeys and black-swathed house wives through the narrow souks of the bazaar, drinking in the smell of spices and the elixir of being utterly distant from England. Nearly everyone wore ankle-length gowns, not Western dress. The medieval-looking arched alleys had shops on aged wooden platforms, with a knotted rope suspended above to help the shop keeper heave himself in. At other times I stayed at home and struggled on with my Arabic catechism, sitting upright on one of the two beds in our bare room of whitewashed cement. My ritual of study kept the chaotic rush of new experiences at bay and offered the distant promise that one day I might be able to comprehend them.

My academic efforts, however, were rapidly being overtaken by a crash course in Middle Eastern reality. At five A.M. on our first morning in Madame Olga’s, we awoke to dozens of large explosions shaking the city. Later that morning we discovered that the Syrian army had ringed and sealed all roads into the city. The shopkeepers had declared a general strike, locking down their metal shutters in what I was to learn was the time-honored but often futile fashion of Middle Eastern urban protest. Now a few keystrokes on a computer can dig out reports on the Aleppo troubles of March– April 1980 as part of the Syrian government’s unending quest to crush its domestic opponents. Some commentaries say power-hungry Islamic extremists were fighting to overturn the secular order. Others note that moderate Islamists were finding sympathy among businessmen frustrated with impoverishment and corrupt economic mismanagement. Apparently, conservative Sunni Muslims were chafing at domination by the schismatic Alawite Muslim minority who monopolized the country through their strongman, President Hafez al-Assad. Perhaps all of the above was true. Back then, I couldn’t have told these concepts apart, and nobody was framing events in these easy sound bites anyway. News agencies and radio stations in Beirut eventually carried a few confused reports from Aleppo, but they were short, appeared days later, and vaguely quoted “travelers from the city.” We did not hear about these. Not even Jean-Pierre’s vivacious cross-questioning of everyone we met could explain what was going on.

The populace lived in a swirl of conflicting rumors. The bazaar was nearly empty except for the soldiers. A few tradesmen watched in silence as army platoons smashed the padlocked shop fronts open with sledgehammers, making the stone vaults ring with metal clangs and explosions of glass. The army conducted searches for Islamist dissidents, district by district, house by house. I spent most of the first evening on our tiled balcony, hypnotized by the lines of tracer bullets lacing through the night sky. Armored vehicles clanked along the nearby main road, occasionally passed by columns of open trucks filled with frightened civilian captives in pajamas or flowing nightgowns. I could read stress on the faces of everyone, but the population was not necessarily cowed. One of our ladies at Madame Olga’s did her share, emptying a bucket of water over the heads of two soldiers as they left the establishment. That image of a prostitute servicing the oppressors but at the same time supporting supposedly “Islamist” rebels implanted in me a long-lasting suspicion of all ideological interpretations of the Middle East.

The soldiers arrested Jean-Pierre and me several times. They were unpredictable, either extraordinarily friendly or so nervous that they armed their guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and rammed them into our bellies. Once, when Jean-Pierre’s loose-leaf photocopies of Ottoman texts were mistaken for the flyers calling for shop keepers to strike, we spent an uncomfortable hour in one of the impromptu torture and interrogation centers set up in construction sites on the edge of the city.

With my donkey outside the ancient...