Drinking the Koran

By: David Stansfield | August 05, 2009 | Non Fiction

The Middle East, the Middle East, the Middle East. The Arabs, the Arabs, the Arabs. War, war, war. Why, why, why? Who are these people, lurking on the edge of our consciousness - these shadows in the corner of our eyes, like the smudges around theirs, these bruises that have never healed? Who are these people? What do they want? Never has there been a people about whom we need to know more and about whom we know less. Travel back in time to Damascus Gate in 1961 where so much was ending and so much beginning, and where the author, as a young British university student, had a chance to lift a tiny corner of the veil, to penetrate an impenetrable culture via an impenetrable language that enabled him to enter another world that he’s never left.

Jasmine. That’s what the young man had pressed into my hand as he showed me how to rub the white petals together in my palms and then cup my hands over my nose to breathe in the scent. It was the custom. Different sensual modalities. Where I came from, they offered guests something to drink; here they offered you something to smell.

“Our house is your house, ahlan wa sahlan, welcome, welcome,” said Ahmed as he led me
into the tiny one-story house just across the road from the Damascus Gate, continuing to enunciate the lovely Arabic sounds slowly and clearly to make sure I understood every word.

Painstakingly, I had written out a want ad in my best classical Arabic explaining I was a British university student, and that to improve my command of the spoken language, I would like to spend the summer as a paying guest with an Arab family. I had then posted the ad to al-Quds — “The Holiness” — the leading newspaper in the city of that name, which only foreigners called Jerusalem.

I’d received dozens of replies, all of them expressing the same sentiment: I was welcome to stay with their family for as long as I wished, but on one condition: that I promise faithfully never to pay for anything myself. Their house was my house.

At Cambridge, there had been much talk of this legendary Arab hospitality, but only now did it begin to sink in, another aspect of the strange new cultural landscape I’d ventured into the moment I’d stepped off the plane in Beirut a few days earlier. The blast of hot air that had hit me had been like walking into an oven, but not a hostile Third World heat, more like a warm bath to soak away my British stiffness, to bring about some deep alchemical change in my bones as it drew me into another reality.

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