The plane had landed at Ben Gurion Airport in the desert past Tel Aviv. It’s not actually near anything, so it’s somewhere you want to get out of as soon as possible. Actually, any airport is a place you want to leave quickly. I snatched my backpack off the table and hustled toward the buses.
I’ve been travelling now for more than ten years, slipping in and out of countries, poking my nose into where I probably shouldn’t be. I’ve been attacked by wild dogs on a high mountain pass. I’ve heard jaguars roar in the deep jungle foliage. And once, in the calm blue waters above a coral reef, a shark angled in at me. But in every case the wildlife was protecting its territory, and I was the one who didn’t belong.
Humans, of course, tend to section off their land with borders, guns, and barbed wire. But these are only surface markers. In reality we claim our territory with a much more powerful and ancient tool. We mark our place in the world, and even ourselves, with language.
About six thousand languages are spoken around the globe today, and each is a whole world in itself. Before I went off travelling, I was studying linguistics. In fact, I’d been doing graduate work and had just been accepted to do my doctorate.
I turned the offer down.
Languages, as one philosopher said, are the Houses of Being. And I wanted to journey to these houses. I wanted to strut up their sidewalks. I wanted to knock on their doors and peek in their windows. I wanted to see what they were hiding in their basements … even if it meant a little bit of trouble.
The bus took me into Tel Aviv, the most modern city in the Middle East. It sits on a long beach and could easily pass for a metropolis on California’s coast except that here people carry even more guns than Californians. I saw a young man and his girlfriend walking along a tree-lined street. They were holding hands and obviously much in love, and the whole picture would have made me sigh were it not for the Uzi machine guns draped over their shoulders.
Near the bus station I found a bank to change my money into shekels. In the line something quite strange happened. The windows of the bank began to rattle quite noticeably. It felt as if a minor earthquake was shaking the ground. Then it stopped, and five minutes later it started again. Very odd.
When I got to the cashier, I asked her what had happened. “Oh,” she said, “that means a jet has just broken the sound barrier.” Somewhere ten thousand metres above us the cutting edge of military technology was knifing through the slipstream, arcing over some of the most ancient cities on Earth.
But listen, shekels, can you believe it? I know it’s only a name, but it conjures up a world that’s long gone, something quite old. I miss such things in Europe now that the European Union countries have gone over to the euro. Euros themselves are dull pieces of paper adorned with nondescript images. I miss counting out drachmas in Greece. I miss the schillings of Austria. I miss the drawing of the little prince on the fifty-franc note in France. When the world becomes homogenized, something is lost. Even if it’s only a name, we lose a little part of the soul of that place.
No matter. There I was on the doorstep of Jerusalem, hands dripping with shekels. I caught another bus that took me into the Judean hills, up into one of the world’s most disputed regions.
And so … Jerusalem … Jeru-salam. The name rolls off the tongue like a poem. Five thousand years of history in four short syllables. A Canaanite city is mentioned in an ancient Egyptian papyrus scroll dating from the second millennium B.C. Then, in ancient Semitic, it was called Ursalem.
My first glimpse of the old city was of its massive walls gleaming in the sunlight. Everyone must feel like a pilgrim here. It’s impossible not to. I’m not very religious, but this city wallops you on the chest and really gets to you.
I spent a few days clambering down dark passageways, finding my way from one holy site to another. One early morning I went up to see the Temple Mount long before the crowds arrived. Even that early, sunlight splashed onto the stones and in the desert air, the blue tiles of the Dome of the Rock standing out vividly. The roof of the Dome is coated in gold and shimmers and dazzles.
The first and second Jewish Temples stood here. Christ was whipped here. Muhammad ascended to heaven here. All of it here in an area no larger than a soccer pitch. These are events people kill and die for — and they have for thousands of years in great numbers on this very spot.
On this particular morning, though, I had the whole place to myself except for one old Palestinian man who was sweeping the steps. I wandered aimlessly for a while around the geometric tiles of the Dome and eventually made my way to the back wall where a small set of steps dropped to the Golden Gate. Of the eight gates in the walls of Jerusalem, this is the only one that is sealed and permanently closed. The door has been bricked in because of an ancient legend that says the Jewish messiah will arrive through this gate. So the current keepers of the Temple Mount have blocked it up.
The Golden Gate was one of the ancient entrances to Jerusalem, and almost certainly Jesus Christ, on his first palm-waving entry into Jerusalem, accessed the city here. So I stood and gazed at the steps, the very ones Jesus would have strolled up. They were roped off, but soon enough the old man who had been sweeping came over. At first he said it was forbidden to go closer, to actually walk down the steps and touch the fabled gate, but after looking both ways he removed the rope and swept his arm forward in invitation. I descended and placed my hand on the gate. It was cold. In the dark shadows, however, there was only decaying masonry and the acrid smell of urine.
Wbutchers line the alleyways hen I came back up the steps, the old man held out his hand for baksheesh. This translates as a kind of a tip. If someone has done a service for you, you’re obliged to reciprocate by giving baksheesh, usually in the form of money. I didn’t begrudge him, and he seemed perfectly happy with the single shekel I doled into his old broom-callused hand. He flashed a cracked-tooth grin, and I left the Temple Mount, disappointed because, in the heart of three of the world’s major religions, I hadn’t felt anything.
The streets of old Jerusalem are narrow and dark. Spice shops and halal butchers line the alleyways, and in one doorway I spied two elderly shopkeepers arguing with each other. Standing nose to nose, they shook their fists in the air, then, after a few hot moments, ambled down the street arm in arm. I watched them disappear around a corner, and I couldn’t understand it. How could they go from confrontation to friendship so quickly?
I was forgetting that their House of Being, their Palace of Words, was different. In English we frame arguments within the metaphor of a battle. We “defend our positions.” We “shoot down” the ideas of others. It’s a metaphorical fight, and the whole point is that there will be winners and losers. It’s not necessarily like that in Arabic. Different languages work under different metaphors. An argument could, for example, be a performance, or a dance, if you like. There are steps to be learned. It’s a delicate interplay of give and take, a thing to be engaged in and even enjoyed.
All in all, Arabic has received a bad rap in the West. We tend to think of it as a harsh language filled with crackling, angry consonants. The truth is that these consonants float on a bed of honey. They drip with vowels.
Most Arabic words are constructed from three-letter “roots.” For example, k-t-b conveys the idea of writing. The addition of other sounds before, between, and after the roots produces a whole family of related words such as book (kitab) and writer (katib). Kataba forms the past tense, and yaktuba yields the future. And maktub takes everything a step farther. It carries the concept of fate, the hand of Allah, and a whole way of being. Literally, it