But for the moment I gloried in a feeling that American author Eleanor Clark best expressed when she wrote that Mediterranean streets constitute a great warm “withinness,” an inclusion that permits people to believe that to go out into a city is to go home.
The next day, I reviewed my notes for the lecture on travel, travel writing and travel literature that I had agreed to give at the American Center. Justin Siberell had read a similar paper I’d presented four years ago at a Modern Language Association meeting in New Orleans, and he assured me it was appropriate to the audience he expected in Alexandria. Typically, he said, such talks attracted a large turnout of Egyptians and a smattering of expats. Since there would be a simultaneous translation, his only warning was to speak slowly and distinctly so that the interpreter could keep pace.
Yet I felt a growing uneasiness, not so much premature stage fright as topic regret. In the context of Egypt and the Muslim world, in view of the life-and-death conflict within Arab countries, and between them and the West, it struck me as lightweight and elitist for an American to breeze into Alexandria and discuss his personal hobbyhorse. Okay, I could argue that travel is crucial to political and religious understanding. I could quote the eleventh-century Sufi Imam Qushayri, who declared that the objective of travel was “to discover inner ethical values.” I could cite Robert Byron, widely regarded as the best travel writer in English, who blamed the failure of British colonialism on “insufficient, or insufficiently imaginative, travel.” Still, I feared I’d sound like another self-indulgent foreigner larking around North Africa, another Orientalist presuming to lecture the natives.
Siberell swung by the Cecil to pick me up in a tanklike American SUV whose door shut with the solid thunk of a safe deposit box. It sounded armor-plated. A chauffeur steered us through the evening rush hour, and a powerful AC system screened out the heat, grit and smells of Alexandria. Yet Siberell seemed as tense as I was—and with much better reason. His assignment here was drawing to a close, and within days he would depart for Baghdad. He’d done a previous tour in the Green Zone. Now he was married and had kids, and he would be away from his family for a year.
“Shows you how smart I was to study Arabic,” he joked. It was a lament that I would hear from Foreign Service officers all across North Africa. Their hard-won fluency had sentenced them to the worst posting in the world. Sooner or later they would have to serve in Iraq, and while no American diplomat I met openly criticized the war, none defended it, either.
The American Center occupied the former private mansion of a wealthy Alexandrian family. In 1967, during the Six Day War, Egyptians had overrun and ransacked the building, and it had remained shut until Egypt and the United States resumed diplomatic relations, in 1974. Now it was surrounded by walls and wrought iron fences and flanked by armed guards. At the front gate, eyed by U.S. Marines, I stepped through a metal detector, traded my passport for a clip-on badge and crossed through a garden, following Siberell to a side entrance. There another squad of security guards scrutinized us.
From the American Center’s foyer we climbed a marble staircase to a loggia where locked doors of bulletproof Mylar lined the hall. Behind them, offices were accessible by computer code. Egyptians crouched on the carpet, as though begging for admission. They were reciting their evening prayers.
After they finished, we proceeded into a conference room where a crowd of seventy or so was divided between those in Western and Egyptian garb. But even men wearing suits and ties had prayer bumps on their foreheads, and all the women wore headscarves. One was in full niqab, staring out through slits. Lacy black gloves covered her hands and arms up to her elbows. Not a centimeter of her skin was visible. Beside her a man in a knit cap combed his fingers through a beard as broad as a broom.
Siberell introduced me in Arabic. The only words I understood were “Sharon Stone.” She had starred in a movie made from Year of the Gun, a novel I had written about terrorism in Italy. Mention of her name drew scattered laughs.
There were one or two American or European faces in the crowd, but I didn’t focus on them. As I spoke I tried to maintain friendly eye contact with the Egyptians, who listened through earphones. I couldn’t read anything from their reactions, and it disconcerted me to stare out at a sea of beards and prayer bumps and dark eyes with no idea how the lecture was going. Just one line prompted smiles and a brief outburst of applause—criticized George Bush for having lumped together Iraq, Iran and North Korea as an Axis of Evil.
The Q&A session lasted longer than the lecture. Each questioner stood up, introduced himself or herself by name and profession, gave a formal ritual greeting, welcomed me to Alexandria, praised my past accomplishments, expressed fascination for my current project, then lashed me for a multitude of intellectual shortcomings and cultural misapprehensions.
One gentleman complained that he had looked me up online and read the same lecture I had just inflicted on the audience: “It’s four years old. Have you learned nothing since you first gave this talk?”
Siberell interrupted, explaining that he had invited me to give this particular address.
“Shukran, shukran,” said my interrogator. “Thank you, thank you,” said the interpreter. The man sat down and a lady in a floral headscarf stood up and repeated the ritual greeting and gratitude and fulsome praise, then laid into me. “How can you come to our country and expect to understand anything when you don’t speak Arabic?”
With deep apologies for my ignorance, I attempted to make a case, just as I had in my lecture, that language was not the lone means of understanding and that words weren’t always the best links between people. Human beings had other means of perception, and sometimes words got in the way. For me, I said, one of the delights of travel was that it brought my dormant senses alive. Suddenly in foreign surroundings, I could see and hear and smell again. And afterward, if I was lucky, I could write. Blank pages, I pointed out, were like blank spaces on a map. In both cases I was eager to fill them up.
“Egypt is not a blank space,” someone shouted.
“Of course not,” I apologized. “A poor figure of speech. I realize I’m bound to make mistakes and misunderstand your history and religion. But I’m traveling in good faith to see things for myself and to learn. I’ve read the Koran and I ...”
“You read it in English. That’s not the Koran. Only in Arabic is it the Koran.”
For more than an hour, their cavils crashed over me. Though nobody asked about orgasms and black women, I almost wished someone had. That would have been preferable to their accusations that travel was a species of colonialism, an exploitation of poor countries by privileged people like me. Wasn’t I aware that Egypt had been invaded in 1798 by Napoleon and subjected to cruel dissection by squadrons of French scientists? Had I never heard that the British bombarded Alexandria in 1882 and ruled the country afterward like a royal fiefdom?
To my astonishment, this rough and tumble Q&A ended with the audience surging forward for an up-close-and-personal rapprochement that made me suspect that their harsh questions had been as formulaic as their greetings. Like other academics I would meet, they seemed to believe that giving a speaker a severe going-over was a sign of respect. But now there came a laying on of hands, a kind of benediction, heartfelt invitations to tea, promises of hospitality, requests for my e-mail address.
Although they had listened to me in translation and posed their public challenges in Arabic, they spoke to me privately in excellent English. A bespectacled young woman in a hijab asked, “Are you a feminist?” and when I said I supported equal rights for women, she exclaimed, “So do I. Everything I do is for feminism.” To her, she said, the hijab was a symbol of female empowerment.
A pale man in a dark suit, starched white shirt and black tie patiently waited his turn and introduced himself as a professor of literature at a university in the Nile delta. He had read online that forty years ago I had lived in France on a Fulbright Fellowship. He was in contention for a teaching Fulbright to the United States, and it appeared that he would have his