Walking the Bible (51 page)

Even animals can get caught in the morass. In 1992, before Israel and Jordan signed their peace treaty, a gray gelding belonging to Crown Prince Hassan, the brother of King Hussein, tossed his trainer during a run on the beach of Aqaba, swam a few hundred yards across the gulf, and walked ashore in Eilat. Israeli officials, not knowing the animal’s pedigree, transported him to a nearby kibbutz, where the stray pony became something of a celebrity among local schoolchildren, who combed, rode, and fed him. When word reached Israel that the horse belonged to the Jordanian prince, the government, fearing a diplomatic disaster, sent special veterinarians to watch over the animal and began trying to arrange a discreet handover across the border. Two days later, the Israeli Army drove the horse twenty-five miles north of Eilat and gave him to officials of the UN, who walked him across a specially arranged opening in the border, where officers from the Jordanian
Army were waiting. In a brilliant act of public diplomacy, the “petulant royal polo pony,” as the Israeli press dubbed him, took along hand-painted messages from Israeli schoolchildren pleading with the prince for peace.

These days, peace is nominally at hand, and a visitor arriving from Israel is expected to come bearing cigarettes at least. Having made this trip many times, Avner knew the drill and presented our Jordanian guide, Mahmoud, with a red-and-white carton fresh from the duty-free. “But they’re not Marlboro,” Mahmoud said. “They’re Gold Coast.” His disappointment at the cheap imitations was palpable, so Avner walked back through the security gate and to the border itself, only to arrive back fifteen minutes later, unsuccessful. “Oh, well. It’s all poisonous just the same,” Mahmoud said, and we were on our way.

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan is a water-poor, desert-rich country of five million people in an area slightly larger than Portugal and slightly smaller than Indiana. The country’s per capita consumption of water is 200 cubic meters a year, compared to 1,800 in Syria, 7,700 as the world’s average, and 110,000 in the United States. That means the average American uses 550 times more water a year than the average Jordanian. The main reason Jordan uses so little water, of course, is that it has so much sand: Only 4 percent of Jordanian territory is arable, and that’s concentrated in the north, around the capital. Jordan is shaped like a pistol, with the trigger being the area around Amman, the handle jutting hundreds of miles eastward toward Iraq, and the barrel pointing downward toward the Gulf of Aqaba. In this scheme, the trigger represents most of the habitable land, while the handle and barrel contain little but dust.

In part because of this inhospitableness, the land that is today called Jordan has been mostly overlooked since history began. The area didn’t even have its own name until the twentieth century and was called (since Ottoman times) Transjordan, a name that means “across the Jordan river” but that implies “the other side of the tracks.” In the Bible, the area has a split role. Parts of it—the fertile hills around Amman—are
included in the Promised Land. It’s there, in the valley of Jabbok, where Jacob wrestles with God’s messenger and receives the name Israel. By contrast, other parts—namely, the desert—are treated with contempt.

The first indication of this contempt comes with the story of Abraham and Lot. Earlier, Genesis explains how Lot flees Sodom and Gomorrah to the mountains of Jordan and gives birth to two incestuous sons, who grow up to head the nations of Moab and Ammon. Centuries later, in Deuteronomy, the Israelites under Moses encounter these two nations on their final trek up the east bank of the Jordan. Though these two nations are technically descended from the same family as Abraham—Lot being Abraham’s nephew—they are now rivals of the Israelites.

Another enemy the Israelites encounter on their northerly trek also has patriarchal roots. Ishmael and Esau, of course, are the banished first sons of Abraham and Isaac. In a little-noted twist that links the two outcasts, Esau marries the daughter of Ishmael, his cousin Basemath. Their descendants (along with those from Esau’s other two wives) eventually settle across the Jordan River and become the clan of Edom.

What Lot, Ishmael, and Esau have in common is that all are disaffected family members, separated from the tribe, who ultimately give rise to nations that become antagonistic toward their forebears’ descendants. That all three nations are located across the Jordan seems to confirm that biblical storytellers viewed this territory as a particularly poignant mirror image, one that looks identical to the Promised Land, is settled with nations that are directly
related
to the inheritors of the Promised Land, but that for some reason were not chosen to live in the Promised Land. In the case of Lot, his fate seems to come from associating himself with the lascivious inhabitants of Sodom. By contrast, there is no comforting explanation why Ishmael and Esau end up across the river, permanently ostracized from the land of milk and honey. Ishmael, to be sure, was the son of a concubine, but such unions were considered legal at the time; plus, Sarah sanctioned it. As for Esau, he was merely the wronged older brother of Jacob.

The only consolation seems to be that God allows both Ishmael and Esau to father a people. This is subtle storytelling: God’s chosen people
may be the most elite nation in the region, but God also creates other nations—spin-offs, if you will—that still warrant a watered-down version of his blessing and serve, in a geographic sense, as buffer states around his chosen lot. These semichosen people are hostile to the children of Israel, but forever attached to them, too; blood rivals living just across the street.

This intimate connection between both sides of the Jordan has never disappeared. Since biblical times, the fate of Jordan has never been removed from the fate of Israel, making the two lands the Siamese twins of the Middle East, joined at the head and hips by a single river often no more than a few feet wide. David, the first king of Israel, conquered parts of Jordan; and the two places together were subsequently overrun by the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Umayads, Mamluks, and Turks. The interconnection became particularly intense in the twentieth century. During World War I, the British recruited Sharif Hussein, a bedouin emir from Arabia (and a purported direct descendant of Mohammed), to help oust the Turks from the Middle East. In return, the British promised to promote Arab independence. Hussein and his two sons, Abdullah and Faysal, led the so-called Great Arab Revolt, spurred by a British information officer and onetime archaeologist, T. E. Lawrence. The revolt appeared to be a success, as Faysal and Lawrence led a band of bedouin guerrillas from Medina to Aqaba, and later to Damascus. In 1920, Faysal declared himself king of Syria, while Abdullah was named king of Iraq.

Their independence proved to be a chimera. The British had, indeed, promised to help the Arabs gain sovereignty, but they had also promised to help the Jews carve out a homeland, and were simultaneously colluding with the French in the Sykes-Picot Agreement to keep the Middle East under European control. In the end, loyalty to their colonial partner proved deeper. Faysal was ejected from Damascus, and Abdullah was barred from Iraq. Abdullah was then offered a golden parachute, a job no one considered of much importance, head of the Emirate of Transjordan, a completely fabricated state drawn up by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill.

Abdullah ruled the colony for more than twenty-five years, at
which point the British finally granted him independence. In 1946, the emir became a king, and Transjordan finally lost its pejorative prefix
Trans
and became the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. (The term
Hashemite
refers to Abdullah’s family lineage.) In no time, the rivalry between Jordan and Israel reignited, as the new kingdom controlled much of the West Bank of the Jordan and half of Jerusalem. Palestinian residents of the West Bank were frustrated, too, since they wanted a homeland of their own, and in 1951 a Palestinian walked up to King Abdullah while he was visiting the Temple Mount and shot him dead; a bullet intended for the king’s fifteen-year-old grandson, Hussein, ricocheted off a medal on the boy’s chest. Abdullah’s son Talal had schizophrenia and was unable to rule, so Hussein became king. He ruled until his death in 1999 and was succeeded by his eldest son, who, in a fitting emblem of the convoluted politics of the region, had a British mother, an American education, a Palestinian wife, and the name of his great-grandfather, Abdullah.

King Abdullah II had another remarkable genealogical claim that linked him to the literary tradition at the root of the region: the Bible. Abdullah’s great-great-grandfather Hussein held the title of sharif, or nobleman. Sharifs had ruled Hejaz, the region of Arabia around the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, for over one thousand years, with Hussein’s branch maintaining control since 1201. The first sharif was the Prophet Mohammed’s elder son, which means, as a matter of tradition, that Abdullah II is a forty-third-generation direct descendant of the founder of Islam. The lineage doesn’t stop there, though. Mohammed’s great-grandfather Hasem, whose name is the root for Hashemite, was a member of the tribe of the Arab chieftain Quraysh. Quraysh claimed to be descended from Ishmael. If true, this would mean that today, more than three thousand years after Moses first set foot in Transjordan, and four thousand years after the patriarchs passed through here, the current king can trace his family tree back to Abraham himself.

One consequence of this pedigree is that two tiny nations, Jordan and Israel, already bound by geography, climate, and history, also share national story lines that bind them to one of the oldest stories ever told: Abraham and his son. In the case of Israel, the son is Isaac; in the case of Jordan, the
son is Ishmael. This difference, seemingly minor, has actually made one of the narrowest rivers in the world seem like one of the widest.

As we drove north on the only highway of southern Jordan, a single-lane road that bisects the reddish desert, I explained to Mahmoud the nature of our trip. He brought out a notebook and occasionally diverted his eyes from the road to jot down notes. Of all our guides, he was clearly the most studious. About forty, with eyeglasses and an accountant’s meticulousness, Mahmoud described himself as a student of the holy books. I asked if that included the Bible.

“In Islam we believe in all the holy books,” he said. “Mohammed tells us, ‘Don’t refuse all the Bible, and don’t accept all of it.’ ”

“So how do you know what to accept and what not to accept?”

“We don’t know. We should compare it to logic, to the Koran, and so on.”

“So have you read the Bible?”

“In Arabic, yes.”

“What was that like?”

“From the central points, it’s the same. But from the religious points, it’s completely different. Because the Koran, we believe, is the last book, it’s our holy book. Every sentence is important because it came from Allah to the Prophet Mohammed. But the Bible—we believe that some parts of it are not the original ones.”

“When I look through the Koran, I notice that there are far fewer details about places,” I said. “The writing seems more poetic.”

“Here is the main point. To understand the Koran you should read it in Arabic. You can’t translate it. There are some sentences in the Holy Koran, for example, that the Prophet Mohammed made us promise would be kept in Arabic writing.”

“So do you find the Bible beautiful?”

“In the Bible, as I told you, there are a lot of things which are useful. It’s one of the great books for a lot of things. For example, I am interested in botany. There are lots of plants mentioned in the Bible that I can recognize.”

“What about the god of the Bible? Do you understand him?”

“From the Muslim eye, Allah is the same god who deals with Moses, who deals with Jesus, who deals with Mohammed. In Hebrew you call him Yahweh, or Elohim. In Arabic we call him Allah.”

“So when you read the Bible, your god is there?”

“Yes, because we believe that the creator of all this world is Allah. In the Koran it is mentioned that Allah created the world in seven days. It’s the same in the Bible. When I read the Bible I get a certain feeling toward Allah.”

“And what is that feeling?”

He thought for a second. “If you are stuck on an island, and you’ve lost everything, at the end you will feel that the only help will come to you from Allah. That’s the feeling I get.”

After about an hour we turned east off the highway and ventured across the sand toward one of the most spectacular natural environments I’ve ever seen. Wadi Rum is one of three dry riverbeds that drip down from the central mountains of Jordan like braids. On a map, the twenty-five-mile-long, two-mile corridor looks similar to the countless wadis we had seen in the Sinai and Negev. What makes Rum so spectacular, “vast, echoing, and godlike,” in Lawrence’s words, are the granite and sandstone mountains—as high as 2,100 feet—that soar from the sand in endless strata of peanut-butter-colored stone, interrupted with layers of red, purple, and pink. The cliffs have been so softened and shaped by the wind that they look like wet gobs of clay about to be sculpted. They bulge in places, pucker in others, and generally loom so large over the ground, like chubby aunts peering over a crib, that any visitor looking up at them feels diminished, childlike in awe.

As Lawrence, the laureate of Rum, wrote of a journey through the wadi with his bedouin brigade: “The crags were capped in nests of domes, less hotly red than the body of the hill; rather grey and shallow. They gave the finishing semblance of Byzantine architecture to this irresistible place: this processional way greater than imagination. The Arab armies would have been lost in the length and breadth of it, and
within the walls a squadron of aeroplanes could have wheeled in formation. Our little caravan grew self-conscious, and fell dead quiet, afraid and ashamed to flaunt its smallness in the presence of the stupendous hills.”

Even more than that of Moses, the ghost of Lawrence lingers over this part of Jordan. On our drive, Mahmoud pointed out places associated with Britain’s sand prince: here a spring that bore his name, there a nook where he camped his troops, here a place that David Lean filmed his 1962 biopic. In many ways, the image of Lawrence is more important than the reality. Thomas Edward Lawrence was the second of five illegitimate sons born to an Irish gentleman and the governess of his two (legitimate) daughters. Masquerading as “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” the couple fled Ireland and settled in Oxford, where T.E. (he preferred the initials) eventually went to university, specializing in medieval architecture. While still a student, Lawrence traveled throughout the Middle East, surveying Crusader castles like the one in Harran and dabbling in archaeology. During the war, Lawrence, one of the few British officers who spoke Arabic, was assigned to do intelligence work in Cairo, eventually tapping Faysal Hussein as the British government’s best hope against the Turks. Soon Lawrence joined Faysal’s army as a liaison, and led it on a spectacular, two-month march through the desert to capture Aqaba, a feat of myth-making proportions in the Arab world. By the time Faysal arrived in Damascus, Lawrence had inspired him to liberate the Arab world.