#7 £8

a r a b i c a

east is best
 image: Brigitte Parusel

coverphoto: Justine · styling: Faye Sawyer · make-up: Nicole Jaritz · hair: Thomas Dunkin
model: Agatha @ Storm · headpiece by Chris Brooke + Alexis Panayiotou
 Ceri Amphlett p.21
Toby Neilan p.84
Jananne Al-Ani p.132
Chant Avedissian p.158
Jananne Al-Ani p.170
Roy Wilkinson p.234
Shadi Faridian p.238
Khosrow Hassanzadeh p.274

Smile by Paul Smaïl p.60

Remembering Nasser by Rabih Alameddine p.182
Zaabalawi by Naguib Mahfouz p.250

Chewing Viagra Gum by Mai Ghoussoub p.10

Iranian Cinema by Derek Malcolm p.30
Going Native by Louise Gray + art by Joel Lardner p.106

thirst by Malu Halasa p.136

Omar Sharif by Marion McGilvary p.214

Karena Perronet-Miller p.38

Felix Lammers p.52
Julia McKay p.90
Louis Decamps p.100
Alexi Tan p.120
Brock p.126
Frederic Jagueneau p.152
Sacha Teulon + Stacey Williams p.202
Karel Kühne + Bela Barnert p. 226
Justine p.246
Mary Rozzi p.268
Thierry Van Biesen p.280
Masoud p.290

Eid Mubarak p.22 image: Brigitte Parusel

Andreas Laeufer p.74
Henrique Gendre p. 164
Alasdair McLellan p. 178

4
Issue #7 · December 1999

Editorial:
Editors in Chief: Masoud Golsorkhi, Andreas Laeufer
Features Editor: Malu Halasa
Art Director: Andreas Laeufer
Contributing Arts Editor: Rose Issa
Arts Editor: Claire Canning
Fashion Co-ordinator: Emma Greenhill
Fashion Editors: Giannie Couji, Charty Durrant, Faye Sawyer, Jo Phillips, Christophe Martinez
Editorial Assistant: Nadine Sanders
Design Assistant: Greg Stogdon
Copy Editors: Jo Glanville, Louise Gray

Special Projects: Vicky Stewart

Effendi: Julien Vogel

For advertising and business inquiries contact ++44.207.916 52 64 or E-mail: bill@tankmagazine.com

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Tank strongly urges and demands unsolicited contributions; they must be accompanied with a self-addressed
stamped envelope if they are to be returned. Tank will not be held responsible for loss or damage in the post.
Tank is published six times a year by Tank publications Ltd. Reproduction of any material without written
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beat stories from big sur

FOR INFORMATION: 0161/2041064

words by Mai Ghoussoub
chewing viagra gum
“No blood spilled and no battles. It is the chewing gum that unleashes sexual
instincts with nervous effects that exceed the power of thirty portions of medical sex-
ual enhancers."
This is no run of the mill aphrodisiac. It is the latest weapon used by the Israelis
against the “Arab body”, claims the liberal newspaper al Ahrar. Israeli chewing
gum unleashes the sexual desires of its consumers at the same time it renders them
sterile. According to this frightening headline, the sexual chewing gum was invent-
ed by a Mossad agent working with the KGB; Yitzhak Rabin gave the order to
increase its production.
“The sexual excitement brought about by the chewing gum is not an end in itself,”
continues al Ahrar. “ The ultimate object is the negative consequences of this stim-
ulation for if this gum increases the activity of the sexual glands in an extraordinary
way, multiplying it by at least fifty times its normal rate, chewing it, even if only
rarely, causes impotence through the destruction of the reproductive organs in the
metabolism. The whole thing resulting in the total ceasing of sexual activity among
the inhabitants of the Arab countries within a few months. And the aim lying behind
this infamous Israeli plot is the decrease of the birth rate in the Arab countries in
order to narrow the broad demographic gap between the Arabs and Israel.”
When the story broke in June, 1996, the nationalist daily al Arabi boasted that it
had been the first newspaper to expose the chewing gum plot. Moreover, “Egyptian
MP Fathi Mansour relied on our information in order to carry this disaster from a
mere newspaper campaign to an actual item on the agenda of the People's
Congress.” Even the serious al Nahar newspaper in Lebanon related the facts about
the enchanted, poisonous gum in a news dispatch without additional commentary
11
 and without mentioning the words “rumours”, “claims” or even “alleged”.
We all know too well the dividing line between rumour and information can be
blurred and in some cases it may even disappear entirely. The question surrounding
the sexual chewing gum is not the credibility of the Arab media or whether editors
seized upon an irresistible rumour and canonised it with the written word. It is
whether this information was automatically considered reliable because it justified
already existing public attitudes.
Certainly the gum preyed on the imaginations of newspaper editors, readers and on
at least one active member of the Egyptian People's Congress who initiated a par-
liamentary investigation to find and arrest the culprits. A photograph of the gum
was published in the Egyptian press during those troubled days. Printed in black and
white, on thin grey paper, the sexual chewing gum could have been very easily mis-
taken for the white little squares produced by the Chicklets Company or the
Lebanese Ghandour factory. However, since rumours draw their strength from the
people who believe, repeat and spread them, the meaning behind this phantasmic
chewing gum takes on new significance. It appears that the need to believe in its
existence is stronger than the need to question the credibility of the story.
Why chewing gum? Could it be because women are its main consumers and that the
fear of the effect of the Israeli chewing gum is actually a fear of women? If this gum
triggers an insatiable sexual appetite among the female population, what choice are
husbands left with? They may quite understandably be tempted to use this miracu-
lous enhancer to satisfy their demanding wives, but the price paid for this short-lived
super-virility is enormous: eternal impotence, the end of their progeny and endless
shame. How could a father or a brother preserve his honour if his daughter or his
12
sister has an uncontrollable sexual drive? All masculine fears are exposed and chal-
lenged by these little white Chicklet squares, which act with the swiftness and the
efficiency of an invisible spy, threatening everyone.
Who said it was easy to be a man?
•••
For a while now Arab publishing has been prolific in “educating” the modern read-
er with reprinted editions of sexual manuals retrieved from a less inhibited past.
Sheikh Nefzawi 's al Rawd al 'Ater (The Perfumed Garden ) written and published
at the beginning of the fifteenth century, Ahmad Bin Selman's Ruju'u al Sheikh ila
Sibah (The Rejuvenation of the Old Man ) from the sixteenth century, al Tijani's
Nazhat al Aruss (The Bride's Promenade ) or al-Siyuti's Kitab al-'Idah fi 'Ilm al Nikah
(The Book of Explanations in the Art of Fornication ) - the list is long - are a prod-
uct of an age before Christian austerity impregnated the modern Muslim world,
which has caused many fundamentalists to reject what has been labelled western
depravity and unconsciously reconstruct Victorian attitudes, which predate the sex-
ual revolution. These perceptions are expressed among today's secular Arab elite in
terms of high culture versus vulgarity. When in the Nineties a publisher decided to
reprint Sheikh Nefzawi’s Perfumed Garden in Beirut, the morality police banned it
and the edition was - in principle - confiscated. These books, written in good faith a
few hundred years ago to better serve the needs of the believers in the prophet, are
now considered pornography by modern religious authorities. As a result, a multi-
tude of popular as well as luxurious editions have appeared in the market-place.
Even if a few women do purchase these manuals, they have a predominately male
reading audience. If you visit Arabic bookshops, you will see the manuals piled next
13
 to Fukuyama's End of History or Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great
Powers and neither their male readers or booksellers feel that they are the least
anachronistic or out of place.
You might be asking yourself what is the link between the sexual chewing gum and
The Perfumed Garden ? How could these manuals written for the glory of Muslims
have anything to do with an Israeli plot aimed at destroying them? I believe that the
relation lies in the fears and fantasies of men whose lives have changed drastically
in the last century, as far as their morality, social norms and existence are con-
cerned. Yet, their views on sexual performance and women's desires are still deeply
engraved in their inherited memory. Conversely, the status of women has changed
dramatically despite the backlash in Arab-Islamic societies. Women’s images on the
pages of popular magazines and on the TV screens are limitless in their variety. This
is true even in the most misogynist corners of the Arab World. How can men not
have changed accordingly, be it in one direction or the other?
The most revealing expression of this dichotomy is an early 1960s reprint of The
Perfumed Garden, which landed an entrepreneurial Lebanese publisher a few nights
in prison. The image on the cover had obviously been cut, very roughly, from a Fifties
American fashion magazine, in which a very slim, high-heeled and elegantly dressed
lady, whose face is hidden under a wide, sophisticated round hat, appeared holding
a tray. But instead of the drinks, the publisher had stuck on a large penis for the
lady to carry. The saying “old concepts in modern dress” has never been more to
the point.
Nowadays no modern Arab man writing about sexuality would dream of thanking
God for having created women's vaginas for men's pleasure and men's penises for the
14
Al Alfiya - the Thousander - who owed her name to the thousand men
she had sex with, had acquired a great experience in keeping a man
erect for days on end. She held a salon where women gathered to
collect recipes for that purpose. Honey, onions and the camel's milk are
essential ingredients...
pleasure of women - an appreciation, which appears on the first page of the
Nefzawi's famous book. Out of his civic and religious duty Nefzawi wrote his explic-
it manual for the wazir of Tunis and asserts that “women are never saturated nor
tired of copulating. Their thirst for intercourse is never quenched.” Another writer,
Bin Selman, confirms his predecessor's vision of female sexuality: “Some have
affirmed that women's sexual appetite is many times superior to that of men. The
weakest sexual desire among women is more powerful than the strongest male
desire.”
These statements are told in the best tradition of story-telling: slaves or princesses
have made love to hundreds of males without ever feeling tired or saturated. They
keep asking for more and better sex. Taking these statements as objective and indis-
putable facts - and this is how these observations are presented - it must have
seemed impossible for a man to satisfy female sexual aspirations. The task must
have been terrifying for a woman “is never tired of copulating” and “her sexual
appetite exceeds his”. What a frightening perspective for men if they give credence
to these manuals. If women have such insatiable appetites - and this assertion is stat-
ed as a scientific reality by many of these learned men who speak with authority
from Fiqh (religious law) as well as through their great knowledge of biology -
wouldn’t the women not seek fulfilment in many more other men? The fear is real:
15
 it is the fear of not being up to the ideal masculine, of failing at performing like the
stud women are supposed to want, desire and desperately need!
According to Bin Selman in The Rejuvenation of the Old Man, Al Alfiya - the
Thousander - who owed her name to the thousand men she had sex with, had
acquired a great experience in keeping a man erect for days on end. She held a salon
where women gathered to seek her advice and collect recipes for that purpose.
Honey, onions and the camel's milk are essential ingredients against the undesired
relapse of a man's virility. Opposite ingredients had to be used, no doubt, to produce
these treacherous small white squares of the sexual chewing gum.
The image on the cover had obviously been cut, very roughly, from a
Fifties American fashion magazine, in which a very slim, high-heeled
and elegantly dressed lady appeared holding a tray. But instead of the
drinks, the publisher had stuck on a large penis...
Reading these sex manuals, one cannot but realise the universality of male fears and
fantasies. Very often the authors confuse their own illusions with their objective and
scientific conclusions. The length of a male penis is one obsession that all these
learned men take for granted, as far as the satisfaction of their demanding and per-
manently aroused women are concerned. Remember, these books that deal at length
with the needs and desires of women are written by men. When the poetess Leila al-
Akhiliya was asked about the desired length of a man's penis, she answered that the
ideal is when it reaches twelve inches; and when the penis of a man is less than six
inches long he has to compensate with other qualities and through other means.
16
To make men's lives more difficult, manuals insist on the limitless capacity of women
to concoct stories, to resort to the most ingenious ruses in order to reach their aim.
Men are less shrewd and women are always triumphant. Women are not only over-
sexuated, but they have powerful brains as well! “The wiles of women are innu-
merable,” warns Nefzawi, “they can mount an elephant on the back of an ant.”
The writer I like most among our sexologues is Shehab Eddin al-Tifashi, born 1184.
He introduces his book Nazhat al-Albab Fi Ma La Yujad Fi Kitab (The Mind's
Promenade Inside What No Book Will Tell You ) by thanking God for blessing men
with the capacity to have fun and to enjoy lightness. Al-Tifashi is the least misogy-
nist among his colleagues. He mixes many literary genres in his book, telling jokes,
quoting poetry and referring to science and logic in order to tell us about women,
their desires, their sexual tastes and their ruses. He states the elements that consti-
tute and produce the perfect adulterer. According to our proficient author, to be a
perfect adulterer a man needs:
-To be young for women prefer them younger.
-To wear perfume, women's desire is aroused by nicely scented bodies.
- To bath frequently and colour his hair with henna. Henna should be used
in generous quantities.
- To carry with him many little gifts; pretty objects that are not very
expensive but always available.
- To have among his acquaintances a Qawada - an old woman pimp.
- He has to be sensitive and capable of shedding tears very easily.
Al-Tifashi is obviously more sensitive and sophisticated in his knowledge of women
and the politics of desire than Sheikh Nefzawi or Bin Selman. But he shares with
them the belief in an active female sexuality. Women in his book are often seeking
17
 sexual encounters, and preferably with “another” partner (the word ajnabi - foreign
- is used in this context in the text). The women in Nazhat al-Albab will use their
attributes to reach their target: the Jaleous will show her anger, letting the desired
man or men hear how much her unfaithful husband had mistreated her, she will
incite male desire by acting angry and furious. The desired male cannot resist her
and will end up fulfiling her wish: making love to her. The same will happen with all
the other types of women. They are different, but they want one thing from men, the
sexual act.
These manuals reveal more about their authors' innermost fears than about what
they had promised to do: help men understand women's sexuality and better perform
their sexual duties. These are the same questions raised by the sudden appearance
of the Israeli chewing gum. It is in rumour and innuendo we finally find out what
people are really thinking. Rumours do not emanate from facts, they are the prod-
ucts of perception. A rumour is information that we wish to believe, and the wish to
believe , according to Jean Noel Kapferrer in his book Rumours, is always stronger
than the quest for credibility. "A rumour that alleviates a deeply rooted sentiment
makes the listener less critical.”
What if the internalised fear finds a way to express itself, to relieve itself? What if
the failure to perform and satisfy women's sexual demands is not caused by the
male's shortcoming? What if the danger of sexual encounters and adultery was not
the result of the unavoidable mixed nature of contemporary society? What if all
these ills had been instigated by an ignominious plot? Then l'honneur est sauf, and
the anguish is exorcised. Who is better placed to concoct this plot and be successful
in its implementation than Israel, the state that has been invincible, has won many
wars against the Arabs and has an inflated reputation of efficiency? The
18
transposition is shifted from one male activity - war in the battlefield - to another
kind of aggressiveness, a biological war - symbolic castration - that may prove lethal
to men's virility and even deny them a progeny. "The benefits drawn from the adhe-
sion and the participation to a rumour, fully justifies the little consideration given to
plausibility," writes Kapferrer.
Rumours come and go quickly. A few weeks after the big upheaval and the gener-
alised anguish, the whole story was forgotten. It knew neither a solution nor an end-
ing. Could this silent finale be the result of a hidden awareness, born with the emer-
gence of the rumour, that the whole story was a necessary fantasy. Or has the short-
lived sexual chewing gum episode evaporated quietly after having accomplished its
therapeutic role?
Who said it was easy to be a man?
•••
The Egyptian film industry has been more successful in exorcising the feeling of
humiliation towards the Israeli supremacy through a totally opposite process: a
super-woman, an adorned Egyptian film star, infiltrates the highest of all Israeli
security posts, thanks to her smartness, beauty and courage. Nadia al-Jundi, a very
popular actress, invaded Arab cinema and TV screens in the early Nineties with her
best selling film, Muhimma fi Tel Aviv (Mission in Tel Aviv ). The film was so suc-
cessful that it keeps generating sequels and large posters of the espionage protago-
nist are exhibited in the video shops in the remotest corners of the Arab World. The
heroine al-Jundi plays is a victim of the class system in Egypt, as well as the unfair
laws towards women. Having lost the custody of her child, she turns loose and
19
 immoral and ends up as the lover of an Israeli agent in Paris. Her national feelings
and original honesty do emerge though at the most crucial time, and she decides to
work and use her charms and connections to serve the Egyptian cause. Since she is
irresistible, she manages to bring a very high ranking Israeli security officer to her
bedroom, and before making love to him - the spectators do not need to miss the tit-
illating, entertaining bits in the movie - she manages to put sleeping pills in his drink
and to steal the keys of the high security room, where all the strategic Israeli mili-
tary secrets are kept. She is a hero, a liberated woman who dresses in the sexiest
way without losing her dignity or her sense of sacrifice for her country. This fanta-
sy based on a liberated image of women, drawn and filmed with fun and drama has
survived better as a psychological catharsis than the threatening sexual chewing
gum.

These episodes in the modern life of Arab media may be unrelated. I still see through
them a chaotic quest to define modern masculinity. Through fears and hopes,
anguished images and courageous depiction of “the new woman”, through the revis-
iting of old sexual manuals and their modern re-appropriation, the meaning of mas-
culinity is called into question.

Who ever said it was easy to be a man?

Chewing Viagra Gum was adapted for Tank.

A longer version of the essay appears in Imagined Masculinities edited by Mai Ghoussoub and
Emma Sinclair-Webb, published in March by Saqi Books.

art: Ceri Amphlett

20 21
 photos: Eid Mubarak

22
25
27
29

iranian cinema
words by Derek Malcolm
Iranian cinema was to the Nineties what the Chinese cinema was to the Eighties - the darling of the
third world to film festivals, critiques and students worldwide. A unique cinematic language was born
out of the peculiar restrictions imposed by the theocratic regime's censor on an already flourishing and
popular film industry. The veteran critic Derek Malcolm, who long championed the case for Iranian
cinema, charts the rise and rise of a cinematic phenomenon, despite being short on car chases.
30
The first time I attended the Teheran Festival was in the last years of the Shah’s
regime. It was difficult to see too many of the better Iranian films, even though we
all knew that they not only existed but were, in the late Sixties and Seventies, con-
sidered extraordinary. At that time, what was called the New Iranian Cinema was
celebrated with enthusiasm throughout the film festivals of Europe. Unfortunately
this did not always meet with the approval of the Shah, and I unwisely wrote from
Teheran that I knew there were new Iranian films but couldn’t tell the readers of the
Guardian in which prison cells its directors could be found. That was an exaggera-
tion. Not many of the new Iranian directors were actually incarcerated, though some
were. But not many of their critical films were freely shown, and were certainly not
made available to festival audiences in the Iranian capital. Apparently my article
made the Shah furious, and I was afterwards to learn that he had personally decreed
that every major paper in the UK was to be invited to the next festival, except the
Guardian.
That first visit to Teheran was an adventure. We were lavishly entertained even if
not allowed to see more than a handful of the less controversial Iranian films. By
the end of the event, we had eaten more caviar than one would normally be able to
slip down one’s throat within a lifetime. Teheran society, which the Shah had stu-
diously encouraged to seem as Western as possible, opened its doors to us with some
thoroughness. There was a party every night and a reception given by the Shah him-
self which outdid anything at Cannes. Middle-class Iranian women never wore veils
or headscarves and plastered themselves with clothes and make-up from Parisian
salons. The men wore suits from London. After all this, it was a pretty severe shock
to be told, on the way back to the airport, that the main building had suddenly col-
lapsed, killing some and injuring many others. It took us three days to get home,
and to add to my personal mortification, I was told that the architect of the
31
 collapsed building was British. Rushing back to my hotel, I sent a cable to my edi-
tor with the story. I handed it to the manager who promised faithfully to send it. But
it was never received.
I unwisely wrote from Teheran that I knew there were new Iranian
films but couldn’t tell the readers of the Guardian in which prison cells
its directors could be found.
By the time I became Director of the London Film Festival some years later in 1982,
the New Iranian Cinema seemed to have fizzled out, or to have been proscribed even
more thoroughly by the mullahs. But there was one old Iranian distributor in Paris
who knew all the directors and had access to their films, and he sent me several after
securing a promise from me that I was not to divulge where they came from. I met
him in Cannes and each year he suggested one film or another. Clearly good films
were still being made. But it was an even worse struggle for their directors than in
the Shah’s day. I mention this just to assure you that the Iranian cinema that has
come to the fore in the last few years is hardly a surprise. In fact, the Iranian cine-
ma has existed for some sixty years and survived, somehow or other, despite every
political and social upheaval in that country.
The first director whose name became recognised in the West in the late Sixties was
Daryush Mehrjui who made two remarkable films about the countryside from
whence he came. One was called The Cow and the other The Postman. The Cow,
made in 1968, is the most famous. Made in black and white, it’s the seemingly naïve
story of a peasant who owns the only cow in his small village and cherishes it to the
32
point of mania. When it dies while he is away on business, the villagers are so scared
of his reaction that they tell him it has strayed. He goes in search of it and
gradually assumes its identity. He is clearly going mad, and Mehrjui’s portrait of a
simple man rendered tragic by circumstances is minutely observed. So is the life of
the villagers and the landscape in which they live. The Cycle, made some six years
later, took matters to the big city and proved one of the greatest ever to be made in
Iran. A young man brings his elderly father to Teheran for treatment for a persis-
tent illness. There is only one way to pay for the cure and that is to sell his own blood
to the local hospital, and eventually to become a middle man for such transactions.
The hospital scenes are extraordinary and the feeling that corruption is everywhere
in a desperate society is so plain that it was no surprise that the film was banned by
the Shah’s censors for several years. But its dark atmosphere, bitter humour and
profound horror at the circumstances in which so many lived make it look like an
Italian neo-realist film made with passionate anger. Largely because of the ban,
Mehrjui then decided to make his films out of Paris but seldom found the same
strength outside his own country and has now returned to Iran.
If Mehrjui led the way, there were other fine directors emerging during the final
years of the Shah’s regime. One of them was Bahman Farmanara whose Prince
Ehtejab, which managed to win the Grand Prix at the 1974 Teheran Festival despite
being a direct criticism of the Qadjars, the former royal family of Iran. In it, an old
and irritable prince, now down on his luck and living in painful solitude in his man-
sion, recalls the extravagant regimes of his ancestors. We observe that his grandfa-
ther’s cruelty to his subjects is now matched by his own ruthless psychological tor-
ture of his wife. And the closing shot, of the old man, wracked with disease and now
dying, descending a spiral staircase into the dark bowels of his mansion, is unfor-
gettable. If that film carries reminders of Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room, Bahram
33
 Bayzai’s The Stranger and the Fog, shown at Cannes in the same year, is an epic
that owes some allegiance to the Japanese cinema of Kurosawa. Set in the distant
past, the film centres round a stranger who arrives in a remote village, marries a
young widow but never escapes the feeling that he is not one of the locals. Years in
the making, the film is shot with great skill, tension and atmosphere so that its two
and a half hour length seldom seems too long.
The Cow, The Cycle, Prince Ehtejab and The Stranger and the Fog - all totally dif-
ferent in style and each deservedly awarded prizes at European festivals - were
markers for the New Iranian Cinema. They inspired the first work of Abbas
Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, the two directors who came to the fore inter-
nationally in the late Eighties and Nineties, somewhat to the surprise of critics and
reviewers who had never heard of the explosion of talent in the Sixties and Seventies
and only knew of the difficulties faced by Iranian film-makers under the religious
regimes which followed the Shah.
This ignorance has led to some over-estimation of the leaders of Iranian film-mak-
ing now, as if we should be surprised that anything remotely stylish or interesting to
the sophisticated West should arrive from such a quarter. And sometimes it seems
that the mere appearance of a new Iranian film at a European film festival is the
signal for international juries to celebrate it with a prize. Even so, many good judges
regard Kiarostami as one of the premier directors in the world and Makhmalbaf as
not far short of that mark.
Kiarostami, whose A Taste of Cherry won a share of the Palme D’Or at Cannes in
1998, and whose latest work, The Wind Will Carry Us Away, was awarded the
Special Jury Prize at Venice this year, is the most celebrated director of the Iranian
34
cinema, able to circumvent many censorship problems because of his fame abroad.
Born in 1940 in Teheran, he came to film by chance after studying painting and
working in an advertising agency. His first feature, made in 1969, was for Kanoon,
the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, and all
his early films had child protagonists relying on their own wits, righting wrongs and
questioning adult authoritarianism. They formed the basis of his style which is sim-
ple and direct but also poetic and capable of achieving flights of the imagination that
highlight the role of art and the cinema in daily life. Thus his films can be read on
many levels - as a straightforward commentary on life in Iran or parables that may
take place in Iran but have a universal appeal.
By the end of the event, we had eaten more caviar than one would
normally be able to slip down one’s throat within a lifetime.
One such film is Close Up, in which a poor, unemployed man passes himself off as
Makhmalbaf, the film-maker. The middle-class family whose home he enters believe
him at first but then realise he’s a fake. He is tried in court but successfully defends
himself with the aid of the kindly judge who pronounces that he meant no real harm.
Makhmalbaf himself embraces him and all’s well that ends well. This is the film
through which Kiarostami shows his warmth and humanity and also the essential
decency of the Iranian people themselves. And Life Goes On... is another of the same
kind, investigating the devastation caused by the earthquake in 1990 which killed
50,000 people in northern Iran. Filmed largely in silence as a film-maker and his
son travel to a crippled township, And Life Goes On... refuses pessimism and shows
how, even with tragedy on their doorsteps, ordinary people renew their lives.
His later films are more complicated, regarded very much as art films in the West,
35
 but imbued with much the same generosity of spirit. A Taste of Cherry has a mid-
dle-aged man driving around the countryside asking strangers to help him commit
suicide. No one can be found to do so, since such a thing is a mortal sin and, any-
way, life isn’t that hopeless. Finally he’s given new hope, paradoxically by a taxi-
dermist who deals with death. This parable is rendered both eloquent and even
amusing by Kiarostami’s gentle touch, and so is the story of The Wind Will Carry
Us Away, in which a group of strangers travel to a remote village for a reason no
one understands. Are they there to provide electricity, or to steal valuables from the
local graveyard? Whatever their motives, they come into conflict with the locals, and
Kiarostami seems to be saying that the new catchword of Third World progress often
does more harm than good to traditional ways of life. This is perhaps one of the
director’s most beautiful films if one of his most elliptical.
In fact, the Iranian cinema has existed for some sixty years and sur-
vived, somehow or other, despite every political and social upheaval in
that country.
Makhmalbaf, born in 1957, joined a militant anti-Shah movement in his teens and
was seriously wounded when trying to rob a bank for the cause. He was sent to
prison for four years and released following the Islamic Revolution in 1979. When
he became a film-maker, his early work was in the tradition of the Italian neo-real-
ists, reflecting his concern with the poor and dispossessed. Later he became more of
a maverick, moving towards a more poetic style and annoying the authorities enough
to have several of his films banned. Like Kiarostami, he was won many internation-
al awards - his greatest success being Gabbeh, a visually very beautiful amalgam of
36
epic poetry and traditional peasant story-telling that captured the imaginations of
Western film-goers largely because of its exoticism. Earlier, less complex films of a
more direct appeal were The Peddler, three stories set among the poor city dwellers
of modern Iran, and A Moment of Innocence, in which the film-maker confronts the
policeman he wounded in the bank robbery many years previously and then engages
actors to recreate the incident on film. This is one of his most elaborate and sensi-
tive works, mixing fantasy with reality in such a way as to criticise both himself and
Iranian society as a whole. More prolific than Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf is perhaps
the most surprising contemporary Iranian director. The danger is that his new poet-
ic non-narrative style, perhaps imposed by the fact that censorship is still strict, will
alienate him from all but a small coterie of admirers.
For the Makhmalbafs, cinema has become a family affair. Last year, The Apple was
an astonishing debut by eighteen-year-old Samira Makhmalbaf, even though many
suspect that her experienced father gave her considerable help. Her story of an old
widower who nervously keeps his two backward daughters virtually in captivity at
home until a neighbour tells the social services about their plight is handled with
sympathy both for the children and their father, and never tries to score easy points.
What is certain is that with film-makers of this quality - and there are several more
I have not mentioned - the Iranian cinema will continue to produce films capable of
holding the attention of Western film-goers and of achieving success on their home
ground. The will and the talent are there. The authorities are gradually losing their
fear of them. There will still be confrontations. But no one seriously doubts that the
sixty-year history of the Iranian cinema has more in store for us yet.
Derek Malcolm of the Guardian is the president of the International Film Critics Association.
37
photos: Karena Perronet-Miller

top by Shelley Fox · gloves by Cornelia James 39

t-shirt Sophia Kokosolaki · pleat skirt by Sonja Nuttall · tulle skirt
(worn under) by Agnès B· white chasum chair one foot taller @ Same
40 41
 pleated dress by Sophia Kokosolaki from Joseph · dress (worn under) by Alberta Ferretti
· wrap by Dai Rees · headdress by Philip Treacy · knit arms by Maria Chen from Brown’s Focus
42 43
 shorts by Andrew Groves · dress by John Rocha · socks by Issey Miyake ·
shoes by Vivienne Westwood Gold Label · armlets by Maria Chen

stylist: Jo Phillips @ Transit

make-up + concept: Phyllis Cohen using Yves Saint Laurent · hair: Thomas Dunkin using John Frieda
models: Nadine Kuiperf @ Premier, Marisa Heath @ Take 2 + Joanne Walpole @ Models 1
dress by John Rocha · corset by Antonio Berardi · trilby by Philip Treacy photographer's assistant: Lee Collins · stylist's assistant: Aaron Collins
45
Advertising
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48 49
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50 51
 photos: Felix Lammers
52 53
dress by Yohji Yamamoto twinset by Aziz
55
dress by Jurgi Persoons
57
 anorak by So by Alexander Van Slobbe

photographer's assistant: Gilles Quemoun · styling: Mirsaine Lembert @ Natacha

Sheshom/Paris · stylist's assistant: Ray Lee · hair: Wendy Jles @ Aurélien/Paris
vest + top by Dries van Noten make-up + concept: Yasmin Heinz @ Olga Heuzé/Paris · models: Lynda, Adel, Chaïr, Baharé,
58 Blandine + Nabil · special thanks to: Sala Productions, Paris + Studio Zappa, Paris59

excerpt from the novel by Paul Smaïl
Through the half-open door I can see her sitting hunched on a stool, her hands
clasped about her knees, rocking gently back and forth, as if nursing her grief. She’s
not moaning anymore, or crying, and, for me, there’s something even more awful
about her stubborn silence than her heart-rending screams at the other end of the
line when I called her from Hamburg to tell her once again what she already knew:
that it was over.
She hasn’t combed her hair. She’s wearing a long, loose gown and slippers. Since
my father died, Ma’s much happier wearing Moroccan clothes - it’s a way for her
of not having to dress up anymore. Specially if she doesn’t have to go anywhere. The
fact is, she goes out less and less, and finds fewer and fewer reasons to leave the
house.
Daniel didn’t like her wearing her long gown - a gandoura - on the beach. I say
Daniel, but if I’m totally honest with myself I should say: Daniel and I, her two sons.
Even though one day, when my brother was getting at her for not wearing a dress
like other women, I ticked him off severely:
- Fuck it, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Ma wears what she likes! You’re lucky
Dad didn’t hear you.
I put the urn with his ashes on the upper bunk bed, his in the days when we shared
this room. The uprights and the wooden ladder were the masts and shrouds of our
ship. Hoist the mainsail! Furl the spanker and the royal! Aloft there, Queequeg!
On a shelf I find the Adventures of Sinbad and Redburn: His First Voyage. Stuck to
the door, a full-length, life-size portrait of Vince Taylor, not the singer our parents
listened to but the body-builder who won the 1992 Iron Man title. Above his bed -
which used to be mine - a poster from a Khaled concert. I don’t remember him lik-
ing Khaled. I remember him listening to the Cure - “This isn’t love, this isn’t life,
this isn’t real, this is a lie...”
smile To stir things up, he would often say that he wasn’t interested in anything Arab. But
when he realised he was very ill, he stopped denying his roots. As if by becoming
Arab he’d get better, maybe. Reading the Koran, listening to raï, deciding strictly to
61
 observe the next Ramadan...Not much, really, and just for form. And he died one
moon before Ramadan. But he would definitely never have ticked Ma off again
about her gown and slippers. At the very end, he said a strange thing, he said if he
pulled through he’d go back to Morocco to live. Go back to live...As if he’d ever lived
there!
His toys are all still there. He kept everything, didn’t break things, and looked after
all his stuff. On his desk, piles of Muscle World, Flex, Iron man and Hein Gericke
catalogues - with the pages devoted to cross-country hiker gear marked with Post-
Its. But also, neatly arrayed in three rows along the groove of the pen-tray, his
Spidermen, his Goldoraks, his Darth Vaders and little Playmobil figures: workers,
firemen, policemen, ambulance drivers...And not one was without its accessories:
helmet, tools, and first-aid box.
But most of them fall over when I open the top drawer. So was Daniel patient
enough to stand them all up again every time? Or did he pull the drawer open more
carefully? And as there isn’t a single speck of dust, Ma must be dusting them in his
absence, one by one.
When I piss in the dark, it’s Pigalle. I piss neon, I shit orange. You should
see it! Day-Glo shit! It’s the boldone mixed with clenbuterol that does
that. They give it to horses. I take a dose fit for a one-ton nag.
In this drawer, other body-building magazines and a photo with a dedication signed
by Nagui (a photo with a dedication signed by Nagui, Queequeg!). In another, spi-
ral notebooks that I start to flick through. In them he jotted down with obsessive
precision, to the nearest ounce and fraction of an inch, day in day out, his weight
and his measurements, and his body-building progress: neck, biceps, shoulders,
chest, size measured at the sternum, waist measurement at the navel, thighs, calves.
Insane lists of figures, some underlined in red. Number of sessions per week, exer-
cises per session, repetitions per exercise...Weights lifted...Calculations of the
amounts of proteins, fats and carbohydrates taken at each meal: so much chicken
breast, so much low-fat cottage cheese, so much cereal with additives...vitamins,
62
lecithin, leptin, carnitine, creatine, insulin, choline, ovalbumin and lactalbumin,
amino acids...And then, I guess, the record of a more sinister bookkeeping: his dope,
the junk he salted his soup with, to borrow Mr. Luis’ words: veterinary products,
anabolic steroids, testosterone, and the like - the junk that killed him. Med, Sol, Dur,
Bol, Clen, Glut: the names are mysteriously abbreviated and followed by a series of
ten to twelve numbers - dates, amounts, and prices, I suppose.
- Damn, baby brother, you stink! And you see how you sweat?
It was a white sweat, thick, greasy, frothy, like the foam on a horse’s neck...Sticky,
yes, just like semen. And a smell of the butcher’s, a funky smell of rotting dairy prod-
ucts. I also noticed that his skin had hardened and started to look like thick leather.
But he just smiled inanely at me, to taunt me.
- Yeah, yeah, and when I piss in the dark, it’s Pigalle I piss neon, I shit orange. You
should see it! Day-Glo shit! It’s the boldone mixed with clenbuterol that does that.
They give it to horses, and I dope myself like a horse. I take a dose fit for a one-ton
nag...Yeah! One fix a week. Fucking right! With the IV, well, I’ll spare you the
details but you know it’s going to hurt! Your ass feels like concrete for a good hour,
you can’t move. But afterward it’s great...The first times, it’s heaven: you lift the
smallest dumbbell and bang! Your biceps double in size...
- And your liver gets two or three times as big! Mr Luis told me. And in the end
your pancreas bursts. And your tendons snap...They snap, Daniel! And your balls
burst too! And you get cancer or Parkinson’s like other people catch colds, Daniel!
It’s not true! You’re crazy! You’re not a horse, fuck it, you’re not a horse!
But he neighs to rile me a bit more, and carries on:
- Nhhhin! Better than medol, better than durboline, soludecadron! To start with...
- To start with...Yeah! The first few times. But after that, then what?
- To start with, you feel all your muscles pumped full of blood, like having a hard-
on all over...
63
 - All over except where the hard-on’s best! Because as soon as you touch all that
stuff, you can’t get it up anymore, I know...
- Mr Luis told me! He interrupts me, in a mocking, falsetto voice.
I make as if to hit him. I yell:
-You can’t get it up anymore!
He answers quietly, bitter:
-No hard-ons or hard-ons for guys...
- Fuck it, I don’t believe it! Baby bro! You’re not going to bug me with that crap!
I don’t give a damn if you get fucked in the ass! I’m not Farid, I’m not Taouif! My
kid brother can jack off with whoever he likes! I’d rather have you gay than dead!
And if you carry on like this, you’re going to kill yourself! Look! Your hands are
shaking, fuck it! Just look at yourself in the mirror! It’s not muscles anymore, it’s
just swelling! Pure beef! But shit, Daniel, you’re not a piece of meat! You’ve got a
soul! And where’s your smarts in all this, hey!
- Anyway, I’ve always been stupid,so...it took me three tries to pass my exams,
didn’t it? And no good marks! I’ll never find a decent job.
- Nor will I. That’s not the point. There aren’t any decent jobs for the likes of us -
none at all. The Rumanians have got a better chance than us!...Anyway, you’re no
dumber than anyone else, and you know it. Fuck, you’re no more stupid than me!
Except when you shoot up anabolics, enough for a horse! Now, if it was real dope,
so everything looked rosy, that I could understand. But it isn’t! You’re killing your-
self for nothing, fuck it!
- I don’t give a fuck. I’ve had it. Anyhow, why should I go looking for a proper job?
I can make twenty bucks in three hours at the peep show, half of it on the black!
As he spoke, he raised his chin, and had a defiant look, but his eyes were full of tears,
64
and then he rested his forehead on my shoulder...And he started to sob.
- Don’t cry on top of everything! Don’t cry, baby bro!
The massive nape of his neck was running with foam, and the strong animal smell
it emanated, more animal stench than sweat, made me feel a bit sick. Between two
gulps he whispered:
- I’m full of hate, full of hate...
But he said it without any violence, almost without any hate. I wanted to tell him
that the hate he felt was for himself, but words failed me.
•••
- Er hat nicht geleiden...
All of a sudden I didn’t understand what the nurse said to me as she accompanies
me to the elevator, but I thanked her:
- Danke schön.
Then, remembering the little German I know, I guessed she’d said what people
always say in such circumstances: he hadn’t suffered. But how would she know?
In an elevator 1, for me, means the first floor, so I pressed the next button down -
U - and ended up in the Untergeschoss, the basement. The steel doors opened onto
a view of piles of dirty laundry in trolleys, and a notice screwed to the far rough con-
crete wall pointing to Desinfektion.
In my confused state, I pushed 3, and went back up to the floor where my brother
had just died...And then, by mistake again, I pushed U. The elevator went back
down. But, thank God, the doors opened before it reached the basement, this time
65
 at the ground floor. And at last I got out of there fast.
There were telephones in the reception hall. I had to call Ma. Had to call Mama...To
tell her about Daniel. To tell her.
•••
Now I found myself in a modern, low-ceilinged office opposite a statutorily com-
passionate official - sehr korrekt - who handed me bundles of documents to sign. A
secretary from the French consulate, who was every bit as administratively humane,
sensitive and courteous, translated the few lines above the dotted line where I had
to sign my name. I had a choice of procedures: either repatriate the body or have it
cremated here in Germany and take the urn back to France, free of charge.
- You’re, er...French?
-French, yes. Born in France, French father.
A grandfather who died for France, and uncle murdered by the French police on
Papon’s orders...I didn’t add.
She told me my rights and what the law said: green EEC label, free movement of
goods...(Goods, Daniel!)
The day after next at the Hamburg Airport, a security person stuck a red adhesive
strip on the urn marked IDENTIFIED PARCEL. But the alarm went off when I
walked through the metal detector.
- Was ist das?
- My brother’s ashes.
- Was?
66
- Ashes...My brother.
I didn’t have any anger left in me, or sorrow. It was and wasn’t me walking though
the metal detector.
•••
The burial - I’m talking about our father’s burial. I’ve gone back a few pages in my
notebook, and Daniel was cremated without ceremony, without witnesses, with just
his brother there. The funeral at the Thiais cemetery was what you’d call a nice
funeral. A chance for people to get together, a reunion for family and
friends...Emotion and dignity.
There was - yes - a feeling of peace, almost. I didn’t feel any more rebellion inside
me. The sky was very blue, and birds sang in the foliage (“Wow, mofo, foliage,
conceited prick! Asshole!”)
When we reached the Muslim neighbourhood, Ma, Zaïa, Daniel and I got out of
funeral car and went on on foot. Between her two grown sons holding her by the
elbows, Ma stood very straight and didn’t stumble on the gravel on the path.
We walked alongside the spot reserved for Muslim soldiers from North Africa, the
rows of simple slabs, all the same, in a half-circle, engraved with the first names of
all those young men who’d died for France, our brothers: Saïd, Mohamed, Rabah,
Abdelkader, Rachid, Djeloul, Tahar, and so on. Farther on, in a communal grave,
victims of the bloody night of October 17, 1961, were buried.
It was a big procession. Behind us came cousins, cousins of cousins, cousins of
cousins of cousins - I hadn’t known we were such a big tribe. Then our friends,
Daniel’s and mine. Lastly, my father’s colleagues, who had offered a large wreath
dedicated very simply To Yacine.
When it was all over, everybody offered to take us back to Rue Ordener. A distant
67
 cousin, whose first name I hadn’t known until then, offered to take us in his car, a
Renault Espace. He had arranged the seats facing each other in the back, and he
said, with a smug little smile:
- It’s just like a small living room. You’ll be better off with me. Get in!
So there we were, facing each other, Ma, Zaïa, Daniel, and me.
Our teeth stayed clenched. Even Zaïa was unable to say the slightest word. We had
to drive right across Paris, and the streets were very busy. The road home seemed
to take forever. Huge traffic jam on Boulevard de Magenta, deafening concert of
horns...
As had happened often of late, there’d been trouble at the Barbès-Rochechouart
intersection. Identity checks? Demo for illegals? Spontaneous defence of some
thieves who’d just been arrested? Rival gangs of dealers settling scores? Fighting
between rival groups of fundamentalists? A round-up of ethnic types? We didn’t
know what it was: the Espace was at a standstill by the Luxor, and we looked on
without understanding. People were running in all directions, shouting...Police sirens
drowned out wailing women. A line of police buses appeared. Riot police jumped out
before they’d stopped, to get to the scene that much faster.
In front of the down-market department store Tati, clutching their truncheons, they
started to charge the crowd blindly.
For a split second, for my brother and for me, our hatred prevailed over our despair.
From the depths of his sadness, Daniel uttered a vague:
- Fucheis!
And me:
-The bastards! The bastards!
68
•••
Every day, for several weeks, they’d been finding bodies of Arabs drowned in the
Seine and St. Martin’s Canal. Others were found in woods around Paris, at Chaville
and Meudon. Men who had been killed with a bullet in the belly, or strangled with
their own ties or a length of wire. They had neither ID papers nor money on them.
Several hundred had disappeared like this in the autumn of 1961: FMA, French
Muslims from Algeria, or simply, NA, North Africans. Like my uncle Mehdi.
In full daylight, an unmarked Peugeot 403 would pull up level with a poor guy who
had “the features”. Plain clothes inspectors would make him get in, and would then
tear away at top speed...He would never be seen alive again.
Massive swoops and raids took place every night. Armed with long truncheons and
submachine guns, police officers went Arab-bashing in subways, Arab-bashing at
Maison-Blanche, Arab-bashing at the Goutte d’Or. On the Asnières and
Gennevilliers bridges, they stopped buses and sorted through the passengers. On one
side, people of “European type” on the other the “Fellouzes”[Algerian soldiers dur-
ing the Algerian War of Independence], whom they shipped straight off. Or ten or
twelve of them would burst into a café used by “Nor’Afs” and break the place up.
People were tortured in police stations and detention centres.
On October 5, the French government introduced a curfew for all French Muslims
from Algeria. Arabs, whether Algerian or not, lived in a state of fear. Italians and
Portuguese guys were murdered simple because they looked “the type”...But on the
seventeenth the National Liberation Front - the FLN - put out the word for every-
one to demonstrate peacefully and to demand that the curfew be lifted. The demon-
strators were unarmed, and most of them were dressed to the nines, as if in a party.
Then the terrible slaughter started.
At home, I only heard people talking about it on three or four occasions, and then
only in veiled terms. As if my parents were ashamed of what went down, as if it was
up to them to feel ashamed. Zaïa spoke more openly about it, but in hushed tones,
too. I got to know a bit more about it from Mr Hamel, who finally admitted to me
69
 that, at the time, he was part of a support network for the FLN. And four or five
years ago, a book titled The Battle of Paris came out detailing the full horror of that
Kristallnacht.
At the Ile de la cité, fifty men were massacred in a yard at the police headquarters.
In the Sports Arena, at the Porte de Versailles, of the six thousand rounded up,
many were seriously injured, left unattended, with nothing to drink, stripped of what
paltry possessions they had - their watches, their wallets - by the cops, who shared
out the loot...And they were finished off with rifle butts when they still had enough
courage left to raise their voices and chant: “Freedom! Freedom!”
As I said, my uncle was off to work backstage of the Olympia. (Jacques Brel was on
the programme that night. Zaïa has kept a photo of the singer dedicated To my
friend, Mehdi.) His corpse was fished out at the main sewer at Conflans Ste-
Honorine on October 21...or October 22.
Across the file at the forensic science laboratory, somebody had scrawled, in big red
letters, suicide - apparently.
Today, as I write these lines, I realise that when he died he was the age I am today:
twenty-seven. Zaïa was twenty-three, Leila - Ma - fourteen.
The chief of police at the time was Maurice Papon, who’s since been found guilty of
crimes against humanity - but not for those goings-on.
On the TV news one night, when they were debating whether to charge him, his face
appeared, and I saw my father, usually so reserved, so measured in his feelings, gri-
macing with hatred, get up from the table, stick two fingers at the screen simulat-
ing a pistol, aim, get even closer until he was actually touching the screen, and fire
at point-blank range.
- Halouf!
70
•••
After supper, I’ll go home and finish packing my bags, turn off the taps and the
meter. I’ll give the keys back to Mr Zeboudji. It’ll be a long time before I see
You’ll always find bargains at Berber! again. I’ll spend my last night in France here
on this sofa, under the portrait of my uncle Mehdi. My flight’s tomorrow.
In my take-on bag I had the urn containing Daniel's ashes. I’d put it on the convey-
or belt through the metal detector. The customs’ policewoman called me over and
got me to open the bag:
- What’s this?
I’d anticipated the question. I answered by brandishing the papers I’d needed to
bring the ashes into France:
- A funeral urn. Here are all the relevant documents.
(Relevant was the word I used! An A-rab, but an educated A-rab.)
This didn’t stop her asking me to open it, though. I protested, and my tone of voice
grew louder: No, I’m not going to open it. She said I must. I said it was an infringe-
ment of my human rights and my dignity, and showed a lack of respect for the rights
of the deceased. I also pointed out to her that it was rare for anyone to try and smug-
gle drugs or explosives through in this direction. Her colleague, looking embar-
rassed, called their superior on his walkie-talkie. I could see the moment coming
when I would no longer be able to board my flight. Curious passengers gave me dirty
looks.
I had to wait. They were trying to contact the captain.
If you’re continually suspicious of us, aren’t we going to take offence? If you talk
down to us, isn’t that going to annoy us? If you ask us for our papers for the slight-
est thing, aren’t we going to become exasperated? If you treat us like wogs,
71
 rag-heads and A-rabs, isn’t that humiliating for us? If you beat the shit out of us in
the police stations, doesn’t this hurt us? If you kick us and break our fingers when
you take us into custody, if you spit - quite literally - in our faces, if you piss on us
- quite literally...And if you refuse to give us jobs that you’ll give to others who are
less qualified but less swarthy, too, won’t we finally rise up in revolt? Doesn’t an
Arab have feelings, emotions, and passions? If we’re like you in every other way,
we’ll be like you in this, too: we’ll get our revenge.

The captain of the Royal Air Maroc flight AT761 was called Idir Ben Achab - cross
my heart, I’m not making it up. He gave me permission to board without opening
the urn.

I suddenly thought back to a comedy routine that always made my father laugh until
he cried when he heard it on the radio. It had to do with a lower-middle-class French
couple flying on holiday to Morocco and seeing - horror of horrors! - that even the
steward was an Arab! And even the captain was an Arab! And even the king there
was an Arab!

I can hear him laughing now.

advertising
ICA
The pseudonym Paul Smaïl belongs to an author living in Morocco, who has only been interviewed by fax.
His novel Smile has sparked off a debate among French critics who argue that the novel is too literary to be
written by a North African. Smile is published by Serpent’s Tail in the UK on January 27, 2000, and on
March 22, 2000, in the US, where the books are available though Consortium.

72
photos: Andreas Laeufer

75
trousers by Paul + Joe
76 77
78 79
80 81
stylist: Nadine Sanders
photographer's assistants: Sarah Greenwood + Elise Dumontet · shot @ James English Studios
thanks to: Necati, Cetin-Kana, Nazim, Mehmet and Ozan black trousers by CK
 illustrations: Toby Neilan @ Creative Union

84
86 87
88 89
 photos: Julia McKay

jacket by Paul Smith, zipped front sweater by Joe Casely-Hayford

90 jeans: 1st giant by Levi's at Cinch, trainers by Adidas, gloves by Agnès B91
left: jacket + gloves by Agnès B · trousers by Kenzo Homme

right: coat by Agnès B · shirt by Paul + Joe from the Cross · pyjama pants by Paul Smith ·
gloves by Joe Casely-Hayford 93
jacket + trousers by Issey Miyake, shirt by Nigel Curtiss from the Librarypumps coat by Warren Kade, jacket worn as shirt by Cerruti Homme
by Y's by Yohji Yamamoto from Jones, vintage Adidas bag from Cinch, gloves by Agnès B black trousers by Nigel Curtiss, cream trousers + gloves by Agnès B, pumps by Converse95
shirt by Paul Smith,tabard by Joe Casely-Hayford, trousers + shoes by jacket + sneakers by Issey Miyake, shirt by Vivienne Westwood, trousers by Agnès B
Vivienne Westwood Man, gloves by Agnès B
96 gloves by Joe Casely-Hayford, scarf by Mohsin Ali97
 left: jacket by Warren Kade, jacket
(worn as shirt) by Imar Engineering
from Jones, trousers by Nigel Curtiss
from the Library, gloves by Agnès B
right: cardigan + gloves by Joe
Casely-Hayford, shirt by Fake, trousers
by Nigel Curtiss from the Library

stylist: Aaron Collins

models: Nick @ Take 2
+ Bijan @ Models 1
make-up: Natsuka Yamamoto
set/prop design: Adrian Kirby
stylist's assistant: Paul Criag
photographer's assistant: Paul Clayton
special thanks to: James Electrical,
Coops De'ville + Nicki B
98
photos: Louis Decamps
101
page 101, suitcase by Louis Vuitton; right: top by Oscar Suleyman, pants by Gaspard
Yurkievich, belt by Christian Lacroix, shoes by Adele Clarke for Kostas Murkudis, left: blouse
+ vest by YSL Rive Gauche, skirt by Kostas Murkudis, scarf by YSL, bag by Louis Vuitton,
shoes by Adele Clarke for Kostas Murkudis

page 102, trench by Burberry, right: dress by André Walker, boots by Christian Lacroix; left:
dress by Balenciaga, bag by Louis Vuitton, shoes by Jeremy Scott, pet travel bag by Gucci

page 103, bag (on camel) by Louis Vuitton, left: top + skirt by Gaspard Yurkievich, belt by
Christian Lacroix, shoes by Adele Clarke for Kostas Murkudis; right: blouse by Kostas
Murkudis, skirt by Carrie Rossman, tie by Kostas Murkudis, bag by Véronique Leroy, flower
by Sonia Rykiel, shoes by Adele Clarke for Kostas Murkudis

page 105, belt (camel collar) by YSL Rive Gauche, front: shorts by Jeremy Scott, shirt by
Gilles Rosier, belt by Christian Lacroix, scarf by Kostas Murkudis
boots by Balenciaga, sun shade by Louis Vuitton
back: skirt + sweater + cap by Louis Vuitton, belt by Sonia Rykiel, shoes by Jeremy Scott,
scarf by Kostas Murkudis, bag by Gucci

photographer's assistants: Mai lin Mignard + Monia Litti

stylist: Keiko Seya · stylist's assistant: Celine Ayel · make-up: Tatsu Yamanaka · make-up
assistant: Saloi · hair: Andreas Bernhardt · models: Ciara + Ruth
decor: Patrice Lamotte · thanks to: Studio Cosmos, Matphot, Picto, Lidia Magic Décor
 words by Louise Gray + art by Joel Lardner @ Creative Union

going native

106 107
 Oh, honey, we’ve shrunk the world! Slam in a video: The Sheltering Sky, Hideous
Kinky or vintage stuff, Lawrence of Arabia, can’t beat it. Such freedom, noble stuff
those Arabs. Oil’s ruined them and those beardie weirdies aren’t so hot, but...well.
The shops had the halva and the chequered keffiyehs and we can dress up nicely -
can’t quite afford that Alexander McQueen catwalk kasbah stuff, although those
leather yashmaks were hot - and all be someone else. Somewhere else. Somewhere
exotic. Just for an hour or two.

The idea of escape is as old as humanity. And, in its emptiness, the desert has
became the most potent escape image of them all. A site to lose oneself and be lost,
a place to find oneself. The most arresting moment of Hideous Kinky, a strangely
anxious movie for one so light, is not that of the children and their mother adrift in
the magnificence that is Morocco, but another unsettling in its raw uncertainty.
There he stands - a Dane? a Dutchman? - on the desert highway, screaming, scream-
ing, screaming. He’s looking for God; or maybe he’s found God. Crazy man, the local
Berbers say. Whichever, mind-expanding experiences and the metaphor of the
empty land, as well as its actuality, go hand in hand. And now, the idea of freedom
and liberation is couched in these ascetic terms that bear no resemblance to any
reality. In being retold, the desert had become its own end, its own story, its own
narrative of a narrative.

“Going native” was the phrase, used by the British colonialists. It recognised the
power of the pull. To be British abroad required a distillation of all things British,
and an aloofness from native ways was essential to prevent cultural contamination.
For the novice traveller, there was always on hand a bevy of experienced officers,
civil servants, wives to advise, be decent to the natives, but never fraternise. Caste
rules and rules of pollution, the rules that govern a community. You inhabited a

108
111
 parallel universe, gliding side by side with a world which was a step away and a light
year distant. Going native was the colonialists’ nightmare because it was the great-
est, simplest temptation to step outside one frame of reference and into another.
The detritus of a colonial family: bookcases, old trunks and boxes that
yield up civil service stamps amid old glass-plate photos and early cine
film, ships’ logs, dictionaries in any number of tongues...and then, the
rush of something else in the jangle of an Arabian bride’s headdress.
But the vision of an empty land has always called those whose own landscapes were
either too full or too constricted. And the desert offered a deep fascination to the
Europeans, English in particular. It called in a particular way. Victorians - trav-
ellers seems too tame a description for them - like Richard Burton and Charles
Doughty, and, more surprisingly, women like Jane Digby and, later, Gertrude Bell,
Freya Stark, Isabelle Eberhardt. Not simply poets and scholars, these were people
who invoked the wrath of colonial society by going native. The soldiers T.E.
Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger sealed the desert’s place in modern English lan-
guage myth. In their hands, the desert was a place to find oneself, or even lose one-
self. Its emphatic metaphor was one of casting oneself free, finally, of everything.
Freud wrote that civilisation is achieved by repression and England thought itself to
be the most civilised place on earth.
That the stone-cropped desert offered an experience of solitude and harshness had
much appeal to those schooled in a system of European thought that found in
Rousseau’s notion of the noble savage a compelling charm. It had nothing to do with
any tension between Christianity and Islam, or if it did, the “Nazreny” interlopers
played it down well. Shorn of the softness and morbidity associated with the
112
Ottoman luxuries, it also provided a way of escape from the fixed identities that civil-
isation preferred. It is no coincidence that many Arabists purposely blurred the lines.
Burton - who, like many others, was there for the East’s sexual promise - was a mas-
ter of disguise, penetrating even Mecca under the guise of a Levantine merchant,
while Doughty masqueraded under the nom-de-desert of Khalil. Lawrence, arguably
a shattered man after the joint experience of wars and the unfettering that Arabia
allowed him, returned to England and having published The Seven Pillars of Wis-
dom, lived and died under an assumed name. There was a masculinity - real or imag-
ined? - to be claimed in the wilderness, its strictures, its falcons, its society of men
and the freedom it offered was available to both men and women. The European
women claimed their independence through horsemanship, through basic medicine
and their utter strangeness to the tribe. And being an honourary man in those days
offered the European woman, in those pre-emancipation days, a satisfying paradox.
And yet, there is always the sense that the women were there through the lure, the
possibility of romance: if so, what sadnesses did their sacrifice bring? Both Lady
Hester Lucy Stanhope and Isabelle Eberhardt ended up dying, destitute and alone.
But for those whose birth lands had been the colonies, going native was also a way
of returning home. And there was a constant temptation to go native: the detritus
of a colonial family recognised as much. Bookcases, old trunks and boxes would
yield up civil service stamps amid old glass-plate photos and early cine film, ships’
logs, dictionaries in any number of tongues...and then, the rush of something else in
the jangle of an Arabian bride’s headdress, a piece of mounted Chinese bamboo that
served as a pillow to ladies with elaborate hair, tiny carved elephants and penknives
and finally, a wicker basket with the heads and broken limbs of long-remembered,
long-dismembered china dolls. The desire might lie latent for many years, but the
yearning for home, this return of the repressed was an assured visitor who would
113
114 115
 come calling on chill nights in London or after conversations about nationhood and
belonging.
To go native was often a misunderstood process, because it had less to do with join-
ing the society of natives in preference to one’s own than the rejected outsiders sus-
pected. Its hidden emphasis was precisely in a process of unbelonging. To unbelong
to the society of peers, of civil service routine and administrative regimen: surely
there was never such a route to freedom before! Certainly, it was a perilous path: to
not belong hazarded the risk of becoming invisible. In another very different society
(but, incidentally, in a place where glacial wastes produced their own counterpart to
the desert sands), this had been a terrible fate. The sentence of outlaw, pronounced
upon wrong-doers in medieval Iceland, had the effect of dispersing the fact of one’s
very existence. One became a ghost among the living.
The spin-off, for the westerner finally alone on the edge of the Arabian desert, was
a sense of space and wonder. To look up into the infinite stars or across a terrain of
vast distance and acerbity, was to contemplate life on a scale far bigger than any-
thing civilisation could offer. Was such contemplation an invitation to transcenden-
tal experience? Quite possibly, and certainly one native to the Middle East. The forty
days of quarantine Christ spent in the wilderness in search of enlightenment were
not an event singular to him: it’s just that his story was written about. That’s all.
Whatever mirages thrown up the shimmering sheets of desert heat where the tem-
perature and landscape would conspire to create vast lakes of nonexistent water, the
hallucinations or the sense of hyper-reality, the visions had less to do with the cir-
cumscribed realities of civil society and everything to do with a universe of unimag-
inable breadth. Reduction had become expansion in the space of a shift of con-
sciousness. To survive would require a singular focus on one’s own body and its
116
needs. Distance was measured in the hours of shade each season proffered, in the
gait of a camel or the weight of a goat’s skin of brackish water. This was life with-
out its incidentals and appurtenances; it was an essential existence.
Visit the Arabia Deserta National Park!
With the aid of four-wheeled vehicles readily available for hire in Riyadh, the Empty
Quarter is easily reached within several hours driving. Travellers should please note
that women are on no account allowed to drive; moreover, women, suitably veiled
and modestly attired, can travel only in the company of their husband or close male
relatives. It’s a good idea to stock up on snacks - Colas and other brand names - in
town before you begin your journey. Petrol, on the other hand, is easily available
along the main route. Upon arrival at the Empty Quarter Visitor Centre, you can
partake of camel rides or go dune surfing in any one of a number of karts for hire.
Helpful Bedouin (English/French/Japanese spoken) - recognisable by their white
headdresses and name-badges - will guide guests around the Empty Quarter nation-
al park, displaying the native wit and wisdom that makes the Empty Quarter the hol-
iday location of choice for ten million tourists a year. A centrally-located shop (next
to the halal burger franchise) offers T-shirts, ornamental Arabs and other memen-
tos - small bottles of the local “black gold” are very popular! - to take home as a
tasteful reminder of your visit here.
•••
We can never escape again. The cartographers, the travel agents and tour operators
have seen to that. Escape is in the mind; it is a product of fantasy to be built in far-
off places for those too unimaginative to dream themselves. And we dreamily fol-
low, down the trails and around the rocks, the tail end of a tale, the narrative of a
narrative.
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photos: Alexi Tan top by Ghost, mirror pin by ORFI, wrap (worn as pants) by Jean-Paul Gaultier
Femme, ankle bracelet by Erickson Beamon
dress by Clements Ribeiro · pants by Daryl K skirt as top by Alessandro dell'Acqua · customised t-shirt by CK Calvin Klein Jeans
left: customised dress + belt by Ghost; right: skirt as top by Fake · shrug by
Versus, belt by Lucy Gordon Resources · necklace as belt by Erickson Beamon styling: Daniela Jung, make-up: Feride Uslu @ ferideuslu.com
pants by Martin Margiela imaging: Leo Bustamante · thanks to Drive In Studios + Melissa Sison-Tan
photos: Brock
129
 all clothes by Issey Miyake

stylist: Damian Foxe · make-up: Polly Osmond @ A+R

hair: Thomas Dunkin for John Frieda · model: Sorcha @ Storm
photographer's assistant: Dominic Cooper · thanks to Big Sky Studios131
art: Jananne Al-Ani
 Grandfather Farhan believed in God but mistrusted nature. His farm was on the
wrong side of the Jordan River in the parched mountains of the East Bank. When
Moses led the chosen people past my grandfather’s village of Madaba, he paused
long enough to cleave a rock with his staff, and the spring that appeared is still flow-
ing today. Its name Ayun Musa is a pun, since “ayun” in Arabic means both spring
and eye. From the top of nearby Mount Nebo, Moses saw the Promised Land, which
lay beyond the 550 dunums (137.5 acres) Grandfather spent his whole life
cultivating.

thirst It was not easy. The prophet’s gift was, like his God, punitive and mysterious. During
words by Malu Halasa
droughts that could last up to three years, the spring diminished to a trickle, and
when the skies finally opened, flash floods washed away Grandfather’s tender young
wheat seedlings, his main cash crop. He tried other, less water intensive plants,
lentils and barley, but his experiments were rarely successful. Water scarcity result-
ed in economic deprivation and, more sadly, childhood fatality.

Grandfather lost almost half his children to diseases of poverty - malnutrition and
poor sanitation - an equation he sought to balance by sending my father to where
drought and water scarcity were practically unknown. One of my father’s letters,
which described American trees so laden with fruit that he picked as much as he
liked, made Grandfather cry. It also forced the old man to make up his mind. As
soon as they were old enough, he sent eight more sons and daughters out of the
Middle East. Even though it fractured the insular continuity of his own family, any-
where had to be better than home.

I never met Grandfather Farhan, but I know he was a short, intense man like my
father. In his keffiyeh and agal, he was a strict traditionalist. Guests were treated to

137
 lavish hospitality, even if the food was snatched out of the mouths of his own chil-
dren. To him, reputation and honour were paramount. Every year he took livestock
to the markets of Jerusalem, a three-day journey by foot. Once over the Allenby
Bridge, he passed through the fertile farmlands of the West Bank, where the soil
was yielding and the rainfall good, and felt an emotion that as an honest man, he
would have acknowledged as envy.
He often took refreshment from a goatskin drawn up from a 2,000-year-old lime-
stone well shaft. The sweet water he drank first fell as winter rains over the moun-
tains of the West Bank - known as Samaria and Judea to Orthodox Jews - and gath-
ered in porous limestone, dolomite formations and subterranean caverns, which
stretch underneath the whole of the West Bank. The moving waters in these under-
ground reservoirs, collectively known as the Mountain Aquifer, are the advantage
the West Bank enjoys over the East, and the cause of my grandfather’s jealousy.
•••
Like the future of Jerusalem, the return of Palestinian refugees and the outcome of
the Jewish settlements, water is one of those troublesome issues that has been saved
for the current final status negotiations. Israel obtains one-third of its renewable
fresh water requirements from the waters of the Mountain Aquifer, which accounts
for ninety-five per cent of the western aquifer’s annual reserves. The remaining five
per cent goes to the Arab inhabitants of the West Bank. The imbalance of this equa-
tion has been profound.
If Grandfather Farhan were alive today he would recognise, on every Palestinian
roof or beside houses, tanks and cisterns used to collect rainwater. These are an
138
emblem of both nationality and hardship, since Israeli homes and settlements, sup-
plied by the Israeli water utility Mekorot, do not rely on rainfall. Like my grandfa-
ther who farmed in the early to mid-1900s, modern Palestinians are completely
dependent on the vagaries of nature. Their economic and agricultural demise began
over thirty years ago. Since 1967, stringent Israeli military controls and heavily
enforced laws have prevented Palestinians from freely partaking of the natural
resource that’s literally beneath their feet.
The situation couldn’t have been plainer along the same stretch of road my grand-
father travelled. Before wells were drilled in the nearby Jewish settlements of Yitav,
Gilgal and Na’aran, three crops of melons and vegetables were planted every year,
alongside banana and citrus groves, in the Palestinian village of al-Auja. Now farm-
ers like Ahmed Muhammad Jerhod rely on the village spring. When the rains come
late, the growing season is ruined.
“We should kill them all,” Jerhod says of his thirty dunums, nearly eight acres of
bananas, “because there is no water.”
A half kilometre away, precise rows of thriving banana, citrus and palm trees fill
Israeli plantations. Irrigated from unlimited supplies of the Mountain Aquifer,
Jewish settlements are a lush, dark green, a sign that their plants are water greedy
or “spoiled”.
My guide is a woman hydrogeologist Manal Ba’Ba’ from the Palestinian Water
Authority. When we arrive in Beit Furiq, outside the city of Nablus, Ba’ba’ waves
down the first man we see on the street, and he immediately invites us to his home.
Amin Zadmot, a subsistence farmer with no education except four years in an Israeli
139

Since 1967, stringent Israeli military controls and heavily enforced laws
have prevented Palestinians from freely partaking of the natural
resource that’s literally beneath their feet.
jail, has been waging a campaign against Nablus’ municipal dump, a smouldering
mountain of burning trash less than a mile away. He called and wrote the munici-
pality about respiratory ailments in the village, but nothing was done. He then sent
a letter to Yasser Arafat who lived in Beit Furiq in the Sixties and called it “my
country”. Zadmot’s letter was delivered to the Palestinian Authority (PA), which
sent it to Nablus municipality. The unopened letter was returned to Zadmot. Now
there are plans to dump medical waste beside the burning mountain.
By his front door, Zadmot dug a cistern through sheer rock face to store the run-off
rain from the house’s flat roof. When the cistern runs dry he buys from water
tankers. Inside, his pregnant wife, Wahjeha, mops floors with leftover washing-up
water in a plastic bowl, since there’s no sink in the kitchen. The sink in the hall has
taps for the plumbed-in rain-water only. Nearly half of the Palestinian communities
are like this.
Wahjeha points to the shower in the bathroom that has never been used. The fami-
ly carries their own water in various containers. “I’m always yelling at the children
when they wash not more than a bucket and breek (a pitcher).” They use fifteen
litres every few days, compared to a five-minute shower in Britain, which takes, on
average, seventy-five.
140
Zadmot openly despairs, “For seven months I can’t find a job. There is no water to
work the land so whatever you do, you lose. All you want is a job building houses in
Israel.”
He doesn’t state explicitly what everybody knows. It isn’t just any house. Israeli set-
tlements have been constructed by Palestinians. With a sixty per cent unemployment
rate, they either work as labourers, find employment with the PA or become car
thieves. Some villages have become known for black market spare parts. Zadmot
tells Ba’ba’ that the people in power can do what they like. It is their revolution.
Once we’re back on the road, Ba’Ba’ is silent and brooding.
Officially the 1.6 million West Bank Palestinians utilise 118 million cubic metres
(mcm) of water a year compared to the fifty mcm employed by the 133,000 Jewish
settlers in the region, excluding Jerusalem. Or as the London’s Foreign and
Commonwealth Office’s Greg Shapland - considered a neutral source by both sides
- writes in his book Rivers of Discord, “The Palestinian population - twelve times
greater than the settler population - is consuming less than two and a half times as
much water. Put another way, the settlers’ consumption per capita is five times that
of the Palestinians.”
“They’re lucky if they get that.” Dr. David Scarpa, a professor at Bethlehem
University, samples water in West Bank towns and villages, where supplies are cut
off as a rule. Even the best estimates place Palestinian per water capita consump-
tion at only forty or fifty bathtubs a year above “absolute scarcity”, the minimum
amount of water people require to support themselves economically and live
healthily.
141
 The people who monitor water in the region belong to a small international com-
munity. I initially met Dr. Scarpa at a Mid-East water conference in London, where
a Palestinian hydrologist calling for a “sewage intifada” against the Israelis was
told not to give the terrorists ideas. While Palestinians, Israelis and Jordanians
argued over mcm, Dr. Scarpa discussed the plight of the Rashidiyya bedouin. We
started corresponding by email. I didn’t know he has been a Christian Brother for
the last forty years, until I visited him on Bethlehem’s campus, where he sometimes
wears a frock coat and a white ecclesiastical collar.
Brother Scarpa regularly examines Hebron’s concrete reservoirs. For him,
Palestinian rage is about Palestinian deprivation. “Arabs in Hebron get water on
the average twice a month, the settlers twenty-four-hours a day.” Under the Oslo
interim agreement, the Palestinian population is supposed to get more water.
Recently the Israeli authorities sent the Palestinians a bill for their electricity and
since they can’t pay it, the Israelis said they will take a credit and the Palestinians
can pay them instead in water.
Brother Scarpa shrugs, “Wouldn’t you be angry if you saw their swimming pools
filled?”
•••
The great divide between Palestinians and Israelis is not only in green lawns and
flower gardens, but in something as basic as sewage systems. The 2,300 military
orders the Israeli authority passed between 1967 and 1992, which effectively con-
trolled every aspect of Palestinian life from health care to the banning of email in
the West Bank and faxes in the Gaza Strip, conveniently omitted a sewage system.
142
Former head of the Palestinian delegation to multi-lateral negotiations on environ-
mental protection, now head of the Applied Research Centre of Jerusalem, Jad
Isaac explains, “Israel ignored any investment in the Palestinian infrastructure
while they heavily taxed us. They depleted our resources to build the roads and inter-
nal networks for the Jewish settlements, but they never built one treatment plant.
Instead their settlements are pushing their effluent onto Palestinian lands.”
In the West Bank approximately 200 Israeli factories - part of Israeli industrial
zones and also inside the Jewish settlements - manufacture aluminum, batteries,
fibreglass and chemicals, among other products. Their industrial waste is con-
veniently dumped onto adjacent lands. Since the West Bank is mainly agrarian,
Palestinian citrus groves and farms suffer. The division of the West Bank into polit-
ical zones has provided Israeli contractors with another cheap option of burying
toxic waste, mainly in Area C, currently sixty-nine per cent at the time of writing.
Analysis of one dump near the Palestinian town of Tulkarm showed organo phos-
phates, pesticides and asbestos. Although twenty-eight barrels were buried in the
Gaza Strip in 1997, recent plans to transfer another fifty trucks of toxic waste from
Israel to the West Bank were stopped by the Palestinian Environmental Authority.
Because of the porous nature of the Mountain Aquifer, Israel’s and Palestine’s
underground water supplies are coming increasingly under threat. The sewage intifa-
da could happen not because of terrorists but due to unscrupulous contractors.
These kind of environmental factors combined with the Israeli Civil Authority per
capita health expenditure of $18.30 for West Bank Palestinians - before Palestinian
self-rule - compared to the $370 spent for every Israeli, put Arab life expectancy at
sixty-five, eleven years less than Israeli, with an Arab infant mortality rate at six
times higher.
143
 Over the last fifteen years there have been diphtheria and polio epidemics. In 1995
all fruits and vegetables were prevented from coming out of Gaza because of anoth-
er water transmitted disease, cholera. As Abdel Rahman-Tamini, director of the
Palestinian Hydrology Group, has admitted, ”I would not dare to drink a cup of tea
or coffee from the waters in Gaza.”
The Gaza Strip is ecologically dead. Leaking sewage near wells means people liter-
ally drink their own shit; fifteen per cent of the children suffer from malnutrition,
ninety per cent from intestinal parasites. Poor sanitation and scarce and polluted
drinking supplies cause disease, a lesson from my grandfather’s time that is still rel-
evant to the modern age whether in Orissa in India or in Palestine.
Word of sweet water spreads fast. Islamic University earth science professor Dr.
Muhammad Ramadan Al-Agha frequents a certain well near Khan Younis. When
he was alerted to its existence by his neighbours, he took a sample from the well and
analysed it in his laboratory. He keeps bottles of the water in his refrigerator and
even his four-year-old son knows which one contains drinking water. Offering clean
water is a religious duty. The ice-cream factory in Gaza City has access to a decent
well and makes it available to anyone.
Understandably frustration is high. UNRWA engineer Morgan Cox, from Ireland,
designed the sewage and storm drainage systems for the Beach refugee camp across
the street from Gaza City, where 66,000 people live within a third of a square mile.
With both water and electricity regulated from the other side of the Erez checkpoint,
the Israelis are firmly in control.
“There is no self-determination for the Palestinians,” maintains Cox. “Their grand-
144
fathers were citrus farmers and their kids will know nothing but the camps. They’re
being punished and these people didn’t even fight in the Second World War.”
From the hill of Cox’s sewage plant, the Netzarim Jewish settlement is in full view
with a clear demarcation between Arab and Jewish lands. From where I stand I
can’t see the electric fence. However the settlers’ crops, a deep, dark, rich green,
begin with a graceful line of poplars. From a gun turret, an Israeli soldier stands
guard, watching through binoculars.
•••
When modern Israel was created, “making the Negev bloom” was as much a polit-
ical imperative as economic necessity, and control of water supplies was essential.
(As it still is. In 1990, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture took out a full-page adver-
tisement in the Jerusalem Post, “The Question of Water - Some Dry Facts”. The ad
warned against “excessive pumping or uncontrolled sewage and waste
disposal...liable to cause serious depletion, salinisation and pollution of the aquifers,
which in turn would effect Israel’s supply” but concluded with the caveat: “For those
advocates of Israeli concessions who believe the Jews should have a viable indepen-
dent state in their ancient homeland...it is important to realise that the claim to con-
tinued Israeli control over Judea and Samaria is not based on extremist fanaticism
or religious mysticism but on a rational, healthy and reasonable survival instinct.”)
The US attempted to broker many water-sharing plans between the nascent state
and its suspicious neighbours: the Ionides Survey in 1939, Lodermilk Plan in 1944,
Hays in 1948, Johnson in 1953, but the Arab countries were not inclined to share
a vital resource with a nation they did not recognise. The few projects that were
145
 agreed to floundered and were postponed indefinitely. So Israel embarked on an
ambitious, unilateral waterworks programme throughout the Fifties and Sixties,
culminating in the completion of the National Water Carrier in 1964. According to
Arab sources, part of the scheme involved diverting up to seventy per cent of the
Upper Jordan river (Israel maintains it is only fifty per cent).
He doesn’t state explicitly what everybody knows. Israeli settlements
have been constructed by Palestinians. With a sixty per cent unemploy-
ment rate, they either work as labourers, find employment with the
Palestinian Authority or become car thieves.
Rainfall ranging from 900 to 1500 millimetres - thirty-six to sixty-eight inches - per
year, in the Mount Hermon region, forms the tributaries of the Upper Jordan, which
flow into Lake Tiberias, then south into the Jordan proper. Under the National
Water Carrier scheme, it is pumped from the lake’s north-western shore into 112
kms of canals, tunnels and pipelines to a terminal east of Tel Aviv. There, it joins
the Yarkon-Negev pipeline and is sent to irrigate the most arid parts of the Negev,
an area which receives at best 200 millimetres (eight inches) of rain per year. Syria,
in particular, wanted to instigate its own programme to divert the headwaters of the
Jordan, but was specifically warned by Israel’s Premier Levi Eshkol that any use of
water resources that limited flow to Israel would be provocative.
Even Grandfather Farhan would have understood that the right to water supplies
was equated with the right to exist. And from the beginning, it has led to violence.
In the summer of 1965 there were clashes along the Syrian border. The Syrians
fired on Israelis working near the Dan spring, a Jordan tributary within their terri-
tory. The Israelis hit Syrian workers and equipment at the headwaters diversion
146
project. The first act of sabotage by al-Fatah, the guerrilla group that came to dom-
inate the PLO, was a dud bomb in the canal of the Beit Netofa Valley, part of the
National Water Carrier. A year later after Israel attacked diversion works on the
Banias Yarmouk canal in Syria, there were dogfights between the two countries over
Lake Tiberias. On May 23, 1967, Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the entrance to the
Gulf of Aqaba, the Straits of Tiran, to Israeli ships. The Israelis destroyed the
Egyptian air force on June 5; the war was over by June 10.
A Palestinian hydrologist calling for a “sewage intifada” against the
Israelis was told not to give the terrorists ideas.
Those six days, decisive in so many ways, gave Israel hegemony over the waters in
the region. It controlled three tributaries of the Upper Jordan, the Dan spring, the
Banias, a Syrian river, and the Hasbani, a Lebanese river that travels towards the
Golan Heights. After the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the remainder of the Hasbani
was under its dominion. Israel had already begun to draw heavily on groundwater
supplies from the coastal plains aquifer under Gaza, and the Mountain Aquifer
beneath the West Bank, but after 1967 it was in sole charge of them. Since then,
according to Palestinian economist Adel Samara, Israel’s exploitation of renewable
water sources in the region is one of the most intense in the world, running at nine-
ty-five to ninety-eight per cent.
Nothing else but water could have insured Israel’s rapid economic development. In
1948 there were 75,000 acres of irrigated farm land, by the end of the Seventies,
400,000 acres, more than a fivefold increase. The population had tripled in size, but
continued expansion increased consumption. The most easily exploited source was
the aquifers, but over-pumping caused water levels to fall well below the water table.
147
 In the case of the coastal plains aquifer, sea water contamination occurred, despite
a computer-operated system that regulated both aquifer and sea water, and pumped
in reclaimed sewage to maintain correct levels. By the mid-Seventies Israel had over
pumped by an entire year’s supply, two billion cubic metres.
A three-year drought - not a war - shattered Israeli perceptions as a self-sufficient
agricultural nation. In 1991, state comptroller Miriam Ben Porat acknowledged,
“Israel had no more reserve water stored in its reservoirs...there is a real danger the
country will not be able to maintain the quantity and quality of its water supplies
even in the short term.” Priority was shifted away from agriculture and given to
domestic and industrial use.
•••
Today Israel uses 1,112 mcm of water per year for agricultural purposes - seventy-
five per cent of the available water resources in the region - while agriculture con-
tributes not more than 3.7 per cent to the Israeli GNP. Palestinians employ a total
of 94.4 mcm per year of water for agriculture, enough to irrigate only four per cent
of their total cultivated land.
Each avocado tree in the 125-acre grove at Maagan Mikha'el, the fourth largest
agricultural kibbutz in the Sharon Valley, receives more irrigated water than some
West Bank Palestinians drink in one whole year. Moshe Bresser from the Fruit
Board of Israel and his companion Aaron Priel, a leading agricultural journalist,
admire the kibbutz computer system, which regulates exact amounts of water and
fertiliser. On our drive back from the Sharon Valley, they talk non-stop: Bresser’s
plans to make the Israeli avocado as popular as the New Zealand kiwi, Priel’s arti-
cle on an ultra-sound instrument that predicts an avocado’s optimum ripeness.
148
Conversation falters when I mention water.
Bresser is dismissive, believing, “Here even love is politics.”
Later Priel confides, “We’re in deep trouble in political and international affairs,
but the spirit of the farmers propels the country forward.”
People might be inspired by their spirit, but the farmers themselves are angry. Once,
their champion Saul Arlosoroff, a former acting water commissioner from 1969 to
1977, transformed Israeli agriculture with increased water management through
the use of drip and sprinkler irrigation. Now he is considered their enemy, when he
advocated to government commissions that the state decrease and eventually scrap
water subsidies, which allow both farmers and settlers to pay a third of the price
charged to Palestinians. By the year 2115, Israelis will stop exporting water in cit-
rus and avocado and meet the costs of desalination for drinking.
“From that point water in Israel will become like power,” predicts Arlosoroff.
“Every few years when the demand grows you build a power plant. When the urban
and industrial demand for water grows, people will pay.”
He believes that the Palestinians should buy additional supplies even though treat-
ment and transportation expenses of Israel’s first desalination plant would be far
beyond their means. Arlosoroff scoffs at the suggestion that desalinated reserves
could replace Israel’s dependency on the underground West Bank aquifers. He cites
his country’s right as “historic first use”. Because Israel took first - whether by force
is not the issue - its needs remain a priority.
149
 “Go to Egypt,” he adds, “and try developing upstream water in Ethiopia or Sudan
beyond the agreement.”

•••

None of the Israelis I met wash their clothes outside in a spring. In the biblical vil-
lage of Artas, teenagers Samira, Maryam and Kitah scrub the family laundry, where
a sixty-year-old woman who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca describes a glass of
the soapy water as “delicious”.

Upspring from Artas in the ancient pools of Solomon, Hasham Akmed Musa, 73,
collects water. His skin is wizened by age and relentless sun. Twice a day he makes
the six-kilometre journey to the pools, where he fills four-gallon, blue, plastic con-
tainers and ties them on the back of his mule. He uses the water to irrigate his young
fig trees. His exertions are not for their benefit alone. If Musa shows the nearby
Jewish settlers that he still cultivates his land, then under Israeli law, it cannot be
confiscated.

As Musa moves slowly, methodically, a man of infinite patience, I am reminded of

my grandfather. If not for his foresight, our family would be locked in an eternal
struggle against the elements. I say nothing when Musa tells me, “This life is like

designed by Philippe Morillon

fire.”

(c) Malu Halasa

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 photos: Frederic Jagueneau
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 helping to lift weights: t-shirt + trousers by Dries van Noten, shoes by Camper
lifting weights: trousers by Christophe Lemaire
getting dressed: jacket by So by Alexander Van Slobbe, t-shirt by Kostas Murkudis, shirt by Dries van
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Noten, trousers by Lieve Van Gorp, shoes by Camper · girl: dress by 0.918, shoes by Madame á Paris
 left to right: skirt, top + shawl by Dries van Noten, dress + top by Dice Kayer,
dress: model’s own, dress by Viktor + Rolf, belt by Karim Tassi

page 152: client waiting: jacket, shirt + pants by Moschino, shoes by Comme des Garçons
hairdresser: pants, shirt + sweater by Yohji Yamamoto, shoes by Lina Audi for Liwan
client: jacket, pants, shirt + scarf by Y's for men, shoes by Yohji Yamamoto

photographer's assistant: Jeff Lebailly · stylist: Valou

make-up: Valerie Bavouzet for atelier68@aom.com · hair: Sylvain Lehen for
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atelier68@aom.com · thanks to the Ikhles family + Astre studio 157
art: Chant Avedissian
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161
162 163
 ring + chain: stylist's own
photos: Henrique Gendre · styling: Ciro Midena bracelets by Jacqueline Rabun
cuff by Jade Inc. 165
 shirt from Brick Lane market, top by Jade Inc., cuff by Jade Inc., bracelet by Jacqueline Rabun jacket, shirt + cuff-links by Paul Smith · shirt by Richard James · watch from Portobello
166 antiques market
cuffs by Kelly Pentin tracksuit jacket by Kappa · dress by Vivienne Westwood · coat from Spitalfields market
necklace by Sarah Fung · bracelet by Jacqueline Rabun · dog collar: dog's own 169
art: Jananne Al-Ani

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 photos: Alasdair McLellan

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181

short story by Rabih Alameddine
remembering nasser
While reading, I was reminded of a walk I used to take when I was much younger,
during the summers in my father's hometown. Memories of Nasser kept interrupt-
ing any attempt at concentration, so I put the book down. We run from the house
before anybody can stop us for chores, through the back, behind the fig trees, which
provide us with good cover, and over the back fence to the back road. To the fami-
ly cemetery, my family's not his, for he will be buried, is buried now as a matter of
fact, in Barouk, his father's hometown, which was higher up, farther west, than my
father's. I am alive, but he is dead. Who would have bet on that outcome? I feel the
stone in my hand as I read, sitting on my sofa, in my house in San Francisco, the
sharpness of it, the weight, as I throw it at the gravestone, lapidary phrases seared
in my mind like sentences in my book. My cousin Nasser, on one of those walks,
stands atop a stone and reads, "Sheikh Nadim Talhouk, 1903-1957," as he counts
how many years that makes. "I can beat that," he says proudly. He did not. Like a
basketball announcer who tells us how well a player shoots his free throws right
before the player misses, Nasser jinxed himself. On the walk, that day, he took his
penis out and peed on Sheikh Nadim, desecrating what I once thought to be sacred,
urine cleansing the old stone, making circles, my eyes fixed, aghast. Seductive blas-
phemy.
•••
My mother saved pictures of all her children in photo albums, each organised with
dates and descriptions. Almost half of all my pictures in the albums included Nasser.
There is a series of four pictures dated March 1961. I was eighteen months old, he
was twenty-two months. A professional child photographer must have taken them,
for most of the photos look terribly contrived. We sit close to each other, shoulder
to shoulder, and look at a small basket. I put various toys in the basket. He waits
for me to finish, after which he takes the basket and stands up. The last picture
shows me trying to get up, to follow him most probably, his diapered butt framed in

182 183
 the picture as he leaves.
•••
I recall a poker game at Ann Arbor. It must have been 1978 or 1979. Nasser was
visiting from England where he was attending some pay-for-a-degree college. The
game was in my apartment. I was in my room, out for a couple of rounds, trying to
reacquaint myself with my lungs after a heavy bout of cigarette-induced coughing.
The whole table was Lebanese, as most of my acquaintances were at the time. This
was long before I came out. Nasser felt at home. Someone made a joke I did not
hear. I heard Nasser's voice though. "No, no, no. I'll not have it. Don't make fun of
him while I'm around. I'm his cousin."
•••
Fred, my lover, was jealous of him. It completely confused me. Fred used to say my
face would light up whenever I spoke of Nasser. If he called, I would run to the
phone. He was like my twin brother. How Fred could be jealous was beyond me.
Sometimes I wonder whether I should have blamed Fred for what happened. What
difference does it make? He is dead now, too.
•••
A classical pianist who was once a student in our school came back one day to talk
to each class about piano playing. He then tested separately each boy and girl. When
it was my turn, he had me turn my back to the piano and played a note, then a sec-
ond note. I had to tell him whether the second note was lower or higher than the
first. I got them all right. I knew I was doing well because he stayed longer with me
than with any of the others. With Nasser, the test only lasted about half a minute.
The pianist tested me for at least five minutes.
At the end of class, he wanted me to deliver a note to my parents. In it he told my
parents that I was talented and I should be given piano lessons. Nobody else in class
184
got a note. I gave the note to my mom when I got home. She waited till after din-
ner to tell my father. I was sitting in the den, playing with Nasser quietly, which we
were supposed to do when my father was home. We heard my mother tell my father
that I should be taking piano lessons. We heard my father say that he did not think
it was a good idea. He thought I was too effeminate as it was without piano lessons.
I felt Nasser move closer to me. He did not say anything. We sat next to each other
and played with the Matchbox cars in front of us.
•••
A phone conversation:
- I have to get married.
- Why?
- What do you mean why? It's what I want. People get married.
- I know that. I meant why now?
- Because it's time. I'm tired of being a bachelor.
- Why all of a sudden?
- I don't know. I don't have matching plates.
- What are you talking about?
- I have no idea. Issam slept over at my house while he was here, and then when
he went back to Beirut, he told my mom I don't have matching plates. I don't even
know what matching plates have to do with anything. Mother called and said I need-
ed a wife because I don't have matching plates.
- You're getting married because your mother wants you to have matching plates?
- Fuck you. I need a wife. What's wrong with that? I want someone to greet me
when I come home. I want sex. I'm tired of looking for it. We don't all live in
America where everybody fucks like rabbits.
- I thought you were fucking that woman I met.
- She's married. I can only fuck her when her husband is not there. I need
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 something more permanent.
- So you want to get married?
- That's what I said. Why are you making a big deal out of this? I want to get mar-
ried. We're all going to get married. Why not now? It makes sense. I'm not a young
buck anymore. Neither are you, you fucker. You should start thinking about getting
married. It'll make your father happy. You should be happy for me. I tell you I want
to get married. You should be happy. What kind of friend are you?
- Hey, I'm happy. If you're happy, I'm happy. I only wanted to know why now. Who's
the unlucky girl?
- Fuck you. The lucky girl. She'll be damn lucky. I don't know yet. We're looking.
•••
One of my earliest memories is of an occurrence in a bathroom. I do not know where,
or in what house. It is evening. Nasser and I are in the bathroom with a maid. She
must be Egyptian or Lebanese because the language is Arabic. The tub is full. We
are supposed to take our nightly bath, but we are using the toilet. Both of us need
to shit. Nasser sits at the commode for a while. I feel really uncomfortable. I tell the
maid that I need to go. She tells Nasser to get up and let me have a go. He com-
plains that he is not done, but gets up anyway. He turns around to plead his case
and I see a small, greenish-coloured turd in his anus. I tell him he can go back to
the commode and finish. I can wait.
I must have been no more than three.
•••
In 1976, before either one of us left for school, during a lull in the fighting, we were
in Chouiefat, driving towards Beirut. Nasser was driving his father's car without his
father knowing. Whenever his father had a card game, Nasser stole the car for a
couple of hours and we took turns driving. A well-dressed man waved at us to stop.
186
On the walk, that day, he took his penis out and peed on Sheikh Nadim,
desecrating what I once thought to be sacred, urine cleansing the old
stone, making circles, my eyes fixed, aghast. Seductive blasphemy.
He asked us nicely if he could ride with us to Beirut since he was in a hurry. He sat
in the back behind Nasser. He was charming as he conversed with us. He treated us
like adults. As we drove, we noticed a new checkpoint on the road. Nasser started
cursing. He hoped nobody would recognise him and tell his father. I thought maybe
they would figure we had no license. Our passenger calmly told us not to worry. It
was not us they were after. He looked distracted. At the checkpoint, a man in civil-
ian clothes with a big handgun put his head in the window. He smiled at us. He said
something about the danger of picking up strangers. The man then bent Nasser's
head with his left hand and with the other shot our passenger until the bullets ran
out. Blood spurted everywhere. Our passenger died with a smile on his face, as if
looking forward to death. It was the closest I would get to see first-hand the new
breed of Lebanese fighters, those who would dedicate themselves to the ultimate sac-
rifice. I sat with my back to the window, facing the man with the gun, mouth agape.
He let go of Nasser's head.
"You never saw what I look like, right?" he asked us. He sneered. "I don't want you
young boys getting into any kind of trouble. Do we understand each other?"
Nasser could not even look at him. He was staring straight ahead. He could not
bring himself to move.
"Do we understand each other?" the man repeated more sternly.
187
 Nasser still could not move. He seemed paralysed. "We didn't see anything," I
screamed in a high-pitched voice. "We didn't see nothing."
"That's good. Now why don't you drive home."
Nasser still stared ahead, unable to move a muscle. The man wanted us out of there,
but Nasser could not move. Finally, I struck the back of Nasser's head with my hand.
"Move," I screamed as loudly as I could. Finally, he looked at me. "Drive," I yelled
again. He put his foot to the pedal and we were out of there.
We drove for less than a kilometre. When we got to Khalde, I told Nasser to stop
at the side of the road. I got him out of the car and walked him over to the beach.
I dragged him into the water, both of us fully clothed. I washed him, washed the
blood off. He let me dunk his head in the water to untangle the blood. I washed him,
punctiliously and ritualistically, like washing the dead, or a blood baptism, the
colour intensifying in the water surrounding us and then dissipating quickly. I tried
to remove as much of the blood as possible.
Once done, I took his hand and he followed. I walked him home, hand in hand, all
the way. We left the car. It took us an hour and a half to get to his house. He was
still unable to say anything and I did not talk to him, just walked him home. By the
time we arrived our clothes were dry. We looked haggard, but that was not unnat-
ural for us. Nobody noticed the remaining bloodstains. I undressed him and threw
the clothes out. No reminders were left.
We did not say anything to anybody. The car was found with the corpse of a man
who had betrayed a militia leader. Everybody knew which handy-man had killed
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him, but nobody would have been able to touch him in any case. It was assumed the
car was stolen to kidnap the man and kill him.
We were free.
We never ever spoke of it.
•••
Another early recollection. Nasser and I shared a room, as well as a bed, in the
mountain house, when we were younger. Through our window, when we first arrived,
we always saw a blanket of red. The poppies covered the sloping field. Nasser and I
would look through the window trying to find the one, lonesome poppy that was not
part of the larger blanket. There was always one, sometimes two, rarely three, inde-
pendent poppies, not like the rest, different. We loved that poppy.
Years later, I was reminded of that poppy while reading. Proust saw it too. He called
it the poppy that had strayed and been lost by its fellows. As I read that, the mem-
ories came flooding back.
•••
I met Fred in grad school. More precisely, I met Fred while I was attending Stanford
and he was there to give a speech on the economies of the Middle East. I was in his
hotel room within an hour of the end of his speech. I surprised myself. I was still
closeted, but allowed myself to be seduced. He came on so strong that not one of my
classmates had any doubt as to what was happening. He asked me to leave with him
while everyone was still around. He outed me, so to speak.
We were together until he died in 1993, eleven years, only seven of them healthy
though.
189
 •••
I can be walking when all of a sudden something reminds me of him. It can be any-
thing, a flower, a man wearing a pair of jeans in a certain way. If I see a painting,
I think of McEnroe, who is now an art dealer, which would of course bring me back
to Nasser.
I remember him as he was when he was young, without the moustache, the fat, the
alcoholism; fourteen, fifteen maybe.
•••
“Brother,
My hand trembles so I cannot write. I cannot face you either because I will do harm.
I am furious. How could you do this to me? I will leave you two...”
The note was crumpled and thrown in the waste basket. He said he did not want me
to see it, but he left it in an empty waste basket.
He could not stay in an apartment with my lover and me. Fred was furious. Nasser
was furious. They both blamed me.
From the beginning, Fred had wanted me to come out to my family. He thought as
long as I did not tell my family about our relationship, I was not really committed
to it. I could not. I was out in the United States and closeted in Lebanon. My two
lives were separate. I felt it was better for everybody that way. When I met Fred, I
cut out anything in my life that was Lebanese. Lebanon became this place I visited
twice a year. To this day, I have not told my family.
When Nasser had to come to the US for a business meeting, he thought he should
190
come and stay with me for a week in San Francisco. I tried to clean up, to remove
any trace of gayness in the house. Fred was livid. He did not allow me to move any-
thing. My clothes and I were to remain in our room. Nothing would be hidden. He
thought Nasser, if he loved me as much as I thought he did, would accept the situ-
ation. I told Fred there was no way Nasser would accept the situation. Once he knew,
all he would be able to see when he looked at me is someone who takes it up the ass.
Fred said there was more to being gay than taking it up the ass. Not for Nasser.
•••
In the beginning it was Ilie Nastasie, the great Rumanian. Nasser idolised him. We
played tennis constantly. I do not think either one of us could ever have been a great
player. We were not athletically gifted, nor were we ever truly coached. Later,
Nasser dropped poor Ilie for John. No one was more Nasser's alter ego than
McEnroe. I loved Borg, but Nasser breathed McEnroe. To Nasser, he represented
everything that was great about the world.
•••
I remember I was at Nasser's house visiting. Fred was sick back in San Francisco,
but I needed a break. Nadia was making breakfast. Nasser's two-year-old daughter,
Layla, came in from the kitchen laughing loudly. "Abed is here," she kept repeating.
"Abed is here."
Nasser picked her up and swung her around. "Don't embarrass me in front of your
uncle," he chastised her jokingly.
"Who's Abed?" I asked.
“The driver," he said. "She has an infatuation for our driver."
191
 "Layla, you little tramp!" I joked.
He looked at me funny.
•••
Nasser's father, Habib, was the family clown. Everybody loved him because he made
you laugh, everybody except Nasser. I remember Nasser once telling me, after he
had a few drinks, "How can you respect a man who left absolutely nothing but debts
for his wife and children?" He truly abhorred his father, which I did not realise while
Habib was alive, but which became apparent after his death. My father paid for
everything when it came to his sister and her boys. They lacked nothing. Nasser
began to idolise my father. It was only gradually that I realised I was being replaced.
After college, Nasser went to work in Kuwait through contacts that my father pro-
vided, while I stayed in the United States. First I stayed because of grad school, and
then it was a great job with Booz, Allen, a management-consulting firm. At one
point my company wanted to transfer me to Saudi Arabia thinking that as an Arab,
I would be able to handle things better than the last couple of executives, who had
burned out. I refused. They dangled money, status, and all they could think of, but
I did not budge. I was starting a family in San Francisco with Fred. My father could
not understand my wanting to stay away. At first, he conceded it was not a bad idea
because the war was dragging on, but still he wanted me closer. Europe would have
been preferable for him. I did not wish to tell him that the East Coast was too close
to Lebanon for my taste. It was not that I disliked my family. I loved them dearly.
I wanted a barrier, distance being the best I could think of, between us. I could not
see how I could possibly be a complete person, let alone a gay one, if I hung around.
Nasser hung around.
192
Slowly but surely, he became the son my father wished I were. He got married to a
nice Druze girl from the mountains. They had a real house with matching plates, and
she gave Nasser two boys and a girl. When the war was over, Nasser moved his fam-
ily back to Beirut. Every time I went back to Beirut, I saw as much of Nasser as I
did my family. He spent all of his time with my father.
Nasser picked up my father's mannerisms. He talked like my father. He walked like
my father. He gained weight like my father. He combed his hair like my father. He
smoked like my father. And he drank like my father.
He died of heart disease and liver problems, exactly like my father.
•••
I never liked confrontation. When I was a young boy, Nasser's mother would always
try to get me to fight other children. I never wanted to fight. All the other kids would
fight just to please her and other adults. They would constantly wrestle. I could not.
My aunt would try to shame me by suggesting that her daughter could beat me. She
probably could. She was a tomboy then, and years later, even after a marriage and
four kids, I could swear that she was a lesbian. In a different culture, she would have
been a true butch dyke, and a happy one at that.
In 1972, Nasser and I started a neighbourhood soccer team. We called ourselves
The Firebirds, an exotic name. We played a couple of games against other teams.
In what would turn out to be our last game with the team, we were playing against
another team with an older boy who must have taken offence at the way I looked or
something. He wanted me to fight him. He was cussing and harassing me the entire
game. At one point, while the game was going on, he started calling me names and
stood directly in front of me, face-to-face, not allowing me to go around him. I was
193
 unsure what to do. All of a sudden, Nasser came out of nowhere and punched him.
I had to enter the fray. While both teams watched, and no one tried to stop any-
thing, Nasser and I beat up on this guy. I never fooled myself into believing that I
added much to the fight. Nasser alone could have taken him out. But I tried to help.
I held on to one of the older boy's arms so Nasser could beat him up easier. When
the damage was done, the rest of our team made fun of the way I had fought, limp
wrist and all. That only made Nasser more furious, screaming at them for standing
around and not doing anything. We stopped playing soccer.
Tennis suited us better.
•••
I dream about Nasser. He is a constant landmark in my dreams. I even have recur-
ring dreams with him in them. In one, Nasser and I, as teenagers again, walk along
until we arrive at a fork in the road. We don't know which road to take. Each road
has its own enticing features. We decide that he will go right and I left, and then we
can tell each other what it was like when we get home.
•••
As a young boy, I would walk alone for hours. I would take a book and read as I
walked. I would go out of the house to be by myself. I told myself stories of escape.
I fantasised about being somewhere else.
•••
One afternoon, in 1974, Nasser's mother was playing cards at a friend's. We skipped
school. We had some hash stored up. We ended up in his house, on the sofa, getting
wasted. The house reeked, which we thought was totally hilarious.
His father walked in, shocking the hell out of us. "Hi, boys," he said as he went
194
straight to the bathroom. Nasser looked at me, shrugged, and we started giggling.
When Habib came out, he was about to leave again when he looked at his watch.
"Aren't you boys supposed to be in school?" he asked.
"We're home to do a science experiment," Nasser replied.
"That's good. Okay then, I will see you boys later." He turned the door handle and
was about to leave when his nose twitched. "What's that smell?"
"Smell?" Nasser asked.
"Must be the oven," I said.
"The oven?"
"Yes," I replied. "The science experiment was in the oven."
"We were trying to dry a bird's nest," Nasser added.
"Except we burned it, which is why it smells."
"It was wet because of the rain."
"So we put it in the oven to dry," I went on.
"But there were no eggs, just the nest."
195
 "And it burned."
"So it wasn't a complete failure because we figured out the combustion point."
Nasser's father just kept nodding. "That's good. I'm glad you boys are so studious.
Keep up the good work." And he left.
"Combustion point?" I snickered. We giggled for a couple of hours.
•••
He told no one about Fred. He tried to pretend he did not know and never saw.
Nonetheless, the wall went up. It might have seemed to the naked eye that it was
the same, but since that day, it never was.
•••
I was there when he proposed to his wife, if you could call it that. Once Nasser decid-
ed he was going to get married, his mother began the requisite search. Before Nadia,
he had gone out with two girls. He flew to Beirut for both dates. They met all the
criteria so he asked them out. I had heard rumours, which he denied, that he was
proposing on the first or second date and being rejected. He did not deny the rejec-
tion, only that he had asked so early on in the game.
With Nadia, I saw it happen. It was their second date. I felt like a Lebanese meze
so I went to a restaurant and they were both there. Nasser could not understand how
I would want to be alone in a public place. I had to sit with them. She was pretty.
That was the only thing I could be sure of about her. Two hours later, Nasser was
talking about the time to get married. He was twenty-eight. She was nineteen. He
told her he would be interested in marrying her. She said she had to think about it.
196
She did look up to the ceiling at one point and whisper to herself, "Nasser and
Nadia," and sort of nodded her head.
•••
Years later, when I brought up the overheard conversation about piano lessons,
Nasser was shocked that I still remembered, surprised that I still blamed my father.
He said I finally left home and if it were important that I take piano lessons, I would
have. He said if it were such a big deal, I should take piano lessons now. Wasn't I
the free one now?
•••
A conversation at the sickbed:
- You know, Nasser was that way too. He was always grumpy when...
- I know. I know. When you both had mumps, you were put in the same room and...
- Okay, okay. I get the hint.
- And you looked like matching bookends, with both your necks so swollen, and they
kept you in that room for three weeks...
- I get the picture. I shouldn't have brought it up.
- And you had a wonderful time, both of you, even though Nasser was grumpy at
times, because he's always grumpy when he's sick.
- I'm sorry. Okay?
•••
In another picture, dated the same in 1961, definitely by the same photographer,
Nasser and I are looking up, something above captivating us, probably some toy.
We look longingly.
•••
How old were we then, nine, ten? The cemetery was our favourite place. Few
people went through there, so we had the place to ourselves. Our favourite grave was
unsigned. It was built like a small pyramid with only three layers of marble. We tried
197
 to move the top slab numerous times. It was incredibly heavy. As Nasser got
stronger, the marble slab frustrated him more and more.
Blood squirted everywhere. It was the closest I would get to see first-
hand the new breed of Lebanese fighters, those who would dedicate
themselves to the ultimate sacrifice.
Years later, after the war, I got Nasser to come walk with me through the ceme-
tery. I wanted to see what it looked like. Exploded shells littered the grounds. The
clean-up crews had removed the mines but not the "litter". Our favourite grave was
damaged, large holes and chips in the marble, yet the slab itself was unmoved.
"How could anybody do this?" I asked rhetorically.
"I did that. One time I got really angry, I came here and shot the fucker."
•••
I took him by the hand once - we could not have been more than five or six, maybe
seven - and led him to his sister's room. Everybody was out of the house so it was
completely safe, but still he was nervous. I took out all her Barbies.
"You want to play with her dolls?" he asked me.
"Yes, it's fun."
"What if we get caught?"
"No one will know."
198
"I don't want to play with dolls."
"It's ok. You can be Ken."
•••
There is a word in Lebanese that has no corresponding word in English. Halash, or
Yihloush, with a heavy h, means to pull hair out, or to yank someone's hair. I always
assumed that there was a Lebanese word for it, because we do it often, both to other
people and ourselves. All you have to do is attend a funeral and you will see what I
mean.
I began to wonder why a word did not exist in English when I saw Nasser pull his
newly-wed wife's hair and take her to the bedroom. I was visiting them in Kuwait.
They had been married for about seven months. It was about 9:30 at night. Nasser
asked if I wanted to get high. I agreed. Nadia had this look of utter disbelief. Nasser
went into the bedroom. She followed him. I did not hear what she said, but she
seemed perturbed. I heard Nasser say calmly, "What's the big deal?"
Nasser came out with a pipe. He lit it and gave me a hit. We both smoked. Nadia
came out of the bedroom, slamming the door, and went into the bathroom, slam-
ming the door. She obviously had not locked the bathroom door because Nasser fol-
lowed her and dragged her out by her hair into the bedroom. I heard a slap. Nasser
came out as if nothing had happened.
"I guess you have not smoked in a while," I said.
"No, it's been a while."
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 Next day, Nadia was as chipper as ever.
•••
My father grew suddenly old and sad, fast, with full sail. It happened in only a few
months. One trip he was fine; the next, six months later, he seemed engulfed in a
sea of sorrows, his face sagging, crushed by the burden of idleness. He had stopped
working between those two trips.
One time, my father sat in the den, in his chair, with Layla on his lap. He rocked her
as she played with his sparse, white hair. She pulled a strand forward towards his
eyes. "Ouch, you little devil, you," he said, and tickled her. She giggled and tried to
do it again. Nasser crouched next to my father. "Be careful when you do that," he
told his daughter. "You don't want to hurt Grandpa." He blew his daughter a kiss,
and seemingly unconsciously, he flicked my father's lock of hair back in its place.
My father closed his eyes.
I had to return for his funeral two months later.
•••
When Fred started getting sick, he withdrew. I could not get through to him, did not
know how to talk to him. I took care of him, but I was unable to be there for him.
When he started getting sick, I began to feel lonely again.
•••
Nasser and I used to play phone tricks. We were good at it. One of my all time
favourites is calling some lady and pretending we were phone technicians. Nasser
would tell the woman to put her finger in the number four and dial. Then put it in,
say, number seven and dial. Finally he would tell her to put her finger in her ass and
dial. My other favourite was calling the pharmacies. I would call one and ask the
pharmacist if he had a thermometer. He would say yes, and I would tell him to shove
200
it up his ass, then hang up. Then Nasser would call ten minutes later and in all seri-
ousness ask the pharmacist if some kid had called a while back and told him to shove
a thermometer up his ass. The pharmacist would say yes in a huff. Nasser would tell
him it was time to take it out, then hang up.
•••
When Nasser got married, he began to get rounder till he finally achieved his final
pachydermatous heft. The last time I saw him, I realised that somewhere in there
was the boy I used to know. My father succeeded in killing himself with excess, but
it took him a lot longer than Nasser. My beautiful Nasser was a quicker study. He
died at thirty-eight, a couple of years after my father, a couple of years after Fred.
•••
While reading, I was reminded of a walk I took when I was much younger. Nasser
and I were in the cemetery. He was being his usual mischievous self. He challenged
me to throw stones at different graves. He looked at a grave of a Talhouk. "I don't
like any of them," he said. He took his dick out and peed on the grave, on the entire
family. "Don't keep your mouth so open," he said, "or I will pee in it." He laughed.
We sat on our favourite grave, the pyramid. He took out his hunting knife. "I have
to cut you," he said. I resisted. I did not understand why we would need actual blood.
Wouldn't calling ourselves blood brothers be enough? He cut the tips of my two fin-
gers and put them in his mouth. He looked in my eyes the whole time. Shivers ran
up my spine. I made small cuts on the tips of his fingers. I put them in my mouth
and sucked. He let me suck on his fingers for as long as I wanted.
"We are now brothers," he said.
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images: Sacha Teulon + Stacey Williams in frame: outfit by Chloe · skirt by Dries van Noten
dress from left to right: Martin Margiela · Comme des Garçons · Martine Sitbon
dresses by Marc Jacob and Martine Sitbon dress by Prada · shoes by Christian Louboutin
 dress by Hussein Chalayan · shoes by Christian Louboutin
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outfit by Comme des Garçons · shoes by Christian Louboutin outfit by Callaghan
211
left to right: outfit by Dries van Noten · shoes by Natasha Maro
dress by Prada · shoes by Christian Louboutin
dress by Comme des Garçons · shoes by Christian Louboutin

hair: Asashi · make-up: Neusa @ Rocket · models: Karina @ Take 2, Aude @ IMG, Frances
@ Assassin · special thanks to Chris & Maxime Moore @ Chris Moore Studios and Will Lee
213
 omar sharif words by Marion McGilvary

214
 When I first saw him he was about thirty-five and literally, since his son is exactly
the same age as me, old enough to be my father.
There he was: slim-hipped and sensitive. A poet staring out across the frozen steppes
in his flapping great coat, with those dark, brimming, broodingly seductive eyes. I'm
sorry Mr Freud - but if this has anything to do with wanting to fuck my father then
you can just call me Electra. Though whether I was in love with Omar Sharif or
Doctor Zhivago, I've never been entirely sure.
And does it matter? They both put the “f” into fantasy. All those fur rugs, the
sleighs, and the frozen ice palaces - Doctor Zhivago was like a dramatised Disney
version of the Snow Queen with the Russian Revolution and the First World War
thrown in for local colour. History reduced to Mills and Boon on Ice with Omar
Sharif as the hero. Oh let me die and go to Hollywood heaven where men are oblig-
ed, by contract, to kiss the leading lady.
Who can forget the moment when he first appeared as a speck on the desert hori-
zon in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia ? I watched it again recently and so
enthralled had I been the first time that I had failed to notice that his character was
that of an imperiously brutal Arab sheikh with a gun in his hand. The only thing I,
and most other female viewers, remembered was Omar's gradual emergence from
the desert haze: that wide-angle, two-minute ride into the forefront of the screen
where he swept aside his robes and revealed himself. Even now, it's pure cinematic
Viagra, especially compared to Peter O'Toole as Lawrence who minces around like
Julian Clary camping it up for panto - complete with eyeliner.
As Kenneth Tynan said at the time, Omar Sharif was “the only full-blooded
216
romantic hero working in the English-speaking cinema.” And, thank God, he
wasn't English.
By the time he made Lawrence of Arabia he was already a huge star throughout the
Arab world. He and Faten Hamama, Egypt's answer to Elizabeth Taylor, gave the
Middle East its first screen kiss in 1954 - and just like the plot of one of their own
low-budget Arabic films - were later married just over a year later.
Omar Sharif was born Michel Shaloub in 1932 in Alexandria, Egypt, though his
parents were of Syrian/Lebanese descent. He had a privileged upbringing and was
sent to the exclusive Victoria College in Cairo where he seemed to excel at every-
thing, especially mathematics. In common with most other upper-class Egyptian
families, he spoke French at home, and being in the Christian minority, already felt
“different” from his classmates. He longed to be an actor and by the time he made
his first film had already changed his name to Omar, he claims - after General Omar
Bradley - because he wanted something that would be instantly recognisable in the
West.
However one general does not a Western stage name make. It's much more likely
that, being a Catholic in a Muslim country with a Frenchified Christian name, he
wanted something more identifiably Arab to make him palatable for his greater
Middle Eastern public. Omar is a name common to both Christians and Muslims,
as well as being one of the Prophet's successors, and Sharif means “noble”. When
he was discovered by Sam Shepard in the early Sixties, the world’s first Egyptian
sex symbol had arrived. His name became synonymous with that wonderful indefin-
able “foreign” quality. From the beginning Omar had a distinct sense of otherness
that allowed him to play any generic Mediterranean character the script demanded.
217
 Even now, it’s pure cinematic Viagra, especially compared to Peter
O'Toole as Lawrence who minces around like Julian Clary camping it up
for panto - complete with eyeliner.

Exotic, erotic - but he still spoke our language. On screen Omar purred. His words
were so soft you could take them in your hands and stroke them. They were also rel-
atively few. In Doctor Zhivago it must have taken him the best part of several min-
utes to learn his lines. The sultry, silent type, his dialogue was confined to monosyl-
lables, usually uttered whilst gathering a swooning or otherwise distraught woman
into his arms.

But, in all true sexual fantasies, words are unnecessary. Omar Sharif could pene-
trate you with his eyes and seduce with just a few murmured phrases. That soft voice
with its lilting foreign accent - it sounds like hot chocolate would, if you made it with
double cream, brandy and a sprinkling of crushed bitter, coffee beans. And if
Starbucks ever decide to market it, they can call it “The Omar” and I'll have a tall
one - with lots of whip. Caffeine isn't the only thing that gets your heart pumping
and your pulse racing.

He started his Hollywood career in 1962 playing Sharif Ali in Lawrence of Arabia
- a man full of Eastern promise - most of which he failed to keep. However, since
then he has played starring roles that read like the cast list of Nancy Friday's Secret
Garden: In 1964 he was a Spanish priest in Behold a Pale Horse ; in 1965 he was
Genghis Khan and then Che Guevara in 1969. He also played enough different

218 219
 nationalities to staff the United Nations; a Russian in Doctor Zhivago, a German in
The Night of the Generals, a Jew in Funny Girl, a Yugoslav in The Yellow Rolls
Royce, a Mexican in Mackenna's Gold and an Austrian in Mayerling.
Close your eyes and think of anything but England and there was a sexy part for
Omar. In fact, after Lawrence of Arabia made him a bankable star, he became the
first Middle Eastern heart-throb to become famous for playing everything except an
Arab. But then, just like little girls in nativity plays, there are not many good parts
available for Arabs in modern cinema. In the nativity you're either Mary, a sheep,
or a cross-dressing shepherd with a tea towel on your head. In Hollywood, you're at
He had affairs with many of his leading ladies and also indulged in
that most unforgivable of Arab practices - that of running off with
princesses.
best an unscrupulous sabre-wielding cheat - at worst a terrorist. And when there is
a sympathetic portrayal of an Arab such as that in the Libyan-financed film
Omar al-Mukhtar, then they call for Anthony Quinn. Who better than an
Irish/Mexican with a suitably craggy profile? Anthony Quinn also played the lead
role inThe Prophet - the film about the life of Muhammad as well as the role Auda
Abu Tayi inLawrence . Meanwhile, Alec Guinness, the quintessential Englishman,
played Prince Feisal so well as Fagin that one almost expected him to burst into
song.
Omar, sadly, had few qualms about playing the bad Arab. He is often quoted
220
as having no interest in politics, sitting on the Arab-Israeli fence for so long that one
expects he has a ridge the size of the Suez Canal on his backside. Then in 1979 he
played the part of a sleazy slave-owning Arab prince in the Israeli production
Ashanti, starring Michael Caine and found himself, not unsurprisingly, on the Arab
blacklist: from noble savage to just savage in less than two decades.
Not that this seems to have overly worried him. In an interview with Miriam Rosen
in the publication Cinéaste he is quoted as saying that the way Arabs are depicted
in Western cinema is “their own fault...obviously there have been a lot of Arab ter-
rorists, so they are not being invented”.
Does he mind having perpetuated that negative image? No, because he thinks “film
is unimportant. Film is entertainment”. Though what is really important is that
Omar needed the money to pay off his gambling debts.
For a man who made a career out of not playing an Arab on screen, he played the
stereotypical Arab in real life with rather more expression than he gave to most of
his roles: when not accepting roles in supremely bad films Omar lived like a
dilettante. He complains often of boredom - like a latter day jaundiced King
Shahriyar waiting for Sheherezade to charm him out of his ennui. He made a for-
tune and gambled it away. He played cards, lost money on horses and womanised -
the very activities that cause people in the West to curl their lip when enraged by
“rich Arab sheikhs” in Park Lane hotels.
In his autobiography The Eternal Male he talks about waking up in bed with a
woman on one of the monthly visits to Beirut which Peter O'Toole and he took dur-
ing the filming of Lawrence. “We went hunting girls in every bar, every night-club”
221
 and, he says “made up for the restrictions placed on us by the producers.” Never
mind the restrictions of that piffling little thing called marriage. The film hit our
screens in 1962 yet he didn't divorce his wife Faten Hamama until 1966. Fidelity,
apparently, wasn't his strong point.

He was adored by his mother and spoilt as a child. People often talked about him
as an “exceptional little boy” and his mother thought him a “marvel”. Long before
he became a heart-throb, Omar was used to the devotion of women. One story often
recounted in interviews tells of the time, aged fifteen, when he broke into his sister's
piggy bank for the money to entertain some girls. His mother, far from being angry,
actually made excuses for him.

He had affairs with many of his leading ladies and also indulged in that most unfor-
givable of Arab practices - that of running off with princesses.

He was famously linked with the fantastically sexy French actress Catherine
Deneuve who played Baroness Maria Vetsera to his Prince Rudolph of Austria, as
well as the most famous Jewish princess of all - Barbra Streisand - his co-star in
Funny Girl.

But, unlike his fellow countryman Dodi al-Fayed, we absolved him. They may have
both been rich Arab playboys but one had Hollywood - the other only Harrods. And
Omar at least had the good taste not to court Princess Diana and try to turn her as
Dodi did Diana, in the words of Julie Burchill, into “an Arab merchant's bit of posh”.

He might have taught her how to play bridge though. Omar is an expert. He has
played in the Olympics as part of the Egyptian team (though as a sport it seems to

222 223
 me somewhat lacking on the machismo front being about as sexy as darts) and writ-
ten several books on the subject. But when you want a man who is good with his
hands, this isn't really what you have in mind.
However, another of Omar's leading ladies found a way to bridge this particular gap.
Again in his autobiography, Omar talks of his particular fondness for his one time
lover Anouk Aimée who was also his co-star in Sidney Lumet's The Appointment :
“Anouk drew her happiness from mine - or, at least, she did everything to make me
think so...She knows exactly how to act with the man she loves. She can make him
happy by giving him the impression that she's happy too.”
Anouk, it seems, liked nothing better than watching Omar play bridge all evening.
Bridge seems to have been his only lifelong passion, and one to which he has been
significantly more faithful than any single woman.
While he forgot everyone around him until 4 am in the morning, Anouk sat behind
him with a “serene, happy expression” on her face. Oh happy, unreconstructed days
when men were men and women, even glamourous movie stars, were compliant
doormats, who knew their place.
How can this be? Were those deep brown, liquid, come-to-bed eyes that stared at
one so beseechingly from the cinema screen really wondering if you would make him
a cup of cocoa, rub his feet and trim his toenails?
Say it isn't so!
Some dreams are best kept only in the mind of the dreamer and some fantasies
224
should remain between the sheets with the curtains firmly closed.
Heroes grow up and get old. Sex bombs fizzle out and die. He's been called a walk-
ing love scene but nowadays he's a cameo walk on in television mini-series. The Arab
world's answer to Barry White who once so famously crooned his way seductively
through “You Are Woman” in Funny Girl has grown seedy and dissipated.
According to recent interviews, Omar is worried about his heart, his liver and the
prospect of his teeth falling out. Imagine that famous gap-toothed smile being
replaced by - well - a gap. Jan Moir who met him earlier this year reports that his
teeth have turned the colour of “cheddar cheese” and of course his hair is grey, his
face jowly and his moustache like something you would use to clean stubborn stains
from your bathtub.
But I'll always love him anyway. That's the thing about fantasy men. They really exist
only in that twilight world between sleep and the moment you swim up into con-
sciousness and should leave in the morning before you're properly awake. Dream
lovers don't hang around to take out the trash. And, unlike Omar who hasn't made
a decent film in decades, they really shouldn't star in it either.
p.214-215, from Lawrence of Arabia, directed by David Lean (1962) · p.218, from
Doctor Zhivago, directed by David Lean (1965) · p.222, from Che!, directed by
Richard Fleischer (1969) · All photographs from the BFI Stills Library
225
 photos: Karel Kühne + Bela Barnert

trenchcoat + skirt by Junko Shimada · boots by Céline

226
dress by Jane Garber · scarf by Véronique Leroy
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combinaison by Balenciaga · boots by Céline shirt by Frisch · jacket by Dries van Noten
231
 styling: Vincent Gapaillard
models: Rosemary + Anya @ Vision, Kead, Faouzi + Dries · hair: Louis Bester @ Brigitte
left to right: jacket by Raf Simons · pants by Agnès B · dress by Christian Lacroix Hébant make-up: Gabrielle @ Olga Heuze · photographer's assistant: Christin Drefahl
boots by Céline · shirt + tie by Dries van Noten · pants by Raf Simons stylist's assistant: Bettina Krauss 233
illustrations: Roy Wilkinson

235
237
 photos: Shadi Faridian

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 photos: Justine trapeze piece by Jessica Ogden
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headpiece by Chris Brooke + Alexis Panayiotou · jeans: Levi’s Red Label
styling: Faye Sawyer · photographer’s assistant: James Mountford + Maxine Blyth
make-up: Nicole Jaritz · hair: Thomas Dunkin · models: Agatha + James Coffee @ Storm bodypiece by Jessica Ogden
with thanks to: James English Studios 249
 Finally I became convinced that I had to find Sheikh Zaabalawi.

The first time I had heard his name had been in a song:

Oh what’s become of the world, Zaabalawi?

They’ve turned it upside down and taken away its taste.

It had been a popular song in my childhood, and one day it had occurred to me to
demand of my father, in the way children have of asking endless questions:

“Who is Zaabalawi?”

He had looked at me hesitantly as though doubting my ability to understand the

zaabalawi answer. However, he had replied, “May his blessing descend upon you, he’s a true
saint of God, a remover of worries and troubles. Were it not for him I would have
died miserably -”

short story by Naguib Mahfouz • translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
In the years that followed, I heard my father many a time sing the praises of this
good saint and speak of the miracles he performed. The days passed and brought
with them many illnesses, for each one of which I was able, without too much trou-
ble and at a cost I could afford, to find a cure, until I became afflicted with that ill-
ness for which no one possesses a remedy. When I had tried everything in vain and
was overcome by despair, I remembered by chance what I had heard in my child-
hood: why, I asked myself, should I not seek out Sheikh Zaabalawi? I recollected
my father saying that he had made his acquaintance in Khan Gaafar at the house of
Sheikh Qamar, one of those sheikhs who practised law in the religious courts, and
so I took myself off to his house. Wishing to make sure that he was still living there,

250 251
 I made inquiries of a vendor of beans whom I found in the lower part of the house.
“Sheikh Qamar!” he said, looking at me in amazement. “He left the quarter ages
ago. They say he’s now living in Garden City and has his office in al-Azhar Square.”
I looked up the office address in the telephone book and immediately set off to the
Chamber of Commerce Building, where it was located. On asking to see Sheikh
Qamar, I was ushered into a room just as a beautiful woman with a most intoxi-
cating perfume was leaving it. The man received me with a smile and motioned me
toward a fine leather-upholstered chair. Despite the thick soles of my shoes, my feet
were conscious of the lushness of the costly carpet. The man wore a lounge suit and
was smoking a cigar; his manner of sitting was that of someone well satisfied both
with himself and with his worldly possessions. The look of warm welcome he gave
me left no doubt in my mind that he thought me a prospective client, and I felt acute-
ly embarrassed at encroaching upon his valuable time.
“Welcome,” he said, prompting me to speak.
“I am the son of your old friend Sheikh Ali al-Tatawi,” I answered so as to put an
end to my equivocal position.
A certain languor was apparent in the glance he cast at me; the languor was not
total in that he had not as yet lost all hope in me.
“God rest his soul,” he said. “He was a fine man.
The very pain that had driven me to go there now prevailed upon me to stay.
252
“He told me,” I continued, “of a devout saint named Zaabalawi whom he met at
Your Honour’s. I am in need of him, sir, if he be still in the land of the living.”
The languor became firmly entrenched in his eyes, and it would have come as no sur-
prise if he had shown the door to both me and my father’s memory.
“That,” he said in the tone of one who has made up his mind to terminate the con-
versation, “was a very long time ago and I scarcely recall him now.”
Rising to my feet so as to put his mind at rest regarding my intention of going, I
asked, “Was he really a saint?”
“We used to regard him as a man of miracles.”
“And where could I find him today? I asked, making another move toward the door.
“To the best of my knowledge he was living in the Birgawi Residence in al-Azhar,”
and he applied himself to some papers on his desk with a resolute movement that
indicated he would not open his mouth again. I bowed my head in thanks, apolo-
gised several times for disturbing him, and left the office, my head so buzzing with
embarrassment that I was oblivious to all sounds around me.
I went to the Birgawi Residence, which was situated in a thickly populated quarter.
I found that time had so eaten away at the building that nothing was left of it save
an antiquated façade and a courtyard that, despite being supposedly in the charge
of a caretaker, was being used as a rubbish dump. A small, insignificant fellow, a
mere prologue to a man, was using the covered entrance as a place for the sale of
253
 old books on theology and mysticism.
When I asked him about Zaabalawi, he peered at me through narrow, inflamed eyes
and said in amazement, “Zaabalawi! Good heavens, what a time ago that was!
Certainly he used to live in this house when it was habitable. Many were the times
he would sit with me talking of bygone days, and I would be blessed by his holy pres-
ence. Where, though, is Zaabalawi today?”
Look carefully in the cafés, the places where the dervishes perform
their rites, the mosques and prayer-rooms, for he may well be con-
cealed among the beggars and be indistinguishable from them.
He shrugged his shoulders sorrowfully and soon left me, to attend to an approach-
ing customer. I proceeded to make inquiries of many shopkeepers in the district.
While I found that a large number of them had never even heard of Zaabalawi,
some, though recalling nostalgically the pleasant times they had spent with him,
were ignorant of his present whereabouts, while others openly made fun of him,
labelled him a charlatan, and advised me to put myself in the hands of a doctor - as
though I had not already done so. I therefore had no alternative but to return dis-
consolately home.
With the passing of days like motes in the air, my pains grew so severe that I was
sure I would not be able to hold out much longer. Once again I fell to wondering
about Zaabalawi and clutching at the hope his venerable name stirred within me.
Then it occurred to me to seek the help of the local sheikh of the district; in fact, I
254
was surprised I had not thought of this to begin with. His office was in the nature
of a small shop, except that it contained a desk and a telephone, and I found him
sitting at his desk, wearing a jacket over his striped galabeya. As he did not inter-
rupt his conversation with a man sitting beside him, I stood waiting till the man had
gone. The sheikh then looked up at me coldly. I told myself that I should win him
over by the usual methods, and it was not long before I had him cheerfully inviting
me to sit down.
“I’m in need of Sheikh Zaabalawi,” I answered his inquiry as to the purpose of my
visit.
He gazed at me with the same astonishment as that shown by those I had previous-
ly encountered.
“At least,” he said, giving me a smile that revealed his gold teeth, “he is still alive.
The devil of it is, though, he has no fixed abode. You might well bump into him as
you go out of here, on the other hand you might spend days and months in fruitless
searching.”
“Even you can’t find him!”
“Even I! He’s a baffling man, but I thank the Lord that he’s still alive!”
He gazed at me intently, and murmured, “It seems your condition is serious.”
“Very.”
255
 “May God come to your aid! But why don’t you go about it systematically?” He
spread out a sheet of paper on the desk and drew on it with unexpected speed and
skill until he had made a full plan of the district, showing all the various quarters,
lanes, alleyways, and squares. He looked at it admiringly and said, “These are
dwelling houses, here is the Quarter of the Perfumers, here the Quarter of the
Coppersmiths, the Mouski, the police and the fire stations. The drawing is your best
guide. Look carefully in the cafés, the places where the dervishes perform their rites,
the mosques and prayer-rooms, and the Green Gate, for he may well be concealed
among the beggars and be indistinguishable from them. Actually, I myself haven’t
seen him for years, having been somewhat preoccupied with the cares of the world,
and was only brought back by your inquiry to those most exquisite times of my
youth.”
I gazed at the map in bewilderment. The telephone rang, and he took up the
receiver.
“Take it,” he told me, generously. “We’re at your service.”
Folding up the map, I left and wandered off through the quarter, from square to
street to alleyway, making inquiries of everyone I felt was familiar with the place.
At last the owner of a small establishment for ironing clothes told me, “Go to the
calligrapher Hassanein in Umm al Ghulam - they were friends.”
I went to Umm al-Ghulam, where I found old Hassanein working in a deep, narrow
shop full of signboards and jars of colour. A strange smell, a mixture of glue and
perfume, permeated its every corner. Old Hassanein was squatting on a sheepskin
rug in front of a board propped against the wall; in the middle of it he had inscribed
256
the word “Allah” in silver lettering. He was engrossed in embellishing the letters
with prodigious care. I stood behind him, fearful of disturbing him or breaking the
inspiration that flowed to his masterly hand. When my concern at not interrupting
him had lasted some time, he suddenly inquired with unaffected gentleness, “Yes?”
Realising he was aware of my presence, I introduced myself. “I’ve been told that
Sheikh Zaabalawi is your friend; I’m looking for him,” I said.
His hand came to a stop. He scrutinised me in astonishment. “Zaabalawi! God be
praised!” he said with a sigh.
“He is a friend of yours, isn’t he?” I asked eagerly.
“He was, once upon a time. A real man of mystery: he’d visit you so often that peo-
ple would imagine he was your nearest and dearest, then would disappear as though
he’d never existed. Yet saints are not to be blamed.”
The spark of hope went out with the suddenness of a lamp snuffed by a power cut.
“He was so constantly with me,” said the man, “that I felt him to be part of every-
thing I drew. But where is he today?”
“Perhaps he is still alive?”
“He’s alive, without a doubt...He had impeccable taste, and it was due to him that
I made my most beautiful drawings.”
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 “God knows,” I said, in a voice almost stifled by the dead ashes of hope, “How dire
my need for him is, and no one knows better than you of the ailments in respect to
which he is sought.”
“Yes, yes. May God restore you to health. He is in truth, as is said of
him, a man, and more...”
Smiling broadly, he added, “And his face possesses an unforgettable beauty. But
where is he?”
Reluctantly I rose to my feet, shook hands, and left. I continued wandering eastward
and westward through the quarter, inquiring about Zaabalawi from everyone who,
by reason of age or experience, I felt might be likely to help me. Eventually I was
informed by a vendor of lupine that he had met him a short while ago at the house
of Sheikh Gad, the well-known composer. I went to the musician’s house in
Tabakshiyya, where I found him in a room tastefully furnished in the old style, its
walls redolent with history. He was seated on a divan, his famous lute beside him,
concealing within itself the most beautiful melodies of our age, while somewhere
from within the house came the sound of pestle and mortar and the clamour of chil-
dren. I immediately greeted him and introduced myself, and was put at my ease by
the unaffected way in which he received me. He did not ask, either in words or ges-
ture, what had brought me, and I did not feel that he even harboured any such
curiosity. Amazed at his understanding and kindness, which boded well, I said, “O
Sheikh Gad, I am an admirer of yours, having long been enchanted by the render-
ings of your songs.”
“Thank you,” he said with a smile.
258
“Please excuse my disturbing you,” I continued timidly, “but I was told that
Zaabalawi was your friend, and I am in urgent need of him.”
“Zaabalawi!” he said, frowning in concentration. “You need him? God be with you,
for who knows, O Zaabalawi, where you are.”
“Doesn’t he visit you?’ I asked eagerly.
“He visited me some time ago. He might well come right now; on the other hand I
mightn’t see him till death!”
I gave an audible sigh and asked, “What made him like that?”
The musician took up his lute. “Such are saints or they would not be saints,” he said
laughing.
“Do those who need him suffer as I do?”
“Such suffering is part of the cure!”
He took up the plectrum and began plucking soft strains from the strings. Lost in
thought, I followed his movements. Then, as though addressing myself, I said, “So
my visit has been in vain.”
He smiled, laying his cheek against the side of the lute. “God forgive you,” he said,
“for saying such a thing of a visit that has caused me to know you and you me!”
259
 I was much embarrassed and said apologetically, “Please forgive me; my feelings
of defeat made me forget my manners.”
“Do not give in to defeat. This extraordinary man brings fatigue to all who seek him.
It was easy enough with him in the old days, when his place of abode was known.
Today, though, the world has changed, and after having enjoyed a position attained
only by potentates, he is now pursued by the police on a charge of false pretences.
It is therefore no longer an easy matter to reach him, but have patience and be sure
that you will do so.”
He raised his head from the lute and skilfully fingered the opening bars of a melody.
Then he sang:
“I make lavish mention, even though I blame myself,
of those I love,
For the stories of the beloved are my wine.”
With a heart that was weary and listless, I followed the beauty of the melody and
the singing.
“I composed the music to this poem in a single night,” he told me when he had fin-
ished. “I remember that it was the eve of the Lesser Bairam. Zaabalawi was my
guest for the whole of that night, and the poem was of his choosing. He would sit
for a while just where you are, then would get up and play with my children as
though he were one of them. Whenever I was overcome by weariness or my inspi-
ration failed me, he would punch me playfully in the chest and joke with me, and I
would bubble over with melodies, and thus I continued working till I finished the
260
most beautiful piece I have ever composed.”
“Does he know anything about music?”
“He is the epitome of things musical. He has an extremely beautiful speaking voice,
and you have only to hear him to want to burst into song and to be inspired to
creativity....”
“How was it that he cured those diseases before which men are powerless?”
“That is his secret. Maybe you will learn it when you meet him.”
But when would that meeting occur? We relapsed into silence, and the hubbub of
children once more filled the room.
Again the sheikh began to sing. He went on repeating the words “and I have a mem-
ory of her” in different and beautiful variations until the very walls danced in ecsta-
sy. I expressed my whole-hearted admiration, and he gave me a smile of thanks. I
then got up and asked permission to leave, and he accompanied me to the front door.
As I shook him by the hand, he said, “I hear nowadays he frequents the house of
Hagg Wanas al-Damanhouri. Do you know him?”
I shook my head, though a modicum of renewed hope crept into my heart.
“He is a man of private means,” the sheikh told me, “who from time to time visits
Cairo, putting up at some hotel or other. Every evening, though, he spends at the
Negma Bar in Alfi Street.”
261
 I waited for nightfall and went to the Negma Bar. I asked a waiter about Hagg
Wanas, and he pointed to a corner that was semi-secluded because of its position
behind a large pillar with mirrors on all four sides. There I saw a man seated alone
at a table with two bottles in front of him, one empty, the other two-thirds empty.
There were no snacks or food to be seen, and I was sure that I was in the presence
of a hardened drinker. He was wearing a loosely flowing silk galabeya and a care-
fully wound turban; his legs were stretched out toward the base of the pillar, and as
he gazed into the mirror in rapt contentment, the sides of his face, rounded and
handsome despite the fact that he was approaching old age, were flushed with wine.
I approached quietly till I stood but a few feet away from him. He did not turn
toward me or give any indication that he was aware of my presence.
“Good evening, Mr. Wanas,” I greeted him cordially.
He turned toward me abruptly, as though my voice had roused him from slumber,
and glared at me in disapproval. I was about to explain what had brought me when
he interrupted in an almost imperative tone of voice that was nonetheless not devoid
of an extraordinary gentleness, “First, please sit down, and second, please get
drunk!”
I opened my mouth to make my excuses, but, stopping up his ears with his fingers,
he said, “Not a word till you do what I say.”
I realised I was in the presence of a capricious drunkard and told myself that I
should at least humour him a bit. “Would you permit me to ask one question?” I
said with a smile, sitting down.
262
Without removing his hands from his ears he indicated the bottle. “When engaged
in a drinking bout like this, I do not allow any conversation between myself and
another unless, like me, he is drunk, otherwise all propriety is lost and mutual com-
prehension is rendered impossible.”
I made a sign indicated that I did not drink.
“That’s your lookout,” he said offhandedly. “And that’s my condition!”
He filled me a glass, which I meekly took and drank. No sooner had the wine set-
tled in my stomach than it seemed to ignite. I waited patiently till I had grown used
to its ferocity, and said, “It’s very strong, and I think the time has come for me to
ask you about -”
Once again he put his fingers in his ears. “I shan’t listen to you until you’re drunk!”
He filled up my glass for the second time. I glanced at it in trepidation; then, over-
coming my inherent objection, I drank it down at a gulp. No sooner had the wine
come to rest inside me than I lost all will power. With the third glass, I lost my mem-
ory, and with the fourth the future vanished. The world turned round about me, and
I forgot why I had gone there. The man leaned toward me attentively, but I saw him
- saw everything - as a mere meaningless series of coloured planes. I don’t know how
long it was before my head sank down onto the arm of the chair and I plunged into
deep sleep. During it, I had a beautiful dream the like of which I had never experi-
enced. I dreamed that I was in an immense garden surrounded on all sides by lux-
uriant trees, and the sky was nothing but stars seen between the entwined branch-
es, all enfolded in an atmosphere like that of sunset or a sky overcast with cloud. I
263
 No sooner had the wine come to rest inside me than I lost all will
power. With the third glass, I lost my memory, and with the fourth the
future vanished. The world turned round about me.
was lying on a small hummock of jasmine petals, more of which fell upon me like
rain, while the lucent spray of a fountain unceasingly sprinkled the crown of my head
and my temples. An orchestra of warbling and cooing played in my ear. There was
an extraordinary sense of harmony between me and my inner self, and between the
two of us and the world, everything being in its rightful place, without discord or dis-
tortion. In the whole world there was no single reason for speech or movement, for
the universe moved in a rapture of ecstasy. This lasted but a short while. When I
opened my eyes, consciousness struck at me like a policeman’s fist, and I saw Wanas
al-Damanhouri peering at me with concern. Only a few drowsy customers were left
in the bar.
“You have slept deeply,” said my companion. “You were obviously hungry for
sleep.”
I rested my heavy head in the palms of my hands. When I took them away in aston-
ishment and looked down at them, I found that they glistened with drops of water.
“My head’s wet,” I protested.
“Yes, my friend tried to rouse you,” he answered quietly.
264
“Somebody saw me in this state?”
“Don’t worry, he is a good man. Have you not heard of Sheikh Zaabalawi?”
“Zaabalawi!” I exclaimed, jumping to my feet.
“Yes,” he answered in surprise. “What’s wrong?”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know where he is now. He was here and then he left.”
I was about to run off in pursuit but found I was more exhausted than I had imag-
ined. Collapsed over the table, I cried out in despair, “My sole reason for coming to
you was to meet him! Help me to catch up with him or send someone after him.”
The man called a vendor of prawns and asked him to seek out the sheikh and bring
him back. Then he turned to me. “I didn’t realise you were afflicted. I’m very
sorry....”
“You wouldn’t let me speak,” I said irritably.
“What a pity! He was sitting on this chair beside you the whole time. He was play-
ing with a string of jasmine petals he had around his neck, a gift from one of his
admirers, then, taking pity on you, he began to sprinkle some water on your head to
bring you around.”
265
 “Does he meet you here every night?” I asked, my eyes not leaving the doorway
through which the vendor of prawns had left.
“He was with me tonight, last night, and the night before that, but before that I
hadn’t seen him for a month.”
“Perhaps he will come tomorrow,” I answered with a sigh.
“Perhaps.”
“I am willing to give him any money he wants.”
Wanas answered sympathetically, “The strange thing is that he is not open to such
temptations, yet he will cure you if you meet him.”
“Without charge?”
“Merely on sensing that you love him.”
The vendor of prawns returned, having failed in his mission.
I recovered some of my energy and left the bar, albeit unsteadily. At every street
corner I called out “Zaabalawi!” in the vague hope that I would be rewarded with
an answering shout. The street boys turned contemptuous eyes on me till I sought
refuge in the first available taxi.
The following evening I stayed up with Wanas al-Damanhouri till dawn, but the
266
sheikh did not put in the appearance. Wanas informed me that he would be going
away to the country and would not be returning to Cairo until he had sold the
cotton crop.
I must wait, I told myself; I must train myself to be patient. Let me content myself
with having made certain of the existence of Zaabalawi, and even of his affection
for me, which encourages me to think that he will be prepared to cure me if a meet-
ing takes place between us.
Sometimes, however, the long delay wearied me. I would become beset by despair
and would try to persuade myself to dismiss him from my mind completely. How
many weary people in this life know him not or regard him as a mere myth! Why,
then, should I torture myself about him in this way?
No sooner, however, did my pains force themselves upon me than I would again
begin to think about him, asking myself when I would be fortunate enough to meet
him. The fact that I ceased to have any news of Wanas and was told he had gone to
live abroad did not deflect me from my purpose; the truth of the matter was that I
had become fully convinced that I had to find Zaabalawi.
Yes, I have to find Zaabalawi.
Naguib Mahfouz is a Noble Prize winner for literature. Zaabalawi first appeared as Za’balawi in
Dunya Allah (God’s World ) in Cairo; it was selected by Denys Johnson-Davies for The Time and the
Place and Other Stories , a collection of Mahfouz short stories. Zaabalawi (c) Denys Johnson-Davies
267
 photos: Mary Rozzi

top by Ghost · undies by Jean Colonna · gloves by A.F. Vandervorst

268 269
bodysuit by Yves Saint Laurent · fishnets by Fogal · shoes by Balenciaga · belt by Véronique Leroy tunic by Yoss
271
 shirt by Bernhard Willhelm · panties by Oscar Suleyman · fishnets by Fogal · belt by Paco Rabanne

dress by Balenciaga · stockings by Veronique Branquinho · belt by Yves Saint Laurent styling: Anastasia Barbieri · make-up: Phophie Mathias @ Marie France Thavonekham
shoes by Balenciaga hair: Maxim Mace @ Calliste · model: Kasia
 art: Khosrow Hassanzadeh

274
277
278
 photos: Thierry van Biesen dress + collar by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac · boots by Adidas · bracelet by Lara Boeing
280 glove: stylist's own
 front: coat by Issey Miyake
left to right: top by Preen · skirt by Godfrey · boots by Adidas back, left to right: poncho by Jessica Ogden · trousers by André Walker · boots by Adidas
dress by Nothing Nothing · shoes by Joe Casely-Hayford dress + shoes by Joe Casely-Hayford
left to right: cape by Double O · top by Sofia Malig · trousers + glasses by Jean-Charles de
Castelbajac · boots by Adidas
top by World · bangle top by Zambesi · trousers by Godfrey · shoes by Camper
bag by Jean-Charles de Castelbajac 285
 front: skirt by Marc O'Neil · top + cape by Angéline Kingsley · rings, earrings + necklace by
Delphine-Charlotte Parmentier
front: top, corset + trousers by Marc Le Bihan · rings + bracelet by Jacqueline Rabun back: top by Maria Chen · trousers by Clements Ribeiro· armband (from socks) by Jonathan
Aston · bracelet by Sara Fung · shoes by Michiko Koshino
 styling: Marianne Ghantous
hair: Lance Lowe @ the Industry (pages 1-7) + Sam @ the Industry (pages 8-10)
make-up: Alex Box @ the Industry · models: Marisa @ Take 2, Hella @ Select, Sebastian, Aron +
top by Russel Sage · trousers by Miki Miali · shorts by Robert-Cary Williams Jimmy @ Models 1 · photographer's assistant: Elise Dumontet
bracelet
288 + rings by Delphine-Charlotte Parmentier · shoes by Michiko Koshino · socks by Jonathan Aston special thanks to Kodak films 289
photos: Masoud
291
page 291: t-shirt by Daughters of Style from the Pineal Eye · scarf from Portobello market

opposite page: trimming from Mokuba · white top by Jurgi Persoon

tulle top by Ann Demeulemeester · scarf: stylist's own 293
Knickers by Morgan · top by Martine Sitbon · ribbon from Mokuba · skin jewellery by J.Maskrey skirt by Eric Bergere · lace leggings by Aherche · tulle top by Jean Colonna
pink top by Trace by Koji Tatsuno 295
knickers by Missoni · jumper by Veronique Branquinho · scarf from Portobello market
leather flower by Daughters of Style from the Pineal Eye · boots by Chloé 297
 t-shirt by Daughters of Style from the Pineal Eye · skirt by Trace by Koji Tatsuno
scarf from Portobello market

photographer's assistant: Kay Wahlig · stylist: Keiko Seya · stylist's assistants: Nadine Sanders
boots by Chlóe · Dress by Martine Sitbon · pink scarf: stylist's own · ribbon from Mokuba + Celine Ayel · make-up: Tatsu Yamanaka · hair: Kevin Ford @ Naked · models: Rebecca @
Storm + Marisa @ Take 2 299
illustration: Greg Stogdon
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