The Wet and the Dry (3 page)

Despite the presence of the Hard Rock Café and the nightclub in the ground floor of the Bay View, well known to Saudi princes, this part of the Corniche never feels oppressive to me. I come to La Plage, where there are often entertaining weddings going on in the indoor restaurant upstairs, the girls dancing in palls of smoke, and I go down the outside steps to the tables spread out on the cement jetty below. Here the waves crash against the piles, and you can see the sloping lights of the city spreading away into darkness. The foursomes with their
shish
pipes, the exhausted wedding guests recovering with a therapeutic cigar; only a tall cold Almaza beer will do here, drunk with a plate of bitter greens and a side of
moutabal
. Almaza is for those days when the vodka has accumulated too intensely. It’s my cleanser, my palate refresher.

I find myself walking home with difficulty, staggering a little as I negotiate the city’s hills. Ruins remain from the wars, houses still wide open to the sky, and in my altered state they seem like obstacles to understanding a city that is already baffling. I get to the top of Rome and I hear the muezzins echoing across the
quartiers
. At a corner with a lingerie store, I grip myself by one wrist and hold myself down. Do I have to walk through yet another roadblock of skeptical soldiers in this condition, destabilized and wandering with a loose eye? It is not a
walker’s city despite appearances to the contrary. The drinker when pedestrian is at a disadvantage. I clamber past the Druze cemetery, and a soldier stops me and asks me in broken English if I need to sit down and take a rest. It is, on reflection, a good idea. I sit on a bollard and listen to the swallows swooping among the old cedars by the side of the road, and I realize that I have been drinking for hours and yet I have no memory of it. It is negative time.

Alcohol is mentioned a mere three times in the Koran, and its use, though frowned upon, is not always explicitly forbidden. The hostility to wine in the holy book, if stern, does not seem especially ferocious. It is drunkenness, rather than alcohol per se, that provokes the Prophet’s ire. The first mention of wine in the Koran’s traditional chronology, in the very first
surah
known as “The Cow,” is this: “They ask you about drinking and gambling. Say: ‘There is great harm in both, although they have some benefits for the people; but their harm is far greater than their benefit’ ” (2: 219). Next we have this: “O you who believe! Draw not near unto prayer when you are drunken, till you know that which you utter” (4 An-Nisa 43). Later (in 5 Al-Ma’idah 91), drink is referred to as Satan’s handiwork more explicitly: “O you who believe! Strong drink and games of chance and idols and divining arrows are only an infamy of Satan’s handiwork. Leave it aside that you may succeed.”

The Hadith is another matter. But there is little certainly about the origin of Islam’s strong interdiction of alcohol. Prohibitions
can come and go. Few remember now that coffee was prohibited in Mecca and in Egypt in the sixteenth century because it was considered an intoxicant. Some suggest that the suppression of alcohol may have arisen with the Turkish Seljuk military’s desire to maintain order in its troops. No one now knows, and the beginnings of the prohibition no longer much matter. Others have claimed that it is a modern reaction against rampant Westernization, where the infidels are everywhere present through their infamous Johnnie Walker and their satanic Bong vodka.

Drinking has not disappeared, even from Saudi Arabia. The
Khaleej Times
, from time to time, regales us with harrowing accounts of Saudis who are taken to hospital after having tried to use eau de toilette as a drink. In 2006 twenty citizens of the Kingdom died after bingeing on perfume. Nothing changes the fact, meanwhile, that in the Arab land of Lebanon the national drink is arak, a distillate of aniseed.

The word
arak
in its origin means “sweat” and refers to droplets of distilled wine vapors condensing on the sides of a cucurbit. The Muslim Persian poet Abu Nuwas, in the ninth century, who wrote many verses about the pleasures of wine and distilled liquors, described it as “the color of rain water but as hot inside as the ribs of a burning firebrand.” So with all distillates, which are Arab in origin and which were once exported to Europe from the Islamic lands.

Arak and the vodka martini, therefore, have a common Islamic origin. They are both the color of rainwater. And how,
sitting here morosely at the bar of the Bristol, can I not think of the fuck-you, homosexual Abu Nuwas, who appears as a character in
One Thousand and One Nights
, and the long-dead poetry of that genre known as
khamriyyat
, “the pleasures of drinking”? The scabrous poet who mocked “ye olde Arabia” and made the case for the cutting-edge urban life of Baghdad. Who lamented the sexual passivity of men and the devious sexual appetites of women. For whom a crater on the planet Mercury is named.

I have with me in my room my copy of
Homoerotic Songs of Old Baghdad
and
O Tribe that Loves Boys
, even though there’s not a single affordable edition of Abu Nuwas on Amazon.com. And this despite the poet’s popularity with NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association. For Abu Nuwas desire is incarnated in the
saqi
, the Christian wine boy at the tavern.
A gentle fawn passed around the cup
. And as I sip my vodka martini in the Bristol at midnight, alone but for a bowl of salted peanuts, those words come down through the centuries, from the debauched salons of Baghdad.

A gentle fawn passed around the cup.

He glided among us and made us drunk,

And we slept, but as the cock was about to crow

I made for him, my garments trailing, my ram ready for butting.

When I plunged my spear into him

He awoke as a wounded man awakes from his wounds.

“You were an easy kill,” said I, “so let’s have no reproaches.”

I recall that in Abu Nuwas’s day, Baghdad was a city of hundreds of wineshops, just as ninth-century Muslim Córdoba must have been. Abu Nuwas saw himself as a pleasure “mine” with men and women both chipping away at his “seams”:

Come right in, boys. I’m a mine of luxury—dig me.

Well-aged brilliant wines made by monks in a monastery

Shish-kebabs! Roast chickens! Eat, drink, get happy!

And afterwards you can take turns shampooing my tool.

In the early morning I drove two hours from Beirut to the Roman city of Baalbek with Michael Karam, Lebanon’s preeminent wine critic. He is from an old Maronite family of Mount Lebanon, educated in England, fashioned by a disastrous spell in the British Army, a connoisseur of arak as well as of wine.

The temple lies at the head of the Bekaa Valley in Hezbollah territory, to one side of a clean little town of the same name. We sat in a café in the sun just by the ruins drinking pomegranate juice and watching black-clad clerics walk past as if they were ruminating on that morning’s unpleasant electricity bills. The loudspeakers were active here. Sermons delivered at an emphatic clip. It seemed like a reasonably oppressive place, clean and safe. The kind of place where you might be kidnapped for an hour or two just to satisfy someone’s curiosity. Halfway through our drink I knocked over my glass of pomegranate juice, and it fell to the ground, smashing loudly into a hundred pieces. The passersby froze for a split second. The loudspeakers started
up again, and suddenly the Roman architraves visible over the trees seemed yearningly alien and lost. We walked over to them with a silent, mutual relief. To step from twenty-first-century Baalbek to first-century Baalbek felt like a blessing. The latter was called Heliopolis. The gods that once ruled here stand facing their conqueror, divided by a parking lot.

Baal, Jupiter, Venus, and Bacchus. The Temple of Jupiter is unlike any other extant Roman building. Its scale is immense. Six of its columns remain—the Emperor Justinian hauled off nine for the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople; the rest were toppled by earthquakes. Their drums lie around the pavement below. But even these six columns quell any modern hubris. Below them lies the Temple of Bacchus, raised by Antoninus Pius in the second century, the largest sanctuary to the wine god ever built. It is also virtually intact, the most perfect of all buildings surviving from the Roman Empire except the Pantheon in Rome and the remains of Ephesus the Maison Carrée in Nîmes. No one remembers that Dionysianism was the most popular religion of the late empire before the arrival of Christianity. It was Christianity’s principal rival. Here a stoned Rasta sat on one of the drums waving to everyone. We asked him where he had come from. “Outer space,” he said.

The cult of Venus at Heliopolis was so wild, it had to be curtailed by Christian emperors. The cult of Bacchus must have been as fierce. We walked into its temple as the sun was declining, and we could look up and see the near-perfect fretwork of the ceilings over the outer columns. Two and a half centuries ago they inspired the English architect Robert Adam in his
decor at Osterley House in Hounslow. We went into the
cella
, which felt like the nave of a church, still partially roofed, the niche carvings still preserved, the steps to the altar intact. One rarely thinks of the cult of Dionysus-Bacchus having an actual church and a rite that may have influenced Christianity very early on. Scholars like Carl Kerényi have argued that the figure of Christ absorbed many of the characteristics of Dionysus. But here you suddenly become aware of this possibility.

I sat on the steps and listened to the echoing Hezbollah sermons coming from the town. I could sense that Michael was thinking the same thing. I glanced down at the marble relief at the foot of the steps and saw a single panel with a dancing girl etched into it, pristinely chiseled, her hair and chiton flowing. A bacchante from the time of Antoninus Pius. She was no bigger than my hand, so tiny perhaps she had been forgotten by all the looters. Like the sculpted girls you can see in remote Angkorian temples in Cambodia, she had survived against the odds. A follower of Bacchus caught in a single moment and still here, spinning to her god’s energy.

Nowhere else does the transitory nature of religions seem so obvious. They seem fixed and immovable, but they are not. They are constantly receding and re-forming and fragmenting into pieces. Thus they are always prey to paranoia, because they know that they are far more transitory than they can afford to admit. We have even forgotten that Dionysianism was a religion at all.

Yet the energy of cults passes on into the new cults that replace them. I put my palm over the marble girl and closed my
eyes. One has to remember what she was dancing to, and why intoxication is the most primitive mystery. In the Mediterranean world, it was at the origin of a religious passion. Today we have turned that same passion into a secular industry and a private struggle. But meanwhile Hezbollah are right to hate the drinker: he, and this delicate marble girl, are their greatest threat.

*
In Arabic there are two words, often rendered as
haram
and
haraam
in English, that are etymologically related but distinct. The former refers to a sanctuary or holy place, the latter to that which is sinful or forbidden.

Fear and Loathing in the Bekaa

                                  
On the coast a few miles north of
Beirut lies the port of Batroun. Its name comes from the Greek for grape,
botrys
, which suggests it was one of the great wine ports of the ancient world. In the sun and the smell of thyme, in the dust of hills that seem to turn to powder every time the sea wind hits them, I was driving to Batroun with Michael Karam again. We drove along the edge of a forest fire, towering dark-orange flames rising above the silhouettes of cedars. But the villages nevertheless had a soft luminosity, paths carved between vineyards and fields of sunflowers.