Karzakan is an untidy jumble of concrete houses, uneven streets and some fairly erratic-looking plumbing. It’s not actively unpleasant, at least in the warm evening when the people are socialising in the streets under the banners of their beloved religious dead. It even feels vaguely cosmopolitan– there’s a South Asian element certainly on main street. But, Karzakan is a Shia village, and outright, it is poor. It doesn’t look like there are going to be any fantastic investment opportunities opening up here anytime soon. They only happen 20km down the road, in Manama, in its phallicly banal “Financial Harbour” or the dusty-but-high-rise Seef district.

In Karzakan, on the 9th April, something happened, but all that I can see for sure is the scorch marks. The story from the official side is that a gang of thirty masked men attacked a police vehicle that was being driven by a policeman of Pakistani origin. The mob threw Molotov cocktails (in Arabic, petrol bombs are seemingly always referred to as Molotovs. I don’t know why, maybe the Arab journalists like the exoticism of the name), and the Pakistani policeman was killed. A few days later, police entered the town and arrested 30 or so people that they alleged had been involved with the attack. (If they had been masked, how did they know who to arrest?) Until now, they are being held incommunicado. My unofficial sources tell me that a) perhaps there was no mob, b) perhaps there were no Molotovs, (although I saw scorch marks of something. Maybe they had a bonfire) and c) the grandfather of the Pakistani policeman said that there were no burn marks on his grandson’s body, which, in any case has been conveniently repatriated. The only thing that is fairly clear is that there are a handful of young Shia men in a very Sunni Bahraini jail somewhere, probably not enjoying their stay. I saw the demonstration outside the public prosecutors office on Thursday, of their black-clad female relatives demanding to know their whereabouts, surrounded by feral-looking riot-cops with tear-gas guns. The fact that it was a Pakistani-origin policeman that was involved would seem to point to some truth in the matter. The authorities wouldn’t make that up, because a Pakistani policeman is a very visible symbol of the creeping Sunni-naturalisation process that has the Shia population so indignant in the first place.

On the road out of Karzakan, which is bumpy and full of potholes, the surface suddenly improves as you drive past the high walls of what I was told is the palace of one of the minor Khalifa royals.

We then drove a few miles up the road into a different world. The conjoined villages of A’ali and Rafa’. The velvet streets. The subdued, elegant street lighting. The manicured median between lanes of the empty highway. Date palms swaying over the walls of enormous, darkened villas. Portraits of the Khalifa family adorning the traffic roundabouts. No street-side barber shops, no kebab joints spilling their noisy customers onto the street, no potholes, no dirt. Just manicured, sinecured, privilege. The mosque built in dour, orthodox, sunni style. Apparently empty. This is not just the sunni neighbourhood, but the seat of sunni power in Bahrain. We drove past the diwan of the King, of the Crown Prince, and of the Prime Minister. Couldn’t see the buildings of course, the walls were too high.

Then Sabanis, which is another slummy neighbourhood right beside the Bahrain Mall. Here, the inverse relationship between outdoor social life and poverty. Everybody on the street, having a yarn, riding bicycles, going to and fro. Mhmd pointed to a house he said had eight families in, that barely looked as if it could hold one without falling over. I wonder how many of them had ever driven round Rafa’.

And then Mhmd took me to the mall for a burger.

Next week, there’s going to be an election in Egypt. It will be another opportunity for the Great Egyptian Public to voice their freely-held preferences, in a vote that will fairly elect 52,000 local councillors around the country.

The only difficulty will be finding someone to mind your place in the bread-queue whilst you go off to get your thumb inked at the local school.

Or, perhaps, in some other reality.

It has occurred to me that Egypt’s elections ought to be studied for the funny things it does to the space-time continuum. Maybe nobody else has noticed this, but I’m convinced that the whole affair of an Egyptian election takes place in another dimension, although we can actually feel what’s going on over there as if it were in our own dimension. Does Egypt have some kind of privileged access to a wormhole between different bits of the multiverse?

Maybe somebody should ask Zahi Hawass.

I’ll get to the inter-dimensional double-penetration in a moment, but first, here’s how it works:

Election day dawns bright in the Delta. A dusty elementary-school opens for polling forty-five minutes after it was supposed to. No matter. Peace and calm reigns, because the (bad, evil, wicked) Muslim Bothergood candidates were already dragged off to jail by the beard a week ago. No judge arrives to monitor the activities at the polling booth, because he is in the pool at the Gezira Club smoking an imported cigar and speaking French. His day in the dust at the school was handily removed from constitutional necessity – which is why the whole election itself is two years late in the first place.

The police arrive. Six fat men in acrylic shirts dangle their walkie talkies about the place, and then sit on tiny little chairs meant for tiny little undernourished primary school kids, and settle down to drink tea for the rest of the morning. A small, odorous phalanx of central security troops lurks in a green truck around the corner, just like the Greeks in the Trojan horse. Some local election monitors arrive, in freshly printed caps and t-shirts paid for by an endowment for democracy from “abroad” that isn’t allowed to pay for caps and T-shirts. They’re not allowed in. They settle down on tiny chairs to monitor the front door.

No voters turn up.

11am arrives and some voters with beards turn up, including a figure in a niqab, who, we know, is wearing a beard under all that black acrylic. They’re not allowed in.

A busload of nice people from the local biscuit factory arrives, some of them covered in crumbs. They have that joyous look of people who are coming to exercise their democratic right under threat of losing their 19-hour a day, 300 Pounds-a-month job unless they vote for el-Basha. El-Basha that owns the biscuit factory, that is. They go in.

One man with a beard walks past on the way to the bread queue. The police fire tear-gas at him. And then go round to his house and drag his cousin out by the toes and take him off to jail. No-one knows why.

At the end of the day, turnout is 26% of the electoral roll, most of whom died in 1974 anyway. A government press attaché starts working the phones from his lair at the glutinous end of the gene pool, and calls the foreign journalists to announce the excellent turnout of 53.2%, a firm mandate. The election monitors start working the phones to call the journalists to tell them about the tear-gas riot that took place at the polling station, and the pitched battles between Islamic fundamentalists and army that of course happens when civil society is so irreparably weak and women’s rights aren’t respected. A grant proposal for some new caps and t-shirts is drafted. The polling station is closed, and the ballots are taken off to the administrative block in the biscuit factory to be counted. Peace reigns, all is calm, all is stable.

—

So, back to our multi-dimensional mix-up. In a far off finger of the multiverse (let’s call it Universe A), this system works. Under the immutable laws of politics in this dimension, it works because everyone more or less accepts the Great Leader (if only because we are not sure that his predecessor wasn’t Ramses II), and despite the process flaws, things are moving forward.

Everybody sort of swallows the propaganda, because it’s in everyone’s interest that not to have the undeniable chaos that would ensue from a change of government. The present system is strong, and in favour of foreign investment. People can afford new cars. Why worry about the electoral rights of a few fundies and lefty malcontents?

But here, in our own slice of multiverse (let’s call it the Gyptoverse) where people don’t believe the bullshit that issues from the mealy mouths of government press attaches, the present system does not work.

Here, the undeniable chaos that results from a change of government is the government’s fault, and it’s going to happen in an even worse way, when the Great Leader dies.

And we’re not moving forward. The army, just to keep them from plotting a coup, have been pressed into baking bread, in an effort to hide the painful subsidies necessary to feed the people from the investment banks. Some people aren’t getting enough to eat, while pleasant new cafes seem to be opening daily in Heliopolis and Mohandiseen. But still, Egypt gets the elections that ought only to happen in Universe A.

Something is not right.

This has got to be a wormhole, and it will be opening to its fullest extent on April 8th.

Once Aden was the happiest of places. Or so thought the Greeks, who had the luxury of being able to pass by. They called it Eudaemon, supposing it and its environs to be endowed with all that life requires.

In the late classical era, Aden was the main rival to Alexandria as the trading entrepôt between the Mediterranean and India. Diodorus Siculus wrote in the 1st century BC of Eudaemon being visited by “sailors from every port of the world, and especially from Potana, the city which Alexander the Great founded on the Indus river.”

However, by the time of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, which was written in the first century AD, the city seemed to have fallen on hard times – the result of a good sacking by the Romans. The Periplus was the Greek maritime way of knowing how to get around, where to harbour, where to re-supply. Or where not to. The first kind of travel guide, in a way. It records Eudaemon thus:

Eudaemon Arabia was once a fully-fledged city, when vessels from India did not go to Egypt and those of Egypt did not dare sail to places further on, but came only this far.

In the middle, then, of a convenient trader’s hiatus. Reason enough for a city; to be the chandlers, store-men, bookkeepers and postmen for generations of transient seafarers. Fortunes made notching up commissions on goods bound for some other place. In this case, spices moving westwards to Europe, and later, manufactures eastward to Asia. But everyone in some way a passer-by, on their way to somewhere else.

There is plenty of evidence that in later years some prosperity returned to the port of Aden. It is, after all, one of nature’s more spectacular sheltering places: A wide crescent with a narrow mouth, and a ring of muscular volcanic shoulders that protect from wind and interior marauder.

Aden’s occupancy of the mid-point on East – West trade routes meant that by our medieval period, fame returned. In 1421, the Chinese emperor decided to send two treasure ships as tribute. The Chinese geographer Ma Huan described this imperial envoy in his admirably comprehensive Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores.

All of this is, of course, wilfully obscure. Modern day Aden is hardly mindful of any of that, as if to suggest that history unwinds itself in long cycles, which often disappear themselves without trace. The Ottomans, Portuguese and Omani seafarers that dominated the Arabian coastline from the 16th to the 19th century have scarcely left anything behind in Aden to remember them by.

Aden’s extant form is the work of a yet more distant power: The British. The casus belli that allowed them annex the city seems flimsy from a distance, but the motivation certainly was not. Aden was to the British of vital strategic importance, lying roughly equidistant between the Suez Canal, Bombay and Zanzibar, three nodes of the Empire. The prevalent marine technology of the mid 19th century called for ships to be refuelled with coal at suitable intervals. “Steamer Point,” on the south western tip of al-Tawahi, under the looming old volcano, was such a place.

From 1839, Aden became a pivot for not just British but most seafaring life in the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. So much so that in the infamous case of the Patna steamer, the ship which Joseph Conrad’s fictional Lord Jim deserts, it is to Aden that the stricken boat is towed, and from where justice is dispensed.

For a hundred and twenty eight years, the British military and its accompanying civilian bureaucracy occupied Aden. They built the town in that slightly twee style that is supposed to be a home from home, and can be found everywhere from Cape Town to Hong Kong Island. Although, I doubt there has ever been a town in England that looked like Aden.

British servicemen that served in Aden do not, I have found, generally have much positive to say about it. One entry from a veterans’ forum on the subject reads like this:

It was filthy and it stank but I have many humorous memories of it, like the time in 1967 when terrible storms broke and the whole place flooded (well it did need a wash). I saw a skeleton float by me which had supposedly been washed out of its grave with a thick piece of shit sticking out of its mouth just like a cigar. I think the situation was quite desperate .

In the end, the British were shooed away by the local population. Following the “Aden Emergency” of 1963, forces of the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the rival Front for the Liberation of Occupied South Yemen (FLOSY) (People’s Front of Judea, anyone?) became increasingly effective at harassing the British troops. One member of the 3rd Anglian Regiment remembers:

Often we would have a firefight with terrorist gunmen and from this position we could effectively defend the sandbagged tower of Juliet, which had a GPMG [a machine gun] mounted on it. One particular night, late on, there was an almighty explosion. A Blinderside rocket had been fired at the tower.(I still have a piece of fragment that I picked up the following morning). Immediately the section in the building returned fire with a GPMG and SLRs [rifles]. The terrorists continued firing Kalashnikovs for a short while and then disappeared into the night. Luckily nobody was hurt, but what I do remember was the devastation that was caused by one rocket. Another lesson in what it was like to be on the receiving end of Communist hardware!

The British eventually left on 30th November 1967, rather ignominiously. The day has since become a national holiday.

But walking around al-Tawahi and Sira (then known as Crater) today, it seems like nothing whatsoever has happened in the town since the last squaddie left. Well, actually, the most significant thing for the health of the port was the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 by al-Qaeda. One sort of terrorist morphs slowly into another. Inevitably, the money leaves.

And now? From my notebook:

The Great Harvest lying empty off Steamer Point. The shabby-looking Astoria disgorging tourists. Business doesn’t seem to be all that brisk at “Sanaa Towers” cafeteria. The boys behind the grill hoot at the few tourists that have just got off the Astoria. Mostly they are ignored. A long time ago, would Aden have been prim, neat and tidy? Anyhow, the ships don’t stop much now. Counted three calling at Steamer Point in two days, although more lurk at the container port on the other side of the bay. Great Harvest is flying a Yemeni flag, despite the glorious Chinese-sounding name.

Around Crater, it is like a Welsh village that was bombed and never properly rebuilt. A very 19th Century Methodist-looking town hall. In perpetual renovation. The Department of Antiquities must have been some vast colonial hotel or ministry. At the fish market, the boats ride the breakers, and the men look like they’ve just come in from Africa. A young man came in off the rocks with his flippers in hand and the mask on his head, carrying three bright squid purposefully towards the market. I hope he gets a good price for them.

The Astoria has sailed. Aden did not detain its inhabitants long. Gold Mohur Club: A beer in the sand, abayas in the surf. The Great Harvest looks as if it is preparing to move. It sailed.

In the market, at Tawahi, after prayers, all the market boys come out to play. Billiards. Cooking chicken gizzards in chili in the street. Serving them from a wheelbarrow. The air is hot, greasy, salty, exhausting. In the tourist restaurant now, groping for a breath. This is a sultry hole, isn’t it? Where some sort of past remains present, if perhaps only as proof of ineluctable decay.

Decay. The lack of everything. But, the beach. There’s even Russians on the beach. There’s a sense of fun here, at least for leisure life. At least for some of them. But are also, by repute, slums full of recent arrivals, beggars, prostitutes. Last night, at the Sailors’ Club, no prostitutes – proof that there can hardly be any sailors there anymore. Just flirtatious local girls who lifted their abayas so that their boyfriends could take pictures of their arses. Empty, low lit and without any sense of impending entertainment. Some solitary figures chewed Qat by themselves. Wonder what sort of existential wonderings Qat engenders. Maybe the opposite. Maybe it banishes them.

—

At Sanaa Towers cafeteria, I ran into Mr Adams. Mr Adams, dark, weathered, semi-naked. Claimed to have been half Irish. He wouldn’t explain it. There were, of course, scattered around the old corners of that empire, countless orphans, most dead but some still surviving, born to unknown fathers, from an Irish, or Welsh, or English regiment perhaps. Sons of squaddies in an imperial army.

Maybe Mr Adams was one of these. Then, he told me that his father had gone away when he was a child, perhaps to “Somali Land”, perhaps to Europe to fight against the Germans in the second war. He didn’t know for sure. He’d applied to the British Foreign Office, but they didn’t know what had happened to him either.

Anyhow, there’s his ageing progeny, hanging around Prince Charles Pier in Aden in a Hawaiian shirt and a Yemeni loincloth. Makes me think of Kimball O’Hara, Rudyard Kipling’s “little friend of all the world” who set off on a fantastical voyage through British India on the urgings of his long absent Irish regimental father. Unlike Kim, however, Mr Adams Jnr is staying still, watching the ships coming in and going out again.

In 1837 a ship under British colors was wrecked near Aden, and
the crew and passengers grievously maltreated by the Arabs. An
explanation of the outrage being demanded by the Bombay
government, the sultan undertook to make compensation for the
plunder of the vessel, and also agreed to sell his town and port
to the English. Captain Haines of the Indian navy was sent to
complete these arrangements, but the sultan’s son refused to
fulfil the promises that his father had made. A combined naval
and miltary force was thereupon despatched, and the place was
captured and annexed to British India on the 16th of January
1839.

From the very helpful and fittingly outdated britishempire.co.uk

On the off-chance that it might be open, on Sunday I walked down past the Great Mosque, past the beggars and the kids not at school, to the House of Manuscripts. The gates were solidly locked and closed, but after a few mumblings from the security I was admitted through a side door, and ushered into the entrance hall. There, a harassed-looking man surrounded by a group of people was counting a sheaf of 500-Riyal notes. He was obviously paying the staff of Dar al-Makhtoutat, who, it being nearly midday, were anxious to be off home with their gains. A small, even more harassed-looking man who had plainly not received his wage yet, spotted me and asked what I wanted.

At that point I thought that I should have thought up some sort of cover story. Dar al-Makhtoutat is not, after all, a museum that is accustomed to visitors. So I stammered, and said that I had a general interest in the manuscripts and would really like to have a look, please. He frowned. What else would I be doing here, I thought.

He brought me into a room crammed with disused furniture, dusty prayer mats and a sad-looking microfiche machine. He pointed to a large volume lying on a desk, and said “here is the catalogue. You can have a look at that first.” I thought that this might be progress, so I dutifully began to comb through the volume, which had, judging by that musty old-paper smell, been produced at the same time as the building itself in the mid-1970s, and had not been revised since. Or rather, it had: Next to the original index numbers for the manuscripts, new numbers had been entered in biro, several times. Things had obviously been moved around a bit. The subject index was encouraging, including: Qurans, Tafsir, Hadith, Linguistics, Political Science, Mathematics, Medicine and Literature, all from the original find in 1972.

Great. “So, can I have a look at the real thing?” I asked.
“The manuscripts?,” said the little man, worried.
“Yes, the manuscripts.”
“Um, no. Sorry. You need a letter. Write to the director.”

I went back out to find the director, and instead I found his deputy, the man still handing out the notes. Each employee was getting about 4000 Riyals – or $20. I don’t know if that was for the week or for the month. The deputy of the deputy now asked what I wanted. “I’d like to write a letter to the director, to ask to see the manuscripts,” I said. “Do you have a piece of paper?” he replied. Wasn’t expecting that.

What happened was that I wrote my own letter of introduction and passed it to the director’s deputy, who paused from the cash counting to write a long “approval” on the bottom, before going back to the more urgent task. Then an orderly asked me which manuscript I wanted to see. Again, I hadn’t thought of that. “One of the oldest Qurans please, I said, innocently.” That didn’t go down well. “He can’t see those!” shouted someone in the group still surrounding the deputy. Nope, can’t see the Qurans, another one confirmed. OK, then. I picked a number at random from the tafsir section of the catalogue.

Another orderly then told me to sit, and disappeared off behind a long sliding door. He came back a minute later with a thick, cloth-bound volume which he dumped on the desk in front of me, amongst the people waiting to be paid and the deputy.

The book turned out to be a volume of tafsir, which could have been from any time from the middle ages to the 19th century. It was hand-written, in a curious script on thick paper. The paragraphs were highly irregular, sometimes spiralling down the left side of the page and leaving yellow spaces in the middle. To me it was mostly illegible, but it was evident that it was a tafsir, but more than that, I could not decipher. No one else there knew what it was either. Another staff member introduced himself as being in the restoration department. He didn’t know what it was. Come back tomorrow. With a letter.

A bumbling amateur I am, but these chaps were hardly more qualified. In the seeming absence of qualified academics, who may or may not have an agenda, things are going quietly to seed at Dar al-Makhtoutat. On the way home I had visions of shelves upon shelves of valuable texts lying jumbled in a back room of the library, waiting to be dumped in front of any hopeful visitor.

By this point, I have become dimly aware of the boundaries of a debate about the origins of the Quran and what that might mean for modern Muslims. That debate will be the subject of another entry in the diary, but whatever it may be, it isn’t happening here, in the house of manuscripts.

When you are fourteen, you get the Jambia – a fearsome-looking weapon. There was a time when it wasn’t safe to go out without one. Things aren’t so bad now. But when your cousin or brother gets married, you unsheath the blade. And then you dance with it.

Orientalists have a lot to answer for. They theorised, justified and organised the projection of European power in the Middle East for centuries, starting with Napoleon. They’re not finished yet–although these days, they are more apologetic about the power bit.

One of the side effects of the business of Orientalism in the 19th and 20th centuries was the transportation of large amounts of art and artefacts back to Europe, to tantalise world-hungry and wistful westerners for generations to come.

I have been one of those wistful types. The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin contains Europe’s finest private collection of Quranic manuscripts (which may even rival that of the Louvre). It was the first place that I encountered the marvel of Islam’s early religious art. An example contained there, by 11th Century Baghdad scribe Ibn al-Bawwab, was a treasure. Before I learned to read Arabic, as an undergraduate I remember pressing my nose against the display cases wondering what all those carefully inscribed lines and marks actually meant.

Consequently, from a personal point of view, the discovery this week that Sanaa holds an astonishingly large collection of early Quranic manuscripts was a delight. However, from the point of view of the Yemeni government, muslim believers, and just about everyone else, this fact is something of a headache.

In 1972, around 40,000 papyrus and vellum codices were discovered hidden in a ceiling of the Great Mosque in Sanaa’s old city, where they had been mouldering for God knows how long. Some of the manuscripts turned out to be, after carbon dating, from the 7th and 8th centuries AD–i.e. from the first years of Islam.

To date, apparently 15,000 of these manuscripts have been cleaned and flattened, and presented. They are housed in the Dar al-Makhtoutat in Sanaa, just beside the Great Mosque–a place which so far I’ve had no luck getting into.

Such a trove ought to be a centrepiece of world scholarship into the history of Islam, into the history of religious texts, into the history of the Arabian Peninsula. How did these texts come to be here? Whose hand wrote them? What part do they play in the history of the Quran? What can they tell us about the first years of the Islamic Caliphate? A new field of debate and inquiry ought to have opened up in the thirty-odd years since their discovery. But it hasn’t.

Why not? The arrival of the Orientalists, for a start. Following the 1972 find, the Yemen government invited a team of scholars, amongst them Gerd. R. Puin, from Saarland University in Germany, to preserve and arrange the texts. As mentioned, that has to an extent been done. But since then, something has prevented full dissemination of the information gleaned from that process. It still isn’t really clear to me what, but I have a feeling that it’s got something to do with Mr Puin himself, and the fact that the Sanaa texts appear to contain discrepancies between what is written in them and what is now accepted as the standard text of the Quran. Mr Puin seems to have an agenda in this respect:

“So many Muslims have this belief that everything between the two covers of the Qur’an is Allah’s unaltered word. They like to quote the textual work that shows that the Bible has a history and did not fall straight out of the sky, but until now the Qur’an has been out of this discussion. The only way to break through this wall is to prove that the Qur’an has a history too. The Sana’a fragments will help us accomplish this.”

This quote is attributed to him in an Atlantic Monthly article from 1999. Faced with this sort of attitude, it is no wonder that, as has been reported, the Yemeni Government has frozen up scholarly access to the texts. If the quotes are accurate, to me, it seems ridiculous that the “Ha ha, your religion isn’t true” line qualifies as scholarship.

Are the textual discrepancies really the most important thing about the Sanaa Manuscripts? Is it necessary to “prove” objectively that a text has a history so that one can exercise moral authority over people that believe it ‘fell from the sky’? People believe all sorts of crazy things, but they will continue to believe them whether or not a German orientalist has evidence to the contrary.

Accordingly, there has and will be significant resistance to work on Quranic manuscripts that had this sort of objective in mind. The Yemeni authorities will hardly want to draw criticism for allowing infidels to meddle with the holy book: The argument that the Quran is created in time and has a history has been landing scholars in political hot water from the Mu’tazilites to Nasr Abu Zayd.

I hear reports that other scholarly work on these treasures is ongoing, but of what nature, I do not know. Once I manage to get into the Dar al-Makhtoutat, I might have a better idea about what is going on in this field. For now, I still have my nose pressed up against the glass.

Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, and often Bobby Sands, follow me wherever I go. Despite having left Ireland years ago, I have not been able to leave the giants of the Irish Republican movement behind. This is because, somehow, they have made it into the liberation lore of the Middle East’s taxi drivers.

Over the past week here in Sanaa, I have been repeatedly congratulated on my kinship with these gentlemen. The frequency of this event seems to increase the further away I get. This is a little uncomfortable. In the bit of Ireland where I grew up, Adams and McGuinness were not heroes. They were murderers.

In Sanaa, however, they have joined the great pantheon in the sky where successful anti-imperialists go when their work is done.

The conversations go a little like this:

Taxi-Driver: So, where are you from.
Me: Ireland.
TD: Oh, really? Which part – North or South.
M: North.
TD: Fantastic! Then we are brothers. Down with the Brits. [or a similar comment.]

This has happened four times in seven days. Now, I like the easy affinity with Sanaa’s cabbies that this identification seems to give. Instant camaraderie: Just add enemies.

The other day, one Qat-chewing, Jambia-wielding chap, as he was weaving through the late-afternoon traffic, announced apropos of this topic that Gerry Adams was one of his personal heroes.

So, as the streets clogged up and progress slowed, I decided to try and add a little nuance to his view of that old, distant conflict. “Adams was a terrorist, who killed civilians”, I declared, in a not very nuanced way. “And there are two communities in Northern Ireland, not just the Irish and an occupying army.”

He chewed his Qat for a bit. “Sure,” he replied, “but in a civil war, everyone is a fighter. It was only when the IRA went to London [conducting a terror campaign on the “mainland” from the 1970s to the 1990s] that they were in the wrong. The campaign in Ireland itself was legitimate.”

His knowledge of the historical detail was impressive – but the Yemenis do have an interest in these things. In 1967, before the British army had even entered Northern Ireland, they were being kicked out of South Yemen.

Conversely, during the 1994 Yemen Civil War, the British Government gave political support to the ‘secessionist’ South that it had previously occupied. Yemen has definitely seen its own version of perfidious Albion.

But my driver’s finely calibrated moral measures made me wonder.

It made me wonder about how in liberation lore the victims of violence get filtered out in the a process of dehumanisation similar to that that led to the imperialist impulse in the first place.

It made me wonder about how killing some people is a good thing while killing other people is a crime against humanity.

My driver expressed no regret when I mentioned the murder of eight Israeli students at a seminary liniked to the religous settler movement, in Jerusalem on the same day. He changed the subject to the simultaneous horror happening in Gaza. I hardly blame him.

I shouldn’t be so naïve.

This is how it works. Pick a side.

But I hate picking sides. So maybe I will adjust my nationality to something less heroic in the minds of Sanaa’s cab drivers.

Or maybe I should just keep quiet, particularly when they ask my name. I found out today that “Jifri” is a Yemeni slang-word for a short-stocked Kalashnikov.

It tastes great, sits in the stomach like a pound of ballast and keeps you happy all afternoon. The humble fasoul bean is well travelled – turning up in hearty, revered dishes from here to Italy. I’d love to find out in which direction the recipe traded, and when. In the meantime, old Sanaa has a number of great spots where you can pick up a plate, with bread and a scalding, sweet tea for next to nothing. These guys were installed in a cave-like eatery just east of Bab al-Yaman, and were preparing to feed the five thousand judging by the vast amount of beans they were boiling up. This young man’s right arm was all a-blur with his garlic and tomato grinding efforts. The chap wielding the frying pan wouldn’t have been out of place in Dante. The end result though was hot, filling, and cost 50 cents.