‘A definition is the enclosing of a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.’
Samuel Butler, Notebooks
THE RAIN BEAT DOWN. Horns rasped against the door: a sheep trying to get in. I didn’t blame it – spring was late in the Isle of Harris and it was cosy inside, all peat smoke and roll-ups. An easterly gale was whistling across the Sound from Skye and flinging sackfuls of hail at the tin roof of the croft house. The noise was deafening.
You have to be somewhere quiet like Harris in the early stages of learning Arabic, somewhere you can walk around unheard, muttering strange, strangulated syllables, limbering up minute and never-used muscles of tongue and glottis. I got up to make tea. ‘Hhha’!’ I said to the matches when I found them; ‘Ghghgha’!’ when they refused to light. ‘ ˛ ’ I mouthed to the hooded crow on the fence outside the window; that innocent-looking sign represented the trickiest letter of all, ‘a guttural stop pronounced with constriction of the larynx’, my grammar said. The hoodie croaked back and flapped off to peck out lambs’ eyes.
The fire let out a rich belch of smoke. I threw on another sod of peat and drew up a chair. Cowan’s Modern Literary Arabic lay open at ‘The Dual’ (not content with mere singulars and plurals, Arabic also has a form for pairs): ‘The two beautiful queens’, it said, ‘are ignorant.’ The odds against ever uttering the sentence were high: grammars, like theatre, call for a suspension of disbelief. Under Cowan was an Arabic reader produced for British officers in the Palestine Mandate. At the bottom of the pile, as yet untouched, was a dictionary. I reached for it and looked at the title page. The dictionary had been compiled for the use of students and published Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam by the Catholic Press, Beirut, in 1915. As I turned its foxed pages, I broke through the wall of words into a wilderness of idea. It was another world, a surreal lexical landscape whose inhabitants lived in a state of relentless metamorphosis.
Over there was a zabab, ‘a messenger’ or possibly ‘a huge deaf rat’, while in the distance grazed a na’amah, ‘an ostrich’, although it might have been ‘a signpost’, ‘a pavilion on a mountain’ or even ‘a membrane of the brain’. Nearer to hand someone was maljan, ‘sucking his she-camels out of avarice’; he’d be in for a shock if he had istanwaq them, ‘mistaken male camels for she-camels’. He could just be suffering from sada, ‘thirst’, also ‘a voice’, ‘an echo’, ‘a corpse’, ‘a brain’ or ‘an owl’. Maybe his well was makul, ‘holding little water and much slime’. He was in a bad mood so I passed on quickly, worried that he might tarqa me, ‘strike me upon the clavicle’.
In Dictionary Land you could come across a malit, ‘a featherless arrow’ or ‘a hairless abortive foetus’. That, at least, showed a clear semantic link. So did firash, ‘a mat/wife’, and siffarah, ‘an anus/whistle/fife’. But other entries defied rational explanation, seeming no more than the word-associations of a hopeless head-case: you could take your qutrub, your ‘puppy/demon/restless insect/melancholia’, for a walk; qarurah could be ‘the apple of one’s eye’, also ‘a urinal’. With a single verb, nakha’, you could both ‘slay someone’ and ‘bear them sincere friendship’; with another, istawsham, you could ‘look for a tattooist’; and if you were a calligrapher, you could be adept at yayyaya, ‘forming a beautiful letter ya’ – perhaps thus: 
On the culinary side, you might be akra’, ‘fond of trotters’ or ‘thin in the shank’, while with the verb karrash you could ‘contract your face’ or ‘prepare a haggis’; the latter could be accompanied by a helping of wahisah, ‘a dish made of locusts and grease’, and washed down by adasiyah, an ‘aromatized soup of lentils’ or ‘bat-dung used as a medicine’. Alkhan doubled for ‘a rotten walnut’ and ‘a stinking uncircumcised person’. The sounds of Dictionary Land included inqad, ‘the squeaking of eagles/the noise of fingers being cracked/the smacking of lips to call goats’ or even ‘the noise made by truffles being extracted’. The truffles might be of a species called faswat al-dab’, also the name for a kind of poppy and, rendered literally, ‘the noiseless flatulence of a male hyena’.
Somebody once said that every Arabic word means itself, its opposite or a camel.* But to me the world of the qamus, the dictionary (or ‘ocean’), was even more bizarre. To do it justice called for the descriptive faculties of the pre-Islamic poet Ta’abbata Sharra, whose name means He Who Carried An Evil Under His Armpit. And this dictionary was a shadow of Lane’s, which in ten folio volumes over a period of thirty-four years only got as far as the letter qaf. Lane’s was based on works like The Bridal Tiara of al-Zabidi, the great Yemeni-educated lexicographer and a contemporary of Dr Johnson. As a small boy I used to stare for hours at the fanciful oriental watercolours on my grandmother’s walls; dreamed recurringly of flying over desert encampments in a telephone box; was shown, by my father, a strange, misshapen red globule which he produced from his bureau and said was the blood of an Arabian dragon. Now, out of these pages, the exotic beckoned once more, and I was hooked.
The door opened. I turned round, expecting to see a black woolly face, or a Person from Porlock; but it was Roddy, the person from next door. He had been out gathering his flock and was soaked. A bottle stuck out of his poacher’s pocket.
‘Och, you’ve let the fire burn out.’ He looked briefly at the dictionary, sighed and snapped it shut. ‘Let’s have a drop of the Grouse.’
The vision was not shattered – just temporarily blurred. Time and again in the years that followed, some verbal curiosity or weirdness of phrase would sidetrack me out of the corridors of the Oxford Oriental Institute and back into Dictionary Land.
‘I didn’t get the drift of lines 66–7. Could you, er …?’
‘ “Verily I have seen upon your mandibles the belly- and tail-fat of a lizard./ Your words reveal the buttocks of your meanings.” ’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘ “Your words reveal the buttocks of your meanings.” ’
‘Oh.’
They taught us abstruse and arcane mysteries, how to compound the base elements of syntax into glittering and highly wrought prose. We were apprentices in a linguistic alchemy. And, like alchemy, Arabic seemed to be half science and two-thirds magic. The Arabs themselves are spellbound by their language. Look at the effect on them of the Qur’an: the Word – divinely beautiful, terrifying, tear-inducing, spine-tingling, mesmerizing, inimitable – was sufficient in itself. It did not need to become flesh. But Qur’anic Arabic is only one manifestation of the language. You can be preacher, poet, raconteur and fishwife in a single sentence. You can, with the Arabic of official reports, say next to nothing in a great many words and with enormous elegance. You can compose a work of literature on the two lateral extremities of the wrist-bone. You can even be cured of certain ailments by procuring a magic chit, infusing the ink out of it, and drinking the water: word-power at its most literal. They taught us all this, but they didn’t teach us how to speak it. After two years of Arabic I couldn’t even have asked the way to the lavatory.
My tutor spun round from his computer screen. ‘Yemen? Why do you want to go there?’
It must have been a shock. Usually only a truly major disaster, a wrong case-ending or a misplaced definite article, would unstick him from his corpus of Andalusian erotic verse.
‘I … I met a Yemeni who said Yemeni Arabic was the closest dialect to Classical.’
He smiled a painfully long smile like the rictus on a ventriloquist’s dummy. ‘They all say that, you stupid boy. Yemen.’ His mouth puckered around the word as if it were some disagreeably bitter fruit. Lemon. ‘Why don’t you go somewhere respectable … Cairo, Amman, Tunis?’
Cairo was out, a bedlam of smog, smugness and touts where the last Wonder of the World was disintegrating under acid rain and tourists’ feet. Amman, I had been told, was the most boring city in the Arab world. Tunis was, well, complexée.
In fact I’d lied. I’d never knowingly set eyes on a real live Yemeni. But I felt that my tutor would find the true reason for my demanding a sabbatical in Yemen even less palatable. Some years before, the Museum of Mankind in London had recreated a corner of the market of San’a, the Yemeni capital, as part of Britain’s World of Islam Festival. Yards from Piccadilly was a secret, labyrinthine microcosm of the suq. Even its sounds and smells were reproduced. The swiftness of transposition was unreal, although little more so than the ten-hour flight from London to San’a. The exhibition wasn’t Yemen, but over the years it became a Yemen of the imagination which I peopled with faces seen in books: faces which were proud but not arrogant, grave but not severe, delicate but not weak, their eyes intensified by kohl and calligraphic eyebrows.
My reading revealed that others, too, had been bewitched by Yemen. ‘Never’, wrote one medieval visitor, ‘have I seen glances more penetrating than those of the Yemenis. When they look at you, they dive into you …’ Many references, however, were hardly complimentary. Yemen was seen as at best a backwater, more usually as backward. For example, a Yemeni who had been extolling his country at court in eighth-century Baghdad was attacked thus: ‘What are you Yemenis? I’ll tell you. You’re nothing but tanners of hides, weavers of striped shirting, trainers of monkeys and riders of nags. You were drowned by a rat and ruled by a woman, and people had never even heard of Yemen until a hoopoe told them about it!’* I was not put off. My first glimpse of Yemen had been at far too impressionable an age.
Besides, Yemen – the Yemen I was seeing at second hand – had something of Dictionary Land about it: as well as the talking hoopoes and dambusting rodents, men chewed leaves and camels lived on fish; they (the men) wore pinstriped lounge-suit jackets on top, skirts below, and wicked curved daggers in the middle; the cities seemed to have been baked, not built, of iced gingerbread; Yemen was part of Arabia but the landscape looked like … well, nowhere else on Earth, and definitely not Arabia.
In the end my tutor relented, even gave me his blessing – though he warned me not to be away too long. So I set out to explore Dictionary Land on the ground; and perhaps, eventually, to understand the people who lived in it.
I’ve been there ever since.
