Loading ...Moving Across Worlds: From a Western World to an Arab World
By John Mason/Contributing Writer
As anthropologist, I yearned to go to the Arab World, and more specifically, to the Sahara Desert in Libya. There, I lived with an Arab-Berber community in the eastern part of the Libyan Desert. It was an oasis called Awjila (Augila) and it had been around for millennia—at least back to the time of the Greek historian, Herodotus, who wrote about it around 450 BC! It is even much older than that.
Photo 1: aerial view of Awjila (Augila) Oasis
So, my wife Nancy and I were off to the Libyan Desert, comprising most of modern-day Libya. In 1968, this country was a Kingdom. En route, Nancy and I passed through Rome, almost as if this were a chance for a brief second honeymoon, only a year after we’d been married. In this last moment in a more or less familiar land, we could live it up before committing to life in a traditional, conservative Arab society. Accordingly, we decided to brave the streets of Rome on a motor scooter. Not knowing those streets, much less the reputation of Italian drivers, we romped off on our little Vespa.
Photo 2: scene of Rome
A portent of the next stage of our life in Libya loomed before us, as we careened up and down Roman streets on our scooter. We searched out sacred sites and good restaurants. It was as if in transiting to a more austere lifestyle, we needed one last fling. Though Rome was considered by some the ‘rock on which the Christian Church had been built,’ for us it seemed closer to Bacchanalia. Relatively speaking, we were headed from there straight to Austerity.
As we approached a major traffic circle in downtown Rome on our little scooter, we were directed by a traffic policeman in a dazzling white uniform, standing on his little platform way off in mid-circle. He blew his whistle and gestured for us to move, but I must have misread his signal. As we weaved in and out of a whirlwind of traffic that only Italians can understand, the policeman looked straight at us, his face contorted in a mock state of fear. He then raised his arms into the air, as if to say “mama mia” as we passed in front of him. Our last view of him as we sped out of the circle was of him making the unmistakable sign of the cross as if wishing us “good luck, you crazies.”
Photo 3: Traffic Policeman
We laughed nervously, thinking perhaps we’d come too close for comfort to a crash. In a more pensive moment, the policeman’s sign of the cross seemed significant in a wholly different way: we were leaving the spiritual capital of Christendom heading for a place where Islam prevailed and in which we would be hard put even to find a church, much less a policeman making the sign of the cross.
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Adapted from John Mason’s LEFT-HANDED IN AN ISLAMIC WORLD: An Anthropologist’s Journey into the Middle East, New Academia Publishing, 2017.
