Expats: Travels in Arabia from Tripoli to Tehran

By Christopher Dickey

Book Overview

Expats is Christopher Dickey's fascinating account of the new Arabia, and of the expatriates who have helped create it. The fabled Arab world - whose vast deserts, overwhelming solitude, and stark, noble civilizations once beguiled explorers like T. E. Lawrence and Wilfred Thesiger - is nowhere to be found today. The deserts remain, of course, but souks give way to shopping malls, fortresses crumble in the shadows of glittering hotels, and oases are replaced by ice-skating rinks. In Dubai an earthly paradise has been wrested from the sands: the Emirates Golf Club. Foreigners have moved in on Arabia's oil wealth like pilgrims to a shrine, bringing their own hopes and dreams, mingling them with those of the Arabs. The stories of the expatriates' lives, of the peculiar niches they inhabit, and of the meteoric ascendancy of a hybrid society are the stuff of Expats "a book that penetrates what Lawrence called "the glamour of strangeness," and that updates all our notions of the Middle East.

The symbiosis of the West and Arabia is eccentric, to say the least. Texans extract oil from the Libyan desert for Muammar Qaddafi and brew "flash" to numb their brains back at the company compound. The Sultan of Oman has retained a firm run by an ex-CIA agent to manage the affairs of several government agencies. Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt's Nobel Laureate, lives under threat of death from Islamic fundamentalists for writing like a Westerner - that is, books with conscience, truth, and sex. Dubai boasts Tex-Mex food at Pancho Villa's, a bar where it is rumored that one evening a shaken boat crew, having just been strafed by Iranian speedboats, found themselves seated next to their attackers. Video clubs vie with the imams for the attention of the populace, and life, such as it is, goes on.

And so does the war in the Gulf. While Iraq launches Exocets and Iran lays mines, a Yorkshireman who once fished the North Atlantic now operates supply boats out of Sharjah. Missile explosions rattle windows in Kuwait but rarely interrupt the flow of commerce. All around the Gulf the war is spectrally present, at times swift and fatal, but overall not bad for business'drydock work, weapons trafficking, and always the lucrative trade of shuttling oil through the Strait of Hormuz to the industrial world. One retired British military man makes his living defusing rockets lodged in the sides of tankers. And the U.S. Navy, protecting "the free world's oil supply," blows a commercial airliner from the skies. In the aftermath, the Iranians Dickey meets in the streets of Teheran, numbed by fighting, reminisce fondly about the expatriates they knew in the days of the Shah.

The new Arabia bears only a passing similarity to its desert ancestry. As Thesiger says, "It's the curse of this bloody oil, you see." But in this land awash with Madonna videos and air-conditioned BMWs, the Arabs have started searching again for their past. Camel races followed from four-wheel cars, and impromptu falcon hunts arranged by cellular phone keep them in touch with their traditions. Theirs is a world where the wildest dreams - of Arab and expat - have come together and come true.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0871134632
• ISBN13: 9780871134639
• Release Date: February 1994
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Poignant and Enlightened

Christopher Dickey has written an impressive book on the lives of the non-Arab expatriates living throughout the Middle East. Mr. Dickey provides a very lucid account of the experiences of several westerners living (or passing through) different countries of the middle east, in the process shedding light both on the indigenous cultures as well as the one they create for themselves once there.The only reservation I have about the book (and it does not take away from its overall merits) is that Mr. Dickey's singular window into the lives of non-Arab expats is not matched by any similar insights into the lives of Arab expatriates. This glosses over the rainbow of cultures which exist in most of the Gulf countries, and often impede many westerners from being able to appreciate the diversity that awaits them.Overall, an easy, engrossing read... with wonderful anecdotes and a singular view into a group of people which most people are not even aware exist.

Sensitive look at who's in Arabia besides Arabs

This is a series of essays, some previously published in magazines like Vanity Fair, by Newsweek journalist Dickey.The author gracefully paints both romance and reality; certainly the west's long-running orientalist fantasies still exist in the heart of anyone who has wanted to visit that part of the world. Dickey simply acknowledges these and strives to give insightful reports of the volatile politics and diverse societies (mostly those of foreigners) in the vast region covered. There is a guileless sense of truth on these pages that stays with the reader.There are very good chapters about Arabs themselves: a censured writer in Cairo, e.g., Dickey's record of stunned Iranians voicing their dismay in reaction to a particularly heinous American military blunder.Dickey offers occasional history lessons (the chapter on Oman's leadership), humor (the witty chapter about British expats in Dubai), and poignant human interest (many chapters touch upon the innocent lives scarred or ended by various military acts).I picked this up thinking I was getting a light book about western expats, but that is a very small part of Dickey's focus. He writes of Filipino tanker crews facing mortal danger with a smile and a shrug, a Russian businessmen in a bad suit and the UN's splendidly stylish Turkish PR man, a self-important French Canadian aid worker. Dickey's contacts are many and vivid. The book is resolutely but subtly anti-war. It will be impossible for a reader to generalize about Arabs after reading Dickey's book. A great book to give to anyone going to an Arab country, either as expat or visitor.