A huge bowl of rice, beans and mutton was set in the middle of each group of six guests. A spoon was used for the rice and beans but the mutton was picked up with the fingers. When each of us had eaten enough, he laid down his spoon and the wash bowl was passed around again. This was followed by Pepsi Cola, amid loud and justified praise of the excellent, highly seasoned food. The closing ritual of the three cups of tea was accompanied by lively conversation, touching on- among other topics- the surface of the moon, the floods near Ghat, a camel that had disappeared near Awainat Wanin, the joy of visiting Mecca…I think often of that meal under the stars…We were nearing the essential brotherhood that a man’s heart seeks all his life long. Suddenly, while talking of other things, without seeking it at all, we had found it almost involuntarily, as did the birds of Attar.
-Touring Libya, The Southern Provinces, Philip Ward
I was in the town of Germa at the edge of the Ubari Sand Sea to write about the Garamantians, a Berber tribe in Roman times settled hundreds of miles from the Mediterranean coast who harried Tripolitania for over two hundred years. Ward was there in the 1960s, I was there in the early 2000s, and for both of us we felt to be the only outsiders. In Ward’s time they were not yet recklessly draining the Fezzan’s deep aquifer through the Great Man-Made River, and by just a few days I had missed meeting the British archaeological team led by David Mattingly. They had packed up and left for the season.
I remember eating spaghetti and tinned tuna cooked up by the driver and guide who had been assigned to me in Tripoli. Ward dined far better than that and apparently had more enlightened post-prandial conversation, about the moon, a flood, a lost camel, and Mecca, which brought to his mind Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th Century poem The Conference of the Birds. To me, those topics seemed almost Biblical, or Quranic as the case may be. In our case, my mates and I talked about girls- Ukrainian girls, Libyan girls, and American girls. More Playboy reader’s advice than Persian sufi poetry.
And unlike the birds of Attar, we had not had to cross the Valley of Annihilation or the Valley of Detachment in order to find enlightenment. Just get past the Mizda Hospital’s Ukrainian nursing station- They were so, so, so hot, my companions assured me. Worth the detour, in Michelin’s words. Yalla Binaa- “God be with us”- in theirs.