January 2008
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Saudi Arabia's ancient port may not have the heady attractions that tourists expect, but its wild beauty has been in tact for a thousand years
I am writing this on my knee, uncomfortably, as our air-conditioned four-by-four glides down one of Jeddah’s boulevards. The shops are opening up for the night: the kind of shops I assumed I’d left behind in London’s King’s Road or Paris’s Boulevard St Germain. Just occasionally, there is a faint local flavour, a charming approximation of English: ‘Before hungry gets you,’ says a sign outside a restaurant. But that’s all.
We swing from lane to lane alarmingly. Beside us, in a police car, the driver is shouting into one phone while he texts on another, his arm locked through the steering wheel.
From our dashboard comes a pinging noise, warning the driver to put on his seat belt. I’ve got mine on, though this clearly offends him. We haven’t spoken for some time.
This is Saudi suburbia, very different from the rest of the country, where the wild beauty hasn’t changed in a thousand years. Yet even here you can find traces of a history, a soul, which hasn’t yet been blotted out.
Jeddah is an ancient port, and its old city, small and crowded, is still recognisably the place where Captain Richard Burton landed in the 1850s, disguised as an Indian pilgrim, keen to penetrate the mystery of the Holy Cities. The narrow streets reek of the pungent spices, which the shopkeepers are selling. Women’s dresses, scarlet and green and chrome yellow, hang from rails, showing every passer-by what will never be seen again once they are bought.
You can buy pieces of wax-like aromatic gum, a kind of frankincense, or betel nut, or half a dozen other things I couldn’t even describe, let alone name. We have left Mothercare, Timberland and the other boulevard shops a long way behind.
The houses of the old city are in a pretty bad state. No one seems to care much about them, but that only adds to their attraction. They lean towards each other, high above the alleyways, their windows covered by intricate woodwork casements that enable the people inside to see who is passing below. There isn’t a straight wall in the place, and at night, when the crowds are out and the lights burn brightly in the shops, the darkness of the side streets seems magical indeed.
I wander around, taking it all in. Suddenly a quiet voice beside me says, in flawless English, ‘Excuse me, sir, but may I ask if you are from Britain?’ He is in his late fifties, I suppose, balding, a little stooped, with searching eyes. If it weren’t for his teeth, broken and stained, he would have looked rather distinguished. He carries a curious walking stick with a round head, and his white robe isn’t very clean.
He is, of course, a beggar, and his urgent, quiet demand is for money. Yet he phrases it in a way I can’t resist. ‘You see, I am a little, shall I say, embarrassed for cash at present, and any small gift you felt prepared to make...’ It was, I think, the best-expressed pitch I’ve ever come across. I fumbled in my pocket and gave him a rather large-denomination note. Then we walked on, side by side, avoiding the carefully laid-out displays of shoes and mobile phones and vegetables on the ground. Skinny cats darted into the shadows beside us. I’ll call him Abdul Aziz, though that isn’t his name and since he was educated at a well-known British public school in the 1960s there must be a good many people around who remember him. It’s a sad story: his father, not a wealthy man, saved everything he had to send Abdul Aziz to England, where he spent five years studying for his A levels. But that neither equipped him for life in England nor back in Jeddah, and drugs probably came into the story somewhere. ‘My father died brokenhearted,’ Abdul Aziz said with a sigh, looking up at the dark sky above the glaring brilliance of the street. ‘And I – well, you can see what I have become.’
Yet I could also see that he was an excellent guide to the street life of Jeddah. ‘Not very many people in this part of the city are Saudis, you know. I am something of an exception. Over there, for instance, that group of four or five are from Central Asia, from Uzbekistan, possibly. This woman here is from, I should say, West Africa. And many of the others around us are from Yemen or Sudan. Jeddah has always been a melting pot, you know. I myself may not be entirely an Arab. Who knows?’
Looking at the crowds now, I could see he was right: large men with pockmarked faces and light skins pushed their way through groups who could only have come from Somalia or northern Kenya. Others were Asiatic, whose forefathers may have come from the Far East. Jeddah, the great port for the hajj, would take in the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims year-on-year for a millennium and a half, and a few would always stay on and intermarry and become true Jeddans, as native to the place as Abdul Aziz with his unlikely public-school accent.
‘I love this city,’ he confided. ‘It has everything I could ever wish for. But it has changed so much. When I was a child running around these streets, people would say, “What is Abdullah’s son doing here?” And they would grab me by the ear and take me home. Now scarcely one in a hundred knows who I am, or what has happened to me.’
And what about the vast new city, with its British and French and American shops? ‘My dear chap, I never go there. This is the real Jeddah. The rest is just a wasteland, ugly and built of concrete. I belong here.’
I understood the feeling, and reached for another banknote. It was worth it.
John Simpson is the BBC’s world affairs editor and can be seen around the globe on the BBC World news channel. BBC World is available in 200 countries and territories worldwide and on selected flights. John Simpson’s Not Quite World’s End: A Traveller’s Tales (£20, Macmillan) is out now.
