A Muslim nation that offers an object lesson in tolerance

Warmth. That’s what I remember most from the week we spent in Tunisia the week before last.

Not just the physical kind, though there was that too: in the mid-twenties Celsius. It’s the perfect level, comfortably warm without being unbearably hot.

But the main thing was the human warmth. An awareness that others too had rights. A willingness to treat them as you’d want to be treated yourself.

The Tunis Souk.
Lively, bustling, diverse. Fun

There was an expectation that we would bargain over any price, so starting offers were always high. Once an agreement had been reached, however, that was the price. Neither side would change it. And what was to be delivered, would be delivered. Cars we ordered turned up on time (actually, ahead of time we generally found), and the price on a bill presented for payment was the price agreed.

But even that reassuring honesty wasn’t what mattered.

No, what really mattered was the tolerance, the willingness to live and let live. Tunisia is undoubtedly a Muslim country, and most restaurants and cafes we visited served no alcohol. However, it isn’t an Islamic nation, so there were plenty that did sell alcohol, and they served it to Tunisians as well as tourists.

What I found interesting is that those places had their conventions. I’ve cut down recently on the amount I drink (not just doctor’s orders, though I’ve had those too – well, actually, nurse’s orders: I’ve never yet managed to see a doctor at the Practice where I’m registered, instead always being palmed off on a nurse but, hey, they’ve been great so why should I complain?)

One evening I decided to stick to water with the dinner. After the meal, the restaurant offered us a liqueur on the house – but the waiter brought four to the five of us. Clearly the restaurant was used to mixed groups of guests, some of whom were drinking and others not, and tactfully offered no drink to those who weren’t.

I was impressed by the delicacy of the gesture.

Later on, the manager did still better, having one of the staff drive us back to our hotel through a torrential downpour. I’ve never known a restaurant anywhere else offer that kind of service.

As it happens, it was a bit like the courtesy drinks. There was only space for four, so I walked. I’m not sure whether that was related to not drinking alcohol – the one who was drinking only water might as well be the one who got wet, perhaps? 

My overall impression of the country was one of charm, generosity and above all a willingness to admit that there are many ways to live a life, and no-one needs to tell others what’s wrong with theirs.

Sadly, there are elections later this year, and many fear that the Islamists will make gains. I know the difference between Muslims and Islamists, and I’d much rather see the former continuing to live as they do than the latter taking their place. Insha’Allah, the present happy arrangement may continue.

If it does, well, Tunisia will have a lesson or two to teach other countries, not least the democracies of the West. A lesson in basic liberalism. And its most important component: tolerance.

Tunisia: land of warmth. With an afterthought about Britain's cold shoulder

As the time approaches for us to leave Tunisia, I’ve been thinking about all the aspects that have struck me about this smiling country, before I head back towards my own, with the rather sterner face it seems to want to cultivate these days.

What shall I miss about Tunisia?

First of all, warmth of early summer, to be replaced by the cold and grey that has returned in Britain. And which, as we shall see, rather reflects the attitudes of these two nations.

Because I shall also miss the easy, warm-hearted people we met everywhere we went in this short break. All those people who did what they could to help us when we needed it, and always ended by wishing us welcome to their country or, quite simply, welcome.
I shall miss the honesty we encountered. People who told us they would meet us at 8:00 were there at 8:00 or a little before. If we agreed a price of 120 dinars, then the charge they made was 120 dinars. It made life feel safe and easy.

I’ll also miss the food. A lot of fish, in a country only 95 miles across, and in which I don’t think we ever got more than about 30 miles from the sea, but varied, interesting and delicious. And accompanied by harissa. 

Harissa: wonderful with every meal

You don’t know harissa? It’s the wonderful, deep red hot sauce that sets your tongue a-tingling, followed shortly afterwards by your throat. There’s something wonderful about being able to have harissa at every meal, breakfast, lunch and dinner. The hotel had a great pancake chef at breakfast time, and a cheese and ham crêpe with harissa is a wonderful start to the day; going on with highly-spiced food at lunch and dinner takes things forward just the way I want.

In addition, being able to wrap up with a mint tea – and why not with pine kernels floating in it? – just finishes off the experience perfectly.

What about the things I’ll be happy to do without?

I thought that I might mention the call to prayers. In Marrakech, that certainly got to me: it woke us each day, and not just in the form of a simple statement that God is great or anything – that assertion would be followed by what sounded like “my most recent essay for the school of advanced imammic studies” and went on for what like ages. Particularly at 6:00 in the morning.

But here in Tunisia it’s all so much more discreet. God is great, we’re told, maybe three or four times, as though to say “well, that’s it, I’ve let you know this would be a good time to pop in for a prayer, now it’s up to you.” Since the statement and the prayer are two of the five pillars of Islam, that sounds like a pretty reasonable call, especially as it really doesn’t disturb any of the rest of us.

I also thought I might be happy to get away from people who pester us for money, but that’s barely happened. Again, it was far worse in Morocco. Here, people invite you to buy from you but take “no” as an answer, politely and immediately. I was going to say that I didn’t like the small numbers of people who seem to attach themselves to us, and try to show us things we can already see, obviously for some small payment. But I won’t say even that, since to my embarrassment the last time I got irritated by a man who insisted on following us into a restaurant, it turned out he was the proprietor and was trying to show us to a table. So perhaps it would be better to say nothing.

So really I have nothing to complain about in this country. It’s my first visit, but it won’t be my last. And this holiday was just what a holiday should be: a real break, a real rest and wonderful change.

The saddest aspect? I saw some mixed couples, which should have been a matter of great satisfaction: such couples are the phenomenon that will save us from ourselves, if anything can, by showing that underneath all superficial differences, we really are all one race. But today the thought occurs to me that if either half of the couple was from Britain, then they would find it hard to settle there.

Because we’ve decided that people from nations like Tunisia are beneath us and walls are needed to keep them out. All in the name of immigration control. And so we knock down bridges.

I’m just glad that Tunisia doesn’t share that attitude or, to get back at us for our ill-placed contempt, don’t cut off their own noses, and ours, by refusing to share their charm-filled country with the rest of the world.

The Tunis Souk
Lively, cheerful, colourful bustle
The warmth rejected by British cold

The African way: just right for a holiday

One of the main benefits of a holiday is to get away from the breakneck pace at which we spend so much of our lives. And from the pressure of deadlines.

Also, if you live in England, it’s to go somewhere with more reliable weather. Or perhaps I should say, weather that’s less reliably grey, muggy and wet.

So we’ve chosen Tunisia for a week, around Danielle’s birthday, and with three friends.

We flew into Enfidha yesterday, a large regional airport. Which felt, looked and operated exactly like any large regional airport in Europe. There was no sense of being in Africa, even though the temperature – thank God – was appreciably milder.

Once in the terminal building, everything kept working in a perfectly efficient and well-oiled way. People with clipboards approached us to check whether we were booked onto the hotel shuttle. It turns out they couldn’t find our names on their list but, hey, that happens in Europe all the time too. They accepted our booking confirmation, in any case, and told us to head outside, turn left, and take bus 2.

That’s when things started to come apart. There were fifty or sixty buses out there and no way of seeing where bus 2 ought to be. So we wandered up and down the lines until we found the one with a square of paper pasted to the windscreen with a 2 on it.

“The Hotel Sindbad?” said the driver, “We don’t go to the Hotel Sindbad.”

“Ah,” I thought, “perhaps we are in Africa after all.”

This had a certain familiarity. But one of the appealing things about Africa, in my relatively limited experience, is that things generally work out, if not always in the way you first imagined. And this was to be no different.

A colleague of the driver’s came over and launched a discussion in Arabic, in the course of which his hand gestures rather suggested he was explaining where the Sindbad was.

“It’s OK. Load your bags,” the driver told us, to my relief, an effect slightly spoiled when he went on, “we just have to wait for some other passengers.”

Fortunately I’d brought plenty to read with me, because it turned out I had plenty of time for reading. It took an hour and a half to fill up the coach. And the trip involved stopping at serval other hotels, before we reached the Sindbad. But reach it we did, safe and sound. In time. As for on time? Not so much. Luton to Enfidha airport (1200 miles) took two and three-quarter hours; Enfidha to the Sindbad (32 miles) took four hours.

But as I said, we’re on holiday. What time pressure are we really under? And the lesson was a good one. Africa’s good at teaching the value of patience, to learn the value of waiting and doing other things, instead of always chasing after the next urgent goal.

Sardine boats on the beach at Hammamet
The Medina in the background

Today we strolled in a leisurely manner along the beach into Hammamet. We wandered through the Medina, we came out and relaxed in the sunshine over mint teas.

Temperatures in the mid twenties Celsius. Good company. No time pressure. A valuable lesson in treasuring the moment which I needed Africa to teach me again. And just right for a relaxing holiday.

Taking the time:
what the chambermaids did with my tee shirt

Sarin in Syria and toxic reactions

So France and Britain have unearthed evidence that the Syrian government has used the nerve agent Sarin against its own people.

That’s a shameful act, and it’s understandable that for the US as well as the French and British governments, it represents a red line they’ve said they won’t let the Assad regime cross. So their accusations, coming on top of the successful British and French move to lift the EU arms embargo on Syria, suggest there’s a head of steam building up to intervene against Assad. At the very least, the governments seem intent on supplying weapons to the rebels.

What’s impressive, at first glance at least, is that they’ve gone to the trouble to build up some evidence for their view before acting on it. The problem is they’re ignoring rather a lot of other evidence.

The first is that Western intelligence agencies don’t have a terribly good track record on information about inhumane weapons in the Middle East. We went down that road over Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and it didn’t lead anywhere we’d want to go again.

Qusair. Now recaptured by government forces.
Is this somewhere we really want to get sucked into?

The Iraq experience rather makes my second reason for reticence over renewed Western intervention in the region. All these Arab springs, they’ve had mixed results. Probably the one that has done best was Tunisia, and even there there’s plenty to question, not least the current trial of feminist activists. But whatever Tunisia achieved, it managed without Western involvement. On the other hand, where we have stuck our oar in, things have often gone pretty badly. 

In Libya the results have been at best patchy. And in Iraq, they were disastrous: at huge cost, above all in Iraqi lives, we’ve converted that country into a client state of Iran, the nation the West most loves to hate in that part of the world. Which presumably wasn’t the aim of the exercise.

It looks as though we could end up doing the same thing in Syria, by putting entirely the wrong people in power. Al Qaida elements are increasingly dominating the rebels. Certainly, we’d be supplying arms to the nice guys, but how could we prevent them sliding into the hands of the bad guys afterwards?

It’s hard to see how anyone can possibly still believe that getting involved in warfare around the Middle East will do the West the slightest good. That our governments still indulge that fallacy can only be a tribute to the power of their faith, or at least its capacity to overwhelm any aptitude they may have had for sober policy-making.

The faith in British and French government circles may not move mountains but it can shift arms and involve us in another debacle. Which has already started: the first, and dramatic, consequence of the ending of the EU arms embargo is that Russia has provided Assad with advanced anti-aircraft missiles. Emboldened, the regime has since recaptures Qusair, for a long time a major rebel stronghold. And the conflict now has the potential to become a proxy war between Russia and the West.

That the British government should be that wilfully blind is perhaps understandable: Britain has previous form on blundering into Middle East wars on misleading or even faked evidence. But the French? They had the good sense to stand out against the Iraq disaster. They got that one right, so why are they out there beating the drum with Britain this time? Such a disappointment, that Hollande fellow.

The British electorate is way ahead of its government in the good sense stakes. Polls suggest that three quarters are apparently opposed to our arming the rebels. Sadly, however, I remember the biggest ever demonstration in British history: two million people opposing intervention in Iraq. Blair took us in anyway.

We seem to be standing on a dangerous slope we could slip down to results as toxic as any nerve agent being used in Syria.  That would put us in danger of proving Hegel right: ‘What experience and history teach is this – that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.’

We fail to learn from our errors and condemn ourselves to repeating them. The saddest consequence is that the price will be paid first by the Syrian population, and then by our own.

The sword-waving politicians responsible will merely wipe the blood from their hands, write best-selling memoirs and make a fortune on the speaker circuit.