The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East
by Neil MacFarquhar

Hizbollah isn’t exactly known for its courtesy in this part of the world, at least until now.

Though it rigorously controls media access to southern Lebanon, the political party, social services provider and militia group is at least polite to those whom it approves. Each year, writes Neil MacFarquhar, the PR-savvy “Party of God” sends birthday emails to its approved journalists, sometimes written in verse: “On your birth day/ I wish all the Joy your heart can hold/ All the smiles a day can bring/ All the blessings life unfold/ May you have God’s best in every thing.” The emails came every year, MacFarquhar notes, until 2006, when Hizbollah was busy fighting Israel in a deadly and devastating month-long battle.

It is an apt title tale for a book filled with the stories MacFarquhar, a one-time Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, didn’t often get to tell. After years of reporting on the violent conflict in the region, MacFarquhar here focuses on everything else: the daily lives of people, the TV they watch, the songs they sing, the food they eat, the religious rules they follow, the injustices they suffer at the hands of despotic leaders and secret police. Violence appears in the book as it likely appears in these lives – an ever-present threat, a ready topic of ordinary conversation, a background hum that sometimes erupts.

MacFarquhar’s desire to learn about Middle Eastern life originates, he writes, from his childhood growing up in Libya. After the Six Day War – during which the would-be writer penned his first journal entry, at age seven – MacFarquhar’s home, along with those of other ex-pat American families, was cordoned off. His neighborhood was, ultimately, “more Texan than Libyan.” His family left in 1975. When he returned years later as a correspondent, MacFarquhar found himself in a similar situation: “the violence had become a barrier to understanding the region.”

MacFarquhar travels through Libya, Lebanon, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Syria, reporting around the violence, mentioning his encounters with the powerful – Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi, Syria’s Bashir Assad, Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah – but focusing on his meetings with ordinary people and intrepid reformers. In Lebanon, he meets a disgruntled hashish grower turned dairy farmer, whose new line of work, spurred by an American aid program, makes him significantly less money. (MacFarquhar calls the U.S. “unbelievably miserly in some of its aid programs”). In Kuwait, he chats with a sensual sex advice columnist whose purr you can almost hear. He meets the self-proclaimed (probably rightly) “last brewer on the Arabian peninsula.” And reformers fill the pages – a Bahraini webmaster, a Saudi novelist, a Syrian filmmaker.

Throughout, MacFarquhar contextualizes what Americans often envision to be the symbols of the violent Middle East. He explores the idea of jihad from Saudi Arabia, whose dominant sect, Wahhabism, gave rise to some of the most violent extremists. The country’s desert culture, according to one of MacFarquhar’s sources, fuels a particular strain of jihadi attitude, the inherent suspicion of and allowable violence against strangers. He profiles Al-Jazeera, the news network often maligned here for its airing of Osama bin Laden tapes and gruesome war footage. MacFarquhar, however, discusses its effectiveness at reporting breaking news and, more significantly, creating a competitive news industry in the region, while still noting that its reporting confirms the biases of its viewers(he compares it to Fox News or MSNBC). MacFarquhar explains the vast world of fatwas for an audience that, he imagines, is primarily familiar with only one – that against Salman Rushdie last decade. There are fatwas, he notes, by everyone on everything, from the women bicycling to the tearing down of monuments (it’s encouraged, says one ill-advised ruling) to the dirtiness of having pet dogs.

The latter half of MacFarquhar’s book focuses on challenges the Middle Eastern countries face that are more fundamental than the absence of elections, the indicator most obsessed about in the West: the absence of the rule of law, the power of security forces, minority control of governments, the absence of freedom of assembly, the power of religious parties, and, most tragically, the failure of new generations of rulers to pursue reform, even if they promise it. MacFarquhar ends his story on a political note – citing ways the U.S. can better work for freedom in the region. But it’s the personal that makes his book powerful – both his story and those of the ordinary people he meets, whose lives, like his, were defined by that six-day conflict, the new barriers it built and the realities it cemented.

Excerpt: It was my first experience to a phenomenon I subsequently experienced again and again, one that proved the hardest to convey to newspaper readers fed a steady diet of appalling violence from the region. The Libyan meetings indicated that ordinary Arabs are well aware that their nations are out of step with the rest of the world, that they are fed up with both the incompetence of their rulers and the unpredictable quality of their lives. They crave normalcy, but despair at not knowing how to attain it in the face of oppression that brings at least jail terms and even death to anyone trying to organize dissenters. One of the great failures of American diplomacy in the Middle East has been Washington’s inability deftly to harness that frustration.

Further Reading: Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present and Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think