Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

March 4, 1991
Horwitz, London-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal , visited several Muslim countries plus Israel in 1988-89, sometimes accompanied by his equally intrepid wife. In Yemen he sampled qat , a narcotic, and bought a souvenir dagger, becoming ``possibly the first armed Jew to parade through the streets of Saada.'' He found Khartoum ``the world's most blighted city'' but liked the Sudanese, who ``exhibited none of the studied indirection or straight-out lying I'd become accustomed to in the Arab world.'' He made a lightning visit to Beirut under shellfire, covered the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral in Tehran, and interviewed Nobel novelist Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo. Of the 14 countries he traveled, Israel seems to have pleased him the least: ``The first thing you notice, coming into Israel from the Arab world, is that you have left the most courteous region of the globe and entered the rudest.'' Horwitz visited Iraq three times in the summer of '88 and returned after the invasion of Kuwait to find things ``paranoid and thuggish.'' His memoir is entertaining, often funny, and occasionally informative.