The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Read online

  How long can I keep wearing it? I found myself thinking, as the bus lurched into motion and cars honked around us. The rest of the day? Forever?

  I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something I could do. It wasn’t difficult, or expensive. Why should I not cover my head here, if it made the people who lived here feel so much better? Why should I cause needless discomfort to them and to myself? Out of principle? What principle? The principle that women were equal to men? To whom was I communicating that principle? With what degree of success? What if I thought I was communicating one thing but what people understood was something else—what if what they understood was that I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward? Did that still count as “communicating”?

  I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk?

  And yet, when I thought about leaving the scarf on for the rest of my stay, something about it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me. Those girls who smiled into my eyes—they thought I was like them. The guy who helped me on the bus—he thought I was his sister.

  At that point, another thought came to me, a kind of fantasy, so foreign that I could barely articulate it even to myself: What if I really did it? What if I wore a scarf not as a disguise but somehow for real? I was thirty-four, and I’d been having a lot of doubts about the direction my life was taking. I had had an abortion the previous year, with some reluctance, and everything—every minor defeat, every sign of unfriendliness—still hurt a little extra. I had never felt so alone, and in a way that seemed suddenly to have been of my design, as if I had chosen this life without realizing it, years earlier, when I set out to become a writer. And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children—not maybe but definitely. You didn’t have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone’s ass, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their PR strategy? Traveling alone, especially as a woman, especially in a patriarchal culture, can be really stressful. It can make you question the most basic priorities around which your life is arranged. Like: Why do I have a job that makes me travel alone? For literature? What’s literature?

  These thoughts recently came back to me when I read Submission, the latest novel by Michel Houellebecq, a satire set in a 2022 France ruled by democratically elected Islamic moderates. The Islam in Submission is largely a fantasy designed, by Houellebecq, to appeal to someone just like Houellebecq, with lavishly funded universities, fantastic meze, freely flowing French and Lebanese wines, and multiple teen wives for every intellectual who converts to Islam. But the political rhetoric of the movement’s leader, Mohammed Ben Abbes, is well reasoned and coherent, bearing a certain resemblance to Erdoğan’s actual platform, and presented with a frankness and lucidity that made me understand the logic of the AKP in a way I never had before.

  Internationally, Ben Abbes seeks to transform Europe into a Mediterranean and North African union of Muslim states: a program similar to the “neo-Islamism” of Ahmet Davutoğlu, the AKP prime minister. Domestically, Ben Abbes supports entrepreneurialism, family businesses, and the free market; socially, he seeks to bolster Muslim education and to encourage women to be stay-at-home mothers, while continuing to tout the supreme value of democratic rule. I had never understood how all these goals were related, or even compatible. How could someone who opposed feminism—who was okay with half the population being less educated than the other half—be in favor of democracy? How could a democratic constitution not be secular? How could it be compatible with any of the Abrahamic faiths, with anything that came out of that cave in Urfa? I had always assumed that Erdoğan was being insincere about something: either he was just pretending to care about democracy or he was just pretending to care about Muslim family values—or, as my relatives said, he was pretending about both democracy and Islam, and the only thing he really cared about was building more shopping malls with Gulf money.

  Reading Submission, I saw that there is, in fact, a logical consistency in the Islamist moderate free-trade platform. Democracy, like capitalism, is a numbers game, and “family values” is a machine that boosts the population. As one Houellebecq character puts it:

  Couples who follow one of the three religions of the Book and maintain patriarchal values have more children than atheists or agnostics. You see less education among women, less hedonism and individualism. And to a large degree, this belief in transcendence can be passed on genetically. Conversions, or cases where people grow up to reject family values, are statistically insignificant. In the vast majority of cases, people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in. That’s why atheist humanism—the basis of any “pluralist society”—is doomed.

  The atheist humanists in Houellebecq’s 2022 are doomed, not just to extinction but also to uncoolness. The 1968 movement in Europe, much like the Kemalist revolution in Turkey, was once youthful and countercultural, and then it won, and itself became an old and crumbling establishment. Ben Abbes, Houellebecq writes, gets no trouble from “the last of the soixante-huitards, those progressive mummified corpses—extinct in the wider world—who managed to hang on in the citadels of the media.” The outnumbered, irrelevant zombies, still naively believing themselves to be the defenders of the downtrodden, are so “paralyzed” by the Muslims’ “multicultural background” that they don’t even put up a fight.

  Houellebecq’s narrator, François, is a middle-aged professor of French literature—a specialist in the novels of Joris-Karl Huysmans. Huysmans’s Against Nature (1884), widely considered a masterpiece of the decadent movement, tells the story of a dissolute aristocrat who devotes his life to aesthetic pursuits, such as eating all-black meals and hanging around with a giant jewel-encrusted tortoise. These activities fail to bring him happiness, even as they seem to exhaust the possibilities of the decadent novel. Huysmans converted to Catholicism after writing Against Nature. The parallels between François and Huysmans’s hero are clear. François, too, has devoted his life to aesthetic pursuits: reading, watching television, chain-smoking, drinking supermarket wine, and dating undergraduates. He, too, finds these indulgences empty and exhaustible: literature stops seeming interesting, and sex gets more difficult every year. In much the same way that Huysmans converted to Catholicism, François converts to Islam.

  When the Muslim government subsidizes a Pléiade edition of Huysmans and commissions François to write an introduction, he does some rereading and realizes, for the first time, that “Huysmans’s true subject had been bourgeois happiness, a happiness painfully out of reach for a bachelor.” That was all Huysmans ever wanted: not the all-black meals, not the jewel-encrusted turtle, but simply “to have his artist friends over for a pot-au-feu with horseradish sauce, accompanied by an ‘honest’ wine and followed by plum brandy and tobacco, with everyone sitting by the stove while the winter winds battered the towers of Saint-Sulpice.” Such happiness is “painfully out of reach for a bachelor,” even a rich one with servants; it really depends on a wife who can cook and entertain, who can turn a house into a home.

  This is the cost of bourgeois happiness, in Houellebecq’s Islamic utopia: the independence of women. It’s fascinating to see how Houellebecq rises
to the challenge of making female domestic enslavement seem palatable in the novel, not just to the Islamo-curious François but also, to some extent, to the women of France. For example, early in the novel, François looks up two of his exes, successful single women in their forties; these scenes suggest, not implausibly, that the penalties of aging, and the psychic toll of dating and singleness, are even harder for women than for men, and that they aren’t really balanced out by the joys of a career in, say, wine distribution or pharmaceuticals. François subsequently visits a female ex-colleague who has retired to domestic life pending the Islamization of the university. “To see her bustling around the kitchen in an apron bearing the humorous phrase ‘Don’t Holler at the Cook—That’s the Boss’s Job!,’ . . . it was hard to believe that just days ago she’d been leading a doctoral seminar on the altogether unusual circumstances surrounding Balzac’s corrections to the proofs of Béatrix,” he observes. “She’d made us tartlets stuffed with ducks’ necks and shallots, and they were delicious.” In a later passage, set on a train, François contrasts the visible stress of a Muslim businessman, who is having a clearly harrowing phone conversation, with the high spirits of his two teen wives, who are solving puzzles from the newspaper. Under the “Islamic regime,” François realizes, women—or “at least the ones pretty enough to attract a rich husband”—live in an eternal childhood, first as children, then as mothers, with just a few years of “sexy underwear” in between: “Obviously they had no autonomy, but as they say in English, fuck autonomy.”

  Houellebecq’s vision of an Islamic state, for all its cartoonishness, has a certain imaginative generosity. He portrays Islam not as a depersonalized creeping menace, or as an ideological last resort to which those disenfranchised by the West may be “vulnerable,” but as a system of beliefs that is enormously appealing to many people, many of whom have other options. It’s the same realization I reached in Urfa. Nobody has everything; everyone is trading certain things for others.

  I didn’t wear the scarf again, after that afternoon. I couldn’t explain it rationally, but it didn’t feel right. I stuck to my original strategy of smiling and ignoring social cues—the American way. “In the vast majority of cases,” as a French intellectual once said, “people stick with whatever metaphysical system they grow up in.”

  In the course of multiple trips to the site, the surly taxi driver gradually opened up, especially after I complimented him on the skill with which he avoided hitting pedestrians at the last possible second. “That was nothing,” the driver said, and told me about the time he had managed not to run over an old man who was walking right down the middle of the road as if it were the sidewalk, and who, in response to the driver’s honking, simply stood where he was and shouted, “Pretend I’m a tree.”

  “How can you reason with someone like that?” the driver demanded, adding that when he drove in Urfa he conducted himself according to logic and not according to the traffic laws, because the rate of survival for someone who followed traffic laws had dropped to zero percent.

  We pulled up at the hotel. “So you’re still with us,” the receptionist said, not unhumorously, when I walked in.

  “Of course,” I replied. “What person who has come to Urfa would ever want to leave?”

  TOM BISSELL

  My Holy Land Vacation

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  I. Stand with Israel

  I listen to a lot of conservative talk radio. Confident masculine voices telling me the enemy is everywhere and victory is near—I often find it affirming: there’s a reason I don’t think that way. Last spring, many right-wing commentators made much of a Bloomberg poll that asked Americans, “Are you more sympathetic to Netanyahu or Obama?” Republicans picked the Israeli prime minister over their own president, 67 to 16 percent. There was a lot of affected shock that things had come to this. Rush Limbaugh said of Netanyahu that he wished “we had this kind of forceful moral, ethical clarity leading our own country”; Mark Levin described him as “the leader of the free world.” For a few days there I yelled quite a bit in my car.

  The one conservative radio show I do find myself enjoying is hosted by Dennis Prager. At the Thanksgiving dinner of American radio personalities (Limbaugh is your jittery brother-in-law, Michael Savage is your racist uncle, Hugh Hewitt is Hugh Hewitt) Dennis Prager is the turkey-carving patriarch trying to keep the conversation moderately high-minded. While Prager obviously doesn’t like liberals—“The gaps between the left and right on almost every issue that matters are in fact unbridgeable,” he has said—he often invites them onto his show for debate, which is rare among right-wing hosts. Yet his gently exasperated take on the Obama-Netanyahu matchup was among the least charitable: “Those who do not confront evil resent those who do.”

  Prager’s audience is largely Christian; Prager is a Jew. Over the years I’ve heard numerous friendly callers tell him, often in thick Southern accents, that he’s the first Jew they’ve ever spoken to. One day last summer, Prager mentioned that he would be heading up something called the Stand with Israel Tour. For a little under $5,000, you could join Prager, and his most devoted listeners, on an all-inclusive guided jaunt across the world’s holiest, most contested land. The goal, he said, was to remind Israel of its devoted friends in the United States.

  America’s religious right hasn’t always been enamored of Israel, much less of Jews. Quite a few of the originators of the American Christian fundamentalist movement were unabashed anti-Semites. In 1933, the radio preacher Charles Fuller told his listeners that Jews represented “a wicked and willful rebellion against God”; other early fundamentalist leaders eagerly circulated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Israel had no friendly harbor in American conservatism for decades; its first real champion in the Oval Office was John F. Kennedy, a Democrat.

  In 1981, the Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, publicly embraced evangelical Christians, whose stated determination to convert Jews to Christianity had long spooked Israelis. While evangelical religious tourism, and the millions of dollars it injected into Israel’s economy, had always been welcome, evangelicals were kept at arm’s length politically. Begin was the first to recognize that the Israeli right and American evangelicals shared many common beliefs, from forbidding abortion to maintaining a general suspicion toward the Muslim world. The Christian Coalition, founded in 1989 by the broadcast Baptist Pat Robertson, became invested in the Zionist cause, and by 2002, Tom DeLay, former majority leader of the House of Representatives, commended the group for “standing up for Jews and Jesus.” Robertson dwelled darkly on the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and his “gang of thugs” as the political emergence of Christian Zionism fused with right-wing Israeli goals. In the early fifth century, St. Jerome resisted the acceptance of Jews with faith in Christ, warning Augustine that “they will not become Christians, but they will make us Jews.” Sixteen hundred years later, American evangelicals have become de facto Israelis.

  I wanted to more fully understand why conservative politics had become synonymous with no-questions-asked support of Israel, so I asked my beloved partner, Trisha, if she would accompany me on Prager’s tour. This would necessitate leaving our sixteen-month-old daughter with her grandparents for ten days. Trisha was okay with a vacation from parental obligations, but she had some questions: “Will people care I’m not a Republican?” I told her I wasn’t sure. “Do I have to pretend to be religious?” Not if you don’t want to, I said. “Will I have to get baptized?” I doubted it.

  Trisha was in.

  II. The Israel Test

  Months later, in November, we step out of the elevator and into the lobby of the Leonardo Plaza Hotel in Ashdod, Israel, to catch Prager’s tour-opening lecture. We want good seats. But when we arrive, forty-five minutes before go time, we find none. Everybody is already here. The majority of our fellow Stand with Israelites are sixty years of age and older. There are somehow around 450 of us, from a dozen American cities. There are too many Stand with Israel
ites for one hotel, so our cohort has been spread throughout Ashdod, a coastal city twenty miles north of Gaza and a frequent target of Hamas’s rockets in the 2014 Gaza war. I watch our tour group’s few latecomers step off their buses, all of them marveling, as I had, at the huge banner draped across the front of the hotel: WELCOME TO THE LAND OF THE BIBLE.

  Around me a lot of “Hey you!” reunions are happening, with people remembering faces but not necessarily names from previous Prager tours. (He’s done them for more than a decade, leading his listeners everywhere from Israel to Albania to Nova Scotia.) Platters of cookies are attacked. Jugs of mint-flavored water are drained. Everyone wears a lanyard with a laminated name tag attached to it, all branded GENESIS TOURS, the faith-based travel company that’s been squiring Christians around Israel since 1990.

  We finally find two seats. Trisha starts chatting with the older woman sitting next to her, one of the seventy-eight conservatives from southern California. I hear Trisha tell the woman what she does for a living (actor) and where she lives (the Hollywood Hills), which triggers some intrigued follow-up questions.

  Trisha has just violated the cover story we agreed to use while standing with Israel: Trisha would say that she is a stay-at-home mom, which is true, and I would say that I work in the video-game industry, which is also true. We wouldn’t disclose our politics or other jobs unless asked—we agreed not to lie—and we would never argue with anyone. We’d listen and observe and try to understand. I’m open to making friends here, and hope I do. A good way not to do that, however, is to be identified as a crypto-liberal during our first interaction on our first night in Israel. Trisha blames her slip on jet lag.