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“Hello,” she said.

“Are you Nour?”

“Nora,” she said archly. “Do I know you?”

“I’m Megan. From the L.A. Times. We talked a while ago. We were supposed to meet.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You were supposed to translate for me.”

“I don’t know who you are,” she said lightly. “But I’d be happy to help you.”

I sighed. “We just talked on the phone.”

“Well,” she said, “why don’t we walk together anyway, and I’ll help you out.”

She had been herding us along as we talked, Nora the Pied Piper of pale and gangly journalists, and now we had reached the old mosque. Piled rose-and-white limestone in the oldest quarter of Amman, the mosque is not far from the skeleton of the Roman amphitheater, and they say it was set on the ruins of the Temple of Philadelphia. But whatever splendor graced this valley in the days of the Romans has been rubbed away by centuries. Wealthy Jordanians didn’t stay in the tight, shabby streets of downtown; they climbed up the hills and into the desert to build lavish white houses. At the al-Husseini mosque, poor men peddled slabs of cardboard for makeshift prayer rugs and knelt down like ragged flowers in a stained concrete garden. The voice of the preacher piped through a loudspeaker.

“The Arab nation is being humiliated because we are not religious enough,” Nora translated. “The Arab nation tasted humiliation because we do not pray enough.

“If we unite as Arabs, we will win this war. This war is a sign for us to move forward and do something about our nation.”

Not very radical, I thought. Whatever happens, this cleric will be able to say it wasn’t his fault. Rings of praying men radiated from the mosque, a field of timeworn carpet and bowed heads. Everybody was tensed. It was coming and we waited. The prayers ended and the men stood, dusted off their dishdashas and the knees of their slacks. The street was crowded as a circus and silent as a cemetery. More men poured from the dim recesses of the mosque. Eyes flicked around, wary. Who would start the demonstration? They had so little practice.

A knot of men broke from the shadows and charged into the street, words in their throats and fists in the sky, screaming the timeless incantation of Arab dictatorship:

Bil roh! Bil dam! Nafdeek, ya Saddam!

With our souls, with our blood, we will sacrifice for you, O Saddam. This is shouted in every single Arab country; only the name changes. We will sacrifice for you, O Mubarak, we will sacrifice for you, O Rafik, we will sacrifice for you, O Bashar, we will sacrifice for you, O Islam, O Nasrallah, O Sheikh Yassin. In every Arab country, crowds of young men rush into the street to holler about sacrificing soul and blood for a dictator. It’s the cave art of political discourse, done as automatically as American students pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic, et cetera. Except these men are not passive, muttering their lines, hands limp on their hearts. They flame with rage and fierce pride. And then, through some alchemy, it cakes off like dried dust and blows away. The feeling is there, and then it is not. I looked many times at these skinny men with their thin mustaches and injured eyes, watched their mouths stretch and snap around the words. They looked back at me with hatred and yet it was tainted with confusion over which they hated more: themselves and their circumstances, or me standing there staring. Could they even say themselves, could they sort through the palpable indignity of having to cheer for an abusive power, through the vague pride and eagerness to please authority that rang in their voices?

With our souls! With our blood!

Disorder had been induced, the shouting scared away the pigeons, and after that nobody needed a prompt. The men who lurked cagily on the stained old streets, waiting for somebody else to get things started—they joined in, too. They punched at the sky, screamed for Iraq and Saddam, cursed America and Israel. The protestors emptied the dirty air from their lungs, the chains loosened