The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah: Fear and Love in the Modern Middle East

by Adam Valen Levinson

Overview

Chronically questioning, funny, and bold, a young American explores the majority-Muslim lands that scare him most.

Armed only with college Arabic and restless curiosity, Adam Valen Levinson sets out to “learn about the world 9/11 made us fear.” From a base in globalized and sterilized Abu Dhabi, he sets out to lunch in Taliban territory in Afghanistan, travels under the watchful eye of Syria’s secret police, risks shipwreck en route to Somalia, investigates Yazidi beliefs in a sacred cave, cliff dives in Oman, celebrates New Year’s Eve in Tahrir Square, and, at every turn, discovers a place that matches not at all with its reputation.

Valen Levinson crosses borders with wisecracking humor, erudition, and humanity, seeking common ground with “bros” everywhere, and finding that people who pray differently often laugh the same. And as a young man bar mitzvahed eight years late, he slowly learns how childish it is to live by decisions and distinctions born of fear.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393608366
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/14/2017
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 3.20(d)

About the Author

Adam Valen Levinson is a journalist and travel writer whose work focuses on human stories in conflict areas. His work has appeared in numerous outlets, including VICE, the Paris Review, Al Jazeera, and Haaretz. He is an affiliate of the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., and a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, studying humor as a key to cultural understanding.

Table of Contents

Author's Note xi

Preamble 3

Part 1 The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah

1 In The Air What Is Above, My Dog? 9

2 Abu Dhabi I'm Sanjay 17

3 Kuwait The Western Perception of Islam Department 55

4 Oman Go for It! Don't Do It! Jump! 64

Part 2 NX844B1G

5 Lebanon She Loves Me But I Do Not Love Her 79

6 Syria Ma Fi Shi 91

7 Afghanistan Wall Save Butts 105

8 Pakistan Cool Wind 129

9 Iraq Ou Eve! 141

10 Iran Not Every Time You Can Eat Ice Cream 187

Part 3 Another People Begin

11 Egypt Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap Bap 205

12 Yemen Waa-oww! 236

13 Somalia Is There Peace? 297

Outro 331

Acknowledgments 337

A Note on Transliteration 341

Selected Sources 347

Editorial Reviews

This book…is hard to criticize. The reason? Whenever I had an objection to The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah…the author, Adam Valen Levinson, had the same objection. And he phrased his critique more cleverly…Levinson is a very funny writer…he gives you a tour of the Middle East that you won't see on CNN or read about on TripAdvisor…After reading the book, I did feel just a bit more optimistic about the chances of peaceful coexistence between East and West. One of Levinson's themes is exactly what you'd expect in a book about a wildly foreign culture: In the end, we're all people.

The New York Times Book Review - A. J. Jacobs

10/16/2017
In this aimless memoir, freelance writer Valen Levinson chronicles a trek across the Middle East to grasp a part of the world that holds a fascination for him. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, ignited a peculiar curiosity in Valen Levinson, then a middle schooler; he “moved to New York to lock eyes with my bogeyman” and studied at Columbia University. After college he took a job at New York University Abu Dhabi and used that as a base camp travel throughout the Middle East. “Unburdened by guidebooks and online reviews and knowledge, everything was a little discovery,” he writes. “The thrill of novelty comes easy for the ill-informed.” He clumsily refuted the amorous advances of an eager Lebanese soldier, noting that “Lebanese hair gel and friendship are not American hair gel and friendship.” He visited the house where Osama bin Laden was killed, got bar mitzvahed in a quick celebration before work, and, throughout, tried to blend in despite being “a white man entirely outside of caste.” But Valen Levinson’s’s good intentions and open mind get lost within a meandering narrative that dilutes Valen Levinson’s spiritual awakening and the humanity of the countries he visits. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah is the rare work of art that mixes cultural immersion with personal reflection—and actually gets it right. This book would be entertaining as a novel, but the fact that it’s a true story should make it required reading for anyone who wants to learn about the world. I laughed, I cried, I preordered."

Chris Guillebeau

"A thrilling, riotous, sympathetic read that reminds us that little in the world is truly ‘foreign,’ bringing the peoples and cultures of the Middle East nearer to us, and pushing hatred and fear farther away."

Reza Aslan

"Overturning cliché to find a deeper humanity, the funny Valen Levinson is always fearless, and occasionally pantsless."

Henry Alford

"Adam Valen Levinson is too young to have written a book this good: eloquent, analytical, funny, sad. The Middle East is a wondrous and strange and supernatural place, hard to articulate in all the different shades and shadows. But Levinson absolutely nailed it in a brilliant first book."

Buzz Bissinger

"[Valen] Levinson skillfully relates aspects of his destinations' histories alongside his journalist's observations and personal thoughts and emotions in this unique and illuminating travelogue."

Booklist

"A fabulously written primer on the darkest countries in the world—or not so dark, as Valen Levinson shows with his toolkit of sharp sociology and brilliant humor. This brave, humane, hilarious, and introspective account of his adventures is a must-read."

Peter Theroux

2017-09-17
While the blank spaces on the maps have long since been filled in, the psychological barriers walling off regions of the world where Westerners dare not tread are as tall as ever. Here, a "multimedia backpack journalist" explores some of them.Levinson, fresh out of college, with fortuitously ambiguous ethnic features and something of a talent for languages, pushed the bounds of his comfort zone to encompass Somalia, Afghanistan, Syria, and other Muslim-majority places. Travel writers have done this before—for every breezy account of summer in Spain, there's a breathless dispatch from a leaky motorboat on the Congo—but Levinson manages to establish his own voice admirably, with an endearing mixture of ironic self-awareness, incisive sociological analysis, and simple humor. When the author, a fellow at the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale, arrived in the United Arab Emirates, he struggled to get his bearings: "The chord changes of the country, the cultural-religious-historical roots that still hold sway are hard to find, and so I felt like we were just skimming the surface, ready to drift off into nothingness." But as he ventured further afield to locales ever further "along the axis of perceived terror," that sense of cultural displacement became an opening through which he was able to glimpse a shared humanity. Using humor to connect with the locals, as with his readers, he makes pithy observations at once earnest and ironic, eventually asking, "was I so biased that I cherry-picked the memories I wanted to have? So committed to contesting the darkness that all I saw was light?" The author's linguistic riffs are a highlight and more insightful than the norm for travel writing. Of Arabic's most popular word, he writes, "inshallah carries no judgement of probability. It is weighted only toward what you believe….The way you feel in the moment between inshallah and conscious thought—that is your default setting on the spectrum from optimism to despair."While Karachi or Aleppo may not be next year's hot vacation destinations, Levinson proves there's ample reason to go.

Kirkus Reviews

"Levinson skillfully relates aspects of his destinations' histories alongside his journalist's observations and personal thoughts and emotions in this unique and illuminating travelogue." ---Booklist

From the Publisher