The Slow Road to Tehran E-Book

Rebecca Lowe

• Herausgeber: September Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 681

Beschreibung

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2023 EDWARD STANFORD TRAVEL WRITING AWARDS TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR One woman, one bike and one richly entertaining, perception-altering journey of discovery. In 2015, as the Syrian War raged and the refugee crisis reached its peak, Rebecca Lowe set off on her bicycle across the Middle East. Driven by a desire to learn more about this troubled region and its relationship with the West, Lowe's 11,000-kilometre journey took her through Europe to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, the Gulf and finally to Iran. It was an odyssey through landscapes and history that captured her heart, but also a deeply challenging cycle across mountains, deserts and repressive police states that nearly defeated her. Plagued by punctures and battling temperatures ranging from -6 to 48C, Lowe was rescued frequently by farmers and refugees, villagers and urbanites alike, and relied almost entirely on the kindness and hospitality of locals to complete this living portrait of the modern Middle East. This is her evocative, deeply researched and often very funny account of her travels - and the people, politics and culture she encountered. 'Terrifically compelling ... bursting with humour, adventure and insight into the rich landscapes and history of the Middle East. Lowe recounts the beauty, kindnesses and complexities of the lands she travels through with an illuminating insight. A wonderful new travel writer.' Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Leseprobe

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

First published in 2022 by September Publishing

Copyright © Rebecca Lowe 2022

The right of Rebecca Lowe to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Map copyright © Helen Cann 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holder

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, www.refinecatch.com

Printed in Poland on paper from responsibly managed, sustainable sources by Hussar Books

ISBN 9781914613029

EPUB ISBN 9781914613036

September Publishing

www.septemberpublishing.org

Contents

Map of the Slow Road to Tehran

Prologue

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Lure of the Unknown

Chapter 2: Borderlands

Chapter 3: Between the Cross and the Crescent Moon

Chapter 4: The Frontline of Tolerance

Chapter 5: Man-World Country

Chapter 6: The Long Ride to Freedom

Chapter 7: The Imprint of the Desert

Chapter 8: Brave New World

Chapter 9: A Tale of Two Countries

Chapter 10: Secrets and Dreams

Photographs

References

Bibliography

Acknowledgements


To Dad, whose generosity of spirit was an inspiration in life and beyond – and who might actually have read this book if only I had completed it on time.

And to my baby daughter Frankie, whose birth finally made me realise what I put my poor parents through. Sorry Mum (and Dad, if you’re listening).


Prologue

‘For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.’

Dervla Murphy, Full Tilt (1965)

I can see the road clearly, threading its way between the mountains and the sea. I trace my finger along it. At times it is distinct and solitary, at others it disappears into the darker line of the motorway or the crease of a coastal ravine. I look up, expectant.

‘See,’ I say. ‘Here.’

The man seems unimpressed. He rubs a hand down his chin and I hear the quiet rasp of stubble against flesh. For the first time, I notice the smudge of grey beneath his eyes. He looks older than his twenty-seven years.

‘There’s no road,’ he repeats. He doesn’t acknowledge the map. The map is irrelevant because he knows this country well.

‘But look,’ I tap my finger. ‘It seems to go all the way, no?’

Finally, he glances down. I notice he has tufts of grey at his temples too. The poor man, I think. He is not a fixer by trade but an electrical engineer. I recruited him to help me because he was known about town. Samer, the man who connects people; the guy who gets things done. But so far our relationship hasn’t gone well. First, he kept me waiting for three hours due to a ‘minor gas explosion’ at home. Then there was the flyover incident with the forklift truck that nearly killed us both, and which went some way towards explaining the grey smudges and tufts.

And now this. You might have thought, considering Samer’s somewhat relaxed approach to traffic signals, that a quiet coastal track would appeal to him. But he seems determined to put me off this route.

‘There is a road,’ he concedes. After all, there’s no real denying it. ‘But it’s bad.’ He stabs at the pale, shaky line, crushing four villages beneath one plump digit. ‘There’s sand. And cracks. Bad for cars. Bad for bikes.’ His eyes flick to the bulky three-gear contraption leaning against the wall, its royal blue frame tarnished russet at the joints. On the handlebars, a dayglo zip-bag declares ‘BEIRUT BY BIKE’ beside a logo of a rather athletic cyclist in a jaunty bandanna doing a wheelie. Having been cycling around the city for several days now, I admit it’s not an image that I recognise. ‘Bad for that bike.’

I put down the map, resigned. The truth is, I’ve already made up my mind to cycle up to the border in the north. It is December 2014 and I’ve come to Lebanon to report on the worst refugee crisis the region has ever known, as millions of displaced Syrians flee the devastating war at home. For the past week, I’ve been in Beirut interviewing politicians, activists and aid workers to try to gauge the impact of the conflict on Syria’s smallest and most vulnerable neighbour. But my report feels dry and lacklustre. To understand the issue fully, I’m aware I need to access the tented camps beyond Tripoli on the coast. I need to speak to the people living and surviving on the front line.

How to get there poses a challenge, however. Taxis are expensive, while buses have a frustrating tendency to dawdle for hours or neglect to turn up at all. In a sudden eureka moment, it occurs to me that a bike may be the solution. To Tripoli, it is under ninety kilometres door-to-door, so doable (just) in a day. And the road looks ideal, hugging the shoreline and unspooling like Ariadne’s magic thread all the way to the north. From Beirut, it seems to me that I should be able to travel the entire route without once having to navigate the madman’s gauntlet of the motorway.

Plus, I admit the idea excites me. I have cycled in a few interesting places before – India, Mexico, the Balkans – but never the Middle East. For this reason, the thought also scares me, and I’ve spent the past few hours trying to find someone to accompany me on the ride. So far, however, I have failed.

‘You shouldn’t go to Tripoli anyway,’ Samer says. ‘Jihadists are still fighting. You could be shot. Or …’ He hesitates.

‘Or …?’

‘Worse.’

‘Worse?’

‘Yes, worse.’ He seems irritated now, as if talking to a child. ‘Kidnapped, tortured. Worse.’

I look at him, unsure how to respond. A lengthy silence passes as he finishes one cigarette and lights up another. The Cedars packet is a similar colour to my bike, and probably equally as life-threatening. ‘So you don’t want to come, then?’ I ask finally.

He blows out a long, slow trail of smoke, then stands up and reaches for his leather jacket. It is heavily worn at the elbows and smells wholesome and musty, like damp wood. ‘No, Rebecca,’ he says, and I know from his tone that our conversation is at an end. ‘I’m afraid you’re on your own for this one.’

After Samer leaves, I think long and hard about what he has said. He is not the first person to caution against cycling the coastal path or travelling to the northern governorates alone. And the bicycle has admittedly seen better days. Even the men at the rental shop laughed when I suggested taking it outside Beirut, presuming that I was joking.

But my instincts suggest it will be okay. Friends in Tripoli have reported that, despite pockets of unrest, the city streets are safe. And if the road proves unrideable, I can always just try another tack. So, after lengthy consideration, I decide to ignore Samer – and Mohammed, and Midhat, and Halifa, and all the other locals who seem to see cycling through their country as a mark of mental illness – and take the plunge.

Escaping Beirut isn’t easy. Extricating myself from the city’s noodle-like tangle of ring-roads and overpasses feels like fighting off an attack by a many-tendrilled cephalopod. But once I’ve finally wrested free, my entry onto the coastal path is all the sweeter. From that moment on, it is a thrilling, beautiful ride. The road, doubted by so many, is indeed sandy and uneven, but also quiet and pleasant and almost perfectly designed for a bike. Following an early puncture – repaired for free by a passer-by, who charitably risks his young son’s life by sending him on his BMX down the eight-lane motorway for a repair kit – the trip is smooth and straightforward. For several hours, I dip up and down the cliff edge, through whitewashed villages that blaze with reflected light, brushed by a crisp winter breeze seasoned with jasmine and spice. Wisps of music drift from hidden fishermen’s coves and I recognise Fairuz, the ‘Jewel of Lebanon’, and Mohamed Mounir, the ‘Arabic Bob Marley’.

By the time I reach Tripoli, I’m in a relaxed, buoyant mood. The Sunni and Alawite militia groups reportedly operating in the area are nowhere to be seen, and I make it up to the border without incident.

This uneventful mini-adventure teaches me several important things. First: always carry a puncture repair kit when cycling. Second: Lebanese people are astonishingly helpful. Third: Lebanese drivers are homicidal maniacs. Fourth (most importantly): never trust people who say things can’t be done. Of course some things can’t be done. I couldn’t have cycled to the moon, for example – or even realistically beyond Lebanon itself, which is hemmed in by a warzone in the north and its long-time adversary Israel in the south. But there’s measured risk and there’s recklessness, and I feel that often the two are confused. Activities that many may judge as foolhardy frequently transpire to be nothing of the sort, the dangers illusory and overblown.

Following this brief coastal junket, the thought occurs to me: if I could cycle across Lebanon when so few seemed to think it feasible or wise, could I not go further? Across a larger country, perhaps? Or even a continent? Could I – possibly, at a push, with enough chamois cream and a good tailwind – make it from my home in London all the way through the Middle East?

The idea seems absurd. But it comes on with a rush, as if the notion has been sitting there all along just waiting to be found. I will travel with nothing but the barest essentials and speak to local people to understand their concerns. I will peel back the layers of artifice and prejudice to unearth the human stories underneath. And I will do this, like Patrick Leigh Fermor, not as a vagrant or tourist, but as an errant sage or cognoscenti with an eye to revealing the truth.

At least, this is what I’ll tell my mother. Lacking Fermor’s earnest romanticism, I harbour few illusions. I am more Sancho Panza than Don Quixote, and arguably more Rocinante than either: ageing and unqualified and – in sporting terms, at least – undoubtedly past my prime.

Like Fermor, however, my destination isn’t in doubt. For him, it was the ‘mysterious and lopsided’ Black Sea and the ‘levitating skyline’ of Constantinople. For me, it is the dark burgundy foothills of the Alborz, where a city shrouded in mystery lies in a pool of violent sun.

The thought is immediate and unambiguous. If I go anywhere, I know Tehran should be the prize.


Introduction

‘I am neither of the East nor of the West, no boundaries exist within my breast.’

Rumi, thirteenth-century Persian poet

My interest in the Middle East began aged ten with a journey down the Nile.

I remember the trip vividly. My family and I were booked on a boat that would take us from Aswan to Cairo over the course of a week. Each morning we would rise at 4.30am to reach the temples and tombs before dawn, then return five hours later for a pot of hydrating milky tea. Those early alarm calls felt exhausting, as we were herded blindly onto the coach in the dark – but there was no way around it. By 7am the sun was already high overhead, gleaming like the blade of an executioner waiting to strike. It felt like a completely different sun from any I’d ever known, not warming or life-affirming but keen-edged and cruel. Among the ruins, clammy tourists in straw fedoras clustered in islands of shade as if shipwrecked and awaiting rescue. Meanwhile, my brother and I would dash from shadow to shadow, pretending the sunny areas were crocodile pits or briny swamplands determined to suck us into their grasp – neither of which felt like such a stretch of the imagination.

For me, the most enjoyable parts of these excursions were the trips underground. Entering the burial chambers felt like being transported into a new world – not a descent into a fiery abyss but into a cool Elysium of gilded sarcophagi, frescoed tombs and beautifully baffling hieroglyphs engraved from ceiling to floor. Here, away from the heat and tumult of the surface, was a subterranean wonderland that glowed in silent splendour; a place where power seemed etched into the earth itself and humans walked shoulder-to-shoulder with the gods.

‘Egypt in Arabic is called Misr, which means “frontier”,’ our guide, Abduh, told me one afternoon. I had just escaped a thrashing at table tennis by the loss of our final ball over the balustrade and was sprawled on my belly scouring the water for crocs. ‘This suits us, I think. Long ago, we were the great gateway to Africa and Asia. Maybe one day, inshallah, we will be again.’

Or this is how I imagine our conversation might have gone based on the spidery mess of jottings in my diary. I kept a journal every holiday until my mid-teens, but the one from Egypt is the most detailed: a tumescent magnum opus bursting with Polaroid photographs, primitive hieroglyph sketches, scraps of papyrus and declarations of unrequited love for Abduh, whose great marmot of a moustache and dominance on the ping-pong table more than qualified him in my eyes as husband material.

Egypt fascinated me. What happened to these imposing monuments, I wondered, now eroded and shattered by time? Or to the pharaohs who created them, whose spirit were considered divine? It had never occurred to me before how power shifts through the ages, and how empires rise and fall. To me, Britain had always been Great, its position as enduring and inevitable as the air that we breathe. But 5,000 years ago, we were forging homes from dung and willow rods while Egypt was erecting limestone pyramids on foundations the size of ten football pitches. And when Egypt was celebrating its first female leader, it would be another three millennia before we would feel ready to do the same.

Before we parted ways, Abduh gave me a dried lotus flower for my diary. ‘You seem to like our country,’ he said, as I hastily shut the book so he wouldn’t see his name plastered in tiny scarlet hearts across the page. ‘Make sure you return. You’ve only visited a small part of it – the safe, easy bits – and there’s so much more to see.’

I promised him I would. Twelve years later I kept my word, and from then my interest in the Middle East grew steadily. Over the next decade, I returned several times to Egypt, both for work and leisure, as well as to elsewhere in the region: Lebanon, Turkey, Oman, the UAE. Each visit revealed more of this cryptic corner of the globe, while exposing how little I truly knew. These places confounded me, each a bewildering Gordian knot of cultures, faiths and histories spanning back far beyond the beginnings of my own native land. As an outsider, I knew that there was a limit to how much I’d ever understand. But I felt a growing desire to at least fulfil my pledge to Abduh: to look beyond the ‘safe, easy bits’ and see the place raw.

On my return from Lebanon, I immediately began preparing for my journey to Tehran. When asked about it, I told most people I would be ‘touring the Middle East’. But this was a quick answer to a complex question because there are many Middle Easts to choose from. There’s the one stretching from Morocco to Pakistan and the one from Egypt to Iran. There’s the one involving Turkey and Sudan, and the one excluding both. There’s the one focused on Arabia and the (rare) one embracing the ’Stans. The lines of this difficult patch of land have never been firmly drawn. Or, more accurately, they’ve been drawn too many times and never from within. The term itself reveals the problem: middle of what? East of what? Certainly nothing relating to the people who live there – people who may justifiably be perplexed by the criteria of this club into which they’ve been cast.

The idea of the Middle East is a relatively modern phenomenon. In the nineteenth century, Western diplomats preferred a more binary approach, splitting the East into ‘Near’ and ‘Far’. The Far East largely referred to countries beyond India, while the Near East designated a hazy tract of land between India and Europe focused chiefly on the territory ruled by the Ottoman Empire. ‘The limits of the Near East are not easy to define,’ British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote in 1916. ‘On the north-west, Vienna is the most conspicuous boundary-mark, but one might almost equally well single out Trieste, Lvov or even Prague. Towards the south-east, the boundaries are even more shadowy …’ Following World War I, the epithet became fuzzier still – as well as increasingly redundant. Why have a collective term linking parts of Eastern Europe to Western Asia, after all, when the common denominator (the Ottomans) had collapsed?

Meanwhile, the area between Turkey and East Asia was swiftly assuming greater strategic importance. The British soldier and diplomat Thomas Edward Gordon was not the first to label this zone, but in 1900 he became the first to commit the moniker ‘Middle East’ to paper and therefore into the history archives. For him, the region was centred around Iran and Afghanistan, which he saw as crucial buffers against Russia. Two years later, US naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan referred to the ‘middle East’ (sic) to indicate approximately the same area, echoing Gordon’s concerns and calling on Britain to strengthen its naval fleets between Suez and Singapore.

Nowadays, this sprawling land of soft borders continues to change shape with the seasons. The US, EU, UK and UN all employ different definitions, each nominally conclusive, their smudgy uncertainties disguised. The frontiers of the so-called ‘Middle East’ remain so pliable, in fact, that commentators sometimes choose to ignore it and employ more useful, concrete names. The ‘Arab world’ is one, although this excludes Israel and Iran, both of which most Westerners would see as distinctly ‘Middle Eastern’. The ‘Islamic world’ is another, but this extends far beyond the region into Africa and Asia, with Indonesia and India between them accounting for a quarter of all Muslims across the globe.

So what is the Middle East? Nobody really knows, it seems. And yet everybody knows. In the West, its form rises before us, fixed and inviolable, splashed daily across the media. It suggests chaos and repression, conflict and terror. It appears alien and menacingly ‘other’, with values that clash wildly and incontrovertibly with our own.

It wasn’t until recently that I truly began questioning this image. In 2011, as murmurings of protest grew into mass revolt across the region, I was working at the International Bar Association (IBA), a global legal organisation with a tenacious Human Rights Institute. As the IBA’s lead reporter, I covered the Arab Spring extensively, with a focus on human rights violations, military abuses and constitutional crises. For the Arab people, this was a time of profound hope and acute despair, as dictators tumbled like dominoes and new devastating forces rose unstoppably in their wake. Every day, the press was filled with reports of gross atrocities almost impossible to imagine – yet what was often missing, I felt, was context. Where had this unrest come from? What was the driver? With two-thirds of its population aged under thirty, the Middle East has long been a young region ruled by old men, so why were these demonstrations happening only now?

The answers to these questions frequently seemed glib. This was a world of simple dichotomies – tyranny versus terror, democracy versus dictatorship, East versus West – while the voices of the people, trapped between the extremes, were rarely being heard at all.

The Middle East has always been a difficult place for Western journalists to cover. It is too thorny, too delicate, too detached from our own immediate concerns. And prejudice is pervasive. Since 9/11, the region has largely been reduced to a troika of incendiary tabloid bullet points – Bombs! Burqas! Bigots! – which both reflect and perpetuate bigotry at large. ‘It is no coincidence that racist violence is on the rise in the UK at the same time as we see worrying examples of intolerance and hate speech in the newspapers,’ Christian Ahlund, chair of the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), said in 2016. His comments followed an ECRI report that was particularly critical of the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express for ‘fuelling prejudice against Muslims’ with ‘reckless disregard’.

More recently, the outgoing chair of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, Alan Moses, echoed these concerns. ‘I have a suspicion that [Muslims] are from time to time written about in a way that [newspapers] would simply not write about Jews or Roman Catholics,’ he remarked in December 2019. In fact, he said, the portrayal of Islam had been ‘the most difficult issue’ he had faced during his five-year tenure as head of the watchdog.

It is not just the British media exhibiting these worrying trends. In 2015, a study by the universities of Illinois and Arkansas reported that 81 per cent of domestic terrorists presented on US news broadcasts were identified as Muslim, despite the fact that – according to FBI data – Muslims only comprised 6 per cent of all domestic terror suspects in reality. Likewise, research by the consultancy firm 416 Labs found that only 8 per cent of New York Times headlines about Muslims from 1990 to 2014 were about positive issues, while 57 per cent were negative. Their investigation concluded that the average reader is ‘likely to assign collective responsibility to Islam/Muslims for the violent actions of a few’.

In recent years, far-right Western leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Andrzej Duda have done their best to fan these flames, bolstering the strength and legitimacy of Islamophobia throughout the world. With such powerful voices shaping the public narrative, it hardly seems surprising that most Europeans have come to view Syrian and Iraqi refugees as a ‘major threat’, even though their chance of being murdered by a jihadist is roughly the same as being struck and killed by lightning. Or that three-quarters of Americans say they’re too scared to travel to the Arab world because of its perceived dangers – despite the fact that eight in ten cannot even identify the region on a map.1

While covering the Middle East, I wrestled with how to cut through this bombast. Was there a way to depict the region with a clearer lens? The problem was not simply the bias in the media, I knew, but the nature of journalism itself: an industry led by crises and conflict – ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ – because this, on the whole, is what people want to read. Dominated by stories of violence and villains, the media inevitably paints a deeply distorted image of the world in which dangers are magnified and the very worst events come to appear as the norm.

What was needed, I felt, was a new type of reporting – one that shifted the focus away from politics and bloodshed to the everyday lives that lay beyond. One that depicted the region not as a homogeneous sphere of chaos and fanaticism but as a sweeping, splintered mosaic, often as different from itself as from those looking in from elsewhere.

What I needed, I knew after my brief jaunt through Lebanon, was a bike.

When I told friends and family that I planned to cycle alone from London to Tehran, the response was mixed. Many were supportive, several … less so. Most people’s concerns focused on three core personal traits that, notwithstanding some tremendous good luck on my part, would in all likelihood prove my undoing: being a woman (vulnerable to sex pests); being a Westerner (vulnerable to terrorists); and being a journalist (vulnerable to tyrants).

‘We think you’ll probably die,’ one friend helpfully informed me, looking at me with the kind of wary fondness usually reserved for unruly toddlers or puppies that have soiled the carpet. ‘We’ve put the odds at about 60:40.’ Others were less optimistic. A family member with a particularly unfortunate sense of humour sent me a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘If’, stressing the importance of keeping my head ‘when all about you / Are losing theirs’, while a man in the pub described me as a ‘naive idiot who’ll end up decapitated in a ditch – at best’.

My mother took it well, all things considered. At least, she didn’t burn my passport or call the local sanatorium to have me committed. She did write me an email, however, to clarify her feelings in case there had been any ambiguity on the matter. ‘You cannot imagine how devastated I feel …’ it began, before launching into a calm and measured analysis of the potential pitfalls awaiting me along the way. The words ‘dangerous’, ‘reckless’, ‘hostile’, ‘juvenile’, ‘dangerous’ (again), ‘terrible worry’, ‘risking life and limb’, ‘robbed and raped’ and ‘family disintegrating’ were all used to persuasive effect, alongside a restrained smattering of a dozen or so exclamation marks to emphasise the most salient points. In response, I’d done what any loving daughter would do in such circumstances – I’d hugged and kissed and reassured and comforted … and continued to do exactly as I pleased without another thought.

It was my boyfriend, however, who was likely to be affected the most. P (as I’ll refer to him here) and I had been going out for three years and living together for two when I told him of my plan. It wasn’t a request for permission; it was a statement of fact. And he accepted it, albeit grudgingly, and put up no serious objection. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me how unreasonable I’d been, and how in his situation I may not have been quite so understanding. While I’ve never been good at compromise, even for me this level of blinkered obduracy was extreme. I loved my boyfriend, yet I had a driving compulsion to do this trip – however foolish or ill-advised to some it may have seemed.

It didn’t help matters that I was leaving at the height of the Syrian War, when Islamic State was at its strongest and the refugee crisis at its most severe. By the end of 2015, nearly five million people had fled Syria – double the number of the previous year – and jihadist killings were mounting. In the months before my departure, ISIS captured Ramadi in Iraq, Palmyra in Syria and Sirte in Libya, and claimed responsibility for the murder of hundreds of civilians across Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Kuwait, Tunisia, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Because of this, there seemed to be an assumption by some that I was courting risk simply for the thrill of it; that the threat of death or disaster was, at some level, part of the point. But I am no adrenalin junkie and I was in fact keen to survive the endeavour. In my mind, as with the Lebanese trip, the risks were measured. The jihadists, far from running amok across the region, were in reality circumscribed and avoidable – and I fully intended to avoid them. I would not be entering live warzones, such as Libya or Syria, or terrorist hotspots, such as the borders of Syria or Iraq. A handful of courageous journalists were risking their lives by reporting from such places, but that wasn’t what my journey was about. My journey was about the people outside these areas who comprise the vast majority of the Middle East: the silent 99.9 per cent who are stifled by the deafening minority every day.

It was a refrain I repeated to my mother on regular occasions but one that also happened to be true: I wasn’t doing the trip because I believed it would be dangerous; I was doing it because I was convinced it would be safe.

There were problematic aspects to my plan, I knew. Though well-meaning in intent, it carried the weight of history with it. Europeans have been venturing to distant shores for hundreds of years for personal and political gain, inspecting the world much as a zoologist might scrutinise specimens in a lab. The history of exploration is bound up with exploitation, from the early seafarers who sought riches and fame, to the later cartographers, Arabists and spies who worked in the shadows of empire. Even someone such as Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British officer and explorer who travelled to connect rather than conquer and spent years living among the Marsh Arabs and Kurds, was the product of the imperial system (‘He seemed … as though he’d just been awarded his First Field Colours,’ he once pompously replied to a student when asked his opinion of a murderous Danikil tribesman, in reference to a sports prize given out at Eton).

These people may overwhelmingly have been men – and wealthy, public school men at that – but there was no denying that, as a white British traveller journeying through the Middle East, I would be following in some controversial and insalubrious footsteps. My trip may not have been incentivised by money or power, but there was undoubtedly more than a whiff of vanity about the endeavour. I wanted to learn about the region’s history, culture and people, yes. But I also wanted to prove myself, to have an adventure, to enjoy as absolute a sense of freedom as possible without sprouting a pair of wings.

The journey, I knew, would be an exercise in privilege. Due to the lottery of circumstance, I would be whisking in and out of places where others were trapped, enjoying a personal liberty that many couldn’t share. I would return home to accolades and applause – and the publication of this book, itself an emblem of privilege – while those making far more courageous journeys would face abuse, resentment and arrest. All of this couldn’t help but leave a sour taste in the mouth. It also made me more than aware of the irony when people warned me of the potential perils of the trip. Could I really be worried when I was the one, ultimately, in the position of power? When I, with my pallid skin and purple passport, symbolised one of the greatest threats ever to impact the Middle East: namely, the hegemony of the imperialist West?

I couldn’t change my heritage. But perhaps, I felt, I could use the journey to take a good look at myself. I could try to improve my understanding of the connections between our worlds, and of my complicity in the difficulties facing the region today.

The reality is that the Middle East cannot shake the past because it continues to bear the scars. Long before oil was discovered, the region was a battleground for global power struggles between East and West, each jostling for dominance with little concern for the people over whom they fought. It is no coincidence that the largest 2011 protests occurred in countries with a recent colonial legacy, where dictators had risen from the ashes of empire either to challenge Western supremacy (Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad) or to collaborate and benefit from its largesse (Hosni Mubarak, Ben Ali, Ali Abdullah Saleh). In both situations, homegrown tyrants became a kind of mirror image of the imperial powers they replaced, maintaining control largely through violence, coercion and fear.

Through their autocratic allies, Western powers have been able to maintain their influence in the Middle East to the present day. Colonialism may have ended, yet colonial-era policies continue to impact the region through diplomatic meddling, military intervention and a global economic system that benefits kleptocratic regimes over the public at large. In the lead-up to the Arab Spring, fiscal reforms imposed by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank helped to rip apart societies that did not have the transparency or accountability to support them, redirecting public funds into the hands of a cosy nepotistic elite. Meanwhile, the West remained characteristically blind to the consequences of its actions. In 2010, as Egypt creaked under the most severe inequality it had experienced since the feudalistic 1950s, the World Bank was branding the country its ‘top Middle East reformer’ for the third year in a row and praising Mubarak’s ‘bold’ and ‘prudent’ governorship. A few months later, the country erupted in flames.

The protests, therefore, were not simply a call for a more ‘Western’ way of life, as they have so often been portrayed. They were also, just as clearly, a rejection of the West-sponsored injustices that have beleaguered the Middle East for so long. In this way, the West could be seen as both cause and cure of the Arab Spring: a paradoxical symbol of liberté, égalité and fraternité on the one hand, andexploitation, expedience and hypocrisy on the other.

Tragically, despite the courage of the participants, the bulk of the revolutions failed (in the short term, at least); Syria, Libya and Yemen descended into civil war, while Egypt found itself tightly bound in fetters once more. In the meantime, paranoid despots used the unrest as an excuse to crack down on civil rights across the region, from the harassment of local activists and journalists to the expulsion of foreign aid workers and NGOs. Indeed, it is this suffocation of freedoms, and not Islamic State or al-Qaeda or any of the other fanatical groups who consistently dominate the news agenda, which constitutes the main threat facing the region today.

And it would be this heavy repression, as stifling as the summer heat, which – beyond terrorists, criminals, perverts, poor drivers and all the other manifold risks I was warned about before I left – I would most come to fear and resent during the twelve months I spent on the road.

My route, which was designed to cross as much of the Middle East as possible en route to Iran, ultimately comprised twenty countries: the UK, France, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, Oman, the UAE and Iran. But why pick Tehran as the finish line, you may ask? Well, Iran more than any other nation in the region has arguably experienced the most devastating impact of Western interference in recent times. A direct line can easily be drawn between the M16- and CIA-sponsored coup that ousted the democratic leader Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 and the 1979 Revolution that ushered in the oppressive Islamist regime that remains in power today. Since this time, Iran has been vilified by the international community as a dangerous, fanatical backwater – and Western travellers have largely stayed away.

Yet the more I read and wrote about Iran, the more this image began to appear both simplistic and flawed. The Islamic Republic seemed to me a tale of two countries, starkly divided between the conservative, insular ruling clerics on the one hand, who viewed the outside world with scorn, and the more progressive, outward-looking populace on the other, who embraced it with warmth. This somewhat crude, bipartite analysis had problems of its own, I was sure. But this apparent disconnect – between politics and the people – fascinated me. As my plans for the trip began to take shape, I knew my journey could only end there.

But endings, of course, need beginnings … So, with no further ado, let me leave these introductory notes here and kick this story off. I very much hope that you enjoy the ride.


Chapter 1

The Lure of the Unknown

Western Europe

‘The door to the east lies open: O you who strive after leaving, enter it with a glad greeting! Seize the chance of freedom from the cares of the world …’

Ibn Jubayr, twelfth-century Arab traveller

First, a confession. I am not a cyclist. I am, at a push, someone who cycles.

My apologies, therefore, to anyone who bought this book under false pretences. But if you’re hoping for rousing tales of sporting prowess or pushing the limits of physical endurance then I advise you to stop reading here. Likewise, if you’re after an informed analysis of the difference between cantilever and caliper brakes, or the pros and cons of an internal gear hub, this probably isn’t the book for you. No hard feelings – just drop it back and request a refund. We’ll pretend you were never here.

The truth is, examining my credentials in the run-up to departure, I was not an obvious contender to attempt an 11,000-kilometre, year-long bike ride halfway across the world. I was not particularly fit, had no sense of direction and held uncharitable views about people in spandex. It was at least six years since I’d last cycled up a hill.

While I rode my bicycle almost every day in London, I did so on a light carbon racer that I mainly used to commute: a round trip of precisely fifteen kilometres. Prior to departure, I clocked up a total of zero hours of training (why waste time trying to get fit in advance, I reasoned, when I could just do this on the road?) and instead focused on purchasing equipment, researching the route and organising logistics. I had at least done one semi-long cycle before, I consoled myself: a London-to-Paris charity event I’d undertaken as a reporting assignment in 2009 alongside twenty-four strapping policemen. Admittedly, I’d been in Team Rhino, the slowest of the three groups (later re-christened ‘Team Wino’ for reasons I found deeply unfair), and was travelling baggage-free courtesy of the support vehicle that accompanied us. But these, I felt, were mere details. I had completed the ride without injury or disaster, and that surely was what counted.

I set my leaving date as 20 July 2015 – in the (ultimately vain) hope that this would give me time to make it through the Sahara and Gulf before the searing heat of spring – and, as this day approached, I tried my best not to focus on the magnitude of the endeavour in front of me. Nonetheless, I could feel the tension lurking inside, coiling tightly about my chest and gut. Nights were the worst, when my worries broke free from their daytime shackles and beat about my head like bats in a cave. The same thoughts circled endlessly: why am I doing this? Should I be doing this? Am I able to do this? And the unsettling notion that every person is forced to confront at some point in their lives: what if my mother is right …?!

It didn’t help my nerves that I didn’t have a bicycle. While I had generously been donated one by Kona, it was coming fresh off the production line and wasn’t due to arrive until the day before departure, meaning I wouldn’t have time to practise on it or have it adjusted to fit my body. This, however, felt like a small price to pay for the privilege of owning a beautiful new tour bike – one that I knew would not only be a strong and reliable companion on the road but the name of which added a frisson of excitement to the idea of having it nestled between my legs for a year: the Kona Sutra 2016.

I have long been an advocate of diving in at the deep end. When we were toddlers, my parents taught me and my brother to cycle by running alongside our bikes holding our handlebars and then abruptly letting go, at which point we would crash with brutal predictability into a prickly shrubbery or onto the concrete flagstones. It was a painful, chastening experience that seared itself long onto both my memory and my cranium, and it strikes me now that a period with stabilisers might not have been such a bad idea. But the method was an effective one. It didn’t take long before we both realised it was in our best interest to stay upright, veering away from the rocks and thorns like a workhorse cowering from the whip.

The mind and body are astonishingly resilient things when put to the test. Ability is overrated, I’ve always felt; it is proclivity that counts – the instinct and readiness to succeed. So I resolved just to get on my bike and deal with the trivial problem of having no idea what I was doing once it was too late to back out from actually doing it. There are few things harder than setting off, after all: that sharp, bracing blow when the floor is pulled out from under you or the safety catch released.

After that, surely, half the battle would already be won?

The night before I’m due to leave, I am already regretting this course of action. I feel chronically underprepared and wish fervently to delay. Having left my job only three weeks ago, I’ve spent every minute since then scouting for sponsors, tying up loose admin and purchasing gear – leaving very little time to pack.

At 9pm, the living room is carpeted with a colourful medley of bike tour ‘essentials’, from a mini-tripod and inflatable chair to a collapsible wine glass and silver-plated hipflask. In my ‘electricals’ pile alone, I have three cameras (a DSLR, Go-Pro and camcorder), a laptop, a Dictaphone, a solar-powered battery charger, a normal battery charger, a Kindle, a travel speaker, a satellite tracker – bought by P and my parents as a safety measure – a mini-iPod and an iPhone 4. Beside this heap is a knotted lump of cables the size of a basketball that I feel obliged to include because I removed all the wires from their respective boxes and now have no idea which ones go with which pieces of equipment.

And in the centre, perched with elegant insouciance against the armchair, sits my most prized possession: my ukulele.

It does seem rather a lot of things when they’re laid out like that, I admit. But I console myself that my haul at least pales in comparison to the items ferried by camel train across the desert by the explorer and Arabist Gertrude Bell in the early 1900s, which included folding tables with linen tablecloths, a trunk of hats and parasols, a Wedgewood dinner service, a canvas bed and bath, and as many pieces of weaponry as she could strap to her stockinged calves beneath layers of lacy undergarments.2 That was a different era, of course, and I’ve no doubt that even Ms Bell would have discarded the odd chaise longue or two if she’d been forced to carry everything herself. But there’s sadly no time to distil the cargo now. By the time everything is squeezed into my four panniers, rucksack and bar bag, the total load including the bike weighs nearly ten stone. And that’s before my bottles of water and gin are added, and my hardback copy of Miss F.J. Erskine’s Lady Cycling: What to Wear & How to Ride: a must-read for any serious female tour cyclist (‘Wool above, wool below, wool all over, such is the Medes and Persians hygienic rule for cycling,’ the author counsels wisely. ‘It is essential to have well-cut knickerbockers in lieu of skirts …’).

Having never cycled with panniers before – especially ones swollen and bulging like a blocked water main – I wonder whether it might be prudent to take a test ride. However, it is already dark outside, so instead I place the bike on its side and practise trying to pick it up. Ten minutes later I call for P, and together the two of us manage with some difficulty to heave it upright and rest it awkwardly against the wall.

‘Feeling prepared?’ P asks, a little unkindly.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’ll get used to it.’

‘You definitely need a whole litre of chamois cream? That’s a lot of chafing.’

‘You never know.’

‘And seriously, a ukulele? Who do you think you are? Laurie Lee?’

The romantic in me protests vehemently, while the cynic concedes he may have a point. Aged thirty-plus, with a mortgage and long-term partner, I can no longer claim to operate in Lee’s ‘swinging, weightless realm’ of endless unmapped potential, ‘when the body burns magic fuels, so that it seems to glide in warm air, about a foot off the ground’. My gliding days are over, and my fuel tends to be the kind you purchase from crooked roadside mechanics in Karakalpakstan. However, I admit I struggle to discount this image entirely. In recent weeks, I cannot deny having entertained the occasional quixotic vision of the road ahead, in which I’ve imagined myself in some kind of meadow or bucolic pastureland, strumming a plaintive folk ballad while local herdsmen and wildlife gather around to listen. In these passing fancies, people would be clapping and cheering, birds swooping and singing, and nearby fauna would be looking on with that wistful poise we all know from classics such as Watership Down and Bambi.

P, however, appears to see things differently. ‘Well, at least it’ll act as a good deterrent,’ he says, handing me an enormous goblet of red wine. ‘A few bars of “The Lancashire Hot Pot Swingers” and no self-respecting thief or murderer is likely to hang about for long.’

My alarm sounds at 6.30am. Then 6.45am. Then 7am. Getting up feels like a momentous effort. The day looms bright and fierce, ablaze with a lifetime of anticipation. With my eyes still closed, I flex my left arm, my last remaining hope for delay. Since having my typhoid jab a week ago, I’ve felt like I’ve been having daily wrestles with Tyson Fury. Lying in bed each night, I’ve passed the sleepless hours imagining myself as the heroin addict in Requiem for a Dream, my bicep turning mushy and gangrenous as I cry out deliriously, heroically, that I’m leaving no matter what, only to be dragged off by medics and sedated.

But it isn’t to be. My arm feels fine. I feel fine. The weather is perfect. So, summoning all the willpower I possess, I finally drag myself up, change into my cycling gear – sleeveless top, shorts, padded underpants, sports sandals – and prepare a modest breakfast of cornflakes, three crumpets, two bananas, a blueberry muffin and three cups of tea, drawing out these final moments of comfort and familiarity as long as I can. It is fortunate, perhaps, that this initial ride is going to be easier than the rest, as P has offered to drive my panniers to my sister’s house in Bolney, West Sussex, where we’re due to meet my parents before I board the ferry to France. So I will enjoy the shameful indulgence of cycling the first few hours David Cameron-style, with accompanying support vehicle and entourage.

The day begins well. The sun is a pale lemon disc, warm but not hot, and my doubts and restlessness fall away as I weave my way south around cars trapped in rigid jams. This is easy, I think, conveniently forgetting that I’m carrying about a tenth of the weight I should be. What was all the fuss?

Then I enter Croydon – and I hope I never have to say those words again. Does it ever end? It reminds me of Montana, which I once travelled through during a Greyhound bus trip around America, hoping to be as enamoured with the ‘land of the shining mountains’ as John Steinbeck had been during his (admittedly largely fanciful) journey through the state five decades earlier. Instead, I recall falling asleep at the border and awaking what seemed like several months later to exactly the same fields of wheat and skipping tumbleweed, wondering if this was where time went to die. Croydon feels the same. It is also necessary to climb a gruesome hill to escape it, which may explain why so many people end up staying there.

The hill is truly fierce. As I edge my way up in fitful wheezes and gasps, it occurs to me that cycling on a slope is an entirely different proposition to cycling on flat ground. A different sport altogether, in fact. Ridiculous as it may sound, it never occurred to me to examine the terrain between here and Iran; instead, in an act of hubristic folly, I pored over the map like a giant or god, teleporting myself with seamless ease from one point to the next. Because of this, I have no idea what lofty horrors might lie in store – and I find myself suddenly gripped by panic. Could I plot a route that bypasses all but the most meagre of gradients, I wonder? Would that not be a feat admirable in itself, for its creative cartography, perhaps, if not its athleticism?

For now, however, I have no option but to continue. If nothing else, the idea of having crossed Croydon for nothing is unconscionable. So I press on, exhausted, and eventually make it to the top of the hill and onwards to Bolney by lunch. The meal is a jolly affair. Over champagne and fish pie, I am treated to a hamper of generous gifts from my sister – including two rape alarms (‘one for convenience, one for volume’) – as well as useful advice on how to dislocate a man’s thumb if attacked (‘bend, twist and pull!’).

Then, before I know it, it is time to say goodbye and I find myself enveloped in a series of smothering bear-hugs. ‘Please be careful,’ my father cautions. Aged eighty-seven, he recently began a course of chemotherapy for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia, although as ever he’s doing his best to appear spry. ‘Remember: call if you need anything. BLAST [the ‘Becky Lowe Action Support Team’, founded by my long-suffering parents two decades ago] will be waiting!’

‘And don’t speak to any strange men,’ my mother adds. ‘Unless they’re very handsome, of course.’

P and I say our goodbyes at the dock. It will be two months before we meet again, although it doesn’t feel like it. All day long I’ve felt an odd sense of detachment from my surroundings, as if it is not me going away but someone else entirely. Rather than fear or excitement, all I feel is a tremor of adrenalin low in my abdomen, like the whirr of a generator gently powering me on. It’s as if all extraneous emotion has been harnessed to the challenge ahead, just as oxygen is channelled to the core muscles of long-distance runners to help spur them towards the finish line.

‘Call me when you arrive,’ P says, giving me a hug. ‘And try not to get lost between here and Dieppe.’

‘It’s just a direct ferry ride,’ I reply.

‘Yes. I know what you’re like.’

On the boat, a couple spot me with my bike and ask where I’m going. They seem impressed when I say Iran but immediately assume that I’m single and searching for love on the road. It is a response I’ll come to know well. Male travellers generally require little rationalisation, I find, while women are often suspected of having an ulterior motive: mending a broken heart, perhaps, or soothing a troubled soul. Perhaps there’s some truth to this – but what of Dervla Murphy or Gertrude Bell, who carried souls as tough as bootstraps? Or Hester Stanhope, Freya Stark, Mary Kingsley, Nellie Bly?3 Or the growing number of female pioneers today, whose aims and hopes and fears are as disparate as any of the men who’ve gone before?

I have already outlined my reasons for doing this trip. But these are really only the justifications. Beyond them lies a deeper urge far harder to explain. George Mallory famously climbed Everest because it was ‘there’. Wilfred Thesiger was drawn to Arabia for ‘the lure of the unknown’. Ibn Battuta relished the idea of turning from speechlessness ‘into a storyteller’.4 Ask any traveller and their answer will most likely be infuriatingly vague: both everything and nothing; to go mad and stay sane. It’s a black hole of obfuscation where some see eternity and others a dead star. In this way, travellers are the ultimate paradox. They crave knowledge and secrets, enlightenment and bewilderment. They want both to decipher the mystery and delight in it; to expose the world, while mourning, in the words of Robert Macfarlane, ‘the diminishing limits of the unfamiliar’.

In the ferry lounge, I buy a bottle of 2010 Chateau Lieujean Haut-Medoc and watch as the Newhaven shoreline slips quietly between the sky and the sea. Soon the tremor in my gut begins to settle and the brittle reality of the venture ahead assumes a softer glow. I can do this, I think. And for the first time, as the cool sea air turns from white to gold to violet to silver-grey, I think that maybe I truly can.

My relationship with the Dieppe hotelier gets off to a bad start. This is perhaps unsurprising, as I startle her awake at 11pm by crashing through the door with my big dirty vélo. She is wearing a cotton nightgown and is small and angular, all elbows, knees and nostrils. She twists into the room like a spindle, hisses at me to taisez vous and disappears again with a dismissive swipe of her hand. So French! I think delightedly.

The next morning, I rise early to pack for departure. But without a bicycle stand, attaching the bags to the luggage racks proves a challenge. First, I rest the bike against a sturdy-seeming potted plant, which promptly collapses. Then I try the hedge. But hedges are thorny, hateful things and not to be trusted. This one gives a veneer of helpfulness before rearing up on its bushy haunches and swallowing my bike whole. It isn’t until 10am, two hours later than planned, that I am finally ready to leave – but this poses some difficulties too. Rather than cycling directly from the hotel, where I fear I may have witnesses, I instead walk a hundred yards down the lane, where I mount my steed with what I hope may be mistaken for a nonchalant swing of the leg. Then, with a sharp push, I veer away from the fence, launch myself erratically off the kerb and collide with the side of a Vespa. Glancing around, I’m relieved that nobody seems to be watching except a herd of enormous cows. They stare at me disdainfully. I try again and stagger with inevitable futility into the path of an oncoming van. Ah yes, I remind myself. People drive on the right in France.

Disheartened, I stop for a rest. Cycling with panniers already feels exhausting. I’ve made progress, at least: about ten metres, to be precise. I do some calculations. At this rate it will take me approximately fifty-eight years to complete the trip. And P, I suspect, may have got bored of waiting.

Eventually, however, many failed attempts later, I achieve a kind of unsteady rhythm – even if this rhythm, as it turns out, is largely misdirected. For the next few hours, I circle and backtrack along a muddled contortion of backroads, often arriving after twenty or thirty minutes in broadly the same spot as where I started. By the time I locate the highway, I feel almost ready to give up for the day. But here I finally begin to make good progress, the weight of my bike propelling me over its soaring undulations like a bowling ball aimed at the pins.

The miles start to flash by, although I’m mindful of overdoing it. ‘It is important that ladies should only go moderate distances at first,’ the ever-perspicacious Miss F.J. Erskine advises. ‘Any day’s work over forty miles is too much.’ I take her words to heart. By 5pm, having covered an extravagant forty-three miles, I pull into Forges-les-Eaux flush with elation and relief. Relief that I’m alive; relief that I can steer; relief that my bags, which seemed so uncompromisingly cumbrous on the ground, can move – and efficiently – when annexed to the body of the bike. Keen to celebrate these ostensibly minor but momentarily earth-shattering achievements, I take a turn about town to see what it has to offer. Known primarily for its thermal waters, Forges-les-Eaux has a large central square and pretty river with a green, pearlescent sheen. But limited life can be found today. Some cafés and bar-tabacs are open, but most places are closed. And nowhere has wifi except the tourist office, which is also closed.

Admitting defeat, I buy a Camembert and baguette and return to the town periphery to find somewhere to camp. After a little exploration, I discover the ideal place – a beautiful meadow bathed in buttery sunlight, accessed by a slender track choked by dense foliage – and I feel a wave of pure contentment as I erect my tent and shake off the rigours and strains of the day.

Then, with a jolt, I realise I forgot to pack my gin – and immediately my mood shifts. Here I am, alone, exhausted and inescapably sober, with nothing to soothe my nerves as the chill of night descends. For the next few hours, I lie shrink-wrapped in my sleeping bag, ice-cold and alert, every sound and shadow as sharp as the prick of a knife. My mind drifts: to the derelict farmhouses I passed today, which reminded me of the psychopath’s lair in the film Wolf Creek; to the jungly vegetation outside, which initially seemed so enchanting but in the dark of a moonless night calls to mind the carnivorous algae in the novel Life of Pi; to every faintly disturbing story, book and movie I’ve ever encountered, which rise from my subconscious like steam from a gutter, haunting my thoughts and permeating my dreams.

I feel uneasy and lonelier than I’ve ever been. And – by god – I still have 11,000 kilometres left to go.

‘We’re not Poland or Hungary,’ the shopkeeper says as he fills paper bags with cherries in the central arrondissement of St Germain, Paris. ‘Muslims are pas de problème. But if they cannot accept our liberté, then we have problem.’

Around one in fourteen people in France are Muslim, making it the most Islamic country in the West. Many are second- and third- generation immigrants whose families arrived from the former North African colonies several decades ago. Historically, public attitudes to these communities have been fairly positive. Surveys suggest that the French view Muslims more favourably than any other European country except Germany and Britain, while Muslims have affirmed their sense of attachment towards France. When I arrive in Paris, however, tensions are clear. The brutal ISIS attacks that left 130 people dead are yet to occur, but the Charlie Hebdo shootings and a series of smaller attacks, including a beheading near Lyon, have shocked the nation.

‘We absolument condemn these attacks,’ a young Muslim cleric says after approaching me outside the Great Mosque. The pearly white Moorish building was built in 1922 in memory of the Muslim tirailleurs killed fighting for France during World War I and was later used by the Algerian imam Si Kaddour Benghabrit as a refuge for Jews during the Nazi occupation. ‘This isn’t Islam. These men don’t come to mosque. Their ideas are from la propagande.’

The further from the centre I cycle, the more the city seems to unravel, and the Périphérique ring-road feels like a frontier between worlds. The air seems denser on the other side, the light duller, while Brutalist concrete blocks clog the skyline, pockmarked and cinereal grey. Soon, I find myself passing through La Grande Borne in the southern banlieue of Grigny. Designed initially as a socialist utopia but inhabited mainly by impoverished residents of Arab or African origin, cités like this are now places of ‘geographic, social and ethnic apartheid’, according to the former French prime minister Manuel Valls. Today, the only people I encounter are an elderly Chinese man fiddling with his moped engine, which coughs and spews black smoke, and two young men on a side street smoking weed. Nearby, broken bottles lie heaped beneath a torn Givenchy poster on which the ‘e’ has been transformed into a noose with dashes of khaki paint.

I approach the two men and ask directions to strike up conversation. They are both dressed in grey tracksuits and one has a hamsa (hand of God) tattooed on his arm. They speak broken, hesitant English.

‘He idiot,’ the one without the tattoo, Benjamin, says when the conversation turns to Amédy Coulibaly, an Islamic State sympathiser from La Grande Borne who killed five people in the wake of the Hebdo attacks. ‘Always in trouble.’

‘You’re Muslim?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

‘Kind of.’ His friend, Hakim, smiles. ‘We try.’

The boys, both eighteen, grew up here, though Benjamin’s family originates from Morocco and Hakim’s from Algeria. I ask if they enjoy living in France and they glance at each other.

‘Yes,’ Hakim says.

‘No,’ Benjamin says.

They both grin nervously.

‘We love France, but …’ Hakim pauses to pass me the joint. ‘Here we have – how you say? – laïcité [secularism]. Some people see us as threat. And then some Muslims get angry.’

‘Angry?’

‘In words, I mean. But sometimes – boom boom!’He mimics shooting a gun.

‘No, she’ll think we’re terrorist!’ Benjamin turns to me. ‘We’re not terrorist. We’re rappers.’

I laugh, but he’s serious. ‘No, c’est vrai. Music is our passion.’

I request a performance, but they both turn shy. Instead, I ask where they think of as home. ‘France? Morocco? Algeria?’

‘France,’ Hakim says. ‘But my parents maybe Algérie. We speak Arabic at home. My grandfather knows people killed by France in the war.’

France has long tried to suppress troubling aspects of its colonial history. Yet in the banlieues the ghosts of the past continue to rise. A focus of France’s ‘civilising’ mission abroad, Algeria was under French rule from 1830 to 1962 and only achieved independence following a brutal eight-year conflict in which atrocities were committed by both sides. Textbooks are sparse on the details, however, and while President Macron recently took the ground-breaking step of acknowledging wartime crimes, wounds from the period remain raw.

Relations with Morocco, a former French protectorate, are similarly sensitive. ‘What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman?’ George Orwell asked scathingly in his 1939 essay ‘Marrakech’. ‘An orange-grove or a job in government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays and bandits. One could probably live there for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people, the reality of life is an endless, back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.’