“Are you going to Friday prayer?” asked Amal, my grandparents’ caretaker. I looked at my teta and jiddo—grandma and grandpa—sitting beside me on the balcony while I considered my options. I’d arrived in the Lebanese town of Kab Elias the night before, and it felt too soon to offend my elders and start rumours about myself, the heathen Canadian; so I said sure. “Good,” she said. “I’ll leave you some hot water so you can make wudu.”

I needed to freshen up after a day of travel anyway, and was eager to explore my family’s hometown alone, something I’d never done before. It was my first trip to Lebanon in eight years, and my first as an adult. Fresh out of college, I’d planned to spend the previous summer here to figure out what, if anything, I could do with two certificates from two separate colleges and little life experience. I was prepared to extend my trip to a year if time allowed it. But six days before my flight, on July 12, 2006, Hezbollah militants instigated a war with Israel, whose government retaliated with predictable cruelty; in addition to killing scores of civilians and wiping out entire families, the Israel Defense Forces targeted civilian infrastructure, including runways at the Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport—which had just been renamed in honour of a prime minister who’d been assassinated by Hezbollah agents. Instead of going, I spent that summer educating myself about Middle Eastern politics, psyching myself up for the rescheduled trip a year later and enrolling in yet another college; my third in three years.

People told me I was brave or crazy to still go, but if not that summer, then when? The situation, I agreed, would likely get worse before it got better—but would it get better while I was still a wandering young adult, convinced that my hidden potential lay dormant in the homeland? “Well, at least shave your beard,” advised an uncle before I left, concerned that I’d be mistaken for a Shi’a Muslim—which, especially in our predominantly Sunni Muslim town in the foothills of Mount Lebanon, essentially meant being taken for a Hezbollah sympathizer. I told him never; my beard had been my defining feature since the ninth grade. It signified my proud Middle Eastern identity in defiance of anyone who’d, jokingly or not, call me a terrorist—and, if I’m being honest with myself, in defiance of my own failures to embrace my heritage. Abstaining from alcohol and reading Arabic was hard, but I could still distinguish my Arabness with personal grooming.

The advice was repeated after I landed in Beirut. My uncles and cousins reprimanded me for my beard on the drive from the airport, and I heard it again from Amal and my grandparents on the balcony—which upped my motivation to get dressed and get going. With a slim digital camera and notebook in my satchel, I bid them goodbye. I never intended to go to Jum’ah, the Friday prayer; I planned to see the town, revisit childhood memories and return home after prayer finished.

My first order of duty was to buy cigarettes. I stood in line behind a kid who couldn’t see over the counter, yet who could buy a pack of Viceroys (for his dad, one hopes). Not recognizing any of the other brands, I asked for the same when it was my turn. The clerk, whom I vaguely remembered as a distant relative named Karoomi, did a double take. “You’re Ahmed Mouallem’s son,” he said, then proceeded to remind me how chubby I had been in the seventh grade. “Look at you. You’ve lost weight.” Karoomi dragged his knuckles across my cheeks. “You look like a terrorist.” We laughed about it and caught up for as long as my limited Arabic allowed, then I was on my way.

I didn’t get far before running into Ghassan, another distant cousin, who used to own an arcade and billiard room. Once, when I was seven, while walking around his store, my foot slipped out of its flip flop onto a sharp, rusty dustpan and was sliced open. Ghassan rushed me to the hospital for stitches and a tetanus shot. Fifteen years later, it was the first thing he remembered about me. I offered to show him the scar but he was busy looking for his cat. She was so beautiful that Ghassan was convinced someone had stolen her.

I suggested he print posters of her and offer a finder’s reward. Ghassan liked the idea and asked me to help him make some. He took me to his house to choose a picture from his son’s computer. While his son booted the machine up, I scanned the teenager’s bedroom walls. Amidst posters of Brazilian soccer all-stars were pictures of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah with his fist raised. Three flags draped from the ceiling—Lebanon, Brazil and the yellow Hezbollah one, with an emblem in which the first letter in “Allah” rises up to grasp a rifle. Just a year prior, you never would have seen these decorations outside of a Shi’a home. Many, if not most, of my relatives in Kab Elias have portraits of Rafic Hariri or his prodigal son Saad. Nasrallah had been a parasite to them. Clearly the 2006 war was changing the leader’s public image. Creeped out, I wanted to leave, but first I had to survive reviewing a hundred pictures of Ghassan’s kitty, and each time remark on how beautiful she was. The call to prayer mercifully intervened. Ghassan offered to take me with him to the mosque, but I said I needed to run home and make wudu first. “Hurry,” he said. “There’s not much time.”

On the way out I saw another Nasrallah picture, framed and placed where most people keep family photos. Ghassan caught me glancing at it, and, smiling almost tenderly, said, “You look like him, with your glasses and beard.”

I slipped into the procession of worshippers walking through traffic, then slunk out at the last intersection before the mosque. It didn’t take long to reach the outskirts of Kab Elias. I wandered through the industrial area toward a strip of undeveloped land and unfinished apartment buildings that represented the unrealized dreams of émigrés like my father, who left Lebanon vowing to return. These émigrés bought the land and then either ran out of money or changed their minds. For my father, it was the latter. His dream project never even broke ground. I looked at the empty plot off the highway, pointed out to me by my uncle the previous night. In my lifetime, its only use has been as a parking lot for tanks from the Syrian army, until mass demonstrations following Hariri’s assassination pressured Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to end the twenty-nine-year occupation.

I paused to photograph an Arabic stop sign, thinking that posting it on Facebook might earn me some traveller’s clout. As I took photos from different angles, a mechanic across the street came toward me, shaking a big wrench. “Ey!”

I looked at him, then behind me, around me and back to him.

“Ey! Come here!”

I waved at him happily, stupidly, which had the intended effect of chilling him out.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Canada.”

“Canada?” he asked, instantly friendlier. “What are you doing?”

“Just taking pictures of things for my friends.”

“No, here in Kab Elias. What are you doing?”

“Visiting family.”

“Which bayt are you from?” His eyes lit up when I told him the household. “Bayt Mouallem! Are you Ahmed Mouallem’s son?”

Suddenly, he’d forgotten that he had taken me for a national security threat. With a vigorous handshake and a hearty “ahlan wa sahlan,” he welcomed me home.

The whole exchange lasted only a minute, but prepared me for the next time I took out my camera, not much later. A cemetery wall caught my eye on account of the curious graffiti on it: a bunch of Hotmail addresses scrawled in spray paint for reasons I didn’t understand. I found it terrifically hilarious; but unfortunately, the hilarity was hard to explain to the barber in the adjacent building. He jumped down the steps, getting right in my face, and demanded I tell him who I was and what I was doing. With my wretched Arabic, I could only describe my fascination with the wall as “it laughs.”

“The wall laughs?” he asked, baffled.

“Yeah, the emails on it. We don’t do that in Canada.”

“You’re not Lebanese.”

“No, not Lebanese. Canadian,” I said. “From bayt Mouallem. Son of Ahmed Mouallem.”

“Mouallem! My son married a Mouallem. In Canada, too. Do you know her?” He mentioned her name, and indeed I knew her very well. We grew up together in northern Alberta. As I connected our family trees, his grin suddenly inverted, appearing distracted by a concerning thought. “Why did you say you are not Lebanese?” he asked.

“I’m Lebanese here,” I said, pointing to my head. “And I’m Lebanese here,” I said, pointing to my heart. Then I pointed to my lips and said, “But here, I’m not so Lebanese.”

He laughed. “I can hear that.” The barber then advised that I be careful walking around alone with my camera and beard. Times are tense, he explained. People will think I’m a spy.

I decided my fellow Sunni Muslims were too paranoid and nosy, so I started hiking uphill to the Maronite Catholic community. But all along the way, and even once I got there, I was scrutinized with what felt like even more intensity. The eyes of deceased soldiers staring back at me from photos adorning shrines did not calm my nerves. People behind me whispered, “Who’s that?” prompting me to do things that were completely benign, like talk to wild chickens, so that at the very least they’d think I was a “simple” terrorist. The only people who seemed not to give a shit were three soldiers on foot. “Marhaba,” I said as we crossed paths, greeting them. They nodded their heads in unison at the bearded spy and kept walking. 

The view of the Beqaa Valley was spectacular. The red roofs stretched into farmland, then into another small town, then to the Anti-Lebanon Mountains bordering Syria. From the minaret speakers below, I heard the Friday sermon and prayer wind down and watched a crowd spill out of the mosque. It was time for everyone to return to work or home, myself included.

On my way back, I spied a man watching me from his window. He disappeared, then reappeared in front of me with interrogative questions. I offered my declaration of place, family and father again, but it fell short. So, I told him who my mom was. As luck would have it they’d gone to junior high together. I accepted his invitation for coffee, which seemed sincere at the time, but which I now think was probably feigned hospitality that I had been expected to decline. Whoops.

Arm in arm, he led me to his apartment, introduced me to his family, then asked his son to gather his brother’s family from upstairs. We had a rickety conversation about life in Canada compared to life in Lebanon, translated through his niece Nadine, who had also been delegated to dote on me with offerings. Again and again she disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared with a refilled platter of fresh cherries, plums and Turkish coffee. The family’s generosity became satirical after I complained about the cost of cigarettes in Canada, and how happy I was to buy them at a dollar a pack in Lebanon. “But I don’t know which brand is best yet,” I said.

“Nadine, go get him the cigarettes,” her uncle said, embarrassing us both. I assured them it wasn’t necessary, but soon Nadine had replaced my fruit tray with a platter of every cigarette brand. He insisted I try each one. I couldn’t tell if this was a teachable moment about the harms of smoking, but I went ahead. One by one, I picked a brand, put the cigarette to my lips for the patriarch to light it, smoked a bit, snuffed it out and let him light another. Overloaded on nicotine and coffee, I felt light-headed and shaky. I realized the only way to escape their hospitality challenge was to declare one brand superior to all the others.

He kindly handed me the whole pack of Lucky Strikes. “It’s yours.”

I thanked them all for their generosity and promised I’d drop by again.

“But shave, all right?” he said sincerely.

“I’Il think about it.”

By the time I approached my family’s apartment building, I’d been gone for three hours—far longer than Jum’ah lasts. As I considered my alibi, I spotted my cousin walking on one side of the road, and his dad driving slowly on the other. They seemed to be searching for someone. My uncle stopped the car, hopped out and called for his son, saying, “I see him.” Then he turned to me, looking unusually angry. “Get in the car.”

As far as I knew they weren’t religious, so I couldn’t understand why they cared about me playing hooky with Friday prayer. But I did as told. My uncle launched into his tirade. “You’re going around taking pictures? What were you thinking? You can’t do that. Do you know what the state of Lebanon is like? People are very afraid. They’re looking for anything unusual. And you! You walk around with your beard and bag and camera. A yellow shirt?”

I looked down at my shirt, and yeah, I guess it was yellow.

“You look like you’re from Hezbollah!”

“I do?”

“Yes, you do! And what else? I go to the barber and he tells me he met my nephew. My nephew, yes, taking pictures of a wall. Why are you taking pictures of a wall?”

“It laughs.”

“The wall laughs? He thought you were a spy. And what else? You weren’t at prayer.” He continued, “We thought for sure the soldiers saw you and arrested you.”

“Actually,” I said, trying to hide my amusement, “I did talk to soldiers. Three of them. I said, ‘marhaba.’”

“And?” he asked, surprised.

“And here I am.”

My comedy of errors was practically folklore that summer in Kab Elias, exaggerated and elongated with each iteration. Due to my stunted Arabic, I was rarely the storyteller. I’d sit silently with a forced grin as people told their versions of it. In every case, I was yelled at by the barber. Sometimes I was chased by him. In one inexplicable version, I was spotted talking to someone in a red truck, getting in with him and driving away.

The rumours were reinforced when the barber himself would come over for dinner. “Hey, it’s your friend,” Amal joked when he walked in. “Nasrallah!” he’d call me, then turn his handshake into a citizen’s arrest by pinning my hands behind my back while everyone laughed. If teasing me was an elaborate scheme to get another client, it worked. I went in for a shave and was never called a terrorist again. At least not in the homeland. ⁂

Excerpted from the collection Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home, edited by Taslim Jaffer and Omar Mouallem and forthcoming from Book*hug. Used with permission from the publisher.

Omar Mouallem is an Edmonton-based author, filmmaker and educator. His journalism has appeared in the Guardian, Wired and the Wall Street Journal. His book Praying to the West: How Muslims Shaped the Americas won the 2022 Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the Globe and Mail’s best books of 2021. His film The Lebanese Burger Mafia won the 2023 audience favourite award at NorthwestFest. He teaches creative nonfiction at the University of King’s College.