The reports in this book originally appeared, in much shorter versions, as newspaper and magazine articles in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Afghanistan I), the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Pakistan), die tageszeitung (Palestine), Der Spiegel (Iraq) and Die Zeit (all other chapters). I thank the editors and the archives of those publications, especially Die Zeit, and my editor Jan Ross, for their encouragement, support and advice. I would also like to thank the Goethe Institutes in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Karachi and Cairo, the Goethe Centre in Lahore and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Cairo, which invited me to give readings and lectures. All the other trips were taken on assignment for the publications named.

The travelogues written between 2006 and 2009 have become part of the novel Dein Name (published by Hanser, Munich, 2011).

I thank my editor Ulrich Nolte at C. H. Beck for his excellent collaboration over many years, most recently on this book.

The tea house where I was the youngest of the regulars, twenty years ago, has expanded but lost none of its charm. To be exact, a few more plastic chairs have been set out in the narrow alley between two sooty colonial buildings, nothing more; but, in this place, just moving some furniture is a cultural revolution. Because any natural sense of taste seems to have died out in Cairo three, four decades ago, progress mostly takes the definition Adorno gave it: preventing progress. Around one, two o’clock, the tiredest whores in Cairo are sure to turn up for a last cola or a first client, while Umm Kulthum sings, as every night, of ‘those days’. The enchantment of the tea house, like that of every hostelry worthy of the name anywhere in the world, consists in the fact that nothing matches and therefore everything, as chance would have it, goes together: the furnishings and the decor, which must have been shabby already when the place opened; the cordial staff who nonetheless overcharge; the most artistic Arab orchestras from the most excruciating loudspeakers; the men regressing to little boys over card and board games; the women likewise acting as if they were still young; and, most of all, the laughter, the loud, chortling, jangling, squeaking, hoarse, malicious, self-effacing, gloating, roguish, jolly, forgiving laughter that is heard more often in Cairo than in any other city, and nowhere in Cairo more often than in the tea house in the evening, and, fortunately, still heard today, I must record, for I am always afraid until I return that the demon responsible for it all may have vanished. An entry in a travel guide could be the end of it, or a notice in the newspapers by one of the new zealots nostalgic for something that never existed – prostitution is among Cairo’s traditions, but not puritanism. There is no way that a symphony like the tea house could be composed today. And of course it never was composed; it was simply there, already a relic on its opening day. All the guests gather and pose for a group portrait, together with the staff and the neighbourhood’s shopkeepers, for a daughter eager to take a picture with her birthday present. Then the head waiter takes a picture of father and daughter that by itself is worth the twenty-year journey.