BOOKS

By R.Z. Sheppard

BAGHDAD WITHOUT A MAP

by Tony Horwitz; Dutton

276 pages; $19.95

MOTORING WITH MOHAMMED

by Eric Hansen; Houghton Mifflin

240 pages; $19.95

The Arabic equivalent of "No way, Jose" is "Mish mumkin." "No problem" is "Mafeesh mushkilah."

For example: "Pardon me, Yasser, but would you care to contribute to the United Jewish Appeal?"

"Mish mumkin!"

Or, "There appears to be a Scud heading my way. Is there anything you chaps with the Patriots can do about it?"

"Mafeesh mushkilah."

Another lesson, generously illustrated in these two travel books about places where one would not currently travel, is that the will of Allah is important in these parts. This remains true even as Saddam Hussein discovers that the will of George Bush is guided by lasers.

Tony Horwitz, a London-based reporter for the Wall Street Journal, visited the Middle East as a free-lance writer during the 1980s. Eric Hansen sailed the Red Sea and discovered the charms of North Yemen as a free spirit. Another difference between the two books: Baghdad Without a Map is about an observant and witty man trying to make a living; Motoring with Mohammed is about a man who has evidently discovered how to live without a job.

Thirteen years ago, Hansen and four friends in a sailboat were shipwrecked on an uninhabited island 20 miles off the Yemenite coast. Mafeesh mushkilah. They had food, water and no appointments to keep. Hansen's emergency flares were undoubtedly seen by local fisherman and passing ships, but help came later rather than sooner.

Hansen's pleasantly elliptical narrative slides over a 10-year period at the end of which the author returns to North Yemen to retrieve his journals, buried for safekeeping on the island. It is not much of a payoff, though along the way Hansen delivers a lush portrait of a society that has managed to survive even though there seems to be a Kalashnikov for every copy of the Koran.

One reason for this longevity may be that Yemenites always find time for a communal chew of kat, a mood-altering plant whose effect seems similar to that of the Andean coca leaf. Horwitz also makes the kat scene, but the effect soon dissipates in the tensions of Cairo, Khartoum and Baghdad. In 1988, he notes, the popular joke in the Iraqi capital was that there were 32 million Iraqis: 16 million people and 16 million pictures of Saddam Hussein. This count included the President's face on wristwatches and ashtrays, and an unnerving number of government officials who are Saddam look-alikes. The extent of the idolatry renews the urgency of Vladimir Nabokov's warning that portraits of a nation's leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp.

In Libya, Horwitz finds a designer dictator dressed in a cape, tartan sweater and red wool hat. Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is also given to mismatched profundities, like "Woman is a female and man is a male" and "Democracy means popular rule, not popular expression."

Horwitz quotes the late Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini as having once said, "There is no fun in Islam." Yet the sartorially and culturally suppressed of trendy Tehran have their ways. The author and his wife are invited to a dinner party at an apartment in an affluent section of the Iranian capital. Once inside, the women slip out of their long, black chadors to reveal miniskirts and low-cut blouses. They are soon drinking bootlegged vodka and wiggling to pop music. Although the guests grudgingly respect the imam and are proud of their heritage, they are sadly aware of their predicament. "You cannot spend your whole life behind closed curtains, drinking bad vodka and listening to low-volume Madonna," said an engineer who had studied in North Carolina.

The difference between East and West is the source of humor in both books, but both authors also catch the poignancy of their hosts' struggles to be reborn from the ruins of their ancient civilizations.