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until half past nine at night, rustle up a piece on a notepad in less than an hour, and ring it through to the Netherlands—knowing that the next morning more than two hundred thousand people would find it lying on their doormats. Or it was ten degrees in the Netherlands, but there I was in baking-hot Tehran, standing next to an election box and listening to the producer in Hilversum say, “Five seconds now,” and then I could tell a few hundred thousand countrymen about Iran.
    Of course, I made beginner’s errors, and I still blush when
I remember the time I casually asked the New York Times correspondent if I could have the phone number of the man he’d written about last week. He looked me up and down, presumably to see whether I might ever be able to return the favor, mumbled that he might feel a bit uncomfortable about it, and walked off.
    This was part of the job, too, but a reaction like that was the exception; most of my fellow journalists were helpful, perhaps because I was the only full-time correspondent from the Netherlands, and I wasn’t fishing in anyone else’s pond. There was just one list that everybody kept to themselves: The names and numbers of people with dodgy connections who could get you a visa for a dodgy country within a few hours, for a high price, if you got wind of breaking news.
    Over the months, my list of talking heads and ex-pats grew: Tour guides, business people, diplomats, scholars, development workers, Jesuits, and missionaries. For background and analysis, I used CNN, the New York Times , Al-Jazeera, and the other big boys. From these sources I pieced together a picture, combined it with websites and magazines, and then put it to my network: Does this match your impression? Am I missing anything?
    I found a better apartment in Cairo where the landlord had a human look in his eyes, not just dollar signs, and I can still remember looking around in a press conference some six months after that first trip to Sudan and happily thinking, Yes, I’ve finally arrived.
    At the same time, I couldn’t escape a growing feeling of unease.

Chapter Two
    No News
    It’s normal for people to take on the colors of the organization they are working for without realizing it, and that’s what happened to me. I was working so hard to fulfill the demands and expectations of my employers that I had no time to reflect on them. When my article “Islamic Front threatens U.S. with new attacks” led the front page, I glowed with pride. It was only a summary of agency press releases and local news and, thanks to the Internet, I could just have easily have written it in Amsterdam. But I’d scored the headline. And my colleagues were congratulating me! Successes like this gave me a good feeling for the first six months. After that, it became so routine that I had time to reflect on what I was doing, and where that feeling of unease was coming from.

    Earlier, as a student, I’d spent quite some time in the Arab world. My first encounter had been in the mid-1990s, as an unworldly twenty-something traveling through Syria. Mass tourism didn’t exist in Syria back then, and I’d been frightened. Despite the political correctness I’d grown up with, I saw Arabs as irrational men who set fire to flags or effigies, and shouted horrible things about the West. In any case, I thought they were exotic—perhaps not inferior, but certainly different.
    But once in Syria, I didn’t see any burning flags, I didn’t hear a single anti-Western slogan, and if I began to talk about politics I saw repressed panic rather than hatred on people’s faces. My confusion continued to grow because nobody had told me that Arabs, and therefore Syrians, too, can do some things better than Westerners. Syria might be thirty times poorer than the Netherlands, but I saw scarcely any vandalism, beggars, aggressive drunks, or homeless people. There was almost no petty crime; I could leave my luggage at a bus stop or archaeological site