In an idle moment, I was thinking: what would be my Top Ten list for the coolest things, and the uncoolest things, I've seen in the Middle East.

Particularly Cool Things, in no particular order:

1) Seeing former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami give a speech in Qom, Iran, then drive about eight feet in front of me in his jeep waving to adoring fans under the dome light a couple hours later. The masses of people gathered there treated him as a rock star.

2) Spotting Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the late founder and president of the United Arab Emirates, sitting in the front passenger seat of his monstrous stretch Mercedes limo while sitting at a red light in Abu Dhabi. He was one of the richest men in the world, yet his simple sense of Bedouin hospitality would not permit him to sit in the back seat and leave the driver unaccompanied. Though his image was plastered all over the country like most Middle Eastern leaders, Zayed was a truly admirable character.

3) The vast, unfathomable diversity of the believers gathered in Mecca during our visit there in 2002. The social systems of our lives have a way of filtering out people who are unlike ourselves. We tend to come into contact with people who are at least something like us, college educated perhaps, speak the same language, come from roughly the same economic background. Mecca was like having all those filters torn away at once, to see humanity as it really is in all its glorious filth and beauty.

4) Visiting an Alevi community center in Istanbul and seeing the dervish like dancers blissfully springing around in ritual dance to the raw, almost punk-like jangle of the Turkish Saz. The Alevis are a mystical and secretive Shiite minority in Turkey, and deliciously heterodox at that.

5) Interviewing the famous Lebanese Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadhlallah in Beirut in 2000. A gracious host with a defiant and powerful liberation theology, survivor of numerous assassination attempts, icon of the Lebanese resistance.

6) Interviewing the second-in-command of the legendary and secretive Mandaean-Sabean religion in Baghdad before the war, 2002. These folks are said to be the followers of John the Baptist, and have their own holy book called the Kenza Raba, written in Aramaic. In decline partly because of a proscription on conversions, they still exist in small numbers in Iraq and Iran. Baptism, as you might predict, is their main ritual.

7) Sitting in the courtyard of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul as the call to prayer swept over the city. Pigeons, jostled by the rousing voice of the mu'ezzin, streamed overhead in the twilight while rows of young Quran students bobbled in semi-disciplined lines across the stone floor to the door of the mosque for prayer.

8) Hiking and wadi-bashing in the deserts of the UAE. Going out into the vast, empty desert gives you some small insight into the sense of noble poverty at the core of Arab values.

9) Seeing my grandfather's village in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon for the first time. Still remembered there, my grandfather left hearth and home for the United States as a wee lad of eight and never returned. Though never much of a 'heritage' kind of guy, this was mentally, physically, and emotionally overwhelming for me. I am still not sure why, exactly. A friend suggested it was some form of 'cellular memory'.

10) The Sayyida Zainab shrine in Damascus. This place more than any other in the region has a powerful draw for me, and I feel like there is a silver cord which now connects me to it no matter where I go.

Uncool Things list to follow.