He’d had a rotten day at the office — the boss had barked at him, ordering some project done within an impossible deadline. So he got aboard his pearl-white Harley-Davidson Street Glide, turned the ignition, gripped the throttle and revved the engine.
He rode through streets crowded with apartments, past well-lighted skyscrapers. The city faded behind him and he breathed in the cool nighttime air, his motorbike roaring through the desert.
For a few minutes, he felt free of his job, his family, of pressures and demands on his time, just heading out on the highway atop nearly 800 pounds of pure American thunder.
On a Middle Eastern highway.
“My mind just clears,” says Rakan Talal, 26, from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, who was among a small but fervent crew of hog fanatics converging on Lebanon last weekend for the country’s first Harley-Davidson tour. “I don’t think about anything. Just the road and feeling the wind. … Riding a bike makes it all feel better.”
About 130 Harley riders roared into town from all over the Arab world — Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia.
Even as clerics and politicians in the Arab world ring out denunciations of U.S. foreign policy and the encroachment of Western-style decadence, these gleaming emblems of American freedom are growing in popularity here, says Marwan Tarraf, who sells Harleys in Lebanon and helped organize the tour. Harley clubs are popping up around the region. Talal says his chapter in Riyadh has about 300 members. They ride in one of the world’s most religiously conservative countries wearing the black leather jackets, heavy boots and snarling insignia of biker gangs everywhere.
“It’s part of American culture,” says Tarraf, a burly 40-year-old with a head shaved shiny and a goatee speckled with white. “It’s a lifestyle adopted mostly by people who have some kind of connection to America. They either lived there or studied there or are connected to Americans.”
But anyone can ride a Harley.
“Once you get on a Harley, you feel that you are really free and that your spirit is always up high and you’re going through the wind,” said Abraham Kadoumy, 51, who discovered the motorcycle culture when he lived in Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early ’80s. “Freedom is what it’s all about.”