"First time?" asked Nbil with a broad smile as I walked through the doors of the Al Pasha Turkish Bath.

"Yes!" I exclaimed, delighted that even after all of my years of world travel, when you look hard enough, there are still first times.

The Al Pasha is perched atop one of the oldest of the nine hills that comprise Amman, Jordan. This thoroughly modern Middle Eastern city of 5 million residents boasts every conceivable amenity: shopping malls and art museums; beauty parlors and Starbucks coffee shops; Coca Cola and Burger Kings. Still, Amman has not abandoned a past that reaches back more than 1,000 years before the Christian era began.

Hammams like Al Pasha are living cultural treasures. The word hammam derives from the Arabic word for heat. The public bathhouse began with the Greeks. The Romans expanded on the concept, adding libraries and gymnasiums. For the Romans, the bathhouse became the center for social interaction; a place where politics, social issues and family matters were discussed.

But the Ottoman Turks took a good idea and made it better. They merged art and architecture with leisure and religion and made the Turkish bath an integral part of the Middle Eastern social order.

An essential tenet of Islam requires that followers be pure in both mind and body. Before entering the mosque for prayer, Muslims perform the ablution known as the wudhu. The prophet Mohammed himself is quoted: "Wudhu is the key to prayer as prayer is the key to paradise." The ritual washing focuses mainly on the five human senses; the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the hands and the feet. It is not enough for Muslims to pray five times daily. They must prepare themselves physically before they may worship their Almighty.

This explains in large part the proliferation of hammams throughout the Muslim world at large and the Arab region in particular. For instance, during the Mamluk dynasty (the 13th to the 16th centuries), which extended across present-day Egypt and much of the Middle East, Cairo once boasted 365 hammams; one for each day of the year. Everywhere the Quran went, so did the spiritual thirst for purification by water.

The health benefits of hygiene were not lost on the healers of the day. As early as the 12th century, the Andalucian Arab physician Averroes (Ibn Rushd) reportedly attributed healing powers to steam baths. Women sought and won the right to enjoy the privilege, and specific days and times are set aside for their use of the hammams.

A SESSION AT AL PASHA TURKISH BATH REQUIRES A MINIMUM OF 2 HOURS

Although found in Amman, Jordan, Al Pasha's architecture draws distinctly from Islamic Spain. Archways and walls are layered in the classic style of alternating belts of grey basalt and sandstone. Its outward appearance is undeniably Moorish. The grand room near the entrance of the Al Pasha Turkish Bath, the hammam, or steam bath, that I visited, is filled with a water fountain surrounded by chairs and couches draped in the rich red and golden yellow textiles evocative of the Near East. It is sublimely serene.

From the main hall, I entered the dressing area and exchanged my street clothes for slippers and a pair of shorts. After a warm shower, I was escorted to the steam room. The Al Pasha steam room doesn't suffer from the modern disease of bland, uninspired design. No uniform white tiles here. No square corners. No nice, antiseptic lighting.

Instead, the ceiling rose into a huge central dome into which small but colorful glass portals were placed. The early morning sun radiated beams of light in shades of blue and orange and yellow and green. It looked more like church than a bathhouse. It also felt more sacrosanct than a locker room. All of it proved what I already knew was true; our seeming insatiable urge for modernity has come at a high price. Being more familiar with Mahatma than Mohammed, I recalled one of Gandhi's lessons: "There is more to life than increasing its speed." While sitting quietly in the peace of the Al Pasha hammam that early morning, I understood what he meant.

Although washing before prayer takes only minutes, a session at Al Pasha requires a minimum of two hours. It is the ultimate desert luxury. Resplendent water drenches every inch of the marble surfaces as the humidity from the steam rooms saturates the entire central atrium. In the arid place that is the Arabian Plateau, nothing could feel more decadent than the extravagant presence of water.

Entering the steam chamber requires bending at the waist and emerging into what feels like a cave. The rounded ceiling was barely high enough in places for me to stand erect, and I am not a tall man. "Mind your head!" I warned myself as blistering hot steam wafted into the cavern from unseen vents. After catching my breath, I noticed that there were two chambers; a lower one, which was bearably hot, and a smaller one, which I quickly found out was not.

Ever curious, I took a slippery step up into the tiny, super-heated room and immediately conked my head in the process. I retreated almost as quickly as I had entered when I found myself engaged with moist heat so hot it felt volcanic. Timidly, I resumed my place in the lower chamber.

Just when I thought I had all I could take, the tellak (bath assistant and masseur) appeared and led me to a hot water pool. He pointed for me to enter the water and then was off in an instant, disappearing as if he had dissolved into the steam cloud itself. I floated in the warmth of clear water with my head barely above the surface. I could hear soft, New Age music. The kind of music that has no definition of era, unlike, say, disco. All disco songs sound the same and because of that defining rhythm, one can guess about when it was recorded. Rock 'n' roll, too. But New Age? It is music that comes from nowhere, made by no one, and can't be hummed in the shower. But I liked it.

There are few sounds more calming than the soft patter of dripping water punctuated by a background of strings and chimes and voices drawing out notes like Gregorian monks. If it weren't so pleasant, it would be sheer torture. But that's when Nbil (a different one from the one who first greeted me) showed up.

He led me to the bathing area across the room. It was, essentially, a nook defined by an archway. There I was told to lie on my stomach on top of a long, warm, dark green marble slab. Nbil was a large Egyptian with huge, powerful hands attached to even larger Egyptian arms. While I lay still, Nbil began to apply soap with a loofah mitt. He scrubbed. And he scrubbed. And he scrubbed until I was covered with tiny pills of skin. I felt clean but I also a bit raw.

But screaming loudly in pain seemed completely out of the question as I had been in the Turkish bath for nearly an hour now and I had yet to hear anyone yelp. Needless to say, Nbil divorced part of me from myself. An entire epidural layer was gone. But then with the gentleness that reminded me of my mother bathing me as a child so many years ago, my 225-pound Egyptian tellak poured buckets of warm water lavishly over me until I began to feel tingly clean.

Almost as soon as the last bit of suds disappeared down onto the floor, Fadhel ambled over and escorted me to another marble slab for my massage. Fadhel was big and brawny and looked as if he could break me in half if he wasn't careful. But careful he was. He pushed and pulled and kneaded my muscles until the word "tense" had lost all meaning. And then, while I was lying face up with my eyes closed, he applied a facial mudpack. It was cool and scented with eucalyptus oil. At that point, everything went black.

Twenty minutes or so later, I awoke from a warm, moist darkness. I gathered myself and stumbled into the shower yet again and rinsed hardened mud off of my face. Nbil (the first one) re-entered the central room, wrapped me head to toe in cotton linens and led me out of the humid climes to an adjacent sitting room decorated with couches, pillows and a huge fish tank. I lounged for an extraordinarily long time, hoping against hope that alluring Scheherazade would saunter into the room ready to share one of her thousand-and-one Arabian tales. It is a fact that in one of her tales she spoke of hammams as a "paradise of this world." But instead of Scheherazade, Nbil re-entered and handed me a tall glass of pomegranate juice and some fresh mint tea.

It was difficult to complain, though. All of this attention was mine for the equivalent of a paltry $28. As I lounged easily and watched the fish float by, suddenly, the reality loomed that soon I had to leave. I toyed with the idea of staying all day. Moving quietly from the dry rooms to the wet ones. Sleeping and lounging and talking to strangers who, like me, had discovered one of the wonderful secrets of a tradition whose days are probably numbered.

It wasn't a great leap to conclude that Mahatma and Mohammed were both right. Moving slowly and being clean at the same time may be as close to a religious experience that some of us may ever experience. Then again, for others, their religious experiences come from a different direction. Like the young, boisterous men just beyond the door to the entranceway.

Through the doorway that led to the grand room, there was raucous laughter. Even though my knowledge of Arabic was improving by the day, I was still quite challenged. But young men laughing and joking with one another is always expressed in a universal way.

I looked over at Nbil quizzically.

"Oh, is wedding party," Nbil explained happily, "Many times men bring the groom here the night before to make him pure before his special day."

In the calm of the foyer and in the afterglow of a steam, a bath, and a massage, I envied the sweetness of this revered Arabian tradition. And I thought, "Now that's what I call a civilized bachelor's party!"