Bush in Dubai

Goat brains on the buffet in Dubai
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates
by Mark Silva

They served goat brains on the buffet in the hold for pool reporters here today, but I cannot directly report what it tastes like -- read on for a review.

.....As we were led in we saw Bush arriving from an interior door to the courtyard, where he was greeted by six young girls - they must have been under nine, because at nine they must go under cover and these girls were not covered but rather wearing bright gowns - half of them in fuchsia and half of them in turquoise.

..."Hi girls," said Bush, arriving to their greeting, as they burst into song. Their hands were henna'd with designs and Bush remarked on their "beautiful hands." After the song, two stepped forward with baskets of flowers and said "Welcome to Dubai."

The girls who greeted Bush and the ruler of Dubai are younger than nine, for at nine they must cover their heads.

They walked to the front bench in the center facing the rugs and now 12 girls, all dressed in the hot blue and pink gowns - fuchsia and turquoise, Dana Perino assures me - started dancing on the carpet before them.

....They circled and swayed and made great flourishes to music, and the president smiled broadly, nodded his head to the rhythm and tapped his right black-shoed foot in decent timing. The dance lasted a while and Bush was beaming throughout.


"Shukran," Bush told the girls. Thank you.

The drizzle had ended by the dance's end, and then four robed men came out with hunting falcons on their arms - fabulous big birds of light brown tones with dark markings, and they approached Bush, who briefly took a bird on his arm and handed it back. "Beautiful birds," Bush said.

With this, we were led out and motorcaded to the cultural center past the famous Dubai creek, which was not active on this national holiday - declared so for the Bush visit.

Your pooler dubbed it Freedom Day.

They circled and swayed and made great flourishes to music, and the president smiled broadly, nodded his head to the rhythm and tapped his right black-shoed foot in decent timing. The dance lasted a while and Bush was beaming throughout.

Shukran," Bush told the girls. Thank you.

Covering Countries in Crisis

The international news has recently been dominated by countries in crisis, first Pakistan’s pre-election rioting following the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, and the by Kenya’s post-election violence following a disputed presidential poll.

Kenyans and Pakistanis face an uncertain year ahead, but the way these two stories are being reported has raised serious issues. Kenya reports often boiled down to machetes, tribal warriors and rage; and on TV this mantra was accompanied by appropriate images of angry young men confronting each other, the police, and their neighbors. This was strikingly similar to the Pakistan coverage, when video packages of violent mobs shaking their fists, burning tires, and smashing cars were used over and over again.

Without providing adequate background and explanation, a lot of reporting simply perpetuates the idea of black and brown people as inherently savage and barbaric, their modern politics tribalism and feudalism by another name. Kenyan journalist Peter Kimani paints a very different picture by detailing the alliances and rivalries among the countries politicians in the last few decades and how they lead to the current tragic outcome, without ignoring or minimizing the role tribal allegiances play.

Kenyan Pundit (one of the bloggers who have come to the fore during this crisis as sources of information) felt that the way the international media reported the current crisis “only served to reinforce what I have always felt about news that emanates from Africa, we need to really work on news for us by us, we can no longer rely on the international stations and media”, and hoped that A24, a pan-African 24 hour news channel to start broadcasting this year, would change things when it launches. After all China has International CCTV, Germany has DW-TV, there’s Russia Today and France-24 and Jazeera English so it’s high time that Africa gets its own station to with an African perspective.

In the mean time, the Kenyan blogosphere had some praise for the quality of Aljazeera English’s coverage, which can in part be ascribed to the fact that AE’s reporters (Haru Mutasa, Mohammad Adow and Andrew Sullivan) were not network stars parachuted in for the disaster.

Anchors and reporter without detailed knowledge of the country they’re reporting about tend to extrapolate, and in the case of African nation experiencing a horrific mixture of ethnic, political and criminal gang violence, this means “the specter of Rwanda” is invoked. CNN, the Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel for example used the comparison repeatedly.

In the case of Pakistan, meltdown took on a whole different dimension, with the notion of Alqaeda somehow getting hold of the bomb once the country had descended into lawlessness being bandied about frequently, especially in the American media. You’d think the Pakistanis kept the nukes in a shed.

But the real interest in the Pakistan story was of course Bhutto herself, the assassinated leader. She was “pale-skinned” (the phrase was used by The New York Times and the AP news agency, others slipped in references to her “fair complexion” as clarification for her nickname Pinkie), spoke English as her mother tongue, and had been educated in convent schools and then attended Harvard and Oxford. She was good looking, she was a Muslim woman and she said what the west wanted to hear.

How powerful her image had become is made clear by the fact that one of the Republican candidates for president, Rudy Guliani, launched a new advert to try and boost his dismal ratings, and featured Benazir Bhutto. The same man had reprimanded his fellow republican candidates for attempting to make political profit out of a tragic event. The video features a lot of scary brown people while a voice over warns of “a people perverted” “madmen” and “a nuclear power in chaos”. Then archive footage of a younger, prettier Benazir Bhutto as the voice talks of “democracy attacked”.

In a way this posthumous ‘tribute’ is appropriate, Bhutto personifying an embattled democracy in the East, exactly the image she had spent a lot of time and money creating, and consistently repeated in interviews, TV appearances, op-ed pieces. She knew that she needed the US on her side if she was ever to return to power, and like any shrewd political operator, crafted a message to achieve her goal.

But according to Richard Engels the Richard Engel, Middle East bureau chief of the American network MSNBC, “Pakistan’s Ms. Liberty” perfidiously performed a “dance of the seven veils” and should not be trusted. The phrase also turned up in a biography by the NYT company which was printed in other newspapers, though it seems that the original New York Times was induced to change the wording of its online edition after reader’s indignant comments. Benazir Bhutto was a politician not a saint, but her political wheeling and dealing can be described without resorting to a phrase that combines misogyny and orientalism.

The negotiations between her and Musharraf for a power sharing agreement were brokered by Washington and London, which are also involved in negotiations between Kibaki and Odinga, and perhaps that is the most overlooked point in the coverage of both crises: foreign intervention.

Both Kenya and Pakistan were divided and ruled by the British, both became US allies against the Soviets, which meant periods of American backed dictatorship, and both are involved in the current ‘war on terror’, which has proved a divisive issue in both countries. The Pakistani army is pitted against its own people in an unpopular war in the Northern provinces, while Kenyan opposition leader Odinga is being characterized as the ‘Shariah candidate’ by his opponents, and described as a closet Muslim.

While there is no case for blaming the current unrest on the West, it does seem strange that most talking heads and op-ed writers prefer horrified glee over the natives displaying the atavistic urges to analysis of the 20th century history of the countries in question.

Shakespeare in Arabia

Although Arabs generally see the theatre as a recent import from Europe, different forms of performing arts, such as shadow plays, Sufi and Shia miracle plays, and the oral performances of poetry reciters and storytellers, have a long history in the region. Acting troupes also entertained aristocrats in their palaces, travelling merchants in khans, and competed with other street performers for the attention of shoppers and passers-by in the maidan.

While such traditions seem comparable to the earlier forms of European dramatic art from which the theatre evolved, a few play scripts have recently been discovered, suggesting an Arab theatrical tradition comparable to the Chinese or Indian for example.

However, as with music, Arabs made no real attempt to preserve a fixed record. In the case of music this was because improvisation was seen as essential, which might also be the case for drama. But, while both music and performance arts survive in the folkloric tradition, the native theatrical heritage does not have an equivalent to the ‘high’ status form of classical Arab music. Historical records provide the life story of the legendary Zeriab, who brought the music of Baghdad and Damascus to the Andalusian court; but no mention is made of playwrights, which indicates that dramatic performance were seen as mere amusement.

The Arab world only began to consider drama as ‘art’ after the introduction of works by European playwrights, of whom Shakespeare was the foremost, the ‘canon of canons’, as Khalid Amine puts it.

Amine goes on to argue that the “making of the Shakespeare myth” in the Arab world was not spontaneous, but “was induced through the implantation of a whole apparatus of translation and theatrical reproduction” following an unequal colonial encounter.

After independence, Amine says, “Shakespeare becomes a paradigmatic icon of the 'Western Other' or the Other's dramatic medium”, so that artistic engagement with his work by the postcolonial dramatist “amounts to a dialogue with the West and the Western dramatic tradition”.

The Nigerian Wole Soyinka has another take on the relationship of the Arab cultural establishment to Shakespeare. In his essay “Shakespeare and the Living Dramatist” he surveys Arab appropriations which seek to “claim him as one of their own”, and disparages Arab “translations and adaptations” of his work. However he ends by concluding that this still leads back to the immortal source, “to the gratification of celebrating dramatic poetry anew”, which reverses the earlier power dynamic that presents the English genius as the object of inept manipulation, and seems a positive spin on the process Khalid Amine describes.

Margo Hendrix argues that Soyinka’s essay anticipates two related points later raised by postcolonial theorists: recognising that importing the Shakespearian canon requires the absorption of culturally alien elements; but also the fact that the plays contain so much foreign material (settings, characters, topics, or just the odd reference –like Lady Macbeth’s “All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand”). The plays themselves are in a sense internationalised in their own right, as texts and not just in terms of appreciation.

Shakespeare’s fascination with the unknown and unfamiliar was a feature of the theatre during the Western ‘age of exploration’ (or exploitation for those on the receiving end); but what sets him apart is his complex treatment of ‘the other’.

Shakespeare’s play Othello, in it's exploration of paradoxes and inconsistencies, is frequently cited to as the most striking example of this complex treatment . The title character being a North African commanding Christian European forces against an invasion by the expanding (European Muslim) Ottoman Empire, and the hatred, or at best ambivalence, with which he is regarded by the Italians whom he ‘defends’, have been linked to similar paradoxes and inconsistencies in Shakespeare’s Britain.

Although ‘Turk’ and ‘Moor’ were words that inspired fear and loathing, Queen Elizabeth I had alliances with both the Ottoman Sultan and North African states against her Catholic rivals. Mark Hutchings discusses the fearful fascination with the ‘Turkish Threat’ in English plays of the time, arguing that by drawing on memories of the fall of Constantinople and “perhaps an older 'crusader' narrative”, plays provided a safe thrill for an English audience who, as opposed to most of Europe, were not in reality threatened. The Turks were essentially the Godzillas and King Kongs of Elizabethan cinema. Nabil Matar’s book Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery details extensive commercial relations and cultural exchange, including the fact that it was much more likely, and profitable, for an English adventurer to move to North Africa than North America.

Khalid Amine, in “Moroccan Shakespeare: From Moors to Moroccans”, charts the development of a range of responses to Othello specifically and the Shakespearian canon more generally, from “celebrations of Moroccan presence in the English Consciousness”, to more radical rewritings of Shakespeare’s plays.

Such subversive strategies are present in the titles of Abdelkrim Berrchid’s two plays. Otheil Wa Alkhail Wa Al Barudu re-arabises the Othellos name, and to anyone familiar with Arab poetry echoes a line by Almutanabi, while Imri’u Alqais Fi Paris replaces Hamlet with the pre-Islamic poet who faces a similar “to be or not to be” predicament in a destructively futile revenge tragedy.

Set in the present, the play is a re-visioning of Hamlet’s “tragedy of delay and procrastination…[as] a collective tragedy rather than an individual tragedy” as Khalid Amine puts it, quoting Berrchid who says the “The new Imruù al-quays cannot be but the spirit of this new age, that is the age of homesickness, murders, and military coup d'état, and the migration of intellectuals and laborers in search for bread and dignity”

In this new age Shakespeare has not lost his potent spell, but there are conflicting ways of putting it to use. Some Arab playwrights strip Shakespeare of what Amine calls the “aura of authority” created by European dominance in order to rewrite his work in terms of their own concerns.

Sulayman Al-Bassam, the British-Kuwaiti writer and director of ‘the Hamlet Summit’ and ‘Richard III: An Arab Tragedy’, presents his project of adapting Shakespeare’s plays to the politics of the modern Arab world in exactly the opposite way.

He insists on the “aura of authority”, or what he calls “the global accreditation”, with which Shakespeare is invested; seeing it in positive terms as giving the Arab dramatist “not merely a mask but a bullet-proof face” with which to face the censors.

More problematic is Al-Bassam’s assertion that “A fundamental pre-modernity is at the core of both the Shakespearian world and today’s Arab world”, which sounds like something straight out of The Collected Orientalist Stereotypes. His adaptations engage with the original context in a much more complicated and productive way.

But this point is made in even broader terms by reviews of his plays, which inanely and repetitively begin by saying that Arab world’s woes cry out for Shakespearian treatment, and back it up by noting one thousand and one parallels with England emerging from the Middle Ages.

Perhaps the best commentary on such reductive simplification of a postmodern and postcolonial situation to stereotypes of towel-heads in the dark ages is the fact that ‘Richard III: An Arab Tragedy’, part of the RSC’s Complete Works Festival, was on at the same time as another Richard III adaptation - set in modern Britain.

The director of this Richard III, Michael Boyd, sees both his and Al-Bassam’s plays as dealing with "the tendency, very difficult to resist, of pulling more power where power was in the first place, of increasing the centralization of power”, and draws his own parallels, the totalitarian behaviour of democratic governments in the context of the war on terror, citing the manipulation of information to create and use “fear as a political weapon, fear as a means of censorship, a means of mobilization, a means of justifying arrest”.

This is the same ‘war on terror’ which in ‘Richard III: An Arab Tragedy’ is used as a pretext for tyranny and occupation, setting up an equivalence between the invading American general and the Arab Dictator. The French adviser to the Emir boasts that he “can make a mockery of the judiciary; thread an axis of evil through the eye of the press; I can turn a democracy into a tyranny and keep it all as clean and transparent as a Security Council resolution".

What the two Arab re-makers of Shakespeare, the Morrocan Berrchid and the Kuwaiti Al-Bassam, have in common is their mixing of Arab and Western forms of performance in their theatrical art.

In Berrchid’s case, as in that of many Arab dramatists, this includes a conscious decision to incorporate native dramatic traditions, such as the Albsat tradition of improvised comedy with a political message. Al-Bassam’s Arabian-Shakespearian tragedy contains recitals from the Holy Quran and folkloric dance and music, as well as email messages, phone conversations, Aljazeera newscasts and a religious TV show.

They both create a mixed form which mirrors their content, a hybridized product of Arabia and Europe, East and West.

published in the Tripoli Post

Chad case

I'm getting a lot sick at the Europeans-in-captivity coverage of the Chad case, the focus is completely on that and I heard very little about the children until Jazeera finally gave the parents and relatives a chance to tell their story - in an interview which the English channel copied and pasted as per usual.

“Bushra is Madeline...because she’s blonde!”

was how Alarabiya headlined a report on the hullaballo over the cropped, blown up out of all proportion photo of the ‘Moroccan Maddie’.

The channel interviewed the Ben3isas, who said the first journalist didn’t even bother telling them anything. They were just asked to pose with their daughter because they looked like ‘such a nice local family’.

Then the media circus descended on their village, and now that they know what all the fuss is about the parents are worried about their daughter’s safety.

This is obviously an understandable reaction to what they’ve been exposed to. Although Alarabiya seemed to participate in the media hysteria when they suggested the Moroccan government should do something to ‘protect Bushra’.

Anyway Alarabiya’s headline sort of sums up underlying assumptions that lead to so many Madeline ‘sightings’ in North Africa. As the Daily Mail has it, the Berbers, “unusual among African people for having a strong blonde gene”, are responsible.

It’s sort of weird how it works. Because it’s not just about colouring. It’s about props. The parents and siblings were on Alarabiya, and there just isn’t the startling contrast of skin colour inevitably mentioned as the reason for suspicion. The (in?)famous photo by the Spanish tourist would not have made the Ben3isa‘s seem like a gang of malicious Muslim Gypsies if they were dressed differently. As Bushra’s mother told Alarabiya, they were walking to the bus stop…what could be more common-ordinary?

But the headscarves, as one sharp-eyed blogger points out, marked them off as ‘Muslim Moroccan slave-traders’. The post goes on to identify the wisp of hair and fraction of a face in the photo as Madeline...supernatural powers? Exactly: “ I have long had an uncanny knack for identifying people beneath even Hollywood makeup or from afar” Wonder if his skills are being utilised properly in the ‘war on terror’?

Back in May The Times had a piece on the contemporary version of fairy changelings and Gypsy child-snatchers surfacing in coverage of Madeline’s disappearance: the idea that there are “organised bands of evil, swarthy foreigners grabbing our babies to flog in their vile markets”.

It’s amazing how in tune with capitalism urban mythology is, everything is about supply and demand:

In Southern Europe tourist tots are kidnapped and sold to rich childless local couples who’ll pay extra for blue-eyed blondes.

And as for North Africans…someone at yahoo answers has it from “a reliable source that in such places (arab type countries) that blonde hair/blue eyes/ white kids generally are seen as very beautiful and men go nuts for western women! but of course western women arent generally muslim or respect the ways of muslims so a western child would be sought after as it can be made muslim - so in that - there is high demand for such kids! ie there is a market for it!”

Sandcomics - Arab cartoons and national identity

This advert has been running on all UAE channels for a while, and what with the repetition and the cool graphics, I felt compelled to go check out the website it advertised.

Turns out there is a new bilingual Emarati comic that will be distributed both in printed form, at an as yet unspecified price, and an online edition will provide a downloadable page every day.

The idea, in the words of Ahmad Almansuri, is that it should "promote national identity and show the traditions of this Gulf state to visitors "

I find the whole concept of 'native pride' a bit iffy, and as for Sandman as the incarnation of the spirit of the past ...as Asia said "DAMMIT! muslims PLEASE be original ".

Some of the artwork is very good, but not up to the standards of the TV trailer. And the super hero Ajaaj doesn't seem to have been fully developed - what can you say to this for example:

Then there's the name.

3asifa Ramliya (Sandstorm) not being a very catchy, they came up with Ajaaj. Which has a sort of nice ring to it…only instead of conjuring up some primeval force bearing the ‘values of the desert’ into a futuristic city, it is - to me at least- synonymous with those ‘ayam 3ajaj‘ when you’re cooped up at home, with nothing to do but think about whether to dust or not to dust.

So overall it was a bit disappointing. I was expecting something like the Khaleeji cartoons last Ramadan, the Saudi and Emarati ones were pretty awesome.

Almost every national Arab channel has a short let's-make-fun-of-ourselves cartoon during the fasting month, usually aired around if6ar time, for a local audience.

Highlander has blogged about our own 7aj 7mad, the great dissector of Libyan mores, who desperatly needs a make-over as her photo makes clear.

Last year the Saudi's aired يوميات مناحي on their pan-Arab mbc - it dealt with topics from youth unemployment to Iraq. Sort of like 6ash ma 6ash but more understandable :P, so it was the content rather than the technical presentation that mattered.

It was the Emarati الفريج however, broadcast on Dubai, that broke the usual format of a well-meaning male fool as the central figure and representative of the 'national character'.

Instead there were four older Emarati women of varying ethnic and social backgrounds, personalities, and I.Q levels. It was visually visionary too, being the first Arab 3-D animation.

Resurecting the past, or retrieving forgotten knowledge?

Reorganising my dad’s books I came across this arresting title, Alfiya mukarrara fi al-amrath al-nafsiya almu3tabara( ‘the thousand’ Alfiya repeated on important psychological disorders) a book-length poem which combines the many talents of Dr. Salim 3amar:

the first professor of Psychiatry in the newly independent Tunisia’s national university, he has published over 300 research papers and won a prize for his book on schizophrenia; but his interests are not limited to the strictly scientific - he is a prominent member of the International Society for the History of Medicine, has written extensively on Arab and Islamic Medicine, and has a passion for poetry.

As the introduction, by a former Tunisian culture minister states, ” is there anything stranger than the case of this ‘Alfiya’ which appears even in it’s name to be a rare example of an attachment to heritage and a desire to revitalise it with the spirit that created it in the past”?
Indeed a modern Arab book with a rhyming title in the medieval fashion is a novelty in itself, but this one is also more specifically placing itself in relation to Ibn Sina’s Alarjuza Fi Al-6ib ( alarjuza - from rajz, one of the seas of poetry- on medicine; often called the Alfiya because it has 1000 odd lines). In fact Dr. Salim 3amar proclaims his poem an Alfiya Mukarrara, as it has 3500 lines.

Writing a poem, even if not great in the aesthetic sense and regardless of the topic, of such length is an achievement; and as this one conveys detailed information on psychiatry for a lay audience in an uncomplicated way it is is a doubly impressive one…but I wonder if it is worth the effort?

However there seems to be no reason why a book on psychiatry printed in 1992 should be a poem, and the limitation of the rhythm must have adversely affected Dr. Salim Amar’s treatment of his material, and is offset by no positive practical benefit.

The book seems to ‘degenerate’ into a mere curio, even in the fulsome praise of the minister of culture who ends by declaring “this Alfiya is thus given a unique character, and becomes a wondrous treasure [tuhfa 3ajiba]…so the reader should enjoy it’s manner as well as it’s matter, as every person of taste enjoys everything that is rare and precious”.

Printed on glossy paper with patterned borders, the two column layout of traditional arabic poetry reinforces the ‘gimmicky’ effect of the rhymed chapter and subtitles, the cover illustration from a medival manuscript, and the title which echoes the descriptive rhyme of the inumerable Alfiyat across the centuries on everything from grammar to theology.

In short, Dr. Salim 3amar’s Alfiya mukarrara fi al-amrath al-nafsiya almu3tabara ends up being just the sort of book people only buy as gifts, ending up looking good and gathering dust on a shelf.

A different approach is taken Dr. Sami Mahmoud, who supervised a recent edition of Tadhkirat Uli Al-albab wa Al-jame3 li Al-3ajab Al-3ujab (The memorandum for the intelligent, and the compendium of the wondrously strange) by Dawud ibn 3amr Alan6aki, and says he found his original intention to publish a full or even abridged version impractical.

Instead of seeking to slavishly duplicate what was produced to fulfil the needs of a different era, Dr. Mahmoud used the Tadhkira as a basis for a book he calls Tadhkirat Dawud Lil-3ilaj Bil A3shab wa Al-wasa2il Al-6abe3ia (Dawud’s memorandum on on herbal and natural treatments), the title says it all really- no rhyme, and he uses the phraseology natural to him as the writer of an earlier best-selling book on herbal medicine. Unlike Dr. Salim 3amar he sees no need to twist his expertise into an unatural form to revive the past, instead he goes back to it to take what is useful in a contemporary context.

The original Tadhkira is a massive three volume book - the first volume gives the properties of over 3000 medicinal plants and herbs arranged in alphabetical order, the other two deal with the diagnosis and treatment of alphabetically arranged illnesses and diseases; but it also contains detailed sections on topics such as veterinary science, farming and geography. The language is difficult, and at times obscure, and as the publisher says in his introduction, some of the elements required for the compounds are almost impossible to obtain, and others are unkown even to an expert.

This edition edits content and language, and after each entry on a plant or illness from the Tadhkirah adds the explanation in terms of modern science. As an active researcher in the field of herbal medicine, Dr Mahmoud provides additional uses for plants and treatments for diseases from other medieval texts, and from folk remedies.

Such an approach is actually much more in line with that of doctors and 3ulama like Ibn Sina and Dawud ibn 3amr, the latter says in a quote which serves as an epigraph to Dr. Sami Mahmoud’s book:

"We have chosen medicines that are easily available and inexpensive, to comply with the needs of the seeker, who if he agrees accepts, and if so his acceptance is an honour, and if not let him cover what faults he sees with the tail of forgiveness, for it is the ever-blessed (God) who is free from all deficiency and mistakes…and let my prize for this [work] be a prayer from him; God is the one who guides us to the right, and to him is the return and in his hands my fate, there is no power but God the high and great, he is the one I depend on, the most perfect sustainer"

"Far more than a bookworm's nostalgia trip"

says the Economist of Francis Spufford memoir The Child that Books Built, and (although how anyone can use a derogatory "only" about such a nostalgia trip is beyond me), it is a lot of things besides that...like a confidence-in-my-mastery-of-the-english-language-booster.

I always thought my private (and if I'm not careful embarrassingly public) idiosyncratic pronunciations were because English was my third language, but a native asserts, and I quote, that "everybody" has "words... learned exclusively from books [whose]...pronunciation is our own, deduced from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it was too late"...so that was reassuring :)

[As a six year old] I couldn't read a lot of the words in The Hobbit. I had accelerated into reading faster than my understanding had grown. If I press my memory for the sensation of reading the second half of the book, when I was flying through the story,I remember, simultaneous with the new liquid smoothness, a constant flicker of incomprehensibility. There were holes in the text corresponding to the parts I couldn't understand. Words like prophesying, rekindled and adornment had never been spoken in my hearing...I could enjoy them. They were obviously the special vocabulary that was apt for the slaying of dragons and the fighting of armies: words that conjured the sound of trumpets. But for all the meaning I obtained from them, they might as well never have been printed. When i speeded up, and my reading became fluent, it was partly because I had learned how to ignore such words efficiently. I methodically left out chunks...

Now that I hardly spell out I do not know, and the things that puzzle me in books do not lie in individual words but in the author's assumption of shared knowledge about the human heart (never my strong point), I still have, like everybody, words in my vocabulary that are relics of that time. The words we learned exclusively from books are the ones we pronounce differently from everyone else. Or, if we force ourselves to say them the public way, secretly we believe the proper pronunciation is our own, deduced from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it from the page and not corrected by hearing the word aloud until it was too late to alter the sound of the word. The classic is 'misled', said not as mis-led but as myzled-the past tens of a verb, 'to misle', which somehow never comes p in the present tense. In fact, misled never misled me. One of mine is 'grimace'. You probably think it's pronounced grimuss, but I know different. It's grim-ace to rhyme with face. I'm sorry, but on this point, the entire English-speaking human race except me is wrong.

grimace = grim-ace is one of mine too, but at least that's a fairly uncommon word, I wonder how I missed hearing such mundane words as pigeon (= pig-on ) or plait (= plat)...

Anyway its a pretty unique book - a combination of autobiography, child psychology and literary criticism/classification of children's' literature.... he has a real knack for putting the experience of reading as a child into words.

Another element is the tragic story of his sister, suffering from a rare disease, which is central to his need for the escapism only books can provide. He tells it with some sense of guilt for seeking isolation, but without an ounce of sentimentality as befits her character-in her final illness she declares herself "tired of living at the frontiers of medical knowledge". Here too the comforting power of reading is present - she lingers “ long enough for my father to read her the whole of The Lord of the Rings aloud”.

Arabian Manga(stan) - Arab cartoons and Islamic 'culture'

Nathaniel Naddaf-Hafrey wonders: Can Comics Change the Arab World?


“I went back to my Arab heritage to draw from its design calligraphy, myths and legends, I tried to incorporate them all into the character. Manga usually features Japanese culture, and I wanted to introduce some Arabian mysticism to the market.”

Asia Alfasi has taken part in (and won) local and international competitions, landed a contract with Harry Potter's publishers, and is being celebrated as a "cool muslim" icon.

Apparently she was the the first female finalist on Hi8us competition, which I thought was interesting. Jazeera had a Japan season quite a while back, and one of Fadi Salama's reports was about the predominance of female manga artists, despite the 'machismo' of much of what they produced...

Anyway, Asia's achievements are just WONDERFUL, especially in light of her being a Libyan!

BUT (being nitpicking me) I've got... issues with cartoons based on Islamic 'culture'

This petty-peeve is actually about a completely different person, a Kuwaiti guy who created the 99 and recently featured on Witness. First off he did the whole revolutionary "first comic based on Islamic culture" thing, which is simply untrue.

My experience would confirm the Fulla-hype for example, in that none of my girl-cousins whine for a Barbie doll/bag/skipping rope - in fact I haven't heard anyone mention Barbie at all since the alternative hit the shelves...and the satellite channels.

But the 99 is more of an addition. It competes with Western imports like Majalit Mickey, and with 3ala'idin and Samir and the gazillion other Arabic comics I grew up reading in the 90s.

So basically the documentary gave me the impression (rightly or wrongly) that this Naif Al-Mutawa person was self importance on steroids personified.

Also obnoxious was the way he kept re-repeating the "comic based on Islamic culture which is NOTHING to do with religion" line, like he was afraid of being shoved into some CIA dungeon unless he transformed his dark materials into something as palatable as Tan's sugar-sister-hooded Chinatown.

About the characters:"there's nothing fundamentally Islamic or non-Islamic about them"

Asked about a muhajaba he says "well is that Islamic, or is that just part of being human?" (yep, he actually used those words) "nuns dress like that, and some orthodox Jews cover their hair or wear wigs "

Which is true, but doesn't alter the fact that the character is a muslim girl wearing a hijab. And that shouldn't be too bitter a pill to swallow unless sugar coated.

Except if your from the Planet of the Chimps, whose comments on Mangastanis include:

Invocations to the Spartan 300:

There is nothing like the spectacle of defenders of Western Civilization slaughtering tyrannical Persian invaders...

And various ever-so-original suggestions for FUNdamental characters, followed by the observation that it was "Sad how these kids are brought up as if terrorist were heroes"

More puzzling was this complaint:

Once again, proof positive that Muslims are completely incapable of original
thought or idea. They copy EVERYTHING from the culture that they so despise,
sprinkle large helpings of Islam all over it...

Bush's endless WWII and Cold War analogies had left me with the distinct impression that we were supposed to copy-cat...

Somebody had a somewhat similar reaction:

I actually like this idea. Assuming these Superheroes are really "Good" guys and fairly Western, and aren't like roaming the globe, forcing conversions to Islam, beating women, and cutting off infidel's heads, killing Jews, then I think it would be good role models for muslim youth. It would give them something to look up to, and perhaps keep them out of the madrasas... maybe.. well, one can hope...

Despite the long string of ifs and buts, and the implications of "really 'Good' guys and fairly Western", in it's context I suppose the above exemplifies tolerance, multiculturalism and all that zift.

AT A LATER DATE: closer inspection reveals the ABC article they're commenting on (which managed to get the "intricate backstory" wrong) mentions a FATWA!!! Make way for Sir Naif Al-Mutawa...

Mixed Middle East Metaphors

was blog-grazing when I stumbled across the above at the this blog....

Last summer Rice's be-laboured metaphor generated lot's of ME midwife jokes, and made regular apperances in Hizb'Allah's Divine Victory Ad-campign (no really) ...anyway so they're all being renovated in light of recent events in Gaza, which actually is not a major mess, courtesy Dayton's gang of Dahlan thugs, but the birth of a new dawn, the rise of a new statelet, and the deification of another moderate....and the prelude to another another hug-and-kiss to death fest

(In)conclusion: 07 suffering a sever case of 06 repetitiosis, what with the second shrine bombing and all

Popaganda

Can pop music make the Arab world love us?

American book publishers can tell you that American men between 18 and 30 don't read a lot of books. The Arab street reads even fewer—just one book, mostly: the Quran.

The United States should have followed the lead of Arab governments, which know that music is the region's most powerful form of expression. That's why they use it for propaganda—and also why they ban so much of it.

What the State Department ought to have done to reach those underemployed young men, then, is call Miles Copeland [who] became interested in Arab culture while... growing up in the Middle East, where [his] father worked for the CIA.

(how appropriate...)

Maybe Copeland can start turning out Arab-American fusion hits for another federal agency, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees... Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language news and entertainment station with frequencies throughout the Middle East.

Genuine Query: on what basis fusing Britney/Haifa imagined to have an effect different from alternating Britney/Haifa?

Arab Muslims still mostly experience the Quran that way and listen to it all day long, in taxis, coffee shops, stores. Quranic reciters are something like pop stars.

Long before the Quran, classical poetry in Arabic issued from an oral tradition; it wasn't written down until well after the text of the Quran was established.

6aha Husain says the Hanged Poems....were mp3 files festooning the ka3ba

The Arabic language itself, its rich vocabulary, argues for the overwhelming pleasure of sound in a culture that was not very visually interesting...

Such monochrome dreariness backed up by eskimo textbook example linguistic evidence:

There are, I believe, nine different words for "desert" in classical Arabic—which reminds you that 1,500 years ago most Arabs were looking at desert most of the time.

and a native guide who is said to have said:

so we stay at home and listen to the music of singers like Umm Kulthoum, marveling at her perfect diction, piecing out the phrasing, the repetitions, the variations.

Cairenes = streetlife. He must have taken the joke kul yuom el masri yif6ar foul, wi yitghada kora, wi yit3asha Um Kulthum too seriously

Literary Journalism - an oxymoron?

"In the region's cultural history, journalism evolved from the French tradition of partisan journalism married to the Levantine fondness for belles lettres "adab" literature rather than the alternative Arab literary tradition of "hadith"…sacred reporting, with its seemingly obsessive stress on reliable sourcing and research to ensure objective accounts of what the Prophet Muhammed really said and did." Arab Talk Shows and TV Journalism, a TBS article by S. Abdallah Schleifer

What a delightfully Fatima Mernissi-esque idea!! It’s a fascinating way of classifying the unclassifiable Arab media scene:

On the one hand, Levantine Adabies + Frenchies = partisan journalism where rhetorical considerations take precedence over fact.

And on Schleifer's other hand Khaleeji Hadithites + Anglo-Saxonites = Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia: Now supplanting Egypt and the Levant, the traditional providers of news gossip for old men in Qahwas to squabble about while playing tawla and sipping thick black coffee.

...like i said, it's interesting, whether you agree with it or not. But why the dichotomy between objective journalism and adabi style?

For example, Yousri Fouda in Siri lil ghaya uses Riwaya language in what are essentially investigative reports about subjects such as Israel and Hizbullah's prisoner swap, the effects of Depleted Uranium in Iraq, Sufi brotherhoods in North Africa...

In Siri lil ghaya the Riwa’i narrative hasn't affected the journalism, it just added another dimension to it. As a conter-orientalising comment: Arab culture since the Jahiliya has always placed a high value on poetic style.

Another Egyptian who I think has a similar ‘hybridizing’ style is As3d Taha. His documentary series Yu7ka ana is definitely my favorite. Literally it means something like "it is related/told" but the phrase is actually used in the sense of "Once upon a time".

It has a definite folkloric quality as Taha draws on the repetitive, rhyming language of traditional fables to tell the story of the war in Kosovo, Venzeula's original inhabitants, religious oppression in Central Asia, the orange revolution in Ukraine and of Fort Makuna - where Morrocan political prisoners where held in secret for decades.

A lot of Arab TV journalists write in such a deadly booooooring way.... perhaps they fall into the western factual/literary divide ....or maybe it's just that they're working in a visual medium?

And (although irrelevant to the above) I couldn't resist the opening - this on the "arbiters of global opinion":

Looks are deceiving. Right now the mood among Western journalists taking a fleeting look at the new Arab public affairs talk shows that have become the hottest popular format throughout the region in all their variations is upbeat, amazingly positive. A new world of free speech is dawning in the region and according to the columns appearing in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune and other arbiters of global opinion, most of the credit goes to Al-Jazeera channel. Well, there are a number of ironies right there

....multiplied to the power of ten in a post-9/11, post-Kabul, post-Baghdad, post-al-Hurrah world

Bilingual Terrors

This post is really just an excuse to put up this cartoon by 3bd el-3al in Al-Arabi magazine, which for some reason I really really really like. As they don't say (or do they?) : simplicity is the mother of perfection.

Anyway so it's illustrating an article by Dr. Hamid Tahir, a Professor of Islamic Philosophy, intoning the usual doomsday litany: the degeneration of the language, the desperate need for regeneration, the danger of non-identification…etc, etc, etc

But this was interesting:

“One of the most important effects of the absence [of a living link with fus7a]…is the disconnection of young people from the balanced religious concepts which should prevail in society…”

hee ho humming & hummus

Naive Propagandist?

"a naïf collector of customs would be a paradoxical monster" said someone or other about Chaucer... and a naïf propagandist would be a paradoxical monster... but how else to explain such paradoxical monstrosity?

This from Isi Leibler's Response to Aljazeera :

The "People of the Book" seem to have forsaken the ability to harness the power of the word. However, it is the increasing impact of the electronic media dispensing with objective truth and selectively concentrating on graphic images of "innocent" civilian casualties that has been the primary factor contributing to our demonization....

WHAT CAN WE DO? The answer is obvious. The creation of a global TV channel promoting a Jewish viewpoint must now assume the highest priority....In these trying times for the Jewish people a shortage of funds must not represent an insurmountable barrier to such a vital project. There are now more Jewish billionaires and greater Jewish wealth than at any other time in our history...

and it goes on

We spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually on numerous Jewish agencies and bodies whose primary objective is to protect Jewish rights, promote the case for Israel, and combat anti-Semitism. Yet many of these organizations are ineffective, overlap and compete with one another rather than pooling their resources to overcome the common threat.

and on

In addition to American organizations like the Anti Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, which have huge budgets, there are smaller, parallel bodies in the UK and Europe. There are also the powerful American synagogue roof bodies with the capability of raising enormous funds simply by adding a modest surcharge on synagogue seats or membership that would in no way detract from their core activities.

and on

It is time for an international summit of major bodies engaged in pro-Israel and anti-defamation activities to review this crucial enterprise. They should explore the possibility of forming a board comprised of representatives of organizations willing to divert funds from their existing budgets in order to seed and maintain a genuine global Jewish TV channel. Of course, other Jewish resources and contributions from wealthy individual donors and foundations would also be tapped.

And then this from his truly impressively elaborate sweeping under the carpet of Christian Zionism's rapturous Final Solution:

As genuine Christian Zionists whose faith is based on the Bible they believe that God gave Eretz Israel to the Jewish people. They pray for our welfare and most of them unconditionally love Jews as God's chosen people. I often wish that some of our more aloof Diaspora kinsmen could display similar passion and commitment for our cause...

However that should not be seen as suggesting that 100 million Evangelicals throughout the world are all philo-semites. They are in fact no more monolithic than Jews. Yes, many of them believe that the return of their Messiah will be hastened by the Jewish ingathering of the exiles. But this surely should not be of concern to us. Some undoubtedly may be obsessed with the wish to convert Jews and others may even be anti-Semitic. But the overwhelming majority are unquestionably decent men and women seeking to promote Christian ethical values - many of which mirror the Judeo-Christian heritage....

Of course we unquestionably differ from Evangelicals on many other issues. But today, it is unbecoming to insult our friends and painful to witness ignorant Jews biting the hand that feeds us - especially at a time when we so desperately seek allies. As an observant Jew I am comfortable, enthusiastic and grateful for the support we receive from Christian Evangelicals.