Changing a Flat

Somewhere in the Nubian Desert between Wadi Halfa and Dongola, Sudan. Winter 2004.

Rabia of Basra

"Religion is a field unplanted except by those who accomplish an interest from it - return.
If it were not from fear of hell, none would worship any god;
And if not for the expected rewards, they would deny God."

- Khalil Gibran

*

Fortunately, and occasionally, some come to live another religious reality.

Rabia al-Adawiyya, a woman and a mystic from Basra of the late 8th century, is one such person. Her early and formative life was most difficult. She was orphaned as a child, kidnapped by slave traders, sold for six silver pieces and only freed her when her master was astounded by her saintly conduct.

Over time, and to free herself from all enslavement, Rabia pursued the most difficult of roads: the freedom to worship the Divine without temptation, distraction or ulterior motive. "I will not serve God like a labourer in expectation of wages," she said, and went on to transform herself from a suffering child of Basra to an ascetic, and then to most ardently seek her freedom through the Sufi way.

Asceticism is not encouraged in Islam, a religion that puts much more emphasis on being a normal member of society, and providing service to the development of humans. Yet, Rabia shirked the regular life. She had few belongings, carried a stick and wore an old patched mantle and worn sandals. She would spend the night praying on the rootops of her city, and denied herself motherhood and love for a man.

Even though she thwarted the normal life and embraced a more radical road, it may be that "the imbalance of the thoughtful is much better than the conservatism of one who takes no thought." (1)

Indeed, her extremism came from a noble and intense source: a wish to worship out of complete freedom, and out of her own (and not any other) choice.

What little we know of her life comes to us by way of Farid al-Din Attar, a major Muslim luminary who lived in the 12th and 13th centuries. He devotes a chapter to Rabia in his Tadhkirat al-Auliya (Memorial of the Saints) - a compilation of biographical anecdotes from the lives of Islamic mystics.

Ever since her death, Rabia has been revered among her own kind as one of the most realized of beings. She has come down through history as a beacon to all who suspect, or know, that there is a greater reality than the ironclad materialism and seductive ideologies that we often embrace. Rabia was also an exemplar to people, both now and at the time, that the path of knowledge was not just something restricted to men.

Today, she is most well known for her saying, that was sure to have inspired Gibran to his:

"My Lord, if I am worshiping you from fear of fire, burn me in the fires of hell;
and if I am worshiping you from desire for paradise, deny me paradise.
But, if I am worshiping you for yourself alone, then do not deny me the sight of your magnanimous face."

(1) Much of the material for this entry is drawn from the book, ¨First Among Sufis - The Life and Thought of Rabia al-Adawiyya¨, by Widad El Sakkakini, 1982

Echoes from Ugarit

In 1972, after 15 years of research, Dr. Anne Kilmer (professor of Assyriology at the University of California, and a curator at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley), transcribed one of the oldest known pieces of music notation in the world.

Clay tablets relating to music, written in the cuneiform "Ugaritic" language (with both Hurrian and Akkadian influences), were excavated in the early 1950s at the ancient Syrian coastal city of Ugarit at what is now Ras Sharma. Ugarit is considered the birthplace of the modern alphabet.

One text contained a complete hymn, both words and music and is the oldest known preserved music notation in the world. The tablets date back to approximately 1,400 BC and contain a hymn to the moon god's wife, Nikal. Remarkably, the tablets also contain detailed performance instructions for a singer accompanied by a harpist as well as instructions on how to tune the harp.

From this evidence, Professor Kilmer and other musicologists have created versions of the hymn.

One of these adaptations, came to life in a performance in Atlanta recently. The instrumental piece is entitled, Echoes from Ugarit and was performed by Syrian pianist and composer Malek Jandali along with The Ludwig Symphony Orchestra.

Many thanks to one of our readers who brought the story to our attention.

The Emotional Brain

Part of the enormous task in trying to resolve conflicts in the Middle East is getting past the perceptual barriers that stand in the way of properly seeing these conflicts for what they really are.

Longstanding traditions of practicing diplomacy focus on state and interest-based negotiations, or an emphasis on concrete issues, for example, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, on resolving borders or settlements in the West Bank. These approaches are understandable because they are based on familiar institutions and methods. However, they assume that since we don’t see other potential causes of conflict, that they must not be there.

As we have indicated in previous posts, despite the best intentions of conflict resolution specialists, these efforts often fall short. This is because attending strictly to “issues” does not take into account the deeper human dynamics that give rise to those issues in the first place.

Unacknowledged are the psychological and cultural aspects of conflict, which are fundamental and which, if properly understood, may hold the keys to improved conflict resolution.

The role of excessive emotion in Middle East cultures, for example, is a factor that is virtually unrecognized or brought to bear in studies involving conflicts in the region. And yet emotion is one of the most salient factors, playing a crucial role in helping to instigate and maintain political conflict between human groups.

Cycles of revenge, exacting punishment, and an inability to see beyond the needs of one’s own group - actions and reactions between Israel and its Arab enemies today - are all driven by excessive emotional states.

Discoveries in the behavioral sciences allow us to see why the key to understanding and resolving conflicts lies in understanding our brains, and in our emotional brains in particular:

• Our emotional brains date back to the earliest life forms on Earth and evolved to help ensure our survival.
• Extreme emotional arousal results in primitive thought patterns and triggers the fight-or-flight response, creating a mindset that sees the world in either/or, black and white, and good or bad terms.
• Being in a highly aroused emotional state prevents us from seeing subtle distinctions and shades of grey that are the mark of intelligent or evolved thought, and that more accurately depict reality.
• Too much continual emotional arousal creates a state of ignorance in people and makes individuals susceptible to indoctrination and brainwashing

All violent conflicts, and acts of inhumanity and discrimination have as their hallmark high emotional arousal among humans. It is therefore easy to understand how a region like the Middle East, with its emotionally charged culture and complex politics, continues to be embroiled in so many ongoing difficulties.

However, this idea has not been embraced because it does not fit into our constructs of the world. We are not educated from an early age to know how our brains work and so we passively accept that all forms and degrees of emotion are simply an acceptable part of being human. The idea that excessive emotion may be to blame for many problems may also seem simplistic, and a leap from the hard interests that we usually equate with politics.

If we were all taught from an early age about the consequences of excessive emotional arousal and the need to temper those emotions, we might stand a chance to greatly reduce the periodic tides of conflict that arise between peoples - movements that bring with them waves of debilitating excessive emotion that literally drive the conflict and block the road to effective resolution.

As it stands - and in some cultures at that - we only view excessive emotion as a problem only if it seriously disrupts our interpersonal relationships. In cases like these we may seek out counseling or attempt to learn things like “anger management”.

But what about on a collective level?

Certainly, in cases of war and violent conflict, our group relations are more than disrupted. Is there also not a desperate and dire need for something akin to anger management among groups when it comes to certain international, interethnic, and inter-religious relations?

If people could be more cognizant of the power and damage of extreme emotions, they could better manage them, making their lives more fruitful both for themselves and for their neighbours, near and far.

Middle East Weather

In a previous posting, 'The Dog River Tablets', we had indicated that the long history of conquest and empire in the Middle East had caused trauma and tight belonging and attachment to traditional cultures among the peoples of the region.

The following link depicts this history in a graphic and dynamic fashion:

From this bird's eye (satellite) view, empires moved back and forth, like warm and cold fronts, imitating the weather across the millenia, bringing both calm and storm to the people of the region.

The Real 'Da Vinci Code'

"Those who know all, but are lacking in themselves, are utterly lacking."

- Jesus of Nazareth in The Gospel of Thomas

*

In December 1945, a peasant farmer from Upper Egypt named Mohammed Ali Samman made a most unusual discovery.

Digging near some limestone caves, Samman came upon a large earthenware jar. He knew that he had found something out of the ordinary and proceeded to smash the jar, hoping to find buried treasure. He did indeed find a treasure, but not the sort that he had expected: contained within were some 12 leather-bound papyrus books written in the Coptic language.

This collection of books, which have since been translated, are known today as the Nag Hammadi Library or Nag Hammadi Codices - so named because of the proximity of their discovery to the town of Nag Hammadi in southern Egypt.

The books include fifty-two early Christian treatises that date back to around the 3^rd or 4^th century AD. The writings themselves are thought to be of an earlier origin.

It is believed that the books may have belonged to a nearby Christian monastery, which hastily buried the texts in order to save them from destruction at the hands of the church, which condemned the use of unsanctioned religious texts in 367 AD.

Among the more interesting and notable of the writings is a text called The Gospel of Thomas. This document is a list of sayings attributed to Jesus.

Stripped of context, and in many instances bordering on the indecipherable, these sayings give a very different impression of the Jesus we know in the New Testament gospels - all of which underwent considerable editing over the ages.

Certainly what comes across in the Gospel of Thomas is a Jesus somewhat removed from the more simplistic and didactic Jesus of the New Testament gospels. And as such it may be that the Gospel of Thomas is a more genuine and accurate representation of the historical Jesus.

The early Gnostics maintain that Jesus was not just a religious pep-talker or teacher of morals, but was a man who had a certain practical knowledge to impart.

The word Gnostic derives from the Greek word gnosis meaning "knowledge" or the "act of knowing.”

The Gnostics held "the conviction that direct, personal and absolute knowledge of the authentic truths of existence is accessible to human beings, and, moreover, that the attainment of such knowledge must always constitute the supreme achievement of human life.”

To the ancient Gnostics, Jesus was part of such a tradition and the Nag Hammadi Codices contain writings that view Christianity in the light of that very tradition.

The Islamic faith, which has its own traditions of Jesus (who Muslims view as a prophet and teacher), depict him similarly.

The Nag Hammadi Codices had a convoluted trajectory, passing through the hands of numerous people including historians, antique dealers, monks, and in the case of one of the books: the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich, before finding their way to the Coptic Museum in Cairo where they are housed today.

The texts were rejected outright by the ruling authorities of Christianity and remain heretical.

Middle East Institutions - Charcuterie

Charcuterie (Rabbi Hanina St., 3, Jaffa) is a Middle East Institution in the making. If it lasts long enough and maintains its excellent fare, it will be a place to resort to without fail.

Situated in the pedestrian streets around the old Jaffa Souk and flea market, it is a resto-bar that is highly conducive to conversation and late night cavorting. It has all the marks of a good "hang-out": with a full and relaxed atmosphere and enough surrounding competition to keep its standards up.

The food is superb, marked by choucroute and the chef's sausages of all varieties. The owners and staff are part of the crowd that spills into the street on summer nights.

The restaurant is marked by a memorable stained glass image of the city where it is located.

Chosen: The Litmus Test

To some, Israel represents a monolithic block of injustice against the Palestinians and disregard for its neighbours.

In fact, there are many vocal Israelis who query these relations and what it means to be Jewish in Israel today. They ask questions that cut deep about secular and religious Jewish identity. Even if their dialogues don't always see wide distribution, individuals like Menachem Klein, Avram Burg, and Shlomo Sand share a common desire, with varying approaches, for a critique of Israel beyond the question of its survival.

These individuals wish to move Israelis and Jews to a new understanding of their society. Like Old Testament prophets, they have a tough time of it, garnering as much criticism as their fore-bearers. Their words may seem like 'cries in the wilderness' while occupation and conflict continue.

As is the case with many Middle Eastern identities, the past remains a large ingredient of what it means to be Jewish today. The Jewish people have survived over millenia. Among many achievements, they have utilized a book of scripture to preserve their culture, resurrected a holy language and transformed it into a vernacular, and returned after centuries to a land described in these scriptures as their home.

Indeed, the commitment of Jews to their culture (and, by some, to their faith) is remarkable in its durability despite tribulation: Jews have survived a great number of the difficulties and traumas that history can inflict. That survival has resulted in the state of Israel: a country that represents a haven and fortress for a people that has 'wandered' and suffered for thousands of years.

Jews have indeed often overcome massive odds, preserved their identity and founded a state. But, is the purpose of all the triumphs and defeats of history only the survival of the group for its own sake? Or do Jews have a larger mission implicit in their compact with their scriptures and with themselves?

It is a natural human instinct to put the needs of our group’s survival above all else. If the main goal of the Jewish people is group survival for its own sake, then indeed Jews in Israel should fight at all costs to survive with few other considerations. The mission would be clear and simple and the litmus test would be, indeed, survival. If that is the case, then the question of any larger purpose is moot.

But, it is the Jews themselves who claim a higher calling.

Throughout history, Jews have been the reverse of simply a tribe: they have been also the source of many universal laws for greater human development. From Abraham the patriarch of three faiths, to the message of Jesus, to Freud's breakthroughs in psychology, to Marxist dialectics, to Einstein's laws of physics, Jews have contributed hugely to the discovery of universal laws of great utility to humanity.



Indeed, this tendency may derive directly out of the scriptures on which Jewish culture and bonds are based. These writings may reflect a deep interest in understanding a unifying and universal being; they may spur a millennial commitment and a longstanding search for universals.

Today's Jewish nationalism, and many actions of the state of Israel, have much to do with the preservation of a people, or a tribe, and little with that greater principle.

The fact is that the creation of Israel has resulted in the suffering and displacement of another people, the Palestinians, as well as chronic conflict with its neighbours. Yet, in all faiths and in most societies, healthy relations with outsiders is a consistent marker of properly meeting a larger reality.

If Israel and Jews have a larger road, then Israel's relations with its neighbours are today’s litmus test: Is the group effectively the centre of its universe or is it, like all things, a means of outreach to a greater whole?

In the early 20th century, Martin Buber, an early Zionist and philospher, believed that the Jews should live alongside the Arabs in a new enterprise. He pleaded with his fellow Zionists for a bi-nationalist project: Arab and Jew. He believed both peoples were there to serve the land, and not to compete over its acreage. In his view, the universal call in Jewish scripture would be the spark of a more constructive and less exclusive relation with others at all levels: political, social and moral.


Martin Buber lost his battle but the struggle has been picked up by others. Recently, Avram Burg, former Speaker of the Knesset, wrote a book entitled 'Defeating Hitler'. It claims that Hitler had in fact won, not by destroying the Jewish people but by leaving them with enough trauma and fear to create an oppressive force for survival in the Middle East. 'Defeating Hitler' would mean moving away from this trauma and towards a renewal of the Jewish universalism cultivated so successfully in the past in the Islamic world, in Europe and elsewhere.

The basic question that Jews, Israelis, and all groups must ask is: What is the purpose of an identity? What is its litmus test? Only survival for its own sake? Or is it an instrument for larger growth, an extension from the particular towards universal qualities - a stretch that Jews have in fact excelled at for millenia.

The Land Between The Rivers

For millenia, humans settled the land between the two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, to grow their crops, raise their families, and build great cities. Indeed, the earliest human civilization came about there because of these grand rivers.

Today, due to a number of factors - mostly human - that water flow is in danger and the green Mesopotamian plain is threatened with becoming a desert. The European Water Association warns that the waters of these rivers could disappear by 2040. The amount of water in the Euphrates has already fallen by 75% over the past decade.

The waters of the Tigris and Euphrates originate in Turkey, and, to a lesser extent, Syria. Damming and increased water storage upstream are diminishing the water flow into Iraq. Other factors including drought due to climate change, population growth in Iraq, the absence of economic water pricing and a lack of erosion control in Iraq, are heavily exacerbating the situation.

The result is desertification, a reduction of land for grazing, and more severe sandstorms in Iraq as the earth is loosened, gathered up by the winds, and scattered.

Steps are being taken by the Iraqi government to address the matter. However, like many challenges in the Middle East and elsewhere, moving rapidly and with great efficacy is imperative if one of the cradles of civilization is not to exhaust itself.

A recent article in the New York Times describes this critical situation in more detail.

Manual of Astronomy

This text is just one example from the over 10,000 Islamic manuscripts on astronomy and mathematics that have been recorded to date. Entitled Kitab al-Suwar (Manual of Astronomy), this manuscript is attributed to one Abir al-Husain and dates back to 960 A.D. It is housed in the National Museum of Damascus.

Astronomy and mathematics were considered sister sciences in the Islamic world. The former discipline, which Muslim scholars classified as "the science of the aspect of the universe" was treated as a special extension or branch of mathematics. One of the goals of astronomy was to study the visible movements of the stars and provide them with a geometric presentation. This, in part, helped to ensure that the five daily canonical prayers and various religious celebrations be carried out at exactly the right time.

Ishbilia

"Seville feels very Arab," I recently told a Sevillian. "What do you mean 'feels'?", he responded. "We ARE Arabs."

This quintessential Spanish Andalusian city does indeed feel very Arab, with an enigmatic oriental spirit, a sense of cunning and a joie de vivre found among its residents. The city holds this spirit despite the echoes of the Inquisition and its very Christian and Catholic past demonstrated yearly in the spooky marches of Semana Santa - with capes, cones, and all.

Seville, once Arab 'Ishbilia', and before that, the Roman 'Hispalis', is a city that during the right season appears like a collection buildings strewn about a large orange orchard with cobbled streets. Some of the remaining Moorish city walls can be seen from the top of the Giralda, the massive minaret turned steeple. The walls embrace and contain this large urban space situated on the Guadalqivir River (from Arabic 'Wadi El Kebir' or the Big Valley). It is here, where the river stops being navigable for ocean-going ships - a convenient stopping point - that Seville was founded.

In the rabbit warren of low rise buildings below the Giralda, a rich history unfolded: Yemenis rose up against the great Abdel Rahman I, the exiled Umayyad king from Damascus; it is where sailors readied to sail to the Americas and drank themselves to oblivion, as many still do today in the Sevillian night; and where the great Ibn Khaldun came to look for his family's roots.


The city was the setting for the infamous Don Juan, from the play the "Trickster (Burlador) of Seville" by Tirso de Molina. Seville was also the centre of the "poetry mad" Abbadids - Muslim strongmen of the 11th century, and rivals of the rulers of Toledo. It remains today a centre for play and cunning.

Many things in Seville are interestingly odd. The city's motto, on its flag, is NO8DO. The "8" apparently represents yarn, or "madeja" in Spanish. The motto when read aloud would be "NO madeja DO" mirroring the words "No me ha dejado" or "it has not abandoned me."

The city's apparent oddness comes from its succesful mix of cultures: the mosque turned cathedral, the minaret turned steeple, the Andalusian Arabs turned Andalusian Spanish, and Hispalis turned Ishbilia turned Sevilla. Castillian monarchs even decorated their palaces with the Muslim inscription: "Wa la ghalib ill Allah" which translates to "There is no Victor but God".

This is indeed still today an 'Arab' city. It is mysterious, on the edge, and full of street humour and trickster-like personages. Like most matters in Seville, the Giralda has a twist: it was built with a ramp, not stairs, to reach its distant top. For centuries, early in the morning, Sevillians would hear the sound of horseshoes on cobble stone as the Muezzin rode horseback up the tower to sound the call to prayer.

Margaret George, Bandita

Margaret George, an Iraqi Assyrian Christian, joined the Kurdish resistance movement in Northern Iraq in 1961 at the age of 20. One of the first female rebels in the history of the Kurdish resistance, she quickly asserted herself as a capable fighter, commanding at the head of an otherwise all-male unit.

Within just a few years she became a legendary hero figure whose military exploits, bravery and leadership in the isolated mountain passes of Northern Iraq echoed throughout all of Kurdistan. Iraqi Kurdish leaders deftly transformed her into a local version of Joan of Arc and handed out portraits of her to the peshmerga rank-and-file who carried her photos into battle in the manner of a talisman.

“Margaret liked people to buy photographs so they knew she was a peshmerga and so that other women would go to the mountains like her,” says Zaher Rashid, George’s portraitist, who photographed her at his studio in the town of Qala Diza, near the border with Iran.

Accounts of Margaret’s life - and death - are sketchy at best. Depending on which version you believe, she is said to have met her end in 1969, after many difficult battles, either at the hands of a jealous lover, or the rebel Kurd leadership, the latter of which viewed her popularity and Assyrian nationalism as a threat to their interests and designs.

To this day, Margaret George remains famous among Assyrians and Kurds and some Kurdish fighters still carry photographs of her.

The photos included here are those of Zaher Rashid published in Susan Meiselas’ Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History.

Margaret George posing in traditional Kurdish dress with her sister (left); and with her father in military gear (right).

Wilfred Thesiger, Photographer

“In Arabia I kept my camera in a goat-skin bag to protect it from the sand – and have done so ever since.” - Wilfred Thesiger

The late Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003), one of the 20th century's most intrepid explorers is remembered for his works of travel literature documenting vanishing cultures, and namely for his landmark books, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs. Few people know, however, that he was also a prolific photographer, having taken thousands of human portraits and landscapes throughout his travels into some of the most isolated parts of Africa, the Middle East and West and Central Asia.

What started off as curious experimentation with his father’s Kodak roll film box camera turned into a lifelong passion for documenting traditional peoples and places that were then on the cusp of an irrevocable transformation at the hands of the modern world.

“I started to take photographs when I hunted in the Danakil country immediately after I had attended Haile Selassie’s coronation,” Thesiger wrote later in life, referring to the time he spent as a young man in Abyssinia in the early 1930s.

Carrying a Leica II 35mm camera, some Ilford black-and-white film, and a yellow filter, the explorer took advantage of his intimate access to places off-limits to most foreigners to take some of most remarkable photographs of his time. Travels to Hazarjat and Nuristan in Afghanistan, the tribal areas of modern day Pakistan, Sudan, the Empty Quarter of Arabia, Kurdistan, Yemen and beyond resulted not only in the adventures that would inform his prose, but also a corpus of first class documentary photographs that would endure into the next century.

Thesiger had an instinctive sense of composition but admitted to having very little technical knowledge of photography. Yet his images evoke a sense of effortless mastership. His human subjects are all the more memorable, not only for inhabiting what are now long-lost epochs, but because they knew little or nothing of photography and therefore adopted no self-conscious poses.

Most of all, Thesiger’s photos powerfully invoke the passion, pain and inconveniences of old world travel in all of its patient detail.

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Second from the left, the late Sheikh Zayid bin Sultan al Nahyan, a highly respected leader of the Bedu, and former President and founder of the United Arab Emirates. 1947.

Iraqi Jews living in the Hajar region of what is today Iraqi Kurdistan. 1950.

Morocco. 1955.

A compilation of Thesiger's best images can be found in his photo book, A Vanished World.

The Round City

On August 1, 762 AD the second Abbasid Caliph, al-Mansur, decided to relocate his residence from the city of Kufa in modern day Iraq, to a nearby area which he would call Dar al-Salam (the Abode of Peace). His new capital, which would also be referred to by its pre-Islamic name of Baghdad would become the seat of the Islamic empire and one of the greatest cities of its time.

Its convenient location with caravan routes to Syria, the Hijaz, the Iranian plateau, as well as its easy access to water sources, made it an ideal spot for a new city. The Caliph assembled engineers, surveyors, architects, artists from around the Muslim world to come together and draw up plans for the city which was designed with the utmost beauty and technical perfection in mind. Work was completed on the capital about 4 years later in 766 A.D.

The original framework of the city was circular, being over 2 km in diameter, causing it to be also be known as “al-Mudawara” or “the Round City”. This design has its roots in the Parthian Sassanid tradition and some of the key masterminds of the project are reputed to have been Persian.

Three concentric circular walls made of towering mud brick enclosed residential, administrative and business quarters. Within the innermost circle stood the caliph’s residence and the mosque. The walls were pierced at inter-cardinal points by four gates that opened towards Kufa, Basra, Syria and Khorasan - with roads radiating out in those directions.

With the city eventually outgrowing itself and then later being destroyed, nothing of Baghdad's original construction remains and whatever ruins might still exist are likely buried deep beneath the modern city.

Click here to view a video showing a digital recreation of the city.

The Foundation Stone

"Dignifying Security and Securing Dignity"

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is known for its intractability. Soon, it is expected that President Obama will try to bring together Israeli and Palestinian leaders for yet another round of negotiations.

He has a chance to succeed - possibly by sheer will power, if he exercises it - but it is not very likely.

There is another possible approach. It is one that has not been properly tried, and that Obama hints at in some of his speeches. This is to come to an explicit agreement on something more basic before beginning negotiations on such thorny issues as Jerusalem, the refugees and borders.

According to this approach, Israelis and Palestinians would agree beforehand that they both have a common set of human needs that are essential to their future, but that if these needs continue to be unmet, it will simply perpetuate the conflict between them. These fundamental needs underlie and fuel the problems between the two peoples and remain unaddressed because they are intangible by nature and are not traditionally considered in the realm of statecraft.

At a general level, these 'human givens' (1) include, for example, the need for security and safe territory, a sense of autonomy and control, meaning and purpose and the need to be valued by a wider community, among others.

All humans, no matter their identity, will spiral into dysfunctional patterns of behaviour and resort to violent reactions and unsuccessful management of differences if these basic elements of our nature are left unfulfilled.

In the case of the Middle East, the two sides have specific unmet needs: after decades of occupation and no Palestinian state, Palestinians need a sense of autonomy and control over their lives without outside interference; Israelis need security and safe territory in order to provide Jews with a national home. Both sides have denied the other this basic requirement.

Ironically, both peoples also need to a strong sense of legitimacy from and to be valued by others. For Jews, their experience in Europe as the victims of capricious history was the source of this lack, and it was followed, ironically, by their arrival in the Middle East, where their takeover of land - in their minds for a good cause - ensured that Arabs would in turn deny them legitimacy.

For the Palestinians, the rule of the Ottomans gave way to the rule of the British and from there directly to the creation of Israel on their land, reaffirming a consistent pattern of being 'lesser' in the eyes of others. This lack of legitimacy is an unacceptable status for any people.

It is these unmet and very human needs that lie, like phantoms, behind the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No amount of political activity, innovativeness, even will, can resolve the situation if these basic needs are not agreed to as the basis for negotiation. Many have referred to these needs in various forms in their analysis of the region, but few have recommended that talks explicitly be held on the basis of addressing these needs.

As difficult as it may be to agree to recognize an enemy’s needs, this mutual agreement can greatly facilitate agreement and lead to known answers:

• For Palestinians, the need for autonomy and control can be met through the creation of a Palestinian state

• For Israelis, security can be met by normalizing their relations with neighbours and ending the state of conflict, as offered, for example, in the terms of the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002.

• The need for legitimacy from and being valued by others can be further met for both through recognition of Jerusalem as their respective capital and of their links to the city on the basis of religious heritage.

• Resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem by recognizing refugees' rights without endangering the status of Israel as a Jewish state, providing refugees with permanent and stable conditions through citizenship, employment opportunities and compensation for suffering can go a long distance to making Palestinians feel less as the nation undeserving of a national status.

Experts will look at the above and say the most talented negotiators have tried to tackle these issues and failed and that this is more easily said than done.

But they have not. They have dealt with Jerusalem, Israeli security, a Palestinian state and the refugees as issues in themselves. They did not come to an explicit, mutual recognition of the common human needs behind these issues first - pinning the phantoms to the ground - before entering the issues and their details.

An initial, explicit recognition by Israelis that Palestinians share these of their common human needs may greatly facilitate negotiations by providing an equivalence between the sides based on a common human condition and a perspective and foundation to return to if talks become heated, hit an impasse, or sink into a quagmire of details. Over decades, both sides needs may have spiraled beyond these basics; however, this may be a way to return to the necessary basics.

Admitting the existence of basic human needs as the basis for any negotiation may seem odd at first. It appears to pull the carpet from right under the feet of the politicians and demystify apparently intractable and addictive, angst-ridden processes. Yet, this basic human recognition of the needs of another, even an enemy, may right decades of wrong and provide the foundation stone for greater contentment and a future for Israelis, Palestinians, their children, and their children’s children.

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(1) http://www.hgi.org.uk/archive/human-givens.htm

Mulla Nasrudin

The Smuggler

Time and again Nasrudin passed from Persia to Greece on donkey-back. Each time he had two panniers of straw, and trudged back without them. Every time the guard searched him for contraband. They never found any.

‘What are you carrying, Nasrudin?’

‘I am a smuggler.’

Years later, more and more prosperous in appearance, Nasrudin moved to Egypt. One of the customs men met him there.

‘Tell me, Mulla, now that you are out of the jurisdiction of Greece and Persia, living here in such luxury – what was it that you were smuggling when we could never catch you?’

‘Donkeys.’

From the Exploits of the Incomparable Mulla Nasrudin, © 1983 The Octagon Press

*

In different cultures around the world, particularly in those of the Middle East, traditional stories, fables or tales serve numerous functions and can operate on different levels. A tale - listened to or read - might entertain, serve as a joke, be used to illustrate something moralistic, or it can have an even higher purpose of conveying something far more subtle – the first steps on the road to greater awareness and wisdom.

One of the more familiar characters found in the traditional corpus of tales from the East is the joke figure known as Mulla Nasrudin. The Sufis, the traditional psychologists of the East, maintain that they have used Mulla Nasrudin stories, in part, to help fine-tune the perceptual abilities of the human mind. And according to the late Afghan author, Idries Shah, a collector of these tales, Mulla Nasrudin stories “constitute one of the strangest achievements in the history of metaphysics.”

Mulla Nasrudin tales are similar to other collections of stories such as Aesop’s Fables, the Greek Myths, and the Arabian Nights collection – all of which were originally, for their own times and places, written to provide a vehicle for esoteric psychology and to symbolize aspects of human behaviour and the human mind.

As for Nasrudin himself, nobody really knows who he was, where he originated, and whether or not he even existed. His elusiveness is mirrored in the stories in which he appears. Here he takes different forms from an often bumbling, pathetic and self-deprecating fool to a man of deeper insight who has knowledge to impart.

Nasrudin tales can be found in different parts of the world from Iran and Afghanistan where he is best known; to Turkey where he is called Hodja Nasreddin; to the Arab Middle East where he is referred to popularly as Joha; to other local versions of this personality found in Italy, Greece, Bosnia, Russia and beyond to China.

In the same way that the smuggler Nasrudin and his donkey slip past the border guard in the story above - a representation of the ability of tales and humour to transcend political and cultural borders - these traditional stories are of such a refined subtlety that they have a way of also bypassing the borders and obstacles of the mind.

How do Nasrudin tales work exactly?

According to Shah and to others, Nasrudin tales are not meant to be didactic, nor are they meant to be decoded, taken-apart or analyzed by the rational mind. They are instead meant to simply be read and re-read and absorbed until they take form holistically in one’s mind. The tales can form patterns or templates in the mind which at certain moments can match up to reality, allowing us to see ourselves and the behaviour of others – including thought patterns, habits, behaviours, and even aspects of reality - which would otherwise be out of waking consciousness.

These amusing stories, told orally, have entertained countless people in the East for centuries. More recently they were collected and put into book form by Shah who spent his life researching and collecting the Eastern heritage of Sufi knowledge and relating it to the science and psychology of the West.

Impressions

The Middle East has been imagined and depicted in many ways throughout history and into our time. Maps have been one way of doing so. From Roman impressions to the modern satellite image, the region has been seen through different eyes, and with a different shape or meaning.

(1)

(1) Map of internet usage in the Middle East: http://adiamondinsunlight.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/middle-east-internet-map-by-lumeta.jpg

The Cult of Khat

“Khat makes you happy. Khat makes you crazy. It can also make you cry.”
- Hisham al-Khamisi, taxi driver

Any travel to Yemen nowadays, particularly by those for whom the Middle East is something of a novelty, tends to include dabbling in the popular Yemeni pastime of chewing khat – a locally grown flowering plant that contains an amphetamine-like stimulant causing a mildly euphoric, uplifting effect. Trying khat and reporting on its subtle, amorphous effects to friends back home has become so de rigueur that it is now almost something of a cliché – not to mention a kind of right of passage or experiential badge for aspiring Arabists travelling the Middle East circuit.

Not that they can be entirely blamed. For this socially-sanctioned drug is employed ritualistically and en masse in Yemen, with a large portion of the day being allocated to its use. It is an omni-present fact of life as well as a tool of social cohesion that is difficult to avoid for any visitor seeking an easy inroad into the local culture.

This widespread practice of chewing khat, which in recent decades has grown to become a national addiction, was neither always the problem that it is today nor is it an issue confined to just one or two dimensions of consequence. It can even be said that the future of Yemen and its development as a nation is powerfully impacted by the question of khat use and the implications surrounding it.

The plant is believed to have come to Yemen around 400 years ago from Ethiopia. Similar geographic and climatic conditions made it a perfect transplant location. For centuries, it was only the very rich and the elderly who chewed the plant, and only occasionally; often during official meetings and political discussions to empower and enliven debate. Otherwise use of the drug was strictly confined to only a few hours in the early afternoon.

It was only in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, when approximately 4 million Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi Arabia for their government siding with Iraq against the international coalition, that the khat industry exploded. Many of the unemployed repatriated Yemeni workers took to the khat fields to find work, while others, with little to do, began to use the drug themselves. The wave soon spread to university students, women and children (some as young 7) - traditionally non-users of the drug.


Today, khat production constitutes a major industry in Yemen with powerful vested interests. Countless people are employed in the business of growing, delivering or selling khat – around 10% of the population. The Yemeni government itself derives money from the taxing of wealthy khat merchants and the slapping of tolls on the transport of the drug, by way of checkpoints along the roads on which they’re delivered.

The plant is mainly cultivated in northern Yemen, especially in and around the towns of Sana’a, Haja, Taiz and Ibb. Numerous varieties of the plant are grown, and like all fruit or vegetable produce can be divided into superior and inferior strains reflected by price and availability. The “best” quality khat can be described as having the smallest leaves and is light green in colour, with thick, whitish stems. Red stems reflect a lesser quality plant which translates into lesser or negligible psychological effects.

Less known or discussed are the numerous problems associated with the growth and consumption of the drug, which include:

• The large-scale use of pesticides which have been known to cause disease and in some cases has poisoned and even killed consumers

• The loss of precious arable land which is used to grow khat – land which could be used to grow other important staples lacking in Yemen

• The loss of even more precious water resources used to cultivate khat. Estimates are that 40% of Yemen’s water supplies are being used to grow the drug.

• Too much money being spent on khat by an underclass that has very little income to begin with, thereby helping to perpetuate poverty in Yemen.

• Human inactivity and a productivity drain attributed to whole afternoons and evenings being lost to chewing khat

• The negative physiological effects, chemical dependency and long-term changes to the brain resulting from prolonged use of the drug

• The environmental cost – millions of clear plastic bags used to bag khat can be found strewn across the Yemeni countryside

With millions of Yemenis using khat on almost a daily basis, it is easy to see how any discussion about the future of this ancient country (one of the oldest and most culturally intact in all of the Middle East), will depend upon the ability of Yemenis to end their dependency on, and reduce to the most moderate levels, their use of this powerful plant.

All images and text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2009

Hobeika - Super Agent

The Middle East is full of intrigue, or so we are told. Dens of spies, spymasters, vast conspiracies - these are the warp and woof of the place, we imagine. On January 24, 2002, Super Agent Elie Hobeika was blown up in his car near his home. His body was flung 60 meters by the blast, possibly landing on a nearby balcony - so far that was he expelled from his previous spy status.

Elie Hobeika was the incarnation of duplicity in the shifting sands of the Lebanese civil war. He is reported to have executed the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees after Lebanese President Bashir Gemayel was assassinated by a large detonation at his party's headquarters in East Beirut. Hobeika is even reported to have been behind this very act, killing the President he later revenged by assisting the convicted perpetrator to gain access to the necessary explosives and to the site.

He is reported to have worked with the Syrians to help destroy the Christians' military power which he had previously built up. He was notorious for having been involved in the bombardment of the mainly-Christian town of Zahleh by Syrian and pro-Syrian forces. Finally, he was named as member of the government of President Hrawi - a man from that very Zahleh - and so became Minister of Electricity of Lebanon.

Beyond these major events, Hobeika may have been involved in untold numbers of extra-judicial killings, kidnappings, briberies and blackmail. He exercised each and every one of these crimes with a great passion and a kind of blindness one only sees in saints and the greatest criminals. He was so efficient at the task that every side - Lebanese, Israeli, Syrian - is reported to have gladly drawn on his services.

No one dared touch him until that January 24, a decade or more after his major crimes. Many are convinced that former Israeli Prime Minister Sharon ordered his death after Hobeika agreed to testify against the Israeli leader in a Belgian court over the Sabra/Shatila massacres. Others believe the Syrians took advantage of his expendability to signal that Lebanon remained very shaky and needy of their presence, or to confirm that the Israelis are still meddling in Lebanon. So clear are the muddy waters of Middle Eastern politics. Hobeika's assassination was cloaked in the confusion and duplicity of his very life.

There are some who believe that Hobeika worshipped regularly at the tomb of the Maronite Saint, Mar Charbil, whose corpse remains miraculously uncorrupted by the ravages of time, and that Elie held a bottle of oil in his palm and recited prayers before entering battle, where he would often be seen to laughing like a hyena at times of extreme crisis, shouting "You fools! You don't know what you're doing!".

Some women were also strangely captivated by the green-eyed man, loving him with a desperation suitable to his extreme criminality. Despite the logical pleading of family and friends, these women would gladly go to his bed for the experience of Hobeika. He was greatly feared when he walked his own neighbourhood; all knew of the wrath and vengeance that awaited any who would dare cross him.

There are many who cheered and sighed 'good riddance' when he died. Most of the Lebanese political elite - except the brother of the assassinated Bashir and including many former enemies - attended Hobeika's funeral.

A woman with henna-coloured hair, whose age has only softended her magnificent figure, is reported to be seen placing a red rose at his grave at regular intervals.

(Most of this entry is true; the additional fictions are in line with the general course of events)

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Text and photo copyright (c) John Zada and John Bell 2009

“My whole life was preparation for this job,” says Ismail Serageldin, as he sprouts a wry smile and gazes out of his 5th story office window overlooking the Alexandria corniche.

What might otherwise seem like an unusual comment coming from a man who gave up a sparkling career in international development to return to Egypt to take up a job as the head of a library, begins to make sense as the scale of the enterprise to which he heads comes into focus.

Serageldin, a former Vice President of the World Bank and longtime socio-developmental guru is today commandeering of one of Egypt's most ambitious projects: he is the Director of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a gargantuan library-cum-cultural centre inspired by Alexandria's ancient library of antiquity.

The $220 million brainchild of Alexandria historian, Mustafa al-Abbadi, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina (meaning “Library of Alexandria” in Latin), is the modern incarnation of one of the most esteemed institutions of learning and knowledge in history. The Bibliotheca, whose ancient predecessor vanished under dubious circumstances in the late Roman period, took several years to build and first opened its doors to the public in October 2002. In addition to providing Alexandria University with a top-notch research facility, the library was undertaken as part of a larger effort to reinvigorate Egypt's second city by recapturing the same spirit of learning that once made Alexandria one of the epicenters of knowledge in the ancient world..

To read this article in its entirety click here.

The Dog River Tablets

“The Middle East is the invaded civilization: it is the occupied territory par excellence.”

The Lebanese coast consists of a series of regular rock outcroppings reaching out into the sea. Some of the most well known are Ras En-Naqoura on the border with Israel and Chekka between Byblos and Tripoli in the north. One such jutting presence is known by the Dog River (or Nahr El Kalb) that flows by it into the Mediterranean.

These massifs separate areas of Lebanon, creating coves, and bays - effectively districts - helping to define the geography and even the politics of the area (the local "geopolitics"). They create separations and served to point the locals outwards towards the sea, rather than inwards towards each other.

The Dog River was also a key passage for any army moving along the Lebanese coast. It was sufficiently dramatic and scenic, by the sea, that it inspired the conquerors to chisel their passage in stone. Each left a plaque announcing himself usually on his way elsewhere: Ramses II, Nebuchadnezzer, Alexander the Great, the Roman Emperor Caracalla, Salladin, Napoleon III of France were all here. In one glance, the tablets at the Dog River speak of the passage of armies and the multi-layered and convoluted history of the Middle East.

The region has been the thoroughfare of conquest because it stands at the intersection of the continents. It has served as a commercial and cultural crossroads between Asia, Europe and Africa, a kind of permanent distribution network of scriptures and goods, as well as the locus for a clash of cultures and peoples - and the very human reflexes of defence that are then provoked.

All cultures in the Middle East have a long memory of conquest and the brutal tides of history. Cities like Sidon, Jericho, and Aleppo have each been ransacked over and over again and contain the layers of soot, the sediments of devastation, beneath today's streets. The Mongols, the rule of the Byzantines, the cruelty of the Crusaders, or the arrival of the Islamic faith from the Hijaz in Arabia, each left its impact in a bristling civilization - and in the traumas of the local inhabitants.

Hyper-vigileance, chronic distrust of outsiders and concern about the future would seem to be natural reactions to this longstanding process of invasion and destruction. This naturally led to tight belonging and identification with a group - once upon a time, a critical survival mechanism in an environment of regular threat. If you and your group did not stick together, the play was over.

Issues of identity and belonging in the Middle East are thus unconsciously understood as existential – or so they appear. Survival techniques became over time cultural habits. The passage of conquerors is not just carved on the rock of the Dog River, it is etched into the amygdylas of the people of the region and perpetuated today still in their cultural habits.

Therefore, the people of the region come to their challenges today with their minds occupied with past trauma and past responses which seemingly need to be relied upon. A need to protect and maintain traditions that ensure survival, including close, almost cult-like, group belonging appears essential.

In a mutable world, however, the challenges ahead today - environmental, economic and political - may require new responses based on more reflective and holistic answers rather than the reflexes of history played out over and over again. "Eye for an eye" or "kill or be killed" may have once been essential but today they may very well be the instruments of extinction.

Understanding Iran IV - Mutual Respect

We have put forward the possibility that relations with Iran are handicapped by narrow perceptions of that country, and that Iran's behaviour, including some of its excesses, can be explained through its search to have its 'intangible' needs met in the face of considerable international barriers. This is especially the case in a country with a powerful sense of status and entitlement driven by millenia of sophisticated culture and political history.

We believe there are two basic approaches to deal with Iran. Either we use what Ornstein calls our "old brain", rely on its caricatures and act on that basis and continue to deprive Iran of its needs, or we derive a new more nuanced and realistic approach to the matter, unfamiliar as it may seem.

As we have indicated, we have in our minds only slim pictures of a fuller reality, including that of another society like Iran. All can appear terribly simplified through the words of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or, indeed, of George Bush. It is also plain that not only the USA suffers from this problem; Iran has the same simplistic understandings of the USA (and of Israel) that Americans have of it. This is a two-way street where a sense of moral superiority, a black and white world of right and wrong, drives both sides.

Iran is a country seeking basic, if intangible, needs of legitimacy and respect. Many of the policies that have been under consideration do not sufficiently consider this. Iran will neither be bribed into a deal, nor threatened out of its ambitions. This is a cold reality. Therefore, the whole diplomatic approach of "carrots and sticks" that has marked American diplomacy will not work here. Furthermore, limited and cartoon perceptions not only limit our views of another society, they can cause misjudgments regarding the consequences of our actions:

• Sanctions on Iran, even very heavy sanctions, will not likely make it bend nor stop it from enriching uranium. In fact, it will likely only strengthen the Iranian hardliners and radicals making them pursue uranium enrichment at an even faster pace, which, theoretically, is counterproductive to the international community's goals.

• A military attack on Iran will not likely destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities nor its desire to pursuit it, but it will certainly destroy a country in the process. Hatred for the USA and Israel will be beyond the pale after such an attack with many currently incalculable consequences. Furthermore, in response, Iran can unleash a mixture of terror and missiles at Israel, American targets and other strategic sights in the Gulf, wreaking havoc in an already heavily destabilized Middle East.

Therefore, military strikes and sanctions cannot assure that Iran will not go nuclear; but they can assure that Iran will strike back, and that the atmosphere between the USA, Israel and Muslim countries will be deeply poisoned.

The reality is that this mindset may still, sadly, prevail. Both sides still feel the need to punish the other for past misdeeds, and expectations of threat can easily morph into an uncontrolled spiral of violence.

The key to avoiding this human disaster is to engage Iran on the basis of mutual respect and equality, which meets Iran's needs and may yield positive results for all concerned. Negotiating while threatening sanctions does not meet this criterion.

Although this second approach may be may be difficult and counterintuitive because of understandable aversions to the Iranian government's policies, especially over human rights, or Ahmadinejad's rhetoric about Israel, it may only be this reality that can move matters forward constructively.

Understanding Iran III - A Question of Needs

Recent advances in the field of psychology, in addition to shedding light on our own behaviour as individuals, can also provide valuable clues as to what may be happening below the surface with regards to such things as conflicts between groups. Our awareness of the subtle, and perhaps more fundamental, aspects of the Iran-West conflict may be measurably heightened by our consideration of some of these new understandings.

We are fast learning that mental health and well-being (and the actions that arise from those states) depend highly upon certain emotional needs being met. It is being demonstrated that in addition to important physical needs of food, air water, and shelter, human beings need and require:

* security
* attention (to give and receive)
* a sense of autonomy and control
* to be part of a wider community
* a sense of status within social groupings
* a sense of competence and achievement
* meaning and purpose

When enough of these emotional needs are unmet within a person or larger community, psychological disarray, suffering and conflict may result.

Iran’s political and diplomatic behaviour, posturing and rhetoric which is often characterized as “extreme” or “rogue” and is sometimes depicted as being intrinsic to Iranian culture, is more likely related to its needs as a nation being deprived than it is to some inherent evil. And western countries may be quite complicit in this situation.

The ongoing effort by the West to sanction and isolate Iran, as an uncreative standard operating procedure, may be a primary cause. In fact, it might be said with some degree of certainty that the reason for which tools such as sanctions exist is to deprive countries of their needs in order to exact punishment, or to force capitulation on an issue or range of issues.

Decades of Western hostility, suspicion, forced isolation from the global community, and a devaluing of all things Iranian, go completely against the grain of the needs listed above: security, the ability to exercise attention through official relations, autonomy, control, being part of a community, and enjoying a certain national status and the fruits of growth and achievement. The implications of this, as profound as they are on their own, are further bolstered by the fact, often unappreciated, that Iran is a historically and culturally rich nation with a deep sense of pride. It’s needs for recognition, respect, and status perhaps run even deeper than other nations.

How does this bear upon the conflict and on our perception and understanding of Iran as whole?

If Iranians, or others in a similar situation, cannot have their needs met through the usual avenues that modern nations and people do, they will try to fulfill them in other ways.

For instance, what the west takes to be actions that are purely hostile towards it, may in fact be alternate and/or misplaced avenues for Iran to pursue its needs:

• Iran’s continued revolutionary struggles, especially by its elites, against its “enemies” that include extreme rhetoric, action and political – may constitute an alternate form of pursuit of meaning and purpose, whose more appropriate forms are denied by sanctions and isolation

• The development of a nuclear program (either energy or weapons or both) is a pursuit of security, status, competence and achievement, again, where isolation and sanctions prevents Iran from attaining these goals in other areas

• Iran’s controversial relations to other groups such as Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria, North Korea can easily be understood in terms of its needs to share attention, have relations with others, and feel part of a larger community, since it is currently excluded in various ways from the community of nations

• Iran’s intentions to become a regional power in the Middle East – something construed as hostile and ill-intentioned – may be seen through the prism of Iran’s need to have a sense of autonomy and control denied to it by the wide range of economic and political strictures imposed by the world community

• Any one of these actions can be related to other unmet needs cited in the other examples.

A dialogue with Iran can be entered into to both understand these needs as well as to discuss such possible excesses.

What is the impact of all of this for our understanding of Iran?

These behaviours, seen as pure hostility and apart from their other motives, re-enforces and feeds back into our already skewed caricatures of Iran. Our responses further alienates Iran and produces more behaviours that we use strengthen our models. The cycle seems to have no end. Iran itself, or its leadership, may not be fully aware of the needs as described above and may be trying to compensate for those starved needs in excess.

The first step away from the precipice of the deadly violence which looms above this long-standing conflict, and towards more flexible policy options and improved relations between Iran and the West is for not only elites, but also regular citizens to learn and better understand why we see each other as we do, and how we might be able to bring our perception, even slightly more in line with what the reality might be.

Understanding Iran II - A Distorted View

In order to appreciate the notion that what we as humans actually perceive is often far removed from what is actually there, we need to draw upon recent understandings in the fields of psychology and human behaviour.

Dr. Robert Ornstein is an American psychologist whose pioneering research and work in the areas of brain functioning, consciousness and human nature has transformed the way in which we understand ourselves. Among other things, he has shown that contrary to what we think, we as human beings do not perceive and experience the world as it actually IS, but instead as a distorted picture or caricature of that reality.

According to Ornstein, because of the evolutionary imperative over millions of years for humans to survive, our brains have evolved to filter in only certain information relevant to our survival while ignoring a multiplicity of other stimuli and data which exists in the external world.

Once we have experienced any given thing - whether it be a person, a place, an object or an environment - our minds create visual models and slots those things into simple and generalized categories, which we subsequently re-experience as we understand them in our own minds, rather than they actually exist.

Our views and experiences become “habituated” or “automized”, as kind of natural shortcut to ensure survival. Things like assumptions, biases, and prejudices are all part of the way in which our minds generalize and simplify the world around us, in order to see and react to those things that may be most relevant to our survival. The end result is that we can only see what our minds have allowed us to see at any given time. Whatever we do “see” or “experience” is almost always done so in an incomplete fashion, and as we know it to be in our minds.

Far from being a far-flung theoretical exercise with little relevance to the real world of people and events, these contentions have been confirmed by science and apply to all aspects of human life and human interaction. Because reality feels to each of us so convincing, so rich and so complete, and because we are not otherwise taught about the limitations of our cognition, it seldom occurs to us that our perceptions are incomplete or flawed. We are thus convinced of our views, and are too often compelled to act upon them.

We tend to see a country like Iran primarily in terms of its potential dangers and its propensity for aggression because that is how we have come to identify, categorize and model it, both individually and collectively in our brains. We have become habituated to that generalized perception.

Our distance from the reality of the country itself, its people, and its rich cultural heritage, combined with media coverage filtering in stories that confirm our viewpoints further strengthens our incomplete picture. A country like the United States which has been conditioned by its past experiences with Iran, or like Israel, whose predominant collective paradigm on the outside world is that of threat and the possibility of persecution, are both more susceptible to these processes.

But the cycle of misunderstanding does not end there. It is further heightened by our own actions on the political stage, which are essentially our responses to these entrenched viewpoints, which then play back into, and further enforce, our incomplete and lopsided perceptions.

Understanding Iran

The traditional view of Iran, that of an irrational and hatemongering monolithic regime pining at any opportunity to harm its enemies, is one which has become widely accepted and unquestioned in the West. Over a generation of experts, academics, and policy-makers - some with relatively little firsthand knowledge of Persian culture - have inherited and continue to perpetuate the vilifying clichés and rhetoric that constitute the brick and mortar of a conflict that very few people understand.

The cornerstone of the West’s strategy in confronting Iran has always been to contain and punish it through the use of sanctions and diplomatic isolation, while waging covert actions in the shadows where Iran’s allies and agents are said to be also continually operative.

Despite periods of brief détente and cooperation on tactical issues, notably after 9/11, both sides have never been able to fully bridge the chasm of misunderstanding that divides them. Now, with Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power, this conflict threatens to escalate to dangerous new heights as Israel – with or without the backing of the United States – stands poised to intervene militarily to deny the Iranians a nuclear capability.

Few people (including most Iranians) will deny that many of the ruling elites and organs of the Iranian state manifest extreme religious and ideological positions that are antagonistic towards the West. But in much the same way that an American would tell an Iranian who’s never experienced America that the United States is quite a lot more than someone’s idea of a “Great Satan”, Iran is also more welcoming, tolerant, diverse and sophisticated than the bleak unchanging image presented to us on the nightly news, or by our own blinkered politicians.

Indeed, at the political and other levels, if one is willing to look closely enough, there is an obvious dissonance between our perceptions of one another, and what may in fact be a more complex reality.

This in turn begs a number of questions:

1. How much of the Iran-West conflict (or any other conflict) is the result of limitations in our cognition that we as humans are naturally subject to, and are not even aware of?

2. Could the character and actions of Iran be seen through different lenses, which could help to free us from the myopic viewpoint to which we are today seemingly condemned?

3. If so, could an understanding of these subtler factors also constitute an important key towards the resolution of a long and unnecessary conflict which may yet have devastating consequences for the Middle East and for the world?

In the case of relations between Iran and the West, for example, we would like to put forward the idea that the conflict, although encompassing real issues, is also an ongoing drama involving and demonstrating flawed human cognition on multiple levels.

The West’s understanding of Iran and the dangers that it poses is more of an imaginary or psychological construct, than a true reflection of reality – and is one which gets in the way of amelioration of the conflict. The West’s inability to properly understand Iranian culture and its failure to appreciate that its own largely reactive, conditioned, and ritualistic posture of hostility towards Iran, elicits and compels Iran towards certain behaviours that then further reinforce our generalized misperceptions of Iran being a rogue.

We will be exploring these ideas further in our next series of posts.

Symbols in Jerusalem

The Jerusalem International YMCA (JIY) building was designed by Arthur Loomis Harmon, a partner in the firm that also built the Empire State building in New York City. The JIY is known for its imposing tower, a landmark in the Holy City, but at a smaller scale, the building offers a cornucopia of rich symbolism and references to the three monotheistic faiths.

From friezes, to internal decoration, to cornerpieces, the JIY offers a complex mixture of depictions of scripture, mystical symbols and an unusual blending of the heritages of east and west.

Taha Hussein

Photo by Van-Leo

Taha Hussein (b. 1889, d. 1973), a man of letters who got into considerable trouble for publishing a book entitled "On Pre-Islamic Poetry" that stated that this often raucous literary form was in fact written after, not before, the Quran.

The Castle on the Beach

Tel Arsuf or Appolonia is an ancient site 15 km. north of modern Tel Aviv. It was originally colonized by the Phoenicians who named it after their god Reshef, god of thunder and war.

The site took on the name 'Arsuf' from the god's name and the Greeks in turn named it Appolonia after their god Apollo. Arsuf/Appolonia was later colonized and developed by Byzantines, Muslims and the Crusaders who took it in 1101, naming it Arsur and building a large castle there. In 1261, the city was ruled by the Knights Hospitallers when the great Mameluke Sultan Baibars captured it and razed the fortress.

The castle stood on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean with a view of magnificent sunsets that surely have not changed over time. Through feast and famine, the castle and the site have hosted the whole panoply of human life. During Arab and Muslim rule, some residents of Arsuf became famous scholars while many gained their livelihood from farming, crafts and trade. Later, during the Crusader period, John of Ibelin, Lord of Beirut, became Lord of Arsur in 1207 after he married Melisende of Arsur, and they had a son, John of Arsur.

What the builders of the fortress, and all who lived there, whether Greek or Crusader, did not notice however, while looking out onto the exciting sea, was that their home stood on a cliff of disintegrating sand.

Slowly, over time, the winds and tides eroded the cliff on which the castle stood, and the great fortress fell into the sea below.

The Egyptian Tin Tin - 1970-1981

Farafra Oasis

All text and photos in this post copyright (c) John Zada and John Bell

The last thing anyone would expect to find in one of the most isolated outposts of humanity is a famous man.

Meeting “Mr. Socks” - or “Dr. Socks” as he prefers to be called - at the edge of a palm grove in Egypt’s smallest and most remote desert oasis was a lesson that the affliction of human fame can even extend to those places shrouded in virtual obscurity.

“Everybody knows me,” says Gaafar Abdullah, the 39 year-old Bedouin who earned his catchy “Socks” nickname by virtue of his longstanding business of knitting and selling camel wool apparel - socks, scarves, gloves, and hats. “My name is on the Internet and in the guidebooks. I am a very famous man.”

He is, as it turns out, a kind of local celebrity and claims that he is also known to many people worldwide who, by some whim or chance have happened upon a tiny swath of green, found deep in an ocean of desolation.

Located in a depression several hundred kilometers southwest of Cairo, and at the center of Egypt’s unforgiving Western Desert, is Farafra Oasis – one of the smallest, most isolated and least visited parts of inhabited Egypt. Palm forests, sulfurous hot springs, Bedouin farmers and an enchanting air of calm, bordering on inertia, characterizes this patchwork of cultivated lands. Farafra is one of a string of desert oases linked by road that fan in an arc westward from the Nile, part of what Egyptian officials began referring to in the 1950’s as “The New Valley.”


Situated closer to Libya than to the Nile Valley, Farafra is considered by many Egyptians - most of whom have never been there - as the proverbial end-of-the-line. Even local desert aficionados express dismay at Farafra’s bewilderingly small size and isolation, to the point where some of them speak of the oasis a virtual non-entity.

But in spite of its puny size and position, Farafra has always played an important role in the history of the Western Desert. Its life-giving wells, located further west than all others, have made the oasis a necessary way station for caravans and travellers criss-crossing the waterless wastes of the Sahara. The Greek historian Herodotus wrote that the Lost Army of the Persian King Cambyses departed from near Farafra on its famous and ill-fated march across the Great Sand Sea to distant Siwa Oasis in the 6th century BC. The Persians were later followed by the Romans and Byzantines who both occupied distant outposts here. In 19th and 20th centuries, desert explorers - including an elite unit of the British Special Forces during World War Two - used the oasis as a platform in which to launch expeditions and raids deep into the Sahara.

With its long history and periodic entanglements in the affairs of empires, Farafra has surprisingly little to show in terms of relics or material culture. Its main archaeological vestige is the centuries-old and highly dilapidated mud town of “Qasr al-Farafra”, which remains today partially inhabited and surrounded by a sleepy and lackluster village of small concrete tenements of the same name. Dust-blown and exuding an air of abandonment, Farafra’s main town resides in another dimension, located somewhere between the outskirts of modernity and the metaphysical void. But therein resides part of its charm.


Flanking the old town to its immediate south and west is one of several large tracts of cultivated land in Farafra bursting with crops and towering date palms – the real heart and soul of the oasis. One can lose themselves for hours exploring these idyllic blooms of green that locals refer to in English as “the gardens”. The area teems with plants, insects, animals, and thermal springs, and is caressed by draughts of desert air that play to a stillness that runs very deep. The almost total dearth of human activity here, save for the odd farmer or hot springs bather, gives the area a sense of timelessness found in few other places.

Farafra’s calm and simplicity are profoundly soothing. And for residents of the oasis, despite the isolation and material deprivations that they must endure, it makes life virtually impossible for them anywhere else.

“I can’t be away for more than a few days,” says Dr. Socks, as he stops to wash his hands and face at a hot spring. “Even going to the other oases is a very big trip for me. I don’t feel at ease in these places.”

Stepping out of the palm groves and into the surrounding desert, one is reminded of the extent of Farafra’s isolation. A short journey in any direction from the oasis will bring one into contact with some of the most pristine, dramatic and sometimes unusual desert landscapes on the planet. Farafra sits at the cusp of several unique and converging desertscapes, including the White Desert, the Black Desert and the Great Sand Sea - one of the largest sand dune fields on Earth. Because of this, Farafra remains one of the preferred embarkation points for travelers looking to explore the far recesses of the Egyptian Sahara.

The oasis itself, however, tends to be overlooked by visitors, who, with a little extra time and effort, might discover for themselves a hidden hot spring, a tranquil palm grove, or even a famous man.

A version of this article appeared in the March 7, 2009 edition of The National.

"We are better than Them"

"White smoke drifted up from a fog machine... A sound system played...anthems - deep male voices booming to a marching band's rhythms. The parents applauded wildly, the mothers ululating." (1)

We usually reserve the word ¨cult¨ for groups that commit mass suicide by drinking poison-laced purple cool-aid.

There is a view however that cult phenomena are much more pervasive in our lives. In the book 'Them and Us: Cult Thinking and the Terrorist Threat', Dr. Arthur Deikman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, explains how cult thinking affects almost all of us. In the Middle East, where group belonging and identity remain supreme totems, the effect of hidden cult behaviour may be especially marked. Understanding its effects there may be critical to moving the region to new and more constructive paradigms.

Deikman points out that cult behaviour has three main characteristics:

• Dependence on a leader;
  
• Devaluing the outsider; and
• Avoiding dissent within the group.

Compliance to and within groups is a natural human phenomenon, necessary for survival. But group activity can vary greatly, from consensus building and open critical discussion to more cult-like closed systems that reject not only outsiders but also any intruding realities – ultimately much to the expense of the group and its survival.

Taboos and respect and fear for authority are strong features of many groups in the Middle East. From national identity, to religious systems to patriarchal families, respect for the leader, authority or ¨father figure¨ is unquestioned. The values of the society, especially religiously based ones, are taboos that do not sustain critical inquiry. Indeed, in this scenario, the ability to truly see an outsider at ¨eye level¨, i.e. equal, is simply not there.


In the Middle East, these matters are simply seen as "the way things have always been, and will always be". However, this is a method of group survival with potentially terrible consequences in an age of globalization and weapons of mass destruction.

Whether in Israel´s relations to its neighbours, its desperate desire to preserve its identity or assumptions among some about being somehow superior to others, or in Hizballah´s grip on its members, motivating them to higher purpose through sacrifice, even death, cult behaviour continues to grip the region, hidden in the veneer of tradition and references to longstanding cultures and civilizations.

"You are our leader... We are your men!" (2). Indeed, most seductive of all, according to Deikman, is when belonging to a group comes with a divine calling. It makes the mission of sublime importance and eases the ability to maintain the tightness of the group, calling on members to act blindly in its favour. By devaluing outsiders and feeling supreme, the group can provide members with a sense of mission and meaning.

The benefits of belonging to groups that act like cults are many: comfort, security, belonging, and, above all, a sense of higher purpose that the group and leader deliver, often at any cost. Indeed, it is when security and comfort meet higher purpose that the cult becomes an iron-clad contract between individual and group.

The cost of cults is massive. Deikman calls it ¨diminished realism¨. We see it every day in the Middle East:

• 91% of Israelis supported the bombing of Gaza even though the results are profoundly uncertain, even possibly counterproductive (e.g. a post-war strengthened Hamas), and other methods of approaching the problem may not have been exhausted. 

• Hamas is so sure of their ¨divine purpose¨ that there is little questioning of their goals or methods. All - rockets, bombs, terror – can be justified in the light of the group´s distant goals even if, again, the results are not there: Gaza remains under siege and in a profoundly abnormal condition despite Hamas's strategy. 
  

Certainly, the record of progress in the Middle East is testament to a state of ¨diminished realism¨. It may not be at all impossible for Israelis and Palestinians to come to terms if certain taboos are sacrificed, i.e. if cult behaviour is recognized and reduced.

Cult behaviour does not just apply to religious or Middle Eastern groups. It appears in a more subtle fashion in companies, organizations, and even between friends. The difficulty is that devaluing outsiders, avoiding dissent and blindly obeying leaders is often unrecognized for what it is. Furthermore, the reality is that breaking out of the group can be terrifying. Being thrust out, "excommunicated", a heretic in one's own "family" - however understood - can mean that the most basic instincts of life or death are triggered.

Yet, ironically, the word 'heretic' is derived from the Greek 'hairetikos', meaning 'able to choose'. Indeed, many in the Middle East deny the possibility of choice and point to the dance of fate in their desperate destiny, where in fact longstanding and unconscious acceptance of cult behaviour may be at play. After all, no one really wants to be a heretic.

Developing awareness of the problem is not easy, but it is possible. Recognition of one´s own cult tendencies may be the beginning.

"The musk oxen gather in a circle to defend against the wolves yet there may be only other oxen outside the circle."




(1) "Hezbollah Seeks to Marshall the Piety of the Young", New York Times, November 21, 2008
(2) Ibid.

All text and photography copyright (c) John Bell and John Zada

The Deputy

"He renounced honour, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure."

Not all Middle East personages inspire. For that matter, most are quite forgetful. Some, however, have gone down in history as the vilest of villains, the bastions of deepest infamy, cast as far down as Dante's frozen Seventh Circle of Hell. That is where the great Italian placed Judas, the betrayer of the Christ. With one kiss, the sinner signed up for an eternity of hatred, his very name - innocent enough in the original Hebrew (Yehuda) - became the very mark of betrayal.

An equally talented Argentinian writer suggested a different understanding of the great betrayer from the Middle East. In two short and incisive stories, Jorge Luis Borges leaves a trail where Judas ends up in a somewhat better light. In 'Three Versions of Judas', Borges puts forward the un-suggestable: Judas chose infamy as an ultimate act of respect for the divine. Braver and truer to the greater reality than others, Judas shunned all good as only suitable for God and debased himself into an ultimate ascetic, willing to pay a higher price than his Master in the cosmic drama: to become forever a criminal in order for the Passion Play to be complete.

In a second story, 'The Sect of the Thirty', Borges goes further. He suggests that in fact Jesus and Judas were the only two characters of the path to crucifixion who were aware of what was going on - the rest of the cast playing out out their roles in a desultory sleep. Roman soldier, Sanhedrin, even Mother Mary - all were oblivious, their consciousness barely dawning in comparison to the bright wakefulness of Judas and Jesus.

This means not only that Judas acted with conscious intent, but that he was also positively essential for the fulfilment of the Christ's mission. Indeed, Borges raises a question that has always baffled: "why the kiss?". Jesus would have been well known enough to be arrested without one. It may be that Judas intended his infamy in both method and timing, as Jesus also needed his doppleganger.

It is so that the great betrayer saunters into history, forever reviled, the ultimate anti-hero, in full and conscious compliance with the divine order. Together, Jesus and Judas, Yeshua and Yehuda, two men of the Middle East two millenia ago, created a story of friendship and betrayal, of suffering and redemption that resonates across the ages, continents and civilizations.

Indeed, at the Last Supper, it was Judas who was seated to the left of Jesus, the most honoured seat at the table in the Middle Eastern tradition of the time. I have always wondered to what degree the two men were in fact in league, and Borges suggests that they were more likely than not in very close collaboration. John Zada goes one step further and calls Judas, "Jesus' Deputy".

All text in this post copyright John Bell and John Zada

Desert Virtuoso

All text and images in this post copyright (c) John Zada and John Bell 2009

Ask Retired Colonel Ahmed al-Mestakawy - a man so obviously the product of a certain destiny - the “hows” and “whys” of it all, and he’ll just grin and shrug his shoulders in a gesture of amused bewilderment.

“At one moment you are moving in one direction, the next moment you are somewhere else entirely,” says the 56 year-old native of Alexandria. “How or why I got to where I am today, I have no idea.”

Al-Mestakawy is talking about his lifelong love-affair with the desert, which began without warning, when, after graduating officer school in 1977, it was decided that out of all the possible roads for a military man in Egypt, his should be with the Border Intelligence Forces along the Libyan frontier.


For 18 years al-Mestakawy, became the most feared and respected border patrol officer in Egypt’s Western Desert – one of the most treacherous and inhospitable regions on earth. It is an area known, among a few other things, for its smugglers and drug traffickers who risk life and limb moving their illicit cargo across well worn paths in the no man’s land between Libya and the Nile.

For al-Mestakawy, spectacular drug busts, surveillance missions and border skirmishes, some of which come straight out of fiction, all paled in comparison to his one true love - the desert. A man of action, he took the opportunity during his time in the army to learn the desert’s deepest secrets from three semi-legendary masters - all close friends - who would impart their entire lexicons of knowldge to him:

Samir Lama, an eccentric Egyptian-Jewish cinema actor and desert enthusiast, today regarded as one of the great contemporary Egyptian Western Desert explorers, fine tuned al-Mestakawy’s desert driving skills, and instilled in him a thirst for desert exploration. Suleiman Silmy, a Red Sea Bedouin tracker and soldier, imparted knowledge about camels, flora, tracking, and desert survival. Ghenewa Abu Balooza, a Bedouin guide and camel caravaneer from Sidi Abdel Rahman taught al-Mestakawy about principles and conduct in the desert.

“All these men today live inside of me,” he says. “They taught me everything there is to know about the desert. They live in my heart.”

But his life’s path would continue to meander. After turning down - with difficulty - consecutive work offers which he refers to as “the three big crossroads”, including a career as a diplomat, a political intelligence officer, and an army general, al-Mestakawy decided in the mid-1990's to pursue his dream of becoming a desert guide. Since then, in addition to organizing trips into the desert, he has helped plan and has partaken in desert race rallies, and has discovered a cave with prehistoric rock art – one of the largest in Africa - that was recently named after him.

“In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions that I ever made,” he says. “Had I not taken this path, I would probably now be a general. And generals do NOT go on patrols and travel into the desert.”

Today, al-Mestakawy works full-time as the co-owner and manager of Zarzora Expeditions, an Egyptian outfitter that takes travelers by jeep to the furthest reaches of the Western Desert. Here al-Mestakawy combines and employs all of his various skills and talents culled from three decades of desert work.

“The desert is like his bride,” says al-Mestakawy’s business partner and desert conservationist, Wael Abed. ”Getting to see him in action is like watching him in a beautiful and passionate dance with her. He is brilliant at what he does.”

And he is a pleasure to watch. Decked out in army fatigues, a beige keffiyah and Bolle’ sunglases, he can predict the weather simply by looking at the glare of the morning sun, can read tracks in the sand and tell you who or what made them, and can plot a course and drive through dune fields so menacing that they would overturn or swallow any other vehicle - all the while managing a crack team of driver-mechanic-cooks that preside over every aspect of the trip. His commanding physical presence and primal instinct for survival are softened by his French educated, gentlemanly manner reminiscent of characters from old Egyptian cinema.

“The desert is my home, my second home,” he says. “It’s the place where I found myself and discovered who I am.”

Al-Mestakawy’s website is www.zarzora.com

Riwaq

In 1991, two Palestinians, Nazmi Al-Ju'beh and Suad Amiry began thinking about their people's architectural heritage and its conservation. Eighteen years later, 'Riwaq' - or 'Arcade' in English - is the premier organization for heritage preservation and restoration in the West Bank. Its data and work today rival that of official institutions.

Nazmi Al-Ju'beh believes the secret of success lay in several practical premises which were effective on the ground and attractive for supporters.

The first goal set by the initiators was to fill the vaccum of dialogue regarding the very issue of cultural heritage. Palestinian society had not as yet put a value on this kind of effort.

Riwaq then aimed to create a registry of all heritage buildings in the West Bank. Today, that adds up to more than 50,000 sites and 103,000 drawings. Riwaq's staff knocked on 50,000 doors to gain this data.

This activity helped realize a new vision: It was not enough to restore the beauty of Palestinian heritage or support concepts of "identity", there needed to be socio-economic value in this work. For Nazmi, Palestinians need to draw on their heritage as an instrument of socio-economic development.

"Without the two domes" - the Dome of the Rock and the Dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - "what do we have?" he asks. "Cultural tourism is the core of our future economy."

For example, some renovation has taken place on buildings located on an old pilgrim's trail that ran from Ras El' Ein (today in Israel), and passed through Aboud, Bir Zeit, Jifnah and Taybeh in the West Bank, en route to Jerusalem. In better days, this route and its heritage may again become of interest and use to Western visitors.

With its work in the West Bank, Riwaq has aimed to enhance this cultural heritage in the "rif" - the rural lands - ultimately providing new sources of tourist income and employment in villages that are today made up of up to 50% heritage buildings.

The last, but not least important goal is job creation. "One hundred dollars can give us 2.5 days of labour and cover management costs and basic resources," Nazmi says. It is an important factor in a place where employment levels have been in the double digits for decades.

Riwaq is proud that it has managed to put the issue of cultural heritage in Palestine on the national agenda. With its 57 employees today, it has become the national reference for such work. Through this effort, Riwaq and its dedicated staff have managed to open up cultural awareness, assist socio-economic development, and provide employment and a future for many Palestinians.

The Market Under the Overpass

All photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2009

In Cairo's Sayeda Aisha district, people flock in droves to take part in the weekly al-souq al-gomaa (the Friday market). This souq, one of the largest, busiest and most frenzied in the Middle East is a fusion of flea market, junk market, antiques market, animal market and textile market, and runs directly underneath a long highway overpass that bisects the city's southern cemetery. 

The souq commences at the crack of dawn and is thronged by countless thousands of people who come early to find the best deals in anything and everything imaginable - from pairs of jeans, to new shoes, to pigeons, snakes, dogs and goldfish, new toilets, kitchen ceramics, and replacement carborators or spark plugs for one's car. Ad hoc gambling stands featuring forms of the 'three shell game' can be found here for those apt to trying their luck against seasoned shysters. Mounds of random junk, culled from households all across Cairo gather in the souq and remain in situ sometimes for years, or even longer.. 

The Perpetual Motion Machine

In the small town of Chtoura, halfway between Damascus and Beirut, in the Bekaa Valley, there is a string of shops stacked with the finest food products in the world: German biscuits, Italian mozzarella, French wine and Armenian sausages. The shop owners make their living because wealthy Syrians and other foreigners know that they can find in Chtoura what they cannot find in Damascus. Today, despite war and chaos, Lebanon remains a consumer dynamo.

The country remains corrupt, confused, still suffering from the traumas of war and the soap operas of its leaders, yet it still has an energy and vitality lacking in healthier nations. The Lebanese daylife and nightlife are varied, rapid and active. Goods from across the world pervade Lebanon's markets. Trendy nightclubs grace Monot Street and Gemayzeh, while traditional cafes line the Corniche serving up apple-flavoured tobacco waterpipes alongside Turkish coffee. Everything can be found in Lebanon: cappucino and carpets, Mercedes and mandarin oranges - it is a cornucopia of consumerism.

This basic vitality goes on and on despite profound political schisms and problems. The Lebanese perpetual motion machine spins around its troubles like a mad merry-go-round whose minder has gone home. It spins and offers rides to all comers, without apparent direction, rhyme or reason. The Lebanese move for two reasons: that is what they do best, and they are afraid of what they might find if they sit still.

Lebanon is fundamentally two hundred miles of port cities at the foot of some confounding mountains. East of those snowy heights lies the Arab hinterland and the desert - the deep and wide spaces from which conquerors have sprung for millenia. 

The Lebanese, whether Phoenician or Maronite, is wont to upkeep a certain distinction between himself and his cousin from the hinterland. Even though they share a similar culture, the Lebanese marks his distinction by the sea that speaks to him every day of new possibilities and new lands. Furthermore, the mountains, with their convoluted valleys, have served as a place for sects to hide and find refuge from the great hinterland. So today, the Lebanese has the knack for international commerce and cosmopolitanism spurred by the sea alongside the apparently contradictory drive for tight identity and ethnic distinction built up by the seclusion of valley or the cove.

As always, nothing is ever that straightforward. Many other Lebanese consider themselves today and forever much more tied to the hinterland. They perceive less of a gap with their neighbours and wish to be part of a larger current. Indeed, there is a record of Lebanese contributing and belonging to the larger sweep: Sidon built the Persian fleets that invaded ancient Greece, Tyre contributed Septimus Severus to the Roman Empire, and Lebanese intellectuals were seminal to the renaissance of Arab culture one century ago.

Yet, this Janus-faced life, one looking west to the sea, the other east to the desert, has a political manifestation which led to 15 years of civil war and continued schisms and strife today. The war and the continuing saga demonstrate a sharper and truer Lebanese character trait: a supreme individuality, fluidly defined according to the needs of the moment and circumstance. Although the war consisted of ´two sides´fighting, in detail it also broke into an endless permutation of every sect against the other, and fragments among fragments within sects.

The Lebanese demonstrated that their most profound allegiances were truly nowhere.They drifted between family, sect, feudal allegiance, city, faith, ideology, prevailing wind or richest buyer, their politics captivated by only one consistency: shifts and moves. The perpetual motion machine spun round and round.

With its dozens of sects and allegiances, Lebanon reflects the mosaic of the Middle East and the rainbow of nation states we see on our maps of the world. The wars in Lebanon are case studies of the dangers of ethnic strife that could plague the planet on a much larger scale. If the Lebanese could have stayed away from the fixations of their identities, from the machine of motion propelled onto the political-scape, their truer nature would have prevailed: the spinning wheel of mountain and sea producing trade for profit, enrichment and survival.

By moving goods, they can fulfil their nature. The shifts and moves are not only escapes or momentary power plays, but are also a basic and commendable drive: vital, energetic, resourceful, inclusive, varied, and thus (de facto) tolerant. When this great virtue is married to the politics of power seeking for its own sake, certain cataclysm is assured; when it is pursued without such hungers, nothing results but a rich diversity and a unique playground of the senses.

Torino Express

Most aptly described as a pint-sized hole-in-the wall, this café-cum-bar located in Beirut’s boisterous Gemayze district, is one of Lebanon’s epicenters of social ferment. Throngs of diehard regulars made up of local and expatriate artists, journalists, and creative young professionals descend in waves upon this cellar-like intrusion to revel the night away to the strangely eclectic musical selections of DJ-proprietor "Andreas" – Torino’s celebrity half-German, half-Lebanese owner known for his bushy salt-and-pepper beard, scotch-taped headphones and glassy-eyed disposition. He is both loved and held in contempt for sending his parties into convulsions by throwing sudden wrenches into the musical fray – German beer garden music, classic Julio Iglesias, and Mirielle Mathieu being some notable selections. Lab-coat clad bartenders serve up bottles of Almaza, trademark mojitos, and some of the best toasted salami sandwiches found anywhere east of the now vanished Green Line. Often packed like a sardine can, this bar is not for the claustrophobic or faint of heart.

All text and photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2009

The Astrolabe

The astrolabe is an ancient astronomical computer designed for solving problems relating to time and the position of the celestial bodies in the sky.

Brass astrolabes were developed in the medieval Islamic world chiefly as an aid to navigation and as a way to locating the direction of Mecca for daily prayers. But they were also used for a variety of other purposes in the fields of astronomy, astrology, surveying, timekeeping and meteorology. Over 1,200 examples survive today.

The knowledge that gave rise to the creation of the astrolabe is said to have originated from the Greek astronomer Hipparchus who lived in the 2nd century BC - a man who may have also constructed the first rudimentary astrolabe.

An eighth century Persian mathematician, Mohammed al-Fazari, is credited with building the first astrolabe in the Islamic world. Another mathematician-astronomer, from Syria, Muhammed ibn Jaber al-Harrani al Battani (known to the West as “Albatenius”), contributed in the 9th and 10th centuries AD, by way of his scholarship, to the development and evolution of the astrolabe.

This particular piece shown above is a “planispheric astrolabe” and dates back to around 1500 AD. It is made of a four-metal alloy comprised of copper, lead, zinc and tin. It is 15 cm in diameter, and 2 cm thick.

Such astonishing masterpieces of instrumental art are an example of the great contributions that Arab and Islamic scientists made to the world by resuscitating the knowledge of the ancient Greeks and Romans (and their forebears) before developing it, and handing it off to an intellectually impoverished Europe that was fresh out of the Dark Ages.

Munzer's Book Shop

For most international visitors to East Jerusalem, Munzer's Book Shop at the American Colony Hotel is an oasis away from the frenetic activity, gossip and wheeling-and-dealing of Middle East politics. This narrow shop, tucked away in a classic Jerusalem style room of rough hewn stone with a domed roof, is a place where people come to browse books specialized in Middle East history, literature and politics. People also come to chat with Munzer Fahmy, the owner of this institution. Talks with him can range rapidly over current politics, visitors to the hotel, and the books themselves.

Munzer, a Jerusalemite from the Old City, and partly of Egyptian stock, got the idea to open up the bookstore through a circuitous road. After learning about the book business in the Netherlands, Munzer attended a book fair in Tel Aviv where he realized that people were disappointed by the predictable and shallow selection being presented. He decided to put on his first book fair at the Zionist Organization of America in Tel Aviv.

Success spurred him to try his luck in his home town, and so he moved his enterpreneurship to the Hyatt Regency in Jerusalem. Someone there suggested to him that his next book fair should be at the elegant Pasha Room of the American Colony Hotel - the nexus of hobnobbing for journalist and diplomats. And so he did. And at that event, another individual in the relay proposed that he open up a shop in the American Colony - another idea which he successfully acted on. And so it was.

The shop has been open since 1998 and beyond the Middle Eastern materials on sale, one can find everything from the latest South African literature to the poetic verses of an Afghan Sufi. The book store is the perfect addendum to the hotel: a conversation there about Jerusalem can lead to the purchase of a book on the city.

The shop's success and popularity goes on, and after much seeking, Munzer will soon be married to his Swedish fiancee. He continues to enjoy meeting and speaking with all comers to his shop.

'Black Cloud' Over Cairo

The UN released a report earlier this week stating that a large number of urban areas in Asia and Africa today are blanketed by a toxic cloud of pollution caused by automobile and industrial emissions, slash-and-burn agriculture, coal burning and cooking fires.

The cloud, which varies in its intensity and area of coverage, has blotted-out the sun in certain places, altered weather patterns and negatively impacted the health of millions of people.

This is no news to Cairenes who, in addition to having to bear some of the worst air pollution in the world, have had to suffer the dreaded "black cloud" which for over ten years has descended upon the city for a number of weeks, every autumn.

This so-called "black cloud", a discernible spike in pollution, is attributed to Egyptian farmers in the Nile Delta region who practice the burning of rice straw after the harvest. Anyone who has travelled through the Delta at this time of year can attest to the large pillars of smoke that can be seen pluming upwards across the horizon from all directions. The smoke collects and then drifts towards the capital where meteorological conditions in autumn trap the pollution in the lower atmosphere.

Despite the undeniable contribution that rice straw burning makes to Cairo's severe pollution, the black cloud is much more than just a perennial agricultural phenomenon. Smog from traffic, industrial pollution, and the burning of garbage - another widespread practice in Egypt - make up the lion's share of that black cloud. It is a year-round condition, which only becomes more discernible and intolerable as autumn rolls around.

The good news is that some progress has been made in convincing farmers to stop burning rice straw. Delta farmers have begun selling their rice straw to factories that can turn it into animal feed or biofuels. As a result, the "black cloud days" - a seasonal tally of the worst daily spikes in pollution - have dropped in number over the last few years.

The not so encouraging news is that this effort, as laudable as it is, is only a tiny step in what has to be a more willful and comprehensive effort to reverse Cairo's air pollution. 

Unless Egypt can get its worst polluting vehicles off the streets, clean up its industries, better manage its population, and instill a new awareness of the environment, the dreaded black cloud will never go away. Instead it will only thicken and expand, impacting the lives of countless millions of people for whom a breath of clean air has become an unimaginable luxury.

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Chogan

This painting, entitled "Chogan" or "Polo" was created by Mahmoud Farschian, a world-renowned Iranian-American master of Persian painting and miniatures. His distinct style, which has given rise to its own school of painting, combines Persian classical form with the contemporary fantasy genre. His works appear in numerous galleries and private collections around the world. This piece was completed in 1973.

Friday in Jerusalem

Children at play in an alleyway in the Old City.

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

The Sun is Satisfied

“We will die if we do not create gods. We will die if we do not kill them.” - Adonis (Syrian poet)

In the 14th century B.C., a man called Amenhotep changed his name to Akhenaton. With this move, he set about changing the culture of Egypt from one that reveres a pantheon of gods, with "Amon" as the top god, to the worship of a one god, "Aton", the sun.

Akhenaton was not however an average citizen - he was a pharaoh. He was the first monotheist in his world, a revolutionary, in a very traditional society. This king removed the Egyptian gaggle of gods in favour of a one god.

Akhenaton also directed his nation away from imperial ambitions and stopped its aggressive drives against other countries. Instead of pursuing adventures to prevent domestic revolution, he did the opposite.

In the religious field, he did the unthinkable and prohibited the use of the word “gods” in favour of Aton. Indeed, he viewed his god as being for the whole world and not just for Egypt. He did what he could in his time for people to get away from worshipping images in their minds and to permit a greater reality to set in.

Akhenaton suffered from a strange physique, and may have had the genetic disease called "Marfan’s Syndrome" - an ailment that Abraham Lincoln may have also suffered from. Akhenaton represented himself in portraits and sculpture as he really was, deformed – unlike the idealized representations of other pharaohs.

Naturally, Akhenaton ran up against heavy turbulence from the priests of Amon - the elite of Egypt - who despised his changes and fought against him. They ultimately triumphed, destroying his newly-built capital of "Akhetaton" ("Horizon of the Sun") defacing his images.

Some of the benefits of Akhenaton’s revolution nevertheless included:

• Physicians no longer collected money for expelling evil spirits.

• Shepherds no longer placed a loaf of bread, or a jar of water, under a tree in order to placate the goddess of the tree.

• Peasants no longer erected crude images of the gods in the field to drive away the terrible demons of drought and famine.

In case it looks as if Akhenaton’s story sounds like a distant fairy tale, some believe that Moses, who was raised in Egypt and had an Egyptian name, may have been Akhenaton’s contemporary and may have acquired his notions of monotheism from the great pharaoh himself. It is therefore possible that without Akhenaton’s intellectual courage, without his desire and commitment to renew his culture, Judaism, Islam and Christianity - all branches of the Mosaic tree - would not exist as they do today.

It may now be time for new ‘Akhenatons’ in the Middle East - not pharaohs, but people who wish to live without evil spirits, demons and darkness - to cut away the dead wood from the Mosaic tree, and so improve its chances for growth.

Akhenaton means “useful for Aton” and it also means "Aton", or "the sun, is satisfied."

The Moulid

Text and Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

This week the city of Tanta in Egypt's Nile Delta region swells to over 2 million people in the annual moulid celebrating the birth of one of Egypt's most popular saints: the 13th century medieval mystic, Sayyid Ahmed al-Badawi.

Falling at the end of the cotton harvest every year, the festival attracts people from across Egypt and North Africa who come to pay homage to Badawi (1194?-1273?), who travelled to Egypt from Morocco and who made Tanta his home. A mosque in his name, containing the tomb where he is interred, has long been a place of pilgrimage and is at the epicenter of the moulid, which is one of the largest religious festivals in the world.

Spanning several days, the moulid is a veritable carnival that combines musical, religious and amusement park attractions. Men, women and children - whole families - pass the night in Tanta's streets which are transformed by the moulid into labyrinths of florescent lighting, ornate tents and shops selling anything and everything.

Despite the celebration's religious bent, the festival is first and foremost a social occasion where people come out to have fun, forget their problems, and break free - albeit temporarily - from the narrow strictures and controls of a growingly conservative society.

The memory of Badawi, a man whose reality is probably now all but forgotten, is kept alive by a modern personality cult made up of self-styled religious adherents who claim to be working in his spirit, and through his mandate. Large, colourful tents booming with songs, chants and traditional music - blasted through massive speakers - stir worshippers into emotional frenzies. Others, motivated by every manner of want and need, and overcome by emotional outpourings of every sort, flock to Badawi's tomb in search of miracles, favours and redemption.

Watching nearby, and unable to curb the appetites of the masses, are the state-sanctioned religious authorities of al-Azhar and members of the semi-outlawed conservative opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood. They can only roll their eyes in annoyance at so large a flaunting of heterodoxy - one that inspires unease in the minds of those who seek to impose a different flavour of conditioned behaviour and control.

Human Needs and the Lure of Extremism

All text in this post copyright John Bell and John Zada 2008

As the boundaries of our understanding of psychology and human behavior are widened by the work of innovators in those fields, we are provided with new possibilities for perceiving the world around us in ways that may be more in line with reality.

For years, academics in the social sciences looked to socio-economics in their attempt to find an explanation for the powerful appeal of political and religious extremist groups in the Middle East. The idea soon emerged that disenchanted individuals – people with little education and/or few or no means to financially support themselves - were easily lured by militants, and made up the majority of their rank and file.

To many, this explanation seemed straightforward and logical enough. The solution, according to its proponents, was for governments to address the root economic causes of the disenchantment that led to people embracing extremist ideology – including unemployment, poverty, and lack of access to education.

But then something happened to muddy the waters.

Other academics, as well as those in some security services, started pointing to exceptions to this socio-economical approach. Many people, they claimed, who joined militant groups were in fact educated professionals that were known to be from the middle or upper classes. Lack of education and economic opportunity - although a factor in many cases of extremist recruitment - did not fully account for the large numbers of others who were clearly not lacking in education, jobs or money. These others had been suddenly magnetized to “the cause” for some other reason or reasons. Something else had to be at play.

Despite an emerging body of evidence-based research in the fields of the behavioral sciences that bear upon this question, there remains little consensus among academics and policymakers as to what causes some people to be attracted to extremist groups, and others not.

We now know that human beings have a set of clearly defined emotional needs that are as equally important to their well being as their physical needs. It is a person’s attempts to fulfill those needs that largely accounts for much of his or her underlying motives and behaviour in the many areas of life - regardless of how that person views his or her own actions. It is this needs-based approach that is the key to understanding the powerful motive to join an extremist group.

Some of these needs, including the need for a sense of status within social groupings and the need for a sense of competence and achievement, reflects the longstanding view by some social scientists that socio-economic issues including unemployment, poverty and lack of education do in fact play a role in the appeal of extremist groups. The inability to fulfill these needs on their own compel people to connect with others who can offer them the means to realize those needs, but in another way. For instance, a person who can’t derive a sense of competence and status through his or her work, simply because they are unable to find work, will be easily lured by a group or organization that can offer to meet those needs. But it doesn’t end there.

One could have an education, status, and money but still be vulnerable to the appeal of militancy – as demonstrated by privileged individuals who are a part of these organizations. But why would this be the case?

The appeal to join an extremist movement may be amplified for those who lack any or a combination of security, attention, a feeling of control, friendships, community, and meaning and purpose – and other fundamental human needs - because any such grouping will almost inevitably provide just those things for the would-be member. Being handed a gun and given a mandate to combat “evildoers” can provide a very powerful sense of safety, social cohesion, control over one’s destiny, and meaning to those who previously lacked those things - regardless of how well-off they may have been.

If people have their needs met through the healthy outlets of daily life, in a healthy society, by way of a good job, a sufficient income, a safe environment, a social network of family and friends, and a sufficient sense of meaning, they would not need to look elsewhere to have them met and will think twice about joining with others whose outward goals don’t gel with their own. This has always been the fundamental, subconscious, appeal of cults, who in addition to offering to meet certain needs also appeal to a person’s sense of dependency on others, especially authority figures.

Educating people about their needs and the necessity to meet them in a healthy fashion, combined with efforts on the part of governments, and others with influence and resources in the Middle East to foster environments where those needs should not go unmet, would go a long way in reducing the appeal of extremist groups. It would also have the effect of reducing conflicts and ameliorating core issues that provide the raison d’etre for these groups in the first place.

Dhow Repairs

Mending a dhow boat on the Musandam Peninsula of Oman

Photo in this post copyright John Bell and John Zada 2008

´This´ is Jerusalem

This map, posted previously without text and explanation, is what negotiators devise as a possible political solution for Jerusalem - a situation today compounded by the construction of the barrier around 'Greater Jerusalem', separating the city from the West Bank. The reality on the ground would be walls, barriers and separations as per the multi-coloured map above.

Of Nasser and Cleopatra

This anecdotal history about the creation of the Cleopatra cigarette was recounted to "Al-Bab" by Kamal K. Katba, a former general manager of the Egyptian Chamber of Tobacco, where he worked from 1952 until 1968. The story, told in the first person, goes like this:

In the winter of 1960-1961, Syria was still the northern province of the United Arab Republic – the union of Egypt and Syria - and we at the Chamber of Tobacco managed to establish with the Syrian Tobacco Monopoly a kind of common market. This we hoped would be the prelude of a common market between all of the members of The League of Arab States (the Arabs are still waiting and praying for their useless League to establish that common market).

A few weeks after our agreement with our Syrian brothers, Egypt decided to hold an international exhibition on the Cairo exhibition fairgrounds at Gezira. The board of directors of the Chamber of Tobacco, after consultation with the Syrians, decided to build a large pavilion in which samples of Egyptian and Syrian tobacco products would be nicely displayed. It was left to me to implement that decision.

A couple of days before the inauguration of the exhibition, we were advised by the cabinet of the Minister of Commerce that the late President Nasser would himself attend the inauguration.

Because of the importance of the event, we decided that all members of the board, led by Joseph Matossian, its chairman, plus myself, and others, would form a committee to welcome President Nasser and show him around.

On the day of the inauguration ceremony, Nasser arrived with members of the Free Officers group. We received him at the entrance of the pavilion, we shook hands with the utmost respect (he even hugged old Mr. Matossian), and we took him around briefing him about each of our tobacco products on display.

At the end of his tour, we offered Nasser a Belmont - our number one brand - and offered cigarettes and cigars to all the dignitaries in his company. They all obliged but Nasser himself, a chain smoker, declined to accept our cigarettes. Instead he put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a pack of illegally smuggled Kent cigarettes. I lit his cigarette with my lighter while all the assistants were looking on with surprise. Nasser felt a little uncomfortable with the situation, and apologized to us claiming that he was used to the Kent and any change of brand would irritate his lungs.


It suddenly dawned on him that what he was doing was illegal and was a kind of faux pas, considering the context. He looked at us and chuckled, saying, “Shoufo kidda ya geda’an (Look here guys), if you make me a cigarette similar to the Kent, I’ll be your first and your best client.” Matossian looked at Nasser and responded, “Mr. President, your wishes are our orders.”

The next morning Matossian called me up and said, “Ya Kamal, we promised the rais that we would make him a cigarette similar to the Kent. I want you to go down to the black market where they sell the American cigarettes and I want you to buy three cartons of Kent. We’ll have them analyzed and we’ll see what the exact blend is, and we’ll create something similar.”

So I went to Kasr el-Nil street where they sold contraband on the sidewalk. I bought three cartons and took them back to Matossian. Weeks later I was phoned and told that some samples were ready. Matossian got his designers in the company to design a box that was very similar to the Kent box at the time – white with gold inlay.

We then had to decide what we were going to name the cigarette. A Hollywood film in production with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor called “Cleopatra” was making headlines at the time. Taylor and Burton were having an affair, and there was a huge scandal surrounding the actors and the film. It was also the most expensive movie ever made at the time at around $20 million dollars. Therefore we thought "Cleopatra" would be a good name for our cigarette. True, Cleopatra was of Macedonian origin, but she was after all the Queen of Egypt at one time, and an icon. We also figured we would not need to advertise the new brand as the film was, and would continue, doing all the promotion work on our behalf. It was decided.

We felt that since the cigarettes were created at the behest of Nasser, that the first person to try them should be the President himself. We had four Cleopatra cartons wrapped with golden paper and silver ribbons, and had a letter signed by Matossian attached to the parcel. The chairman and myself drove to the Kubbeh Palace, which was then the site of the presidential offices. There we were received by Mr. Abdel Meguid Farid, then the General Secretary of the Presidency who thanked us on behalf of Nasser.

A few months later, a friend of ours was getting married to the daughter of General Rashad Hassan, Nasser’s aide-de-camp. We actually knew both families and helped to introduce the young couple. So of course we attended the wedding. It was held at the Heliopolis Palace Hotel, which is now the Presidential Palace of Mubarak. We were seated just next to the main wedding table. There was a long delay in serving dinner and rumours were rife that Nasser was expected to attend.

So finally after waiting an eternity, in comes Nasser with his entourage of bodyguards and he is given a seat right in between the married couple – just a few meters away from my wife and myself. Nasser was a chain smoker and I knew that the first thing he would do was to light a cigarette. I was dying to see what cigarette he would smoke. After hugging the newlyweds and sitting down, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out his pack of cigarettes and put them on table in front of him.

He wasn’t smoking his usual Kents, nor was he smoking Cleopatra, the cigarette of Egypt which we worked for months to create at his request - he was smoking L&M! Another contraband American cigarette!

We never knew in the end whether this chain-smoking, Egyptian nationalist president ever departed from his beloved American cigarettes and gave in to the seductions of Cleopatra. My guess is, probably not.

Kamal K. Katba worked for The Chamber of Egyptian Tobacco, a branch of The Federation of Egyptian Industries, from 1952 until 1968. In that same year, he emigrated to Canada. He worked for the Canadian Federal Government in various capacities between 1973 until his retirement in 1999.

Façade

Apartment Block, Bur Dubai, UAE

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell

The Rug Shop

Sweet narghile tobacco,
Brazier coal fire.
Mothballs and musty wool,
Furniture polish and 4711 German Eau de Cologne.
Cardamom-scented Turkish coffee,
Fresh lemonade tinged with rose water and orange blossom.

It was the winter of 1961. I was 11 years old. This pot pourri of scents encircled me as I entered my grandfather’s carpet shop. Etablissement Azar E. Nahhas & Associates, Saida, Lebanon.

The shop hummed with contentment. Elegant Persian rugs hung above stacks of neatly folded carpets. Hand-polished furniture glowed from the corners: olive and light oak, ebony and mother of pearl, walnut and acacia wood, all intricately carved into tric-trac tables, writing desks, and chairs. Antique brass lanterns dangled from the ceiling and gleaming silver ewers stood on table tops.

My grandfather, Jeddo Azar, sat behind his desk at the deep end of the shop and looked over his horn-rimmed glasses as I pushed open the shop door.

¨Ahlan, Ahlan wa Sahlan, Ya Habibi. It’fadal wa foot. Ta’ala hoen, wa I’teena bausee. Ya habib, Jeddo.¨

(¨Welcome, welcome, my dearest. Come over and give grandpa a hug. Dearest grandson.¨)

Youssef, the office boy, stopped stoking the coal fire and got up to fetch me a chair and a glass of freshly squeezed lemonade.

I took the lemonade, declined the chair, and climbed onto a carpet stack, dangling my legs and kicking my heels rhythmically against the heavy, soft wool of a magnificent Tabriz carpet.

…………………………………..

18 years later, I felt a familiar emotion as I entered George Yeremian’s shop, Indo-Iranian Rugs Ltd, on Temperance Street in Toronto, Canada.

Distanced by 6,000 miles and two decades, the two shops shared a link to rugs and carpets hailing from ever more distant places: Turkey and Turkmenistan, Isfahan and Kashan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, India and Afghanistan. Here was a 19th century Kashan from Central Persia, a weathered yet still graceful survivor (two World Wars, three Middle-Eastern wars, and multiple generations of small and large feet). There a charming Isfahan, allegedly the original purchase of a Canadian diplomat in Iran. The lure and magic of oriental rugs was back upon me.

Written by "Roro"
…………………………………..

Lamb-soft Kurk wool, bristly coarse camel hair. Indigo blue, deep red madder. Pure cotton, fine silk. Pistachio green and aubergine. Colours and textures harmonized into delicate flowers and stark geometry. These products of wool and loom originated in steppes and deserts, villages and cities.

After 30 years of discovery and appreciation, here are some of my favourites from our collection:

1) Yomut Turkomen Asmalyk (camel trapping), Central Asia, 19th century

2) Silk mini pattern Holbein rug, Afghanistan, 20th century

3) Western Anatolia, Melas prayer rug, mid 19th century

Chadi Younes, Director

Photo Courtesy of Chadi Younes
All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

The impression one gets of Chadi Younes is anything but that of a man whose life is split among cities spread across colliding hemispheres and cultures. But if asked, this is exactly how he would describe it. His serene, almost sedate, manner - one more appropriate of a Biblical shepherd than of an international, jet-setting, ad director - belies this fact.

We are at Wanda’s Pie in the Sky - a café and bakery in the quasi-bohemian Kensington Market district of downtown Toronto. It is Sunday and the street teems with shoppers and drifters idling away the afternoon. Although Younes, just back from a directing job in his native Beirut, is visiting this neighbourhood for the first time, he appears as much at home here as any of the Torontonians ambling leisurely past our table. 

"Beirut and Toronto, my cities of residence, are complete opposites," Younes says. "They mirror the opposites in my personality, which is why I have to constantly go to one to get away from the other.”

Younes, 36, is one of the Middle East’s most promising directors whose synergistic embrace of both eastern and western cultural influences has made him one of the more highly sought after ad directors in the region. Constantly skipping between the cities of Beirut, Cairo, Dubai, and his newly adopted Toronto (where he makes the occasional appearance for R&R after his lengthy jaunts in the hyperactive capitals of the Arab World), Younes is a gipsy in the truest sense of the word.

Admitting to being part of a generation which he describes as “not feeling at home anywhere”, and wanting to embrace all cultural influences, Younes has made the fusion of East and West his calling card. And you can see it in his work. He has directed commercials for MTV Arabia, Showtime, Vodafone, Snickers, and many others – all of which are geared towards Arab audiences, but which are crafted with a directness and edge that are more typically western in style. His use of unusual characters, humour, strong art direction, rhythmic cuts to music, ambient light, and wide camera apertures, typifies his work and sets it apart from that of his contemporaries in the region.

After working several years, first as an Art Director and then an Associate Creative Director at the BBDO Advertising Agency in Dubai, Younes decided to leave his job in 2003 to try his luck at directing his own commercials. The combination of his experience at BBDO, his good contacts, his enrollment in the odd filmmaking course, and a strong foundation in stills photography, helped Younes get off to a solid start. In 2005, he directed an ad for “Barbican” – a non-alcoholic beer that was considered a huge success and became a creative benchmark for television advertising in the Middle East. He attributes a big part of his success to selecting work that is intelligent, interesting to watch, and which allows for his own creative input.

“I like to put myself in the shoes of the viewer before I create something that invades his or her space,” Younes says. “I feel it criminal to invade someone's home with material which is not watchable. So I try to take care with what I select and craft.”

Despite his success at finding interesting projects, Younes admits that there are limits to working in the Middle East. 

“Clients are generally fearful and cautious in this part of the world,” he says. “Any approach which is deemed risky or in the slightest way sensitive is quickly shot down. There’s a lot of self-censorship.”

In addition to wanting to work on more projects in North America, Younes is planning to try his hand at short films, and to direct more music videos. 

His most recent music video was made for Rima Khcheich, a Lebanese singer whose style Younes describes as a "jazz classical Arabic fusion." This video, called Haflit Taraf was "directed in a way to express visually what the Lebanese people have been going through of late," Younes says.

To view a few of Chadi’s MTV Arabia ads, click here and here.

To go to Chadi’s website, click here.

Posing for a Photograph

Istalif, Afghanistan

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

The Story of the Caliph Hakem

Review: ¨Histoire du Calife Hakem¨, by Gerard De Nerval, 92 pages, L´Esprit Frappeur.

¨Everyone has their obsession when they are drunk. Yours is to be God.¨

So Gerard De Nerval, a young romantic French author of the 19th century, described the Caliph Hakem in his novella about the founder of the Druze faith. The quotation is made by Youssef, a Sabaean who manages to help Al Hakem - or Al Hakim bi Amr Allah as he is more accurately known - investigate the wiles of hashish on a riverboat on the Nile.

This is one of many inventions De Nerval imputes to the Fatimid ruler of Cairo (996-1021) whose life was bizarre enough without the Frenchman's orientalist intrusions. The Shiite ruler was known for his strict, almost Wahhabist, adherence to his faith, prohibiting alcohol and mulukhhieyeh (a famous Egyptian culinary dish), and placing great restrictions on women, Christians and Jews. In his enthusiasm, he destroyed many churches, including the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem - an act that contributed to the arrival of the Crusades some seven decades later.

In a concoction of drug-induced hallucinations, madness, and dopplegangers, Hakem declared himself God, was imprisoned by his Vizier for this blasphemy, and then escaped to find his double, Youssef, in the lap of his beautiful sister, Sitt-Al Mulk.

According to Nerval, Hakem burned down one third of Cairo in the uprising after his departure from the Muristan, or mental hospital.

In fact, this Caliph did declare himself God in 1017. Those who followed him were later called the Druze, named after the man who apparently helped convince Hakem of his divinity - Mohammad Ibn Ismail Al Darazi.

Hakem was also known for his visits to an astronomical observatory in the Mokattam hills, where Cairo's zabaleen garbage village today stands. There he observed a bronze knight set in a circle with the names of all places on Earth written in Chaldaean and pointing to the upcoming Abbasid invasion of Fatimid Cairo.

The Caliph, in addition, was known to ride around Cairo on his grey donkey, "Qamar", and accompanied by his mute slave. According to De Nerval's account, one day, Caliph Hakem went out on Qamar never to return. He met up with three criminals around Cairo's city of the dead, who attacked him with daggers until they realized his identity and ran off. Only his donkey and bloodstained clothes were ever found.

Some believe Hakem's sister had him killed. His future followers, the Druze, believe that he simply disappeared.

Gerard De Nerval's story is very much the seductive and romantic vision that the Orient has inspired in so many Europeans in the 19th century. The writer also drew upon his own tenure in a mental asylum in Paris, as well as from the "Club des Hachachins" in Paris's Ile St. Louis - the same haunt of Delacroix, Daumier and Baudelaire.

But De Nerval mostly bases his book on a tale told to him during his travels in Lebanon in 1843. There, he met a young lady called Salema, the daughter of a Druze notable who was imprisoned by the Ottomans for various mischiefs.

He subsequently met with with this notable - named Al Shirazi - in his prison cell in Beirut, where the old sheikh revealed all he knew about the founder of his faith. This he recounted to De Nerval in Italian, the only common language between the Frenchman and the Lebanese.

At the end of the day, it is not known whether the Druze sheikh al-Shirazi, who spoke Italian and recounted this tale to De Nerval, ever really existed.

All text in this post copyright John Bell and John Zada 2008

The Hejaz Railway

My grandfather helped rebuild the railway that Lawrence of Arabia helped destroy. Robert Smith Bell, graduate of engineering from Columbia U. and hailing from Philadelphia, came to the Middle East in 1917 and ended up with the British team in Amman assessing how to rebuild the Hejaz railway after the First World War.

That line, first conceived in 1864 by Sultan Abdel Hamid and completed by the Ottomans in 1908, extended from Damascus to Mecca, and was intended to facilitate the pilgrimage to the Holy City.

The railway was a major financial undertaking for the Ottomans, trying to vault themselves into technological competition with European powers. Building railways was a major financial exercise requiring its establishment as a 'waqf' or religious endowment with innovative funding techniques including 'donations' on the part of Turkish soldiery.

Its construction was fraught with dangers - lack of water, fuel, risky and hostile terrain. Indeed, many Arab bedouins and caravan operators attacked the line because it threatened their ancient livelihood of escorting pilgrims to Mecca. The line saw 8 years of solid service (1908-1916) and carried 300,000 passengers in 1914 until the First World War and T.E. Lawrence presented its destruction in the great Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

My father was born in Amman because of the Hijaz railway and my grandfather's death in 1937 was a result of the desert conditions and the scourges of such difficult engineering endeavours. 'Mr. Lava' as he was known succumbed to a stroke in the upper eastern arm of what is now Jordan while building the road on the lava plain in that area. The road was needed to construct the oil pipeline from Kirkuk to Haifa.

He is now buried in the British cemetary in Haifa near the very railway lines that run along the Mediterranean coast, once stretching from Cairo to Beirut.

Two Views from Apamea

Looking west towards Qalaat al-Mudiq, the Orontes River Valley, and the Jebel Ansariya (Syria)

Looking north along the cardo maximus towards the Pillar of Bacchus

(Photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008)

Cairo Portraitist

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008
All photos in this post copyright the Rare Books and Special Collections Library, The American University in Cairo, (AUC)

Levon Boyadjian, or ‘Van-Leo’ as he called himself, was a 20th century portrait photographer who lived in Cairo, Egypt. Working for over half a century, this eccentric Armenian-Egyptian created some of the most stunning, and often bizarre, black-and-white portraits of himself, and others, ever seen in the Middle East.

A strange mix of artist, philosopher, and aspiring actor and director, Van-Leo became one of the last in a line of Armenian photographers that emerged during Cairo’s Belle Epoch: a cosmopolitan period today known for its liberalism, flamboyance, and multi-ethnic flair. He would later come to be seen as one of the first Middle East photographers to employ innovative and creative techniques, fusing glamour photography with documentary studio-portraiture.

Born in the Hatay region of eastern Turkey in 1921, Van-Leo fled with his family at the age of four to Egypt, escaping the genocide of Armenians during, and in the aftermath, of the First World War. As a teenager in Egypt, he became obsessed with Hollywood movie-stars, collecting magazines and miniature cards featuring still images of his favorite actors and actresses in character. Actors like Clarke Gable, Greta Garbo, Gary Cooper, and Marlene Deitrich, and the many films in which they appeared, were memorized and absorbed into the photographer’s psyche. Intoxicated by cinema and living in a fantasy world of fictional characters, games and make-believe, Van-Leo made the decision to leave his floundering studies at the American University and to devote his life to photographing people in the manner of a possessed cinema director with a stills camera.

Van-Leo made his grand entrance as a photographer in Cairo just before the beginning of the Second World War. While Europe regressed into a period of bombings and destruction, Cairo flourished, becoming centre-stage for the intrigues that simmered behind the war's front lines. British soldiers stationed in Cairo, and the countless entertainers that flocked to the city to find work, provided Van-Leo with his first and most cooperative subjects.

Partnering with his brother Angelo, the two siblings opened shop in the living-room of their parents’ apartment in 1941. Often in exchange for a free portrait the photographer would convince his sitters to give him full creative license. His approach was to employ cinematic techniques of artificial light, shadow, and creative poses, to generate charismatic personas that bordered on film noire in their mood and dramatic effect.

As his reputation grew, countless people flocked to his studio to be photographed, from army officers, to aristocrats, to cabaret dancers, to singers, to actors, expatriate foreigners and Egyptian commoners from all walks of life. The famous too would be drawn by his flair for playfulness and creativity in the studio. Writer Taha Hussein, actors Omar Sharif, Rushdie Abaza, and Samia Gamal, and the singers Farid al-Atrache and Dalida were among the many notables who passed through Van-Leo’s studio and whose images today still periodically appear on walls, books, newspapers, magazines, and on television in the Arab World.



But within photography circles Van-Leo is just as much known as a self-portraitist, having taken hundreds of photographs of himself disguised as just as many characters. His fictional avatars ranged from Zorro to Rasputin to Sam Spade and all manner of personas in-between from a shirtless Bohemian, to a Cossak Prince, to a Geisha girl, to a pipe-wielding steam-ship Captain, to a British fighter bomber. Each of these images provides a key to the deepest depths of Van-Leo’s psyche, linking the observer directly with a man who wanted to live every fictional character in endless worlds of his own making. Living as a minority Christian foreigner in a predominantly Arab-Muslim Egypt, his self-portraits are also a clear reflection of fundamental identity issues. He deals with the reality of who he is by reveling in his lack of attachment to any nation or creed by literally becoming anyone he wants.

These same social and political mores that affected Van-Leo’s private life would deal the photographer his final and most serious blows where his work were concerned. With the rise in the latter part of the 20th century of socialism in Egypt, and later, Islamic extremism, and with the flight from Cairo of its foreigner and liberal classes, Van-Leo found his pool of subjects ever-dwindling. Also vanishing was an epoch in which manners, civilities, pomp and glamour had characterized photography - and by extension, life at large.

The transformation of Cairo into a more homogenous, more religiously conservative and less tolerant society, combined with the rise of instant-development color-photography, challenged Van-Leo at every level as an artist and as a photographer. No longer could he create his film-noire style portraits as easily as he once had. The glamour, shadow and fantasy that once marked his photographs were slowly replaced by big hair, bright colors, and bland faces - all wrapped in a mood of conservative sobriety. Unlike many of his artistic contemporaries who eventually fled to Europe and beyond, including his brother Angelo who moved to Paris in 1961, Van-Leo stubbornly chose to cling to the past and remain in Egypt, continuing to attempt his unique brand of photography late into the 20th century. This he would do despite the deteriorating artistic environment and growing disapproval of his aesthetic that existed in many quarters.

This downward spiral continued into the 1970s and 1980s until his “rediscovery” by a group of foreign expatriates in the 1990s would revive his art and popularity, helping to garner for him the international recognition and accolades which he so much sought. But despite the late resurgence of his art and his name, he continued to see himself until his death in 2002, as a victim of history, a living relic of a tragically forgotten age.



Van Leo’s importance as a photographer in the early photographic tradition cannot be overstated. His portraits covering six decades of life in Cairo are an important social and historical document of Egypt and the Middle East, and of its sudden and radical transformation as a society. He was decades ahead of his contemporaries as an artist and had an experimental attitude, seen especially in his self-portraits, that was very rare at the time and is still rare among photographers in the Arab world today. His story exemplifies the extent to which one’s environment, its society and politics, can impact or even dictate the life and work of any given individual, especially an artist.

Felucca Captain

Aswan, Egypt

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

'What is this?'

Town Scene

Kerman, 19th century
Courtesy of Cyrus Carpets, New York

Moving Forward

In recent years, a new approach in the field of psychology has opened up possibilities for understanding important aspects of human nature. This new organizing idea, known as The Human Givens, postulates that when certain specific important human needs are not met, or are denied to an individual, that mental illness and suffering can ensue. Optimal well-being therefore can only be assured when a person’s needs are both known to that person and are sufficiently met.

We believe that this scientific, evidence-based approach, which is now gaining wider currency and is replacing outmoded models of psychology, can be applied to collectives as well, and can be used to better understanding the situation in the Middle East - a region which is undoubtedly today in a state of disequilibrium.

We propose that not only does the issue of unmet human needs hold as true for collectives, groups, and societies as much as for individuals - indeed, the goal of collectives is mostly to ensure that individuals have all those needs met - but that unmet needs are at the root of many of the problems in the Middle East today – fueling “issues” which are grappled with endlessly by politicians and diplomats using traditional methods and mechanisms, often with little or no results.

Viewing issues through the lens of unmet needs offers new possibilities for addressing complex issues in the Middle East.

Below is a list of needs, which we have adapted from the Human Givens approach, and which we believe societies in the Middle East must have met if a more healthy, productive, and promising future for the region is to be realized. This follows our July 2 post entitled "The Problem":

Security - safe territory and environment free of threat for the healthy growth of individuals and of societies respectively.

Ecological and Environmental Health – the maintenance and promotion of a balanced physical environment that can provide for the physical sustenance/needs of individuals and societies – clean air, water, and food and sufficient living space to avoid crowding.

Economic Welfare and Opportunity – systems for governments to deliver sufficient economic welfare and opportunity for their citizens.

A Sense of Autonomy, Control and Responsibility – for communities and nations in relation to each other and the outside world, and for individuals within all societies in the Middle East. Too much control by one country over another, one group over another, or by governments over its own citizens robs collectives and individuals of the sense of volition, and leads to frustration. Examples of greater autonomy and control include:

* Israel allowing Palestinians greater freedom of movement

* Palestinians having autonomy and control over their lives through an independent government and state.
* Easing of controls and restrictions by certain Arab governments on their people on access to information
* Greater opportunities for individuals and communities to be involved in politics, local or national.
* Less intrusion by governments into the lives of citizens through security services, informants and the like
* Greater allowance and encouragement of independent thought and dissent within groups or communities

Recognition – a recognition between communities and political entities of each others’ existence and the right to exist, and the cultivation between them of healthy relations, interactions, and exchange on an equitable and mutual basis.

Connection to the Wider Community – a more integrated Middle East, and more integrated countries within the Middle East with fewer divisions, separations, and barriers, and greater interconnectivity between countries, regions, and people. Some examples:

* Greater freedom of movement for people in the region to travel to different countries
* Greater allowance for people of the same ethnic community who are currently separated by borders to meet with one another in other countries or regions, ie – Palestinians, Kurds, Druzes etc.

Individual and Group Competence, Achievement and Status – better run societies with more effective frameworks for providing groups and individuals greater opportunities to realize their economic, political and cultural goals - thereby providing individuals and collectives with the need to have a sense of their own competence, achievement and status.

Corruption, nepotism, inefficiency, greed, and government apathy, deny individuals and groups fair access to opportunities for political and economic growth, leading to frustration and the channeling of energies by individuals and groups towards violence and dangerous ideologies in an attempt to meet those unmet needs.

Meaning and Purpose - Enabling an environment and culture which permits individuals to pursue meaning and purpose in their life.

From Beirut to Jerusalem to Beirut to Jerusalem to Beirut to Jerusalem...

All text and photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

These two cities somehow belong together:

Beirut: Sexy, vibrant, pretentious, fed by sea breezes, a city of Mercedes cars and Cohiba cigars, sophisticated restaurants, electronic trance music and a cosmopolitanism that speaks of Babylon - a place for food and fun, a city to drive and dance in, and get very tense in.

Jerusalem: Elegant, quiet, inspiring, covered in a cool mountain breeze, clearly lit, surrounded by golden stone city walls, cypresses - yet also oppressive in its cultish heaviness, its worship of rocky monuments and odd ritual gear - a city to walk and converse in, and get very tense in.

In these two extremes, the very nature of the Middle East is expressed. On one hand: a worldly cunning where all is possible, all can be bought, the give and take of the bazaar, a love of food, talk, and smoke.

On the other hand: a sense of spirituality, profundity, magnetism, the land of prophets and ideals, of reaching transcendence and unity, of overreach, self-obsession and of a grace embodied in the very hills of the Holy Land.

The two belong together because they complete one another.

The social psychology of the Middle East is very much like these two cities: a daily friendliness and form mixed with a brutal pursuit of dreams, a toughness in business mixed with a fatalistic submission to the future. The surface and the depth are not always in harmony and the schismatic labyrinthine Easterner is difficult to understand for the much more linear Westerner.

This schism can be found within the borders of each Middle Eastern nation: Tel Aviv and Jerusalem in Israel, Cairo and Mount Sinai in Egypt, Beirut and the Cedars of Lebanon, each exposes the polarity of the other. It is most profoundly exhibited between Beirut and Jerusalem, these two cities seven hours apart by car. Yet, the border between Lebanon and Israel has ruptured them. Except for Israeli soldiers and the few Lebanese who had access to Israel during the latter’s occupation of the South, plus a few UN workers, the great majority of Israelis have no access to Beirut’s ample charms, nor Lebanese to the grace of Jerusalem.

The two cities are only 250 km apart, by highway only 3 hours apart, and in between are the great old Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre, the Crusader Keep of Acre, Mount Carmel and the bay of Haifa, the valley of Megiddo, and inland, off the beaten path, Nazareth and its olive groves, and the hills rising to Jerusalem. Each stop, a station in mankind’s history, the places of battles that formed the world, or thinkers and prophets whose words echo still today in our laws and morals, of potters and merchants who moved wares from Assyria to Rome, or from Baghdad to Venice. Throughout the trip, the Mediterranean accompanies you, with the possibility of the setting sun, or the olive groves of Galilee creating a corridor of travel.

Beirut and Jerusalem would be better off in connection with each other and the rest of the region, for they work together, balancing each other, finding what is missing in the other. Not through politics but by the very movement and interaction of people with all their wares and vices, their sweat and illusions. This movement, now interrupted by national projects, is the very core of a healthy Middle East – in this way can the various peoples find balance to their local excesses.

A View of Amman

Amman, Jordan

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell

Al-Fishawy's Cafe

All text and photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Barring times of war, domestic turmoil, and national emergency, al-Fishawy cafe - located in the Khan al-Khalili district of Islamic Cairo - has been serving customers non-stop for over two hundred years.

This 24-hour 7 day-a-week establishment, located in a narrow alleyway just off of Midan Hussein, began as an informal meeting place with coffee after evening prayer. The meetings were hosted by a man whose name we know only to be al-Fishawy. As time went on the gatherings grew, tea and sheesha tobacco were added to the menu, and the clientele ballooned. Today al-Fishawy's is run by the descendants of the cafe's originator and has become one of the most famous coffee-shops and social gathering places in the Middle East.

The old adage of location being the primary factor in a business's success was likely coined in relation to this coffee-house. The establishment owes its immense popularity to being at the epicentre of old Cairo life - lying on the cusp of the overlapping meeting places of the Khan al-Khalili bazaar, the 1000 year-old al-Azhar University (the world's oldest university), and the Sayyidna al-Husayn ibn Ali Mosque, where the head of one of the Prophet Mohammed's grandsons is said to rest.

With its tucked-away location, partial open-air view, and antique disposition, al-Fishawy has long been a magnet for intellectuals, musicians, artists, and writers. Today, local and out-of-town Egyptians mingle with foriegn tourists and expats beneath the old oil paintings and enormous mirrors with guilded Arabesque frames. A steady stream of stray cats, child urchins and trinket salesmen move through the alleyway seeking to capitalize on the daily gatherings of humanity.

In addition to the staple coffees and mint tea, the cafe serves kirkaday (a deep-red hisbiscus tea said to have curative properties), fresh lemonade, and sahlab (a hot milky drink consumed in winter and topped with nuts and raisins).

The Coast

Gaza Beach, Thursday, August 7, 2008

(photograph by Diaa Hadid)

The Artist

Yara is an artist from Tyre. Her etching of a black and white tiger hangs near her desk in the office where she translates press articles. All day, she spins through the Arabic media searching for relevant articles for foreigners to read and understand her region better. Like many millions in the Arab world, she wishes for a normal life but instead has war, corruption, and limited horizons. She sits and watches as the political robbers or bearded ones have their way with her world.

Yara will never leave her beloved Tyre, her city by the sea - a place once conquered by Alexander and since, transformed from an island into a peninsula. She stands every evening at the rocks above the Christian cemetery where the Temple of Melqart once stood, the Phoenician god of strength and deeds, their Hercules. There, Yara watches the red sun drift into the Mediterranean and then walks home through the narrow streets of the old district where children play like fairies in the night, the sound of the surf mixing with their giggles.

Yara spends most of her day imagining she is an artist in the hills above Tyre, living in a terra cotta home, working with others in sculpture, paint and ceramics, away from the gossip, politics, and restrictions her society places on her.

She has seen the Palestinians use her land as a platform to attack Israel and to liberate their land. She has seen the Israelis invade to get rid of them and then stay in occupation for 22 years. She has seen Shiite militias fight the Israelis and encourage them to leave, and she has spent years in Beirut being shelled by God-knows-who. Yara concluded that politics is a cynical business with no winners and many losers. She gave up her sense of justice, all her ideals, and just cried out for the liberation of her soul. An impossible task among the gossiping women and oppressive men around her day in day out.

At times, she thought she must have once been a woman of ancient Tyre, watching her people make the purple dye that would give them their name in Greek: the Phoenicians. That woman worshipped at the altar of Baal and Ashtarut and looked out at sea for the sailors of Tyre off to sell their wares in Alexandria, Athens, or the Sicilian coast. She saw the invading armies of Assyrians and Persians come in galleys and chariots to her island city and burn it to the ground in a red fire.

Yara knew somehow that her people were still living that memory, in the invading armies of today and in their sense that life was toil and destruction, anger at your neighbour, and survival of the fittest.

But her soul spoke otherwise. She thought there was too much obsession with past glory, land, or sacred texts - all more important than the present gift of being alive. She remembered that we are the source of our happiness, and live the mystery of tomorrow with creativity.

So Yara spent her days and nights imagining a thousand sketches of her tiger, a thousand students working with her, and a few masters with the touch of Florence and the engraved mosques of Isfahan, guiding her. They would learn together what it means to be free to create, to explore what is inside them, and not just who has the latest, hottest, car or what the latest speech was by the demagogue.

She'd need a large degree of courage, and a patron with good money, to break with her family and feuding friends to establish her terra cotta school in the hills above Tyre.

For the time being, she would dream it.

Oriental Rugs

Karagashli Sumak, Kuba District, East Caucasus, 19th cent.

(from collection of Robert Bell)

The Shepheard's Hotel

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008
Photo Courtesy of Studio Kerop, Cairo

In order to accommodate the influx of tourists coming to Egypt in the mid-19th century, including those passing through Cairo en route to India, some of the first large-scale hotels were built in the Egyptian capital at that time. In 1841, Samuel Shepheard became the co-manager of The British Hotel in Cairo, one of the first of those lodgings to be built. Four years later Shepheard bought The British Hotel and changed its name to Shepheard's. Located in the heart of the downtown quarter within close proximity to Cairo's best amenities and historical sites, the hotel gained a favourable reputation for good service and access to adventure that spread far and wide.

Referred to as “the caravanserai through which the world flows”, the Shepheard's became, at least for a time, one of the most luxurious and opulent hotels in the world. As the years passed however, and as the hotel moved into different buildings to accommodate the growing tourist flood, the Shepheard's would become an overcrowded terminus for colonialists, some of whom traveled to Egypt merely to imbibe the hotel's legendary atmosphere. In addition to being an expatriate hub and meeting place for the well-heeled, the hotel also served as the base for the King Tut excavations in Luxor, and for the British Army during World War One.

The Shepheard's longstanding associations with Britain's imperialist-colonialist agenda led to its eventual downfall. The hotel was burnt down by an angry mob during city-wide nationalist riots in January 1952. It's modern namesake, an imitation façade that stands today on Corniche al-Nil, miles from the original Ezbekiya location, was built soon after the fire, but retains little to nothing of the old hotel, save the name.

Wadi Qadisha

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

If there is anywhere that makes Lebanon unique, it is Wadi Qadisha. This gash in the earth winding from the heights of the remaining biblical Cedars to the coastal city of Tripoli, earns its name, 'The Holy Valley'. 'Qadisha' is an Aramaic or Syriac word for 'holy' echoing the Arabic 'Qadiss' for Saint, or the name of Jerusalem itself, 'Al Quds'.

The valley is deep. Its sides are lined by dense Mediterranean vegetation and littered with cave churches. The valley floor carries the Qadisha River that becomes the 'Abu Ali' when it nears Tripoli and the sea. There it is reduced to a trickle with concrete banks winding below the Crusader Fortress of St. Gilles.

The valley moves in jagged shifts from Bsharre (home of Khalil Gibran and Samir Geagea) to Hasroun, Ehden, and Hadath - a zigzag of villages facing each other across the Wadi.

The drive into the upper reaches of the valley is more like an automotive mountain climb: steep, fast, a rush. After one reaches the target of the Cedar grove at the pocket of the valley, one can go beyond to the higher mountains above the cedars to look down on the earth. There, one is literally above the clouds. The drive down, more leisurely, leaves one with a sense of accomplishment. Indeed, once, like an airplane making its descent, I drove down from that high point into the clouds and the cedars, and into the sound and fury of a hailstorm.

The trick to Wadi Qadisha is that it rises from sea level to 2500 meters in the span of 35 kms - a very steep climb for any coastal region. The wadi also shelters the monasteries of many who decided to seek the safety of its high alpine valley, including Qannubin, Mar Sarkis, and Lady of Hawqa - to name only three. It is this rapid climb from seashore to mountain that is the secret to Lebanon's beauty. It is also the key to understanding Lebanon as a mountain safe-haven that drew the Druze, Maronite, and Shiite sects that configure and define the country today.

The Palestine Youth Orchestra - "Celebrating Jerusalem"

The Palestine Youth Orchestra and the Collegium Musicum of the University of Bonn play in Ramallah, July 27- August 2, 2008. Conducted by Mastro Walter Mik.

Manuscript

This medical manuscript is from Syria and comprises three medical works - the first two date from the 14th century and the third from the 16th century. The first book, by al-Hamathami deals with pathology and has a section for every organ in the human body. The second book, by Najbe al-Din al-Samarkandi describes medicines according to the diseases that can attack various human organs. The third book, written by Abi al-Hassa al-Mukhtar ibn Abdoun classifies food into different categories. It was common for Arab manuscripts on medicine to be illustrated as this one is.

For several centuries during the Middle Ages, Arab scientists led the world in various disciplines - especially the field of medicine. This book is today on display in the National Museum of Damascus.

Persian Poets: Omar Khayyam

I am sick of idolaters and the temple.
Khayyam, who said that there will be a hell?
Who’s been to hell, who’s been to heaven?

It is we who are the source of our own happiness,
the mine of our own sorrow,
The repository of justice and foundation of iniquity;
We who are cast down and exalted, perfect and defective
At once the rusted mirror and Jamshid’s all-seeing cup.

I saw a waster sitting on a patch of ground
Heedless of belief and unbelief, the world and the faith
No God, no Truth, No Divine Law, no Certitude:
Who in either of the worlds has the courage of this man?”

Mardin

All photos and text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Mention to anyone in the Middle East that your family comes from a town in Turkey that was once a part of Syria, and is today located just north of the Syrian border, and you will invariably be told that you must be from either Iskinderun or Antakia. A good guess. But travel 200 odd miles east along the Turkish-Syrian frontier from either of these former Syrian cities, and you will reach an unusual-looking hillside town with a commanding southern view over the baking Mesopotamian plain.

This is Mardin, a city of pigeon flocks and old stone homes situated on the far cusp of the Arab world. It is also a place that is strangely unknown to the vast majority of Middle Easterners. Located in the heart of the Kurdish-populated southeast Anatolia region of Turkey, Mardin was up until recent times a kind of microcosm of the Middle East. An important Silk Road station, the town brought together disparate ethnic communities from all across the interior of the Levant, Northern Mesopotamia, Iran, and the Caucasus. These included Syrian and Bedouin Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Assyrians, Nestorians, Yezidis, Chaldeans, Syrianis, Nestorians, Chechens, and Turkomen - all of whom shared the tiered cobblestone byways of the city's old Arab medina built of a light coloured amber stone.

Mardin was the northernmost outpost of Arab culture before the deep hinterland of the non-Arab Middle East began - those rugged mountains where the flanks of the Turkish and Iranian empires collided and mixed with the Kurdish and Armenian nations to form a primeval confluence of blood and belonging. All non-Arabs that settled in Mardin were inadvertently Arabized as though by some strange and unexplained law of nature. A typical “Mardeli” (the word denoting a person hailing from Mardin) spoke a brusque dialect of Levantine Arabic (also called “Mardeli”) that was as coarse to most Arabs as the Sicilian dialect of Italian is to most mainland Italians today.

From its establishment as a strategic outpost in early antiquity, Mardin has always been a frontier town in the truest send of the word. It has manned the edges of numerous cultural empires whose beginnings and ends were measured and marked by the transitions between peoples. Babylonians, Hittites, Assyrians, Urartians, Persians, Romans, Arabs, Selcuk Turks, Mongols, and Ottomans all made use of this hillside perch that dramatically announced the end of the plains and the beginning of the mountains.



But with the coming of the modern age, as tribes and nations adopted or were forced to accept the practice of strictly demarcating their territories, Mardin fell into decline as a multi-cultural experiment without borders. The political upheavals of the early 20th century - massacres and ethnic resettlement programs - sent the Mardelis packing. They were scattered like seeds in the wind to places all across the Middle East - to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt and beyond. These were countries where they would be resettled and assimilated, but where deep inside they would belong to no place in particular - embodying instead, intangible notions and genetic memories of a rural cosmopolitanism based on tolerance.

Today, even more than in Mardin itself, echoes of that past can be seen and heard in Mardin's satellite towns of northeast Syria where some semblance of that original admixture of peoples - the "Mardelis" - still resides: towns like al-Qamishle, Hassake, and the Euphrates River town of Deir al-Zor.

The pigeons, the old stone palaces, and murmurs of a dilapidated Arabic still abide in Mardin - but under the watchful gaze of a Turkish military garrison peering suspiciously across the frontier into Syria and engaged in an unresolved local conflict between cultures that once knew few divisions.

The Coast

The coast has always attracted humans. They emerge from the adjacent hills and valleys to try their luck in the waters. This scene is repeated on the coasts of Brittany, Malabar, or Batan. Here is a scene from Beirut at sunset.

(Photograph by Gabriel Reyes)

Mike Molloy: Watercolours of the Middle East

Mike Molloy is a former senior Canadian diplomat who has done a lot of good regarding the very sensitive issues of Palestinian refugees and Jerusalem.

This is beyond the help and sage advice he has given to hundreds, if not more, along the way - and he still had time to produce some fine watercolours of the region.

You can find his work at http://molloypaintings.blogspot.com/

The Master Musicians of Jajouka - Summer Tour 2008

The Master Musicians of Jajouka featuring Bachir Attar are currently touring Canada and the United States. For a list of concert venues, click here.

View a video clip of the group performing live.

Bozburun

A view of Bozburun Bay as seen from the Dolphin Pension Hotel, Bozburun, Turkey.

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Middle East Institutions - Restaurant Mounir

Camille Chamoun Blvd, New Roumieh Road,

Broummana, Tel.: (04) 873900

http://www.mounirs.com

The Problem

Photo copyright Tim Paul 2008

For years, efforts to resolve the Israel-Palestine problem, as well as other issues in the Middle East, have floundered outright or only managed to scratch the surface of issues whose roots lie much deeper than where most peacemaking work has taken place. Despite the failures, these political initiatives continue unabated while the problems of the Middle East become further entrenched. 

As a result we have a situation today in which a team of well-intentioned doctors are attending to a patient, whose malady has been misdiagnosed, in the hope that a successive application of misplaced treatments will result in a sudden, random, and miraculous cure.

We believe that new clarity is desperately required regarding the problems of the Middle East and their resolution. In our view, the problems of the region cannot be effectively addressed on faulty premises or political terms, or in talks or agreements that do not attend to the root problem.

We believe the correct basis and working assumptions must be established before efforts move forward. Therefore we would like to suggest reframing the problems of - and the solutions to - the Middle East in wider, simpler and more fundamental human terms that draw upon new understandings in the fields of psychology and human behaviour.

We therefore postulate the following:

* Human beings come into high states of anxiety and emotion if their needs - physical and emotional - are not met. These needs can be defined and articulated and they must not be confused with wishes.

* This heightened state of anxiety and emotion is not conducive to finding ways to meet those needs, leading to a downward cycle of worsening of conditions, and in the end, violent conflict

* We believe that the Middle East is exactly in this state, failing to find successful mechanisms to meet the needs of its citizens, societies and its groups.

* Part of the reason that Middle Easterners are not properly attending to the needs of their own, is because theirs is a region that emphasizes and employs the use of ancient means of meeting needs - approaches that no longer work in today's complex world.

* These ancient means can be described as old systems of survival used by small groups (whether tribe, religion, or nation - or a mix of the three) derived from millenia of threat and competition.

* Historically, the pressing need to survive in a region filled with competing groups and frequent invaders, often combined with a lack of overarching authority to provide security, have led to the creation of these group survival systems - based partly on strength, intimidation, deterrence, and war-making - and which have persisted until today. A high degree of exclusivity within groupings adds further fuel to these divisions in a region where groups live together, or in exceptionally close proximity.

* This continued reliance upon survival through a system of exclusive and ancient grouping that once helped to meet the needs of another time is now obsolete in a world where human beings live as part of one global community, where our survival as a race depends on collective cooperation against collective threats, and in a region that, despite the wishes of many, is fundamentally interconnected.

* Put in another way: continued emphasis upon ancient group survival in the Middle East only leads to worse emotional states and poorer responses to a conflict which now, ironically, threatens the survival of the people employing these techniques in order to survive.

* In addition to spending much of their time and resources towards ensuring group survival and neglecting the basic needs of its citizens, leaders in the region often take advantage of these conditions in order to keep themselves in positions of power, prohibiting the development of new mechanisms and deepening the already profound crisis facing the region.

* This failure to properly meet needs, and the ability to move towards approaches that do, is the source of regular violent conflict in the Middle East, whether between Israelis and Palestinians, or between groups in states such as Lebanon, or Iraq, or even between Palestinians, for example.

* Indeed, today in the Middle East, there is an often intentional approach of denying or belittling the other group and its needs as a means of strengthening one's own. This, above all, needs to change if negotiations or political processes are ever to achieve lasting solutions.


We believe that new mechanisms can be achieved in the Middle East for the needs of all groups to be met, and for survival and prosperity to be assured. To be sure, these must be developed by the people in the region on the basis that the needs of all sides must be met and that new arrangements - political, economic, and cultural - can and must be found to do so. As a basis for moving forward, various groups in the Middle East must also recognize each other's legitimate needs.

Through this blog, and through an adjunct site created specifically for these issues called The Missing Piece, we will aim to elucidate an examination of the problems, the needs, and the means to meet them, and thus, the possible roads that could help the Middle East move from illness to health.

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

The Great Arab Conquests

Review: The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In, by Hugh Kennedy, 376 pages, Da Capo Press.

"The success of the Muslim conquest was the result of the unstable and impoverished nature of the whole post-Roman world into which they came, the hardiness and self-reliance of the Bedouin warriors, and the inspiration and open quality of the new religion of Islam."

This, the last paragraph of the The Great Arab Conquests, succinctly summarizes 376 pages of detailed text outlining how a context, vehicle and organizing idea came together to change the world. The last phrase regarding Islam may be surprising for non-Muslims today, saturated as they are by the debates over the radicalism of that faith in our era.

Nevertheless, this book makes a very good case that it was indeed universalism and tolerance that the Muslim warriors carried with them on the backs of camels and horses out of Arabia, north into Syria, east through Iran to Central Asia, and all the way west to the Atlantic. The Great Arab Conquests is the tale of that sudden and vast expansion anchored in the fascinating characters who carried it out: Khalid bin al-Walid and his march with 500 troops across the Syrian desert to conquer the Levant; Amr bin al-As, the "Odysseus of Islamic times" and the conqueror of Egypt; and Musa bin Abd Allah bin Khazim, the man who crossed the Oxus and whose fate is fitting of a Shakespearean tragedy.

These men and their armies had little problem routing the empires of Persia and Byzantium - a considerable feat owing to the hardiness of the Arab warrior who travelled light, often rejecting the luxury of a coat of mail that his enemy coveted (another secret of the Arabs' success were the relatively easy terms imposed on the conquered).

It is an irony of history however that the only trouble the rough and ready armies of Islam encountered were fellow nomads such as the Berbers - led by the mysterious Kahina, a purportedly Jewish queen - and the Turks. The latter would be a great foreshadowing of the future takeover of the Islamic empire by the horsemen of Central Asia.

Still, this book carries with it the spirit that the "early Muslims brought with them a great cultural self-confidence....they were the bearers of true religion and God's own language". It is that past confidence, that dream of success, that still haunts Arabs today, making them proud yet also often lost in a wondrous glory of yesteryear. It is also the reason Arabs find it so difficult to come to terms with some of today's harsh political realities.

Can inspiration and a more open quality to their culture and faith once again be terms of creation for Arabs, despite today's challenges?

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell

View from the Krak

Looking west over the village of al-Husn from the medieval crusader castle of Qalaat Husn, also known as Husn al-Akrad or Krak des Chevaliers.

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Reservoir Dogs

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser with Libya's Muammar Ghadaffi and a member of the Libyan Revolutionary Council, in Cairo. The date of this photograph is unknown.

Propaganda

During the American invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, I travelled as part of a documentary film crew aboard the USS Nimitz. The American aircraft carrier, which was then operating somewhere in the Persian Gulf (we weren't allowed to know where) was busy scrambling aircraft and conducting the messy business of war.

Among the mix of exhilarating, strange, and often sad images that confronted us, were these posters which we found in a room somewhere far below deck.

Anyone familiar with American World War Two propaganda posters can immediately see the resemblance here.

Not aimed at the general public at large, and concerned with internal military affairs (recruiting and security), the posters are nonetheless a throwback to wartime manipulation techniques of old.

OPSEC in the first poster refers to "operational security."

All text and photos in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Souq Merchant

Baghdad, Iraq

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Ancient Faces

For more than two centuries, archaeological excavations at cemeteries in Egypt dating back to Roman times have unearthed some unusual and powerful images. These are the painted mummy portraits, often referred to as "The Fayoum Portraits" - so named because of the frequency in which these artifacts have been unearthed in the lush Fayoum Basin, southwest of Cairo.

These realistic portraits of the deceased, usually painted on wood panels or on cloth and attached to the mummified remains of the dead, have been found all over Egypt and not just in the Fayoum.

These remarkable works date back to the period from the 1st century BC until the 3rd century AD. The use of this art in the funerary rites of the time point to the fusion of two traditions - those of Pharaonic Egypt and that of the Classical World.

The idea of an afterlife, derived from the ancient Egyptians, stipulated the importance of physically attaching or leaving close to the body an idealized image of the deceased. The Greco-Roman art of panel painting, highly popular in Rome in those days, was the method of choice for people with enough money to afford to be mummified and have themselves sketched. Owing to Egypt's dry climate, these panel paintings have survived nearly intact and continue to be found to this day.

Little is known of these people beyond what can be inferred from their very "Roman" appearances. These poignant and highly personal images of what were once very real people, our ancestors, literally stare at us from another time and place: ancient faces that speak of lives lived, of empires come and gone, and of knowledge practiced and superseded. They are a testament to the inevitability of change and thus speak to the transitory nature of all those things which we struggle to make permanent at unnecessary and often tragic costs - political and economic systems, religious convictions, borders, power structures, and ruling dynasties..

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Tunnel Vision

There are recent reports out of Israel that Hizballah is strengthening its positions in southern Lebanon by digging tunnels throughout the troubled area. If these reports are true, then there is indeed a new and strange trend in the Middle East: deep underground in Bint Jbeil, Jerusalem and Gaza, men are busy burrowing away after some strange purpose.

Without its knowledge, Hizballah has joined the likes of other active diggers in the region such as the right wing Jewish settler groups digging a tunnel between the City of David and the Dung Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem. Both these efforts can join the now infamous tunnelling efforts beneath Rafah in Gaza. Of course, each of these activities has its own purpose. Hizballah is readying for a future fight with Israel, Hamas digs tunnels for smuggling goods into Gaza and the Israeli settlers are trying to connect their Jewish heritage through subterranean methods.

This burrowing can seem as surreal to an objective eye as the dwarves in the Lord of the Rings digging ever deeper into Mount Moriah. But what exactly is going on here with all this underground activity in a region troubled enough overground?

Digging tunnels in the Middle East is today the purview of non-state actors on serious political missions. They all preserve the right to act underground or elsewhere in the name of a greater cause, despite the presence of a sovereign state, whether that state is Lebanon, Egypt or Israel, and whether the goal is Jewish supremacy in Jerusalem or Hizballah dominance in Lebanon. What better way to do so than underground, invisible, unseen and, generally, effective?

Metaphorically, by digging below the ground, these ideological non-state actors are wearing away at the validity of state power in the Middle East, making authority impotent in the face of their hyperactivities. The sadder fact is that almost all this digging goes on with some knowledge, and even complicity, of elements of the sovereign state – a fact that confirms the hollowness of that authority, a power that either does not take itself seriously or underhandedly agrees or bows down to the agendas of non-state actors.

For sure, nothing would insult these groups more than lumping them together, but together they do represent a real problem in the Middle East - one of the supremacy of the ¨non state¨ and its most recent manifestation: ¨tunnel behaviour¨. And there is no one there, or ready, to stop them.

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Middle East Institutions - Abou Shakra

69 Kasr el-Einy Street
Garden City, Cairo
Tel. 531 6111

A Cairo landmark, this fancy kebab house has been serving locals for over 50 years. There are other branches in Heliopolis and Mohandiseen. Recently refurbished and purged of its Disney idols and other kitsch collectibles, this conservative Muslim restaurant is done up in marble and alabaster. Seating is a little tight and the staff can be slow, but customers are always guaranteed an authentic Egyptian experience.

The main speciality here is kebabs, with prices calculated per kilo of meat and a host of salads and dips to choose from. Pigeon, chicken and specialty beef dishes are also on the menu. The Egyptian desserts served here are heavenly, with top honours