Al-BAB

Cairo's Manial Palace

2012-01-16T09:06:00.011-05:00

Located a few kilometers from downtown Cairo, on a lush plot of land on Roda Island, sits one of Egypt’s little known architectural treasures. The walled complex, known as Manial Palace, is an ornate monument to Egypt’s belle époque period built by a crown prince of the country’s former royal family.

Prince Mohamed Ali Tewfik, the younger brother of Egypt’s Khedive Abbas Hilmi II, and uncle of King Farouk, made the palace his pet project and lifelong obsession. It was built and furnished in successive stages during first 30 years of the 20th century.

After attending school in Europe and traveling the world, the young prince returned to Cairo and decided to construct his own quarters away from prying eyes. His mother suggested 15 acres of gardens filled with banyan trees on Roda Island, off the East Bank of the Nile. In 1901, the 26 year-old Tewfik began construction on his saray-cum-island-retreat, naming it after a Mameluke nobleman who once resided on the island.

For Tewfik, the project allowed him to pursue another passion that ran in parallel – the world of Islamic art and motifs. The prince scoured the world for objects, sending his agents far and wide to look for rare pieces of art. He hired some of the most skilled professionals in Egypt at the time - including Mohamed Afifi and Antonio Lasciac - to design and furnish the various chambers in elegant Ottoman, Mameluke, Moroccan, Persian and Moorish styles. Cairo’s Ilhami School of Crafts-Making, a waqf, or religious trust patronized by Tewfik, also contributed works to the palace. A Rabat-style Moroccan lookout tower and stables for Arabian horses would also grace the property.

“He always meant the palace to be a museum where young people could come and learn,” said his grandnephew. “If they could not travel, they could come here and see all the styles.”

As the Manial Palace flowered into mature elegance, it became a gathering spot for all manner of foreign and domestic personalities at the time including writers, poets, journalists, musicians and diplomats. The compound became a world of high society interactions combining tea parties, evening galas, and private impromptu meetings of members of Egypt’s royal family.

After the 1952 revolution that overthrew the country’s monarchy, the compound and all its furnishing were confiscated by the Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. The Manial Palace is now an art and botanical museum open to the public.

St. Francis and the East

2011-12-31T05:45:00.032-05:00

St. Francis (1181-1226) is one of the most well-known figures in Christian history. He is most renowned for his love of animals and nature, and for having founded the Franciscan Order of Monks. Like St. Augustine before him, he was caught up in a wild and worldly life before coming to religion, and he is revered for the kindness and devotion that he demonstrated thereafter. What is less known about him is his relationship with the Eastern and the Muslim world which, at that time, represented a great rival to Christendom.

The story of St. Francis is yet another example of the interweaving of eastern and western currents during the Middle Ages, especially those moving from a vibrant Islamic civilization to a burgeoning Europe. This mixing and fertilization was especially evident in Italy and Spain, which directly abutted the Muslim world. Among these currents on the southern shore of the Mediterranean were the Sufi schools of human development.

St. Francis's connections with the East may have begun early in life. He was very interested in the Troubadours of Provence during his youth and may have been influenced by their way of life. They, in turn, were likely derived from Islamic culture (the etymology of the word 'troubadour' is disputed, but it is unusually close to the Arabic word 'tarab', which means a kind of transcendence through music). Later, he exhibited a keen interest in travelling to the Muslim world. He attempted to go east to Syria, but managed only to get to the Dalmatian coast of what is now Albania. He then tried to go west to Morocco, but ended up in Spain.

In 1219, St. Francis did finally succeed in an eastern journey when he reached the city of Damietta in Egypt, which was then besieged by Crusaders. St. Francis crossed from the Crusader to the Saracen side of the Nile to meet with the Sultan Malik el-Kamil. The traditional explanation is that he did so in order to convert him to Christianity, but failed in his effort. There are indications however that his purpose was different.

He was well received by the Sultan and permitted to preach in his lands. Upon returning to the Christian armies, St. Francis did his utmost to dissuade the Western knights from attacking the Muslims. He was ignored and the result was a Crusader defeat at the walls of Damietta. Since the fall of the Crusader kingdoms in the Middle East, only the Franciscans have been permitted to be the "Custodians of the Holy Land" on behalf of Christianity.

In subtle ways, he (and many others in his time) may have symbolized a broader current of human development than either the outward forms of Christianity and Islam can convey. He and the Sufi poet Rumi, for example, were contemporaries and share strong similarities in their poetry.

St. Francis even more closely paralleled the Sufi Najmuddin Kubra, the founder of an order called the 'Greater Brothers' (the Franciscans were also known as the 'Minor Brothers'). Sixty years before St. Francis's birth, Najmuddin was known for his love of animals, and for having tamed a fierce dog - as the Christian saint was later to do with a wolf.

Indeed, one of St. Francis's major contributions was to infuse a more democratic and "grass roots" movement into a very hierarchical church. He refused to become a priest, and returned the faith closer to the people, and away from institutions and authorities - a characteristic that has defined the Franciscans ever since.

Among his other many achievements, St. Francis, with his love for nature as the mirror of God and for animals as his "brothers and sisters", created the idea of the manger or nativity scene for Christmas, a symbol still very much alive today.

Like many other saints, St. Francis has been depicted in a variety of ways throughout history.

Ara Guler's Istanbul

2011-12-20T15:19:00.023-05:00

“The secret of Guler’s photographs is that they allow us to see this great imperial centre, still the Turkish Republic’s richest city, in images that also evoke the fragility of its people and the poverty of its streets and teahouses and ramshackle workshops.”

- Orhan Pamuk

The city of Istanbul, a bustling conglomeration of humanity straddling two continents, has always evoked a sense of mystique. Its hybrid East-West character and outward-looking maritime disposition give it an alluring face which beckons the visitor to partake in its robust variety of human interaction.

Ara Guler, nicknamed “the Eye of Istanbul”, is a Turkish photographer of Armenian descent who spent decades documenting the soft human underbelly of this former seat of Empires. Guler spent three decades, beginning in the 1950s, capturing images of Istanbul during a hurried phase in its transformation into a modern, industrialized, city.

His photographs are often described as vignettes that border on paintings. They capture a city and its inhabitants that seem to almost stagger under the weight of new incarnations suddenly grafted upon them. Gritty and mist-covered scenes involving shops, factories, shipyards, back-alleys and the hurried traffic of cars, people, horse-carts and buses, are reminiscent of images from turn-of-the-century New York.

In addition to containing what Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk calls Istanbul’s “ostentatious splendor” one finds in Guler’s photos what Pamuk also describes as “fatigue, the wear and tear, and the human face of poverty.” His images, many of which convey a sense of melancholy and tattered innocence also have a commotion, energy and life-force brought to bear by the human element present in them.

Ara Guler was born in 1928. He started working as a photojournalist in the 1950s for Turkish magazines and newspapers while taking commissions from numerous international publications. In the 1970s, he traveled around the world and to remote parts of Turkey documenting people and life in colour. Yet, his most evocative images are still considered to be the black-and-white images taken in Istanbul in the 1950s and 1960s with his Leica camera.

Guler’s former studio, in the district of Beyoglu, is now a museum and archive containing some 800,000 of his images.

Muhammed al-Idrisi

2011-11-21T21:40:00.008-05:00

Muhammed “al-Sharif” al-Idrisi (c. 1100-1165) was a major Muslim scholar, geographer and mapmaker of the medieval Islamic period. He was born in the town of Ceuta, in Morocco, and was descended from a line of nobleman who traced their lineage to the Prophet Mohammed.

Al-Idrisi took an interest in foreign lands and travel early in life. Starting in his teenage years, and continuing into adulthood, he made extensive voyages through Spain, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, deliberately gathering geographical data along the way.

After completing university in Cordoba, Spain, he relocated to Sicily where the Normans had recently overthrown its Arab rulers. Opportunities were rife in Sicily for people like al-Idrisi since, as Ibn Jubayr, another Arab traveler-savant wrote, “the Normans tolerated and patronized a few Arab families in exchange for knowledge.”

Sicily’s new ruler, Roger II, invited al-Idrisi to join his court at Palermo. His education, travels, and his extensive political connections made him a valuable addition to the King’s court. Being a patron of the arts and sciences, and having huge interest geography, Roger commissioned al-Idrisi to produce a new map of the world that would rival no other. It was task that would consume a large portion of the mapmaker’s life.

Al-Idrisi combined his personal knowledge and experience with information from older maps, particularly Roman and Ptolemaic charts. He and his team also collected reports from seafaring Muslim merchants, Norman voyagers, and Christian scholars, and used that information to assemble what would be the most accurate map of its time.

In 1154, after 18 years of toil, al-Idrisi produced his magnum opus, a map which came to be called the “Tabula Rogeriana”, or the “Book of Roger”. It was a chart of the known world comprising Europe, Asia, and North Africa and the Horn of Africa – and extending all the way to Southeast Asia. Al-Idrisi is said to have presented the map to Roger on a disc of solid silver two metres in diameter. The map was also made into manuscript form, a few of which survive today.

In keeping with Islamic tradition, al-Idrisi’s map is oriented with the south appearing at top, and north at the bottom (the maps here are turned right-side up for viewing). Though lacking images of people, animals, or plants, it contains stylized portrayals of mountains and rivers. It is also one of the first maps of its kind to depict the Indian Ocean as an open body of water connecting to the Pacific – details which were perhaps provided by Arab and Chinese mariners.

For three centuries, geographers used al-Idrisi’s unaltered maps. His works inspired some of the world’s greatest explorers, scholars and cartographers including Ibn Battuta, Ibn Khaldun, Piri Re’is, Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. The above circular map is a simplified reproduction, made in Cairo in 1456, of al-Idrisi’s masterwork, the “Tabula Rogeriana”, seen below.

The Silk Factory

2011-11-13T10:59:00.024-05:00

The Golden Century for silk, and its use globally, was between 1830 and 1930. It was during that period, in 1893, that one of the earliest silk factories in Lebanon, Maaser Beiteddine, was built.

The women of the villages were provided with mulberry trees where the silkworm grew, and were made responsible for the production of the fibre. They took care of the worms, including sensitive temperature and humidity control of the storage rooms, until they began to spin their cocoons.

The worms were then transported to the silk factory where they were killed in a process involving hot air, and the silk from the cocoons captured. The textile was shipped from Lebanon primarily to France and Italy.

The silk industry was a useful way for rural women in Lebanon to contribute significantly to the financial welfare of their households, while the men worked in the fields. The use of silk took a great downturn after the introduction of nylon by Dupont Chemical after the Second World War. The factory in Beiteddine, the town in Lebanon's Chouf region famous for its elegant and aristocratic palace, slowly went into disuse.

This was until Nino Azzi, the founder of ´Art Lounge´ - a gallery and cultural space in the Karantina area of Beirut - and Hala Khattar decided to transform Maaser Beiteddine into a gallery. Hala Khattar's family were the owners of the silk factory, and it made sense to extend Art Lounge to the serenity of the Chouf mountains.

A recent exhibit in the silk factory suitably celebrated "Woman in the Contemporary Arts", highlighting the work of thirty local and international artists.

The Yezidis

2011-09-19T21:23:00.014-04:00

The Yezidis are a non-Muslim ethnic minority group, concentrated in the Kurdish regions of Northern Iraq, Western Iran, Eastern Syria, southeast Turkey and Armenia. Numbering no more than a million and a half souls worldwide, the adherents of this little known religion are a people shrouded in mystery and obscurity.

Yezidis consider themselves to be among the oldest races on earth. Theirs is a monotheistic religion dating back to the time of the Median Empire during the middle of the first millennium BC. It is believed the religion either preceded or derived from Zoroastrianism – an ancient Aryan faith, which is centered in modern-day Iran, and with which Yezidism shares many qualities.

What makes the Yezidi religion so hard to pin down is that there are no surviving texts or scriptures. It is a religion that has been transmitted orally. That, along with its cult of secrecy, and changes to its doctrine over the years, has caused it to be poorly understood even among Yezidis themselves.

But if anything, it is the term “devil-worshipper” which is most frequently attached to adherents of this elusive sect. In the Muslim, Christian and Jewish faiths the popular story of the angel Lucifer - or Satan - who disobeyed God and was demoted to rule Hell, has a somewhat different twist in the Yezidi faith.

In the Yezidi version of the creation story, the rebellious angel, who in this rendering is called “Azaziel” or “Malek al-Tawwus” (The Peacock Angel), was later pardoned by God and made chief of a gang of six angels.

The Yezidis worship and pray to the Peacock Angel which has caused others living in their midst to refer to them by the pejorative “devil-worshipper”. The idea in the Yezidi faith that both good and evil are of equal importance in the world, and that neither can exist without the other, has not helped them to gain many admirers. Reincarnation, another pillar of their faith, is another notion highly reviled by the orthodox religionists living among them.

It is thus of little surprise that throughout the ages, Yezidis have been persecuted and driven into isolation by both Muslims and Christians who had little comprehension or tolerance of their beliefs or ways.

European travelers, too, who wrote about their encounters with the Yezidis in the 19th and 20th centuries, including such notables as Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark, tended to perpetuate the devil-worshipper misnomer without much scrutiny.

Despite the difficulties they’ve endured, the Yezidis continue to practice their culture and religion.

Once a year, Yezidis from around Europe and the Middle East, gather for their annual Eid al-Jameyah (the Feast of the Assembly), at the holy sanctuary of Lalish, near the city of Duhok in Northern Iraq.

This sacrosanct area has no residents apart from the custodians of several spire-topped mausoleums tucked in a valley below scrub-spotted hills. The Yezidis maintain that Lalish is the place where the universe began. During the festival it teems with thousands of families who bring their belongings and camp among the mausoleums for the weeklong festivities.

“This event is a kind of haj to a holy place,” says Sheikh Pasha, the Supervisor of the Yezidis in the Governorate of Ninevah, in Northern Iraq. “Lalish is like the Qa’aba at Mecca, or the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem - but of the Yezidi people.”

Music, food, song, dance and socializing underpin the event, which is more akin to an enormous family reunion, than a religious festival.

Saudi Vignettes

2011-08-24T18:54:00.011-04:00

A trip to the antiques market yielded another unexpected find last week. There, I came across a book entitled Saudi Arabia: An Artist's View of the Past.

This hardcover book published in 1979 by Jeddah-born artist Safeya Binzagr features interesting sketches and paintings of traditional Saudi scenes.

Binzagr was compelled to capture and preserve images of old world Saudi Arabian life as the pace of sweeping cultural and technological change quickened in the latter half of the 20th century.

Her illustrations (a combination of oil paintings, watercolors, pastels, and etchings) capture the finer details of traditional Bedouin life. The writer of the book's preface commends Binzagr for having “done something commendable, for she has preserved these scenes from the ravages of time and oblivion.”

She reportedly took much of her material from old photographs which she found at such places as the Royal Geographical Society in London.

“It is important for Saudis to remember, and for the West to learn,” Safeya writes in her introduction. “This book will be a record for the new generation.”

A quick Internet search yielded a website for Binzagr’s gallery, which opened in Jedda in 2000, and where many of her works are displayed today.

The Ancient Olive Trees of Bechealeh

2011-08-16T10:19:00.022-04:00

Lebanon is famous for its biblical cedars. But there are also ancient olive trees in the country that rival the cedars in age and beauty. They may or may not be as old as the Ministry of Tourism claims (4,000 B.C.), but nature's craftsmanship and the twists and turns of the wood over centuries is a metaphor for time itself.

This miniature grove of half a dozen trees is tucked away on a small road on the way to Douma in the northern Lebanese mountains. From there, one can climb to the valley of Tannourine, and further up towards the great cedars themselves. Unlike those emblematic trees, however, it's very easy to just drive by and miss the ancient olive grove of Bechealeh.

'The Baptized Sultan'

2011-08-06T11:38:00.030-04:00

Most people are aware of the impact of Islamic Spain on the European history. The role of Andalusian philosophers, mystics, and translators on the development of the West cannot be underestimated. What is less known is the positive effects of Islam on Italy, and its role in the blossoming of the Renaissance there. Over the coming months, we'll examine some of the key examples of this influence, among other cross-cultural learning.

In these days of globalization and the confusion that comes with it, it may be useful to examine some past examples where cultural mixing and tolerance by leaders led to positive and unexpected developments. In the late 11th century in Sicily, Norman kings developed a royal dynasty. One of its first kings, Roger II, had a court that combined East and West, Christianity and Islam, merging the traditions of civilizations from all shores of the Mediterranean. His son, Frederick II, who was a polymath, went on to become an even greater cultural and political innovator, as well as Holy Roman Emperor.

Frederick's string of achievements were unusual: he established a written constitution that protected the rights of his subjects and founded the first secular university in Europe at Naples (Thomas Aquinas later studied there before going on to theological greatness in Paris). He also set up a refuge for Troubadours fleeing from southern France, and a Sicilian school of poetry which directly influenced the poetry of Dante.

Like the great Italian poet, Frederick's court used the local dialect for literature, rather than the traditional Latin. And despite Germanic and Norman roots, Frederick spoke Arabic fluently. His court scholars in Palermo translated the great works of Ibn Rushd and Aristotle, and it is even claimed that Arabic numerals came to Europe through his efforts. Frederick was so Arabized that he was referred to by some as "The Baptized Sultan".

This fantastic cross-mingling that he permitted helped re-awaken European culture. Significantly, Frederick II disbelieved anything that could not be proved by reason. Like Akhenaton, the great pharaoh, he insisted on shutting down charlatanism among physicians, and banned useless cures. He was also a profound religious iconoclast, and is said to have denounced Moses, Jesus and Mohammed as deceivers and fakes. For this and his closeness to Muslims in general, he earned himself a place in the sixth level of Dante's inferno - a heretic to forever burn in his tomb.

Frederick was also excommunicated four times, once by Pope Gregory IX for refusing to join the Crusades. When he finally travelled to the East, he managed to rapidly parlay access for Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land in his discussions with the Sultan of Egypt. Indeed, he viewed the peoples of Islam as a rich and honorable society to be respected and learned from - possibly one of the secrets of his success, earning him the title 'The Wonder of the World' in his time.

The Emperor was described by the Damascene chronicler, Sibt Ibn Al Jawzi as having "eyes green like .. a serpent. He was covered with red hair… bald and myopic. Had he been a slave, he would not have fetched 200 dirhams at the market."

Frederick II is an example of the constructive coexistence of cultures at a time of great intolerance. His achievements speak to the possibility of success even as cultures blend and mix under duress. Through his eccentricities, his liberalism and healthy linkages with the Muslim world, he became a key door for the knowledge of the East to enter Europe and begin the process that we know as the Renaissance.

Islamic Art Across the Ages

2011-07-09T09:32:00.019-04:00

The following are examples of Islamic art stretching across ten centuries, and ranging from Central Asia to the Maghreb. They are found in "The David Collection", in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The Haji Omran Road

2011-07-04T22:48:00.016-04:00

The Haji Omran Road, also known as the “Hamilton Road”, is a little-known rural highway in Northern Iraq that cuts through some of the most rugged terrain in the Middle East.

Sir Archibald Hamilton, a New Zealand engineer in the British army, was charged with building the road. He and a motley crew of local workers (comprising Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Persians, and Turcomen) labored for four years on the project beginning in 1928. The crew, working under the most difficult circumstances, blasted their way through a mountain wilderness where tribes who've always resisted central authority, made their home.

Hamilton completed his namesake route in 1932 and detailed his many adventures in his travel classic, Road Through Kurdistan.

The British desire to create a direct overland route and short cut linking the Eastern Mediterranean coast to the Caspian Sea, Iran and India led to the road’s creation. The route runs north from the city of Erbil, and then turns east connecting it with the remote towns of Rowanduz and Choman, and the Iranian border-village of Haji Omran. Passing through some of the region’s most difficult terrain (including five separate mountain ranges and the formidable Gali Ali Beg Canyon), the road is today still considered a marvel of engineering.

Buses and lorries traveling between Iraq and Iran ply the road. Iraqi Arabs from Baghdad also use the route to reach the higher altitude regions of Kurdistan in the summer to escape the stifling desert heat.

As you push past Rowanduz and head closer to Iran, the traffic thins out. Small side roads of dirt and gravel break off the main route and can be seen threading up towards mountain villages lying in the direction of the Turkish and Iranian frontiers.

In spite of the access granted to the outside world by the highway, and the subsequent inroads made by modernity, the region through which the Haji Omran Road runs remains wild, untamed and autonomous. Smuggling, rebel activity military intrigues and kinder-than-kind Kurdish locals are just some the things lying in wait for those intrepid enough to venture off the road.

Ibn Maimoun (Maimonides) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes)

2011-06-19T06:25:00.016-04:00

In the tenth century, the city of Cordoba was the New York and Paris of its time, the centre of cultural activity, with over seventy libraries and even more centres of translation and learning. It was also known for its pervasive street lamps, and well-lit and paved streets – a stark contrast to the mud and darkness of its northern counterparts, like medieval London. This Andalusian city was the centre of learning and intellectual effervescence in Europe.

By the mid-twelth century, however, a new Islamic and Berber dynasty, the Almohad (or, more tellingly in Arabic, ‘Al-Muwahiddun’ or ‘unitarians’ or ‘unifiers’) had taken over the Andalus, imposing a stricter and less tolerant interpretation of Islam than previous rulers.

It was in this more difficult and darker environment, that these two men, Musa Ibn Maimoun (Maimonides) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a Jew and a Muslim, were born in Cordoba, nine years apart. They grew to leave a lasting legacy on both Islam and Judaism and to become known, in later times, as the ‘Second Moses’ and the ‘Second Aristotle’, respectively. Through their later impact on an Italian studying in Paris, they also changed the future of Christianity, and the cultural development of Europe.

The two men were both the sons of jurists, and became in their own way, intellectual revolutionaries. They brought the logic of reason into a world whirling often with blind faith, testing and questioning many long-held premises in their societies, and gaining much opprobrium from the religious powers of their time.

Both men were profoundly influenced by Aristotle and saw no contradiction between believing in a greater universal faith and utilizing reason to the utmost of an individual’s capacities – as the great Greek philosopher had so clearly demonstrated in his texts.

Oddly, their lives also paralleled each other. Both men lived out difficult worldly versions of their intellectual daring. The two men were cast out of Cordoba and both lived in exile in Fez for a time - neither able to return home again. Both also became authorities in their respective religious traditions, as well as court physicians: Ibn Rushd, originally, to the ruler of Cordoba, and Ibn Maimoun to Salaheddine in Egypt.

Ibn Mainoun wrote that “the truth should be pursued from whatever source that it proceeds,” and both men died as they lived. Ibn Rushd lost his life in Marrakesh, under suspicious circumstances, likely while under house arrest by the Almohads for his philosophy. Ibn Maimoun died in Egypt or Tiberias from ill-health brought on from a maniacal work routine of writing, medical healing and community service.

Their brilliance arose out of a marked humility regarding the place of the human in the larger scheme. As Ibn Maimoun wrote:

“Now consider the enormous dimensions and the large number of these material beings. If the whole earth is infinitely small in comparison with the sphere of the stars, what is man compared with all these created beings! How, then, could any one of us imagine that these things exist for his sake and benefit, and that they are his tools! This is the result of an examination of the corporeal beings: how much more so will this be the result of an examination into the nature of the Intelligences!"

Despite their tribulations, their legacies ultimately lived on in a man called Thomas Aquinus - an Italian studying at the University of Paris, who absorbed their works and, through his own thinking, changed forever the philosophy behind the Roman Catholic church. Aquinus brought the power of reason into the intellectual infrastructure of the church, and from there into the development of knowledge and education of Europe and the West as we now know it.

Sheikh Ali

2011-06-08T19:07:00.030-04:00

For conservative Egyptians, this bar, located on a side-road off Saad Zaghloul Street in Alexandria, adds a certain insult to injury with its unorthodox appelation. Seldom has an establishment selling alcohol in the Middle East found itself with a name better suited to a mosque, a holy shrine, or a person of religious piety. But then again, Alexandrians have always had the reputation of being a little more open-minded about things.

This famous watering hole, which opened circa 1900, was called Cap D’Or (not to be confused with its notorious imposter on Abdel Khalik Tharwat Street in downtown Cairo). Two Greeks and a Frenchman were the proprietors of the bar - one of a cluster of venues in the neighbourhood catering to the city’s cosmopolitan socialites. Egyptian aristocrats, politicos, foreign expatriates, businesspeople, and artists all flocked there to eat, drink and make merry.

When the 1952 socialist revolution took place, the foreign owners of the bar, like many others, decided to pack up and leave the country. Before departing, they sold Cap D’or to a local man named “Ali”.

But unlike subsequent owners of the bar, Ali decided to close on Fridays (the Muslim sabbath). So when clients came to the bar that day, only to find its doors shut, they began to refer to him as “al Sheikh Ali” - the "sheikh" being an honorific designating piety, respectability and knowledge, especially of a religious type. And like all nicknames of genius, it stuck like glue.

Ali’s son now runs the joint. It retains its art nouveau décor and is one of the most popular old-school drinking shacks in the country. The bar has its own regulars and has a bit of a cliquey, clubhouse feel to it. Henry Kissinger is said to have made a stop here in the 1970s, between his diplomatic hobnobbing, to have a cold Stella.

Old World New Mind

2011-05-28T11:18:00.003-04:00

In 1989, two renowned American psychologists, Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich, wrote a book called “New World New Mind: Moving Towards Conscious Evolution”. Their thesis, in essence, was fairly straightforward: humans had created a new world for themselves, but were still using an “old mind” to ineffectively deal with its consequences.

This mismatch meant that primitive fear and anger could potentially launch nuclear weapons, and that a mind wired for drama and stark contrasts simply could not detect and react to “slow change” - such as what we are seeing in climate change and the slow but sure consumption of the planet’s resources. By the time Chinese and Indians consume like Westerners, it may simply too late.

Ornstein and Ehrlich put forward an answer: humans can develop a “new mind” to deal with the challenges of a new world through a process they call “conscious evolution”. For this to happen we need to slow down our fast reflexes, widen our mental filters, see more “grays” in the world and approach the complexities facing us through holistic methods. Through a campaign of awareness and new forms of education that are focused on developing those parts of the mind currently slumbering, they believe we can make this transformation, thereby effectively saving ourselves from the spiraling dangers of our new world.

Above all, the shift will hinge on humans first becoming aware that they even have a problem, and realizing that their minds are operating according to methods devised to save us from saber-tooth tigers - and not from the environmental impact of carbon-based resources. Only when we become “conscious” of these limits, can we proceed to a new evolution.

In our other blog, entitled The Missing Piece, we have attempted to demonstrate how the specific problems of the Middle East, especially the ongoing ethnic conflicts and their fall-out, can be approached in new ways based on novel understandings of our psychology and culture. We have looked at matters ranging from cult thinking, to conditioning, to the basic sources of extremism. We have also placed a heavy emphasis on the Human Givens approach of psychological understanding that describes the innate needs and capacities that all humans have, and that, if satisfied, eliminate mental illness.

In our view, meeting these needs will also diminish and even resolve conflict in the Middle East, and serve as the basis for the proper planning and development of societies there and in other regions.

The approaches presented in “The Missing Piece” are another way of understanding and developing “The New Mind” that Ornstein and Ehrlich propose.

Recently, we have seen the Arab countries go through unexpected revolutions that have succeeded in casting aside leaders and systems in place for decades. In the first few months of 2011, this "old world”, which is in a sense the oldest world, has leapt from a culture frozen since ancient times to a situation where positive evolution is at least possible.

The road ahead for the Arab world is difficult and unpredictable. The old mind may triumph. But the Arab revolutions carry with them a spirit of individual empowerment and functionalism that are largely anti-cult, anti-ideology and anti-authority, and which may yet carry the day even if the process is decades long.

The Arab people have risen up en masse because their needs - especially for legitimacy and dignity - were not sufficiently met by their rulers and governments. Today, they have the space to attempt to wrest control over their lives and build a future where their needs, their “Human Givens”, are indeed met and the problems ahead faced more constructively.

Ornstein and Ehrlich wrote their tome the year that the Berlin Wall fell. Little did anyone know that twenty-one years later another set of earth-shaking revolutions would occur, and that radical changes would begin in a most unexpected place. There are no assurances of success for this endeavor in the Middle East, nor anywhere in the globe for that matter. However, we believe that the dissemination of these ideas is crucial today to the solution of our problems and for the future of human development. As Ornstein and Ehrlich say to end their book:

“If this book stimulates some more people to think about the roots of the human predicament, and how we might begin to adapt to our society, then we will have accomplished our purpose. With luck, we will have started to change your mind.”

With luck, the Arab revolutions may also lead, against all odds, to an “Old World New Mind”.

Jibril Rajoub

2011-05-23T20:48:00.014-04:00

They say that birds are descended from dinosaurs. It may be that some humans have also undergone such transformations. Jibril Rajoub, once supreme tough guy and the head of security in the West Bank under Yasser Arafat, is today the head of the Palestinian Football Federation and the Palestine Olympic Committee.

“Abu Rami”, as he is better known, has successfully managed the shift from confronter of Hamas, to leader of youth and sports activities in Palestine. Indeed, as Palestinians increasingly aim for the symbols and realities of statehood this year, Jibril’s efforts to bring international football teams to play in Palestine, and to give coherence to his national football league, can only be seen as part of this living current: the slow and belated search for statehood for the Palestinian people.

Abu Rami was not always so benign. He was arrested at the tender age of 17 for having thrown a grenade at an Israeli bus in an act of resistance against the occupation. The explosive did not go off, but the attempt was enough to land him 17 years in jail. There, he learned Hebrew and formed his character, firming up his toughness and acumen enough to become a leader - a skill that has served him well as a member of the Fatah Party.

Jibril has known the full spectrum of knocks in life. He was exiled from the West Bank in the late 1980s and unceremoniously dumped in southern Lebanon by the Israeli government for his troublesome activities. From there, he made his way to Tunis and the offices of Yasser Arafat and the PLO, before returning to the West Bank with the Palestinian leader during the Oslo accords. From there he rose to the highest positions of national security of the Palestinian Authority.

All those efforts wasted away in a few deadly months in 2000 as Israel crushed the Palestinian Intifada that followed the Camp David negotiations, and, along with it, all of Abu Rami’s security institutions in the West Bank.

Since that time, Abu Rami moved slowly but surely away from pure politics. But he retains an important position on the Fatah Central Committee, and has since made the best of his positions as leader of athletics in his burgeoning nation.

A trip to a football match with Abu Rami is a thrill ride. A fight between players caused President Rajoub to leap from his imperial balcony (where he presides over the game) and rush the field to split up the players and create the calm needed for the game to go on. Undoubtedly, this is an intervention he had practiced in jail, and later in the West Bank, before applying it on the grass of the stadium at Al-Ram.

But these are just the professional depictions of the man. Those who know him well describe him as generous and buoyant personality, with a deep, gravelly voice, fitting of a member of "The Sopranos". He possesses an intimidating presence that makes everyone from young women to ministers cower near him. Indeed, there are some who have very difficult memories of his time as head of security in the West Bank and the abuses that came with that.

Still, an invitation to Abu Rami's diwan (with daggers and scimitars hanging from the walls) for a meal of every fowl and fish available in Ramallah, is an opportunity to know the power of traditional Arab and Bedouin generosity. It's also a chance to know the large heart of a man who, after all his travels, will always be from the village of Doura, near Hebron.

Restaurant Varouj

2011-05-13T17:30:00.025-04:00

The most interesting Middle East Institutions are often those that fly far below the radar of the masses. A purely word-of-mouth establishment, Restaurant Varouj is one such place.

This Lebanese cookery, located in the tiny labyrinthine streets of Beirut’s Armenian enclave of Burj Hammoud, requires of its customers not just a monster appetite, but also a serious wherewithal for exploration.

There are no maps, street names or workable directions to find the place – just a general location from which to enter that Borgesian maze of laundry-draped alleyways that make up the Middle East’s most densely populated neighbourhood. Only by asking directions from a series of bleary-eyed elders and teenagers playing soccer in flip-flops will one find their way, point-by-point, to Varouj’s doorstep.

Here a father-and-son team presides over all four tables situated beneath shelves decked with Middle Eastern bric-a-brac. The mercurial, cigar-smoking elder, playing the combined role of owner, waiter, and maitre d’ is a character of the old school variety, who’s known to verbally manhandle his customers in the slightly tarnished Arabic of the Burj Hammoudi Armenians. His mild-mannered son whips up culinary storms at his command from a cooking station just a few feet behind him.

The usual Lebanese fare is on offer here – and all of it is extremely good. The prize dishes are the sujouk (spicy Armenian sausages), chicken livers, makanek (Lebanese sausages), b’tata harra (spicy homefries), and the raw kibbeh. To wash the whole thing down, order a bottle of locally made Arak (diluted with water in a pitcher and served in small glasses with ice cubes).

The novelty of the Varouj experience is amplified by the absence of printed menus or listed prices of any kind. Food is ordered ad hoc depending on what the master of ceremonies has available that day - and what he thinks you should eat!

At the end of the smorgasbord the host haphazardly tallies the meal price in an indecipherable chicken-scratch and throws it on the table. But it’s invariably less costly than what you'd expect to pay for such a meal fit for a king.

We’d add a few lines about how to find the place, but getting there through one’s own efforts is half the reward.

Mujib Nature Reserve

2011-04-22T17:39:00.034-04:00

Overshadowed by the heavily trafficked tourist sites of Petra and Wadi Rum, is one of Jordan’s least known treasures. Ninety kilometers south of the capital Amman, off a main highway is Wadi Mujib – a massive riverine gash in the mountains running in an east-west direction to the Dead Sea.

Comprising numerous tributaries and located within the Mujib Nature Reserve, Wadi Mujib begins inland at around 900 metres and drops to more than 400 metres below sea level to reach the Dead Sea. The main wadi is fed by several seasonal and permanent streams and is a major source of H2O replenishing the ever-receding shores of the world’s lowest body of water.

Like its iconic cousins to the south, Wadi Rum and Petra, The Mujib Nature Reserve is breathtakingly beautiful, and exudes the same Biblical profundity and rock-hewn drama as the other sites. But there is an added feature here that the other venues lack: water and few people.

The area’s stark disposition (marked by canyons as narrow and as steep as the famous rock cleft that leads to the Treasury at Petra) is brilliantly juxtaposed by the life-giving rivers that run through it, creating an impression of a kind of secret paradise flowing with milk and honey. It is a safe-haven resonating with an almost sacred quality.

But it's not so much the wadi itself that is Mujib's real worth. Instead, it is what’s contained within it. The area’s relative remoteness and inaccessibility to humans has allowed a large biodiversity to thrive here – including both rare and endangered animals.

Mujib is an important home and way station for around 200 species of birds, many of them migratory. They include birds with such colorful names as the Black Stork, the Honey Buzzard, the Levant Sparrow Hawk, the Short-Toed Eagle and the Barbary Falcon.

Three hundred different species of plants grace the wadi’s walls and floors. Walking through the shallow, clear waters of its streams, one is surprised to find small schools of fish and even frogs.

And although they are not easily seen, Mujib is also home to jackals, wolves, mongoose, hyenas, Nubian ibex, and caracals (a medium sized cat with black and white ear tufts that can catch birds in mid-air). The animals’ continued survival here is owed, in part, to the special care given to the site.

The 212 square kilometer Mujib Nature Reserve was created in 1987 by Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature (RSCN). There are three main trails for hiking and canyoning and no more than 25 people are allowed on each trail per day. The dry trails are open year round. The wet ones, where you can sometimes wade up to your chest in fast-moving torrents of water, are open between 1 April and 31 October.

(These photos were taken on the Malaqi Trail, which follows part of the Mujib and Hidan Rivers).

The Beauty of Reform

2011-04-08T07:15:00.009-04:00

A reality that is easily forgotten about each of the three monotheistic faiths of the Middle East is that they were each once a profound attempt at reform of an existing religion.

Judaism was a reform of the many pagan Canaanite faiths, focusing on the One God, instead of the many.

Christianity was a reform of Judaism, focusing on the individual human relation with God, rather than the law in-itself.

Islam was a reform of both Christianity and Judaism, focusing again on the universal unity of God (known in Arabic as “Tawhid”), rather than ethnic or iconic representations of the intangible.

Of course, each derived from a specific context and time and still reflects the tones and spirits of those beginnings - in Judea, Galilee and the Arabian Peninsula, respectively.

Today, we view these faiths as civilizations and separate cultures, often in deep competition with one another, and even sometimes at war. Despite the talk in interfaith activities, the common spirit behind them is secondary to the cultural references; the form of the faiths is more important than their spiritual motivation.

As reforms of existing religions that had grown stiff and fixated on objects rather than the divine, Judaism, Christianity and Islam are originally simply branches of a singular “tree” of spiritual and human development. It is a tree that existed before those branches took shape and that continues to this day in other forms. Their acts of reform were in direct line with this larger effort, and no other.

The question today is whether these three faiths, spread as they are across the globe, can be realigned to serve their original purpose and the deeper current from which they stemmed. There may be no way to do this without each becoming humbler to that origin. That would mean that the rituals, cultures and identity these faiths have developed are treated as secondary to human growth and development; a step that would require the religions be adjusted to the needs of today.

The monotheistic faiths are not ends in themselves, but means, and so a process of endless reform of human foibles without sacred cows. Only so can they help humanity in its “eighth day of the week”.

Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul

2011-04-05T06:25:00.013-04:00

In his book, Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul: The Pertinence of Islamic Cosmology in the Modern World, William C. Chittick has put forward a refreshing outlook on Islam today. Away from the ideological and cartoonish depictions of this faith, Chittick unfolds a forward looking, indeed revolutionary perspective on how Islam was meant to be understood in the first place.

The core of his work is a critical differentiation in Islam between two forms of human knowledge, "transmitted" and "intellectual". Simply put, the former is passed on in the form of "Taqlid" (imitation of an authority), the latter can only be found independently through "Tahqiq" (realization, verification), using mind, heart and personal experience.

According to Chittick, to think “Islamically’” is above all to pursue the unity of God, the only source of truth and reality, through Tahqiq. This highly personal pursuit of unity stands in stark contrast with the modern obsession with intellectual and academic specialization, a form of fragmentation that moves away from the discovery of unifying principles in the world.

In his view, this fragmentation creates the many gods of modernity, a source of confusion and suffering, especially when "God" enters the domain of politics becoming yet another manifestation of difference. Indeed, Chittick claims that much of modern Islamic intellectual and political thought “suffers from a grave illness” by imitating modern Western thought, having little to do with original Islam as he understands it.

He also puts a powerful focus on how to “go beyond ideology and dogma”, and steps beyond politics to include much of modern Western scientific thinking as dogmatic because it involves imitation, rather than personal realization. In this novel yet ancient approach to knowledge, there can be no ivory towers of pure objectivity. Knowledge becomes moral again because it springs directly from the human, embedded in our very natures. “We cannot study the natural world without studying ourselves, and we cannot learn about ourselves... without understanding the wisdom inherent in the natural world.” The two are inseparable; there is no room for stark dualisms.

The odd but perceptive title of the book introduces this secret missing piece of Islamic science, the human dimension of "soul". This is in many ways a very radical book, asking us to approach matters with an unimposed or legislated lens: “Until you know yourself … your self-knowledge is based on imitation, not realization.”

What Chittick proposes requires enormous training and personal discipline in the development of one’s self and “soul”, the very instrument through which verification and understanding are gained. But, he makes a powerful argument that this is the real Islamic tradition, and one that offers the modern world, East and West, the chance to rediscover the self as the proper basis for knowledge and creativity.

There are signs today that the Arab world is awakening. The Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions have sought independence from authority, rejected dogma and ideology and, by their pluralism, accepted that individuals, and not just "tribes", matter. Although this current runs at the political level, it mirrors Chittick´s intellectual approach, a mechanism that can be a road forward for Arabs, and a model for many others around the globe.

As he clearly states in this book, the need has never been greater for creative, independent, and unifying action to meet our challenges. "Tahqiq" and its fruits seem very much the proper beginning.

Hasankeyf

2011-03-21T22:30:00.021-04:00

Situated on the Tigris River in southeastern Turkey, the village of Hasankeyf may be the oldest continually settled town on earth. It is a painfully picturesque place embodying 10,000 years of history and clinging dramatically to limestone cliffs peppered with medieval Islamic monuments.

Anyone who visits Hasankeyf can’t help but be smitten by its ageless disposition – one that inspires an unconscious nostalgia for that pivotal moment when pre-history gave way to the earliest refinements of civilized life. If there’s any place where our ancestors decided to give up the countless millennia of wandering begun in Africa, in favor of something slightly more palatable, it is likely here.

Neither the area’s harsh climate nor the vicissitudes of empire (including the brutal 13th century onslaughts of the Mongol hordes), could dislodge this honey-toned Silk Route station, and its people, from the banks of the slow moving Tigris. Which is why it’s ironic that in an era of relative calm for the area, and after weathering all that Time could throw its way, Hasankeyf now finds itself a village waiting to die.

If all goes according to the plans of Turkish developers, Hasankeyf, and other towns like it will soon be underwater. Turkey’s long-running Ilisu Hydro-Electric Project, designed to dam the Tigris and which is now slated to be completed in 2013, will create a 300 square kilometer reservoir along the river’s basin running north from the dam.

That man-made reservoir will submerge Hasankeyf and drive away its Kurdish inhabitants - many of whom were once semi-nomadic, and who, until recently were eking out a modest but happy living from the region’s limestone caves (before being resettled by the government to newly built homes).

The Ilisu dam project has been in the works since the 1950s, but because of periodic political, economic and military upheavals, has continually gone into abeyance. Since the project's inception, Hasankeyf has been living on borrowed time, its imminent demise declared each time the project seemed to be near completion.

Proponents of the dam say it will give a new lease on life to a region which is moribund and poor. Power-generation, irrigation, jobs and aquatic tourism are just a few of the perks being cited by Turkey’s doyens of progress.

Others, who are just as married to their convictions say the dam will destroy Hasankeyf - an archaeological, cultural and human loss too valuable to calculate. They, the heritage activists, say that the town should instead be managed by archaeologists and historians whose work there, they claim, has hardly begun.

Caught in the middle of this tug of war are Hasankeyf’s inhabitants who are fed up from having to live in a kind of in-between zone, where the present is constantly being overshadowed by a future too imprecise to properly fathom. They say that living that uncertainty is much worse than having to face the town’s eventual fate – whether a flood of Biblical proportions, or years of archaeological excavations that will mean further relocations and the picking apart of a village already fragile and in some places, falling apart.

In the meantime, Hasankeyf’s inhabitants continue with their daily struggles, without a firm knowledge of when those changes will finally come, nor an idea of why others cannot accept the town, and their area, for what it simply is – and no more.

Beirut Graffiti

2011-03-15T10:48:00.002-04:00

A Manuscript of Ibn al-Shatir

2011-02-10T21:48:00.015-05:00

Ibn al-Shatir was an important Arab astronomer who lived during the medieval Islamic period. Like many of his peers he was a polymath and also worked as a mathematician, engineer, artisan, and inventor. He lived in the 14th century, in what is today modern Syria.

Al-Shatir (b. 1304) was orphaned as child and was raised by his grandfather who later turned him over to an uncle who taught him the craft of inlay work, using ivory, wood and mother of pearl - an artform for which Damascus is still famous. When he was old enough, and after having earned a large sum of money, he traveled to Egypt where he studied mathematics and astronomy in Cairo and Alexandria.

From 1360 to 1375 al-Shatir occupied the prestigious position of chief muwaqqit at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. He was responsible for the regulation of the astronomically defined times of prayer. He fixed the precise times for the five daily prayers, based on the observations of the movements of the sun, moon and stars. He also had to adjust the Muslim calendar, which was lunar rather than solar.

Al-Shatir also made substantial advances in the design of astronomical instruments. In addition to improving the astrolabe, he constructed in 1371 a magnificent sundial on the northern minaret of the Umayyad Mosque which remained in use until the 19th century.

He also calculated tables (such as the manuscript above), called a zij, for the region of Damascus. These tables enabled one to determine what time it was by observing the height of the sun by day, and the position of a given star by night.

But his most important contribution was his theory of the movements of the planets. These calculations improved upon the ancient Ptolemaic system and pre-dated the theory of Copernicus a century later.

In fact, al-Shatir’s models were mathematically identical to those of Copernicus, which makes it likely that al-Shatir's work was transmitted to Europe and used by the Renaissance astronomer.

The Stamps of Lebanon

2011-01-23T22:59:00.017-05:00

The postage stamps displayed here come from a collection entitled "Lebanon Illustrated by its Stamps" by Dr. Joseph M. Hatem and published by Dergham.

Hatem, who spent his life working as a physician and biologist, has been an avid stamp collector since childhood. He and his team, which included journalists, a political commentator, an archaeologist, the publishers and members of his family all pooled together their skills and knowledge to put together a large collection of stamps issued in Lebanon mostly in the 20th century.

Below are examples of Lebanon's artistic self-representation reflecting its personages, culture, and milestones.

The Emirs Fakhreddine II and Bashir II. Commemorating Lebanese Independence. Issued 1962.

The 16th century Emir Fakhreddine Maan II. Issued 1968.

The 19th century Emir Bashir II. Issued 1942.

International Year of Tourism, 1967. Views of various seaside cities. Issued 1967.

Air Liban's purchase of 4 DC-4 planes. In October of 1954 the first plane flew direct from Paris to Beirut. Issued 1953.

The Phoenician invention of the alphabet and its diffusion. Issued 1966.

Centennial of the International Red Cross. Issued 1963.

The 26th International Ski Congress held in Beirut in 1967. Issued 1968.

Tourism month. May-June 1961.

Traditional Lebanese attire. Issued 1973.

Folklore troops and philharmonic orchestra. Issued 1966.

The army's 40th anniversary. Issued 1984.

Perspective

2011-01-15T13:34:00.006-05:00

Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean by night as seen from the International Space Station.

An Oracle on the Middle East

2011-01-08T15:14:00.030-05:00

On a recent trip to New Orleans, I came across an interesting and unusual breed of street artist.

Sitting on the sidewalk, outside a popular jazz club, along the raucous and uber-happening Frenchman Street, was a young poet-for-hire. For a price he offered to churn out quality verse on any topic thrown to him. He came fully equipped with a decrepit manual typewriter, a small table and one of those folding lawn-chairs (complete the beer holders) that you often see at the beach.

There was a sort of brilliance in the whole getup. He was not only offering the invaluable service of insight-on-demand, as well as the entertainment of the written word, but was also acting as a kind of street performer: revealing how the poet undertakes his mind-bending labours (a craft so often performed behind closed doors).

Here's how the whole thing works:

As the intoxicated throng makes its way past the artist, one person usually stops, curiously takes notice, and asks the poet to pronounce on some topic of import – the name of a musician or an actor, or some other pop culture reference.

At first the writer reveals a look of disappointment. He then quickly bounces back, consulting with the muses and then dives head-first into the work.

For several minutes, the customer watches fascinatingly as the poet fights to pluck words from thin air. He laboriously enciphers his art onto a ragged sheet of paper by way of his tired old machine. Long, awkward pauses are interrupted by sudden bursts of inspiration and a renewed tapping at the keys.

The death throes-like process of poetry-making finally comes to an end, and voila, the customer is presented with the finished piece.

The reaction to the poems depends on the quality of the verse and how much alcohol the customer has consumed beforehand. But often enough there seems to be an overwhelming sense of anti-climax, and even confusion.

Then came my turn to approach the New Orleans oracle with a request for some verse of my own.

John - “I’d like a poem. How much do you charge?”

Poet - “It depends. Usually about twenty dollars.”

John - “I’ll give you eight.”

Poet - (pauses) “I’ll do it for ten.”

John - “Deal.”

Poet - “What’s the topic?”

John - “The Middle East.”

Poet – (another pause) “Oh.”

John – Is that alright?

Poet – Yeah, but that subject will cost you more money.

John – I don’t think so. We came to an agreement.

Poet – Alright.

Below is the text of that poem, written, while i waited, on a sultry night along one of New Orleans’ main drags..

THE MIDDLE EAST

everyone wants war:

excuses are everywhere –

territory, history,

ingrained philosophy;

the superiority of

whatever group one’s in.

everyone wants to win,

and victory seems guaranteed.

each propaganda machine

speaks its own local metaphor

for global narratives

force-fed to us by the U.S.

operatives, newspaper tickers,

we watch from home

- by Allan Andre, NOLA, 6/11/10

The Tale of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men

2010-12-26T15:18:00.009-05:00

Raymond Lull was a Mallorcan of the late Middle Ages who became known for his writings and his mystical and religious dedication. He was born into a wealthy family in Palma and worked in the royal household there until a religious conversion compelled him to travel and spread Christianity. His ideas and works were based on the power of reason and not blind faith, and he strongly opposed any conversion through violence.

In 1314, Raymond Lull was stoned by an angry crowd in present day Algeria, and died one year later in Palma at the age of 82.

One of his most well known books was called The Gentile and the Three Wise Men. It dealt with the three major religions that have arisen out of the Middle East: Judaism, Christianity and Islam – in a daring manner for its time.

Although written for another age (with theological arguments that are not easy to follow), the story's universalist bent and the openmindedness of its protagonist is a sober and refreshing message in our age of increasing religious radicalism, and exclusive mindsets.

Here is a summary of the book’s unusual tale:

A miserable "gentile" is roaming the roads, berating himself for his unhappy state in life. Lost and depressed, he comes upon three wise men: a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim. The gentile explains his unhappiness, and enters into a discussion with them about God in order to gain some contentment. They agree with the gentile that after they complete an account of their laws and traditions, he will choose one of their faiths as a means to escape his misery.

Each then gives a detailed and masterful explanation of his religion, along with answering the gentile's queries. At the end of the discussion, the three turn to him to find out which faith and tradition he has been most impressed by.

However, instead of stating his choice, the gentile proclaims a personal outpouring of faith, declaring a new profound and heartfelt understanding of the divine road.

The three – Jew, Christian and Muslim – are deeply impressed by the gentile’s ardor and humbled by the superiority of his newfound faith and sincerity. They are especially marked by how rapidly he gained truth after being so long in error, in contrast to the decades it had taken each of them.

Afterwards, the three men commit to spending their days explaining to one another the virtues of each of their religions, without recrimination and prejudice. They agree to continue these discussions until they are united in one single faith.

The Gentile, by his sincere queries, and honest arrival at the truth, had managed to impress three devout and knowledgeable believers enough that they turned from a fixation on their own traditions to openness to one another’s common truths.

Street Scene

2010-03-13T10:16:00.001-05:00

Damascus, Syria

The Village of Ghajar

2010-02-26T00:41:00.016-05:00

According to UN cartographic teams, the village of Ghajar lies bifurcated between two countries. Its northern two-thirds is in Lebanon, its southern third in the Israeli-occupied Golan. The village is in a true no-man's land. It was the route of passage of the Crusaders on their way to Jerusalem - just before the swamps of Hulah, the cliffs of granite to their right and the vast Golan to their left. It is also the road of thieves and drifters who hid in the contours of the land, belonging to no one, distant from the Damascus, Beirut, Jerusalem or the coastal towns of Tyre and Acre.

The village was originally called Taranje, before the arrival of the Kurds who changed its name to Ghajar, or 'Gypsies' in Arabic. It is very possible that a tribe of the Romani ended up there, as they did in valleys and plains throughout the world. Under the Ottoman Empire, Alawites from northern Syria settled in Ghajar, as well as two other nearby villages in the Golan: Za'ura and Ayn Fit.

Once upon a simpler time, a bus line connected Marjayoun in Lebanon to Qunaytra in the Golan. Ghajar was a stop on that route - its only connection to the rest of the world. Today, the town finds itself in a strange seclusion, surrounded by fields of land-mines to the north (placed there by Israel during its 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon), and a fence erected south of the village, similar to the electronic sensitivity grid Israelis have placed elsewhere to detect attempts to cross from Lebanon.

Today's Ghajarites are, however, well adapted to their context. They live in a large village with well-off homes, different in style and size from the poorer Lebanese villages to their north, or the tidy California-style spreads of Israel at Metulla and Kiryat Shemona to their southwest. Source of income of the village: unknown; "border enterpreneurs", if you wish.

The Ghajarites claim they are Syrian, descendants of a man who ran from trouble in the Alawite regions in the north-west of Syria, and who settled in this strange and barren corner. However, they also hold Israeli passports and speak Hebrew, with many of their children educated in Haifa at the Technion University or elsewhere - a function of their adaptation to Israeli rule since 1967. The Ghajarites claim allegiance to Syria, demand the fruits of citizenship in Israel, and want nothing at all to do with Lebanon, where half of them now technically belong.

They are victims of war, the march of history, modern cartography and the borders that have carved up the Middle East. During the rush to create a line of Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the UN partitioned the village into two sovereignties. Indeed, it may be that the partition of the village was decided under the pressure to complete the Israeli line of withdrawal from Lebanon, and may not present the most accurate picture of history.

Maps depicting Ghajar, including those made prior to the Israeli invasion of 1967, are very inconsistent. The 2000 partition may have been based on historical and cartographic errors; Ghajar could have been part of any of the entities created at the end of the Ottoman Empire: Syria, Lebanon, or Palestine (1). Indeed, Ghajar is an example of a general problem, the lack of exact border demarcation between Lebanon and Syria. Here, however, the problem is exacerbated by the human dimension: nowhere else does the border apparently cut through a village.

At one point, Ghajar became a flashpoint between Israel and Lebanon/Hizballah. Because the town was a potential infiltration point into Israel from Lebanon, the Israelis took it upon themselves to occupy the northern two-thirds of the village. The Ghajarites have demonstrated actively against being divided, fenced in, and handed over to countries where they do not belong.

Ghajar speaks to a day when political identity mattered much less, and when states did not measure borders to the inch. Certainly, these villagers were once the victims of marauding armies, and, no doubt, they swayed with the prevailing political winds to survive and thrive. But, nobody had previously thought of bisecting their village and its surrounding fields in the name of a proper border. That act took the brilliance and exactitudes of modern diplomacy.

Like other unfortunate "political gypsies" of our time, including the Palestinian refugees, they belong nowhere, in a sense, at a time when everyone must belong somewhere, or suffer the consequences.

(1) This entry is based partly on the study by Asher Kaufman, "Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: On Ghajar and other Anomalies in the Syria-Lebanon Tri-Border Region."

The Human Journey

2010-02-21T15:47:00.014-05:00

Those who liked the subject of our last post, will be interested to hear about a new website which tracks the development of human beings over the last 100,000 years.

The Human Journey is a longstanding web project of the Institute for the Study of Human Knowledge (ISHK) - an organization which has been working for decades to increase public awareness about human nature and human capacities and potential.

Drawing upon the latest discoveries in genetics, evolutionary biology, anthropology and linguistics, The Human Journey website traces the development and evolution of human beings with a view towards our future.

To quote from the website:

The future depends on how we understand who we are, and how that past has made us so: what is unchanging about Human Nature and what we CAN and MUST change to face a world that is far different from our ancestors... If we don't know our history, social and biological, we can't adapt fully to a world that we made.

The website will also be relevant to people interested in the Middle East, not just in terms of its portrayal of early human development in that part of the world, but more importantly, in terms how the past has shaped us into who we are today. This knowledge might provide us with a better understanding of - and could help us to mitigate - the conflicts in the region.

Mahmoud Marai, Desert Adventurer and Explorer

2010-02-10T00:39:00.019-05:00

Located off a busy Cairo square, in the bucolic and tree-lined district of Maadi, is a small and inconspicuous basement-level office space. At first glance, the room looks no different than most of the dusty and austere apartments that sometimes double for offices in Africa’s largest city. But upon closer inspection, an entire universe spanning eons, opens up.

Found along the office shelves, on its walls and in its corners are curiosities that speak to a succession of bygone eras of natural history: old topographical maps North Africa, prehistoric stone tools, alien-looking rocks and crystals, ancient tribal artifacts, colonial-era regalia, and dusty old journals and academic periodicals.

This veritable storehouse of treasures, flying stealthily below anybody’s radar, is the headquarters and personal sanctuary of Egypt’s youngest Saharan explorer, Mahmoud Marai.

For more than a decade, Marai, age 35, has been at the forefront of deep desert exploration in Egypt. His journeys have taken him to the furthest and most inaccessible corners of the country.

A high-school chemistry teacher by trade, he has spearheaded dozens of journeys to the Gilf Kebir and Jebel Uweinat regions of the Western Desert (also known as the Libyan Desert) – a still somewhat unexplored wasteland of over 700,000 square kilometers known for its cave paintings, prehistoric relics and concealed wadis.

“People say Egypt is ‘The Gift of the Nile’,” says Marai. “But Egypt is also the gift of the desert.”

Undaunted by his lack of experience or training, this self-taught adventurer started by making solo expeditions in a single vehicle between 1998 and 2003 – an almost unheard of (and some would argue foolhardy) - undertaking that nonetheless earned him the respect of other desert guides. After staking out his own claim to the Western Desert, he began work as a professional guide, desert outfitter and explorer-for-hire in 2004.

Unlike other guides, Marai has become known for his preferred method of doing trips into the desert, either largely - or entirely - on foot.

“You can’t find anything by car,” says Marai. It’s totally useless. Most people who travel into this area bypass a lot of rock art and artifacts because much of it needs to be seen on foot.”

During his short career, he has crossed the Great Sand Sea numerous times, has walked hundreds of kilometres overland to the Gilf Kebir, and has explored most of the hidden wadis of the majestic Jebel Uweinat.

His experiences don’t end there. While at Karkur Talkh at Uweinat, he was abducted and held, along with two others, for weeks by a rogue North Darfur paramilitary organization operating along the porous Sudanese-Egyptian-Libyan frontier. The experience, which was life-threatening, shook Marai to the core. But he nevertheless, intrepidly, went back to explore the desert he loved.

In late 2007, Marai, along with Maltese adventurer Mark Borda, stumbled upon Neolithic cave paintings in the Uweinat Desert, some seven hundred kilometres west of the Nile Valley, near the twin massifs of Peter and Paul. Then, at another nearby location, the two surveyors found engravings on a large rock consisting of hieroglyphic writing: a Pharaonic cartouche, an image of a king and other ancient Egyptian iconography.

The implications of the discovery appeared to be significant. The consensus among Egyptologists up until then was that the ancient Egyptians did not penetrate the Western Desert any further than around 80km southwest of Dakhla Oasis – an area of sandstone hills containing hieroglyphs discovered by German explorer Carlo Bergmann. Marai and Borda’s discovery seemed to indicate that the Ancient Egyptians had in fact penetrated much, much, further into the desert than had previously been believed - all the way to the area near the Libyan border.

“The ancient Egyptians had the means, the methods and knowledge to undergo very long journeys in the desert,” says Marai.

Photos of the inscriptions, whose location has been a tightly held secret, were taken to the UK to be looked at by a hieroglyphics specialist. A preliminary translation determined that the hieroglyphs mention the name of a region where they may have been carved – the fabled Land of Yam: one of the most mysterious nations that the Ancient Egyptians traded with in Old Kingdom times.

Marai and Borda both believe that Yam, which has never been positively identified, lay somewhere in the area where they found the inscription.

Despite his best efforts to get the academic and Egyptology community as a whole to recognize his discovery, there has been relatively little interest in the Yam inscriptions. This due perhaps to a lack of willingness to budge an iota from the accepted historical narrative, which sits heavily in text books with the weight of dogma.

Because of the worldwide recession of the last few years, there has been far less of an appetite for internationally sponsored desert expeditions, and much less demand for Marai’s skills. He has since fallen back on teaching high-school chemistry.

But ever the dreamer, Marai looks ahead to the day when he can pick up where he left off and perhaps contribute in his own way to the story of history, which, he maintains, will continue to be re-written, despite of the intransigence of the “experts”.

Changing a Flat

2010-02-02T20:18:00.004-05:00

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

Rabia of Basra

2010-01-27T04:14:00.027-05:00

"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

2010-01-26T14:34:00.007-05:00

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

2010-01-06T21:33:00.010-05:00

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

2009-12-31T08:45:00.006-05:00

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'

2009-12-25T18:49:00.052-05:00

"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 open, 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 3rd or 4th 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

2009-12-20T03:12:00.022-05:00

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

2009-12-07T05:06:00.063-05:00

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

2009-11-20T10:02:00.014-05:00

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

2009-11-09T21:27:00.011-05:00

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

2009-11-02T12:42:00.023-05:00

"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

2009-10-19T23:39:00.011-04:00

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

2009-10-07T21:35:00.027-04:00

“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.

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

2009-09-25T22:51:00.008-04:00

In August of 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

2009-09-21T12:39:00.010-04:00

"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.

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

Mulla Nasrudin

2009-09-15T23:44:00.012-04:00

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.’

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

2009-09-04T06:29:00.037-04:00

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

2009-08-24T14:22:00.029-04:00

“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.

Hobeika - Super Agent

2009-08-12T10:30:00.022-04:00

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

2009-08-09T17:03:00.007-04:00

“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

2009-07-26T15:33:00.028-04:00

“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 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 serve 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 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, Salah al-Din, and 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 Middle East 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 sediments of devastation beneath today's streets. The Mongol invasions, 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-vigilance, 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 within 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 game was over.

Issues of identity and belonging in the Middle East are thus unconsciously understood as existential – or so they appear. Survival techniques became cultural habits over time. 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 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

2009-05-01T13:58:00.007-04:00

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

2009-04-28T20:02:00.010-04:00

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

2009-04-22T00:15:00.014-04:00

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

2009-04-16T17:35:00.009-04:00

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

2009-04-13T13:43:00.022-04:00

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

2009-04-05T20:21:00.008-04:00

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

2009-03-24T13:02:00.025-04:00

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

2009-03-20T16:48:00.007-04:00

Farafra Oasis

2009-03-08T17:12:00.013-04:00

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"

2009-02-28T10:04:00.051-05:00

"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

2009-02-26T09:38:00.018-05:00

"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

2009-02-23T07:13:00.022-05:00

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

2009-02-11T06:31:00.040-05:00

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.

Cairo's Friday Market (al-souq al-goma'a)

2009-02-06T03:59:00.018-05:00

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

2009-02-01T09:45:00.028-05:00

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

2009-01-11T04:46:00.004-05:00

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.