The Joy and Pain of Beirut

Tom Young is a British painter who has developed a fascination for Beirut and Lebanon and depicted it in his work. He points out that the city provided him with the symbols of both 'joy and pain' and their co-existence. No doubt, there is little shortage of either in Beirut and Lebanon.

Tom Young's attitude and craft are discussed in this pleasant video that also depicts photographs of a Lebanon long-gone, one that will be hauntingly familiar to anyone who lived there during that era.

Young states that his work focuses on memory and longing, as well as rebirth and recovery. Lebanon is indeed penetrated with sentiment and melancholia; the people's faces, and often their taste in music, reflect these longings. Their actions do also speak to the patch-up and the constant recovery from war.  

The video also has a quote which may be relevant in these circumstances: "There is a circle called sentiment and there is the compulsion to break free of it. In the negative space between contraries we learn to venture."

Syria's Wedding Singer

Aficionados of Middle Eastern politics and anyone who's kept a close eye on Egypt's revolution (and its aftermath) is likely familiar with Omar Suleiman: the former army general turned intelligence chief under Hosni Mubarak, who was once deemed most likely to succeed the aging autocrat.

As Mubarak's ouster catapulted the otherwise camera-shy Suleiman into the international spotlight, and the world scrambled to piece together the biographical fragments of the all-powerful mukhabarat king, another little-known man of the same name (but famous in his own right) kept popping up on Internet search engines.

In nearby Syria, a country stewing in the breathless anticipation of its own impeding rebellion, there appeared to be another Omar Suleiman - but spelled Souleyman - whose talents had little to do with orchestrating political intrigues or striking deals with the Israelis. The Syrian Souleyman was instead making a name for himself as one of the region's busiest and most accomplished wedding singers.

Born in the rural region of al-Jazeera, abutting the Turkish and Iraqi borders, Omar Souleyman has become a kind of cult figure situated on the margins of Middle Eastern pop music. A fusion of singer, emcee, dance-maestro and D-J, Souleyman was encouraged by friends to go professional after strutting his stuff at a handful of weddings in his village of Ras al-Ain. Known by his trademark red checkered keffiyeh, dark aviators, bushy moustache and his no-nonsense demeanour, Souleyman has produced around 500 albums (mostly recordings of live wedding celebrations) since 1994.

His unique and innovative sound, blending disparate traditions, stems directly from the multicultural wellspring of his native Syrian Mesopotamia. Souleyman combines classical Arabic mawwal style vocalization with Syrian dabke (folkloric dance music) and infuses it with Iraqi choubi and some of the bolder elements of Kurdish and Turkish music.

The gritty, high-energy sound that's produced, relying heavily on synthesizers, comes across as almost alien to the untrained ear. Its galloping techno-esque vibe has been described by some as "frenetic", "overdriven", and even "shrill". Various reed and percussion instruments combine to turn his performances into prefect storms of regional musical fusion.

The ancient line and circle dances that erupt at the weddings and parties he plays - a unique cultural expression that goes back thousands of years - provides the final element of the music, without which it would somehow be incomplete. Souleyman presides over these ritualistic and somewhat tribal events like an iconic garage band pied piper of the Mesopotamian unconscious.

One of Souleyman's collaborators, a man named Mahmoud Harbi, is responsible for generating the singer's lyrics. The two often perform together, with Harbi standing behind him while he whispers folk poetry into Souleyman's ear (like a kind of human teleprompter), which the singer then broadcasts. The spontaneous routine is employed to create songs that are relevant to the event and families that host the parties Souleyman plays.

The growing popularity of this musical form has landed Souleyman big gigs at weddings and other functions in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. He's made appearances in the West (where he now has a small following) and has even collaborated on a track with Icelandic singer Bjork - a longtime fan.

Ara Guler's Istanbul

“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.

The Silk Factory

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.

Saudi Vignettes

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 Stamps of Lebanon

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.

Manual of Astronomy

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

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

Wilfred Thesiger, Photographer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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 Egyptian Tin Tin - 1970-1981

The Astrolabe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chogan

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