A Walk through Medieval Cairo

"From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan, to Qutuz the Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords: You should think of what happened to other countries and submit to us....We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows are sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as mountains, our soldiers as numerous as the sand."

These are the words that Hulagu the Mongol sent to the ruler of Cairo, Qutuz the Mamluk, after sacking Damascus. The Mongol horde had swept through Central Asia and Persia, destroyed Baghdad, and threatened the 600 year old Islamic civilization with annihilation.

Qutuz responded by cutting the Mongol emissaries in half, and hanging their bodies from Bab al Zuweila, one of the southern gates of Medieval Cairo. He went on to join forces with Baibars the Turk and defeat the Mongols at the Battle of Ain Jalut in eastern Galilee, saving the Muslim world from utter destruction.

Bab Al Zuweila is one of the remaining gates of Fatimid and Medieval Cairo. It was named after a Berber tribe from the western desert that fought with the rulers of the city. It, along with the walls of the city, were built by Badr Al Jamali in 1092. Two other remaining northern gates are Bab Al Futuh, and Bab Al Nasr.

The latter is inscribed with the customary ´shahadatain´ of Islam (¨There is no God but Allah, and Mohammad is the Messenger of God¨), but it also includes the Shia statement that Ali has the right to succeed the prophet, echoing its Fatimid (i.e. Shia and Ismaili) origin. The Fatimids had also built Al Azhar, an irony given that it is today the most renowned and prestigious centre of Sunni learning.

Today, these remaining gates of medieval Cairo offer the opportunity to experience Cairo at its most enriching. A walk from Bab Al Futuh or Bab Al Nasr to Bab Al Zuweila will take you through a maze of shops and food stalls, and an enviably vast collection of medieval buildings ranging from mosques to madrasas and sabils.

The experience is one of the living sedimentation of history and the surging humanity of Cairo, trading, eating, debating and sleeping through revolutions, epochs and the rise and fall of kings and queens. Here are some images of what one can see on this interesting walk.

The Life and Times of Piri Re'is

Ahmed Muhiddin Piri Re’is (1475-1544) was an Ottoman mariner and mapmaker whose rise to prominence paralleled the ascending fortunes of the empire he served. In addition to becoming an admiral in the Ottoman navy, Re’is also founded Suleiman the Magnificent’s school of mapmaking. He had a huge talent for drawing charts and he created both a costal atlas of the Mediterranean as well as maps of the world.

His most famous works are two world maps created in the early 1500’s, whose fragments survive until this day. One of those maps which depicts Africa, South America and Antarctica has become famous for its surprising mathematical and geographic accuracy. It reveals details, where Antarctica is concerned, which some argue could not have been known at the time because of ice cover. According to Re’is himself, those maps were based on some 20 source charts including Arab, Spanish and Portuguese maps – plus a handful of others which he claimed dated to the time of Alexander the Great.

There has been much debate among academics and armchair scholars as to where those maps of antiquity could have come from. Whatever the answer, the extraordinary accuracy of his charts are cited as evidence for the existence of cartography in antiquity, or even pre-history, and that this knowledge was passed along a line of transmission to him.

Despite his contributions, we still know fairly little about Piri Re’is (a name which roughly translates to ‘Captain Piri’). His ethnic background and origins also remain contentious.

What we do know is that he was the nephew of an illustrious Ottoman admiral, Kamal Re’is, with whom he sailed as a teenager. That important apprenticeship allowed Piri to take part in many sea battles against Ottoman rivals Spain, Genoa and Venice.

Following Kamal’s death in a shipwreck in 1511, Piri abetted the expansionist activities of the Ottoman empire by taking part in the 1516-17 conquest of Egypt, and in the 1522 siege of Rhodes against the Knights of St. John. His knowledge, skills, experiences and naval pedigree made him one of the most respected officers in the Ottoman fleet.

A key moment in his career came when Piri took Suleiman the Magnificent’s Grand Vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, to Cairo in 1524. The Pasha, admiring Reis’ skills, commissioned him to create an atlas of the ports of the Mediterranean. After much toil and collation of knowledge, Piri presented his grand Atlas, called ‘The Book of Navigation’ to the Sultan in 1526.

The above image is from a manuscript copy of that atlas. It depicts the cities and coastlines of Beirut and Tripoli in Lebanon. The two eastern Mediterranean port cities date back to ancient times and had ever since thrived on mercantile trade. Like other maps of the Islamic era, the map looks south in the direction of Mecca (with the arrow indicating North). Beirut, at the top of the image, is depicted lying below Mount Lebanon with its eternal cedars.

After rising to the rank of Admiral in 1547, Piri Re’is spent the remainder of his days sailing the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf, fighting to keep the Portuguese navy at bay. His efforts met with mixed results. As an old man in his eighties, still sailing, he fell out with his political masters and was publicly beheaded in Egypt, at the behest of the despotic governor of Iraq.

Today, a number of warships in the Turkish navy are named after him.

The Blood of Adonis

Legend has it that a young man grew up in the city of Byblos, and became so handsome and prominent that he was called "Adon" (or "lord" in Canaanite) - an appellation the Greeks later hellenized into "Adonis".

Adonis was so loved by two goddesses that another god grew jealous, transformed himself into a wild boar, and gored the beloved young man to death. A river near Byblos was named Adonis after the legend (today it is called the Ibrahim River, see photo below). Its annual spring run-off is reddish which was interpreted as the very blood of Adonis coursing into the sea.

On February 15th of this year, another Lebanese river ran red into the sea - but the source was no legend or metaphor. The Lebanese Ministry of Environment found that a nearby factory had dumped a red dye into the Beirut River causing the frightening scene. That sad river was already deprived of its natural beauty by having its banks paved with concrete, and it has now suffered a second humiliation.

This event is a powerful and stark emblem of how badly things have gone wrong in Lebanon's environment. The flow of red dye may be a singular phenomenon, but Beirut's daily air pollution is three times the norms considered acceptable by the World Health Organization. The seashore cities, such as Sidon, Tyre and Tripoli, pour endless currents of raw sewage into the sea close to shore. The mountains around Beirut are paved with uncontrolled development that can only be described as a kind of urban cancer, and of civilization gone terribly wrong.

Lebanon is infamous for its civil war and troubled politics. In fact, the real threat to the country may be from environmental degradation - air, noise, water, sea, and ground pollution that is slowly but surely destroying the bodies and souls of its citizens. The red river of Beirut may be a dramatic warning, but who will heed it?

Behind these troubles is a more mysterious tale, and the legend of Adonis can enlighten us again. The boar that gored the young man is a symbol of the wild creature within us that thinks of naught but itself. It has uncontrolled appetites and is known variously as the ego, the beast within, or the "Commanding Self" - that knot of motivations created by a lifetime of greed and vanity. In the legend of Adonis, the wild self destroys the beauty that is within each human.

The factory that dumped the dye into the Beirut River, the developers who build randomly in the hills and the corrupt government officials who pocket money intended for building sewage plants suffer from the same uncontrolled appetites as the wild boar that destroys out of jealousy and self-interest. To be sure, some of this is due to the failure of the state in Lebanon, but even that is due to the rapacious motivations of its leaders and politicians.

The story of Adonis goes on to tell us that one of the goddesses who loved him begged the masters of the Underworld to let him "resurrect". And so he did, and was afterward permitted to live in the hills above Byblos (where this entry was written) in summer and spring, and to descend back to the Underworld for the other six months of the year. His drops of blood are also believed to have been transformed into the red anemone flower that carpets Lebanon's fields every spring.

For Lebanon to gain any such recovery, someone, if not many, will have to demonstrate some sincere love for their country, and for the welfare of their children, and rise beyond the narrow self-interest: the wild boar within.

Time is short. The Lebanese would do well to hear the clarion call of the red river.

Nasser in Tahrir

The Mandaeans

For every Mandaean living in Iraq today, there were twelve living there in 2003. What was once a population of 60,000 has dwindled to 5,000 as they fled their ancient homeland for the safer grounds of Australia and America.

What is a Mandaean?

The Middle East is a much more complex and complicated stew of ethnicities than the sound bytes in the news convey. Beyond the Arabs and the Israelis, and the Shiites and the Sunnis are many other groups, including the Chaldaens, Kurds, Alawites, Armenians, Yazidis, Maronites, Sephardic Jews, Ismailis, the Assyrians, the Bahais - and the Mandaeans.

The region is interspersed and enriched by these small and often very old communities that have maintained their way of life for centuries and millennia. Many of them are a testament to the manifold attempts at religious understanding that have sprouted in the Middle East since the dawn of civilization.

The Mandaeans gain their name from the Aramaic word "manda", meaning "to know". They are an ancient religious group whose origins are disputed. Some believe they are a sect that left Judea after the destruction of the Jewish Temple in the 1st century A.D. Others speculate that they came from southern Iraq in the 2nd century. Some insist it was a combination of both sources.

Today, they are often cited as one of the few vestigial "Gnostic" groups - people who pursue understanding of the divine through self development, and, ultimately, a direct knowledge (gnosis) of truth. Hence, the origin of the term "Mandaean", or literally, "The Knowers".

They worship, among other prophets: Adam, Noah and St. John the Baptist. They believe the latter to be the authentic prophet of his time, rather than Jesus. Their rites revolve around 'baptism' and 'ascent' - both of which involve the use of running water for ritual purifications.

The purpose of baptism is the expiation from sin and a communion with light, while ascent is performed when a Mandaean dies to assist his or her soul to rise to the world of light. It involves cleansing with running water, anointing with oil, and placing of a crown of myrtle on the adherent's head. In both cases, the living waters represent the higher world of transcendence and greater reality.

Their theology is described as dualistic, involving good versus evil. But it is more complex than that label. It is well articulated in the following passage:

"[They] believe in a supreme being, without form, who produced spiritual powers and worlds from its own being. They declared that among these emanations are creator gods, including archetypal man, who produces the material Universe. They portray each human soul as a captive, an exile whose home and origin is the supreme Entity to which the soul eventually returns." [1]

Whether the Mandaeans are any more truly and actively gnostic, directly partaking in the great truth of life, is a matter of conjecture. Their disappearance from Iraq and their diaspora remains, nevertheless, a sure and hard reality and a tragic testament to the intolerance that swept that country after the American invasion in 2003. They were persecuted heavily by religious extremists in Iraq, and had to undergo forced conversion.

The suffering of the Mandaeans is a lesson in the dangers of a monopoly on truth, or a belief in the supermacy of one's faith. The inevitable logic of such views is the persecution of others.

Their disappearance from Iraq is also a reflection of the ignorance of the spiritual path called "gnosis", or knowledge of the truth. This critical current of human development, once rare and hidden, may now have to become a universal and common project in order for our species to survive and evolve.

[1] Godhead: The Brain's Big Bang, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, HG Publishing, p. 400.

Cairo's Manial Palace

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

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

“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

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

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

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 around 700,00 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 who disobeyed God and was demoted to rule Hell as Satan, 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 gain 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 colonial-era 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

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.