The Most Important Nowhere on Earth

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

In brackish Arabic laced with Farsi and Hindi, Captain Abdul-Fatah al-Shehi orders a young deckhand to steer his boat along a sharp bend in the coastline. As the wooden dhow veers from the open water into a rocky inlet, al-Shehi grins with satisfaction, the vessel now navigating a course of placid water between two desolate mountains rising sharply from the Persian Gulf.

“Do you have something like this where you are from?” al-Shehi asks in heavily accented English.

On the horn of the Arabian Peninsula, the Musandam region is a place characterized by – of all things - fjords. These coastal mountains, barren and fissured, are the Middle East’s answer to the giants that guard the coasts of Alaska, Norway and Greenland. Though less grandiose than their cousins, Musandam’s fjords are an enchanting feature of an area full of strange and intriguing oddities.

Part of the Sultanate of Oman but separated by a 70km strip of the United Arab to the south, the Musandam Peninsula remains an enclave of nature and traditional Arab culture on the fringes of Dubai’s mega-urbanization project. Here steep mountain-hugging paths, isolated coastal villages, and an endless series of wadis where lone Shihuh tribesman shepherd their small flocks of goat, exist in a centuries-old time-warp.

This rocky headland of the Hajar Mountains also happens to be one of the most strategically important points on the planet: the rugged cape guards the southern side of the Straits of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf narrows between Oman and Iran into a busy thoroughfare that sees 90 per cent of the Gulf’s oil transit to the Indian Ocean and beyond.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the geopolitics of the area, Musandam is one of the quietest and most pristine areas in the Middle East. Its deep blue waters are home to thriving coral reefs, and countless other marine species, including whale sharks and dolphins. And so inaccessible is the peninsula’s mountainous interior that it is believed to hide a small population of the elusive and critically endangered Arabian leopard.

Once a military zone largely off limits to foreigners, the area was opened to travellers in the late 1990s to attract some of the burgeoning tourist activity taking place across the border in the United Arab Emirates. Soon afterward, local businessman such as al-Shehi, emerged from Musandam’s quieter nooks to take advantage of the windfall. “Before the foreigners came, I had only one dhow boat that I used only to catch fish,” says al-Shehi, whose Musandam Sea Adventure Tour Company, is based in Khasab, Musandam’s capital. “Eventually this one boat became four, and now we make many runs a day from the port.”

Nestled in a wadi full of palm groves between the mountains and the sea, Khasab feels entirely cut off from the world. But its small port bustles day and night. As al-Shehi quietly points out to us while we are still moored, the area is teeming with Iranian smugglers – a big part of the local economy. They come to purchase commercial goods in Khasab by day - cigarettes, televisions, stereos, DVD players, refrigerators and almost anything one can find in the town’s market - then carry them across the Gulf to southern Iran in speedboats by night, carefully avoiding detection by the Iranian police boats that wait in ambush on the other side. “It’s a very dangerous job,” al-Shehi says. “Two years ago some smugglers were killed by pirates in Iranian waters - local criminals, hired by the police to stop these people.”




Parked near the speed-boats are the much slower-moving dhows that are owned and manned by Omani sailors. These wooden craft, some of them examples of ancient designs and building practices, constitute one of the oldest continuous seafaring traditions in existence. The waters off the Arabian coast are dotted with these vessels, which carry their cargo as far away as India and Pakistan.

Of course, in recent years, sailors such as al-Shehi have also become tour guides, refurbishing their boats with cushions and light canopies to ferrying travelers comfortably along the Peninsula’s circuitous coastline.

He sees it as a sustainable industry and is keenly aware of the area’s environmental sensitivity.

“It is a business, yes, but we also want travelers to continue to appreciate the beauty here,” he says. “We value nature and are working to protect it – unlike what is happening in other parts of the region.”

His dhow comes to a stop a few hours later at the end of the fjord and moors beside a tiny islet known as Telegraph Island. This, he explains, was once the site of a strategic base where the British Empire’s telegraph lines connected London with the Indian subcontinent.

The coral reef below hosts a riot of colourful fish. The passengers are handed snorkeling gear and given 45 minutes to enjoy the show while al-Shehi prepares a lunch of fish biryani and other local delights prepared beforehand by his wife.

“Maybe these fjords are not as large as the ones you know,” al-Shehi says while heating up the biryani. “But I’m sure you will not find another fjord in the world where you can do what we are doing here right now.”

This article first appeared in The Globe and Mail Travel section on Saturday April 19, 2008.

The Rise and Fall of Alexandria

Review: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria - Birthplace of the Modern World, by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid. Penguin Books, 300 pps.

This book in fact has two titles. The one above, and the one as registered in the Library of Congress, “The Rise and Fall of Alexandria – Birthplace of the Modern Mind”. It is much more the latter: Justin Pollard and Howard Reid do a great job at taking the reader through the intellectual adventure of the city and its contribution to the way moderns think.

Through nineteen chapters, the authors take us through the history of the city by looking at a series of geniuses, inventors and critical figures and what they contributed to the unique development of Alexandria.

The story begins with Alexander the Great, the founder who laid the outline of the city and its harbour with barley flour as birds dived to devour the seeds. He used the meal because of the lack of chalk in Egypt – a practical act that threads through the city’s classical history. Although this is the story of the scientists and philosophers of Alexandria, many of their findings, from the inventions of Archimedes to the geometry of Ptolemy were geared towards the practical and not just the speculative. The city’s history is replete with eccentrics creating odd devices and tricks through such things as steam power, or determined minds seeking to circumnavigate the globe.

Some stand out above the others. Erastothenes, who worked at Alexandria's great library, set out to measure the earth’s circumference. Despite ancient measuring devices, he was only off by 225 miles.

Another savant was Philo, who stated that God is creativity itself. He was a believer in the “Great Chain of Being” and a man who mixed his Jewish heritage with Hellenism as the city itself merged Greek thought with Egyptian cosmology.

The revered Hypatia, teacher, mathematician, and leader of the city’s academic elite in its late Classical period - an era of decline that witnessed battles between its “pagan” roots and its newfound zealotry, Christianity. Hypatia was killed on the floor of the nave of a church by a Christian mob that “set upon her with broken pieces of roof tile, flaying her alive.”

Alexandria was the great cosmopolitan experiment in its time. It housed large, Egyptian, Greek and Jewish communities among many others. Its library provided a cultural hub and its merchant class and location meant it was the New York of its era, being connected to but also beyond the continent it sat upon.

However, another city today also offers a parallel: it has a kind of “library”, is a leading edge cultural hub, has a “Pharos”, a global wonder of architecture, and like ancient Alexandria, serves as an entrepot where many millions are made. That city is Dubai with its “Media City” and its great Burj, soon to be by far the tallest building in the world. Like Alexandria, it may even end up with a battle between a “pagan” or secular culture and the surrounding religious zealotry.

But Dubai has yet to show us its Hypatia, Erastothenes and Philo. Indeed, the book begs the question: where today are those figures that give birth to the future?

Alexandria

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

“I have a wonderful idea for a novel,” wrote a clerk of the British Information Office in Egypt, in a letter to a friend in Big Sur, California in 1944. “A nexus for all news of Greece, side-by-side with a sort of spiritual butcher’s shop with girls on slabs.”

When novelist Lawrence Durrell confided his idea to his lifelong literary confidant and friend Henry Miller, little did he know he would construct a piece-de-resistance from which all references to a city would be forever drawn. His celebrated four-decker novel, The Alexandria Quartet chronicles a city in which every international crossroads today claims some sort of lineage.

A town of auspicious, mythological beginnings, Alexandria would engender herself to every cosmopolitan soul throughout her recorded history. From the moment of her conception in the mind of her namesake, Alexander the Great, in 331 BC, foreigners flocked to her shores. Situated on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast with her back to Africa, the town fixed her gaze northwards towards Europe in a gesture of perpetual invitation.

Within decades of her construction she became lord and locus of world knowledge carrying humanity further in her first six hundred years than in all previous millennia combined. Beyond her initial burst of brilliance Alexandria would continue to radiate her eminence as the influential bride of many a conqueror. From the Dark Ages onwards, she bore witness to waves of successive invaders who parked their ships in her crowded harbours: Byzantines, Arabs, Ottoman Turks, French, and later the British.

Yet it wasn’t until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that this erstwhile cosmopolis saw its latest incarnation as an international entrepot. This was the Alexandria that stoked the Durrellian imagination. That no other writer of modern fiction had before drawn upon the city’s storehouse of anecdotal riches, gave Alexandria yet another new form in which to be realized.

As colonial avatar, Durrell’s Alexandria was a confluence of agendas. It was where British soldiers and bureaucrats refined and executed their imperial designs, and where merchants from across the Mediterranean came to make their fortunes. In her souqs and on her palm-lined esplanades, English, French, Arabs, Italians, Greeks, Armenians and Jews all intermingled in a dizzying frenzy of work and play; churning an economy that thrived on the exchange of gossip and goods.

Day and night, the city seethed with intrigues. It was in its sweltering heat mitigated by a northwest breeze that “Monty” planned and won the war in North Africa. Where writers like E.M. Forester and Constantine Cavafy immortalized a decadent epoch through their respective brands of myth-making. Every word spoken, every move made, during this time, later became a nostalgia to be clung to by her aging denizens.

Yet, this was but one Alexandria. Despite her modern renaissance, this city of pashas and aristocrats was but a mere approximation, an unconscious and fleeting parody of an earlier self. For entombed beneath the concrete of the modern town, were the undisturbed remains of one of the greatest cities the world had ever seen. This, the Alexandria of antiquity, brought together all previous crossroads, setting the standard for every great international city that would follow in her wake.

The Alexandria of the ancients was a civilization unto herself -- an epicenter of human achievement. Within her boundless parameters thrived a people devoted to scholarship, invention, technology, commerce and leisure. Today, this memory echoes as an endless catalogue of peoples, personages and achievements. Her success was predicated upon the wiles of Egyptian priests, Greek aristocrats, Jewish merchants, Persian middlemen, and Phoenician sailors. Visitors from Iberia to India to sub-Saharan Africa came to explore the city’s bi-ways. From the labyrinthine crypts of the city’s great library come to us the calculations of her immortalized savants: the geography of Strabo, the astronomy of Hipparchus, the mathematics of Euclid. Flourishing side-by-side with this rigorous scholarship was a mélange of pseudo-sciences that operated with unprecedented freedom: Gnostics, neo-Platonists, and Hermetic philosophers shared the city’s pulpits with the cults of Mythra, Isis, Christ and Yahweh – to name but a few. Without doubt, Alexandria was an interzone par excellence - a powerhouse of civilization - where every idea, philosophy and project coalesced into perfection.

Yet, the passing of time would exact its inevitable toll. Today Alexandria stands as little more than a maritime suburb of Cairo. Squalid, dusty and ghost-ridden, she exists as a husk of laundry-bannered tenements and European motifs held captive by the hinterland she had always rejected. Upstaged as a seaport, much of the traffic to-and-from the town nowadays enters and exits from the desert to her rear – perhaps the greatest indication of her tragic descent into irrelevance. Even the reincarnation of her legendary library in the architecturally savvy Bibliotheque Alexandrina (a structural epitaph to a bygone moment) inspires the pathos of a past utterly unattainable.

But from Alexandria’s poignant decay comes the glory of a life lived to its fullest. She remains the original exemplar of the international crossroads whose legacy resides in her many progeny in which so many of us today call home. Whether or not she is to be re-born, is left purely to Providence. In the meantime she sleeps, forever exuding the past beneath that same Mediterranean breeze.

Wings Above 'The Empty Quarter'

Over the al-Rub al-Khali, Saudi Arabia

Photo copyright John Bell and John Zada 2008

A View from the Citadel

Aleppo, Syria

Photo copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Middle East Institutions - Nanuchka

Aqabat Esh-Sheikh Rihan

Old City of Jerusalem

Photo copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Making Bread

Bakery, Kabul, Afghanistan


Photo copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Nassim

Reconstructions of skulls of Jews living in Galilee at the time of Jesus show a face a little more robust than the ‘Roger Moore’ look-alikes, the haunted blonde archetype, that signify the Christ for modern Western Man. It is likely that Jesus did indeed look more robust than these fair depictions: the azure eyes are basically not very likely.

Nassim Sayah, a friend of mine from Aalma As-shaab, a village in the south of Lebanon, a stone’s throw from the border with Israel, has a Gallilean’s skull. And, like Jesus his possible ancestor, it is sure that it his eyes speak a kind of truth. They are golden, and twinkle about some hidden secret.

The region he comes from is a rural suburb of Galilee, an area of olives and blue sea between Jerusalem, Acre, Tyre and Sidon. Beyond, to the east, lies distant Damascus, beyond Mount Hermon, "Jabal el-Sheikh" as it is called, for the snow on its peak is reminiscent of the white skull caps that elders here, “sheikhs”, wear.

Nassim survived the 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon by the Israelis, miraculously and happily managing to avoid serving in Israel’s proxy at the time, the South Lebanese Army. This is despite the fact that he’s a sure shot, practiced in years of boar hunting in Aalma, and is an excellent diver among the rocks of the nearby Mediterranean. His family has adapted, somewhat, to the presence of Hizballah who are now in the South.

He’s done some strange things in his life from working at the medical station for the UN peacekeeping Force in the South, to running a restaurant in Stockholm, to being the driver, majordomo and security detail for the Personal Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations for Southern Lebanon.

Nassim is very ready to help anyone who comes across his path. He lifts, picks up, fixes, soothes and caters to the views of a Noah’s Ark of opinions and characters. The smile rarely leaves his face. He does get frustrated occasionally, feels unappreciated, but this does not prevent him from continuing to be of service in every way – a boon to anyone who comes across his way.

He’s not a big believer in religion, he plays trump, and he likes to drink Almaza beer. He befriends all faiths, all colours, and assists anyone in his path. 22 years of war, of shelling, fear, and terror have left him strong, self-reliant, joyful and hating no one.

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

Adrift

The Middle East is adrift as never in my lifetime. There is no political framework that anyone takes seriously, no "Middle East peace process", "Arab Peace Initiative", nor "Road Map", no serious role by a superpower, and no regional "architecture".

Simultaneously, it also appears that no one wants a war. Neither Barak, nor Olmert, nor certainly Ashkenazi, nor Syria, Iran or Hizballah. Not even Hamas want the situation to get out of hand. They all have too much to lose.

Strangely enough, there is an implicit acceptance of a strange kind of conflict management that also ironically involves the creation of minor kinds of conflict that then require - managing. It’s a way for everyone with a gun, a militia or an army to assert themselves, to show that they are relevant, and then back off when matters get too hot.

This scenario also avoids serious compromises and sacrifices, never mind new political direction, because, well, you just can’t really trust those neighbours.

This situation suits some in the region quite fine. One could make the case that low grade conflict and conflict management are indeed quite suitable for the ambitions of parties such as Hizballah, Hamas and Syria, who can grow with it over the long term. This includes certain political dynamics in Israel that use this context to maintain the status quo, including the situation of settlements - the least cost scenario, politically, for Israel in the short term.

Some might even argue that this situation may also inevitably lead to unexpected positive developments:

• Israel cuts a deal with Hamas that effectively leaves the latter running Gaza, and yet still somehow a partner with Abu Mazen in the West Bank.
• Hizballah finally cuts a deal with March 14 over the Cabinet and Presidency under Syrian tutelage.
• The Islamists are effectively introduced into governance - Syria proceeds towards some kind of peace arrangements with Israel because its players are in place in Lebanon and Gaza, and Iran keeps going towards its nuclear goal and with its strategic assets now also in place.

There results a kind of peace and calm that slowly but surely marks the beginning of understanding - no one wants to spoil what they have gained. We can foresee a strange hybrid situation in the West Bank and Jerusalem (Israel, P.A., Hamas, Jordan and internationals all working together to manage the situation?), and even in Gaza (Hamas and Egypt together and quietly, through Egypt, with Israel).

What is wrong with this scenario? Is this not as good as it gets for the current reality? Conflict management followed by practical initiatives may have their virtues. The lessons of the summer war of 2006 appear to have been absorbed.

Or have they?

Can a region adrift avoid the risk that any violent act will not thread the needle (whether it is Hizballah’s revenge for Mughniyeh, or Hamas’s rockets on Sderot, or Israeli attacks in Gaza) and create, once again, the spiral towards all-out war?

No political direction, no clear framework means, at the end of the day, that violent actions can spill over non-existent boundaries into endless horizons and dreams, a world without limits, where the enemy exists no more, that lurks just below this conflict-management in the minds of many Middle Easterners…

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

Border Town

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

Majdal Shams is a Druze village located on the northern side of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Its name in Arabic (derived from Aramaic) translates into "Tower of the Sun" and nestles the slopes of the uber-strategic Jebel al-Sheikh, also known as Mount Hermon. Home to roughly 8,000 inhabitants, the town, along with the rest of the Golan Heights was seized by the Israeli Army from Syria in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.

The town is located along the militarized and heavily mined border that divides Israel from Syria. Although liberated by the Syrians for a handful of days during the October War of 1973, it has remained firmly under Israel control ever since.

The eastern side of Majdal Shams is perched on an incline facing Syria and the verdant valley through which the invisible border runs. When the town was captured by the Israelis in 1967, Majdal Shams was automatically cut-off from neighbouring Druze villages in Syria with which it had very close ties for centuries. Friends and families alike became separated by that invisible line carved into a landscape that had never before known borders.

Since then, under the intense and watchful gaze of Syrian and Israeli army garrisons, as well as an observer force of the United Nations, Druze families have intermittently gathered on either side of the border to communicate with one another across what has come to be known as "the Valley of the Shouts."

Using megaphones and at times screaming at the top of their lungs, Druze families have remained in touch, exchanging news as well as coming together at times to deliver brides for arranged marriages taking place across either side of the frontier.

The below photos were taken on the Syrian side of the border where a group of students, originally from Majdal Shams but now studying in Damascus, came to make contact with their families across the valley.

*

A United Nations peacekeeper watching the students from his tower.

Two other peacekeepers keeping on eye on things from the Syrian side.

One of the students yelling to get the attention of residents across the valley.

Residents of Majdal Shams communicating back.

Curious bystanders watching from the Syrian side.

The Travels of Ibn Battutah

Review: The Travels of Ibn Battutah
Editted by Tim Mackintosh Smith
Macmillan UK, 400 pages.

The Travels of Ibn Battutah recounts a 14th century Moroccan’s wanderings through Europe, Asia and Africa on the eve of the Black Death. Translated in the 20th century by British scholars H.A.R. Gibb and Charles Beckingham, The Travels is a work which until recently was only found in university libraries or by way of the antiquarian book trade.

This abridgement of the Gibb-Beckingham translations by British travel-writer Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the latest refinement of a travel classic which may yet receive the wider audience it deserves.

Born in Tangier in 1304 and raised as an Islamic jurisprudent, Mohammed ibn Battutah left home at the age of 21 intent upon visitting Mecca. He appeared to have little more in mind for himself until meeting early in his travels with the Alexandrian sage, Burhan the Lame. In a pivotal encounter, Burhan prophesies Battutah’s travels to the Far East and requests that he convey his greetings to his spiritual brothers in India and China. “I was amazed at his prediction,” Battutah recalls, “and the idea of going to these countries having been cast into my mind, my wanderings never ceased until I had met these three that he named.”

Battutah's circuitous journey takes him across three continents - tripling the distance covered by his predecessor Marco Polo a generation earlier. After spending roughly ten years exploring the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia, Battutah arrives at the wealthy Sultanate of Delhi in the mid-1330’s.

Here Battutah settles after finding employment as a magistrate and is appointed the emissary and head of a delegation in 1341 bound with gifts for the Emperor of China. But the journey is cut-short by a maritime disaster in which the greater part of the delegation and its gifts are lost. Rather than return to Delhi empty-handed, Battutah pushes eastward on his own, accepting work again as a magistrate on the Maldive Islands, before travelling to Ceylon, Burma, Sumatra, and finally to China. In what may be the climax of his journey, Battutah visits a venerable cave-mystic on the outskirts of Canton, who upon meeting him sniffs his hand and turns to his interpreter and says, “This man is from one end of the world, and we from the other.”

Returning home in 1353 by way of a Middle East smitten by bubonic plague, Battutah would dictate his journeys to “Ibn Juzayy” who completes Battutah’s memoires in 1356 and titles the book, A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and Marvels of Travelling. It is the largest travel book ever written in terms of distances covered.

The immensity of The Travels is due to more than just the sheer scope of its geography. Ibn Battutah’s observations cover a wide range of subjects qualifying it as a work of scholarship as well as a travel journal. His Travels teem with vivid accounts of the ceremonies, benefactions and cruelties of the various royal courts that hosted him.

He catalogues the exploits of long-dead rulers, and proffers descriptions of never-before-seen flora and fauna. His unusual accounts range from those of dog-sledding in the semi-legendary “Land of Darkness” of Siberia, to an encounter in southeast Asia with the formidable princess-warrior Urduja, who would only marry the man who could defeat her in combat.

No less fascinating is Ibn Battutah himself, whose personality is marred by the struggle between the competing impulses towards worldliness and asceticism. Throughout his travels, Battutah seems to inhabit two planes of existence simultaneously: one peopled by yogis, faqirs and dervishes, the other by sultans, court officials and diplomats.

Seldom does Battutah pass-up an opportunity to visit the local sage, and on numerous occasions the author interrupts his official functions by disappearing on lengthy spiritual retreats, of which he gives little account. His love of women is the only thing that keeps rescuing him from the clutches of his self-imposed austerities. Time and again, Battutah takes up with an ever-changing entourage of female slaves and wives. This, however, does not prevent him, as magistrate, from trying to force the topless female inhabitants of the Maldive Islands to cover their breasts.

A longtime resident of Yemen and author of the much-acclaimed Travels with a Tangerine, Tim Mackintosh-Smith distills the essence of Battutah’s journeys from Gibb’s original five-volume text. He excludes some of the lengthier descriptions of the Ummayad Mosque in Damascus, and of the holy sites and rites of Mecca. In their place he retains the complete account of Battutah’s abduction in northern India by brigands in 1342, as well as the author’s tropical sojourn in the Maldives. Smith preserves all of Gibb’s immensely detailed and informative footnotes, which provide an invaluable context to the body of the work.

The Travels of Ibn Battutah offers a remarkable and unparalleled view of the eastern world as it was between the golden age of Islam and the European revival. It is also a colorful autobiography of a little-known caricature whose epitaph could easily derive from his own description of the saint and fellow-traveler, Abduallah al-Masri:

“He journeyed through the Earth, but he never went to China, nor the island of Ceylon, nor the Maghrib, nor al-Andalus, nor the Negrolands, so that I have outdid him by visiting these regions.”

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

A Future History of the Middle East

“They made a desert and called it peace.”

-Tacitus

Jerusalem, 2015

The early morning light of Jerusalem is a divine gift. It shelters the holy city in its hollow.

The early morning light on April 12, 2015 was shattered by a roar in the sky and a great blinding light.

It was 5:00 a.m. As the sun began its rise above the Judean Desert beyond the Mount of Olives, the rocket soared, interrupting the sound of the rising birds. Its roar increased and all who were up at that hour looked up to see its tail of flame - until it stopped flickering orange, and fell directly to earth.

All those awake looked up to witness the event without knowing what it meant. Seconds later, the rocket spoke its tale: a great white flash blinded all onlookers. A blast knocked people to their feet, reverberating into the walls of the Old City and shattering the glass of the parked cars wide open.

All that was fragile, the vegetable stall, the ornate stained glass window, the human body, all of them shattered like a cookie in one’s hand. The crumbs of living beings were strewn about in trees and by curbs - their atomic shadows left on the kitchen walls.

The blast was quick and dirty. The air was sucked back in with the vengeance of a millennium of pain and suffering, all the way back to ground zero somewhere above the Via Dolorosa, in the Muslim Quarter. It took everything with it - walls, vehicles, lampposts and crushed them all together like dust in the bag of a vacuum cleaner.

As the grey cloud of radioactive tinsel settled on the city, no one was steady enough to think about what had just happened. The shock, the impossibility, caused whatever few survivors there were to just walk around and around, not caring where they were going, not knowing why they were still alive. A great suffering came upon the earth, and very many, close and intimate, fell in its wake.

Somewhere between the appearance of a red heifer, an architectural plan for a new Temple, the destruction of Iraq, the massacre of Nablus of 2010, and the chemical-terror fire in Tel Aviv three years after, the decision percolated in the minds of some leaders to send the rocket forward.

It came in the early morning light - that hour of greatest human frailty, of silent and lonely deaths in the hospital while those who cared had finally dozed off, when the darkest and most arid thoughts ran amok in the minds of the sleeping. And it came, in the push of a button, a "why not?" in the minds of leaders who understood well the consequences: total annihilation, the obliteration of the region in a series of nuclear spasms and an encroaching chemical soup. A mass suicide implicitly agreed to by the hundreds of millions living in the Middle East, committed by their leaders, after the pain and confusion of over sixty years of suffering, oppression and fear.

Jerusalem, the sacrificial lamb for Jew and Arab, would be no more. By noon that day, April 12, 2015, there would not be much left of the rest of the Middle East: Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad, Aleppo, Haifa, Tel Aviv – all destroyed in a frenzied exchange of weapons of mass destruction.

A few corners of the Ottoman wall of the Old City were left standing against all odds. The graves on Mount Scopus were engraved into the ground by the blast, and the creaking tower of the Holy Sepulchre was still hanging against gravity by a concrete thread. Mount Moriah remained, the Dome of the Rock blasted out of its octagonal foundation, its blue tiles strewn about the valleys around the city, including Ga-Hinnom, the valley of Hinnom, a word that signifies "Hell" in Arabic and Hebrew. The small bones of children now lay buried besides the old corpses. The grey dust of the living dead: the citizens of modern Jerusalem, Jew, Arab, Armenian and pilgrim, annihilated by a rocket from distant quarters. The messenger of a battle gone wrong, of men whose priorities had become the function of their fears.

The City on the Hill would be remembered in lore and legend. Its destroyers, dark pawns of a strange evil that visited man in the early 21st century, and its old occupiers and past courtiers, greedy nations who valued their tribal ways more than the ways of men - these now live on in the children growing up around the cypresses and Mediterranean oaks of the few lands untouched by the Great Cataclysm.

Text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Middle East Institutions - Le Chef

Gouraud Street, Gemayze, Beirut, 961 1 446769 - 961 1 445373

In Arabian Nights

Review: In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams
By Tahir Shah, 388 Pages. Bantam Books

Just over a year ago British travel writer Tahir Shah released his bestselling book The Caliph’s House in which he recounts a year spent with his family in a Casablanca shantytown renovating an old Moroccan estate attended to by a host of disruptive servants. In his latest travelogue, In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams, Shah continues the story, but makes as his focus the timeless oral traditions of the North African kingdom.

Inspired by one of his servants who rebukes him for not really knowing Morocco and by his coffee-shop acquaintances who suggest that he ameliorate this situation by seeking out the raconteurs of Morocco’s traditional tales, Shah embarks on a personal quest to uncover and then unlock the heritage of storytelling that lies at the soul of Moroccan society and culture.

By following a string of mysterious leads, Shah ventures forth from his newly adopted Casablanca and into the Moroccan hinterland in search of wizened bards and their yarns, encountering a strange concoction of characters who help him in his quest to “find the story in his heart.” The author’s own upbringing in this same tradition of storytelling by way of his father, the late Afghan writer and savant, Idries Shah, infuses his quest with deeper meaning and provides a wider context to which the younger Shah places his discoveries.

The result is an interesting, if highly unusual, travelogue of interwoven narratives combining anecdote, personal reminiscences, cross-cultural observations, and traditional tales, whose warp and weft resemble the story within a story format of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Unlike some other travel books which overload their readers with daring escapades, and expositions of the ultra-bizarre, In Arabian Nights avoids such obvious showmanship. Demonstrating that “real travel is not about the highlights with which you dazzle your friends once you’re home” Shah imbibes his readers, as though through osmosis, with the subtle but surreal nuances of life deep within the bosom of Morocco.

The inquisitive reader is rewarded with direct, almost voyeuristic, access into the complex human relationships and events unfolding behind the walls of Dar Khalifa or “The Caliph’s House” - the name of Shah’s renovated estate.

Here pitched battles unfold between Shah’s two female nannies vying for the attention of his children; his gardener mysteriously quits out of shame for having been caught staring at one of Shah’s female workers; and his entire staff of caretakers become obsessed with the possibility that Dar Khalifa is possessed by jinn - troublesome spirit-beings said to inhabit the recesses of abandoned places.

More central to Shah’s journey are his discoveries, made while trawling the souqs and medinas of Fes and Marrakesh, about the role of traditional storytelling in the Middle East as a method of passing down knowledge.

In contrast to the predominant view in the West that stories and tales exist at best only to entertain and stir the imaginations of children, Shah tells us that stories are seen in the East as being for everyone, embodying important truths and containing narrative patterns designed to nurture wisdom and cultivate the human mind. Drawing upon the verbiage of the Sufi tradition of which his father was a part, Shah asserts that such stories act as “a kind of key, a catalyst, a device to help humanity think in a certain way, to help us wake up from the sleep” in which humankind finds itself.

This same oral storytelling tradition, Shah tells us, has entirely disappeared in the West. This is largely owing to what the author claims is our current obsession with book learning. It is a particularly poignant indictment. Believing that knowledge and wisdom come only with volume, the people of the western world, he tells us, simply read too many books, and are constantly demanding new material. “Much of the time it’s the same old stuff packaged in a fresh way” Shah says. “The result is wordage for the sake of wordage.” This is in contrast, the author claims, to the situation in the East, whose denizens value the same narratives that have been in circulation for millennia and which have been “tried and tested” as vessels of knowledge.

In Arabian Nights reads like a fairy tale, moving between moments of sobering reality and a surrealism generated from an unusual mix of dream sequences, fictional storytelling, and metaphysics. There is little here for those readers seeking the outlandish characters and drug-induced exploits of the expatriate Morocco of Paul Bowles and William Burroughs, although Shah does throw in one such character for good measure -- an eccentric Italian book collector in Tangier obsessed with phalluses and who sells Shah the complete first edition of Burton’s translation of The Arabian Nights.

Shah’s chronicle at first appears puerile and the tales which he collects and recounts, sometimes in succession, come across as slightly overwhelming and oppressive. But as the author implies throughout the book, this reaction stems from our rejection of such modes of communication inculcated by a culture bereft of the knowledge of what a story can actually do.

Although Shah does not explicitly reveal what these stories in fact do to those who read them, by the end of the book the yarns have somehow seeped into you.

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

Not the Iran We Imagine

Review: Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran

By Jason Elliot

416 pages. Picador.

Travel writing may often entertain and sometimes astonish, but seldom does it take the reader past a constellation of anecdotal experiences into the true essence of a place beyond all preconception.

Jason Elliot’s Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran takes aim at the blunting assumptions and false perceptions of this little understood country, slipping past the usual suspects of our myopic obsession with the Islamic Republic – mullahs, ayatollahs, and their agitated underlings – and into the other rarified Iran, which almost never sees the light of day in the mainstream media.

Coming several years after his New York Times’ bestselling travelogue An Unexpected Light about his journeys in Afghanistan, Elliot’s second book seamlessly collates a series of trips to Iran made over a period of three years and which follows faintly in the footsteps of Robert Byron's 1930s travel classic, The Road to Oxiana.

Using the congested megalopolis of Tehran as an embarkation point and periodic way-station, Elliot goes forth in all directions to uncover a complex mosaic of landscapes, characters and architecture that underscores Iran's palpable soul. Elliot’s travelogue however goes further than Byron’s in its intent to uncover a hidden world so vastly different from that which most people think they can see: both in the concealed reality of a country and its people, and in its heritage of art and architecture.

At every step of his journey Elliot is confronted by situations and experiences that shatter his own admitted preconceptions of Iranian life and culture. Elliot’s expectations of a trip plagued by hostility and imminent threat are again and again dispelled by the openness, hospitality, and humour of his forthcoming and generous hosts. Reader's expecting a travelogue peppered with the grating disruptions of government minders and suspicious locals will find instead an account of a journey as free and unopposed as any imaginable. Elliot finds that he has unfettered access to the remotest corners of the country.

At every turn of the page, the anticipated barbarisms of a country thought to be foaming at the mouth give way to moments of normality, even civility: an Iranian Interior Ministry official repeatedly telling an incredulous Elliot that he is free to travel anywhere in Iran that he wants; the wife of a friend taking Elliot on a car-tour of the capital; travels on horseback through forested Elburz mountain villages where people live simple and idyllic lives; a martyrdom celebration in Kashan which is peaceful and friendly and free of self-immolation. Here is the Iran that constantly flies beneath the radar of the foreign correspondents and policy analysts. Elliot pulls aside the curtain to show the Wizard in all of his benevolent glory.

The way in which Elliot weaves his tale leaves the reader with the experience of having his or her own assumptions trounced along with the author’s. In a memorable instance Elliot and an Iranian friend watch a mob of violent protesters clash with police on a television newscast. We along with Elliot assume the scene to be taking place in Tehran and feel a slight bit of embarrassment for Elliot’s host. That is, until we discover that the child of Elliot’s friend has just asked his father in Farsi “whether everywhere in England is always as bad as that, or just that place called Brad-ford.”

Elliot’s subsequent meeting on a plane with an Iranian forensic pathologist, returning with his wife to Tehran from a conference in Stockholm sums up poignantly the morass of misunderstanding in which West today finds itself vis-a-vis Eastern cultures. Bewildered and appalled by the strange comments and questions that the pathologist and his wife received from their European colleagues regarding fictional barbaric medical practices in Iran, the doctor asks Elliot in a fit of desperation, “Where is the Iran these people imagine?”

More than highlighting our own misperceptions through his personal encounters with everyday Iranians, Elliot embarks on a journey-within-a-journey to expose and unlock one of the least appreciated of Iran’s contributions to human thought and expression – it’s heritage of Islamic art and architecture. Here Elliot continues the work begun, but left unfinished, by Byron.

According to Elliot, Islamic art has been misunderstood and misconstrued by western academics and historians. The flowery motifs, abstract geometry and ornate calligraphy which typify the interior and exterior designs of many of Iran’s historical and religious buildings - such as those at Isfahan, Shiraz, Kerman and Mashhad - are considered by the West to be, at best, aesthetically appealing expressions of exoticism devoid of any real meaning or symbolism. For the academic who can only see through academic eyes, it is an aesthetic that reflected once former religious and political mores, and which was designed to be pretty and clever – but nothing more.

Elliot suggests on the contrary that much Islamic art was designed to express a hidden reality, an ineffable cosmic order. The perfection of symmetry, rhythm and beauty seen in much of Iranian architecture was intended in part to act upon the human mind, guiding the observer’s perception non-linearly and non-rationally towards the divine – a destination where neither logic nor reason may arrive on its own. Islamic art, the author suggests, should be seen as the earthly manifestation, the terrestrial mirror-image, of the unseen world of the beyond. And hence we have the title of Elliot’s book.

Much like the culture he is describing, Elliot’s travelogue is both subtle and powerful. His prose is magnificent and human, flowing with candor and humility. He includes just the right mix of politics and history, anecdote and personal musings to keep the narrative constantly fresh and moving. Intensity of experience is interspersed with the periodic comic relief of cab drivers and hotel owners pitting their wits against Elliot in their attempts to constantly overcharge him.

And despite the generally positive take on Iranian society and culture, we are still reminded of the dark brooding forces of irrationality that lurk in the background, by way of a few marginal characters that cross Elliot’s path: including a thuggish cleric and his armed-to-the-teeth bodyguards at the horse races in Gombad-e-Qabus, and a brutish police checkpoint official who manhandles the author’s driver on a rural highway south of Isfahan.

The lack of relevance that Elliot assigns these people is one of the true hallmarks of Mirrors of the Unseen. Pay them little heed, Elliot suggests. It is part of the implicit message directed towards western civilization, it's policymakers and leaders, who, from their continued misperceptions seem to be plotting yet another course of confrontation with a country which they think they know by way of their convoluted imaginings.

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

Sheikh Abbad Hill

In the year 2000, I was working with the United Nations as the political advisor to the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Representative for southern Lebanon. Among our problems was a special spot on the Lebanese-Israeli border. There stands there a hill with a panoramic view of the Israeli panhandle and Lebanon’s rolling southern hill.

The Muslims call the site ‘Sheikh Abbad” after the Sufi saint they believe is buried in a tomb located at the top of the hill. According to tradition, he lived as a hermit in the area about 500 years ago and he had religious followers, makers of mattresses, who sold their goods near the Sea of Galilee.

The Israelis, on the other hand, believe Rabbi Ashi, a Jewish sage, is interred on the same spot. Rabbi Ashi lived about 1,600 years ago and assembled the Babylonian Talmud, an interpretation of Jewish oral law.

In 1978, Israel occupied southern Lebanon and also gained control of Sheikh Abbad hill. Twenty two years later, Israel withdrew from Lebanon and the UN was left with the dubious responsibility of drawing a line of withdrawal between Lebanon and Israel.

The UN cartographers used sophisticated GPS systems to mirror the armistice line that existed between British Mandate Palestine and French Mandate Lebanon in the early 20th century. This ‘Blue Line’ that the UN drew between Israel and Lebanon was accurate within metres… and happened to pass right through the small tomb (1 x 2 metres) on Sheikh Abbad Hill. This effectively left the tomb one-half in Lebanon, one-half in Israel. The photos included here are from the Lebanese side of the border.

After the withdrawal, Hizballah, the Lebanese Shiite group that had fought the Israeli occupation, sent busloads of its followers to the Lebanese side of the tomb to visit the site of the Sufi saint, but also to harass the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the tomb. Young Lebanese who detest the Israelis, would come and spit and throw rocks at them. Once, two teenagers lobbed firecrackers at the young Israelis hunkered down with M-16s on their side of the tomb and occasionally the soldiers would get angry enough to fire at their Lebanese harassers - one boy was shot in the leg due to his misbehaviour.

Matters got bad enough that the Israelis finally put up a fence over and around the tomb, physically cutting it in half. Israel had also put up a plaque in Hebrew to commemorate the presence of Rabbi Ashi, but this was also cut in half by the Blue Line and the new fence. The Lebanese scratched out the Hebrew words left on their territory.

No one knows who, if anyone, lies in the tomb. It’s an old legend. As one clever diplomat said, “Knowing the Middle East, it’s probably a Christian monk in there…”.

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

Cedars

The Cedars of Lebanon stand solitary on a mountain top. What little remains of these majestic trees is a silent testament to the health, or lack of it, of Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East.

The Cedars are the most powerful symbol of Lebanon, with the Lebanese flag sporting an image of one of the remaining trees. They have lasted millennia. They stand witness to the dozens of armies that marched up and down the coast of Lebanon, to and from battle, and to the tenacity of Phoenicians, Canaanites and Maronites that conquered the mountains to harvest the Cedar wood.

They stand in the lore of the Middle East: in the wood of the Solar Boat buried beside the Great Pyramid of Giza, in the cedar chest that Osiris was sealed in to die, and in the boats that plied the Mediterranean in search of trade, plunder and treasure. Yet, what stands now is a small grove, some dozens of trees, where once there were mountainsides. The disappearance of the Cedars of Lebanon is due to deforestation and soil erosion - a classic tale of humans blindly using up their resources for short-term interest.

Some of the trees in the Cedar grove above the village of Bsharre are now also ill. They have a disease that requires their pruning and a diminishing of their majesty and longevity. The Cedars are a symbol of where the Middle East has come to: a state of disregard for nature, its resources, and above all for humans' place in the great play. The mountains above Beirut are now paved with concrete.

That city, despite flashes of architectural beauty, suffers from rampant grey construction, the fumes of diesel and automotive congestion, and a seaside littered with garbage. Cairo, Damascus, Alexandria all suffer the same fate. Demographics are a key driver of this unfortunate circumstance. Large populations blindly living out technological and industrial habits will mean pollution and concrete - a new kind of deforestation.

There are activists who are attempting to reclaim the Lebanese mountains. Their efforts are commendable and indeed one can see the dark saplings on the slopes of Jaj or the Chouf in the Lebanese mountains. However, their efforts must expand in scope and kind - it is not enough to replant hundreds of trees. Hundred of thousands must be sown, and this effort must also be reflected in the clean-up state of cities and politics.

The Cedars are today a symbol of past glory, but they are also a symbol of deadwood, reflecting the essential need for renewal. The road ahead for the Middle East, like any society, can only be in renewal. This can take place in projects of reforestation, or a clean-up of the environment, or in urban renewal - not just through words, but also through activities requiring human planning, devotion of time, money and in resources which are currently allocated to less productive activities: political infighting and corruption, ideological wishes, or a comforting sense of victimization.

The latter produce barren mountains and the bare remnants of a forest - an ailing grove whose majesty is fading fast. The former is an act that reflects the imperatives of nature: renew or die. Admission of this state of affairs may be harsh, and a sting to pride, but it is a rule of nature to renew for the sake of one's children - for survival.

This rule applies to people's relationship to their environment, as well as to their religion, politics and their relation with their neighbour. This rule stands not only for Arab societies but for the Arab-Israeli conflict as well. The most famous appointment of the woods of the Cedars of Lebanon was with Solomon's Temple.

The hard and scented cedar beams were the basis of that spiritual monument. The memory of that place, the Temple Mount, is now the symbol of the toughest conflict between peoples on this planet.

The wood of the Temple building has rotted away, but the spirit behind it - a relationship with the divine that means inclusion and not intolerance - must be now renewed, and renewed again - or the region will perish as the old wood has.

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