Oriental Rugs

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

(from collection of Robert Bell)

The Shepheard's Hotel

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

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

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

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

Wadi Qadisha

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Palestine Youth Orchestra - "Celebrating Jerusalem"

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

Manuscript

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

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

Persian Poets: Omar Khayyam

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

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

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

Mardin

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

The Coast

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

(Photograph by Gabriel Reyes)

Mike Molloy: Watercolours of the Middle East

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

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

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

The Master Musicians of Jajouka - Summer Tour 2008

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

View a video clip of the group performing live.

Bozburun

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

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Middle East Institutions - Restaurant Mounir

Camille Chamoun Blvd, New Roumieh Road,

Broummana, Tel.: (04) 873900

http://www.mounirs.com

The Problem

Photo copyright Tim Paul 2008

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

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

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

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

We therefore postulate the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

The Great Arab Conquests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All text in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell

View from the Krak

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

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Reservoir Dogs

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

Propaganda

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

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

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

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

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

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

Souq Merchant

Baghdad, Iraq

Photo in this post copyright John Zada and John Bell 2008

Ancient Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tunnel Vision

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Middle East Institutions - Abou Shakra

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

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

The main speciality here is kebabs, with prices calculated per kilo of meat and a host of salads and dips to choose from. Pigeon, chicken and specialty beef dishes are also on the menu. The Egyptian desserts served here are heavenly, with top honours going to the Om Ali (flakey dough with raisins and nuts soaked in sugar and milk).

Bitter Lemons

Review: Bitter Lemons, By Lawrence Durrell, Marlow and Company, 1957, 256 pp.

In March 1953, author Lawrence Durrell, penning a letter to his friend and colleague, Henry Miller, describes his newly adopted island of Cyprus as "...a piece of Asia Minor washed out to sea - not Greece. It's the Middle East - taste of Turkey and Egypt."

In another letter two months later, he writes nearly the same thing: "...I think it is a weird and rather malefic sort of island - not at all like Greek islands. Palm trees, camels, the smell of Syria. It is really a piece of Anatolia lopped off."

Bitter Lemons is a travelogue recounting the years Durrell spends in what was then an undivided Cyprus, on the eve of the conflict that would later divide the island. Writing from the perspective of an English-language instructor at a Greek elementary school, and then later as the Press Officer at the British High Commission in Nicosia, Durrell chronicles the rise of the Greek Cypriot independence movement and its impact on the lives of those around him. Readers with an interest in Cypriot life and culture, the Cyprus conflict, travel writing, Mediterranean life, or just the writing of Lawrence Durrell, would find Bitter Lemons an interesting read.

The first part of the book details Durrell's purchase and renovation of a small Turkish house in Bellapaix. The scene in which his newly acquired Turkish friend, a cunning and well-respected middle-man, wheels-and-deals on his behalf for the house stands as perhaps one of the most poignantly comedic bargaining scenes in all of literature. We later watch as Durrell, slowly and with difficulty, assimilates into village life, trying to figure his way through Cypriot Greek and Turkish cultures.

Interesting characters, landscapes, political intrigues, and the start of the crisis that would eventually engulf the island, fill the book's second half.

Bitter Lemons is an especially interesting book for those of us who never knew Cyprus before its division, and who would like to get a preview of how the island might look and feel in the aftermath of its inevitable reunification.

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

Middle East Institutions - The Acropole Hotel

Zubeir Pacha Street, Khartoum, Sudan

Tel. +249 1 8377 2860

Fax. +249 1 8377 0898

"Native Cheikh"

A turn-of-the-century Egyptian postcard

Abdel Hadi Halo and the El-Gusto Orchestra of Algiers

In a concert hall down by the old port in Marseilles, a rabbi wearing a suit, Phillipe Darmon, walks on stage and launches into an unaccompanied song. Beside him stands another man; they trade verses before singing together. So far, so ordinary: except for the fact that the man at the rabbi's side is Cheikh Saidi Benyoucef, a Muslim imam.

Read the rest of The Guardian review here..

(No longer) Stuck in Gaza

This is Rania Kharma. She is thirty four, attractive and intelligent. She has ambitions, bills to pay, and worries that preoccupy her. She is not so different than many other people I know: Canadians in Toronto, Spanish in Madrid, or Israelis in Tel Aviv.

But, she's stuck in Gaza.

Rania came back voluntarily to Gaza from Ramallah last September. I made some fainthearted attempts to dissuade her but her attachment to Gaza was stronger than reason. She made her way back because, understandably enough, she wanted to be where she felt she belonged.

Now, she cannot leave. Hamas and Islamic Jihad thrust rockets at southern Israel, the Israeli army and air force strike back – the Middle East game of torture goes on. The gates in and out of Gaza are shut. Another day in the life of Rania since mid-September.

She has recently written a letter to Ehud Barak stating that she is no security risk to Israel.

Rania wishes to leave Gaza via Egypt or Israel – the only two roads – to make her way somewhere else to start a new life and have ambitions, bills to pay, and normal everyday worries like so many other people I know.

*

On November 7, 2008, Rania managed to get out of Gaza through the Egyptian border.

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

Beyond Yemen's Villanous Veneer

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

“So, this is your first time with us!” exclaimed Abdulrahman al-Anesi with a dose of feigned surprise. “May Allah bring you back to us again and again!”

Al-Anesi, my airport pickup, whose jewel-bedecked jambaya dagger sat at his midsection like a monstrous scimitar waiting to be unsheathed, was full of laughter teeming with mirth and colourful teeth. Nothing it seemed could trouble him that morning. Neither the frenzied traffic, nor my questions about the political demonstration that we passed outside the heavily guarded Ministry of Interior building.

“What? This? No, no. This is nothing,” he blurted with a smile. “Out-of-towners here to make their usual complaints.”

But as we coasted further along the dusty streets of Yemen’s sprawling capital Sana’a, past a bus depot brimming with every manner of ragtag character, I could not help but feel a slight bit of trepidation. After all, wasn’t Yemen supposed to be the seedy underbelly of Middle Eastern terror? An up-and-coming member of the League of Failed States? A place whose chaotic tribalism and medieval disposition make it utterly uncontrollable?

Stories about Yemen’s kidnapped tourists, whisked away to an impenetrable alpine wilderness and fed a mixed fare of chivalrous hospitality and snake-meat, have by now become the stuff of legend. Yet, beneath the veneer of sensationalism and the vilifying epithets of a nation caught perpetually in the headlines, lies a gem of a country waiting to reward the intrepid traveller.

Containing natural splendours, jaw-dropping architecture, and an intact traditional culture, Yemen is without a doubt one of the last great frontiers of adventure travel in the world. The perfectly preserved Old City of Sana’a, the jewel in Yemen’s cultural crown and a UNECSO World Heritage Site, is a veritable time machine that transports visitors into the past. Its fairytale book metropolis teems with ancient high-rise buildings made of stone and brick, many of which date back hundreds of years.

It is true that travellers must exercise both caution and common sense when planning a trip to Yemen. A largely unreported conflict in the Sada region in the north of the country continues to rage unabated, while random attacks against foreigners - as rare as they remain – have and still do occur. Yemen’s growingly restive and tribally politicized population has caused the Yemeni government to institute measures to protect tourists. Overland travel through, and to the more dicey areas of the country require official permits from the Ministry of Tourism which are often granted or withheld on a whim. Travel with registered tour guides, and sometimes an armed retinue of Kalashnikov-wielding Bedouin, has become in many cases mandatory.

As a result of the bad press and negative stereotypes, Yemen sees only a handful of travelers every year. These are mostly Europeans in search of exoticism and adventure, and westerners enrolled in the country’s well-known Arabic-language programs centered in Sana’a. In other areas of the country, including the Africanized Red Sea Coast and the Bedouin-populated rural east, the absence of foreigners can be shockingly conspicuous.

For travelers who are compelled to see Yemen but who lack the requisite appetite for risk-taking and the harried logistics of movement between unknowns, Yemen’s capital Sana’a, especially its old city, remains the easiest and most accessible option.




Comprising only a part of the sprawl that is becoming greater Sana’a, the old city is a universe unto itself. Enclosed within the old city walls, sections of which remain standing, are a dizzying maze of pedestrian thoroughfares and narrow alleyways. Here one finds Sana’a’s ornately decorated high-rise homes, souqs selling anything and everything imaginable, and expansive gardens flanking large mosques that were once used as communal growing areas.

One can get lost for days exploring the endless matrices of streets, byways and cul-de-sacs that snake through the various districts of the old town. During the day, Old Sana’a’s wider thoroughfares bustle with life as residents of this open-air museum flock in droves to shop, go to the mosque, socialize, and to conduct their daily business.

At the epicenter of the old town is the Souq al-Milh, the city’s spice market. Here black-clad women arrive in the morning to fill-up on grains, seasonings, and sticky-dates. Directly behind, and within earshot of the souq, scenes of pandemonium unfold as groups of men (wearing the traditional northern Yemeni attire of a Western suite jacket over a jalabiya) throng a series of tea stalls, kabab vendours, and cooking kitchens. By noontime, the area is overrun with every male in the old city coming to eat at one of Sana’a’s two lunchtime institutions that stand facing one another: Houmayda Salta and al-Farran. Both restaurants, fierce competitors, specialize in the Yemeni national dish, Salta – a bubbling meat and vegetable stew seasoned with fenugreek and cooked over blazing gas fires stoked with industrial air-blowers.

A few steps around the corner and the scene transforms yet again as you walk into the narrow and dingy alleyway which is the Souq al-Khat. Here men and boys line the floor of the alleyway on both sides, selling little bushels of the Yemeni plant, khat, which is chewed daily throughout Yemen as a stimulant. In the mornings and early afternoons Sana’a’s men come to barter with the sellers who receive a daily shipment of khat leaves from different parts of Yemen. The strength and price of the khat varies depending on the soil conditions of the region it is grown in, and the care given to growing it. Prices start from 400-500 Yemeni riyals (around $2 dollars) for the weakest variety typically grown around Sana’a, to a few thousand riyals (upwards of $10 or more) for the stronger variety coming from as far afield as Hajja, Ibb and Taiz.

“You never know what types of khat you will find here from day-to-day,” says Abdul Wadud al-Abbasi, manager of the Hotel Dawood and a frequent visitor to the souq. “There has been no rain in the last few months and so the quality of the khat has now gone down. This is not a problem for the tourists who don’t know the difference. But for us Yemenis, it is another story,” al-Abassi adds with a grin.

Wandering away from the hubbub of the central market into the narrower alleyways of the old city, one finds a different Sana’a. Here in the late afternoons the mood is quieter, the light softer. Adult traffic has begun to taper off, giving way to children who are out spinning wooden tops, playing marbles, or kicking around soccer balls made of cellophane wrap.

Seven-stories above, on the roof of the Burj al-Salam Hotel, a four-star lodging renovated from an old apartment building, the mood is much the same. Here one can imbibe the vistas and medieval ambience of old Sana’a at the apex of its charm - by sunset. At this time of day the city’s apartment blocks come into robust view, their white gypsum motifs glowing in the warm sunlight, forming a skyline that subsumes the whole of Sana’a. As the sun dips behind the Haraz Mountains and the wind kicks up, the evening call-to-prayer rings out, reverberating simultaneously from a hundred different points across the city, creating a phantom eeriness that transports the visitor back eons in time.

If asked, one would be hard-pressed to find a more entrancing and unforgettable scene in this corner of the world - one which unfolds repeatedly, but which sadly takes a back seat to the other associations of Yemen that keep this magical country well off the beaten path.

This article first appeared in "The National" on May 8, 2008

The Top of the World

The view from the ascending 'Burj Dubai', in the UAE

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.