Monthly Archives: June 2007

Fat Chance Fatwas

Egypt, Islam and Christianity, Islamic Law, Journalism and Media

Breastmilk and urine: two unlikely bodily fluids to be news fit to print in the New York Times. But an article by Michael Slackman in Tuesday’s edition pours it on, the kind of hook that tabloids feed on, and then it gets milked for less than it is worth. Here is the hook at the front:

First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.

Continue reading Fat Chance Fatwas →

Laughter that Lasts 12 Centuries

Ethics, Humor and Satire, Literature

The honor of being the greatest writer in Arabic prose, at least in the eyes of numerous Arab literati for the last millennium, belongs to the Iraqi Abu ‘Uthman ‘Amr ibn Bahr al-Jahiz. Born in Basra in 776 C.E., a full millennium before our own nation was founded, Jahiz lived most of his life between the recently founded Baghdad and Samarra. He is the acknowledged master of Arabic adab literature, an eclectic form both entertaining and instructive. The elegance of his writing is matched by the grounding of his reflections on the ordinary and the lowest parts of the social order.

One of his most entertaining works that survives is a satirical look at misers and the nature of avarice. In a culture that idealized hospitality from the poor Bedouin’s goat-hair tent to the sumptuous silk cushions of the sultan’s palace, this is a telling admission that not everyone abides by the social norms. Continue reading Laughter that Lasts 12 Centuries →

The Butler Did it in Hebron

Bible and Holy Land, Orientalist Art, Palestine, Travel

In the late 1890s a certain Elizabeth Butler, accompanying her British military husband, made one of those Protestant-style visits to Anglican nirvana, the Holy Land made somewhat less holy for her at the time by Ottoman Turkish troops. “The time of year chosen by my husband for our visit was one in which no religious festivals were being celebrated, so that we should be spared the sight of that distressing warring of creeds that one regrets at Jerusalem more than anywhere else,” she notes in the preface to her Letters from the Holy Land. Better to go in the off season, it seems, than face the reality of the individual Palestinian Arabs and Jews cluttering the biblical landscape. Her letters, written to her mother “lay no claim to literary worth,” as she humbly and astutely admits. The chief value of the work is, in her own ranking, her 16 color sketches, mostly pastoral pastiche, with the exception of an anonymous Arab attendant, shown here. Continue reading The Butler Did it in Hebron →

Always a Kurd

Iran, Travel

In his post-World War II visit to the Kurdish highlands of Iran, Justice William O. Douglas was clearly thrilled by the resilience of his hosts in the face of threatened Soviet dominance. His comments on the Kurds here are worth remembering more than half a century of political change later:

I learned three things from my visit among the Kurds. ‘First’: Kurdish nationalism is in the marrow of these tribesmen – deeper than any creed or dogma. They want a state of their own, one in which they have a degree of self-government. But their basic loyalty is to Persia. There it will remain. They have pride in the tradition that they are Medes. They have pride in their historic role – border patrol. Neither their misery and poverty nor Communist propaganda have altered those articles of their faith. Continue reading Always a Kurd →

Wavell in Arabia: Face to Face with a Pasha

Travel, Yemen


[Illustration, Guests in Turkey, from John Clark Ridpath, Ridpath’s History of the World (Cincinnati: The Jones Brothers Publishing Company, 1899), vol IV.]

[Note: Arthur John Byng Wavell (1882-1916) was a British soldier and adventurer who traveled in disguise to Mecca in 1908 and went on to Yemen in 1911 to witness fighting between the Zaydi imam’s troops and the Ottoman Turks. This account was originally published in 1912.]

The hour was late and the smoking room almost deserted when the conversation about to be reported took place. My companion the Pasha was a tall, heavy man, on whose sunburned and lined countenance a long life in the open air and many hard-fought campaigns in tropical countries had left their traces. He had been a field marshal once, but that was in the days of Abdul Hamid, when as some one said after the American civil war, “you could not spit out the window without hitting a major-general.” It was to this latter rank that the reshuffle which followed hard on the constitution had reduced him… Continue reading Wavell in Arabia: Face to Face with a Pasha →

A Dialogue With Allah

Anthropology/Sociology, Bahrain, Islamic Rituals, Photography


Figure 1: Mosque, women and palm tree.

By el-Sayed el-Aswad

Folk culture provides members of the society with living models in the form of iconic images, key symbols, and root metaphors that enable them to express themselves, and the other as well. Sanctity or religious meaning is bestowed on an object or place for the reason that a religiously significant event (a miracle, wonder or blessing) is associated with it.

At an art exhibition at the College of Art, Bahrain University last year, 2006, I was surprised to see very beautiful and stunning pictures in which a group of women were climbing palm trees (figure 2-5). Recognizing the cultural significance of the palm tree in Arab societies, I decided to interview Waheeda Malullah (figure 6), the artist whose photos show that the climbing of palm trees is not just aimed at the collection of dates commonly consumed in the Arab Gulf countries, but rather at the engagement in spiritual communication with invisible spheres of the cosmos and the achievement of blessing or grace (baraka), among other objectives. Continue reading A Dialogue With Allah →

Six Biblical Days of War

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Bible and Holy Land, Israel, Palestine

Quick, here’s a trivia question. How long did it take God to create the world, according to the book of Genesis? Six days, of course. If you miss this one, you may have been brought up in the backwaters of the Amazon, although it would not be the fault of Christian missionary translators who have tried to undo God’s rash Babeling of tongues to get the Bible into every known tongue. But what’s a day? Before the scientific revolution sealed by Darwin, the ordinary 24-hour variety day posed few problems for the devout. Once it seemed that the world must be older than Bishop Ussher’s supposed official date of 9 AM on October 23, 4004 BC, seeds of doubt grew into Enlightenment-nurtured forests. But is nothing sacred? it turns out that poor Bishop Ussher never ordained that God slept in late on Day One; the distinction of 9 AM goes to a certain Dr. John Lightfoot. But there’s still the problem of how to define a day, especially in a creation scenario in which the creation of light precedes the sun, moon and stars. Theologians in retreat (as distinguished from those who remained, and still do so, in denial) resorted to a semantic salvation of the scriptural record, arguing that with God a day is the same as a thousand years.

Tomorrow, June 5, is the 40th anniversary of a modern event on Holy Land soil of biblical proportions: the Six-Day War of 1967 in which Israel expanded its borders, took total control of Jerusalem and embroiled the region in the plight of the Palestinians. It only took six days for the overmatched armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria to be effectively eliminated and since that war there has been little doubt that Israel as Zionist-revived David to a disorganized Arab Goliath lies only in myth. Only six days, but how long is a day? Continue reading Six Biblical Days of War →

The Dervish Dishes it Out

Ethics, Poetry, Sufism

Some messages are timeless. This poem of Rumi, though at least seven centuries old, still resonates no matter how sanitized the morality of the day.

Dervish at the Door

A dervish knocked at a house
to ask for a piece of dry bread,
or moist, it didn’t matter.

‘This is not a bakery,’ said the owner.

‘Might you have a bit of gristle then?’

‘Does this like like a butchershop?’

‘A little flour?’

‘Do you hear a grinding stone?’ Continue reading The Dervish Dishes it Out →