All posts by tabsir

The Wedding That Wasn’t Supposed to Wait

Literature, Yemen

by Reem Jazem

In 2014, my biggest concern was when to get married.

I was engaged in August, and my fiancé and I planned to have our wedding in May 2015. I wanted March instead. We were both born in March, and three had always been my lucky number, so a March wedding seemed almost too perfect to give up.

Unfortunately, he was going to spend three months filming a television series, so May won.

I was not planning a big wedding. I wanted something simple so that we could spend more of the money on our honeymoon. We were choosing between Turkey and Socotra Island, and my friends and I spent our time looking for a dress, a wedding hall, invitation cards, and all the other things that suddenly become extremely important when you are a bride.

Life was ordinary.

That is probably the best way to describe it.

We had plans. We had dates. We made decisions based on what would happen next month, or next summer, or after the wedding. We assumed that tomorrow would be there when we reached it.

I had never thought much about how extraordinary that was.

In Yemen, preparing for a wedding is not exactly a small task. Traditionally, the groom provides the agreed dowry, while the bride and her family carry many of the wedding expenses. The bride is also expected to prepare new clothes and gold jewelry for herself.

Men, I often thought, were lucky.

They put on a suit and show up.

The bride, meanwhile, could spend months preparing for a single day.

At the time, these were the problems occupying my mind.

Then came March.

Because we could no longer have our wedding that month, I decided that at least we could celebrate our birthdays together. On March 17, my colleagues surprised me with a birthday party at work. I remember that day clearly. Even my serious, strict manager danced Lahji.

At some point that day, I told my fiancé that I had a strange feeling that it would be my last birthday.

I had no reason to say it.

A week later, on March 26, I was at home chatting with friends on WhatsApp while my parents watched television.

Then came the explosion.

It was so loud that the house shook.

My father changed the television channel, and the news announced the beginning of the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen against the Houthis.

Until that moment, the future had been something I could schedule.

After that night, it became something I could only wait for.

The airports closed. Traveling became difficult. Businesses and projects stopped. Buildings were damaged and people were killed. Things that had once been simple—getting somewhere, buying something, planning a trip, making a living—suddenly required calculations, luck, and sometimes could not be done at all.

We postponed everything.

The wedding. The honeymoon. The plans that depended on a life returning to normal.

We assumed the war would end.

So we waited.

Then we realized that waiting could not last forever.

The wedding finally took place in October.

The war did not.

By then, we had learned something that people living through ordinary times rarely have to learn: life does not always wait for the world to become normal again.

Sometimes you postpone your plans for a few months, expecting the interruption to end.

And then the interruption becomes the landscape of your life.

The war continued far beyond October, far beyond what we had imagined, and eventually far beyond what we could have imagined in our worst nightmares.

Looking back, I think about that girl who was worried about whether she would get married in March or May.

She thought she was choosing a date.

She did not know that history was choosing one for her.

Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing

Anthropology/Sociology, Humor and Satire, Islam and Christianity, Islamophobia

This post has been published in Informed Comment.

On Sunday, May 17, a conservative religious group known as Freedom 250 is inviting you to a prayer vigil at the National Mall. This is called Rededicate 250: A National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise & Thanksgiving. The goal is to “prepare for the nation’s 250th birthday with Scripture, testimony, prayer, and rededication of our country as One Nation to God.” Freedom 250 was created by the National Park Foundation to work alongside the White House Task Force 250, which is a child of Project 2025. The chief architect of that project is Russell Vought, who now serves Trump as Director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Although it is advertised for “Americans of every background,” there is an immediate link on their website to register your church to join the event, even a “Church Engagement Toolkit.” Looking over the list of speakers, it is obvious what kinds of churches are behind this event: mostly Evangelicals and especially Baptists. This includes Jonathan Falwell, the Senior Pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and Chancellor of his father Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. Jonathan replaced his brother Jerry Falwell, Jr., who resigned after a sex scandal. There are also charismatics, including Paula White, a spiritual advisor to Trump who seems to know more about glossolalia than the Gospels.

There are two Catholic bishops, one of whom is the conservative Catholic Timothy Dolan, who Pope Leo recently replaced as Archbishop of New York. A Black senator and a Nigerian singer are also part of the show, but no major African American pastor was invited. I did not find any speakers from the mainline Protestant sects, including Episcopals, Lutherans, Methodists, Presbyterians and United Church of Christ. Nor are there any Latter Day Saints or Jehovah’s Witnesses. The only Jewish speaker is Orthodox Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, who offered prayer at the last Republican convention. There are no Hindu or Sikh speakers.

Not only are there no Muslim speakers, but one of the main stars is Franklin Graham, who has made his father Billy Graham’s Foundation an ultra-conservative political tool. Graham’s vitriolic hatred of Islam has a long history, including calling it a “a Very Evil and Wicked Religion.”  Graham not only supports Trump’s war on Iran, but has the delusion that “the church in Iran is among the fastest growing in that part of the world.” He insists that more Iranians have become Christians in the last two decades than the entire 1,300 years since Islam arrived in Persia. At last year’s Pentagon Christmas Worship Service, Graham told the military personnel assembled that God is not just about love, but also a God of hate and war.

Featured as a main speaker is Pete Hegseth, identified as the 29th United States Secretary of War. Actually, since we have not had a Department of War since 1949, this number is off. Hegseth has promoted the war in Iran as a Christian duty with God on our side. This echoes the call of his religious advisor, Douglas Wilson, who argues that America should be a Christian nation and Christianity should dominate the world. Wilson also thinks women should not be allowed to vote, nor be in the military. Although it is not clear what kind of prayer Hegseth will ask for in his talk, he will probably not ask forgiveness for his previous adultery and drunken behavior.

I grew up in a small Fundamentalist Baptist church in northern Ohio, where my father often led the Wednesday night prayer service. I heard lots of sincere prayers from the elders, but none calling for God to kill someone. We were told that God hated sin, but Jesus died so that sinners do not need to be killed. They would be judged by God.  It was common practice to pray for the American President, no matter which party he came from. This small church supported two local missionaries, who went to India and Africa to save souls, not to judge them.

Every once in awhile there was an Evangelistic Service in which we were told to invite our unbeliever, i.e. not Baptist, friends so the Holy Spirit could convict their hearts when a Bible verse was read. This has been the teaching of Fundamentalists and Evangelicals for a long time. The proposed national prayer vigil is a politically glorified evangelistic service by ultra-conservative Christian Nationalists. It is not going to be a prayer ritual for peace, justice or tolerance. The special message that will be read by Trump, who apparently will not attend in person, will have been written by an aide for a man who has never read the Bible and certainly has no desire to do so.

There is a scriptural passage which well defines this national display streamlining Sunday across the country: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (Matthew 7:15, KJV). There are many different kinds of sheep in our country, both those who are religious and those who do not belong to a formal religion. A good shepherd, the kind that anyone who recites Psalm 23 knows by heart, is one who protects all the sheep, not just a select few. That is the founding principle of the United States: a separation of church and state that prevents the state from defining which religion is best. Rededicate 250 is a non sequitor since our country has never been dedicated to a specific religious sect. Make no mistake, this call for Freedom is not about being free to worship or not worship who you please.

Sunday’s call for prayer is clothed in religious rhetoric, but there is nothing sheepish about it. A good shepherd knows that wolves want to devour the sheep. The whole point of Sunday’s state-sponsored event is to promote a specific religious view that disenfranchizes the majority of American citizens. Evangelicals, not all of whom support Trump, represent less than a quarter of the population. The goal is to indoctrinate, not to provide a meaningful forum for the wide range of religious and spiritual views throughout our entire history as a nation. This event must be seen as nothing more than a wolf call for Christian Nationalism, ignoring one of the very reasons our country was founded to prevent this attack on freedom of and from religion.

A Visit to Yemen in 1884: Part 1

Orientalist Images, Travel, Uncategorized, Yemen

Most scholars who have read about the many travelers to Yemen in the past are well aware of the Italian Renzo Manzoni, whose 1884 El Yemen records his visit to Ottoman Yemen in 1877-1878. This travel account has even been translated into Arabic. A little more than a decade later, in 1891, another Italian visited Yemen after a journey that took him through Tunis and Egypt. His name is G. B. Rossi and his Nei Paesi d’Islam was published in 1897 with some 70 drawings. It is a popular account, drawing on earlier works of Yemen along with his own personal anecdotes about his visit, which he notes was at a time when there was tension between the Ottomans and the Imam. For a flavor of his writing, consider the following near the start of his discussion on Yemen:

Rossi provides a map about his journey:

Among other items is a list of the altitudes of Yemen’s main towns at the time.

What makes this text worth looking at is the number of illustrations. I attach one below and will follow up with more posts of the illustrations.

To be continued…

If Only Abraham Had Known

Bible and Holy Land, Humor and Satire

A fable, dedicated to Mark Twain and all who really understand what it means to suffer

Abraham was sitting just inside his tent flap near the oaks of Mamre. He was getting on in years and his son Ishmael would soon have to take over the family herds. So it was time to think about buying a burial site, perhaps the cave that Hittite had offered over near Hebron. Then he lifted up his eyes and three men stood before him. And though he did not realize it at the time, these were angels sent from God.

“Abraham,” said one of the angels, “God wants you to know what is going to happen to your descendants over the next three or four thousand years. So we are here to tell you. Are you sitting down?” Abraham was used to the flamboyance of this One God, so he made sure he stayed close to the ground.

“First of all,” said another angel, “your wife Sarah is going to have a son. I know she is a hundred years old and will probably think this is some kind of joke, but let me tell you that God doesn’t fool around when it comes to sex. You have to call this son “Isaac” and then just when you think things are going alright, God is going to ask you to take Isaac up on a mountain and kill him as a sacrifice.”

Abraham decided to keep quiet. Maybe there was more.

The second angel continued, “Now God doesn’t really want you to kill Isaac, he just wants to test you, so don’t worry, the boy will grow up and have two sons who will fight like hell over their inheritance. The younger son, whose name is going to be Jacob, will trick his brother and go on and give you great and not-so-great grandsons who will become the twelve tribes of Israel, which people will start calling Jews. They will be slaves in Egypt for awhile and then wander around in the wilderness for forty years. But eventually they will come back here to Canaan, blow their horns and slaughter the locals with my blessing. Are you with me?”

Abraham nodded, but was not sure what to say yet.

“Alright, let’s get on with it then. There will be a few good years with a couple of kings named David and Solomon. These guys will be household names for years afterward. But because most of your your children will be stubborn and rebellious, God will send several prophets to tell them to shape up. When they worship other gods, then he has no coice but to have barbaric hordes of Assyrians and Babylonians destroy the whole kingdom of Israel. People will be trying to figure out what happened to some of the twelve tribes until the end of time. A few of the exiled Jews will come back and rebuild the temple — God has plans to settle down in a real house sometime you know — but basically things will go from bad to worse. After a few centuries, the Romans will knock down the temple again. Before this one of your descendants named Jesus will say he is God’s only son and start a whole new religion called Christianity. The Jews will hate the Christians and try to kill them for awhile, and then the Christians will get the upper hand and get back at the Jews for killing Jesus. Some half-crazed actor named Mel Gibson will even make a film about it.

Abraham stared straight ahead, afraid to say what he was thinking.

The third angel now took over. “But that’s not all. About 600 years after Jesus a desert prophet called Muhammad will come along and start another religion in your name. Only this time he will say that Ishmael is your true heir and not Isaac, who of course isn’t born yet, but will be soon. The followers of this new religion will call themselves Muslims. Sometimes they will get along with the Jews and Christians, sometimes they won’t. At some point there will be a big war with lots of people killed crusading to gain control over this land we sit on right now. Historically speaking, this real estate you were promised is going to skyrocket in value. More blood will be spilled over this land than any other piece of the earth. Just think of it.”

It was hard to tell exactly what Abraham was thinking at this point.

“But there’s more. The descendants that are related to you through Isaac will have a tough time of it wherever they go. Everyone will persecute them. In another three thousand years or so a nasty Nazi called Hitler will come along and try to exterminate all the Jews. After a big-time world war, Israel will once again become a state. The only problem is that the people living there and all around won’t get along very well. Muslims will kill Jews. Jews will kill Muslims. Christians will kill Druze. Turks will kill Kurds. Everyone will basically try to kill everybody else until they pretty much forget why they wanted to kill each other in the first place. You know, the whole world will be tuned in as bombs go off in crowded market places, airplanes strafe villages, tourist busses are blown up, prisoners are tortured, women are raped and children are shot dead in cold blood. And then, believe it or not, on one day in February of 1994 a guy from Brooklyn will walk into a mosque built over the site of your tomb and shoot over 40 men and boys as they pray and then…”

“Enough! Enough! ” shouted the old patriarch, rising unsteadily to his feet. I’ve heard enough to know you can’t be angels. You certainly don’t come from the God I worship. This is a pack of lies from the Devil himself. If I thought for one split second that even a part of what you three just said could ever happen, I would kill myself and all my family on the spot. Get out of my sight, damn you!”

The angels disappeared and suddenly Abraham awoke under the harsh afternoon sun streaming in through the tent flap. “Sarah,” he cried, “please come. I’ve just had the worst dream, a nightmare so awful I can’t bear to repeat it. It was something so terrible. It just couldn’t be true.”
“Abe,” said Sarah calmly, you can tell me about your dream later, because I have exciting news for you. Abe, it’s finally happened. I don’t know how, but I’m pregnant, Abe. I’m going to have my own son. It has to be a miracle. God has finally answered our prayers. Abe? Abe? Abe, speak to me? Abe, what’s the matter?”

The patriarch lay motionless on the ground, no longer breathing. The family assumed he had died peacefully in his sleep. And he was laid to rest in a cave near Hebron. History, of course, would never be the same.